The Poisoned Island Read Online Free Page A

increasingly pointless leg. He turns the chair back to his desk and away from the window to await the man, checkingthe letter from the resident magistrate at Bow Street, Aaron Graham. It is this letter which introduces the captain and asks Harriott to receive him. Thomas Hopkins was made post captain five years ago, is now almost forty years old, and has a solid Royal Navy career behind him. He has commanded the Solander as a particular favor by the Admiralty to Sir Joseph. The letter does not reveal what Harriott understands to be the truth behind this odd arrangement: that the Admiralty had refused to fund the Solander ’s mission, even though it had funded other similar voyages, but as part-compensation had thrown a decent captain Sir Joseph’s way. Harriott wonders what this says about the capacities of Captain Hopkins, or at least the Admiralty’s view of him. Is he not needed for fighting, or is he seen as someone reliable? Hopkins has a wife, lives in comfortable surroundings in Putney, and (rather to Harriott’s dismay) is Welsh.
    Though not one for society gossip or even daily news, Harriott is aware that the arrival of the Solander is a significant matter to the social and cultural cognoscenti of the metropolis. It has been much discussed in the capital’s newspapers over the last two days, and Harriott perfectly understands why. What could be more romantic than a deliberate reenactment of the first journey of the Endeavour ? It has been forty years since the working man’s son James Cook extended England’s dominion into the southern seas, coming home with tales of beautiful native women, strange flora and fauna, treacherous reefs, and adventure. Those tales spawned thousands of inches of newsprint, and hundreds of volumes, both learned and scurrilous. Also, more to the immediate point, detailed charts and new names for far-flung islands, shores, and seas bloomed from Cook’s voyage. New English names.
    This new ship, the Solander , seems all of a piece with thatbrighter, clearer time, when an Enlightenment England was still thrusting out into the world, when America was still a brother and not an enemy, when fighting France meant fighting another King, not a bunch of shouting zealots whose revolutionary prognostications seem to cut at the heart of statehood itself. Those were the long-ago years when Harriott himself had been at sea, joining the Navy at thirteen and the East India Company at twenty-three. Adventure had been in his heart then, much as it had been in England’s. Now his heart is old, and England’s great dreams of discovery are, if not quite over, then certainly grown old and cynical. These voyages are now about acquisition rather than discovery, and acquisition is a drier thing, more for clerks and accountants than captains.
    Of course, it had been Cook’s journey on the Endeavour which had embedded the extraordinary personality of Joseph Banks in the English imagination. Cook had returned with charts; Banks came back with tales, scandalous tales of sexual encounters beneath beached boats and in forest tents, drenched in descriptions of dark ritual and human sacrifice. Caricaturists and satirists had dined magnificently on the public body of Banks, while the man himself accrued vast influence, including friendship with the King and the presidency of the Royal Society itself.
    Now Banks—old, fat, and politically weakened by the recurrent illness of his great royal benefactor—has with characteristic theatrical flair dispatched a second ship to Otaheite, that strange Pacific paradise which has infected imaginations for decades, with its waterfalls cascading down from green hills to wash the backs of sultry, willing natives. The Solander ’s voyage was primarily intended to stock the hothouses of the botanical garden at Kew, which Banks has championedin countless editorials and speeches but which now faces the noted indifference of the aggressively non-horticultural Prince Regent. Every