Beyond the Bounty by Tony Parsons

Author:Tony Parsons [Parsons, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2012-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

6

Crime and Punishment

We watched the horizon.

Where the light blue of the sky met the darker blue of the sea, our eyes strained for sight of a ship.

Every man did it.

You might be fishing for your dinner. You might be picking fruit. You might be laying with your wife under the shade of a palm tree, or blind drunk with your mates on William McCoy’s firewater.

It might be the start of the day, or when the sun was setting over Tahiti, the endless ocean and home.

We all tried to fight against it.

But some point in every day your eyes would drift towards the horizon, looking for the black sails of a ship.

You could not help it.

And when a man looked, he could not look away.

I tried to rip my eyes from the horizon. I tried to order myself not to look. With all the strength in my being, I tried to turn my eyes inwards, to Pitcairn, and our new life.

Yet my eyes would always drift back to the horizon.

I was walking on the cliff where my wife had died hunting for gull eggs, and I came across John Adams, sitting cross-legged with the big black ship’s Bible in his lap.

He smiled at me and I sat with him for a while, and he read me a bit from the book. John Adams knew that I did not have the power of understanding the written word.

‘He provides food for those who fear Him,’ smiled John. ‘He remembers His covenant forever. He has shown His people the power of His works, giving them the lands of other nations.’ He closed the good book and smiled. ‘Is it not true, Ned Young, my old shipmate?’

‘It is very true indeed,’ I said.

He caught me watching the sea.

‘They will never find us,’ he said quietly.

I was silent for a moment. But I could not remain silent for long, because I did not believe him.

‘They must find us one day,’ I said.

John Adams took a breath.

‘Pitcairn appears on no map owned by the King’s navy,’ he said. ‘Or when it does appear, it appears in the wrong place. Because of a mapmaker’s mistake, Pitcairn is 150 miles from where it is supposed to be. You know this to be true?’

‘I do, John.’

‘So that is why the navy will never find us.’

‘Then they will find us by accident,’ I insisted. ‘They will find Pitcairn exactly as we found her – by luck. One of the accidents of the sea. They will have already looked for the Bounty and they will have already found the men we left on Tahiti. I have no doubt they will have already hung them. They know we are out here somewhere. Now they will be looking for us, and when they find us we will have nowhere to run.’

He could not argue with me.

‘Yes, perhaps they will find us one day,’ he said. ‘But it might not be for a hundred years.’

‘Or it might be tomorrow,’ I said.

We were both silent for a moment.

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