This Thing Of Darkness (8 page)

‘I cannot accept. Your mother meant for you to have it.’

‘I’d like you to have it, sir. It would mean a deal to me.’

‘My dear fellow, every lonely old captain on the seas turns to God or the bottle. It is considerate of you to drive me away from the latter prospect but ...’ FitzRoy tailed off.

Sulivan summoned up all his resolve, more than he had required to climb the mizzen-mast during the previous night’s storm, and addressed his captain. ‘“Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.” Joshua one, verse nine.’

And with that, tears stinging his eyes, he turned and left FitzRoy’s cabin for the last time.

The three motionless figures stood sentinel on the shore, drawn up on horseback in line abreast. Some twenty feet up the beach, a lone horse stood to attention, riderless, without a saddle, but perfectly still.

‘They’re Horse Indians. Patagonians.’

FitzRoy took the spyglass from Lieutenant Kempe. It was difficult to make out many details of the distant trio and their solitary companion, but it was clear from their attitude that they were an advance guard, posted to greet the ships.

‘Whoever named this place Dungeness was spot on,’ piped up Midshipman King. ‘I’ve been to the real Dungeness with my father. This is the living spit.’

It was indeed. A deep indigo sea smeared against a beach of rounded shingle, backed by a low, thorny scrub. The sky was a pale cornflower blue. It could easily have been a beautiful, breezy autumn day on the Kentish coast, except for two crucial differences. First, the beach was dotted with penguins: fat, fluffy ones moulting in the sunshine, downy feathers floating off them like dandelion seeds puffed in the wind; and sleek, more confident black-and-white birds, slithering down to the sea on their bellies and launching themselves into the surf. The shallows were thick with bobbing penguin heads. The three statuesque sentries and the riderless horse, who provided the second aberrant note, now came into focus.

‘Either their horses are very small, or the Indians are extremely big,’ observed FitzRoy, squinting through the lens. ‘The giants of Patagonia, perhaps?’ he murmured.

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ enquired Kempe.

‘I’ve been reading about the Patagonians in one of Captain Stokes’s books. A Jesuit missionary called Faulkner met one chief who was seven and a half feet high. Admiral Byron apparently met a man so tall he couldn’t reach the top of the fellow’s head. And Magellan reported giants here too. When he saw their footprints in the sand he exclaimed,
“Que patagones!”
What big feet. Hence the name of the place.’

‘I can’t say we ever encountered any that big, sir, but they certainly average more than six feet. You should converse with Mr Bynoe, sir. He’s interested in the savages.’ Kempe’s tone made it clear that he found Bynoe’s interest a trifle eccentric.

Midshipman Stokes attracted FitzRoy’s attention. ‘The
Adventure
is signalling, sir.’

All hands looked across to King’s vessel, a hundred yards away across a field of white horses, where a line of little flags was in the process of being hoisted. King was back in charge now, with the admiral gone to do His Majesty’s business at Monte Video, and would remain so for the rest of the expedition.

‘Captain King wants you to lead a shore party, sir.’

‘Very well. Mr Bennet, if you’d care to prepare the whaleboat and select six men. We’ll need firearms and ammunition. And ask Mr Bynoe if he would be good enough to join us.’

‘I’ll go below and get the medals ready, sir,’ offered Kempe.

‘Medals?’

‘Presents for the savages. They have a moulding of Britannia on one side, and His Majesty on the other. Savages love shiny things, sir.’

 

‘I am told you are something of an anthropologist.’

Bynoe’s earnest young face flushed slightly. They were bouncing towards the shore in the
Beagle’s
whaleboat, pulled along by six pairs of wiry arms. ‘I wouldn’t say that, sir. That is, I’m interested in all areas of natural philosophy but I have no great learning. Stratigraphy is what really interests me, sir, but I know so little.’

‘Well, you’ve had ample opportunity to study the coast of Patagonia as it hasn’t changed one whit these last thousand miles. How would you diagnose it?’

Bynoe stared across at the featureless plain that stretched hundreds of miles into the interior, which found its end here at the southern tip of Dungeness Point. There were no hills to break the monotony, no trees, not even a solitary thicket. There had been only salt flats, low, spiny bushes and tufts of wiry, parched grass since the last white settlement at the Rio Negro; and no sign of life either, other than a few grazing herds of guanaco and the occasional disturbed, flapping ibis. ‘It’s not very interesting, is it, sir? Well, not to the other officers. They don’t reckon it much of a hobby to have the steam up about a lot of rocks.’

‘Is it not part of the officers’ duties to take a keen interest in the surrounding landscape?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose so, sir, but that rather became pushed to one side when we reached Tierra del Fuego. Conditions are so tough there. It’s just me interested now, sir - and Mr Bennet, of course, sometimes.’ Bynoe hastily added the last part, having noticed a cloud of panic pass over the coxswain’s normally sunny countenance.

‘And your stratigraphic diagnosis?’

‘I’d say there were three layers to the coastline, sir. Gravel on top, then some sort of white stone - maybe a pumice, I don’t know - then a layer of shells in the ground. I’ve had a look on a shore expedition. I couldn’t identify the white stone but I’ll tell you a curious thing about the shells. They’re mostly oyster shells, but there are no oysters hereabouts. So it looks as if the oysters have become extinct since the shell beds were laid down.’

‘That’s very good, Mr Bynoe, very good indeed. Has it occurred to you that the central white layer might also consist of shells, but shells that have been crushed to a powder and compressed into stone?’

‘Crushed by what, sir? There’s only a thin covering of gravel above.’

‘By the action of the water, perhaps. Why is the land hereabouts covered in salt flats? I would hazard a guess that this country was once submerged under a great many feet of seawater. A sudden inundation, perhaps, that deprived the oysters of the oxygen needed to sustain their life.’

‘By Jove, sir, I do believe you’ve got it!’

‘I wouldn’t go that far, Mr Bynoe. I am only hazarding a guess, but tell me what you know of our friends on the shore there.’

‘They’ll be from the settlement at Gregory Bay, sir. We stopped there in ’twenty-seven. They’re led by a woman called Maria, who speaks a little Spanish. The Horse Indians have been trading with the sealing-ships for hundreds of years, so they’re well used to Europeans. I doubt we’ll be needing those.’ He indicated the Sea Service pistols, the bag of shot, the wad cutters, rammers and the box of flints in the bottom of the boat.

‘A few hundred years ago they were hostile, and armed with bows and arrows. Sarmiento built two settlements, called San Felipe and Jesus. I believe there were three hundred settlers at Jesus, but the Indians left no survivors. Then in San Felipe there were about two hundred settlers, who starved to death for the most part. There were only fifteen left when Thomas Cavendish sailed by. They being Spaniards, he ... well, he put the rest to death. He renamed the bay Port Famine. You can still find a few ruined walls in the beech forest. It’s where Captain Stokes took his life, God rest his soul.’

‘We must thank God that we live in civilized times.’

absolutely, sir.’

FitzRoy sat back. Inquisitive penguin heads surrounded the boat now, craning to look over the side as it passed, then darting forward to the prow to get another look. On the beach, the three sentries were close enough to examine in more detail. There were two men and a woman, tall, muscular and broad-shouldered, each over six foot in height, with long, luxuriant black hair divided into two streams by metal fillets at the neck. What was visible of their skin was dark copper, but their faces were daubed with red pigment and divided in four by white crosses, like the flag of St George reversed. Their flesh was further ornamented by cuts and perforations. Their noses were aquiline, their foreheads broad and low beneath rough black fringes. The woman’s eyebrows were plucked bald. About their shoulders they wore rough guanaco-skin mantles, the fur turned inwards. They were armed with bolas and long, tapering lances pointed with iron. They carried an air of lean strength and wary pride. Their horses, by contrast, were small, woebegone, shaggy creatures, controlled by single reins attached to driftwood bits. Rough saddles and spurs cut from lumps of wood completed the rudimentary trappings. For FitzRoy, the comparison with Don Quixote was irresistible.

As the whaleboat scrunched into the shingle, scattering penguins, he stepped lightly ashore. One of the horsemen broke ranks, trotted forward and gravely handed him a stained piece of paper. He unfolded it with what he hoped was comparable gravity and read:

FitzRoy refolded the paper and returned it with a nod that indicated he had understood. The horseman spoke in a low, guttural language - rather as if his mouth was full of hot pudding, thought FitzRoy - and produced a spare guanaco skin from under his saddle. Leaning forward, he proffered it to the Englishman. FitzRoy could smell him at close quarters, a deep, pungent animal smell.

‘
¿Agua ardiente?
’ the man asked, in Spanish. FitzRoy shrugged his shoulders to indicate that he had none.
‘Bueno es boracho.’

‘¿
abla
español?’
FitzRoy asked.

‘Bueno es boracho,’
the man repeated.
It’s good to get drunk.
With that he turned and galloped away with his two companions. The lone, riderless horse further up the beach remained, as before, utterly motionless. Only then did FitzRoy and Bynoe notice that the animal was quite dead. And, furthermore, that it had been stuffed.

‘They’ve gone without their medals,’ murmured Bynoe.

 

Dungeness was drawing round to the
Beagle’s
quarter when the ship caught the first gust of the howling gale that blows perpetually through the Straits of Magellan. Funnelling through the narrows, where the rocky banks are so close that it seems as if a passing vessel cannot but scrape her spars against one side or the other, the winds exploded from their constricting bottleneck and swept at high speed across the shoals and sandbanks of Possession Bay. Windbound, with topmasts struck, the
Beagle,
the
Adventure
and the
Adelaide
approached the narrows in tight formation, jinking delicately between the underwater obstacles: not just sand and rock, but huge tangled gardens of giant kelp, whose strands can grow to twenty fathoms long in just fifty feet of water.

‘Apart from the westerlies, there’s an opposing tidal stream of eight knots,’ explained Kempe. ‘The tide here is above seven fathoms. Last time out it took us more than a week to get through the first narrows.’

FitzRoy was painfully aware that, as the lead vessel of the formation, the
Beagle
must be first to attempt the narrows. She was already making ever shorter tacks in an attempt to zigzag against the head-wind and the current. It was hard to see how she could possibly manoeuvre through the pinched opening ahead in the face of such a gale. At least the crew were putting their backs into the process of tacking. The lower sails were clewed up and the lee braces slackened, while the weather braces became the lee braces and vice versa, and the whole process began again. It was back-breaking and repetitive work, and for every ten yards they gained against the wind, nine were lost to the current. The sailors sang as they hauled.

‘I do wish they wouldn’t sing that particular shanty,’ FitzRoy murmured.

‘They have a song for every occasion,’ said Lieutenant Kempe, with his death’s head smile.

‘Would it please you if I started off a different one, sir?’ offered Boatswain Sorrell.

‘No, thank you, Mr Bos’n. I do believe I should be well advised not to interfere in such a matter.’ FitzRoy made a mental vow.
I will not let the elements dictate to me this time around. I will make my own luck.

As the afternoon wore on the
Beagle
made repeated attempts to tack through the narrows, but a breakthrough proved impossible, and eventually the weary afternoon watch had to admit defeat. During the dog-watches of the early evening the
Beagle
stood off the narrows instead, making short tacks merely to stand still, the wind too strong for her to heave to and drift. As the sun settled, the breeze finally fell away, and the dusk was dotted like starlight by the fires of the Indians along the northern shore. The curious shrill neighs of the guanaco herds sounded from far off in the darkness. Where the deck had earlier been a scene of frantic, sweaty activity, now the dim light from the binnacle illuminated only the men at the wheel. The night lookouts took up their positions at the four corners of the ship. FitzRoy, frustrated, stalked the starboard side of the poop deck. ‘We could have made it through the narrows in this light breeze.’