by J. M. Barrie
“There’s my boat, John, with her sides stove in!”7
“No, it isn’t. Why, we burned your boat.”
“That’s her, at any rate. I say, John, I see the smoke of the redskin camp!”8
“Where? Show me, and I’ll tell you by the way smoke curls whether they are on the war-path.”
“There, just across the Mysterious River.”
“I see now. Yes, they are on the war-path right enough.”
Peter was a little annoyed with them for knowing so much; but if he wanted to lord it over them his triumph was at hand, for have I not told you that anon fear fell upon them?
It came as the arrows went, leaving the island in gloom.
In the old days at home the Neverland had always begun to look a little dark and threatening by bedtime. Then unexplored patches arose in it and spread; black shadows moved about in them; the roar of the beasts of prey was quite different now, and above all, you lost the certainty that you would win. You were quite glad that the night-lights were in. You even liked Nana to say that this was just the mantelpiece over here, and that the Neverland was all make-believe.
Of course the Neverland had been make-believe in those days; but it was real now, and there were no night-lights, and it was getting darker every moment, and where was Nana?
They had been flying apart, but they huddled close to Peter now. His careless manner had gone at last, his eyes were sparkling, and a tingle went through them every time they touched his body. They were now over the fearsome island, flying so low that sometimes a tree grazed their feet. Nothing horrid was visible in the air, yet their progress had become slow and laboured, exactly as if they were pushing their way through hostile forces.9 Sometimes they hung in the air until Peter had beaten on it with his fists.
“They don’t want us to land,” he explained.
“Who are they?” Wendy whispered, shuddering.
But he could not or would not say. Tinker Bell had been asleep on his shoulder, but now he wakened her and sent her on in front.
Sometimes he poised himself in the air, listening intently, with his hand to his ear, and again he would stare down with eyes so bright10 that they seemed to bore two holes to earth. Having done these things, he went on again.
His courage was almost appalling. “Do you want an adventure now,” he said casually to John, “or would you like to have your tea first?”
Wendy said “tea first” quickly, and Michael pressed her hand in gratitude, but the braver John hesitated.
“What kind of adventure?” he asked cautiously.
“There’s a pirate asleep in the pampas just beneath us,” Peter told him. “If you like, we’ll go down and kill him.”
“I don’t see him,” John said after a long pause.
“I do.”
“Suppose,” John said a little huskily, “he were to wake up.”
Peter spoke indignantly. “You don’t think I would kill him while he was sleeping! I would wake him first, and then kill him. That’s the way I always do.”
“I say! Do you kill many?”
“Tons.”
John said “how ripping,” but decided to have tea first. He asked if there were many pirates on the island just now, and Peter said he had never known so many.
“Who is captain now?”
“Hook,” answered Peter; and his face became very stern as he said that hated word.
“Jas. Hook?”11
“Ay.”
Then indeed Michael began to cry, and even John could speak in gulps only, for they knew Hook’s reputation.
“He was Blackbeard’s bo’sun,”12 John whispered huskily. “He is the worst of them all. He is the only man of whom Barbecue13 was afraid.”
“That’s him,” said Peter.
“What is he like? Is he big?”
“He is not so big as he was.”
“How do you mean?”
“I cut off a bit of him.”
“You!”
“Yes, me,” said Peter sharply.
“I wasn’t meaning to be disrespectful.”
“Oh, all right.”
“But, I say, what bit?”
“His right hand.”
“Then he can’t fight now?”
“Oh, can’t he just!”
“Left-hander?”
“He has an iron hook instead of a right hand, and he claws with it.”
“Claws!”
“I say, John,” said Peter.
“Yes.”
“Say, ‘Ay, ay, sir.’ ”
“Ay, ay, sir.”
“There is one thing,” Peter continued, “that every boy who serves under me has to promise, and so must you.”
John paled.
“It is this, if we meet Hook in open fight, you must leave him to me.”
“I promise,” John said loyally.
For the moment they were feeling less eerie, because Tink was flying with them, and in her light they could distinguish each other. Unfortunately she could not fly so slowly as they, and so she had to go round and round them in a circle in which they moved as in a halo. Wendy quite liked it, until Peter pointed out the drawback.
“She tells me,” he said, “that the pirates sighted us before the darkness came, and got Long Tom14 out.”
“The big gun?”
“Yes. And of course they must see her light, and if they guess we are near it they are sure to let fly.”
“Wendy!”
“John!”
“Michael!”
“Tell her to go away at once, Peter,” the three cried simultaneously, but he refused.
“She thinks we have lost the way,” he replied stiffly, “and she is rather frightened. You don’t think I would send her away all by herself when she is frightened!”
For a moment the circle of light was broken, and something gave Peter a loving little pinch.
“Then tell her,” Wendy begged, “to put out her light.”
“She can’t put it out. That is about the only thing fairies can’t do. It just goes out of itself when she falls asleep, same as the stars.”
“Then tell her to sleep at once,” John almost ordered.
“She can’t sleep except when she’s sleepy. It is the only other thing fairies can’t do.”
“Seems to me,” growled John, “these are the only two things worth doing.”
Here he got a pinch, but not a loving one.
“If only one of us had a pocket,” Peter said, “we could carry her in it.” However, they had set off in such a hurry that there was not a pocket between the four of them.
He had a happy idea. John’s hat!
Tink agreed to travel by hat if it was carried in the hand. John carried it, though she had hoped to be carried by Peter. Presently Wendy took the hat, because John said it struck against his knee as he flew; and this, as we shall see, led to mischief, for Tinker Bell hated to be under an obligation to Wendy.
In the black topper the light was completely hidden, and they flew on in silence. It was the stillest silence they had ever known, broken once by a distant lapping, which Peter explained was the wild beasts drinking at the ford, and again by a rasping sound that might have been the branches of trees rubbing together, but he said it was the redskins sharpening their knives.
Even these noises ceased. To Michael the loneliness was dreadful. “If only something would make a sound!” he cried.
As if in answer to his request, the air was rent by the most tremendous crash he had ever heard. The pirates had fired Long Tom at them.
The roar of it echoed through the mountains, and the echoes seemed to cry savagely, “Where are they, where are they, where are they?”15
Thus sharply did the terrified three learn the difference between an island of make-believe and the same island come true.
When at last the heavens were steady again, John and Michael found themselves alone in the darkness. John was treading the air mechanically, and Michael without knowing how to fl
oat was floating.
“Are you shot?” John whispered tremulously.
“I haven’t tried yet,” Michael whispered back.
We know now that no one had been hit. Peter, however, had been carried by the wind of the shot far out to sea, while Wendy was blown upwards with no companion but Tinker Bell.
It would have been well for Wendy if at that moment she had dropped the hat.
I don’t know whether the idea came suddenly to Tink, or whether she had planned it on the way, but she at once popped out of the hat and began to lure Wendy to her destruction.
Tink was not all bad: or, rather, she was all bad just now, but, on the other hand, sometimes she was all good. Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time. They are, however, allowed to change, only it must be a complete change. At present she was full of jealousy of Wendy. What she said in her lovely tinkle Wendy could not of course understand, and I believe some of it was bad words, but it sounded kind, and she flew back and forward, plainly meaning “Follow me, and all will be well.”
What else could poor Wendy do? She called to Peter and John and Michael, and got only mocking echoes in reply. She did not yet know that Tink hated her with the fierce hatred of a very woman. And so, bewildered, and now staggering in her flight, she followed Tink to her doom.
1. “Second to the right, and straight on till morning.” The address for Neverland is made up by Peter on the spur of the moment, and it has been repeatedly evoked as a navigational tool for those seeking creative solutions for reaching a destination or goal. As noted earlier, Robert Louis Stevenson’s instructions on how to reach Vailima, his estate in the Samoan Islands, may have inspired the wording of directions to Neverland: “You take the boat at San Francisco, and then my place is the second to the left” (Margaret Ogilvy, 147).
2. the next time you fell he would let you go. Peter’s flightiness consists of a need for variety and an inability to form attachments. Lacking any understanding of death, he puts the children at constant risk, seeing everything as a mere adventure rather than a real danger. Peter’s love of variety in sports reveals a lack of commitment that translates into the human sphere as well. His poor memory makes him an unreliable and capricious host.
3. “Follow my Leader.” The game Follow my Leader was played among Native American tribes, with a leader improvising steps and movements that would be followed by others in the rhythms set by a song sung by all. “Follow my Leader where’er he goes; / What he’ll do next, nobody knows” are the words in one such song made up for children playing the game.
4. he did not remember them. That Peter has no memory and lives in an eternal present has been seen as the curse of living in Neverland. But because Neverland makes you forget everything, it also opens up worlds of possibilities and allows you to try out everything. In this sense, it begins to resemble Wonderland, for everything is new and arouses curiosity for the elated pilgrims wandering through it. Peter lives each moment to the fullest, reveling in the opportunities it offers and disregarding what was past and what the future holds. His identity remains unstable, for he can freely reinvent himself at any moment, even to the extent of turning into his own adversary.
5. the island was out looking for them. That Neverland can be reached only by invitation from the island makes it clear that some (in particular, adults) are banished from landing on its “magic shores.”
6. a million golden arrows. Neverland is characterized by luminescence and beauty radiating from the sun. Its reflected glory has the power to attract and animate.
7. “with her sides stove in!” “Stove in” comes from “stave in,” meaning “to smash a hole in” or “to crush.”
8. “the redskin camp!” In Anglo-American cultures, the term “redskin” has been used from the eighteenth century onward as a pejorative way of designating Native Americans. In litigation over the trademarks used by the Washington Redskins football team, Native American activist Suzan Shown Harjo claimed that the word had its origins in “the practice of presenting bloody red skins and scalps as proof of Indian kill for bounty payments.” Ives Goddard, a linguist at the Smithsonian Institute, has argued that the term did not begin as an insult. According to him, the color designations “red” and “white” were first used by Native Americans themselves to make racial distinctions. Goddard identifies the earliest example of redskin in 1769, when three Piankashaw chiefs sent statements to a military commander, using the term (later written out in a French translation of their speeches as “peaux Rouges”). The first documented public uses of redskin came in 1812, when President Madison gave a reception for an Indian delegation in Washington and addressed them, throughout his speech, as “red people,” “red children,” “red tribes,” and “red brethren.” French Crow, chief of the Wahpekute band, declared himself on that occasion to be “a red-skin,” as did No Ears, one of the second chiefs of the Little Osages.
Barrie uses the term to refer to American Indians, and, oddly, creates a tribe called the Piccaninny. In the screenplay for Peter Pan, Barrie advised staging scenes of “real redskin warfare that will be recognized as such by all readers of Fenimore Cooper.”
9. pushing their way through hostile forces. The journey to Neverland has been seen as a journey to the unconscious but also as a move in the direction of discovering imagination, identity, and everything that lurks hidden in the mind. That the children can only “break through” when they are fast asleep and that they discover powerful paths of resistance suggests a connection with Freudian dream worlds, but their journey seems in many ways more attuned to Jungian than Freudian developmental trajectories. In Neverland, they could be said to discover their individuality through powerful encounters with shadows, archetypes, and the anima, as Jungian critics eagerly point out.
10. with eyes so bright. Peter’s eyes seem to be as bright as the stars. They “sparkle,” and they link him to the light of the “million golden arrows” pointing the way to Neverland.
11. “Jas. Hook?” J. M. Barrie gave Hook his own first name, James. In early drafts of the plays, Hook was represented as a headmaster and embodied to some extent the harsh and cruel, but also pedantic, elements of institutional life. In the course of revisions, Hook became a volatile mix of aristocrat and pirate, diabolical yet also curiously addicted to good form. Barrie implies that Hook (not his “true name”) attended Eton College, and, in the play, Hook’s last words are “Floreat Etona” (May Eton Flourish), the motto of the college. (Four of the Llewelyn Davies boys attended Eton.)
In stage versions, the same actor often plays Mr. Darling and Hook, presumably because “all grown-ups are pirates.” (Barrie had originally planned to have Dorothea Baird, the actress playing Mrs. Darling, also play Hook, but Gerald du Maurier, who played the first Hook onstage, persuaded the playwright to give him the double role.) In a speech given at Eton with the title “Captain Hook at Eton,” Barrie declared the pirate to be “the handsomest man I have ever seen, though, at the same time, slightly disgusting.” Barrie had invented a character known as “Captain Swarthy,” a “black man” and pirate, while playing games with the Llewelyn Davies brothers. He wrote the first draft of the play without Hook, for he already had a villain: “P[eter] a demon boy (villain of the story).” Andrew Birkin writes that only the need for a “front-cloth scene” (a scene included to give the stagehands time to change the scenery) gave rise to the pirate captain. The front-cloth scene became a new set: The Pirate Ship.
In his scenario for the screen version of Peter Pan, Barrie emphasized that “Hook should be played absolutely seriously, and the actor must avoid all temptation to play the part as if he was conscious of its humours. There is such a temptation, and in the stage play the actors of the part have sometimes yielded to it, with fatal results.”
While writing Mary Rose (a play about a dead mother who haunts her living son) in 1920, Barrie developed a severe cramp in his right hand and, from
then on, wrote only with his left hand. He recounts: “About fifteen years ago a great change came over my hand-writing. I was saved by an attack of writer’s cramp to which, once abhorred, I now make a reverential bow, though it is as ready as ever to pounce if thoughtlessly I take up the pen in my right hand. I had to learn to write with the left, not so irksome to me as it would be to most, for I am naturally left-handed (and still kick with the left foot). I now write as easily with this hand as once with the other, and if I take any pains the result is almost pleasing to the eye. . . . Nevertheless, there is not the same joy in writing with the left hand as with the right. One thinks down the right arm, while the left is at best an amanuensis” (Meynell vi).
Prosthetic limbs had not yet been invented in Barrie’s day, and hooks were then not as unusual as they are today. One critic located a picture of local worthies in Kirriemuir, with a postman, who also worked as a mason, shown with a hook.
12. “He was Blackbeard’s bo’sun.” “Bo’sun” is an abbreviation for boatswain, an unlicensed member of a merchant ship who takes on supervisory roles. Blackbeard’s real name was Edward Teach (1680–1718), and he terrorized the Caribbean Islands and western Atlantic with his attacks on ships. Captured in 1718, he was decapitated and his head displayed on the bowsprit of his captor’s ship, then placed on a pike in Virginia as a warning to those who were considering taking up the life of a pirate.
13. Barbecue. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Long John Silver goes by the names “Barbecue” and “the Sea-Cook.”
14. “Long Tom.” The pirates’ gun is named Long Tom, and, after it is fired at Peter and the Darling children, it reappears when Starkey uses it as a launching pad to jump into the ocean and when Peter falls asleep by it.
15. “Where are they, where are they, where are they?” Barrie’s love of repetition in sets of three comes alive in this chapter, with three children, whose names are repeated in a triple sequence, and who speak simultaneously. Long Tom’s triple question reveals a determination to find the three children, but it also reveals something about how Barrie combines sophisticated diction with speech mannerisms characteristic of dialogue between parents and children. Repetition is used frequently by young children (ages two to three) and also by their adult caregivers. Children most likely use it to sustain a conversation because it makes minimal processing demands and yet is a way of showing attentiveness. Caregivers have a different purpose, using repetition to acknowledge what a child has said, to avoid overloading a child’s processing abilities, and to prompt a child.
