Читать книгу Mutiny on the Bounty. Historical Novel онлайн

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I was off watch that afternoon and engaged in sorting over the articles I had laid in, at the suggestion of Sir Joseph Banks, for barter with the Indians of Tahiti. Nails, files, and fishhooks were in great demand, as well as bits of cheap jewelry for the women and girls. My mother had given me fifty pounds for the purchase of these things, and Sir Joseph had added another fifty to it, advising me that liberality to the Indians would be amply repaid. “Never forget,” he had remarked, “that in the South Sea the Seven Deadly Sins are compounded into one, and that one is meanness.” I had taken this advice to heart, and now, as I looked over my store of gifts, I felt satisfied that I had laid out my hundred pounds to good effect. I had been a lover of fishing since childhood, and my hooks were of all sizes and the best that money could buy. My sea chest was half filled with other things—coils of brass wire, cheap rings, bracelets, and necklaces; files, scissors, razors, a variety of looking-glasses, and a dozen engraved portraits of King George, which Sir Joseph had procured for me. And down in one corner of the chest, safe from the prying eyes of my messmates, was a velvet-lined box from Maiden Lane. It contained a bracelet and necklace, curiously wrought in a design like the sinnet seamen plait. I was a romantic lad, not without my dreams of some fair barbarian girl who might bestow her favours on me. As I look back over the long procession of years, I cannot but smile at a boy’s simplicity, but I would give all my hard-earned worldly wisdom to recapture if only for an hour the mood of those days of my youth. I had returned them to my chest when I heard Mr. Bligh’s harsh, vibrant voice. His cabin was scarcely fifteen feet aft of where I sat.