A thousand deaths by Jack London

seventy-five miles to the southwest. Its lagoon was thirty miles long, and its

entrance was excellent. When Captain Davenport gave his orders, the crew

refused duty. They announced that they had had enough of hell fire under their

feet. There was the land. What if the ship could not make it? They could make

it in the boats. Let her burn, then. Their lives amounted to something to

them. They had served faithfully the ship, now they were going to serve

themselves.

They sprang to the boats, brushing the second and third mates out of the way,

and proceeded to swing the boats out and to prepare to lower away. Captain

Davenport and the first mate, revolvers in hand, were advancing to the break

of the poop, when McCoy, who had climbed on top of the cabin, began to speak.

He spoke to the sailors, and at the first sound of his dovelike, cooing voice

they paused to hear. He extended to them his own ineffable serenity and peace.

His soft voice and simple thoughts flowed out to them in a magic stream,

soothing them against their wills. Long forgotten things came back to them,

and some remembered lullaby songs of childhood and the content and rest of the

mother’s arm at the end of the day. There was no more trouble, no more danger,

no more irk, in all the world. Everything was as it should be, and it was

only a matter of course that they should turn their backs upon the land and

put to sea once more with hell fire hot beneath their feet.

McCoy spoke simply; but it was not what he spoke. It was his personality that

spoke more eloquently than any word he could utter. It was an alchemy of soul

occultly subtile and profoundly deep–a mysterious emanation of the spirit,

seductive, sweetly humble, and terribly imperious. It was illumination in the

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dark crypts of their souls, a compulsion of purity and gentleness vastly

greater than that which resided in the shining, death-spitting revolvers of

the officers.

The men wavered reluctantly where they stood, and those who had loosed the

turns made them fast again. Then one, and then another, and then all of them,

began to sidle awkwardly away.

McCoy’s face was beaming with childlike pleasure as he descended from the top

of the cabin. Thee was no trouble. For that matter there had been no trouble

averted. There never had been any trouble, for there was no place for such in

the blissful world in which he lived.

“You hypnotized em,” Mr. Konig grinned at him, speaking in a low voice.

“Those boys are good,” was the answer. “Their hearts are good. They have had

a hard time, and they have worked hard, and they will work hard to the end.”

Mr. Konig had not time to reply. His voice was ringing out orders, the sailors

were springing to obey, and the PYRENEES was paying slowly off from the wind

until her bow should point in the direction of Makemo.

The wind was very light, and after sundown almost ceased. It was insufferably

warm, and fore and aft men sought vainly to sleep. The deck was too hot to

lie upon, and poisonous vapors, oozing through the seams, crept like evil

spirits over the ship, stealing into the nostrils and windpipes of the unwary

and causing fits of sneezing and coughing. The stars blinked lazily in the dim

vault overhead; and the full moon, rising in the east, touched with its light

the myriads of wisps and threads and spidery films of smoke that intertwined

and writhed and twisted along the deck, over the rails, and up the masts and

shrouds.

“Tell me,” Captain Davenport said, rubbing his smarting eyes, “what happened

with that BOUNTY crowd after they reached Pitcairn? The account I read said

they burnt the Bounty, and that they were not discovered until many years

later. But what happened in the meantime? I’ve always been curious to know.

They were men with their necks in the rope. There were some native men, too.

And then there were women. That made it look like trouble right from the

jump.”

“There was trouble,” McCoy answered. “They were bad men. They quarreled about

the women right away. One of the mutineers, Williams, lost his wife. All the

women were Tahitian women. His wife fell from the cliffs when hunting sea

birds. Then he took the wife of one of the native men away from him. All the

native men were made very angry by this, and they killed off nearly all the

mutineers. Then the mutineers that escaped killed off all the native men. The

women helped. And the natives killed each other. Everybody killed everybody.

They were terrible men.

“Timiti was killed by two other natives while they were combing his hair in

friendship. The white men had sent them to do it. Then the white men killed

them. The wife of Tullaloo killed him in a cave because she wanted a white man

for husband. They were very wicked. God had hidden His face from them. At the

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93

end of two years all the native men were murdered, and all the white men

except four. They were Young, John Adams, McCoy, who was my great-grandfather,

and Quintal. He was a very bad man, too. Once, just because his wife did not

catch enough fish for him, he bit off her ear.”

“They were a bad lot!” Mr. Konig exclaimed.

“Yes, they were very bad,” McCoy agreed and went on serenely cooing of the

blood and lust of his iniquitous ancestry. “My great-grandfather escaped

murder in order to die by his own hand. He made a still and manufactured

alcohol from the roots of the ti-plant. Quintal was his chum, and they got

drunk together all the time. At last McCoy got delirium tremens, tied a rock

to his neck, and jumped into the sea.

“Quintal’s wife, the one whose ear he bit off, also got killed by falling from

the cliffs. Then Quintal went to Young and demanded his wife, and went to

Adams and demanded his wife. Adams and Young were afraid of Quintal. They knew

he would kill them. So they killed him, the two of them together, with a

hatchet. Then Young died. And that was about all the trouble they had.”

“I should say so,” Captain Davenport snorted. “There was nobody left to kill.”

“You see, God had hidden His face,” McCoy said.

By morning no more than a faint air was blowing from the eastward, and, unable

to make appreciable southing by it, Captain Davenport hauled up full-and-by on

the port track. He was afraid of that terrible westerly current which had

cheated him out of so many ports of refuge. All day the calm continued, and

all night, while the sailors, on a short ration of dried banana, were

grumbling. Also, they were growing weak and complaining of stomach pains

caused by the straight banana diet. All day the current swept the PYRENEES to

the westward, while there was no wind to bear her south. In the middle of the

first dogwatch, cocoanut trees were sighted due south, their tufted heads

rising above the water and marking the low-lying atoll beneath.

“That is Taenga Island,” McCoy said. “We need a breeze tonight, or else we’ll

miss Makemo.”

“What’s become of the southeast trade?” the captain demanded. “Why don’t it

blow? What’s the matter?”

“It is the evaporation from the big lagoons–there are so many of them,” McCoy

explained. The evaporation upsets the whole system of trades. It even causes

the wind to back up and blow gales from the southwest. This is the Dangerous

Archipelago, Captain.”

Captain Davenport faced the old man, opened his mouth, and was about to curse,

but paused and refrained. ‘mcCoy’s presence was a rebuke to the blasphemies

that stirred in his brain and trembled in his larynx. ‘mcCoy’s influence had

been growing during the many days they had been together. Captain Davenport

was an autocrat of the sea, fearing no man, never bridling his tongue, and now

he found himself unable to curse in the presence of this old man with the

feminine brown eyes and the voice of a dove. When he realized this, Captain

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94

Davenport experienced a distinct shock. This old man was merely the seed of

McCoy, of McCoy of the BOUNTY, the mutineer fleeing from the hemp that waited

him in England, the McCoy who was a power for evil in the early days of blood

and lust and violent death on Pitcairn Island.

Captain Davenport was not religious, yet in that moment he felt a mad impulse

to cast himself at the other’s feet–and to say he knew not what. It was an

emotion that so deeply stirred him, rather than a coherent thought, and he was

aware in some vague way of his own unworthiness and smallness in the presence