The New World

The Lamberts: Georgie, Constant and Kit

Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life

Keats: A Biography

In the Blood: A Memoir of My Childhood

The Poetry of Edward Thomas

Philip Larkin

Ways of Life: Places, Painters and Poets

Selected Poems: William Barnes

Selected Poems: Thomas Hardy

John Keats: Poems Selected by Andrew Motion

Here to Eternity: An Anthology of Poetry

First World War Poems

Wainewright the Poisoner

The Invention of Dr Cake

Silver

The Pleasure Steamers

Independence

Secret Narratives

Dangerous Play: Poems 1974–1984

Natural Causes

Love in a Life

The Price of Everything

Salt Water

Selected Poems 1976–1997

Public Property

The Cinder Path

The Customs House

Peace Talks

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Andrew Motion

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Originally published, in slightly different form, in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, a division of the Random House Group Limited, London, in 2014.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Motion, Andrew, 1952–

The new world / Andrew Motion. — First American edition.

pages cm

Sequel to Silver.

I. Title.

PR6063.O842N49 2015

823'.914—dc23

2014030289

ISBN 9780804138451

eBook ISBN 9780804138468

eBook design adapted from printed book design by Elina Nudelman

Cover design by Anna Kochman

Cover and title page illustration by Hughes, Nigel (b. 1940)/Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library

v4.1

ep

F
OR
K
YEONG-
S
OO

The stars streaming in the sky are my hair

The round rim of the earth which you see

Binds my starry hair

Adapted from Jeremiah Curtin,

Creation Myths of Primitive America
,

Boston, 1898

When one book is the child of another it is courteous to acknowledge the parent, so without delay I will say this volume continues the story of my life with Natty Silver, which I first brought to public attention a little under three years ago. I should also make clear at once that Natty is the daughter of Mrs. Silver, formerly of the West Indies and in more recent times the landlady of the Spyglass Inn, Wapping, London; and of Mr. Silver, better known as “Long John” Silver on account of him having only one leg, or as “Barbecue” since he used to work as a ship's cook. My own father Jim Hawkins was his companion on their celebrated journey to Treasure Island.

In my first installment I described how I was persuaded by Natty to return with her to the Island in the summer of 1802; our purpose was to recover the bar silver left behind by Squire Trelawney, when he made off with the other spoils that Captain Flint had previously buried there in secret.

Nothing turned out as planned. Where we expected a primitive wilderness we found a barbarous kingdom, ruled by three villains the squire had marooned on the Island; when we thought to enjoy an easy and profitable return to England we faced a catastrophe. Our ship the
Nightingale
was blown off her intended course and back through the Bay of Mexico until she was smashed on the coast of Spanish America, in the part called Texas. In that disaster I lost a great deal, including the human cargo I had helped to liberate from the three maroons, and the promise of my own future wealth and comfort.

The fact that I am able to say as much proves I did not also lose my life. For instead of following almost the whole company of our ship into Davy Jones's locker, and never seeing the light of this world again, I managed to scramble onto dry land. Here, as I shall soon explain, I had good reason to think my Maker would have dealt more kindly with me if he had allowed me to die with the rest.

But I must not judge the events of my life before I have remembered them, and shall therefore now wind back the clock forty years and return to the waters of that savage coast. The
Nightingale
lies in pieces; the storm has abated; the moon is almost set; and the latest pulse of seawater has carried me onto a beach of black stones. I am exhausted—fluttering between life and death.

But I am alive.

I am alive.

The Hispaniola

1842

When I approached the gates of heaven there was no brightness of the kind we are told to expect. No dazzle, no promise of homecoming, no rapture. There was only darkness, like a sky at night without stars or moon or cloud, and a mild but steady breeze blowing in my face, making me turn and look backward over my shoulder.

Miles below me, dozens of miles but perfectly clear as if caught in the eye of a microscope, I saw—myself. My own young body stretched on a black shore, with my hair in my eyes, and my arms flung about, and my legs half-in and half-out of the water, and my skin puckered with cold, because…

Because why? Memory failed me, then sparked again.

Because of the hurricane.

The wreck.

My plunge from our ship.

The plunge, and the water rushing into my throat, and the wave that suddenly lifted me up. The smaller and gentler wave, that singled me out and brought me safely to land.

The lens of the microscope left me there and shifted back to the sea. Outlined in starlight was the miracle that had saved me—a rock-ledge jutting out from the beach, keeping the worst of the storm at bay. And beyond it, sixty yards off where the waves still surged and battered, with the first gleams of daylight brightening their white caps: the
Nightingale
. But not our home as she had been, never that any more. The
Nightingale
quite finished, with her two masts torn down, her sails billowing underwater, her hull smashed through, and deep at the heart of her wound—our treasure.

But the microscope would not let me see that. The microscope darted off once more, suddenly impatient with the sea and switching instead to the black cliffs that enclosed the beach where my body lay unconscious, scouring the rock-crannies and birds' nests, searching the clefts and cracks, before deciding it had done with them too and must turn instead to the shoreline.

Where at last it found what it wanted.

Which was Natty.

When I saw her there in the eye of the microscope, her bare feet stamping on the stones for warmth, I felt my grip loosen at my enormous height, and the breeze in my face strengthening, trying to shake me off.

But I was not yet ready to slip back to myself, my earthly self. I still hung at my distance, high and separate.

Except that nothing was separate now, because everything was Natty. Natty in her tattered white shirt and knee breeches, with the cliffs rearing around her, and the ocean roaring, and the moon dipping between clouds. When her head tipped forward I caught the sheen of her beautiful brown skin, and the gleam of her eyes. And her hair—the tight curls of her hair shining as brightly as metal as they blustered around her face.

What was she doing, though, staring at the waves continually and paying me no attention? I was lying no more than a few yards away from her! Had she not seen? Or had she seen all too clearly, and given me up for dead?

“I am here!” I called to her. “Me, Jim Hawkins! Your Jim!” But I was not just a few yards away; I was still dozens of miles above her, and she did not notice.

I knew then I must find my way back to her, not wait for her to search for me. I knew I must tumble down through miles and miles of swirling air and rain and spray until I landed smack on the stones, the black stones.

Where she would find me and know who I was. Where she would fold me into her heart.

She reached me at once, hauling me out from the waves with the stones grinding beneath my heels. When I was clear she knelt down and rested my head in her lap; when she whispered my name there was no other sound I wanted to hear.

But I moved my head. I rolled it from side to side for pure pleasure, with life running warm in my veins again, and so I lost sight of her, finding the cliffs instead.

All through the hours we had floundered in ruins, with the
Nightingale
shattering beneath us, and her corridors flooding, and her cabins breaking open to the sky, and our friends dying, I had thought these cliffs were a blank wall. A vertical stop; the end of the world.

Now as they dizzied into the rain above me I saw they were covered with scrapes and scratches—there, near the summit, where the first daylight was crawling across. Rockfalls I thought, my eyes blurry with salt. Gouges made by the rain and sea. But as the light grew stronger, much stranger than that.

They were teeth and tongues; but just for a blink because now a new ghost-mark had appeared. A fissure that ran from the crown of the cliffs in a zigzag down to the beach and ended twenty yards off.

A stairway.

I opened my mouth to tell Natty, to say she must see this too and help me to walk and climb and make our escape. But I only groaned, which made her whisper my name again.

So I forgot the cliffs. I forgot them along with the path and the stones and the storm and the wreck and the friends we had lost.

I'll sleep for a moment longer, I told her, or meant to at least. I'll sleep and we'll find our way home together, and heal ourselves in the old world we know, and be happy.

And I'll find my good sense there as well.

And my sentences.

But first I must sleep; I must sleep and dream.