Beyond the Bounty Read Online Free PDF Page B

covered with these stumpy trees, before it reached the sheer drop to the rocks far below. So as Jenny edged carefully down to the nest, her bare feet seeking grip on the dusty white rock, she must have felt no fear.
    I watched her take one scraggy little branch in her hand, and then push her long black hair from her face with the other. She had another think. Then, with her hair shining in the sun, she reached for the eggs in the nest, still holding onto the little branch for safety. Her lovely hair fell forward.
    I sat up and smiled to myself.
    I could almost taste those gull eggs on the back of my tongue.
    But the nest was just out of reach. Those gulls knew where to build, the crafty bastards.
    Jenny got on her knees and leaned further out. Then at last they were in her hand. Those light blue gull eggs with their dark freckles. Three of the little beauties, as far as I could see, with one more still in the nest.
    Jenny reached for the remaining egg.
    I thought to myself,
Soft-boiled or fried in a dollop of fat, Ned?
    And then she fell.
    The stumpy root that she was holding onto came away all at once. At least, that’s how it looked. One moment it was attached to the chalky side of the cliff, and the next it was attached to thin air.
    Although the slope of the cliff was gentle, poor Jenny had reached out a long way to steal the eggs of the gull.
    And there was no way back.
    She fell.
    At first she scrambled up the side of the cliff – the top must have seemed so close, and then suddenly so far away.
    But she was always falling.
    For a terrible second or two she seemed to clutch the gull eggs to her breast, as if she thought that they could still be brought to the dinner table. Then she was sliding down the cliff and the eggs dropped.
    And so did she.
    She was over the side of the cliff and spinning in the air, always falling, and the rocks were rushing to claim her.
    I was on my feet and I called her name.
    And I could not stop calling her name.
    As if that might bring her back.
    As if that might give her life.
    Because Jenny was my wife.
    And I loved her, you see.
    I stumbled back to the camp, my vision blinded by tears.
    ‘Jenny,’ I said, my voice all choked with loss. ‘Jenny, Jenny.’
    I struggled to understand what had happened. I had just watched my wife die while picking eggs. She was on a cliff. Then she fell. It sounded so simple. And yet I struggled to understand how easily happiness could fall apart.
    I call her my wife. Of course she was a maid that I met on Tahiti. Perhaps not much of a maid. She had certainly paddled her canoe around the island with the local boys once or twice before I ever dropped my anchor. I do not doubt that.
    Still, she was my wife. Perhaps they would not have called her my wife in England, but we were a long way from England. And when she fell, my world fell with her.
    I was in the camp before I realised that my shipmates were all stinking drunk. In these early days we still squatted in rough shelters made from palm leaves and bamboo and whatever bits of driftwood we could scavenge from the beach.
    Outside these hovels, the sailors loafed about like lords of the realm, rolling with stupid laughter and pawing at any women who were foolish enough to get close.
    William McCoy shoved a glass jar in my hand.
    ‘We did it, Ned!’ he cried excitedly, too drunk to realise that he was talking to a man with bitter tears on his face. ‘We made grog! A good batch of home-made rum! Look!’
    Right in the middle of our humble camp, surrounded by the mean grass huts we had assembled, there was some kind of knocked-up device.
    It was a big steaming iron pot, pillaged from the mess of our dear departed
Bounty
. A wormy coil of copper connected it to a barrel that had once held our drinking water in the days when we were sailors.
    ‘Take a drink, Ned Young,’ McCoy screamed in my face, his reeking breath making me almost puke up my guts. ‘It is real grog we have made. Cornmeal, sugar, water,