This Thing Of Darkness (99 page)

‘You say Capp’en Fitz‘oy is here. You say Capp’en Sulivan is here,’ spat Jemmy. ‘You lie. You try take away Jemmy’s childs!’

‘Hold your tongue, James Button,’ commanded Despard.

‘No thief!’ shouted Schwaiamugunjiz angrily.

The contents of the Fuegians’ bundles spilled out across the jetty. Jemmy’s brother Macooallan assumed a guilty look as two turnips and a hammer were revealed among his belongings.

‘Ha!’ said Despard triumphantly. ‘It seems that we do indeed have a thief in our midst.’

‘No thief,’ said Macooallan defiantly. ‘Macooallan grow turnips. Macooallan eat turnips.’

‘No,’ said Garland Phillips, stepping forward to take the vegetables back. ‘They grew on mission soil. They are not yours to remove.’

‘Who turnips belong?’ said Jemmy accusingly. ‘Belong God?’

‘Yes,’ pronounced Despard, his arms folded as if to settle the matter. ‘They are God’s vegetables. And this is God’s hammer. Now. It is time for you to board the vessel.’

Heads down, the line of sullen Fuegians did as they were bidden.

 

Battered and bruised, the
Allen Gardiner
limped into Woollya Cove close to a year after her previous visit. It had been a tough passage, the ship tossed around on mountainous seas like a piece of flotsam. A storm in the Beagle Channel had cracked the topsail halyards and torn down the mainsail as if it were bunting. Even the crew had lost some of their Christian enthusiasm for the venture, but Garland Phillips, who had been placed in command of the voyage by Despard, had maintained his grip. When two sailors had attempted to wash their clothes on a Sunday, he had ripped into them. ‘Not in this vessel,’ he had roared. ‘It has been built, launched and sailed in God’s service, and His holy day is not to be profaned in it with impunity. If you wash it will be at your cost!’ The two men had slunk away, chastened.

‘Sailors are like children,’ Phillips had later confided to Captain Fell. ‘The better they are treated, the more they want.’

Phillips’s orders were to build a mission station on the scale of Cranmer at Woollya Cove. ‘Spend every day with the natives,’ Despard had advised him. ‘Try them much with singing. Have a Sabbath morning and evening service on shore, that the natives may attend and be aroused to enquiry.’ Phillips, as a result, had decided that the mission church should be the first building erected, and had immediately put the crew of the
Allen Gardiner
to work. Captain Fell, staid and solemn, marshalled his men to dig foundations and cut down trees for timber. The Cranmer Fuegians proved more reluctant accomplices, until a daily wage of five biscuits was agreed for their labours. Gradually, the little wooden church took shape; and gradually, canoe after canoe of curious natives arrived, until several hundred sat cross-legged in the wet grass, fascinated by proceedings. At first they were content to remain spectators, but eventually they began to inch forward by degrees, nosy and demanding, asking questions repeatedly of their countrymen. More thefts were reported.

‘Can’t you make them go away?’ grumbled Phillips to Jemmy.

‘You go away now! What you call this, come here? We no want you here!’ shouted Jemmy in English, to a sea of uncomprehending faces.

‘I mean, in Yamana,’ said Phillips despairingly.

‘Me no speak Yamana,’ replied Jemmy tartly. ‘Jemmy is English
gen’leman.’

Phillips abandoned the exercise.

In an effort to dissipate the air of menace that was slowly thickening about the camp, Captain Fell ordered the entire store of mission clothing to be broken into and distributed. Before long there was barely a Fuegian at Woollya Cove who was not attired in some item of European finery. Men wore girls’ lacy pantalettes about their heads; women wore men’s brocaded waistcoats as underwear; heads were forced through the straining armholes of woollen vests.

‘You look a fine fellow,’ said Captain Fell to one barrel-chested specimen, who had worked out more or less correctly how to put on his suit of clothes.

‘You look a fine fellow,’ repeated the man.

Fell produced a small looking-glass from his pocket, and showed the man his reflection. With a yell, the Fuegian fled screaming into the trees.

By 9 November, the actual anniversary, God’s house was almost - but not quite - completed. No matter: it was the Sabbath. It was an auspicious date, Phillips decided, for the first ever church service to be held on the mainland of Tierra del Fuego. The natives would be dazzled, he calculated, by the simple grace of the ceremonial and by the harmonic beauty of the hymn-singing. The entire ship’s company rose in a body at sunrise and went ashore in the cutter, leaving only Coles the cook to mind the
Allen Gardiner.

He watched them bob across the dark waters, the surface flecked here and there with wan pinpoints of light from the pale dawn. The sun seemed to take flight, and retreated behind a dense bank of cloud almost as soon as it had been spotted. It took the cutter a full twenty minutes to reach the shore, its dark cluster of heads getting smaller and smaller as it shrank into the distance. Bored, Coles fetched the captain’s spyglass; he knew where it was kept.

After mooring the boat, the missionaries and sailors formed up in their smart guernseys and marched up to the church in a platoon order.
That’ll show the darkies how it’s done
, thought Coles. Before long he could distinctly hear singing, muffled but sweet, wafting like incense across the waters of the cove. The hymn, he recognized, was ‘His Praise Who Is Our God’. He even fancied for a moment that he could hear Garland Phillips’s proud tenor rising above the rest, sending the word of the Lord echoing out of the church and swooping between the wild peaks and lonely channels. You had to hand it to old Phillips. He was a tartar, all right, but he knew what he was doing. The hymn-singing was certainly having an effect on the Fuegians. Some of them were on their feet now, listening intently. Others were creeping down to the water’s edge. What were they up to? Coles squinted through the glass. Why, the thieving buggers were stealing the cutter’s oars! And on a Sunday an’ all! They’d steal the cutter itself next, like as not, and then the crew’d be in a pickle. He tried to identify the miscreants, but they were too far away. Was that Jemmy? Hard to say. He noticed that Phillips’s musket, which he’d left propped against the church door, was also missing. It had been there a moment ago.

Suddenly, smoke began to envelop the rear of the church, followed quickly by ravenous licking flames.
What the devil?
Choking and spluttering, the sailors and missionaries began to emerge from the building, wiping their streaming eyes, dirty smoke-clouds billowing out after them. Captain Fell was first, carrying his hat under his arm — Coles recognized the uniform and the pale disc of his bald head, which stood out pink at first, then crimson when the first rock battered him to the ground. Then there were scores of rocks, yielded by hordes of Fuegians, all suddenly converging on the church door. One by one, the congregation were brutally beaten to death as they were driven by the blaze out into the daylight.

His bowels loosening, Coles watched both John Johnstones dragged out by their hair and pulverized, one after the other, before the simple wooden porch. The Swede, Petersen, made a run for it, but got no further than ten yards down the slope before a smartly aimed rock brought him down. Then the savages were on him like jackals, raining blows upon the helpless, doomed sailor. Wait! There was another runner! This one had got away. Coles fought to refocus the spyglass. For a split second he caught sight of a dark, blurred figure, coat-tails flapping in the circle of light, long black hair streaming, haring towards the shore. It was Mr Phillips!
Go it sir, go it! Not the cutter, sir, not the cutter. The buggers have taken the oars!
But Garland Phillips was smarter than that. He was making for an unattended native canoe.
That’s it sir, that’s it!
Coles managed at last to bring the glass into focus. He was fit and fast, was Mr Phillips, and he ran like a gazelle on those long legs of his. He was giving himself a chance.

Phillips was plunging through the icy shallows now, scattering the gelid, viscous seawater into glittering cascades as if it were the warm, sparkling waters of the tropics.
Come on sir, come on!
He had reached the canoe now, untied it, and was climbing in. The savages were chasing him hard, for they were powerful buggers too, but they hadn’t thought to make for their own canoes yet. They were hurling rocks, but the rocks were falling short. He had a slim chance, had Mr Phillips, but it was a chance all right. The catechist levered himself up on two wiry arms and remained there, momentarily suspended on the lip on the canoe, held for an instant too long in the centre of the lens; then the top of his cranium disintegrated in a silent red puff, a delicate crimson cloud of vapour, and Garland Phillips subsided slowly into the water, quite dead, looking rather astonished, his black hair and coat-tails waving, like the dark fronds of beckoning seaweed that welcomed him down into the scarlet sea.

A second later, the musket report rolled out grandly across the bay. Coles lifted the spyglass and refocused it, trying to identify the shooter. There he was: young Threeboys, a little smile of pride on his twelve-year-old face, accepting the accolades of his fellows for what really was a first-rate piece of marksmanship.

FitzRoy rose at six, dressed, breakfasted, and had bidden goodbye to his wife by seven. It did not come easily to think of his cousin Maria as his wife: he had hardly known her before their marriage, and she was still a stranger in many ways. Maria Smyth was kind, gentle, plump, maternal and had still been a spinster at the unthinkable age of thirty, so the family had seized an undoubtedly useful opportunity to tie up two rather awkward loose ends. He was grateful for her furious dedication to the pursuit of matrimonial bliss, and he was almost — but not quite - in love with her; but both of them knew that Mary FitzRoy had been his true wife, and would reclaim that title from her usurper on Judgement Day. Maria did her best to make him happy, but nothing could make him happy, for his daughter Emily, wilful, beautiful and sole inheritor of the earthly spirit of her mother, had died in August at the tender age of eighteen; taken by the good Lord for the fulfilment of a divine purpose that seemed increasingly arcane, increasingly arbitrary and increasingly baroque in its cruelty as the years went by. He blotted out his grief by driving himself furiously at his work, staying late at the office until well into the evening. As he waved his wife goodbye he knew, as she did, that they would not meet again until shortly before it was time to retire for the night. Such was the case six days a week; only on the Lord’s day would he relent, and pause to beg his Creator to grant him comprehension.

FitzRoy walked up Church Road towards the relocated Crystal Palace, then fed eastwards into the stream of black-clad, black-booted, black-hatted men heading down Anerley Road to the station and the seven sixteen Pimlico service operated by the Crystal Palace and West End Railway. Black was the colour of the cast-iron locomotive that would ferry them to London, black the colour of the coal that filled its tender. Black were the buildings that would consume this army, dirtied by the soot from a million coal fires; black was the newsprint they would consume
en route,
the vehicle of information and authority in this modern world. Black was the colour of innovation and progress. Why, then, did FitzRoy feel like a worker ant? When he was young, he had returned from the first
Beagle
voyage to a stumbling, poverty-stricken, directionless Britain in which men had dressed like hummingbirds. Now technology had taken a hand, and prosperity and security were being smelted and forged in a thousand factories. But technology had not been a liberating force, as he had hoped; rather, it constrained, it imposed uniformity. Men’s individual souls, God’s most precious gift, were being corralled like cattle by industrialists and factory-owners in Mammon’s cause. Even time had been standardized: men’s watches told the same time in East London as they did in West, in Norwich as they did in Plymouth. FitzRoy felt a sudden urge to stop in the middle of the swarm, and perform an about-turn; to shout at his fellows, that there were other places in this world, other peoples, that most of them would never even become aware of, other sights and sounds that were every bit as vital a part of God’s universe as they were. He wanted to tell them of sixty-foot waves, of crashing earthquakes and exploding volcanoes, of majestic Araucanian tribesmen with long, tapering lances, of wild-haired, white-painted Fuegians lighting fires on their lonely windswept shores at the far end of the world; marvels to be celebrated and studied by modern man, not eradicated or homogeneated in the pursuit of commercial or political gain. He wanted to stop and shout all these things, but he could not, for Emily was dead, like her mother before her, and conformity was his only escape, his only refuge. It did not do, in the end, to question God’s purpose unduly. That was Darwin’s weakness, and the philosopher was surely doomed. In the end, all FitzRoy could do was put his trust in God, and live in accordance with His teachings; that was the silent promise he had made to his dying wife, and nothing would induce him to stray from that path, wherever it took him. The sole remaining purpose of his life was to serve her memory to the best of his ambitions. That was the way it must be.

It was December, so progress had even clouded the atmosphere. As the train pulled into the steamer dock platform at Battersea, a veil of dense, dirty-yellow mist descended, as if the air itself had grown mouldy. A sickly gleam betrayed a surreptitious attempt by the sun’s rays to cut an opening in the fog. Ghastly, pallid circles rimmed the wintry gas lamps that burned all day and all night at this time of year, their futile oily smears more part of the problem than part of the solution. The paddle-steamer nudged cautiously across the crowded grey river, fearful of collision. The great army of black-clad office-workers stood in silence on the deck, like mourners at a wake, listening to the chug of the engine and the dull, rhythmic slap of water against the paddles. FitzRoy half expected, half wanted to see a great wall of water bear down on them out of the fog, wanted to battle it, to pit his wits against wild nature and emerge victorious, his adversary bested but not destroyed, racing away into the mist once more to challenge him another day.