Coconut Chaos Diana Souhami (classic books to read txt) 📖

So there’d be a larder: fish, eggs, clams, oysters. All the necessary food for survival, and delicacies too.

‘It lies in latitude 20°2’ south and longitude 133°21’ west. It is so high that we saw it at the distance of more than fifteen leagues and it having been discovered by a young gentleman, son to Major Pitcairn of the marines, we called it Pitcairn Island.’

Christian knew these readings were wrong on every chart and that such an error might mean safety for him. Bligh had told him how he and Cook searched for the island in the Resolution in 1776, then gave up and sought respite in Tahiti because many of the crew had scurvy. The Polynesians with Christian on the Bounty calculated it lay 180 sea miles southeast from where Carteret had said.

Christian sighted Pitcairn Island on the evening of 15 January 1790, four months after leaving Tahiti. He saw this great rock rising from the sea, with clouds trapped above its mountain peaks. He and a well-armed crew took a boat to the shore. For two days he explored. He found all he’d hoped for. No people, no hospitable bay for a ship of retribution to anchor, a rugged coast, inland forests of coconut palms, breadfruit, miro and hibiscus trees, nesting birds, freshwater springs and flat land for building. The bays were full of fish, and oysters clung to the rocks.

He returned to the Bounty ‘with a joyful expression such as we had not seen on him for a long time past’. He’d found what he was looking for, what he thought would save him, an island to colonise, a world to control, as far away from Bligh and the gallows as the earth could provide.

24

The sky was dark and starless on the night the Tundra Princess approached Pitcairn. Again there was driving rain and waves twenty-six feet high. The ship sounded its horn each minute, an eerie bellow. On the bridgehead Captain Dutt said that unless there was improvement soon, he wouldn’t stop. His scalp jiggled, his eyes looked anxious. He faxed his company. They again warned him not to anchor, for the ship might swing. Again he said his priority was his ten-million-dollar cargo of kiwi fruit.

The island appeared as a bright speck on the radar screen. Lady Myre asked questions about how radar worked. Captain Dutt’s answers were terse. A fax came from Pitcairn’s mayor, Steve Christian, telling him not to try to approach until dawn. He should then go to the lee of the island, where the sea was calmer, and drift until the longboats came to unload supplies and collect Lady Myre and me. It would be three miles back to Adamstown, the only settlement, but the swell was too great to attempt to unload near Bounty Bay.

Dutt told Lady Myre and me to pack our bags, leave them in our cabins, then come to the bridge at dawn. He reduced the ship’s speed to fifteen knots. ‘Why do you want to go to this benighted place?’ he asked. ‘I don’t understand it. Don’t you have family? It’s not necessary.’ I thought of the migration of swallows, the restless travel of people, the transport of kiwi fruit, the feeding of Tahitian breadfruit to West Indian slaves. I wondered what was necessary.

For our last supper we had mutton and cabbage. The talk was of the war in Iraq, how wrong it was, how unsafe it made us feel. ‘It should not have happened,’ Da Silva said, and Harminder, Jaswinder and Captain Dutt agreed. Lady Myre said we had to fight to preserve civilisation, but no one took any notice of her. She and Soni and Da Silva then took photographs of us all with their digital cameras, and we exchanged email addresses and invitations to our homes. Soni gave Lady Myre an assortment of glittering stars and spots to stick round her nose and eyes, and me a necklace of wooden beads. Lady Myre then went to the lounge to watch a video of The Sound of Music with Da Silva. I returned to my cabin to pack and prepare to land.

At six in the morning, the Tundra Princess idled three miles offshore from Pitcairn in a turbulent sea. The clouds were black and there was driving rain. Wrapped in waterproofs, Lady Myre and I stood in a haze of wet, with our wallets, passports, tickets and liquor licences concealed in our bum bags. Pandal had put our luggage – my rucksack, her fourteen motley cases and boxes – in thick blue polythene bags.

Captain Dutt looked through binoculars at the island’s gloom. ‘I don’t like this,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the look of those rocks.’ He repeated that he could not linger and that it would not be possible to unload supplies. ‘They’re coming,’ he said and handed me the binoculars. He made it sound interplanetary. I saw a longboat filled with people, most of them in yellow oilskins. The boat rose to the crest of each wave, then plunged from view. Lady Myre looked too. ‘Whoosh!’ she said, and then again, ‘Whoosh! Is it coming to collect us? What a heck of a lark.’ She faltered and gave her wide, toothy smile. ‘But how do we get into it?’ she asked. ‘How do we get off this ship and into that bucketing tub?’

‘Do exactly as you’re told,’ Dutt replied. ‘I’ll give you gloves so the rope doesn’t burn your hands.’

‘Rope?’ she said. ‘What do you mean, rope?’

‘The rope of the ladder,’ Dutt said.

‘But you will put the gangway down for us so that we can alight from the ship to the boat.’

‘You would end up in the sea,’ he said.

Her smile switched off. ‘I am Lady Myre,’ she said, the fright of it all reminding her of her class. ‘I am not a chimpanzee.’

‘I am concerned for you,’ said Captain Dutt. ‘This is folly. Why do you want to go to this terrible place? You should come with us to