Nov 1775
“Bula!” they said as we approached the shores, after they’d come aboard to welcome us in their spartan dinghies.
***
I had never seen, but had spent long months onboard the Fortitude imagining what paradise might be. The one that awaited us at Suva was beyond my reckoning. I thought I had not seen it and also knew it to be a person, not a place. The place, which is not my beloved, has pristine shores with waters teeming with life. Fruits offered themselves in abundance, making for a kind people who welcomed us, seemed more human for their lives. It was too much. Too much to turn from.
We had chased a Spanish ship, (WHY ALWAYS THESE BLOODY BUGGERY SPANIARDS), from the Philippines into the open expanse between land masses. We had already been some 2 years outside our mandate, and Fiji resupplied men unwilling to go back to paucity, the long way around. Learning a new path through the arctic after already having gone round the world. Not when we could make for the horn and speed back to crown and country.
From the moment we heard Bula (welcome kisses) and saw boats rowing out to meet us, I knew that home was the only way for us to go. I tried to tell the commander. More than twice. More than a handful of times. I had to do what I did.
***
We took La Loca, we brought her home with her cannon largely intact, took her around Cape Horn. She was a prize, guaranteed. We had maps. We had strange fruits and creatures for the crown to catalog. We offered ourselves to their Majesties for judgment and asked only for mercy. My father was the mercy’s guarantor.
I had not grown up among the midshipmen this time. I had sewn myself in with a charlatan’s winks and nods, falsified papers as my enlistment in the navy was when I was a man already of some two hundred and thirty six years. But sailing master O’Ryan, well... he was a friend. Invaluable. Of highest experience and moral standing. He’d return home when I did.
Breadfruit, papayas, sun, sand, sea and SPACE? Well that was enough for me. Add to that women or long unexpressed loves given privacy, well...
No more than the men I stood and dined with, no less either, was I willing to get back aboard for fractioned rations and the uncertainty of the passage to the northwest. We kept rank onboard, but on leave? There were only suggestions. How could convention hold up some thousands of miles away, when we knew by then we were all just men? Tapers of powder, ill lived life cramped together, being far adrift from grounding, from knowing, we set the root of our thoughts adrift in that Pacific frontier.
Fortitude returned, sure and sorely lacking by the time of her embarkation upon homely shores from seeking Northwest Passage once more, but our departure is not at fault for her failure. Our departure, we calculated, gave our comrades another two years of rations, with as much manpower as was required. We were not wrong.
Ask Commander Haligh. We took not a single cannon, not a barrel of powder. Rather we left these in our wake, shifted our stores to the ship we’d all come to know as home.
We brought home, though Commander Haligh’s son survived him not, enough for his granddaughter to see proliferation. His brother too. Like my brother would have done, given his desires. Or any sane man.
Thus I requested leniency, in my name for the men who came along. What happened? As a result? Victory and defeat.
Yes. Charles Windgrace donated to the crown and so I not only lost my promotion but was ejected with disgrace from service. But the men were able to live on, unprosecuted, honored for the prize’s value though used again to crew it in parole before freedom.
I did strangle Haligh’s son that he’d threatened my sister with when we returned, myself as mutineer. My haste landward had that objective only in mind as warm sandy shores and sun ripened fruit moved ever further away behind me. I was no man to settle his roots among a tiny Pacific isle. I took one of his rings and yet wear it. It reminds me of my time in the service. Not of his doughy face turned purple.
