The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

  ‘A cigarette?’ Gascoigne laughed. ‘That was offered quite free of charge.’

  ‘I reckon I’m still freer for having turned it down,’ said Carver, and Gascoigne laughed again.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘How long ago did you purchase this ship?’

  ‘You’ve got a lot of questions,’ Carver said. ‘What’s your business asking them?’

  ‘Well, I suppose it doesn’t really matter,’ Gascoigne said. ‘It would only matter if you made the purchase less than a year ago. Never mind.’

  But he had snagged Carver’s interest. The other man looked over at him and then said, ‘I’ve had her ten months. Since May.’

  ‘Ah!’ Gascoigne said. ‘Well. That’s very interesting. That could work in your favour, you know.’

  ‘How?’

  But Gascoigne didn’t answer at once; instead he squinted his eyes, and pretended to brood. ‘The man who sold it to you. Did he pass on conventional cover? That is to say: did you inherit an extant policy, or did you take out a policy on your own account?’

  ‘I didn’t take out anything,’ Carver said.

  ‘Was the vendor a shipowner in the professional sense? Did he own more than just Godspeed, for example?’

  ‘He had a couple of others,’ Carver said. ‘Clipper ships. Charters.’

  ‘Not steam?’

  ‘Sail,’ said Carver. ‘Why?’

  ‘And where did you say you were coming from, when you ran aground?’

  ‘Dunedin. Are you going to tell me where all these questions are headed?’

  ‘Only from Dunedin,’ Gascoigne said, nodding. ‘Yes. Now, if you’ll forgive my impertinence once last time, I wonder if I might ask about the circumstances of the wreck itself. I trust there was no dereliction of duty, or anything of that kind, that caused the ship to founder?’

  Carver shook his head. ‘Tide was low, but we were well offshore,’ he said. ‘I dropped sixty-five feet of chain and she caught, so I dropped two anchors and another twenty feet of chain. I made the call to keep her on a reasonable leash and wait until the morning. Next thing we knew, we were broadside on the spit. It was raining, and the moon was clouded over. The wind blew out the beacons. Wasn’t anything anyone could have done. Nothing that might be called dereliction. Not under my command.’

  This, for Francis Carver, was a very long speech; at its conclusion he folded his arms across his chest, and his expression closed. He frowned at Gascoigne.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘What’s your interest on account of? You’d do well to tell me plain: I don’t like a slippery dealer.’

  Gascoigne remembered that the man had murdered his own child. The thought was strangely thrilling. Lightly he said, ‘I’ve thought of something that might be of some help to you.’

  Carver’s scowl deepened. ‘Who says I need help?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Gascoigne. ‘I am impertinent.’

  ‘Say it, though,’ said Carver.

  ‘Well, here,’ said Gascoigne. ‘As I mentioned before, my late wife’s father worked in shipping insurance. His speciality was P&I—protection and indemnity.’

  ‘I told you I don’t have that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gascoigne said, ‘but there’s a good chance that the man who sold you this ship—what was his name?’

  ‘Lauderback,’ said Carver.

  Gascoigne paused in a show of surprise. ‘Not the politician!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Alistair Lauderback? But he’s in Hokitika now—running for the Westland seat!’

  ‘Go on with what you were saying. P&I.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gascoigne said, shaking his head. ‘Well. There’s a good chance that Mr. Lauderback, if he owned several ships, belonged to some sort of a shipowners’ association. There’s a good chance that he paid a yearly fee into a mutual fund, called P&I, as an additional insurance that was of a slightly different nature than what you and I might think of as conventional cover.’

  ‘To protect the cargo?’

  ‘No,’ said Gascoigne. ‘P&I works more like a mutual pool, into which all the shipowners pay a yearly fee, and out of which they can then draw down funds if they find themselves liable for any damages that regular insurers refuse to touch. Liabilities of the kind that you’re facing now. Wreck removal, for instance. It’s possible that Godspeed could remain protected, even though the ownership of the ship has changed.’

  ‘How?’ He spoke the word without curiosity.

  ‘Well, if P&I was taken out some years ago, and this is the first significant accident that this particular ship has sustained, then Mr. Lauderback might be in credit against Godspeed. You see, P&I doesn’t work like regular insurance—there aren’t any shareholders, and no company, really: nobody’s looking to make a profit off anyone else. Instead it’s a co-operative body of men, all of them shipowners themselves. Every man pays his dues every year, until there’s enough in the pool to cover them all. After that, the ships stay covered—at least, until something goes wrong, and then somebody has to dip into the pool for some reason. The notion of being “in credit” applies very nearly.’

  ‘Like a private account,’ Carver said. ‘For Godspeed.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Carver thought about this. ‘How would I know about it?’

  Gascoigne shrugged. ‘You could ask around. The association would have to be registered, and the shipowners would have to be listed by name. This is assuming that Lauderback indeed belongs to such a group, of course—but I would venture to say that it’s very likely that he does.’

  In fact this was more than likely: it was certain. Alistair Lauderback did have protection and indemnity against all his crafts, and each ship was in credit to the tune of nearly a thousand pounds, and Carver was legally entitled to draw down these funds to help pay for the removal of the wreck from the Hokitika spit, so long as he filed his appeal before the middle of May—whereupon a year would have passed since the sale of the craft, and Lauderback’s legal obligation to Godspeed would cease. Gascoigne knew all this for certain because he had made the inquiries himself, first in the offices of Balfour Shipping, and then in the news archives of the Times, and then at the Harbourmaster’s office, and then at the Reserve Bank. He knew that Lauderback belonged to a small co-operative of shipowners called the Garrity Group, so named for its most prominent member, John Hincher Garrity, who was (as Gascoigne had discovered) an enthusiastic champion of the Age of Sail, the imminent twilight of that era notwithstanding, and who was also, it transpired, the incumbent Member of Parliament for the electorate of Heathcote in the East, and Lauderback’s very good friend.

  We ought to clarify that Gascoigne had made these inquiries in the service of a separate investigation—one that was not concerned with maritime insurance, or with John Hincher Garrity, in the slightest. Since the night of the 27th of January he had spent long hours in the Harbourmaster’s office, poring over old logs and old pages of the shipping news; he had worked with Löwenthal to examine all the old political bulletins in the Leader, the Otago Witness, the Daily Southern Cross, and the Lyttelton Times; and he had skimmed through all the archives at the Courthouse that pertained to George Shepard’s appointment, the temporary Police Camp, and the future gaol. He had been looking for something very particular: one thread of evidence to connect Shepard to Lauderback, or Lauderback to Crosbie Wells, or Crosbie Wells to Shepard—or perhaps, to connect all three. Gascoigne felt very sure that at least one of these possible connexions was significant to the mystery at hand. So far, however, his research had turned up nothing useful at all.

  The discovery that Godspeed was insured against extraordinary damages was no exception to this ‘nothing useful’, for Lauderback’s insurance history had no bearing upon the case of Crosbie Wells, and nor was it connected in any way to George Shepard, or to the gaol-house currently under construction. But Gascoigne did have some experience in the field of maritime insurance, as he had admitted to Francis Carver, and he had not lied in sa
ying that the subject was of some curiosity to him, being the profession of his former father-in-law, and therefore the subject of much drawing-room conversation over years past. He had made a note of Lauderback’s affiliation to the Garrity Group with interest, filing it away in his mind as something to be examined in better detail at a later time.

  Aubert Gascoigne knew that Francis Carver was a brute, and he did not care to court his friendship; he felt, however, that to get Carver on his side would be somehow valuable, and he had solicited the other man’s attention on the spit that afternoon with that purpose in mind.

  Carver was still thinking about protection and indemnity. ‘I suppose I’d need Lauderback’s consent,’ he said. ‘To lay claim to that cover. I suppose I’d need him to sign something.’

  ‘Perhaps you would,’ Gascoigne replied, ‘but the fact that only ten months have passed since Godspeed changed hands might be worth something. That might be a loophole.’ (Indeed it was.) ‘And the fact that you inherited a standard policy from Lauderback might be worth something, too: why, if you inherit the whole, you inherit its parts, do you not?’ (Indeed you do.) With a flourish Gascoigne concluded, ‘You were sailing in New Zealand waters, and if there was no dereliction on your part, as you say, then it’s very possible that you will be entitled to lay claim to those funds.’

  He had done his research well. Carver nodded, seeming impressed.

  ‘Anyway,’ Gascoigne said, sensing that the seeds of curiosity had been adequately sowed, ‘you ought to look into it. You might save yourself a great deal of money.’ He turned his cigarette over in his hand, examining its ember, to give Carver a chance to look him over unobserved.

  ‘What’s your stake in this?’ said Carver presently.

  ‘None whatsoever,’ said Gascoigne. ‘As I told you, I work for the Magistrate’s Court.’

  ‘You’ve got a friend in P&I, maybe.’

  ‘No,’ Gascoigne said. ‘I don’t. That’s not the way it works—as I’ve told you.’ He flicked the end of his cigarette onto the rocks below the beacon.

  ‘You’re just a man who tells another man about loopholes.’

  ‘I suppose I am,’ Gascoigne said.

  ‘And then strolls away.’

  Gascoigne lifted his hat. ‘I shall take that as my cue,’ he said. ‘Good afternoon—Captain …?’

  ‘Carver,’ said the former captain, shaking Gascoigne’s hand very firmly this time. ‘Frank Carver’s my name.’

  ‘And I’m Aubert Gascoigne,’ Gascoigne reminded him, with a pleasant smile. ‘I can be found at the Courthouse, should you ever need me. Well—good luck with Godspeed.’

  ‘All right,’ Carver said.

  ‘She really is a marvellous craft.’

  Gascoigne, strolling away, felt a kind of dawning wonder at himself. He kept his face forward, and did not look back—knowing that Carver’s dark eyes had followed him down the spit, and around the edge of the quay, and all the way to the southern end of Revell-street, where he turned the corner, and disappeared from view.

  Sook Yongsheng, en route to Kaniere to seek an interview with his compatriot Quee Long, was at that moment very deep in thought, his hands locked behind his back, his eyes fixed sightlessly upon the ground before him. He hardly registered the figures he passed along the roadside, nor the laden dray-carts that clattered by, nor the infrequent riders making for the gorge—every man hatless and in shirtsleeves, enjoying the pale summer sun that seemed, for its rarity, to shine with a providential, good-hearted light. The mood along the Kaniere-road was merry; through the trees there came, occasionally, a snatch of a hymn, sung unaccompanied and in unison, from one of the makeshift chapels at the inland camps. Ah Sook paid no attention. His reunion that morning with Lydia Greenway—now Lydia Wells—had deeply unsettled him, and as a kind of conciliation to his unrest he was replaying his own history in his mind—narrating the very same tale, in fact, that he had related to Ah Quee three weeks ago.

  When Francis Carver had first made his introduction to the Sook family he had been but one-and-twenty, and Ah Sook, as a boy of twelve, had very naturally looked up to him. Carver was a terse and brooding young man, born in Hong Kong to a British merchant trader, and raised at sea. He was fluent in Cantonese, though he cherished no love for China, and meant to leave that place as soon as he acquired a ship of his own—an ambition he referenced very frequently. He worked for the Kwangchow branch of the merchant firm Dent & Co., of which his father was a high-ranking official, and he was responsible for overseeing the transfer of Chinese wares to and from the export warehouses along the Pearl River. One of these warehouses was owned by Sook Yongsheng’s father, Sook Chun-Yuen.

  Sook Yongsheng understood very little about the financial operations of his father’s business. He knew that the Sook warehouse served as a liaison point for buyers, the majority of which were British merchant firms. He knew that Dent & Co. was by far the most illustrious and well connected of these firms, and that his father was very proud of this association. He knew that his father’s clients all paid for their wares in silver ore, and that this was a further point of pride for Sook Chun-Yuen; he knew also that his father hated opium, and that he held the imperial commissioner, Lin Tse-Hsu, in very high esteem. Ah Sook did not know the significance of any of these particulars; but he was a loyal son, and he accepted his father’s beliefs without comment, trusting them to be both virtuous and wise.

  In February 1839, the Sook warehouse was targeted for an imperial investigation—a fairly routine procedure, but a dangerous one, for under Commissioner Lin’s decree, any Chinese merchants harbouring opium faced the penalty of death. Sook Chun-Yuen welcomed the imperial forces into his warehouse cordially—where they discovered, hidden amongst the tea, some thirty or forty crates of opium resin, each weighing roughly fifty pounds. Sook Chun-Yuen’s protestations came to nothing. He was executed without trial, and at once.

  Ah Sook did not know what to believe. His natural trust in his father’s honesty prompted him to believe that the man had been framed, and his natural trust in his father’s acumen made him doubt that the man could have been framed. He was in two minds—but he had no time to contemplate the matter, for within a week of the execution, war broke out in Kwangchow. Fearing for his own safety, and for the safety of his mother, who had been driven near to madness with grief, Ah Sook turned to the only man he knew to trust: the young delegate from Dent & Co., Francis Carver.

  It transpired that Mr. Carver was more than happy to take on the Sook family business as a holding, and to accept all burdens of organisation and management upon himself—at least, he said, until Ah Sook’s grief had run its course, and the civil wars had quieted, or resolved themselves. In a show of kindness to the boy, Carver suggested that he might like to continue working in the export trade, in order to honour the memory of his late father, disgraced though that memory now was. If Ah Sook wished it, Carver could find work for him packing merchandise—a decent, honourable job, if menial, which would see him through the war. This proposition gratified Ah Sook extremely. Within hours of this conversation he had become Francis Carver’s employee.

  For the next fifteen years Ah Sook packed chaff around specimens of porcelain and china, wrapped bolts of printed silk in paper, stacked caddies of tea into boxes, loaded and unloaded packages, hammered the lids of shipping crates, pasted labels onto cartons, and itemised those finely wrought and purposeless objects that were termed, upon the merchandise inventories, Chinoiserie. He saw Carver only infrequently over this period, for the latter was often at sea, but their interactions, when they happened, were always cordial: it was their custom to sit upon the wharf together and share a bottle of liquor, gazing out over the estuary as the water turned from brown to blue to silver, and finally to black, whereupon Carver would rise, clap his hand upon Ah Sook’s shoulder, toss the empty bottle into the river, and depart.

  In the summer of 1854 Carver returned to Kwangchow after several months’ absence, and informed Ah Sook�
��now a man of nearly thirty years—that their agreement was finally to come to an end. His lifelong ambition to one day command a trade vessel had at last been realised: Dent & Co. was to establish a trade run to Sydney and the Victorian goldfields, and his father had chartered a handsome clipper ship, the Palmerston, on his behalf. It was a fine promotion, and one that Carver could not ignore. He had come, he said, to bid the Sook family, and this era of his life, goodbye.

  Ah Sook received Carver’s farewell with sadness. By this time his mother was dead, and the opium wars had given way to a new rebellion in Kwangchow—one that was bloody, and incensed: it promised war, and perhaps even the end of empire. Change was in the air. Once Carver was gone, the warehouse sold, and the relationship with Dent & Co. dissolved, Ah Sook would be severed from his former life completely. On impulse, he begged to be taken along. He could try his hand on the Victoria goldfields, to which place many of his countrymen had already sailed; perhaps, he said, he could forge a new life for himself there, as they had done. There was nothing left for him in China.

  Carver acquiesced to his suggestion without enthusiasm. He supposed that Ah Sook could come along, though he would be required to pay for his own ticket, and keep well out of the way. The Palmerston was scheduled to break her journey in Sydney, spending two weeks loading and unloading cargo at Port Jackson before continuing on to Melbourne in the south; during these two weeks, Ah Sook must keep to himself, and not bother Carver—henceforth styled ‘Captain’—in any way. When the Palmerston landed at Port Phillip, they would part as amicable strangers, owing nothing, expecting nothing; thenceforth, they would never see each other again. Ah Sook agreed. In a frenzy of sudden excitement, he relinquished his few possessions, changed his meagre savings into pounds, and purchased a standard ticket in the highest class of berth that Carver would permit him to occupy (third). He was, he soon discovered, the ship’s only passenger.

  The journey to Sydney passed without incident; looking back, Ah Sook remembered it only as a static, nauseated haze, slowly brightening, like the onset of a migraine. As the craft made her long approach into the wide, low throat of the harbour, Ah Sook, weak and malnourished after many weeks at sea, struggled from his berth at last, and ventured topside. The quality of the light seemed very strange to him; he felt that in China the light was thinner, whiter, cleaner. The Australian light was very yellow, and there was a thickened quality to its brightness, as though the sun were always on the point of setting, even in the morning, or at noon.