Читать книгу Men Against the Sea – Book Set. The Greatest Maritime Adventure Novels: The Bounty Trilogy, Lost Island, The Hurricane, Botany Bay, The Far Lands, Tales of the South Seas… онлайн

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Christian stood up and Stewart and I sprang to our feet. I was the first to seize Christian’s hand.

“Yes,” I said, too moved for further speech.

A moment later Christian turned to hail the house. “Maimiti!” he called, in his strong seaman’s voice. She must have been awaiting the call, for she appeared almost instantly, a slender white figure flitting under the palms. The paddlers followed her, seized the canoe, and dragged it into the wash of the sea. The Indian girl came to me without a word and embraced me tenderly in the fashion of her people. Still in silence she embraced Stewart, and sprang into the canoe. Christian shook our hands for the last time. “God bless you both!” he said.

We stood on the beach, watching the double canoe fade into the night. At dawn, when I walked out of the house for a plunge in the sea, the Bounty was standing offshore with all sail set, heading north, with the light easterly breeze abeam.

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Though I had reason to congratulate myself on my present situation, the week following the Bounty’s departure was an unhappy time for me. For the first time in my life, I think, I began to question the doctrines of the Church in which I had been brought up, and to ask myself whether human destiny was ordered by divine law or ruled by chance. If God were all-powerful and good, I thought, with a lad’s simplicity, why had He permitted one man, in a moment of not unrighteous anger against oppression and injustice, to ruin his own life and the lives of so many others? Many a good and innocent man had accompanied Bligh in the launch: where were they now? The majority of the mutineers themselves were simple fellows with a grievance that might have led better men to revolt. Held in subjection by the iron law of the sea, they had endured with little complaint the hardships of the long voyage and the temper of a man considered brutal in a brutal age. Had Bligh not goaded his junior officer beyond endurance, no other man on the ship would have raised the cry of mutiny, and the voyage would have been completed peacefully. But one moment of passion had changed everything. Out of the whole ship’s company, only seven of us—those who had had no hand in the mutiny and were now awaiting the first English ship—had come out of the affair scot-free. And our fate could scarcely be termed enviable—marooned for an indefinite time among Indians, on an island at the very ends of the earth. As for the mutineers who had chosen to remain on Tahiti, I knew only too well what their fate was likely to be. Young Ellison, who had been our mess boy, was often in my thoughts at this time. He had no realization of the gravity of the part he had played. Yet I knew that unless he quitted Tahiti before the arrival of a British man-of-war, our sea law would infallibly condemn him to death.