Ship Fever

by Andrea Barrett

  Marianna, still annoyed about Rob and Alicia’s absence, said, “Why do you even bother with them when they treat you like this?”

  Zaga watched her youngest brother put together a kite for his son and then struggle to launch it. “I don’t know,” she answered. “Joel would have wanted me to.” It seemed impossible to admit that all the years she’d spent with them had not forged a connection strong enough to survive Joel’s death.

  Joel had led her through their house after she lost their baby, pointing out the peach curtains she’d hung in Alicia’s room, the built-in desk she’d had made for Rob. The children’s mother was staying in France, he said. She wasn’t coming back. Then he asked her if she couldn’t be happy raising Rob and Alicia as their own. “It’s too late,” he said. “I’m too old to go through this again.” Tired and heartsore she’d bent to his wish, the way one of her grandmothers might have bent to life in her new country. No one had consulted Alicia or Rob.

  The kite had a body of lightweight blue nylon and a red tail that spun like a pinwheel. “Bird,” said the baby in Marianna’s lap, pointing at the kite as it rose. A string of children trailed Zaga’s brother, his two grade-schoolers mingled with the toddlers produced by her oldest brother’s son. It seemed impossible that she should have a brother who was a grandfather. Impossible that everyone in this family had children but her and that all of them could grow up without her help.

  Birds with No Feet

  [Fire—1853]

  There was no breeze that night. The sea, lit by the full moon, shone smooth and silver; the Southern Cross turned above the ship and below it squid slipped invisibly through the depths. Between sky and sea lay Alec Carrière, sprawled like a starfish in his hammock and imagining how the treasures packed in the holds were about to change his life.

  Beetles and butterflies and spiders and moths, bird skins and snakeskins and bones: these were what he’d collected along the Amazon and then guarded against the omnivorous ants. Mr. Barton, his agent back home in Philadelphia, had sold Alec’s first specimens for a good price, and Alec expected this shipment would finally set him free to pursue his studies in peace. He was a few months shy of twenty-one, and dreaming a young man’s dreams.

  Until he’d sailed for the Amazon, he’d worked in a shop making leather valises, not far from the tavern his parents ran in Germantown. But like the young English collector he’d met in Barra, near the flooded islands of the Rio Negro, he’d been saved from a squalid and unremarkable life by a few kind men and a book. With his uncle’s ornithology text in his pocket he’d wandered the banks of the Wissahickon, teaching himself the names of birds and imagining wild places. His brother Frank had taught him to shoot, and behind the outhouse he’d prepared his first clumsy skins and mounts. Even then he’d known that other naturalists had taught themselves their trade. Others had risen from just such humble beginnings, and he’d seen nothing extraordinary in his ambitions.

  Once every few months he went into downtown Philadelphia to visit the Academy of Natural Sciences, where a few of the members corrected his malformed preparations and taught him what they could. His interests spread from birds to other species. Titian Peale showed him an excellent way to pin and display his moths. Two of the Wells brothers, Copernicus and Erasmus, taught him how to prepare skeletons. All this gave Alec great pleasure but annoyed his father; by the time he was sixteen his father was pressing him to abandon this childish hobby and take his work more seriously. He almost gave up. But in 1850 Peale made him a gift of William Edwards’s small and wonderful book, A Voyage Up the River Amazon.

  When Alec read it a door seemed to open. What was there to keep him in Philadelphia? Edwards had been only a few years older than him when he’d set off; Alec was strong and healthy and his three brothers could look after their parents. And he had a most earnest desire to behold the luxuriant life of the tropics. Mr. Barton, a natural history auctioneer whom he’d met at the Academy, assured him that all of northern Brazil was little known, that Edwards had brought back only small collections, and that Alec might easily pay the expenses of his trip by gathering birds, small mammals, land-shells, and all the orders of insects. Among the wealthy, Mr. Barton said, glass cases filled with tropical creatures arranged by genus or poised in tableaux were wildly fashionable. And so few specimens had reached North America from the Amazon that high prices were guaranteed.

  With the brashness of youth Alec wrote to Mr. Edwards himself, who provided him with letters of introduction to several traders. Then he packed his things and used his small savings to book passage on a merchant ship. His father was angry with him; his mother wept. But he saw miracles.

  The mouth of the Amazon was like a sea, and could be distinguished from the ocean only by its extraordinary deep-yellow color. The Rio Negro was as black as the river Styx. Jet-black jaguars and massive turtle’s nests, agoutis and giant serpents; below Baião, a crowd of Indians gathered, laughing and curious, to watch Alec skinning parrots. Driven to gather as much as he could, Alec shrugged off the heat and the poor food and the fevers that plagued him intermittently. His persistence was rewarded in Barra, where Alfred Wallace greeted him like a brother.

  Wallace wasn’t famous then. Except for the light that burned in him and lit a similar flame in Alec, he was just another collector, exceedingly tall, with a thatch of yellow hair and clothes as shabby as Alec’s own. On the day they met the sun dropped like a shot bird, and in the sudden tropical night they compared skins and guns.

  Alec was lonely, and glad for the company after months among Indians whose language he couldn’t speak. He talked too much the night he met Wallace, he knew he did. But although Wallace was a decade older, wracked with fever and ready to leave for home after three hard years in the jungle, he never laughed at Alec’s chatter or made him feel less than an equal. He showed Alec the blow-pipes his Indian hunters used, and the bitter vegetable oil with which he coated the ropes of his specimen-drying racks. Alec showed him the glorious umbrella-birds he’d captured in the flooded forest of the igapo. Standing by the side of this long, lean, wasted man, Alec took pleasure in his own youth and compact sturdiness; how his hands, next to Wallace’s fine bones, were all broad palm and spatulate thumb. Around them the toucans yelped and the parrots chattered and the palms went swish, swish in the evening breeze. They ate fish and farinha and turtle. Later they traded stories about the books that had saved them. When Alec learned that Wallace was no gentleman scientist but was, like Alec himself, solely dependent on selling specimens to pay his way, he felt an immediate bond.

  After they parted, Alec collected with even more fervor. Now the results lay snugly packed below him, and as the ship rocked sluggishly he was imagining how he’d drive up to his parents’ tavern, dressed in a new suit and laden with more money than they’d ever seen.

  They would be thrilled, Alec thought. As would everyone who’d helped him. How surprised the Wells brothers and Titian Peale would be, when Alec made them gifts of the especially amazing butterflies he’d set aside for them! And then the hush inside the Academy, as he lectured to the men who’d taught him. Holding up a perfect skin from one of those rare umbrella-birds, he would point out the glossy blue tufts on the crest-feathers. “When the bird is resting,” he would say, “the raised crest forms a deep blue dome, which completely hides the head and beak.” The men would give him a desk, Alec thought, where he might catalogue his treasures. And he might marry, were he to meet someone appealing.

  He was happy; he was half-asleep. Then the cabin-boy ran up to Alec’s hammock and shook him and said, “Mr. Carrière! The captain says to come immediately. There seems to be a fire!” And Alec, still dreaming of his wonderful future, stumbled from his cabin with only the most recent volume of his journal and the clothes on his back.

  The scene on deck was pure chaos: smoke rising through the masts, a sheet of flame shooting up from the galley, crew members hurling water along the deck and onto the sails. Captain Longwood was shouting orders
and several of the men were unlashing the boats and preparing to lower them, while others hurriedly gathered casks of water and biscuit.

  “What’s happened?” Alec shouted. “What can I do?”

  “Save what you can!” Captain Longwood shouted back. “I fear we may lose the ship.”

  Even as Alec headed for the forecastle, he could not believe this was happening. Some months after his meeting with Wallace, he’d heard that the brig carrying Wallace home had burned to the waterline, destroying all his collections and casting him adrift on the sea for several weeks. This news had filled Alec with genuine horror. Yet at the same time he’d also felt a small, mean sense of superstitious relief: such a disaster, having happened once, could surely never happen again. Although Alec’s own collections were not insured, since he could not afford the fees, Wallace’s bad luck had seemed to guarantee Alec’s safe passage home.

  All this passed through his mind as he fought his way forward. Then every thought but panic was driven away when he saw the plight of his animals.

  In the holds below him was a fortune in things dead and preserved—but in the forecastle was the living menagerie he was also bringing home. His sweet sloth, no bigger than a rabbit, with his charming habit of hanging upside down on the back of a chair and his melancholy expression; the parrots and parakeets and the forest-dog; the toucans; the monkeys: already they were calling through the smoke. And before Alec could reach them a spout of flame rose like a wall through the hatchway in front of him.

  Wallace’s ship, he knew, had caught fire through the spontaneous combustion of kegs of balsam-capivi, but their own fire had no such exotic cause. The cook had knocked over a lamp, which had ignited a keg of grease, which had dripped, burning, through the floorboards and set fire to the cargo of rubber and lumber just below. From there the fire licked forward, downward, upward; and when the hatches were opened the draft made the fire jump and sing.

  Alec was driven back to the quarterdeck and stood there, helpless, while the men prepared the boats and hurriedly gathered spars and oars and sails. The captain flew by, still shouting, his hands bristling with charts and compasses; they were five days out of Para and no longer within sight of land. The skylight exploded with a great roar, and the burning berths crackled below them. Terrible noises rose from the bow where the animals were confined. His lovely purple-breasted cotingas, roasting; the handsome pair of big-bellied monkeys, which the Brazilians called barraidugo—his entire life, until that moment, had contained nothing so distressing.

  For a moment he thought the birds at least might be saved. One of the men dropped from his perch on the cross-trees and smashed in the forecastle door with an axe. Then the toucans, kept unconfined, flew out, and also a flock of parakeets. The cloud of birds seemed to head for the cloud of smoke but then swooped low and settled on the bowsprit, as far from the fire as they could get. They were joined by the sloth, who had magically crept up the ironwork. But meanwhile the mate was shouting, “Go! Now!” and hands were pushing against Alec’s back, men were tumbling over the stern and he tumbled with them, falling into one of the leaky boats. Someone thrust a dipper into his hands and he began to bale, while men he had never noticed before barked and struggled to fit the oars in the oarlocks. The man pressed against his knee dripped blood from a scratch on his cheek and gagged, as did Alec, on the smoke from the rubber seething in the wreck.

  The shrouds and sails burned briskly; then the masts began to catch. Soon enough the main-mast toppled and the moon-lit water filled with charred remains.

  “Please,” Alec begged Captain Longwood. “Can we row toward the bow? Can we try to save some of them?” His animals were lined along the last scrap of solid wood.

  Captain Longwood hesitated, but then agreed. “Two minutes,” he said sternly.

  But when they approached the bow Alec found that the creatures would not abandon their perches. As the flames advanced, the birds seemed to dive into them, disappearing in sudden brilliant puffs that hung like stars. Only the sloth escaped; and he only because the section of bowsprit from which he hung upside down burned at the base and plopped into the water. When Alec picked him up, his feet still clung to the wood.

  They were three days drifting in their leaky boats before they saw a sail in the distance: the Alexandra, headed for New Orleans. A fortunate rescue. Alec was grateful. But a year and a half of hard work, on which his whole future depended, was destroyed; as was the sloth, who died on the voyage. Alec reached home in one piece, but with hardly more to his name than when he’d left. As a souvenir he was given nightmares, in which the smell of singeing feathers filled his nostrils and his sloth curled smaller and smaller, and closed his eyes, and died again and again.

  In November, recuperating at his uncle’s house as his father would not have him at his, Alec learned that his acquaintance from Barra had written two books, one about his travels and the other about the exotic palms. Alec read both and liked them very much. They had shared a rare and terrible thing, Alec thought: all they’d gathered of the astonishing fauna of the Amazon, both quick and dead, turned into ash on the sea. Alec wrote to him, in England.

  Dear Mr. Wallace: I expect you will not remember me, but we passed a pleasant evening together in Barra in September 1851. I was the young American man heading up the Rio Negro in search of specimens. I write both to express my admiration for your recent books, and to record an astonishing coincidence. You will hardly believe what happened to me on my journey home…

  Wallace wrote back.

  Dear Alec: My sympathies on the distressing loss of your collections. No one who has not been through this himself can understand. Beyond the horrors of the fire itself, the terrible loss of animal life, and the substantial financial blow is this fact, so difficult to explain: That each specimen lost represents a double death. Our hunting always had a point; each bird we shot and butterfly we netted was in the service of science. But burnt, they now serve no one. It is very hard. I thank you for your kind words about my books. I plan to head, this coming spring, for the Malay Archipelago: an area hardly explored at all, which should prove extremely rich for our purposes. Perhaps you might like to consider this yourself?

  Alec’s mother, who had faithfully written to him during his absence, without understanding that he would get her letters only in one great batch when he returned to Para, was during this hard time very kind to him. She visited Alec weekly at his uncle’s. And when he told her what he planned to do next, she encouraged him and secretly bought him two suits of clothes.

  [Ague—1855]

  It was not as if Wallace and Alec traveled together throughout the Malay Archipelago, nor as if Wallace took Alec under his wing in any practical way. Alec was in Macassar when Wallace was in Bali; Wallace was in Lombok when Alec was in Timor; they both visited the Aru Islands, but in different years. And their situations were no longer as similar as they’d been in the Amazon. Wallace was still strapped for money, but his books had made him a reputation and the Royal Geographical Society had paid his first-class passage to Singapore aboard a fast steamer. Alec made a slow and uncomfortable voyage on three merchant ships and a filthy whaler. Wallace had with him an assistant, 16-year-old Charles, who helped capture, preserve, and catalog specimens, whereas Alec was all alone, and often overcome by details.

  During the wet season of 1855, Alec was in Sarawak, in north-western Borneo. He’d heard tales of a lively Christmas house-party at the bungalow of Sir John Brooke, the English Rajah of the territory—all the Europeans in the out-stations being invited to enjoy the Rajah’s fabled hospitality, and so forth. But he had not been asked to join the party, and he never suspected that Wallace was there. Over that Christmas, and into January, Alec was miles east of the Rajah’s bungalow, collecting beetles and hunting orangutans in the swamps along the Sadong River.

  For some weeks he’d been blessed with astonishing luck. Moving through the dense foliage he would hear a rustling overhead, then glimpse one of the reddish-brown
apes swinging. Branch to branch, tree to tree, never touching the ground. His desire for possession seemed to carve a line in the air between his gun and his target; he aimed and a moment later the orangutan was his. Retrieving the body was more difficult, but here the native Dyaks helped him. As the orangutans fed on the fruit of the durian tree, of which the Dyaks were very fond, the Dyaks were happy to guide Alec to them and then, after the shooting, to fell the trees in which the bodies were trapped, or climb the trunks and lower the bodies down. With their help Alec obtained four full-grown males, three females, and several juveniles. Just before the ague hit again, he also shot another female high in a giant tree. While lashing the body to the carrying poles, one of his Dyak hunters found the orangutan’s little infant face-down in the swamp, crying piteously.

  This orphan Alec brought back to camp with him. He could not feel guilty about shooting the infant’s mother; this was part of his work, what he was meant to do. But neither could he abandon the small creature who’d become his responsibility. While he lay on his cot, alternately burning and chilled, the infant orangutan clung to his clothes and beard and sucked on his fingers as he might at his mother’s breast. For a long time no one had touched Alec. He gave the infant sugar-water and rice-water and coconut milk through a quill, and later offered bits of fruit and sweet potato. The orangutan insisted on clinging to some part of his body at all times. And Alec found this peculiarly touching, despite the weakness and lassitude brought on by his fever. When a pair of strangers walked into his hut, he was flat on his back, in a violent sweat, with the infant curled like a cap around his head.