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Authors: Matthew Pearl

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BOOK: The Last Bookaneer
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Hines stood with his head hung low. “I should thank you for my property back.”

Davenport put down his cigar and took the book from me. He leaned his face close to the merchant's. “Books inspire a man to embrace the world or flee it. They start wars and end them. They make the men and women who write and publish them vast fortunes, and nearly as quickly can drive them into madness and despair. Stay away from what you do not fathom from now on, and we will like each other better.”

He reached into Hines's coat and slipped the book inside. Hines did not look at either of us. He walked over to the table and drew his arm across it with a grunt, sending books flying to the floor, before exiting.

I began to try to thank Davenport but he spoke over me.

“Excellent,” he said to himself. “An excellent development.” His voice was almost pleased (giddy, really, for Davenport).

I was confused. “How did you even know I needed help down here?”

“Help?” He seemed to be considering my meaning. “I was listening to the pleasing sounds of the storm from the passageway, imagining what horrible screams one would hear if a ship scuttled, when I saw Hines with a marching step and a rather pitiful look of rage on his face on the move in this direction. Knowing you have been spending time in here as a sort of sailing librarian, and having taken note of his amusing dislike for you, I presumed there was the possibility of a confrontation.”

“You were precisely right. Well, I do appreciate your help,” I reiterated, a little less sure.

He still seemed perplexed by my sentiment. “Did you not see it, Fergins?”

“See what?”

“When I remarked that books could start wars, his eyes fell like a rock, however unconsciously, on
this
.”

He pointed to a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's
Treasure Island
, a standard in the library of any ship where there were young men among the sailors. In fact, a book that had made more than its share of sailors.


Treasure Island
?” I asked.

“Not the book, but the name of the author drew his unconscious thoughts,” Davenport noted with an air of satisfaction. “I have suspected that Hines, as a merchant with dealings in Samoa for some years, would have some knowledge of what Stevenson is involved in there. Of course, I do not want to draw attention to our interest by asking direct questions. But now he has begun to reveal his impression of Stevenson's role on the island, and to add knowledge that I believe will make my mission successful.”

“You came into the library to see if the man would reveal something about Stevenson?”

“Indeed. And very much worth the effort.”

He gave a proud nod, rising to his feet. As I sat frozen with astonishment, he started to walk toward the door but stopped when his eyes landed on a book, one of the volumes knocked down by Hines and now sliding across the slanting floor. His bottom lip quivered slightly and he closed his eyes before he stepped around the book and continued out.

V

I
suspect you have never heard of a French novel called
The Castle in the Forest.
How a copy of it came to lead a life at sea in the frigate's library, I will not venture to guess any more than I would the provenance of the rest of the trunk's hodgepodge. There was a time long ago when the author of that title, Elizabeth Barnard, was very popular, particularly in France, where she lived, and an era when each of her books would have been translated into English and many other languages. Now her name, like those of her novels, is all but forgotten, not only by a young man your age, my dear Mr. Clover, but by most people. There is no great mystery to what happened to Mrs. Barnard, for it happens to so many authors. People imagine that literature is the collection of books that we read as a nation or society, but, for just a moment, picture it as something alive instead, a new organism. Not a pretty or delicate thing, either. A grotesque, cold-blooded beast, as big as the biggest whale and growing. Give it seven or eight heads while we're at it, and it feeds on a book in each loathsome mouth simultaneously. Each book requires whatever blood and tears an author has, but to the beast of literature it is merely one sliver of a meal to swallow down, and upon ingesting it that particular head of this beast licks all its shiny red lips, as if to call out, “Next!” If the same author provides another meal quickly enough, then the beast has been pleased; if not, the beast swallows the unlucky author whole instead and waits in rage for the next one. The hydra-headed abomination savors female authors in particular—Mrs. Shelley and Harriet Beecher Stowe could never satisfy its appetites after their respective masterpieces had been consumed. The moral is this: authors do not create literature; they are consumed by it. As a bookseller, I am often asked if I didn't dream of being an author, but I should rather think it is the author who learns to dream of becoming a bookseller. I do not seek the mantle of genius. I am an appreciator, an observer, a preposition, and content in that, and that is me in a nutshell.

Back to Pen Davenport's ambivalent emotion upon laying eyes—for what was probably the first time in years—upon that book sliding across the library floor of the man-of-war. I believe his reaction relates directly to an early time in his career as a bookaneer, and it is worth a brief digression to shed some light on it. Mrs. Barnard moved from her native England to the beautiful rural environs of France after marrying a French potter. She had already published a few forgettable pieces of magazine poetry in England under her industrious maiden name, Werker. While in their tiny village in France and while her husband shaped clay, she spent her hours writing prose alone in their quiet cabin. There were heroines, and magic, and sorcery, and devious monsters disguised as suitors. These may sound like trifles to a young man who prefers Socrates over Horatio Alger. But there is a truism that if women who live in the countryside enjoy a book, then that book could sell anywhere, and Barnard soon was writing novel after novel, with her novels keeping the presses in Paris humming around the clock. Success plagued her with overly enthusiastic admirers as well as ruthless critics punishing her for popularity. After five books, she proclaimed that she would never put pen to paper again. As quietly as they had come, she and her husband moved away, some said to Ireland and others to Bath, for a life of peace. A few years later, news of her death reached the Continent.

It was about a month after the newspapers reported her death that a young man in rustic clothes was walking into the offices of Mrs. Barnard's publisher in Paris. He explained that he was hired to remove some crates left abandoned in a shed on the property formerly belonging to the potter and his novelist wife, and was given permission to keep what he liked. He came upon a bundle of papers and, preparing to burn it, noticed the page on top.
A Tomb
—so it said—a romance by Elizabeth Louise Barnard. The publisher on the other side of the desk from this visitor had many years of experience and a deep suspicion of forgeries. He never knew Mrs. Barnard personally, as she had been reclusive even before her abrupt departure, but he knew her work intimately. To his utter joy, after examining the mysterious pages, he had no doubt they were authentic. Since the family of the deceased had given this young laborer permission to keep whatever he wished, he owned the manuscript. The lad had lucked into a golden goose.

To the publisher's amazement, the visitor refused to sell. “No. If she wanted to have it published, wouldn't she have done it herself?” young Pen Davenport moralized in French.

Davenport made himself scarce but left enough traces to be found and sent for. He knew the publisher's head would burst thinking of the money he could make from a posthumous Elizabeth Barnard book.

The publisher soon arranged to have him return to Paris. “Good day,” the publisher greeted him, with a big smile this time.

“I must tell you, sir, that I haven't changed my mind. Indeed, I have not even brought the manuscript I suppose you're still after.”

The man recovered after a moment of disappointment and took the young laborer on a tour of the offices. He brought him to a vault. There was not money inside but stereotype plates and woodcuts from which their books were made. He meant to persuade the naive lad by demonstrating the importance of the trade of publishing, one can suppose, by placing the objects in his hands. The young and morally upright man did not waver. However, after a long day being regaled by the publisher at Paris's finest coffee shops and wine taverns, the visitor finally relented, agreeing to a small fortune in exchange for retrieving and handing over the manuscript. The publisher happily parted with the sum. He could barely contain himself. After all, whatever he was paying this simple country boy was far less than he would have had to pay Mrs. Barnard herself, who had been a very hardheaded woman.

A few weeks after purchasing the manuscript from the laborer, he received a letter from England. It purported to be written by Mrs. Barnard, assuring him that she was very much alive, that the rumors of her death in the papers were so foolish she had not even responded to them, and that she had heard about his plans to publish a new book by her while she was visiting London. She had written no book called
A Tomb
, she protested, and in fact everything she had ever written had been published and she did not seek to enlarge the list.

The publisher trembled at the thought of losing the money he had given to the laborer and the far greater sums spent preparing the publication. Childishly, he hid the letter and then incinerated it in the boiler. He did his best to forget it. Until one day a woman appeared in their offices. She was short with thick black curly hair and a glowing white complexion, smelling of oranges and mint, with a small mouth.

“Good afternoon. I am Elizabeth Barnard, and I understand you are publishing a book under my name that I did not write.”

The publisher was speechless, no doubt burning up at the thought of the lad who had somehow tricked him.
Him
, of all people
.

“Mrs. Barnard. Thank goodness you are among the living!”

She waited, her expressive brow wrinkling.

“We must have been duped,” he went on.

“By whom?”

“I do not know. A confidence man! A Jeremy Diddler!”

She replied after a thoughtful pause. “Did you not receive my letter in time to stop publication of the hideous thing being called a book?”

“No, I suppose . . . No. A letter? I never received it,” he stammered and sputtered, turning red as a beet.

She took both his hands in her own and turned his palms upward, stroking each with her thumb. “An odd thing—it is an odd thing. I have a messenger who swears he delivered it into these hands.”

It is said by some he actually got on his knees and begged her mercy, but it hardly matters if that detail is true or fanciful. Rather than endure a lawsuit, he paid her an exorbitant sum and agreed to publish an announcement that
A Tomb
was a forgery.

This French publisher, who died a few years later, his demise perhaps hastened by the cruelty of this episode, was said to be a very big, strong-limbed gentleman. The lady bringing him to his knees was barely five feet tall. Even I have not been able to confirm whether Davenport and Kitten, who of course presented herself as Mrs. Barnard (who really was under the ground, in an out-of-the-way burial yard outside Bath), had coordinated their efforts, or Davenport had made his move forging the document and Kitten made hers on top of it. In any case, the tale of their mutual success became one of the most renowned in the annals of the bookaneers, and, by many accounts, was the true beginning of their love affair.

 • • • 

T
HERE WAS
an interesting development with our uninteresting and despicable fellow passenger, Hines. Once Davenport had humiliated him during our confrontation in the ship's library, he was as docile as a lamb toward the bookaneer. I had been as kind as could be to the man—kinder with every barb and insult thrown my way—yet he still only scorned me, while Davenport had wrung his neck, figuratively speaking, and in doing so rendered him tame. More important, he continued to be a useful source of information about Samoa, however unpleasant his delivery.

“You bachelors might look to pick a girl in Samoa to bring home and marry,” he said crassly to us, “if you wouldn't mind your darling wife showing her bosom to every man she meets.”

“Pardon me?” replied Davenport.

The merchant's face shook with laughter. “A joke, good fellow. I like to have some fun with new visitors. Those brown women on the islands never cover themselves up above the waist, you know. But they're still embarrassed if you happen to see one of them without the little clothes they wear!”

“How do you know that?” Davenport could not resist asking, stopping Hines's laughter cold.

“All I'm saying”—he screwed his face into a serious one—“is that they're happy to have a white man to marry, so they don't end up carrying their husband's bloody, brown head home from a battlefield. Many whites marry the prettiest natives or half-castes they see when they're in the South Seas. It's all well and good to bring them back with you—just don't bring a white woman to the islands. It is all too primitive; being in a place like that kills a civilized woman.”

Another time, while playing euchre with the first officer and another passenger in the smoking parlor, the merchant chimed in, “It is important always to remember one thing about savages: they are far more frightened of us than we ought to be of them. Savvy? It will feel as though you are dealing with people who are deaf and dumb, or just beasts, but they can be persuaded to understand our ways. You probably heard the story of the gunboat
Adler
.”

Davenport and I said we had not.

“German warship,” continued Hines, leaning back on the cool wooden bench and stretching his legs out, though there was hardly room for all of us in the small space around the table. He was pleased to assume the role of expert. “The Germans sent it to anchor at the Samoan harbor of Apia to enforce their government's preferences in the last battle for the rule of the islands three years ago, which was between two of its chieftains—Mataafa, who the natives had chosen as king, and Tamasese, the savage who had made a deal with the Germans to rule how they wished him to. Its guns pointed at the coast, there the hulking vessel waited to be defied. It could eradicate a whole village with a single shot. Then a hurricane ripped it from its spot and brought the ship down at the top of the reef where it remains—a complete wreck.”

“Nature keeps to its own plans.”

“And probably prevented war between the Americans and Germans. Listen closely—here is what is most remarkable. The natives formed lines of men to rush into the beating surf and try to save the lives of the German sailors who, only hours before, were prepared to fire on their villages. You see, the savages are simple and good fellows, on the whole, who bow down to the needs of the white men when it comes to it.”

“What happened after the storm?” I asked.

“The Germans kept their position having the most sway on the Samoan island. The consul ordered three more warships to take the
Adler
's place, while the Americans and British each carry one of theirs at a time, like the
Colossus
, and bring them in and out as they see fit.”

In addition to learning more about the current German stranglehold over the Samoan people, we picked up from the merchant and some of the experienced sailors a few useful Samoan words, adding to those we had gathered from the dry pages of our books. Davenport was also using the time to observe Hines and the other passengers and make certain none were there for the same reasons as we were.

—
Very sorry to interrupt.

BOOK: The Last Bookaneer
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