SAMPLE CHAPTER

STRANGE CARGO

TWO DAYS PRIOR TO his departure from New Zealand, with his passage secured aboard the

SS Mataura, the tramp solicited one ﬁnal forecast from the world beyond. It did not bode well. He abandoned his duties on deck, cornered the captain and delivered his absurd warning in a Continental slur.

‘I have spoken with the spirits. The ship will be wrecked but all hands will be saved.’

Having signed him on solely for amusement, Charles Milward surveyed the impossibly furrowed face of his new swab with fast-fading interest.

The following day, the captain of the neighbouring SS Waikato, bound for London via the Cape, visited Milward’s quarters to solicit the services of an able man. Milward told him he had none to spare, but less than an hour before the Mataura was to sail, Captain Croucher returned to his friend’s cabin in desperation. He told Milward that the Union, aware he needed a man to complete his crew, had raised the wages a fabulous amount.

‘Give me anything that wears trousers and I’ll make him do.’

Milward pointed to the tramp, at that moment scrubbing his cabin ﬂoor.

‘You can take him, if you like.’

Milward told the tramp to pack his bag and go aboard the Waikato.

The tramp continued to scrub without looking up. ‘No,’ he replied.

‘Did you understand me?’ said the captain. ‘You will go home in the Waikato.’

Still the tramp did not move. ‘No.’

He pulled the man up from the ﬂoor by the seat of the pants and the nape of the neck, hauled him from the cabin and ran him down the ship’s ladder. A few rungs from the bottom he despatched the tramp’s meatless rump on to the Wellington dock with a ﬁnal kick. His belongings followed.

The tramp picked himself up and ran down the wharf to the nearby magistrate’s ofﬁce to obtain a warrant for assault. The magistrate, a friend of Milward, was eating his lunch. The warrant was notforthcoming. By the time the tramp returned, the Mataura had slipped her tethers and was heading out from Queen’s Wharf.

The tramp ran along the dock until he was abreast of the bridge. Mounting one of the big bollards, he waved an arm to Milward and sounded his warning call.

‘Captain, remember, remember! There is trouble to the Eastward.’

Spying some loose coal upon the foredeck, Milward called to his bo’sun.

‘Have a shot and see if you can knock him off his perch.’

The bo’sun seized a lump and hurled it over the waters, hitting the frantically waving seer anddislodging him from his post. Undeterred, the man rose from the boards and continued along the wharfshouting his portent. When he reached wharf ’s end, he climbed atop the corner bollard and cried out again, ‘Remember, there is trouble to the Eastward.’

Captain Milward ordered his bo’sun to take another shot but this time he missed his mark.

The last Milward saw of the tramp that morning was his waving ﬁgure shrinking into the Wellington distance. As the Mataura slid out into Cook Strait, the captain of the Waikato strolled up, retrieved the black lump from the wharf and pitched it to the tramp with a smile. Negotiations were brief – all work and no pay. Aboard the Waikato, the man was designated quarters in a stinking crevice of the hold.

They sailed the following morning.

For nigh sixty days the tramp worked twelve waking hours: seven shovelling coke into a searing furnace and ﬁve working the deck under a relentless sun. He slept ﬁve. In the remainder he ﬁlled several grimy, cotton-clothed notebooks in an elaborate scrawl, ﬂooding their pages to the edge. He was no stranger to the life of the sea. There in the hull’s depths he counted for company a colony of bilge rats. Mould grew before his eyes.

He took his meals in the hold, all the while entertaining his fellows – a scrofulous, black-humoured band of stokers and waypayers- with incredible tales of adventure in the tropics. He had survived violent seas and deadly deserts, shipwreck and disaster; witnessed miraculous events and performed near-biblical feats; wrestled crocodiles and tamed snakes. It was all re-enacted with ﬂailing limb in a performance that held his audience captive through the roaring forties and beyond.

As he leapt from one astonishment to the next, his hooded, weary eyes sparked into life. The eroded face that seemed so defeated at rest joined the dance, the red-ridged ﬂesh contorting in excitement.

A voice and vocabulary too reﬁned for a mere beggar completed an act of beguiling showmanship.

His conviction was indisputable. If the stories were true, his fortitude, let alone his memory, was phenomenal; if false, his powers of invention equally so.

The impossible events he described seemed more than enough to occupy several lifetimes, but few of his life-hungry crewmates questioned their veracity. What did it matter as long as the hypnotic tales caused one to forget the killing heat, made time evaporate and brought London drifting closer across the drink? Even the most leery among them stilled his tongue lest he break the spell.

To relieve the monotony and obtain some paltry reward, he also moonlighted at palmistry, demonstrating an accuracy that surprised even him. He was well connected in other worlds. Previously, in Sydney and various towns of New Zealand, he had plied the nascent trade of spirit photographer, miraculously summoning up apparitions of departed loved ones in the ill-lit background of customers’ photographs.

In Wellington he had survived by falling in with a group of mediums attached to a travelling circus. Now his fame rose above decks, and soon sea-bored passengers were being ushered below to occupy an upturned steel trunk at the foot of the ﬁre ladder, their palms extended in anticipation.

The medium chattered artfully, relaxing and drawing out his clientele, his accent exaggerated for effect. The portents were usually good, the occasional setback was thrown in only for the sake of verisimilitude. Broken hearts,catastrophe, acts of God and sudden death were bad for business. The passengers’ disbelief was willingly suspended. Only a corpulent and corrupt insurance clerk would later return to complain. The medium, he said, had only reported what had already happened. But the tramp shook his head. Past and future, he said, were all the same.

‘The past was the future once. It is only a different way of looking. It is best for you,’ he told the gallows-bound thief, ‘that I tell the past.’

The fortune telling business earned him a few merciful guineas for his own future on English soil. At journey’s end he signed off and slipped invisibly away, leaving behind nothing but a name not his own on the ship’s log.

The tramp was last to descend the plank into the ﬁrst London spring morning of 1898. He clutched only a ball of torn canvas wound about with rope pilfered from the Waikato’s hold. It concealed a single soot-smothered vest, a stub of lead, the notebooks and a Reader’s Card for the British Museum. Coal dust was baked into his skin, polished by sun and furnace to a ruddy sheen. From his wiry form hung a lattice of tweed alive with itinerant bugs, distant descendants of recent emigrants to the southern colonies.

London Dock was jammed with business under a sky fouled by smoking funnels. The thrum of steam-driven cranes, machinery and rattling chains deafened him. At the wharf ’s end was the port’s less proﬁtable trade – families strewn amid their thin scatterings of possessions. From their grim demeanour it was impossible to tell whether their passage had just been made or paid. At ﬁfty yards he felt their desperation leach through his coat, through the sun-cracked crust of his skin. He walked swiftly by. He did not wish to know, or tell, their fates.

He rollicked free of the port, swinging the canvas bundle, the earth in perpetual motion below sea-swaying legs. Beside him was the Thames: the same river from which the seasick Darwin had ventured on the Beagle to alter the course of humanity’s past and future; upon which the brave explorer Livingstone’s gutted, sun-dried, salt-stuffed corpse, borne lifeless out of the newfound depths of Africa, made ﬁnal passage home; from which even now an expedition vessel, the Southern Cross, was being readied for journey to the ﬁnal frontier, the vast white wastes of Antarctica. It was the river upon which the tramp himself had some three decades earlier ﬁrst set out across the seas.

He sludged from Billingsgate up through manure-ridden streets, skirting the cab-clamouring City, before being swallowed up in the riotous din of Soho. By afternoon he had secured a ﬁlthy airless boarding-house room in Frith Street, furnishing only a story as his bond. Infallible destiny had led himto lodgings inhabited by ghosts of travellers past. His very room had been host to Swift, creator of the fabulous Gulliver, explorer of imaginary lands. Soho was territory familiar to the expatriate European from his wandering youth. But his desiccated ﬂesh now housed a different self and all seemed new once more.

Here the ages collided and fused into a single continuum, the centuries of squalor, greed, misery and excess on naked parade. It emboldened him, made everything possible, fortiﬁed him with Gulliver’s spirit. In Sydney, an infant city, his senses had hungered for the absent past.

Next morning, following a sleep torn by fevered dreams of ﬁre and brine, he made his way on foot to Bloomsbury. He detoured down Great Queen Street, through the neighbourhood of the occultists and spiritualists. Clairvoyants spruiked at doorways and stairwells for custom. The futures trade. The city delivered a near inexhaustible supply of the insecure, woebegone and gullible.

Opposite the Theosophists’ Society he turned off Great Russell Street, up the stone steps and through the towering colonnade of the British Museum. To either side of the entrance ran corridors leading to the great viewing halls, brimming with antiquities, treasures and relics. But he had not come to gape at the spoils of imperial conquest. Ahead in the courtyard sprouted the huge ediﬁce of the British Museum Reading Room. The palace of the printed word, repository of more than a million works, of pages enough, laid end to end, to stretch from London to Wellington and back again. The high circular walls were crowned by a great copper dome, cloaked in grime by the city’s constant effusion of smoke and char.

Entry was by possession of a Reader’s Card only, an honour bestowed upon only the most serious of researchers. Thackeray, Thomas Hardy and George Bernard Shaw had all passed through these doors. He looked the Admissions Clerk in the eye and presented him with the card his brother hadposted to him in Wellington. The clerk bade him sign the register and waved him through the arched doorway. The tramp’s ship-soiled appearance was clearly insufﬁcient to deny him entry. His way had already been paved by the poverty and eccentricities of his predecessors. He was not the ﬁrst to appear at the entrance in rags, nor the ﬁrst to gain admission under false pretences. One famous Reader’s Card holder, Sherlock Holmes, did not even exist. Had the clerk cared to decipher the lavish French script in his register, he would have found that the tramp had given not the name inscribed upon the card he had shown, but instead, ‘Louis De Rougemont’.

Inside the chamber, rows of oak desks radiated out from a ring of catalogues. An Inspections Ofﬁcer surveyed his territory from a central wooden eyrie. Now, breathing the same dust-fouled air that had sustained Dickens and Marx, De Rougemont prepared to stake his own place in history. He laid his notebooks down on a numbered desk. His writing stub rolled slowly toward him across the surface, over wood hollowed from forty years supporting the books and heads of stale academics, godweary clergy and hallucinatory writers. The incessant rubbing of cloth, paper, skin and sweat had burnished the oak until it gleamed. Underneath the desk, heated water ﬂowing through a copper pipe supplied warmth to De Rougemont’s feet. Beyond the detection of the eagle-eyed inspector he removed his footwear – stockings and all – and the odour from his corn-crusted feet conspired with paper mould, binding glue and ink to produce a single pernicious funk.

The reading room’s treasures were arrayed around the walls. Three encircling tiers of shelves, ﬁlled with over ﬁve centuries of printed works, stretched upward to the dome’s inner rim. Beyond the walls lay a maze of book stacks accessible only to the dust-jacketed clerks. Huge iron ribs, like futtocks of a capsized ship’s hull, curved upward to support the ceiling. Cathedral window coupletsadmitted pale daylight. The weak illumination left the squinting scholars below crouching over their books in the half-dark, like monks memorising scrolls in a medieval abbey. Sunrays failed to penetrate the dome’s silted glass summit. In earlier times, heavy fog would force the readers to be ejected and the room closed. Now, with the miracle of electricity, arc lamps ﬂung light from above, casting De Rougemont’s narrow silhouette upon the oak.

De Rougemont left his notebook upon the desk and ascended the stairs leading to the treasures above. He crab walked slowly along the galleys adjacent to the open shelves, circumnavigating eachtier in turn and perusing the titles on offer. On the second lap he halted at the ethnographic section and scanned the worn cloth and calf spines, removing several volumes: Among Cannibals; Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas; Peter Longueville’s The English Hermit; The Cannibal Islands.

One, an 1837 text of particular interest, boasted the longest title De Rougemont had ever encountered:

The Shipwreck of Mrs Fraser, and the loss of the Stirling Castle, on a Coral Reef in the South Paciﬁc Ocean. Containing an account of the hitherto unheard of sufferings and hardships of the crew, who existed for seven days without food or water. The dreadful sufferings of Mrs. Fraser, who, with her husband, and the survivors of the ill fated crew, are captured by the savages of New Holland, and by them stripped entirely naked, and driven into the bush. Their dreadful slavery, cruel toil, and excruciating tortures inﬂicted on them. The horrid death of Mr. Brown, who was roasted alive over a slow ﬁre kindled beneath his feet. Meeting of Mr. and Mrs. Fraser, and inhuman murder of Captain Fraser in the presence of his wife. Barbarous treatment of Mrs Fraser, who is tortured, speared, and wounded by the savages. The fortunate escape of one of the crew, to Moreton Bay, a neighbouring British settlement, by whose instrumentality, through the ingenuity of a convict, named Graham, the survivors obtain their deliverance from the savages. Their subsequent arrival in England, and appearance before the Lord Mayor of London.

At twenty-four pages long, the actual text only just outweighed the title. It told of the survival of the pregnant wife of a ship’s captain, Eliza Fraser, in the company of a tribe of Aboriginals at Wide Bay in Queensland. Later, repatriated to England, she had painted up her story for proﬁt and unashamedly presented it to public and press.

It would be half the day before De Rougemont returned to his station below. After half a lifetime in book-starved colonial wilds, he wanted to savour the menu before sitting down to the feast.