• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4081 0

women that they had loved them and that they hoped the women were pregnant and that they would bear children, even though those children would be slaves. They recalled the few good days they had known on Bora Bora, the memorable days when they had chanced upon one of the king's stray pigs and had eaten it surreptitiously, for to have done so openly would have meant immediate death, or the days when the high nobles were absent from the island and they had been free to breathe. In the fading darkness of the night, for a day of great terror was about to dawn, they whispered of love, of human affection and of lost hopes; for the four men knew that when the canoe landed, a temple would be built, and when the four corner post holes had been dug, deep and sound, one of them would be buried alive in each, so that his spirit would forever hold the temple securely aloft, and the doomed men could already feel the taste of earth in their nostrils; they could feel the pressure of the sacred post upon their vitals; and they knew death.

Their two women, soon to be abandoned, could taste worse punishment, for they had come to love these four men; they knew how gentle they were, how kind to children and how alert to the world's beauty. Soon, for no ascertainable reason, the men would be sacrificed, and then the women would live on the edge of their community, and if they were already pregnant, and if their children were sons, they would be thrown under the prows of canoes to bless the wood and to be torn in shreds by it. Then when they were not pregnant, on strange nights men of the crew, their faces masked, would rudely force their way into the slave compartments, lie with the women, and go away, for if it were known that a chief had had contact with a slave woman, he would be punished; but all had such contact. And when the children of these unions were born, they would be slaves; and if they grew to manhood, they would be ripped to pieces under canoes or hung about the altars of gods; and if they grew to comely womanhood, they would be ravished at night by men they never knew. And the cycle would go on through all eternity, for they were slaves.

In the early light of morning it became apparent that the smoking mountain and its supporting island lay much farther away than had at first been supposed, and a final day of hunger and work faced the paddlers; but the visible presence of their goal spurred the famished men so that by nightfall it was certain that next morning the long voyage would end. Through the last soft tropical night, with the luminous mountain ahead, the crew of the West Wind followed their rhythmic, steady beat.

As they approached the end of a trek nearly five thousand miles long, it is appropriate to compare what they had accomplished with what voyagers in other parts of the world were doing. In the Mediterranean, descendants of once-proud Phoenicians, who even in their moments of glory had rarely ventured out of sight of land, now coasted along established shores and occasionally, with what was counted bravery, actually cut across the trivial sea in voyages covering perhaps two hundred miles. In Portugal men were beginning to accumulate substantial bodies of information about the ocean, but to probe it they were not yet ready, and it would be six hundred more years before even near-at-hand islands like Madeira and the Azores would be found. Ships had coasted the shores of Africa, but it was known that crossing the equator and thus losing sight of the North Star meant boiling death, or falling off the edge of the world, or both.

On the other side of the earth, Chinese junks had coasted Asia and in the southern oceans had moved from one visible island to the next, terming the act heroism. From Arabia and India, merchants had undertaken considerable voyages, but never very far from established coasts, while in the undiscovered continents to the west of Europe, no men left the land.

Only in the north of Europe did the Vikings display enterprise even remotely comparable to that of the men of Bora Bora; but even they