Cloud Atlas

I asked, why had not the Whites stayed the hands of the Maori during the massacre?

Mr. Evans was no longer sleeping & not half so deaf as I had fancied. “Have you ever seen Maori warriors in a blood frenzy, Mr. Ewing?”

I said I had not.

“But you have seen sharks in a blood frenzy, have you not?”

I replied that I had.

“Near enough. Imagine a bleeding calf is thrashing in shark-infested shallows. What to do—stay out of the water or try to stay the jaws of the sharks? Such was our choice. Oh, we helped the few that came to our door—our shepherd Barnabas was one—but if we stepped out in that night we’d not be seen again. Remember, we Whites numbered below fifty in Chatham at that time. Nine hundred Maoris, altogether. Maoris bide by Pakeha, Mr. Ewing, but they despise us. Never forget it.”

What moral to draw? Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience. 

Night—

The name of Mr. D’Arnoq is not well-loved in the Musket. “A White Black, a mixed-blood mongrel of a man,” Walker told me. “Nobody knows what he is.” Suggs, a one-armed shepherd who lives under the bar, swore our acquaintance is a Bonapartist general hiding here under assumed colors. Another swore he was a Polack.

Nor is the word Moriori much loved. A drunken Maori mulatto told me that the entire history of the Aboriginals had been dreamt up by the “mad old Lutheran” & Mr. D’Arnoq preaches his Moriori gospel only to legitimize his own swindling land claims against the Maori, the true owners of Chatham, who have been coming to & fro in their canoes since time immemorial! James Coffee, a hog farmer, said the Maori had performed the White Man a service by exterminating another race of brutes to make space for us, adding that Russians train Kossacks to “soften Siberian hides” in a similar way.

I protested, to civilize the Black races by conversion should be our mission, not their extirpation, for God’s hand had crafted them, too. All hands in the tavern fired broadsides at me for my “sentimental Yankee claptrap!” “The best of ’em is not too good to die like a pig!” one shouted. “The only gospel the Blacks savvy is the gospel of the d——d whip!” Still another: “We Britishers abolished slavery in our empire—no American can say as much!”

Henry’s stance was ambivalent, to say the least. “After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolong a dying race’s agonies for ten or twenty years. The merciful plowman shoots a trusty horse grown too old for service. As philanthropists, might it not be our duty to likewise ameliorate the savages’ sufferings by hastening their extinction? Think on your Red Indians, Adam, think on the treaties you Americans abrogate & renege on, time & time & time again. More humane, surely & more honest, just to knock the savages on the head & get it over with?”

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

Tuesday, 12th November—

Our noble Cpt. Molyneux today graced the Musket to haggle over the price of five barrels of salt-horse with my landlord (the matter was settled by a rowdy game of trentuno won by the captain). Much to my surprise, ere he returned to inspect the progress in the shipyard, Cpt. Molyneux requested some confidential words with Henry in my companion’s room. The consultation continues as I write. My friend has been warned of the captain’s despotism, but still, I do not like it.

Later—

Cpt. Molyneux, it transpires, suffers from a medical complaint which, if untreated, may impair those divers skills demanded of his station. The captain has therefore proposed to Henry that my friend voyage with us to Honolulu (victualing & private berth gratis), assuming the responsibilities both of Ship’s Doctor & personal physician to Cpt. Molyneux until our arrival. My friend explained he had intended to return to London, but Cpt. Molyneux was most insistent. Henry promised to think the matter over & come to a decision by Friday morning, the day now set for the Prophetess’s departure.

Henry did not name the captain’s illness, nor did I ask, though one needs not be an Aesculapian to glean Cpt. Molyneux is a slave to gout. My friend’s discretion does him much credit. Whatever eccentricities Henry Goose may exhibit as a collector of curios, I believe Dr. Goose is an exemplary healer & it is my zealous, if self- serving, hope that Henry returns a favorable answer to the captain’s proposal.

Wednesday, 13th November—

I come to my journal as a Catholick to a confessor. My bruises insist these extraordinary past five hours were not a sickbed vision conjured by my Ailment, but real events. I shall describe what befell me this day, steering as close to the facts as is possible.

This morning, Henry paid Widow Bryden’s hut another call to adjust her splint & reapply poultice. Rather than submit to idleness, I resolved to scale a high hill to the north of Ocean Bay, known as Conical Tor, whose lofty elevation promises the best aspect of Chatham Isle’s “backcountry.” (Henry, a man of maturer years, has too much sense to tramp unsurveyed islands peopled by cannibals.) The tired creek who waters Ocean Bay guided me upstream through marshy pastures, stump-pocked slopes, into virgin forest so rotted, knotted & tangled, I was obliged to clamber aloft like an orang-utan! A volley of hailstones began abruptly, filled the woods with a frenzied percussion & ended on the sudden. I spied a “Robin Black-Breast” whose plumage was tarry as night & whose tameness bordered on contempt. An unseen tui took to song, but my inflamed fancy awarded it powers of human speech:—“Eye for an eye!” it called ahead, flitting through its labyrinth of buds, twigs & thorns. “Eye for an eye!” After a grueling climb, I conquered the summit grievously torn & scratched at I know not What o’Clock, for I neglected to wind my pocket watch last night. The opaque mists that haunt these isles (the Aboriginal name Rekohu, Mr. D’Arnoq informs us, signifies “Sun of Mists”) had descended as I ascended, so my cherished panorama was naught but treetops disappearing into drizzle. A miserly reward for my exertions, indeed.

The “summit” of Conical Tor was a crater, a stone’s throw in diameter, encircling a crag-walled depression whose floor lay unseen far beneath the funereal foliage of a gross or more kopi trees. I should not have cared to investigate its depths without the aid of ropes & a pickax. I was circumambulating the crater’s lip, seeking a clearer trail back to Ocean Bay, when a startling hoo-roosh! sent me diving to the ground:—the mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms, thus I glimpsed first a tusked hog charging, then a Maori warrior, spear held aloft, his face inscribed with the ancestral hatred of his race.

’Twas but a mollyhawk, wings “flupping” the air like a windjammer. I watched her disappear back into the diaphanous fog. I was a full yard shy of the crater’s lip, but to my horror, the turf beneath me disintegrated like suet crust—I stood on not solid ground but an overhang! I plunged to my midriff, grasping some grasses in desperation, but these broke in my fingers & down I plummeted, a mannikin tossed into a well! I recall spinning in space, yelling & twigs clawing my eyes, cartwheeling & my jacket snagging, tearing loose; loose earth; the anticipation of pain; an urgent, formless prayer for help; a bush slowing but not halting my descent & a hopeless attempt to regain balance—sliding—lastly terra firma careering upwards to meet me. The impact knocked my senses out of me.

Amidst nebulous quilts & summery pillows I lay, in a bedroom in San Francisco similar to my own. A dwarfish servant said, “You’re a very silly boy, Adam.” Tilda & Jackson entered, but when I voiced my jubilation, not English but the guttural barkings of an Indian race burst from my mouth! My wife