The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 106

spared us, since the pirates were required to fight to save their ship rather than to pursue us. As we got our boat into the surf I looked at the pleading Negro and made a decision. I was later glad for it. From what the Negro told Indigo Zulema on the beach, and, after we took him along, from what he told Lazarus and one of our Portuguese-speaking couples back on board King James, I learned much of the plight of the fleet of wretches, the wretched, in the Southern Ocean.

His name was Xique. He had been a seaman on a coastal freighter that had been scuttled in northern Brazil, at Recife, a year before. He said he had escaped overland, fought as a guerrilla, worked for the army as a gravedigger, then led a band of deserters down a large river until he was captured by the army, escaped, got on a frigate that worked first as a troop transport, later as a raider on the coast, and once as a mercenary blockade- runner to evacuate soldiers from Africa’s Gold Coast. This ship was sunk by a gunboat at Rio de Janeiro, and he escaped again in an open boat with a group of seamen who soon forced their way aboard a trawler from the Caribbean—the same trawler Davey Gaunt had burned. That was where he met the two Frenchmen. They were killers, had murdered their captain and been chained as mutineers, and only the intervention of Xique and his mates saved them. The trawler then theirs, they had put in at various small ports down the coast, selling passage to refugees. Once at sea, they threw their victims overboard and put into port again.

His fantasies and deceptions aside, what he said that was most important to me was of the time he had spent on the coastal freighter before it was scuttled at Recife. His ship had been hired several times to run in convoys south to relief camps on islands off the coast of Antarctica. He described what sounded to my sealers to be the South Shetland Islands. When we challenged him for details, he said he did remember one island called “Elephant.” That had been four years before. Also, the two Frenchmen had sold passage to a Brazilian man and his family, whom they had then drowned, but not before the Brazilian had told Xique that the relief camps were relocating refugees, had told Xique that he had been there as a seaman and seen such the year before.

At that point, Xique utterly contradicted and degraded his story, claiming he had been at the camps the year before, claiming he had been a soldier and not a pirate. Xique said the sea was covered with pirates and plague ships and warships, that we should be particularly afraid of raiding ships from Africa, because that was where the sickness was worst.

Xique said he could take us to the relief camps. In Portuguese he called them ice camps. He said a ship as good as ours was sure to be welcomed by the priests and the soldiers there. The oddest, saddest detail was that he kept talking about “English nurses.”

My memory is that the very next day was Sunday. That may be off, a few days might have passed, since it took us time and seamanship to find Candlemas Packet, where conditions had continued to deteriorate. At Longfaeroe’s service that morning, it was announced that I had forbidden anyone from voluntarily going over to Candlemas Packet. Longfaeroe’s sermon was furious and blunt about the sternness and stoutheartedness of David of Jerusalem; he added a scripture lesson from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus’ words to the effect that “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.”

I ruled a house divided. I had Germanicus announce our sailing course, which I had arrived at without counsel. The reaction was not pronounced—they were tough and pragmatic—rather it was skeptical, cautious. Longfaeroe’s service ended and the debate began.

“More of the same!” said Lazarus. “The face of the bully!” What relief camps? What proof? A killer’s lies? And show me the plague! Cholera, yes, typhus, yes, but where is this plague that chases us? Show me that we can’t get ashore on Patagonia. Show me we can’t run for America. Let Grim Fiddle answer me. He is using us, and all to look for a man, a monster, his grandfather, who is dead, dead! I know you, Grim Fiddle. I know your mind!”

“What’ve we become?” said Jane. “What sets us other than the Hospidar, to let those poor folk on Candlemas Packet die? And what if the sickness starts here? Throw bairns over? We have medicine. We can fight it!”

“My people are afraid,” said Toro Zulema. “We are not sailors. I cannot know if that man is truthful. We fear the sickness and pirates. We want to go home. I cannot know if these camps, or the priests, will help us. I do not want to speak against Grim Fiddle. My people need help.”

“Me, I seen the Shetlands, and ye that have too know,” said Christmas Muir. “Ice and more. I ain’t sayin’ couldn’t be camps. I ain’t sayin’ I won’t go. I ain’t sayin’ I ain’t scared of that Satan’s Seat. I ain’t sayin’ I got answers. It be ice there, and more ice.”

The talk did not sway the Volunteers under Motherwell, or the crew under Germanicus; it did not leave them untouched, either. There is much more I could write of the dissent. I push that aside now. My mind was set, perhaps from a point I cannot find, and it is misleading to detail the controversy, the more so because Lazarus was right.

The truth is that I did not care about the reasons to go south or not to. I was trusting my luck. I figured loosely: that if Grandfather had gone ashore on East or West Falkland, he was