Deadly Shoals

by Joan Druett

  Wiki looked around. Mr. Peale—like the pilot—was nowhere to be seen. “It seems we have to fetch the pilot from the pilothouse,” he said, and followed Ringgold into the boat, where a boat’s crew was ready to pull them ashore.

  To their consternation and dismay, as they arrived on the riverbank a guard of lancers galloped around a bend, hauled their steeds to a stop, and jumped down with leveled weapons. The boat’s crew and Captain Ringgold beat a hasty retreat to the safety of the boat, while Wiki explained the situation to the man who was in charge of the squad. Finally, to his relief, the pikes and cutlasses were lowered, and Ringgold bravely stepped ashore. Then the chief guard revealed that though they were still very jumpy about the rumored French invasion, their real mission was to arrest the pilots and carry them off to the fort.

  “For God’s sake, why?” Ringgold demanded, after Wiki had conveyed this.

  “It seems that agreeing to pilot a foreign vessel without getting permission from the governor first is a heinous offense.” The crime, Wiki thought, was trivial enough, but the state of the two pilots when they were dragged out of their cabin was pitiable. As they were hauled off in shackles they begged Captain Ringgold to intercede for them, vowing their lives were at stake.

  Ringgold scarcely listened. Instead, as the lancers cantered off down the riverside path with the pilots in tow, he fell into a fit of swearing. He had good reason, Wiki admitted. Since she had grounded, the Sea Gull had been sitting relatively still, but now, as they could all see from the riverbank, with the ebb tide she was starting to thump up and down.

  Then Ringgold’s flow of invective was abruptly interrupted. A man stepped out of the scrub, glanced around in a surreptitious fashion to make sure that the troopers had left, and then offered his piloting services in good American English.

  He was a weathered man in his thirties, with a short beard that was redder than his brown hair. Though not large in stature, he carried such a strong impression of an electric abundance of energy that he seemed bigger than his size. He also had wonderful self-confidence. Everyone stared in silence, completely confounded by this sudden apparition, but this didn’t faze him in the slightest. Stepping up to Captain Ringgold with his hand outstretched, he announced in hearty Yankee tones, “Benjamin Harden, junior, at your service.”

  Instead of shaking hands, Ringgold took a quick pace backward, saying with disgust, “You’re an American?”

  “Was left behind by my ship in Buenos Aires quite some years ago,” said this fellow, not put out in the slightest. “Came here to make my pile, sir—an ambition that has remained unrealized, unfortunately.”

  Ringgold stared him up and down, and then observed to Wiki, without bothering to lower his voice, “He’s nothing but a confounded adventurer!”

  “There’s two or three of them around here, sir, or so Captain Stackpole told me,” Wiki told him.

  “Good God. What’s our great nation coming to?”

  Wiki was saved from finding an answer by Harden himself, who abruptly improved his position by revealing, “I have my Protection, sir.”

  Ringgold’s brows shot up, and Wiki was equally surprised. The Seaman’s Protection was a slip of paper testifying that the bearer was a citizen of the United States, with the right to apply to a U.S. consul for help if he was sick, marooned, or shipwrecked. Any American seaman who failed to go to the local customshouse and get this certificate before he sailed was foolish, as it was valuable evidence of his identity. However, if Harden had been adrift in South America for years, as he claimed, it was amazing that he’d managed to retain it.

  While they all watched, Harden felt around in the interior of his shirt, and hauled it out. The captain stared at him for a long moment before taking it, and then gave it only a brief look. “You’re a Rhode Islander?”

  “Born in Providence thirty-five years ago, sir, just the way it says there.”

  “And you reckon you can pilot our schooner off the sandbar?”

  “And back out to the fleet, sir.”

  “Not up the river to El Carmen?”

  “Ain’t possible, sir, not with the tide against us.” Harden licked a finger, wetting it, and then held it up in the air, reminding them all that there was no breeze at all, let alone one that would help waft the Sea Gull upriver.

  Another pause. Then Ringgold nodded, and handed the paper back. “All right,” he grunted. “Come on board and navigate her off the sandbank and into deeper water, so we can get her a hundred or so fathoms upstream with the sweeps. Then we’ll discuss what happens next.” He turned to Wiki, and said abruptly, “Since we’re going to El Carmen by land, I need horses.”

  “How many horses?”

  “Lieutenant Perry will come, and I’ll take Mr. Waldron, and Mr. Hale, too—so we need four, quick as you can.”

  Wiki had heard of all three men before, though the only one he had met personally was Mr. Waldron, the purser of the Vincennes and one of Captain Wilkes’s particular cronies. Wiki had noticed Mr. Waldron on board the Sea Gull the night before, but had not paid much attention to anyone else. The schooner had been extremely crowded, having two surgeon-scientists on board as well as Mr. Peale and the crew of fifteen men, and Wiki’s major goal had been to find a place to sleep—which had turned out to be within the folds of a spare sail stowed on the foredeck, where he had reposed quite comfortably, wrapped securely in his poncho.

  Now, realizing that the crowd must have included Mr. Hale, who was the expedition philologist, he wondered why the oddly named Titian Peale was not taking part in the jaunt to El Carmen. And what about the two surgeon-scientifics? Wiki knew only one, Dr. Fox, by sight—not just because he lived on the Vincennes, but also because he was a native of Salem, Massachusetts, Captain Coffin’s hometown. John Fox was only three years older than Wiki himself, and during Wiki’s first year or so in Salem, he had often seen him walking in and out of the prestigious Salem Latin School, where he was a noted scholar. The other surgeon looked equally high-toned and intelligent, so why had the pair been excluded?

  Wiki wasn’t foolish enough to ask. Instead, as soon as the boat had pushed off for the Sea Gull with the new pilot on board, he went back to the pilots’ cabin. His mare, thankfully, was still tethered to the hitching post, the lancers having forgotten to steal her. She shied madly when she saw him, greatly disliking the prospect of another jaunt, and it took several minutes to get the saddle cinched. Then she bucked and kicked viciously when Wiki grabbed a hank of mane, set a bare toe on her knee, and jumped on board.

  Curbing her with difficulty, Wiki set off along the top of the headland for the estancia where he and Stackpole had hired the horses. So much had happened in the meantime that when the silvery fence and then the cluster of buildings came into sight, it seemed much more than two days since he’d been here last. The estanciero had no trouble remembering him, though. Another bout of bargaining commenced, and then, after signing a paper on behalf of Captain Ringgold, Wiki led a string of four ponies back, to find the schooner a half-mile farther upstream, well out of the shoals and bobbing serenely at her anchors. Obviously, Harden had made good his boast that he could pilot her to safety.

  However, another crisis had arisen. To Wiki’s consternation, when he got to the landing place on the riverbank, he found the six men of the boat’s crew holding a posse of gauchos at bay with pistols and rifles, while Ringgold and three companions watched from the safety of the boat.

  “They’re friends,” Wiki hastily said.

  The gauchos were, in fact, Manuel Bernantio and his men. They sat at ease in their great sheep-fleece saddles, not even deigning to notice the seamen, who looked scared to death despite their armament. Bernantio was smoking, while others scraped at tobacco plugs with the enormous cut-down swords they used as knives, the little squares of paper they used for making their cigars gripped between their bare toes.

  “Friends? They look even more rascally than you do, Wiki,” Ringgold declared, stepping from boat to shore
. “What the devil do they want?”

  Wiki asked Bernantio, tactfully rephrasing what Ringgold had said. Then he turned back and said, “They say you need an armed escort to El Carmen, the countryside being in a ferment, still. For a sum, they are willing to provide it.”

  “H’m!” said Ringgold, thinking this over. “How much?”

  Wiki told him, noticing at the same time that Bernantio watched him with the fond expression of a man contemplating a continued source of wealth.

  “Do any of them speak English?”

  Wiki shook his head.

  “Then you will have to come to translate.”

  And to report to the governor, Wiki silently added, and see if Stackpole had managed to track down the clerk and Hallett in the meantime. He was surprised, though, that Horatio Hale, the philologist—who was supposed to be expert in the science of languages—was not expected to interpret.

  As it happened, when the three other men stepped out of the boat, he was not at all sure which of the two younger ones was Mr. Hale, because both were wearing lieutenant’s undress uniform of dark blue trousers and claw-hammer coat, and a round hat with a beak. One, according to what Ringgold had said, was Lieutenant Perry, while the other was the twenty-one-year-old philologist. But which was Perry, and which was Hale? And why was a scientific wearing lieutenant’s dress?

  The party soon became strung out, with the gauchos in the lead, and Ringgold and the officers following in pairs, leaving Wiki to bring up the rear. An hour later, when one of the two young gentlemen fell back to engage him in conversation, Wiki nodded without speaking, being none the wiser.

  “You are a New Zealand native,” this fellow stated without preamble.

  “I am,” said Wiki, neglecting to mention that he was also half American. It was growing hot, so he paused to draw off his poncho, fold it, and lay it over the front of his saddle.

  “And your name is Wiki,” the other went on. Beneath his peaked hat he had short, brown hair drawn back from a pale, high forehead, and his expression was studious and earnest.

  Wiki admitted that, too.

  “Tell me, what does the word Wiki mean?”

  Wiki blinked in surprise, then said, “In the Hawaiian language it means swift.”

  “And very appropriate, I am sure,” commented the other, casting an envious sideways glance at Wiki’s athletic form. “But what does Wiki mean in your own dialect?”

  “You mean in te reo Maori?”

  “If that is what you call your form of Polynesian, yes.”

  “It means nothing at all.”

  “Nothing? As in null?”

  “It has no meaning,” Wiki repeated. “It’s just a name—like yours, no doubt.”

  “Horatio?”

  So this was Mr. Hale, Wiki realized. He nodded.

  “And the word Maori that you used just now—I think I have heard it before, though I have always heard your people referred to as ‘New Zealanders.’ Is Maori what you call yourself when people ask you about your race?”

  “I call myself Ngapuhi—the name of my iwi, my tribe.”

  Mr. Hale opened his eyes wide. “Is it usual with your people to identify themselves by the name of the tribe?”

  Again, Wiki nodded.

  “So the word you used, Maori—what does it mean?”

  “It means normal.”

  The philologist seemed quite taken aback, and said cautiously, “So, your word for white men like me—pakeha—does it mean abnormal?”

  Wiki quenched a grin. “No, it means foreign—and you don’t have to be white to be pakeha.”

  Horatio Hale fell silent awhile, mulling over this last revelation. Then he rallied, saying, “Did you know that small children can speak the sounds of all known languages, and that they employ these when they make up their own words?”

  “No, I did not,” Wiki confessed.

  “Well, that is how languages were originally formed, the Polynesian language being no different from the rest.”

  “There are several Polynesian languages,” Wiki corrected. “Samoan, for instance, is quite a lot different from te reo Maori.” He remembered the first time he had heard Samoan spoken, and how intrigued he had been by its energy, the odd clicks, and sharp consonants. Compared to the sealike resonance of te reo Maori, it had sounded to him like the birds in the trees. Then he had recognized familiar words and concepts, and so he had learned Samoan, which he now talked like a native. In fact, he spoke in that language much more often than he did in Maori, on voyage, because two of his closest friends on the Swallow, Tana and Sua, were Samoan.

  “But alas, you are wrong,” the other informed him. “Being an illiterate islander, it’s probably very hard for you to realize that the languages of the Pacific are all forms of the same tongue.”

  Wiki said coldly, “I am not illiterate.”

  Mr. Hale blinked. “You can read?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Taught by the missionaries, no doubt.”

  As it happened, Wiki had originally learned to enjoy books because a drunken Yankee beachcomber—a man who, once upon a time, had been a respectable Edgartown captain—had taught him how to read and write. However, he kept silent.

  “Valuable men, the missionaries,” Mr. Hale declared. “In addition to their traditional tasks, many of those great laborers in the foreign field have written down lengthy vocabularies of the people with whom they work, and a detailed study of these lexicons leaves no doubt whatsoever that the tribes belong to a single nation, and have a common language that varies only as dialects differ.”

  Remembering how difficult it had been to make himself understood at some of the island landfalls he had made in the past, Wiki kept silent.

  “For illustration, give me the various Polynesian words for canoe.”

  Wiki shrugged. “In Samoa and Tahiti, the word for canoe is va’a, in Tonga and Rarotonga, vaka, in Maui and Oahu, wa’a, and in te reo Maori, waka.”

  “Can’t you see how the great similarity of the words proves my point?” exclaimed Mr. Hale, delighted with himself that he had chosen such an apt example. “In each great area of the earth—or, in the case of the Pacific Ocean, the sea—there was a single original language, which evolved as people moved from one place to another. It is by means of tracing these changes that we can chart the past migrations.”

  “Is this why you have come on the expedition?” Wiki queried. “To make lists of words?”

  “Precisely! My mission is to collect a sample vocabulary of each language, and compare the resultant lexicons to see how the tongues have evolved as the tribes moved farther apart, then to publish my findings in a volume of ethnology.”

  “I see,” said Wiki, thinking that he now understood why he, and not Horatio Hale, was the expedition translator. Right from early childhood, he had derived immense pleasure from his gift for absorbing new languages whole passages at a time, complete with their depth and emotion. Didn’t Mr. Hale understand that words lost most of their meaning when ripped singly from their context? Apparently not.

  Then the philologist pronounced, “I am convinced that once I have collated my information, I will be able to prove beyond academic doubt that the Polynesian tribes originated in Malaya, and that islands like New Zealand were populated as these people sailed from one island group to another, moving from the west to the east and spreading out as they went.”

  Involuntarily, Wiki exclaimed, “That’s just not so!”

  Mr. Hale looked surprised. “Why are you so angry?”

  Wiki was silent. Normally, he was able to ignore pakeha misconceptions, but Hale had blundered onto sacred ground. Every New Zealander knew beyond doubt that the ancestors had come from a fabled island that lay far to the east—that they were the descendants of the greatest seamen the world had ever known, who had navigated their way across an immense tract of unknown waters, from the east to the west. The tribal knowledge that their forefathers had sailed to New Zealand from the direc
tion of the rising sun had great spiritual significance—houses were built with their doorways facing east, and people sang karakia prayers to greet the dawn.

  However, Mr. Hale simply waited, so finally Wiki pointed out, “The prevailing winds blow from the east.”

  “Not at all times of the year,” the other corrected. “You must have heard of islanders who were blown great distances by unexpected storms—and this is most probably how the migrations took place. And, if not by an accident of nature,” Mr. Hale amended, noticing Wiki’s involuntary gesture of rejection, “then the great outward movement was achieved by waiting for the seasonal reversal of winds, which would have carried the canoes east. Thus, the Fijis were colonized first, then Samoa, then Tahiti, and finally the Marquesas Islands. The missionaries have already gone a long way to prove this with their observation that in the west the Polynesian tribes have a simple mythology and spiritual worship, while in the east this has been debased to a cruel idolatry.”

  Wiki retreated into cold silence again. After waiting another moment Mr. Hale decided that he’d won the argument, because he changed the subject, saying, “It surprises me greatly that you do not have a tattooed face. Why do you not?”

  “I was carried to America when I was just twelve years old.”

  “That makes a difference?”

  “Twelve isn’t old enough to have a moko.”

  “Moko? Is that your word for tattoo?”

  “Aye.”

  “That’s strange! Why do New Zealand Maori use that word for tattoo when the rest of Polynesia has a different word?”

  “I don’t know,” said Wiki, rather pleased that he had produced something, even if inadvertently, that rattled Mr. Hale’s superiority. However, he had to admit that it was indeed odd. The generally accepted word for tattoo was the Tahitian one, tatau. Only in New Zealand had he heard it called moko.

  Finally, he said, “Moko is also our word for lizard. Maybe the curves of the lizard inspired the curved lines of the moko.”

  “That’s clever!” said Mr. Hale. Wiki had the impression that if he’d had a notebook, it would have been written down. “Do you ever think you will get tattooed?”