by John Boyne
Within a half-hour of the clock, Mr Fryer emerged again and strode off purposefully and I looked up to see the captain standing by his door, a look of utter defeat and perplexion on his face.
‘Are you all right, sir?’ I asked. ‘Can I get you something?’
‘No,’ he muttered. ‘Thank you, lad. Get you some sleep.’
He stepped back inside then and I would have heeded him and drifted off, only, the sound of boots re-emerged and this time it was Mr Fryer accompanied by Mr Christian and Mr Heywood. I jumped up and knocked on the captain’s cabin door to let them in. They marched past me without an acknowledgement and I followed them inside.
‘Out,’ said the captain immediately, pointing a finger in my direction.
‘Sir, perhaps the officers might like some—’
‘Get out,’ he repeated. ‘Now.’
I did as I was told, closing the door carefully behind me, but doing everything in my power to leave an inch of air space whereby I might hear what was going on inside. I could not make it all out, but what words I did hear were shocking.
‘. . . In Mr Churchill’s belongings, you say?’ the captain asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Mr Fryer. ‘Discovered by my own hand not an hour ago.’
‘And this list of names,’ he said. ‘What do you suppose it means?’
‘That is for you to decide, Captain. But, as you can see, the names of the three deserters are on it. At the top.’
‘Aye, I see that. And the names of several other seamen. What do you make of this, Mr Christian?’
I know not where he was standing but I could hear only a muffled sound as he replied and made out none of his words.
‘But nine of them, sir?’ asked the captain. ‘Nine men who planned to desert and stay on the island? It seems preposterous!’ Mr Christian spoke again, followed by Mr Heywood, but neither were distinguishable; then the captain’s words came through once more. ‘No, the list stays with me, Fletcher. As few people as possible should know the identities of these men. I realize that is frustrating for you but I prefer to handle this my way.’
The voices were getting closer now, so I jumped into my bunk, pulled the sheet atop me and feigned sleep. A minute or two later, all four men emerged and the three officers dispersed silently. I could sense the captain standing above me, watching me, but I dared not move. After a few moments, he went back inside and shut his door behind him. Shortly after that, I did fall asleep.
I woke in the darkness to the sound of voices. I could tell by the noises around me that it was the middle of the night and that most of the men and the officers were in their bunks, but something had woken me up: the sound of footsteps passing me quietly and a gentle tapping on the captain’s door. By the time I was fully conscious I had missed most of their conversation, but I remained totally still, my breathing consistent, my eyes closed to hear how it ended.
‘Should you not have challenged them, sir?’ came a question and I knew the voice to be that of Mr Fryer.
‘Perhaps,’ replied Captain Bligh. ‘But what good would it have done? We have no real idea why Mr Churchill included their names on his list.’
‘They weren’t just on the list, captain,’ he replied. ‘They were at the head of the list.’
‘It’s simply impossible,’ said Captain Bligh. ‘Two warranted officers? It’s simply impossible,’ he repeated. ‘Go to your bed, Mr Fryer. Do not speak of this matter again.’
There was silence for a few further moments and then the master crossed past me again and returned to his cabin, while the captain stepped back into his and closed the door.
This time I did not fall asleep.
36
THE DAYS PASSED AND, TO my dismay, I was left on board the Bounty with little opportunity to return to shore. I had been afforded no opportunity to say goodbye to Kaikala, so suddenly had the captain’s decision for the crew to return to the Bounty come about. Night after night I lay in my bunk dreaming about her and what she must think of me, but when I asked the captain whether I could join him on his daily trips to the island to inspect the gardens he would shake his head and tell me that he needed no one to attend on him and my time would be better spent helping to prepare the ship for its imminent departure.
But if I was lying, broken-hearted, in the corner of a dusty corridor, it was as nothing compared with the rumblings of the men on board the Bounty, who were increasingly angry about their confinement. Of course there was a part of them that blamed Muspratt, Millward and Churchill, the three deserters, for being the catalysts for this unhappy turn in our fortunes, but more than that their contempt was saved for the captain, who to my mind had merely reacted to the insubordination of a group of malcontents rather than instigating a campaign of senseless authority for himself.
‘Why, I should have gone with them and I wish to blazes I had now,’ said Isaac Martin one evening as we sat on the deck of the Bounty, staring across at the beach fires and the women who surrounded them, so tantalizingly close but too far away to do us any good.
‘Had you planned on it, then, Isaac?’ asked the quartermaster’s mate, George Simpson, a tricky old cove trusted by no one on account of an incident during Ruff and Trump shortly after we had crossed the 55th parallel; there was a matter of some deuces being held down the seat of his britches and reappearing at opportune moments. The incident had come to blows and he had been considered a villain by all for some time afterwards and even now was not fully trusted. Honesty at the cards was a tenet of naval life.
‘I had not,’ replied Martin, careful not to utter mutinous words when such a man as Simpson was listening. ‘I would never desert my post, not in this world. I merely say that I envy them their freedom and the luxuries that freedom brings.’
‘Lucky devils,’ said James Morrison, the man who, by privilege of being the boatswain’s mate, would be the unfortunate creature who would have to tie the rope around the men’s necks should they ever be discovered. ‘They won’t have gone far, if you ask me. They’ll be in and out of that camp at night whenever the officers are on the ship and their whistles need tending to.’
Here was the truth of it already. The malcontent was based on little more than the fact that the men had been among women who had allowed them to take liberties as many times during the day as they liked. We were soaked in the physical, every man jack of us. I was no better than any of them, although to the surprise of many of my fellow sailors I had saved my attentions for only one.
‘Bloody Bligh,’ came a deep murmur from behind me and I turned round to see the face of the cooper, Henry Hilbrant, now fully recovered from his flogging some weeks before. ‘He does it because he’s jealous, that’s all. That’s his only reason.’
‘Jealous?’ I asked, uncertain why he should say such a thing. ‘And what does the captain have to be jealous of, if you please?’
‘Of us, you wee pup,’ he replied, not looking me in the face but looking towards the shore instead. ‘Every man here knows that the captain hasn’t laid a finger on a woman since the day we left Spithead. All these treats here before us and is he interested in them? Not a bit of it. Perhaps he can’t manage it, that’s what I say. Perhaps he hasn’t a manhood at all.’
I stared at him in disgust, for it was a vile thing to say, a calumny of the worst nature. In my heart I wanted to defend the captain, for he had been good to me, but I couldn’t help but wonder whether there was some truth in the charge. Of course the captain loved his wife, but I knew from my conversations with the men that there were many who loved their wives and would have died rather than cause them pain. This, however, this life we were living on Otaheite, this was not betrayal. Or it was not seen as such anyway. It was seen as reward for the length of time we had spent at sea and the indignities we had suffered during our difficult crossing. It was a physical matter, not an emotional one. A need satisfied.
‘He’s gone mad, if you ask me,’ said Hilbrant. ‘A man goes mad if he does not take his pleasures. Wo
uldn’t you agree, Turnip? Sure, you’re half crazed already and it’s only been a few days since you last dipped your wick. There’s a madness in your eyes, can’t you see it? Should the moon come out I dread to think what might become of you!’
I ignored the comment for fear that it might be true. There was a long voyage home ahead of us. And now that I had partaken regularly in the act of love I could not imagine my mornings, afternoons and evenings without those particular pleasures. The very idea sent a pain southwards in me.
‘We should say a prayer that the Bounty will be destroyed,’ said Isaac Martin. ‘And then we would be forced to stay.’ There was a silence for a long moment and then he started to laugh. ‘I jest, of course,’ he said.
‘Still, it’d be quite the thing, wouldn’t it?’ asked Hilbrant. ‘To be able to stay for ever?’
‘And if we were stuck here, then no man would be in charge. Not the captain, not the officers, no one. We would rule over ourselves as the Saviour intended.’
‘Pipe-dreams, lads, pipe-dreams,’ said James Morrison, standing up and blocking my sight of the other men for a moment. He stood there quite still and I saw his head turn from man to man and settle on them for a few moments. I thought nothing of it at the time, only marvelled at how quickly the conversation changed from talk of the island to a tale that Hilbrant had about the time his brother Hugo had engaged in a wrestling match with an alligator of some renown. Indeed, the conversation, which had seemed a trivial thing to me at the time, vanished from my mind quite quickly and I was left to contemplate more important matters, such as how I would ever manage to see Kaikala again.
Every day more and more seedlings were being planted in the earthenware pots in the lower hold and I watched as the rows and rows, many hundreds of them, lined up. When they reached the far door I knew that our time was nearly up; and when, one particular afternoon, I saw that at the rate we were going that day was fast approaching, I determined to put a plan of some risk into action.
When I was a lad, living off my wits and the especial generosity of Mr Lewis in Portsmouth, I was not what you would call a particular specimen of manliness. I was small and slight, my arms were reedy and my chest a little sunken. I could walk around the town all day and not feel the exhaustions, but break into a run – as I did whenever a blue saw me pocketing an item that was not mine or a trick felt my nimble fingers pulling their pocket-watch from its home – and you could be assured that when I found my hiding place I would be stuck there, gasping for breath, for an hour hence. All that had changed, however, over the previous eighteen months. I had grown strong. I had grown able. I was what you might call a healthy fellow.
The Bounty was anchored a mile from the beaches of Otaheite; this was as close as we could get without the ship running aground and, although it was not something I had ever had cause to do in the past, it occurred to me that a nimble lad such as myself, with all his capacities intact and a determined rudder pointing him towards his destination, could swim that distance without finding himself in jeopardy. And if I was to be denied any further visits to shore until we left our paradise home, then I was determined to see Kaikala one more time and decided that I would wait until nightfall and swim the distance myself.
The officers were, of course, able to move freely between the island and the ship – Captain Bligh drew the line at limiting their freedoms – and this was another thing that was causing malcontent among the men. The idea of Mr Christian, Mr Elphinstone, Mr Heywood and even Mr Fryer suddenly having the pick of all the ladies of the island, ladies who had previously been under certain attachment to particular coves, dismayed all the men and caused a great deal of anger about the issue of how one fell into the role of being an officer in the first place, whether it was by just deserts or by a father’s deep pockets.
But each of them went back and forth, taking the launches with them, and those officers who were on board at night took a count of those tubs to make sure that none had been stolen – not that any man would have been able to sail one of them back to the island without being seen; they were too big for that. Each launch was twenty-three feet in length, not big enough to hold very many occupants, but too small to make such a journey unseen either. And so this was not a possibility for me. I had a simple choice: swim or stay. And I chose the former.
I waited until what I felt sure could only be our third or fourth last night there and was fortunate that the moon was half covered by clouds, so the possibility of being spotted and apprehended was more slight. The captain had gone to his cabin late but had fallen asleep almost immediately – I could tell by the sound of snoring emerging from his bunk – and the ship had fallen to silence. I was aware that the two officers on board were Mr Elphinstone and Mr Fryer, but the latter had already taken to his cabin too, so the footsteps I heard pacing the deck when I ascended were those of Mr Elphinstone.
I emerged from beneath and looked around cautiously. He was nowhere to be seen, so I assumed he had made his way to the foredeck, and I in turn made my way to the rear and quickly slipped over the side of the boat, descended by the ladder and allowed my body to glide gently into the water beneath.
Glory to God, it was shoddy freezing as I recall. I had dressed light, naught more than a pair of britches and a chemise, in order to make the swim easier, but it did little more than cause me immediate concern that I would freeze to death before I could complete my journey. I clung close to the boat still and waited until I heard Mr Elphinstone’s feet make their way to a spot above me, whereupon I waited for him to turn back, the point at which I planned to begin my swim. He took his sweet time about it too, standing there for what felt like an eternity, whistling a tune to himself, then singing a ditty in a low voice. I could feel the sensations in my feet starting to disappear and began to worry whether I would even make it to the island, but finally he turned and began his walk to the foredeck again and I was away.
I was forced to swim quite slowly, with long stretches under water, for this would limit the sound of my journey through the waves being carried back to the ship. I believed it unlikely that anyone could hear me, but I was resolved to play this game carefully. And what looked to be a short and surmountable distance from the deck of the Bounty seemed another thing altogether from the vantage point of the waves: the island suddenly appeared fierce far away. Determined, however, I set my mind to it, swam as if my very life depended on it and not just my passions.
When I eventually swept up on shore I believed my lungs were going to give way inside me, so exhausted was I by the swim. I lay there gasping, then reached down to massage my frozen feet, but my hands were so cold that I could barely get the circulation into them either. A part of me wanted to lie there, to simply lie there and sleep, but I knew that if I did there was a chance that either Mr Christian or Mr Heywood would discover me and I would be hanged for a traitor. So instead I stood up and made my way carefully through the forest towards Kaikala’s home.
It took some time to reach it and when I peered through the gaps between the reeds I failed to see her. I walked round all sides and could make out her sister and parents asleep, but she was missing. This was a curious thing. I sat on the sand and considered it. After a few moments’ thought, I wondered whether she might be waiting at our special place by the lagoon. There was always the possibility that she knew I would come back for her – I had yet to decide how I would smuggle her on board the Bounty and hide her during the journey home – and was lying in wait for me every night, expecting me to find her.
The thought of it sent me to my feet once again and I left the small village of houses and headed towards the waterfall. At night, with a darkened moon overhead, it was not so easy to find my way and I took several wrong turnings as I walked. Finally I was forced to stop every few yards and reassess where I stood. Time was not on my side. I had to find it, then find her, enjoy some time together, plan our escape and make it back to the ship before anyone discovered my absence; even now the captain could be ca
lling my name and demanding his tea. I was no longer worried about the cold but about capture.
After what I felt was too long a time I finally crossed by a familiar series of small copses and knew that I was close. My heart jumped at the idea that she would be there waiting for me and I tried not to imagine where I would go next if she was not. I began to hear the gentle sound of the lagoon water and before very much longer I was close to the spot. I hesitated, peering through the trees, desiring to observe my beauty for a few moments without her seeing me, and I was not disappointed, for through the split of the trees between I could make her out, lying by the lake, waiting for me.
I smiled. My heart leaped. And I am not ashamed to admit that I got a sudden rush of the motions. But I held my ground for now. I wanted to just watch her for a little longer. And then she spoke.
‘You have promised to take me with you to England,’ she said, and my face broke into a smile. She was too good for me. She could sense my presence. ‘You will not betray me? You will take me there and make me a fine lady?’
I opened my mouth to respond, to tell her that, yes, yes of course I would, that I would never desert her and I would never betray her. My right foot lifted from the ground so that I might emerge through the trees and take her as my own. But before I could move, her question was answered by another.
‘Of course I will,’ said the voice. ‘I will take you wherever you want to go. I promised you that and I’m a man of my word.’