Galapagos Regained

by James Morrow

  The three companions were standing on the foredeck, passing Mr. Dartworthy’s spyglass back and forth as the Equinox tacked around St. Paul’s Rocks. Squat, bald, and glazed with dung, the dwarf archipelago comprised five distinct islets, the largest perhaps a mile in circumference, plus a scattering of lesser outcroppings. In The Voyage of the Beagle, Chloe recalled, Mr. Darwin had recorded the peculiar fact that these formations were neither volcanic upwellings nor coral atolls but instead reflected the fluctuating contours of the seabed.

  “How do we account for their whiteness?” asked Mr. Chadwick, relaying the glass to Chloe.

  “Bird droppings,” she replied confidently.

  “Those are gannets, are they not?” asked the vicar, indicating the nearest flock.

  “To be exact, the kind of gannet called a brown booby.” Scanning the largest formation, the notched and serrated Southwest Isle, Chloe failed to discern a single creature that might give credence to the species theory—not one transmuted lizard, tortoise, finch, or mockingbird. “As opposed to the blue-footed boobies we shall meet in the Encantadas.”

  A half-hour later, Mr. Dartworthy having spotted an anchorage site, ordered the hook dropped, and arranged for the bosun to row them ashore, Chloe and her fellow adventurers stepped onto dry land for the first time in seven weeks. The tropical terrain appeared firma but not fecunda. True, beyond the ubiquitous gannets, whose females apparently declined to build nests (instead laying their eggs directly on the rocks), she noted two varieties of noddy—the brown and the black—which made their nests from seaweed, plus an aggressive species of crab, waiting to steal whatever fish the male noddies might bring home for their mates. But on the whole Southwest Isle was no more an evolutionary showcase than The Beauteous Buccaneer was King Lear.

  “As I feared, there are very few illustrations to hand,” said Chloe, fanning herself with her Panama hat. “I shall merely aver that the brown noddy and its black cousin share a common ancestor, now extinct, a bird that in turn traces to a proto-noddy.”

  “We are not impressed,” said Mr. Chadwick.

  With its nasty crags, stinking kelp, and abundant excrement, Southwest Isle fell considerably short of an equatorial Eden, and yet the birds exhibited the same primordial innocence as their distant relations back in the Down House zoological dome, making no fuss when the explorers approached. The nearest avian community comprised a half-dozen black noddy nests, two holding vacant shells, two containing female birds incubating their eggs, and two sheltering a mother and her newly hatched chicks. No sooner had Chloe taken this census than a crab appeared, seized a squawking chick, and—before the mother could intervene—dragged the victim back to its lair.

  “Behold the struggle for existence.” She pointed towards the crab’s abode. “Just as wind, rain, ice, and vulcanism sculpt our planet’s face, so do predation, disease, famine, and extinction transmute its creatures.”

  “Not the least of the reasons a healthy-minded person must prefer Genesis to your baboon theory,” said Mr. Chadwick.

  “Suffering is but part of the story,” Chloe hastened to add. “I have posited not a web of death but a Tree of Life, a phenomenon in whose branches roost countless female birds and beasts, forever selecting partners and bearing offspring.”

  “Reverend, what do you think of the mechanism to which Miss Bathurst alludes?” asked Mr. Dartworthy. “Is mating merely the most efficient way God could devise for human beings to perpetuate themselves, or did He also have our carnal pleasure in mind?”

  The vicar scowled and said, “A lady being present, I suggest we have this conversation at another time and place.”

  “A lady and two dozen female noddies,” noted Chloe.

  As the remorseless sun dipped towards the distant coast of Brazil, Chloe and her fellow explorers returned to the longboat, whereupon the bosun ferried them to the opposite shore. Alas, beyond the expected seabirds and crustaceans, Southeast Isle proved as biologically barren as its sister formation.

  Given her certainty that the present archipelago supported no vertebrate more interesting than a noddy, Chloe was shocked when, guiding her companions along a shelf of silicate carpeted in lichen, she heard sounds of a sort only the highest ape produced. Yes, no question, this island had a female human tenant—though perhaps, judging from the frantic timbre of her voice, a person of addled wits.

  “Praised be the sibyls of coincidence!”

  Chloe fixed on the speaker, a castaway standing atop a balding knoll. Suddenly the agitated woman charged down the slope and across the beach, a rucksack riding on her shoulders, one hand gripping a spyglass not unlike Mr. Dartworthy’s. Her gown was woven of dried kelp, her bonnet of grass, so that she seemed to belong as much to the plant kingdom as to the animal.

  “What interesting specimens one finds in the tropics,” said Mr. Dartworthy.

  “All hail the sylphs of serendipity!” Moving with a singleness of mind, if a mind was indeed what lay beneath that weedy brow, the castaway set her glass on a mossy boulder, rushed up to Chloe, and grabbed the puffy sleeve of her pirate blouse. “Solange Kirsop at your service.” She pointed towards the anchored brig. “And if that’s the Equinox, then you must be Miss Bathurst.”

  “Indeed,” said Chloe, fascinated and perplexed.

  “Also known as the Covent Garden Antichrist and the She-Devil from Dis,” said Solange Kirsop, caressing Chloe’s cheek. A pendant swayed from the castaway’s neck, the pewter setting sculpted to resemble a lion’s paw, a fat red gem fixed in the claws. “Before embarking on the Lorelei, I read the Evening Standard every day. Mr. Popplewell’s reports on your expedition enthralled me.”

  “She-Devil from Dis?” said Chloe.

  “As in Dante’s Inferno. I may be a trollop’s child, but I spend more money on books and less on beer than an Oxford don.”

  “As it happens, I am a connoisseur of such ironies,” said Chloe.

  From her rucksack Solange Kirsop drew forth a wine bottle, then yanked out the stopper and downed a mouthful. “You have the look of a ship’s officer,” she told Mr. Dartworthy. Receiving his nod, she added, “I pray you, sir, take a draught of claret”—she waved the bottle in his face—“a gift from the Queen of St. Paul’s Rocks to her handsome vassal.”

  “I never drink in the morning,” he said.

  “Neither do I, but here on the equator it’s always noon,” said Solange. “Since my marooning forty days ago, the most amazing jetsam has washed up here, including a case of claret, a brass spyglass, and my ruby pendant. It’s really glass, I know, but it makes me feel like a duchess.” She took a second swallow, then offered the bottle to the vicar. “You, on the other hand, seem not a nautical person at all.”

  “I am a man of the cloth,” said Mr. Chadwick, gesturing the wine away.

  “As I am a woman of the sheets,” said Solange.

  “My faith is Church of England, so I shan’t purport to forgive your sins, but neither shall I presume to judge them.”

  “Attend my tale,” said Solange.

  The castaway proceeded to reveal that she’d never known her father, a knave who’d thought nothing of deserting his harlot lover, Gwyneth Kirsop, in extremis and their child, Solange, in utero. Owing to her mother’s ingenuity and devotion, Solange had been spared a life of streetwalking. Instead she’d become first the consort of a Stepney barrister, then the doxy of a Finsbury perfumer, and finally the ardent companion of the brilliant Dr. Lucian Humberdross.

  “Lucian called me his courtesan. That word did me proud. Last year he got himself appointed physician to the governor of Barbados, right before Mama died of the typhus. On the day after she was laid to rest, Lucian and I sailed for Bridgetown.”

  The courtesan took a sip of claret, then resumed her story, telling how the master of the Lorelei had proved to be a superstitious man. After the brig suffered three consecutive days and nights of heavy weather, Captain Balch decided that Solange must be a sea-witch. And so, despite Dr. Humberdross
’s tearful pleading, she was stripped down to her chemise and put ashore on Southeast Isle to die.

  “Not long into my ordeal, I told myself, ‘Solange, you sorry child of circumstance, if you wish to survive, you’ll need a religion to sustain you.’ Now Her Majesty’s Church has never appealed to me, nor the Popish sort of eternity either, and so I rummaged about in my soul, seized hold of my personal demons, and flung them into the sky. The constellations that shine above this archipelago are in truth the little bits of Lucifer that once burned within me.” The courtesan pointed heavenward. “When the stars come out tonight, you’ll see a succubus who stays eternally youthful by bathing in her lovers’ blood.”

  “We must get this demented woman aboard the Equinox without delay,” said Mr. Chadwick.

  “For once you and I agree on something,” said Mr. Dartworthy.

  Solange fixed Chloe with a voracious gaze, her glass pendant flashing in the sun. “It’s time I expanded my spiritual horizons,” said the courtesan. “From this moment on, I’m not just the disciple of my demons—I’m also a follower of the incomparable Miss Bathurst.”

  Despite the equatorial heat, a chill passed through Chloe’s frame. True, her self-appointed apostle had lost her moorings. Yes, the castaway was a candidate for Bedlam. And yet it seemed that this same Solange Kirsop could peer into a person’s soul as easily as Mr. Darwin observing barnacles through his microscope. Perhaps she really was a sea-witch.

  “I imagined God’s bête noire would be taller, with flaming eyes and crimson hair,” the courtesan continued. “No matter, darling. Were my she-devil a dwarf, I would still serve her. The gold is there for the getting, and you and I and your lovely friends will pocket it as planned. No doubt you mean to put your share to a benevolent use.”

  “My father is but one degree of remove from debtors’ prison,” said Chloe, growing dizzy beneath Solange’s incandescent stare.

  “And yet becoming rich is the least of your ambitions—am I right? You’ve been granted a peach of a part, and you mean to play it to the hilt.”

  “True,” said Chloe.

  “Look west of the moon tonight,” said Solange, “and you’ll see a demon who delights in dousing coastal beacons, sending ships to their doom.”

  “Rubbish,” said Mr. Chadwick.

  “My disciple is distraught,” said Chloe, taking Solange’s hand. “Miss Kirsop has been too long without human companionship,” she added, touching the castaway’s muddy brow. “And once we’re back on the Equinox, I should like her to share my cabin.”

  * * *

  An assortment of torments plagued Malcolm Chadwick as he staggered across the weather deck towards the improvised theatre—not only the clerical collar scratching his neck but also the sunburn gnawing his shoulders and the mal de mer roiling his stomach. Wincing and gasping, he appropriated an empty chair between Third Officer Colin Flaherty, a taciturn Irishman with a fondness for rum, and Second Officer Hugh Pritchard, a freckled Welshman whose pet monkey sat on his hip like a miniature Siamese twin. As the capuchin shrieked in his ear, chee-chee-chee, Malcolm looked towards the pageant that Miss Bathurst had prepared to celebrate the brig’s imminent crossing of the equator. Evidently such rituals were the norm on mercantile and survey ships, but rarely did they enjoy the supervision of a professional thespian.

  Although impossible to ignore, the commotion in Malcolm’s guts was as nothing compared to the turmoil in his soul. Two aspects of St. Paul’s Rocks had particularly troubled him: the unhinged Miss Kirsop—that pitiable harlot who’d made a religion of her own depravity—and the resident animals. The castaway was indubitably the lesser evil. True, Miss Kirsop was delusional, and yet Malcolm believed that through God’s grace she might escape the dark heathen wood in which her mind now wandered. By contrast, the archipelago’s seabirds and crustaceans had caused him unutterable distress, each such creature a reminder of the Oxford Diocese’s designs on the supposedly maleficent fauna of the Encantadas.

  Dressed in a burlap shift, Miss Kirsop emerged from the forecastle and proclaimed that she was Amphitrite, “a nubile nereid who in my naïve youth allowed an oafish sea-god to take me as his bride.” Malcolm would admit that she’d scrubbed up well, her bronzed skin glowing in the tropical sun, her lustrous raven hair flourishing on a scalp no longer infiltrated by weeds. On hearing Amphitrite’s epithet, the sailors in the audience applauded. (It seemed probable that none could define “nubile nereid,” but apparently the term sounded gratifyingly lewd.) Miss Kirsop then explained that the pageant concerned “the eternal battle between my glorious companion, Athena, mistress of wisdom, and my doltish husband, Poseidon, master of maelstroms.”

  An instant later Miss Bathurst, cast as Athena, came on stage dragging a canvas sack. She wore a peplos of bedsheets and a helmet improvised from a bailing bucket. Next to appear was Ralph Dartworthy as Poseidon, gripping a trident and dressed in a sailcloth robe, an oakum beard swaying from his jaw. After sticking her tongue out at Dartworthy, a gesture that set the audience to chortling, Miss Kirsop invited them to travel with her through time and space to Cecropia, an ancient Greek city. “Behold King Cecrops,” she said, whereupon Algernon Bathurst stepped forward wearing a cape that was once a Union Jack, “who has brought prosperity to his people by refusing to propitiate Zeus with the blood of birds and beasts.”

  Malcolm grimaced, pained by an irony of the sort Miss Bathurst relished. Although the pagan ruler Cecrops disdained animal sacrifice, the Anglican clerics Wilberforce and Hallowborn embraced it—for what term other than “animal sacrifice” adequately described the Great Winnowing? Ever since his visit to St. Paul’s Rocks, Malcolm had grown increasingly miserable over the vow of silence he’d made in the bishop’s conservatory. By acquiescing to the Oxford Diocese’s scheme, had he struck an accord with the very same Satan whose progeny allegedly infested Galápagos?

  “The rivalry between Athena and Poseidon came to a head when the King announced that whoever offered his city the best gift would become its patron deity,” narrated Miss Kirsop as Mr. Bathurst assumed his throne, which strongly resembled a cook’s stool. “Poseidon straightaway appeared in the palace yard and drove his trident into the ground.”

  Dartworthy approached a bloated wineskin that lay on the deck like a basking seal, spearing it abruptly and releasing a dozen gallons of seawater.

  “A majestic fountain gushed from the Earth,” Miss Kirsop continued, “but when the King drank thereof, he found it salty.”

  Mr. Bathurst soaked a sponge in the puddle, brought it to his lips, and feigned to suck up brine. An expression of disgust contracted his features.

  “And so the King rejected the gift,” said Miss Kirsop.

  Bathurst hurled the sponge at Dartworthy.

  At first Malcolm wondered why Poseidon was faring so badly in the equatorial pageant. How peculiar that the ship’s company took pleasure in the humiliation of the greatest maritime deity. But then he apprehended the obvious. A sailor did not love the sea. A sailor loved a dry bed, fresh meat, painted women, and full measures of grog. For the crew of the Equinox, mocking Poseidon was a splendid sport—their way of avenging themselves for soggy hammocks, rancid food, carnal privations, and relentless drudgery.

  “Now Athena presented her gift, a sapling bursting with olives,” said Miss Kirsop.

  Miss Bathurst opened her canvas sack and removed a miniature tree (not unlike the prop she’d brought to Alastor Hall) complete with belaying pins for branches and rum corks for fruits. Her brother plucked an olive and pretended to consume it.

  “King Cecrops understood not only that Athena’s gift supplied delicious food,” said Miss Kirsop, “but also that the pits would germinate more such trees. And so he accepted it, making Athena the city’s patron deity and changing its name to Athens. My enraged husband then attempted to slay the King, an ambition that, I am happy to report, Athena stood ready to thwart.”

  No sooner had Miss Kirsop completed her speech than Dartworthy r
ushed at Miss Bathurst’s brother with his trident. The intended victim stepped aside. Before Dartworthy could attempt a second thrust, Miss Bathurst removed her helmet and aligned it with Poseidon’s weapon. Dartworthy lunged, skewering the helmet, just as Miss Bathurst had doubtless intended—for she instantly wrested the encumbered trident away. Freeing the trident from her headgear, she hurled it across the stage, driving the prongs deep into the larboard gunwale. The wooden shaft vibrated like a tuning fork. The crew whooped and clapped, reveling in Poseidon’s disgrace.

  As the cheering faded and the phantom curtain fell, an urgent breeze wafted across the weather deck. Captain Runciter, rising, ordered the crew to provide the yardarms with maximum canvas. Assuming that the wind held true, Malcolm calculated, the Equinox would gain Fortaleza within four days. He wondered what sorts of currents, zephyrous and aquatic, had thus far accompanied the Reverend Simon Hallowborn and Captain Adrian Garrity. Most likely the Antares was already coursing southward along the coast of Brazil, her crew practicing daily with their fowling pieces, rehearsing the Great Winnowing by blasting seabirds from the sky.

  A crude and un-Christian hope took form in Malcolm’s imagination. He pictured the Antares coming apart in the churning seas off Cape Horn. The brig’s company survived unscathed, including Simon Hallowborn, as did all ninety-two Mephistropolis convicts, everyone washing ashore on Tierra del Fuego. Mindful that their rescue probably lay many months in the future, the castaways founded a self-sustaining colony—and then one glorious day Mr. Hallowborn experienced a change of heart, the scheme to slaughter the Galápagos creatures now striking him as woefully misguided. The redeemed rector fell to his knees, clasped his hands in prayer, and thanked the Almighty for sinking his ship.

  * * *

  The days that followed the presentation of her equatorial pageant were the most satisfactory Chloe had yet known aboard the Equinox. Although she’d relished the sailors’ applause, her happiness had less to do with the pageant’s reception than with the adulation her acolyte was lavishing upon her.