The Navidad Incident (25 page)

Properly, all things in perspective, they need not have feared cannibals. Throughout the countless atolls and archipelagoes of the Pacific no race of man-eating primitives ever lived, save in Western phantasies. Indeed, the very notion to simply feast upon unknown travellers would scarcely occur to persons anywhere. Cannibals, such as did exist in remotest New Guinea & Fiji, rather preyed as warriors upon malefactors from rival clans, presuming to consume the spirit resident in the hearts & organs of their valiant foes. Even if fabled Cathay accounts of Chinese gourmands eating anything four-legged save tables & chairs or two-legged save their parents (siblings beware!) may not have been entirely exaggerated, in no regard had they any parallel in the peoples & cultures of Micronesia. Had our English wayfarers but known!

That said, first encounters are a most delicate moment in social intercourse, the initial reactions of either party affecting greatly the poise & demeanour of both. Moreover, having been wreck'd and left atremble at Nature's wrath through wind & wave & reef, and with the imprint of terror yet upon them, had our Englishmen misconstrued the least hostility in the queer mien of their visitors, they might easily have over-reacted in kind. How fraught with tragic misunderstandings the meeting of disparate peoples has often been! Yet glad to tell, the people of Pelew rather ‘shewed no little kindness' to the shipwreck'd strangers, greeting them with such warmth as to reaffirm our belief in the innate goodness of humanity. What luck it was, the crew thought to a man, not to have met with hungry lions or tygers or wolves (though again we should note, these creatures of the wild tend to shun humans unless provoked). Not only did the Pelewans soon regale them with food & drink, but even exchanged gifts & emissaries. King Abba Thule bade one of his brothers assist them and learn their ways. In grateful response, Captain Wilson offered tools & clothing & sundry tokens of civilisation, all personally delivered in his stead by his own flesh & blood brother, the ship's Navigator, Mathias. When the Englishmen gave a demonstration of blunderbuss shooting, a duly impressed Abba Thule prevailed upon them to put down a rival clan, thereby proving that alliance with the White Men could be a most commodious stratagem.

In due course, a bricollaged schooner was completed by Wilson & his crew and christened the
Oroolong
after our waylaid travellers' tiny dry-dock home away from home. By November, fair summer weather in that Hemisphere, the Captain was making plans to set sail, when one of his men named Blanchard, a common sailor afore the mast, confessed his wish to remain behind. This was beyond the good Captain's comprehension. Why should an Englishman born and bred, apprenticed in the honourable profession of sailing, harbour such unfathomable whims as to make him forsake his duties and dally in these God-forsaken hinterlands? The swab, however, was adamant, wanting only his sailing papers revoked and thus to be unencumber'd of further obligation. Yea, an early convert to the lure of the South Seas!

After much deliberation, Captain Wilson assented to Blanchard's request. More than a purely occupational calculation, the Captain had thought in some form to repay his hosts the Pelewans & their King Abba Thule, and decided to offer several muskets for the King to maintain the upper hand over contrary islanders. There was no time, however, in which to impart to his warriors the divers skills of musketry, hence it seemed apposite to leave behind a person practised in the art. These being the circumstances and the Captain a civilised English gentleman of seasoned career & ethic, he welcomed it when Blanchard volunteer'd for this role. Verily it seemed a godsend.

Yet even now Henry Wilson met with a further complication. Abba Thule asked that his second son might travel to England with them. If Blanchard's madness to linger in those Southern climes foreshadowed the Romantic Era, with its love of the Noble Savage, we may also discern in the young Prince's curiosity to see Europe some enlightened current of the times, an instinctive passion for knowledge. During the Englishmen's brief three-month sojourn on the isles, the Pelewans had watched them at close quarters and learnt to mimick the rudiments of their wiles. Reckoning that these strangers definitely possess'd a powerful magick, albeit presently held at bay owing to their shipwreck'd straits, they knew the isles could not remain isolated forever. Nay, the next visitors from afar would doubtless not lend their services to help Abba Thule vanquish his enemies, but rather fire upon the King himself. Thus, whilst Blanchard's folly was his alone, the young Prince's motives were in spirit stamped indelibly with the hopes & fears of his isle, of the entire archipelago.

Whether privy to the Pelewans' plight or not, Captain Wilson consented to this exchange of envoys, albeit this time the balance tilted heavily askew. King Abba Thule, for his part, granted Blanchard leave to remain, and emptied his coffers to bestow upon his son a generous allowance. Yea, like an early stipendiary scholar!

The Pelewan Prince was named Lee Bo, later Anglicised to Leigh Beau, a youth of some twenty years of age, handsome of countenance and favoured with intelligence, most visibly embodying the difference between commoner & crown. At their first interview, the Captain overcame his reservations to enquire through the ship's Interpreter how it was that a native nobleman who can scarcely have imagined the months ahead at sea had reached so bold a decision. To which Lee Bo answered, although most eager to visit the many lands across the long water, he would meanwhile exert himself to eat what the English ate, learn to speak their tongue, and otherwise prepare himself to endure several years abroad by observing the greatness of English Civilisation, as was his mission. This sufficiently reassured the good Captain that the Prince would not start mewling the second day at sea, and he promised Abba Thule he would cherish his son as if he were the King himself.

So it was that, on the twelfth day of November, 1783, the
Oroolong
set sail from the Pelews. Upon their departure, King Abba Thule addressed Captain Wilson thus. ‘You go home, you happy. I see you happy, I happy … ut you go, I no happy.' How the good Captain replied to these emotion-steep'd words is lost to posterity. Very likely he failed for an equally memorable aphorism in response.

The Prince's possessions were meager: a crude mat for sleeping, woven of cocoa-palm fibres, and a length of rope for tying knots so as to record things he found worth remembering; nothing more. We may easily picture the young Prince, gallantly parading the decks in his sailor's kit, fashioning innumerable different knots, the ship with its cargo of dreams sent off by a fleet of royal canoes!

The
Oroolong
now turned her stern to the isles and bore northwest, a mere one-sixth the draught of the lost
Antelope
and far too small to reach Portsmouth. For this reason, Captain Wilson made for Macao, hoping there to transfer to a sister East India Company vessel bound for Britain. Fortunately, they met with no inclement weather in the Luzon Strait twixt the Philippines and Formosa, negotiating the Batanes Channel to make Macao some three hundred leagues distant by the thirtieth of the month. At long last, the marooned sailors had returned to civilised lands, and for Lee Bo his first foreign country.

“How did you feel then?” Matías asks his ghostly confidant.

“In some senses, 'twas as I expected,” Lee Bo replies. “From how the English comported themselves, from such effects as even those castaways possess'd, I knew to expect great things. Not to boast nor dramatise, but I must say my surprise was over and done with when first I saw an English musket.”

“Yes, but China must have been overwhelming.”

“True enough, tho I merely stood in the doorway. Macao was an open port, free for the rambling, but ne'er did I set foot in Canton. Not even the Company factors were allowed overland into Canton. All business dealings were settled on board ship by appointed spokesmen. Nay, the only China I did see was the port and the rabble living on sampans. Once when a yellow boatman asked me for victuals, I pitied him with an orange or such, thinking, a great people, these Chinamen, but not a rich people withal. Ne'er once on our island kingdom did any man beg of me like that.”

“But the city? The buildings?”

“All very grand, I warrant. But one gets accustomed to it after the thrall of first sighting. Anything piled up block upon block so high is bound to impress, if only for a day. Thereafter, things are simply there, part o' the firmament so to speak, unless they change their aspect. Tho were I to try to build in stone beside my father's lodge, no doubt I would meet all manner of quandaries, and so take the true measure of the mason's art.”

“I guess it was like that for me too, the first time I went to Japan. Things must have awed me, but you can't keep gawking at each novelty. You just have to accept things for what they are and only later stop to admire it all in private.”

“Aye, admiring what others have wrought can only rile and vex,” says Lee Bo. “All the more so when on foreign shores, shouldering your whole native culture.”

Thus, the two kindred latecomers to world civilization reaffirm their common bond, an affinity that draws the Palauan phantom to these neighboring isles of Navidad and makes him seek out the President.

“Mark you, I was made most welcome, being this rarity of an indigene. Macao stood me in good stead for faring on to England. The Portuguese
senhoras
all fussed over me, touching my tattoos. Hong Kong, you ask? Nay, it did not e'en exist then. 'Twas but a fishing village. The Portuguese founded Macao first. Macao, that was the bourne for Europeans. Hong Kong came only much later, after the English commandeered the Territories in the Opium War. Up till then, English ships all called at Macao before bearing upwind to Canton for trading. Macao was a veritable warren of diff'rent races. I felt so favourably disposed as to reckon England would not pose much hardship.”

“Smart thinking. Born smart, lucky for you. They set you down far from your homeland, but you knew how to read the territory,” says the President.

“The compliment is not unwelcome,” allows Lee Bo. “Tho I have felt shocks that buckled my legs. The greatest astonishment was the mirror.”

“A looking glass? A vanity?”

“Aye. My whole body shewn in just proportion, as others might see me—oh, the wonder of it! Being but twenty and a primitive with such a weakness for glass baubles as might have bartered a kingdom for a handful of beads, I spent hours before the contrivance.”

“A mirror, eh. Like meeting oneself out in the world.”

“Indeed, a moment most philosophical. The captain saw me pass the glass so often to and fro, he gave me a hand mirror.”

“Not a bad gift for any twenty-year-old.”

“Animals were also consternating. At that time, when Palau still had no dogs, e'en the two bitches that Captain Wilson rescued from his ship had our islanders in a dither. And in Macao, there were goats and sheep and cows and horses! Wonders all, even if I could somehow fathom that men had a hand in their breeding. From the moment I spied the wreckage of the
Antelope
, I was in awe of men's capacity to manufacture. Tho a horse, born from a mare—how could they make that? 'Twas most uncanny.”

Matías notices how childlike his ghostly friend becomes when talking about these things, as if the centuries-old apparition had returned to his twentieth year. It's such a novelty to hear him chat so freely, Matías just quietly lets him reminisce.

“And what of my prowess with the spear?” Lee Bo goes on. “A gang of shoremen were boasting of their skill, taking turns throwing at a painted wooden bird. One says, ‘Ar been to far Madagascar an' learnt me to spear.'
All bluster, he was, ne'er hit a thing. Well, they see me watching and taunt me, ‘Have a try, Jimbo.' So I take up the spear, let fly, and pierce the bird right through the head! I was so pleas'd I could beat the Europeans at something!”

“I had a similar experience,” Matías wants to say, but the ghost doesn't hear. He's deep into his reverie, two hundred years in the past.

As Providence would have it, several large English ships were in port when they arrived in Macao. Captain Wilson then enter'd into negotiations with the Company to secure his men return passage to England. Having lost a vessel did not help his bargaining position, though as the Isles of Pelew did not yet figure on any charts, the blame for the shipwreck was not entirely his. On the other hand, he found advantage in his misfortune by drawing up an accurate map of the islands, which was naturally well received, as reliable charts represented the cumulative product of many such brave misadventures.

Presently the crew split up, each to his allotted ship by seniority. Lee Bo travelled together with the Captain aboard the Company's Indiaman, the
Morse
, a huge ship three times the size of the
Antelope
carrying 285 chests of Chinese tea. Crossing the Indian Ocean, the
Morse
rounded the Cape of Good Hope and headed north up the Atlantic, with Lee Bo hard at reading and writing throughout the voyage. When they called at St. Helena, that tiny Rock of Empire in the mid-Atlantic where unbeknownst to our returning travellers the defeated Napoleon would be exiled thirty years hence, Lee Bo met up with his friends from the
Antelope
who had arrived by another ship, and they were amazed at his progress.

Finally, on the fourteenth of July, 1784, the
Morse
docked at Portsmouth. The Industrial Revolution was upon England in that hour, even as Gibbon penned his
Rise and Fall
, and Boswell & Dr Johnson conversed on matters philological. Eight years since the American Colonies declared independence and five prior to the French Revolution, this was the age of Mozart, Diderot and d'Alembert, just before some say Europe's star began to wane, or at least a sweet hiatus whilst the hypocrisies of the nineteenth century remained at bay and human happiness was still the measure of worth. In this age, our Lee Bo breathed the air of England, and rode in ‘a little house which was run away with by horses' all the way from Portsmouth to London. Yea, this was the age of six-mile-an-hour carriages. A mere trot, yet to our Prince accustomed to strolling the hibiscus & bougainvillaea & ylang-ylang-flowered paths of Pelew shaded by cocoa & pandamus palms & betelnut trees, it was like rocketing through the heavens. Needless to say, the Portsmouth Road presented vistas dismal, cold and gray, the English summer a blighted winter to his eyes. Nor did anyone see fit to inform the Prince that highwaymen still plundered the carriageways, or that murderers were often strung up in plain view.