Galapagos Regained

by James Morrow

  As it turned out, Merridew Runciter’s petulant question was the last utterance Chloe would ever hear him make. The following morning, whilst standing watch by the crated cannon, the luckless master of the lost Equinox found himself in the path of an equally luckless anaconda when, heralded by the report of a snapping branch, the serpent plummeted thirty feet towards the afterdeck. Striking Runciter’s shoulders, the startled creature coiled about his neck like a demonic scarf. For a fleeting instant Chloe simply stood and stared, shocked by the awesome proportions of the thing, a beast as long and thick as the Pulga’s anchor chain. The captain’s face grew purple. His eyeballs expanded like hot bubbles. By the time Torresblanco arrived on the scene, machete in hand, and hacked the serpent into four equal segments, Runciter was dead of suffocation.

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” said Solange, inflicting a grin on Chloe.

  “Miss Kirsop, I pray you, be quiet,” said Mr. Chadwick as, like butchers packing a sausage, he and Torresblanco inserted the corpse into a canvas sack.

  “Satan, by contrast, works in obvious ways,” said Ralph. “Every time God turns His back on humanity, a frequent occurrence these days, the Devil performs a transparently devilish act.”

  “Leave her alone!” snapped Mr. Chadwick.

  “No, don’t leave me alone,” said Chloe, sobbing. “I killed this man. I lured him to South America, and I killed him.”

  “His avarice killed him,” said Mr. Chadwick. “He never stopped coveting the Byssheans’ gold, even after you dedicated our expedition to a higher purpose.”

  “Let’s bury the poor híbrido,” said Torresblanco.

  Because Chloe was the only person on board of a religious sensibility, it fell to her to perform the funeral service. Standing before the sheathed corpse, she offered up a selection from the Book of Common Prayer, a version of the “Order for the Burial of the Dead” that Mr. Chadwick had cobbled together from memory. “‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live,’” she recited. “‘He cometh up and is cut down like a flower. He fleeth as it were a shadow and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we are in death. Of whom may we seek for succor but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?’”

  Sorrowfully she watched the vicar and the capitán consign her brother’s friend to the engine-boat’s wake. Weighted with stones, the canvas shroud sank beneath the shimmering emerald face of the Solimões. With a mixture of puzzlement and gratitude Chloe decided that, despite the meaningless brutality of Runciter’s death, she still loved the God of her epiphany. The Presence was yet her shepherd, the morning stars still sang together, and she felt confident that, by alloying infinity with ingenuity, she could keep the Encantadas birds and beasts from harm.

  * * *

  At first light on the fourth day in May, 1850, the engine-boat left Tabatinga and crossed the phantom seam demarking the sprawling empire of Brazil from the mountainous republic of Peru. Later that morning, Torresblanco anchored the Pulga Feliz in a secluded inlet and assembled his crew on the veiled foredeck. As Miguel squawked out curses, the capitán paced back and forth within the silken refuge, telling Chloe and her friends how, on reaching the Bahía de Iquitos, the Pulga would not put to port, lest the Peruvian government seize the cannon. Instead the company would slip furtively onto the main Solimões tributary, the Marañón, then steam two hundred miles to the southwest, about as far as a vessel of the Pulga’s draught could proceed without running aground.

  “We are soon to enter the region of the Great Rubber War,” said Torresblanco, “where the air reverberates day and night with two talismanic names. I speak now of the odious General Zumaeta and the saintly Padre Valverde.”

  General Zumaeta, the capitán hastened to add, was not a military officer but the bastard son of a Barranca harlot and her seringueiro lover. After a brief career overseeing several tin mines near Puerto Etén, an interval during which he notoriously mistreated his Huancabamba Indian workers, Zumaeta had contrived to make himself indispensable to one Rómolo Salazar, a Lima businessman bent on turning the entire Marañón valley into a rubber plantation. It did not take Zumaeta long to realize that Don Rómolo had staked out so many hectares of caucho plants along the river that the crop could be profitably harvested only by means of slave labor.

  “At first Zumaeta tries recruiting the Marañón tribes to tap the rubber,” Torresblanco continued, “but they prove so ferocious even Don Rómolo’s mercenary army cannot subdue them. Zumaeta then considers the example set by tobacco and cotton planters of the American states to the north. He decides to import thousands of West African Negroes, a scheme he abandons when the Peruvian government declares chattel slavery illegal. Zumaeta then looks to the coastal Indians he put to work years earlier in the tin mines.” The capitán fed his parrot a slice of mango. “Knowing that in the case of aborigines Lima will never enforce the abolition, he takes command of Don Rómolo’s mercenaries, launches a slaving expedition to Puerto Etén, rounds up four hundred Huancabamba families, and drags them in chains over the Andes.”

  Now Torresblanco brought on stage “the second player in the Great Rubber War, the young Dominican priest Hernando de Valverde.” Shortly after assuming his duties at the Misión del Misterio Bendecido, Padre Valverde had concluded that God did not want him simply to catechize the local tribes. No, he must also liberate the slaves imprisoned on Don Rómolo’s plantation. Towards this end Valverde had raised an indigenous force of Indian volunteers, plus a paid militia of ribeirinhos, “skilled with firearms but at present having no arms to fire.” Day after day, this ragged army was reinforced by rubber tappers who’d escaped from the plantation, including, as it happened, the three grown children of the Huancabamba chief.

  Thus far Padre Valverde had confined the war to skirmishes in the curing depots, but once in possession of the cannon he would attack Zumaeta’s main camp, Castillo Bracamoros, which was not really a castle but a fortress of wood and adobe. Here lived most of the mercenary army, plus a half-dozen deputies charged with assaying the Indians’ weekly rubber deliveries, as well as two hundred Huancabamba seringueiros for whom the stockade had become a fixed abode, Don Rómolo having decided to build no more slave settlements than necessary.

  “I must say, Padre Valverde’s willingness to take up the sword bewilders me,” Mr. Chadwick told Torresblanco. “I think of the Jesuit mission near Curuçá. Padre Sampaio would never start a war, not even against a malefactor like Zumaeta. He has found better ways to help Amazonia’s natives.”

  “If you’re suggesting one should not confuse Portuguese Jesuits with Spanish Dominicans, I quite agree,” Torresblanco replied. “The Society of Jesus has always fancied itself Christ’s earthly army, but when it comes to actual warfare, it’s the Dominicans you want on your side. Before the Cabanagem horrors shattered my faith in God, I’d considered pursuing a Dominican vocation myself. Though incompetent at both Latin and compassion, I stood ready to serve the order by fracturing jaws and cracking skulls.”

  “The shedding of human blood,” Mr. Chadwick asserted, “even when it flows through mercenaries defending an ignoble cause, is widely regarded as contrary to Christ’s message.”

  Torresblanco heaved a sigh. “No doubt you’re right, Padre. But despite that incongruity, or perhaps because of it, I am devoted to my warrior-priest.”

  “I believe I speak for my fellow crewmen when I say that Valverde’s fight, exalted as it may be, is not our own,” said Ralph. “And so we request that, as the boat approaches Iquitos, you put us ashore, so we can enter the city and convince the local police to help us save thousands of Catholic birds and reptiles from a dire Protestant threat.”

  “No!” shrieked Torresblanco, punching the air with a clenched fist. “I forbid it! Without a crew I could never get the Pulga up the Marañón!”

  “As the founder of the Encantadas Salvation Brigade, I should like to say a few words,” declared Chloe, fixing on a fearsome herd of caimans ke
eping watch over the lagoon in which the Pulga lay. “Dear friends, permit me to suggest that we join forces with Valverde.” Although the Presence was surely chary of warfare, that same entity doubtless wanted her to try rescuing the animals—and with a scheme more robust than Ralph’s muzzy notion of raising an anti-Hallowborn brigade in Iquitos. “If we help to liberate the Huancabambas, they’ll feel obligated to take us along when they march back over the Andes, and then the whole tribe will help us find a way to get from the Peruvian coast to Galápagos.”

  “No, my fair philosopher,” said Ralph. “I followed you into a hurricane. I followed you up a piranha-infested river. But I shan’t have you leading me into a storm of bullets on behalf of savages I’ve never met.”

  “If you get killed in this dubious war,” Mr. Chadwick added, “you won’t be able to protect your precious lizards.”

  “And if you get me killed,” said Solange, “you’ll antagonize your favorite deity, in whose eyes even courtesans deserve redemption.”

  “We are going to the Misión del Misterio Bendecido,” Chloe informed her friends. “After we get there, if you decide against enlisting in Valverde’s army, then that is your prerogative.”

  “A prerogative I intend to exercise,” said Ralph.

  “Myself as well,” said Mr. Chadwick.

  “I didn’t escape the London streets only to die on a Marañón beach,” said Solange.

  At this juncture Torresblanco, having evidently decided that reaching the Marañón eclipsed all other considerations, ordered his company back to their posts. As Chloe turned towards the pilothouse, musket in hand, she felt a sudden compulsion to leap off the boat, wade through the lagoon, and disappear into the jungle. Just as other apostles of the Presence had tested their mettle in brutal places—deserts, tundra, mountaintops—so might she profit from pitting herself against the rain forest. Her imagination displayed the ordeal as a kind of magic-lantern show, not unlike the staccato flashes that had accompanied her sickbed tribulations: Miss Chloe Bathurst, alone in the wilderness, charming the caimans—taming the anacondas—beguiling the jaguars—transfixing the fire-ants—mesmerizing the scorpions.

  But no, she decided. Just then a distant community of finches needed her, as did a faraway population of tortoises. When she was ready to temper her soul in the jungle, its thorns and scourges would still be there. Firming her grip on her musket, she pushed back the veil, marched past the pilothouse, and began once again to guard the ziggurat.

  * * *

  Whether their good luck traced to the whims of Dame Fortune, the winds of circumstance, or the intentions of some power beyond the nonexistent Supreme Being, Malcolm could not say. Whichever the case, the crew of the Pulga Feliz, aided by a caul of morning mist, successfully smuggled the brass cannon from one end of the Bahía de Iquitos to the other. Throughout the uneasy passage, Alfonso Torresblanco counted up the gunboats: thirteen in all—a tally that, the capitán told Malcolm, would enable Comandante Cuarón, Valverde’s chief of military operations, to infer whether the Peruvian navy had dispatched any vessels towards the fortress in anticipation of a major Indian offensive in the Great Rubber War.

  As the sun climbed towards its apex, the Pulga pursued her southwesterly course, reaching Tamshiyaco by late afternoon. Here the mighty Solimões transmogrified into a rather different sort of body, the Marañón, shallower, frothier, swifter. For the next four days the vessel’s beleaguered engine fought a squealing, screeching battle with the onrushing river, even as Malcolm observed scores of cargo boats sailing effortlessly downstream with their loads of bolas, cocoa, tamarinds, and bananas.

  Shortly after dawn on the eighth day of their Marañón voyage, the Pulga reached a sector of the jungle from which rose torrents of black smoke, each twisted ribbon indicating a rubber depot. In his mind’s eye Malcolm beheld a seringueiro: a skinny brown wretch seated before a brazier amidst a haze of creosote fumes, methodically turning the paddle on which the cured caucho lay spitted like a roasting boar, the Indian pausing only to pour on more latex to fatten the bola. No act of imagination was required to apprehend the stench of the curing process. It penetrated the entire plantation, a toxic pall that, by forcing the birds to flee, had brought to the valley a funereal silence broken only by the Pulga’s throbbing engine.

  Malcolm now grew preoccupied with a mystery. At no point since lending him the transmutation sketch in Codajás had Miss Bathurst solicited its return. Did she not trust herself to keep the manuscript safe? Left alone with those thirty-five pages, might she set them on fire or pitch them over the stern? Unpalatable as Mr. Darwin’s theory might be to an apostle of the Presence, the thing deserved better, and she surely knew as much.

  “You’ve neglected to reclaim your essay,” Malcolm reminded her.

  “Giving it to me would be like handing pistol and ball to a melancholic,” Miss Bathurst replied, thus corroborating his conjecture. “Might I appoint you guardian of the Tree of Life for the duration of our travels?”

  Much to Malcolm’s satisfaction, her hair had grown back sufficiently to halo her face with soft chestnut curls. “You may—but allow me to offer you something of arguably comparable value,” he said, pressing his Bible into her grasp.

  “A gift gratefully received,” she said.

  No sooner had twilight descended than an island appeared, dense with vegetation: Isla de los Loros, according to the chart. They navigated the wider channel without mishap. The gloom thickened. Torresblanco ordered turtle-oil lanterns deployed in the prow. The boat chugged onward, clattering past the Rio Huallaga tributary, until finally, shortly before ten o’clock, the bell tower of the Misión del Misterio Bendecido emerged against the spangled expanse of the moonlit sky.

  Limned by a palisade of torches, the wharf held four steam launches and a flotilla of canopied tolda canoes. Whilst Torresblanco moored the Pulga, a party of ribeirinho militia dressed in mud-flecked green uniforms appeared on deck, equipped with crowbars and claw hammers. Swarming towards the contraband, the soldiers uncrated the cannon, revolvers, and Lepage carbines. Briefly Malcolm contemplated the exposed artillery piece, its barrel carved with laurels and blossoms. Such a paradoxical thing, designed to assuage men’s appetite for carnage yet decorated to gratify their love of beauty.

  Torresblanco strode across the pier, his parrot perched on his shoulder like an outsized epaulet. Malcolm and the other Pulga sailors followed, toting their duffels. Counterpointing the militia’s frenzy was the stillness of three Indians huddled together on the dock, their gracile frames wrapped in white muslin robes turned to silver cocoons by the lunar light, their black hair glowing like inverted obsidian bowls.

  “Prince Gitika?” inquired Torresblanco, approaching the frozen figures. Each Indian was modestly adorned with a toucan-feather headband and a quartz amulet suspended from a leather thong.

  “A su disposición, señor,” said the male Indian, evidently one of the fugitive royal children of whom Torresblanco had spoken, “and here are Akawo and Ibanua, my sisters.”

  “What do you call your parrot?” asked Princess Akawo. Although their tribe was reputedly of a pacific disposition, the stately demeanor of Prince Gitika’s sisters evoked for Malcolm the warrior-women from whom the Rio Amazonas had taken its name.

  “Miguel,” said Torresblanco.

  “Puta madre!” cried the macaw.

  “Are there more volunteers on your boat, Capitán,” inquired Prince Gitika, “or is this the whole of your army?”

  “At Olivença we lost a man to an anaconda,” Torresblanco replied. “The rest of my company stands before you—our first mate, Señor Dartworthy, our chaplain, Señor Chadwick, and our bichos da seda: Señorita Bathurst and Señorita Kirsop.”

  “We hope to make ourselves useful to you,” said Malcolm, “but only Capitán Torresblanco intends to take up arms.”

  “No es verdad,” said Miss Bathurst. “I, too, am prepared to join Padre Valverde’s army.”

  “You have already
made yourselves useful,” said Princess Ibanua to Malcolm.

  “Because of the Cabanagem cannon,” added Princess Akawo, “the tide of the war will now turn in our favor.”

  “That’s the finest artillery piece I’ve ever seen,” said a wild-eyed ribeirinho, stepping off the Pulga. He flourished his newly acquired carbine. “And this is the finest rifle.”

  “Mierda!” squawked the parrot.

  Prince Gitika introduced the soldier as Sargento Jiménez, then presented him to Torresblanco and the Pulga’s company, whom the prince insisted on calling “our brave volunteers from Manáos.”

  Malcolm lost no time apprising Jiménez of his ambivalence towards the Marañón valley campaign, prompting the sargento to reply, “I understand your doubts, Padre, but I can promise that you will never fight in a war more holy than this one.”

  “Christ blessed the peacemakers, not the avenging angels,” said Malcolm.

  “Whatever our Savior’s present opinion of avenging angels,” said Jiménez, “I feel certain he holds them in higher regard than he does the slave masters of the Pacopampa Rubber Plantation.”

  Fixing on Torresblanco, Gitika proposed to escort him to the Centro de Mando, Comandante Cuarón being anxious to learn how many gunboats the capitán had counted in Iquitos. “When we meet again, Padre,” said the prince, turning towards Malcolm, “may it be at the public execution of General Zumaeta!”

  Jiménez snapped his fingers, inspiring an aide-de-camp to hand him a turtle-oil lantern. Holding the luminous globe aloft, the sargento marched Malcolm and his friends along an ascending path through the forest, its dark reaches concealing multitudes of insects serenading one another with chirrs and chitters. After negotiating a succession of clay dykes, the party passed through the main gate, beyond which stretched a flagstone plaza where the ribeirinho militia and the Indian volunteers were bivouacked in huts and shanties. Campfires blazed everywhere, each ringed by soldiers enacting a curious rite involving a latex syringe. When a given fighter’s turn came, he would insert the nipple in his nostril and squeeze the bulb. Instantly the communicant winced and gasped, but his pain soon subsided, leaving him with a countenance as serene as that worn by Miss Bathurst during her Manáos revelation.