The Poisoned Island Read Online Free

trade would die out with the coming of the new docks. They were quite wrong. London’s trade continues to grow at an astounding rate, even in the face of the obstructive little Emperor’s attempts to strangle it. Britain is at war, and no one is more aware of the importance of commerce to that effort than John Harriott, a bristling patriot who has served in the Royal Navy, the Merchant Navy, and the East IndiaCompany. Now sixty-seven years old, he has buried two wives and reached an accommodation with a third, and his sons are full-grown and leading mercantile lives of their own. His energy is notorious, his bulldog stubbornness resented, his commitment to his duties fearsome.
    Harriott has been watching the water to see if he can catch a glimpse of today’s celebrated arrival. The Solander is a rare thing on the river: a ship arriving from far-off climes preceded by its own reputation. She is something of a throwback to the great days of discovery of Harriott’s youth, when ships with names like Endeavour and Resolution set out onto the white expanses of the charts and brought back tales of lands formed from ice, islands of sun and enchantment, cannibals, canoes, spears, and serpents.
    Harriott has his own particular reasons for wanting to witness the safe arrival and mooring of the Solander . The vessel’s main backer, the Royal Society president Sir Joseph Banks, has asked that Harriott in particular take an interest in the ship’s security; word has gotten back to Harriott that Sir Joseph has described him as a “singular man, one who can be trusted with the Treasures of my returning Ship.” This does not flatter Harriott; rather, it has only served to make him resentful but determined. Resentful, for Harriott has reasons to distrust Sir Joseph, reasons that lie within recent events in Wapping. Determined, because he wishes his relationship with Sir Joseph—such as it is—to be one of unblemished achievement on his side, and guilty reliance on the part of Sir Joseph.
    The ship in question had arrived on the morning tide, and she is now moored to the chain in the river, just upstream of the new entrance to the Surrey Canal system. She is hard to spot around the bend in the river, in amongst the busyshipping which, day and night, turns the Thames into a floating city of wood and rope. Harriott knows what to look for, though, and he does indeed spy her. She is not, truth be told, much to look at, but Harriott knows his maritime history and knows that her predecessors, from the Endeavour on, were all very ordinary-looking vessels. Like the Endeavour and the Bounty , the Solander is a Whitby collier, broad-beamed and square-bowed, squat and practical, made for the repetitious carrying of coal across the unyielding North Sea. There is no romance to look at her, unless you know something of where she’s been and what she brings back. Knowing that, an old Navy man like John Harriott cannot help but find the romance in her irresistible.
    It is now the afternoon. Looking up once again from his work to gaze out of the window, Harriott thinks that he can detect a wherry rowing away from the Solander and heading upstream towards him. Years of looking at the river have given him the ability to pick out particular activity, even among the clamor of barges, whalers, luggers, packets, brigs, ferries, dinghies, and lighters. Wherries have been making their way from the Solander for some time now—indeed, one discharged several seamen at the Wapping stairs just below his office only a quarter-hour ago. But this particular wherry carries only one passenger, and as it rows closer Harriott is convinced it must be the captain.
    Harriott is seated in his ancient leather chair, saved from the rushing Essex waters during the inundation of his island farm years before he came to Wapping. The chair can swivel through a full circle, allowing him both to watch out of the window and work at his desk without standing on his lame and