He also had time to survey the frigate’s decks. They were even more beautifully clean than usual and had been since sunset; and everything was in the most exact order, with all falls flemished and what brass she possessed outshining gold, for it was possible that the king of this island might be asked aboard. Yet even so a good many foremast jacks, and not only young ones either, had found leisure to put on their shore-going rig: broad-brimmed sennit hats with Surprise on the flowing band, embroidered shirts, snowy duck trousers with ribbons sewn along their outer seams, and small shining pumps with bows; for the Surprise, manned solely by volunteers, was extraordinarily generous with liberty.
Most of them had already arranged little bags full of nails, bottles and pieces of looking-
glass, since everyone knew how presents of this kind had pleased the young women of Tahiti; and this too was a South Sea island. They had been in the Great South Sea, as sailors reckoned it, ever since they crossed the hundred and sixtieth degree of eastern longitude, and whatever the Doctor might say all hands (apart from a few miserable old buggers like Flood, the cook, whose brother had been eaten in the Solomons) confidently expected sirens. And there on the forecastle stood the two medicos, Stephen looking as eagerly at the island as Martin, although he had cried down its potentialities.
Yet there was something not quite right about the village.
No movement at all, apart from the gentle waving of the palms. The canoes were all beached: none on the lagoon, none to be seen offshore.
The sound of the breakers, the moderate breakers, on the reef grew louder: Jack called down to the men in the chains, ‘Hooper, carry on: Crook, carry on.’
‘Aye aye, sir,’ came the two voices, starboard very hoarse and deep, larboard shrill. A pause, then the splashes well out and ahead, and the alternating voices: ‘No bottom with this line. No bottom with this line. No bottom. .
The entrance was clear ahead and the water turned more green than blue. ‘Come up the sheet a fathom,’ called Jack. ‘Port half a spoke. Steady, steady thus.’
‘Steady it is, sir.’
‘By the mark, eighteen,’ came from the starboard chains.
‘By the deep, nineteen,’ from larboard.
‘Port a spoke,’ said Jack, seeing a pallor ahead.
‘Port a spoke it is, sir.’
Now they were well into the passage with the reef and its palm-trees high on either hand; the breeze was now on the beam and abruptly the sound of the sea breaking on the outer side and the answering sigh of its long withdrawal was cut off.
The ship moved on in silence, the leads going on either side, the occasional slight changes of course: apart from these calls and the cry of a tern, nothing; a silence on deck until she was well into the lagoon, when she came up into the wind and dropped anchor.
No sound from the shore.
‘Are you coming, Doctor?’ asked Jack: both medicos had run along the gangway the moment the boat was lowered, and they were standing there hung about with collecting-cases, boxes, nets.
‘If you please, sir,’ said Dr Maturin. ‘It is our clear duty to look for antiscorbutics at once.’
Jack nodded, and while muskets, presents and the usual trade-goods were handing down the side he said in a low voice ‘Does not this island seem strangely quiet to you?’
‘It does: and almost uninhabited. Yet three sharp-eyed men have separately assured us that they have seen people moving on the fringe of greenery, young women in grass skirts.’
‘Perhaps they are assembled in the grove for some religious ceremony,’ said Martin.
‘Nothing more numinous than a grove, as the ancient Hebrews knew.’
‘Bonden, cover those muskets with the stern-sheets apron,’ called Jack, and turning aft,
‘Mr West, carry out a kedge and keep her broadside-on: two guns to be drawn and fired blank if there are signs of trouble. Ball wide of us if I hold up my hand. Grape if they pursue the boat in their canoes. Carry on, Mr Reade.’
By this time Reade had become wonderfully adept at getting about with only one arm, but there was a nest of anxious hands stretched out below to catch him if he fell; a nest that remained, almost as kind and far more reasonable, when the medical men made their descent, followed by the Captain.
‘Shove off. Give way,’ piped Reade. ‘All together now, if you can manage it: and Davis, you row dry for once.’
These were the last words as they pulled across the lagoon, the officers looking thoughtfully at the silent shore. ‘Rowed of all,’ cried Reade at last, and the bargemen tossed their oars into the boat, Navy-fashion. A moment’s glide and the bows ground up into the sand; bow-oar jumped out to lay the gang-plank and Jack and the officers stepped ashore.
‘Heave her about, stern-on, just afloat to a grapnel,’ said Jack. ‘Wilkinson, James and Parfitt to be boat-keepers this tide
– the muskets out of sight. The rest come up the beach with me. No straggling until I give the word.’
Up the white sand, their eyes half-closed against the glare but still looking expectantly right and left at the canoes, the woods, and the long, long house. And in spite of orders Reade, somewhat behind the main group, went skipping away to the canoes.
Some moments later, as a hog rushed from behind the nearest canoe and into the trees, he came running back. He looked pale yellow under his tan and he said to Stephen,
‘There is something horrible there. A woman, I think.’ The party stopped and looked at him. In a faltering voice he added, ‘Dead.’
‘Will you wait for me here, sir, without going on,’ said Stephen: and there they stood, uneasy, while he walked away, followed by Martin. In this brilliant light the silence was all the more oppressive: all round the group they turned their questioning faces to one another, but never a word, not even in an undertone, until the Doctor, coming back, called from a distance, ‘Sir, all the men who have not had the smallpox should return to the boat at once.’ And coming up he asked, ‘Mr Reade, have you had the smallpox?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then take off your clothes: go bathe in the sea, wet your hair through and through and sit by yourself in the front of the boat. Touch no one. Who has a tinder-box?’
‘Here, sir,’ said Bonden.
‘Then pray strike a light and burn Mr Reade’s clothes. You have had the disease, sir, as I recall?’
‘Yes, when I was a child,’ said Jack: and to the men who were standing somewhat apart,
‘Johnson, Davis and Hedges, you go back to the boat.’ They turned, touching their foreheads, and walked down the slope, their faces disappointed but above all troubled; and a charnel-house eddy followed them as far as the sea.
‘And all the rest of you?’ asked Stephen. ‘Make sure, now, for this is the wicked and confluent kind.’ Another man fell out, muttering something and hanging a shameful head.
‘Now, sir, I shall look into the long house; and then perhaps we can search for our antiscorbutics. The hands had better stay here for a while. Do you choose to come, sir?’
Jack walked deliberately after Stephen and Martin, hating each step. He expected something very unpleasant, repulsive; but what he saw and what he breathed as he followed them up the ladder and into the buzzing twilight of the long house was far, far worse. Almost the entire village had died there.
‘It is no good we can do here, said Stephen, having walked up and down the whole length twice with the closest attention; and when they were outside, on the raised platform with its
pyramid of ancestral skulls, the lower tiers moss-green, he observed ‘You were in the right of it, Mr Martin, when you spoke of a religious ceremony; and these’ – pointing at two hatchets, new but for a little rust, lying on what had recently been a bed of flowers – ‘these, I believe, were the sacrifice offered up to preserve the tribe, poor souls.’
Again Jack followed them as they went along, talking of the nature of the disease and of how badly it affected nations and communities that had never known it in the past – how mortal it was to Eskimos, for example, and how this particular infection must have been brought by a whaler, its visit proved by the axes. He felt a certain indignation against them, a resentment for his own unshared horror, and when Stephen turned to him as they joined the others and said ‘I believe we may take coconuts here, and fruit and greenstuff, robbing no man,’ he only answered with a sullen look and a formal inclination of his head.