The Signature of All Things (50 page)

The captain was a Mr. Terrence, out of Nantucket. He was a sailor much admired by Dick Yancey, who had secured Alma her place on his vessel. Mr. Terrence was as hard as a captain should be, Yancey promised, and he enforced better discipline in his men than most. Terrence was known more for being daring than careful (he was famous for raising his canvases in a storm, rather than subtracting them, in the hopes of gaining speed from the gales), but he was a religious man and a sober one, who strove for a high moral tone at sea. Dick Yancey trusted him and had sailed with him many times. Dick Yancey, who was always in a hurry, preferred captains who sailed fast and fearlessly, and Terrence was just such a type.

Alma had never before been on a ship. Or, rather, she had been on many ships, when she used to go with her father down to the docks of Philadelphia to inspect arriving cargo, but she had never
sailed
on a ship before. When the
Elliot
pulled out of its slip, she stood on the deck with her heart drumming as though to burst from her chest. She watched as the last of the dock’s piles were ahead of her, and then—with breathtaking swiftness—were suddenly behind her. Then they were flying across the great Boston harbor, with smaller fishing boats bobbing in their wake. By the close of the afternoon, Alma was on the open ocean for the first time in her life.

“I will pay you every service in my power to make you comfortable on this voyage,” Captain Terrence had sworn to Alma when first she boarded. She appreciated his solicitousness, but it soon became clear there was not
much that would be comfortable about this journey. Her berth, right next to the captain’s stateroom, was small and dark, and reeked of sewage. The drinking water smelled of a pond. The ship was carrying a cargo of mules to New Orleans, and the animals were unrelenting in their complaints. The food was both unpleasant and binding (turnips and salt biscuits for breakfast; dried beef and onions for dinner) and the weather was, at best, an uncertain affair. For the first three weeks of the journey she did not once see the sun. Immediately, the
Elliot
encountered gales that broke crockery and knocked sailors about at a most remarkable rate. She sometimes had to tie herself to the captain’s table in order to eat her dried beef and onions in safety. She ate it gallantly, though, and without complaint.

There was not another woman on board, nor an educated man. The sailors played cards long into the night, laughing and shouting and keeping her awake. Sometimes the men danced on the deck like spirits possessed, until Captain Terrence threatened to break their fiddles if they did not stop. They were all rough sorts, aboard the
Elliot
. One of the sailors caught a hawk off the coast of North Carolina, cut its wings, and watched it hop across the deck, for sport. Alma found this barbaric, but she said nothing. The next day, the sailors, bored and distracted, staged a wedding between two mules, decorating the animals in festive paper collars for the event. There was a fine ruckus of hooting and yelling. The captain let it happen; he saw no harm in it (perhaps, Alma thought, because it was a
Christian
wedding). Alma had never before in her life seen the likes of such behavior.

There was nobody for Alma to speak to of serious matters, so she decided to stop speaking of serious matters. She resolved to be of good cheer and to make simple conversation with everyone. She vowed to make no enemies. As they would all be at sea together for the next five to seven months, this looked to be a sensible strategy. She even allowed herself to laugh at jests, so long as the men were not too coarse. She did not worry about coming to harm; Captain Terrence would not permit familiarity, and the men displayed no licentiousness toward Alma. (This did not surprise her. If men had not been interested in Alma at nineteen years, surely none would take notice of her at fifty-one.)

Her closest companion was the small monkey that Captain Terrence kept as a pet. His name was Little Nick, and he would sit with Alma for hours, picking over her gently, always looking for new and odd things. He
had a most intelligent and curious disposition. More than anything, the monkey was fascinated by the woven-hair bracelet that Alma wore around her wrist. He could never get over his perplexion that there was not a similar bracelet on her other wrist—although every morning he checked to see if a bracelet had grown there during the night. Then he would sigh and give Alma a resigned look, as though to say, “Why can you not just once be
symmetrical
?” Over time, Alma learned to share her snuff with Little Nick. He would daintily place a crumb of it in one of his nostrils, sneeze cleansingly, and then fall asleep in her lap. She did not know what she would have done without his company.

They rounded the tip of Florida and stopped in New Orleans to deliver the mules. Nobody mourned to see the mules go. In New Orleans, Alma saw the most extraordinary fog over Lake Pontchartrain. She saw bales of cotton and casks of cane sugar piled on the wharfs, awaiting shipment. She saw steamboats lined up in rows, as far as the eye could see, waiting to paddle up the Mississippi. She found good use for her French in New Orleans, though the accent was confusing. She admired the little houses with their gardens of seashells and clipped shrubbery, and she was dazzled by the women with their elaborate fashions. She wished she had more time for exploration, but was all too soon ordered back on board.

Southward they sailed along the coast of Mexico. An outbreak of fever swept the ship. Scarcely anyone escaped it. There was a doctor on board, but he was more than useless, and so Alma soon found herself dispensing treatments from her own precious cache of purgatives and emetics. She did not think of herself as much of a nurse, but she was a fairly capable pharmacist, and her assistance won her a small group of admirers.

Soon Alma herself fell ill, and was forced to keep to her berth. Her fevers gave her distant dreams and vivid fears. She could not keep her hands away from her quim, and woke in paroxysms of both pain and pleasure. She dreamed constantly of Ambrose. She had been making a heroic effort not to think of him, but the fever weakened the fortress of her mind, and his memory forced itself in—but distorted horribly. In her dreams, she saw him in the bathtub—just as she had seen him, nude, that one afternoon—but now his penis grew beautiful and erect, and he grinned at her lecherously while bidding her to suck him until she choked for breath. In other dreams, she watched Ambrose drown in the bathtub, and she woke in a panic, feeling
certain she had murdered him. She heard his voice one night whispering, “So now you are the child and I am the mother,” and she woke with a scream, arms flailing. But nobody was there. His voice had been in German. Why would it be in German? What did it mean?
She lay awake the rest of the night, struggling to comprehend the word
mother
—
Mutter
, in German—a word that, in alchemy, also meant “crucible.” She could make no sense of the dream, but it felt most heavily like a curse.

She had her first thoughts of regret about attempting this journey.

The day after Christmas, one of the sailors died of the fever. He was wrapped in sailcloth, weighted with a cannonball, and slid quietly into the sea. The men took his death without any evident sign of grief, auctioning off his belongings among themselves. By evening, it was as if the man had never existed. Alma imagined her belongings auctioned off among these fellows.
What would they make of Ambrose’s drawings?
Who was to say? Perhaps such a trove of sodomitic sensuality would be valuable to some of these men. All types of men went to sea. Alma well knew this to be true.

Alma recovered from her sickness. A fair wind brought them to Rio de Janeiro, where Alma saw Portuguese slave ships bound north for Cuba. She saw beautiful beaches, where fishermen risked their lives on rafts that looked no sturdier than the roofs of henhouses. She saw the great fan palms, bigger than any in White Acre’s greenhouses, and wished to the point of agony that she could have shown them to Ambrose. She could not keep him from her thoughts. She wondered if he had seen these palms, too, when he had passed through here.

She kept herself distracted with inexhaustible walks of exploration. She saw women who wore no bonnets, and who smoked cigars as they walked down the street. She saw refugees, commercial men, dirty Creoles and courtly Negroes, demi-savages and elegant quadroons. She saw men selling parrots and lizards for food. Alma feasted on oranges, lemons, and limes. She ate so many mangoes—sharing a few of them with Little Nick—that she broke out in a rash. She saw the horse races and the dancing amusements. She stayed at a hotel run by a mixed-raced couple—the first she had ever seen of such a thing. (The woman was a friendly, competent Negro, who did nothing slowly; the man was white and old, and did nothing at all.) Not a day went by that she did not see men marching slaves through the streets of Rio, offering these manacled beings for sale. Alma could not bear the sight
of it. It left her sick with shame, for all the years that she had taken no notice of this abhorrence.

Back at sea, they headed for Cape Horn. As they approached the Cape, the weather became so unseasonably fierce that Alma—already wrapped in several layers of flannel and wool—added a man’s greatcoat and a borrowed Russian hat to her wardrobe. So bundled, she was now indistinguishable from any man on board. She saw the mountains of Tierra del Fuego, but the ship could not land, as the weather was too fierce. Fifteen days of misery followed as they rounded the Cape. The captain insisted on carrying all sail, and Alma could not imagine how the masts endured the strain. The ship lay first on one side, then the other. The
Elliot
herself seemed to scream in pain—her poor wooden soul beaten and whipped by the sea.

“If it is God’s will, we shall go clear,” Terrence said, refusing to lower the sails, trying to run out another twenty knots before darkness.

“But what if someone should be killed?” Alma shouted across the wind.

“Burial at sea,” the captain shouted back, and pushed on.

It was forty-five days of bitter cold after this. The waves came in endless, rolling assault. Sometimes the storms were so bad that the older sailors sang psalms for comfort. Others cursed and blustered, and a few remained silent—as though they were already dead. The storms loosened the hencoops from their stays, and sent chickens flying across the decks. One night, the boom was smashed into dainty chips, like kindling. The next day, the sailors tried to raise a new boom, and failed. One of the sailors, knocked over by a wave, fell down the hold and broke his ribs.

Alma hovered the entire time between hope and fear, certain she would die at any moment—but never once did she cry out in panic, or raise her voice in alarm. At the end of it all, when the weather cleared, Captain Terrence said, “You are a right little daughter of Neptune, Miss Whittaker,” and Alma felt she had never been so mightily praised.

Finally, in mid-March, they docked at Valparaiso, where the sailors found ample houses of prostitution in which to attend to their amorous wants, while Alma explored this elaborate and welcoming city. The area down by the port was a degenerate mudflat, but the houses along the steep hills were beautiful. She hiked the hills for days, and felt her legs grow strong again. She saw nearly as many Americans in Valparaiso as she’d seen in Boston—all of them en route to San Francisco to hunt for gold. She filled
her belly with pears and cherries. She saw a religious procession half a mile long, for a saint who was unfamiliar to her, and she followed it all the way to a formidable cathedral. She read newspapers and sent letters home to Prudence and Hanneke. One clear and cool day, she climbed to the highest point of Valparaiso, and from there—in the far and hazy distance—she could see the snow-covered peaks of the Andes. She felt a deep bruise of absence for her father. This provided her with a strange relief—to miss Henry, and not, for once, Ambrose.

Then they sailed again, out into the broad waters of the Pacific. The days grew warm. The sailors became calm. They cleaned between the decks, and scrubbed away old mold and vomit. They hummed as they worked. In the mornings, in the bustle of activity, the ship felt like a small country village. Alma had become used to the want of privacy, and she was comforted by the presence of the sailors now. They were familiar to her, and she was glad they were there. They taught her knots and chanteys, and she cleaned their wounds and lanced their boils. Alma ate an albatross, shot by a young seaman. They passed the bloated, floating carcass of a whale—its blubber stripped away clean by other whalers—but they did not see any living whales.

The Pacific Ocean was vast and empty. Alma could understand now for the first time why it had taken the Europeans so long to find Terra Australis
in this tremendous expanse. The early explorers had assumed there must be a southern continent as large as Europe someplace down here, in order to keep the planet perfectly balanced. But they had been wrong. There was little down here but water. If anything, the Southern Hemisphere was a
reverse
of Europe: it was a huge continent of ocean, dotted with tiny lakes of land spread very far apart, indeed.

Days upon days of blue emptiness followed. On every side, Alma saw prairies of water, as far as her mind could imagine. Still, they saw no whales. They saw no birds, either, but they could see weather coming from one hundred miles away, and it often looked bad. The air was voiceless until the storms came, and then the winds would shriek in distress.

In early April, they encountered a most alarming change of weather, which blackened the sky before their eyes, murdering the day in the middle of the afternoon. The air felt heavy and menacing. This sudden transformation worried Captain Terrence enough that he lowered the sails—all of
them—as he watched chains of lightning come at them from all directions. The waves became rolling mountains of black. But then—as quickly as it had come upon them—the storm cleared, and skies grew light again. Instead of relief, though, the men cried out in alarm, for immediately they saw a waterspout drawing near. The captain ordered Alma belowdecks, but she would not move; the waterspout was too magnificent a sight. Then another cry went up, as the men realized there were, in point of fact,
three
waterspouts now surrounding the ship at distances much too close for comfort. Alma felt herself hypnotized. One of the spouts drew near enough that she could see the long strands of water spiraling upward from the ocean all the way into the sky, in one great swirling column. It was the most majestic thing she had ever seen, and the most holy, and the most awesome. The pressure in the air was so thick, Alma’s eardrums seemed in danger of bursting, and it was a struggle to pull breath into her lungs. For the next five minutes, she was so overcome that she did not know if she was alive or dead. She did not know what world this was. It struck Alma that her time in this world was over. Curiously, she did not mind. There was no one she longed for. Not a single soul she had ever known crossed her mind—not Ambrose, not anyone. She had no regrets. She stood in rapt amazement, prepared for anything that might occur.