Son of Fortune

by Victoria McKernan

  Finally he summoned Christopher and Aiden to his office, where his lawyer was waiting with a stack of papers.

  “It would be wiser to sell the ship,” he said. “But I expect you will not do that.”

  “No, sir,” Christopher said solemnly. “I believe our venture, though bold, is well reasoned. And your own life, sir, demonstrates the advantage of boldness.”

  “My boldness,” Mr. Worthington said grimly, “never put me at risk of being lost at sea.”

  “The ship is sound, sir,” Aiden said. “And our captain is very good. You needn’t worry. Very few ships sink, really.”

  “Of course,” Mr. Worthington said sharply. He pushed the papers toward his son. “If you are determined to go, you will go. But I am divested entirely of the enterprise. Understand that. The investment is yours alone. You will draw against your inheritance. My lawyer has prepared the papers.”

  “Yes, sir.” Christopher picked up the pen. His hand shook slightly. Aiden could not tell if it was from excitement or fear.

  hen you are on a ship at sea, the sea is all the world and time is just the sky. The Raven was a self-contained world, like a little village, only with all men and no dogs. There was a cat, however, and chickens, four small pigs that would be fattened on scraps along the way, two goats and three obnoxious geese. Strange as it was, there was also something familiar about it to Aiden. The isolation, the self-containment, was not so different from the months he had spent crossing the country in the wagon train.

  The voyage was mostly good and sometimes not, terrifying a dozen times to Aiden but only twice to the more experienced crew. Only once did they all fear death, in a storm that built fast as Genesis. The sky was blue, then green as pus. The sea went flat and oily, and the cat grew twice her size and sparked when touched. It was not fifteen minutes from calm day to full storm. The weather sliced in fast and sharp as ice over ice, smelling of iron. Waves crashed over the deck. A spar twisted and broke like a twig the ducklings might use to build one of their fairy houses. But Fish steered them well, the men knew what to do and somehow at the end of it, which was a long, awful time coming, they were all alive and the ship was whole and there were stories for days—no more nor less than a thousand storm tales from history, but truly their own.

  Even on routine days, nothing was ever really ordinary at sea. A thousand dolphins would suddenly burst out of the waves around them, leaping and playing along with the ship like children in some spontaneous game of chase. There were popping schools of flying fish almost every day, and whales almost as long and broad as their ship. To see a dozen or more whales was not uncommon but still felt like a miracle.

  “They have their babies in Mexico during the winter,” Fish explained. “Then they swim north all the way to Alaska to feed during the summer.”

  They ate fresh fish most days, and in the six weeks it took to reach their destination, hardly any weevils invaded the biscuits. Most of the cabbages, carrots and onions lasted. Every desperate sea story Aiden had read seemed false and overwrought. So sprits were high the morning of August 20 as they neared the Chinchas. The sea was churning and tumbling with life. Schools of silver-blue mackerel boiled through the water. Chasing after them were a hundred sea lions, supple and glossy as pulled taffy. They dodged and spun through the swarms of mackerel, pausing just long enough to lift glistening heads with mouths full of sparkling fish, as if showing off before gulping them down. Their barking cries were so loud the men on the ship had to shout to be heard.

  “I’ve never seen fish thick as this,” Fish shouted. “It’s like a carpet you could walk across!” This boil of fish sounded like a waterfall.

  The sky was also impossibly thick with life. Millions of seabirds soared and skittered across the dense blue sky. Not millions like the way people casually say “millions,” but millions like real millions. In the distance, they could see the snowy peaks of the Andes.

  Aiden, Christopher and Fish stood on the quarterdeck like kids on Christmas morning. The long voyage was over, and here they were, ready to scoop up their fortune in guano and sail triumphantly home again. But the mood changed as they neared the islands. At first they saw no land at all, just a strange low yellow cloud on the horizon. It was something like fog, but it did not melt off over the water or wisp away up into the sky. It simply hung there, immobile and fuzzy, like an ancient dog in its ancient place. They took turns looking through the spyglass, but still no one really knew what it was. The morning passed and the miles closed and the dense yellow cloud grew larger.

  As they got closer, the actual islands began to appear out of the yellow haze. It was like no place anyone had ever seen or even imagined. There was not a scrap of vegetation, not a tree or bush to be seen—only guano. The color ranged from rusty ocher to almost white. Years of mining had carved out one whole side of the mountain. Aiden shuddered. What was this place?

  “Jesus—there are a hundred ships anchored there!” Christopher said, scanning the anchorage. “How long does it take to load a hundred ships?”

  “There can’t be that many,” Fish said. “Here, give me the glass.” Christopher handed him the telescope, and Fish scanned the forest of masts. “Not more than seventy, I think,” he offered lamely. “Maybe eighty.”

  “Two ships loading every day would still put us waiting here a month for our turn!” Christopher held his handkerchief up to his nose. “And no one said it would smell so ghastly!”

  “It’s shit,” Fish said. “How did you think it would smell?”

  In reality, it smelled nothing like ordinary waste, animal or human. It was more acrid and penetrating, with a taint of ammonia. It stung their eyes and left an odd soapy feeling in their mouths.

  It took the rest of the afternoon to maneuver the ship into place and get it securely anchored. The water was deep, so plenty of chain was required to anchor safely, and with so many ships, swing room also had to be carefully calculated. The sun was setting by the time everything was all secured. The smell of the guano was less pungent without the steaming power of the sun and was soon overshadowed by the smell of cooking from nearby ships.

  Fish gave most of the sailors leave, keeping only two volunteers for the evening watch. There were two “saloon ships” in the near vicinity, older vessels, no longer seaworthy but not quite ready to be sunk, that were permanently anchored to sell necessities and serve as saloons for the sailors who were stranded here with no other outlet. The sailors dropped the launch as if the ship were on fire and rowed away so fast Fish swore their wake bobbled the Raven. Throughout the harbor, yellow lamps flickered aboard other ships, and a fiddle tune floated over the still water. The yellow haze of dust settled, and the island, in the gibbous moon, looked almost beautiful, like a half-eaten wedding cake. Aiden, Christopher and Fish ate a cold supper on deck, with a bottle of champagne.

  “Here we are, then.” Christopher leaned back in the canvas chair and raised his glass. “Three Kings of the Chinchas! Sons of fortune!”

  They toasted, and tried hard for merriment, but it never felt like a real celebration. There was a deep gloom that hung about this place. Bits of music and talk floated over from the other ships, but the island was silent and dark. Christopher drank enough to fall asleep easily, and Fish never had trouble, but Aiden could not quiet his mind. There was almost no wind and the little cabin was hot and stuffy, so he finally gave up and went up on deck and watched the stars until he fell asleep in the chair.

  Everyone was awake by sunrise, and after a quick breakfast he and Christopher set off in the launch to register with the office onshore. As owners of the ship, they should have sat like gentlemen and let the four sailors row them in, but they were both tired of idleness, so each took an oar for most of the way, sometimes racing each other to see who could pull hardest. It was at least a half mile to the island, and they were both sweating but energized by the time they arrived.

  The landing dock for small boats was sheltered by a rocky breakwater. It protruded b
arely twenty feet from the shore, offering space for only three or four boats to tie up.

  “I don’t suppose crowding is often a problem,” Christopher said. “It hardly seems a place for sightseeing.” The acrid smell was strong and the island radiated heat even at this early hour.

  About two hundred yards away, partly obscured by the rocks, was the loading wharf, which had been built out from a high cliff edge. Right now there were two ships tied up, one on each side, loading the guano. Bags of it were slid down canvas chutes, one on each side, directly to the ships, where men tossed them into the holds belowdecks. The sailors wore kerchiefs over their mouths and often ran to the bow of the ship, bending over the rails, gulping fresh air.

  “What are they doing?” Aiden asked one of his own crew. He knew that after just a few hours aboard the saloon ship last night with the other sailors, the men probably knew ten times as much about the business as he and Christopher did.

  “Trimming the load,” the sailor replied as he expertly rowed them through the surf. “Making it balanced in the hull,” he explained, remembering that Aiden had no experience with this. “It’s foul work, but there’s no one else can do it. The coolies aren’t allowed.”

  “Why not?” Aiden asked.

  “They’re not allowed to even talk to a white man. Never allowed near a ship for fear they’ll try and escape.”

  “Escape what?”

  The sailor shrugged. “This place.”

  Before he could ask any more questions, they pulled alongside the little dock. When Aiden climbed ashore, his legs were so unused to solid ground that he almost fell. He turned and gave a hand to Christopher, who was equally wobbly but, being more practiced with drunkenness, better able at negotiating it. They started up the path that led to the manager’s compound. After about a quarter mile, the path came into an open area, where they could see, for the first time, the actual mine. What they had seen from aboard the ship, even with the telescope, was not a tenth of the true operation. It was like they had suddenly landed on another planet. Christopher and Aiden both just stopped and stared. It was one thing to know that there was a pile of bird droppings here three hundred feet high; it was quite another to actually see it, a pile as high as a castle or cathedral, built over thousands of years, plop by plop, a spoonful at a time. With the weight of centuries and the uniquely dry atmosphere, it was now compacted hard as cement. And everywhere they looked, hundreds of men were working furiously to chip it away. Perhaps a quarter of the mountain had already been gouged out, in tiers that stepped back from the shore.

  The workers were all Chinese—skinny little men, men of only bones. They looked so frail it seemed impossible they could even stand, let alone swing a pick or shovel, but all over the vast site, they smashed away at the guano mountain. As quickly as the chunks fell, other men scooped them up and carried them away. Some had wheelbarrows, but most used baskets that they carried on their backs, held on with a strap across their foreheads or braided ropes that dug into their shoulders. They scurried back and forth in a quickstep shuffle, bent forward to keep from falling over under the load. There were at least two hundred men laboring, and no one ever paused. Dotted throughout the site, ensuring that no one ever would, were a dozen tall Negro overseers armed with clubs and bullwhips.

  “I suppose I thought there would be machines,” Christopher said quietly. “Not just…this.” It was the first time Aiden had ever seen him rattled.

  “Yes,” Aiden said blankly, unable to tear his eyes away from the awful scene. “But how would they get machines out here? Or the coal to run them. And the dust would be hard on machines.…” He trailed off. Talk of machines was just to fill up the air. What level of hell was this? A track ran from the center of the dig site straight to the cliff edge above the loading wharf, but the carts that ran on this track were pulled by men, not mules. A cart that size, Aiden knew from coal mining, could carry one ton. But mules needed more food and water than men did, and they probably could not work long in this blistering heat. So it was men—hundreds of men.

  “What do we do?” Aiden whispered, his voice choked more by horror than by the toxic dust.

  “What do you mean?” Christopher grabbed his arm, his fingers digging into the flesh, and turned him away from the scene. “Business,” he said. “We do business.”

  As he followed Christopher toward the office, Aiden thought about the strange, haunted captain so eager to wager away his ship, so ready to burn her if he could not. What kind of business was this going to be?

  The office compound was a collection of shabby little buildings that would have been considered poor anywhere else in the world, but here, where every plank of wood had to be hauled in from the distant mainland, were probably considered quite grand. There was one main building with three separate doors opening onto a narrow veranda, barely wide enough for two men to walk side by side. There was a separate little kitchen building, essentially just a thatch roof for shade with some woven mats for walls, and two sturdier sheds to store supplies, with locking doors and no windows. There were two large water barrels, also with locks, set under the shade of a lean-to.

  A large, dark Negro sat in a cane chair at one end of the veranda, where he had a view of both the compound and the digging below. His clothes were worn, but his short hair was meticulously cut, smooth and even as the perfect hedges outside the Worthingtons’ front door. Propped against the wall behind him was a wooden club the size of a baseball bat, though thinner, meant to be swung with one hand. It had leather lacing wrapped around the handle, stained darker in the middle from a sweaty grip. Coiled neatly beside the Negro’s chair was a braided bullwhip. He said nothing as they stepped onto the narrow porch, just looked them quickly up and down, then nodded toward the middle door.

  Mr. Koster, the manager of the island, sat at his desk. He was a small man with heavy bones, not fat exactly, but soft and unworked. He, like the Negro, was clean-shaven and had his hair cut so short it was impossible to tell the color. His skin was ghostly pale and puffed the way it got to be for men too fond of brown liquor and tinned meats. Aiden had assumed he would be Peruvian, but now he couldn’t guess what his heritage was.

  “Good morning, Mr. Koster. We are so pleased to meet you.” Christopher took his hat off and made a formal bow. “I am Christopher Worthington; this is my partner, Aiden Madison, of the Raven. We arrived yesterday from San Francisco.”

  Koster’s desk looked like a schoolteacher’s castoff, and there was a crack down the front from top to bottom, as if an angry student had kicked it in a temper. The top of the desk was almost entirely covered in little decorative knickknacks: carved wooden birds, embroidered pincushions, small blobby glass animals, china angels crowded together on painted tin trays. There was barely enough space for a ledger in the center. The office was covered in calendar pictures. Covered wall to wall, ceiling to floor. Some, dated as far back as 1857, were just faded bluish shapes with curled, crispy edges by now, the Alps indistinguishable from Tahiti.

  “The Raven?” Koster looked puzzled. “I know that ship.” His accent was impossible to place, but there were suggestions of German.

  “She has sailed here before,” Christopher said. “Under Captain Newgate. We are the new owners. We have the guano license as well.” He produced the paper, with its official signatures and stamps. “We are looking forward to conducting our business here. We haven’t had much chance to look around, but it seems like a splendid operation!”

  Aiden was startled to detect Mr. Worthington in Christopher’s voice, cadence and even posture. How easily he had slipped into business mode, like a lady whipping out her painted fan. Koster leaned back in his chair, an ornate construction of carved mahogany—a bishop’s chair, though spidery with cracks and pocked with tiny wormholes. He examined the papers.

  “They appear to be in order,” he said. Christopher and Aiden waited awkwardly, neither sure what to say next. Koster controlled the fate of every ship in the anchorage, determining
who would load and depart in a few weeks and who might languish for months. The Worthington name had clout in the United States, but the biggest shippers in the guano trade were from England or Germany and had been dealing here for a decade. Koster would have to be courted carefully.

  “This will do.” Koster tapped the papers together and handed them back.

  “We would be honored if you would dine aboard our ship,” Christopher offered. “Our cooking is undoubtedly less fine than you are accustomed to, but we do have a fattened live goose and some excellent wines that have been carefully kept.”

  “Very nice.” Koster creaked forward in his chair, sliced his nail beneath the ledger page and turned it with a heavy sigh. “I could come Tuesday, a week from now, though it must be early—say, six? I have another engagement at nine.” He closed the book and looked at Christopher with a smug little smile. “Will your wine keep that long? I would hate to see fine wine spoil on my account.”

  “Yes.” Christopher fumbled for the first time Aiden had ever seen. “As it suits you, sir,” he recovered. “We will await your company.”

  Aiden could tell Christopher was annoyed by the man and was working as hard as he could to hide it. “Is there anything else?” Koster asked.

  “No. Good day, sir.”

  “Is it possible to explore a bit?” Aiden asked impetuously.

  “Explore?”

  “To walk around on the island.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “I have some interest in the natural elements,” he said, grasping for the best excuse. “Birds and such.”

  Koster looked at Aiden as if he had asked to be dropped into a pit of spiders.

  “Fine, if you stay away from the digging,” Koster said. “It’s dangerous. Nature is filthy, but I know there are those who must have a look at it, so fine if you must. You know there is no water anywhere?”