The Cannibals

I came to know my father as we voyaged to Australia. At first he seemed a different man, his face sunburnt and bright, wrinkled round the eyes into a never-ending smile. Gone was his weariness, and years from his age. But he hadn't really changed; I had only forgotten. Along with his sea clothes, he had donned his old self, becoming again the man I had known as a child.

I grew to love him as I had then, and saw my love returned, though not the way I wanted. Father could see that my time in the prison hulk had left me pale and thin, but not that I was stronger on the inside because of it. So he vowed to keep me safe, and cared so deeply for me that it proved our undoing in the end.

Five months out of England, we rounded the Cape of
Good Hope. We
stormed
around it, in furious winds and tumbling cliffs of water. But I saw nothing but a patch of sky, a glimpse of sails through the ragged holes in an old tarpaulin.

A tangled fate had made my father my jailer, and now he was sailing me beyond the seas, in a ship that had been a slaver. He was the captain and I was a convict.

With sixty others I was penned below, in the dark and shuddering hull of the ship. The wind howled and tore at the tarpaulin that covered the hatch. Whole waves exploded through the grating, and for every drop of water that rained through the deck seams, a bucket's load welled up through the timbers.

I found that I had not beaten my old fear of the sea. For nine days running I lay sick as a dog on my wooden berth, almost wishing for the ship to founder, yet terrified that it might. I clung to the ringbolts where the slaves had been chained, listening to the ocean batter at the planks. If it weren't for Midgely I might have gone as mad as my poor mother. He was young and small, blinded in both eyes. But he stayed at my side, little Midge.

When the Cape was behind us, the weather cleared. The hatches were opened, and up we went to a sunlit morning.

My father was too kindhearted to be a jailer. Perhaps his spell in debtors' prison had taught him the misery of confinement. He always gave us the run of the deck on fair-weather days. He'd let the crew indulge us with seafaring stories, and from time to time he had the fiddler play while we danced. Our prison wasn't the ship, but the sea itself.

On this day we milled like cattle in the small space between the masts. Sailors were tightening the lashings on the
piles of planks and timbers. Others worked high in the rigging, but it made me dizzy to turn up my head to watch them. Every sail was set, the brig pushing along below its towers of canvas. The air was hot. Water steamed from the deck and the sails and the rigging.

A sailor came for Midge and me. We were hurried off, up to the afterdeck and down to the cabins. My father was waiting below, standing by his broad windows that looked back where the ship had been. Our silvery wake stretched over the waves like the trail of a slug.

“Good morning, Captain Tin,” cried Midgely.

Father turned to greet us, a great smile on his face. “Good morning, William,” he said. He was the only one to call Midgely by his proper name. His hand fell upon my shoulder. “Are you bearing up, Tom?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You've weathered the storm, I see.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” said Midge. “It was a ripping storm, weren't it?”

Father smiled. “Sit, boys,” he said, waving us toward his berth.

I took Midgely's hand to guide him to our place. He could hardly see at all, and never when he went from sunshine into shadows. But he pulled away, and went straight to my father's berth, dodging the table and dodging the chair. He'd learned the cabin well in the dozen visits we'd made. When I climbed beside him on the bed, it seemed the height of luxury to sit on a mattress again.

“What would you like?” asked Father. “Cheese? Bread and jam?” He always offered, and we always refused.

I went straight to the point. “Father, we have a plan,” I said.

He stood with his hands behind his back. The sea tilted and slashed across his windows, and he leaned from side to side against the roll of the ship. The motions made my stomach churn.

“We want to escape,” I said.

Father looked surprised. His mouth, for a moment, gaped open. Then a hearty laugh came out. “Escape?” he asked. His hand motioned toward the huge sea. “To where?”

Midgely answered. “To a place near Tetakari Island, sir.”

“Where the devil's that?”

“South and east of Borneo,” said Midge. “But not as far as Java.”

My father frowned. He crossed the cabin to his table, then reached up to the rafters. His charts were stowed there, rolled into tubes, and he talked as he sorted through them. “I've never heard of such a place,” he said.

“Well, there's an island near it what looks like an elephant,” said Midge. “The cliffs and the trees, they look like the elephant's head. There's a sandy beach, and coconuts and breadfruit. It was in the book. Ask Tom, sir. Ask him if it ain't true.”

Father picked through his charts. “Well, books are travelers' tales, you know. The writers fill them with nonsense.”

“But this one was wrote by a reverend, sir,” said Midge.

My father smiled back at him. Like every sailor on the brig, he adored little Midge. My friend might have been the ship's cat for all the pats and treats that came his way. “Let's have a look at your elephant island,” he said.

He pulled out a chart and unrolled it, placing little weights on the corners, then leaned down with his hands on the table edge.

I stood beside him. I had never found my sea legs, and the ship tried to pitch me around like a skittle. It tossed me away from the table, then pushed me against it. My head spinning, I stared at the chart.

There were hundreds of islands drawn there, and most looked as small as peppercorns. At once, our plan seemed foolish. I couldn't count the hours we'd spent in the pages of Midgely's book, traveling from island to island with the reverend writer. Midgely, especially, had escaped from our prison ship into the book. In a fashion, he had taken me with him, out of the hulk and in through the etchings and the printed words, into the islands of the South Seas. When he had been blinded—when that dreadful Benjamin Penny had punctured his eyes—Midge had relied on me to read him the tales, and to tell him the pictures. I'd thought I could glance at any chart and pick out all the places we had read about.

But now it seemed hopeless. How could we ever find our way among those hundreds of islands when I couldn't tell one from another?

“Here's Borneo,” said Father, reaching down to the chart. His fingers touched a large island, then slid across the paper. “Here's Java. So if your book is right—and I don't believe for a moment that it is—your island would be somewhere here.” His hand moved in a spiral over the scattering of islands. “Well, as you can see…” He leaned closer to the table. “By George!” he breathed. “There it is. Tetakari.”

“See? I
knew
it was true,” cried Midgely. “Tom and me, we can sail to there. If you let us off in a boat, we can sail from island to island.”

Father looked up. He didn't turn toward Midge on the berth, but stared straight at me. “That's your plan?” he asked. “
That's
your scheme?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, as boldly as I could.

“Well, it's foolish.” He shook his head. “I won't be a party to it.”

“But, Father, we have to escape,” I told him. “It's all lost if we get to Australia. They'll put us in chains and we'll never get home again.”

“Oh, you'll not
stay
in Australia,” said he. “You may lay to that, Tom. Don't think I haven't been dwelling on this myself.”

The ship lurched over the crest of a wave. A shadow flitted across the table, and I looked up at the windows to see an albatross gliding across the glass.

“I shall take you to Australia,” said Father. “But I shan't put you ashore. I'll say straight out that Mr. Goodfellow plotted against us, that's he's hounded us for years. I'll call for the governor, or whoever's in charge, and tell him the whole story.”

“But he won't believe a word,” I said.

“Come, come,” said Father. “It's a tangled tale, I'll grant you that, but tell it we must. Have we any choice?”

“Do we
ever
have a choice?” I asked, which made him frown in puzzlement.

I had learned that the lives of men and women were decided only by chance. We were as twigs in a stream, unable
to choose our course, knocked hither and yon by the currents and eddies of fate. For most of my life, luck had been with me. By chance I'd been born with a twin, joined together—flesh and blood—by a bit of skin so small that my father had easily cut us apart. Through no choice of mine, we were born in a tempest, so that fate gave me an everlasting fear of the sea. But the same fate saw my father take hold of me while my twin was snatched away by the storm. So I had gone off to school to become a gentleman, while my twin, saved from the storm by a fisherman, grew up as a vagrant in the streets of London. He became known as the Smasher, one of the gang of urchins ruled by the Darkey, a mysterious woman whose own river of fate had since carried her off to the gallows.

It had seemed the luckiest day of my life when fate led me to the banks of the Thames, to unearth the most fabulous diamond in all the world. Only later did I wonder if it wasn't the Jolly Stone, that famous jewel with a terrible curse. Right then I had felt on top of the world, though—in truth—I was really balanced on the edge of a great cataract in my river of destiny.

I tumbled down it that day, and into a raging whirlpool. And, ever since, I'd been trapped in that current. There the lives of myself and my twin joined together again. I met old Worms, the body snatcher, who took me to my twin's very grave, down to the earth where his moldering body lay, and when I rose again I was him. Round and round I went in that whirlpool. My diamond was left in the empty grave, while I was delivered to the hands of the Darkey, and to those who had known the Smasher, to Benjamin Penny and Gaskin
Boggis, and on to Weedle himself, whom the Smasher had disfigured so cruelly.

So I knew there was no gain in battling chance. But I had learned something else as well: that a man could become so rich and powerful that he could change the course of fate's long river. Such a man was Mr. Goodfellow, he who had hounded my father into debtors' prison, then tricked him into sailing his filthy ships.