by V. E. Ulett
“She’s seems to be holding,” he shouted at the lieutenant, longing to ask after Aloka.
“I will ready a sheet anchor, and the Admiral is aft. The great Russian has dished us, Father.”
Quite nearly a navy like response, was Captain Blackwell’s odd thought as he made his way aft. The deck beneath his feet was canting down toward the sea, and he slid to a halt near a group of seamen at the taffrail. He peered over the rail in time to see Aloka’s head pop out above the boiling surface of the sea. He shook his hair out of his face, clinging to a line over the stern, and began to pull himself up hand over hand.
Aloka tumbled over the rail, completely sodden and panting for breath.
He gulped in air. “She has taken off the rudder and the rudder post, carried away the starboard quarter gallery, and stove in the stern lights. The sea is coming in fast.”
His eyes met Captain Blackwell’s.
“All hands forward of the mainmast,” Aloka called.
As the men struggled up the deck, slipping on the wet surface and holding to the hances, Aloka took Captain Blackwell’s arm and held him back.
“We may be grateful the regents were not in the cabin when the Russian ran us down. They came on deck as soon as we were level with the fort. How we are ever to bring them ashore I do not know. I regret to say it, the barky, she’s done.”
Seamen never speak of sinking, not even when they are father and son. Captain Blackwell and Aloka staggered forward up the quarterdeck together, Aloka behind with his hand on his father’s shoulder.
There were a hundred and more natives on the shore. A shore that now began near the Mission church and house, and its companion cottage built by the English. The winds had dropped and they were no longer in danger of solid flying debris, the heavy rain seemed to have dampened it, but the sea continued high. Emma felt lost in the crowd of natives, very much a foreigner in unknown territory. On the trek down the mountain from the lava caves there had been many young women like herself in the party, concerned for their men. Emma was unique only in that she had her breasts covered. Kanakoa and his followers took no notice of her, none offered their arm, or was the least concerned for how she did.
Emma tried to remain near the king nonetheless, one of his followers. They reached a vantage point with a view of the bay. Two merchant ships and one Russian navy brig were on shore, farther out other ships were dragging their anchors, some dismasted and none unwounded from collision or the seas. Among the wounded ships was Kamehameha I, on which the interest of all the people round her was focused.
How Emma wished for one of her father’s perspective glasses. She looked round behind her over the heads of the natives, wondering if she should run to her parents’ house, and then spotted a most welcome sight.
“Saunders, thank god!” Emma cried, making her way through the crowd.
Saunders gave Emma a nod, asked very low after Mercedes, then proceeded to push her way through to Kanakoa. Behind her trailed a file of dockyard men, the woman Anushka, and now Emma.
The sloop Kamehameha I lay less than half a mile away, a distance most of the natives were capable of swimming, much less reaching in their canoes or on float boards.
“She has her boats too, your majesty,” Saunders was saying of the sloop, “but no boat can swim in this here sea, sir. We can try bringing a gun down from the fort, and firing or launching a line out to her. A great Russian slack-arsed tub has stove in her stern quarter, your honor, do you see? She fouled five other ships besides, saw it happen myself.”
Saunders in fact had a telescope slung over her shoulder, and she offered it to the king. Kanakoa studied the ship thrashing about in the seas of the bay in front of them. Emma’s hands itched to take the glass.
“Make it so, then, master shipwright,” Kanakoa said, gravely handing her back the glass.
The men around him were galvanized into action, and a large contingent began moving off with Saunders for the fort.
Emma ran after them. “Saunders! May I borrow your glass?”
Saunders unslung the telescope and gave it her. “We shall place the cannon as near as we can manage to the old quay, Missus, you can meet us there.”
“Thank you, and bless you Saunders. Do you think it will answer?”
“We can but try. I owe your mamma and the Captain that much, and more.”
Anushka, though she appeared loath to lose sight of Saunders, stopped and said anxiously to Emma, “Can he still be alive, out there on that ship?”
“I have no doubt he is gone from this earth, else the ship would not have returned.”
“The people are saying Kaumuarii George caused this great storm.”
“Vengeance from beyond the grave?” Emma frowned, angry at the suggestion for a number of reasons. But there was incomprehension on the poor suffering woman’s face. “Dead is dead, Ana,” she said not unkindly, “and no man has power over nature. You are living in this world, he is not.”
Aboard Kamehameha I they were watching the movements on shore with intense interest, after having discussed the possibility of launching a boat. Aloka and Captain Blackwell were unaccustomed to collective decision making, they gave the regents one of their telescopes and took themselves a ways apart on the forecastle.
“Maaro, a deep sea line bent to the capstan,” Aloka said. “The larboard watch into the tops.”
The watch on deck was busy tending the scraps of sail keeping the ship’s head to the wind. There was water in the waist with the level rising, and although the ship carried only nineteen hands, with all of them forward of the mainmast it was rather crowded. They should all have to retreat to the tops soon enough.
“By God, she’s a clever one! How glad I am I did not boot her off the ship in Brazil all that time ago.”
Aloka jerked round at his father’s exclamation, and Captain Blackwell handed him the glass. Through it he saw the natives had hauled a six pounder cannon to the shore, and were setting it up on a great platform, complete with its gun carriage. They had also a modified capstan, a multitude of small barrels, the accoutrement of the gun, and in the midst of all was Saunders directing the work.
“That’s what I thought she was about!” Aloka declared, taking the glass away from his eye. “She is going to try to cast us a line. Maybe we can meet her with our own.” He looked over his shoulder at the deep sea line the men were bending to the capstan. “Bless her! Dear god, Emma’s with them!”
“It’s an infernal device, Missus, a rocket,” Saunders said, in answer to Emma’s asking what she was assembling. “Picked them up from a Canton trader. I meant to use the gunpowder to fill canister, but they may serve as they are. Trick will be lighting the bugger in this wet.”
Emma turned and moved through the crowd asking the women she’d come down with, if they knew how to build a shelter. The master shipwright needed one over the gun platform. Someone put a small axe in her hand and Emma ran upcountry with the people, in search of saplings for poles and broad forest leaves for a matted roof.
Aloka lost track of Emma in the crowd. He lowered the telescope feeling he would give anything to be on shore with her in his arms. “Saunders is readying a mortar, or something like Cochrane’s incendiary rockets.”
“Let’s hope it saves us rather than blowing us up, this time. And can carry with it enough line to reach us.”
“Amen, amen,” Aloka said, and clapped his father on the shoulder. “Emma is scampering about on shore, where she would never be if Mercedes were in need of her.”
Saunders had the rig ready on shore, the line bent to the capstan with the inboard end secured to the rocket. The deep sea line between was neatly coiled on the platform, and the whole arrangement weighted in place by the cannon.
“We shan’t fire it unless this other don’t serve,” Saunders told the crowd of native men round her.
Emma stood off to one side with a knot of women, warriors and chiefs, Kanakoa among them, when the first rocket went off. The explosion
was accompanied by much cheering, and the sound of the line whipping out off the platform. There was a sense of elation, they jumped in the air and hooted. Working together they’d built a stout shelter double quick and been able to fire the rocket in the worst conditions. Trailing a tail of sparks the rocket skipped across the surface of the sea, and sank far short of the sloop.
“No!” Aloka shouted.
A body whipped past him at a run, and Kimo jumped from the larboard bow and launched himself into the sea. Round him was tied the deep sea line. Aloka watched the rocket, aimed too low, sink quite close to shore.
“Ahead of orders! Do you see?” he shouted angrily at no one in particular.
Kimo’s head bobbed up some way from the ship, and there was a collective exhalation as the young man struck for shore. They lost sight of him for some moments in the trough of a swell, the line continued to pay out. Scanning the surface with their telescopes, they glimpsed his head and an arm. Kimo seemed to be waving in distress.
“Oh Lord,” Captain Blackwell said. “The boy’s in a whirlpool.”
“Stopper the cable!” Aloka called.
Should he pay in the line, bring it back aboard with the capstan? Aloka thought of the weight of the deep sea line once wet. Kimo would be pulled under by the weight of it, and the turbulence of the sea.
On shore someone called out there was a swimmer in the bay. Saunders snatched up her glass. She gave it over almost at once to Emma though, in order to return to the task of readying the second rocket and bringing in and coiling down the line that had paid out.
After much scanning of the surface of the harbor between the sloop and their position, Emma saw a dark head and a brown arm thrust briefly above the surface. She shrieked and called out to the people round her. She ran down shore toward the Nuuanu stream, where she’d glimpsed the figure in the water.
“They are forming a chain,” Captain Blackwell declared, looking through his telescope at the activity taking place where the Nuuanu stream emptied into the harbor. “A human chain, it is the completest thing!”
Aloka alternated between the rescue trying to take place, and Saunders and her group.
“I wish Emma may not be among them,” he murmured to his father, about the group after Kimo.
“She will be if she thinks you are out there.”
“They’ve got him out!” Aloka said. “I think they have. Maaro, look here, is that Kimo?”
He handed over the glass.
“The very candlenut!” Maaro declared. “And the bugger slipped the line.”
“Shorten in cable!” Aloka ordered. “And the next man to act except under orders shall answer to this ali‘i of the candlenut shade!”
Captain Blackwell turned his back to hide the grin that arose at those words, ali‘i no ka malu kukui. A chief of the candlenut shade, meaning of questionable genealogy. Of a sudden his heart was filled with pride for his mixed race son, and an odd desire that he should live to see the sons and daughters he would raise.
Saunders had elevated the rocket’s mounting carriage, and she lit the fuse of the second rocket from a slow match burning in a tub underneath the shelter the people had built. The fuse stayed alight and the rocket exploded in a singing arc, the line whipping out behind, this time trailing an even more spectacular tail of colored sparks. Another cheer went up from the natives clustered on the shore, and a group of them rushed into the waves.
At first Emma didn’t know what they were about, and then she saw them positioning themselves along the length of line as it fell to steady it in its path toward the sloop. A modified version of what they’d done at the stream with the human chain. Emma ran forward and dove into the oncoming waves.
She surfaced some ways ahead, looking round to orient herself with the line, and dove again. The next time she came up, and the next, the native men waved her on as though aware of her royal status. Emma dove deep and swam hard in the turbulent sea, and reaching the surface gasping she had to kick over to the nearest native man.
The man clutching the fallen line said, “Hand on my shoulder, sister.”
They bobbed there together, smacked in the face by waves, all active and kicking below the surface. The native man made a loop in the end of the line and passed it over Emma’s head and one shoulder, so that it lay between her breasts.
“The Admiral comes this way.” The native man moved his head in the direction of the ship.
“Don’t see him.”
Emma stared, following the line leaving Kamehameha I’s hawse hole, and then she gasped. She sucked in a great breath, arched her body into the oncoming wave and swam hard.
When she surfaced a third time after that dive, Emma spotted him and raised her arm above the surface. Waving, waving frantically, her strength on the ebb.
Aloka popped up next to her and they patted one another, gasping. He mimed pulling the cable over his head and pointed down. Emma nodded, took another great breath and dove with Aloka.
He kicked down hard, she followed. When they were at a depth removed from the worst tossing of the surface, Aloka took the coil from over Emma’s body, passing her end through the loop still over his chest. He pointed at Emma and then the surface, reached over, grasped her foot and shoved upward.
Emma’s head cleared the surface and she sucked in air, followed by sea water as a wave broke over her head. She choked and spat, took in several gulps of air and sank back below the waves, trying to discover Aloka.
He surfaced a ways from her, clutching the knot he’d made in the two deep sea lines. She swam over to him, and he put her hand on the lifeline.
“Go back.” He pointed toward the shore.
She shook her head no, water flying in all directions. “Together. Or I won’t.”
Aloka gave her an exasperated look, and passing his hands around her body, exchanged places with her to put her before him.
“Move then, woman, to the ship is shortest,” he said. When Emma began pulling herself along the line in front of him, he added, “My dearest love.”
Captain Blackwell reached a hand down to her as Emma came up the steps in the sloop’s side. He and Maaro lifted her aboard once they could reach her, and Captain Blackwell clasped her to his chest in a close embrace.
“You are the bravest, strongest, most admirable woman.”
Before he could ask, she said, “Mama’s upcountry, at the place of refuge. I promised her we would all come to fetch her away.”
“Bless you, sweetheart.”
They turned to Aloka with tears standing in both their eyes.
Aloka wiped the water from his face with both hands. “No one listens to my orders,” he said privately to them.
“Shorten in cable!” Aloka called. “Handsomely does it, handsomely now!”
He turned back to Captain Blackwell, and put his arm round Emma, who was shivering. “Father, you will help me with the regents, if you please.”
They stepped over to where Ka‘ahumanu and Karaimoku and their people were huddled together in the bow. Aloka’s heart was aglow. Gratitude, love and happiness, even triumph lived there, where he never could have imagined they would be, on this day of all days.
Fourteen
The tropical storm was a milestone in their lives, one of those events after which life was forever different and unalterably changed. It was the end of Emma’s and Aloka’s first youth, the time before their two children were born. Captain Blackwell experienced an immediate and lasting backlash from the great storm, in the form of recriminations started by the British merchants in port. He was accused of insufficient zeal in coming to their aid, and of preferring native interests over those of the Crown.
“Father cut up rather old fashioned,” Aloka had said, “when they suggested he could command King Kanakoa’s men.”
The ill will of his countrymen was not nearly the change of the most moment to Captain Blackwell, however, it was that Mercedes had never really been well since the blow. He’d written his letter to go
vernment requesting to be relieved of his diplomatic duties more than a year since; not as a consequence of the old clash of his two worlds, but because his role as consul general necessarily took him away to the different islands. He did not wish to leave Mercedes alone for any length of time, though she now had ladies constantly in attendance upon her. To help her with what Mercedes called her squalid needs.
Captain Blackwell made his way through the Chinese section of Honolulu. At an earlier hour than he usually looked in on her, he’d gone to Mercedes’ room that morning and stood in her doorway. They’d run out of the laudanum Dr. Russ had sent with them on the trip out. Captain Blackwell had found her, when she thought no one was by, writhing on the bed and moaning. He was not aware there were tears streaming down his face, as he walked along thinking of her, the shops opening and the town coming to life round him.
The cancer was not in her breast this time, she said the pain lived somewhere deep in her innards. He’d offered to take her back to England, there was a chance Dr. Russ still lived, and where there were other physicians and hospitals.
“No, James, much as I long to see Edward again,” she said. “I thank you, but I cannot. I would not have you to myself for the entire voyage, and I am not sure how long...and besides I should miss Tomi and Ana.”
Her grandchildren, and her children, were the greatest joys of her life. Captain Blackwell couldn’t imagine what it cost her to suppress her pain in the short times she now allowed each of them into her bed chamber to visit. He turned into an herbalists and apothecary’s shop, with the intention of buying opium.
He was concluding what was to him a foreign and distressing business with the elder of the two Chinese shopmen, to come round to his house later with the purchased item and demonstrate how it was to be taken. Captain Blackwell had never been a man for strong spirits, and he did not indulge in awa the local kava drink, disliking the physical and mental numbness that ensued. But he’d be damned if he would give the oriental draught to Mercedes or the pipe, or however it was done, without he should also brave it himself.
