The Last Bookaneer

by Matthew Pearl

  “I do not know his white name, and I doubt it is remembered by anyone,” said a Chinese man who owned one of three new restaurants in the village. “He is called Fa’amoemoeopu,” said a fisherman, whose words my hunchbacked guide translated slowly in my ear. The name, I was told, meant “one who does not forget words.” “It is said Fa’amoemoeopu was in Tale-Pui-Pui once, years ago.”

  “That’s the prison?” I asked. I brightened up. Perhaps Davenport himself could finally give me the answers Mr. Fergins had not, if I could persuade him to talk to me.

  “I saw him once.” This came from a gray-haired Samoan woman whose excellent English brought her odd jobs for the American consulate.

  “You did?”

  “Not in person, no,” she admitted. “I saw a portrait brought back from Tonga. He will not allow most men to see his face and it is covered by a bushy beard. But he has many followers and admirers who serve him, as I understand it. He is like you,” she said after a moment of studying me.

  “What do you mean?”

  She grinned. “You could be his son.”

  I was not sure what she meant. Since to these natives my coffee-colored skin seemed more white than black, it could have simply meant Fa’amoemoeopu was a white man and the native woman thought I was also, or a close enough approximation.

  By this point, there was not enough time left in the furlough to go to Tonga. In the months that followed, as we continued our route through the South Seas, Davenport—the exile, the secret white king of the natives—flourished in my imagination. His calling taken away from him, his rival having vanquished him, he would have refused to return to a world desolate and empty. The bookaneer would have a new purpose and a new source of power. As I became increasingly fascinated by these notions, I determined to return one day to investigate them. Then, there was a stroke of bad luck that proved a godsend to my curiosity. On our return voyage, the rains came and lasted a week; our ship had leaks and required repairs so we returned to anchor near the nineteenth parallel south latitude—not very far from Tonga. While repairs were being made, one of the masts was found to be rotted, which would require another week, at least. Being stranded let me solve the mystery of Pen Davenport sooner than I’d hoped.

  • • •

  THE CRESCENT-SHAPED ISLET in question was so small no map or chart shows it. The few histories of it I have found suggest it was discovered by Captain Bligh a few weeks before the infamous mutiny against him. I had to travel two days with no more than four hours’ sleep in order to secure my transportation. The islet was part of a chain of land masses that formed a tail of the 150 islands that comprise Tonga. It had very little fertile land and was rocky even where verdant. I could see almost nowhere to land, the edges skirted with coral reefs and rough-breaking water even at mid- and low tide. I had been told that the small number of natives who settled there served as lookouts in the event enemies of Tonga tried to approach. This was confirmed as soon as we coasted through the early gloom of dawn into a treacherous and narrow opening in the rocks, the closest thing the isle had to a harbor. A group of watchful islanders appeared on the beach with spears out.

  The natives who rowed my vessel stopped suddenly, some distance from shore. I was about to demand to know why they halted our progress. Then I noticed a rope drawn across the harbor’s opening that would have capsized us. My escorts offered a series of elaborate gestures to our greeters to indicate that I wanted to visit and that I was coming in peace. The island guardians kept their eyes on me while my escorts conveyed the purpose of the tired, weather-beaten foreigner seated in the middle of the canoe: to meet the half-legendary Fa’amoemoeopu.

  The rope was soon lowered but their continued skepticism toward my visit was palpable once I stood on the beach. All my pockets and cuffs were searched. Then I was asked to remove my boots and they led me farther ashore. The sand felt surprisingly solid between my toes. I was brought up a hill alone to a hut to wait, wait, and wait, and I could only hope the guides and oarsmen I had hired from the Cook Islands would not grow impatient enough to strand me. I pressed my fingers to my temples. Hanging from the rafters, there were palm-leaf baskets filled with colorful birds, whose squawking made any attempt to think or rest impossible.

  New places and experiences don’t frighten me. I was not the boy who once boarded a train to flee my small village. Indeed, if I was ever to return to New York City after my wandering years, I do not think I would be belittled by it. Neither was I so impressed as I once was by newness for its own sake. I could hardly remember all the places I sailed, and the journeying had only left me more restless. Still, there was something different about this. It seemed I had not merely reached another spot on the map of the world, but rather was seeking entrance into the secret life of a man who did not wish to be found. The truth dawned on me. My life could be at the mercy of Pen Davenport, this white dictator who had long ago traded civilization for raw power.

  “If you please,” said a tall bejeweled native who entered the hut with a silent step and spoke with a stern voice, but managed to convey enough kindness toward me to give me a little comfort. He left a tray that had a bowl of cold orange soup, some mango and pineapple, and some white grubs wrapped in leaves. I thanked him and I devoured almost all (leaving behind the grubs, which I feared might still be living). The tall native returned and gestured for me to follow.

  I walked behind him up a steep hill to a larger structure, a building with a verandah and some enclosed rooms, though the roof and beams were still of the native style and I had to duck my head under the eaves upon entering. Once inside, I was brought into a chamber that I suppose could be called a parlor, though it had no chairs—just the mats on the floor in the style of so many of the islands in the area.

  There was a white man lying on a mat on the floor, stretching his feet into the air. Chickens were pecking at the ground around him. He wore a loose-fitting native gown, the bland color of bamboo, while around his head a garland of satiny red and purple leaves marked him as a person of authority. His radiant face, revealed in the glow of the strong sunset coming through the windows, was covered by a full white beard.

  “Fa’amoemoeopu?”

  “My dear Mr. Clover, what a pleasure,” said Mr. Fergins, a single tear creeping down his cheek.

  • • •

  “BUT I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” I said after an exchange of mutually surprised greetings. “I expected to find Pen Davenport. . . .”

  “Look at me, weeping like a schoolboy to meet an old friend,” Mr. Fergins said, sniffing and drying his eyes. “Davenport?” He pronounced it as though he had not heard or spoken the name in a long time.

  “From the descriptions I heard of Fa’amoemoeopu, a white man who had been in the prison on Upolu . . .” Even as I said it I recalled that the bookseller had been confined, however briefly, in the prison alongside Davenport. “Never mind. What could have possibly brought you back here after you returned to London?”

  “What could have . . . ?” he again echoed my words. He polished his spectacles with the tail of his gown and, returning them over his eyes, blinked out at me with the look of a trapped animal. To observe him was to think that more than four years had passed since I had last seen him. He appeared different. I do not mean he looked as though he’d aged so much. True, the top of his head was now completely bald and his remaining hair whitened along with his new beard, but on the whole the bookseller, who at this point had to be nearing sixty, looked far heartier and more alive than the last time I had seen him. Perhaps it was the light, so much more natural and forgiving in this tropical setting than in the confines of a train car or the distracted haze inside any room in New York City. He seemed a man remade.

  As I continued to wait for an answer, the details of the story he had told me on the stalled train and in his boardinghouse swirled in my mind, reordering themselves into something that had a new and fuller meaning. He was
still examining me, expecting me to answer my own question—something, I thought, Pen Davenport himself might do.

  “It was you,” were the words that came out of my mouth, and suddenly I was trying to fathom my own realization.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “What happened to Belial and Davenport . . . You did it. . . . You did it all. . . . You were the one.”

  “You always managed to impress me.”

  “If I impressed you so much, then why did you lie to me?”

  “Lie? I did nothing of the sort, Mr. Clover.” He seemed genuinely distressed by the charge. “Everything I told you was true. There were certain omissions, I suppose. Why, stories never can include every detail—it would be dangerous for all involved. Things must be left out.”

  “Tell me the rest of what happened when you were in Samoa.”

  “Mr. Clover, it was such a long time ago.”

  “You said stories must begin somewhere. Well, they must end somewhere else. Tell me how you turned the events against Davenport,” I demanded, and he seemed to know that I had no intention of repeating myself.

  “When we realized Whiskey Bill had sent both Davenport and Belial on the mission, and suspected that he might have written Stevenson in the latest mail to sabotage them both, I went upstairs to Stevenson’s little sanctum, as I related to you from my sickbed in New York. ‘Tusitala,’ I called out to him. I found him there opening his mail, just as I described it to you. ‘Mr. Fergins,’ you’ll recall he replied, ‘I have here a most interesting letter from abroad. You might as well join me.’ Only . . . there was nothing there from Whiskey Bill. He was showing me an amusing letter from a man in Wales who claimed that Stevenson stole the idea for The Black Arrow from him. That’s when I interrupted and told Stevenson everything about us. Everything. I told him the truth about why the man they knew as Porter—Davenport—was really there, I told him who Belial was, too. Even about Kitten, and about the lives and times of the bookaneers.

  “‘You mean you men have all come here, clear across the globe to Samoa, to steal my book?’ Stevenson replied to me. ‘Did you think I would stand for it?’

  “I asked him to hold his fire. I said I had an idea to make things right. I began to tell him the intricacies of a plan. Then I added, ‘You’ll need my help with this design, because even with Davenport out of the way, Belial has to be dealt with.’”

  Incredulous at what I was hearing, I interrupted. “Wait a minute. You mean to say you were the one to arrange for Davenport to be imprisoned?” I asked the bookseller.

  “Yes, Mr. Clover, I arranged it with Stevenson, and I went along to the prison, so Davenport would not suspect my part.”

  “But Belial still got the manuscript,” I pointed out.

  “Of course he did! That was part of our design!” Mr. Fergins said, and emitted a joyful laugh. “It was essential to make sure he took it without any problems. You see, I knew that by the time we reached America the word would have circulated about our adventures, and every bookaneer left in the world would be trying to take the manuscript. They would be the bottom-feeders, the ‘barnacles,’ who would not mind the laws until they were in jail. But even if they were lesser lights than the top-notch bookaneers, they were still far too skillful for me to handle. I needed Belial to transport the manuscript in order to get it past them. Nobody but a bookaneer of the finest caliber could have managed it.”

  “But then you had to find a way to get it away from him once he was in America.”

  “A bit like taking a bone from a starved dog.”

  “The calendar—wasn’t that it, Mr. Fergins? You tricked Belial into walking into that publisher’s office, didn’t you, by providing an incorrect calendar on the ship and making sure he wouldn’t realize it was already after the first of July. Is that it?”

  “When I was first in the South Seas,” he said with a glimmer of pride in his eyes, “I noticed how there was almost no sense of the passage of time, usually hardly anyone even knew the date. Sometimes they didn’t know the year! Time really does seem unsure of itself here, as though washed out by the tide tick by tick. With the copyright laws changing and paving the way for other charges, I suspected that if I could make Belial think we had arrived just a few days before we actually did, then the manuscript could be confiscated as soon we got past that final and crudest rung of literary thieves. I knew Judge Salisbury—now Senator Salisbury—a man who had bought books from my stand and who had traveled to London to deliver a lecture he called ‘The Wrongs of Copyright,’ was hungry to put a literary pirate on a whipping post to use for his campaign for the United State Senate. While I was at the German consulate with Vao, after she was carried out, I used their telegraph desk to wire Salisbury, telling him the publishing firms where I suspected Belial would try to sell the book upon arrival. His men were waiting at the offices of each important publisher the day our ship came in, with policemen ready to make the arrest.”

  “That is how you knew Salisbury would arrange with the judge presiding over the case for you to review the pages at the courthouse.”

  “Yes, he was in my debt. All was well for me, because I needed time to prepare it for publication. Meanwhile, Stevenson wired Scribner’s. Everything was set.”

  I felt myself riding a wave of suspicion that I was misled again. “No—that can’t be right. The novel you spoke of, The Shovels of Newton French, was never published. I tried to find it over the years with absolutely no luck.”

  He was nodding before I finished. “When Stevenson and I were planning that day what would happen, I talked about how I would help bring Newton French, his masterpiece, to light.

  “‘That? Really?’ Stevenson gave me a humorless laugh under his breath. Then he said, ‘Well, that book. The more I think about it, the less I like the blasted thing.’

  “‘It is your masterpiece. You said it was the masterpiece you had been missing from your career. I heard you say it!’

  “‘I write two or three novels at a time, Fergins, with two or three more in mind at all times. They come cheaply, and you must serenade them while writing, but all novels are disappointments as soon as they leave your hands. Think of this fact: my reputation will always rest in good part on Treasure Island—Treasure Island, for goodness sake!—a book for boys written with considerably less labor and originality, and probably more than the usual unconscious plagiarism, than anything else I’ve written. I do not think it will live beyond me, though I believe Kidnapped might. But that thing I’ve just finished? Why, I’ve burned far better books that that.’

  “He was carried to his bedroom after a fit of coughing during this conversation, and I was bid to follow a few minutes later. ‘Fifteen drops of laudanum, Fergins, that is all it usually takes.’ The novelist spit into a silver bowl, where I could see saliva swirled with blood. ‘Pay no attention; I have proven myself incapable of dying. You were correct that I was writing my masterpiece. It was not that foolish novel I was referring to.’

  “I waited, holding my breath.

  “‘Samoa saved me,’ Stevenson added in a very serious tone.

  “I asked him rather bluntly what that had to do with anything. The novelist blinked like a man who has stood out in the sun after a long sleep. ‘Fergins,’ he finally replied, ‘when I lived in Edinburgh with its icy winds and conventions, I spent much of the day lying on my back just how you see me now. How little our friends in Europe know of the ease they might find here in Samoa. Half the ills of mankind can be shaken off without a doctor or medicine here. It was Mark Twain who first told me about the enchantment of the balmy atmosphere of the South Seas—said it would take a dead man out of his grave, and, you know how Twain caricatures things, but he was right. I know what I look like to you, like an old skeleton, but I have become a healthy old skeleton. Now, were I to be deported—that would be a death sentence for me. The German powers that seek my remova
l must be repelled. My very life, not to mention the future life of the island, depends upon it.’

  “‘Then this masterpiece . . .’

  “‘There,’ Stevenson said, looking at the pillow beside him on the bed, where a thick manuscript rested. It was in rough shape, the edges bent and folded, spotted with tobacco marks, the strained handwriting scribbled almost end to end, the very narrow borders of the paper filled with marginalia and notes. It was an incredible sight.

  “It was the same novel he had just said should be burned, The Shovels of Newton French. Freshly confused, I was about to ask him again what it all meant, when I remembered how Davenport had found those original pages from Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde—the very ones that led to Charlie’s death—that had been used as scraps for other writing. I flipped the novel over and found on the backs of some of the pages, scattered among other meaningless and discarded writings, an entirely different narrative. I asked him if this was another novel.

  “‘Here is my masterpiece, Fergins. The most important thing I have ever written, that in which everything else I have tried culminates. It is no novel, heavens no. A comprehensive chronicle of the turmoil and the injustices of the foreign intervention in Samoa.’

  “I scanned the pages, which contained dense descriptions of the islands’ political and military conflicts. I remembered Davenport had come across similar scribblings during his first searches at Vailima but never gave them a second thought. It had some potential titles written in a list, including A Footnote to History. I looked back up at Stevenson and he continued explaining to me: