by Carmel Bird
Magnus read many books and papers about sea voyages. He read of thrilling and successful journeys, and he read also of the disasters. In the Glasgow Herald was the re-telling of the story of a most notorious shipwreck. It happened in 1838, when a ship went down in the Torres Strait, and a few survivors landed on an island off the coast of New Guinea. The exhausted men fell asleep, only to be awakened by savages who held knives to their throats. The one man who finally lived to tell of what had happened recalled being forced to watch as the natives devoured his companions. ‘I watched them eat the eyes and cheeks raw, blood running down their chests.’ There was fascination for Magnus in the horror of that. Many tales of ferocious cannibals made their way into the Scottish press, stories from all parts of the Empire, including New South Wales. Magnus often read these stories, along with tales of pirates, tales of torture, death by starvation and thirst, and he was strangely attracted by the danger, by the sense of adventure, by the challenge of the unknown breath of the Antipodes.
The final decision to emigrate was made when Jenny, Magnus’s bride-to-be, died of tuberculosis in Glasgow. The recollection of that pewter twilight when they buried her often rose up in his sad memory. In an effort to mend his shattered spirit and ease his broken and tortured heart he would put his homeland behind him and make a new life on the other side of the world, following a different dream, seeking extreme adventures in the wild places of the earth. In his deep sadness, part of him longed to confront the terrors and the dangers, to meet the fury of the sea, to feel the knives of pirates and savages at his throat. He would see his companions eaten alive, would await the moment when he would witness the splitting open of his own abdomen.
Magnus had a good and sensible and orthodox aim as well, and a serious streak of optimism. He meant to go to the southeast part of the Great South Land, to settle in the district of Circular Head, on the lands assigned to the Van Diemen’s Land Company. Great green and golden imaginary acres drifted gracefully through the swirling skies of his water-bright dreams. He imagined he might sleep in his plaid in the heather on the sweet bright moorlands of the Great South Land. These dreams were far from the reality of the gloomy forest and the primitive makeshift hut that fate, after other adventures, had in store for him.
He left behind in Glasgow three sisters and his mother. Maggie, his youngest sister, said she would follow him to Van Diemen’s Land. When she eventually learnt of the shipwreck of the Iris, her nerve failed her, and she realised she could not face the five-month sea voyage from Glasgow. Magnus would never see his family again, although he wrote to them, and they wrote back to him, the letters taking many months to come and go. They begged him to return to them, but he never did.
Minerva Hinshelwood was a married woman, wed in Liverpool to Edward Herbert Hinshelwood who now lay dead deep down in the black waters of Bass Strait. Pale handsome Edward who had loved to see Minerva dance and loved to listen to her sing. He was a romantic, had paid no attention to stories of cannibals or even stories of shipwreck. In his heart he knew Minerva was a strange choice for a wife to transport to the colonies, but Edward was not a practical man; Minerva was not a practical woman in any ordinary way. Yet there was a side of Minerva that was characterised by plain common sense and practical ability. She could run a household; she could minister to the sick with the skill of a witch or an angel; she believed she could garden and also cook. Minerva and Edward planned to take up land in Port Phillip.
‘Let me make myself quite plain,’ Edward’s father had said. ‘If you marry this woman, Edward, I intend to cut you off without a penny.’
His mother wept and asked the vicar to pray for him. His sisters tried to interest him in their charming pretty friends, some with money, some without.
‘The boy is a complete fool,’ people said. ‘Throwing away a fortune for some woman of ill-repute.’ In their hearts his friends had a sneaking admiration for him—the madness, the daring, the beautiful woman. But why could he not marry an heiress and simply keep Minerva in lodgings until he tired of her? Well, for Edward it was not a question. He had fallen in love with Minerva and his mind was made up.
Edward was not particularly suited to farming, being an amateur botanist and entomologist with an ambition to catalogue the mysterious insects and animals, flowers and plants of the fascinating and promised land of Port Phillip. With him he had several of the new glass and mahogany boxes in which grew and flourished plants he hoped to grow. Minerva was delighted and fascinated by these plants. On the voyage out Edward studied the flying fish, the dolphins, the great stingrays, the seabirds. They were the kind of nineteenth-century couple people now love to find existed and flourished back there in their family tree.
On the eve of the new year Edward and Minerva, filled with hope and joy, stood on deck entwined in each other’s arms and breathed in the sound of the sixteen bells as they rang out in mid-ocean, mid-heaven. Omens of all the great goodness to come, promise of prosperity, of children, of discoveries, of adventures in unknown places.
Edward had long desired to witness the sight of the thick eerie tentacles of a slimy Kraken of which he had read in verse with his tutor. Was it a myth? He planned also to study the moonbird. He made close observations of the weather, the sky, the fragrances in the air. He catalogued the stars, sketched the ship, the passengers, the sea, the horizon, the moods of night and day. It was Edward who first noticed that the albatross that followed the ship had four white feathers in a line on one dark wing, and four in a diamond formation on the other. Edward was a man who was filled with wonder at the varieties of nature—and Minerva was in his eyes one of the greatest marvels on earth. She was to his poetic mind and heart an iridescent creature flashing before his dazzled eyes, a source of light and life, and she was his alone.
To Edward’s distress and to Minerva’s fascination and horror the albatross was caught on a line that was baited with a piece of pork rind cut like a swallow’s tail. The bird was a creature that measured fourteen feet from wingtip to wingtip. Its head was huge and heavy, its powerful curved bill a thick yellow-tipped apricot. It was killed, skinned, then the skin was plucked, thick rivulets of blood moving across the decking in shiny globules. Minerva could not look away, was captivated by the sight, and she observed that the skin was fine, soft, white and very beautiful. Whiter than what? Whiter than milk and soft, softer than kid-skin, slimy in death. The graceful creature, whose great and powerful wings had never beaten as it rode the wind, lay on the deck in its separate pieces, for separate purposes, the blood washed away with buckets of water, the meat thrown into the sea. In a long purple and red arc the guts flew out across the open sky, ribbons spiralling down towards the shining silken surface of the sea. There was a quick swoop and squabble and shrill squawk of birds that came from nowhere to take the sudden gift. A flurry of clean grey and white. ‘We eat the eggs,’ the first mate said, ‘but the meat is only for the birds—or for the starving and the mad.’ The hollow wing-bones were taken for making pipe stems, and the feathers would be quills to be sharpened for writing. The feet would make excellent tobacco pouches. ‘The head,’ the Captain said, ‘is a real curiosity. I don’t collect them myself, but perhaps you, Mr Hinshelwood—he turned to Edward, holding out the severed head of the victim—perhaps you would care to keep this as a memento of the voyage? Your great interest in the animal kingdom? You spotted him first, I hear. Those strange markings on the wings. They say it’s bad luck you know, to kill an albatross. Are you the superstitious type, Mr Hinshelwood?’
Edward was speechless with emotion, with rage and grief and bewilderment. Minerva could see that he was almost ill with disgust at the killing and dismembering of the creature for its useful parts. She expected him to refuse the offer of the skull and to lecture the Captain. But, his hands trembling as he did so, he took the grotesque but lovely tragic thing, cradled its heaviness in his spread palms. Water streaked with blood ran between his fingers. He nodded to the Captain, and went below with Minerva at his s
ide, below to the airless quarters that they shared with three other couples. He wrapped the head of the albatross in a blue silk cloth, a cloth embroidered in white flowers on Sunday afternoons by his youngest sister.
The sky, mussel blue as darkness moved across it, was laced with ribbons of pale crimson and rust. Edward’s breath came in strange feathery rasps, his heart contaminated by what had occurred. Something, he sensed, had snapped deep inside him when the Captain handed him the head. Yet with his rational scientist’s approach, he planned to dry the head and study it, to record its measurements, its textures, its poetry, not, as the Captain inferred, to keep as a memento. Its only memories were freighted with the ugliness of what had been done, alive in the mind’s eye with images of grinning sailors with bloody knives, accomplices to the carrion birds that came in for the leftovers. The whole picture would remain as an ache in Edward’s heart, and he imagined that he had brought the whole thing about by discovering the bird for the crew. He had set the evil in motion, and he had ended up with the creature’s proud, sad, severed head. He wept as he explained this to Minerva, and she cradled his own sorrowful head, and in the softness of her embrace, he slept. Over the ship the bruised sky opened, emptying great sheets of icy rain onto the world. And finally Edward slumbered like a sorry child.
That was then, and now Edward was gone, was drowned, lost, dead, gone. He had, at the time of the wreck, been suffering from the beginnings of a fever from which several passengers had died on the voyage. Minerva and Magnus separately, unknown to each other except perhaps vaguely by sight, both witnessed with horror the burials, the bodies dropped over the side of the Iris with hasty ceremony and short prayers. Usually at night. The first was a young woman. There were children whose little forms, weighted with ballast and wrapped in blankets or shawls, made no sound as they fell into the ocean, slid from the arms of their fathers and mothers and went drifting down forever into the bottomless swirling soundless darkness of the sea. As Edward lay in his berth, his eyes wild with pain and a black terror, Minerva had a sense that he feared the fever as a punishment for his having abandoned his home and family, for having followed his heart utterly in marrying Minerva. Perhaps it was punishment for sighting the albatross, and for other transgressions committed, both known and unknown. Now Edward was gone and to Minerva it was strangely as if he had never been. As she searched the waves of Bass Strait for a sign of him, she knew she was utterly abandoned, completely alone in the universe, with just the blue fragment of the wing of a little Claudina at her throat on a silver chain, a gift of love from her dead husband Edward Hinshelwood.
That’s the way the story’s told, from what I can piece together, and the Claudina on the silver chain came down to Virginia, and then to Golden, but I am getting ahead of myself.
There was the tragic end of one of life’s chapters, and the beginning of what would be the romance of Minerva and Magnus. Some tellers weep for Edward, lost with his cases of moths and insects and books and seeds and leaves and fossils on the deep seabed, lost with the head of the albatross cradled in his hands. All that was light and air and green and sweet, all that was Edward and his hopes and ambitions and fears, rolled into the thick and never-ending darkness of the deep. Edward, so gentle and kind and fond of life and love and music. Some girls, hearing the story, long for Edward, imagining him to be so intelligent, so handsome, so attentive, so loving, so poetic; yet others thrill to the thought of Magnus, tall, wild, rugged, handsome also, fierce, brave. Whichever category of man they imagine, they imagine themselves into the slender golden body and powerful spirit of Minerva.
Fate, chance, fortune brought Minerva and Magnus, destiny’s flotsam, together on the shore of Puddingstone Island. Minerva had prayed in the storm, her mind and heart a heavenly space filled with fervent intercessions to El Niño and his Mother. Magnus prayed to God the Father in Heaven, his prayers loud and urgent, snatched by the black and salty wind. Minerva and Magnus were two spirits borne by the wind to a scrap of land in the waters of Bass Strait, saved from a sea that raged and foamed and swallowed everything in a night. Their love and romance proper did not begin until much later, until they had been rescued, reached dry, dry land and had time to reflect in a kind of tranquillity on the ways of fate and fortune. This really was pure legendary romance, the union of Minerva and Magnus who were thrown together by a fate that they did not resist. All her life, on the slender silver chain around her throat, Minerva wore Edward’s gift, the pendant that contained the dark blue from the lower wing of the colour-patched Claudina, a native of the Amazon rainforest. It was a brilliant blue triangle set in silver. The upper wings of this creature were splashed deep pinkish-red on black, but the lower half was midnight-velvet black imprinted with the unreal luminous blue of hallucination. Magnus never asked her to take off the pendant, this memorial to another man, a drowned husband, and she never did. When she died she left it to her grand-daughter, and eventually it graced the throat of Virginia Mean, who was born in 1975. To Virginia it seemed a miracle in itself, that such a small and fragile treasure as the wing of a South American insect could travel the world, and then continue to be passed down in the family without ever being lost or stolen or sold. Because of the silver pendant ‘Claudina’ was a name that was often given to girls in the family.
The two survivors of the wreck of the Iris clung together to one broken piece of timber, wild-eyed, unable to speak, swallowing water, freezing, and by working their arms to guide themselves, they finally came to the shore, exhausted and sick, and they climbed onto the rocks on the eastern side of the island. Magnus’s thick clothing was heavy, drenched with the waters of the Southern Ocean, and he had lost his tartan plaid. Minerva was dressed in a dripping nightgown, drawers and slippers. The dawn sea was still, and a strange silence hung over the island. With an air of formality they introduced themselves, constantly staring past each other to the empty sea, or looking into each other’s eyes as if searching for an answer to a riddle. At last Magnus could utter a few words.
‘There must be others. There will be others. We must look for them.’
Minerva, knowing in her heart that Edward had drowned, could not bring her lips to form his name, but in her head she heard him humming the way he hummed when he was happy, and the tears, hot and hopeless, welled again and again, stinging her eyes. Knowing she was foreign, Magnus assumed she could not understand him, and there was much about his accent that she found incomprehensible. She bent low to the ground, feeling faint and ill, and a stream of yellowish-green water, thin and curdled, gushed from her mouth. Her bare hands, and her feet in brown slippers were so cold she could not stand, could no longer grasp anything. She fell into a faint. Fearing she was going to die, Magnus took her hands in his and worked her arms, beat her palms together.
She appeared to him to be praying, and in time she regained full consciousness, opening eyes of onyx velvet to look at Magnus whose face and beard were caked with thick streaks of blood. Minerva and Magnus walked around the tiny island, climbing over rocks, slipping, falling, going forward, but they found no sign or trace of more survivors. Magnus had lost his boots in the wreck, and his bare feet were cut and bleeding. Minerva discarded her soft leather slippers which clung to her feet, were smooth treacherous, and worse than useless on the rocks. She tucked them into the belt of her long, sodden and bedraggled drawers. Her feet also were soon scratched and bleeding. Her hands had been bruised and cut in the storm, and her fingernails were torn.
Minerva kept stopping and staring at the water, willing Edward to rise up before her eyes. And always looming somewhere at the edges of her mind was the unbelievable image of the thrashing parts of a great pink-grey sea creature, as if the churning, lashing waters had released a primitive secret, as if the storm had given slippery birth to a fat implacable evil. The image was forever out of reach, just out of focus, maddening in its refusal to come forward, to be examined. Did she really see a giant squid? Did the Kraken really power up from the ocean floor and h
ug the Iris to its deadly bosom? Or did the twirling darkness of the thrashing waves throw up hallucinations to occupy the spaces of unreality, to explain the unexplainable, to, in a perverse way, comfort her, give some meaning to the loss of everything? Much later Minerva told Magnus of her visions, but he remembered nothing like that. He had perhaps been stunned by falling timbers and had by a miracle floated free, seeing no monster, hearing none of the shrieks and moans and prayers as the ship made its last journey to the bottom of the sea. Or perhaps he saw and yet could not recall. The giant squid became, as you would expect, part of the folklore of the family, gathering a mythic strength and yet losing solid credibility as time went on.
Minerva and Magnus discovered, abandoned by the receding tide, three pieces of luggage: a leather bag, a wooden box, a tin trunk. All three were pushed up against each other, as if they had been the burden of one of those great, fantastic, and heaving waves, dumped together by the rocks, surrounded by bits of broken timber and flopping shreds of sail. Had they burst from their place in unison, or were they objects from three different sources, three different ships perhaps? There was really nothing to say that they had come from the Iris at all. Except that they had an air of freshness, of not having lain in the weather for any time. Minerva and Magnus found also a scrap of tartan cloth. A tin dish. And a baby.