Andrea Barrett - Ship Fever - Stories

After they parted, Alec collected with even more fervor. Now the results lay snugly packed below him, and as the ship rocked sluggishly he was imagining how he’d drive up to his parents’ tavern, dressed in a new suit and laden with more money than they’d ever seen.

They would be thrilled, Alec thought. As would everyone who’d helped him. How surprised the Wells brothers and Titian Peale would be, when Alec made them gifts of the especially amazing butterflies he’d set aside for them! And then the hush inside the Academy, as he lectured to the men who’d taught him. Holding up a perfect skin from one of those rare umbrella-birds, he would point out the glossy blue tufts on the crest-feathers. “When the bird is resting,” he would say, “the raised crest forms a deep blue dome, which completely hides the head and beak.” The men would give him a desk, Alec thought, where he might catalogue his treasures. And he might marry, were he to meet someone appealing.

He was happy; he was half-asleep. Then the cabin-boy ran up to Alec’s hammock and shook him and said, “Mr. Carrière! The captain says to come immediately. There seems to be a fire!” And Alec, still dreaming of his wonderful future, stumbled from his cabin with only the most recent volume of his journal and the clothes on his back.

The scene on deck was pure chaos: smoke rising through the masts, a sheet of flame shooting up from the galley, crew members hurling water along the deck and onto the sails. Captain Longwood was shouting orders and several of the men were unlashing the boats and preparing to lower them, while others hurriedly gathered casks of water and biscuit.

“What’s happened?” Alec shouted. “What can I do?”

“Save what you can!” Captain Longwood shouted back. “I fear we may lose the ship.”

Even as Alec headed for the forecastle, he could not believe this was happening. Some months after his meeting with Wallace, he’d heard that the brig carrying Wallace home had burned to the waterline, destroying all his collections and casting him adrift on the sea for several weeks. This news had filled Alec with genuine horror. Yet at the same time he’d also felt a small, mean sense of superstitious relief: such a disaster, having happened once, could surely never happen again. Although Alec’s own collections were not insured, since he could not afford the fees, Wallace’s bad luck had seemed to guarantee Alec’s safe passage home.

All this passed through his mind as he fought his way forward. Then every thought but panic was driven away when he saw the plight of his animals.

In the holds below him was a fortune in things dead and preserved — but in the forecastle was the living menagerie he was also bringing home. His sweet sloth, no bigger than a rabbit, with his charming habit of hanging upside down on the back of a chair and his melancholy expression; the parrots and parakeets and the forest-dog; the toucans; the monkeys: already they were calling through the smoke. And before Alec could reach them a spout of flame rose like a wall through the hatchway in front of him.

Wallace’s ship, he knew, had caught fire through the spontaneous combustion of kegs of balsam-capivi, but their own fire had no such exotic cause. The cook had knocked over a lamp, which had ignited a keg of grease, which had dripped, burning, through the floorboards and set fire to the cargo of rubber and lumber just below. From there the fire licked forward, downward, upward; and when the hatches were opened the draft made the fire jump and sing.

Alec was driven back to the quarterdeck and stood there, helpless, while the men prepared the boats and hurriedly gathered spars and oars and sails. The captain flew by, still shouting, his hands bristling with charts and compasses; they were five days out of Para and no longer within sight of land. The skylight exploded with a great roar, and the burning berths crackled below them. Terrible noises rose from the bow where the animals were confined. His lovely purple-breasted cotingas, roasting; the handsome pair of big-bellied monkeys, which the Brazilians called barraidugo —his entire life, until that moment, had contained nothing so distressing.

For a moment he thought the birds at least might be saved. One of the men dropped from his perch on the cross-trees and smashed in the forecastle door with an axe. Then the toucans, kept unconfined, flew out, and also a flock of parakeets. The cloud of birds seemed to head for the cloud of smoke but then swooped low and settled on the bowsprit, as far from the fire as they could get. They were joined by the sloth, who had magically crept up the ironwork. But meanwhile the mate was shouting, “Go! Now !” and hands were pushing against Alec’s back, men were tumbling over the stern and he tumbled with them, falling into one of the leaky boats. Someone thrust a dipper into his hands and he began to bale, while men he had never noticed before barked and struggled to fit the oars in the oarlocks. The man pressed against his knee dripped blood from a scratch on his cheek and gagged, as did Alec, on the smoke from the rubber seething in the wreck.

The shrouds and sails burned briskly; then the masts began to catch. Soon enough the main-mast toppled and the moon-lit water filled with charred remains.

“Please,” Alec begged Captain Longwood. “Can we row toward the bow? Can we try to save some of them?” His animals were lined along the last scrap of solid wood.

Captain Longwood hesitated, but then agreed. “Two minutes,” he said sternly.

But when they approached the bow Alec found that the creatures would not abandon their perches. As the flames advanced, the birds seemed to dive into them, disappearing in sudden brilliant puffs that hung like stars. Only the sloth escaped; and he only because the section of bowsprit from which he hung upside down burned at the base and plopped into the water. When Alec picked him up, his feet still clung to the wood.

They were three days drifting in their leaky boats before they saw a sail in the distance: the Alexandra, headed for New Orleans. A fortunate rescue. Alec was grateful. But a year and a half of hard work, on which his whole future depended, was destroyed; as was the sloth, who died on the voyage. Alec reached home in one piece, but with hardly more to his name than when he’d left. As a souvenir he was given nightmares, in which the smell of singeing feathers filled his nostrils and his sloth curled smaller and smaller, and closed his eyes, and died again and again.

In November, recuperating at his uncle’s house as his father would not have him at his, Alec learned that his acquaintance from Barra had written two books, one about his travels and the other about the exotic palms. Alec read both and liked them very much. They had shared a rare and terrible thing, Alec thought: all they’d gathered of the astonishing fauna of the Amazon, both quick and dead, turned into ash on the sea. Alec wrote to him, in England.

Dear Mr. Wallace: I expect you will not remember me, but we passed a pleasant evening together in Barra in September 1851. I was the young American man heading up the Rio Negro in search of specimens. I write both to express my admiration for your recent books, and to record an astonishing coincidence. You will hardly believe what happened to me on my journey home …

Wallace wrote back.

Dear Alec: My sympathies on the distressing loss of your collections. No one who has not been through this himself can understand. Beyond the horrors of the fire itself, the terrible loss of animal life, and the substantial financial blow is this fact, so difficult to explain: That each specimen lost represents a double death. Our hunting always had a point; each bird we shot and butterfly we netted was in the service of science. But burnt, they now serve no one. It is very hard. I thank you for your kind words about my books. I plan to head, this coming spring, for the Malay Archipelago: an area hardly explored at all, which should prove extremely rich for our purposes. Perhaps you might like to consider this yourself?