The Cannibals (2 page)

How his eyes had glowed with greed when he heard of my diamond! He offered a bargain: my life for that stone. But I wanted its riches and wouldn't give them up. So I kept the secret, and it was Mr. Goodfellow—not fate—that sent me to Australia.

Now only the diamond could set me free. I had to unearth that stone from its churchyard grave, then use its powers to set Mr. Goodfellow adrift in the terrible river. But I had to get home to do that, or neither myself nor my father would ever be free.

Not all of the crew could be trusted. There was one man aboard the brig who watched our every move, who did double duty, we were sure, serving the owner, the wretched Mr. Goodfellow. In turns, my father suspected the bosun, the mate, and the cook, but I'd cast in my teeth with the steward. The fellow had ears as big as blinkers, and a habit of lurking close to the great cabin whenever I was there.

On this day, as we bowled through the seas below the great Cape, his shadow lay on the deck, head and shoulders in the doorway. Father and Midgely and I did our scheming in whispers. Midgely had moved from the berth, and all three of us stood braced against the table, where the spread-open chart fluttered and shifted with each roll of the ship.

“I don't care for this plan of yours,” said Father. “Do you
really think I can turn you loose in a boat and send you off through the islands?”

The ocean tilted in his big stern windows. The ship rattled and groaned as it climbed the swells.

“We won't get lost,” said Midgely. “We know the book.”

“That isn't what I meant,” said Father. “It's the ‘how,’ William.” He cupped his hands, as though the word were a thing he could hold. “The
how
. If it's seen that I'm helping convicts escape, we'll all be put in chains as soon as we reach Australia.”

“We've thought of that,” said I.

Midgely nodded. “We know we're on our own hook, sir.”

How my father smiled at that sailor's expression! I said, “No one will know you've helped us. We'll launch the longboat ourselves and…”

Father looked astonished. “The longboat? You're just going to shove it over the side, are you? Just push it off and hop in?” He scratched his head. “Do you know how much the longboat weighs?”

“How much, sir?” asked Midge.

Father's breath exploded; his hands flew out. “I don't know,” said he. “It takes four men with blocks and tackles to hoist it up and over. That's how much it weighs.”

“But ain't it worth a go?” asked Midge.

The ship stumbled through a trough. The masts shook and the rudder creaked, and there came a rattle from the doorway. The steward stepped in, carrying a tray. “Tea and biscuits, Captain Tin,” he said. “Will the young
convicts
be joining you, sir?”

“No,” said Father, as the man well knew. Midge and I
never ate in the cabin; we didn't want to be noseys. “Leave it and go,” said he.

The steward carried his tray to the smaller table, the one that hung in gimbals. He had to pass beside me, tipping the tray to keep it level. I didn't watch him put it down. I had been sickened before by the sight of that table sitting still in its gimbals as the cabin reeled and rocked.

“Studying the islands again are you, sir?” asked the steward. “Teaching the young convicts geography, sir?”

“That will be all, Bede,” said Father.

“You might better teach them the fear of God, if I may say so.”

“You may not.”

“It's what they'll need in Australia, sir. A good, smacking fear of God. And a fear of the lash, of course.”

“I said that will be
all
,” snapped Father.

He didn't care for the steward, but he didn't distrust him. To him, Willy Bede was a loyal servant who would never breathe a word of what he saw and heard in the great cabin. But to me, he was the perfect agent of a distant owner, the very man Mr. Goodfellow would choose to plant on the ship. I didn't speak again until he'd passed through the door, taking his big jug-handled ears beyond hearing. I looked at the chart, and the line of crosses that marked our progress toward Australia. The line curved and bent. There were more than a hundred and eighty crosses, marking that many days at sea, and it seemed that only a dozen more would connect the line to New South Wales.

“Father, please,” I said. “Will you at least agree to help if you can?”

He answered my question with another. “Do you really think you're up to it, Tom?”

“Yes, sir,” I told him.

“A boy from the city? A schoolboy?” He sighed. “You don't know the dangers in these islands.”

“But we do!” cried Midge. “Don't that reverend tell it all? Didn't he say there's crocodiles and snakes?” His voice began to slur, as it always did when he got excited. “Eelsh and shpidersh. Ain't it all in the book?”

“That's nothing,” said Father. “That isn't half of it. There are human dangers, too.”

He held up a hand, fingers spread. “We won't even count the navy. But they'll go after you like a hound for foxes. They'll chase you day and night.”

Father touched his index finger to count his first danger. “Headhunters, Tom. They paddle canoes as long as this ship. They'll take your heads for trophies.” He touched the next finger. “Then there's the cannibals, and they're worse than the headhunters. They live here, and here,” he said, jabbing at the islands on the chart. “Here and here, and maybe here as well. You can't tell by looking if they're cannibals or not. Each man you meet, you'll wonder: will he help you on your way or put you in a stew?”

There had been no cannibals in Midgely's book. Even the word put fear inside me.

“And if that's not bad enough,” said Father, touching a third finger, “there's the pirates, the Borneo pirates.”

His hand went again to the chart, down to the big sprawl of an island in the middle. “They go roving, Tom. Black ships with black sails. They'll take on a frigate, no fear. They
might slaughter the crew like so many sheep, or whisk them away to be slaves. Myself, I'd rather be killed.”

I swallowed. It was as though he were talking of different islands from those in Midgely's book. The reverend had written of friendly natives, of whole villages turning out to greet him with dances and lavish feasts.

“Have you ever seen cannibals, Captain Tin?” asked Midgely.

Father shook his head.

“Have you seen headhunters? Or pirates?”

“No, William, but…”

“Then maybe they ain't there,” said Midge. “Maybe
that's
the travelers' tales, and what the reverend said is the truth. He wouldn't lie, would he, Captain Tin?”

“You're willing to wager your life on it?” asked Father.

To my surprise, Midgely nodded. “We'd rather take our chance than be put in chains, and ain't that the truth, Tom?”

It seemed no choice at all. Seven years in chains would surely kill me. It would only be a slower, more miserable death.

“I admire your spirit,” said Father. “But the problem remains. How can I set you off in a boat with nobody knowing?” He turned away from the table to stand again at his windows. The sea bubbled up from the stern, boiling into white streaks that faded away as we traveled on. “That's the crux of it, boys. Find an answer, and I'll do as you wish.”

Midge and I went up to the deck and joined the convicts. As he always did when we left the cabin, Midgley winced and groaned and limped along, hoping the others would think he'd been punished. He thought he was awfully clever,
but there wasn't a soul who believed him. Though none really knew why we were called every fortnight to the captain's cabin, it was clear to all that Redman Tin would never lay a hand on anyone, and least of all on Midgely.

The sailors rounded up the convicts and marched us below. I stepped over the hatch with my usual sense of dread and despair. For all my father did to make the voyage bearable—with plenty of food and water, with a fiddler playing as we danced now and then—the ship was still a traveling prison, steaming hot or cold as frost. It stank of sweat and waste, and seethed with a simmering violence, like a cage overfilled with wild beasts. Among the sixty boys I had no friends but Midgely.

As we settled into our place, I watched Walter Weedle send a boy fleeing from his own spot near the hatch. His scarsplit face made his grin seem huge. He sat like a little king, flanked by the other nobs who were his muscles and his bravery. That horrid Benjamin Penny was on his right, and the dim giant Gaskin Boggis on his left. Behind him was Carrots, and another called Early Discall.

Penny and Boggis and Carrots had belonged to the Darkey's gang. They had roamed through the streets of London together with my twin. After all our months at sea, it must have been plain to them that I was not the Smasher they had known, no matter how much I looked like him, and talked like him. We differed in nature so greatly that Father might have severed good from evil when he cut us apart on the stormy night of our birth. Yet Benjamin Penny, more than any other, would sit and stare at me—bewildered—as though trying to decide how a boy who had loved him could now despise
him so deeply. Ugly and freakish he was, but at times I nearly pitied him. Then I'd see him go at other boys, suddenly, with feet and fists and teeth. I'd hear the shrieks of his victims, and the soft thuds as Weedle sneaked in his cowardly blows, and then the bright shine in Benjamin Penny's eyes would turn me cold.

I watched them as they watched me, while the brig ran steadily east. Chased by storm and gale, we flew nothing but topsails for half a week, then no sails at all. We scudded bare-masted through a raging ocean, and then I trembled in the darkness. I hated the storms as much as Midgely loved them, and I was glad to have thoughts of escape to keep my mind from dwelling on the groans of the timbers, and the shaking of the masts.

When we were nine days from Australia, I still had no answer to the problem. Then the fates that had dogged me took a very strange turn.

There was a storm more vicious than any. It howled from dark to dawn, and down below we heard the lumber shifting on the deck, the mizzenmast being carried away. It left the decks in such a ruin that we were kept below through a full day and a night and a morning, then found the sailors still repairing damage.

Weedle and Carrots climbed up on the stacks of lumber. Benjamin Penny tried to go with them, but his twisted spine and wretched arms wouldn't let him scale the lumber. He tore shreds from the ancient, sun-rotted tarpaulins as he scuttled round and through the stacks, disappearing at one spot to emerge at another.

Midgely and I made our way to the stern. A new mast had
been fitted, and sailors were splicing the rigging. The carpenter was hammering away at the longboat, so we sat down to watch him, and were soon greeted by my father when he came up with his sextant. It was the first time he'd ever taken the deck when the convicts were free, and he was careful not to look down toward them. The sight of the boys, he'd said before, was enough to break his heart.

But he was happy to find Midgely and me. “Rotten weather, wasn't it?” he said. “Nearly tore the old ship apart, I tell you.” He fiddled with the sextant, then held it to his eye. “We've been blown many leagues to the north. Do you see the clouds there on the horizon?”

I looked out and saw them in the north, flat clouds floating on the skyline.

“There's always land below clouds like that,” said Father. “You may get to see your islands after all.”

He squinted through the eyepiece as he worked the sliding arm. “Here, I was thinking of a dance,” he said. “The boys enjoy a dance, don't they?”

“Very much,” I said.

We watched him take the sight. Then he went below to work out the position, and we stayed with the carpenter. An old German, he muttered to himself as he drove strands of cotton rope between the longboat's planks.

“The fair battering she's tooken,” said he. “The trouble she's made. But ach!” He rapped the hull. “Look, boys, fit as the fiddle again. Ve put her in the vater, and then you see, huh?”

“You're going to launch it now?” I asked.

“How else you sveeten planks?” said the carpenter.
“Vood, boy, it must to drink. Vood and men—ach!—they both the same.”

He called for a crew, and the tackles were rigged, a towline attached. Then the longboat—with two pairs of oars lashed to its seats—was heaved over the side.

Midge squinted as he tried to see it all, then grinned at me. “All's Bob now,” he said. “Ain't it, Tom?”

We went that day to my father with a plan. He would hold his dance, we said, when we were closer to the islands. And that night Midge and I would hide on deck instead of going below. “The sailors never count the convicts anymore,” I said. “We'll hide in the stacks of lumber until you can bring us to your cabin. In the morning someone will say we're missing, and you'll say we must have drowned.”

“Tom, they'll search the ship,” said Father.

Midgely giggled. “High and low, but not in here 'cause
you'll
look here yourself. That's why it's rummy, Captain Tin.”

“We can get out through your windows,” I said. “The next night, or maybe the one after. We'll get into the longboat, and you can pass us food and water and charts of the island. We'll untie the rope, and everyone will think the boat got loose.”

My father looked out through those windows. Just yards from where he stood, the longboat surged through the wake of the ship. “It's rather clever, by George,” he said. “I could see to it that you'll steer due north to make landfall.”

“Then we'll go on to the elephant island,” said Midge. “We'll wait for you there.”

“Yes.” Father smiled. “What a happy accident, hmm? I'll
stop for water, and—good Lord!—there you'll be. You'll have to come aboard in chains, of course.”

“I don't mind,” said Midgely.

“Chains until we get to England,” added Father. “Then we'll confront Mr. Goodfellow. Show him up for what he is.”

Our plan seemed settled. But Midgely changed it all. “Wouldn't it be better if we hid aloft?” he said. “Instead of in the lumber, Captain Tin?”

I didn't like heights. I didn't want to climb the rigging, especially not in the dark. But Father agreed with Midge. “You're quite right, William. The maintop's a safer place.”