Killigrew and the Incorrigibles

by Jonathan Lunn

  The natives on the island had run down to the beach. Robertson saw two missionaries with them – Polynesians in clerical garb – climb into an outrigger canoe with a dozen of the dark-skinned natives. They were pushed out through the surf, and the natives began to paddle them to meet the Tisiphone.

  Polynesian missionaries were nothing unusual in these islands. Since the death of the Reverend Mr Williams on Erromanga, the London Missionary Society had started taking young men from the islands of Polynesia, where Christianity had found more acceptance, and trained them to bring the word of God to the New Hebrides. It was hoped that, having a better understanding of the ways of the peoples of the South Seas, they would be more acceptable to the dark-skinned heathens of these islands who had reacted so violently to the incursions of the white man.

  The missionaries’ greeting as their pirogue approached the Tisiphone, however, did take Robertson by surprise. ‘Are you looking for Thorpetown?’ asked one, in perfect English.

  The commander leaned out from the entry port. ‘Yes. Is this the right way?’

  ‘Turn back! Turn back now! The place is damned, do you hear? Damned! For Thorpetown is the Babylon of the Pacific, mother of all whores! Abandon all hope, you who enter here! Shun the Sodom and Gomorrah of the South Seas, for all who touch here are accursed!’

  ‘Yes, yes, very good. It’s this way, is it? Mad as a hatter,’ he added to Yelverton, sotto voce.

  With the missionaries’ warnings still ringing in the crew’s ears from astern, the Tisiphone steamed around the island and a channel less than a cable’s length wide opened up before them.

  ‘Looks deep enough to take the Tizzy in, sir,’ said Yelverton. ‘Do we go on?’

  ‘Of course!’ said Robertson. ‘I think the hands would be extremely disappointed if we didn’t.’ There was not a seaman on board who did not know the kind of warning the missionaries had just given them usually heralded a den of vice and intemperance, and if there were two things Jack Tar could not get enough of, they were vice and intemperance. ‘Pass the word to Mr Muir, Mr Woolley; ahead slow.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ The midshipman descended the after hatch to inform the chief engineer.

  Beyond the bottleneck, the channel opened out into a lagoon five hundred and fifty yards wide and almost two miles long. The sloop advanced, her paddle wheels plashing at the crystal-clear turquoise waters. There was still no sign of any trading station, just thick jungles pressing in on either side of the lagoon, the mangrove trees dipping their gnarled roots into the water as if they were testing the temperature.

  At the far end of the lagoon, the channel divided in two, but there was a sign at the fork, an ornately carved stone bearing the single word ‘THORPETOWN’, and a stylised hand pointing to the right. Robertson supposed the stone was intended to be in the form of a milestone back in England, but to his jaded eye the marble block looked more like a headstone.

  ‘Steer two points to port, Holcombe,’ he commanded. ‘Leadsman to the chains. Shorten sail, Mr Darrow.’

  The right-hand channel narrowed to a cable’s length once more, and with the leadsman at the chains calling out the soundings as rapidly as he could take them, the Tisiphone nosed her way through. The channel curved to the right and grew narrower and narrower, until it was barely a hundred yards wide. Robertson was just starting to think he had made some mistake – perhaps he had missed another sign, another turning – when suddenly the jungle opened out on both sides and a second, upper lagoon was visible before them, a mile and a half long and broadening out like the head of a sperm whale to a width of over half a mile. On the south side of the lagoon was a beach of white sand where the crystal-clear waters lapped, and a thick jungle of coconut palms and banyan trees draped with vines and lianas, with rare jungle blooms adding splashes of colour to the emerald verdancy.

  On the north side of the lagoon stood Thorpetown.

  Compared to Paddon’s main trading station at Aneiteium, it was magnificent. Paddon looked as if he intended to stay on Aneiteium until all the sandalwood was logged out of these islands. The scale of Thorpetown suggested that Thorpe intended to start a whole new civilisation. There were houses, stores, godowns, a sawmill and a try-works, even a library. Streets ran between the weatherboard houses in straight lines, as if Thorpe planned to extend the settlement inland in an orderly grid pattern; while many of the houses still looked to be under construction, more jungle had been cleared behind them to bear out the suggestion that Thorpe intended to expand this overlarge settlement. Behind the wharf there was a plaza where a bronze statue of a man stood on a marble plinth. But the focal point was a broad flight of stone steps, carved out of the rock that rose up behind the plaza, which would not have looked out of place in Rome or Paris. At the very top of these steps stood a large stone mansion, with two gleaming bronze cannon flanking the impressive portico.

  But the strangest thing of all was that there was not a living soul in sight.

  Robertson felt like an explorer in the jungles of Indonesia or Central America, stumbling unexpectedly across the ruins of a once-great but long-dead civilisation. Thorpe had only founded this place two years ago and everything was obviously new, and yet at the same time there was an unmistakable air of decay over it all. Despite the land clearance behind the settlement, the jungle encroached on either side of it as if it were merely biding its time. Dead leaves lay in the streets like harbingers of the inevitable invasion, and here and there lianas were already starting to creep forwards. Apart from the cries of strange jungle birds, the only sound to be heard was the splashing of the Tisiphone’s paddles.

  It was Yelverton who broke the awed silence on deck. ‘Lor’!’ was all he could say.

  The sloop drew level with the plaza, close to where a wooden jetty ran out from the wharf. ‘Stop engine,’ ordered Robertson. ‘Starboard anchor… let go.’

  In the eerie silence of the lagoon, the sound of the anchor hitting the water was like an explosion.

  ‘What do you think happened here?’ wondered Yelverton.

  ‘Maybe they were wiped out by a plague,’ suggested the helmsman.

  ‘Belay that nonsense!’ barked Robertson. ‘Make ready my gig, Mr Darrow. I’m going ashore. There must be someone here who can tell us where everyone is.’

  * * *

  Petty Officer Holcombe gripped his musket tightly as he gazed up at the dark windows of the weatherboard buildings that fronted the lagoon. The empty windows seemed to stare back like dead eyes. ‘Who d’you think built it, sir?’ he whispered.

  ‘Island labour, Holcombe,’ replied Robertson, thinking: slave labour. He did not bother to whisper; it was not in his nature.

  A set of hardwood rails ran the length of the jetty, with a wooden truck on them like a mine car. At the end of the jetty the tracks ascended a gentle wooden ramp up to the loft of the try-works; just before they reached the ramp, there was a set of points where a second branch cut across the wharf at an angle, ending in a set of buffers in front of the sawmill. A funnel that looked as though it had been cannibalised from a steamship projected through the shingled roof of the mill, betraying the presence of an engine to power the blade.

  The commander climbed up the wooden steps to the mill and looked inside. The rails ended at a set of buffers right alongside the saw, which boasted one of the new, circular blades. The machinery gleamed, but there was enough grease on the moving parts to suggest this was a working engine, a supposition which was borne out by the sawdust on the floor and the aroma of sandalwood.

  He climbed down to the wharf once more and followed the wooden tracks up the ramp to the half-loft of the try-works. The rails ended right next to the mincing horse, a kind of trestle for cutting up the ten-foot-long blanket pieces of whale blubber. Beside it was a mincing tub where the horse pieces could be chopped into skin-spined leaves of blubber known as ‘bibles’. A sluice gate in the side of the mincing tub allowed the ‘bibles’ to be washed down a chute into the two huge try-pots which
sat above a brick furnace surrounded by a low cistern of water to prevent the spread of fire. Another chute led from the platform to the furnace, so the fritters scooped off the surface of the simmering blubber could be delivered straight to the flames, and spigots allowed the blubber to be drained off into casks.

  Looking down into the try-pots from the half-loft, Robertson saw they were gleaming and spotless inside, but that was nothing unusual. The captain of any whaler kept his try-pots polished inside and out: when a sperm whale was captured, the spermaceti was tryed-out first, and the pots needed to be spotless to keep the precious fluid pure. There was no disguising the traces of blood in the mincing tubs: these facilities had been used at least once.

  He climbed down the ladder from the half-loft to the ground floor of the try-works. A door set in the far wall led into the next building, a large warehouse stacked high with casks. Robertson rapped on the nearest with his knuckles, and was surprised not to get a hollow knocking sound: the cask was full. He exchanged glances with Holcombe.

  ‘Must be someone around, sir,’ said the petty officer. ‘I can’t imagine anyone in his right mind leaving a godown full of whale oil. If all these casks are full, there must be thousands of guineas’ worth of oil in here!’

  Robertson grunted noncommittally. ‘See if you can find a crowbar. There must be one around here somewhere.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  It did not take the petty officer long to find what he was looking for. Robertson took it from him and pried the lid off the first cask. He lowered his face to the contents and took a sniff. Then he removed one of his gloves, dipped his fingers in the liquid, rubbed his fingers together to test its greasiness and finally dabbed a bit on the tip of his tongue. He spat it out. ‘Salt water, to preserve the casks.’

  The two of them left the try-works and rejoined the rest of the gig’s crew in the plaza. Robertson walked across to the bronze, larger-than-life statue. Although the plaque on the plinth merely declared ‘Our Benefactor’, there was no mistaking the statue was a study of Thaddeus Thorpe himself; but either it had been sculpted before the trader had put on so much weight, or the sculptor had wisely judged there was no harm in pandering to Thorpe’s vanity.

  Robertson eyed the statue askance. ‘Is there plenty of fresh water in the Tisiphone’s stores, Holcombe?’

  ‘I believe so, sir.’

  ‘Good. Because I don’t want any of the men drinking the water hereabouts. First that deranged missionary, and now this Bedlam without inmates; there’s obviously something in the water.’

  ‘There’s a kind of madness here, right enough, sir.’

  ‘Sir!’ exclaimed one of the seamen, and pointed.

  Everyone turned to see a figure descending the steps leading up to the mansion. His descent was erratic: he meandered from side to side as if drunk, a possibility borne out by the bottle he clasped by the neck in one hand. A white man whose face had been tanned brick red by the tropical sun and was covered in several days’ growth of beard. He was barefoot, wearing only trousers and a grubby shirt that was neither tucked into his trousers nor buttoned at the front.

  ‘Welcome!’ he called. ‘Welcome to Thorpetown, strangers! The metropolis of the South Seas!’

  ‘And who the blazes are you?’ demanded Robertson.

  ‘I?’ The man looked puzzled while he tried to remember. ‘I am Jeremiah Underwood, esquire: secretary, clerk, and general factotum to his imperial godhead, Mr Thaddeus Thorpe, may his black soul burn in hell; and the sooner, the better, says I.’ The man made a sweeping, contemptuous gesture with the bottle that would have resulted in him falling flat on his face, had not Holcombe caught him and propped him up. His breath stank of rum.

  ‘Where is everyone, Mr Underwood?’

  ‘Everyone? Everyone’s right here. Every one? Only one, because I am the only one. I am everyone. The one and only. That’s me.’

  ‘But what about the people who built this place?’ Robertson demanded impatiently.

  ‘Gone. Long gone. Gone back whence they came, back into the jungles.’

  ‘The natives, you mean? But what about the whalers? The sandalwood traders? Where did they go?’

  ‘They didn’t go anywhere. They couldn’t, because they never came. You can’t go, unless you come first. And they never, ever came.’

  ‘Someone came,’ said Robertson. ‘There’s sandalwood dust in the sawmill, and bloodstains in the mincing tubs in the try-works.’

  ‘Oh, a few came,’ admitted Underwood. ‘Just a very few.’ He held up thumb and forefinger, a fraction of an inch apart, as if to say that the men who had come had been no larger than ants. ‘What brought them? I don’t know. Curiosity, I s’pose.’ He belched.

  ‘We’re wasting our time with this fellow,’ snorted Robertson. ‘Let’s get back to the Tisiphone.’

  ‘Not before time, sir,’ said Holcombe. ‘This place gives me the shivers.’

  A look of panic appeared on Underwood’s face. ‘You’re not going without me, are you? Don’t leave me here, for God’s sake!’

  ‘We’re not going far,’ Robertson told him impatiently. ‘We’ll be staying here a couple of weeks.’ If Quested knew what a ghost town the trading station was, then he would think it an ideal place to lie low until the Tisiphone gave up her search for him; the more he thought about it, the more convinced Robertson was that this was where the Lucy Ann was bound. ‘If you want to come with us when we leave, well… I suppose we can find room for you on board,’ he said grudgingly. ‘We can drop you off in Auckland, after we’ve concluded our tour of the South Seas. But before you make your mind up, I should tell you Thorpe’s coming back.’

  ‘Thorpe?’ Underwood’s face twisted in a scowl of hatred. ‘He’s never coming back! That bastard left me here to rot!’

  ‘To the contrary, Mr Underwood, I encountered Mr Thorpe aboard his yacht at the Isle of Pines just three days ago. He told us he was on his way here; I should say you can expect him some time tomorrow.’

  A mixture of emotions crossed the drunkard’s face all at once: hope, fear, hatred and despair. He seemed to drift off into a reverie.

  Holcombe was gazing around at the buildings that surrounded the plaza on three sides. ‘Notice anything rum about this place, sir?’

  ‘I should say this whole place is rum, Holcombe. Did you have anything in particular in mind?’

  ‘This place has got everything, sir: houses, stores, sawmill, try-works, hotels, taverns, a town hall… there’s even a bloody library over there. But there’s something missing, sir.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘Apart from people, sir. There’s no church. Nowhere for the people Thorpe dreamed would be living here to worship.’

  ‘Perhaps he thought they would be too busy working for him to worship,’ Robertson said impatiently.

  Underwood overheard them. ‘Worship, d’you say? He expected them to worship, right enough. But not in any damned church.’ He drained the last dregs from the bottle, and used the same hand to point up the steps to the house at the top with an extended index finger. ‘That’s the temple. That’s where he wanted them to bow down. Before the palace of the god-king himself, Thaddeus Thorpe!’ He hurled the bottle furiously at the statue; it missed and shattered against the steps, splashing a few drops of blood-red rum on the pale stone.

  * * *

  ‘Signal from the lookouts, sir.’ Midshipman Cavan gazed along the beach to where two seamen were stationed on Cook’s Pyramid, a flat-topped rock on the east side of the bay where the great navigator himself had taken some sightings in 1774. The men were taking it in turns to take some sightings of their own, levelling a telescope to where Ågård was at the lookout post on Mount Melen with two ratings from the port watch; Killigrew was due to relieve them after supper.

  One of the seamen had a telescope, and was reading the flags of the signaller with Ågård; as he spoke, the other was signalling to Killigrew with his own flags, relaying the message. The lieutenant had
worked out a simple set of signals – using flags by day and lanterns by night – to indicate distance, direction and heading, which they had written down for the benefit of the others. That limited lookout duties to those who could read, but there were sufficient men in the shore party who were young enough to have attended the new ‘ragged schools’ for pauper children.

  ‘Vessel sighted twenty miles off, bearing south-west by south, heading for the southern tip of the island,’ read Killigrew. Any vessel approaching from that direction would have to sail around the southern tip to reach Port Resolution.

  ‘It could be them, sir,’ said Cavan.

  Killigrew glanced to where the men of the starboard watch swam and splashed about playfully in the surf. Endicott floated on his back, pretending to be a whale by occasionally spouting up mouthfuls of seawater. One of the ships’ boys, Cuddy Gamel, was making a sandcastle. Fourteen years old, Gamel was a little too old for that kind of thing, but he was simple-minded so no one worried about it. Besides, it really was a very good sandcastle; the tip of his tongue protruding from his lips in a show of concentration, Gamel was scoring lines in the walls to give them the look of masonry, and the black sand added to the effect.

  One of Killigrew’s principles was to let the men play hard when they were off watch, as long as they worked hard when they were on watch; and he had certainly kept them hard at it in the twenty-four hours since the Tisiphone had steamed away from Tanna. Once the marquee had been completed, he had divided his bluejackets and marines into two watches, starboard and port, and they continued to keep watches just as if they were still on board the Tisiphone. Without the business of sailing to be done, he kept his men busy with cutlass or small-arms drill when they were on watch.

  Killigrew saw Sharky dive off some rocks into the water, and waited for him to surface. But there was no sign of the nakaimo. The lieutenant knew better than to let that worry him by now, but it still unnerved him, even though he suspected that Sharky had surfaced somewhere out of sight, and was only pretending to be able to hold his breath for an inordinately long period of time to add credence to his ludicrous claim that he could turn himself into a shark.