Artemis k-2

by Julian Stockwin

  ‘Hang him, the scurvy rogue? Do you think I should?’ It was a nice problem: without question he had been instructed in the deed, so who was the more guilty? ‘Well, sir, I—’

  ‘He has failed. He did not succeed in his purpose. We leave him to return and explain himself — punishment enough?’

  ‘But, sir, he will implicate the savage.’

  ‘Not if it is explained to him that in such an event we will have no other recourse than subsequently to express our deepest gratitude to his superiors for his safe pilotage through the Strait, for the merest pittance in gold.’

  The next day most of the ship’s company of Artemis padded down the jungle path, Captain Powlett and the first lieutenant leading with Goryo and Pinto, the rest following respectfully behind, all in their best shore-going rig. Stirk shouldered a sea-chest, and was flanked by Kydd and Crow, who also carried small bundles.

  There would be no danger from the indolent Spaniards on this holy day and so far from the provincial centres; Powlett could rest easy with his men ashore for a few hours — a cannon fired from the ship would have them back in minutes.

  As they walked the familiar sounds of the sea fell behind, replaced by the curious cries of geckoes, the swooping mellow call of the oriole, the screech of parrots. Sudden rustles in the undergrowth were perhaps wild pigs or other, unknown, species.

  They halted at the edge of the village and were met by the wizened cabeza. His formal speech was rendered in Spanish by Goryo and in turn to English by Pinto. The words may have suffered on their journey but the sentiments were plain. Powlett bowed and they moved on into the village. The inhabitants stood in awe, grouped in the open clearing before the nipa palm thatched huts. To one side a glowing pit was tended by the old men of the village, whose job it was to slowly turn the lechon — an enormous spitted roast pig.

  Gracefully shown to one side, the Captain sat with the cabeza at the only table with a covering, Goryo and Pinto standing behind. The rest of the men sat cross-legged on the bare earth, keenly aware of the tables on the opposite side of the clearing waiting to be loaded with food.

  Stirk placed the sea-chest strategically behind Powlett. It contained unused remnants of finery left over from Lord Elmhurst’s entourage. At the right time it would be brought forth, but not now.

  Chivvied by one of the adults a file of children approached, and shyly presented to each man a little package wrapped in a charred banana leaf. Unsure, the men looked to their Captain. Powlett gingerly unwrapped the parcel. Inside was a discoloured rice cake. ‘Bibtngka^ said Goryo, with satisfaction.

  Kydd did likewise, and bit into it. The taste was a chaotic mix of flavours that made him gag. Powlett recovered his composure first and politely enquired of the cabeza. It transpired they were eating gelatinous rice with fermented coconut milk and salted eggs.

  Pressed into line, the children sang. It was a remarkably unselfconscious performance, full, melodious and clear but no tune that Kydd could recognise. Renzi sat next to him, delicately picking at his bibingka. He didn’t respond to Kydd’s comment, wearing a faraway look that discouraged talk.

  A hush descended. Powlett got to his feet. ‘Bo’sun’s mate,’ he growled, ‘pipe “hands to carols”.’ Hesitating only for an instant, the man’s silver whistle whipped up and the call pealed out, harsh and unnatural in the jungle clearing. ‘Haaaands to carols!’ he roared.

  The men stood up and shuffled their feet. ‘“Away In A Manger”,’ said Powlett. “Awaaaay In A Manger”,’ bellowed the boatswain’s mate.

  Doud’s voice sounded out first, pure and clear. A bass picked up and others followed, and soon the ship’s company was singing in unison. Kydd stole a glance at Haynes. The hard petty officer was singing, his voice low and heartfelt. He wouldn’t meet Kydd’s eye, and Kydd felt his own eyes pricking at the buried memories being brought to remembrance.

  The children watched wide-eyed, wondering at the volume of sound the seamen produced, but when two or three more carols had been sung, they stepped forward and drew the men over to the tables where the feast had been laid.

  No matter that the comestibles were as different from their normal fare as the exotic jungle chaos from the warlike neatness of a frigate. Language difficulties happily drew a veil over the true identities of the delicious fruit-bat broth, the ant-egg caviar and the dogmeat in nipa and garlic. The men ate heartily.

  The children squealed in joy as they were carried on the shoulders of a fierce sailor, then thrown in the air and caught by those who in another world could reach effortlessly in darkness for invisible mizzen shrouds then swarm aloft. A red-faced Doody had them screaming in delight as he became a village pig and snorted and oinked at them from all fours. Others were chased shrieking about the compound by a burly boatswain’s mate and a tough gun captain, but the act that stole the show and had Powlett’s eyebrows raising was Bunce and Weems doing an excellent imitation of an indignant sergeant drilling a private soldier up and down, carrying a ‘musket’ of bamboo.

  The afternoon raced by; the drink on offer was lambunog, specially fermented for the occasion the previous evening from palm-tree sap. This was served in half coconut shells, but its pale pink viscid appearance and stomach-turning strength gave pause to even the stoutest friend of the bottle.

  Evening approached. The probable nearby presence of a volcano added violence to the red of the promising sunset, and Captain Powlett reluctantly got to his feet. ‘Pipe all the hands,’ he ordered. The shriek of the boatswain’s calls pierced the din. With a bow, Powlett presented the contents of the sea-chest and bundles, and in the enthralled stillness the sailors left quietly.

  Artemis put to sea immediately, subdued and replete with last-minute mangoes and bananas. Men looked astern as the ship heaved to the long Pacific swells, privately contrasting the spreading gaudy sunset behind them with the anonymous dark blue vastness ahead.

  As days unbroken by any events turned into endless weeks of sameness, the sheer scale of the seas crept into the meanest soul. The winds were constant from the north-east to the point of boredom — an onrushing stream of ocean air that drove them on, still on the same larboard tack, the motion always an easy heave and fall, repeating the same rhythm, surging over the great billows in a gentle but insistent advance. Onward, ever onward, they angled south-eastward towards their vital intercept with the diametric meridian, the furthest they could possibly be from the land that gave them birth, and indeed further from any demesne that could be termed civilised.

  Renzi watched Kydd staring out over the great wilderness of white-dashed azure and the immensity of the deep blue bowl of sky overhead.

  ‘Dark, heaving boundless, endless, and sublime, The image of Eternity …’

  he intoned softly, watching for reaction.

  Kydd picked up his faded blue striped shirt, his favourite one, and resumed his stitching. The cotton had softened under the ceaseless exposure to sun and sea spray and now caressed the skin gently, but it would not take too many more patches. ‘Aye, but Prewse had me at th’ charts again last forenoon. You’d not be enjoyin’ yourself quite s’ much were I t’ tell you that he brought down the workin’ chart fr’m the quarterdeck, and - no flam - he quick sketches in that little island we saw earlier.’

  ‘So?’

  Kydd sighed. ‘Nicholas, we have our sea-chart we navigate from, an’ most of it is white, nothin’ there. An’ the Master is fillin’ in the details as we go along. Does this give you y’r assurance they know where we are?’

  Renzi hid a grin. ‘Dear fellow, pray bring to remembrance the fact that we bear two natural philosophers - eminent gentlemen I am in no doubt — whose study is the earth’s form. We are embarked in the foremost man-o’-war of the age, and a captain who is an ornament to his profession. What else would you have?’

  Kydd’s serious expression did not ease. He looked away over the vast waste of tumbling waters and replied, ‘An’ I’ll bring jou to remembrance of what we say at church — “G
od save us and keep us — the sea is so big and our ship is so small.’”

  Renzi kept silent and let Kydd resume work moodily with his needle. He gazed up. The mastheads gyrated against the sky in wide irregular circles, describing never an identical path but always a rough circle. The bowsprit rose and fell each side of the far horizon; the hull thrust and pulled at the body in its continual sinuous forward movement. Everything was in motion, all different, all the same.

  ‘Grog’s up soon — I’m going below,’ he said, offhandedly. Kydd nodded but did not look up.

  The gloom and odour of the berth deck bore on Renzi’s spirit. The wearisome constancy of their lives was not congenial to his nature. He had found it necessary to ration his reading, which made the books infinitely the more precious. He had taken up Goethe’s Prometheus, Cecilia’s parting gift to him, and again found the restless subjectivity not to his liking - but on occasions he had seen her face emerge, ghost-like, from the pages, troubled, concerned. He persevered with the volume.

  ‘Er, yer pardon, Mr Renzi.’ It was the petty officer’s mess-boy, Will, caught off-guard in his scrubbing of the mess table by Renzi’s early return.

  ‘No matter,’ said Renzi, rummaging in his sea-chest for the Rousseau. He would spark an interest in his friend for the radical precepts of the philosopher, the supremacy of Nature as the measure of all things, which would lead him to an acceptance of the Noble Savage as the superior form of man. He brightened at the thought of how he would present these jewels of intellect to Kydd one night watch in the comfort of the lee of the weather bulwark. He found the Discours surles sciences et les arts and stuffed it into his ready-use ditty bag for later.

  ‘Get yer arse outa here, skinker.’ Haynes’s grating voice preceded his wiry figure as he flung aside the canvas screen. Before the noon grog issue was not a good time to be about where Haynes was concerned.

  Mullion arrived and sat opposite. His blue-black hair was compressed by the red bandanna he still wore after the hour’s gun practice the larbowlines had just finished. He sat sullenly but quiet.

  Crow entered and immediately undid the catches of their neat side locker, and passed down glasses. No one spoke until Kydd arrived with the pannikin of rum, which he gave to Crow. The copper measure filled and filled again as the tots were prepared under the gaze of the whole mess — half a pint of best West Indian rum to each petty officer, dark and rich.

  The last of the rum did not fill the measure. Crow paused, and looked up. In the silence Haynes’s voice held whispered menace. ‘Kydd - he’s bin bleedin’ the monkey!’

  It was nonsense, of course. But Kydd knew he would have to confront the challenge, face Haynes or back down. He didn’t hesitate. His open face broke into a broad smile.

  Almost immediately Mullion took it up and snorted in mock derision. ‘Kydd? He’s green enough, he’d let ‘em gull ‘im on the measures. I’ll ‘ave that.’

  Crow’s eyes flicked over to Haynes, but he passed the glasses round.

  The rum was grateful to the stomach, even if it was suffused by the taste of half an ounce per man of lemon juice, insisted upon by Powlett as the most reliable method of forcing the consumption of the anti-scorbutic. The mood lightened.

  ‘Fair makes me qualmish, seein’ that devil-fish trailin’ in our wake all day,’ Mullion rumbled. The shark had been following them for days, seldom more than thirty yards astern, its great pale bulk shimmering a few feet below the waves.

  Renzi spoke for the first time. ‘It’s interested in our gash only,’ he said, referring to the mush of bones and organic refuse that was pitched overside after every meal.

  ‘No, it ain’t,’ Haynes spat. ‘It’s waitin’ - there’s some soul aboard it’s waitin’ for, it knows who that is, an’ it’s a-waitin’ fer the time that’s written fer ‘im.’

  ‘So what d’ye want to do about it? Shark’s not easy ter kill,’ Crow responded mildly.

  ‘We rigs a tackle aft, streams a line an’ hook with a lump o’ pork, and when it strikes, all the watch on deck tails on an’ heaves it aboard, holus bolus.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘An then we kills it.’

  Mullion grunted. ‘Seen one caught that way - in Amphion frigate in Antigua. We was at anchor, an’ had one o’ them big white monsters fair ‘n’ square b’ the throat. Couldn’t land it on deck till we had a purchase around its tail, an’ a full luff tackle on that — what a mauler!

  ‘Near an hour it took, mates, afore we had it on the foredeck, an’ that’s but half the story. Threshin’ around right mad it was, near a ton o’ weight smashin’ an’ snappin’ with its great mouth open — yer could see right inside, teeth an’ all.’ He paused in open admiration. ‘Then we has ter settle it. At it like demons we was, a-hittin’ and a-slicin’ -blood and gizzards all over the decks, twenty on us, an’ still it weren’t finished. OF Davey, he slips in the blood ‘n’ in a flash them teeth has a slice outa his hide.’

  Mullion swayed back in his seat as if backing away from the sight. Taking another pull of his rum he grimaced. ‘So help me, Joe, when we cut ‘im open, ‘is heart still beats right there in me hand - an’ his tail still twistin’ even tho’ it’s cut right orf his body!’

  ‘What did yer find in the stomach, Jeb?’ Crow wanted to know.

  The table perked up in interest. Human skulls and gold watches impervious to stomach acids were not unknown. ‘Last night’s supper,’ was the prompt reply, bringing reluctant grins all round.

  In a reflective quiet the mess finished their rum. Haynes raised his head and looked squarely at Kydd, who gazed back forthrightly. ‘So where are we at now, mate?’ he asked, as if in atonement for his manner before.

  Kydd noted with satisfaction the assumption that he was in on the officer-like secret of their position, but in truth he had no idea — latitude and longitude were not yet in his experience, which was mainly in the fair copying of Prewse’s working notes.

  ‘We’re headed f’r the di’metric meridian,’ he said, hoping that he had heard it right, ‘an’ we’re still a few days off.’

  ‘Di’metick who?’ said Haynes, in disgust. ‘Never heard any who’s bin there.’

  ‘The exact other side of the world,’ broke in Renzi smoothly. ‘When we get there and keep going, we’re on our way back home.’

  The table stared at him, the implications for their isolation clear. ‘Been three thousan’ miles on the same course since Christmas,’ a shadow passed across every face, ‘an’ how far before our hook’s down again?’ Mullion said, in a low voice.

  Renzi looked at the man steadily. ‘From the meridian to the nearest point of mainland to the east is about a hundred and ten degrees, say twice as far again — but that’s Cape Horn. We won’t trouble to linger there, so after that we’ll need to cross both the whole width and length of the Atlantic Ocean before our anchor touches ground again.’ They looked at each other in silence, the swinging lanthorn in the gloom plucking shadows from their faces. Bearing her crew on into the unknown, Artemis’s decks rose and fell, her movements as regular and unthinking as the rise and fall of a woman’s breast.

  Crow scratched his ear. ‘There is somethin’ by way of -compensations, mate.’ His companions looked up.

  ‘We’re in Fiddler’s Green fer women. These islands, yer c’n buy a woman fer a nail or a bit o’ iron, they’re hot even fer a pretty bit o’ rag. All over yer like a rash, they’ll be, have ter beat ‘em off with a stick —’

  Kydd saw Renzi’s face tighten.

  ‘- an’ they goes at it like good ‘uns, no hangin’ back!’

  Renzi suddenly stood; his face was pale and set. They stared at him, but he left abruptly.

  ‘What ‘n’ hell’s bit ‘im?’ Mullion said.

  Kydd could not believe that Renzi’s usual near inhuman control had slipped on a matter of common coarseness. He got to his feet hastily and went after his friend. He found him standing at the ship’s side, gripping a shroud and staring intensely out at the infinity of blue se
a. ‘There are times when it is — save your presence, Tom — an insupportable burden to be closeted with such … savages, barbarians.’

  ‘It was lewd talk, is all.’

  ‘Not that! Never that! I have heard worse in the best company. No, what freezes my blood is that they believe themselves the civilised, enlightened society, and the savage your unredeemable barbarian. Nothing could be more offensive to me! Tonight we will talk of the Noble Savage of Rousseau, the irreconcilable dichotomy between nature and the artificial, perfectibility and man in a state of nature. My friend, your eyes will be opened. You will understand the sources of unhappiness and discontent in our ways, but as well you will come to know the potential human felicity in natural man.’

  Kydd saw that Renzi had been deeply moved and determined to pursue the reason further.

  ‘Sir, I give you joy. We are at the furthest extremity of the world. We have intersected the meridian you so desire, and yet within span of your due date.’ Powlett’s words were dry and sarcastic, but they did not affect the satisfaction in Hobbes’s face.

  ‘My felicitations on your consummate maritime skills, Captain,’ Hobbes rejoined, in like tones. ‘And now we have but to select a suitable point of land - an island - somewhere along this meridian to erect our observation platforms.’

  Powlett glanced stonily at Prewse.

  ‘Sir, the islands are here far separated, days sailing one from the other,’ Prewse said doubtfully.

  ‘The nearest one, then. Do I have to make my meaning plainer?’ Hobbes snapped.

  ‘We may raise Nukumea before evening,’ Prewse replied, nettled.

  In deference to her condition, her increasingly sun-bleached sails and stretched rigging, Artemis did not tack about to her new northerly course, but took the longer, safer route of wearing ship. They would track up the meridian until they found a suitable location for the observations. Within hours a tiny dark-green smudge hoisted itself above the horizon. It was an unremarkable-looking island, a little lopsided with a peak to one side and the rest relatively flat. Nearer to, they saw that the flat part was in fact a palm-encircled inner lagoon, and on the flanks of the peak was a plateau of higher ground. Pacific surf beat continuously on the bright sandy beach in a dull roar that sounded above the shipboard noises.