Coconut Chaos

by Diana Souhami

  20

  In his journal Bligh wrote forensic descriptions of the wanted men, their scars, colouring and tattoos. Of the nine mutineers who sailed to Pitcairn he wrote:

  FLETCHER CHRISTIAN master’s mate aged 24 years, 5 feet 9 inches high, blackish or very dark complexion, dark brown hair, strong made; a star tatowed on his left breast, tatowed on his backside; his knees stand a little out, and he may be called rather bow-legged. He is subject to violent perspirations, and particularly in his hands, so that he soils any thing he handles.

  EDWARD YOUNG midshipman aged 27 years, 5 feet 8 inches high, dark complexion and rather a bad look; dark brown hair, strong made, has lost several of his fore teeth and those that remain are all rotten; a small mole on the left side of his throat and on the right arm is tatowed a heart and dart through it with EY underneath and the date of the year 1788 or 1789.

  JOHN MILLS gunner’s mate aged 40 years, 5 feet 10 inches high, fair complexion, light brown hair, strong made and raw boned; a scar in his right arm pit occasioned by an abscess.

  WILLIAM BROWN assistant botanist aged 27 years, 5 feet 8 inches high, fair complexion, dark brown hair, strong made; a remarkable scar on one of his cheeks which contracts the eye-lid and runs down to his throat, occasioned by the king’s evil;* is tatowed.

  JOHN WILLIAMS seaman aged 25 years, 5 feet 5 inches high, dark complexion, black hair, slender made; has a scar on the back part of his head, is tatowed and a native of Guernsey; speaks French.

  ALEXANDER SMITH seaman aged 27 years, 5 feet 5 inches high, brown complexion, brown hair, strong made; very much pitted with the small pox and very much tatowed on his body, legs, arms and feet. He has a scar on his right foot, where it has been cut with a wood axe.

  MATTHEW QUINTAL seaman aged 23 years, 5 feet 5 inches high, fair complexion, light brown hair, strong made; very much tatowed on the backside and several other places.

  WILLIAM MCCOY seaman aged 25 years, 5 feet 6 inches high, fair complexion, light brown hair, strong made; a scar where he has been stabbed in the belly, and a small scar under his chin; is tatowed in different parts of his body.

  ISAAC MARTIN seaman aged 30 years, 5 feet 6 inches high, dark complexion, brown hair, slender made; a very strong black beard with scars under his chin, is tatowed in several places of his body.

  Bligh delivered these descriptions of the Pitcairn settlers, as well as those of the men who returned to Tahiti, to the port authorities at Timor and Batavia. They were circulated to the Admiralty and to every ship that plied the South Seas.

  * Scrofula: supposed to be cured by the touch of royalty.

  21

  On the fifth day on the Tundra Princess the wind abated and the sea calmed. Captain Dutt said if it was like this at Pitcairn, Lady Myre and I wouldn’t have to climb down the Jacob’s ladder to the longboats, he’d put the gangplank across.

  He announced a party, to be held on the crew deck at seven. Frequent parties were part of his command. He held them when the ship crossed the equator or the International Date Line, if the weather was fine, if the crew had birthdays … I fretted about what to wear, for I’d brought only Rohan adventure clothes in my backpack. Pink sandals were my only concession to the party mood.

  Lady Myre called for me. She shimmered like a tribal queen in purple silk and feathered hat, her lips crimson, her toenails green. She flashed a large sapphire ring. ‘Don’t you look cute,’ she said. ‘Just like a boy.’

  We were guests of honour. The crew lined up to welcome us. They were not going to party until we arrived. Like a memsahib, Lady Myre dangled her fingers to the manner born. Some of the men bowed. Befuddled though she might be, she starred in the part. I was more of a problem in jeans, fleece and glasses, with incongruous pink sandals.

  Speakers blared a mix of Indian and western music. There was a bar, a DJ, a barbecue. On a trestle table was a large bowl of vodka, tomato juice and Tabasco, glasses with frosted rims, plates of corn and spam fritters, and sandwich-spread on fried bread. Soni arrived late and looked exotic in a sari and flowing scarf but the crew took little notice of her because she was so wifely. They wore western clothes – jeans and sneakers, T-shirts with logos, or coloured shirts. Their dancing was energetic, sexy and unselfconscious. Sanjeet Dutt encouraged it for the same reasons as Bligh: as exercise, for conviviality and to reduce tension, but he was friendly and observant and took the measure of his men. I thought how when John Mills and William Brown refused to dance a jig at the obligatory hour Bligh stopped their supply of grog. It was not surprising they were among the mutineers.

  Lady Myre knocked back Bloody Marys. She danced alone, waved her hands above her head and sang ‘I Have a Dream’ from her time on the Shaw Savill Line. She gave it all she’d got:

  Something good in everything I see.

  I believe in angels.

  When I know the time is right for me

  I’ll cross the stream

  I have a dream.

  The crew loved it and there was a cheer when she then asked Captain Dutt to dance. She took him by the hands and he beamed. Like a lot of fat men he was dainty on his feet.

  She tried to get me to whirl about, but I wouldn’t. After a ballroom number with Da Silva, she sat beside me and washed down spam fritters with another tumbler. In a slurry voice she asked Captain Dutt if there was much homosexuality on board. He said there was none. ‘Believe that and you’ll believe anything,’ she hissed in my ear, then offered a complicated anecdote about when Sir Roland had picked up a marine in Skegness who’d pulled a gun on him and told him to keep driving. She then said I should keep my legs crossed, because a standing tool knows no conscience and a sailor from Goa wouldn’t care about my age and strange appearance, for him a change would be as good as a holiday. Once again I advised her to stay on the ship until Panama.

  Captain Dutt checked Raja from emptying another bottle of vodka into the Bloody Mary bowl. Harminder quaffed a tumbler of whisky. Prem, who was next on watch, drank only Coca-Cola. Pandal barbecued fish and vegetables. The wind made the coals flare, but Dutt saw the men could manage the incident and didn’t intervene, though Lady Myre’s ear was singed by a flying cinder of red-hot charcoal.

  I didn’t like not joining in and I wished I’d brought something snazzy to wear and could contribute and not be awkward. I thought how this was just one thing that was happening at a certain point in time: young Indian men dancing together in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a cargo ship loaded with ten million dollars’ worth of kiwi fruit, heading towards Pitcairn, the most isolated island in the world.

  I left the party early, wanting to be alone.

  The link between me and Verity weakened as the ship sailed on. In my cabin I mused on the past: the time we brought bay trees back on our bicycles from the flower market, the time we canoed on the River Brett and I steered us into the bank, the time we first kissed and she wondered about the origin of the cliché ‘hook line and sinker’, the times we tried to separate, but then went back. I wrote her an email, aware that Captain Dutt would read it and wonder about the passenger in the master’s cabin.

  Dear Verity

  It’s strange to receive email here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with nothing in sight for days and nights but the sea. The journey’s taking longer than expected because of pan pan weather, but hopefully we’ll arrive at Pitcairn in two days’ time. Life on board the Tundra Princess is very comfortable, the food’s good, my cabin’s luxurious and I eat with Captain Dutt and the officers in their mess room. There’s one other passenger for Pitcairn, a strange woman called Lady Myre who seems to think she’s travelling to Picton on New Zealand’s South Island to be reunited with her long-lost half-brother. I think she’s a bit soft in the head. Tonight there was a party on the crew deck, but I left early. I think of you and at times I wish you were making this journey with me.

  Love etcetera

  Lady Myre didn’t show up for breakfast the morning after the party. I took coffee to her cabi
n. Her face looked unironed and grey roots sprouted from the blonde of her hair. She languished on her bed in a lemon silk housecoat, and she had a gold Alice band in her hair. She said her head ached because of there having been two Wednesdays and the clocks going forward an hour each day. All the cabin clocks were altered from the bridgehead in the night, which added to her confusion. She believed that the right time was that shown on her watch.

  She seemed in a bad way. I told her it would be no big deal for her to fly home to London from Panama and that she was in no fit state to be buffeted by the waves in a longboat and then have to struggle up Pitcairn’s Hill of Difficulty. She snivelled and said her whole life had been a hill of difficulty.

  I told her she couldn’t easily phone home from Pitcairn. She grizzled and said what did that matter – she’d no one to phone, no one loved her. She seemed unstable. But then her manner changed, she gave a sly look and said I was only goading her because I wickedly wanted to leave her alone with all these men. She patted the bedcover for me to sit beside her and said now she felt like girly talk. She closed her eyes and appeared to sleep. I sat on the fixed bench and talked winsomely of tectonic plates, island formations and the turbulence of tsunamis, but she didn’t respond. She opened her eyes to slits, asked why I’d never been married and was there a significance to my wearing a ring on my little finger. ‘Why should there be?’ I replied. She seemed determined to be personal. She said she’d heard it was an indicator of homosexuality, but that wasn’t always true. Roley’s dear friend Colonel something-or-other was always lusting after some little darling and he wore a beautiful onyx on his pinky. Again I obfuscated. Though I’d no wish to conceal my sexual orientation, I feared frankness would disadvantage me on Pitcairn, given the teachings of Adventism. Nor did I want to disconcert the crew of the Tundra Princess.

  I made some fatuous remark about how everything signified. She looked most comfortable reclining on her bed and I admired her unselfconscious ease. She said, ‘It’s clear you’re not going to tell me anything about yourself. You’re going to remain an enigma.’ I didn’t deny this. I asked if her husband minded her travelling alone and in such an unconventional way. ‘Roley?’ she said. ‘No, he’s such a dear. He doesn’t mind what I do. He gave up trying to understand me the day after we married. He knows that if I say I’m going to Singapore I’ll end up in Saskatchewan and if I say I’ll be away for a week it probably means a year.’

  I pondered this information and how it fitted in with chaos theory and variations in patterns of random interconnected change. I supposed her provocative movements were because of her training as an actress and her year with the Shaw Savill Line. I asked if she felt like going up to the bridgehead to talk to Raja and Captain Dutt about our approach to Pitcairn. She said, much as she’d love to her head wouldn’t allow it, so I went alone.

  On the stairs I passed the cadet Salman Kanjee. He looked gaunt and hadn’t slept. I’d thought him an arrogant young man but now he was deflated. He’d dropped all the keys to the stores out of the top pocket of his overalls into the sea. He’d checked that the containers of kiwi fruit were securely lashed, then bent over the side of the deck to look at the swirling waves. He feared he’d lose his job. The purser had received the news in silence. Some keys had no duplicates. It was a coveted position to be a cadet. Salman told me he was landsick – not homesick particularly, but sick of the sea. He wanted to walk down familiar streets, or sit in a cafe with a girlfriend.

  On the bridgehead deck I looked out over the ocean and at the few intrepid seabirds that swirled in the ship’s wake. Bligh had logged sight of porpoises, an albatross, blue petrels, shearwater, pintados, sharks, dolphins, whales and phosphorescent fish. Raja, who was keeping watch, said no creatures were visible in these deep cold waters. We might voyage for weeks and see no other sign of life, no other ship, no scrap of land.

  He explained something of the wonder of the computer screens to me. To keep watch was essentially to observe a screen. Radar could pick up a ship twenty-four miles away. If something went wrong with the refrigerated containers – a loose connection or a swing in temperature – this would show up on the screen. But still the watchman at all hours surveyed the sea with his eyes and still in nil visibility he’d sound the ship’s horn every minute.

  Raja said people might think of life at sea as exotic, but it was very demanding. The work was hard, mistakes must not be made, trust and interdependence were essential and no one worked in a vacuum. A good sailor must think laterally, be competent in many areas and able to cope with tensions, gossip and discomfort.

  As a cadet, Raja said, he’d endured kicks but they’d made him a man and taught him self-discipline. In the days before he left home, tension set in. When he said goodbye to his family, it was for months or years at a time. Once it was for three years. When he returned, his son called him Uncle. His wife said, ‘That’s not Uncle that’s Daddy.’

  I liked his soft quick voice, his thoughtfulness and swanky, capable frame. I was surprised he was only twenty-six, for he seemed so wise. He came from Vellore. I asked what Salman’s punishment would be. He said there’d be some loss of privileges and an obstacle to promotion, but that he was an immature young man who had much to learn. ‘You mustn’t make such mistakes on a ship,’ he said. But Captain Dutt had said losing the keys was punishment enough.

  I thought how punishing Bligh was to Christian at Nomuka when islanders stole the anchor of his boat and how he humiliated him over the coconut affair. And then, on Sunday Island, when Robert Lamb was starving, Bligh beat him for eating the birds he’d caught.

  That evening, though the officers had fish curry, Agnelo Dias, the cook from Goa, prepared Chicken Maryland with chips, a frizzed spring onion and sculpted carrot for Lady Myre and me. But he must have thought his efforts bland, for he poured curry sauce over it all. Pandal brought us each a glass of sweet white wine, and at our appreciation of so much kindness Dutt, Da Silva, Harminder, Raja and Soni all beamed.

  Da Silva showed how he could cut an apple into flowery shapes. A restored Lady Myre made them all laugh when, with her rather beautiful hands, she cut orange peel into protruding teeth. She wore a silver leather miniskirt, a bust-bursting crimson top and a plastic daffodil in her hair. There was no coherence about her attire beyond it always looking odd. She never wore the same thing twice. One afternoon I saw her come from the engine room in combat gear and a deerstalker, and after Da Silva passingly remarked, one lunchtime, that as chief engineer he checked the air-conditioning to safeguard against legionnaires’ disease, at dinner Lady Myre wore a mask with a carbon filter. She lifted it to speak and pop morsels of highly spiced food into her mouth. Da Silva appeared a little in love with her blondeness and insanity. Sometimes she’d wear large diamond earrings that looked like trinkets, or flash a white sapphire ring, or she’d be festooned in sparkling beads from a Cairo street market.

  Officers and crew all called her ma’am. I avoided calling her by any name, though in my mind I thought of her as Lady Myre. From her passport I’d seen that her first name was Hortense and that she was fifty-five. She told Captain Dutt she was forty but, as he had care of her passport, I wondered why she attempted this deception.

  I thought of the defining details of name, date of birth, country of origin, and of the negating of the Polynesian women abducted by the mutineers. The men gave them English names: Isabella, Mary, Sarah, Jenny, Susannah, Nancy. Even their names were controlled by the sailors who abducted them, had sex with them, made them pregnant and whom they were obliged to serve. Bligh’s descriptions of the mutineers made it hard to see them as romantic or attractive, with their sweaty hands, rotten teeth and scars. I tried to remember the girls’ Polynesian names: Mauatua, Vahineatua, Teatuahitea … Their views on losing their homes, families, friends, and customs were not recorded. Caught in a crude adventure of crime and evasion, chance changed their lives beyond their control.

  A rhythm of habits defined shipboard life: times to ea
t, the time when the water was hot enough for a bath, when the sun rose, when it set. I felt the persuasiveness of living for months and years on a ship, close to the circling of the world, the pull of the moon on the tide, the movement of the ocean bed. The ship was an island with only the sea in view. Some nights I went alone to the bridgehead deck to look at the stars and the moon’s reflection in the ocean. I didn’t want my voyage to end.

  The crew seemed glad to have women on board, even women as odd as Lady Myre and me. Soni scolded them in Hindi when they flirted with Lady Myre.

  For Saturday lunch Pandal served vegetarian curry, because of Soni’s gods. Harminder told him it was horrible, Da Silva asked for luncheon meat to eat with it and Lady Myre spilled a forkful of hers down her shalwar-kameez, then dabbed the bright stain with a lemon. The talk was of marriage. Soni’s had been arranged and she said how happy she was with her parents’ choice of Jaswinder from Jamshedpur. She commended their wisdom and care. They asked for more from relationship than the frailty of falling in love. They wanted the good father, the good provider, and relatives they liked. Jaswinder sat beside her and looked inscrutable.

  Da Silva said his was a love marriage and he’d want his children to choose for themselves in the same way he had. He’d tell them if he thought they were choosing unwisely, but he wouldn’t deny them their freedom. Lady Myre expounded on meeting Sir Roland on Riis Beach and how it had been love at first sight. She said that love conquered all, then snapped her fingers for Pandal to bring more chapattis. Da Silva called her a true Christian and again said if ever she was in Mumbai she must stay at his house.