The Signature of All Things (51 page)

After the waterspouts finally passed and the sea was tranquil once more, Alma felt it had been the happiest experience of her life.

They sailed on.

To the south, distant and impossible, was icy Antarctica. To the north was nothing, apparently—or so said the bored sailors. They kept sailing west. Alma missed the pleasures of walking and the smell of soil. With no other botany around to study, she asked the men to pull up seaweed for her to examine. She did not know her seaweeds well, but she knew how to distinguish things, one from the other, and she soon learned that some seaweeds had conglomerate roots, and some had compressed. Some were textured; some were smooth. She tried to puzzle out how to preserve the seaweeds for study, without turning them into slime or black flakes of nothingness. She never really mastered it, but it gave her something to do. She was also delighted to discover that the sailors packed their harpoon tips in wads of dried moss; this gave her something wonderful and familiar to examine again.

Alma came to admire sailors. She could not imagine how they endured such long periods of time away from the comforts of land. How did they not go mad? The ocean both stunned and disturbed her. Nothing had ever put more of an impression upon her being. It seemed to her the very distillation of matter, the very masterpiece of mysteries. One night they sailed through a diamond field of liquid phosphorescence. The ship churned up strange molecules of green and purple light as it moved, until it appeared that the
Elliot
was dragging a long glowing veil behind herself, wide across the sea. It was so beautiful that Alma wondered how the men did not throw themselves into the water, drawn down to their deaths by this intoxicating magic.

On other nights, when she could not sleep, she paced the deck in her bare feet, trying to toughen up her soles for Tahiti. She saw the long reflections of stars on the calm water, shining like torches. The sky above her was as unfamiliar as the sea around her. She saw a few constellations that reminded her of home—Orion, the Pleiades—but the northern pole star was gone, and the Great Bear, too. These missing treasures from the vault of the sky caused her to feel most desperately and helplessly disoriented. But there were new gifts to be seen in the heavens, as compensation. She could see the Cross of the South now, and the Twins, and the vast, spilling nebulae of the Milky Way.

Amazed by the constellations, Alma said to Captain Terrence one night, “
Nihil astra praeter vidit et undas
.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“It’s from the Odes of Horace,” she said. “It means there is nothing to be seen but stars and waves.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know Latin, Miss Whittaker,” he apologized. “I am not a Catholic.”

One of the older sailors, who had lived in the South Seas many years, told Alma that when the Tahitians picked a star to follow for navigation, they called it their
aveia—
their god of guidance
.
But in general, he said, the more common Tahitian word for a star was
fetia.
Mars was the red star, for instance: the
fetia ura.
The morning star was the
fetia ao
: the star of light. The Tahitians were extraordinary navigators, the sailor told her with undisguised admiration. They could navigate on a starless, moonless night, he said, reckoning themselves merely by the feel of the ocean’s current. They knew sixteen different kinds of wind.

“I always wondered if they ever went to visit us in the north, before we visited them in the south,” he said. “I wonder if they came up to Liverpool or Nantucket in their canoes. Could’ve done, you know. Could’ve sailed right up there and watched us while we slept, then paddled away before we saw them. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn of it.”

So now Alma knew a few words of Tahitian. She knew
star
, and
red
,
and
light
. She asked the sailor to teach her more. He offered what he could, trying to be helpful, but mostly he only knew the nautical terms, he apologized, and all the things you say to a pretty girl.

Still they saw no whales.

The men were disappointed. They were bored and restless. The seas were hunted to depletion. The captain feared bankruptcy. Some of the sailors—the ones that Alma had befriended, anyway—wanted to show off to her their hunting skills.

“It is such a thrill as you will never know,” they promised.

Every day they looked for whales. Alma looked, too. But she never did get to see one, for they landed in Tahiti in June of 1852. The sailors went one way and Alma went the other, and that was the last she ever heard of the
Elliot.

Chapter Twenty-two

A
lma’s first glimpse of Tahiti, as seen from the deck of the
Elliot
, had been of abrupt mountain peaks rising hard into cloudless cerulean skies. She had just awoken on this fine, clear morning, and had walked onto the deck to survey her world. She was not expecting what she saw. The sight of Tahiti grabbed the breath from Alma’s chest: not its beauty, but its strangeness. All her life, she’d heard stories of this island, and she’d seen drawings and paintings, too, but still she had no idea the place would be so
tall
, so extraordinary. These mountains were nothing like the rolling hills of Pennsylvania; these were verdant and wild slopes—shockingly steep, alarmingly jagged, staggeringly high, blindingly green. Indeed, everything about the place was overdressed with green. Even right down to the beaches, it was all excessive and green. Coconut palms gave the impression of growing straight from the water itself.

It unnerved her. Here she was, quite literally in the middle of nowhere—halfway between Australia and Peru—and she could not help but wonder: Why is there an island here at all? Tahiti felt to her like an uncanny interruption of the Pacific’s vast, endless flatness—an eerie and arbitrary cathedral, thrusting up from the center of the sea for no reason at all. She had expected to view it as a kind of paradise, for that was how Tahiti had always been described. She had expected to be overcome by its beauty, to feel as though she had landed in Eden. Hadn’t Bougainville called the island La
Nouvelle Cythère, after the island of Aphrodite’s birth? But Alma’s first reaction, to be quite honest, was fear. On this bright morning, in this balmy climate, faced with the sudden appearance of this famous utopia, she was conscious of nothing but a sense of menace. She wondered, What had Ambrose made of this? She did not want to be left alone here.

But where else was she to go?

The old pacer of a ship slid smoothly into the harbor at Papeete, with seabirds of a dozen varieties spinning and wheeling about the masts faster than Alma could count or identify them. Alma and her luggage were dispatched onto the bustling, colorful wharf. Captain Terrence, quite kindly, went to see if he could hire Alma a carriage to take her to the mission settlement at Matavai Bay.

Her legs were shaky, after months at sea, and she was nearly overcome by nerves. She saw people around her of all sorts—sailors and naval officers and men of commerce, and somebody in clogs, who looked as though he might be a Dutch merchant. She saw a pair of Chinese pearl traders, with long queues down their backs. She saw natives and half-natives and who knew what else. She saw a burly Tahitian man wearing a heavy woolen pea jacket, which he had clearly acquired from a British sailor, but he wore no trousers—just a skirt of grass, and a disconcertingly nude chest beneath the jacket. She saw native women dressed in all sorts of ways. Some of the older ones quite brazenly displayed their breasts, while the younger women tended to wear long frocks, with their hair arranged in modest plaits. They were the new converts to Christianity, Alma supposed. She saw a woman wrapped in what appeared to be a tablecloth, wearing men’s European leather shoes several sizes too big for her feet, selling unfamiliar fruits. She saw a fantastically dressed fellow, wearing European trousers as a sort of jacket, with his head all aflutter in a crown of leaves. She thought him a most extraordinary sight, but no one else paid him any notice.

The native people here were bigger than the people Alma was used to. Some of the women were quite as large as Alma herself. The men were even larger. Their skin was burnished copper. Some of the men had long hair and looked frightening; others had short hair and looked civilized.

Alma saw a sad knot of prostitutes rush toward the
Elliot
’s sailors with immediate, brazen suggestions, just as soon as the men’s feet touched the dock. These women wore their hair down, reaching below their waists in
glossy black waves. From the back, they all looked the same. From the front, one could see the differences in age and beauty. Alma watched the negotiations begin. She wondered how much something like that cost. She wondered what the women offered, specifically. She wondered how long these transactions took, and where they occurred. She wondered where the sailors went if they wanted to purchase boys instead of girls. There was no sign of that sort of exchange on the dock. Probably it happened in a more discreet place.

She saw all manner of infants and children—in and out of clothes, in and out of the water, in and out of her way. The children moved like schools of fish, or flocks of birds, with every decision rendered in immediate, collective concurrence:
Now we shall jump! Now we shall run! Now we shall beg! Now we shall mock!
She saw an old man with a leg inflamed to twice its natural size. His eyes were white from blindness. She saw tiny carriages, pulled by the saddest little ponies imaginable. She saw a group of small brindled dogs tangling with each other in the shade. She saw three French sailors, arm in arm, singing lustily, drunk already on this fine morning. She saw signs for a billiards hall, and, remarkably, a printing shop. The solid land swayed beneath her feet. She was hot in the sun.

A handsome black rooster spotted Alma and marched toward her with an officious strut, as though he were an emissary dispatched to welcome her. He was so dignified that she would not have been surprised had he worn a ceremonial sash across his chest. The rooster stopped directly in front of her, magisterial and watchful. Alma nearly expected him to speak, or demand to see her documents. Not knowing what else to do, she reached down and stroked the courtly bird, as if he were a dog. Astonishingly, he allowed it. She stroked him some more, and he clucked at her in rich satisfaction. Eventually the rooster settled at her feet and fluffed out his feathers in handsome repose. He showed every sign of feeling that their interaction had gone precisely according to plan. Alma felt comforted, somehow, by this simple exchange. The rooster’s quietude and assurance helped put her at ease.

Then the two of them—bird and woman—waited together silently on the docks, waiting for whatever would happen next.

I
t was seven miles between Papeete and Matavai Bay. Alma took such pity on the poor pony who had to haul her luggage that she stepped out of the
carriage and walked along beside it. It was exquisite to use her legs after so many stagnant months at sea. The road was lovely and shaded overhead by a latticework of palms and breadfruit trees. The landscape felt both familiar and confounding to Alma. Many of the palm varieties she recognized from her father’s greenhouses, but others were mysterious concoctions of pleated leaves and slippery, leathery bark. Having known palms only in greenhouses, Alma had never before
heard
palm trees. The sound of the wind through their fronds was like rustling silk. Sometimes, in the stronger gusts, their trunks creaked like old doors. They were all so loud and alive. As for the breadfruit trees, they were grander and more elegant than she would ever have imagined. They looked like the elms of home: glossy and magnanimous.

The carriage driver—an old Tahitian man with a disturbingly tattooed back and a well-oiled chest—was perplexed by Alma’s insistence on walking. He seemed to fear this meant he wouldn’t be paid. To reassure him, she tried to pay him halfway to their destination. This brought only more confusion. Captain Terrence had negotiated a price beforehand, but that arrangement now looked to be void. Alma offered payment in American coins, but the man attempted to make change for her from a handful of dirty Spanish piastres and Bolivian pesos. Alma could not figure out how he was possibly calculating this currency exchange, until she realized he was trading in his dull old coins for her shiny new ones.

She was deposited in a fringe of shade under a banana grove in the middle of the mission settlement at Matavai Bay. The carriage driver stacked her luggage into a tidy pyramid; it looked just as it had looked seven months earlier, outside the carriage house at White Acre. Left alone, Alma took in her surroundings. It was a pleasant enough situation here, she thought, though more modest than she had imagined. The mission church was a humble little structure, whitewashed and thatched, surrounded by a small cluster of similarly whitewashed and thatched cottages. There couldn’t have been more than a few dozen people altogether living there.

The community, such as it was, was built along the banks of a small river that let out straight into the sea. The river bisected the beach, which was long and curved, and formed of dense, black, volcanic sand. Because of the color of the sand, the bay here was not the shining turquoise one normally associates with the South Seas; instead it was a stately, heavy, slow-rolling
inlet of ink. A reef about three hundred yards out kept the surf fairly calm. Even from this distance, Alma could hear the waves smashing against that distant reef. She took up a handful of the sand—the color of soot—and let it pour through her fingers. It felt like warm velvet, and it left her fingers clean.

“Matavai Bay,” she said aloud.

She could scarcely believe she was here. All the great explorers of the last century had been here. Wallis had been here, and Vancouver, and Bougainville. Captain Bligh had spent six months camped on this very beach. Most impressive of all, to Alma’s mind, was that this was the same beach where Captain Cook had first landed in Tahiti, in 1769. To Alma’s left, in the near distance, was the high promontory where Cook had observed the transit of Venus—that vital movement of a tiny black planetary disc across the face of the sun, which he had traveled across the world to witness. The gentle little river to Alma’s right had once marked the last boundary in history between the Tahitians and the British. Directly after Cook’s landfall, the two peoples had stood on the opposite sides of this stream, regarding each other with wary curiosity for several hours. The Tahitians thought the British had sailed out of the sky, and that their huge, impressive ships were islands—
motu—
that had broken loose from the stars
.
The English tried to determine if these Indians would be aggressive or dangerous. The Tahitian women came right to the edge of the river and teased the English sailors on the other side with playful, provocative dances. There seemed to be no danger here, decided Captain Cook, and he let his men loose upon the girls. The sailors exchanged iron nails with the women for sexual favors. The women took the nails and planted them in the ground, hoping to grow more of this precious iron, as one would grow a tree from a sprig.