A Watery Grave (6 page)

Knowing all that did not make George feel any less impatient, however. The satchel sat on the table between them like doom, but he could not open it until the talkative young fellow had gone. When at last he went, George ushered him to the gangway with a briskness that was positively impolite, ran below, tore open the satchel and the envelope within, read the contents with growing consternation and rage, and stamped back up to deck.

“We have to remain behind for the convenience of Mr. Tristram Stanton,” he exclaimed to Wiki, who was leaning on the taffrail and looking somewhat more respectable, having changed into dry dungarees and tied his long hair into a ponytail. “We have orders to hang about until his wife is buried, his affairs are settled, and his dunnage is stowed on board. Then we do our best to catch up with the fleet; otherwise, the rendezvous is Madeira. Why
us,
for the sake of Jehovah, why
us?
”

“And why Stanton?” said Wiki slowly, his blue eyes narrow crescents under eyebrows that curled down.

“What do you mean?”

“I'm sure they could have found a replacement—you're always assuring me that any ambitious scientific would kill for the chance to come along on this voyage.”

“Oh, Tristram Stanton and Wilkes are great cronies,” Rochester assured him. “Wilkes, as an astronomical fellow himself, wanted to do it all on his own—everyone knows that it is the scientifics who are going to reap the glory of the enterprise, not the officers of the expedition. But the department was determined there should be a civilian astronomer on board the flagship, and so Wilkes finally gave in, though he declared he would only accept Stanton because they are as thick as thieves with their lenses and chronometers—and so we hang about here until the soft soap and palaver is over and Stanton's wife is safely interred. And where the devil am I going to put him, I ask you? Not to mention his traps.”

There were just three small private rooms on the brig—the captain's cabin, where George lived, along with the five chronometers Wilkes had ordered him to carry; a small stateroom for Ernest Erskine; and another for Wiki who, as a civilian and a scientific, was entitled to a sleeping room of his own.

Wiki shrugged. “I'll shift to the fo'c'sle. After all,” he added with a touch of malice, “you wished me to come along on this great venture on account of my seamanship, not because of my talent with words.”

This, Rochester was forced to admit, was true. Shipping Wiki as the expedition's linguister had been a last-ditch measure, as his original plan had been that Wiki should come along on the expedition as one of the seamen. This was because Wiki was one of the finest mariners afloat—or so George reckoned. It was a gift his friend owed to the sea apprenticeship he had chosen.

The inevitable horrible confrontation with George's grandparents and Mrs. Coffin at the end of their Connecticut River adventure had led to both sets consenting to allow the boys to follow their ambitions and go to sea. In fact, Mrs. Coffin had been so relieved to get quit of her husband's bastard that she had provided a decently filled sea chest when he'd signed onto the crew of a Nantucket whaler—a deliberate choice because Wiki's aim was to explore the far reaches of the Pacific his mother's people had described in song and story, and spouters were famous for poking their noses into the remotest islands possible.

What Wiki hadn't expected was that he would dislike the whaling business so much and that the slow hunt for the prey would be so unbearably tedious. To make up for this, he had become a confirmed deserter, absconding when his ship arrived at an island he wanted to explore and then shipping on another when he was ready. According to the stories he'd told George, this was easier than it sounded. Spouter masters were used to losing their men on the beach because whalemen jumped ship all the time, and they were just as accustomed to filling the holes in their crew from the stock of destitute seamen on the beach, so his behavior had not been considered particularly eccentric.

There had been other advantages to the spouter trade. While whalemen might have lacked loyalty to their ships and their captains, they were consummate seamen, both on deck and in boats. And while their methods might be harsh, they surely knew how to pass on their remarkable skills. Within a month of shipping, Wiki had learned how to box the compass; heave the lead; haul out an earring; strap a block; and hand, reef, and steer; yet still his education wasn't finished. Six months later, not only could he heave a harpoon and steer a whaleboat, but if the ship was wind-bound on a lee shore, in a place where it was too deep to anchor and impossible to either tack or wear, he knew exactly how to take in after sails, haul everything hard aback, and boxhaul the vessel safely out of trouble. Two months after that, and he had learned how to jump ship without being caught.

Because of this free and easy attitude, he and George had met up remarkably often over the intervening years, getting together in a dozen ports both American and foreign to pick up the conversation where they had dropped it last and exchange rousing tales about their exploits. Now George recalled anecdotes of many a forecastle experience, and he mused that his friend's offer to give over his stateroom to astronomer Stanton made a lot of sense.

The
Swallow
forecastle held just nine seamen—stalwart fellows, Rochester thought, though he meditated uncomfortably that they were as jaded and dissatisfied as the rest of the expedition's sailors. In contrast to the officers and scientifics, who were burning with enthusiasm for the adventure ahead, the ordinary navy hands were in a pessimistic mood, one and all being cynically certain that it was their superiors who would reap the high honors, never the humble but patriotic tar. Also, they were tired to death of being kept on call at Norfolk while the politicians and the navy department folk quarreled about the disposition of the expedition. Some had been waiting as long as five years.

But Wiki knew how to take care of himself, George decided, so he said, “I'd be obliged if you would move to the fo'c'sle,” feeling rather more sunny about life. Then he wandered off to his own cabin to luxuriate in the trappings of being a captain, ignore the pile of paperwork that awaited on his desk, and wind all those chronometer clocks.

Wiki took his sea chest down the forecastle ladder and then stood surveying his new situation with his fists propped on his belt. The forecastle, the abode of the common seamen of the ship, was in the bows, underneath the part of the foredeck where the windlass and the cook's kitchen were set. It was a dark and damp space that smelled of rusty chain and old rope and would be very noisy when the
Swallow
was smashing her nose through rough seas. She had been a sealer at some stage in her checkered past, deduced Wiki, because this sailors' dormitory was fitted out with six double tiers of wooden bunks instead of being supplied with hooks for hammocks, navy-style. They were hulking, clumsy affairs, which cast black shadows that shifted in the flickering light from a single, smoky tallow lamp, and from these shadows five hostile pairs of eyes met his. The only reason there were not nine pairs of eyes was that the starboard watch was on deck, on duty.

From his week of trawling the taverns of Norfolk while waiting for the brig to arrive, Wiki knew he was in trouble. For a start, seamen were traditionally slow to accept strangers. Also, morale was low. The notorious waterfront street of the port—known to sailors the world over as the “River of Styx”—might have been thronged with a cosmopolitan lot of all nations mixed up together, eating, drinking, singing, dancing, gambling, quarreling, and fighting; but whatever their race or culture, they were united in their dislike of this expedition. Contrarily insular despite choosing a life spent at sea, the general opinion of these sailors was that it was a scandal that America should be exploring the Pacific when so much of America itself had not been properly looked at yet. And, as everyone knew, a similar expedition that had set out nine years before had failed ignominiously because so many of the sailors had run away it was impossible to sail the ships.

Since then the seamen who had been waiting for another expedition to be pulled together had watched ship after ship tested in the waters off Norfolk and fail the sea trials. The vessels that were finally assembled were no better than the discards, in the general opinion. Compared to great ships of the line like the
Constitution,
where a lot of them had lived while all this was going on,
Vincennes
and
Peacock
were shamefully small. The
Peacock
might have been painted up to impress lubbers like President Van Buren, but all the varnish in the world could not disguise her wretched condition. Everyone knew that the storeship
Relief
was a dog, while not only were the
Flying Fish
and the
Sea Gull
ridiculously small for a voyage around the world but they had seen rough careers as pilot boats, herding merchantmen from Sandy Hook to New York Harbor. And the
Swallow
—well, she might be very pretty, but in truth she was nothing better than a pirate.

Worst of all, Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones, a hot-tempered but thoroughgoing seaman they had all respected, had resigned the command of the expedition. Then a junior lieutenant had been given the job because no senior officer was willing to take it—a junior lieutenant who was notorious as a martinet. The stories of his harsh treatment were legion. They had all heard about the good young fellows who for the most trivial of reasons had been flogged so hard that the fabric of their shirts and trousers had been beaten into the cruel wounds, so that the victims were forced for weeks to pick threads out of the scars. Now the
Swallow
men were all stinging from the long-winded slurs on their appearance and their reputation they had been forced to stand and hark to that very afternoon—and they knew who to blame for it, this upstart Kanaka, that's who. In Portsmouth he had delayed them in an unseemly fashion, first by getting himself arrested for murder and then by bathing himself in the river. Worse still, he was a crony of the captain's and without a doubt the captain's spy.

Wiki, who knew exactly what was going through their heads, quenched a sigh as he looked around for an empty wooden bunk. He would vastly prefer a berth that ran fore-and-aft, so he would not be jerked out of bed every time the brig pitched, and one on the top tier so he could be sure of not having a sea boot planted on his sleeping face as some sailor clambered in or out of the bunk above. There was a spare berth that fitted both specifications, but he knew it was the wrong moment to claim it. Instead, he left his sea chest in a corner, went back on deck, and climbed aloft to reeve off some running gear. The reckoning, he estimated, would come in the dogwatch, the time in the early evening when all the hands were off duty.

He was right. He was leaning on the windlass quietly digesting his supper when he was approached by the other Polynesian in the crew, a huge Samoan whose beautifully tattooed thighs were the size of tree trunks. They introduced themselves in the traditional way, in the Samoan language, traded a few insults, and then settled the disagreement with a bout of wrestling, Polynesian fashion. Wiki came off very much the worst but told himself, as he winced every time he turned over in his berth that night, that he had deliberately let the big Samoan win. After that he stood watches like the rest and took up all the ordinary duties of a seaman, too, knowing without a scrap of doubt that his forecastle companions would make his life very difficult indeed if he was not perceived to be pulling his weight. He kept alert, particularly when working in the rigging, knowing that it would only take a stamp on a footrope to send him crashing down to the deck. However, by the time the boat arrived to deliver Tristram T. Stanton to the ship, he felt relaxed enough to join Captain Rochester on the quarterdeck.

The brig was now floating in solitary splendor. The expedition fleet had been delayed by a gale off Chesapeake Bay but had finally got away on the seventeenth, accompanied by a great deal of signal flying and rolling salutes from both ships and shore that had blanketed the harbor with smoke. Because of the emptiness of the anchorage, the boat was in plain view for much of its approach. Wiki could see Tristram Stanton in the stern sheets, his brown hair flopping in the breeze, boxes and bundles packed all around him. More dunnage, to add to the steady stream of crates and boxes that had been coming on board the brig and filling up his erstwhile stateroom, he wryly perceived. Then, somewhat to his consternation, he recognized the burly figure of the sheriff.

“That reminds me of a question I meant to ask you, old boy,” said Rochester thoughtfully, as he lowered his spyglass.

The afternoon light was hard and bright, bouncing off the water. Wiki scowled at Rochester. “What?”

“That duel.”

“What about that duel?”

“You must have appointed a second—you have to have a second in a duel. Or maybe you didn't know that?”

“Of course I know that,” said Wiki, somewhat snappishly, not enjoying the reminder of his humiliation. The boat was very close now, the headsman reaching out to catch one of the falls that dangled down from the davits. “Jim Powell was in the tavern, too, so I invited him to stand by me.”

“Powell? Not the Powell who came to the Pierce place after a message from Stanton?”

“The same man.”

“But that's odd! I do think you could've chosen better—he's not the most reliable of men, you know; the whole fleet considers him an infamous liar, as well as a gambler and a drunk. And as your friend,” Rochester said reproachfully as the boat clicked against the side of the brig, “I would have expected to have been invited.”

“To be my second?” said Wiki, and laughed. It was a contagious giggle, the characteristic laugh of the Pacific. Rochester often thought that Wiki's laugh was the one part of his Polynesian side that would never give way to his American half.