Killigrew and the Incorrigibles

by Jonathan Lunn

  ‘Landlubbers often misjudge the perils of swimming in the sea. The chances of her swimming four miles, getting past the sharks and making it across the reef—’

  ‘Are tiny, yes. But there is a chance. And if she makes it to the mission, or to Paddon’s trade house… she can identify the Lucy Ann, Cap’n. She can identify us. Is that a chance you want to take?’

  There was silence for a moment, and then Lissak heard someone in the cabin take a step towards the door. He quickly started to walk boldly down the corridor to the great cabin at the far end, and bumped into Quested as he emerged from the door.

  The captain looked at the old lag suspiciously. ‘And what do you think you’re doing, creeping around down here? Why aren’t you up on deck with the others?’

  ‘I thought someone had better check on Fingers,’ said Lissak, all innocence. He gestured through the open door of the great cabin to where Vickers still sprawled unconscious on the deck.

  Quested narrowed his eyes at Lissak. He knows, thought Lissak. He knows I was eavesdropping… and he doesn’t like it; not one little bit.

  ‘All right,’ hissed Quested, after an uncomfortably long pause. ‘Come on, Mr Forgan. Let’s get this ship closer to the shore.’

  Chapter 13

  Mrs Cafferty’s Run

  Scrunched up in the locker beneath the window seat, Mrs Cafferty listened as Lissak dragged Vickers out of the great cabin and closed the door behind him. On the deck above, she heard Quested order the sails unboxed and tell the helmsman to put the tiller over. She lay perfectly still, feeling the change in the rolling of the deck beneath her as the ship changed direction.

  It felt like hours before she heard the anchor splash into the sea, but she had heard the ship’s bell ring seven times and knew she could not have been in the locker for much more than three-quarters of an hour.

  ‘Bring that boat in, Mr Macy!’ Quested bellowed. ‘You too, Mr Forgan. We’re going ashore. Break out the shooting sticks and any lanterns you can find, Utumate.’

  ‘Shooting sticks, Captain Quested?’

  ‘Muskets, Mr Cusack. The natives on that island are only half civilised. It’s less than eight years since the crews of the Star and the Catherine were massacred here. The Kunies may have accepted the presence of the mission and the two trading stations, but they may not be so friendly if they find us creeping about on their island in the wee small hours of the morning. I’ll take one boat with Tavu, Inácio, Gog and Magog, and Mr Cusack; Mr Forgan will take another with Mr Pilcher and Chase, Mr Wyatt, Mr Lissak and Mr Griddha.’

  In the darkness of the seat-locker, Mrs Cafferty smiled to herself in spite of everything. Obviously Quested did not trust Cusack, Wyatt, Lissak or Mangal enough to leave them on board the Lucy Ann while he was ashore.

  ‘Everyone else will stay on board, and keep a close watch. You’re in charge until I get back, Mr Macy.’

  More footsteps on the deck above, and the plash of oars as the two boats headed for the shore. Having worked out that the Lucy Ann’s crew was reduced to twenty by the time it sailed from Norfolk Island, she had kept a careful tally: with Quested ashore with Cusack, Wyatt and nine others, that left Mr Macy and Mr Gardner on board with ten sailors and the two remaining convicts.

  Her heart pounded in her chest as she debated what to do next. She had supposed there would be natives on the island, but it had not occurred to her they might be cannibals. She could hardly remain hidden in the locker for the rest of the voyage: it would be weeks before they reached California, and even if she kept sneaking out for food or to relieve herself, she was bound to be caught sooner or later. So she had a simple choice of pressing ahead with her plan or giving herself up to Quested and the others at once. They would be furious she had pulled the wool over their eyes, and there was no telling how the hot-tempered Wyatt might react.

  Her experiences in Afghanistan had taught her that the old axiom ‘better the devil you know’ was not always true. When Akbar Khan had offered to take the officers’ wives of the army under his protection, if she had been given any choice she would certainly have chosen to stay with the army as it retreated towards the Khyber Pass. But she had not been given any choice in the matter: the officers had taken the decision for her, and despite her conviction that the Afghans would submit all the women to a fate worse than death she had been too timid to argue in those days. In the event, the Afghans had treated herself and the other women as honourably as circumstances would permit, while the army had been wiped out at Gandamack.

  Quested might claim that the natives of the Isle of Pines were cannibals, but how savage could they be if a mission and two trading stations could survive on the island? The natives were an unknowable quantity; but she knew all about Wyatt, Vickers and the other escaped convicts, and it did not take her long to decide she would prefer to take her chances with the natives than spend another day on board the Lucy Ann.

  She waited until she heard the shore party climb down into the two whaleboats before she pushed up the seat and peered out into the great cabin. Seeing the coast was clear, she climbed out of the locker and lowered the seat back into place.

  She looked around, wondering what she could take with her. She wished she had the courage to creep down to the galley to steal some food, but she had calculated that the shore party had left plenty of men on board, and she could not run the risk of running into them. There was a box of matches, but she could think of no way of taking them ashore without getting them soaked. She needed a knife: something to help her build a shelter of some kind if necessary, and to defend herself in extremis; but the best she could come up with was a letter-opener. There was no sheath for it, but she found a kid glove and thrust it over the blade so she would not cut herself when she tucked the knife behind her belt.

  She extinguished the oil lamp and crossed to the window. It was still dark outside, but she could see the bull’s-eyes and flambeaux of the men in the boats as they rowed towards the shore, now less than a hundred yards away. The lights glittered on the waters that surged through a gap in the reef, perhaps half a mile wide.

  The boats reached the beach and the crews drew them up on the sand; two men stood by them while the remaining ten members of the shore party headed inland. If she could stay clear of them for long enough, perhaps they would give up the search and sail on without her. She knew she was taking a big chance, but a big chance was better than no chance at all.

  She took one of the sheets off the bunk in the cabin and carried it into the day room, tied one corner of the sheet in a double knot around the frame between the two windows, and hauled on it with all her might to make sure it would take her weight. Then she tied the laces of her half-boots together, hung them around her neck, and dropped the rest of the sheet out of the window.

  She climbed up to perch on the sill, taking care not to stab herself with the knife tucked behind her belt. It seemed an awfully long way from the window down to the water below, even though she knew it was no more than a few feet. Gripping the sheet firmly, she took a deep breath and eased herself out.

  It was almost impossible to get a decent grip on the sheet and she slithered as much as she climbed down, but at least she did not hit the water with a splash. The water was surprisingly cold and it was all she could do to keep herself from gasping with shock. The clothes she wore weighed her down and she knew she had no time to linger. She struck out with a powerful but silent breaststroke.

  A deceptively strong current ran across the beach but it only served to carry her away from where the two men waited by the boats, which suited her to a T. It carried her past a headland, but then she realised almost too late that the coast beyond angled away from her and she was in danger of being carried out to sea. A glance over her shoulder reassured her she was already a good distance from the Lucy Ann.

  Breakers crashed whitely ahead of her in the pre-dawn light and she realised with a surge of panic she was being swept towards the reef. She fought desperately against the cu
rrent, but each time she glanced to her right the jagged rocks showed closer and closer. The next wave swept her up and carried her towards the rocks. Stinging pain lacerated her left leg and she cried out, but the noise was drowned by the crash of the surf. Then she was plunging downwards, and gallons of water smashed down against her, forcing her under. She was swirled about beneath the waves and she held her breath until it seemed she could hold out no longer. With her blood roaring in her ears, she struck out in the direction she only guessed was the surface. She found only water and more water, and panicked, thinking she was diving rather than surfacing; then her head broke the waves and she found herself treading water in the calm of a lagoon.

  The next wave that broke over the reef swept her in towards the shore, and her hand brushed something in the water below her. Even then she almost lost her cool, thinking it was a shark, but then she realised it was the sand. She stopped swimming and stood up in the water.

  She stumbled up on to the beach, gasping for breath from her exertions and sobbing with pain. Dawn was coming fast now, and the horizon was clearly silhouetted by the lighter sky behind the Lucy Ann. Glancing down, she saw that the leg of her trousers was shredded: the skin beneath was in little better condition. She tore one of the sleeves off the guernsey she wore and bound it over the lacerations to stanch the bleeding. Then she collapsed on the dry sand.

  The only sounds she could hear were the lapping of the surf, the cry of birds in the jungles before her, and the occasional distant shout of the shore party as they quartered the bush for her. The first thing to do was to get clear of the beach before sun-up, then find somewhere safe to hide and rest until dawn. By some miracle she had not lost her half-boots when she had been swept over the reef, although they were soaked through. She tipped the water out of them and laced them on her feet. Then she passed between two of the palm trees that fringed the beach and headed into the forest of araucaria trees beyond.

  * * *

  Killigrew had seen William Hodges’ paintings of Captain Cook and his officers exchanging greetings with native chieftains on exotic South Sea Islands, but even after he had joined the Royal Navy he had never thought he would feature in such a scene himself. The thought lent an air of unreality as Captain Richards, who ran the trade house on Tanna, introduced Commander Robertson to Moltata, the chief of the village overlooking Port Resolution.

  Named after the flagship of Cook’s second voyage in the Pacific when the great navigator had touched here three-quarters of a century earlier, Port Resolution was a large cove, about a mile deep and a third of a mile wide. The barren, treeless slopes of the volcano Mount Yasur rose up about three miles inland, barely a third as high as the two mountains of about three and a half thousand feet over the southern end of the island. But the dark plume of volcanic smoke that rose from its crater gave the peak a terrible grandeur of its own.

  The north-western side of the bay was dominated by jumbled piles of black volcanic rocks, and a cluster of low, open-ended native huts with palm-thatched roofs were visible beneath the coconut palms that fringed the black sand beach on the south-eastern side of the bay. A number of outrigger canoes were drawn up on the sand, and Captain Richards’ small schooner, the Vanguard, rode at anchor a short distance from the beach. Richards’ trade house, a couple of tumbledown shacks on the edge of the beach, half nestled amongst the trees close to the village. Inland, massive araucaria trees seemed to tower almost as high as the mountains that stretched up behind them. Much of the island seemed to be carpeted with jungle as thick as any Killigrew had ever seen, from Borneo to the Guinea Coast. It was like an illustration of the Garden of Eden from a child’s Bible, but with colours far more vibrant than any aquatint: sand the colour of bleached bones, foliage as green as jade and a cerulean sky in which the plume from Mount Yasur was the only cloud other than the smoke from the Tisiphone’s funnel.

  It was two days since they had parted company from the Wanderer off the Isle of Pines; the following day they had stopped at Paddon’s main trading station off the cost of Aneiteium. Killigrew had expected to find a tumbledown shack like one of the trade houses he had seen at the Isle of Pines; instead he had found a small but bustling community with a try-works, a sawmill, a chandler’s store, a saloon, a number of weatherboard cottages and pens full of cattle. Robertson had interviewed the Reverend Mr Geddie, a dour Scots-Canadian who, with the help of his wife, ran the Presbyterian mission on the opposite side of the anchorage.

  As Thorpe had predicted, the reverend had nothing good to say about Captain Paddon, and had condemned the trading station as a den of iniquity. On investigating the trading station itself, they had found that while the saloon had a goodly compliment of native girls dressed up in the latest fashions from Paris, with paint on their faces, the station also boasted its own library, and Paddon’s boat builder – a sober Scotsman named Mr Henry, who was raising a family on the islet – turned out to be a Presbyterian himself, although he had as little time for Geddie as the reverend had for Paddon.

  There had been no sign of Paddon himself: Henry had informed them that the captain was ‘awa’ picking flowers’: an unprovoked piece of sarcasm, as far as Killigrew could tell. They had left Lord Hartcliffe there with two dozen bluejackets and half a dozen marines, and Robertson had instructed Hartcliffe that if the elusive Captain Paddon did return, he was to be held for questioning until the Tisiphone returned in just over two weeks’ time. One of Paddon’s brigs, the Julia Percy, had been in the anchorage, so if the Lucy Ann turned up they would have the means of pursuing her if necessary.

  There were about a hundred natives on the beach here at Port Resolution, brown-skinned Polynesian negroes, naked but for penis-wrappers, armed with spears, war-clubs, European-made tomahawks – a key good for exchange in the sandalwood trade – and even one or two muskets. If things had turned nasty, they could easily have slaughtered the handful of naval officers and ratings amongst them, but they seemed well disposed for now.

  ‘You feller is welcome long Tanna,’ said Moltata. His hair was grizzled and his face was wrinkled and seamed like old leather, but he stood tall and well built. He wore a pair of boar’s tusks on a thong around his neck to denote his status as yeremanu – the village ‘bigman’. ‘M’be people b’long me got big kae-kae long honour b’long you. M’be you feller is come long shore b’long kae-kae too much.’

  ‘I thought you said he spoke English?’ Robertson hissed at Richards through the fixed smile on his face.

  ‘That was English,’ said Richards. He was in his late forties or early fifties, with greasy salt-and-pepper hair and stubble on his jaw. He wore a grimy white jacket, his barrel-chest naked beneath, and his trousers were ragged to the knees. His face was tanned brick red by the sun. ‘Or at least bêche-la-mer – that’s what we call the pidgin in these parts.’

  ‘He says they’re going to hold a feast in our honour,’ explained Killigrew, who found the pidgin of these islands remarkably similar to those he had encountered on the Guinea Coast and in China.

  ‘Tell him the honour is all ours,’ Robertson instructed Richards.

  Moltata spoke to Richards in his own tongue, and the trader responded in the same. ‘Any idea what they’re saying, Second?’ asked Robertson.

  ‘Probably trying to decide what wine to drink with white meat, sir,’ Killigrew replied mischievously.

  ‘Pay no attention to him, Strachan,’ growled Robertson. As an amateur of the young science of geology, the assistant surgeon had been keen to come ashore to get a closer look at the volcano, but at Killigrew’s words he looked distinctly uncomfortable.

  Richards turned back to the commander. ‘He’s inviting you to join him in the nakamal to drink kava with him.’

  ‘What’s a nakamal?’

  Richards clawed at his stubbled, greasy cheek. ‘Sort of like the village hall, but it’s tabu to women. The village elders gather there in the evening to drink kava – that’s a native brew – and bore each other with long stories.
’

  ‘Sounds like the Carlton Club,’ said Killigrew.

  ‘Should we go?’ asked Robertson.

  ‘He’ll be insulted if you refuse,’ said Richards.

  ‘In that case,’ opined Strachan, eyeing the native warriors dubiously, ‘we should definitely go.’

  As they followed Richards and Moltata to the village, the seamen with the shore party looked equally uncomfortable about being surrounded by the natives. ‘A feast, eh?’ muttered Endicott. ‘With us as the main course, I suppose!’

  Richards overheard him. ‘Don’t worry. They ain’t going to eat you. The kanakas don’t look at a chap, lick their lips and say: “He looks tasty. Let’s have him for supper.” They usually only eat the men they kill in battle. They believe that by doing so, they take the strength of their enemies into themselves.’

  ‘What about that missionary feller that got et on Erromanga?’ asked Endicott.

  ‘The Reverend Mr Williams broke a tabu – even though the kanakas on Erromanga warned him against it. He brought his death on himself.’

  ‘What’s a tabu?’

  ‘It’s a sort of rule – something that’s forbidden. Like when you go in church, you’re supposed to take your hat off. That’s a tabu.’

  ‘I never heard of a church where they et you for not taking your hat off,’ grumbled Endicott.

  ‘Like when we were in Singapore, sir, and the bosun went in that heathen temple, and the priests got all shirty because he’d kept his boots on?’ asked Molineaux.

  ‘I suppose so,’ agreed Killigrew. ‘The imam said he’d defiled the mosque.’

  ‘If they thought his boots defiled their temple, they should see the state of his feet,’ said Endicott, and the rest of them laughed.

  ‘But how are we supposed to know what the tabus are?’ asked Molineaux.

  ‘The kanakas don’t believe that ignorance of the law is no excuse,’ Richards assured them. ‘In my experience they’re usually quite good about trying to warn you away from tabu areas.’