Tales of the New World: Stories

by Sabina Murray

  New Holland!

  A flat expanse of fine white sand, a fiery sun, and two men—one long and lean, one pudding-short and compact—face off against each other.

  “Where are we indeed,” says Dampier.

  “You’re the navigator! You tell me!”

  “Captain Read, sir, when we were in Manila, did I not say, ‘Here we are in Manila.’”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And when we reached the coast of China, did I not remark, ‘Why, there’s China, right where we English left her!’”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And did you not say, ‘Jog us down to Celebes,’ and did I not point the way?”

  “Yes but—” and here Captain Read had paused, so had he predicted interruption, but none had come, Dampier having become distracted by a sight over and beyond the captain’s head. “Dampier, you are a most vexing man!”

  “Well proven.”

  “Do you have no desire of learning where we are?”

  “That interests me!” says Dampier. “Learning where we are is far more provocative than knowing. Indeed, I believe us to be the first Englishmen in this place, although perhaps the Dutch have been here before.”

  “So you have a suspicion?”

  “I suspect this to be New Holland.”

  “What do you know of this New Holland? What is there with which to provision ourselves? Are there natives? Are they friendly?”

  “They are not friendly and are most savage.”

  “Really?”

  “Their Hair is black, short and curl’d, like that of the Negroes; and not long and lank like the common Indians. The colour of their Skins, both of their Faces and the rest of their Body, is coal black, like that of the Negroes of Guinea. They have no sort of Cloaths, but a piece of the Rind of a Tree ty’d like a Girdle about their Waists, and a handful of long Grass, or three or four small green Boughs full of Leaves, thrust under their Girdle, to cover their Nakedness.”

  “How come you to know so much of these savages?” says Read, and seeing Dampier’s gaze, which is focused in the offing, somewhat of a distance sighted past his shoulder, Read turns. He is startled to see a group of savages has crept quite close.

  The savages are shaking wooden spears, cudgels, some variety of a flattened wooden elbow—most primitive and incapable of harm—yet Read (it must be the spectacle of the unknown) shrinks back in fear.

  “Not friendly,” says Dampier. “Most savage.”

  Of the Australian aborigines, Dampier informs himself and, therefore, the world, and, therefore, whatever “the world” at that particular time happens to include: certainly not New Holland, which—in addition to being in a state of transition from fantasy to fact—knows all about its inhabitants and requires no informing. He writes:

  The Inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the world. The Hodmadods of Monomatapa, though a nasty People, yet for Wealth are Gentlemen to these; who have no Houses and skin Garments, Sheep, Poultry, and Fruits of the Earth, Ostrich Eggs, &c. as the Hodmadods have: And setting aside their Humane Shape, they differ but little from Brutes. . . . They did at first endeavour with their Weapons to frighten us, who lying ashore deterr’d them from one of their Fishing-places.

  What else?

  In the Midst of this Distress, I observed them all to run away on a sudden as fast they could, at which I ventured to leave . . . wondering what it was that could put them into this Fright. But, looking on my left Hand, I saw a Horse walking softly in the Field; which my Persecutors having sooner discovered, was the Cause of their Flight. The Horse started a little when he came near me, but, soon recovering himself, looked full in my Face, with manifest Tokens of Wonder: He viewed my Hands and Feet, walking round me several Times—

  My mistake! The second of these accounts is, of course, not Dampier, but Swift, for as Dampier discovers, striding about the previously—at least not by the English—unstrodden sand, there are no large animals, certainly nothing capable of bearing a burden such as a horse, intelligent or otherwise.

  The natives have turned from hostility to curiosity. After a gift of rice boiled with turtle and manatee, they have seen the English to be, if not friendly, mercantile: requiring something of them that makes their murder unprofitable. What this something might be is difficult to determine. First the crewmen pushed upon the natives an assortment of dirty vestments of the kind that they wore. A few of the native men put these on, to the great amusement of their kinsmen and companions. So clad, these men turned to the English, who are all in a fussy pantomime involving some barrels of water, which—or so the New Hollanders suppose—need transporting to their ship. This mad display has been going on for the better part of half an hour and is certainly not so entertaining now as it was at its start.

  “Ritual?” suggests one native to his friend.

  “Really? The presentation seems a bit base for that.” The two men watch as, with embracing, beckoning gestures, Captain Read endeavors to bring them closer to the barrels. “Maybe they are proselytizing.”

  “You know what?” suggests his friend.

  “What?”

  “I think they mean for us to carry the water for them.”

  “Really? How did you come up with that?”

  “Look at them.”

  Together, the natives look as Read, all agitation, mimes the levitation of a cask. He points vigorously at them, asweat and muscles twitching, all this mimicry taking great effort—possibly more than carrying the water themselves.

  “They can’t possibly think that.” The first native smiles in disbelief. “Why would we do it?”

  “I think because they have made us the gift of these foul garments.”

  “Well they can have them back,” says he, quickly shrugging his shirt from his shoulders.

  “They certainly can!” concurs his friend, and shakes his foot free from a trouser leg. “These English,” he adds, “they’re worse than the Dutch!”

  Later, with New Holland slipping over the horizon, Dampier pens:

  . . . we found some Wells of Water here, and . . . thought to have made these Men to have carry’d it for us, and therefore we gave them some old Cloaths; to one an old pair of Breeches, to another a ragged Shirt . . . But all the signs we could make were to no purpose, for they stood like Statues, without motion, but grinn’d like so many Monkeys, staring one upon another: For these poor Creatures seem not accustomed to carry Burthens.

  Another Most Outrageous Storm!

  What small craft is this that floats upon the waves—no, founders!—wait, is that it yet again? It is more of a log than a craft, and our men are soaked and disoriented, the stars coyly veiled behind thick cloud, a cheeky wind scampering about to play first at the west, and then at the east, and the waves—such waves! The canoe first climbs upward, then plunges down, and Dampier through it all cursing and cursing at first, which is a comfort, but then quiet as he contemplates what might be his final moments: he imagines himself descending to the ocean floor, his hair extending upward like a damp flame, his solemn expression as curious fish stop to watch his progress.

  He has done many things in his life that he now regrets. With affecting sorrow Dampier, as an entreaty to his maker, now recalls the wife he deserted. Poor good woman! He shakes his head in shame, but looks upward cautiously—is there any indication that his maker is actually listening? Have his penitence and humility gained him favor? Because these good thoughts are already being replaced by thoughts truer to his nature: Dampier does not regret leaving the woman at all. Indeed, his only regret is marrying her in the first place. What was he thinking? She was not an unattractive person. Did this recommend? In fact, the novelty had been her willingness to marry him. Who chooses a pirate, even one book-learned like Dampier, to be her husband? What flaws does such a woman conceal? The obvious: an evil temper, a love of drink, a passion for indolence. Is his maker still listening? If he knows all, does he not know that she was an insult to her gender? Why did the m
aker, in all his graciousness, make her in the first place? A cautious look heavenward—could God be watching, a togaed giant asprawl on a nimbus couch?—but there is no such thing, just the fearful waves, his friend Hall, who marooned himself along with Dampier—Captain Read having become insufferable—and a few Malays, who—although knowledgeable of this type of boat and region—suffer from a nerve-wracking fatalism that makes it impossible to determine if, firstly, such canoes as this can survive tempests and, secondly, if land is within their grasp.

  “Do you know where we are?” Dampier yells at one of the Malays.

  “Still at sea!” the man shouts back.

  And Hall, half dead and stinking like a dog, can’t help but laugh. And once he’s laughed, finds it so pleasant an activity that he keeps at it, laughing and laughing, madness being preferable to this drawn-out fear.

  For one second, the clouds part, and Dampier sees the stars for the first time in days. He grabs his pocket compass and makes a quick calculation.

  Surprise, surprise. He might survive after all.

  And Dampier, a look of triumph clear upon his face, reassigns his maker once more to the far back, dimly lit row of his consciousness.

  The Bloody Flux!

  Surprise, surprise. The battle is not over, his bowels still being at sea regardless of his feet standing on solid land. But he is not standing, rather lying down, and as his clouded mind conjures his waking dreams, our hero Dampier is not sure which is more fantastic: his phantasms or that which, as his journal bears him out, he has actually encountered. As surely as Archimedes sat in his tub displacing the water, so does our Dampier displace all knowledge that goes before. He writes and writes and writes and whom does he write against? Pliny! Pliny, who has given us old “umbrella foot” of the antipodes! Pliny, who believes in the “pegasi” of Ethiopia and the three-foot locusts of India! Pliny, who believes that having a naked, menstruating woman walk around an orchard protects the apples from insects! Pliny, whose gift for plausible fictive exposition has stood these last fifteen hundred years, and now it is Dampier who must debunk the great Roman.

  In his sweating fever he sees the man (Pliny himself!) sit upon his bed.

  “Do you know me, Dampier?” he says.

  “Yes, sir,” says Dampier, “and I know you for a fool!”

  “That assertion puts you in small company.”

  “You say that Europe is bigger than Asia and twice as big as Africa.”

  “My calculations are on the page.”

  “Your calculations consist of adding length to breadth!”

  There is a moment during which the two men blink at each other and Pliny adjusts his toga, which he is sitting on in such a way that it’s tugging at his shoulder.

  “How do you know me to be so false?”

  “By going. I see with my own two eyes. How come you to so many errors?”

  Pliny rubs his eyes. “I have gone nowhere. I wrote what others saw, or what they thought they saw—”

  “And by committing to print these falsehoods have perpetuated a millennium of ignorance!”

  “Where is the wrongdoing committed? When they saw and saw incorrectly? When I took pen to paper? Or when they read? It does not start with me, Dampier.” Pliny folds his hands in his lap, looking down the length of Dampier’s dysentery-ravaged frame. “What makes you so special?”

  “I observe and then I write it down!”

  “Yes. You are the first to do this, the very first.”

  “William,” comes a weak voice. It’s Hall, who is suffering down the other end of the long hut. “If you must speak, speak quieter, for your madness is keeping me from rest.”

  Madness? For of course Pliny is not there and has been displaced, not by reason and observation but rather air—still air, with a mosquito circling lazily through it.

  Bencouli!

  This fort is rotting to pieces and the governor of this place, soft too, in the head, his mental constitution undermined by heat. Or is it drink? Or is it both? And Dampier, our naturalist friend, has found himself the unnatural job of “gunner.” He is a good shot, as are most pirates who make it to their thirties, but he has now spent five months gunning and writing, with the only entertainment the occasional surprise attack from the Malays—whom he guns—and the petty tyranny of the governor—of whom Dampier writes, “I saw so much Ignorance in him, with respect to his charge, being much fitter to be a Book-keeper than Governor of a Fort . . . I soon grew weary of him, not thinking my self very safe, indeed, under a Man whose humours were so brutish and barbarous.”

  So pop goes the gun. And then reload. And then pop. Who is he shooting? Well, the Malays are not mounting a surprise attack, and the gun is angled toward the sea. Pop. Reload. Pop. This would be a much better moment if he were at sea, shooting into the land—better yet, onboard a ship: “In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water,” although safely harbored in modern literature, “incomprehensible, firing into a continent.” At least this futility would symbolize something, for these islands in some way do comprise a dark continent, not the dark continent, but dark nonetheless. Dampier’s shooting into the water is futility that symbolizes futility, which cancels out the symbolism, making it just what it is: meaningless shooting. And at whom is he shooting anyway?

  Is it the Dutch? But the English are no longer at war with the Dutch. We’re all friends now, except the Malays, who, from a cluster of village huts at safe remove from the fort, announce with a vehement politeness, “We’re victims.” And right they are!

  Dampier looks up from his porthole and wipes his hands on the rough cloth of his shirt. “No longer at war with the Dutch? Then what am I doing here!”

  You’re wasting your time, friend. How long has it been since you were home? It must be twelve years. You left with the scrappy whiskers of youth upon your upper lip, and now look! All the stubble of manhood casts a dark shadow about your jaw, and some of this is gray. You left to find your fortune—

  “I left to leave,” says Dampier, and he packs his journal and his papers carefully. But he does miss England. “What was there in London?”

  What is there now?

  In the corner of the room there is a movement, and I see that Dampier is not alone.

  “Come, Jeoly. We are leaving. That must please you a little, my prince.”

  From the darkened shadow a slight figure steps. He is young, maybe twelve years old, and tattooed from head to foot in brilliant swirls, coiled vines, marvelous birds. He blinks, and from the pattern of his skin the two dark eyes stare out, unmistakably natural, sad. His mother, despite Dampier’s best efforts to nurse her, has died of a fever, and he has been Jeoly’s only caretaker. Jeoly too has been sick. He nearly died along with his mother, first of fever, then of grief.

  “Where are we going?” asks the prince.

  “To London! London is a great city with buildings and people and things that you have never seen before.”

  “It is very cold in London,” says the prince, “and I am sure I will not like the food.”

  From the deck of the ship, Prince Jeoly watches the islands of his youth disappearing into memory. And Dampier? He is hidden belowdecks, as his departure has become more of an escape. The governor withdrew permission allowing him to leave, and Dampier dropped from a porthole of the fort with only his journal and a few other papers on him. His books—valuable—and furniture—expensive—he left, along with the fort and governor and whatever has occasioned their presence on godforsaken Bencouli to be reclaimed by the jungle, to return to anonymity and irrelevance—irrelevance, that is, except to its original inhabitants, who didn’t like the English there in the first place.

  London!

  Dampier cares for Jeoly—this is clear in his writing, and should not surprise, since the English have always done well by their pets. He brings his prince with him up the winding, stinking alleys, directs him around the steaming piles of horseshit and waste-filled gutters, stamps his boot angrily to shoo the ra
ts so that the two can pass across the threshold of the alehouse, in through a wave of heated tobacco and stale-ale stink, along the dark hallway with its cobwebbed beams and grunting patrons. With sweating whores. Through to a quieter dining area, a place closer to the fire.

  The boy’s eyes are all agog with filth and spectacle, yet still he notes Dampier’s reticent behavior.

  Our pirate sits upon a bench opposite the prince, who, as predicted, finds his stew of beef gristle (has it gone off?) not much to his liking. The prince peers into his bowl, his face returned to him, distorted in the congealing gravy. In this, his mother would have found an omen.

  “Eat,” says Dampier with some gentleness. “Look how big we English grow from such food.”

  “And look how far you go to find better.”

  Dampier smiles, but there is little to cheer him of late. He finds his finances wanting, the clink of coin on coin too pronounced when not muffled by the substantial presence of others. He makes a tidy stack of currency upon the table. He swings a boot over the bench to straddle it so that he is not looking at his little prince.

  “It is a neat stack, William,” says Jeoly. “Too neat. You mean to sell me.”

  “No,” says Dampier, “no, no.” But his eyes roam the ceiling because he cannot decide which is kindness: truth or subterfuge.

  “Sell me now,” says the prince, “for I will not survive much longer.”

  “Are you not well, my prince?”

  Jeoly shrugs. “Is this how you English treat your princes? I know I am a slave. And that makes me smarter than you, William.”

  “How so?”

  “You think yourself free.”

  One afternoon, when the weather is fine and the dampness not so noticeable, Dampier is walking back from his printer (Yes, printer!) to his room when he thinks to have a celebratory beer. An alehouse presents itself and within it Dampier presents himself, and soon, within his long, tapering fingers, a beer presents itself. As he’s licking the foam from his lip, he looks up from his drink and sees a poster displayed upon the alehouse wall: The Painted Prince! Dampier takes his cold drink in thoughtful gulps.