Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

  Ourrythin’ farmstead, seated half a mile from Ocean Bay up a winding, blustery valley, proved to be a frugal building, but proof against those hell-bent storms that break the bones of so many hapless vessels upon nearby reefs. The parlor was inhabited by a monstrous hog’s head (afflicted with droop-jaw & lazy-eye), killed by the twins on their sixteenth birthday, & a somnambulant Grandfather clock (at odds with my own pocket watch by a margin of hours. Indeed, one valued import from New Zealand is the accurate time). An Indian farmhand peered through the windowpane at his master’s visitors. No more tatterdemalion a renegado I ever beheld, but Mr. Evans swore the quadroon, Barnabas, was “the fleetest sheepdog who ever ran upon two legs.” Keegan & Dyfedd are honest woolly fellows, versed principally in the ways of sheep (the family own two hundred head), for neither has gone to “Town” (the islanders thus appellate New Zealand) nor undergone any schooling save Scripture lessons from their father, by dint of which they have learnt to read & write tolerably well.

  Mrs. Evans said grace & I enjoyed my most pleasant repast (untainted by salt, maggots & oaths) since my farewell dinner with Consul Bax & the Partridges at the Beaumont. Mr. D’Arnoq told us tales of ships he has supplied during his ten-year on Chatham Isle, while Henry amused us with stories of patients, both illustrious & humble, he has benefacted in London & Polynesia. For my part I described the many hardships overcome by this American notary in order to locate the Australian beneficiary of a will executed in California. We washed down our mutton stew & apple dumpling with small ale brewed by Mr. Evans for trading with whalers. Keegan & Dyfedd left to attend to their livestock & Mrs. Evans retired to her kitchen duties. Henry asked if missionaries were now active on the Chathams, at which Mr. Evans & Mr. D’Arnoq exchanged looks & the former informed us, “Nay, the Maori don’t take kindly to us Pakeha spoiling their Moriori with too much civilization.”

  I questioned if such an ill as “too much civilization” existed or no? Mr. D’Arnoq told me, “If there is no God west of the Horn, why there’s none of your constitution’s All men created equal, neither, Mr. Ewing.” The nomenclatures Maori & Pakeha I knew from the Prophetess’s sojourn at the Bay of Islands, but I begged to know who or what Moriori might signify. My query unlocked a Pandora’s Box of history, detailing the decline & fall of the Aboriginals of Chatham. We lit our pipes. Mr. D’Arnoq’s narrative was unbroken three hours later when he had to depart for Port Hutt ere nightfall obscured the dykey way. His spoken history, for my money, holds company with the pen of a Defoe or Melville & I shall record it in these pages, after, Morpheus willing, a sound sleep.

  Monday, 11th November—

  Dawn sticky & sunless. The Bay has a slimy appearance, but the weather is mild enough to allow repairs to continue on the Prophetess, I thank Neptune. A new mizzen-top is being hoisted into position as I write.

  A short time past, while Henry & I breakfasted, Mr. Evans arrived hugger-mugger, importuning my doctor friend to attend to a reclusive neighbor, one Widow Bryden, who was thrown from her horse on a stony bog. Mrs. Evans was in attendance and fears that the widow lies in peril of her life. Henry fetched his doctor’s case & left without delay. (I offered to come, but Mr. Evans begged my forbearance, as the patient had extracted a promise that none but a doctor should see her incapacitated.) Walker, overhearing these transactions, told me no member of the male sex had crossed the widow’s threshold these twenty years & decided that “the frigid old sow must be on her last trotters if she’s letting Dr. Quack frisk her.”

  The origins of the Moriori of Rēkohu (the native moniker for the Chathams) remain a mystery to this day. Mr. Evans evinces the belief they are descended from Jews expelled from Spain, citing their hooked noses & sneering lips. Mr. D’Arnoq’s preferred theorum, that the Moriori were once Maori whose canoes were wrecked upon these remotest of isles, is founded on similarities of tongue & mythology & thereby possesses a higher carat of logic. What is certain is that, after centuries or millennia of living in isolation, the Moriori lived as primitive a life as their woebegone cousins of Van Diemen’s Land. Arts of boatbuilding (beyond crude woven rafts used to cross the channels betwixt islands) & navigation fell into disuse. That the terraqueous globe held other lands, trod by other feet, the Moriori dreamt not. Indeed, their language lacks a word for “race” & “Moriori” means, simply, “People.” Husbandry was not practiced, for no mammals walked these isles until passing whalers willfully marooned pigs here to propagate a parlor. In their virgin state, the Moriori were foragers, picking up paua shellfish, diving for crayfish, plundering bird eggs, spearing seals, gathering kelp & digging for grubs & roots.

  Thus far, the Moriori were but a local variant of most flaxen-skirted, feather-cloaked heathens of those dwindling “blind spots” of the ocean still unschooled by the White Man. Old Rēkohu’s claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori’s priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man’s blood killed his own mana—his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life.

  Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rēkohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? “Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and here only, were those elusive phantasms, the noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!” (Henry, as we later made our way back to the Musket, confessed, “I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear straight as ‘noble.’ ”)

  Glass & peace alike betray proof of fragility under repeated blows. The first blow to the Moriori was the Union Jack, planted in Skirmish Bay’s sod in the name of King George by Lieutenant Broughton of HMS Chatham just fifty years ago. Three years later, Broughton’s discovery was in Sydney & London chart agents & a scattering of free settlers (whose number included Mr. Evans’s father), wrecked mariners & “convicts at odds with the New South Wales Colonial Office over the terms of their incarceration” were cultivating pumpkins, onions, maize & carrots. These they sold to needy sealers, the second blow to the Moriori’s independence, who disappointed the Natives’ hopes of prosperity by turning the surf pink with seals’ blood. (Mr. D’Arnoq illustrated the profits by this arithmetic—a single pelt fetched 15 shillings in Canton & those pioneer sealers gathered over two thousand pelts per boat!) Within a few years the seals were found only on the outer rocks & the “sealers” too turned to farming potatoes, sheep & pig rearing on such a scale that the Chathams are now dubbed “The Garden of the Pacific.” These parvenu farmers clear the land by bushfires that smolder beneath the peat for many seasons, surfacing in dry spells to sow renewed calamity.

  The third blow to the Moriori was the whalers, now calling at Ocean Bay, Waitangi, Owenga & Te Whakaru in sizable numbers for careening, refitting & refreshing. Whalers’ cats & rats bred like the Plagues of Egypt & ate the burrow-nesting birds whose eggs the Moriori so valued for sustenance. Fourth, those motley maladies which cull the darker races whene’er White civilization draws near, sapped the Aboriginal census still further.

  All these misfortunes the Moriori might have endured, however, were it not for reports arriving in New Zealand depicting the Chathams as a veritable Canaan of eel-stuffed lagoons, shellfish-carpeted coves & inhabitants who understand neither combat nor weapons. To the ears of the Ngati Tama & Ngati Mutunga, two clans of the Taranaki Te Ati Awa Maori (Maori genealogy is
, Mr. D’Arnoq assures us, every twig as intricate as those genealogical trees so revered by the European gentry; indeed, any boy of that unlettered race can recall his grandfather’s grandfather’s name & “rank” in a trice), these rumors promised compensation for the tracts of their ancestral estates lost during the recent “Musket Wars.” Spies were sent to test the Moriori’s mettle by violating tapu & despoiling holy sites. These provocations the Moriori faced as our Lord importuned, by “turning the other cheek,” & the transgressors returned to New Zealand confirming the Moriori’s apparent pusillanimity. The tattooed Maori conquistadores found their single-barked armada in Captain Harewood of the brig Rodney, who in the dying months of 1835, agreed to transport nine hundred Maori & seven war canoes in two voyages, in guerno for seed potatoes, firearms, pigs, a great supply of scraped flax & a cannon. (Mr. D’Arnoq encountered Harewood five years ago, penurious in a Bay of Islands tavern. He at first denied being the Rodney’s Harewood, then swore he had been coerced into conveying the Blacks, but was unclear how this coercion had been worked upon him.)

  The Rodney embarked from Port Nicholas in November, but its heathen cargo of five hundred men, women & children, packed tight in the hold for the six-day voyage, bilged in ordure & seasickness & lacking the barest sufficiency of water, anchored at Whangatete Inlet in such an enfeebled state that, had they but the will, even the Moriori might have slain their Martial brethren. The Goodly Samaritans chose instead to share the diminished abundance of Rēkohu in preference to destroying their mana by bloodletting & nursed the sick & dying Maori back to health. “Maori had come to Rēkohu before,” Mr. D’Arnoq explained, “yet gone away again, so the Moriori assumed the colonists would likewise leave them in peace.”

  The Moriori’s generosity was rewarded when Cpt. Harewood returned from New Zealand with another four hundred Maori. Now the strangers proceeded to lay claim to Chatham by takahi, a Maori ritual transliterated as “Walking the Land to Possess the Land.” Old Rēkohu was thus partitioned & the Moriori informed they were now Maori vassals. In early December, when some dozen Aboriginals protested, they were casually slain with tomahawks. The Maori proved themselves apt pupils of the English in “the dark arts of colonization.”

  Chatham Isle encloses a vast eastern salt marsh lagoon, Te Whanga, very nearly an inland sea but fecundated by the ocean at high tide through the lagoon’s “lips” at Te Awapatiki. Fourteen years ago, the Moriori men held on that sacred ground a parliament. Three days it lasted, its object to settle this question: Would the spillage of Maori blood also destroy one’s mana? Younger men argued the creed of Peace did not encompass foreign cannibals of whom their ancestors knew nothing. The Moriori must kill or be killed. Elders urged appeasement, for as long as the Moriori preserved their mana with their land, their gods & ancestors would deliver the race from harm. “Embrace your enemy,” the elders urged, “to prevent him striking you.” (“Embrace your enemy,” Henry quipped, “to feel his dagger tickle your kidneys.”)

  The elders won the day, but it mattered little. “When lacking numerical superiority,” Mr. D’Arnoq told us, “the Maori seize an advantage by striking first & hardest, as many hapless British & French can testify from their graves.” The Ngati Tama & Ngati Mutunga had held councils of their own. The Moriori menfolk returned from their parliament to ambushes & a night of infamy beyond nightmare, of butchery, of villages torched, of rapine, of men & women, impaled in rows on beaches, of children hiding in holes, scented & dismembered by hunting dogs. Some chiefs kept an eye to the morrow & slew only enough to instill terrified obedience in the remainder. Other chiefs were not so restrained. On Waitangi Beach fifty Moriori were beheaded, filleted, wrapped in flax leaves, then baked in a giant earth oven with yams & sweet potatoes. Not half those Moriori who had seen Old Rēkohu’s last sunset were alive to see the Maori sun rise. (“Less than an hundred pureblooded Moriori now remain,” mourned Mr. D’Arnoq. “On paper the British Crown freed these from the yoke of slavery years ago, but the Maori do not care for paper. We are one week’s sail from the Governor’s House & Her Majesty maintains no garrison on Chatham.”)

  I asked, why had not the Whites stayed the hands of the Maori during the massacre?

  Mr. Evans was no longer sleeping & not half so deaf as I had fancied. “Have you ever seen Maori warriors in a blood frenzy, Mr. Ewing?”

  I said I had not.

  “But you have seen sharks in a blood frenzy, have you not?”

  I replied that I had.

  “Near enough. Imagine a bleeding calf is thrashing in shark-infested shallows. What to do—stay out of the water or try to stay the jaws of the sharks? Such was our choice. Oh, we helped the few that came to our door—our shepherd Barnabas was one—but if we stepped out in that night we’d not be seen again. Remember, we Whites numbered below fifty in Chatham at that time. Nine hundred Maoris, altogether. Maoris bide by Pakeha, Mr. Ewing, but they despise us. Never forget it.”

  What moral to draw? Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.

  Night—

  The name of Mr. D’Arnoq is not well-loved in the Musket. “A White Black, a mixed-blood mongrel of a man,” Walker told me. “Nobody knows what he is.” Suggs, a one-armed shepherd who lives under the bar, swore our acquaintance is a Bonapartist general hiding here under assumed colors. Another swore he was a Polack.

  Nor is the word Moriori much loved. A drunken Maori mulatto told me that the entire history of the Aboriginals had been dreamt up by the “mad old Lutheran” & Mr. D’Arnoq preaches his Moriori gospel only to legitimize his own swindling land claims against the Maori, the true owners of Chatham, who have been coming to & fro in their canoes since time immemorial! James Coffee, a hog farmer, said the Maori had performed the White Man a service by exterminating another race of brutes to make space for us, adding that Russians train Kossacks to “soften Siberian hides” in a similar way.

  I protested, to civilize the Black races by conversion should be our mission, not their extirpation, for God’s hand had crafted them, too. All hands in the tavern fired broadsides at me for my “sentimental Yankee claptrap!” “The best of ’em is not too good to die like a pig!” one shouted. “The only gospel the Blacks savvy is the gospel of the d——d whip!” Still another: “We Britishers abolished slavery in our empire—no American can say as much!”

  Henry’s stance was ambivalent, to say the least. “After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolong a dying race’s agonies for ten or twenty years. The merciful plowman shoots a trusty horse grown too old for service. As philanthropists, might it not be our duty to likewise ameliorate the savages’ sufferings by hastening their extinction? Think on your Red Indians, Adam, think on the treaties you Americans abrogate & renege on, time & time & time again. More humane, surely & more honest, just to knock the savages on the head & get it over with?”

  As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

  Tuesday, 12th November—

  Our noble Cpt. Molyneux today graced the Musket to haggle over the price of five barrels of salt-horse with my landlord (the matter was settled by a rowdy game of trentuno won by the captain). Much to my surprise, ere he returned to inspect the progress in the shipyard, Cpt. Molyneux requested some confidential words with Henry in my companion’s room. The consultation continues as I write. My friend has been warned of the captain’s despotism, but still, I do not like it.

  Later—

  Cpt. Molyneux, it transpires, suffers from a medical complaint which, if untreated, may impair those divers skills demanded of his station. The captain has therefore proposed to Henry that my friend voyage with us to Honolulu (victualing & private berth gratis), assuming the responsibilities both of Ship’s Doctor & personal physician to Cpt. Molyneux until our arrival. My frie
nd explained he had intended to return to London, but Cpt. Molyneux was most insistent. Henry promised to think the matter over & come to a decision by Friday morning, the day now set for the Prophetess’s departure.

  Henry did not name the captain’s illness, nor did I ask, though one needs not be an Aesculapian to glean Cpt. Molyneux is a slave to gout. My friend’s discretion does him much credit. Whatever eccentricities Henry Goose may exhibit as a collector of curios, I believe Dr. Goose is an exemplary healer & it is my zealous, if self-serving, hope that Henry returns a favorable answer to the captain’s proposal.

  Wednesday, 13th November—

  I come to my journal as a Catholick to a confessor. My bruises insist these extraordinary past five hours were not a sickbed vision conjured by my Ailment, but real events. I shall describe what befell me this day, steering as close to the facts as is possible.

  This morning, Henry paid Widow Bryden’s hut another call to adjust her splint & reapply poultice. Rather than submit to idleness, I resolved to scale a high hill to the north of Ocean Bay, known as Conical Tor, whose lofty elevation promises the best aspect of Chatham Isle’s “backcountry.” (Henry, a man of maturer years, has too much sense to tramp unsurveyed islands peopled by cannibals.) The tired creek who waters Ocean Bay guided me upstream through marshy pastures, stump-pocked slopes, into virgin forest so rotted, knotted & tangled, I was obliged to clamber aloft like an orang-utan! A volley of hailstones began abruptly, filled the woods with a frenzied percussion & ended on the sudden. I spied a “Robin Black-Breast” whose plumage was tarry as night & whose tameness bordered on contempt. An unseen tui took to song, but my inflamed fancy awarded it powers of human speech:—”Eye for an eye!” it called ahead, flitting through its labyrinth of buds, twigs & thorns. “Eye for an eye!” After a grueling climb, I conquered the summit grievously torn & scratched at I know not What o’Clock, for I neglected to wind my pocket watch last night. The opaque mists that haunt these isles (the Aboriginal name Rēkohu, Mr. D’Arnoq informs us, signifies “Sun of Mists”) had descended as I ascended, so my cherished panorama was naught but treetops disappearing into drizzle. A miserly reward for my exertions, indeed.