We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [67]
They said the Pacific was just like any other ocean, only bigger. But I learned that was nonsense. It could be gray and rough like the North Sea, or calm like the South Funen Archipelago, but I never saw the sky as blue or as vast over any other sea, and though the earth isn't flat and has no edge, I discovered that the Pacific was its center.
On clear nights when I was at the helm on my own and even the constantly philosophizing Jack Lewis had surrendered to the demands of sleep, the stars were the only geography, and I felt like one of them, adrift in the center of the universe.
The Kanaks sat on the deck, silently watching the constellations, and I knew that as a seafaring tribe who'd once navigated by the most remote suns of the universe, they too felt at home here. Suddenly I understood my papa tru. There comes a time in the life of a sailor when he no longer belongs ashore. It's then that he surrenders to the Pacific, where no land blocks the eye, where sky and ocean mirror each other until above and below have lost their meaning, and the Milky Way looks like the spume of a breaking wave and the globe itself rolls like a boat in the midst of the sinking and heaving surf of that starry sky, and the sun is nothing but a tiny glowing dot of phosphorescence on the night sea.
I was filled with an impatient longing for the unknown, and there was a ruthlessness to it; perhaps this was what Jack Lewis had meant when he spoke about that need for adventure that makes young people yearn to see the whole world, the oceans and all their islands. Mystery emanated from the Pacific's vast surface. My papa tru must have felt it once. And when a man has felt it, he doesn't return.
I was reminded of a summer's evening on the beach back home. The wind had died down and the water was completely calm. In the dusk light, sea and sky had taken on a violet tinge and the horizon had melted clean away, leaving the beach as the only fixed point, its white sand marking the farthest edge of the world, beyond which lay endless violet space. When I took my first stroke, I felt as though I was swimming straight into the immensity of the universe above me.
That night on the Pacific I had the same feeling.
The Flying Scud smelled of copra from stern to bow. There was nothing strange about that in itself. Dried coconut was the most important commodity in these parts. But given Jack Lewis's reputation, it occurred to me that the copra smell might be masking something else. It wasn't through dealing in copra that Jack Lewis had become notorious—though I couldn't work out what else he might be trading.
Anthony Fox had used the word slavery, and when I repeated it to Jack Lewis, for once he failed to reply in his usual direct way.
"I do what all sailors do," he said. "I take things to the places they're needed. That's the way of the world. I don't make it better and I don't make it worse."
"Slave trading?" I asked.
"In case you don't already know, I can inform you that the slave trade's illegal in this part of the world. I'm a law-abiding man."
He gave me a wry smile.
"Plantation workers?" I asked.
It was a well-known fact that there was widespread traffic in Kanak laborers, who were tricked into working on the large plantations where, instead of earning money, they ended up in bottomless debt. Their employers owned everything, including the houses the workers rented and the shops where they bought their food. A plantation worker's contract might be for two years, but he'd end up working ten before he returned to his native island, penniless and broken. If he ever found his way home across the sea, that is.
Jack Lewis shook his head.
"This is an amusing game we've started. But don't think that I'll provide you with