The Poisoned Island (35 page)

John Harriott’s memoirs,
Struggles Through Life
, were published in 1808 to the general approval of his friends and the general indifference of everyone else. He had tussled with the book for years, until it began to serve as a metaphor for the life it set out to describe: an enormous undertaking, almost a backbreaking one, begun with little understanding of its size or its likely effect on him or his family, which then became an ordeal in its own right, such that the act of finishing the damned thing became more important than the thing itself. Such has been John Harriott’s life, and such was the document of it.

By the time he’d reached the end of this mighty effort, he was out of energy and desire. He could manage only two pages at the very finish in which to encapsulate his philosophy, such as it was. In the four years since he published the memoirs he has begun to feel this to be an opportunity squandered. So he has been working on another book,
which he has called
The Religion of Philosophy
and which has attracted some interest from printers in the City. In that book he has tried to expand on the sketched personal philosophy outlined in the
Struggles
:

The greatest pageantry or show, that human magnificence can exhibit, would not tempt me to any particular exertion to view it; yet I would still toil in any cause of humanity, or climb up a burning mountain to view any great operation of Nature, as enlarging my views, and giving new energies to my adoration of the Great Omnipotent.

In others words, John Harriott has ceased to struggle in the world of Money, but is still prepared to take on the world in the cause of Humanity. Sitting above him he still sees a Creator, the Great Omnipotent, but this deity is one increasingly distant from him, as are the liturgies and rituals of the churches, established or otherwise. He has flirted with ending his own life in recent times, such has been his exhausted capacity for despair, and a man who has contemplated his own self-inflicted doom has little truck with the apocalyptic rules of an established church.

To put it yet another way: Harriott still has need of Heaven, but has no belief in Hell.

Of all the types of churchmen he has come across, Harriott finds missionaries the most perplexing. Like most Englishmen, he had followed with interest the establishment of the London Missionary Society towards the end of the last century. He’d felt a definite pride, again like most Englishmen, when that Society sent its first shipload of missionaries to the East. But these were patriotic feelings, not spiritual or evangelical ones. John Harriott is a man who has lived with
Indians, who still dreams of a certain squaw and the way the North American sunlight fell on her long, shining hair. Such a man cannot believe in the damnation of pagans, as missionaries must believe, and thus cannot entirely believe in any personal duty to bring the Word of God to them. These savages are God’s creation as much as he is; that is John Harriott’s view. They celebrate the Great Omnipotent as much as any bishop.

All this informs his reaction to the revelation that the odd young man from Otaheite is not, in fact, the natural son of the most famous missionary archetype of them all, Henry Nott. He must now look at the young man in a new light. He had thought he understood this so-called Nott’s strange intensity and fervor, because he thought it came from a spiritual source. The discovery that the man’s demons may be of a more earthly stripe makes him rather more interesting to John Harriott.

Harriott rides in Graham’s carriage back to Bow Street. The atmosphere in the carriage is quiet and even elegiac, as if the two magistrates are in mourning for their former friendship but still have hopes of establishing a new one. Neither is exactly angry any longer. Harriott’s months-old resentment of his friend has been burned out by his explosion in Wapping. Graham was upset so much by what Harriott had said that it has caused him to look in upon himself in a way he normally tries to avoid. Thus both men are pondering their inner selves on the ride west from Wapping, like two overdressed philosophers.

Peter Nott has not been precisely incarcerated in Bow Street, but he is being watched. Graham had taken him from his house in Queen Street to the Police Office, where an officer kept watch on him during Graham’s visit to Wapping.
When the two magistrates arrive back at Graham’s office, Nott sees Harriott and springs from his seat to protest.

“Mr. Graham, sir, why is this man here? This is a matter between you and myself. Is there no privilege between a client and his representative?”

Graham bridles at that, even as he takes off his hat and moves behind his desk.

“Nott, I am by no means your
representative
. I am a magistrate of the King, as is Mr. Harriott here. And you remain implicated in a series of vicious murders. You have still given no good account of your presence at the deaths in Rotherhithe. If you want my help—and I am by no means assuring you that I can or will give it—then I suggest you moderate your temper, and tell Mr. Harriott here what you told me this afternoon. Leave no detail out.”

Nott’s face looks perplexed, and Harriott recalls the sympathy he felt towards him in Coldbath Fields. The man is such a confused bag of passions.

“But much of what I told you was highly personal!”

“If you wish me to arrest you, Nott, and return you to Coldbath Fields on a charge I will do so,” says Harriott. “You are obstructing our investigations, and I will have no more of it.”

Nott frowns that frustrated little frown again, the one Harriott had seen in the prison the previous Saturday, and sits himself back down.

“Well then,” says Graham. “Harriott, please take a seat. Nott, please speak. Myself and Mr. Harriott may interrupt with questions. Proceed.”

Nott looks at Harriott, still with that same look of frustration Harriott can remember in the faces of his own children when they were on the boundary between childhood and adulthood. And yet this man must be twenty-five or more.
Finally, resignation falls into the childlike man’s eyes, and he begins to speak.

“I told you, Mr. Harriott, that my father is the missionary, Henry Nott. And this is true—Nott is my father. But he is an adopted one. When he came to Otaheite, he discovered me living in poverty with my mother, a native of the island. He saw instantly that I was of mixed parentage—a half-breed. My mother told him my father was an English sailor who had been on the island ten years before, a man she called Peter and after whom she’d named me.”

“You had no memory of your English father?” asks Harriott.

“Impressions, sir, that is all. I was barely an infant when he was taken away, as my mother told me.”

“Taken away?”

“Yes, sir. I am coming to that.”

Nott looks as miserable as a man can look. He speaks to Graham.

“May I have some water, Mr. Graham? I am confoundedly thirsty.”

Graham calls an attendant and tells him to fetch water, then nods at Nott to continue.

“Over the months that followed, Henry Nott spent a great deal of time with me. He taught me the English language and the catechism, and he often said to me I was the great experiment of the English mission, an attempt to prove that a native could learn English and become a good Christian. His fellow missionaries disapproved somewhat, I think. They were uncomfortable with my . . . well, perhaps we should call it my personal history. They questioned Mr. Nott’s relationship with my mother. There had been some unpleasantness early on in the mission when one of their number had professed
his love for a native woman, and they’d expelled him from their community. I think the other missionaries were worried that Mr. Nott might follow the same path.”

The attendant returns with some water, which he places down in front of Peter Nott. The young man takes a swig from the glass, and returns to his story.

“They need have had no worries about Mr. Nott. He was as firm and unyielding as an old breadfruit tree. He showed no interest in my mother. To her shame and mine she did offer herself to him. All his interest was in me and me alone. He was delighted with my progress, and I began to accompany him on his trips around the island, when he attempted to preach to the islanders.

“It was a difficult time for the missionaries. The old king and his son had no interest in the Christian religion, and still practiced the old ways: sorcery, taboos, human sacrifice, all were still common on the islands. These have been dark years for Otaheite, Mr. Harriott. The population has collapsed. Many have died from diseases brought by the Europeans, and not all those diseases were carried by the act of . . . of fornication. Some were carried in other ways. All were lethal.

“Henry Nott believed the islanders could be converted, and he saw me as the first convert, the first savage on the island to come to the Lord. But of course I was a blank page. I wasn’t even ten years old when he began teaching me. I did believe in the Christian stories he told me, and more than once I felt the Holy Spirit moving through me. My mother was terribly upset. She felt I was being stolen from her. And, eventually, I was.

“When I was about twelve, Henry Nott came to my mother with a proposition. He wanted to adopt me, to make me his son. He believed I would never become a true Christian while
living in her hut by the beach. He wanted me to come into the Christian mission and be a permanent part of it. He had not spoken of it to me, and she initially resisted with awful rage. But then he offered her currency. He brought nails and even tools to her, and she saw that these could make her rich and powerful and then she acquiesced. Henry Nott bought me, and I became his son.”

Nott’s hand shakes as he picks up the water glass and drinks from it. His eyes are wet. Whatever his feelings towards missionaries, and however difficult he’d found this young man in recent days, Harriott feels a yawning sadness for him. He’d seen this kind of thing before—the strange half-life of the half-breed, caught between two worlds, native to neither and alien to both. And what an extreme example of the type Peter Nott is: a Christian savage with two fathers, abandoned by one, converted by the other.

“I never saw my mother again. The missionaries never really accepted me. But I lived with Henry Nott. He continued to teach me, and from that point on I began to think of myself as English, whatever the other English thought of me.

“Yet I always knew Nott was not my real father. My mother had spoken of
that
father many, many times. She said he had come from England on a great ship years before, and that this ship had taken from the island a great quantity of breadfruit. She said the ship had left but had then returned, and that some of the men from the ship had decided to stay on the island, and that the others had left again. My father was one of the ones who had stayed.”

Harriott looks at Graham, and the Covent Garden magistrate nods silently and then holds up a hand and points to Nott.
Wait. Hear it all
.

“She said she had two years with my father, and she talked
of those two years as if she’d been in Paradise, though God forgive me for the blasphemy. Otaheite is not Paradise, despite what you may have been told. Sometimes I think it is . . . well, sometimes I think it has more of the other place than it has of Paradise. At the end of that two years, my mother said another ship came from England, and men from the ship came and found my father and took him away. She never saw him again.

“I told this story to Henry Nott as soon as I had the words for it, so I must have still been a young child. I remember he was much taken with it. It became like a puzzle for him, and one night he came to me and told me that he believed my father’s name was Peter Heywood, and that he was a bad man, and he taught me a new word:
mutiny
. He said the ship which came to the island was called the
Bounty
, and that the men on that ship had taken against their captain—that’s when he taught me the new word—and put him off the boat, that they’d come back to Otaheite and some had stayed. He said my father was taken away two years later on a boat called
Pandora
, and that he had been hanged.”

“He lied!” says Harriott, astonished at the missionary’s behavior.

“Yes, Mr. Harriott. He lied. But I only found that out much later.”

“How?”

“A ship came from New South Wales, I think it must have been seven or eight years ago. I remember it was called the
Porpoise
. She was on her way back to England. I spoke to several of the crew and I told one of them that my father was Peter Heywood, the dead mutineer. And this man laughed and told me, no, Peter Heywood is not dead, he was pardoned by the King himself, and is once again a Navy man, alive and thriving.

“I confronted my father with this story, shouting and crying and disrespectful, and I remember he hit me and I remember what he said when he did so: ‘You are my son now, Peter, not Heywood’s. The man is a rascal and a devil and a mutineer. No boy should want a man such as he as a father.’

“But I became determined that one day I should meet my father. My
real
father. I was a dutiful son to Henry Nott and a dutiful missionary. I stayed with him in Otaheite even when many of the other missionaries fled to New South Wales, when the fighting between tribes on the island became fierce and dangerous. But I dreamed of coming to England and of finding my father. I think Henry Nott knew of these dreams, and it saddened him, but the man is made of such firm unyielding stuff that he never said a word.