Patrick O'Brian - The Nutmeg of Consolation

'Shove off. Give way,' piped Reade. 'All together now, if you can manage it: and Davis, you row dry for once.'

These were the last words as they pulled across the lagoon, the officers looking thoughtfully at the silent shore. 'Rowed off all,' cried Reade at last, and the bargemen tossed their oars into the boat, Navy-fashion. A moment's glide and the bows ground up into the sand; bow-oar jumped out to lay the gang-plank and Jack and the officers stepped ashore.

'Heave her about, stern-on, just afloat to a grapnel,' said Jack. 'Wilkinson, James and Parfitt to be boat-keepers this tide - the muskets out of sight. The rest come up the beach with me. No straggling until I give the word.'

Up the white sand, their eyes half-closed against the glare but still looking expectantly right and left at the canoes, the woods, and the long, long house. And in spite of orders Reade, somewhat behind the main group, went skipping away to the canoes.

Some moments later, as a hog rushed from behind the nearest canoe and into the trees, he came running back. He looked pale yellow under his tan and he said to Stephen, 'There is something horrible there. A woman, I think.' The party stopped and looked at him. In a faltering voice he added, 'Dead.'

'Will you wait for me here, sir, without going on,' said Stephen: and there they stood, uneasy, while he walked away, followed by Martin. In this brilliant light the silence was all the more oppressive: all round the group they turned their questioning faces to one another, but never a word, not even in an undertone, until the Doctor, coming back, called from a distance, 'Sir, all the men who have not had the smallpox should return to the boat at once.' And coming up he asked, 'Mr Reade, have you had the smallpox?'

'No, sir.'

'Then take off your clothes: go bathe in the sea, wet your hair through and through and sit by yourself in the front of the boat. Touch no one. Who has a tinder-box?'

'Here, sir,' said Bonden.

'Then pray strike a light and burn Mr Reade's clothes. You have had the disease, sir, as I recall?'

'Yes, when I was a child,' said Jack: and to the men who were standing somewhat apart, 'Johnson, Davis and Hedges, you go back to the boat.' They turned, touching their foreheads, and walked down the slope, their faces disappointed but above all troubled; and a charnel-house eddy followed them as far as the sea.

'And all the rest of you?' asked Stephen. 'Make sure, now, for this is the wicked and confluent kind.' Another man fell out, muttering something and hanging a shameful head. 'Now, sir, I shall look into the long house; and then perhaps we can search for our antiscorbutics. The hands had better stay here for a while. Do you choose to come, sir?'

Jack walked deliberately after Stephen and Martin, hating each step. He expected something very unpleasant, repulsive; but what he saw and what he breathed as he followed them up the ladder and into the buzzing twilight of the long house was far, far worse. Almost the entire village had died there.

'It is no good we can do here, said Stephen, having walked up and down the whole length twice with the closest attention; and when they were outside, on the raised platform with its pyramid of ancestral skulls, the lower tiers moss-green, he observed 'You were in the right of it, Mr Martin, when you spoke of a religious ceremony; and these' - pointing at two hatchets, new but for a little rust, lying on what had recently been a bed of flowers - 'these, I believe, were the sacrifice offered up to preserve the tribe, poor souls.'

Again Jack followed them as they went along, talking of the nature of the disease and of how badly it affected nations and communities that had never known it in the past - how mortal it was to Eskimos, for example, and how this particular infection must have been brought by a whaler, its visit proved by the axes. He felt a certain indignation against them, a resentment for his own unshared horror, and when Stephen turned to him as they joined the others and said 'I believe we may take coconuts here, and fruit and greenstuff, robbing no man,' he only answered with a sullen look and a formal inclination of his head.

Stephen seized his mood and that of the waiting hands - the turning wind had told them all they had not learnt from their Captain's face, bowed shoulders, heavy walk - and he went on 'May I suggest that you should take the nuts, particularly the very young milky nuts, from the palms on the reef, while Mr Martin and I look for our plants inland? Above all, do not stand about in this mephitic atmosphere. But first I beg that Mr Reade may be taken back to the ship and that the loblolly boy should be told to rub him all over with vinegar and cut off his hair before he goes aboard, where he must be kept in quarantine?'

'Very well,' said Jack. 'I shall send the boat back for you whenever you wish.'

'Not this boat, sir, if you will allow me. This too must be scrubbed with vinegar by men who can show their pock-marks. Another boat entirely, if you please, and it rowed only by hands that run no risk.'

A path led inland from the village: very rough steep ground strewn with boulders to begin with, covered with bushes and creepers; and under the bushes a few dead islanders, almost skeleton by now, with the limbs scattered. Then came a flat place, clear among the trees, its high dry-stone wall proof against the swine that could be heard rooting and grunting in the undergrowth no great way off. In this considerable enclosure grew yams, bananas of different kinds, various vegetables, standing together in no kind of order but evidently planted there - the turned earth could still be seen beneath the springing weeds.

'That must be a colocassia,' observed Martin, leaning on the wall.

'So it is. The taro itself, I believe. Yes, certainly the taro. Its leaves, though bitter, improve on boiling; and it is a famous antiscorbutic.'

They moved on, and always up, the bare rock of the path often polished by generations of feet: three more enclosures, the last with a tall boar reared against the wall, trying to get in. By this time they were far beyond the pestilential smell, and Martin picked up a few molluscs, examining them closely before dropping them into a padded box, while Stephen pointed out an orchid fairly pouring out its cascade of white gold-tipped flowers from the crutch of a tree.

'I was prepared for the lack of land-birds, mammals and reptiles, the more so as hogs have been turned out,' said Martin, 'but not for the wealth of plants. On the right hand of this path from the last taro-patch... do you hear that sound, not unlike a woodpecker?' They stood, their ears inclined. The path they were following rose steeply between palms and sandalwood to an abrupt rock-face with a little platform before it, covered with a sweet-smelling terrestrial orchid. The sound, which had seemed to be coming from here, stopped. '... I have seen no less than eighteen members of the Rubeaceae.'

Up and up in silence. Stephen, two paces ahead, with his eyes now on the level of the platform, slowly crouched down, and turning he whispered 'Ape. A small blue-black ape.'

The weak hammering started again and they crept on, Stephen very cautiously making room for Martin, who after a moment murmured 'Glabrous' in his ear.

A second of the same kind appeared from behind a palm, and she being upright and clear of the haze of orchids at eye-level could be seen to be a small thin black girl, also holding a nut. She joined the first, squatting and beating her nut on the broad flat stone that obviously covered a well or spring. They looked very poorly and Stephen straightened, coughing as he did so. The little girls clasped one another without a word, but did not run. 'Let us sit here, looking away from them,' said Stephen, 'taking little notice or none at all. They are well over the disease: the first to take it, no doubt; but they are in a sad way.'