This Thing Of Darkness (75 page)

FitzRoy did not reply. Both of them knew the answer perfectly well.

The Queen continued: ‘The men of Paamotu are warlike, Fitirai. I cannot make them do my bidding. When my husband the King was alive, it was different. His word was law. But the men of Paamotu will not do the bidding of a woman. Pomare is my husband’s family name. My name was once Aimatta. I took my husband’s name when he died, but I am not strong like the true Pomare. If I command the men of Paamotu to pay, they will fight rather than obey me.’

‘You understand, Your Majesty, what will happen if payment is not made? There will be many ships, big ships with cannon. A harsh punishment will be exacted. I wish it were not so but — ’

‘I can see that it is not your wish, Fitarai. I know the money must be paid. We have no choice. My people are but weak children. We often expect to see our island taken from us, and ourselves driven off.’

‘Your Majesty ... I assure you - Great Britain has an extent of territory far greater than is sufficient for her wishes. Conquest is not her object. I come here only in search of justice.’ The word ‘justice’ tasted like ash on his tongue.

‘We wish to do our duty, Fitarai. But I do not possess two thousand eight hundred dollars. This is a huge sum of money. Pray excuse me while I speak with my chiefs.’

FitzRoy withdrew, and a small deputation of the Queen’s advisers was summoned from the back of the church. A period of hushed consultation followed, before he was called back.

‘I have decided, Fitirai. You shall have all the money in the royal coffer. The people of Papiete shall pay the rest.’

FitzRoy was aghast.

‘But Your Majesty, the innocent natives of Otaheite ought not to suffer for the misdeeds of the Low Islanders. This is not justice.’

One of the chiefs answered on her behalf. ‘The honour of the Queen is our honour. We will share her difficulties. We have determined to unite in her cause, and pay the fine demanded by the
manua.’

The Queen fixed her sad gaze upon FitzRoy. ‘My name, Aimatta. In our language, it means “the eater of eyes”. There was a time when my people ate the flesh of other people. The men of Great Britain have brought the word of God to these islands, and have replaced the old ways with God’s law, which must be obeyed. The law of Great Britain, they tell me, is God’s law. So if it is written in God’s law that we must pay, then we must pay.’

‘Your Majesty ... I thank you profoundly, in the name of King William and all my countrymen, for your wisdom and generosity. I hope Your Majesty and all the chiefs of Tahiti will do me the great honour of visiting the
Beagle
, and allowing my officers and crew to entertain you before we go off to England.’

‘Thank you, Fitirai. You are a kind man. I accept your invitation.’

The Queen smiled and inclined her head, and the various chiefs followed suit. FitzRoy felt only a burning sense of shame.

 

The following day a trestle table, knocked together quickly by May, was set up in the lee of the church, just by the main door, where the big square bastion of Anglicanism blocked out the light of the rising sun. A strongbox sat on the tablecloth in front of Lieutenant Sulivan, and a ledger lay before Lieutenant Wickham. An armed marine stood guard to either side, while FitzRoy paced about in an agitated frame of mind. A line of Tahitians queued to make their contributions, male and female, young and old, some virtually naked, some in their ill-fitting European clothes. There were elderly, stooped men clutching clay pots containing their life savings. There were small children, single coins clasped sweatily in their palms. Many of the islanders who had sold livestock and historical artefacts at the impromptu market on the
Beagle’s
maindeck were present, returning the coins they had accumulated so assiduously that day.

‘Dash it, sir, this is rotten,’ said Sulivan bitterly. ‘Absolutely rotten.’

‘It’s a confounded filthy matter,’ Wickham agreed, his jaw set tight. ‘I didn’t join the Service to go about the world stripping good Christian nations bare in this pinchbeck manner.’

‘You do not need to tell me, gentlemen,’ said FitzRoy with a scowl. Anger and embarrassment fought to overwhelm his customary good manners. Savagely, he kicked a stone into the grass.

‘I feel like one of the moneylenders in the temple,’ complained Sulivan.

I was brought up to obey orders,
FitzRoy told himself.
To do my duty. But increasingly I am being given orders that do not tally with natural justice - with God’s justice. Orders that I cannot in all conscience accord with. These people should be helped to found a decent, God-fearing society — not plundered, as if the Royal Navy were little better than pirates. Little better, even, than General Rosas
.

 

After four hours’ march, the width of the ravine scarcely exceeded that of the bed of the stream, and near-vertical walls of volcanic lava a thousand feet high hemmed in the party on either side. Yet in the soft, porous rock, splashed by innumerable waterfalls and warmed by the steaming, humid climate, ferns, small trees, wild bananas and trailing plants sprang from every ledge or crevice. Using dead tree trunks as ladders, clambering up rock chimneys and knife-edge ridges, and employing ropes where necessary, they inched their way up the gorge. Darwin had scaled mightier mountains than this, but none so precarious or precipitous. Finally, after several hours of sweat-drenched effort, they hauled themselves out on to a cool, windswept plateau at the head of a waterfall. The view was spectacular.

‘Good Lord, Covington — what I would forfeit for a cold beer!’ he gasped, forgetting for the hundredth time that his remarks were falling literally upon deaf ears; not, he mused, that the response would have been very different in former days.

‘Beer, very good!’ giggled Hitote, one of the Tahitian guides. ‘But no tell missionary!’ He put one finger to his lips.

It was hard to see, up here, what they would do for food or shelter. The Tahitians had been insistent about the futility of lugging supplies up to the heights, particularly with regard to the delicately mooted suggestion of bringing an entire bed. Surely, now, they would have to furnish a miracle?

Furnish a miracle they did, however - constructing an entire house in a matter of minutes from bamboo-stems and banana-leaves, bound together with strips of bamboo-bark. Then, producing a small net from his loincloth, Hitote dived into the stream above the waterfall, flashing back and forth through the water like an otter, before emerging with a wriggling netful of tiny fish and freshwater prawns. A wild lily-root, sweet as treacle, would serve as pudding. A fire was lit, the dinner was cooked, grace was said, and finally the party fell upon their feast.

Shading the banks of the stream were the dark, knotted stems of a plant Darwin had not seen before, each leaf a sultry green ace of spades. ‘What is that plant, Hitote?’

The Tahitian grinned conspiratorially.
‘Ava.
Very good. Chew
ava
, see many strange things, feel good. When missionaries find
ava
, they burn it. Missionaries say is devil’s plant.
Ava
only left now in mountains. You want try?’

Purely in the spirit of scientific enquiry, Darwin accepted a slice after dinner. He found it acrid and unpleasant on the tongue, but before long a sense of well-being crept over him. He and Hitote sat out on the grass before the cliff-edge, gazing down upon the lavish sweep of the landscape, watching the play and interplay of colour, outline and shape as the sun’s slanting rays and the gentle mountain breezes set the leaves dancing with each other, not just seeing but
feeling
the radiance of God’s universe as its beauty swept over them. Darwin’s eyes followed the course of the stream down the valley to Point Venus: there, opposite the stream’s outflow, was a break in the encircling reef, where the
Beagle
lay at anchor, her officers no doubt carrying out depth-sounding experiments on the coral. Tiny men on a tiny boat, lost in a vista that he alone could see in its entirety, that he alone had the vision to encompass.

For years, men had thought that coral reefs grew up thousands of feet from the sea bed. Then Lyell, not unreasonably pointing out that coral cannot live below ten fathoms, had postulated that it grew instead from the rims of submerged volcanoes that were themselves rising from the seabed. His was the very latest theory on coral atolls. Lyell, however, had no answer to the reefs that fringed the Pacific’s tropical coasts. Why was there a line of coral along the shore, then a further wall of it, half a mile off the beach? Lyell did not know. None of them knew. For Darwin, floating high above them all, the pieces of the universe suddenly seemed to fit together, as if part of a gigantic jigsaw. For if there was dead coral below the ten-fathom mark, then it must once have grown in the light zone nearer the surface. The coral was not
rising
, or it would have been pushed clean out of the water, like the sea beaches he had seen high in the Andes. The coral was
falling.
As it fell below ten fathoms each little creature died, while its fellows above struggled to grow back towards the surface. Coral atolls were the rims of volcanoes that had
sunk
below the surface. The fringing reef? Why, the fringing reef marked the line of an old beach, thrust suddenly below the surface - that was why there was a break in it, opposite the mouth of the stream, and opposite every stream, because the freshwater torrent would have cut through it in the days when it lined the shore. Coral was a shore creature. The coral out on the reef had suddenly found itself marooned in open water following the descent of the land, the Pacific falling as the Andes rose into the clouds.

Darwin lay back in the grass, a sense of profound relaxation stealing over him, while his mind floated away, high above their little eyrie, high above the limpid shallows of the lagoon and the dark, heaving waters of the ocean beyond.

 

‘I have to hand it to you, Philos — you’re a deuced marvel! You really do take the palm for deduction.’

‘Well, I must confess, I did have a little ... help.’

FitzRoy and Darwin had squeezed into the latter’s cabin, the library shelves crammed not just with books these days, but with snakes and insects in jars, armadillo shells, stuffed birds and lizards, all the accoutrements of a natural-history museum in miniature. Darwin, who had outlined his theory of reef formation to FitzRoy, sat at the chart table, examining a section of live coral beneath his microscope.

‘I could not swear to it,’ he pronounced, ‘but it appears to reproduce — asexually. There are similar creatures by the shore at Edinburgh. I used to wade through the shallows of Leith harbour with Professor Grant. “Zoophytes”, he called them, plants that reproduce by releasing free-swimming eggs.’

‘If it released an egg, how could it be a plant?’

‘Well, like the coral, it is a creature so close to both categories that one could happily place it in either. They are animals
arranged
as plants.’

Both men sensed where the conversation might be headed. Professor Grant, scourge of the late unlamented McCormick, was a follower of Lamarck. Tiny sea creatures arranged as plants afforded perhaps the only real ammunition for the transmutationists as to the origins of animal life.

‘It is a fine evening. Shall we take a stroll upon the deck?’

Darwin readily agreed to FitzRoy’s diversion, and folded away his microscope. The pair walked out on to the maindeck, sidestepping a huddle of giant tortoises conspiratorially mulching a mound of green leaves, and headed for the starboard rail, where they stood in silence and drank in the view. The coconut palms lining the shore cut jet-black silhouettes into the purple evening sky. A loose-limbed youth was shinning with no apparent difficulty up one of the featureless tree trunks. Along the beach, a line of little cooking-fires blazed, putting FitzRoy in mind of the bonfires of Tierra del Fuego. Was it only a year and a half since they had braved the thundering seas and lashing rain of South America’s wild tip, and gained admittance to that isolated, mysterious world, primitive man’s last true kingdom on earth? It seemed like a lifetime ago. There the dogs had barked, the drums had beaten out their primal tattoo, and the surf had curled unchecked against the rocky shore. Here, the flames were reflected in the mirror of the lagoon, glittering like gems, and in their glow little children played, or sat in companionable circles singing sweet-voiced hymns, melodious and clear.

‘What an opportunity for writing love-letters,’ mused Darwin. ‘Oh, that I had a sweet Virginia to send an inspired epistle to!’

 

The next evening, every one of the ship’s boats was hoisted out and dispatched, under the reliable command of Mr Stokes, to ferry Queen Pomare and her retinue to the
Beagle
. May had rigged up a jury-cradle, so that Her gracious but undeniably weighty Majesty could be lifted aboard with all due dignity. A salute could not be fired, of course, for fear of disturbing the chronometers, but the ship was dressed with flags, and the crew sent into the yards to stand to attention and give Her Majesty a rousing three cheers as she rose slowly from the cutter. The poop deck had been cleared of tortoises, and a long table had been laid with linen, silverware and candles. So many years into the voyage, the fare was of necessity extremely simple, and FitzRoy thought it no meal to put before a queen; he was conscious throughout of trying his damnedest to compensate for the shabby way in which she had been treated. But there were fireworks after the meal: every rocket, blue light and false-fire to be found on the ship was lit. All were received rapturously by the royal party, as well as prompting a chorus of ooohs from the Tahitians lining the bay. There were presents for each guest, followed by the entertainment: chairs were drawn up, and the best singers and musicians among the crew brought out to perform before the assembled dignitaries.