Nation

sad. And it’s a story about something else, about sailing so far that you come back again…. Oh, I must go back into that cave!
    “But the ghost girl is already banished,” Mau pointed out. “The wave banished her to us.” And so there had to be even more discussion.
    Half an hour later matters were not much improved. The whole population of the island sat in a circle around Daphne, trying to be helpful. Trying to understand as the trial went on.
    “You say they were bad trousermen,” said Mau.
    “Yes. The worst kind,” said Daphne. “Murderers and bullies. You say you walk in the shadow of Locaha, but they walked in his loincloth when he has not bathed for many months.” That got a laugh. She’d probably said it wrong.
    “And how did they walk in Locaha’s loincloth?” said Pilu, and got a slightly smaller laugh, to his obvious disappointment.
    “That’s the wrong question,” said Mau. The laughter stopped. He went on: “You say you told them about the beer song, and they didn’t listen? It is not your fault the man was a fool, is it?”
    “Yes, but you see, it was a trick,” Daphne said. “I knew they wouldn’t take any notice!”
    “Why would they not listen?”
    “Because…” She hesitated, but there was no way of avoiding it. “I’d better tell you everything,” she said. “I want to tell you everything. You should know what happened on the Sweet Judy . You should know about the dolphins and the butterfly and the man in the canoe!”
    And while the circle listened with open mouths, she told them what she had seen, what Cookie had told her, and what poor Captain Roberts had written in the ship’s log. She told them about First Mate Cox, and the mutiny and the man in the canoe…
    …who had been brown and, like Mrs. Gurgle, looked as if he’d been made out of old leather. The Sweet Judy had caught up with him out among the islands, where he had been paddling a small canoe very industriously toward the horizon.
    According to First Mate Cox, the man made a rude gesture. Foxlip and Polegrave backed him up on that, but in his log the captain, who had spoken to them all separately, made a point of noting that they weren’t clear about what the gesture was.
    Cox had shot at the man, and had hit him. Foxlip fired too. Daphne remembered him laughing. Polegrave was the last to fire, and that was just like him. He was the kind of weasel who would kick a corpse, because it was unlikely to fight back. Polegrave giggled all the time and never took his eyes off Daphne when she was on deck. But he was probably smarter than Foxlip, although once you got past the swaggering and the bullying, there were probably lobsters who were smarter than Foxlip.
    The two of them tended to hang around with Cox in a way that was hard to understand until you found out that there are fish that swim alongside a shark, or even in its mouth, where they are safe from other fish and never get eaten. Nobody knows what’s in it for the shark; maybe it doesn’t notice, or is saving them up for a secret midnight snack.
    Of course, Cox was not like a shark. He was worse. Sharks are just eating machines. They don’t have a choice. First Mate Cox had a choice, every day, and had chosen to be First Mate Cox. And that was a strange choice, because if evil was a disease, then First Mate Cox would have been in an isolation ward on a bleak island somewhere. And even then, bunnies nibbling at the seaweed would start to fight one another. Cox was, in fact, contagious. Where his shadow fell, old friendships snapped and little wars broke out, milk soured, weevils fled from every stale ship’s biscuit and rats queued up to jump into the sea. At least, that was how Cookie had put it, although he was given to mild exaggeration.
    And Cox grinned. It wasn’t the nasty, itchy little grin of Polegrave, which made you want to wash your hands after seeing it. It was the grin of a man who is happy in his work.
    He’d come on board at Port Advent, after five of the crew didn’t come back from shore leave. That often happened, the cook told Daphne. A captain who strictly forbade card games, whistling, alcohol, and swearing found crew hard to keep at any price. It was a terrible thing, said Cookie, to see religion get such a hold on a decent soul. But because Roberts was a decent soul, and a good captain, a lot of the crew stayed with him voyage after voyage, even though stopping sailors from swearing was a terrible thing to do (they