Prospero's Daughter. Elizabeth Nunez
skirt the edges of the Dragon’s Mouth. When the boat began to rock, Mumsford found himself again at the mercy of a dark-skinned man. For the commissioner, insisting on secrecy to protect the good name of Dr. Gardner’s daughter, had not sent the government’s launch, manned by a uniformed navigational officer; he had rented a pirogue, and the man at the tiller was a fisherman, a local boatman.
“Nothing to worry about.” The boatman grinned when Mumsford turned anxiously toward him. He was sitting sideways with the insouciance of a man on his way to a picnic, one hand steering the engine and the other waving in the air as he spoke.
A fancy man, Mumsford thought. His life was in the hands of a fancy man. A saga boy. It was a term he had learned from the officers at the station.
“Just the wash from the first boca, sir. We go pass far from it and I go take the boat easy, easy, past the second and the third one.”
Mumsford clamped his hands down hard on the sides of his seat and braced himself.
The Dragon’s Mouth. It was the channel that connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Paria. Across it were underwater rocks, some visible above the surface of the sea, three large enough for the rich to build vacation homes on them.
“The Dragon teeth,” the boatman shouted from the back of the boat. “The first two big teeth call Monos and Huevos. The last one I taking you to is Chacachacare. Is a boca in the space between each big teeth. The water bad there. It rough. He have four mouth, the Dragon.”
Mumsford pressed down harder on his seat. Cerberus, lips drawn back in a grin of fangs, one more head to strike terror in the heart of the condemned.
“You have nothing to worry about, sir.” The boatman’s voice rose above the drone of the boat engine. “You in good hands with me, sir.”
In good hands? He was barefooted, dressed scantily in a loose navy T-shirt and red shorts. How could he be in good hands with this man who could not even speak proper English? He should have put more pressure on the commissioner to give him the launch, Mumsford thought, demanded he send him a man in a uniform.
“We just pass one of the Dragon small tooth,” the boatman called out merrily. “We does call it Scorpion Island. Well, we don’t call it Scorpion no more. We call it Centipede Island now. They have more centipede there than scorpion. Centipede long, long. ’Bout twelve, fourteen, inches.”
Mumsford looked back and saw the tiny island topped with green vegetation.
“Don’t know if centipede long like that eat the scorpion or the centipede more frisky than scorpion. Know what I mean?” The boatman winked at him, but Mumsford was in no mood for winks. He was terrified.
“And on Chacachacare?” he asked nervously. “Are there scorpions . . . centipedes, there?”
“Maybe one or two scorpion, I think. Telling you the truth, sir . . .” The boatman scratched his head and wrinkled his nose. “I never hear ’bout leper dying from scorpion bite.” The idea seemed to strike him as funny. He laughed out loud. “Scorpion catch leprosy before leper die from scorpion bite. You know what I mean, sir?”
Mumsford’s face remained resolutely serious. “So are there scorpions on Chacachacare?” he asked.
The boatman wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I never hear about that, sir. It only have centipede, and if centipede bite you on your leg, you don’t have to bother. Just have to mash the centipede in rum and pour the rum over where they bite you. You be surprise how your leg heal up fast, fast.”
Mumsford gritted his teeth and faced forward in his seat. He had only to step on the poisonous millepatte, the gardener had said to him, and he would get rich. Now the boatman was recommending an antidote to a centipede bite. Crush the centipede in rum, he said. Thank God he was born in England, where medicine was based on science and not in this godforsaken part of the world, where he would have been at the mercy of the superstitions of ignorant people!
The boat rocked, but slightly, as they neared the second boca between the islands of Monos and Huevos. True to the boatman’s word, they passed its outskirts without much difficulty.
“Dey name is Spanish. You know, from the time when Columbus and the other Spanish people came down here. Monos is monkey in Spanish,” the boatman said proudly, “and Huevos mean egg.”
Mumsford already knew the literal translation from his Spanish classes in grammar school and he conveyed his disinterest to the boatman.
“You don’t want to know why? The tourists and them always asking why. Why this, why that. Sometimes just to satisfy them, I does make up things I don’t know nothing about, but I know about Monos and Huevos.”
Mumsford was not impressed. He was more concerned about what he needed to look out for when he got to Chacachacare. “Are there monkeys on Chacachacare?” he asked.
“It don’t have no monkey on Chacachacare,” the boatman said, and undeterred, though Mumsford had positioned his back firmly against him, he informed him that the Spanish people killed all the monkeys on Monos. “They name it Monos and then they kill the Red Howlers. You think they would’ve change the name after that, right? But you wrong.”
Mumsford looked steadily in front of him.
“Is turtle egg they have on Huevos,” the boatman went on. “The turtle swim out in the sea after they lay they egg on the beach. That is how the Spanish people make it in the early days. They eat turtle egg and turtle meat. When they leave here and gone on their way discovering, they used to turn the turtle upside down on the ship so the turtle stay alive. I just can’t believe they was so bad that every day they cut off a piece of the turtle and leave them bleeding till they finish them off. But you know,” his voice became grave, “those Spanish people did some bad, bad things to the Africans they made slaves.”
Mumsford wanted him to shut up. “If there are turtle eggs on the island, the Spaniards must not have killed all the turtles,” he said mockingly. He was tired of these stories about what white men had done to Africans. The past was the past. The slaves were free now. The present was what concerned him, and in the present, his body was on fire. If the trip lasted much longer he would burn, and then in a matter of days he would start shedding like a common reptile.
“You right, sir. So I suppose you could say in the case of Huevos, the name still fit. Correct, sir?”
“Correct,” Mumsford said without enthusiasm.
The boatman said nothing more for a while. When he spoke again, his voice was so soft that Mumsford was not quite sure he had heard him correctly.
“I suppose you know the princess was there.” That was what the boatman had said, and it was only his tone that made Mumsford ask him to repeat himself, for a sly intimacy had entered his voice and Mumsford wanted to be sure.
“Yes, Princess Margaret sheself,” the boatman said.
Mumsford glared at him.
“She come with the governor-general, two, maybe three years now. She like the tortoiseshell she find there. Papers say she plan to make a comb and spectacles for sheself.”
It was not tortoiseshell; it was the shell of the hawksbill turtle, unique for its translucent amber color, some of which was speckled with black, others with green, red, or white. A letter written by a self-styled naturalist was printed in the papers warning of the extinction of the turtles if “certain royalty” insisted on killing them for combs and spectacles.
“He doesn’t dare mention the princess by name,” Mumsford had said to his mother when he read the complaint. “The coward. These are Crown lands and Crown seas. The Crown can do whatever the Crown wants with Crown property.”
“She say the water in the bay in Huevos so nice, she find it hard to leave. She bathe here all the time in she bathing suit. Between you and me,” the boatman continued confidentially, “she could have bathed naked if she want. Hardly anybody here.”
His