That is descriptive of what the leadership on South Georgia inaugurated after the rumor of plague, during my fifth winter there. From the defeat to the visit of the British captain, they had nursed thoughts of revenge on the Patties, plotted possible attacks on Port Stanley; from the captain’s visit to the rumor of plague, they had transformed the island into a fortress against anarchy; after Germanicus’s return, they again transformed the island, this time from fortress to bloody shuffle. They thought like losers, acted accordingly. Reason gave way to meanspiritedness and worse. There were vicious arguments, food-hoardings, suicides, a sharp increase in the death of the old and the very young. The corresponding increase in funerals moved Longfaeroe back to the fore of the community as psalm singer. There were several other pastors in Gaunttown, mostly Falklander evacuees; Longfaeroe was their master. They combined to preach sermons that supported a hardening of everyone’s heart.
The chief controversy, what began the collapse of the nascent goodwill that had seen South Georgia through its deprivations, came not from the outside, not from plague or Patties or British suzerainty, but from inside. It concerned the thousand-odd beasties who had been given shelter before and after the defeat at Port Stanley, mostly as subsistence workers, as outright wards of the South Georgians. They were three quarters from South America, the remainder from Africa, the Falklands, a few families off a freighter that had originated in Italy. With the reorganization in fear of plague ships, the Volunteer command recommended to the governor-general, Elephant Frazer, that the beasties be corralled into a single camp, in a ravine just outside Gaunttown. The camp was built that fall; the beasties were moved into it over the winter, made to live communally in longhouses, were given a curfew, sharp rationing. The men and boys were conscripted into work gangs to help build watchposts along the western shore and to seal the passes that ran through the center of the island, west to east. The women and girls were forced to work in the whaling factory that supplied the island’s lighting and heating needs. A few were allowed to sail with the small whaling fleet left to us. In all, it was slavery. Longfaeroe dared to call it “Christian communism.” I should mention that no one on South Georgia was living much better than the beasties in the camp that winter; many of the Volunteer outriders and those at Shagrock suffered worse.
Still, it was abject cruelty toward those sad, helpless, lost people. I should explain that over the years since the defeat, there had been tentative and short-lived opposition to various maneuvers by the Volunteers, in concert with Elephant Frazer, as South Georgia had moved closer to a military dictatorship. What kept it from an oppressiveness was Elephant Frazer’s evenhandedness and the fact that the homogeneity of the island—cousins upon cousins upon in-laws—disposed people toward cooperation. The detention and enslavement of the beasties was overmuch. Lazarus, who had by then become schoolmaster, and had often before criticized Elephant Frazer and the Volunteers for their tactics, led the opposition to the treatment of the beasties, what he called martial lawlessness. He recruited sympathy among his teachers, among people who had intermarried with beastie families, and from the best-educated people in the beastie camp, notably the Zulemas. Soon enough, Lazarus was denouncing Longfaeroe as a “hypocritical scold,” the Volunteers as “secret police,” and Elephant Frazer as “our despot.”
Lazarus made his worst attacks in the Gaunttown Assembly, a powerless body that was meant mostly as a place to air grievances against neighbors and that had no authority to challenge or direct the governor-general. Lazarus was a good public speaker, played on jealousies between the families, got increasingly larger turnouts as he slandered Elephant Frazer and the Hospidar. Elephant Frazer took this hard, told the new patriarch of the Gaunts, Luff Gaunt III, called Trip Gaunt, that he should control his inlaw, since Lazarus had married a Gaunt widow, Violante. Trip Gaunt had no sympathy with Lazarus, but coveted Elephant Frazer’s position—which would have been Luff Gaunt’s if he had lived—and so took advantage. The Gaunts appeared to break with the Frazers, which in South Georgia terms was as if the right hand had denounced the left hand. They jointly owned the sealing schooner King James, and there was talk that spring of a seizure of the ship by the Gaunts when Germanicus returned from fishing and a run to Africa for supplies. Gaunttown felt obliged to choose between Frazer authority and Gaunt pride. The Falklan der exiles under Simon Brackenbury stood against all beasties and with those extremists who thought the camp was coddling the beasties. Lazarus attacked the more, made a speech at the Assembly Hall (the old Society of Friends’ Meeting House) in which he accused the Volunteer officer corps of making up the plague talk in order to tyrannize South Georgia further.
“Where is this dread disease?” Lazarus asked. (I was not present, off in my precinct building watchtowers. Abigail, who told me about it later, stood beside Lazarus throughout, as did Germanicus’s promised, Jane Gaunt.) He continued, “Has anyone proved it? Has there been a word on the radio? Is it true? The Volunteers send a ship to the Falklands, at the risk of it and its men, in order to placate the Brackenburys and their hatemongers, and then tell us there is plague. What proof do they offer? None! Friends, friends, there is a plague. I admit it. It is the disease in their lawlessness. They imprison innocent men and women and call it proper. They take children from their homes and make them fill sandbags. That is the sickness! Where is this disease? Not in us. In them! And what is it? Not plague out there in some port. A plague in their minds, and the plague is tyranny!”
Within the week, there was a knife fight on the quays below the High Street, between a Gaunt boy and one of the beastie children who, as an orphan like me, had been taken in by the Frazers. The Gaunt boy lost an eye, the Frazer child was badly wounded in the stomach. The Frazer child had been one of the best young students at the school, a prodigy at mathematics, and that he would get involved in violence was telling enough of the stress the island felt. It became much worse when one of Longfaeroe’s presbyters, a sly crank named Fergus Moog, declared at Sunday service that the real knife-wielder was Lazarus, whom he called a “copperheaded snake.”
Events tumbled after that. Jane Gaunt, one of Lazarus’s teachers, was accused of poisoning the minds of the youngest children against the Volunteers. And when Jane called at the hospital to tutor the two wounded children, she was blocked at the door by old women and some of the wild children who lived under the whaling factory. She tried to force her entrance, and was stoned. Those blows left worse than physical scars. When Germanicus returned from Africa to find Jane still convalescing from her wounds, he lost his temper. He denounced Frazers and Gaunts alike. Out of character, he drank too much one night in the sealer tavern, night sun, and challenged his father’s reluctance to heed the counsel of the Gaunttown Assembly, said his father was afraid of Lazarus as he had never been afraid of the Patties. Germanicus’s words flashed through the Volunteers, because he was considered the champion of the young officers, about forty of us altogether. It was recalled that Lazarus had once said that the Volunteers were no better than the Patties. The question was asked, did Germanicus now agree?
The next day, Germanicus was humiliated by what he had done, rashly, in revenge for Jane’s stoning, and realized that he had invited on himself the dilemma of either weakening the Volunteers’ chain of command or watching South Georgia break into factions like splinters. In trying to correct his error, he stumbled further, calling for an emergency meeting of the Assembly (scheduled previously only twice a season) to air the doubts. The meeting was blocked at the last moment by the Hospidar, commander of the Volunteers, who said it was an invitation to sedition. The Hospidar acted cleverly, knowing his intervention smeared Germanicus’s patriotism. This was meant as an affront to all the young officers as well as to the Frazers and, through Jane Gaunt, to the Gaunts. There was talk of a duel, also talks of a court-martial, also mention of a more outrageous solution—posting Germanicus to Cape Disappointment to guard the hermits.
Germanicus was shamed, would not reac
h to cover himself, apologized to his father and to the Hospidar publicly, offered to resign his commission. The Hospidar saw his victory, was generous in conquest, said Germanicus’s contrition was not sufficient but that Germanicus’s arms were necessary, as were all the loyal arms of all the loyal people of South Georgia. Simon Brackenbury was there that day, and added that he could promise that none of his people would ever question Elephant Frazer and the Volunteers while the Falklands remained unavenged. The Hospidar and Brackenbury thus combined to satisfy no one, to advance their own cause. The factions were left bitter, and were well armed. They might have been moved right then to assassination if not for the shock of a real crime against the island.
In December—early summer—someone set fire to the school. I recall the incident clearly because I was at dinner with Abigail in my hut, had gone out for water, when I spied the glow over the ridge. Abigail had left Sam with the Frazer women to come up to celebrate my twenty-seventh birthday. She explained the sparks of the feud as we watched the fire grow quickly in the wind. It was pathetic; South Georgia had so little, and then it had no school.
I realize this has become much detail. I suppose I record it as a way of making myself remember that I did spend almost six years there—though I can recall only that last year with acuity—and also as a way of feeling close again to people whom I did love, who did love me. They were not the most generous people, quick to anger, unforgiving, hateful of outsiders, especially if their skin color or religion or ways were not theirs. I am sure Lazarus’s words would have been considered wise if he had not looked like the Patties, and I do wonder if Lazarus would have been more patient if he had not concluded too easily that his enemies were bigots instead of frightened husbands and wives. Overall, however, the South Georgians were more fair-minded than not—they had taken me and mine and a thousand beasties in—and struggled to remain sanguine and good-natured, considering how cruel nature was to them. More, I have emphasized here their fears and weaknesses and feuding, have not done justice to their decency. I am writing of an island a thousand leagues of water from despair, just ten degrees north of the permanent ice shelf, where there is nothing but wracking work and savage sea. It is natural then that they moved toward savagery to settle their disputes. I also admit that I might have jumbled the details leading up to the school fire; and I have left out or forgotten much of consequence, such as the turns of the Lindfirs, the Harrahs, the Roses, the Moogs, the Johansens, and the beastie family who ruled the camp, the Zulemas. The enslavement, the stoning, the suicides, the stillbirths, a theft from the Volunteers’ fort at the lighthouse on the inlet point that I have not noted, and the Hospidar’s defamation of Germanicus are a sad chronology. But there were even drearier details that I only heard rumor of, and there was one more sadness (which I shall soon record) that reached back before the defeat to the root of the vulnerability of the South Georgians. They were poor people, whale-poachers, high-risk sealers, ill-equipped to continue in a world of electronic warships. I record in this work my disgust for what I call the Age of Exile, the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century; however, I register that the South Georgians were the result of an earlier age’s willingness to degrade and drive out and abandon men and women. One cannot believe that the Scots and Irish and Norse people who made up the families on South Georgia had elected to risk the Adantic Ocean and to scratch a life on hornstone crags. They had survived there without anyone’s help, without even the sinister charity that I identify as the source of the so-called fleet of the damned. They asked no favors, gave no favors, fought and endured and fought. South Georgia was their home, and I think they knew it was not a refuge, nor sanctuary, nor peace. It was a chance, and they took it for that.
The women of South Georgia were far more crucial to the struggle I recount than I have acknowledged: Abigail and Jane Gaunt, Violante Furore and Santa Bianca Furore, Dolly Frazer and Frances Gaunt, and many more. They organized, fed, gave birth, made peace, stood as solid as the cliffs. It was the women who held up better than the men in those days. They seemed to know that the war, the British abandonment, the plague, were fleeting threats, yet the loss of the school was a profound emergency. They responded in unison, outraged at their men for posturing while the children were deprived. There were so many suspects for the arson, it was an easy conclusion that everyone was guilty. Dolly Frazer pulled Elephant Frazer’s beard, told him to act, and soon, or he could govern everything without a bed to sleep in. The Gaunt women and Rose women, and the Hospidar’s sister, Victoria, followed suit. The Volunteers were left to complain in their cups. It was not funny. The weapon was spite, and the women used it. A new opinion was advanced that the sort of government that could fight a war and block out beasties was not necessarily the sort of government that could tend its homes. In a subdued yet serious way, revolution was in the wind. The shock of the fire brought Germanicus to my hut soon after, Christmas week, and with him Jane Gaunt and Otter Ransom. Abigail and Wild Drumrul were already with me. It was a damp night, a big storm coming from the west, and we gathered around my hearth fire eating mutton, very sad, yet in our way young and hopeful.
“Lazarus says we should force an election for a president of the Assembly,” said Abigail. “I agree. We have a part. We must have a say. Lazarus says there should be a constitution, and a popular vote.”
“So Lazarus says,” said Germanicus. “My dad cannot.”
“It won’t be for governor-general,” said Abigail. “For a president to speak for us wee folk. Elephant Frazer speaks for the elders. My dad speaks for the parsons and those pious hens of his. The Hospidar speaks for the Volunteers. Brackenbury, he speaks for the Falklanders. And the beasties, Toro Zulema says their part. Who speaks for me and Jane and the like?”
“Begod no, woman,” said Germanicus. “Beasties and Patties ain’t the problem now. Volunteers! The Hospidar has our sworn loyalty. I’d follow him to Davy Jones. If Dad tried to form a government of presidents and the like, the Hospidar’d say ‘rebellion’ and take over. Yerr talk be daft.”
“So now we’re shy of the Hospidar?” said Jane Gaunt, a rosy, round woman of nineteen, plucky, sharp, competitive of Germanicus, proud.
“Not that, Janey,” said Germanicus, who I thought had a good point. “Lazarus’d be sure to be elected president right soon. He’d speak for himself all right, and against the Hospidar and Brackenbury. Dad’d be caught like a hand in a vice.”
Jane suggested that Germanicus was jealous of Lazarus’s popularity among the young people. Germanicus puffed up, did not reply. It was true that he had come to distrust Lazarus as I had once, for his arrogance, his high-handed intellectualism. It was also accurate that if there was an election, Lazarus would win easily; the mothers wrould vote for him in a block. He was their schoolmaster, and charismatic, and smart, perhaps the only man on the island who cared to show that he loved children.
“What if Lazarus stepped aside?” said Otter Ransom to me in Swedish. He was hesitant to participate, not just because of his poor English, but also because Germanicus was his captain and he was an appreciative and loyal seaman. I encouraged him to talk in English, helped him with his words and idioms. He told them of Sweden, when the King’s government had stepped aside in favor of churchmen who spoke for the common people. He inadvertently scrambled facts, made Grandfather’s revolution seem more sensible than it had been. I was taken aback at how another man, fifteen years my senior, and at one time a hunted outlaw in Sweden, remembered the crisis there. He made it seem logical, just, saving.
Abigail listened and shook her head, said that Lazarus would not stand by quietly. “They burned his school,” she added.
“Oh, aye, his school now? A pity he’s quarrelsome in his inks and books,” said Germanicus. “I done wrong to speak against Dad, but not the half of what Lazarus done to stir up the folk. He’s full of himself for a stranger here among those that feed him. Burned his school, did we? Our school, I think, and what does Lazarus say to t
hat? Ten years I was in that school, and it’d be there still but for Lazarus’s tongue.”
“Lazarus doesn’t matter, does he, because he’s no Frazer?” said Jane Gaunt. “Or is it because he’s married a Gaunt?”
“He be no Frazer,” said Germanicus. The two of them separated.
“Why would he step aside?” Abigail asked Otter Ransom.
“In the North,” began Otter Ransom, “there is a story of an assembly that met once a year, the beginning of summer, where the clans met for their talk and grievances. It had priests, like churchmen, who spoke for the peace of the common people. Grim Fiddle knows.”
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 24