Creation (18 page)

Then, at last, he writes to Maria. “There are millions of tiny flowers, which in their multitudes stain entire rocky plateaus with colour. But when I reach my hand down to pick them, I discover they are smaller than the nail of your own tiny, baby finger. They are all I have here to remind me of your kind self.” (Oh my darling, how I wish we could go on one of our dawn garden walks. I walk here, but the very earth is treacherous, and I am alone.) “I had expected exotic birds, bizarre unknown species. But north, I discover, offers not variety but multitudes. There are
huge
flocks of birds, hundreds of thousands of birds, but few species. Can it be that extremes of climate limit the birds’ variety but increase their numbers? I am not finding the new species I dreamed of. I am not even finding the species I know exist. Where is the Great Auk? And where the Labrador Duck?”

I
N THE DOG WATCH,
at six o’clock in the evening, the sailors are on deck. A few try to arrange foot races for the birds with their clipped wings, but the half-fledged gannets and puffins, the guillemots and Anonyme himself are not co-operative in starting off at the whistle. On the foredeck, a sailor is singing the ballad of Captain Kidd. The young gentlemen come up to listen, and Johnny pulls out his flute to join the fiddling.

My name was Robert Kidd, and God’s laws I did forbid
,

and so wickedly I did as I sailed, as I sailed
,

And so wickedly I did as I sailed
.

Godwin is half standing, half seated, on a barrel and has in his hand the backbone of a shark. He is working at it with a knife. Audubon finds himself elbow to elbow with the pilot.

“What would you be crafting?”

“A fine walking stick.”

The music goes on, a tune both witty and mournful and wrung from the sailors’ hearts, the tale of the pirate who was hung in London.

I’d ninety bars of gold, and dollars manifold
,

with riches uncontrolled, as I sailed, as I sailed, as I sailed
,

With riches uncontrolled as I sailed
.

A long file of razor-billed auks flies toward them, only a few yards above the surface of the sea. The song ends —
lest you come to hell with me, for I must die
— just in time. As the silence falls, the men hear the beat of the wings. The lead bird seems to head toward the schooner, as if he intended to land his troops there. The line curves off only a hundred feet from the ship, the birds aiming for the rocky cliff of a nearby island. For a moment they are exactly synchronized. Their bodies tip, their wings beat up together, and down together; first the bellies flash white and then the backs jet-black.

“Pretty sight, that,” says Godwin.

Audubon had not taken him for one who could be impressed by beauty.

T
HEY SAIL ON,
and wait, becalmed, before sailing on again. At last they come within sight of the great cannon-shaped rock that marks the entrance to the mainland harbour at Ouapitagone. Audubon is ecstatic, though they sit for the time being before an immense wall of rock. No one but Captain Emery would have guessed there was an entrance there, but he finds it, a slip of a passage around the cliffs.

Inside is a harbour such as Audubon has never seen. The entire Spanish Armada could anchor there with ease. And beyond it is land, the solid mainland Audubon longs for. There are beds of moss and
piping larks! Young codfish skip along the surface of the deep cove as if the water cannot contain them.

Shortly after their arrival, they see a British flag flapping behind a rocky ledge. It is Bowen, the lieutenant of the
Gulnare
, in his launch. Hailing him, they discover that he has scouted the route and is expecting the
Gulnare
to arrive this very day.

O
UAPITAGONE HARBOUR
,
JULY
1, 1833

At 5 rounded the rocks which lie off Lake Island (Île du Lac) passing between them & the Southmakers’ ledge in very deep water, stood in sounding for the entrance of Ouapitagone harb’r where Mr. Bowen had just arrived and hoisted a flag. He however had not had time to examine the place and we should have had some difficulty in getting in had it not been for the kindness of the Captain of the
Ripley
, who came off to us and piloted the
Gulnare
into the Harbour. We were moored in Ouapitagone near the Ripley at 7 p.m.

Fine night, an Eclipse of the Moon, she rose eclipsed and we missed observing the termination of it by accident.

—
Surveying Journals
, Henry Wolsey Bayfield, Captain, Royal Navy

O
FF THE STERN
, Bayfield sees a kafuffle in the water. The back fin of a large fish chips the grey glass. The tailfin slices it, in circles, then
shatters the glass with a flap, and circles again, like a knife wielded clumsily, with increasing panic. The fish — it is a dogfish, a small shark — slaps the water hard with its tail and lifts itself out of the water. It seems that it would fly before it would sink. It does not go below the surface. He looks up and there on the deck is Molloy watching the commotion in the water with malicious amusement.

Bayfield had been about to descend into the pilot boat but he stops. The shark’s circles are growing smaller; every third or fourth time it makes an enormous effort to dive and seems to nearly succeed, but then subsides in exhaustion.

“Molloy!”

“Sir?”

“You’ve done it again, haven’t you?”

The sailor grins insolently. Bayfield’s pale complexion turns a mottled pink.

“You have been expressly forbidden to spritsail the sharks!”

“Useless ugly thing,” says the sailor. He ducks his head and is gone.

Molloy has threaded a piece of wood through the creature’s gills so that it cannot dive, and he can amuse himself by watching its agonies. Bayfield looks after him, contained fury steeling his glance. He will discipline the man. But he is distracted by Audubon, whose whaleboat approaches. The artist stands in the bow, as if in stirrups, his hair flying in a brisk wind.

Bayfield paces, agitated, on the deck, and then, folding his two hands together at his waist, makes an effort to put aside his anger. He calls for the ladder. He finds that he is glad to see Audubon.

“We had great difficulty entering the harbour. The
Gulnare
is large for these bays; I am grateful to your captain for guiding us in.”

“It has not been easy then, my friend.”

“This coast is never easy. How has it gone for you?”

“Whatever the harbour I’m glad to be in it. I thought we’d parted from land for the rest of our days.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Bayfield notices the dogfish give up his fight to live. It makes him feel ill. And, strangely, it calls to mind his
last conversation with the man who stands before him. “I have been thinking about what you said about our carelessness with regards to the creatures of this world. Mr. Audubon, I think you are at least partially correct,” he says.

“How do you come to that?”

Bayfield tells Audubon about Molloy, and how he has warned this man before. “I sometimes think sailors hate all creatures — the fish and the birds. They are, it seems, infected with a deep antipathy for nature. That or, if nothing so deep, only ignorance, and grog.

“Now that he has offended again,” says Bayfield, “I will put him ashore at the Ouapitagone trading post, be rid of him. I will put him ashore and leave him to fend for himself.”

A
T LAST NIGHT BEGINS TO FALL
. The clouds stay at the rim of the horizon and the stars are shaken out of their sleep into white swaths across it. Audubon remains on the
Gulnare
to observe the eclipse of the moon. Dr. Kelly has set up the telescope and the theodolite on deck. He cradles a chronometer against his stomach.

Audubon aligns his eye to the pinhole. He sees nothing, and then, as he moves the scope around the skies, the painful blue-white beam of moon. A small bite has been taken out of one side of it.

“Did you know that, to early navigators, the moon was a clock hand as it moved through the stars?” says Bayfield.

“More clocks!” says the artist.

“They took its angular distance from certain bright stars to calculate Greenwich time. But it was not accurate. With our chronometers we find that our calculations over a length of sixty miles may differ by only half a second of time.”

“I see,” says Audubon. “I do not much care to know that it is exactly 9:41 and thirty-five seconds, or 9:41 and forty-five seconds. Even as I observe the time, it changes.”

Bayfield next demonstrates the use of a quadrant. “We hold it vertical, like this, and tilt it to where the sun’s — or, in this case, the moon’s — rays penetrate the sights. Then we can read by the thread on the plummet the altitude of that sun or moon. This simple instrument is
poetry to me. Galileo was born in the same year as Shakespeare, did you know?”

“Shakespeare,” muses Audubon. “I suppose he is your great English genius. I would like to be like him.”

Bayfield is shocked. “He knew all there is to know of life. No one yet has or ever will surpass him.”

“But I too know so much that I must tell. Perhaps no one will know the birds again as I do. I have a vision of my paintings being looked at by people of a long-distant future.”

A commotion breaks out below. One man is roaring and there is the sound of splintering wood. Other men take up the shout, and sailors’ cursing is suddenly louder than the sound of water and birds. This eruption is violent, obscene, under the stars. Bayfield is gone, a blur of blue serge, and now the voice of authority slices the sounds of the fight. “Men! Who is that? Molloy!”

“Sailor Molloy’s in the grog, Captain.”

“All hands! Attention!”

Men stop their work. Stop their hauling on ropes, swinging on hammocks. There is no movement then, only the heave and stagger of one man bumping into the mast, the doors, the railings.

“Bring him here!”

The surly sailor is propped up between Collins and Bowen, in front of the captain. Bayfield’s charm is now cold, the will that rules other men.

“Molloy. I told you not to touch the dogfish again.”

The sailor’s mouth is twisted so far to the right it closes one eye, whether deliberately, or because he has been struck, Audubon cannot tell. “I say you’re nothing better than a tyrant. I tell you now, you’ll all die on this duty, mind my words. You can’t find your way along this coast, not on any man’s life. It only gets worse with the rocks and the wild weather. What’s in this for us? Bloody maps, we can’t take a share of that, can we?”

Bowen wears a tight smile, though he struggles to hold the man. “He’s been stealing grog, sir. We found his stash in one of the boats.”

Bayfield’s eyes have hardened at the corners. “I was going to put
you off in the morning,” he says to Molloy. “I shan’t wait. Tie his hands. We’ll take him in to shore tonight.”

“What’ll he do ’til morning, sir?” asks Collins. “The moschettoes will drive him mad.” He is an easygoing, soft-hearted Irishman.

There is no answer.

Molloy is hustled away.

“If he’s lucky, the trading post will have a porch he can sleep on,” Bayfield says, but not to Collins. “He’ll find work on another ship, perhaps even tomorrow. But he shall no longer be mine to contend with.”

Bayfield returns to Audubon’s side as gentle as ever.

“The eclipse,” says Kelly. “I’m afraid you’ve missed the height of it.”

A shadow has removed a part of the moon. The three men exclaim over it, taking turns at the telescope. They forget, for a time, matters on the earth and on the water. It grows later. As he turns to leave, Audubon bows. The wooden bust of
Gulnare
, protruding straight forward, seems to bow with him.

“We shall be celebrating the Fourth of July on shore and invite you and Mr. Bowen and Dr. Kelly to join us,” he says.

“How very kind of you. We shall be delighted.”

“Come when you are ready. The night will be long and you’ll hear our fiddles playing. You may bring your lady,” he says impishly, gesturing to the
Gulnare
. “We are short on feminine inspiration.”