The drink had revived Caspar and he was sitting and looking at me, but saying nothing. I diced one of our catch and fed him piece by piece. I cannot recommend raw fish. It tastes of very little and is unpleasant to chew, but without having been starving you cannot imagine how wonderful it was.
The sun rose on a hopeful day. There were clouds in the sky and the breeze filled our small sail nicely. I dressed the fish and hung it to dry. The wind and sun would dry it very well and we would be fed for several days. I fed half a fish to Caspar. He felt a little stronger and managed a few words of conversation. He took small pieces of fish during the day, along with sips of water. By the day’s end he had recovered enough to help me rig the sail to benefit from an evening thunderstorm. Again we were blessed with more fresh water than we could drink and went to sleep wet through but not thirsty.
What a blessed morn we woke to! Over our bow floated a heavy dark line on the horizon capped with a dressing of clouds. It could only be land. And as if to make amends the sea had yielded more food, a flying fish lying in the bottom of the boat.
In the middle of the night our boat ground up onto a white beach of shells and coral sand. We slept that night under the stars with opened coconuts beside us.
A Peaceful Haven
I woke to find we were being stared at. From the bushes that fringed the beach, some naked brown children were watching us. I smiled at them and they dissolved into shrieks of laughter, and then flew away like a flock of starlings. Shouting as they went they ran down the strand, the older ones leading and a fat little boy striving to keep up.
The beach the wind had chosen for us was a spit of sand running out to a rocky headland. The sandy ground behind the strand had been planted, amongst the wild palms and bushes, with many coconuts and breadfruit trees, presumably by the inhabitants of the village we could see at the other end of the beach. That end of the beach was sheltered by a substantial reef and the village houses came right down to the quiet waters of the lagoon. We could make out canoes pulled up onto the beach or stowed under the grass houses. We thanked God that we happened ashore where we did. Our boat would surely have been smashed if we had run onto the reef.
Anticipating visitors, we settled for a quick coconut breakfast and tidied up our boat. Soon enough, we saw a large procession of forty or fifty people coming towards us from the village. We prayed that they would be friendly.
The procession was led by a group of older men, presumably the Parish Council. The members of the council all wore skirts of long grass reaching to their knees, and apart from that, very little else. They had a promiscuous taste in ornament, all being adorned in necklaces of shells, bracelets of shell and chains of teeth. How fervently we prayed that the teeth were not human. (We need not have worried. We found out later that they were dogs’ teeth.) Feathers were obviously much prized, either in necklaces or in the hair. The leader, much the oldest of the councillors, incongruously wore a shirt. Behind him, the other villagers were gathering, men and women, youngsters and many, many children. At the edges of the throng wandered dogs and small brown pigs. All the adults wore grass skirts and the men, not the women, wore what jewellery there was. None of them, however, approached the elegance of the man on whom our attention was fixed.
The headman was well past his prime. His limbs were wasted by age and his hair was thin and grey. He addressed us first, in no recognisable language, and then everyone tried speaking to us. Quickly realising that we were too ignorant to understand, they fell to examining our hair, our clothes and our fair skin. Our boat was also of great interest, but the crowd’s attention was mostly drawn to the iron tools lying in its bottom. The headman seized our adze and with unmistakable gestures asked that we should give it to him.
We were at their mercy, but they were disposed to be friendly. I proposed to use the headman’s desire for iron tools to our advantage. By mime I explained our need for food and drink, and sailcloth, and oars. If he could find these things for us, we would give him not only the adze but the saw and chisels as well. The curious hands reaching for our tools were stopped at once. With great harshness he ordered some women back to the village, and set others to making a fire. He and the rest of the men sat down to wait.
Caspar still felt desperately weak, and I was not feeling too strong, so we were glad of the opportunity to sit down. The headman, whose name we found was Aman, was accorded great respect by all his companions. He sat on a palm leaf (cut with our adze) and enjoyed a yard or so of breathing space all round. As honoured guests, we basked in the same deference. So we sat, whisking away the flies that gathered on us and our new friends.
Aman fell to comparing our fair skins to his own mahogany colour, and remarking on the colour of our eyes. He held his forearm alongside mine and displayed to his companions the contrast between our colours. The people of the village were of an Indian type with strong black hair, which they wore long. They were curious to touch ours (mine was fair and curly then). On our side, we wanted to know the way to Port Domingo. We kept repeating the name and pointing along the coast in what we believed was the right direction, but we were rewarded only by puzzled faces.
I tried to mime Port Domingo and after (I cannot imagine how) I had conveyed the idea of a very large village with many boats, a stocky young man suddenly shouted “P’tomingu, P’tomingu!” All of a sudden everyone was laughing and shouting, just as for a Christmas parlour game. Aman confidently told us it was many, many days away (he rendered days by pointing at the sun and bringing it up out of the eastern sea and then down again behind the forest). No one actually contradicted him but the stocky young man, seated behind Aman and out of his sight, pointed at our boat and then held up two fingers and cut a third in half. Maybe he had travelled there himself.
Now they wanted to know where we had come from, and I had to explain that England was several months away to the east, and that it was cold with little sun and no coconuts. In the sand I drew a picture of a ship. I found they were familiar with them. I suppose ships passed by the point en route to Port Domingo every week. As we talked, we watched the women returning bearing food and pots. The others already had several small fires going.
It was a pleasure to watch the women and girls set to work boiling yams and sweet potatoes, breadfruit and plantains, grilling fresh fish over the fire and stirring a rich soup which contained fish heads, peppers and coconuts at least. They laid the food was before us on newly cut banana leaves, and the dark shiny green of our makeshift plates displayed the food like a banquet. Aman and the guests of honour (us) were served the choicest parts of a small pig the men had butchered and set over the fire still warm. The meal made a royal feast for two half-starved sailors accustomed to nothing better than ship’s biscuit and salt pork. Our hosts insisted on our eating to the point of discomfort, and they did the same themselves.
Such a huge meal and the hot afternoon sun combined to send us to sleep, and most of our hosts with us. Men and women curled up on the sand and slept unashamed and unafraid. We needed no consideration of politeness to make us join them.
I awoke when the sun was already falling into the forest behind us. Most of our friends were also awake, sitting in small groups chattering quietly or watching the children run up and down the beach, splashing in and out of the edge of the sea. Some of the women had stoked up a fire, and seeing me awake, hastened to bring food and drink. The day of our arrival had been taken as an excuse for a holiday, and apart from cooking no one had done anything that could be called work. All that remained was to round the day off with singing and dancing. A group of women sitting in a circle started to sing and clap. The tune was strange and the words were foreign, but the effect was very fine for all that. When the men joined in, the music was as good as any you might hear in church on Sunday. After two or three songs, Aman called out a command and shyly at first, all the women except the very young and the very old got up to dance. They stood in a long line and sang, accompanying themselves by clapping and stampin
g their feet. Facing first one way and then another, they swayed to the music dancing more and more energetically as the men beat out the time and shouted the words of the song.
Smiling and elated, the women sat down and a young man took his place. His dance, so Aman told us, was an imitation of a bird, either a sea-bird or perhaps an eagle (it was hard to guess from the old man’s gestures). The music was given by drums and singing, from the men alone. We had to do a turn as well. Caspar was far too weak to manage his hornpipe, so I had to do my best, singing and dancing at the same time. The drummers soon picked up the rhythm and it was, I suppose, the strangest hornpipe you ever saw. I am afraid it ended by my tripping over my feet and pitching into the sand, which probably gave my audience more pleasure than the dance itself for they rolled on the sand and laughed until they were in pain. Honour matched, we sat down to watch more songs and dances until Aman stood up. We politely refused his invitation to sleep in his hut and elected to sleep where we were, along with several of the party who stayed out of companionship or perhaps because they considered their homes were too far away to walk back.
The night was mild and quiet, and we were lulled by the gentle lapping of the sea against the sand. For all that, sleep was slow in coming because I had done little more than rest all day, so I lay watching the stars climb the great bowl of the sky until my eyelids finally closed.
The next day was for business. Aman did not come himself but sent a small party of women bearing a mat woven out of some kind of flat dried leaf. This, they demonstrated, would be our sail and they had come to trim it with thin ropes made from the same dried leaves. I hastened to cut a boom (our old spars having been taken by the waterspout) and showed them how I wanted to secure the sail to the mast and boom. I need not have worried. Sail making was a skill that belonged to women here. My team of sail makers made an amazing sight. They were all pretty brown ladies wearing nothing but grass skirts, and for ornament, flowers in their hair. They spread the sail on the sand and knelt to their work.
With Caspar watching over the sail makers, I turned my attention to the oars we needed. The natives of those parts do not use oars, preferring paddles for their canoes, and it proved difficult to obtain dry poles of the right dimensions. Eventually two were brought from the village and cutting the handles from two paddles, I proceeded to pin them to the poles with wooden pegs. This drew interest and approval from the men who had gathered to watch. I showed one of them how I wanted the handles shaped and he set to with my knife to give them smooth handles that did not give me a single blister when I later came to use them.
As the oars neared completion, so did the sail. The ladies watched it hoisted, but took it down again for correction. When it was finally ready and hoisted on the mast, they stood admiring it and chattering with animation. Their leader, rather more matronly in her figure than her helpers, warned us firmly not to use the sail if it was thoroughly wet. It must first be hung to dry before any strain was put on it.
As the day ended, our boat was ready for sea again, and we had more hospitality to enjoy. We were led to the village, to the house of Aman, where we would have another party. After night had fallen, the entire village, including pigs, dogs and chickens, gathered in front of Aman’s house and sat on the ground in a rough circle. This time there were more drums and flutes, more dance and more songs. On the hard beaten earth the primitive dances were more vigorous, and the pounding of bare feet more insistent and hypnotic. The food was good and limitless, and to accompany it came a form of beer made from coconuts. Again I danced the hornpipe, earning generous applause and laughter, together with requests to fall down again. Seeing we had become impossibly sleepy, Aman’s children led us by the hand up the rickety ladder into the house. There on the floor we fell asleep to the beat of the dancing drums.
In the morning, we were taken in procession by the entire village back to our boat. The day had dawned clean and fresh and there was a breeze to carry us away. Willing hands hauled the boat down the sand to get us afloat, and stowed aboard enough food and water to cross an ocean. Then, as our sail began to draw, all the women stood in a swaying line at the water’s edge and gave us one last song. Their graceful gestures and the mournful sadness of the song could easily have turned us around and kept us there for the rest of our lives. Their singing carried across the water after us as we rounded the point.
Port Domingo
The rising sun picked out the houses of Port Domingo far away across the bay. We were in no great hurry to arrive and so did not trouble to row. We preferred to idle away the time until the land breeze picked up, fishing a little and talking. We had been remarkably silent between ourselves since we left the treasure island. It seemed the tribulations we had suffered had borne down upon us and driven us to look inside ourselves. However, our young bodies were recovering rapidly and Caspar was regaining his vigour.
Caspar recalled the good times he had known while following the trade of soldier. He had gone away young, little more than a boy, marching along the Downs after a recruiting sergeant. He had liked the life that he described as not much different from shipboard, with regular duties and a good company of men of all sorts. Before he had really learnt to use his musket or had time to build up his manly strength, he had shipped off to the Low Countries to take part in wars there.
He had not fought in any great battles but had participated in skirmishing. Most of his days were spent marching from place to place as the generals ordered. He and his companions, all country men, stared and stared at the foreign ways of doing thing, of growing corn, harnessing horses, draining the land, planting and harvesting. All through a long and sunny summer, his regiment trailed the highways and by-ways of the Low Countries and Caspar grew fit and brown.
He told of a time when he and a few others were billeted in a walled garden for a while. One afternoon they had all sat in the sun with their backs to the wall, listening in the stillness to the bees at their work and drinking champagne looted from a great house. It was their first taste of such a heady drink and very pleasant they found it. They fell asleep like leaves falling into a still pool, not insensible because they had not drunk enough for that, but just washed away by the heavy stillness of the summer air. The whole group of them slept against that sunny wall until the evening trumpets woke them and sent them scurrying after tasks that should have been completed long ago.
Caspar’ tales of the doings of Sergeant This and Trooper That, and of the fine fellowship of his regiment on the march, brought us to the harbour mouth of Port Domingo. As we looked inside we saw an unwelcome sight. Moored several cables off-shore lay a king’s ship. The sharp, clean lines of her hull were picked out in black and cream paint, and her prodigiously gilt figurehead depicting some species of sea-nymph stared superciliously at us as we rowed below her. All the ports of her two gun decks stood open for the breeze to pass through, and her guns had been run out to give space to the men we could see passing to and fro in the shaded darkness. We remembered the small pouches of silver we carried against our skins and hoped she knew nothing of us or the Hispaniola. As we approached the landing, a launch rounded her stern and pulled for the shore.
What an elegant sight that launch made, freshly painted and uniform, even to the matching oar-blades dipping in unison. She was crewed by eight solid-looking sailors clad in clean white duck frocks and straw hats, their tarred pigtails hanging down their backs. In the stern sat a severe officer, his hat a blaze of gold lace, and beside him a midshipman. They swept past us in a rush towards the landing.
“Now there’s a fine way to travel!” mused Caspar as he stared after them.
It was a little time before we crept alongside the launch to the accompaniment of various imprecations and warnings to keep clear of her paintwork. The officer had gone ashore and the midshipman stood on the quay with one sailor. I made our painter fast and, leaving Caspar to mind the boat, went off to find Bewley the chandler and, hopefully, Long John’s hiding place.
; Bewley’s was a dark labyrinth that opened directly onto the quay. Here, piled at random, lay everything a sea-faring man might want for his ship. Tubs of nails, blocks and dead-eyes, cordage of all dimensions, galley-pans, various weights of chain, cleats, shackles, paint, pitch, linseed oil, copper sheet, gilt for the gingerbread, patent polish and a brass cannon to go with it, hammocks ready-made, quadrants for tiller ropes, knives for the sailors, sextants and telescopes for the officers, oil-skins, fine hats, eyelets, sailcloth, tarpaulin, salt pork, salt fish, salt itself, fish-hooks for tiddlers or shark, harpoon blades and boat-hooks. A cornucopia, a lexicon of supplies. And if you cared to pass on through to the yard behind, you would find timbers, planks, spars, tuns, anchors galore.
Scampering in and out of these wares were several clerks, all looking more or less respectable but inevitably hot and dusty. I stopped one.
“Is Mr. Bewley here?”
He looked me over quickly. “No. What do you want?”
“I want to speak with Mr. Bewley. I don’t want anything.”
The clerk snorted. “I’ll see if he’s here.” Without haste he disappeared.
I stood for a while bemused by the material around me, trying to identify everything I saw. I had to crane my neck to make out the items hanging in the darkness of the ceiling.
“He wants to know your business,” the clerk had reappeared.
“Tell him Mr. Gold sent me,” I said.
Within moments he returned and beckoned to me. “He’s in the office up the stairs.” I mounted the steep stairway hidden at the back of the store. Passing upwards I could stare at the layers of goods stored on shelves or suspended from pillars or the ceiling. Near the top of the staircase was a window in the wall, opening onto a small landing, placed so the whole store could be surveyed. Through it I could peep into the office of the chandlery. Two clerks were working on ledgers at high tables but, standing in front of them and looking straight back at me, was a stout man with wispy hair. He examined me for a moment, and motioned me onwards to the door.
Where Gold Lies Page 16