by Craig Cliff
I picked up the Norie, retrieved my prepared pages and handed them to Bollons.
‘What’s it say, John?’ one of the others asked.
‘Hold on, I need more light.’
The three of them went outside and I moved into the doorframe.
‘He says he lost his voice. In March.’
‘How long’s he been here?’
‘Hold on. Cripes. He must have been on Horseshoe Island to begin with.’ Bollons looked up into the sky. ‘By my count he’s been down here over four hundred days. Three hundred on this island.’
‘Cor,’ said one of the sailors.
‘Why did we not find him in November?’
Bollons turned the first page over, then counted out the five pages that remained. ‘I suspect, Charlie, the answers are all here.’
‘He don’t look so chipper,’ Charlie said.
‘Nor too pleased to see us,’ said the other sailor.
‘It is odd,’ said Bollons. ‘Normally the first thing a castaway does is give his rescuer a hug. Every man I ever rescued has done that.’
I held out my hand for Bollons to shake, keen to remind the men that, though I could no longer talk, I could still hear well enough.
‘You are a strange one,’ the mate said, but took my hand and shook it firmly. ‘All right then. Charlie, you take, uh,’ he paused and looked down at the pages in his hand, ‘Mr Doig back down to the ship, get him some fresh clothes and a hot meal. Ted and I will take stock here and we can send some more lads up with supplies after.’
Charlie placed a hand between my shoulders and made to lead me down through the tussock and to the ship, but I brushed him off. I stepped forward, snatched the pages from Bollons’ hands and shuffled them until I found the right section. I handed the page back to Bollons, pointing at the spot where he should begin reading. As he read, I returned inside the hut to collect my suit coat. I wish I’d thought to grab Tim’s pocket watch from the floor beside my bunk, but I suppose the next castaway would appreciate it.
‘He says he wants the figurehead to come with him.’
‘The old girl we brought up last time?’ Charlie asked.
‘Time before,’ Ted corrected.
‘It says here,’ Bollons said slowly, ‘that Mr Doig carved her.’
‘He’s batty, though, isn’t he?’ said Charlie. ‘Look at what he did to the depot.’
‘Says he was a ship’s carver in Scotland,’ Bollons said, not looking up from the pages.
‘It is some fine scrollwork,’ Ted said.
‘All of those faces. Gives me the willies.’
‘I’d like to see you spend four hundred days on your own down here and not go a little potty.’
‘That’s enough, men.’ Bollons folded the pages in half and handed them to me. ‘You keep these, Mr Doig. I expect Captain Fairchild will have all of these questions and more. We’ll have you on the mainland by Monday.’
I had not thought to write down any questions I might want to ask my rescuers, but was suddenly possessed by the desire to know where I was and where ‘the mainland’ might be. I ran inside the hut and grabbed my quill. I normally wrote with fresh penguin blood, not having found a way to store it without it congealing and drying overnight. I looked around but saw nothing else I could use as ink, so I removed the albatross-bone needle from inside my jacket pocket and poked it into the tip of my left index finger. Across the title page of Brett’s Pilot, I quickly scrawled: Where am I? Where will we go?
I returned outside and handed the book to Bollons, who gave a single, emphatic burst of laughter.
‘Why man, you’re on Antipodes Island, part of the Colony of New Zealand. You’re bound for Port Chalmers, the South Island, New Zealand, the Pacific Ocean, the world.’ He gave another laugh and slapped me firmly on the upper arm. ‘Get him down to the Hinemoa, Charlie, and get him some bloody ink!’
Arrivals
It occurred to me, as the Hinemoa bore us away from the Antipodes and back to civilisation, that this was the point at which true tales of shipwreck survivors ended, at least the ones I’d read as a boy. There might be a sentence or two about returning to a forsaken wife or finding a bride, taking up a trade or returning to the sea, but then it was on to the next true tale of adventure.
John Bollons had mentioned other men that had been saved by the depots and on the third day of our voyage north I asked him, in my steady handwriting, whether he had kept in contact with any of them.
‘No,’ the mate replied. We were the last men left at the rectangular mess table. Bollons had wiped his bowl clean with a chunk of bread and was eyeing my nearly untouched portion of stew. I pushed my bowl towards him, but he said, ‘Oh no, you need it more than I do, Mr Doig.’ He pushed back from the table and rotated his shoulders as if his hunger were somehow linked to tension. ‘Our timing has not been too good of late. Last year, we visited the depot at Erebus Cove looking for survivors of the Kakanui. We found nothing, but a month later the Campadre goes down in that same cove. The crew of seventeen men found the depot and a note from me saying, “We’ve just called. We will see you in six to nine months!” They lasted three and a half before being rescued by a bloody sealing ship. We never did find a trace of the Kakanui.’ His fingertips traced the line of smooth skin just above his beard. ‘So no, I haven’t had much chance to talk with survivors lately. The Campadre lot never even thanked us for the provisions, not that I heard.’
I nodded.
Bollons leant forward. ‘Don’t worry about what will happen in port. You’ll be looked after. I think you’ll find the New Zealand people are a generous lot.’
I wrote: I am sure they are. Thank you. I only wondered whether you knew how well castaways made their way once back in society.
‘You will do well enough, Mr Doig,’ he said, chuckling. ‘You will do well enough. God knows how you kept your sanity on that island, but it seems you have.’
I thought of my conversations with Vengeance.
My compulsive carving of the depot.
Bollons stood from the table and walked to the doorway. He stood there for a moment, looking out to the silver band of the horizon, his hands clasped in the small of his back. He said, ‘I do remember reading something Alexander Selkirk, another famous Scottish castaway, said a few years after his return to society, as you put it. “I am now worth £800,” he said, “but shall never be so happy as when I was not worth a farthing.” I hope this is not the case for you, Mr Doig.’
I took one last mouthful of beef and gravy, picked up my bowl and handed it to Bollons on my way out. He nodded his thanks and pointed with his forehead at the horizon.
‘The Snares,’ he said. ‘Just the one depot to check here, then it’s on to Port Chalmers.’
I watched the islands grow larger as Bollons devoured my stew. None of the islands was as big as Antipodes, but above the surging fringe of kelp and the familiar ridges of yellow-brows, the islands were blanketed with tree daisy, leatherwood shrubs and a tree, a bona fide tree, covered in pinkish-red flares.
‘The rata,’ Bollons said. ‘It’s almost finished blooming. You should see them at Christmas.’ I had to grip the rail to keep my hands from shaking. The mainland, I told myself. There will be better trees on the mainland.
The brick and stone buildings of Port Chalmers seemed something less than solid through the steam-fog that drifted in from the wee harbour. Reporters and government officials were waiting for the Hinemoa to dock, though neither group seemed prepared for a speechless castaway. In the five days it had taken the steamer to reach the Otago Peninsula, the crew had grown quite fond of me. It was only natural, I suppose, given the care and effort they put into stocking the depots, that I should represent a kind of vindication for them.
Bollons spoke for me on the docks, talking of my four-hundred-and-forty-five-day ordeal, explaining how I’d lost my voice calling for rescue—though he omitted the fact that it was the Hinemoa that had passed me by and that I had actively eva
ded rescue in November.
‘Mr Doig is a private man,’ Bollons said, ‘and does not wish to be unduly hounded.’ It was true, though I don’t think I ever wrote anything to this effect.
The next day a subscription was started, ‘in recognition of a great feat of survival’, according to the article in the Otago Daily Times, ‘and to provide funds to assist another Caledonian son to settle in this great province’.
I wasn’t sure about settling in Otago, but I was penniless and had no choice but to wait out the month until the subscription closed and the government supplied me with new identification papers.
I was given free lodging in Dunedin, eight miles to the south-west, at the head of the harbour, by a hotelier named McLintoch, who never appeared without a piece of his family’s red and black tartan somewhere on his body. The town was many times larger than Port Chalmers and seemed both eerily similar to Scotland—its architecture, the names of the people, the dreich summer weather—and utterly unreal. It was as if I had stumbled into a town of ships’ figureheads come to life: the inhabitants simulating the actions of living men and women, approximating the way they spoke, but somehow falling short of the real MacKay.
Vengeance, however, the one true figurehead in the town, remained silent and frozen. I kept her wrapped in a spare set of bedclothes and stashed in the closet of my hotel room, though I got up from time to time to check she was still there, even going so far as to peel back a corner to ensure that her expression had not changed.
The Hinemoa went back to ferrying government officials around the colony and patrolling its far-flung islands for sealers and castaways, but before departing Captain Fairchild had inquired, on my behalf, about the fate of the Agathos. I was told news would reach me at McLintoch’s. Yet another thing to wait upon.
A local barber offered to tame my wild hair and beard and I accepted. Though I had seen my reflection in puddles and streams on the Antipodes, these images were as true to life as a half-developed daguerreotype, only hinting at colour and wantonly warping forms. When I first encountered a mirror on the Hinemoa, it was not the shock of red hair and whiskers that surprised me, but the whiteness of my teeth. I had Sepsey’s gnashers. A castaway’s smile. Much later I would learn it was from chewing the roots of Hell’s Cabbage, though no one else called it that. Stilbocarpa polaris, that was its scientific name.
McLintoch arranged for a doctor to visit me in my room twice a week. Was this another philanthropic gesture, I wondered, or had the hotelier decided, after seeing me in the flesh, that this was necessary to avoid the bother of a castaway’s corpse in one of his rooms?
I, too, had a worm in my stomach. The cramps had begun almost as soon as I set foot on the mainland. I blamed the rich and varied food I had received on the Hinemoa. Perhaps the kinder climate was also responsible, plunging my body into a form of shock after the prolonged trauma of fifteen months in the subantarctic. I’d wake in the night, my pillow covered in slobber, craving the taste of salted penguin flesh. I could manage no more than a single bite of soft tommy before my throat closed up, as if the morsel of bread were an enchanted sponge that could sap all moisture from a man.
As I lay on my hotel bed, holding my clenched midriff, I wondered if this was how my father’s wammlin stomach had felt. What if this was not related to my time as a castaway? What if this was the onset of the Doig affliction? I was thirty-four—six years younger than my father had been when he was struck down. But then he had been a full decade younger than his father when the affliction arrived. And who was to say my southern travails hadn’t hastened the onset of my own suffering?
Galbraith, the doctor sent by McLintoch, was in his late twenties. He wore an undertaker’s frock coat that was buoyed slightly by the addition of bright buttonholes of scentless native flowers. He came every Monday and Thursday to take my temperature, peer down my throat and offer pills. I gave no indication of my stomach troubles. My experience of doctors—Doctor Stanley, that is, the man who could save neither my grandfather nor father and sent my mother to bed to die—meant I felt safer tipping Galbraith’s elixirs down the drainpipe.
I recalled Alexander Selkirk’s words—I am now worth £800, but shall never be so happy as when I was not worth a farthing—as I sat alone in my hotel room in Dunedin, hungry, nauseous and contorted inside. I didn’t expect to receive £800 at the end of February, but I hoped it would be enough to start a new life, a happier one, should my stomach ever adjust.
To pass the time and quell my doubts, I decided to research the lives of other castaways. I learnt from McLintoch that Dunedin did not yet have a public library.
‘There was a poll back in November,’ the hotelier said, ‘at the same time as we voted for mayor. Unfortunately, those against a free library were in the majority. What I wouldn’t give, Mr Doig, for another hundred and twenty men in this town who knew the value of a bleedin’ book.’
McLintoch, however, had many connections, one of whom was a retired ship’s captain who lived on Cargill Street and possessed an impressive collection of books, mostly on nautical themes. After a single ten-minute interview with the captain, in which time my honest answers and careful handwriting convinced him I was not a true seaman and therefore of little further interest, I was free to come and go from his library as I pleased.
I hoped to find evidence that happiness could enter a life after a stretch of solitude, but the results were less than encouraging. One of the accounts seemed particularly ominous. It told of a native woman who was left behind on San Nicolas Island after missionaries removed the rest of her people to protect them from Russian sea otter hunters. She survived alone for eighteen years. Perhaps it was no great wonder, the island being her home, a place she understood and that had resources enough to sustain a great many more people. Still, when she was discovered in 1853 by another sea otter hunter—I was not aware of there being a great demand for sea otters in my lifetime, though my stretch as a castaway had taught me the manifold uses of an animal carcass—she was living away from the old settlement. She was clad in a dress of cormorant skins roughly sewn together and living in a shelter made from whale bones. She was taken to live with the otter hunter and his wife in Santa Barbara, California, where no one could understand her language. Had she gone mad? It was impossible to tell. She suffered from dysentery almost as soon as she set foot in California and died after seven weeks. You can understand how such stories did little to loosen the knot in my stomach.
At least, I told myself, my trips to the captain’s library got me out of my room and among the locals, however distressing these meetings were at the time. No images of me had been published in the papers—merely a description: ‘Mr Doig is short in stature and emaciated’—and yet everyone in the town seemed to recognise me, even once I was clean shaven and my hair cut short. They waved from buggies and trams, shouting, ‘Good day, Mr Doig.’ They stopped me in the street to ask how I liked Dunedin, how it compared with ‘back home’. At first I thought it was my bright white teeth that singled me out, but learnt soon enough it was my suit.
‘You’re about the only man in the colony who can pull off such an outfit,’ a man told me one day as I bustled along Princes Street to the captain’s library. He had thin brown hair pasted down with what looked like penguin blubber, though I knew it must have been something else.
By this time I carried a number of index cards in my pockets that bore prepared phases—written in black ink this time, rather than blood.
Yes.
No.
I’m fine, thank you.
Dunedin is a lovely city.
I removed from my pocket the card that said Why? and showed it to the man.
‘I am a tailor, sir. Bernstone, the Paris Tailor,’ he said and offered his hand. His accent was not French. He seemed to be another figurehead brought to life but getting certain crucial details wrong. ‘You, sir, are wearing what we in the trade call a “looter’s suit”. That pattern, oh,’ his hands flew into the air, as i
f attached to his wrists by hinges and lifted by a sudden gust of wind, ‘just hideous. Instantly recognisable. What man in his right mind would pilfer such a thing? Though I suppose it’s all you have, poor soul.’
I looked down at the stack of index cards in my hands. I had two more of these looter’s suits back in my room, hanging in the wardrobe next to Vengeance. The crew of the Hinemoa had offered items of their own clothing, but I had grown accustomed to the thickness of my suits, the warmth of the wool. After all those months in the teeth of the Roaring Forties I never wished to be cold again. Instead, the men had given me two brand-new suits of the same design from a box of provisions intended for the depot on the Snares.
‘You must come with me,’ said Bernstone, the Paris Tailor, and led me by the hand—a fiercely intimate gesture that made my eyes fog. I was whisked up Princes Street and through the town square, which the locals called the Octagon for the sake of geometric correctness, and into the tailor’s shop in George Street.
The man let go of my hand once inside and ushered me deeper into the shop. ‘This way, Mr Doig. We’ll get you measured up.’
In the week and a half I had spent in Dunedin, I had avoided stepping inside shops wherever possible. The interior of Bernstone’s shop was a jumble of cabinets and tables buried beneath chalk-lined trousers and rolls of fabric. In the window, I noticed a headless mannequin in a tight-fitting suit. I thought it rather gruesome.
‘Tip top.’ Bernstone brushed his hands together twice, making a light clapping sound each time. ‘Arms out,’ he said and retrieved a yellow tape from the top of a cabinet and began to take my measurements.
‘They tell me you’re a woodworker?’
I nodded.
‘Keep still please. I bet you would have done a better job than Harrison. I told him to make the fittings in kauri and he goes and uses pine. You’d know all about wood, wouldn’t you?’
I resisted any movement this time. Bernstone pulled my feet apart and began to measure my in-seam.
