Henderson's Spear

by Ronald Wright

  “Let’s down helm and discover it then!”

  “That’s the spirit! Where’s your brother?”

  “Catching albatrosses, sir.”

  And so he was, on the poop with the Chief Engineer, a long line astern and some barbed bacon for the great hook-billed birds that scythed along the combers and circled the ship for hours without a flap; such felicitous flyers that many seamen swear the albatross sleeps on the wind.

  It saddened me to see them killed for nothing more than idle sport and the long hollow wing-bones from which young bluejackets make pipestems. All the albatross-catchers were youths, mocking the superstition of their elders. The latter shook their heads, saying the bird was a bringer of kind winds, and no good ever came of killing her.

  “Look, sir!” Eddy called, measuring the span of the biggest he’d snared. “A beauty, what? Nine feet from tip to tip!” Torn between joy to see him so animated, and sorrow at its cause, I replied:

  “But no sweet bird did follow,

  Nor any day for food or play

  Came to the mariners’ hollo!

  “And I had done a hellish thing,

  And it would work ‘em woe:

  For all averred, I had killed the bird

  That made the breeze to blow.”

  “I say, sir!” said Eddy with a frown. “I say, why care a fig for the wind when we’ve got steam?” The Chief Engineer nodded ingratiatingly.

  “It never pays to tempt the Fates at sea, Midshipman. Steam engines have been known to break down. Is that not so, Chief?”

  “Not these! Never. Your Rennies are built like the Rock of Gibraltar.”

  Well, the engines did not break. But the fair wind turned foul within hours of the murder of the bird that made the breeze to blow.

  It came up stronger and colder, a steady blast off the unknown continent of ice. For a day Bacchante ran carefree before it with her canvas tight, 220 miles, her best day’s run under sail. Then the wind rose to Force 10, and more in the squalls. The ship rolled heavily, thick seas sweeping her deck like a tidal bore. A wave filled the port cutter and washed it away. Another took the starboard cutter and hurled it against the mizzen rigging. A mainsail split, and every foot of canvas had to be struck, except a close-reefed jib for steering way.

  By dusk we had lost sight of the Squadron.

  I remember that night as magnificent and terrible. A full moon raced high above, throwing a wan intermittent light on frothing waters, through clouds like the roiling smoke of some industrial fire. I had never seen waves of such amplitude: fifty or sixty feet from crest to trough. Dwarfed by these mountains, Bacchante seemed a mere leaf, now sunk in a rapid with only her masts to be seen, now raised on a peak and leaping like a trout from the seas.

  The noise was deafening, a venomous hiss above the moan of rigging and the Gatling clap of failing canvas. The last jib tore free and flew into the night. Then came the moment of truth for our untried ship. Every man on board held his breath, waiting for Bacchante to reveal her natural tendency.

  A dozen hands were on the wheel but their efforts made no difference. Slowly and helplessly she broached-to, offering her side to the seas. The Princes, sheltering in their cabin under the poop, said later that they felt a strange grinding beneath the screw, as if we had struck a rock or shoal, though that was impossible in these deeps.

  Had she stayed as she was, the waves would have stove the deck to matchwood. Luckily she chose, very slowly, to come up and lie-to, as if she knew this was her only hope. The only hope for every soul on board—and for England’s royal line.

  Another day and night she knocked about, head near the wind, until steam could be got up and the screw lowered. But even under power she’d neither answer helm nor fall off. Her rudder had broken, twisted sideways by a colossal sea, or floating wreckage, or perhaps by one of the giant whales known to exist in those waters.

  Temporary steering-gear was jury-rigged, and Bacchante limped on to King George’s Sound. Because she needed extensive repair work in a Melbourne drydock, we spent more than three months in Australia. Dalton applied himself to finding manly excursions for his royal pupils. These included quail shooting, a kangaroo hunt (with subsequent consumption of kangaroo-tail soup), and a descent into a gold mine, the boys dressed in miner’s rig.

  After a dinner at Melbourne Town Hall, the mayor produced the home-made armour of Ned Kelly, an audacious horse thief and bushranger hanged that year. It was rudely made from ploughshares, pocked by police bullets, and weighed a hundred pounds. Kelly must have been a tough bandit indeed to have worn that portable oven amid the heat and flies of the Australian bush.

  The Princes tried it on, staggering about under its weight like drunken knights. George, who can’t have weighed more than the armour, had a particularly hard time, though as usual he outdid his elder brother, who called piteously from within for the helmet to be taken off him after only a few seconds.

  The obligatory factory tour was Alcock’s Billiard Works. Dalton, the boys, and I played doubles, after which the Princes were presented with their cues. Eddy stammered a speech of thanks, saying that these would be taken to Sandringham and always used there. But he passed his to me a few days later, having no interest in the game.

  Ever since I’d asked for the malodorous jaguar, my cabin had become P.E.’s first resort for disposal of unwanted gifts. Noticing my growing collection of royal cast-offs, Dalton remarked that my quarters were littered with bits and bobs “like a jackdaws nest.” This tickled Prince George, perhaps for the apt allusion to my beak. Hence my nickname. During the long months ashore in Australia the easy informality of that land seeped into our relations; naval discipline was much relaxed between us. When not on duty or official business, I became Jackdaw to them, and they Eddy and George to me.

  In July we boarded Inconstant for an excursion to Hobart, Tasmania, a delightful sunny town beneath dark mountains with a powdering of snow. There was a row of noisy “pubs” along the waterfront, which grew much noisier once we docked. In one of these, a few years back, the last pure-blood Tasmanian man, a whaler named William Lanney, died of flux at thirty-four (an intelligence that haunted me later during my own bouts with dysentery). Several dockland characters with whom I shared an ale remembered him well. To them “King Billy” was a jovial, full-bearded fellow; in short, a seaman much like any other. But certain scientists supposed his race to be the last of the Cavemen remaining from the Age of Ice. There was an unseemly scuffle among these gentlemen to secure the Tasmanian’s skull and bones.

  Here, away from the ship and in a sparsely peopled land about as far from Britain as one can get without leaving Earth, Eddy began to relax and open up. People may have thought him simple and backward, but as one got to know him, one realized that though he was no genius and was certainly young for his age—always preferring young company—it was shyness that crippled him. That and the related fear of appearing stupid.

  When he could forget himself, as it were, one saw qualities of spontaneity and good humour, a complete lack of any royal “side.” At such times it was easy to forget he was the Heir Presumptive. I recall a private dinner in Hobart given one night by the owner of a large sheep station and his son, whom Eddy had known in England. The Prince was perfectly at ease with this young man, and vice versa. We junior members of the company were in an ante-room, gaily helping ourselves to drinks. The Prince presumed to retail some second-hand advice (from Dalton) about the rearing of lambs. His friend replied in a jovial manner, “You stick to the soda siphon, dear chap, and don’t try to teach your granny to suck eggs,” remembering all too late who Eddy’s grandmother was! I, too, felt so at ease that I scarcely noted what had been said until the poor fellow released a torrent of apology. But Eddy stopped him with a loud guffaw, greatly amused.

  A few days later the same young man, on Dalton’s suggestion, got up a party of us to hunt Tasmanian tiger on his father’s estate. Assuming we were after a real tiger, or at least some sort of bi
g cat, I was a little surprised at the amateur manner we strolled about on the high pastures, where a number of horribly mutilated sheep carcasses bore witness to the tigers’ work.

  It was strange country, hilly with bare ribs of rock and great eucalyptus dotted about like oaks in an English deer park. The hills had been shorn of their woods by settlers, and these spreading trees were the lonely survivors, filling the air with the scent of a bronchial remedy. The local “deer” were kangaroos, thicker-coated than those seen on the Australian mainland. The sight of them bouncing across this pastoral landscape in thirty-foot leaps was at once comical and unsettling.

  Whenever I strayed outside Australia’s cities I was struck by the force of what Darwin terms a “second creation.” Every tree, animal, bird, and flower was ineffably strange. Even the light was unique, and the smells, the hue of the desert, the shape of the hills. One felt magically transported to another world or time.

  “I fancy I should pinch myself.” I remarked to Dalton, “All this.…”

  He understood me perfectly. “Cardinal Newman used to say, when he visited the Eternal City, that in order to grasp the genius loci it helped him to mutter aloud as he walked the streets, This is Rome, this is Rome! Perhaps you and I should be uttering, This is Australia, this is Australia!”

  “Tiger!” The yell went up. I glimpsed something like a huge pariah dog sloping off into the bush. There came more shouts. Eddy, who was some distance from me, raised his gun. Several weapons were discharged. “First blood to the Prince!” exclaimed a beater, a rough-looking fellow with a spade beard and the hands of a gorilla. “Well done, yer ‘ighness, sir!”

  The creature was lying on its side, as if resting, but it was nearly dead—shot through a lung. A pink foam of breath and blood issued from a nostril onto the grass. I doubted the shot was Eddy’s, but he dropped to the ground and pressed his cheek against the dying body, his eyes closed in reverie, as if embracing a fallen comrade or a stricken wife.

  It seemed an impossible or mythological beast, a cross between tiger and wolf, with some admixture of hyena, powerfully built, with a long jaw hinged so wide it resembled the maw of a python about to swallow a pig. Across the back were a dozen bold stripes, continuing around a thick ringed tail as long as the body itself.

  What I remember most clearly are its eyes: great black nocturnal eyes, bulging and deeply sad, already congealed with death like the eyes of a mouse one finds in a trap in the morning.

  “I say, what a queer tiger!” Eddy got up and prodded the corpse with his gun, rousing Dalton from a scientific meditation.

  “This is no cat, Eddy. And no wolf. The Tasmanian tiger is unique. Only the Latin is specific. Thylacinus cynocephalus.”

  “Some call it the zebra-wolf … for the stripes, like,” the beater added helpfully. “And I’ve ‘eard em call it the nightmare-wolf, seein’ as how it kills at night. Savage bastards these are. But gettin thinner every year, I’m pleased to say. Thanks to sportsmen like yerself, sirs, and the gover’mint bounty. Take the ‘ead off a sheep in one bite, they will, and leave the rest for the devils.”

  “Extraordinary!” Dalton was crouched beside the corpse, examining it minutely. “Extraordinary! Remind you of anything, P.E.? Something else that dwells in Australia?”

  “What’s that wild dog, sir? Drongo? Is this a drongo, sir?”

  A bray of mirth escaped from the beater. “Them dogs is called dingos, yer ‘ighness. There ain’t none in Tassie, anyhow. A drongo … now that’s somethin else.”

  “What this gentleman tells you is correct, Eddy. The dingo is a true mammal, introduced from the Asian landmass by the Aborigines in relatively recent times. It never reached Tasmania, which may explain the presence here of this living fossil. This creature you have so skilfully shot is a purely autochthonous great carnivore, utterly unrelated to any other on the planet. Indeed, the true tiger is closer kin to you and me, Eddy, than to this marsupial. Does that surprise you?”

  The Prince, who seldom answered his tutor’s rhetorical questions, merely looked lost, as if he’d like to be somewhere else or had, in his mind, already gone there.

  Now the skin had been nimbly removed by one of the guides. Eddy’s prize was a female. Deep inside her silky pouch were three tiny pups, naked and pink, the size of a human baby’s finger, still fastened on their mothers severed teats. One by one, the beater crushed them in his hand.

  Nine

  TAHITI

  Arue Prison

  AT TWO IN THE MORNING FAAA AIRPORT seemed a small, hot Marseilles. The red-eye flight from Los Angeles was packed and overheated. I was tired and sweaty, the thick T-shirt under my denim shift a mistake. I lay on the foreshore of sleep with dank memories of Lumley, as I’ve told you.

  It seemed that card-carrying Anglo-Saxons were not really welcome in Tahiti. The officials—all white men—clearly would rather have been elsewhere. Admitting me to their country (whose country, actually?) was an exasperating inconvenience keeping them from imported wines and local mistresses. Young Tahitian vahines walked along the passport queue planting intensely scented gardenias behind visitors’ ears. The girls were bored, and my first thought was that the bloom might contain a bugging device to detect insulting remarks directed at la patrie. But to be fair, it was two o’clock in the morning.

  The officer said something in a lovely rolling language I’d never heard before. Perhaps the warm way I was dressed made him take me for a local, or was it my colour? The Vancouver summer had been fine, I’d ripened in the sun. Where did I fit in? With the jaundiced French, the café-au-lait Tahitians, or the Demis, the people in between? Maybe he thought I was a Demi.

  Bloodshot eyes travelled up from my photo to my face and back several times, not hurrying over my chest on the way. He was short, his face pinched and suspicious, in a kepi complete with flap over his neck. A Legionnaire from a Tintin cartoon. He spoke again, this time in rapid French. I asked if there was someone who spoke English.

  “Vous êtes Canadienne, non?” He arched an eyebrow, implying that all Canadians spoke French, or if they didn’t, they should.

  I was taken to a small room where laborious inspections were in progress. Large beetles were flying at the lights. Perhaps I was singled out because of my backpack and camping supplies. A customs man—also French, but without kepi—unrolled my tent, mosquito net, and sleeping pad; he took out my freeze-dried tandoori chicken and spaghetti. All this I’d brought for Nuku Hiva. A tent, I’d been warned, would be essential. There were few places to stay, it rained a lot, and the island had deadly centipedes as big as bacon rashers (Melville nearly lost his leg to one). Bob had bought me the camping gear himself months ago, at a store on Robson advertising its sale with Now Is the Winter of Our Discount Tents, a slogan no English prof could resist.

  I missed him already. Term was starting soon. Bob wouldn’t be able to join me for three or four months. The plan was that I’d get my travelling done, and he’d come early in December on “research.” His wife would want him back for Christmas.

  The man sliced open one of my factory-sealed dinners and spread the powdery contents on a tray, a Gauloise-yellow finger stirring wizened peas and orange flecks of carrot. He asked if I smoked marijuana, and suggested I might have to take off my clothes. I pretended I hadn’t understood.

  “Is this really necessary?” I said in my most English English, pointing furiously at my ruined food. “Haven’t you got dogs? If you’re looking for drugs why don’t you use dogs? In Canada we use dogs.”

  “Dogs! Pah! We are more smartair than Canadian dogs.”

  He stuffed everything roughly into my pack.

  “Aroha!” He let me go.

  A taxi driver, larcenous but genial, took me to an overgrown hotel at the end of the Papeete waterfront—a relic of the thirties, thatched bungalows rotting amid hibiscus and bougainvillea. It seemed a refuge from the endless traffic, the pulsing disco of the sailors’ bars. I liked the thought that my father might have seen this
place, even stayed here. And the only alternative was a concrete box with a clattering air-conditioner at twice the price.

  It’s no good dropping out of the sky to a strange town in the middle of the night. I was disoriented, and dazed from the long flight. What now? I sipped Scotch and combed through the phone book till I fell asleep. No Wyverns in all French Polynesia.

  Next morning I rang the only Henderson, who turned out to be a Mormon missionary from the States. Mormons are often well informed about genealogy, so I let him invite me for a lemonade. But he knew of no other Henderson’s in Tahiti, past or present. What he wanted were my Henderson’s details, so Frank could be posthumously baptized a Latter-day Saint. I did not oblige.

  On the following day I met Lars Lindqvist, Bobs writer friend, for lunch out of town at the Taharaa Hotel. He’d picked the place not for its luxury, he said, but to show me Tahiti at its best.

  “I suppose, Miss Wyvern, that you are already disappointed. Everyone is. The real place seldom lives up to outsiders’ expectations. Especially mens.”

  “This comes close. But yes—I was getting off on the wrong foot.” The Tahiti I’d seen so far was a wearing place, a small noisy city and an endless suburb, a two-strand necklace of bungalows along the coastal road. I rode buses through places that sounded like Gauguin titles—Te Rua Mao, Punaauia, Taata, Arue—but saw little open country. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of wild slopes, a pelt of vegetation climbing thousands of feet to a smoke-ring of cloud on Orohena’s cone. Up there might be the old Tahiti, twilit glens and waterfalls, giant trees and rotting idols smothered in moss and orchids.

  The dining terrace was on a bluff overlooking Matavai Bay, where Wallis, Cook and Bligh had anchored. My eyes must also have roamed inland, up over coconuts and mango trees to Orohena and its clouds. Perhaps I glimpsed the dark stone fortress where I’m sitting now. But I don’t remember. Not eight months ago, and it seems eight years.