James Norman Hall - The High Barbaree

“ ‘Yes, sir,’ I replied, eagerly. ‘You won’t forget?’

“He gave me a stern look, but the expression softened immediately after.

“ ‘I want you to remember this, Alec: the Vails don’t forget their promises. When’s your birthday?’

“ ‘April twenty-second,’ I said.

“ ‘Okay. Two years from now, on or about April twenty-second, you can count on having your canoe.’

“My uncle stayed the promised two weeks but it seemed more like two days. I lost some of the pleasure in having him in worry about losing him again so soon. He loved to loaf when ashore. He would sit on the back porch, his chair tipped back against the wall, watching the summer clouds drift across the sky. On these loafing days I couldn’t get him to budge, but it was not time wasted. As a storyteller he was in a class by himself. He had an odd way of beginning without any preliminaries. He told his stories with the minute, circumstantial detail all boys love, skipping from one experience to another, from one part of the world to another, picking out the plums and high spots of his adventures, and I never tired of listening. Sometimes we’d be sitting in his room, with Great-great-uncle Oliphant Vail gazing down at us. ‘Look at him, Alec,’ my uncle would remark. ‘Ain’t you proud to stem from a line of whalers like that one?’ And then he would give me a funny sidelong glance. ‘Of course, I know you’re goin’ to be a doctor. Your mother’s got her heart set on that. I keep forgettin’, so don’t pay no mind to me when I get to talkin’ about the sea.’

“One morning I reminded him that he’d not yet plotted on his wall charts the voyages he’d made since last coming to Westview.

“ ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Come up to my room. We’ll get it done straight off.’

“We rolled back the rug and laid the charts out on the floor. He had half-a-dozen voyages to mark in and he began with those farthest back. I lay on the floor, my chin propped on my hands, watching him as he worked. One of the voyages had been across the Pacific, and as he laid out his course from port to port he kept up a running commentary that was better than a year of geography lessons at school. ‘The Vail’s ocean’ he called it. ‘That’s our old home, Alec. Room enough there even for Vails to move around in.’ He used a special kind of blue ink, the color of the sea when you’re well inside the tropics, he said. Then he changed his mind about that.

“ ‘No, I’m wrong. There’s no such color, in ink. They couldn’t get that shade of blue in a thousand years. Even if they did get it, it wouldn’t be the same. No sir, Alec. You’ve got to see that particular blue to believe in it.’

“ ‘I’m going to see it someday,’ I said.

“ ‘Sure you are. You wouldn’t be a Vail if you didn’t hanker now and again for the tropical Pacific.’ He glanced up at the portrait of Oliphant Vail. ‘Ain’t that a speakin’ likeness?’ he said. ‘If only he could speak he’d have something to tell us about whalin’ a hundred years ago.’

“ ‘Were all the Vails whalers?’ I asked.

“ ‘There’s an old saying about our family:—

As long as ships have masts and sails

There’ll be Vails to hunt the whales.

But there’s none of ’em left in Nantucket now, to follow the old trade.’

“ ‘Would they follow it if there were any left?’ I asked.

“My uncle sat back on his heels and looked at me, an angry light in his eyes.

“ ‘Nantucketers? No, sir! They’d think shame to hunt ’em the way it’s done now. These what-you-may-call-’em whalers go out in big 10,000-ton ships, all the way to the Antarctic, and they take a flock of seagoin’ tugs along. Then the mother ship waits while the tugs go in amongst the whales and explode shells in ’em, shot from guns on deck. The whales ain’t got a ghost of a chance. Belly-up they come, dozens, scores of ’em. The tugs tow ’em to the mother ship to strip the blubber and render the oil. Mark my words! If they keep this up there won’t be a whale left in any of the seven seas in a few more years.’

“My uncle was so burned up at the thought of these modern methods of whaling that he could speak of nothing else for a good five minutes; then he cooled off and went back to the charts. It was while he was pointing out some of the old whaling grounds in the Pacific that I asked about a mere speck of an island I’d noticed. This particular dot lay almost on the Line and was marked, ‘Turnbull’s Island.’ Beneath it were the letters ‘E-D.’

“ ‘It’s queer, your noticin’ that,’ said Uncle Thad. ‘You’ve got bright eyes, sonny.’

“ ‘What does E-D mean?’ I asked.

“ ‘Existence Doubtful.’

“ ‘They don’t know whether the island’s there or not?’

“ ‘That’s right.’

“ ‘Why doesn’t some ship go and find out?’

“ ‘That’s a lonely part of the Pacific even in these days,’ said Uncle Thad. ‘It’s away off the sea lanes.’

“ ‘Haven’t you ever passed near it?’

“He shook his head and pointed to the track of one of his earlier voyages.

“ ‘That’s the nearest, and it’s a good thousand miles off Turnbull’s Island.’

“He went to the bookcase and took down a heavy cloth-bound volume. It was Yardley’s Pacific Directory. I’d glanced at it, but was too young at that time to pay much attention to it; there were no pictures. My uncle turned to the index and thumbed the pages until he found what he was looking for.

“ ‘It’s queer your spottin’ Turnbull’s Island,’ he said. ‘Guess it’s because you’re a Vail. That part of the Pacific is what they called the Line Grounds in the old days of whaling. Nantucketers and New Bedford men cruised there a lot back in the eighteen-forties and fifties. Your Great-great-uncle Oliphant was lost somewhere in that region. I’ll read you what it says about the island in Yardley’s Directory.’

“Then he read me the passage I’ve already quoted to you, and from that day Turnbull’s Island became a place to dream about. I felt that an island that had been twice reported must really be there. You know how it is; not much is needed to set a young kid’s imagination to work, and I had my uncle’s books with their engravings of scenes on tropical islands to set me to wondering about Turnbull’s Island. It burned me up that the editor of Yardley’s Directory should have doubted the reports of two old whaling captains. What could he know about the matter? Captain Turnbull’s reference to the two volcanic spires with the great eastern cliff between them stuck in my mind. I could see the place looming through the mists of a rainy day, cliff and spires looking immensely high as they appeared dimly through the clouds. Or I would imagine a ship approaching it toward sunset, under a cloudless sky, the wall of cliff changing color as the light faded until it showed the deepest purple in the dusk of evening. The ship, of course, was always my Uncle Thad’s, with me on board.

“So it was from that time on. Of an evening as I looked toward the hills west of town, with the last faint light of day streaming up from behind them, I would imagine that the sea lay just beyond, and that the light was reflected from the highest mountains of Turnbull’s Island.”

Brooke halted in his narrative to peer at his companion who was lying on his back, staring into the sky.

“Sleepy, Gene?”

“No.”

“Want me to go on?”

“Of course. I’m glad you got wound up on this story. It’s a life-saver. Makes the time pass.”

“That’s kind of a backhanded compliment.”

“No; I’m interested, Alec. No kidding.”

“How much time has passed so far?”