The frigate’s crew stood on the forecastle or along the gangways, some few leering at the paddlers or exchanging nods and becks with those they had met the night before, but most watching in silent admiration.
Jack said to Wainwright ‘Please tell her that I am profoundly grateful for the chief’s magnificent presents; that presently I shall do myself the honour of waiting on him with an offering of our own, necessarily less beautifully attended; that I shall ask his leave to water in his island and to trade with his people for victuals; and that at present I beg that she and these young ladies will walk into the cabin. Pray make it as elegant as you can.’
Wainwright certainly made it longer and probably more elegant, for the South-Seas speakers of the Surprise were seen to nod approvingly at several passages; and at the close the chief’s sister turned a benevolent face on Jack. He escorted them to the cabin, where Wainwright seated them according to the Polynesian etiquette and Jack gave each a bunch of red feathers and some other little presents. The feathers in particular were very well received; the madeira that followed less so. Their looks of pleased anticipation changed to one of astonishment, in some cases alarm. But after a stunned moment the polite smiles returned and although they were a little artificial the meeting ended with expressions of kindness and esteem on either side.
Shortly after the pahi had left for the shore Jack followed it, his coxswain and bargemen in their best; and about an hour after his return, successful in all points, Stephen first appeared on deck. Admittedly he had slept late, and he had been long delayed in the sick-berth, yet even so he was astonished to see the sun so high and the day so bright, the ship such a hive of activity, the beach so thronged with people and dashed with colour: for in this brilliant light even a pyramid of coconuts on the white coral strand with aquamarine sea in front and the green of palms and gardens behind, was a fine living tawny brown: to say nothing of the heaps of bananas, yams, breadfruit, taro roots and leaves, the baskets of shining fish. He stared and stared again. A pahi came in, the men and women of its crew all singing; they turned their broad, elaborate, beautifully-built craft round the ship in
the light breeze in the most seamanlike fashion, avoiding her cables (she was now moored fore and aft) and running up on the beach to unload yet more fish. A flight of medium-sized parrots he could not identify passed over the gardens beyond the strand: a green, fast-flying pigeon. But the Surprise was a busy ship: the great water-casks were already coming aboard, rising up from the launch, swaying in over the deck with many a cry of Ail together – way-oh – handsomely, there – God damn your eyes and limbs, Joe –
half an inch, half an inch, half an inch forward, mate and vanishing down the main hatchway to muffled but sometimes more passionate cries far below.
And water was not all by any means. It had been agreed between Jack and Tereo that all trading should take place on shore, in order to avoid the complexity of business with fifty canoes at once, and the market was spread out, wide, handsome and remarkably varied.
The Surprise’s chief kinds of trade-goods, tools and everything metal; bottles and everything glass; cloth and the much valued hats; gauds, beads and trinkets, were in barrels with a seaman sitting on each; the bartering was carried out first by Wainwright, who set some kind of a standard, and then on that basis by the more knowing Surprises.
Their purchases flowed aboard in a steady stream, to be received by Mr Adams, his steward, Jack-in-the-Dust, Jemmy Ducks where poultry was concerned, and Weightman, the ship’s butcher, where it was a question of hogs.
These creatures had been arriving in ones and twos since well before Stephen was afoot, rather small, razor-backed, long-legged, dark and hairy swine, inexpressibly welcome to the little girls. They were the same as the hogs of their native Sweeting’s Island in appearance, voice and above all smell: they brought back times past with such force that both girls wept, spoke to them in the Melanesian they had almost entirely forgotten, and comforted them in their distress – they were penned on the forecastle until there should be time to enlarge the quarters below where yesterday’s hogs were kept, and the animals were both anxious and frightened. Yet those below were in a still more wretched state, and when they heard and smelt others of their kind overhead they set up a hideous din: this too was perfectly familiar to Emily and Sarah. They ran to Jemmy Ducks and told him the creatures were starved; they were calling out for food. For a great while Jemmy, who was much taken up with his chickens, put them off, saying that hogs was butcher’s business; but at last they pestered him so that in a lull he went up to Weightman, one of the very few thoroughly disagreeable men aboard, and suggested that the hogs below sounded hungry. He received the abuse he expected – who did he think he was, telling the barky’s butcher about hogs? Did Weightman tell Jemmy Ducks how to look after his fucking hens? Or turtles? Turtles, kiss my arse. In any case, the hogs below had been fed; had been offered every goddam thing the ship contained, from bread to tobacco, passing by a prime bucket of swill. And would they touch it? No, squire, they would not. And Weightman would be buggered if he offered them anything again: they should be salted and put up while there was still any flesh on their bones; and if Jemmy Ducks did not like it, why, he could do the other thing.
About this time repeated cries of ‘By your leave, sir,’ ‘If you please, your honour’ had driven Stephen off the gangway, then farther and farther aft along the quarterdeck to the taffrail itself, where, behind a great mound of netting full of yams, he found Mrs Oakes, gazing at the land, lost, enraptured; and her delight made her look more nearly beautiful than Stephen had ever seen her, and physically better in spite of the remainder of her black eye. ‘Is not this capital, Doctor?’ she cried. ‘I always longed to travel and to make
distant voyages, but I never did – except of course for …” She waved New South Wales aside and went on, ‘And this is what I always hoped Abroad and the islands of the Great South Sea would be like. Dear me, such brilliance! How I wish I may always retain it in my mind’s eye; and how passionately I yearn to go ashore! Do you think the Captain will give Oakes leave?’
‘Forgive me, ma’am,’ said Pullings. ‘I am afraid we must clear the davits.’
Stephen and Clarissa were separated by a gang of seamen earnestly paying out an eight-inch hawser: she took refuge half-way down the companion-ladder, her head on a level with the deck, so that she might not miss anything that might be seen through the passing seamen’s legs; and he was contemplating the ascent to the mizen-top when Padeen thrust his powerful form through the press. ‘Gentleman dear,’ he cried, his emotion drowning what little English he possessed, ‘that black thief the butcher, Judas’ own son, is tormenting the pigs, so he is, his soul to the Devil.’
‘Pigs, is it?’ said Stephen, but even before Padeen had finished speaking – it took him some time even in Irish, with his terrible stammer – pigs he knew it was. An eddy in the gentle breeze brought him a smell that he knew as well as even the little girls did or Padeen, and that was almost as much part of his childhood as it was of theirs, for he had been fostered with peasants in the ancient Irish way, and in their house particular swine walked in and out like Christians, as familiar as the dogs and upon the whole cleaner, more intelligent ; while in one of his Catalan homes he and his godfather had reared up a wild boar from a striped, bounding piglet to a great dark beast of nineteen score with huge tusks that would
come out of his beech-grove at a rocking-horse gallop to greet them, frightening all but the boldest of horses. For him too, although the pigs were eventually eaten and eaten with rejoicing, they had a particular sanctity, at least in part because they were individuals rather than members of a herd. He and Padeen walked forward along the waist, dodging between the baskets of turtles coming aboard on the one hand, the casks swinging in front from the other, and sacks of yams, sacks of yams. At the break of the forecastle Sarah, the braver and more vehement of the two girls, came running to meet them. ‘Oh sir,’ she cried to Stephen, ‘listen to the hogs below. We keep asking Jemmy to tell the butcher they must be given taro, but he will not attend.’