This Thing Of Darkness (76 page)

‘I should like to present Harper, our sailmaker, singing “Rule Britannia”,’ announced Coxswain Bennet, to commence the concert.

‘Peace be with you and your King William,’ replied the Queen, smiling at him.

Harper’s mellifluous baritone having been well received, Bennet stepped up once again to introduce Wills, the armourer, accompanied by Billet, the gunroom boy, performing ‘Three Jolly Postboys’. It was a jaunty number, and the watching crew began to tap their feet and clap along. It soon became apparent, however, that something was wrong. The Tahitians were whispering and muttering among themselves in worried tones, and Queen Pomare’s customary expression of placid melancholy had been replaced by one of genuine distress. FitzRoy waved the two performers to a halt. ‘Pray forgive me, Your Majesty, but is something the matter?’

‘This is not a hymn, Fitirai?’ asked Pomare in dismay.

‘No, Your Majesty. This is a ... a sea song, not a hymn.’

‘But, Fitirai - the singing of songs is forbidden in Tahiti, except hymns. Singing is one of the illicit pleasures, forbidden by God’s law. We have followed God’s commands, as told to us by your British missionaries. This is God’s way. It is the British way. What is going on? I do not understand.’

Viewed through the spyglass, the little village of Kororareka seemed quiet enough, a drab and undistinguished huddle beneath a range of low, drizzly hills. Three whaling ships sprawled lazily at anchor, and the occasional solitary canoe could be seen pottering across the bay, but there was no boisterous welcome like the one that had greeted the
Beagle
in Tahiti. New Zealand’s only English settlement presented a tidy, reticent aspect to the sea, as if its back were turned. Any closer inspection would have to wait, for the ship lay becalmed at the entrance of the Bay of Islands. Darwin, who had been feeling seasick for a week, used the respite to pace the poop deck irritably.

‘Another wretched island. There is nothing I so much long for, as to see
any
spot or object which I have seen before, or
any
which I am likely to see again! To think this will be our
fifth
Christmas away from home!’

‘We are all of us homesick, Philos,’ muttered FitzRoy, as Darwin stalked past.

‘I feel sure that the scenery of England is ten times more beautiful than anywhere else we have seen on our travels. What reasonable person can wish for great ill-proportioned mountains, two and three miles high? Give me the Brythen, or some such compact little hill!’

Wickham and Stokes exchanged the faintest of grins.

‘As for your boundless plains and impenetrable forests, who would compare them with the green fields and oak woods of England? People are pleased to talk of the ever-smiling sky of the tropics — what precious nonsense! Who admires a lady’s face who is always smiling? England is not one of your insipid beauties. She can cry, and frown, and smile, all by turns.’

‘Actually, when I went to Shropshire it looked rather like this,’ offered King, helpfully. ‘Imagine that those ferns behind the shore are meadows, and you will see the similarity at once . . .’

The young midshipman tailed off, as Darwin glared at him.

‘Come on, Philos,’ put in Sulivan cheerily. ‘Let’s not growl. What is five years around the world, compared to the soldiers’ and sailors’ lives in India?’

‘I did not sign up to be a sailor! Not for five years, at least. And I am convinced that it is a most ridiculous thing to go round the world. Stay at home quietly, and the world will go round with you.’

With that, he stomped off to his cabin.

A light breeze picked up after dinner and gently ballooned the
Beagle’s
sails, enabling them to reach anchorage by early afternoon. FitzRoy, Sulivan and Bennet went ashore in the cutter. When they arrived at the main thoroughfare of Kororareka, they discovered that appearances had indeed been deceptive. The place was a pit.

A mucous coating of mud and faeces lined the main street, splattered by passing footsteps up the rough wooden walls of the adjoining buildings. Every second dwelling was either a spirit-shop, a musket-seller’s or a public house. It seemed that the entire population - to judge from the evidence of those on view — was blind drunk. Two men were fighting at the end of the village. A whore, crawling on all fours, was retching up a thin stream of vomit, consoled by a scarcely less sober companion. A man with a Newcastle accent shouted meaningless obscenities at anyone who would listen. Everyone, worryingly, appeared to be armed. A heavily tattooed native, pasted with filth and wrapped in a grubby blanket, lurched towards them shouting angrily. ‘You English captain! You help me!’

FitzRoy halted - he had little option, as the man had blocked his path - while Bennet moved protectively to the front in case the skipper needed rescuing.

‘I am Captain FitzRoy. How may I help?’

‘Englishman steal my wife! Take on whale-ship! You get my wife back!’

‘Then you must call out the watch. The authorities.’

The man’s face was a mask of furious incomprehension.

‘Who is in charge here? Who is boss?’ asked FitzRoy firmly.

‘You English captain! You boss!’

Another native, long-haired and raw-boned, as well built and ferocious as the first, his face a whorl of angry black tattoo-cuts, bore down upon them. ‘You help me!’ he shouted. ‘I work on whale-ship one year. Promise me big money. Leave ship, no money! White man steal my money!’

A drunken white woman cackled at them from a puddle of her own urine.

‘Gentlemen - please!’ FitzRoy managed briefly to silence the furious complainants. ‘Who is the chief here?’

‘No chief. This is white-man town!’

‘Who is the British chief? The British resident?’

The second native jabbed a finger accusingly towards the far end of the street, whereupon the two supplicants fell to arguing with each other.

‘Is it not mystifying?’ pondered a troubled Sulivan, as the trio picked their way through the clinging mud. ‘In a pleasant climate, surrounded by beautiful countryside, can one account for human nature degrading itself so much as to live in such a den?’

Bennet, who remembered his excursion into the rookeries behind Oxford Street with the three Fuegians, kept his thoughts to himself.

The main thoroughfare petered out at the foot of a small hill, atop which two flags fluttered gracefully from a white pole: the Union Jack, and another they did not recognize, a red cross on a blue background. The cottage of Bushby, the British resident, was the last house in the street. After they had pounded upon the front door for some minutes, a metal hatch was finally opened, and two frightened eyes peered out from behind a pair of cracked spectacles. Seeing their naval uniforms, the resident drew back a platoon of bolts and let them in, casting a furtive glance up and down the street before rebolting the door behind them. He beckoned them to follow him down a little corridor, scuttling ahead like a pursued mole, into a dark and shuttered parlour. Mr Bushby’s left arm, they noticed, hung uselessly in a sling.

‘Are you wounded, sir?’ enquired Sulivan solicitously, once the introductions had been made.

*‘I was shot,’ explained Bushby bluntly, ‘during the course of a robbery upon this very house. The swine would have murdered me, but I escaped through the back door. Barely a day goes by, gentlemen, without another murder being added to the charge-sheet of villainy that shames this settlement.’ ‘Can you not take action against the miscreants?’ asked FitzRoy. ‘In a place this size, surely it must be possible to identify them?’

The resident laughed sardonically, a high-pitched little bark that escaped from his throat in a rush, his hands pawing nervously at his side-whiskers. ‘I am a resident, gentlemen. I reside here. That is my sole occupation. I am not granted even the power of a magistrate. I am here to observe. There are no laws, no police and no judges to prevent the vicious, worthless inhabitants of this vile hole practising whatever excesses they wish - be it drunkenness, adultery or murder. They are escaped convicts, for the most part, from New South Wales - although the whalers are no better. They are the very dregs of the earth, all of them - a fact which, had I been apprised of it in London, would have militated against my taking the position.’ Bushby shuddered at the full realization of what he had got himself into.

‘But what of the New Zealanders themselves - the natives?’ asked Sulivan. ‘Do they posses no authority?’

‘None in Kororareka, to be sure,’ said Bushby bitterly. ‘The chiefs only stopped fighting each other long enough to declare New Zealand a sovereign nation seven weeks ago. That is the new flag up on the hill. But this is a nation in name only. It is the New Zealanders themselves who require protection from the abuses of the worst of our citizenry. I tell you, gentlemen, these islands are gone to the very devil.’ The resident drew his coat about him and quivered with silent outrage.

‘Pray excuse my asking, but what do you actually do here, given that you are denied the opportunity to exercise authority?’ enquired FitzRoy.

‘I grow vines. In my garden. Prior to taking up this position, I journeyed through France and Spain, solely for the purpose of collecting vines to grow in my adopted country. The climate here is most admirable for the production of wine. You shall see, gentlemen - at a future day not only the citizens of New Zealand but of Australia, too, will have cause to thank me, and to acknowledge my foresight.’

‘I do not doubt it,’ said FitzRoy hurriedly, for a fervent gleam of enthusiasm had appeared in Bushby’s eyes. ‘And what of the missionaries ? We seek a clergyman by the name of Matthews.’

Bushby’s own missionary glow faded as quickly as it had ignited. ‘Matthews? Matthews is at Waimate. Would that I were at Waimate, and not stationed here at the pointless behest of His Majesty.’

‘Waimate? Is it far?’

‘It is but fifteen miles’ walk. I shall take you there.’

 

The following day, augmented by Darwin and the
Beagle’s
own Reverend Mr Matthews, the party set out for Waimate, along a well-worn path cut through tall, waving ferns. At intervals they passed mean clusters of native houses, flea-ridden, smoky, windowless ovens in Bushby’s derisive estimation. At one point they encountered a funeral ceremony, if that was indeed the correct word: the deceased, a woman, had been shaved, painted bright scarlet and staked out upright, flanked by two canoes driven vertically into the soil and surrounded by a ring of little wooden idols. As her macabre, rotting face looked on, her relatives beat themselves and tore at their own flesh until they were covered with clotted blood, in a communal howl of grief.

‘By all that’s holy,’ said a shivering Matthews, who wondered if he had not merely exchanged the frying-pan for the fire.

‘When Cook first discovered the island,’ said Bushby, ‘the New Zealanders threw stones at his ship and shouted, “Come ashore and we shall eat you all.”’

‘Phrenologically speaking, these are people of the most savage kind,’ said Darwin.

They pressed on quickly.

Presently they came to a small creek, which had to be forded. Bushby kept a skiff tied up in the reeds, and as he untethered it a fiercely tattooed old chief, wreathed in a stinking blanket, appeared through the undergrowth and stepped into the boat, muttering a cursory word or two in his own language.

‘They like to ride in the skiff. Sort of a pleasure cruise,’ explained Bushby, as the chief took a seat unbidden opposite the Englishmen.

‘I don’t think I have ever seen a more horrid and ferocious expression,’ whispered Darwin. ‘It reminds me of one of the characters in Retzsch’s outlines to Schiller’s “Ballad of Fridolin”.’

‘It is not an expression,’ said Bushby. ‘The tattoo incisions destroy the play of the superficial muscles, giving an air of permanent aggression. The designs are actually heraldic ornaments.’

‘Fascinating,’ said FitzRoy. ‘So all those cuts and whorls are the armorial bearings of a knightly warrior.’

‘He can speak English, by the bye,’ said Bushby.

‘Good morning to you sir,’ said Sulivan politely. The old chief bestowed a look upon him, which could have been anything from a friendly smile to a glare of demonic rage.

Matthews shuddered.

As they stepped out of the skiff at the end of their short trip up the creek, the New Zealander spoke. ‘Do not you stay long. I shall be tired of waiting here,’ he commanded Bushby, who ignored him.

‘Good day sir,’ said Sulivan.

‘The hoary old villain,’ muttered Darwin, when they were safely out of earshot.

Matthews, who had found it difficult since Tierra del Fuego even to say good morning to the captain without feeling guilty, remained silent, lost in his own thoughts and fears. But he need not have worried: after three hours’ further walk through the ferns, the most extraordinary vista opened before them.

‘Waimate, gentlemen,’ said Bushby, with a wave of the hand.

There, placed as if by an enchanter’s wand, was a fragment of old England. A church set amid golden cornfields; thatched cottages clustered around a stream, with a waterwheel to drive a little flour mill; orchards, groaning with every kind of ripe fruit; pigs and poultry running about, squealing and clucking; a barn, for threshing and winnowing, and a blacksmith’s forge. To cap it all, a game of cricket was taking place on an adjoining meadow, the shouts of the white-clad players mingling with the thrum of insects carried past on the summer breeze.

‘By the Lord Harry!’ exclaimed Darwin.

The others stood open-mouthed; Matthews looked as if he would weep with relief.

‘All of it constructed within these past ten years,’ said Bushby.

‘It certainly inspires high hopes for the future progress of this fine island,’ marvelled FitzRoy.