The Lonely Island: The Refuge of the Mutineers

“I must knock under for a time, John,” he said, with a wearied look, on the occasion of his ceasing to work. He had of late taken to calling Adams by his Christian name, and the latter had been made unaccountably uneasy thereby.

“Never mind, sir,” said the bluff seaman, in an encouraging tone. “You just rest yourself for a bit, an’ I’ll carry on the school business, Sunday services an’ all. I ain’t much of a parson, no doubt, but I’ll do my best, and a man can’t do no more.”

“All right, John, I hand it over to you. A short time of loafing about and taking it easy will set me all to rights again, and I’ll resume office as fresh as ever.”

Alas! poor Edward Young’s day of labour was ended. He never more resumed office on earth.

Shortly after the above conversation he had another and extremely violent attack of asthma. It prostrated him completely, so that for several days he could not speak. Afterwards he became a little better, but it was evident to every one that he was dying, and it was touching to see the earnest way in which the tearful women, who were so fond of him, vied with each other in seeking to relieve his sufferings.

John Adams sat by his bedside almost continually at last. He seemed to require neither food nor rest, but kept watching on hour after hour, sometimes moistening the patient’s lips with water, sometimes reading a few verses out of the Bible to him.

“John,” said the poor invalid one afternoon, faintly, “your hand. I’m going—John—to be—for ever with the Lord—the dear Lord!”

There was a long pause, then—

“You’ll—carry on—the work, John; not in your own strength, John—in His?”

Adams promised earnestly in a choking voice, and the sick man seemed to sink to rest with a smile on his lips. He never spoke again. Next day he was buried under the palm-trees, far from the home of his childhood, from the land which had condemned him as a heartless mutineer.

Chapter Twenty Two

John Adams longs for a Chum and becomes a Story-Teller

Faithful to his promise, John Adams, after the death of Young, did his best to carry on the good work that had been begun.

But at first his spirit was very heavy. It had not before occurred to him that there was a solitude far more profound and overwhelming than anything he had hitherto experienced. The difference between ten companions and one companion is not very great, but the difference between one and none is immeasurable. Of course we refer to that companionship which is capable of intelligent sympathy. The solitary seaman still had his Otaheitan wife and the bright children of the mutineers around him, and the death of Young had drawn out his heart more powerfully than ever towards these, but they could not in any degree fill the place of one who could talk intelligently of home, of Old England, of British battles fought and won, of ships and men, and things that might have belonged, as far as the women and children were concerned, to another world. They could only in a slight degree appreciate the nautical phraseology in which he had been wont to convey some of his strongest sentiments, and they could not in any degree enter into his feelings when, forgetting for a moment his circumstances, he came out with a pithy forecastle allusion to the politics or the Government of his native land.

“Oh, you meek-faced brute, if you could only speak!” he exclaimed one day, dropping his eyes from the sea, on which he had been gazing, to the eyes of a pet goat that had been looking up in his face. “What’s the use of having a tongue in your head if you can’t use it!”

As may be imagined, the goat made no reply to this remark, but continued its gaze with somewhat of the solemnity of the man himself.

For want of a companion, poor Adams at this time took to talking frequently in a quiet undertone to himself. He also fell a good deal into Fletcher Christian’s habit of retiring to the cave on the mountain-top, but he did not read the Bible while there. He merely communed with his own spirit, meditated sadly on the past, and wondered a good deal as to the probable future.

“It’s not that I ain’t happy enough here,” he muttered softly to himself one evening, while he gazed wistfully at the horizon as Christian had been wont to gaze. “I’m happy enough—more so than what I deserve to be, God knows—with them good—natured women an’ jolly bit things of child’n, but—but I’m awful hard up for a chum! I do believe that if Bill McCoy, or even Matt Quintal, was here, I’d get along pretty well with either of ’em. Ah, poor Quintal! I feel as if I’d never git over that. If it wasn’t murder, it feels awful like it; an’ yet I can’t see that they could call it murder. If we hadn’t done it he would certainly have killed both me an’ Mr Young, for Matt never threatened without performin’, and then he’d have gone mad an’ done for the women an’ child’n as well. No, it wasn’t murder. It was necessity.”

He remained silent for some time, and then his thoughts appeared to revert to the former channel.

“If only a ship would come an’ be wrecked here, now, we could start fresh once more with a new lot maybe, but I’m not so sure about that either. P’r’aps we’d quarrel an’ fight an’ go through the bloody business all over again. No, it’s better as it is. But a ship might touch in passin’, an’ we could prevail on two or three of the crew, or even one, to stop with us. What would I not give to hear a man’s voice once more, a good growlin’ bass. I wouldn’t be partickler as to sentiments or grammar, not I, if it was only gruff, an’ well spiced with sea-lingo an’ smelt o’ baccy. Not that I cares for baccy myself now, or grog either. Humph! it do make me a’most laugh to think o’ the times I’ve said, ay, and thought, that I couldn’t git along nohow without my pipe an’ my glass. Why, I wouldn’t give a chip of a brass farden for a pipe now, an’ as to grog, after what I’ve seen of its cursed natur’, I wouldn’t taste a drop even if they was to offer to make me Lord High Admiral o’ the British fleet for so doin’. But I would like once more to see a bearded man; even an unbearded one would be better than nothin’. Ah, well, it’s no manner o’ use sighin’, any more than cryin’, over spilt milk. Here I am, an’ I suppose here I shall be to the end o’ the chapter.”

Again he was silent for a long time, while his eyes remained fixed, as usual, on the horizon. Suddenly the gaze became intent, and, leaning forward with an eager expression, he shaded his eyes with his hand.

“It’s not creditable,” he murmured, as he fell back again into his former listless attitude, “it’s not creditable for an old salt like me to go mistakin’ sea-gulls for sails, as I’ve bin doin’ so often of late. I’m out o’ practice, that’s where it is.”

“Come, John Adams,” he added, after another pause, and jumping up smartly, “this will never do. Rouse yourself, John, an’ give up this mumble-bumble style o’ thing. Why, it’ll kill you in the long-run if you don’t. Besides, you promised Mr Young to carry on the work, and you must keep your promise, old boy.”

“Yes,” rang out a clear sweet voice from the inner end of the cave, “and you promised to give up coming here to mope; so you must keep your promise to me as well, father.”

Otaheitan Sally tripped into the cave, and seating herself on the stone ledge opposite, beamed up in the sailor’s face.

“You’re a good girl, Sall, an’ I’ll keep my promise to you from this day forth; see if I don’t. I’ll make a note of it in the log.”

The log to which Adams here referred was a journal or register, which Edward Young had begun to keep, and in which were inserted the incidents of chief interest, including the births and deaths, that took place on the island from the day of landing. After Young’s death, John Adams continued to post it up from time to time.

The promise to Sally was faithfully kept. From that time forward, Adams gave up going to the outlook, except now and then when anything unusual appeared on the sea, but never again to mope. He also devoted himself with increased assiduity to the instruction of the women and children in Bible truths, although still himself not very clear in his own mind as to the great central truth of all. In this work he was ably assisted by Sally, and also by Young’s widow, Susannah.

We have mentioned this woman as being one of the youngest of the Otaheitans. She was also one of the most graceful, and, strange to say, though it was she who killed Tetaheite, she was by nature one of the gentlest of them all.

The school never became a prison-house to these islanders, either women or children. Adams had wisdom enough at first to start it as a sort of play, and never fell into the civilised error of giving the pupils too much to do at a time. All the children answered the daily summons to school with equal alacrity, though it cannot be said that their performances there were equally creditable. Some were quick and intelligent, others were slow and stupid, while a few were slow but by no means stupid. Charlie Christian was among these last.

“Oh, Charlie, you are such a booby!” one day exclaimed Otaheitan Sally, who, being advanced to the dignity of monitor, devoted much of her time to the instruction of her old favourite. “What can be the matter with your brains?”

The innocent gaze of blank wonder with which the “Challie” of infancy had been wont to receive his companion’s laughing questions, had not quite departed; but it was chastened by this time with a slight puckering of the mouth and a faint twinkle of the eyes that were suggestive.

Sitting modestly on the low bench, with his hands clasped before him, this strapping pupil looked at his teacher, and said that really he did not know what was wrong with his brains.

“Perhaps,” he added, looking thoughtfully into the girl’s upturned orbs, “perhaps I haven’t got any brains at all.”

“O yes, you have,” cried Sall, with a laugh; “you have got plenty, if you’d only use them.”

“Ah!” sighed Charlie, stretching out one of his strong muscular arms and hands, “if brains were only things that one could lay hold of like an oar, or an axe, or a sledge-hammer, I’d soon let you see me use them; but bein’ only a soft kind o’ stuff in one’s skull, you know—”

A burst of laughter from Sally not only cut short the sentence, but stopped the general hum of the school, and drew the attention of the master.

“Hallo, Sall, I say, you know,” said Adams, in remonstrative tone, “you forget that you’re a monitor. If you go on like that we’ll have to make a school-girl of you again.”

“Please, father, I couldn’t help it,” said Sally, while her cheeks flushed crimson, “Charlie is such a—”

She stopped short, covered her face with both hands, and bending forward till she hid her confusion on her knees, went into an uncontrollable giggle, the only evidences of which, however, were the convulsive movements of her shoulders and an occasional squeak in the region of her little nose.

“Come now, child’n,” cried Adams, seating himself on an inverted tea-box, which formed his official chair, “time’s up, so we’ll have a slap at Carteret before dismissing. Thursday October Christian will bring the book.”

There was a general hum of satisfaction when this was said, for Carteret’s Voyages, which, with the Bible and Prayer-book, formed the only class-books of that singular school, were highly appreciated by young and old alike, especially as read to them by Adams, who accompanied his reading with a free running commentary of explanation, which infused great additional interest into that old writer’s book. TOC rose with alacrity, displaying in the act the immense relative difference between his very long legs and his ordinary body, in regard to which Adams used to console him by saying, “Never mind, Toc, your legs’ll stop growin’ at last, and when they do, your body will come out like a telescope. You’ll be a six-footer yet. Why, you’re taller than I am already by two inches.”

In process of time Carteret was finished; it was then begun a second time, and once more read through. After that Adams felt a chill feeling of helplessness steal over him, for Carteret could not be read over and over again like the Bible, and he could not quite see his way to reading the Church of England prayers by way of recreation. In his extremity he had recourse to Sally for advice. Indeed, now that Sall was approaching young womanhood, not only the children but all the grown people of the island, including their chief or “father,” found themselves when in trouble gravitating, as if by instinct, to the sympathetic heart and the ready hand.

“I’ll tell you what to do,” said Sally, when appealed to, as she took the seaman’s rough hand and fondled it; “just try to invent stories, and tell them to us as if you was readin’ a book. You might even turn Carteret upside down and pretend that you was readin’.”

Adams shook his head.

“I never could invent anything, Sall, ’xcept w’en I was tellin’ lies, an’ that’s a long while ago now—a long, long while. No; I doubt that I couldn’t invent, but I’ll tell ’ee what; I’ll try to remember some old yarns, and spin them off as well as I can.”

The new idea broke on Adams’s mind so suddenly that his eyes sparkled, and he bestowed a nautical slap on his thigh.

“The very thing!” cried Sally, whose eyes sparkled fully more than those of the sailor, while she clapped her hands; “nothing could be better. What will you begin with?”

“Let me see,” said Adams, seating himself on a tree-stump, and knitting his brows with a severe strain of memory. “There’s Cinderella; an’ there’s Ally Babby or the fifty thieves—if it wasn’t forty—I’m not rightly sure which, but it don’t much matter; an’ there’s Jack the Giant-killer, an’ Jack and the Pea-stalk—no; let me see; it was a beanstalk, I think—anyhow, it was the stalk of a vegetable o’ some sort. Why, I wonder it never struck me before to tell you all about them tales.”

Reader, if you had seen the joy depicted on Sally’s face, and the rich flush of her cheek, and her half-open mouth with its double row of pearls, while Adams ran over this familiar list, you would have thought it well worth that seaman’s while to tax his memory even more severely than he did.

“And then,” he continued, knitting his brows still more severely, “there’s Gulliver an’ the Lillycups or putts, an’ the Pilgrim’s Progress—though, of course, I don’t mean for to say I knows ’em all right off by heart, but that’s no odds. An’ there’s Robinson Crusoe—ha! that’s the story for you, Sall; that’s the tale that’ll make your hair stand on end, an’ a’most split your sides open, an’ cause the very marrow in your spine to wriggle. Yes; we’ll begin with Robinson Crusoe.”

Having settled this point to their mutual and entire satisfaction, the two went off for a short walk before supper. On the way, they met Elizabeth Mills and Mary Christian, both of whom were now no longer staggerers, but far advanced as jumpers. They led between them Adams’s little daughter Dinah, who, being still very small, could not take long walks without assistance and an occasional carry.

“Di, my pet,” cried her father, seizing the willing child, and hoisting her on his shoulder. “Come, you shall go along with us. And you too, lassies, if you have no other business in hand.”

“Yes, we’ll go with you,” cried Bessy Mills. “May was just saying it was too soon to go home to supper.”

“Come along, then,” cried Adams, tossing his child in the air as he went. “My beauty, you’ll beat your mammy in looks yet, eh? an’ when you’re old enough we’ll tell you all about Rob—”

He checked himself abruptly, cleared his voice, and looked at Sally.

“Well, father,” said May Christian, quickly, “about Rob who?”

“Ahem! eh? well, yes, about Rob—ha, but we won’t talk about him just now, dear. Sally and I were havin’ some private conversation just now about Rob, though that isn’t the whole of his name neither, but we won’t make it public at present. You’ll hear about him time enough—eh, Sall?”

The girls were so little accustomed to anything approaching to mystery or secrecy in John Adams, that they looked at him in silent wonder. Then they glanced at Sally, whose suppressed smile and downcast eyes told eloquently that there was, as Adams would have said, “something in the wind,” and they tried to get her to reveal the secret, but Sall was immovable. She would not add a single syllable to the information given inadvertently by Adams, but she and he laughed a good deal in a quiet way, and made frequent references to Rob in the course of the walk.

Of course, when the mysterious word was pronounced in the village in the evening, and what had been said and hinted about it was repeated, curiosity was kindled into a violent flame; and when the entire colony was invited to a feast that night, the excitement was intense. From the oldest to the youngest, excluding the more recently arrived sprawlers, every eye was fixed on John Adams during the whole course of supper, except at the commencement, when the customary blessing was asked, at which point every eye was tightly closed.

Adams, conscious of increased importance, spoke little during the meal, and maintained an air of profounder gravity than usual until the dishes were cleared away. Then he looked round the assembled circle, and said, “Women an’ child’n, I’m goin’ to tell ’ee a story.”

Chapter Twenty Three

The Pitcairners have a Night of it

Although John Adams had often, in the course of his residence on Pitcairn, jested and chatted and taken his share in relating many an anecdote, he had never up till that time resolved to “go in,” as he said, “for a regular story, like a book.”

“Women an’ child’n,” he began, “it may be that I’m goin’ to attempt more than I’m fit to carry out in this business, for my memory’s none o’ the best. However, that won’t matter much, for I tell ’ee, fair an’ aboveboard at the beginnin’, that when I come to gaps that I can’t fill up from memory, I’ll just bridge ’em over from imagination, d’ye see?”

“What’s imagination?” demanded Dan McCoy, whose tendency to pert interruption and reply nothing yet discovered could restrain.

“It’s a puzzler,” said Otaheitan Sally, in a low tone, which called forth a laugh from the others.

It did not take much to make these people laugh, as the observant reader will have perceived.

“Well, it is a puzzler,” said Adams, with a quiet smile and a perplexed look. “I may say, Dan McCoy, in an off-hand rough-an’-ready sort o’ way, that imagination is that power o’ the mind which enables a man to tell lies.”

There was a general opening of juvenile eyes at this, as if recent biblical instruction had led them to believe that the use of such a power must be naughty.

“You see,” explained Adams, “when a man, usin’ his imagination, tells what’s not true, just to deceive people an’ mislead ’em, we call it lyin’, but when his imagination invents what’s not true merely for the fun o’ the thing, an’ tells it as a joke, never pretendin’ that it’s true, he ain’t lyin’, he’s only tellin’ a story, or a anecdote, or a parable. Now, Dan, put that in your pipe an’ smoke it. Likewise shut your potato-trap, and let me go on wi’ my story, which is, (he looked impressively round, while every eye gazed, and ear listened, and mouth opened in breathless attention), the Adventure of Robinson Crusoe an’ his man Friday!”

All eyes were turned, as if by magic, on Thursday,—as if there must be some strange connection here. Toc suddenly shut his mouth and hung his head in confusion at this unexpected concentration of attention on himself.

“You’ve no need to be ashamed, Thursday,” said Adams, with a laugh. “You’ve got the advantage of Friday, anyhow, bein’ a day in advance of him. Well, as I was about to say, boys an’ girls, this Robinson Crusoe was a seafarin’ man, just like myself; an’ he went to sea, an’ was shipwrecked on a desolate island just like this, but there was nobody whatever on that island, not even a woman or a babby. Poor Robinson was all alone, an’ it wasn’t till a consid’rable time after he had gone ashore that he discovered Friday, (who was a black savage), through seein’ his footprint in the sand.”

Adams having burst thus suddenly into the very marrow of his story, had no reason thereafter to complain either of interruption or inattention. Neither had he reason to find fault with the wealth of his prolific imagination. It would have done the soul of a painter good to have watched the faces of that rapt, eager, breathless audience, and it would have afforded much material for reflection to a student of mind, had he, knowing the original story of Robinson Crusoe, been permitted to trace the ingenious sinuosities and astounding creations by which Adams wove his meagre amount of original matter into a magnificent tale, which not only thrilled his audience, but amazed himself.

In short, he quite justified the assurance formerly given to Sally, that the story of Robinson Crusoe would make the hair of his hearers stand on end, their sides almost split open, and the very marrow in their spines wriggle. Indeed, his version of the tale might have caused similar results in Robinson Crusoe himself, had he been there to hear it, besides causing his eyebrows to rise and vanish evermore among the hair of his head with astonishment.

It was the same with the Pilgrim’s Progress, which he often told to them afterwards. Simple justice to Adams, however, requires us to state that he was particularly careful to impress on his hearers that the Pilgrim’s Progress was a religious tale.

“It’s a allegory, you must know,” he said, on first introducing it, “which means a story intended to teach some good lesson—a story which says one thing and means another.”

He looked pointedly at Dan McCoy here, as if to say, “That’s an exhaustive explanation, which takes the wind out o’ your sails, young man,” but Dan was not to be so easily silenced.

“What’s the use, father,” he asked, with an air of affected simplicity, “of a story sayin’ one thing an’ meanin’ another? Wouldn’t it be more honest like if it said what it meant at once, straight off?”

“P’r’aps it would,” returned Adams, who secretly enjoyed Dan’s irrepressible impudence; “but, then, if it did, Dan, it would take away your chance of askin’ questions, d’ye see? Anyhow, this story don’t say what it means straight off, an’ that gives me a chance to expound it.”

Now, it was in the expounding of the Pilgrim’s Progress that John Adams’s peculiar talents shone out brilliantly, for not only did he “misremember,” jumble, and confuse the whole allegory, but he so misapprehended its meaning in many points, that the lessons taught and the morals drawn were very wide of the mark indeed. In regard to some particular points, too, he felt himself at liberty to let his genius have free untrammelled scope, as, for instance, in the celebrated battle between Christian and Apollyon. Arguing with himself that it was not possible for any man to overdo a fight with the devil, Adams made up his mind to “go well in” for that incident, and spent a whole evening over it, keeping his audience glaring and on the rack of expectation the whole time. Taking, perhaps, an unfair advantage of his minute knowledge as a man-of-war’s-man of cutlass-drill and of fighting in general, from pugilistic encounters to great-gun exercise, including all the intermediate performances with rapiers, swords, muskets, pistols, blunderbusses, and other weapons for “general scrimmaging,” he so wrought upon the nerves of his hearers that they quivered with emotion, and when at last he drove Apollyon discomfited from the field, like chaff before the wind, there burst forth a united cheer of triumph and relief, Dan McCoy, in particular, jumping up with tumbled yellow locks and glittering eyes in a perfect yell of exultation.

But, to return from this digression to the story of Robinson Crusoe. It must not be supposed that Adams exhausted that tale in one night. No; soon discovering that he had struck an intellectual vein, so to speak, he resolved to work it out economically, and with that end in view, devoted the first evening to a minute dissection of Crusoe’s character as a man and a seaman, to the supposed fitting out and provisioning of his ship, to the imaginary cause of the disaster to the ship, which, (with Bligh, no doubt, in memory), he referred to the incompetence and wickedness of the skipper, and to the terrible incidents of the wreck, winding up with the landing of his hero, half-dead and alone, on the uninhabited island.