Captain Bligh's Portable Nightmare by John Toohey

Author:John Toohey
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781510729209
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2018-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

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John Fryer watched William Bligh sleeping upright, his head slumped forward and his shoulders squeezed uncomfortably between the bodies on either side. After so many nights of constant, harrowing noise the silence was overwhelming as he steered the boat westwards, his mind feeding itself on resentments he’d bottled up through the storms.

Even with his body twisted up and asleep in the most tortuous position, William Bligh looked to Fryer like a smug, self-satisfied individual. Nothing could dent that surface of confidence in his own authority that he liked to convey. He had more time for questions from the most unskilled crew members than he had for John Fryer’s support and advice, and in fact he seemed to see the Master’s experience as something of a threat. That was the way Fryer saw it—as if having made the vow to get the men home safely, it was to be his mission and no one else’s. Perhaps he thought he had nothing to lose. If he failed, the boat and the crew would disappear, and with them the truth about his failure. If he succeeded, the glory—all of it—would be his. No one would know or care that John Fryer could have done the same thing, that he even tried and was prevented. Nobody would care that he endured all the same miseries and torments as the Captain, and no one would call him a hero.

Fryer’s recollections of home were at best vague. He remembered Wells and the pier lined with barnacled fishing smacks, but without sentiment or nostalgia, and he thought of Mary, but he had trouble recalling her face. Actually he had been surprised sometimes at how little she meant to him out here. She was not a reason for living through this ordeal—life’s countless hardships had taught him to be pragmatic about love and marriage, as about living and dying. It seemed to him that the moment something started to matter, you lost it. It was better to play safe and take life as it came, rather than give your heart away and wait in futility for its return.

On Otaheite he had found everything a man forced by circumstance into that philosophy could ever hope for. Every way he’d been taught to behave back in England had been turned upside down, and suddenly he was free to indulge himself without fear of suffering the consequences. His mind went back to other nights that were calm and balmy like this one, his hammock stretched out between mast and bulwark, listening to the timbers creak and the water lap the side of the ship as canoes slid up and young women clambered up the ladders and came calling to him.

William Peckover had been sitting inside a hut packing knives, magnifying glasses and other knick-knacks for a pig-buying expedition deep into the Otaheitean mountains when four Islanders approached and warned him not to leave the village. A family from the inland had been offended and they’d boasted they’d get their revenge by beating up the trader if he came close.

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