A SAIL.
I was roused next morning by the report of a gun, followed by a strange
commotion in the village. I had barely time to dress, and join the
Ancient in the sitting-room, when a man ran in, breathless, to announce
a ship off the Point, and a Queen’s ship.
A Queen’s ship! No wonder the village was astir. A ship that might
fly the Royal Standard, a ship that was English authority and English
might! No work in the Island this day!
The Ancient put on his Sunday coat, and quietly took command. ‘How
lucky the landing is easy this morning! Jonah, hurry off to the Point,
with the white flag, and signal their cutter “All right!” Quintal, you
go down to the landing, and see them over the breakers. Now, folks,
who’s to take them in?’
It was a call to public meeting on the question of the entertainment of
the officers. The islanders always claimed this privilege of boarding
and lodging the Queen’s uniform. Half a dozen heads of families at once
offered to provide for as many guests. There was a brisk competition
for the Captain, who would have fallen to the Governor _ex-officio_,
but for my occupancy of the spare bedroom in his Excellency’s house. I
offered to retire, but my generous hostess would not hear of it.
‘I found him, father, and he belongs to me,’ said Victoria, in the
terms of that earlier claim which had sometimes made me suspect the
existence of slavery in the Island. The blood of the free-born ought to
have rushed to my face in protest against this attempt to count me as a
chattel; but it did not.
The Captain is knocked down to the schoolmaster; the women hurry away
to light their ovens; the meeting breaks up. Its dispersed groups,
however, form so many subcommittees of reception, for they talk of
nothing but the comfort and delight of the public guests. The only
private interest is represented by the two litigants who have the case
on appeal from a decision of the Island courts to the supreme tribunal
of a British man-of-war. They are tossing with a parti-coloured bean,
to see which shall open the pleadings first.
The Ancient, hurrying down to the landing-place, calls for his
whale-boat and his mariners three, and our navy goes forth in modest
pride to meet the Queen’s ship. She is close in-shore, the depth of
water admitting of a near approach; so, when our Governor boards her,
we see all that passes. His Excellency takes off his hat, and pulls at
a forelock that is not there to pull. No real one has been pulled in
that family since the time of George III., but the gesture has survived
with them as a sign of respect. The Captain shakes hands with him,
and presents him to his officers, who do the same. Then they leave
the clean white deck, flashing light from its polished brasses, and
go below, as though for complimentary refreshments. On their return,
the Governor takes charge of the ship’s cutter, in which our guests
embark. Only a native can dodge the rocks, rocklets, and surf currents
of our bay. They wait at the back of the rollers till the look-out man
ashore waves his hat; then they give way with a will, and are hurled
in, safely, on the crest of the wave.
Two of the officers are old friends of mine. What a little world it is!
You would think all were old friends of the islanders, by the warmth of
welcome. Men, women and children struggle for a grasp of their hands,
and a girl offers flowers to the Captain. He kisses her; his officers
kiss the other girls: fathers, brothers, and cousins hurrah approval,
and content.
Then we lead them to the schoolhouse, by the steep paths, in joyous
procession of old and young. Here the Captain must enter in the Island
register the name of his ship, with other particulars, and meet a
deputation of the elders, who come to trade. The ship wants water,
yams, and potatoes: we want hardware. The terms of exchange are settled
according to a written tariff, and the elders depart, to weigh over
the commodities on their side. They are poor traders, though: yams
are scarce at the moment, yet they ask no higher price for them; nor
can I make them understand that to do so would be to seek an honest
gain. ‘Is there less steel in the hatchets than there used to be,’ they
ask, ‘that we are to give less in yams?’ I remember that the value
of a thing is what it will fetch, and I tell them so, but they shake
their heads. For the first time, it occurs to me that these people have
no natural turn for economic speculation; and that, with all their
religion, they may need a missionary of a kind. A certain finer sense
is wanting; but no more of this just now.
The guests have, meanwhile, been led to their quarters, the Captain
beaming with affability and good nature. He foresees his report to the
Lords of the Admiralty on the morals, manners and customs of these
innocent islanders, with the articles thereon in the daily papers.
It is all such a relief after the official landings of the Pacific
station, and the French polish of the South American dons, much
tarnished by keeping in a torrid clime.
The people are as curious and inquisitive as children. They draw the
officers’ swords, run their fingers along the dulled edges, cry
wonder at the damascened blades. Some of them have never seen the
uniform before: none can ever see it too often. They have the fullest
confidence in the honour of the wearers; and they give themselves
up to enjoyment, without a thought of harm. All the rules governing
their intercourse with traders are suspended. The girls go where they
please, with whom they please: every middy, even, has his feminine
aide-de-camp, and local guide. The Captain is attended by no less
a person than the Ancient himself, though I think he would prefer
to rough it with his officers. The Ancient treats him with a fine
courtesy, affecting not to be master in his own domain.
Nor indeed is he master for the time--at least on the judicial side.
The Queen’s navy, as already stated, is our court of final appeal under
the constitution; and there is that unsettled case. It is called on the
morrow of the Captain’s visit, with the cocoa grove for the seat of the
appellate tribunal. The Ancient offered the schoolhouse, but the Judge
asked why a clearing in the trees would not do as well; and his will
was law. It is quieter than most halls of justice, for the whispers
are lost in the open air. The twitter of the birds overhead is not so
troublesome as an usher’s cry of ‘Silence in Court.’ The gentle breeze
is hardly an inconvenience, for there are no papers to blow about;
and the perfume which it brings from the village gardens would be a
distinct improvement to the atmosphere of Lincoln’s Inn.
I had never quite understood this case, and no wonder, for it had
puzzled all the courts of the Island. A cat had been killed: it opened
in that way, clearly enough, but, soon after, the obscurity began. Who
killed the cat? Even here there was broad daylight--one Elias McCall.
Was he justified in the deed?--Ha! His plea was that the cat had sought
the lives of his chickens, and that, after losing several of these in
successive midnight raids, he had, at length, sought the life of the
cat. The law of the case is perfectly explicit: the cat that slays
fowl shall itself be slain. But the proof of murderous outrage must
be conclusive: the cat must be ‘positively detected in killing’--the
Ancient read the statute from his pocket-book, at the request of the
Court. Now, was the circumstantial evidence so strong as to constitute
detection within the meaning of the Act? The proprietor of the
fledglings, as a truthful man, could say no more than that the cat had
been in the habit of taking up her station near his hen-coop in the
cool of the evening, and that, on the morrow of every such visit, he
had missed one or more birds. He had put two and two together, that was
his expression, and finally, his feelings getting the better of him, he
had ‘let go’ at the cat (the Ancient, at this point, bade him remember
in whose presence he stood), with the result that his brood thereafter
remained intact. On a post-mortem examination, moreover, he had found
a small feather clinging to the fur. Pressed by the other side, he was
bound in honour to admit that he had never seen the cat looking at the
hen-coop--on the contrary, her head was usually turned the other way.
She often sang to herself, as though pre-occupied; and her movements
were so little of a threatening nature that she was washing her face
at the very moment of the fatal stroke. It was not denied that there
were many other cats in the neighbourhood; it was not denied that the
fowls often flew upon the fence where the cat used to sit, nor that
they might there have left the stray feather found on her person. With
this evidence, the owner of the cat left his case in the hands of the
Supreme Court. The courts below had decided against him, the Ancient
first, as Chief Magistrate, and then a jury. Now, the Captain of H.M.S.
‘Rollo’ was asked to give the final award.
That his Honour was troubled was evident by the frequency with which
he asked his assessor, the First Lieutenant, to give him a light
for his cheroot. The ‘positively detected’ of the statute was his
stumbling-block; we could see that with half an eye.
‘Where did you find the feather?’ he said at length, ‘near the tail
end, where the cat might have been sitting?’ It was a leading question,
but no one seemed to notice the irregularity. ‘No, sir,’ returned the
murderer, ‘on her cheek, just under the right whisker.’
‘That settles it, I think,’ said the Judge; ‘she was washing up, after
she had eaten the bird.’ ‘Yes, that settles it,’ echoed the First
Lieutenant. ‘That settles it, of course,’ said the ship’s surgeon,
who, as a mere bystander, had no business to deliver an opinion on the
matter. ‘That settles it,’ said the Ancient; ‘I never thought of asking
the question.’ ‘That settles it,’ said all the villagers present,
including, strange to say, the owner of the cat.--Judgment of the
courts below confirmed.