by Lance Morcan
One tale, in particular, caught Susannah’s fancy, as it did her dining companions. It began when she asked Manu whether he’d ever met Hongi Hika.
“I was too young to remember Hongi,” Manu said, shaking his head. “But my father knew him well and he told me many stories about him.”
“Tell her the one about Hongi’s suit of armor,” George Bristow said.
Manu needed no encouragement. It was one of his favorite stories. Turning back to Susannah he said, “Before I was born, Hongi traveled to England where he met King George the Fourth.”
“He was a sensation there,” Shelly Bristow interjected enthusiastically. She’d heard the story many times, but never tired of it.
“Yes,” Manu agreed. “He became quite the socialite and was courted by high society wherever he went.”
“How exciting,” Susannah enthused.
Warming to his story, Manu continued, “King George was so enamored with Hongi that he presented him with a suit of armor.”
“This is where it gets interesting,” George Bristow advised Susannah.
Manu continued, “I’m told Hongi was so taken with his suit of armor he wore it often during the return voyage to New Zealand. Even at meal times when he had to lift the visor of his steel helmet to eat or drink.”
Manu’s audience laughed heartily at the thought of a Maori rangatira dining in a suit of armor.
When the laughter died down Manu said, “But that is not all. After Hongi returned to Kororareka, he distributed muskets he had acquired to his warriors and embarked by canoe on a journey south, attacking enemy tribes along the way.”
Shelly looked at Susannah. “It was horrible,” she lamented. “Hundreds were killed.”
“And eaten,” George added.
“Eaten?” Susannah asked, aghast.
“Yes my people were cannibals,” Manu said honestly. “Eating our enemies was the worst insult we could bestow upon them.”
The conversation lapsed as the diners considered the grizzly news Manu had just shared with them.
“The suit of armor,” George said, prompting the young warrior.
“Ah, yes,” Manu said. “Hongi was so proud of his suit of armor he wore it on his raids.”
“That didn’t last long!” George chuckled.
Manu continued, “On one of his raids, Hongi’s canoe overturned and the rangatira nearly drowned under the weight of his armor.” The young warrior smiled. “Fortunately, the canoe overturned in shallow water, and he survived. But it taught him a lesson and he never wore the suit of armor again to my father’s knowledge.”
Listening to Manu, Susannah found it hard to reconcile the savage looking, tattooed warrior sitting opposite her with the likeable, educated young man he really was. She couldn’t help thinking if there were other Maoris like him, the race had a promising future in store.
Drake Senior was thinking along similar lines. Looking at Manu, he asked, “What are your plans for your future, young man?”
“I do not know,” Manu said thoughtfully. “I have given my heart to God. I know he has a plan for me, but he has not shared that plan with me yet.”
“I’m sure he will soon enough,” Drake Senior said.
“Amen to that,” George said. “Shall we pray?”
With that, the diners held hands around the table and bowed their heads while George led them in prayer.
45
Coral Coast, Fiji, 1848
Namosi laughed joyfully as she watched Jack frolic with their three young children in the shallows of the turquois lagoon in front of the village they called home. Five-year-old Mara, four-year-old Joni and two-year-old Luana loved the irrepressible Cockney as much as she did. Namosi considered him a wonderful friend, husband and provider, and a doting father, which was just as well as she had another baby on the way.
Jack, now thirty-two, interrupted his play with the children and waved to his Fijian princess to join them. She declined with a return wave. The baby was only a month or so away, and she was feeling tired.
Life had changed as much for Namosi as it had for Jack after he’d been found, near death, washed up on the beach here at Koroi, on the Coral Coast, seven years earlier. He’d been found close to the very spot he now frolicked with their children.
As the oldest daughter of Koroi’s ratu, or chief, she’d been expected to marry a Fijian of royal bloodlines – not a lowly vulagi, or foreigner, which is what Jack was to the ratu and his extended family. Especially not one who had literally been washed ashore and had no prospects. However, that had all changed after Namosi nursed him back to health.
The attraction between the two had been mutual and instant. He’d proposed very early on in their relationship and she’d accepted.
Namosi’s father, Tau, had opposed the relationship, but his opposition gradually crumbled as his people adopted the friendly Cockney as one of their own. The wedding that followed – six months to the day after Jack appeared uninvited in their midst – was one of the biggest Koroi had seen in a decade.
Jack’s new status as the ratu’s son-in-law proved a Godsend in the years that followed. After mastering the Fijian tongue and establishing himself as an interpreter for the sandalwood traders so prevalent in Fijian waters, he then followed his entrepreneurial instincts and purchased cutting rights to the Fijians’ coastal sandalwood plantations before on-selling those rights to European traders and making handsome profits.
As profits grew, Jack purchased a large quantity of muskets, which he donated to his father-in-law. The donation had been timely as Koroi was at war with a neighboring village. Koroi’s enemies backed off when they realized they were outgunned all of a sudden, further boosting Jack’s popularity with the villagers and with his father-in-law in particular.
Namosi giggled as her three children tried to drown Jack in the shallows. The children shrieked with laughter when Jack emerged spluttering and spitting out seawater.
While she was content with her lot and still deeply in love with her prince, as she called him, Namosi was also very aware of Jack’s reputation as a womanizer. He seemed irresistible to many of the women – married and single – throughout Viti Levu and indeed on many of the outer islands, and he just didn’t seem to be able to help himself. As a result, run-ins with irate husbands were a fairly frequent occurrence. Unfortunately, his travels as a trader provided plenty of opportunity for him to indulge himself in his extramarital interests.
Namosi had given up complaining to Jack as he’d laughed it off, saying she was imagining things. She’d complained to her father, but that had fallen on deaf ears because he had four wives of his own and considered Jack’s philandering entirely normal.
So she’d learned to accept Jack as he was. She never doubted his love for her, and she knew he’d always return home for that was where his heart was.
Namosi’s thoughts were interrupted when Jack dragged the children up the beach to join her in the shade of the palm trees that fringed the edge of the lagoon. “How was that?” she asked.
“Beautiful!” Jack said. “You should have joined us.” He set the children down on the sand then lay down beside Namosi and kissed her cheek tenderly.
This day was precious to the Hallidays for tomorrow Jack was heading out on a new venture that could see him away from his family for quite some time.
#
Later, alone, Jack sat looking out to sea. Namosi had taken the children up to their nearby bure. As he often did when he was on his lonesome, the Cockney took the opportunity to look back on the last seven years and remind himself how lucky he was.
Life couldn’t be better, he decided. Having survived his poverty-stricken years in London and then the hellish years as a convict in New South Wales, Fiji seemed like paradise on earth.
Looking back on his first year here on the Coral Coast, Jack recalled the specter of bounty hunter Frank Sparrow had hung over him like a hangman. He’d never mentioned Sparrow to anyone – not even to Namosi – but
he’d been half expecting the bounty hunter, or one of his associates, to show up.
That all changed shortly after the first anniversary of his arrival in Koroi when news reached him that the British Government had laid off its South Pacific contractors, or bounty hunters. The official reason was the retention of such contractors was uneconomic despite the undeniable success of Sparrow and his associates in rounding up escaped convicts. Unfortunately for the contractors – and fortunately for escapees like Jack – the economics of tracking, apprehending and returning convicts to the penal settlements they’d escaped from didn’t add up.
Despite the good news, Jack had still kept an eye out for Sparrow for the next year or so – more out of habit than anything else. He needn’t have worried. A few months after the South Pacific contractors were decommissioned, Sparrow was found dead, his throat slit, in a back alley in Apia, in the Navigator Islands. Rumor had it a former convict from Hobart Town, in Van Diemen’s Land, had tracked the bounty hunter down and exacted retribution. Apparently Sparrow had given him a hard time after apprehending him during a failed escape bid several years earlier.
All that was in the past. Right now Jack was looking forward to his next venture. It would take him into the island’s interior. But first, he had to travel to Levuka, on Ovalau Island, to the east of Viti Levu.
While Jack was content with his lot, the sandalwood trade had all but collapsed as a result of short-sighted Fijian landowners selling off the sandalwood plantations to greedy European traders without any thought being given to conservation of the precious natural resource. This had forced him to diversify and find new trading opportunities.
Jack’s focus now was on securing cutting rights to the Fijian kauri forests of Viti Levu’s interior. Before he headed into the interior, he’d arranged to meet with one of the island’s most respected ratus who also happened to be a major landowner and who was currently – and inconveniently – visiting an ailing brother at Levuka. Rather than wait indefinitely until the ratu returned, he’d opted to go to him.
It wasn’t only the thought of a new business venture that excited Jack. He was also looking forward to seeing his latest lady friend who conveniently happened to live at Levuka.
The sight of a schooner attracted Jack’s attention. Sailing eastward, she was a beautiful sight with her sails flapping in the faint nor’wester. How he loved the sight of sailing ships as they passed by. He estimated this vessel was half a mile beyond the offshore reef – close to where he’d parted company with Besieged all those years ago. Passing ships always reminded him of that dramatic night, but he’d learned to push the memory from his mind as quickly as he could. That was another Jack Halliday, he always told himself. He’d long since decided there was no mileage to be gained thinking about his past life.
As he always did when he watched the passing ships, Jack wondered where this particular vessel came from, where she was heading and who sailed aboard her. He wasn’t to know the schooner was none other than Rainmaker and she was heading for Levuka, his next destination. Nor was he to know that among the passengers on the schooner’s deck at that very moment was an American by the name of Nathan Johnson.
The Cockney was distracted by an unusual cloud formation that had formed above the schooner in an otherwise cloudless sky. It resembled a seagull in flight. He took that as a good omen for his journey ahead.
On board Rainmaker, Nathan had been distracted by the same cloud formation. He studied it for a moment then returned his attention to the distant shoreline. If he’d had his telescope with him, he’d have seen Jack Halliday looking directly at him, but the distance was too great for the naked eye.
Nathan could see the village behind Jack, however. He idly wondered who lived there and how its residents passed their days.
46
Levuka, Fiji, 1848
Nathan couldn’t wait to get ashore as Rainmaker sailed into Levuka’s harbor at scenic Ovalau Island. The voyage out from Apia, in the Navigator Islands, had been the final leg in a three-month voyage from San Francisco, and it seemed to take forever. After the horrors of the tsunami, the young American had just wanted to get to Fiji and resume doing what he did best: trading and making money.
As Rainmaker was going into dry dock for scheduled maintenance in Levuka, Nathan needed to organize a berth aboard another vessel for the brief voyage to Momi Bay, on the western side of the main island of Viti Levu. There, he would trade his muskets to Fijians in return for their beche-de-mer. He’d heard the sought-after sea slugs were plentiful in that region, and the local tribes were warlike and hungry for the white man’s musket.
It irked him that Rainmaker had sailed frustratingly close to Momi Bay on arrival in Fijian waters, but Captain Marsden was running behind schedule and had made it clear that any deviation was out of the question. So Nathan was resigned to having to cool his heels in Levuka until he could organize alternative transport.
#
Susannah never tired of looking out over Levuka from the bedroom window of the two bedroom cottage she shared with her father. The cottage was situated on a rise above the town in the well appointed grounds of the Wesley Methodist Mission Station. From her window, she could see the township, the harbor and beyond.
Fiji’s capital of the day was built around a harbor that accommodated all manner of craft. The harbor and the township reminded her of Kororareka, the North Island settlement she and Drake Senior had stayed at in New Zealand. The same colorful characters wandered Levuka’s streets. They included adventurers, sailors, entrepreneurs, whalers, explorers, escaped convicts and the usual assortment of social misfits. Even so, Susannah felt safer here than she had in New Zealand. Exactly why, she wasn’t sure. She imagined it had something to do with the friendly Fijians whose dazzling smiles and generosity had made her feel instantly welcome.
In Levuka’s township and down on the waterfront, the Europeans rubbed shoulders with the local Fijians who, to Susannah’s eyes, were even more colorful than the Maoris and other native races she’d observed in her travels. Especially the men, many of whom wore large, frizzy hairstyles – some dyed all colors of the rainbow.
If Susannah had one complaint it was the weather. It reminded her of Bata, in Equatorial Guinea. The wet season was approaching and she found the heat and humidity oppressive. Although the rains hadn’t arrived yet, rain clouds constantly threatened. The high humidity they brought with them ensured residents and visitors alike were continually bathed in sweat. For new arrivals like Susannah and Drake Senior, it was an ordeal just getting through the day. And the nights were even more oppressive.
The Drakes had arrived in Fiji ten days earlier after an uneventful seventeen-day voyage from New Zealand aboard Southern Cross. Susannah had made use of the voyage out to immerse herself in her studies of Fiji and the Fijian language. Her studies had been aided in no small way by the presence of one Marika Serevi, a Fijian crewman aboard Southern Cross. Fluent in both English and Fijian, and with a good understanding of the languages spoken throughout many of the Pacific Islands, Mariki was used by Southern Cross’s master as an interpreter during stopovers at various ports. He was also a natural teacher, and Susannah hadn’t been slow to take advantage of that. By the end of the voyage, she had a much better understanding of Fiji’s culture and language.
Despite her application to her studies, and her devotion to her daily prayers and bible readings, Susannah remained torn between her spiritual and sexual selves. The fantasies and dreams she’d had about Goldie – and others if truth be known – on the voyage out had if anything increased since she and her father had arrived in Fiji. And the more she’d prayed about it and asked for God’s forgiveness, the more frequent and vivid her fantasies and dreams became.
Susannah hoped it was a passing phase. She was aware she needed to sort herself out – and quickly. Very soon, she and Drake Senior would be departing Levuka for Momi Bay, on the island of Viti Levu, to run the fledgling mission station there. That’s what th
ey’d journeyed from the other side of the world to do, and as the departure date drew closer, Susannah’s misgivings over what she was getting herself into grew. She kept those misgivings to herself, however.
#
On arrival at Levuka, Jack Halliday wasted no time in making contact with his consort of the moment, a fetching lady of royal bloodlines. Talei Serevi was the first wife of a respected tribal headman, and she was as taken with Jack as he was with her. A secret tryst was arranged for the following morning when her husband was scheduled to depart the island for a three-day visit to Viti Levu.
That suited Jack just fine. He was confident he could achieve what he’d come to do before then. And so it transpired: the Cockney met with the ratu and landowner whose considerable land holdings in Viti Levu’s interior accommodated many of the Fijian kauri forests that he so desperately wanted to secure the cutting rights to. The ratu took a shine to Jack; he also liked the sound of the profits he could make in the transaction that was on the table. And so a deal was struck.
The next day dawned full of promise – for Jack at least. He’d arranged to meet Talei as soon as her husband had departed for Viti Levu. The venue for their rendezvous was the vacant home of a discreet friend of Talei’s. They planned to spend the next two days there pleasuring each other.
Jack was so full of anticipation he arrived a full hour before the scheduled assignation. The next hour was the longest he’d experienced since receiving three hundred lashes at Parramatta. When Talei finally arrived, he felt ready to burst.
The two lovers went to it immediately and remained locked in each other’s embrace, almost without a break, for the rest of the day and all that night.
