The Dutch Wife (11 page)

The rain stopped on the third morning, just after he boarded the ship to Hawaii. He was apprehensive about the journey, never having travelled by ship before and having been warned it was the season of storms. But for the entire crossing, the weather remained benevolent: the sun shone all day, the stars dazzled at night, the steamer was as stable as the train had been.

But pleasantness, he knew, never lasts.

The ship arrived at Honolulu and he looked forward to a few days of finding his land legs again. He discovered he had no time to spare: he must go immediately to another dock. He went there and boarded the
Innisfree,
the monthly schooner to the Motamua Archipelago. Her Captain, anxious-looking and Irish, had been waiting for his arrival. Thomas had been on board only an hour when the sails were raised and she was underway.

In the tiniest of cabins, lying in a narrow bunk with a board siding that was clearly meant to prevent the occupant from tumbling out, he soon felt ill at ease. It was like being in the belly of some unhappy monster, the timbers groaned so noisily. The schooner was already so responsive to winds and waves, he didn’t want to think about how it would do in a storm.

These things were going through his mind as the vessel passed into deep waters. The regular ocean swell brought on his first bout of seasickness.

THOMAS VANDERLINDEN KEPT TO HIMSELF
as much as the size of the
Innisfree
would permit. Aside from the Captain and a half-dozen crew who made up the various watches, there were four passengers. Thomas presumed they were typical of the kinds of people who made such journeys.

He got to know the Berkleys first. They were a missionary and his wife from Saskatchewan and they sat on deck much of the day. They were returning to the Motamuas after a sick leave. Mr. Berkley was a tall thin man with protruding cheekbones and big ears. He was in his forties, though at times he looked twenty years older.

His wife was small and plump with short brown hair, a sweaty face and narrow eyes. She wore a waistless blue dress—her “frock,” as she called it. She explained to Thomas that “the Reverend” (as she referred to her husband, even in his presence) had just spent a month in hospital being treated for a tropical disorder she kept calling, over and over again, “dengue.” She said the climate of the Motamuas was responsible. “It’s killing both of us,” she said.

“What exactly is dengue?” Thomas said.

“Oh, you haven’t heard of it? A disease from mosquitoes,” she said. “They’ve never seen as bad a case as the Reverend’s.” She looked at her husband with pride.

Mr. Berkley, who’d been quietly eating, glared at her as though he hated her or was in pain, or both. It would have been hard to tell the difference on that thin face.

“We didn’t catch your name,” Mrs. Berkley said to Thomas.

“Vanderlinden,” he said. “Thomas Vanderlinden.”

Both looked at him with sudden interest.

“Vanderlinden?” said Mr. Berkley. The distaste in the way he said the word was heightened by the severity of his face. “We know a Vanderlinden. He lives in the Highlands of Manu. Are you a relative of his?”

“In a way,” said Thomas.

“Is that why you’re going there? To visit him?” said his wife.

“Yes,” said Thomas. “It’s a family matter.” He didn’t like this inquisition.

Mr. Berkley’s face was stern and evangelical. “I regret to say your relative’s the type who makes our work harder,” he said. “He makes no effort to disabuse the islanders of their superstitions. Indeed, he encourages them.”

Thomas made no comment. Rowland apparently hadn’t changed much from the way his mother described him.

“You mentioned a family matter,” said Mrs. Berkley. “What’s that about?” She asked this bluntly, as though she were entitled to know.

“It’s private business,” Thomas said, just as bluntly. They were offended. He hoped they would leave him alone.

IN FACT, HE WOULD HAVE PREFERRED
to have been alone for the entire voyage. But that was all but impossible on such a small boat as the
Innisfree
. In due course, the other two passengers, Schneider and Cameron, tried to make friends with him too. They were short-haired young men, clean-shaven, and they wore brand-new tropical shirts and pants. They were Foreign Service operatives on their way to their first offshore postings.

But they were disappointed about that. Cameron said his colleagues in the Home Office called the Motamuas “the smelly underarm of the planet.” In fact, they were disappointed in everything, from the size of the schooner (“a toy boat,” said Schneider, the dark-haired one) to the fact that the only woman aboard was a plump, middle-aged missionary (“Lord, save us from temptation,” said Cameron of the ginger hair, looking up to the skies).

They were soon disappointed, too, by Thomas’s obvious reluctance to socialize with them. Eventually they allied themselves with the Berkleys. One very calm day, as Thomas was about to enter the dining salon, he couldn’t help hearing his fellow passengers’ voices above the usual creaking of the timbers.

“He’s a relative of the most degenerate man on the islands,” Mr. Berkley was saying. “He’s going there to visit him.”

“Really!” said Cameron.

“He didn’t tell us anything,” said Schneider. “We could barely get a word out of him.”

Mrs. Berkley summed it all up. “That’s the type he is,” she said. “He won’t tell anyone his business.”

Thomas came into the salon and they changed the subject. But he guessed, from the smirk on Schneider’s face, that if they were aware he might have overheard them, they didn’t really care.

FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS,
each day on the
Innisfree
was an uneventful replica of the day before, except for an occasional visit by wandering dolphins or sharks. The latter made Thomas conscious of how flimsy the schooner’s hull was.

Captain Bonney, who’d renamed the schooner after his home in Ireland, seemed to spend much of each day inspecting rigging or helping the crew with caulking seams—an endless task, it appeared. He made his private library—mainly books abandoned by previous travellers—available to the passengers, though only Thomas seemed to take advantage of it. The Reverend read only his Bible, with Mrs. Berkley sitting beside him, vicariously sharing the experience. Schneider and Cameron played chess and dominoes, and, if they read anything, it was their Foreign Office manuals.

Thomas had acquainted himself with the library the first day he felt well enough. It consisted of one side of Bonney’s cabin, made up entirely of shelves full of books half rotten with damp. The books were in no particular order. Some were technical seafaring books, probably Bonney’s own. Many of the others were cheap mysteries and romances. At the end of the top shelf, four of the most mildewed volumes looked as though they’d never been opened. They were called:
Inspecting the Faults; The Paladine Hotel; The Wysterium; First Blast of the Cornet
. Thomas glanced through a few pages and saw why they were unread—they were appalling rubbish.

Fortunately, he came across a trio of books that were good as well as in readable condition—old friends he could now revisit at leisure: Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy;
Browne’s
Religio Medici;
and Hobbes’s
Leviathan
. He was glad that someone, in some past voyage, had had such excellent taste.

That visit to the library made the prospect of the entire journey bearable for Thomas. And indeed, during those endless days as he sat on deck reading, he’d often quite forget he was on a frail sailing ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. From time to time, he’d realize afresh just why he loved reading so much: it seemed to make the material world, even his own physical self, superfluous. Yes, it was indeed like thought, thinking itself.

ON ONE MEMORABLE DAY,
a week out, he sat alone in the prow of the schooner, reading. He’d enjoyed his lunch, in spite of the company, and was feeling drowsy, what with the warm wind and the
swi-i-i-sssh
of the bow wave as the ship cut through the sea of deepest blue. The book he was reading was
Leviathan
. He had come to the passage containing Hobbes’s famous admonition about
“the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,”
and was marvelling that such an unpleasant idea could be expressed so delightfully and memorably.

Just then, off the starboard bow, he heard a thunderous splash and saw an amazing sight. Not more than a hundred yards from the
Innisfree,
the Leviathan itself—a great black sperm whale—was leaping into the air and plunging back into the deep with a flourish. It jumped three times in all, making the air even saltier. After the third jump, the whale didn’t reappear and the surface of the sea was unruffled except for the occasional whitecap. Thomas stared for the longest time. Nothing. He wondered if anyone else on the schooner had shared his experience, for there was no one else on deck except the steersman behind the bulging mainsail, and he seemed to have noticed nothing odd. The whale had come and gone, as though its appearance had been for Thomas’s illumination alone.

FROM THE MOMENT THEY’D LEFT
Honolulu, Captain Bonney had warned that the
Innisfree
would almost certainly run into at least one major storm on the voyage and that was why it was necessary to keep everything shipshape—hence the constant caulking and rigging inspections. Thomas was apprehensive, for it seemed to him that the one tiny lifeboat couldn’t possibly hold all the passengers and the crew.

He needn’t have worried. For though on some days the skies indeed looked ominous, the seas were swollen and the wind howled in the rigging, the
Innisfree
did not encounter anything more than occasional rough patches.

On the afternoon of the fourteenth day of the voyage, on the southern horizon, a smudge appeared, which became in turn a high column of clouds. An even darker smudge gradually took shape under the clouds: Vatua, the main island of the Motamuas. By daybreak, the
Innisfree
was only a few miles offshore, and everyone was on deck, looking at the mountains skirted by dense green forests and black, volcanic sands.

Thomas was standing near Captain Bonney, who for a moment at least was not occupied caulking the seams. He had taken off his seaman’s cap. His fine ginger hair was thinning and his skull shone through, freckled by the sun. Thomas thanked him for the use of the library.

“Sure now, some of the books were left there by your namesake,” said the Captain.

“My namesake?” Thomas was surprised.

“Aye,” said the Captain. “Mr. Vanderlinden. He’s made voyages with me a few times over the years. Always a pleasant man. Will you be seeing him?”

“Yes,” said Thomas.

“Then give him my regards,” said Captain Bonney.

THE SCHOONER CHARGED THROUGH
the entrance of the reef into the calm waters of a lagoon. Several other sailing ships lay at anchor, and outrigger canoes slid over the surface like water spiders. The
Innisfree
tied up at a wooden dock, where a number of men in sarongs waited to unload the cargo. Thomas, standing on the hot deck with his bag, had never before seen so unappetizing a place. The corrugated iron roofs of the bamboo buildings by the dock were rusted and askew. The palm trees that had seemed quite exotic from the distance were, without exception, yellowing and raddled with some vegetable disease. The heat, now that the
Innisfree
was stationary, was so intense he could feel the sweat running down his body inside his clothing. He envied the islanders—their sarongs looked cool and right in this hot place.

He stepped down carefully onto the Vatua dock. He’d forgotten how the stability of land after the constant sway of the ship would cause him to stagger, and he had to steady himself on a mooring post. A deep breath made him aware of the smell of rotting fish. He felt the first bites of the mosquitoes that hung over everything like miniature cumulus clouds. He looked back at the
Innisfree,
but no one had paid any heed to his departure. Captain Bonney and the crew were busy organizing the removal of the wooden covers from the cargo hold. His fellow passengers had gone below decks.

“Mr. Vanderlinden?” An islander in a sarong and a sailor’s hat was coming along the dock towards him.

“Yes.”

“You come,” said the islander. “I take you to Manu ferry.” He picked up Thomas’s bag and led him off the dock and along the beach.

Thomas stumbled as he followed, his feet now further confused by the fluidity of the sand. A hundred yards along the beach, they came to a big outrigger canoe with a slack, triangular sail. The canoe was half in, half out of the shallow water, and several islanders with children and chickens in cages were already aboard

His guide threw the bag into the back of the canoe and helped Thomas in after it. He and another of the islanders then pushed the canoe out into deeper water, jumped aboard and began to trim the sail.

For about an hour, the canoe sailed southwards, hugging the coastline of Vatua. Then it cut seawards and dashed through a very narrow opening in the reef at a speed that made Thomas cringe.

– 5 –

FOR THE NEXT THREE HOURS,
the canoe sailed across open ocean towards the island of Manu. Thomas sat on an uncomfortable bamboo strut across the stern. There were four men, three women and three children aboard, all with brown skin and jet-black hair. Though they often glanced towards him, they talked only to each other in a soft, alien language that reminded him how far away he was from his own familiar world. But he dozed off and on in the heat, and time passed quickly. Soon the canoe neared another island with its own set of jagged mountains and fringe of black sand. After another frightening plunge through a gap in the reef, the canoe spilled into a lagoon so calm and clear that shoals of fish with yellow and blue and red stripes, and willowy fins and tails, were startlingly visible beneath the hull.

The canoe was met on the beach by a noisy crowd of islanders, who made a great fuss of the other passengers. A ramshackle village faced onto the beach. Thomas stepped ashore last, awkward and stiff.