by Jim Musgrave
Chapter Sixty-Five: Walter Sinclair's Journal
September 29, 1863
Was it that Burns fellow who wrote about "best laid plans of mice and men?" The smashing defeat I was dealt was a blow to my pride, but the beating I received by these natives was the work of this Professor Garvey! Father Perez, indeed! My body is bruised and tattered, and I know my head has a variety of contusions, but I will continue my resistance against this unspeakable treachery! Even when they began to separate us, I realized what their plan required. This Professor Garvey used me as the fool all along, and I cannot abide this. And then, as if he expected our total subservience, he began to prance around us like Abe Lincoln and declare his new Republic of Chaos!
This is why I am left to sit in this cell. I can hear Ericsson consoling the whimpering Greene woman. Our number is down to three. Have they killed the others or perhaps eaten them? I do not doubt the possibilities of this madness at the hands of Garvey. The look in his eyes is completely insane! He has even taken my wife, my own Pen! What kind of debauchery can he be up to? I used to wonder about her faithfulness when I was at sea, but now my fear for her is unbounded. I have seen with my own eyes and experienced with my own body the lascivious nature of this island! It is hell on earth! What is he giving to his Black Bird Man? Are the white women serving his bestial nature? This demonic leader, Professor Garvey, shall not live much longer if I have anything to say about it. My rage must be controlled, so I can respond when the time comes. I cannot write in this infernal diary! This is not my command. I am not writing in a ship's log. I will not let this traitor to his own country read my thoughts and then use them against me!
Go to hell, Mister Garvey, and make quick work of me unless you want to be watching your back for the rest of your days!
Chapter Sixty-Six: Chip Jefferson's Journal
September 30, 1863
Professor Garvey explained to me that when I became the Bird Man I would now be able to run the island the way I wanted to. He said the rongo-rongo tablets gave me the authority to be almost a god to these people. However, when he also told me that they would be sacrificing a white person every month to their god, Meke-Meke, I knew I had to pretend to go along with his plan, or, I too would certainly be offered up as a sacrifice. This shaman, this professor, is crazy!
I am only able to write in this journal after my nightly "fertility ritual" with a different native woman each night. These women don't really care, as long as I pay attention to them early in the evening. I was never as scared as when I first saw one of these naked women come into my hut in Orongo village. The first one smelled like she had been dipped into a barrel of flowers. She had crazy tattoos all over her, and she began to dance in front of me, wiggling her parts like a woman I once saw in a Baptist revival meeting in New York who was overcome by the Spirit of the Lord. She shook all over, and when she stopped, she reached out her arms to me, she puckered her lips, and she closed her eyes. I walked into her embrace, and that's when my own body parts took over. We began rolling all over the blankets and the pillows, and she started to moan and kiss me all over. I never knew life could be so full of hot activity! All the church teaching I learned from my Mama and the others just went flying out of my brain, and I hope I can be forgiven for my animal passions. But I needed to make certain these women did not suspect I was up to something. They had to think I was the proper Bird Man, and this nightly fertility ritual was part of my job, and I don't expect that I disappointed any one of them.
Professor Garvey seems to think I would want to be the Black Bird Man that he read about in their tablets. He is like so many of these white men who expect us to want everything they have. My Papa told me about these kinds of men. He said, "Some white men expect us to seek the same power they seek. What they don't understand is all we want is to be seen as equals." Slavery is not a good thing for any human. Professor Garvey keeps these natives slaves to the Bird Man because they can then be allowed to compete in the yearly competition and raid the other villages for prisoners and love slaves. It makes me wonder if mankind had been created so we could persecute each other. What makes us believe in leaders like this Mister Garvey? I know, Captains Ericsson and Sinclair also wanted to have power on this island, but now I am the Bird Man! We are all fighting to have our own way in the world of Easter Island. However, this shaman, this Professor Garvey, does not want to share his power with any other white man. What does he plan to do with me? Will he get rid of me when I no longer can serve his purpose? As the Bird Man Prince, I couldn't even speak to my own subjects. I didn't know their language. But that's when I met Kaimi.
Kaimi was the third woman I met in my hut one night during the fertility ritual. She was very young, only sixteen and she was really scared. In fact, when she came in she didn't look me in the eyes. She just stood in the corner, looking all beautiful and petite, and then she spoke to me in English! I never heard any of these natives speak any words in English, so this was quite a surprise. She said her name was Kaimi, which meant "the seeker," and she asked me what my name was. I told her my Christian name was Charles Jefferson, but that my slave name had been Reginald Sims. Kaimi told me she had learned English from a passing British merchant ship's crew member, and she was very curious about my slavery, so I told her about living on the Sims' plantation in Virginia and about how we were finally purchased and given freedom. Kaimi said she had a sister who had been captured by the Peruvian slave traders, and she had even received a letter from her sister a year later. She told Kaimi that she could now speak Spanish and that her owners were treating her much better than how the Fainga treated their women. She no longer had to participate in sex orgies or perform in the fertility rights with the Bird Man. Kaimi then wondered if slavery were not better than what she had to live under with the Fainga. However, Kaimi's sister wrote another letter, about six months after that first one, and in it she explained that she had become deathly ill with fever. She had been worked relentlessly in the banana fields until she contracted the disease from which she was then dying. The only medicine she was administered was from the slaves' partera, or midwife. No real doctor would touch her. Kaimi's sister died shortly after, and that's when Kaimi knew that slavery was a much worse condition than life on Easter Island.
I told Kaimi that the shaman, Professor Garvey, was now instituting a practice just as evil as slavery. He was going to sacrificially murder the white people with whom I traveled to Easter Island and steal all their inventions and weapons. He wanted to control everybody, and I told her I was not ready to let him do that. I told her that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever met and that she could perhaps help me save my friends from this evil man who was posing as her tribe's shaman.
That's when Kaimi told me a secret of her own. She told me that the white people were not the only ones who were to be sacrificed. She asked me if Garvey had told about fekitoa, or the "gathering of two men." Of course I knew nothing about this, and she explained that it meant that when my year was up as Bird Man that I would be taken off by natives to be thrown down into the Rano Cao volcano. I would then meet up with Meke-Meke, the other man, in the "other world."
This explained everything. Garvey was going to do away with his Black Bird Man as soon as the year was over. He was going to steal all the inventions of Captain Ericsson and all the weapons of Captain Sinclair. That's when I knew I had to learn Kaimi's language, and I had to learn it really fast! We needed to find a way to stop Professor Garvey from killing the others and establishing his own dictatorship on Easter Island. Unless the natives could understand their Bird Man, we had no chance to foil Garvey's plan.
Kaimi took my shoulders and melted her chocolate eyes into mine. "Yes, my love, I will teach you," she said, and I kissed her with the truest love I have ever felt in my seventeen years of life on this earth. I just hope we can live to see one more year together, that's all.
Epilogue: The Winners
December 25, 1863, Easter Island
The sh
ip docked at Hanga Pika was being boarded by the only passengers headed back to the United States. First, John Ericsson and his wife, Amelia, walked slowly up the ramp. They both stood at the gangway and waved at the only other couple near the bottom. Dana Greene and his wife, Anna, who held their new daughter, Cristina Marie, were following the Eriksson’s and were half-way up the ramp.
The ship, the American merchant U.S.S. Wachusett, under Captain Robert W. Schufeldt, had arrived despite the plague of smallpox. All crew members had been inoculated with the vaccine of cow pox, the same vaccination that Captain Ericsson had used to save the remaining natives on Easter Island.
Captain Ericsson walked alone into Captain Schufeldt's cabin and sat down in a chair in front of the commanding officer's desk. Captain Schufeldt sat behind it, smoking a long briar pipe. He was a tall man, distinguished with large mutton chops and a thick, New York accent. He pointed to a stack of papers on his desk. "Thank you for coming, Captain Ericsson. These journals will be collected and used in our inquiry when we arrive back in the States. As we are still in a state of war, you and Lieutenant Greene will be considered my prisoners until we can consider the evidence in this matter."
"I appreciate it, Captain," said Ericsson, and he cleared his throat. "I welcome your understanding of the delicate nature of our plight. The experience of my group needs to be kept secret from the prying eyes of the public. I am happy the government believes this to be the best possible solution to the problem we have at present."
"Yes, President Lincoln has been advised concerning your adventure. Because your monitors are doing much to assist our naval advances against the rebel forces, it has been Mister Lincoln's decision to keep the details of your trip a secret. However, the matter of the deaths of Mister and Missus Walter Sinclair, Charles Jefferson, and Charles McCord will be thoroughly investigated in the official inquiry. That's why these journals will be important."
"Thank you, Captain. I appreciate the importance of these documents. It is rather ironic that our captors allowed us to keep these journals even during our internment. I suppose it could be considered our Babylonian captivity, of sorts. I have been reading the Bible regularly during these last few months, and it occurs to me that I never really appreciated its relevance to mankind's travails until it related to my own experience. I shall continue to read it with utmost scrutiny in the future."
"Captain Ericsson, as it is Christmas, I would like to take this opportunity to allow you to tell me, in your own words, what occurred over these months at this god-forsaken island. It will be completely off the record, mind you, and I shall give you my word as an officer and a gentleman that none of it will ever be revealed."
"We came to Easter Island because we wanted to establish a civilized colony modeled after the Platonic ideals of the Republic. Sadly, what we found here was a land ravaged by wars between the elite, which resulted in the obliteration of most natural resources and the alienation of the population into a cult that followed a pagan god of fertility and practiced contests such as the Bird Man competition. This was an event that occurred each year to determine a god-man who would be given complete rule over the island and its remaining resources. The people who followed this Bird Man were called the Fainga, and they were the elite group that survived following the Moai statue wars between the Hanau Eepe and Hanau Momoko. When we arrived, a man who was posing as a Jesuit priest, Father Perez, tricked us into competing in the Bird Man contest and he used the winner, our own steward, Mister Chip Jefferson, as his ruse to take over the island populace. At that time, there were only over eight hundred natives, as fifteen-hundred of them had been captured by Peruvian slave traders one year previously."
"Yes, we have heard of these slave traders. They bring disease to the natives, and many thousands have been killed off all over the Polynesian islands," Captain Schufeldt interjected.
"Indeed, and it was this disease that saved our lives, Captain, if you will bear with me. Father Perez turned out to be renegade Harvard Anthropologist, Dr. John Garvey, who had written about a theory he had to control native populations through their original scriptures. In this case, the islanders had what are called the rongo-rongo tablets, which contain hieroglyphic symbols that have meaning only to the shamans of the tribes. Garvey came here to see if he could prove his hypothesis, and when we landed, with our inventions and our weapons, he at last had his chance to take total control."
Captain Schufeldt tapped his pipe with the back of his hand and shook burnt tobacco out. "Go on, Captain, this is quite intriguing. What did he do with these tablets to obtain control?"
"After our Chip won the Bird Man contest, Garvey got his natives to arrest all of us, and he told the lad that Chip was the prophetic coming of the so-called Black Bird Man. This was the special person who would come from afar to establish a new era of peace and abundance here on the island. The natives believed him, and our Chip played along with this false shaman, Garvey, until the day the sacrifices began."
"Sacrifices? What were they sacrificing?"
"I'm afraid to say that Garvey had gone over the edge into madness. He was going to sacrifice one of us each month until their god of fertility, Meke-Meke, was appeased. The first sacrificial offering was to take place on November fifteenth. But first, Garvey had to get all his participants into their proper places. Thus, he recruited Mister Charles McCord, my lead draftsman, to become the master-at-arms of his cache of hallucinogens, a type of mushroom that grows in the base of the island volcanoes. He also added Missus Walter Sinclair and my Lieutenant Dana Greene to become officials at these drug- induced fertility rituals that were conducted in what he called the 'spirit room.' I am sad to say that my own wife, Amelia, was also chosen to become a pagan handmaiden at these rituals of debauchery and carnal revelry. Of course, as I was still being held in our prison at the Maunga Terevaka volcano on the other side of the island, I did not know exactly what each of my compatriots was doing. However, I was soon to find out."
"How dreadful! All this seems to prove how mankind will indeed revert to savagery when Nature and God have been forsaken," said Schufeldt, twisting in his seat and leaning forward in anticipation of the next part of Ericsson's story.
"Savagery is a friendly word for what began to take place on this island, Captain. The Captain of our ship, Mister Walter Sinclair, was residing with me in our prison, and I suppose he was becoming increasingly desperate. I did not realize just how desperate until November the fifteenth arrived. We had been confined in our prison cells for over a month, along with Missus Anna Greene, who was then quite heavy with child. Meanwhile, Professor Garvey had continued with his fertility rituals and the so-called 'translations' of the rongo-rongo tablets. Nobody, not even the Bird Man, knew who was to be sacrificed first, but when they came to take Anna away, we all knew."
"Good God, man! How monstrous!"
"Yes, Garvey wisely kept Mister Greene away from the sacrificial hut. The death blow was about to be struck on the poor woman and her child when Dr. Garvey began to vomit profusely. His entire body began to shake, and he fell into a visible swoon upon the floor. Of course, the sacrifice could not continue, and it was the smallpox that had reached its first victim. It seems the Peruvian slave traders must have brought the virus with them when they ravaged the island, and it had not developed until that very night when Professor Garvey was struck down. Luckily, Anna Greene was taken back to her cell, and we were given a reprieve. Lieutenant Greene came back with her to watch after his wife."
"Good! Now what happened?"
"At last, I had a bargaining chip to play. I had brought with us a small amount of cowpox vaccine, first developed by Edward Jenner in England in 1796. I knew if Garvey were given it soon enough, there was a good chance his smallpox would recede, and I told him so when he came to see if I could do anything for him. He had already taken charge of our vessel, the HMS Caine, yet he knew nothing about my storehouse of drugs. Thus, I offered to give Garvey the vaccine if he would, in exchange, allo
w me my freedom to vaccinate others in the populace, to protect them from almost certain death in the coming days."
"Well, he didn't refuse, did he?"
"No, I was given my freedom, and he was given his life. He was soon to regret his decision. I gave him his inoculation, and I also met with the Black Bird Man to give him his. That was when I discovered that Chip Jefferson had convinced the one-hundred tribesmen of the lower village of Hanga Roa, together with King Maurata, their leader, to attack the Orongo Village. It seems a native girl named Kaimi could speak English, and she had become enamored of Mister Jefferson. She was able to persuade the men to make war that following night."
"Bold move, Captain! I could not have done better myself," said Schufeldt.
"Indeed, but that night, when the natives began attacking, many of the warriors of the Fainga clan in Orongo Village were too sick to fight. Professor Garvey saw that his men were being overcome by the healthy men of the King's tribe, and he panicked. He realized that Walter Sinclair still had the keys to the ship's armory, which held the only weapon that could equalize the odds at that moment in the battle. He sent two natives to fetch Sinclair from his cell, and that's when the tides changed. Sinclair opened the locked armory, but he soon picked up a weapon and shot the two natives dead. He then carried the Gatling Machine Gun up to Orongo Village and set it up in the village square."
"The Gatling? What a stroke of luck! That monster can fire over 600 rounds per minute."
"Indeed, but the person firing it became enraged with jealousy when he saw his wife dancing nude for the Black Bird Man, Chip Jefferson, inside the spirit hut. Did I mention that Walter Sinclair was a racist and supporter of the Southern cause? He shot and killed his own wife, Penelope, Mister Charles McCord, and poor Chip Jefferson, and the tribal chaos that ensued was disastrous. When Sinclair finally ran out of ammunition, over one hundred Fainga warriors were dead, and Walter Sinclair was stabbed to death by the remaining men. What Sinclair and Garvey did not know was that the culture of war amongst the Polynesian peoples is not an affair of complete annihilation as it is in the so-called 'civilized' countries such as our own. Instead, the victorious warrior will take on the name of the warrior he kills in battle—strictly a hand-to-hand affair—and his entire tribe will afterward have a feast to honor the dead enemy. What Sinclair did to these natives broke all bounds of civility and justice for these people, and it proved the undoing of Garvey's anthropological experiment. The natives revolted, and the remaining natives became quite enraged when they discovered Garvey's identity and trickery. He was pushed down into the Rano Cao volcano, together with the sacred rongo-rongo tablets. They also blew-up our ship, exploding the armory, and the craft was nothing but cinders the next day. I officiated in the crowning of the new King, and the Bird Man cult was officially banished from the island. You arrived months following, and the rest will come out at our inquiry state-side, I trust."