The Poisoned Island (3 page)

His room is empty apart from a bed and a chair, but as promised there is wood in the fireplace. He spends twenty frustrating minutes trying to light the fire, his hands shaking, his stomach now as clenched as a hand on a sword, sweat smearing his face even though the room is disgustingly cold for June. Eventually the fire takes, and he remembers the kettle is empty. He goes out of the room and down to the kitchen to fill it with water. The old boardinghouse woman looks at him from her perch at the kitchen table as if he were a particularly nasty form of cockroach which had introduced itself to her residence, but he ignores her. The iron kettle and the water inside it are heavy, but even so his hands shake as he climbs the stairs again, goes into his room and puts the kettle on the fire.

It takes an eternity to boil, months and years and decades of waiting. He takes a primitive-looking wooden cup from his sea chest, and then he takes the pouch from around his neck
and opens it. A foreign, pungent smell instantly engulfs him, a smell full of sun and sand and trees. He tells himself to be calm, to be steady, and with struggling care he empties some of what is in the pouch into the wooden cup. He tightens the pouch back up again and places it in his sea chest, along with his bag of pay, and pushes the chest under the bed. The kettle is boiling, at last, and he pours the hot water onto the dried leaf inside the cup. The smell that had sprung out of the leather pouch now deepens and spreads throughout the room, and every one of Sam’s senses is ringing; he can even hear the noise of a woman laughing, presumably from out in the street. He sits on the bed and finally, deliciously, succumbs to months of waiting, pouring the hot tea down his throat and crying out as it scalds his mouth, his tongue, his lungs. But the pain lasts only a moment, and then a familiar light opens up inside his head and he lies back on the bed, a smile of bliss already slashed across his face.

Many hundreds of pairs of eyes watch over the river. Shipowners and insurance agents cluster at the windows of offices and warehouses to keep an anxious watch on the precarious states of their investments. Old sailors cast mournful gazes and half remember, half invent former, brighter days. Boys with the rage of mothers hard in their ears see the masts and picture far-off coasts glittering with adventure, while their mothers look up tiredly from their laundry when they have the strength to do so and curse the river for being so much more attractive to their husbands than they.

One pair of eyes watches with a particular intensity. John Harriott, the resident magistrate of the River Police Office, looks out from his office on the second floor of the Police Office building in Wapping, which has stood looking out over the wharves and between the warehouses since the end of the last century. The building would not be out of place among the new avenues of villas at the fringes of Middlesex and
Westminster. Out here among the dingy and ancient wharves and in front of the crowded untidy foreshore, the Police Office looks as out of place as a dainty missionary bringing the word of God to a town of sullen thieves.

Harriott was the Police Office’s founding magistrate and has indeed felt like a missionary himself at times, sent down to the river to deliver a message of Law and of Order to a community which had taken pilfering to levels which threatened London’s very status as the richest entrepôt in the world. His officers and waterman-constables have been given the power to board any ship in the river and to
watch
it: to see that its cargo is loaded and unloaded according to its manifest and to confirm that, as far as is possible, none of the items in its hold finds its way into a sailor’s pockets.

In Harriott’s time as magistrate the river commerce has been drastically altered by the coming of the docks: the East and West India Docks in the Isle of Dogs; the London Dock behind Harriott’s Police Office; and a new dock system on the Surrey shore around the old Howland Dock. Harriott does not concern himself with whatever criminal activity occurs within these docks, which are owned by private companies responsible for their own security and answerable to none but the Customs and the Crown. His domain on the river remains a vibrant, noisy, crowded place, despite the arrival of these mercantile cathedrals. Some had imagined that the river trade would die out with the coming of the new docks. They were quite wrong. London’s trade continues to grow at an astounding rate, even in the face of the obstructive little Emperor’s attempts to strangle it. Britain is at war, and no one is more aware of the importance of commerce to that effort than John Harriott, a bristling patriot who has served in the Royal Navy, the Merchant Navy, and the East India
Company. Now sixty-seven years old, he has buried two wives and reached an accommodation with a third, and his sons are full-grown and leading mercantile lives of their own. His energy is notorious, his bulldog stubbornness resented, his commitment to his duties fearsome.

Harriott has been watching the water to see if he can catch a glimpse of today’s celebrated arrival. The
Solander
is a rare thing on the river: a ship arriving from far-off climes preceded by its own reputation. She is something of a throwback to the great days of discovery of Harriott’s youth, when ships with names like
Endeavour
and
Resolution
set out onto the white expanses of the charts and brought back tales of lands formed from ice, islands of sun and enchantment, cannibals, canoes, spears, and serpents.

Harriott has his own particular reasons for wanting to witness the safe arrival and mooring of the
Solander
. The vessel’s main backer, the Royal Society president Sir Joseph Banks, has asked that Harriott in particular take an interest in the ship’s security; word has gotten back to Harriott that Sir Joseph has described him as a “singular man, one who can be trusted with the Treasures of my returning Ship.” This does not flatter Harriott; rather, it has only served to make him resentful but determined. Resentful, for Harriott has reasons to distrust Sir Joseph, reasons that lie within recent events in Wapping. Determined, because he wishes his relationship with Sir Joseph—such as it is—to be one of unblemished achievement on his side, and guilty reliance on the part of Sir Joseph.

The ship in question had arrived on the morning tide, and she is now moored to the chain in the river, just upstream of the new entrance to the Surrey Canal system. She is hard to spot around the bend in the river, in amongst the busy
shipping which, day and night, turns the Thames into a floating city of wood and rope. Harriott knows what to look for, though, and he does indeed spy her. She is not, truth be told, much to look at, but Harriott knows his maritime history and knows that her predecessors, from the
Endeavour
on, were all very ordinary-looking vessels. Like the
Endeavour
and the
Bounty
, the
Solander
is a Whitby collier, broad-beamed and square-bowed, squat and practical, made for the repetitious carrying of coal across the unyielding North Sea. There is no romance to look at her, unless you know something of where she’s been and what she brings back. Knowing that, an old Navy man like John Harriott cannot help but find the romance in her irresistible.

It is now the afternoon. Looking up once again from his work to gaze out of the window, Harriott thinks that he can detect a wherry rowing away from the
Solander
and heading upstream towards him. Years of looking at the river have given him the ability to pick out particular activity, even among the clamor of barges, whalers, luggers, packets, brigs, ferries, dinghies, and lighters. Wherries have been making their way from the
Solander
for some time now—indeed, one discharged several seamen at the Wapping stairs just below his office only a quarter-hour ago. But this particular wherry carries only one passenger, and as it rows closer Harriott is convinced it must be the captain.

Harriott is seated in his ancient leather chair, saved from the rushing Essex waters during the inundation of his island farm years before he came to Wapping. The chair can swivel through a full circle, allowing him both to watch out of the window and work at his desk without standing on his lame and increasingly pointless leg. He turns the chair back to his desk and away from the window to await the man, checking
the letter from the resident magistrate at Bow Street, Aaron Graham. It is this letter which introduces the captain and asks Harriott to receive him. Thomas Hopkins was made post captain five years ago, is now almost forty years old, and has a solid Royal Navy career behind him. He has commanded the
Solander
as a particular favor by the Admiralty to Sir Joseph. The letter does not reveal what Harriott understands to be the truth behind this odd arrangement: that the Admiralty had refused to fund the
Solander
’s mission, even though it had funded other similar voyages, but as part-compensation had thrown a decent captain Sir Joseph’s way. Harriott wonders what this says about the capacities of Captain Hopkins, or at least the Admiralty’s view of him. Is he not needed for fighting, or is he seen as someone reliable? Hopkins has a wife, lives in comfortable surroundings in Putney, and (rather to Harriott’s dismay) is Welsh.

Though not one for society gossip or even daily news, Harriott is aware that the arrival of the
Solander
is a significant matter to the social and cultural cognoscenti of the metropolis. It has been much discussed in the capital’s newspapers over the last two days, and Harriott perfectly understands why. What could be more romantic than a deliberate reenactment of the first journey of the
Endeavour
? It has been forty years since the working man’s son James Cook extended England’s dominion into the southern seas, coming home with tales of beautiful native women, strange flora and fauna, treacherous reefs, and adventure. Those tales spawned thousands of inches of newsprint, and hundreds of volumes, both learned and scurrilous. Also, more to the immediate point, detailed charts and new names for far-flung islands, shores, and seas bloomed from Cook’s voyage. New
English
names.

This new ship, the
Solander
, seems all of a piece with that
brighter, clearer time, when an Enlightenment England was still thrusting out into the world, when America was still a brother and not an enemy, when fighting France meant fighting another King, not a bunch of shouting zealots whose revolutionary prognostications seem to cut at the heart of statehood itself. Those were the long-ago years when Harriott himself had been at sea, joining the Navy at thirteen and the East India Company at twenty-three. Adventure had been in his heart then, much as it had been in England’s. Now his heart is old, and England’s great dreams of discovery are, if not quite over, then certainly grown old and cynical. These voyages are now about acquisition rather than discovery, and acquisition is a drier thing, more for clerks and accountants than captains.

Of course, it had been Cook’s journey on the
Endeavour
which had embedded the extraordinary personality of Joseph Banks in the English imagination. Cook had returned with charts; Banks came back with tales, scandalous tales of sexual encounters beneath beached boats and in forest tents, drenched in descriptions of dark ritual and human sacrifice. Caricaturists and satirists had dined magnificently on the public body of Banks, while the man himself accrued vast influence, including friendship with the King and the presidency of the Royal Society itself.

Now Banks—old, fat, and politically weakened by the recurrent illness of his great royal benefactor—has with characteristic theatrical flair dispatched a second ship to Otaheite, that strange Pacific paradise which has infected imaginations for decades, with its waterfalls cascading down from green hills to wash the backs of sultry, willing natives. The
Solander
’s voyage was primarily intended to stock the hothouses of the botanical garden at Kew, which Banks has championed
in countless editorials and speeches but which now faces the noted indifference of the aggressively non-horticultural Prince Regent. Every Briton who reads a newspaper knows what Banks has long claimed for Kew: that by owning and adapting the natural world to its own ends, Britain will shape the future of the world. For Banks, the transport of plants from one place to another is an Imperial undertaking, the whole globe merely a market garden for the English, with Banks as head gardener and Kew as the hothouse, the place in which English horticulture is fused with British ambition.

It is a weighty narrative to rest upon an ordinary Whitby collier, but it was magnificently told by Cook and Banks forty years ago. And now Cook’s successor, Captain Hopkins, is on his way.

Twenty minutes after Harriott’s first sighting of the captain in the wherry there is a knock at his door, and one of the servants lets Hopkins into his office. The man certainly looks Welsh—short, barrel-chested, his face round and red with that familiar sheen of sweat to which a sea captain carrying a comfortable load around his stomach is prone. He wears a naval uniform of white breeches and blue coat, and looks rather annoyed to be here.