The Unknown Shore (29 page)

Chiloe: the cacique often boasted of his relations with the Spaniards there, and asserted that he knew five, ten, fifty of the Chilotan Indians – could always walk into their houses, and they would give him sheep, potatoes, anything, they loved and esteemed him so. Nobody believed him; nobody took any notice of his flow of words, which alternated with hours of affected gravity, when he would not answer a question. He usually addressed himself to the captain, who spent most of his time in silence, lying in the bottom of the canoe, weaker and iller every day. Nobody believed him; and as the days dragged by, they scarcely believed in Chiloe any more. It seemed that life was to consist of this for ever, an unnumbered series of days in which they urged the lumbering canoe through miles and miles and endless miles of water, often angry, always cold – hard labour the whole day, while the inhuman cacique squatted prating there; and every evening the feverish search along the darkening shore for something to eat, anything, dead or alive, to take the extreme anguish
from their hunger; and then the dreadful night, lying under what shelter they could find.

April merged into May, and in that month, as they crept through the tangle of islands in the south of the Chonos archipelago, the cacique twice killed more seals than he could carry; and therefore made a general distribution – at all other times the rowers fed themselves or went without.

In the horrible repetition of days throughout the month of May these were the only two occasions of relief: in June there were none. The snow came more often, and thicker; the captain was now wandering in his mind almost all day long; his legs were hideously swollen, as if with scurvy, but his body was desperately thin. He was shockingly verminous. He no longer knew their names – called Tobias Murdoch – ‘Murdoch, you villain: five hundred lashes,’ – but he kept his seal-meat with unvarying caution, and when he slept it was with his head upon the seal: his hair and his long beard were matted with the blubber.

At about the day of the solstice, mid-winter’s day itself, they found themselves on a cape in the most northern island of the hundreds they had passed in the archipelago: far away to the leeward there was the cacique’s tribal home, a very squalid place, and to go from there to Chiloe, he said, they always came to this cape. The crossing was shortest from here, but even so it was a desperately long voyage for an open boat: the cacique looked at the roaring sea and crossed himself. He looked at it with horror and moaned and chattered for hours together.

It was impossible to say what determined him to set out, but it was quite certain that they had not gone a mile before he regretted it. But by then there was no remedy: the wind was strong behind them, and the canoe ran at a furious speed under a little, messy lug-sail made of bits of skin, blanket and the remains of the captain’s canvas, sewn together with supplejack and suspended on a tripod of wigwam poles. Once they were out of the shelter of the cape the wind increased to such a pitch that they would have broached-to at the slightest attempt to alter their course; and shortly after this became evident, the bottom plank of the canoe split from stem to stern. The water rushed in, but the canoe did not fall apart; it held together by the fourteen stitches of quartered supplejack at each end,
and, with all hands baling madly, it just kept afloat until Campbell managed to pass a twisted net about it and draw all taut with a tourniquet. This gave a certain amount of support, but it did little for the leak; with each rise and fall of the long canoe the split opened and the water from below joined the water that poured in over the side. The hardest baling could never get her clear, but so long as they never slackened for a moment the canoe would not sink. Hours and hours went by, and steadily the wind increased, driving the half-foundered boat on from wave to wave: at about four the sky darkened with a leaden darkness, and then the snow came hissing down on the sea – it fell so thick and fast that it settled on their shoulders as they worked, for ever baling with all their might, and often the canoe showed all white before the spray wiped it off again. The snow deadened the sea and the wind a little and this was fortunate for them, for it gave them fair warning of the thunderous surf right ahead in the darkness of the early night.

The cacique could swim like a seal: in his terror he set the canoe straight in for the shore through the breakers, trusting that he would survive, whatever happened. But Jack could not see it like that: disobeying orders for the first time, he plucked the cacique from his place, struck him into the bottom of the canoe, kicked him down and steered along the coast until they found smooth water behind a reef, so that they could run ashore safely on the snow-covered coast of Chiloe.

‘Why, ma’am,’ said Jack, ‘if you insist, I must obey.’ He took another mutton-chop piping hot from the grill, and with a courteous inclination of his head engulfed it. ‘Campbell,’ he cried, above the hum of voices, ‘may I trouble you for the ale? Toby, do not keep the bread entirely to yourself, I beg. Bread,’ he repeated, with an unctuous tear running down his crimson visage, ‘bread, oh
how
I love it!’

They were seated at a table in a long, low-ceilinged room; Captain Cheap lay on a pile of sheepskins by the fire, dozing, with a half-emptied bowl of broth by his side; the room was filled with Chilotan Indians, men and women – clean, handsome creatures in embroidered ponchos, who gazed wonderingly at their guests, with expressions of compassion. The news of their arrival had spread by now, and a stream of newcomers came tapping at the door, each
of the women bringing a pot, with mutton, pork, chicken, soup, fish, eggs – an uncountable treasure of food.

‘Egg,’ said Tobias, leering in his uncouth way. ‘Egg. Ha, ha!’

Campbell said nothing, but struggled still with the remnants of a noble ham: the pleasure on his face was so acute as to be very near to excessive pain – for a nothing he would have wept. He ate and ate, staring straight before him at his bowl with bolting eyes.

Their first night in Chiloe had been terrible; they had come ashore in an entirely uninhabited, uninhabitable part – the usual rock, swamp and impenetrable forest – and at one time they thought that Captain Cheap had died in the cold. The next day, when at last they were able to get afloat, they paddled up the coast, ten weary miles and more, with the small hope they ever had fading fast with the evening and the certain prospect of another storm: and then, quite suddenly, on the far side of a rocky creek, there was a field.

It was an almost unbelievable sight, this most southerly field in the world, on the very edge of the barbarian wastes and under the same monstrous skies; but there it was, the unmistakable rectangle of civilisation, with the furrows showing where the snow had blown across them. Then there were houses, a little village with lights. The cacique, demanding his pay, the gun, crammed in the last charge of powder that they had and asked how to fire it. Campbell (a revengeful spirit) showed him how to rest the butt on his chin and bade him pull the trigger. The gun went off, the kick knocked out the cacique’s four front teeth and hurled him into the bottom of the canoe, and at the noise men came running down to help them in – good-looking men, wearing top-hats, with their hair done up in neat buns behind, breeches, ponchos and woollen gaiters – and at last they were out of the canoe; they were done with the vile thing for ever, and they were led up into a real house and installed by a beautiful fire.

The cacique (who took his injuries very much for granted, and valued the gun rather more for its malignance) sank into an obsequious, cringing object, and his prating was done with for good: the Chilotans allowed him into the house only because he was, at least nominally, a Christian – but even so, he was not admitted beyond the outward porch.

The Chilotans had been converted by the Jesuits, that often-maligned
Society, who had liberated them from the burden of ghosts and demons which oppressed their southern neighbours, and had taught them the nature of charity, the duty of kindness. Some of the later padres had been perhaps too busy in taking the Chilotans’ gold away from them, but had they taken fifty times as much still the Chilotans were incomparably the gainers by the interchange, even if it were only their happiness in this world that was to be counted. They knew how to live like human beings: their spirit-haunted cousins to the south did not.

It was almost midnight before they managed to carry Captain Cheap up from the waterside, but these Indians nevertheless hurried out and killed a sheep in order to feed their guests handsomely, and this was an act that their guests appreciated to the full, no men more so. They ate steadily until the moon set, and then they slept for hours and hours – they slept until noon the next day. Since then they had been eating with very little interruption, pausing only now and then to assure the Chilotans of their warmest gratitude, regard and esteem.

But even they had their limits, and now, in the warm and drowsy evening, by the light of the fire (the icy wind roaring outside), they rose one by one from the table, and, bowing to their hosts and the company, crept slowly to their deep, fleecy beds, where they lay torpidly blinking at the flames for a few minutes before sinking into the uttermost depths of sleep.

‘What?’ said Jack, hovering on the edge of insensibility.

‘I have a duck,’ said Tobias slowly, with his eyes already closed, ‘a duck. Three parts of a duck in reserve. Under my pillow.’

T
HE BLINDING WHITE GLARE
of the sun beat down upon the broad Plaza Real, the heart of Santiago, and the fountains in the brass basin that gleamed in the middle of the square made charming little rainbows, most refreshing to the eye. It was a noble square, splendid, busy, animated and magnificently surrounded, and this was fitting, for from the governor’s palace on the north side don José Manso (soon to be viceroy of Peru) ruled the whole of Chile, from the tropical aridity of the Atacama desert right down to the sodden island of Chiloe in the south, while from the cathedral and the episcopal palace that filled the west side, the bishop governed the spiritual affairs of the longest diocese in the world. A great many people – Spaniards, half-castes, Indians of many nations, and here and there a negro slave – moved in and out of the council-chambers, the law-courts and the highly-decorated prison; a great many moved up and down the wide, stately cathedral steps; and a great many who had business with neither the bishop nor the governor walked under the shop-lined arcades that ran along the bottom of the square and provided a grandstand for the bullfights with which the Spaniards, then as now, so strangely celebrate the major feasts of the Christian calendar.

It was a scene of tremendous animation – people, horses everywhere, mules in scarlet harness, boys from the Jesuit school in red capes, a delegation of Araucanian chiefs shining with barbaric splendour, more horses, a great deal of noise, and above all the naked blaze and reverberation of the sun. And yet one had but to turn out of the Plaza Real, past the Dominican church, past the barred windows of the house of the Holy Office (commonly known as the Inquisition), to find oneself in broad, silent streets so lined with trees that one walked in a green shade. The streets cut one another always at right-angles, but apart from this regularity one
might have been in the outskirts of a country town, for the houses (all low, because of the earthquakes) were built far apart, and most of them were surrounded by garden walls, over whose tops waved more green branches: almost no buildings were to be seen.

In the patio of one of these houses, near enough to the Plaza Real for a confused hum of its activity to carry through the orange-scented shade, stood Dr Gedd, an elderly Scotch physician. This gentleman, having remained loyal both to his forefathers’ religion and to the house of Stuart, found himself a proscribed outlaw in 1715. He had the whole world (or at least the Catholic part of it) before him, and he had a certain amount of money in his pocket: he therefore selected the finest climate in the available world and came to Santiago, where he had spent the last twenty years healing the Spanish rulers of Chile and growing cactuses on his patio. He had flourished: so had the cactuses. There was scarcely room for the gardener in his own garden – huge opuntias threatened him with their innumerable spikes at every turn; just above his head a towering cereus broke into dangerous branches; under his feet, obliging him to walk with a doddering, tip-toe step, uncounted mamillarias stood in tiny pots. But in spite of his exotic surroundings and the Spanish wig on his head, Dr Gedd remained very much a Scotchman. He spoke Castilian with the unmistakable accent of Auchtermuchty, and he now stood poised in his spikey paradise listening with a smile to the tentative howls of a bagpipe from within.

To him now there entered, by a small private green garden door reserved for friends, don Juan de las Matanzas, a jolly Spaniard with three chins and a sky-blue coat, who insinuated his bulk through the barbed perils and let himself down, gasping, towards a seat. Instantly he leapt shrieking to his feet, and Dr Gedd ran for the nearest pair of tweezers – there were many pairs scattered about the patio for the relief of visitors. ‘Those were my spinosissima cuttings,’ he said reproachfully. ‘But do not apologise – do not apologise.’

The bagpipe howled again. Don Juan started nervously, but the machine had been explained to him before, and, recollecting himself, he spread out a handkerchief upon a bare, safe stone step and sat upon it. ‘And is that instrument often played in Scotland, don Patricio?’ he asked. The doctor nodded. ‘Then,’ said don Juan, his eyes
already vanishing with the force of amusement, ‘I do not wonder that you left your country. Ha, ha, ha, ha,’ he went on, rocking to and fro and beating his quivering thighs, ‘I wonder you stayed so long.’

‘Now, now,’ cried Dr Gedd testily, ‘that’s mirth enough for today. Have you nothing better to do than insult my exile, for shame? What have you to say?’

‘What a flow of spirits!’ said don Juan, wiping his eyes, ‘what ready wit! – I am an agreeable rattle, am I not? But I have come to tell you that your heretical friends are being looked after. I have a packet from Valparaiso with all sorts of news, and Ramon informs me that the captain-general’s letter to the governor, telling him to send them there, was received last month.’

‘Where are they now?’

Don Juan spread his hands. ‘Who can tell?’ he asked. ‘His Excellency of Valparaiso may have read the letter by now, or he may not. He may read it next month, and act upon it as soon as Saint Isidro’s day: but, on the other hand, he may not. And, my dear friend, if he never thinks of it again, it might be just as well. I have a letter from don Miguel Herrera, of Chiloe, in the same packet, and he tells me that one of the young fellows is a sorcerer and that another of them is a libertine. Listen. “The ugly small heretic cured Dona Maria of her inveterate trembling palsy by removing three asps and a toad from her body. The large yellow-haired one trifled with the affections of the rector’s niece to such an extent that she had to be locked up when they embarked for Valparaiso. He also did so horribly blaspheme that there was an earthquake, which broke, in my house alone, three blue plates, by casting them from a shelf.” Don Patricio, you have quite enough to do with your countrymen,’ said don Juan earnestly, nodding towards the curious sounds of Captain Cheap and Mr Hamilton preparing for Hogmanay, ‘without mingling yourself with libertines and sorcerers, heretical at that.’

Dr Gedd paused, as well he might: and here perhaps it is necessary to observe that the captain and the remainder of the crew of the
Wager,
having reached Chiloe, gave up the idea of warlike operations against the Spaniards, and surrendered very willingly. They were received as prisoners of war by the governor of the island, who at
Captain Cheap’s pressing request sent a boat away southward which presently returned with Mr Hamilton. They were soon let out of prison, and the kind people of Chiloe, overlooking the fact that these were national enemies who, but for misfortune, would have seized their shipping and perhaps burnt their towns, invited them for long visits in one house after another while the administration, in its meditative Spanish way, decided what should be done with them. It was at this time that Tobias, strong in Mr Eliot’s doctrine, performed the cure with which he was reproached, in the town of Chaco, where Jack had also earned his uncomfortable reputation as a blasphemer. They were both staying with a family in which there were a great many daughters – very cheerful girls – and one day an Indian friend, passing by, called in to show them his most recent, proudest acquisition – the printed and coloured likenesses of various saints. The girls, who were all perfectly well brought up in the manner of the country, kissed the saints as they passed them round.

‘I suppose you are too great a heretic to kiss them?’ said the eldest girl.

‘Yes,’ said Jack, and added a rather foolish laugh – ha, ha.

Instantly there came a fearful clap and crack as of thunder, but worse: the ground twitched beneath them: flying dust rose everywhere. It was an earthquake. Everybody ran out of doors, cursing Jack and trampling upon one another unmercifully. The tremor did not last long and it did no great damage, but it cast a damp upon their visit, and it tended to make Jack extremely nervous. He never mentioned a saint again without particular civility and an anxious glance aloft.

But none of this made him half so nervous as the dreadful things that happened to him in Castro, the other town. Here they stayed with the parson, a very amiable old gentleman who was looked after by his equally amiable sister, a widow much valued by all hands for her mutton pies; but she had a daughter, a strong young lady with a moustache and a singularly aggressive way of champing on her pipe. Most of the women of Chiloe smoked a pipe, but few with the zeal of Señorita Marta; it was said that whenever she was in a rage, smoke would pour from her ears. She decided that she would marry Jack, who was really quite a good-looking fellow, now that he was fed again – pink, cheerful face and a bright blue eye – and she sent
her uncle to tell him that he must be converted at once, so that the match could be announced without delay. It is impossible to describe Jack’s sufferings for the remainder of his stay in Castro: his face grew wan, his eyes grew dull, and he could scarcely eat more than five meals a day; and indeed he never (or hardly ever) smiled again until they were aboard the ship that was to carry them to Valparaiso, and even then he waited until they were well out of sight of land.

At Valparaiso Captain Cheap and Mr Hamilton, who had kept their commissions and who were therefore known as officers, were sent up to Santiago, received by don José, and paroled, with liberty to live where they chose – in the event, with Dr Gedd, who hurried to offer them his hospitality as soon as he heard of their presence in the town. It is a very remarkable fact that they should have kept their commissions throughout all their complicated miseries: but it was usual then, for according to the rules of war as it was fought at that time, any officer taken without his king’s commission could be hanged as a pirate. As for Jack, Tobias and Campbell, they had nothing to show – the midshipmen because they had never had any papers, and Tobias because he had lost his – and they were therefore treated as ordinary seamen. Captain Cheap (who, as he recovered, changed out of recognition) tried to explain the peculiar status of midshipmen in the Royal Navy as soon as he reached Santiago, and he pressed hard to have them released; but nobody paid much attention to him – the officials had the whole of Chile to look after, and although some of them were quite amiable, it seemed to them that it would be time to look into the question in a year or two, or perhaps three; and in the meantime the young fellows might very well stay in Valparaiso – the more so as they did not sound at all desirable.

‘In my opinion,’ said don Juan de las Matanzas, picking a spine from his leg with sedulous care, ‘it would have been better if you had never worried don José about it at all. They would be far better in Valparaiso. Sorcerers and libertines, don Patricio, my dear, are far better in Valparaiso.’

‘I wonder where they are now?’ repeated Dr Gedd.

‘A hundred to one they are still in Valparaiso,’ said don Juan, ‘and I think that an unofficial word to my cousin Zurbaran will keep them there.’ He spoke not from any ill-will towards the prisoners,
but from the warmth of his friendship for Dr Gedd, who had several times impoverished himself by his generosity and who, at this time, was far from rich – only his more honourable patients paid him, for he had never pressed a debtor in his life, and fully half his visits were among the poor.

But don Juan was mistaken. The governor of Valparaiso was an avaricious old man; he was quite blind and very near his tomb, but he was as grasping as ever. It had appeared to him that these unwelcome prisoners of war might possibly fall to his charge, that he might not be reimbursed for the few mouldy potatoes that he allowed them, that this might last for years; and he had seized the first opportunity of being shot of them. Within an hour of receiving the order to send the captives to Santiago he had begun working upon a plan for doing so without expense, and now the same brilliant sun that shone upon the Plaza Real beheld them toiling up the Cuchillo pass, singing vehemently, as they urged on the beautiful shining mules, that ‘they were tarpaulin jackets, huzzay, huzzay', and that, in consequence, they would still love the billows, by night and by day, the dear little billows, by night and by day.

They were nominally subject to One-eyed Pedro, the muleteer, but Pedro’s train consisted of one hundred and four mules, all laden with valuable goods from Valparaiso to Santiago, and nearly a quarter of them new beasts, unaccustomed to his direction; he had no time to be playing the turnkey. The journey had not begun at all well: Pedro had been called to the governor, had been told that he must take the prisoners to Santiago, and that he should have nothing for his pains, because prisoners of war came under the same heading as official parcels, which he was obliged by law to deliver free. He was to have nothing for their sustenance on the road, either. ‘They can fast perfectly well for five days,’ said the governor. ‘They are accustomed to hardship. A mere five days is nothing to them.’

Pedro had set out, therefore, with a certain tendency to hate his charges: but he was a good-natured man under his dark, murderous exterior, and the official parcels showed such zeal in pursuing the more brutish and uneducated mules and bringing them to order that before the first day was over he was reconciled to their presence. Their way led over high passes and broad plains, and in the plains
the mules – the new and wanton mules – strayed regularly from the dutiful band which followed their godmother, a little old yellow mare with a bell, and in the narrow roads among the rocks the dutiful mules retorted upon the others by biting and kicking them. There was plenty of scope for helpfulness; they exerted themselves, and Pedro’s esteem for them grew day by day. In the evenings, when they lay, full-fed by Pedro’s kindness, wrapped in their ponchos round the fire, he would tell them of the nature and antecedents of each of his mules, about mules in general and his life as a muleteer.

Now they reached the top of the pass; the narrow path cut into the worn rocks gave way to an open space, and there below them stretched the broad, dun plain, with a silver river winding through it, and far over, against the great snow-topped wall of the Andes, the city of Santiago.