This Thing Of Darkness (67 page)

‘Please sir, I don’t want to be left alone again.’

‘Don’t worry, Hodges, I promise I shall not leave you alone. You are aboard a Royal Navy vessel, called the
Beagle,
and we have come to rescue whoever we can. We shall find Davy too, and rescue him. Should you like to help me captain the
Beagle
? You can show me where to go. We can captain the vessel together. Should you like that?’

‘Yes sir. I should like that very much.’

FitzRoy hoisted Hodges on to his shoulders, and placed his peaked cap atop the boy’s head.

‘Now, Mr Hodges - I shall have to call you Mr Hodges, seeing that you’re a ship’s officer - the first order we need to give is to make all sail for Talcahuano. Do you think you can manage that? Then we shall go below and find you some food and water.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Loud as you can.’

‘Make all sail for Talcahuano,’ said Hodges, in a tiny voice.

‘Aye aye captain,’ snapped the bos’n, and the men moved smartly to their stations as the order was relayed. Hodges clasped his arms around FitzRoy’s neck and, finding warmth and life within his grasp, hung on for all he was worth.

 

They rounded the headland, to find that Talcahuano had simply been obliterated. Only a few bricks and remnants of wall remained: the rest had been sucked out to sea. Every living being in the little fishing-port had disappeared. Further up the hill, beyond the reach of the devouring waves, a ghostly pall of smoke still hung over the remains of Concepción, two whole days after the initial shock had destroyed the town. Even at this distance, they could see that not a building was left standing. The damage to Concepción was more picturesque than the surgical eradication of Talcahuano, but evidently it had been hardly any less deadly. FitzRoy, with the help of his new co-captain, gave the order to let go the anchors, stow the sails and hoist all the ship’s boats into the water.

‘Mr King.’

‘Sir?’

The young midshipman who had once stood shivering, a frightened child, on watch all Christmas night at Barnet Pool, was now a strapping lad of nineteen, well capable of knocking down any surly mutineer.

‘You are in charge of the
Beagle
. The forenoon watch shall be under your command. I want every scrap of food in the ship, and I mean every last canister, unloaded ashore at the double. Mr Sulivan., Mr Wickham, the rest of the ship’s company shall make haste to Concepción, with every blanket, every spare scrap of clothing and every water bottle we can muster. Tell May to bring every tool he has in his possession.’

‘Aye aye sir.’

King wore a bothered expression. ‘
All
our supplies, sir?’

‘That is correct.’

‘But what of our own requirements on the homeward journey, sir?’

‘We shall sail back to Valparayso, Mr King, and I shall purchase further supplies. Now, look lively, all of you.’

‘You heard the skipper!’ barked Bos’n Sorrell. ‘Get the lead out, all of you!’

Within the half-hour, a large party of officers and sailors splashed into the shallows at Talcahuano beach. FitzRoy, the tiny figure of Hodges astride his shoulders, marched determinedly out in front. Two fishing vessels, the
Paulina
and the
Orion,
lay crushed and broken on their sides halfway up the shore: amazingly, they were still anchored, but their anchor-chains were tightly wound about each other, in spiral testimony to their last whirling dance. Two hundred yards further up the hill sat a fat white schooner, upside down and mastless, broken open like a raw egg dropped from a height. Of Talcahuano’s former existence there was absolutely no sign: just a few cold pools of salt water lay amid the ruins, glinting here and there with the body of a lifeless fish. The path up to Concepción felt slimy and rotten underfoot.

From a distance, Concepción put FitzRoy in mind of a romantic engraving of Tintern Abbey. The side walls of the cathedral were fractured but still standing, their arched windows devoutly intact; but the vast anchoring buttresses had been chopped away systematically as if by a chisel. In fact, all the walls that ran from north-east to south-west had survived; but those that ran at right angles had been utterly flattened. The cathedral’s fortress-like front, which had been ten feet thick at the base, had subsided into an incoherent pile of masonry and beams. Huge stones had rolled out from the rubble and come to rest half-way across the plaza. Streets radiated from the square in a neat grid according to the conventional Latin American pattern, streets which had once been lined with smart low houses: now, ranks of heaped ruins and hillocks of brick had taken their place. The ground was fissured with crevasses, as if some invisible hand had grabbed the edges of the town like a laden tablecloth and yanked it tighter than its fabric could stand. Smoke-drifts rose from a score of small pyres where damp thatched roofs had collapsed on to smouldering housefires. Amid the rubble, the dazed survivors wandered aimlessly, or sat warming their hands before these sporadic blazes, a pale, bewildered, dust-covered host, weeping or calling helplessly for friends and relatives. It was the most awful spectacle that any of the
Beagle’s
crew had ever beheld.

FitzRoy split his men into four groups. ‘Mr Hamond. Salvage what timber you can and have the carpenter’s crew build temporary shelters in the centre of the plaza - away from the rubble, in case of aftershocks. Mr Bynoe. You will see to the wounded. Mr Sulivan. You and your men shall search through the rubble for survivors. Mr Wickham. See to it that everyone here receives food, clean water and at least one blanket. And try to keep them quiet - we shall not hear any tapping from beneath the rubble if there is a commotion.’

As the four officers moved smoothly to complete their appointed tasks, a shout rang out in English: ‘Lord be praised! Young Hodges! You’re alive!’ A short, rotund gentleman emerged gasping into the plaza: the top hat on his head had been concertina’d almost flat, and his suit was coated from head to foot with white dust, as if he had come hot-foot from a scrap in a flour-mill.

‘Who is that, Mr Hodges?’ asked FitzRoy.

‘That is Mr Rouse, sir,’ answered Hodges, from beneath the comforting shadow of FitzRoy’s peaked cap.

FitzRoy extended a hand as Rouse panted towards them. ‘Captain FitzRoy of HMS
Beagle
, at your service.’

‘You are Englishmen - thank God! How do? I am Rouse, the British consul.’

FitzRoy passed his water bottle to the consul, who took a healthy swig.

‘Keep it - it’s yours.’

‘Most generous of you, sir. And I cannot tell you how mighty glad I am to see
you
, young Hodges!’

‘Mr Hodges here has been a sound good fellow ever since we plucked him from the water.’

‘Excellent! Sterling work, Hodges.’ Rouse wiped his wet lips with the back of his hand, leaving a clown’s pink smear bordering his mouth. ‘And the, um ... parents?’ he mumbled, in the direction of his own floury feet.

FitzRoy shook his head wordlessly.

At that moment a low bass rumble echoed from the direction of the sea, and the ground seesawed gently beneath their feet. Hodges tightened his panicky grip.

‘Aftershocks,’ explained the consul. ‘Nothing to worry about, young shaver. We’ve had several hundred in the last two days. But the tides have gone to the very d — ... the tides have gone all over the place. They don’t know when to come in and out. Everything is topsy-turvy.’

‘It appears you have had an abominable time of it.’

‘You can say that again. The whole town was flattened inside six seconds. I’ve lived here since a good few years, so I ran into the courtyard at the first rumble. I had just reached the middle when the wall behind me came thundering down, just where I had run from. I couldn’t stand up for the shaking, so I crawled to the top of the pile, thinking that if I once got on top of that part which had already fallen, I would be safe. A moment later the opposite wall collapsed - a great big beam swept this close in front of my head! I could barely see a thing for dust. I managed to clamber over the rubble and out into the street. From there I could see Talcahuano and the bay - and then, Captain FitzRoy, I saw the damnedest thing. Forgive me, the most deuced thing. The sea was boiling!’

‘Boiling?’

‘It had turned quite black, and columns of sulphurous vapour were belching forth. There were explosions in the sea, like cannon-fire. All the water in the bay had receded, as if someone had pulled out a gigantic plug. Then I saw the first wave, many miles out to sea, racing in. When it reached the shore it tore up cottages and trees. At the head of the bay it broke into a fearful white breaker, at least thirty feet in height. It was a monstrous awful sight. And there were three waves in all, each more enormous than the last!’

FitzRoy, who had felt Hodges’s little hands tighten like thumb-screws as the consul’s account unfolded, attempted to indicate with his eyes that perhaps the subject was best saved for later. He was excused from having to explain himself verbally by a tremendous outbreak of yapping, as Coxswain Bennet marched into the plaza holding aloft a slab of tinned beef, pursued by an enormous pack of hungry dogs.

‘Mr Bennet, what ever ...’

‘Forgive me absenting myself from duty for a few moments, sir,’ apologized Bennet, poker-faced but for the hint of a grin, ‘but I felt it important that we should find the absent Davy. It is my notion he shall be here somewhere.’

Sure enough, with a squeal of recognition, Hodges had located his errant pet. FitzRoy restored him gently to the ground, whereupon he charged headlong into the pack and flung his arms round a large black mongrel. FitzRoy recovered his cap from the dust, brushed it down and replaced it on his head. ‘Mr Rouse, it is your business, I believe, to see to the welfare of British subjects on this coast.’

‘Indeed, sir, but what — ’

‘If you would oblige me by seeing to the welfare of Mr Hodges here, I do believe I have some digging to do.’

FitzRoy removed the beef from Bennet’s hand and transferred it to that of the consul. In an instant, Rouse was surrounded by the pack of yapping dogs. Propelling his coxswain forward with a friendly hand, FitzRoy took his leave of the helpless diplomat. ‘I bid you good day, sir.’

Rouse attempted to return the greeting but his mouth simply gaped instead. The two men marched off in step to join in the rescue effort, leaving the consul a beleaguered island in a frothing canine sea.

 

Three days on, and the
Beagle’s
crew had succeeded in feeding, clothing and housing upwards of a hundred survivors. Innumerable broken bones had been splinted, and bruises treated with vinegar and brown paper. A further six people had been pulled alive from the rubble, including two members of a work gang who had been restoring the ceiling of the cathedral when it had collapsed upon them in an explosion of masonry. A further eight bodies had been found crushed in the wreckage of the building: the other seven members of the work gang, and an old man who had rashly tried to take refuge beneath the sculpted arch of the great door. FitzRoy had ordered a huge pit dug for the burial of the dead, and had done the best he could to approximate a Catholic service, although one old half-caste lady had wailed that a Christian burial was of no account, for the Christian God had proved Himself weaker than the volcano-god who had sent the earthquake.

Now the men of the
Beagle
lay exhausted, sprawled on their tarpaulins in the plaza, having done everything in their power to help. Only Wickham — who had been deputized to act as emergency ship’s artist - was still hard at work, producing a highly polished line-drawing of the ravaged cathedral. A figure trotted into the plaza from the Talcahuano side: it was Rensfrey, one of the foretopmen.

‘Begging your pardon, sir, but the compliments of Mr King. He says to tell you there’s a schooner in the bay, sir. He believes it to be the philosopher, sir.’

‘Mr Darwin?’

‘Mr King says to say so, sir.’

FitzRoy grabbed his cap and sprang to his feet. ‘Excellent news indeed! Thank you, Rensfrey, for your trouble.’

With the foretopman in tow, FitzRoy strode anxiously down to the shore, where he encountered Darwin stepping out of a dinghy, accompanied by a short, dapper man in an expensive hat. In the bay behind, a small but elegant private vessel of some thirty-five tons lay at anchor. Overwhelmed with delight and riven with guilt, the two friends embraced on the strand.

‘Captain FitzRoy, may I have the honour of presenting to your acquaintance Mr Richard Corfield, merchant, of Valparayso?’

‘How do, Captain FitzRoy?’ said the swell.

‘The honour is entirely mine, Mr Corfield. Forgive me, but I cannot help but admire your schooner, if indeed she is yours.’

‘The
Constitución?
Oh, she’s not a bad old girl. She’s my boat after a fashion - that is to say, as of today she is yours.’

‘Mine? Forgive me, but ...’

‘I am making you a present of her, old man, for as long as you require her.’

‘I informed Corfield of your having to sell the
Adventure
,’ Darwin chipped in. ‘How you have insufficient boats to complete the South American survey.’

‘Mr Corfield, I beg you will not do such a thing. Your generosity is too great - I cannot trespass upon your kind offices in this manner.’

‘Nonsense, old boy,’ said Corfield, jamming his hands in his coat pockets like a gleeful schoolboy. ‘I never use her anyway. I’m always so monstrous busy. Make what you will of her.’

‘Mr Corfield, I ... I am speechless with gratitude ...’

‘Tish!’ Corfield waved away FitzRoy’s awestruck thanks.

‘But my dear friend,’ said Darwin, ‘how marvellous to find you quite yourself again!’

‘And as anxious to reach dear old England as you are.’

‘But we have news for you, FitzRoy. A missive from Commodore Mason in Valparayso. Good news.’ A grinning Corfield extracted the folded letter from an inside pocket. ‘Forgive the intrusion into your privacy, old man, but the commodore made us sensible of the contents when he appointed us his messengers.’