The Devil in Paradise--Captain Putnam in Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  Word reached here very recently of an occurrence in which I take especial joy. The High Chiefess Kapiolani of Hawaii Island, who became a dear friend to me before I removed to Honoruru, has converted to the Christian faith, and more than that has performed an astounding act of devotion. She became upset when she learned that many commoners on her land were reluctant to abandon the old gods, owing to the presence of an active volcano, called Kilauea, which they hold to be the home of Pele, their fire goddess. This highborn woman walked barefoot, in pilgrimage, to this volcano, and descended into its very crater. She stood at the edge of a lake of fire and lava, and cast rocks into it, insulting Pele, daring her to come do her worst, if she existed at all. Local pagan priests fled in terror. Of course, nothing happened—but because of her courage and devotion, opposition to the gospel has collapsed as flat as the walls of Jericho before the blast of Joshua’s trumpet. Such a thrill of admiration I have seldom felt for anyone.

  Farewell, my dear girl—keep practicing your writing. If what you one day produce for publication shows the skill and acute expression of your letters, success awaits you!

  Ever your loving friend,

  “Missy La Laelae”

  MISS HARRIET BEECHER

  LITCHFIELD, CONNECTICUT

  * * *

  * * *

  FROM HONORURU, WHICH suddenly required the hiring of a pilot because that had suddenly become an emolument within the gift of the crown, the Rappahannock stood down to Lahaina, dropping anchor as near to shore as the sounding would allow to finish taking on victuals. Jakob Saeger, however, had embarked two days before for Canton. Bliven decided to conclude his Malacca business as quickly as he could and see if he could overtake him at Canton to get a full account of what had befallen him, and a list of his losses for which reparation could be sought, which had never yet come to light.

  Upon leaving Honoruru it was discovered when roll was taken that a half dozen men had deserted the ship, lured by the climate and easy sex, preferring to lose themselves in that maze of prostitutes’ hovels, in the suicide of untreated chancres and insanity, than continue in their duty. It was in his power to send Horner and the marines ashore to hunt them down, but he concluded that to have them and their discontent, and probably their disease, back aboard was not to be preferred when Miller easily made up the balance with derelict merchant seamen eager to work to get home.

  Within a week of leaving Maui, Bliven decided, measuring each day’s progress by the chronometer and the casting of the knotted line, and looking at how far they had yet to go, that no one crossing the Pacific for the first time had any conception of the true expanse of the globe.

  None of his officers, he discovered, had ever heard of Boogis pirates any more than he had, but together with Miller concluded to disregard Captain Ward’s advice on making for Singapore via the Indies. If these “sea people” were indeed the root of piracy in these waters, then for a single American sloop of war to thread the passages through those myriad islands and islets and reefs and rocks and atolls and sandbars would do more to put them on their guard than to cow them. From Ward’s description of their ruthless nature, they were likely not a people to be easily cowed.

  Instead, they made generally due west for a month, and then west by south for a month, until they rounded the north coast of Luzon, then southwest through the South China Sea, along the Indo-China coast, slowing, minding the charts carefully to pick through the island-studded shallows to the southern tip of Malaya. Indeed they did begin to see the shores obscured by houses built on pilings over the water, and they were approached by native fishermen in their curious-looking proas, but never too closely. Always the American flag of light silk but the size of a mizzen topsail fluttered from their spanker boom, and they wondered if it was the sight of a theretofore unseen ensign that prompted them to keep their distance, or was the sight of a fifteen-hundred-ton warship itself enough to ward them off?

  In all it was just under three months before he saluted their battery and dropped anchor in Singapore Roads—roads, for there was no bay, or harbor. Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, whose name they had often chuckled over, he discovered, was not in residence, but was occupied in strengthening his fortifications on Java. Ashore, Bliven discovered that Raffles had left in his wake detailed town plans for how Singapore was to be laid out, in quarters according to race—European, Chinese, Malay, and Indian—and he wondered if that reflected any experience that the different nationalities could not cordially assimilate. Truly this would become a crossroads of the world—so far from America that he learned those who knew the name only from reading it were pronouncing it incorrectly. It was not “Sing-apore” but “Sin-gapore.” And he got his first look at an elephant, a gigantic bull with long, straight tusks, nearly ten feet tall, six or seven tons of him, painted blue and crimson and gold, with a howdah on his back, carrying some prince or other down new-named Bridge Road, all of which details he noted to relay to Clarity.

  The authorities that he did find in the Royal Navy office were helpful. The ship was watered and victualed, for Erb produced letters of credit from British banks, as a well-connected purser should be able to do. Bliven also found them helpful on the question of pirates. Not all Boogis were pirates, they told him, but certainly they were the focus of what piracy there was. Their influence, which was to say their extortion and their hiring themselves out to local potentates, was felt from Siam across the Indies to the Philippines, for they were the most populous race in that part of the world.

  With Raffles absent, the administration lay with his longtime assistant, whose title was “resident commandant”: Thomas Travers, whom all acknowledged spoke for Raffles on all things. Travers was familiar with the pirates’ depredation upon Saeger’s ship, and although he did not know about the murder of Saeger’s son, he expressed no surprise. As long as the interests of Britain and their client, the sultan of Johore, were not affected, and Johore employed no pirates at that time, he gave Bliven full license to assert American power against them.

  Boogis pirates, Bliven learned, operated from proas of the kind he had observed casting fishing nets but larger, some large enough to mount a swivel gun or six-pounder. The Boogis depended upon their quarry being unarmed, and massed their proas six or eight at a time to mount an attack and swarm a victim. All this he seemed to have heard before. After his third call ashore he decided he had heard enough. Word came in even as he was taking his leave of Travers that pirates in the service of the sultan of Malacca had raided the coastal town of Sitiawan some one hundred fifty miles up the peninsula that belonged to the sultan of Perak. To spread terror among the citizens, the pirates rounded up the city governor and wealthiest citizens, and publicly executed them by what Travers described as their local embellishment, the Chinese ling chi, the so-called death by a thousand cuts. The Chinese template had its mercy of sedation and early death, with continuing mutilation; the Malaccan pirates had kept their victims alive as long as possible. By the time Travers finished his account, Bliven found himself sick at his stomach, and made his farewell.

  The morning after that third call, light began to come through the open stern windows, seeming as olive-colored as the water they were anchored in, the air as dank and muggy in the morning as when they had retired. Ross had prepared a bed in the window seat, where Bliven now reclined, as yet unshaven, coffee and soft biscuits on a serving cart beside him. There were three raps at the door. “Enter.”

  “Lieutenant Miller, sir.”

  He strode in as Ross held the door open. “Good morning, Captain.” Then he checked his steps. “Good God! Forgive me, sir, but you look like hell.”

  “Yes, Mr. Ross has already apprised me of that fact.” Bliven beckoned him to come around the table and sit by him. “I feel like hell, too, and now I get to look at you, come barging in here looking fresh as a colt. Mr. Ross!”

  “Sir?”

  “I would like for y
ou to find the bosun, the purser, and the carpenter and bring them to me.”

  “Right away, sir.”

  “No, not in too great a hurry. Bring them in thirty or forty minutes.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  When they were alone, Bliven pointed to a packet on the table. “There you see my orders for this cruise. I wish you to read them, in the event that you must assume command.”

  “Are you quite well, sir?”

  “I am not sick, but I fear that may not be the same thing. Michael, I have been lying here, trying to puzzle out how it is I woke up this morning, overcome with the most complete sense of revulsion for this duty. I woke up feeling I hate this, I loathe it, and I want out.”

  Miller moved a chair from the table to where he lay. “Oh, I am so sorry to hear that. Was it something I said?”

  “Ha!” Count on Miller to try to lighten the moment. “It is not you, nor the men, nor the ship, nor even being so far from home. It is this duty, this assignment, this errand.”

  “Nevertheless, Captain, wanting out could pose a difficulty when we are more than a year from home.”

  Bliven fixed his gaze out the window. “Hm! Perhaps.”

  “What is it that you awoke to find so onerous?”

  “You said it yourself, Mr. Miller, when we were in the Galápagos. Pirates—the oceans are lousy with them. I awakened and found myself thinking about something that Mr. Pitt said. You remember, he is the chief who fills the role of prime minister to the royal family in Hawaii. I gave him a tour of the ship.”

  “Yes, I remember him.”

  “I asked him at one point how they had been able to throw off the old pagan religion. And he said that it was mainly the women who had suffered under its superstitions and dogmas, and not just the poor common women, but the women of all classes. In their fear they said nothing, but their resentments grew, and perhaps they discussed it when they were alone among themselves. When there came an opportune time, when the old king died, the queens and the chiefesses rose up and struck. They just reached a point where they would not brook it anymore. And Mr. Pitt said something further. He said that when some of the priests made to fight to preserve the pagan idols, Kahumanu had no shortage of support when she determined to fight them.

  “He said she tried negotiation but the priests wouldn’t have it: they would rule or ruin. Even the sacred queen mother, who is almost a goddess, lent her influence, without effect. Each side assembled an army, and the great battle was fought near the western shore of the big island. Mr. Pitt commanded the queens’ army, and Kahumanu herself commanded a fleet of war canoes off the shore, including her own, which was a double canoe mounted with a carronade. As the tide of battle turned in their favor, Mr. Pitt was able to drive the priests and their followers down to the beach, and there the queen was offshore, and she personally fired the piece, and every time she fired it, she cut down a swath of the old pagan priests. He said that the queen is not by nature a cruel woman, but when she got a bellyful of their arrogance and cruelty—when she realized that reason was lost on them, and that nothing short of death or total, abject defeat would make them cede their claim to rule the lives of everyone else with blood and terror—she accepted their terms. She merely accepted their terms. They demanded victory or death, and she gave them death. She cut them down by the score. She doubted not the justice of her doing so, nor does she yet.”

  Bliven paused and saw Miller studying him with piercing intensity. “And that, Mr. Miller, is how I awakened this morning changed, and feeling the same way—exactly the same way—about pirates.”

  “I see.”

  “The very idea that there is this class of men who actually believe that they have the right to take whatever they please from anyone who is too weak to resist them—such creatures do not deserve the courtesy of a fair fight. An entire ship full of such men is not worth the life of one of my officers or crew. They ought to be removed from the earth to make it safe for decent people, and given this, someone must do the winnowing. In the present time and in this place, that duty falls to me, and so I awakened this morning changed, and I feel changed immutably. I cannot explain it, any more than a caterpillar could explain how it awoke one morning and found itself turned into a moth. I felt . . . I felt I owed you this explanation before you should mark such a change in my temperament and wonder if I have gone mad.”

  Miller considered the whole exposition soberly. “Well, sir, surely no one could look upon your resolve to fulfill your duty to its outer limit, and do so while minimizing the risk to your ship and men, with any criticism. And yet—”

  “What?”

  “Did you not tell me at some time that your orders include the limitation to not engage pirates who work for the rajas allied with Great Britain?”

  “They do. But, happily, I am informed that the Sultan of Johore just now employs no pirates, so any we find are fair game. Moreover, I sense that the British in their better senses are as revolted by them as we are; and third, this vessel has the right to defend itself against an attack from any quarter, regardless of their identity.”

  Miller nodded slowly. “As long as the other side fires first.”

  “I would say that is the safest course. We should never open a fight, but we must be prepared always to finish it.”

  “Do you imagine that we can clear the seas of pirates all by ourselves in our one ship?”

  “No. Only the ones we come across. That is enough. But there is one thing more that I would tell you, not as a lieutenant under my command, but as my friend. It has also been working at my mind that not all pirates are seaborne. Pirates are but one species of the beasts of prey. The family includes also political tyrants, priests pagan or popish who employ fear or compulsion, men of business who profit by the ruin of others. I am no Jefferson, but I awoke this morning like him, as he famously wrote, having sworn eternal hostility to every form of tyranny. And yes, there is a specific event that may have triggered this miasma in my mind. I have learned by letter that my friend, the planter in South Carolina, is being ruined by having been led into financial risks that are proving disastrous, and if he is ruined, he who led him down that path is to take everything he has.”

  “And that is your friend who owns the large number of slaves?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then forgive me, as your friend, but is slavery not the most terrible form of piracy? Is he not reaping as he has sown? Having devoured such small fish, is he not always in danger of being himself devoured by a larger fish?”

  Bliven looked helplessly through the stern windows at what promised to be a hot day. “Miller, you have the damnedest penchant to cut straight to the heart of a dilemma.”

  “I thought that was part of my charm.”

  “He is my friend.” Bliven barked out suddenly in laughter. “You know, when we were boys, we were midshipmen, and some bored and wicked lieutenants goaded us into dueling each other. Dale and Barron stopped us before we could kill each other.”

  “Dale? Richard Dale?”

  “Yes.”

  “Heavens! I did not realize you served under Dale. What a great man to have known. I’m sorry, continue.”

  “They made us shake hands—or rather hold hands—and swear before God that we would always be friends and defend each other’s honor. That was about twenty years ago, and as time and events have separated us, we have held to that. When my wife met him she disliked him instantly for his owning slaves, and I defended him as coming from a different world. But as time has gone by, I cannot . . . I cannot defend it any longer.”

  “Then I may say, sir, that is to your credit. What is the adage? ‘Hate the sin, love the sinner’?”

  “But he would be quick to tell you, and indeed an old slave of his himself told me, suppose you freed them? Where would they go? There are no jobs, they could not buy land, no one would care for them. All
we would create is a class of beggars.”

  “Is that not why we are creating that new country in Africa and we are to start sending them back to their own continent?”

  “Ha! Liberia, yes, although I fear that experiment will fail from its own naïveté. They come from tribes as different as the English are from Mongols. We saw that from our own group that we smuggled into Boston a couple of years ago. So now we think to put them all onto a small patch of land and say, ‘Here you are; good luck to you.’” He shook his head.

  “Well.” Miller stood. “I do not know the answers, but I applaud your wrestling with the questions. And as it comes to dealing with pirates, here or elsewhere, you have my full support.”

  “Thank you, but do not go yet. I want you to be present when I talk to the others.”

  Several moments more and Ross entered with Erb, Yeakel, and Fleming. “You wished to see us, Captain?”

  “Yes, Mr. Yeakel. Gentlemen, our business in Singapore is concluded, except for taking aboard a Malay interpreter that Mr. Travers has been good enough to provide us. Mr. Erb, I wish you to procure a store of paints before we leave. We shall stand out of Singapore very smartly, saluting the fort and all that. But once we are out of sight, we shall hunt up some small estuary and put into it. There we shall do what we can to disguise ourselves as a large merchantman. Complete new paint down to the waterline, I think some dun sort of brownish green. When the gunports are closed, I want them to be invisible.”

  “I understand, Captain.”

  “All hands to wield paintbrushes so that we may be done speedily. Second, you must lay in enough civilian clothes for the men to wear whenever they are topside, not particularly new or nice.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh, and we shall need a name. Paint over Rappahannock and we shall call her . . . Fortuna. Also, Mr. Fleming, make some empty wooden frames on the weather deck, here and there, in no order. Then cover them with sails and anchor them down so it will look like we are carrying more cargo than we can stow in the hold.”