Bright and Distant Shores Read online

  Owen and Jethro had brought their belongings down to the dock and the supply loading slowed as the Chinese rickshaw driver unloaded Jethro’s convoy of kidskin luggage. Jethro tipped the Chinaman and took stock of his possessions, unfastening each case or bag to reveal butterfly nets, camera obscuras, flower presses, a japanned tin box of watercolors, sheaves of herbarium paper, specimen jars wrapped in newspaper, barometers, glass beakers, bottles of formalin, dissection instruments, magnifying glasses, a Bausch & Lomb microscope, pillboxes, sketchpads and inks, a small library of science, art, and literature. The seamen slowed their hoisting and watched Jethro squat to check the final two objects: a brass camera with a hand crank on the side and a wooden tripod. Owen stood with his hands on his hips, staring down into the gaping bags, flushed in the face.

  “Cinématographe,” Jethro said, looking up. “It’s like Edison’s Vitascope but made by the French. They’re a little ahead on this count.”

  “What do you intend to do with it?”

  Jethro paused. “Observe.”

  “What?”

  “Birdlife and whatnot. It also doubles as a projector and I brought some practice reels I made in Chicago. They might entertain the men.”

  Owen leaned down a little so that he would be out of earshot of the bosun. “I’ll put it to you plainly. I ordered several crates of trade items. Without those items we’ll be returning empty-handed. If storage space is lacking, half of this junk will be going over the side. Do you understand?”

  Jethro rummaged for something in a leather bag, refusing Owen the eye contact he wanted. “This journey was my father’s idea, but I intend to fulfill my own vision for it. We’re all collectors of a kind. You, me, my father. Instead of artifacts I want sketches, glass slides, photographs. A ship’s naturalist needs supplies if he’s to be of value.”

  “To who?”

  “Whom.” Gauging Owen’s temper, Jethro added, “I went light on maps and almanacs.” He wrapped a muslin cloth around a film canister. “A mounted rare bird or pressed flower—it’s just as important as weapons from some lost tribe.”

  Owen straightened, decided the San Quentin inmates could hear all they wanted. “This isn’t an expedition into unknown waters. You’re about a hundred years too late for that, sport. Everything’s been discovered out there. Did you think you were going to haul up some ancient sea creature and pickle it?”

  The men laughed and Jethro began snapping the cases shut. Owen continued, “And as far as I can tell, you’re no botanist or zoologist or naturalist. A dilettante is what your father implied.”

  Jethro picked up two bags, one in each hand, and sidled toward the gangplank. “Science has always been kind to amateurs with broad interests. Franklin and Bell spring to mind.” There was something smug and contemptuous in the looped shoulders and wiry voice, the averted eyes, the way they refused to confront or yield. Owen could tell he’d spent his life walking out of rooms in the middle of arguments.

  Owen watched him board the ship and the seamen gathered like a silent, slack-jawed chorus. None of them offered him directions or assistance; they were nervous and uneasy in their demeanor, as if a priest had come aboard. Jethro drifted from bulkhead to stern with his monogrammed luggage, seemingly baffled by how to penetrate the ship’s entryways and hatches. The first mate, Mandrake Pym, a veteran sailor with no criminal background, watched Jethro dither. Captain Terrapin reclined on a settee in the poop deck charthouse and looked on with quiet amusement, a hand working the fur of an English terrier sleeping beside him.

  “Lovelace, you can store your fidgets in the bosun’s store if there’s any room. The rest will have to go below. But wait until the provisions and chooks are settled in.”

  Jethro nodded and set down his bags. “Very well. I’ll bring the other bags up and set them right here for now.”

  Terrapin let his mouth drop open. “No you won’t, pikelet. That’s the main deck and it’s to be kept clear at all times. There’s an order to things on a ship. The Cullion isn’t a venereal old whore with her skirts hitched up. She’s a temperamental lady what likes to be wooed into submission. So we keep her clean and orderly. Go ’ave yourself a cup of chamomile tea and come back in an hour.” The idle seamen chuckled at this and Terrapin gave them a cauterizing stare. The men returned to hauling supplies and lubricating the capstans while Jethro carried his bags back down the gangplank, his head down.

  They weighed anchor in the late afternoon, sails furled and the auxiliary engines steaming them out of the blustery bay. When they passed Alcatraz they edged into the no-go around the island and all of the seamen, Terrapin included, stood cheering at starboard, waving to the inmates in the exercise yard. Jethro was settling into the apprentice berth with his butterfly nets and instruments. Owen stood at the bowsprit, watching seabirds pass in formations over the headlands, a thousand specks in the oyster sky. He stared down into the churning depths beneath the prow— like rippled iron before it all drew in and whitened to foam. The clipper opened out into the wide mouth of the bay, tacked to port, the wind rattling the halyards. The open sea wind hit them abeam, like an iodine breath coming across a mirror. It always smelled like death to Owen and yet he couldn’t explain the calm he felt whenever he was aboard. It was more than riding above the fathomless deep, the watery oblivion glassing out in all directions. It was the sense of being beyond reach. Sea life was an outer current of land life; it somehow ran parallel and separate. The weeks between ports were valleys without newspapers, letters, or telegrams. You worked until your limbs ached, collapsed into a hammock each night and swayed into a dreamless state of exhaustion. The days bled together. Meals and weather and the throb of your own thoughts was all that mattered. Sometimes you stood on deck in the faintness before dawn, somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, and felt without body or mind as you watched the line between sea and sky grow visible. He grew introspective at sea. Owen wanted to believe that he was making this voyage to secure a windfall that would set him on track, earn him the right to Adelaide’s hand in marriage and a shot at a prosperous future, but he also suspected as the ship furrowed into the great plain of the Pacific that he was avoiding the claims of the present.

  Captain Baz Terrapin stayed in his cabin most of the way through the Horse Latitudes. The starboard and port watches had been chosen by first and second mate—a coin toss deciding who would get lumbered with Jethro Gray. It was Terrapin’s habit not to come onstage until the action was well begun. He’d directed the coxswain to skirt the belt of dry, dead air as they plied for Hawaii, planning to shoot across the weatherless ridge under steam, but the former San Quentin inmate (blackmail) had got drunk and allowed the bark to peter out. The wind, when it came at all, arrived in gentle drifts, seemed to fall vertically from overhead before evaporating. Wanting to ration the coal for later use, Terrapin announced to the men that they would flounder a few days and the Sandwich Islands would be delayed.

  They had been at sea less than a week but already it felt like a month. Jethro had been assigned the job of scrubbing the chicken shit off the deck every morning, collecting the eggs and carrying them to the cook before breakfast. He was yet to trim a sail, touch a capstan or halyard, because Terrapin insisted that he know the taxonomy of a ship and her lady parts before he was allowed to help govern her motion. This perplexed Owen and Jethro both, since many of the former steelworkers and inmates, for whom this was also a maiden voyage, were already scaling the mastheads and handling the rigging.

  Mid-morning they met in Terrapin’s cabin. Owen came along with Jethro on the pretext of brushing up on his own maritime knowledge, but mostly he feared leaving the Harvard graduate alone with the hulking, whimsical captain. They sat at a hinged table, the meager light of a spirit lamp burning, a leather-clad nautical encyclopedia spread before them like a pigskin Bible. Terrapin’s quarters were a woody, oiled hollow and oddly effeminate—tapestries, plush Turkish cushions, a feather mattress under a filigreed iron frame, Anatolian rugs, wingba
ck chairs of buttoned velvet. A gramophone and several snake plants stood on an end table directly beneath two portholes. An upright piano dominated the port side of the berth and Owen speculated, given its width and the dimensions of the companionway, that the cabin had been unroofed to insert the instrument. Late at night, when the seamen not on watch started to drift up from the spiritroom to retch overboard or sing lewdly under the rush of stars, low-set music could be heard coming from under the planks of the poop deck. It was all nocturnes and vespers and fugues, forlorn and delicate pieces that were hard to reckon with Terrapin’s gruff and pustulant form. Some of the men who had sailed with him before said it wasn’t unknown to see him come weeping out of his cabin in the middle hours of the night, a carafe of rum in one hand (he switched to spirits at sea) and his little terrier—Nipper—in the other. He would go up to the bridge and check the compass under the binnacle lamp and proceed to recite the names of his illegitimate children, his fingers climbing the ladder of birth dates tattooed on both arms. The incantation of their names made him maudlin and he’d set to rubbing the dog’s underbelly the way a lonely seaman might stroke a woman’s hair. Davey Unsworth swore that one time the dog panted with carnal delight and slipped out the pink tip of his dingus during this show of affection.

  In the stateroom, Terrapin hunched in his minatory way, a plump hand on his belly, reclined in a wingback chair, listening to Jethro pronounce the nautical forms—the ship, sail, spar, and rigging types that were as ancient and venerable as Vedic prayer. Clipper to corsair, brigantine to bark, galley to galiot. The geometry of sailcloth: genoa, spitfire, lateen, mainsail, skysail, spinnaker, topgallant. The truss-and-web conjunctions of spar and rigging, as delicate and precise as lacework. All of it was to be memorized by rote or mnemonic, never mind that half of it didn’t apply to the Lady Cullion.

  “What we’re after here is the arrangement of known objects in the sailing universe. Does a physician go into surgery without knowing where to find the spleen and the liver? The anatomy of a ship is tenacious in its obliquarity.” Terrapin was pushing against the limits of his own jerry-rigged education and vocabulary, trying to impress upon Jethro Gray that he had also read works of the gilt page. He thought nothing of making up a word in a pinch. “And since we got an Ivy Leaguer aboard he should be top-notch and savvy at book learnin, the bloody Pascal of the ratline.” He leaned back, grinning at this neat turn of phrase.

  Jethro pressed on dutifully, reading aloud from the maritime Torah, tracing a finger over the feathered script and cross-sectioned hulls. Terrapin asked him to close his eyes and see what he could parrot back.

  “These aren’t multiplication tables,” said Jethro after an hour of muddling. “If you’d let me take the book to my berth I could study it at night.”

  Terrapin shot up. “The holy book does not leave its tabernacle, mate. The fate of this ship depends on this tome. I’m superstitious deep down, like all seamen. Believe in fiery apocalypse and what-all plague of ruins and frog brains if the lamps ain’t lit just so. Now repeat the sail types from the top. Mr. Graves, you can feel free to lend assistance as propitiated.”

  Owen and Jethro teamed up through another page of taxonomy. When Terrapin was satisfied he poured them each a nip of rum into a sherry glass and crossed to the gramophone. Before they were released topside, they had to sit through Dame Nellie Melba floating an aria across a sea of static. He delicately placed the needle and arm onto the spinning disc, obsidian-black and lustrous as it wobbled. Melba’s soprano seemed to seep out of the joists and caulked walls. They sipped their rum and Terrapin closed his eyes, a hand conducting the space in front of him. “Aw, she makes me cry out of both eyes the way she angelizes that Puccini. She’s the Stradivarius of the human whistle.”

  The captain used the idle Horse Latitudes to train and prepare the remainder of the crew. In the stilled, black air—hours before a sun-driven zephyr rose from the east for fifteen minutes—Terrapin liked to rouse all hands and assemble them on deck. Three-thirty in the morning was his favorite hour for this ritual. It was the transit between debauched drunkenness and the crucifying light of a hangover. He enjoyed the haggard line of men, their mouths caked shut with thirst, eyes gravied with sleep. Nipper trotted at his side or barked at the chickens in the pen. The solitary rooster commenced to crow, mistaking the commotion and lamplight for daybreak.

  Jethro lined up in his union suit, fleeced from ankle to wrist, flanked by bare-chested seamen in gymnasium shorts and jockstraps, hands cupping their predawn erections. They laughed at his pajamas, leering at the fireman’s flap that buttoned in the back, calling it a buggery hatch. Jethro told them that the great heavyweight boxer John Sullivan, who challenged any man in America to a fight for five hundred dollars, wore just such an outfit into the ring. Owen wiped his eyes and tucked his guernsey into his shorts. He ranked somewhere between an officer and an idler on this voyage and wanted to speak his mind with the captain. He was growing tired of the man’s caprices, wanted to remind him that his dock bonus depended on trading success. By that logic, this charade of not steaming through the weatherless latitudes was a colossal waste of time and money. Coal and wood could be bought in Hawaii. But Terrapin left no room for comment, bellying out along the deck in a flowered Samoan sarong. He swore that this was the most comfortable way to sleep in tropical or subtropical climes and wasn’t afraid to admit he’d given up on undergarments entirely. He was fond of soft draperies, both on his body and in the velvet grotto of his cabin.

  After some joking and banter about last night’s dinner giving him the Johnny-trots, Terrapin proceeded to lead the men in calisthenics. This was his own brand of improvised contortion and consisted of various yogic stances coupled with squats, dips, push-ups, and a kind of self-massage designed to push the blood through the extremities. This regimen, just like swimming in frigid ocean waters, was a cure-all and had been known through the ages to diminish winds, catarrhs, and bilious complaints, many of which he had suffered until a swami deckhand inducted him into the shiny halls of perfect health. Given his girth, he was remarkably agile, bowing and stretching into any number of fleshy, catlike poses. Several of the men, still drunk, fell on the deck as they craned upward, for which they received a kick in the midsection from Terrapin. When they had exercised for twenty minutes, Terrapin inspected them for hygiene and made them each eat a lime as prevention against scurvy, as if it were the eighteenth century all over again. There was no bodily part whose upkeep Terrapin was not concerned with. He considered all the men—their bodies, souls, and dreams—to be under his care and supervision.

  “Now, you lot, wash with castile soap. Get inside the crevice of the buttocks and under the flap-trap of ball and tackle. Behind the ears and inside the whirligig of the navel. Christ, if it don’t smell like a Dutch cheese cave below decks.” He doled out the sacramental limes, coming down the deck, watching them peel and eat them on the spot. “Excellent. Now go back to your bunks and hammocks.” Everyone but the seamen of the middle watch was dismissed until first light. By Owen’s reckoning the men were subsisting on three hours of interrupted sleep a night and it would only be a matter of time before someone dozed in the high rigging and toppled deckward.

  Owen spent the windless days finalizing his trading route and writing a letter to Adelaide. He kept a watchful eye over Jethro and made sure the seamen didn’t interfere with the college graduate. Apart from his morning study sessions in the dawning light of Terrapin’s cabin, Jethro was assigned various duties that took him into the lower reaches of the bark. He carried coal from the scuttles to the boiler room for future use, ran sailcloth from the bosun’s storeroom, helped the cook peel potatoes and onions, stocked the bread room with hardtack. The tin-lined sepulcher of the bread room was the only place that the water and rats could not penetrate. His least favorite task was mopping down the orlop with citric acid. An emergency sick bay below the waveline, the orlop smelled of bilgewater.

  When Jethro wasn’t cleaning
and hauling, he found time to begin collecting specimens. The crew watched with mocking delight as he sent dredge nets over the side and hauled up countless jellyfish, slicing them open to study their gelatinous architecture before bottling them in glass. He scampered about with his net and haversack as they came near some atolls, catching everything from flies with iridescent legs to giant silver moths and paper wasps. The winged insects were pinned to blotting paper, their Latinate names printed neatly below. Jethro consulted A Naturalist’s Guide to the Pacific Islands by H. R. Whitcomb. With special permission from Terrapin, he was briefly allowed to mount the sacred altar of the poop deck—strictly reserved for officers—to film with his cinématographe a pair of terns roosting on the mizzenmast. He spent several hours with camera, binoculars, and notepad. Owen watched him make his diligent observations and sort his bugs into labeled pillboxes. He supposed it was akin to collecting artifacts but failed to see the value in gathering tentacle, wing, and claw. A dead starfish was nothing like a piece of handicraft. And a yard of jostled filmstrip—birds huddled in migratory fatigue or whatever it was—hardly counted as science. His own interest in objects, from the native to the urban, had always been about the story each one represented, about possessing material proof of something transient. There was something endlessly fascinating about divining the purpose of a lacquered box or the sequence of cuts in a sculpture, plumbing the mind of the man who’d made it.