Deadly Shoals

by Joan Druett

  “What? Both of them?”

  “The Vincennes blundered into the merchantman first. Unfortunately, the Peacock, which was following close behind, didn’t have time to take evasive action.”

  “In full view of the whole of Rio?”

  Stackpole snorted rudely, Rochester kept a dignified silence, and Wiki winced. The merchant brigantine had been his father’s Salem trader Osprey, and it had been not the first, but the second time, that she had got into a collision with expedition ships. While Wiki had not been on board the Vincennes to see the confrontation with Wilkes that had followed this latest episode, he had been assured by those who had been there that Captain Coffin’s fury had been truly awe-inspiring.

  The whaling master jibed, “I hope they made a real lubberly job of it, and sent the brigantine to the bottom.”

  “On the contrary, it was a trivial matter,” Rochester snapped. “There were a few repairs to be done, and the matter of compensation to be discussed with the master of the merchantman, but that should delay them only a couple of days.”

  “So what about the other four vessels? Did they get into collisions, too?”

  “The gun brig Porpoise was instructed to send a party into the city in search of a few deserters, with squads from the schooners Flying Fish and Sea Gull to assist. The storeship Relief was sent ahead some days before, as she’s a slow sailer, and impedes the fleet sadly.”

  Wiki concealed a grin at this. He had been on board the Vincennes when Captain Wilkes had given the captain of the Relief his marching orders, and so he knew better—that Wilkes had sent the storeship off early not because of her undeniably slow sailing qualities, but because rumors had been running about the fleet that the captain and officers of the Relief had been invited to a merry spree on shore.

  Then he heard the whaling master say, “And you were sent ahead, too?”

  “Not because the Swallow is a slow sailer,” George said, very firmly indeed.

  “I reckon not,” Stackpole agreed without hesitation, taking another admiring look at the brig’s vast sails and taut rigging. “But why were you in such a hurry?”

  “Our orders are to get to the mouth of the Río Negro—where the other ships will join us—and commence a survey of the shoals.”

  “But what the hell for? They change with every tide!”

  Wiki silently agreed. Indeed, he considered the assignment insane. Though it was supposed to be a secret as deep as the grave, every member of the expedition was perfectly aware that Captain Wilkes was determined to embark on a search for the fabled Antarctic continent as soon as the fleet had doubled Cape Horn—but if that was ever to be undertaken, it had to be accomplished before the end of the southern summer, and it was the third week of January already.

  “And the taxpayers are paying for this useless expedition?”

  “Over the past five months we’ve accomplished a great deal,” George Rochester returned with offended dignity. “Unknown tracts of the ocean have been charted—making the sea safer for people like you! Important gravitational measurements were carried out in Rio—mountains were surveyed, along with an immense lot of jungle. Great loads of specimens will be forwarded to the States. By the time the mission is over, the government will be well rewarded for their investment, I assure you!”

  “Well, I most surely do hope so,” said the whaling master, sotto voce, and then, with an abrupt change of topic, inquired, “Do you have any marines on board?”

  “Marines? No, we do not. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I’m in dire need of a well-armed squad.”

  “What the devil for?”

  “You said that part of the mission is to protect American whaling adventures, and that’s exactly what I need—protection!”

  George Rochester cast an all-comprehensive look about the innocently sparkling sea. “Protection from what, pray?”

  “I need help to apprehend a thief.”

  “A thief? You need a sheriff, Captain, not a squad of marines!”

  “Well, there ain’t no sheriff about here—and I don’t actually care how you do it, sir, just so long as I get my money back.”

  “You’ve been robbed?”

  “Of a significant sum—by a man by the name of Adams, who’s American, which I reckon makes all the difference. He’s an American trader who has a store in the village of El Carmen, up the Río Negro,” Stackpole went on, jabbing a finger at the landward horizon. “I gave him a thousand dollars—and he absconded with it!”

  Wiki, at the helm, had trouble not shaking his head in disbelief at such credulous trust in an undoubted adventurer, and George, obviously, felt the same, demanding, “What in God’s name did you give him all that money for?”

  Stackpole shifted from one boot to another, giving the sails another look to conceal his embarrassed expression. “The whaling hasn’t been going well,” he muttered. “So I thought I’d invest in sealing.”

  “Sealing?”

  “And why not?” queried the whaling master, back to delivering George an antagonistic stare. “The sealing trade ain’t finished, yet. There’s plenty of rookeries what ain’t been discovered, with hordes of seals just waiting to be taken.”

  Wiki and George exchanged a startled glance, having already heard this kind of claptrap from a bunch of old sealers they had picked up at Shark Island, off the coast of Brazil, a couple of months earlier in the voyage. There had been a time when men could make a fortune out of a sealing venture, when an eight-man gang could take twenty thousand skins in one four-month season, but since then the rookeries—the breeding beaches—had been devastated, the seal herds wiped out to the very last pup by the hunters’ cruel greed. Despite all the grim evidence, however, a certain type of sealing man still clung obstinately to the mad belief that there were some more lucrative beaches to be found, if only one kept up the hunt. An experienced whaling master, in Wiki’s silent estimation, should have had more sense.

  Rochester said, “But why Patagonia?”

  “There’s plenty of seals about these parts, believe me. Patagonia has been considered too dangerous till just lately, but only six years ago the Penguin sailed into Stonington with fourteen hundred pelts from round these parts, and since then there’s been a lot of interest in the coast. Just one month ago, I heard that the New York brig Athenian did very well indeed over the past coupla seasons, and so I thought I might as well try a venture of my own. The season don’t finish till March, you know! But I need a tender to do it. Adams had a schooner for sale, so I agreed to buy her, even if she were a bit pricey.”

  “But that’s a devil of a lot of money to hand over to a Río Negro trader, American or not!”

  “Adams has never cheated me before,” the whaling master protested. “And I’ve been buying his stores for the past three years. All the whalers use him when they recruit for salt beef on this part of the coast—he’s built up a good little business.”

  “And he just happened to have a schooner for sale?”

  “It wasn’t his vessel,” Stackpole said defensively. “He told me he was acting as the agent for the captain of the Athenian. The brig’s holds are full, so they are heading home. Naturally, they wanted to sell their tender first—a solid little schooner, ideal for me. I gave Adams the wherewithal to buy her, and then told him to provision her, load her with salt for curing the skins, and hire a gang of Indians for sealing hands. I’d be back before long, I said, to take over the craft and settle up accounts. But when I arrived up the river with three spare hands to collect the schooner and sail her downriver, it was to find he’d vanished, along with my cash!”

  Wiki asked curiously, “Did you really pay him in cash?”

  Stackpole turned and looked him up and down, from wild black ringlets to bare brown feet. Then he turned away again, saying contemptuously, “Say sir when you speak to me, boy.”

  George flushed. “I’m sorry, sir, I should have introduced you before,” he snapped. “This is Mr. Coffin, the expedition
linguister.”

  “He’s—what?”

  “Wiki Coffin is a member of the scientific corps.”

  The whaling master looked at Wiki again, eyebrows high as he surveyed his muscular, dungaree-clad frame again. “But how can a Pacific Islander—a kernacker!—be a scientist, for God’s sake?”

  “Not only is Wiki Coffin a scientist, but he could be exactly the man you need,” Rochester loftily informed him. “He’s the representative of U.S. law and order with the expedition, authorized by the sheriff’s department of Portsmouth, Virginia.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  George said to Wiki in tones of sorely tried patience, “Could I trouble you to fetch your warrant, old chap? It seems we have to prove our point.”

  Wiki paused, interested enough by the contradictions of this strangely blatant theft to repeat his question to Stackpole. “Did you really give him the thousand dollars in cash?” he asked.

  The whaling master frowned, but admitted, “I gave him a draft on my Connecticut bank, payable to bearer.”

  Wiki’s lips pursed up in a silent whistle as he contemplated the interesting implications of this. “And the schooner has disappeared, too?”

  “Of course,” said Stackpole sourly.

  Two

  January 25, 1839

  At eight bells—four the next morning—the Trojan whaleboat arrived at the starboard rail of the Swallow. Wiki, who was ready and waiting as arranged, jumped into it. The six men of the boat’s crew looked at him, and he nodded in return. Two of them, he noticed with interest, were Pacific Islanders—kanaka, a word that Stackpole pronounced “kernacker,” Yankee fashion. Remembering how the whaling master had disdainfully addressed him as “boy,” he wondered how they were treated on board the Trojan. However, there was no opportunity to ask them questions, or even to learn their names.

  Once Wiki was settled in the stern sheets Captain Stackpole barked an order, and a sail was set. Then they sailed with the sureness of past experience toward the unseen shoals of the Río Negro. The onshore wind was with them, and the Trojan and the Swallow were soon out of sight. An hour later the sun nudged the seaward horizon, setting the tips of the little waves to dancing orange and gold, and lighting up a tall reddish cliff at the edge of a high headland. At the top of this, the silhouette of a bare flagpole poked a narrow finger at the paling sky.

  This, evidently, was the landmark they were aiming to fetch. At a word from their captain, the sail was taken in, the mast unshipped, and the tiller exchanged for a steering oar. The oarsmen set their shoulders into pulling through the broad band of wild surf that crashed on the beach below the flagstaff, while the headsman, standing in the stern, leaned hard on the big sweep, his eyes slitted. The boat danced madly at first, but a moment later they were through the breakers. The boat grounded with a crashing of gravel and sand.

  Wiki waded ashore, then sat down on a rock and brushed off his feet before putting on his boots and rolling down the legs of his trousers. Two of the men had already turned the boat around for the return trip to the Trojan, while Stackpole stood in the surf, giving orders. Listening to the shouted conversation, Wiki gathered that the Trojan was to go out on a short cruise after whales with the first mate in command, while their captain attended to his business here. Then, with a helping shove from Stackpole, the boat pulled off through the waves.

  When Stackpole arrived on the beach he sat down to put on his own boots, and then led the way up the face of the cliff, which was so steep that the narrow track tagged back and forth along rocky terraces. Stones rolled away as they climbed. Wiki paused to catch his breath when they reached the top, finding that there was a more extensive view than he had expected, the beach being over one hundred feet below his feet. He could see the estuary of the Río Negro immediately to the south of the headland, the black waters heavily braided with shoals which gleamed in streaks of green and russet. On the far side of the river sandhills bulged up and down, pink and gray in the early sun.

  Stackpole had kept on moving across the promontory, heading toward a sere thicket, and as Wiki watched he disappeared into the scrub. When Wiki caught up with him, he was trudging down a narrow track, heading for a long, low, barnlike building which proved to be the pilothouse. Once inside, the whaling master engaged in conversation with two frowsty, weather-beaten river pilots who looked as alike as brothers, though one turned out to be French, while the other was English. They lived comfortably enough, in a kind of cozy squalor, the single room being furnished with a table and benches, and bunks piled high with blankets. Tins, boxes, bags of provisions, and bottles of grog were stacked along wide shelves that ran around two of the walls, while cutlasses and pistols dangled from pegs.

  As Wiki stepped inside, Stackpole was asking the pilots about the hireage of horses for the trek to El Carmen de Patagones, eighteen miles upriver. Neither of them looked very happy about this, there being no commission for sending a party upriver on horseback, but the Englishman consented to give them directions to a nearby estancia, along with a dour warning that it was a twenty-minute walk away. Undeterred, Stackpole nodded thanks, and then headed back through the scrub to the stony headland, where the short, hard grass was turning gold-colored with the rays of the lifting sun.

  Striding along behind him, Wiki looked about with interest, comparing this sere Patagonian steppe with the lush Argentinian pampas of his memories. Just over a year ago, back in October 1837, when his ship had dropped anchor in Callao he had heard talk that the bark of war George Rochester was serving on was lying at Montevideo, so Wiki had jumped ship to head about the Horn as the second mate of a Peruvian trader, in the hope of seeing his old comrade. Arriving in the Uruguayan port, he had found to his delight that the talk was true—George’s ship, the Acasta, was there, and would be there for some time, too, being in the middle of refitting for the West Indies station.

  Equally elated, George had immediately requested leave, and after this had been granted the two friends had hired two tough ponies, and galloped off into the hinterland, where they had joined a band of gauchos, and had learned to use the lazo and hunt with the bolas—les tres Marías. At night, they had sipped the green tea called maté from a common gourd, while they traded yarns of the sea for tales of the pampas. Their new friends had told them that here, at the Río Negro, the great grass plains evolved into a stony semidesert that stretched all the way to Cape Horn, and what Wiki saw now confirmed it.

  The dirt between the clumps of tussock was thin, and dust rose with every step, while mirages shimmered in the inland distance. It was a break in the arid monotony when Stackpole found a path that straggled off to the left, leading past a weather-silvered fence to a clump of big trees and a house with barns perched halfway down the slope. It took another five minutes to rouse the estanciero from his breakfast. Then Wiki dickered in Spanish while the rancher’s wife and children watched him raptly with huge brown eyes, and Stackpole, though he could understand scarcely a word, kept on urging him to get the price still lower. Evidently the loss of the thousand-dollar bond had cost the whaleman dearly, because when they came to an agreement he opened his purse so reluctantly that Wiki fully expected the ranch owner to cheat them. Instead, however, the estanciero produced a strong gray mare for Wiki himself, and an experienced pinto for Stackpole, both equipped with capacious sheepskin saddles and proper European stirrups, though dangling long in the gaucho fashion. There was even a plaited rawhide lazo provided—presumably, thought Wiki, to lasso the horses if they tried to escape.

  Clambering heavily onto his mount, Stackpole trotted down the rest of the slope to a winding riverside trail, rimmed by rushing water on one side, and by tall banks on the other. Following him, Wiki meditated with some amusement that the whaling master rode in the stolid manner of a farmer, the reins held short and his boots jammed into the stirrups. Personally, he kept a long rein and didn’t bother with the stirrups, at times riding with his feet dangling, and at other times with o
ne foot tucked up under the other thigh, native fashion. It was the way he had ridden bareback as a child—a style that was so relaxed and easy that he could keep it up for scores of miles without tiring.

  The world was filled with the rippling sounds of water, the distant cries of birds, and the clatter of hooves—and then Stackpole’s gruff voice. Evidently he had been impressed by Wiki’s handling of the rancher, because he asked over his shoulder, “You been about these parts often, boy?”

  Wiki glanced at him with no friendliness at all, greatly disliking that word boy. He said briefly, “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean, not exactly?”

  “I once spent a few weeks riding the pampas, but it was north’ard of here, on the Río de la Plata.”

  “Well, you sure do seem well acquainted with the local customs.”

  Wiki nodded. The terrain might be very different, but the people were the same. He glimpsed men passing by on the heights above, seated upright on their huge sheepskin saddles—recaos—and swinging their whips over their heads as they drove small herds of cattle or horses before them. The long silver-hilted knives thrust slantwise into their belts at the back stuck out on either side like the upper yards of lateen sails. The steeds’ long manes and the men’s long black hair flew out in the wind, parallel with the ragged fringes of their ponchos.

  He looked back at Stackpole. “Do you come here often?”

  “Often enough. Adams’s salt beef is cheaper than what I can get in Montevideo, and keeps better, too.”

  That was because of the saltpeter in the local salt; Wiki had heard about that, too. The sealers liked it because it preserved the pelts so well. Instead of commenting, he reined in to look around. They had arrived at a valley where several small streams joined the river. A cluster of white ranchhouses had been built on the sandy confluence, partly shaded by pergolas and groves of peach trees, pegged-out hides making rectangular shadows on the ground in front of them. Children ran out to offer them fruit and water, while their sparkling-eyed sisters giggled demurely behind their palms, and their mothers teased Wiki to see his creased-up grin, and told him to go away before he seduced their daughters. Then, with an impatient grunt, Stackpole hassled them on.