An Embarrassment of Riches (35 page)

“You will not give these wretches a decent human burial because you are afraid they will haunt you, and yet you intend to keep disgusting scraps of their persons as trophies?” I remonstrated with them. “Odious! Odious and insupportable!”

The Wejuns glanced down at their bloodied hands.

“I tell you these scalps will bring you more misery than an hundred Spanish corpses buried on your island!”

One after another they dropped the filthy prizes in the dust, or cast them away like an housewife shaking off a spider in the garden.

“And if you have any more of these noisome things at home, you must get rid of them.”

“Beshrew us, an' it please your mastership,” Robin said, and they did as I commanded.

When the terrible business of the bodies was concluded, we boarded the Spanish sloop. The Wejuns had never traveled on a craft this size equipped with sail, plain dugouts serving their ordinary needs.

“Have you never thought of venturing forth from this wilderness?” I inquired of the men.

“Sail? From Paradise?”

“From our only home?”

“Do you know that I could myself sail you to England in a ship not much larger than this sloop?”

“Thanks, i'faith, but alive I'd rather stay,” Gaybob said, “than fly a corpse up England's starry way.”

“You don't seem to understand. England is a real place in this world, a living piece of sod upon this very planet.”

“Hast been there?” Gaybob asked, tongue in cheek, whilst the others tried to stifle their laughter. “Hast lain thine eyes on its shores?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Because thou hast not yet become a corpse,” Gaybob said, and the company now shook unabashedly with mirth.

I could see there was little point in pursuing the matter. If they wanted to believe that England was heaven and not a part of the earth, it was well enough with me.

Having served them already that day as field general, I now found myself in the office of commodore, and being some sort of Englishmen, however degenerate, they proved to be natural-born sailors. All took the vastest delight in plying up and down the river, the wind our bounden slave. Of course, they did not understand such mysteries as how a sailing ship moves forward in a close reach—i.e., almost in the teeth of the wind—but they soon developed an instinctual grasp of the technique if not of the principle.

By late afternoon they had mastered the subtle arts of coming about, of tacking a course, of reaching, and of running before the wind and reefing sail. There were moments when, given their queer costumes and mannerisms, the near-derelict condition of the boat, and our tropical wilderness setting, I fancied myself one of the explorers of centuries gone by, a Francis Drake, say, discovering these fabulous New World shores for the first time, and feeling all the wonder and the glory that must have been his.

We sailed around the island several times, to the crew's delight. When the heat of the day was at its most extreme and oppressive, a storm quickly gathered, and we brought the boat into the lagoon hard by the village where the Wejuns kept their dugouts and dried their nets, and here we moored her. There is nothing like a successful military adventure to set a fellow's keel straight, and nothing to swell one's head like the whiff of power.

Thus did we come to dwell for a time amongst the mysterious Wejun tribesmen on an island in the river they called “The Sweet,” hard by the Gulf of Mexico and the shabby garrisons of Spanish Florida.

Uncle's remorse over his part in the massacre of the Spaniards lasted many days. But eventually he returned to those labors that were his heart's delight: botanizing and collecting specimens. He would have nothing to do with the military drills that the Wejuns sorely needed to acquaint them with the proper use of modern weaponry and to instill some discipline into their innocent ranks.

I put a crew of them to work erecting a palisade around the village. Their knowledge of fortification was scant, to say the least. The plan I devised was a four-square stockade with salient bastions at each angle, a scarp of earth on the outside wall, and a moat to be dug and flooded and filled with snapping alligators on all sides. It was an ambitious plan, but once I had talked them into it, they went to work with the verve of zealots. The project proceeded with deplorable slowness, their wooden tools often breaking. After a week, they had erected only five yards of stockade—but it was a very stout five yards, and I had high hopes that, given enough time, they would be the owners of a very secure habitation.

This labor went along under the supervision of Gaybob, as loyal and intelligent a deputy as any officer ever had. In the meantime, when not drilling my troops, I undertook to make all their portraits, an occupation that filled them with the utmost wonder and that inflated their already august esteem for me.

Their history was a murky business, a strange tangled web of folklore, superstition, and ignorance anchored in a gloomy corner of time's immense labyrinth. You already know what England signified to them. They claimed to have drifted hither, since the days of their “great-grandfathers' grandfathers” from a place vaguely “northeasteringly.” I concluded after pondering these things, and taking into account their manners of speech and dress, that they were descendants of Sir Walter Raleigh's colony at Roanoke Island, in what is presently North Carolina.

This Roanoke Colony, as every schoolboy knows, was established in the year 1587 by the ambitious courtier under a patent granted by Queen Elizabeth.

The colony had consisted of 117 persons: 91 men, 17 women, and 9 children. A Captain John White was appointed governor. He abandoned his office soon after the colony's initial establishment, in order to return to England on a mission of resupply. By then, however, all of England's resources were directed toward the defeat of Spain's Armada. It was four years before White could return to the scrubby island with his relief expedition. He discovered no traces of his comrades or kin. The little huts of the colonists stood abandoned, many of them containing still the articles of daily life in mute and enigmatic array, undisturbed! Wooden trenchers were set out as though for supper, cook-pots hung over cold ashes in the hearths, et cetera, as though the inhabitants had been neatly plucked off the face of the earth.

It is held that the colonists fled to a south-lying island, Croatan, and the protection of the friendly chieftain, Manteo and his kinsmen, but for what reason, nobody has been able to put forward. In any case, no trace of them was found amongst the Croatans either. Others believe that Spaniards massacred them and flung their bodies into the sea. Yet another legend exists to the effect that the colonists were abducted by hostile tribes inland.

Of these theories, none had much meaning to the Wejuns—though they were always avid to hear a good yarn. King Merkin, for one, recalled living in two earlier villages at a distant remove from their present Paradise, when he was a small child, but I gathered that the tribe's manner of living had been no different then, and that the Stinkards—Indians—had sent them packing time and again.

Of the present tribe, none was named Raleigh or White. They possessed no surnames amongst them. There were 163 individuals in the tribe, all told. Besides those leading citizens with whom you have already made acquaintance, they went by the names of Tom, Dick, Fang, Gobo, Hotspur, Casper, Monger, Water, Karoo, Peaseblossom, Touchstone, Lionheart, Moonshine, Wart, Basilisco, Percy, Flute, Hal, Honeybreath, Hammerhead, Hawk, Handsaw, Bess, Catherine, Mary, Twitchgrass, Acorn, Goatsbeard, Sweetflag, Moth, Lark, Throstle, Thistle, Betony, Jack-snake, Jack-a-merry, Jack-a-bones, Cuckoobird, Eyebright, Foxbait, Hyssop, Mistletoe, Bugaboo, Bugbear, Bug, Pan, Pygmy, Pigmeat, Jollyroger, Jingletoes, Wintergreen, and Zeus.

And then there was Tansy, daughter of the recuperating King Merkin, a summer's day of a girl, abloom like a yellow flower in the sweetness of young maidenhood, who in the Wejun manner entreated by affections as though to catch a husband.

She never tired of hearing me describe the marvels of our cities, and I never tired of watching her as she raptly sat and listened. Like country maidens everywhere, she dreamed of shining towns where handsome princes and their sweethearts lived in a dazzling whirl of romance.

“Speak again of this Governor's Ball,” she begged me, and I would paint her a word-picture of the gala doings on a glittering winter's night in Manhattan; the fine carriages drawing up before the old Federal Hall behind the teams of snorting, bobtailed geldings, the cream of New York society spilling out and pausing deliberately before the entrance to be
oohed
and
aahed
by the envious public; the rustling silk gowns, fur cloaks, and coiffures of the ladies; the handsome velvet coats and dashing military tunics of the men; the snow falling like silver confetti in the lamplight. Here now is Hamilton! Ah, Hamilton! His still-youthful face glows with intelligence, showing not the strains of factional strife. His political star has slipped from the sky's zenith to the horizon, but waits there ready to rise again in glory. From the crowd a youth cries, “Huzzah, huzzah for Alec!” The New World Apollo doffs his fine hat and scans the noisy throng. “Columbia College cries huzzah for Hamilton!” I yell again. A smile of gratitude lights up his face, for wolves of faction jeer his every breath, and he salutes me, Sammy Walker! I am so dizzy with excitement I am like to swoon. He has looked into my eyes, recognized me! I am somebody now—!

“O, happy hour! Doth he have a lady?”

“Who? Me?”

“Not thee. This lion, Hamilton.”

“O, yes—”

“What is her costume, prithee tell.”

“Her hair is much bothered over, so as to look as though she just stepped out of a Grecian forest glade—”

“What is this ‘Grecian,” I would like to know?”

“An ancient land, whose arts and attainments long ago presaged our own.”

“Is't far away as England's starry glow?”

“A little farther. But I shall take you someday, if you would like to go.”

“O, no!”

“No? Tansy, you recoil as from a blow.”

“Nay, I may gleek upon occasion, sir. To fly across the vasty vaults on high, we needs be corpses, meaning we must die.”

“Pish. I could take you to England and Greece across the sea, and plunk you down again in Paradise as altogether well as when you left.”

“What is this ‘sea'? Is't like the darkling sky?”

“Did you never see the sea?”

“No, an it pleases your mastership, not me.”

Of course, I was falling in love with her.

While I was busy falling in love and playing the role of Leader-of-Men, Uncle had botanized the island to his satisfaction and began pressing to depart these half-wild, poetical people, for he still intended to be at his hearthside on Christmas eve.

In order to do so, he desired to sail the sloop captured from the Spaniards to New Orleans, by means of coasting. We had reason to suppose that the Gulf of Mexico lay not more than a few leagues down the river, though the Wejuns had never ventured there in their little dugouts for fear of their enemies. I had as well some thoughts about bringing back home with us several members of the tribe, since we had no sloths to show for our pains and expense, for the fate of Raleigh's colonists was one of the great romantic mysteries of America, and our discovery would certainly amaze the scientific community. My last and fondest hope was to include little Tansy in this party, but had broached the subject neither to her papa nor to Uncle.

Before I felt comfortable leaving, however, provision had to be made for their defense; thus the ultimately disastrous raid upon the Spanish garrison was conceived. For I believed that if the Gulf lay close at hand, there too would be found the military outpost from whence had come those Spaniards to their slaughter the day we were captured. It was my further opinion that said outpost would contain much in the way of arms and ammunition, and that it would be lightly defended, if at all. And so my boyish mind devised the naval adventure that would prove to be both our and the Wejuns' undoing.

With twenty of the men aboard, we hoisted the ragtag sails and set off downstream in a fresh breeze. Not a league below the island, the river grew very wide. On either distant shore, the flat terrain was relieved only by the spiky knobs of palmettos. The sky took on a leaden, bellicose character.

After we had been under way a good while, I mustered the men aft and broke the news to them that Uncle and I would be departing their Paradise for our own country, and that we desired to recruit five good sailors of their number to help us sail the hulk to New Orleans. They responded with stunned silence. Off a reedy shoal to starboard, a rookery of snowy egrets rose as one in noisy, frightened flight.

“What say ye, men? Any volunteers? Hotspur? Gobbo? Flute?”

They glanced at each other without speaking, the wind tousling their sun-bleached locks.

“Art leaving Paradise forever, lordship?” Lovelace, my ensign, finally spoke up on behalf of the men.

“No, not forever,” I dissembled, knowing not what the future might hold.

“What shall become of us?” asked Bugbear plaintively, failing to complete his iamb.

“You shall be grandly equipped to defend yourselves, I promise. Now, which of you stout fellows will come with us?”

Again they glanced fearfully amongst themselves. No one stepped forward.

“You needn't decide this minute,” said I, trying to put a good face on. “Think of it. For those who form our crew shall discover wonders beyond their wildest dreams. Very well, back to your posts.”

Their mood had turned as sullen as the sky. The breeze had become a hardy blow. The river was now several miles in width and brackish. The swells that dashed across our bow tasted of brine; the air was redolent of oysters and barnacles, the fecund life of an estuary. The Wejuns wore looks of apprehension upon their faces, for none had ever ventured so far from Paradise before.

About half past one o'clock, we spied the Spanish garrison, a small earthworks fortress thrown up on a miserable scrap of island where the river took a southwest bend to a larger bay beyond. It was situated to command a view of all traffic entering and leaving the river, and thus control it. We hove a mile off her with our bowsprit in the wind and sails reefed while I looked the fortress over through my glass.

Not a soul was visible on her ramparts, not so much as a sentry. The Spanish colors flapped emptily in the wind, the flag so old, tattered, and faded as to seem a very rag. At her wharf before her gate, a weathered dory rocked forlornly at its berth, the mast lashed fore to aft and riggings stowed. My heart raced: I had been right, the garrison was indeed unmanned.

“Up mainsail and bring her about, Mr. Lovelace!” I cried, and our canvas snapped smartly as it caught the wind.

Now we had upon this sloop a pair of swivel guns of very antique design, one each at port and starboard, and capable of firing a one-pound ball, a supply of which we had found on board. What Fort Paradise wanted, however, was real cannon, and these I spied upon the ramparts of the Spanish garrison, ripe for the taking! We bore down on it.

“Light a wick and prepare to fire the starboard swivel,” I commanded.

We closed in: a mile, three quarters, an half….

“Aim for the gate. All right, fire!”

Wick to touchhole. A flash and a loud
crack!
The ball sent a roostertail of sand flying into the air, having struck short of the mark.

“That's the way, my boys. Hurrah!” I cried encouragement. This first volley provoked no return fire from the garrison—further evidence that it was, in fact, deserted. “Hard alee, my gallant fishes,” I ordered them. “Let's try the portside gun.”

“Ready, sirrah!”

“Aim and fire!”

We came about and fired. To my delight and astonishment, the missile found the target. A cloud of dust and wooden splinters blew out of the fortress's gateway.

“Huzzah!” the men cried.

We made two more passes before her, blasting the gate each time and reducing it to rubble. Finally, we made ready to land.

The wharf was in as poor repair as our boat, and the seas being squally, we tied up with considerable difficulty. Five men stayed aboard whilst the rest of us jumped off, rifles, pistols, and swords in hand. (Poor Costard fell through a rotted plank, breaking his ankle, and had to be carried back to the ship.) We crept toward the splintered gate. Not a single Spaniard appeared to offer resistance. We ran inside. I at once climbed a stone stairway up the ramparts.