Stephen seized his mood and that of the waiting hands – the turning wind had told them all they had not learnt from their Captain’s face, bowed shoulders, heavy walk – and he went on ‘May I suggest that you should take the nuts, particularly the very young milky nuts, from the palms on the reef, while Mr Martin and I look for our plants inland? Above all, do not stand about in this mephitic atmosphere. But first I beg that Mr Reade may be taken back to the ship and that the loblolly boy should be told to rub him all over with vinegar and cut off his hair before he goes aboard, where he must be kept in quarantine?’
‘Very well,’ said Jack. ‘I shall send the boat back for you whenever you wish.’
‘Not this boat, sir, if you will allow me. This too must be scrubbed with vinegar by men who can show their pock-marks. Another boat entirely, if you please, and it rowed only by hands that run no risk.’
A path led inland from the village: very rough steep ground strewn with boulders to begin with, covered with bushes and creepers; and under the bushes a few dead islanders, almost skeleton by now, with the limbs scattered. Then came a flat
place, clear among the trees, its high dry-stone wall proof against the swine that could be heard rooting and grunting in the undergrowth no great way off. In this considerable enclosure grew yams, bananas of different kinds, various vegetables, standing together in no kind of order but evidently planted there – the turned earth could still be seen beneath the springing weeds.
‘That must be a colocassia,’ observed Martin, leaning on the wall.
‘So it is. The taro itself, I believe. Yes, certainly the taro. Its leaves, though bitter, improve on boiling; and it is a famous antiscorbutic.’
They moved on, and always up, the bare rock of the path often polished by generations of feet: three more enclosures, the last with a tall boar reared against the wall, trying to get in. By this time they were far beyond the pestilential smell, and Martin picked up a few molluscs, examining them closely before dropping them into a padded box, while Stephen pointed out an orchid fairly pouring out its cascade of white gold-tipped flowers from the crutch of a tree.
‘I was prepared for the lack of land-birds, mammals and reptiles, the more so as hogs have been turned out,’ said Martin, ‘but not for the wealth of plants. On the right hand of this path from the last taro-patch. . . do you hear that sound, not unlike a woodpecker?’
They stood, their ears inclined. The path they were following rose steeply between palms and sandalwood to an abrupt rock-face with a little platform before it, covered with a sweet-smelling terrestrial orchid. The sound, which had seemed to be coming from here, stopped. ‘. . . I have seen no less than eighteen members of the Rubeaceae.’
Up and up in silence. Stephen, two paces ahead, with his eyes now on the level of the platform, slowly crouched down, and turning he whispered ‘Ape. A small blue-black ape.’
The weak hammering started again and they crept on, Stephen very cautiously making room for Martin, who after a moment murmured ‘Glabrous’ in his ear.
A second of the same kind appeared from behind a palm, and she being upright and clear of the haze of orchids at
eye-level could be seen to be a small thin black girl, also holding a nut. She joined the first, squatting and beating her nut on the broad flat stone that obviously covered a well or spring. They looked very poorly and Stephen straightened, coughing as he did so. The little girls clasped one another without a word, but did not run. ‘Let us sit here, looking away from them,’ said Stephen, ‘taking little notice or none at all. They are well over the disease: the first to take it, no doubt; but they are in a sad way.’
‘How old would they be?’
‘Who can tell? My practice has never lain among children, though I have of course dissected a good many. Say five or six, poor sad ill-favoured little things. They cannot break their coconut.’ And half-turned he stretched out his hand and said ‘Will I have a try?’
Their minds were stunned not so much by terror or grief but more by utter bewilderment and incomprehension; and to this was added extreme thirst – no rain these many days past. But there was still sense enough to understand the tone and gesture and the first child handed her nut. Stephen pierced the soft eye with his lancet and she drank with extraordinary application. Martin did the same for the second child.
They could speak now, and they said the same word over and over again, pointing to the great stone and pulling them by the hand. With the slab removed they plunged their faces right in and drank immoderately, their hollow bellies swelling like melons.
‘As far as I can see,’ said Stephen as he watched them eating the now-broken coconut with dreadful avidity, ‘we must take them back to the ship, feed them and put them to bed.
While the yams, taro and bananas are gathering a party can search the island for other survivors.’
‘Clearly, we cannot leave them here to starve,’ said Martin. ‘But Lord, Maturin, if only they had been our nondescript apes, how we should have amazed London, Paris, Petersburg Come, child.’
Down the path quite peaceably, hand in hand; but when they came to the highest enclosure the little girls set up a
roaring and had to be lifted over the wall. They ran straight to a familiar banana and ate all within their reach. The same happened at the second, but by the third both were too tired and weak to go on and Stephen and Martin reached the edge of the sea carrying them, fast asleep.
‘We cannot hail the boat without waking them,’ observed Martin.
‘Oh what a quandary,’ said Stephen, whose child was infested with parasites. ‘Perhaps I can put it down.’ But at his first attempt the black fingers clung to his shirt with such force that he stood up again, abandoning the notion altogether.
There was no need to hail the boat, however. A far less keen-sighted man than Jack Aubrey could tell from half a mile that they were carrying not antiscorbutics but some such creature as a sloth or a wombat; yet even he looked a little blank when he saw them close and heard what was to be done.
‘Well, pass them over,’ he said. ‘Pollack, lay them on the sacks by the mast-thwart.’
‘But that will wake them,’ said Martin. ‘Let me walk gently in by the gang-plank.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Jack. ‘Anyone can see you are not a father, Mr Martin.’ He took the child, passed it over, its head lolling, and Pollack eased it down on to the sacks in a competent, husbandlike manner. ‘When they are as sleepy as that, when they drool and hang loose,’
said Jack in a more kindly tone, ‘you can tie them in knots without they wake or complain.’
This was eminently true. The children were handed up the side as limp as rag dolls; nor did they stir when they were put down on a paunch-mat by the break of the forecastle.
‘Pass the word for Jemmy Ducks,’ said Jack Aubrey.
‘Sir?’ said Jemmy Ducks, whose name was John Thurlow and whose office was the care of the ship’s poultry, a term sometimes held to include rabbits and even larger animals.
‘Jemmy Ducks, you are a family man, I believe?’ At the Captain’s wholly unusual ingratiating tone and smile Jemmy Ducks’ eyes narrowed and his face took on a reserved, suspicious expression; but after some hesitation he admitted that he had seven or eight of the little buggers over to Flicken, south by east of Shelmerston.
‘Are any of them girls?’
‘Three, sir. No, I tell a lie. Four.’
‘Then I dare say you are used to their ways?’
‘Well you may say so, sir. Howling and screeching, teething and croup, thrust, red-gum, measles and the belly-ache, and poor old Thurlow walking up and down rocking them in his arms all night and wondering dare he toss ’em out of window
Chamber-pots, pap-boats, swaddling clouts drying in the kitchen . . . That’s why I signed on for a long, long voyage, sir.’
‘In that case I am sorry to inflict this task upon you. Look at the paunch in the shade of the starboard gangway: those are two children brought back from the island. They are asleep.
A party is going to look for any other survivors, but in the meantime they are to be washed all over with warm water and soap as soon as they wake up, and when they are dry the loblolly boy will rub them over with an ointment the Doctor is preparing.’