Shark Island

by Joan Druett

  “I wonder why Wiki Coffin don’t sail with his father, then?”

  “He sailed on whaleships, so I hear—out of choice, because it’s the best apprenticeship a cove can have. Now, he’s a first-rate seaman, they tell me,” Keith said, and mused that he might even find Mr. Coffin a fount of seafaring lore. “I could learn a lot from him!” he exclaimed bracingly. “Fascinating facts of human nature can be learned even from a savage—and especially from a half-savage. I shall apply myself to it—I shall cultivate his company!”

  “They also say his folks eat people,” Dicken ghoulishly warned.

  Three

  On detailed inspection, the big cutter of the Peacock turned out to be just six inches under thirty feet in length, eight feet wide, and with a three-foot draft; she was of lap strake construction, with the ends of the nails that held her light planks together clinched over. Shallow runners—bilge-keels—were fixed on the outside to keep the boat upright if hauled out onto the beach, and also serve as grab-rails for anyone swimming alongside. Because they would also prevent the boat from rolling heavily or making too much leeway, Forsythe knew he would be able to sail fast close-hauled, something suited to his dashing style. Damn it, he thought, he was in love with the dashing little craft before he’d even tried her out on the water.

  However, Forsythe was far too shrewd to betray this. Instead, with Midshipman Kingman, he went over the boat and her accoutrements with nitpicking care. Sails, masts, and rigging were inspected and either approved or condemned: the first officer of the Peacock was so pleased that neither Forsythe nor Kingman was going to be a fixture on the sloop of war (a nasty thought that had occurred to him as he had watched the big Virginian and his crony arrive) that he sent for new canvas and the sail maker without the slightest demur. Then Forsythe raided the Peacock’s armory, requisitioning a bristling array of dirks, cutlasses, Bowie knives, and Hall breech-loading rifles, plus an assortment of the famous Elgin combination cutlass-pistols that had been designed expressly for the expedition.

  By the time the cutter was ready to be lowered into the water, the six cutter’s men who had been assigned to him had arrived, sea bags over their shoulders and noncommittal expressions on their faces. Casting an equally critical stare over them, Forsythe was just as gratified. All were able seamen, and looked strong, sturdy, and nimble. Too, they were men in their prime—like all the seamen on the exploratory expedition, they were on the young side of forty.

  Having taken their names and assigned them to their places, Forsythe gave the cutter a thorough workout to assess her sailing qualities. For an hour or more he dashed back and forth through the fleet, and the sun was lowering to the horizon when he finally turned for the Swallow.

  On board the brig, Wiki watched the smart cutter tack toward them. He was with the two other Polynesians of the crew—“Kanakas,” as the American seamen called them—and at his ease on the foredeck. Named Sua and Tana, his companions were both Samoan; both were handsome, muscular men, Sua being even more massive in build than Tana.

  Because it was the dogwatch and they were off duty, they were sitting cross-legged on the foredeck, and because Forsythe wasn’t on board yet they had their shirts off and were chatting in the Samoan language. Sua, the big one, had his trousers rolled up his tree-trunk–like legs, revealing a great deal of the intricate blue tracery of his pe’a—the dense tattoo which covered his thighs and extended up to his waist. Gained with physical pain and the payment of much treasure, it was a testament to his manly courage, and also to his sense of community with his home village.

  He was also watching Forsythe’s cutter. He said, “We sail at dawn?”

  “Aye,” said Wiki.

  “Where are we going, do you know?”

  It wasn’t a secret, as far as Wiki knew, so he said readily, “Shark Island.”

  “Ah.” Sua thought a moment and then said wisely, “With a name like that it must be a place of many legends.”

  “Perhaps.” Wiki shrugged. “They say the island is uninhabited, though.”

  “Ah.” He thought again. “Do you have shark legends in New Zealand?”

  Wiki considered. “Only of taniwha.”

  Taniwha were fabulous monsters usually found in deep water, unseen and yet so powerful that captains of great waka taua—canoes of war—would steer up inconvenient creeks to avoid them, and warriors walking the trails through the forest would take a longer path to make sure that they did not have to cross a ford where a taniwha was reputed to lurk. There were fables of great chiefs who kept taniwha as pets, but other great chiefs killed them, if they could, and when their bellies were cut open whole waka were found inside, along with bodies of many people and their ornaments.

  “What do they look like?”

  “Dragons,” Wiki said in English, for they were scaly monsters, some reputed to be winged. Then he added in Samoan, “Some real sea creatures are also called taniwha—but they have to be big.”

  “Te taniwha nui o te moana?”

  “Aye,” said Wiki. He glanced sideways at Sua, intrigued that he was familiar with the New Zealand language—te reo Maori. Of all the Polynesian languages, Samoan and te reo were two of the farthest apart, and it was news to him that he could have been comfortably chatting in his own tongue with Sua. He knew surprisingly little about the big Samoan, he realized then. Back when he had started to live in the forecastle of the brig Sua had been the first to approach him, but there had only been the briefest of formal introductions before they had settled to a wrestling match, which was the usual way for Polynesian men to get acquainted on shipboard. Sua had won easily, Wiki remembered; it had been like trying to wrestle with a battering ram. He also knew that Sua’s “sailor name”—the one his first American captain had given him—was “Jackie Polo,” which implied that he had been first shipped in his native island of Upolu. Too, Sua had helped save his life a couple of times, but that was about it.

  He said, “We call the great white pointer mango taniwha. Other kinds of sharks have other names—kuwai, for instance.” Then he added curiously, “How did you learn te reo Maori?”

  Sua grinned. “The captain of my first American ship was a bastard, so I jumped ship in Rotuma, headed into the bush, and lived there for a couple of months with a bunch of other deserters. The lot of them were bloody New Zealanders, who taught me a lot of bad habits.”

  This was considered hilarious. Tana and Sua giggled in the infectious manner of Pacific Islanders, and Wiki laughed immoderately, too. Then they abruptly sobered as a consciously jocular voice said from right above, “Do I hear you talk of dragons?”

  They froze, wondering how long Midshipman Keith had been listening. The lad stood over them, looking brave but bashful, a tall, skinny young man with a strong resemblance to a heron that was accentuated by his habit of holding his head on one side in inquiring fashion, and the fact that he had one arm in a sling. Sua and Tana scrambled to their feet, while Wiki followed more slowly.

  Midshipman Keith looked embarrassed, waved his free arm, and said, “Please—as you were,” but they remained standing, the two Samoans exchanging wary glances. If either of them had turned his bare back, Keith would have seen the thin, curling scars of a vicious flogging Forsythe had ordered after he had overheard Sua and Tana speaking in Samoan. They had been shouting at a time when the brig was in great danger, but Forsythe had reckoned they could have been talking mutiny, and because of that it was a punishable offense.

  “Sit down, sit down,” Midshipman Keith urged when they kept silent, and led the way by sitting down himself, folding up his lanky form like a cricket. They joined him, though very reluctantly, Sua stealthily pulling down his trouser legs as he did so. Wiki wanted to advise Keith that this was not a good idea, but didn’t know how to do it. When he glanced out over the water the cutter was very close; in a couple of minutes Forsythe and Kingman would be back on board.

  Midshipman Keith said to Wiki, “Do you have myths of dragons in your land?”
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  Wiki didn’t want to invoke spirits as powerful as taniwha by idly chatting about them to a pakeha, so prevaricated by saying, “We were talking about sharks.”

  “Sharks!” The boy had his head even farther on one side, his expression so alert and knowing that Wiki thought he might be bright enough to figure that they had been gossiping about Shark Island. Sharing a stateroom with this young man could be a challenging experience, he mused, and wondered briefly what Keith himself thought of it. It was obvious that he enjoyed listening to yarns. Right now, he was waiting so impatiently he didn’t notice Tana and Sua surreptitiously pulling on their shirts.

  “You have many sharks in New Zealand?” he demanded when Wiki’s silence dragged on. “Are they different from ours?”

  Wiki said, “There’s a certain time of the year in the Bay of Islands when the blossoms of the pohutukawa trees fall so thickly that they turn the water red, and the sharks come in great swarms—perhaps because they are fooled by the color into thinking that there’s blood in the water. It’s a time of abundance for my people—by the time the season is over there’s enough preserved meat to keep the pataka stocked all the way up to winter and beyond.”

  “Pataka? What does that mean?”

  Wiki paused, not just because he heard the cutter touch the side of the Swallow and Forsythe hollering for a boat fall, but because there was no easy translation. Pataka were low houses built on stilts to protect them from thieves and vermin, often beautifully carved and decorated. According to the size of the village, they could be either small or huge. Inside were stocks of tubers, and gourds bulging with the meat of birds and rats preserved in their own fat; it was a store representing so much community effort that it was considered a treasure.

  In the end he said, “Storehouses,” because he couldn’t think of a better word—and Forsythe clambered up to deck, followed by Kingman’s attenuated, stick-insect–like form. The burly southerner tipped back his broad hat, and then exclaimed so loudly that the whole brig heard him, “For God’s sake, Midshipman, what the bloody hell do you think you are doing?”

  Wiki was aware of Sua and Tana beating a swift retreat to the forecastle. Forsythe wasn’t even looking at them, though; instead, he was glaring at young Keith as he strode toward him; his red face was sour with contempt, an expression slavishly imitated by his mindless crony, Zachary Kingman, who followed close behind.

  “You reckon you’re some kind of liberal?” Forsythe demanded, making it sound like a dirty word. “Mebbe you think that all people are equal in the eyes of the Lord? Wa-al, young man, let me tell you that folks just ain’t equal in the U.S. Navy, or any other navy I can bring to mind. It jest ain’t logical, because there have to be superiors and inferiors on board ship. You don’t fraternize with lower ranks, and that includes goddamned Kanakas—understand? Right now, you’re letting the goddamned navy down, and I don’t want to see it happen again.”

  Then, with a jerk of his head, he turned and went aft, again followed by Kingman. When Wiki looked at Midshipman Keith the young man was white-faced—not with fear, Wiki thought, but with rage. He thought Keith was going to stalk away, but instead the boy said in a trembling voice, “I see that I am not alone in the first officer’s stateroom.”

  “Ah,” said Wiki, taken aback. He had moved in already, determined to claim the upper berth because if he had the bottom one he’d have a foot in his face every time Keith climbed in or out of bed. As far as he could remember the stateroom was tidy when he’d left it; in fact, there should have been very little evidence of his presence.

  “Then I wonder much with whom I share it,” said Midshipman Keith bitterly, and before Wiki could say anything he turned on his heel.

  The lad had the first watch, so it was midnight before he headed for bed. Wiki was awake, stretched out on the upper berth with a lamp in a bracket by his shoulder, reading a book by a man named Edmund Fanning. The writer was a wily old sea dog from Stonington, Connecticut, who told such wonderful tales that Wiki would have relished meeting him—and maybe he had but without knowing it, he thought, because his father, Captain William Coffin, had a lot of dealings with Stonington merchants and adventurers, and when Wiki was a lad he had taken him along there on trips for both business and pleasure. Fanning had sealed in the Falklands, and sailed south to South Georgia; he had fought pirates in the South China Sea, and frightened islanders with “Quaker” cannons made of wood; he had dealt with mandarins and been imprisoned by the Spaniards; and he had made himself a fortune out of all these adventures.

  When he heard a tap at the door Wiki was so absorbed it took him a moment to come back to his surroundings. Then the door cautiously opened, and Keith’s face appeared in the gap.

  The junior officer looked exhausted, Wiki thought—and no wonder, because Rochester had given him a second dressing-down, though in the privacy of the captain’s cabin. For Forsythe was right: Without strict divisions of rank a ship of war would never function, and so Captain Rochester—though he’d already had an icy exchange of words with the lieutenant on the undesirability of shaming fellow officers in public—had been forced to bring home the lesson.

  Keith also looked remarkably apprehensive—a surprise for Wiki, who considered that the young man should have been feeling considerably relieved to find that he was not sharing the cabin with either Forsythe or Kingman. So he said with a reassuring grin, “Come in; I won’t bite you.” And wondered why the lad’s eyes incredulously widened.

  Four

  Three days later, Wiki woke as eight bells rang at the start of the morning watch. Being a civilian, he had the luxurious option of turning over and going back to sleep, but this morning the dawn peace was rudely interrupted by the lookout’s long-drawn-out holler of, “Land Ho!” Wiki looked over the edge of his bunk, saw that Midshipman Keith had left already, and swung briskly down to the floor.

  When he arrived on deck the sun was just lifting above the misty horizon, and the brig and the cutter she towed behind her were floating alone in a luminous, peacock-colored sea. In contrast to the serenity of the setting, the brig was a cacophony of noise. Up until now they had seen blessedly little of Forsythe—during their passage the weather had been fair, and the lieutenant, with Kingman and the cutter’s crew, had spent most of the time on board the cutter, racing her alongside the Swallow, and occasionally even overtaking the smart-sailing brig—but now he was making his presence abundantly felt by hollering about the decks.

  George Rochester was keeping aloof from all the commotion, standing at his ease on the foredeck. Wiki, arriving beside his friend, said, “E hoa—my friend—what’s up?”

  “We’ve raised our landfall, and so he’s taken charge, old chap. I never knew before that Forsythe was the studious type, but he quoted Wilkes’s instructions word for word, by rote and without a tremor. We’ve sighted our goal, and so he’s commanding the mission.”

  “He surely didn’t waste time,” Wiki dryly remarked: Shark Island was only just visible from the deck, a toothlike shape on the horizon. Forsythe had obviously leapt out of his berth in a hurry, because his trousers were rumpled and his braces dangling. His voice was abruptly muffled as he hauled a frock shirt over his head, and then he started yelling again.

  “He’s calling for battle stations,” Rochester observed in disbelief. Sua, the brig’s official drummer, had just run out on deck with his drum—a length of log. This was one of the Swallow’s eccentricities, something that Forsythe, surprisingly, had not changed when he was in charge. The Samoan hammered out a primitive, blood-stirring beat to quarters, accompanied by Forsythe’s bawled orders to clear the decks for action, and Wiki and Rochester swiftly got out of the way.

  Zachary Kingman echoed Forsythe’s commands in an ear-splitting howl. Footsteps thumped in energetic response, and within an extraordinarily short space of time unnecessary gear had been stored belowdecks and everything movable lashed into place. The deck planks were wetted and sprinkled with sand. Rigging thrummed as m
en carried cases of rifles into the mast tops. Tubs of water were set about the decks for putting out flames. The boatswain busily handed out arms and measured out powder and ammunition, and soon every man had a pistol and a dirk thrust into his belt. Cutlasses were stacked into a rack on the quarterdeck, and then Lieutenant Forsythe shouted out for the brig’s two nine-pounder cannon to be readied.

  This was supervised by the gun captain, a mountain man by the name of Dave who brought passion to the job. The tight lashings that held the cannon housed up tight to the bulwarks were cast away, and by hauling on rope tackles attached to the sides and the rear of each iron monster, his team heaved the guns back for loading, and then up to the gunports in the rail for aiming. Five dumb shows, and Lieutenant Forsythe was satisfied—the brig Swallow, without a doubt, was ready to defend herself to the very last man. When George inquired gently whether the crew were to be allowed their breakfast, Forsythe nodded complacently, with the air of a man with a job well done.

  By this time Shark Island was in plain sight five miles ahead, its central feature a triangular pinnacle that reared up into the vividly blue sky and was streaked with growth which was intensely emerald even at a distance. Contemplating this while he chewed the last of his bread, Forsythe announced that he would now take the cutter to the island to spy out the lay of the land. Wiki, somewhat to his surprise, was not to be one of the party—instead, he was instructed to take the helm of the Swallow and bring the brig to a standstill a mile from the land, where he would await the return of the cutter. A council of war would follow, Forsythe informed him, during which the details of the mission would be beaten out. Then, with no more ado, he, Kingman, and the cutter’s crew took their stations in the boat, and they were off.