Coconut Chaos, Diana Souhami [leveled readers TXT] 📗

their canoes at it. The mutineers responded with fire from pistols and muskets. Within minutes a dozen Tubuaians, among them a garlanded woman, lay dead or dying in the bay.

Christian then rowed to the shore. He explored the concealing mountains, the lush wooded valleys, the protection of the reef, the rich larder of fish and fruit. He tried to offer the islanders reparative gifts of axes, goats and pigs, but they ran away when he approached. Undeterred, he kept to his plan to return to Tahiti to procure provisions and women, then come to this perfect place to build a fortress as a settlement. The Tubuaians renamed the bay where he’d arrived the Bay of Blood.

15

I had a cabin to myself, the ‘master’s cabin’, adjacent to Captain Dutt’s. Pandal the steward showed me to it. He rightly thought it grand, with its private bathroom, wardrobe, seascapes on the walls, sofa, reading lamps, fridge filled with bottled water, juices and cola. In an opposite room was a Zanussi washing machine and tumble-dryer. Pandal smiled with pride and kept asking, ‘Good?’ I didn’t know a word of Hindi. ‘Good,’ I repeated. ‘Good. Very good.’

Captain Dutt was plump, with small hands and feet and delicate gestures. He wore a baseball cap and when he was worried the skin on his scalp wriggled, which made the cap move backwards and forwards. He was thirty-eight but looked older. He pined to be home in Mumbai with his wife and eight-year-old daughter. He’d joined the Tundra Princess seven months previously in Cape Town and was scheduled to fly home from Panama.

He was agitated by the arrival of Lady Myre and me, the flu vaccine that had to be refrigerated, the prospect of delays and complications because of the Pitcairn stop. He wanted a swift, trouble-free journey, but his deep courtesy prevailed.

Melancholy was behind all he said, a disappointment with his fate. He was tired of the constraints and demands of life at sea. He spoke of missed opportunities and the regrets these provoked. ‘We have to seize our chances,’ he said. ‘Our opportunities are few.’ His head jiggled with memories. He’d earned the rank of captain when he was twenty-nine. Three years ago his employers had promised him a shore job, but it hadn’t materialised and now he’d heard it wouldn’t. He was a good captain, so it was in their interest to keep him in charge of a ship. He needed more crew but was allowed only the minimum. The workload was tiring for a complement of twenty-two men and they had little rest. And this ship had a broken bilge keel, bent on one side, missing on the other, which made it roll to starboard if the weather was bad. Extra vigilance was required to keep the kiwi fruit from damage. A repair would mean putting the ship in dry dock at great expense. He’d make two more voyages for this company then leave. He’d take a year’s course in Cardiff then work in marine insurance.

He told me I might send and receive email from his computer via the ship’s satellite. If I wrote out what I wanted to send, he’d sort it for me. I was free to go to the bridge to look at the navigation charts and radar screens. I’d eat with him and his officers in their mess room. If I didn’t like Indian food his cook, who was from Goa and very good, was happy to serve continental food too.

From the quarterdeck I watched two pilot boats tow the Tundra Princess from the quayside at Tauranga to the deep water of the Pacific. It was a cold late-afternoon. A mile out, the clutter of the harbour receded and the wind and swell picked up. The pilots waved as they cast off the ropes and turned their boats to the shore. The sea looked dark blue and a reflection shimmered over it of the setting sun. Captain Dutt told me the horizon was sixteen miles away and that was the limit of our vision.

Nothing was familiar except the excitement and melancholy of departure. I thought how some people have difficulty reconciling their inner self with the outer world, and perhaps I was such a person. I wondered why I didn’t live by an abiding connection to someone or some place when I so yearned for home. I drafted an email for Verity and my brothers: ‘I am safely at sea. My quarters are very comfortable. You can email me if you want.’

Supper in the officers’ mess began at six. There was chicken curry, daal and vegetables. Men drifted in, ate what they wanted, then left. Da Silva, the chief engineer, welcomed me. He was from Goa and a Catholic. He told me that most of the crew were Hindus and that there were no Muslims on board. He had sleek black hair and knife-edge creases in his trousers. He crossed himself before he ate and said he had to have meat or fish with every meal. His cousin had recently been killed in a motorbike accident, so he wore a black sleeve band of mourning. His wife and daughter were in hospital when this happened. His daughter had dysentery after eating potato balls bought from a roadside stall, and a bolt had lodged in his wife’s head when her pressure cooker exploded. She had to have thirty stitches.

Lady Myre didn’t listen to these familial troubles. She wore a luminous yellow lifejacket over a puce T-shirt and avidly ate her pot noodles. She kept summoning Pandal for chapatti and fruit and she talked to the second engineer, Harminder Palsingh, who was from the Punjab, about her time in Calcutta with the viceroy and her punkah wallah.

There was a mood of order and reserve among the company in which I found myself. Harminder piled his plate with food and had a kirby grip in his beard. Both Da Silva and the first officer, Jaswinder Singh, were silent when he talked