“Smart thinking. Born smart, lucky for you. They set you down far from your homeland, but you knew how to read the territory,” says the President.
“The compliment is not unwelcome,” allows Lee Bo. “Tho I have felt shocks that buckled my legs. The greatest astonishment was the mirror.”
“A looking glass? A vanity?”
“Aye. My whole body shewn in just proportion, as others might see me—oh, the wonder of it! Being but twenty and a primitive with such a weakness for glass baubles as might have bartered a kingdom for a handful of beads, I spent hours before the contrivance.”
“A mirror, eh. Like meeting oneself out in the world.”
“Indeed, a moment most philosophical. The captain saw me pass the glass so often to and fro, he gave me a hand mirror.”
“Not a bad gift for any twenty-year-old.”
“Animals were also consternating. At that time, when Palau still had no dogs, e’en the two bitches that Captain Wilson rescued from his ship had our islanders in a dither. And in Macao, there were goats and sheep and cows and horses! Wonders all, even if I could somehow fathom that men had a hand in their breeding. From the moment I spied the wreckage of the Antelope, I was in awe of men’s capacity to manufacture. Tho a horse, born from a mare—how could they make that? ’Twas most uncanny.”
Matías notices how childlike his ghostly friend becomes when talking about these things, as if the centuries-old apparition had returned to his twentieth year. It’s such a novelty to hear him chat so freely, Matías just quietly lets him reminisce.
“And what of my prowess with the spear?” Lee Bo goes on. “A gang of shoremen were boasting of their skill, taking turns throwing at a painted wooden bird. One says, ‘Ar been to far Madagascar an’ learnt me to spear.’ All bluster, he was, ne’er hit a thing. Well, they see me watching and taunt me, ‘Have a try, Jimbo.’ So I take up the spear, let fly, and pierce the bird right through the head! I was so pleas’d I could beat the Europeans at something!”
“I had a similar experience,” Matías wants to say, but the ghost doesn’t hear. He’s deep into his reverie, two hundred years in the past.
As Providence would have it, several large English ships were in port when they arrived in Macao. Captain Wilson then enter’d into negotiations with the Company to secure his men return passage to England. Having lost a vessel did not help his bargaining position, though as the Isles of Pelew did not yet figure on any charts, the blame for the shipwreck was not entirely his. On the other hand, he found advantage in his misfortune by drawing up an accurate map of the islands, which was naturally well received, as reliable charts represented the cumulative product of many such brave misadventures.
Presently the crew split up, each to his allotted ship by seniority. Lee Bo travelled together with the Captain aboard the Company’s Indiaman, the Morse, a huge ship three times the size of the Antelope carrying 285 chests of Chinese tea. Crossing the Indian Ocean, the Morse rounded the Cape of Good Hope and headed north up the Atlantic, with Lee Bo hard at reading and writing throughout the voyage. When they called at St. Helena, that tiny Rock of Empire in the mid-Atlantic where unbeknownst to our returning travellers the defeated Napoleon would be exiled thirty years hence, Lee Bo met up with his friends from the Antelope who had arrived by another ship, and they were amazed at his progress.
Finally, on the fourteenth of July, 1784, the Morse docked at Portsmouth. The Industrial Revolution was upon England in that hour, even as Gibbon penned his Rise and Fall, and Boswell & Dr Johnson conversed on matters philological. Eight years since the American Colonies declared independence and five prior to the French Revolution, this was the age of Mozart, Diderot and d’Alembert, just before some say Europe’s star began to wane, or at least a sweet hiatus whilst the hypocrisies of the nineteenth century remained at bay and human happiness was still the measure of worth. In this age, our Lee Bo breathed the air of England, and rode in ‘a little house which was run away with by horses’ all the way from Portsmouth to London. Yea, this was the age of six-mile-an-hour carriages. A mere trot, yet to our Prince accustomed to strolling the hibiscus & bougainvillaea & ylang-ylang-flowered paths of Pelew shaded by cocoa & pandamus palms & betelnut trees, it was like rocketing through the heavens. Needless to say, the Portsmouth Road presented vistas dismal, cold and gray, the English summer a blighted winter to his eyes. Nor did anyone see fit to inform the Prince that highwaymen still plundered the carriageways, or that murderers were often strung up in plain view.
Inside the carriage, the other passengers bounced and chafed like groundnuts roasting in a hot skillet, but Lee Bo slept, noting only later that ‘whilst we went one way, the fields, houses and trees all went another’. The carriage stopped at Petersfield and Mousehill, changed horses at Godalming, then continued on to Guildford, Esher and Kingston-upon-Thames before arriving in London proper. From there they barged downstream under London Bridge and Tower Bridge, docking on the south bank in the seamen’s quarter of Rotherhithe. Here lived many a sailor’s family amongst chandlers that supplied sundry tackle to the trade; here boats heading upstream to land cargo often tied up overnight and sometimes tarried in dry dock to repair damages from tide & current; here rumors of the Seven Seas were the talk of the town. Stopping in first at St Mary’s Church to attend a service, they continued a short walk further to Captain Wilson’s home in Paradise Row where Lee Bo was to live as a full member of the family.
“What was it like, the house?” asks Matías.
“Grand and finely appointed. In Palau, three strong men could throw up a house in as many days, whereas the London builder must have needed thirty hands for well on a hundred. And the furnishings! I was given a room of my own with a bed of my own, complete with canopy and curtains. That bed was a room in itself! But even this I soon grew accustomed to.”
“Highly adaptable, for an islander.”
“Foreign cultures were ne’er a distress to me. Or perhaps I simply enjoyed the good fortune to live like a prince in the captain’s house. A move up in the world, if you will.”
“Really?” says Matías.
“Aye, materially greater. The sheer scale of wealth to invest such labors in a private home, and more, to send ships halfway round the globe to some tiny isles in the Pacific.”
“So living in that big house, what did you do every day?”
“I attended the Peter Hills School in Southwark, to learn to read and write and do arithmetic—your ‘three Rs’—but fun, to be sure. Nor were the pupils so very biased.”
“Children of the empire could afford to be magnanimous.”
“Perhaps, but it being a seafaring village, the sailors’ sons welcomed strangers from afar bringing their strange customs and foods and handicrafts. I was introduced as such, an exotic import, if older than my classmates. Schooling serv’d me well; they taught me to pen my own name—Leigh Beau.”
“Did you do anything else besides go to school?”
“Certainly, I was fêted by the leading lights of London who, it must be said, regarded me as a kind of pet, a domesticated wildchild.”
Matías doesn’t know what to make of the ghost’s remark. Is he being sarcastic or simply reporting the facts? Or else priding himself for reasons Matías can’t hope to understand?
“One dandy of a poet, a George Keates, oft invited me to his house. There I met with many diff’rent persons for tea and biscuits and talk. Politely put, I was made to feel most popular; less nicely said, I was a curiosity on display.”
“Did it make you uncomfortable?”
“Nay, quite honestly, I gave little thought to inequalities ’twixt Great Britain and lowly Palau. Only later, in death, was I raised up off the ground, as it were, to a bird’s-eye prospect of the world. At the time, I had scarcely the height to see. I was like a skittle fending off five players at once, the balls coming hard and fast.
In some senses, perspicacious death becomes me more than life.”
“Then it wasn’t so bad, your being a showpiece?”
“To be alone in a foreign land is to be one against many. Of course the English who sailed to our islands and back were in the same boat, made the objects of Londoners’ curiosity, so I cannot say as it was unfair. After all, I boarded the ship of my own free will. Thinking back on it now, the days pass’d in blissful fascination.”
“What did you aim to get out of staying in England? What possible profit?”
“Aim? Profit? Hard words born of the evils of modernity. Eighteenth-century Europe was ne’er so horridly calculating as that.”
“But surely it wasn’t just to see what you could see?” the President asks.
“Perhaps I thought to turn me into a proper Englishman. Is not that the truth? The intrepid soul who ventures out to foreign lands and learns their foreign ways enjoys no higher compliment than to be told, ‘Ye’re as good as English.’ ”
“Well, I guess. Going to Japan, I learned to use chopsticks and take a Japanese bath, to appreciate the seasons. What’s different between us, though, I didn’t have any gentleman of means to watch over me, no polite salon culture, so I never got in as deep as you. No one even pretended I could be ‘as good as Japanese.’ ”
“These two centuries I have thought on it a score of times, that had I dwelt full fifty years in London, what would my lot have been?”
“Like they say, he who sits between two chairs falls flat on his ass.”
“Indeed. At first I did entertain a modest plan: I would stay in England two or three years, learn all there was to know, then return to my homeland embolden’d with my newfound mastery to fortify ourselves against foreigners. A scheme of modernization, if you will. The conceit was to void my vessel so as better to arm me with their cannonry. Yet study as I might, my one lifetime could not span two worlds.”
“It’s next to impossible to embrace two cultures in one person.”
“I despaired. Half a year dash’d my hopes. How I yearn’d for my beloved Palau, yet knew I must stay on till capable of explaining the English and their ways to my father.”
“State scholarships carry big responsibilities.”
“Unlike your free and easy travel papers.”
“Let’s not start. I had my share of hardships.”
“Each to his own. Young as I was, I quash’d my homesickness and immersed myself in daily study. Literacy, however, was of less consequence than observing civilisation at large. I did even see the Great Wind Bladder, which delighted one and all.”
To be specific, the Italian Vincenzo Lunardi demonstrated his invention, the hot air balloon, on the fifteenth of September, 1784, the first aeronautical experiment of its kind ever seen in England. A consummate showman and self-publicist, Lunardi had taken out prior advertisements in various gazetteers, and an unprecedented multitude turned out to witness the launch from the City Artillery Park in Moorfields, paying one guinea a head on the gate. Good Captain Wilson, however, did not see the merit of Lee Bo mingling with great crowds at such a spectacle, nor especially the value of spending a guinea for the same, so the Prince did not attend the festivities, but rather went to preview the bladder placed on free public display some several days in advance. Likewise, on the date of the ascent, he stood a safe distance outside the park to watch it ‘float like a blowfish’ toward the northern skies of London.
Contrary to the acclaim High Society heaped upon Lunardi, Lee Bo thought little of ‘the foolish man imitate bird’. Apparently not a few learned Londoners, the eminent natural historian Sir Joseph Banks and writer Horace Walpole among them, also scoffed at the aerial enterprise, hence our Prince was not alone in his quite rational evaluation of this ‘inhuman presumption’.
Indeed, Lee Bo’s own voyage, uprooted from his isle to this distant northern clime, surely represents a far more fantastic transit than the brief sojourn of that dashingly charming Secretary of the Neapolitan Embassy or his short hop of a mere twenty-five miles to the sleepy village of Standon-Ware in Hertfordshire. But whilst the famous Lunardi enjoyed the ‘heaven-sent’ assistance of one brave sixteen-year-old farmgirl named Elisabeth Brett in landing his craft, the Prince was never again to alight on his native soil. For, alas, he died in England.
By December of that year, having lived in the company of Europeans for thirteen months (five months since docking in Portsmouth), he had attained a considerable degree of fluency in English. No one could impugn the sincerity of his educational ambitions nor his progress in the same, for as George Keates remarked, ‘His application was equal to his great desire of learning; and he conducted himself in school with such propriety, and in a manner so engaging, that he gained not only the esteem of the gentleman under whose tuition he was placed, but also the affection of his young companions.’
And yet on the sixteenth of December, he complained of discomfort and was confined to his bed. A rash of blisters broke out over his body, indicative of smallpox. Captain Wilson and his family had presumably been aware of the danger of contagion. Already by 1796, Dr Jenner had experimented with inoculating humans with pus from cowpox blisters, based on prior empirical recognition that someone once superficially infected did not risk further infection. So, too, must he have known that a visitor from afar would be helpless against diseases that prevailed amongst Europeans. Surely part of Captain Wilson’s enjoining Lee Bo to shun the crowds at Moorfields was the fear that he might pick up ‘bad airs’ there. Yet despite all precautions, the Prince took ill and lost weight. The Captain called in the prominent physician Dr James Carmichael Smyth to examine him, but the prognosis for recovery was nil. The Captain and those of his kin not yet inured to smallpox were to stay away, leaving but few friends to inform the patient why.
Lee Bo met his last with great equanimity. On the twenty-seventh of December, a cold season in a cold country, before even seeing in the New Year, our Son of the South Seas passed away at the age of twenty-one. Bearing in mind how many indigenes the world o’er were later to perish of this disease borne by men of civilised countries, it is most ironic that he should have been a pioneer in this regard as well.
“So what’s it like to die?” Matías asks the big question.
“ ’Tis not half bad. You should feel no menace when your time comes, I assure you. As soon as I learnt that dying means merely moving across to this side, I realised that one’s place and time of death are no reason to fret. Indeed, to take leave of the physical body is justly liberating. One can study things as one pleases. Back then I was so ignorant.”
“But at the time, you must have been one of the most knowledgeable Palauans around,” says Matías.
“To the Western view, perhaps. Though I do believe my father was better versed in the lore of the world than e’en Captain Wilson. Seven years on, when a young Captain McClure sailed his ship the Panther to Palau and told him of my death, my father did not even react. To us island folk, death is literally of no consequence—nothing follows.”
“So what you’re saying is, I have nothing to fear from death?”
“Not in the slightest. That, I had to think, was the greatest diff’rence ’twixt Europeans and Pacific islanders. Thus, even the intelligence that I had perished in London was of little concern to them, whilst the English seem’d to fault themselves, however slightly. As my last request, in my stead, I had the Panther take four cows and two bulls, one Bengal ram and ewe, seven she-goats and four males, four breeding sows and one stud pig, a pair of geese, and two pairs of ducks. Not a bad trade—I daresay, it pleased my father.”
BUS REPORT 9
Early one morning, a bus on a rural route on Baltasár Island was slowing at a crossing when another bus zoomed in from the left. Both vehicles jammed on their brakes, just barely avoiding a collision. Luckily, the fringe of trees at the intersection was clear
of undergrowth, so they could see each other coming for twenty meters. The driver of the first bus leaned out of his window (cars drive on the right in Navidad, drivers sit on the left) and yelled at the other unfamiliar bus, “Hey, watch where you’re going!”
“You watch where you’re going!” came a voice, but not from any driver he could see.
“You’re on a side road, you’re the one who’s supposed to stop,” corrected the first driver.
“Didn’t think anyone was coming,” said the voice.
The driver strained to make out the speaker, but the morning sun rising behind him reflected off the windows of the other bus, making it impossible for him to see inside.
“I drive this road every morning. This is my route.”
“But you ain’t got no passengers, do you?” sniped the voice.
“Passengers or not, this bus runs on schedule,” said the driver.
“Pity for you.”
“And what about you?” the driver challenged.
“I’ve got forty-nine people riding,” boasted the voice.
“Forty-nine passengers!”
“Forty-eight, plus the driver.”
“But that’s you, right?” the first man countered.
“Well, uh …” the voice hesitated.
Strange, thought the driver, taking another good look at the other bus, there didn’t seem to be anyone in the driver’s seat. “You mean there’s no driver?” he surprised himself by asking.
“Why, of course there is. He’s asleep in a back seat.”
“But then, how do you stay on the road?” he fired back sharply.
Silence.
“Okay, so who’s doing the driving?”
Again, no reply. Then suddenly came a growl, “Outta my way!” and the phantom bus shot across the intersection.
The Navidad Incident Page 21