The Poisoned Island (26 page)

“Ah, my
kingdom
is a cold green land of rain and storms,” he had said at last, his big, open face lit by the fires from the beach, his hair bleached almost pure white by the weeks at sea. “There are mountains and valleys and birds that whistle down from the skies. My people work underground, digging jewels and coal from the ground and singing while they work, and when night falls we gather against the windy rain and drink a sweet nectar that kills memories and lights up dreams. We are a fierce sailing people, builders of boats and smelters of iron, and we travel the world seeking adventure and pleasure, the far horizon our only boundary.”

The island prince had watched his new friend during this pretty little speech, and at the mention of horizons and discovery the Englishman had looked out onto the ship and the bay and had lifted his chin into the soft warm breeze, as if to smell the shores which lay over the edge of the world.

“And will you take me to your kingdom when you leave?”

At this the Englishman had looked less pleased. He became furtive and fidgety.

“If you so wish,” he had said, but he did not look at the prince. “But enough of this. I need a woman!”

The prince had laughed, and had shouted down to the ground, and four of his finest concubines had appeared and began to dance below them, turning and turning, their clothes falling to the ground.

For the next three days, the prince kept returning to the same subject: the Englishman’s kingdom, and his desire to see it. Each time the subject was raised, the Englishman became short with him and changed the subject, until it was obvious
to the prince that his new friend was not ready to carry him away from the poisoned island. Not, that is, unless the prince could give him something in return.

So he’d appeared at the encampment last night with a proposal, and now he was taking his English friend to the place high in the hills, the plateau where no Englishman, not even the missionaries, had ever been. They walked along the river, as the prince had done dozens of time before, the walls of the hills growing tall beside them. They came upon a waterfall, and they crossed the pool below it and then climbed even further, the trees around them coming in closer and closer until, quite suddenly, they emerged through the tree line onto the open plateau.

At the center of the open ground was a single tree. It was a breadfruit tree, thought the Englishman, who knew something of botanical matters. Its leaves were green and shining, and it stood fifteen feet high and elegant. It seemed to occupy the clearing as if the place was made for it, and the birdsong which surrounded the two men was at once deafening and as sweet and organized as a choir.

To the right of the tree was a slightly raised table of flat stones—a
marae
, like several the Englishman had seen around Matavai bay, constructed from rock and coral piled up to create a more-or-less flat area raised two feet off the ground. The
marae
were both churches and cemeteries to the islanders, the sacred ground on which they acted out their own religion. When the Englishman had asked his friend about such matters the prince had become quiet and secretive, as if embarrassed or even fearful.

At one end of this particular
marae
stood a kind of altar, a flat rock lying atop two smaller rocks. The prince stepped up onto the stone platform, indicating that his friend should by no means follow him, and thus quietly consecrating the space on
the flat top of the construction. He walked to the altar, making strange movements with his hands and his head which, the Englishman supposed, were the equivalents of genuflecting.

As he approached the altar, the prince knelt down and laid his head on the floor, his hands out in front of him, prostrate. Then he sat up on his knees again, the ritual apparently over, and removed a flat stone from beneath the altar. From inside he pulled out a bag made from
tapa
, about the size of a coconut and seemingly just as full. He also picked up two wooden cups from the cavity. Then he stood, backed away from the altar, and stepped down from the
marae
.

The prince walked a little way to the edge of the clearing. The Englishman could see that the ground here was scorched, as if many fires had been lit. The prince began to gather twigs and branches from the tree line, and soon had the beginnings of a little fire on top of the scorched ground. Then he went into the trees, telling the Englishman to wait.

After only three or four minutes, he returned, carrying something which caused the Englishman to frown with surprise: an iron kettle, obviously from the northern hemisphere and very old. The prince had filled it with water. The Englishman began to ask where on earth this relic of his own land had come from, but the prince shook his head and pressed his finger to his lips.
Be quiet. No more questions.

The prince opened the
tapa
bag and with enormous care—
infinite
care—he dropped several pinches of the stuff inside into the kettle. The Englishman glimpsed something that looked like tea within, dried and fragrant, but then the prince closed the bag again. He placed the kettle within the flames, and then they waited.

After only a few minutes, steam began to rise from the ancient kettle’s spout. Steam and something else: a strange
aroma which made the Englishman’s eyes water and his nostrils dilate. With the same ceremonial care the prince poured water and the infusion from whatever had been in the bag into the cups from beneath the altar. Then, finally, he handed one of them to his friend.

The Englishman gazed down into the liquid in the cup. He could see various bits of organic material, fragments of leaf and triangular shapes that looked like the tops of some strange flower. He breathed in the aroma and his head spun, momentarily, in one great circle around itself, like the leaves circling in the hot water. He looked up and saw the prince watching him and was surprised, even shocked, to see the expression on the savage’s face. For the first time the Englishman thought the prince looked like a king, a great king from the far side of the world, skilled with hidden knowledge and enormous wisdom. The Englishman remembered the joke about his own fabricated royalty and felt not so much ashamed as suddenly terrified lest this king should ever be offended.

The wooden cup was in his hand, hot in his palm. He held it up to his nose, and something flashed before his eyes—
a beautiful young woman, running away
—and then he drank it, and everything changed.

He sipped, then gulped, then swallowed it whole, the leaves and seeds accompanying the water down his throat and into his stomach, and then his head exploded with light and the trees were full of everything and the world was a golden coin which he held in his hand, and he fell backwards onto the earth as the island prince watched, a surprised look on his face, shocked by the strength of the Englishman’s reaction to the leaf.

The tree in the clearing rustled in the breeze, and waited for its newest acolyte to wake up.

A couple of years after his return from New Holland, Robert Brown became ill. He had fallen ill many times in his life, but this had felt different. He was overcome by a terrible torpor, a sense of nothing being to any purpose. Worse, this dissolute sense of indolence was accompanied by an intermittent but profound deafness. When this came over him the world was smothered in a dull hum which, with a terrible irony, seemed to grow louder during the evening and kept him awake, such that his torpor grew worse due to lack of sleep.

It was a difficult time for other reasons, too. Sir Joseph was proving a mercurial patron. He seemed uninterested in Brown’s plans for a major work on the botany of New Holland, and barely supported the younger man’s
prodromus
, for which the Scot ended up paying most of the costs of production. As a result only 250 were ever printed. Sir Joseph’s own journey to the far side of the world had bought him enormous fame and bountiful connections. It seemed to Brown, who
had made as big a journey, that he had returned to general indifference and penury. He was on the point of returning to Scotland and resuming a medical career when Jonas Dryander died, and Banks offered him the post of librarian.

Today, he is a person of some consequence. His
prodromus
, he has been told, is viewed with awe by France’s finest botanists. His positions with Sir Joseph and the Linnaean Society bring with them a certain standing in society. Nonetheless that old sense of torpor had been returning, along with those thoughts of returning to medicine.

But everything had changed with the previous day’s examination of the alien tree at Kew. A new kind of energy is now pouring into him. He did not sleep the previous evening for thinking of the impossible tree. A new species of course, but so much more than a species. A potential economic miracle, a breadfruit tree which is alien and astonishing, a plant with such capacity for growth that it throws into question many of the experimental botanical discoveries of the last thirty years.

This morning he stays in Soho Square to research the matter further in the Banks library. He starts at the beginning: with the papers from the original
Endeavour
voyage, principally Sydney Parkinson’s sketches of breadfruit and the descriptions of them by Sir Joseph. He reexamines the papers from the
Bounty
and the ship that followed her, the
Providence
, which successfully took live breadfruit from Otaheite to Jamaica twenty years previously, as the
Bounty
had been intended to do. There is no record in any of the documents available to him of a tree such as the one he saw yesterday. Nor is there anything in the records of Sir Joseph, Lieutenant Cook, or Parkinson.

He has placed the dried specimens from last night on a shelf above his desk, and now he gets up and examines them
again. There seems to be nothing special about them, here in their component parts, no great revelation to be had. He takes down the microscope he keeps here in the library and then thinks better of it. Today is for following a paper trail, not for further hours lost with his eye to a microscope. He opens one of the jars, the one that contains the dried leaves and flowers which looked to him like tea the previous evening, and the odor from within nearly overwhelms him. His head spins for a moment in a great leap around the place, and the odor flies up into the room such that he believes for a moment he can almost
see
it, this bizarre concoction of smells which causes his nostrils to quiver with life. He feels light-headed and dizzy, and tries to remember if he ate breakfast.

“You’d best sit down, Brown. You look somewhat uncertain.”

Sir Joseph wheels himself into the library, and Brown snaps awake. The first thing he hears is the sound of a girl giggling in the street outside. He goes to shut the window.

“Leave it open, Brown. The air is particularly pungent in here, and I am still recovering from last night. I indulged myself rather more than is good for my health.”

“Indeed, Sir Joseph? And you are not to visit Kew today?”

“Not today, no. I had to be in London for the Royal Philosophers dinner last night, and will attend to matters here. These are the specimens you examined yesterday?”

“They are.”

“May I look?”

Brown feels an unaccountable resistance to showing the material to Sir Joseph, a feeling which he observes with some detached interest, as if another part of him were gazing down into the room through a microscope. There is no earthly reason he should feel possessive towards the specimens. A
headache is beginning to form just behind his left eye, in a familiar place, and something like the old lassitude has crept up upon him. The entrance of Banks has brought back unwelcome maladies.

“As you wish, Sir Joseph.”

He says it with some insolence, and Banks notices this with a raised eyebrow followed by a scowl.

“I will take care, Brown, not to damage your specimens.”

He holds each jar up to the light and looks within. After a few minutes of examination, he begins asking questions, and it is these questions, Brown realizes, that he was hoping to avoid.

“The flower is that of a breadfruit tree?”

“It is, Sir Joseph. As far as one can tell from a tree that is still so young yet possessed of such prodigious growth, the flower is of a piece with breadfruit. The female flower, that is.”

“Hmm. And the flower grows as fast as the rest of the plant.”

“Indeed it does.”

Brown watches the economic calculations whirl through the old man’s brain, and feels thinly disgusted.

“How did you dry the material?”

“I did no drying, Sir Joseph.”

“You must have done. The contents of this jar are quite desiccated.”

“Yes. But I did not dry them. They became like that within hours of being cut from the tree. Perhaps even quicker—I did not notice how dry they were until the end of the day.”

“They dried like this inside the shed yesterday? At Kew?”

“Indeed, Sir Joseph.”