Nation

As for Captain Roberts — he might have wanted to save Cox’s soul from the Fires of Perdition, but he hated the man himself and didn’t mind showing it. This did not sit well with Cox, but shooting captains always caused a bit too much of a stir, so, Cookie said, he must have decided to beat the captain on the man’s own ground, or water, destroying him from the inside.

Cox shot things because they were alive, but to him that was just killing time. He had greater ambitions for the captain. He wanted to shoot him in the faith.

It began with Cox sitting up straight during the prayer meetings and shouting “Halleluja” or “Amen” every time the captain finished a sentence, and clapping loudly. Or he’d ask puzzled questions like “What did they feed the lions and tigers with in the Ark, sir? ” and “Where did all the water go? ” Then there was the day when he asked Cookie to try to make a meal for the whole crew out of five loaves and two fishes. Then when the captain said the story was not meant to be taken literally, Cox gave him a smart salute and said: “Then what is, Cap’n? ”

It started to get bad. The captain got humpty. Crew who’d served with him for a long time said he was a decent man and a good captain, and they’d never seen him get humpty before. Everyone suffered under a humpty captain, who’d find fault with everything and turn every day into a chore. Daphne spent a lot of time in her cabin.

And then there was the parrot. No one was ever sure who taught the bird its first swear word, although the wobbling finger of suspicion pointed at Cox, but by then the whole crew was ill at ease. Cox had his supporters, and the captain had staunch allies of his own. Fights broke out, and things, small things, were getting stolen. That was terrible, according to Cookie; nothing broke up a crew like the thought that a man had to watch his possessions all the time. Dooms and reckonings would be upon them all, he forecasted. Probably more dooms than reckonings, he added.

And the next day Cox shot the old man in the canoe. Daphne would like to report that every sailor in the crew was angry because the old man had been shot, and in a way it was true, but many of the men were less concerned about the sanctity of souls than they were about the possibility that the old man had relatives nearby with fast canoes, sharp spears, and an unwillingness to listen to explanations. And there were even a few who held that one old man more or less didn’t matter, but Cox and his cronies had been shooting at dolphins, too, and that was cruel and unlucky.

In the end there was a war, and so much bad blood had been bubbling that there seemed to Daphne to be more than two sides. She sat it out in her cabin, seated on a small barrel of gunpowder with a loaded pistol in her hand. The captain had told her that if Cox’s men won, she should fire the pistol into the barrel “to save her honor, ” though she was uncertain how much a saved honor would be worth when it was falling out of the sky in tiny pieces, along with the rest of the cabin. Fortunately she did not have to find out, because Captain Roberts ended the mutiny by detaching one of the Sweet Judy’s swivel guns and aiming it at the mutineers. The gun was intended for firing lots of small lead balls at any pirates who might try to board the ship. It was not intended to be a hand cannon, and if he had fired the thing, the recoil would probably have thrown him into the air, but everyone in front of it would have died of terminal perforations. There was a fury about him that even Cox took note of, Cookie had told her. The captain had the look in his eye of the Almighty confronting a particularly wicked city, and maybe Cox was just sane enough to recognize that here was someone who might be even madder than he was, at least for the time it took to turn Cox and those around him into much smaller lumps. Or, Cookie said, the captain may have been about to commit wild murder right up until he realized that this was what Cox wanted, and the devil of a man would drag the captain’s soul to hell along with his own.

But the captain didn’t fire the gun, said Cookie. He laid it on the deck. He straightened up with his arms folded and a grim little smile on his face, and Cox just stood there, looking puzzled, and then every single loyal crewman pointed a pistol at his head. The steam got knocked out of the mutiny. Cox and his chums were herded into the ship’s boat with food, water, and a compass. And then of course there was the matter of the guns. The mutineers still had friends among the crew, who said that leaving them in uncertain waters without weapons was a death sentence. In the end the guns were left for them on a little island a mile away, despite Captain Roberts declaring that in his opinion, any pirate or slaver who ran into Cox and his men would have a new captain in very short order indeed. He ordered the swivel guns primed and ready day and night, and said that the boat would be fired on instantly if it was ever seen again.

The boat was set adrift and sailed, her crew silent and worried except for Polegrave and Foxlip, who jeered and spat. That was because they were too dumb to realize, said Cookie, that they were heading off into bad waters with a murderous madman in command.

The Judy never really recovered, but she kept on course. People didn’t talk much, and kept to themselves when they were off watch. She wasn’t a happy ship at all. Five men had previously jumped ship at Port Henry and so, without the mutineers, there weren’t enough men to crew the ship properly when the wave came.

And that was the story Daphne told. She tried to be honest, and where she’d relied on Cookie’s rather excitable stories, she said so. She wished she had Pilu’s talent; he could make tripping over a stone sound like a desperate adventure.

There was silence when she finished. Most people turned to look at Pilu. She’d done her best in a foreign language, but she’d seen the puzzled looks.

What Pilu gave them was the story all over again, but with acting, too. She could make out the character of Captain Roberts, heavy and pompous, and surely the one who sidled around was Polegrave, and the one who stamped and roared was Cox. They shouted at one another all the time, while Pilu’s fingers popped like pistols and somehow, in the middle of the air, the story unfolded.

A certain extra touch of slightly mad realism was added by the parrot, who danced madly in the top of a coconut palm and shouted things like, “What about Darwin, then? Waark! ”

Pilu’s translation lagged behind Daphne’s account, but when he was about to deal with the old man’s shooting, he stopped for guidance.