Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [6]
But I know now, as my brothers will know soon, the sun that folds in a breaking wave on a Fijian beach, is the same sun that shines on all lands.
I must sleep now and sleep well. Tomorrow I remove from the Mission Society to the good ship Caroline at Blackwall, the vessel chartered to ferry God to my heathen shores.
15 September 1834
Indeed the Caroline is a fine ship, and by the grace of God she will carry us safely to what is the other side of this spinning globe. That my cabin is no longer than my head to my toes does not dismay. It is a palace compared to the damp and stinking billets of the deckhands, who must share their swinging hammocks with each other – one man sleeps while the other works.
As this land I have made my own will soon be memory, I today took what may be a final walk around my favourite haunts. From the crowded markets of Holborn and Covent Garden, to the grand old trees of Hampstead Heath, where one can admire the view from on top of Parliament Hill. At this vantage point the size of the city is apparent, a skyline ever closer to the clouds, the green of the counties encroached. But what I saw today I did not pass judgement upon. For better or worse, it is God who sees fit that this metropolis grows. I will miss it.
16 September 1834
For the next week I am to assist Rev. Stevens in the loading and stowing of the mission supplies. Expecting to be a labourer of the boxes from carriage to hold, I was most surprised to learn that I was in fact the inventory officer – the men employed to shift and lug our chests, clothes, crucifixes and poultry, noticeably sullied at a man of my skin standing above them with paper and quill.
Apart from keeping the inventory I have been occupied with the beginnings of an English to Fijian dictionary, a work that will ultimately contain around five to six thousand words. Many dialects have flowered upon our many islands, and I am somewhat diffident about preparing what will be an authoritative text. Though I must confess, to be a teacher of words to the white man is an exaltation I could not have dreamed. I still remember my time on-board the Fortune, jumped up from Lakemba like a wild animal, and afforded little more comfort than the pigs and fowl. Only when the sailors decided I would not eat them in their sleep was I permitted above deck. They joked and toyed with my tongue as though it were a plaything, putting words into my mouth like handfuls of stones. I spoke and they laughed, not knowing the oaths and blasphemes I was uttering. Beyond the curses against God I was taught the lexis of the ship, and then commanded about it by the bark of the captain in single words, gathering a vocabulary no bigger than the names of the sails and masts I had to scale.
And then the cacophony of London, the screams and shrieks, the intelligible tongues wagging without meaning. Only when the Mission Society confirmed my schooling with Mistress Beaumont did I believe this a language I could tame. A strict and imposing teacher, she peered over her spectacles eager for our errors. I and various other indigenes of the Empire’s reach – Malays, Indians, Hawaiians and Tongans – fast became adept with a tongue we wanted or not. One soon learns to write correctly when the stroke of a cane punishes a spelling mistake, or the bony hands of Miss Beaumont rearrange lips and teeth to fix a mispronounced word.
To think now, with the scratch of a split quill I have the power to shape the mouth of an Englishman!
18 September 1834
This morning the Caroline and her senior officers formally welcomed on-board the Rev. Lilywhite, director of the South Pacific Mission. Despite his senior years and frailty of body, he must surely thank God for his lasting keenness of mind. For the best part of my schooling he was my financial guardian, making regular visits to Miss Beaumont to assure