The natives were dark copper in color and appeared to be wearing even darker clothes. But seeing their exposed genitals, Jack realized they were actually completely naked and used some sort of body paint.
He dared not rush back to alert his comradesâhe feared it might be seen as a defensive, or worse, offensive, act. Instead he stood quietly, taking in the details of the bizarre apparitions while they seemed to do the same with him. It occurred to him that he had been wrong again; it wasn't body paint he saw, it was tattooing.
Their hair was jet black, rolled back on their heads into buns. Jack looked into the eyes of the man closest to him for some sign of mood or intention. The dark eyes met his own without blinking. But he felt they projected neither fear nor threatâif anything curiosity and maybe a hint of amusement. Whatever his intent, the man cut a formidable and fantastic figure.
As this new knowledge sank in, Jack realized that the activity behind him that had been swelling with the onset of the day had silenced. He knew without turning that his shipmates were aware of his situation.
Being closest, Jack figured it fell on him to make the first move. He raised his hand palm outward, smiled, and gestured to the visitors to follow him. Then he deliberately turned his back, which he assumed could only be interpreted by any race as a sign of trust and nonaggression, and took several steps toward his fellows, praying his next sensation would not be that of a spearhead through his body. He sensed the natives had not moved and motioned again to them, resuming his calm stroll toward his shipmates. He was relieved to see the watch had been recalled from the cove, the pistol wisely kept from sight.
With apparent nonchalance, the leader stepped forward, spear now resting on his right shoulder as the axe rested on his left. Quince moved parallel to Jack and uttered the first words of the encounter.
“Uh . . . okole maluna. Friends.”
Jack knew Quince had experience from earlier voyages of the Sandwich Isles, but could tell his words meant nothing to the tattooed man. Quince followed his statement with a gesture that to Jack seemed a happy choice. He removed the red scarf from his neck, the one he had managed to retain through the ordeal of the shipwreck, and offered it to the visitors' apparent leader.
The man broke into a big smile, took the cloth, and waved it at his fellows, accompanied by a wild language sounding of another world. The others visibly relaxed in their demeanor; from nowhere, one produced a good-sized fish. Jack marveled that they had so easily come prepared for battle or barter.
The leader pointed to himself and said, “Gan Jawa.” Then he pointed to Quince questioningly. On impulse, Jack responded before the first mate. He pointed to Quince and stated in a firm voice: “Gan Quince.” A long shot, but it seemed to work. The natives milled about the camp but glanced at Quince for approval as though they were in the presence of a foreign chief. Jack reasoned that a firmly established hierarchy, in a motley group such as theirs, would elicit more respect. We might be wrecked, but we're not leaderless or undisciplined, seemed the correct attitude.
The natives were either extremely cunning or truly inclined to friendship. They were most fascinated with the hairy chests of the Americans and Europeans that had never been darkened with inked decorations, and many stepped up to examine them. Although barefoot, they walked with apparent impunity over the sharp coral that cut the feet of sailors. At one point, Gan Jawa walked back to Quince and waved his arm in a circle encompassing the nearby islands, ocean and sky, and said easily: “Belaur.” Quince nodded knowingly, but when Jawa turned away, he shrugged his shoulders. They now knew the name of the place they were in, although Quince had apparently never heard of it.
Jack remarked quietly to Quince that he counted only nine natives all told. But Quince spotted several canoes making their
way into the cove they had been guarding. Each had three men in it and a noticeable lack of women. In American Indian parlance, this would be called a war party. It did not escape Jack that it had been intelligently deployed. The men in the bushes must have gained the island in some fashion he didn't yet understand, ready to call in reinforcements from seaward at short notice. The newly arrived group disembarked smoothly. The last man in each canoe stepped out and held it steady before the others took their eyes from the white men even for the instant required to shift their weight and ease out of the sleek craft in water less than a foot deep.
Jack also noted that the newcomers deferred to the original leader of the group. That meant that the leader had chosen to expose himself to the danger rather than allot the role to some lieutenant.
As the two groups examined each other, making cautious signs of goodwill, a few objects were exchanged. Pieces of scrap metal and nails from a keg went for woven mats and bone fish hooks. This soon turned into a brisk trade; but Quince, concerned at the undisciplined give and take, ended it by flourishing a feathered hat above his head to get his men's attention. Teeth gritted, but with a smile on his face, he announced firmly, “Avast you dumb sons of sea whores, don't be giving away what we might need to live on.” But at the end of his order, he presented the hat to the leader, gathered his men in a line, and had them salute. A smart move, Jack thought. The trading had been curtailed, but no feelings hurt.
The natives stayed for most of the day, inspecting the wreckage of the
Perdido Star
. The forward section was easily visible in shallow water; they gazed at where the broken masts protruded from the sea. Small clusters of dark men and eventually women and children arrived to observe the activity of the whites, as if witnessing an incredible spectacle. Gan Jawa occasionally motioned his fellows to help in some of the more labor-intensive work of the Americans when it appeared extra hands would be helpful.
The native leader seemed perplexed when the white men turned some of their efforts to cleaning the fish they had been given. Soon another canoe arrived and several women walked over to the fire and unceremoniously took over the preparation of food. It became clear that in these parts men might do the catching of game, but it was definitely women God meant to cook it.
By evening, the natives, much better swimmers than the sailors, had helped the shipwrecked men gather more items from the wreck, cooked a meal, and even produced some fresh fruitâa matter of no small joy. Pacific isles were notoriously variable in abundant edible fruits. If these were plentiful, there was no threat of scurvy.
At some signal Jack didn't catch, the islanders began slowly repairing to their canoes, the grateful hosts walking to the water to see them off. At this point their good fortune became even greater. A departing native man yelled something to one of the women that caused a flurry of excitement from Brown. Brown was just thatâa brown-skinned Malaysian, hired on in Papeete, whose real name was unpronounceable to his mates.
“Quince!”
“Aye, what's yer problem, Brown?”
“No problem, sir. That man told the woman to hurry up with bringin' 'im the paddle.”
“Well, so bleedin' whatâ” Quince paused. “You understood him?”
“Aye, sir. It's Malayâhe's talkin' a dialect I can understand.”
Quince turned quickly to Jawa and indicated he would like to have the last canoe return.
When it did, Brown excitedly rattled off several statements in a singsong language foreign to all but the man who had called out. Immediately, the Belauran replied in the same tongue.
“Mon dieu,” muttered Paul to Jack. “We've found a bloody human Rosetta stone.”
The shipwrecked men had indeed received a bounty of blessings
that day. With the leaving of the last canoe, Quince called a council around the still glowing coals.
“Well, lads, I'm not a religious man but we need to start by giving thanks. Our futures looked sad indeed last night, and now we're sitting here with full bellies among friendly people and thanks to Brown here we can even talk to them.”
The men bowed their heads and Quince led them in a small prayer, lamenting the loss of their mates and thanking the Lord for their good fortune.
“What's the next step, men? What do we need the most and how do we go about gettin' it?”
“Shoes.” The answer from Paul came immediately and was seconded by several voices.
Most of the men, if they owned boots at all, had shed them swimming to land. Even the Jack Tars accustomed to scrambling barefoot up ship's rigging were hard put to deal with the jagged coral piercing through the sand on most of the islet.
“There's hardly any damned sand or soil on this rock, Skipper,” one said. “Christ, it's like we're walkin' on broken glass.”
Jack noted the man's reference to Quince as “Skipper,” carrying with it an unintended import: the men were informally changing the ship's hierarchy. Quince noted it, too. No one had challenged the first mate's leadership all along, but the simple use of that term in a seaman's world was tacit indication that Quince had been promoted.
“You're calling me âSkipper,' lads, but there's nothing says that has to be, since the
Perdido
is a merchant ship, not a sovereign vessel, and we're well past any imminent peril from the sea. So . . . is there any objection to my being in charge?”
A general silence ensued. All seemed to feel no reason to disrupt a working system, and none harbored against Quince more than the usual minor grudges one might have for a superior.
“Okay. Shoes it is then. We've got water and food and we're going to damn soon need something to protect our feet.”
“We can make some moccasins,” Red Dog said, “but it's a
bleedin' shame we can't get to the cargo, where I know we're carrying at least one whole damn box of them.”
“Tools, too,” Mentor chimed in. “We've got some but could use a lot more.”
“And guns,” Coop added. “Don't forget that. The savages have been square with us, but what if that changes?”
“Aye guns,” said Smithers. “We've got plenty powder and lead but we're at anybody's mercy till we have more than one pistol to defend the lot of us.”
“We had a good dozen musket on board,” Quince observed thoughtfully, “but they were locked in the captain's cabin and that went into the abyss when that wave took all the aft superstructure. Most of the hull seems in shallow water; the rest's in the bluest part of Davy Jones.”
“I might be able to help,” Jack said.
They all looked at him.
“The fo'c'sle is sunk shallow and intact. It probably still contains my personals.”
“You aren't sayin' you were keepin' guns in the crew quarters, lad? You know darn well that's against ship's rules.”
“No, I wasn't keeping guns, but my most valuable possessions were there and that includes a bag of brass parts to twenty of the finest rifle mechanisms ever made. I know because I helped my father make them. I took the liberty of removing them from the hold one day when I spied them among my father's possessions that he had left with the captain in Cuba.”
The men were all silence and raised eyebrows.
“And barrelsâ” bosun Mentor broke in, “âyea, I know what you're going to sayâ” he worked belowdecks, often checking the stowage “âthere are twenty fine barrels still in the second hold. Your father's.”
“Yes. I suppose it's my inheritance of sorts. The mechanisms are made of brass, of course, so they should suffer little from exposure to seawater. The barrels are thick gunmetal and well oiled, so they
will also fare reasonablyâfor a time at least. Given our present circumstances, they would be worth their weight in gold if we could get to them.”
“Jaysus,” Coop said. “With stocks made from the mangrove wood and those parts, we could have twenty operational muskets. We could hold our own against all the savages in creation. Think what we could do with some of the cannon.”
“No, Coop,” said Quince. “It's the muskets that would do it. Cannon are good to defend a ship, or if we were making a fort, but they're too damn heavy to lift and move for our purposes. No, the muskets would be the thing.”
“Even better than that,” Jack continued. “These gun parts aren't for your ordinary musket. They're mechanisms and barrels for Kentucky longrifles: we could shoot the eyes out of mosquitoes at two hundred paces.”
Quince fumbled for his pipe and tobacco pouch. “Maybe so,” he said, nodding his head toward the
Star
. “But they may as well be on the moon for all the good they do us out there in five or ten fathom of water.”
“Aye, and what about gettin' home?” Smithers asked. “What in the name of God are we doing about that, I ask ya?”
“Easy, now,” Quince answered. “We're going to be here a good spell and need defend ourselves in the meantime.”
“He's right,” came from Mentor, looking pointedly at Smithers. “We has to live one life at a time, we do. Don't know when we're leaving these parts but it's more likely to be on our own terms, if we got shoes on our feet and guns in our hands.”