The man who emerged in these journal entries possessed a few of the solitary virtues and the entire twisted will of Puritanism: a desire to achieve perfection; the loneliness, self-punishment, and bouts of suicide this brings; and a profound disdain for anyone who failed to meet his nearly superhuman standards. He attributed his knack for survival in uncertain times to a series of exercises he’d developed, written in Latin, French, and Greek — for he thought simultaneously in all three languages — under the heading “Self-Reliance.”
Outside, shoe leather struck the deck near Falcon’s door. Someone coughed, then cursed the skipper safely since he was not there, and I recognized his voice as that of the boatswain, Matthew McGaffin. Long seconds passed while McGaffin pissed on Falcon’s door, expelling the sea within himself; then he moved drunkenly on, and I read of our captain’s personal regimen — training himself to read six lines of any book in one snap, to work while others slept, to withstand extremes of heat and cold in case of shipwreck, to find everything in his cabin blindfolded, to ignore pain, to live on as little as a single biscuit, and to do calisthenics to strengthen his eyes and make bifocals unnecessary. Culture, in his view, came from an Icarian, causa sui impulse I found difficult to decipher. Not surprisingly, he saw himself as profoundly misunderstood, his deeds as terribly underrated. According to one day-old notation, the demands he made on others had someone plotting to kill him — he suspected first Squibb, then Cringle — by dropping arsenic and thallium sulfate into his dinner, though this could simply be the mistrust of an unpopular captain who kept knives concealed in every cabin, and whose imagination, I swear on this, was artistically limited to the finely wrought workmanship of pistols, the blunt simplicity of well-balanced, hand-crafted weapons. Maybe the reason for this was his being a natural marksman. From birth he’d lacked binocular vision. All his life he’d been squinting shut his left eye, so that when someone put a pistol in his hand at eighteen, he naturally sighted his targets and began blowing them away effortlessly. Yet, for all this obsession with survival, he had the air of a man who desperately wanted to die, which made his position on ship — his power over the others — all the more frightening.
Few mates wanted to share his company. Some nights he would step up timidly behind a circle of joking men, there in Bangalang, and instantly feel them stiffen, grow silent, then shuffle off to other business. Or he would hover at the periphery of his foremast hands as they worked, fingers shoved into his waistcoat like a new boy at school, hoping they would invite him into their banter about work and women. But no one did. They knew better. They were common folk. Most could not read, in contrast to Falcon, a polyhistor who spent twenty hours a week pouring over old tomes when the weather was fair — this, because as captain he could not bear having anyone, especially his first mate, correct him. He and Cringle argued bitterly, of course, about his pushing the crew too hard. Some nights their shouting in Falcon’s quarters could be heard by all on watch. It became clear, by and by, that as in a house divided at the helm where both parents bicker, the crew benefited by keeping the officers at odds. If Falcon denied extra rations, Cringle might approve them. If Falcon brushed off a lighthand’s complaints of feeling poorly, the mate might let him lie abed. Still, the skipper needed an audience. Try as he might, he could not win what he wanted most once. We landed in Africa: the loyalty of his crew. Thus, he had few allies. Only hypocritical lickspittles like Nathaniel Meadows, who smiled in his face for favors and bad-mouthed him behind his back. As you might expect, the crew was perpetually angry and dissatisfied. What was odd in this was that it wasn’t their anger at all — it was Falcon’s. His emotions permeated the ship like the smell of rum and rotting wood, and these feelings — as is always true of groups confined together in small quarters, or of couples — the men picked up, believing the directionless rage they felt to be their own. All this explained (for me) Falcon’s web work of traps, the spring-released darts coated with curare. But little else, for in his concluding entry he spoke of plans to purchase forty Allmuseri tribesmen and something else Ahman-de-Bellah lost five servants capturing, a colossus he felt he could sell for a king’s ransom in Europe. Of this creature, he wrote no more, only noting he could not bring it aboard until the Republic’s carpenters reinforced leg-irons and planking in the hold.
Standing there, peering at these pages to make sure I’d read them right, feeling as though I had fallen into another man’s nightmare, and sweating in the heat of his locked room since no air was circulating, I was so absorbed I failed to hear the doorlatch turn and became aware of company only when air rushed in suddenly, altering the room’s pressure and clogging my left inner ear. My right had a ringing sound. The edges of my eyes felt blurred. Then just as suddenly the sensation was gone and I heard a shrill, adenoidal voice that swallowed most of its soft consonants say, “Whatever you’re lookin’ to steal, ’tis gone.”
“Cap’n,” says I, “this isn’t what it looks like. All I wanted was a lantern. I guess I made a mistake.”
“ ’Deed you have.”
Silhouetted as he was, his wild hair like rope yarn, skin drier than scales, and beard nearly an ell from top to bottom, his face looked, so help me, like five miles of bad Louisiana road. Rum came reeking, like a slap, off his clothing. A gun hung low in his belt. Yet his eyes were in-turned, icy, as he pushed by me into the room, swaying on his feet like a damaged rig, drunk and barely registering my presence at all. He lowered his rump onto the cushion of his chair, one hand squeezing the armrest, the other pressed against his chest; then he lifted his chin slightly, to the left and away from me, to let a belch of volcanic proportions bubble free. “Light a candle, please. And bring me that jug in the corner and a clean cup — bring one for yourself too.” Instantly, I felt ill, but hastened to obey, each step I took causing the doubloons in my crotch to jingle. By rights, he could have me birched or keelhauled or lashed to the capstan bar. But even worse than that, I realized he might lecture me again, beginning as he often did with a personal anecdote that might go on forever, embellishing each line of dialogue and taking every part in the story for my instruction. Even worse, he might decide to demonstrate esoteric Chinese jointlocks he’d learned while living for a year in King Miu village, using me as his hypothetical opponent in lessons that resulted in my neck aching for days thereafter. Carefully, I poured him a cup of merry-go-down. Then I took a step back, gauging my distance from the door.