In the Wake of Madness by Joan Druett

Author:Joan Druett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Workman Publishing
Published: 2004-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

GEORGE BLACK

“AT DAYLIGHT THE next morning all hands were called and commenced fitting the rigging it being calm,” Clough recorded. Then, as soon as breakfast was over, the men were assembled to witness the burial of Captain Norris. While they stood in a huddle with their hats in their hands, Thomas Harlock Smith read a prayer, and then the shrouded corpse was launched into the ocean.

To his father, Clough simply noted, “The next morning the Captain was buried with the usual ceremonies.” In his log, however, he added intriguingly, no sooner had Captain Norris’s mutilated body been dropped into the deep, than “Our hogs seven in number were knocked in the head and threw overboard.” These were the pigs that had been found gnawing parts of Norris’s skull. While they represented several pork dinners, the men were too squeamish—or superstitious—to contemplate eating them.

The next job was to get the sails back on the yards. After that, the decks were thoroughly scrubbed to remove all traces of the bloody slaughter. It was not until that was done that the order was belatedly given to search the ship for the third native, whom by now they had identified as George Black; their erstwhile cook was apparently not a man to inspire caution, let alone fear.

Andrew White was with the group that found George cowering in a dim recess in the hold. Instead of shooting, the men told him to come out, but the native commenced “fireing woods,” so the gang “punched him some with a Iron pole.” After a few hard jabs the Kanaka gave himself up, after which they put him in irons. “It appears by his account,” wrote Clough, “that when he came aft and saw the other native dead that he went and jumped overboard and swam away from the Ship it being calm and After the boats were hoisted up he got hold of the Eyebolt in the Rudder.” George had hung on until the decks were quiet, “and then came and got on deck by the bob-stays and went down into the forehole &c.”

Unfortunately, Clough stopped writing at this point. Because of his wounds, for some days he was not able to hold a pen long enough to write a full account of the murder and his single-handed recapture of the ship. Giving up when he reached that enigmatic “&c.,” he stuck the sheets into the appropriate place in his log with sealing wax. Any details of the assassination that George Black might have revealed went unrecorded. Still on board were the three Kanakas who had been down in the boats—the two Rotumans and the last Hope Islander, the one who had been so nearly felled by the ax hurled by his fellow villager. But Clough did not record that anyone asked them questions, either.

The cooper was equally uncommunicative. Instead of noting down what George Black might have had to say about the murder, he explained the unusually long entry in his journal that spanned the fifth and sixth of November.

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