The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 97
What do I take most from this? I permit myself now, this long afterward, to answer drolly: the human comedy of it. Two by two they marched us into King James, my friends and my dogs, and more, including the Zulemas and other beasties representing threat to the Hospidar. I suppose that we were granted King James could seem merciful; it was not, for no man on South Georgia would have dared risk superstition to sail the Frazer schooner. The Hospidar had accused Lazarus of dividing families; he outdid him: son from father, daughter from mother. The Frazers and their cousins were divided with a knife; those that would not speak openly against Elephant Frazer and Germanicus were sentenced to exile. The old sealers were put to the test as well, Christmas Muir and Peggs marked along with many of their recalcitrant mates, like Ugly Leghorn and Ensign Ewart. Also, the misfits and delinquents in Gaunttown who had no familial bonds were grouped with us—thieves, hoarders, drunkards, sheep-poachers, even the slothful and covetous. We got some of the hags, and we got two of the wild boys who had been in the mob at the Frazer camp. Most surprising—not to me but to the Hospidar—were those who volunteered to come with us though they were not put to the test of allegiance: Longfaeroe, without a bitter word, saying he meant to follow Grim Fiddle to “glory”; and Annabel Donne and her brother, she a midwife and Falklander widow who was in love with Longfaeroe; and Jane Gaunt’s brother, Davey, saying he would serve death itself rather than Robby’s executioners; and Meg Frazer’s morose second husband, Half-Red Harrah (a loss to the Volunteers because he was one of the best whalers on the island). King James was filled until it spilled over, and a second sealer ship, Candlemas Packet, was crammed with beasties and indigents, captained by Sean Malody, a half-breed Falklander who had a blood feud with the Brackenburys. In all, South Georgia cleansed itself, South Georgia sullied itself.
The worst of it for me was Orlando the Black. He came to me and Lazarus in our cells to confess that he had spoken against me and the Frazers, that he had begged the Hospidar he be permitted to continue as commander of Shagrock. He said he had humiliated himself before the Hospidar for a purpose: to protect his family. He said he hoped we understood and would forgive him, but if not, he would not alter his course. He did not weep before Lazarus, his brother, and Lazarus sat blank-faced. Then we spoke of my Sam, who could never have survived a sea voyage. It hurt me, perhaps not as much as it should have. We decided quickly. Was I wrong? I cannot pause here. Orlando the Black took my hand. He was a quiet, sober, undramatic man. It was his nature to take what he was given and make the best with it; his grasp was his reach. He gripped my hand and said, “One of us is here. None of them will outlive me. They’re rid of the Frazers. Now they have Roses and Lindfirs. Don’t forget me. Go with God. I’ll have Sam. He’ll know. He’ll live and he’ll know. I swear it.”
Why do I insist on the human comedy of it? It was the poetry. There we were, men and women who had been abandoned by the twentieth century, and who, because of the slaughter of the meek, were condemned as some of the first victims of the twenty-first century; and yet we were struggling with problems set by the Greeks twenty-five centuries before on islands washed by a profoundly different sort of cauldron than the Scotia Sea. The problems have names: tyranny and democracy, despotism and draconism, tragedy and comedy. Those are Greek words. I repeat what Israel told me, that the Greeks thought comedy more profound than tragedy. Aristotle said it. Mankind proved it. Tragedy was history. Comedy was art. Comedy could humble the gods. I have been told that the Greeks laughed at plays about tyrants, thought it hilarious when a beggar called out for justice and was slapped down for his impudence. Those Greeks must have had strong minds, and stronger stomachs. I have laughed at chaos, have smiled at murder; it is not the sort of humor that fills me with joy.
I once shared Israel’s opinion with Longfaeroe; he nodded, then shook his head, not in disagreement, more to turn over the thought in his mind. Later, Jane told me that Longfaeroe had preached the strangest sermon, using as his text the third book of Genesis, the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve. Longfaeroe had told his congregation that when Jehovah punished man for his pride by banishing Adam and Eve from their garden island to slave and to perish in exile, he had created the first comedy out of tragic history. Longfaeroe added that Jehovah had underscored his artful judgment by constraining and cursing Adam and Eve with the knowledge of all opposites—man and woman, love and hate, good and evil, comedy and tragedy. Jane had said that she had no idea what had gotten into Longfaeroe, did I make sense of it? I sighed then, I do now. If Israel was right about the Greeks, if Longfaeroe was right about Eden, where is progress?
The most difficult part of the comedy for me came the day of departure. I stood upon the quarterdeck of King James watching the wrenching scenes on the quays, families in torment, the flavor of civil war