Her closest companion was the small monkey that Captain Terrence kept as a pet. His name was Little Nick, and he would sit with Alma for hours, picking over her gently, always looking for new and odd things. He had a most intelligent and curious disposition. More than anything, the monkey was fascinated by the woven-hair bracelet that Alma wore around her wrist. He could never get over his perplexion that there was not a similar bracelet on her other wrist—although every morning he checked to see if a bracelet had grown there during the night. Then he would sigh and give Alma a resigned look, as though to say, “Why can you not just once be symmetrical?” Over time, Alma learned to share her snuff with Little Nick. He would daintily place a crumb of it in one of his nostrils, sneeze cleansingly, and then fall asleep in her lap. She did not know what she would have done without his company.
They rounded the tip of Florida and stopped in New Orleans to deliver the mules. Nobody mourned to see the mules go. In New Orleans, Alma saw the most extraordinary fog over Lake Pontchartrain. She saw bales of cotton and casks of cane sugar piled on the wharfs, awaiting shipment. She saw steamboats lined up in rows, as far as the eye could see, waiting to paddle up the Mississippi. She found good use for her French in New Orleans, though the accent was confusing. She admired the little houses with their gardens of seashells and clipped shrubbery, and she was dazzled by the women with their elaborate fashions. She wished she had more time for exploration, but was all too soon ordered back on board.
Southward they sailed along the coast of Mexico. An outbreak of fever swept the ship. Scarcely anyone escaped it. There was a doctor on board, but he was more than useless, and so Alma soon found herself dispensing treatments from her own precious cache of purgatives and emetics. She did not think of herself as much of a nurse, but she was a fairly capable pharmacist, and her assistance won her a small group of admirers.
Soon Alma herself fell ill, and was forced to keep to her berth. Her fevers gave her distant dreams and vivid fears. She could not keep her hands away from her quim, and woke in paroxysms of both pain and pleasure. She dreamed constantly of Ambrose. She had been making a heroic effort not to think of him, but the fever weakened the fortress of her mind, and his memory forced itself in—but distorted horribly. In her dreams, she saw him in the bathtub—just as she had seen him, nude, that one afternoon—but now his penis grew beautiful and erect, and he grinned at her lecherously while bidding her to suck him until she choked for breath. In other dreams, she watched Ambrose drown in the bathtub, and she woke in a panic, feeling certain she had murdered him. She heard his voice one night whispering, “So now you are the child and I am the mother,” and she woke with a scream, arms flailing. But nobody was there. His voice had been in German. Why would it be in German? What did it mean? She lay awake the rest of the night, struggling to comprehend the word mother—Mutter, in German—a word that, in alchemy, also meant “crucible.” She could make no sense of the dream, but it felt most heavily like a curse.
She had her first thoughts of regret about attempting this journey.
The day after Christmas, one of the sailors died of the fever. He was wrapped in sailcloth, weighted with a cannonball, and slid quietly into the sea. The men took his death without any evident sign of grief, auctioning off his belongings among themselves. By evening, it was as if the man had never existed. Alma imagined her belongings auctioned off among these fellows. What would they make of Ambrose’s drawings? Who was to say? Perhaps such a trove of sodomitic sensuality would be valuable to some of these men. All types of men went to sea. Alma well knew this to be true.
Alma recovered from her sickness. A fair wind brought them to Rio de Janeiro, where Alma saw Portuguese slave ships bound north for Cuba. She saw beautiful beaches, where fishermen risked their lives on rafts that looked no sturdier than the roofs of henhouses. She saw the great fan palms, bigger than any in White Acre’s greenhouses, and wished to the point of agony that she could have shown them to Ambrose. She could not keep him from her thoughts. She wondered if he had seen these palms, too, when he had passed through here.
She kept herself distracted with inexhaustible walks of exploration. She saw women who wore no bonnets, and who smoked cigars as they walked down the street. She saw refugees, commercial men, dirty Creoles and courtly Negroes, demi-savages and elegant quadroons. She saw men selling parrots and lizards for food. Alma feasted on oranges, lemons, and limes. She ate so many mangoes—sharing a few of them with Little Nick—that she broke out in a rash. She saw the horse races and the dancing amusements. She stayed at a hotel run by a mixed-raced couple—the first she had ever seen of such a thing. (The woman was a friendly, competent Negro, who did nothing slowly; the man was white and old, and did nothing at all.) Not a day went by that she did not see men marching slaves through the streets of Rio, offering these manacled beings for sale. Alma could not bear the sight of it. It left her sick with shame, for all the years that she had taken no notice of this abhorrence.
Back at sea, they headed for Cape Horn. As they approached the Cape, the weather became so unseasonably fierce that Alma—already wrapped in several layers of flannel and wool—added a man’s greatcoat and a borrowed Russian hat to her wardrobe. So bundled, she was now indistinguishable from any man on board. She saw the mountains of Tierra del Fuego, but the ship could not land, as the weather was too fierce. Fifteen days of misery followed as they rounded the Cape. The captain insisted on carrying all sail, and Alma could not imagine how the masts endured the strain. The ship lay first on one side, then the other. The Elliot herself seemed to scream in pain—her poor wooden soul beaten and whipped by the sea.
“If it is God’s will, we shall go clear,” Terrence said, refusing to lower the sails, trying to run out another twenty knots before darkness.
“But what if someone should be killed?” Alma shouted across the wind.
“Burial at sea,” the captain shouted back, and pushed on.
It was forty-five days of bitter cold after this. The waves came in endless, rolling assault. Sometimes the storms were so bad that the older sailors sang psalms for comfort. Others cursed and blustered, and a few remained silent—as though they were already dead. The storms loosened the hencoops from their stays, and sent chickens flying across the decks. One night, the boom was smashed into dainty chips, like kindling. The next day, the sailors tried to raise a new boom, and failed. One of the sailors, knocked over by a wave, fell down the hold and broke his ribs.
Alma hovered the entire time between hope and fear, certain she would die at any moment—but never once did she cry out in panic, or raise her voice in alarm. At the end of it all, when the weather cleared, Captain Terrence said, “You are a right little daughter of Neptune, Miss Whittaker,” and Alma felt she had never been so mightily praised.
Finally, in mid-March, they docked at Valparaiso, where the sailors found ample houses of prostitution in which to attend to their amorous wants, while Alma explored this elaborate and welcoming city. The area down by the port was a degenerate mudflat, but the houses along the steep hills were beautiful. She hiked the hills for days, and felt her legs grow strong again. She saw nearly as many Americans in Valparaiso as she’d seen in Boston—all of them en route to San Francisco to hunt for gold. She filled her belly with pears and cherries. She saw a religious procession half a mile long, for a saint who was unfamiliar to her, and she followed it all the way to a formidable cathedral. She read newspapers and sent letters home to Prudence and Hanneke. One clear and cool day, she climbed to the highest point of Valparaiso, and from there—in the far and hazy distance—she could see the snow-covered peaks of the Andes. She felt a deep bruise of absence for her father. This provided her with a strange relief—to miss Henry, and not, for once, Ambrose.