“No, but we played other forbidden games.”
“Oh?”
“We all went hiding in the woods, to feel around inside each other’s clothes.”
“With your brothers?”
“And cousins. We touched between our legs. All of us together.”
“You were the only girl?”
“No other girls allowed. No girls ever came near me.”
“And then?”
“Then later I began to have bleeding, I grew breasts, but still we played. We had fun, my brothers and cousins and me.”
“And your parents didn’t yell at you?”
“They never knew. They scolded me for going out with the boys, but it was better than me seeing other children get hurt.”
“Your brothers never got hurt?”
“Sometimes, but I never saw it coming. Like with myself, I couldn’t see with them. Then, my belly got big.”
“You did that with them too?”
“Yes. All of us together. Even my youngest brother. He was only twelve, but he got his little thing up. It was cute.”
“Naughty kids.”
“Were we wrong?” Améliana asks Matías to his face. “Was it bad?”
“Well, badly handled,” he hedges. He looks up at the ceiling and something catches the corner of his eye. Butterflies? He turns, but sees nothing there. Butterflies don’t fly at night, not ordinarily.
“Perhaps. My belly was big, so my parents found out. They wanted to know the father, but I had no idea. It was the child of all seven boys.”
“Didn’t you see where your fooling around would lead?”
“No, what happens to me I don’t see. I can’t see it at all.”
“And so?”
“I had a child. A beautiful little boy. But my mother took him away and told me to leave Melchor. I came to Baltasár City and finally found work with Madame Angelina.”
“And the child?”
“The boy is three years old, being raised on Melchor. I go to see him as often as I can. He thinks I’m a much older sister.”
“And your brothers?”
“No more fun and games for them. They come to see me when I visit, and we talk the whole day. My brothers and cousins all listen to what I have to say.”
Strange woman, Matías thinks to himself. Is hers a commonplace story, or is she totally mad? Whatever the case, her powers of prediction might just be the real thing. Only, how to use them? They’re wasted on her, and anyone who believes meets with misfortune. And what about her three brothers and four cousins? His political instincts are intrigued. Can they all be worked into some scheme of his?
The Legend of Lee Bo
On the ninth of August, 1783, the East India Company merchantman Antelope grounded upon the coral-reef’d isle of Coorooraa in the South Pacific. Having weighed anchor in Macau a fortnight prior, she met with a squall on her southward passage via a new route east of the Philippines but continued apace through high waves until First Watch, when just after Captain Henry Wilson ordered First Officer Benger to the helm, the wide open sea suddenly conspired to heave the vessel upon a sunken barrier that skirted a hundred-mile archipelago later known to the world as Pelew or the Palos Islands, though as yet unknown to the English Captain & crew of the Antelope. Whilst under full sail, with nary a warning, her keel struck coral just below the waterline, and she listed to a halt.
The tropic moon through the clouds that night shewed the acute nature of the Antelope’s predicament. Much to the consternation of all aboard, she had voyaged alone, hence without a sailing partner to pull her right. With no hope in sight, the luckless Captain called all hands on deck to cut down her three masts lest they tempt a toppling wind, then lowered two rowing boats laden with water, provisions, weapons & compass over the side away from the reef, and thus made ready to abandon ship, explaining that whilst none were dead or injured, the chances of survival in those uncharted waters were slim.
Came dawn, they sighted land some three leagues to the south. And as the sky grew light, other formations appeared to the north and east, although so indistinct in the distance as to be unapproachable. The Captain sent out the two rowing boats to reconnoiter the closest outcropping to the south, with instructions that should they meet any native inhabitants they were to comport themselves agreeably. For well did the enlightened European of the age know that not all primitives were man-eating hostiles, and their own precarious position left them little choice. Savages whose paths they crossed might indeed oblige them with fresh water, sustenance & knowledge as to sailings for more civilised realms.
In the intervening hours until First Dog, the crew lashed together the cut masts to fashion a raft as a precaution lest the Antelope go asunder. Presently the boats hove into sight with tidings good & bad. They had in fact landed, and discovered a cave of habitable aspect, as well as potable spring water, but the isle appeared to be singularly deserted and without food. Whereupon they hastened to load the raft with supplies and make for the cave ere nightfall. As the raft afforded no grace for personal belongings, each man donned as much clothing & withal as he could muster, which measure proved hazardous under the circumstances. The Helmsman Godfrey Minks did doubly clothed fall into the drink and, thus twice encumber’d, sink and drown ere his mates could lend a hand. Unfortunate man! Much disheartened, the others remaining, together with two dogs, five geese, and a multitude of guinea fowl, were towed cautiously across the chop drawn by the rowing boats.
Reaching the isle past Second Dog, the sky dark and night well nigh, they moored the raft and waded ashore whilst the two boats returned to the ship. What joy it was to be safe on dry land! Lighting a fire, they supped on rations of hardtack & cheese & water, and so began their life in isolation. The following morning, one of the rowing boats delivered unhappy news. The Antelope was irreparably damaged; accordingly their sole recourse would be to salvage as many timbers as could be prized from their trusty vessel, ferry the planks to the isle, and there to wright a lesser craft.
Apparently their beachhead was but a small island in the chain, abundant in water, yet far from sufficing in provender to feed fifty hungry men. Thus marooned, they dared not hope for a passing ship, principally because no Europeans yet knew of this sea route, let alone an entire archipelago. Nay, salvation would not be forthcoming by sea. What then of the larger isles in the offing? Surely there might one find human settlement, whose inhabitants should have noticed a great ship run aground, boats oaring to & fro, bonfires by night. Though would such natives be friendly or belligerent? A most unsettling question.
Two days later, on the morning of the twelfth of August, two canoes were seen approaching. On the beach stood waiting the Captain & Bengal sailor Tom Rose whose command of several tongues had commended his hire in Macao as Interpreter. The other crewmen fell back into the trees, having been warned not to provoke their visitors unduly. Tom Rose hailed the canoes with a shouted greeting and was at first met with silence. Then presently came a response in Malay, which as Providence would have it, was one of the languages Rose possessed. He offered as they were from the wrecked English vessel, traders, not men of war. The two canoes landed a rank of savages naked save for their tattoos, who spake Malay through one man, whereupon the conversation proceeded amicably. The other crewmen came out of hiding, and as the hour of the noontide meal was come, they shared their rations with the visitors. It was learnt that this was Oroolong in the Isles of Pelew under the sovereign rule of King Abba Thule, who sent his two younger brothers & their canoes to bid warm welcome to the strangers. How fortunate for one & all!
Though in truth what were their fortunes? Their ship had foundered but not sunk, the deck boats had not been lost but were within rowing distance of a tiny isle, both Englishmen & Pelewans had Malay speakers amongst them (the native Interpreter, a Malayan called Soogul, had likewise been
cast away here some ten months prior, and thence learnt the local argot), and the two canoes had arrived in time to enjoy a repast, thereby tempering all quite peaceably. Most fortunate of all, the Pelewans were not given to clubbing strangers and eating them, but rather accommodated them with gracious civility. Or as Captain Wilson was later to remark, ‘The barbarous people shewed us no little kindness’.
Properly, all things in perspective, they need not have feared cannibals. Throughout the countless atolls and archipelagoes of the Pacific no race of man-eating primitives ever lived, save in Western phantasies. Indeed, the very notion to simply feast upon unknown travellers would scarcely occur to persons anywhere. Cannibals, such as did exist in remotest New Guinea & Fiji, rather preyed as warriors upon malefactors from rival clans, presuming to consume the spirit resident in the hearts & organs of their valiant foes. Even if fabled Cathay accounts of Chinese gourmands eating anything four-legged save tables & chairs or two-legged save their parents (siblings beware!) may not have been entirely exaggerated, in no regard had they any parallel in the peoples & cultures of Micronesia. Had our English wayfarers but known!
That said, first encounters are a most delicate moment in social intercourse, the initial reactions of either party affecting greatly the poise & demeanour of both. Moreover, having been wreck’d and left atremble at Nature’s wrath through wind & wave & reef, and with the imprint of terror yet upon them, had our Englishmen misconstrued the least hostility in the queer mien of their visitors, they might easily have over-reacted in kind. How fraught with tragic misunderstandings the meeting of disparate peoples has often been! Yet glad to tell, the people of Pelew rather ‘shewed no little kindness’ to the shipwreck’d strangers, greeting them with such warmth as to reaffirm our belief in the innate goodness of humanity. What luck it was, the crew thought to a man, not to have met with hungry lions or tygers or wolves (though again we should note, these creatures of the wild tend to shun humans unless provoked). Not only did the Pelewans soon regale them with food & drink, but even exchanged gifts & emissaries. King Abba Thule bade one of his brothers assist them and learn their ways. In grateful response, Captain Wilson offered tools & clothing & sundry tokens of civilisation, all personally delivered in his stead by his own flesh & blood brother, the ship’s Navigator, Mathias. When the Englishmen gave a demonstration of blunderbuss shooting, a duly impressed Abba Thule prevailed upon them to put down a rival clan, thereby proving that alliance with the White Men could be a most commodious stratagem.
In due course, a bricollaged schooner was completed by Wilson & his crew and christened the Oroolong after our waylaid travellers’ tiny dry-dock home away from home. By November, fair summer weather in that Hemisphere, the Captain was making plans to set sail, when one of his men named Blanchard, a common sailor afore the mast, confessed his wish to remain behind. This was beyond the good Captain’s comprehension. Why should an Englishman born and bred, apprenticed in the honourable profession of sailing, harbour such unfathomable whims as to make him forsake his duties and dally in these God-forsaken hinterlands? The swab, however, was adamant, wanting only his sailing papers revoked and thus to be unencumber’d of further obligation. Yea, an early convert to the lure of the South Seas!
After much deliberation, Captain Wilson assented to Blanchard’s request. More than a purely occupational calculation, the Captain had thought in some form to repay his hosts the Pelewans & their King Abba Thule, and decided to offer several muskets for the King to maintain the upper hand over contrary islanders. There was no time, however, in which to impart to his warriors the divers skills of musketry, hence it seemed apposite to leave behind a person practised in the art. These being the circumstances and the Captain a civilised English gentleman of seasoned career & ethic, he welcomed it when Blanchard volunteer’d for this role. Verily it seemed a godsend.
Yet even now Henry Wilson met with a further complication. Abba Thule asked that his second son might travel to England with them. If Blanchard’s madness to linger in those Southern climes foreshadowed the Romantic Era, with its love of the Noble Savage, we may also discern in the young Prince’s curiosity to see Europe some enlightened current of the times, an instinctive passion for knowledge. During the Englishmen’s brief three-month sojourn on the isles, the Pelewans had watched them at close quarters and learnt to mimick the rudiments of their wiles. Reckoning that these strangers definitely possess’d a powerful magick, albeit presently held at bay owing to their shipwreck’d straits, they knew the isles could not remain isolated forever. Nay, the next visitors from afar would doubtless not lend their services to help Abba Thule vanquish his enemies, but rather fire upon the King himself. Thus, whilst Blanchard’s folly was his alone, the young Prince’s motives were in spirit stamped indelibly with the hopes & fears of his isle, of the entire archipelago.
Whether privy to the Pelewans’ plight or not, Captain Wilson consented to this exchange of envoys, albeit this time the balance tilted heavily askew. King Abba Thule, for his part, granted Blanchard leave to remain, and emptied his coffers to bestow upon his son a generous allowance. Yea, like an early stipendiary scholar!
The Pelewan Prince was named Lee Bo, later Anglicised to Leigh Beau, a youth of some twenty years of age, handsome of countenance and favoured with intelligence, most visibly embodying the difference between commoner & crown. At their first interview, the Captain overcame his reservations to enquire through the ship’s Interpreter how it was that a native nobleman who can scarcely have imagined the months ahead at sea had reached so bold a decision. To which Lee Bo answered, although most eager to visit the many lands across the long water, he would meanwhile exert himself to eat what the English ate, learn to speak their tongue, and otherwise prepare himself to endure several years abroad by observing the greatness of English Civilisation, as was his mission. This sufficiently reassured the good Captain that the Prince would not start mewling the second day at sea, and he promised Abba Thule he would cherish his son as if he were the King himself.
So it was that, on the twelfth day of November, 1783, the Oroolong set sail from the Pelews. Upon their departure, King Abba Thule addressed Captain Wilson thus. ‘You go home, you happy. I see you happy, I happy … ut you go, I no happy.’ How the good Captain replied to these emotion-steep’d words is lost to posterity. Very likely he failed for an equally memorable aphorism in response.
The Prince’s possessions were meager: a crude mat for sleeping, woven of cocoa-palm fibres, and a length of rope for tying knots so as to record things he found worth remembering; nothing more. We may easily picture the young Prince, gallantly parading the decks in his sailor’s kit, fashioning innumerable different knots, the ship with its cargo of dreams sent off by a fleet of royal canoes!
The Oroolong now turned her stern to the isles and bore northwest, a mere one-sixth the draught of the lost Antelope and far too small to reach Portsmouth. For this reason, Captain Wilson made for Macao, hoping there to transfer to a sister East India Company vessel bound for Britain. Fortunately, they met with no inclement weather in the Luzon Strait twixt the Philippines and Formosa, negotiating the Batanes Channel to make Macao some three hundred leagues distant by the thirtieth of the month. At long last, the marooned sailors had returned to civilised lands, and for Lee Bo his first foreign country.
“How did you feel then?” Matías asks his ghostly confidant.
“In some senses, ’twas as I expected,” Lee Bo replies. “From how the English comported themselves, from such effects as even those castaways possess’d, I knew to expect great things. Not to boast nor dramatise, but I must say my surprise was over and done with when first I saw an English musket.”
“Yes, but China must have been overwhelming.”
“True enough, tho I merely stood in the doorway. Macao was an open port, free for the rambling, but ne’er did I set foot in Canton. Not even the Company factors were allowed overland into Canton. All busines
s dealings were settled on board ship by appointed spokesmen. Nay, the only China I did see was the port and the rabble living on sampans. Once when a yellow boatman asked me for victuals, I pitied him with an orange or such, thinking, a great people, these Chinamen, but not a rich people withal. Ne’er once on our island kingdom did any man beg of me like that.”
“But the city? The buildings?”
“All very grand, I warrant. But one gets accustomed to it after the thrall of first sighting. Anything piled up block upon block so high is bound to impress, if only for a day. Thereafter, things are simply there, part o’ the firmament so to speak, unless they change their aspect. Tho were I to try to build in stone beside my father’s lodge, no doubt I would meet all manner of quandaries, and so take the true measure of the mason’s art.”
“I guess it was like that for me too, the first time I went to Japan. Things must have awed me, but you can’t keep gawking at each novelty. You just have to accept things for what they are and only later stop to admire it all in private.”
“Aye, admiring what others have wrought can only rile and vex,” says Lee Bo. “All the more so when on foreign shores, shouldering your whole native culture.”
Thus, the two kindred latecomers to world civilization reaffirm their common bond, an affinity that draws the Palauan phantom to these neighboring isles of Navidad and makes him seek out the President.
“Mark you, I was made most welcome, being this rarity of an indigene. Macao stood me in good stead for faring on to England. The Portuguese senhoras all fussed over me, touching my tattoos. Hong Kong, you ask? Nay, it did not e’en exist then. ’Twas but a fishing village. The Portuguese founded Macao first. Macao, that was the bourne for Europeans. Hong Kong came only much later, after the English commandeered the Territories in the Opium War. Up till then, English ships all called at Macao before bearing upwind to Canton for trading. Macao was a veritable warren of diff’rent races. I felt so favourably disposed as to reckon England would not pose much hardship.”
The Navidad Incident Page 20