The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 104

enough for me to take comfort in a challenge that would have come easier to seafaring warriors than to men standing guard on the watchtowers of Jerusalem. As the Norse would say, I ate a diet of certainty. I stood watch as long as I could bear the fatigue and hunger, as a Norseman would have done; I rested only briefly on a mat I had set up under the inboard steering, leaving Iceberg at my place on the quarterdeck, my icon, as a Norseman would have done; I concerned myself with posture, right-thinking, clear-thinking, highhanded and firm rule, as a Norseman would have done. With Norse fatalism I told myself that events would either bear out my presumptions or would not, and thrashing about beforehand was contrariness and weakness. In all, I tried to be as I thought Beowulf might have been on the deck of his wave-cutter. I also tried to be someone more familiar, of course, on the deck of his Angel of Death: impossibly removed, intractable, visionary, surefooted, iron-fisted, larger than life, and—when it was time to command—thunderous.

We broke through the dirty weather at dusk, found an empty sea, poor visibility. We rode out the high sea through the night, launched a longboat before dawn, Motherwell leading my landing party. At Mead’s Kiss’s waterline there was wreckage and a battered trawler, still seaworthy, no guards, bullet holes in the wheelhouse. There were remains of dozens of craft, stripped for firewood. Motherwell challenged a small figure that emerged from a rusted shell, and it faded into the shadows. We moved up toward the weather station. I knew what gray stone marker Germanicus meant, and knew the way. Davey Gaunt and Wild Drumrul scouted ahead, told us there was a camp there, many bodies sleeping under lean-tos. Motherwell directed a weapon’s check, though we were less anxious about combat with them than contamination by them.

(I write them. That is inexact. I have called them refugees without refuge. Peregrine called himself an exile. They called themselves damned. The South Georgians called them beasties. And yet I resist. None of these words are adequate for those hollow faces, swollen bellies, filthy complexions, terrified eyes, open sores, narrow and bent figures squatting in dust and mud, silent, past weeping, though it was true they cried out when they died. I feel now I have not been rigorous in my characterization of them. It is important to get it right here, at the beginning of my time among them. I am in conflict between calling them people or continuing to name them for what they appeared: broken, discarded, starving, diseased, deranged, half-men. I see something, a new thought. The Norse had a word for the North American Indians they discovered in their voyages beyond Greenland; they called them Skrcelings, which means wretches. In the Fiddle Bible there is much talk of the wretched; Jesus came not for the blessed but for the wretched; Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt, and from what Israel once told me, the word Hebrew might have meant wretches to the pharaoh. Also I recall that at some point during our exodus on. King James, I began to think of the people out there on the ocean as wretches. This might seem a small point, but it occurs to me that on King James I was struggling to describe to myself how I and mine differed from the people we found on the sea, on Mead’s Kiss, and after. That was false discrimination. I understand now that I was one with them, and I should now have the will to call myself whatever I want. I call myself wretched. I call them wretched, not hopeless, not beaten, not damned—wretched.)

My encounter with those wretches at the ruined weather station on Mead’s Kiss was grisly revelation. They had set no pickets. There were more than forty of them, in clumps, a few women, no children. We surrounded them. Motherwell barked an order.

“No, no!” a tall man shouted in broken English. He urged his compatriots in Portuguese to remain still; the women bunched to the side. He said, “No gold! No guns! Over there, guns and gold, yes?”

The tall man with the red face kept babbling as we searched; they did have rifles, pistols, ammunition. Motherwell had the men lie face down in the mud. Wild Drumrul motioned me toward him; he pointed down an incline behind the wall of the weather station. The smell told what the shadows did not show. I asked if it was a graveyard. Wild Drumrul said no, a massacre, children too. Motherwell reported that the tall man said he was a French physician, an apparent lie, and that he thought we were Englishmen because we were so large. There was another Frenchman, at least in part, who said he was a priest, another likely lie. A third man, a leathery Negro, said he was first mate on the trawler. We got these three apart from the rest. Otter Ransom came out of the weather station, spitting, angry, shaken, said they had cut up some women in there.

“Pirates, murdering pirates,” said Motherwell.

I ordered him to deploy scouts up the hill to check on the other side, told Indigo Zulema to get the three ringleaders over to the wall for interrogation.

They said they had been at sea more than six weeks, embarking from the Greater Antilles, from Haiti, or, in another version, from the Lesser Antilles. We struggled with our talk, because we had no French or Portuguese, they had bad English, so we used crude Spanish. The Frenchman, who called himself Monsieur le Docteur, said their party had been twice this size; bad weather and pirates had forced them to land repeatedly on the continental coast, where some had run away, others had died of wounds. He emphasized they were free of disease, that they had lost no one to le cholera. He said there was a war in northern Brazil, with airplanes. Monsieur