Following the Equator - Mark Twain (the reading list .txt) 📗

After four pleasant days in Christchurch, we are to leave at midnight to-night. Mr. Kinsey gave me an ornithorhynchus, and I am taming it.

Sunday, 17th. Sailed last night in the Flora, from Lyttelton.

So we did. I remember it yet. The people who sailed in the Flora that night may forget some other things if they live a good while, but they will not live long, enough to forget that. The Flora is about the equivalent of a cattle-scow; but when the Union Company find it inconvenient to keep a contract and lucrative to break it, they smuggle her into passenger service, and "keep the change."

They give no notice of their projected depredation; you innocently buy tickets for the advertised passenger boat, and when you get down to Lyttelton at midnight, you find that they have substituted the scow. They have plenty of good boats, but no competitionand that is the trouble. It is too late now to make other arrangements if you have engagements ahead.

It is a powerful company, it has a monopoly, and everybody is afraid of itincluding the government's representative, who stands at the end of the stage-plank to tally the passengers and see that no boat receives a greater number than the law allows her to carry. This conveniently-blind representative saw the scow receive a number which was far in excess of its privilege, and winked a politic wink and said nothing. The passengers bore with meekness the cheat which had been put upon them, and made no complaint.

It was like being at home in America, where abused passengers act in just the same way. A few days before, the Union Company had discharged a captain for getting a boat into danger, and had advertised this act as evidence of its vigilance in looking after the safety of the passengers for thugging a captain costs the company nothing, but when opportunity offered to send this dangerously overcrowded tub to sea and save a little trouble and a tidy penny by it, it forgot to worry about the passenger's safety.

The first officer told me that the Flora was privileged to carry 125 passengers. She must have had all of 200 on board. All the cabins were full, all the cattle-stalls in the main stable were full, the spaces at the heads of companionways were full, every inch of floor and table in the swill-room was packed with sleeping men and remained so until the place was required for breakfast, all the chairs and benches on the hurricane deck were occupied, and still there were people who had to walk about all night!

If the Flora had gone down that night, half of the people on board would have been wholly without means of escape.

The owners of that boat were not technically guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, but they were morally guilty of it.

I had a cattle-stall in the main stablea cavern fitted up with a long double file of two-storied bunks, the files separated by a calico partitiontwenty men and boys on one side of it, twenty women and girls on the other. The place was as dark as the soul of the Union Company, and smelt like a kennel. When the vessel got out into the heavy seas and began to pitch and wallow, the cavern prisoners became immediately seasick, and then the peculiar results that ensued laid all my previous experiences of the kind well away in the shade. And the wails, the groans, the cries, the shrieks, the strange ejaculationsit was wonderful.

The women and children and some of the men and boys spent the night in that place, for they were too ill to leave it; but the rest of us got up, by and by, and finished the night on the hurricane-deck.

That boat was the foulest I was ever in; and the smell of the breakfast saloon when we threaded our way among the layers of steaming passengers stretched upon its floor and its tables was incomparable for efficiency.

A good many of us got ashore at the first way-port to seek another ship. After a wait of three hours we got good rooms in the Mahinapua, a wee little bridal-parlor of a boatonly 205 tons burthen; clean and comfortable; good service; good beds; good table, and no crowding. The seas danced her about like a duck, but she was safe and capable.

Next morning early she went through the French Passa narrow gateway of rock, between bold headlandsso narrow, in fact, that it seemed no wider than a street. The current tore through there like a mill-race, and the boat darted through like a telegram. The passage was made in half a minute; then we were in a wide place where noble vast eddies swept grandly round and round in shoal water, and I wondered what they would do with the little boat. They did as they pleased with her. They picked her up and flung her around like nothing and landed her gently on the solid, smooth bottom of sandso gently, indeed, that we barely felt her touch it, barely felt her quiver when she came to a standstill. The water was as clear as glass, the sand on the bottom was vividly distinct, and the fishes seemed to be swimming about in nothing. Fishing lines were brought out, but before we could bait the hooks the boat was off and away again.


CHAPTER XXXIII.

Let us be grateful to Adam our benefactor. He cut us out of the "blessing of idleness," and won for us the "curse of labor."
Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

We soon reached the town of Nelson, and spent the most of the day there, visiting acquaintances and driving with them about the gardenthe whole region is a garden, excepting the scene of the "Maungatapu Murders," of thirty years ago. That is a wild placewild and lonely; an ideal place for a murder. It is at the base of a vast, rugged, densely timbered mountain. In the deep twilight of that forest solitude four desperate rascalsBurgess, Sullivan, Levy, and Kelleyambushed themselves beside the mountain-trail to murder and rob four travelersKempthorne, Mathieu, Dudley, and De Pontius, the latter a New Yorker. A harmless old laboring man came wandering along, and as his presence was an embarrassment, they choked him, hid him, and then resumed their watch for the four. They had to wait a while, but eventually everything turned out as they desired.

That dark episode is the one large event in the history of Nelson. The fame of it traveled far. Burgess made a confession. It is a remarkable paper. For brevity, succinctness, and concentration, it is perhaps without its peer in the literature of murder. There are no waste words in it; there is no obtrusion of matter not pertinent to the occasion, nor any departure from the dispassionate tone proper to a formal business statementfor that is what it is: a business statement of a murder, by the chief engineer of it, or superintendent, or foreman, or whatever one may prefer to call him.

"We were getting impatient, when we saw four men and a pack-horse
coming. I left my cover and had a look at the men, for Levy had
told me that Mathieu was a small man and wore a large beard, and
that it was a chestnut horse. I said, 'Here they come.' They were
then a good distance away; I took the caps off my gun, and put fresh
ones on. I said, 'You keep where you are, I'll put them up, and you
give me your gun while you tie them.' It was arranged as I have
described. The men came; they arrived within about fifteen yards
when I stepped up and said, 'Stand! bail up!' That means all of
them to get together. I made them fall back on the upper side of
the road with their faces up the range, and Sullivan brought me his
gun, and then tied their hands behind them. The horse was very
quiet all the time, he did not move. When they were all tied,
Sullivan took the horse up the hill, and put him in the bush; he cut
the rope and let the swags[A "swag" is a kit, a pack, small
baggage.]fall on the ground, and then came to me. We then marched
the men down the incline to the creek; the water at this time barely
running. Up this creek we took the men; we went, I daresay, five or
six hundred yards up it, which took us nearly half-an-hour to
accomplish. Then we turned to the right up the range; we went, I
daresay, one hundred and fifty yards from the creek, and there we
sat down with the men. I said to Sullivan, 'Put down your gun and
search these men,' which he did. I asked them their several names;
they told me. I asked them if they were expected at Nelson. They
said, 'No.' If such their lives would have been spared. In money
we took L60 odd. I said, 'Is this all you have? You had better
tell me.' Sullivan said, 'Here is a bag of gold.' I said, 'What's on
that pack-horse? Is there any gold?' when Kempthorne said, 'Yes,
my gold is in the portmanteau, and I trust you will not take it
all.' 'Well,' I said, 'we must take you away one at a time, because
the range is steep just here, and then we will let you go.' They
said, 'All right,' most cheerfully. We tied their feet, and took
Dudley with us; we went about sixty yards with him. This was
through a scrub. It was arranged the night previously that it would
be best to choke them, in case the report of the arms might be heard
from the road, and if they were missed they never would be found.
So we tied a handkerchief over his eyes, when Sullivan took the sash
off his waist, put it round his neck, and so strangled him.
Sullivan, after I had killed the old laboring man, found