A Fish Come True by Paul Schullery

Author:Paul Schullery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stackpole Books
Published: 2019-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

Young Men and the Salmon Trout

MIDSHIPMAN MALCOM CAMERON, A YOUNGER SON OF THE SCOT-tish borderlands, was at unexpectedly loose ends in Monterey that summer of 1816. His ship, the HMS Barbour, had lurched into the bay in wretched condition, having encountered an unrelenting series of storms much of the way from Drake Passage. Only hastily patched together in San Diego, she was going to require at least a week of attention, possibly much more, from the smiths and wrights. Captain Murchison, in what seemed to Malcom an act of uncharacteristic and almost certainly inadvertent generosity, detailed his youngest midshipman ashore to assist the ship’s doctor and naturalist, a forty-year-old Geordie named David Gresham.

Truth be told, the doctor needed no assistance in Monterey, and especially none that Malcom could provide, as his energies were primarily focused on the limited but apparently compelling opportunities for debauchery provided by the small port and provincial capital. It was a matter of occasional ribald conversation among Malcom’s shipmates that so far on the trip he had refrained from participating in the opportunities for serious drinking and commercial affection provided the sailors at every port. Once or twice earlier in the trip Gresham had generously invited him along on such adventures, but Malcom was both religiously high-minded and terribly shy in this regard, and said so. Gresham didn’t press him; it would be a very long voyage and time might change the boy’s mind.

Malcom was on the one hand seasoned enough to realize that if he had any real assignment, it was to keep a watch over the doctor so that he didn’t hurt himself too badly and could be found if needed, and was on the other hand naive enough not to realize that the gruff old captain had long regarded the fifteen-year-old boy as only slightly less worthless than the doctor, and was just as glad to have him out of the way during the serious work of readying the Barbour for the next, long leg of its journey to the Orient.

Despite the doctor’s easily distracted temperament, Malcom had grown fond of him. Among the books in his father’s grand library back home, Malcom had most loved Bewick’s History of British Birds, which he’d practically memorized on rainy childhood days; and notwithstanding Gresham’s tendency to bacchanalian distractions the doctor did have a well-informed and sophisticated passion for natural history. On several previous shore excursions on the west coast of South America and Mexico, Gresham had happily broadened the boy’s evident enthusiasm for the natural world and the adventures to be found there. The two quickly developed a productive scientific partnership, collecting a respectable assortment of plant, invertebrate, bird, mammal, and geological specimens, which Gresham patiently taught his young Scottish assistant to prepare and, in many cases, to measure, describe, and even draw with promising results.

But, what with Monterey offering Gresham such irresistible recreational dissolutions, Malcom could see that at least until the doctor’s appetites were sated there would be none of the exciting little scientific jaunts that he and the doctor had enjoyed earlier during their voyage.

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