Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 67

Fish striped in vivid hues of orange and white and black swam around his ankles. A crab dotted with brown spots scuttled past his toes. Green ?ngers of sea life with ?esh-pink tips waved all around him.

“Why don’t you come with us?” Fanny called to her husband. She held on to her straw hat with one hand and a bundle of skirt with the other as she climbed out of a canoe.
“I want to collect a piece of this coral,” he answered. Louis stood calf-deep in the ocean, his pants rolled above his knees, his shirt abandoned on the sand. In the water surrounding him lay an astonishment of coral.

It was a perfect day, somewhere just south of the equator, on a slender thread of land called Arorai in  the Gilbert Islands. They had been  at sea  in  the Janet Nicoll some two months; he knew it was June in the year 1890, but he had lost count of the date and day of the week. He hadn’t any idea  of the hour; it would have been a  sacrilege to consult a watch. He had hitched a ride to shore in a native’s canoe and was stricken nearly blind by the violent glare of the sun on the water. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the reef was made up of a mass of spherical shapes, each a labyrinthine miracle of squiggling grooves.
Louis went back to the ship and fetched a hatchet. With the sound of the surf pounding in his ears, he chopped at the coral. He knew no proper names for the exotic objects in this fantasy, but he wanted a piece of it. Through the clear water, he saw the rippled patterns the waves had made on  the ocean  ?oor.  Was there a  single straight line in  all of  the Paci?c? Even the sand bore the mark of nature’s art. Surely Darwin must have dropped his notebook to gasp at the beauty of the Pacific.

As the morning heat rose, the air singed Louis’s nostrils. He splashed his face to cool o?, tasted the briny seawater in his mouth, longed for drinking water. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave this spot.

The Big Book of the South Seas soaked his brain. Colvin had written to him in Sydney, objecting to his concept for the volume. He was singing the same tune as Fanny, that the book  should  be  in  the  vein  of Travels  with  a  Donkey.  The  letter  left  Louis  feeling uncomfortably  out  of  tune  with  the  two  people  he  trusted  most.  Neither  seemed  to understand that he wasn’t the same man who had written that early book.
Something had happened over the two years since he and Fanny had left Bournemouth.

He wasn’t entirely sure what it was, but he felt himself changed. Physically, to be sure. To function in the world as other men functioned, to no longer view himself as an invalid, was still miraculous to him. He felt more alive than he’d been in a very long time. He was hungry to learn about the world, to be in the world.

Louis continued hacking at the coral. He felt the muscles in his arms growing sore, yet he kept chopping, curious to see how far the new sap in his limbs would take him. After a time —how long, he wasn’t certain—he saw Fanny and Lloyd returning from the village.
“What are you doing?” Fanny asked when she got close. She stood in the water next to Louis,  her  arms  laden  with  necklaces  of  red  seeds  and  shark’s  teeth. “You  fool!”  she exploded. “You haven’t moved from where we left you this morning.”
Louis held up the pieces of coral he had managed to dislodge. “Have you ever seen such extraordinary patterns?” he said.

“How ignorant you are, Louis. That’s common brain coral in your hand. Any schoolboy in San Francisco knows that and will give you specimens.” Fanny was fuming. “You should see yourself—burned to the color of a brick! You’re going to be blistered head to foot.”

“I saw the letter from Colvin,” she said later when they were alone in their cabin. “I’m glad he agrees with me that it is a bad idea to approach this material in such an impersonal way.”

“Colvin is doing what Colvin does,” Louis said.  “He hates an idea when I present it to him, and then, when the book is a success, he claims he knew it would be all along.”
“Louis, listen to me. We have seen things that no one else has seen. And to write in an academic way about the South Seas people with only a few personal ane?es is a terrible mistake. You should have seen what Lloyd and I saw on the island today. The people were so colorful. There were women walking around in these little doll hats they’d gotten in trade, and they’d made them into hair ornaments.”

“I have no desire to cast myself as the witty narrator who tells amusing stories about the quaint characters I encounter in my rambles,” Louis said. “It belittles them, and it cheapens the signi?cance of the tragedy happening to the people here. This material is bigger than I am, and there’s too much at stake. What we are witnessing is the imminent disappearance of  ancient  traditions.  It’s  been  passed  on  orally,  and  if  their  way  of  life  continues  to degenerate, their history will be lost. Not just their history but their wisdom. Somebody

needs to document their languages, their rituals and beliefs, to alert the world to what is happening here.”

“How can you suggest that I would want you to cheapen the material?” She bristled at the idea. The cabin was full of things she’d been collecting, and she threw a pile of rolled tapas aside in order to sit down. “You are the brilliant writer on this journey, and I am a poor  second  by  comparison.  But  if  you  choose  to  ignore  the  stories  of  what  we’ve experienced, I will tell them. This is our journey, Louis, not just yours.”
“We are not one person!” he shouted.

“Have I no voice?”

“You are free to do as you please.”

“We wouldn’t even be on this ship if I had not talked our way onto it!” She raised her chin de?antly.  “Henry James says I should publish my letters. Well, I assure you I will. Along with my diary from this trip, if need be.”

He  left  the  sti?ing  compartment  in  a  fury,  desperate  for  fresh  air.  Up  top,  he  lit  a cigarette and watched the fellows working on deck. They were all black sailors, some from the New Hebrides islands, some from the Solomons, and they all spoke surprisingly ?uent English. Perhaps they didn’t understand one another’s native tongues; he wasn’t sure. One of them was named Sally Day. Fanny had come into the cabin a week ago to report that she’d overheard another sailor respectfully call him Sarah. They’d had a chuckle over it.
That was precisely the sort of tidbit she wanted him to include in the Big Book, and he didn’t blame her, it was funny and sweet, but where was the room? The bigger story to tell was about what was happening to men like them from their home. For years, ships piloted by slavers had been  “recruiting” native men and carrying them o? to distant islands to work as laborers. “Blackbirding,” people called it, as if it were a hunting sport. At best, the workers ended up as indentured servants; at worst, they died in captivity as slaves. “They take my uncle away,” one sailor had told Louis.  “Ten years, ?fteen  … no one see him again.” In their three voyages, Louis and Fanny had come across laborers who had been dumped on far-flung islands after their service, with no hope of making their way home.
The bigger story was about what commerce was doing to the South Sea islanders. It was enough to hear Fanny mention that she noticed native women on Arorai wearing doll hats; Louis had seen the same phenomenon a hundred times. Yes, it expressed the clever way the native people took the brummagem of the trading ships and found some use for it. But it

was an image that sickened him, for it showed how profoundly the in?uence of foreign things was having on the culture. He was struck by how the ships were creating an appetite among  the  people  for  more  things.  And  while  the  traders  collected  copra  to  sell  to manufacturers who would turn it into coconut oil and sell it to merchants in Europe and America at considerable profits, the islanders got dolls’ hats.

I need to tell that story.

Sometimes he wondered what it all said about human beings. These ships hurrying port to  port,  this  busy  moving  around of  goods  in  the  name  of  progress  and industry.  And religion, that must not be forgotten, for it was aboard the ships as well. The South Seas were a wilderness like any other. First came explorers and then a wave of missionaries and traders who brought their brand of enlightenment to the poor savages. Is this what we’ve been evolving toward? Is this the best that the crown of creation can do with his mighty gifts? Is commerce what makes us superior to apes?

He was too much of a realist to romanticize the South Sea islanders or demonize the whites who traded with them and lived among them. But as far as he could see, not much good had come of Europeans bringing their notions of civilization. Of the islands they’d visited, it seemed that the ones with the least contact with the outside world had fared best. And in many places, the kanakas, as the natives were called, had been hideously misused by the colonizers.

Fanny had no claim to be the arbiter of what he wrote and published. He had been pleased enough to see her taking notes so diligently with her journal propped on barrels, on her pillow, on the ?oor, whenever she had a moment to write. Her notes were useful to him,  and  her  perceptions  about  the  women  she’d  encountered  on  this  voyage  were especially interesting. But her perceptions were not identical to his. Proud as she was of her instincts, they were often flawed.

Maybe  it  was  the  money  that  worried her.  After  all,  McClure  was  committed to  ten thousand dollars for the ?fty-two letters; a piece of their future was riding on that horse. Or maybe she was disappointed because he didn’t want to write about their adventures in a romantic  vein.  The  way  he  had  written Travels  with  a  Donkey.  He’d  been  positively possessed when he wrote that book. It had been an open love letter to her. Was she worried that at fifty, she didn’t look like the woman he’d fallen in love with?

Her wrinkles didn’t disturb him; they were a map of her amazing life. He loved his wife,

though love seemed an inadequate word to contain all the emotion that passed between married people. After ?fteen years, shouldn’t disagreeing with Fanny be easier? When they quarreled,  he  felt  as  if  he  were  walking  barefoot  across  jagged  coral.  Shouldn’t  their marriage be smooth by now, like a polished stone?