Chapter I, Part VI

Clinging to the buoy that was the last inflated body afloat, my father shut his eyes, bit into the flesh of his raft for fear his screams of pain might encourage a more savage feeding, and he awaited the judgement. Whether you are a holy man or not, you have to be awed by what happened next. As the sharks closed in one last time and my father muttered curses upon the cruelty one has to endure, a rain of harpoons descended upon those predators of the sea, and soon shark blood was mixing with that of the Aboriginals. A rain from heaven, you might think? Perhaps, in a way. Through the darkness a ship emerged, and hearing the joyous hoots of her crew, my father opened his eyes. Emblazoned upon her starboard bow was the symbol of the Dutch East India Company.

“Europeans!” he thought. “They will surely take me aboard.” Indeed, they took him aboard right then, hoisting him up with a sturdy rope. Yet once aboard, the strangeness of the crew became horrendously apparent. This was not a pleasant vessel, to say the least, and here is where our story takes a frightening turn. Here is where our tale gets disturbing. But first, my mother…

Chapter I, Part V

A raft of the dead bleeds, this I do not have to explain in detail. The science of blood, however, is not known to everyone. For the sake of the layman, I will say this. Blood in the water acts in a way not dissimilar from that brilliant modern convenience, the telegraph wire. It communicates a message. Like the ticks and blips that surge through the electric cable and transmit news of death, marriage and the need for hastily delivered funds, blood surges through the veins of salt-water in order to tell faraway creatures that food is on the market.  The worst of such creatures is also the most famous resident of the Southern Seas. As soon as the sun tucked itself beneath the horizon, my father made the acquaintance of this monster, or rather, of an entire community of these monsters.

A school of Great White Sharks they were, a horror show of muscle and jaw. My father might have been skilled with his own teeth, but he was laughable compared to such destructive fish.  With cold-hearted calculation, they began their assault by plucking away the bodies on the further edges of raft. Down went one, followed by another, sinking like raisins in thin pudding. My father scrambled to the center of the raft, hoping their appetite would soon abate. Alas, it did not, and as the bodies plunged into the sea and the raft shrank to almost nothing, my father turned to religion for the first time in his life. True, he had led a life punctuated with blasphemies, but he was also an opportunist. To God, he made this declaration.

“My sweet forgiving Lord. Deliver me from this predicament. Your ever-open eyes know my sins and the only thing I can say is this. I’ve had my fill of the dastardly life, and so I promise you, my future life, should you grant me one, will be different. It will be a life brimming with Jesus and worship of your godliness and magical wonderments. And that book you have written, I will have a read at that, so long as you bless me with the skill of reading. I shall also cease with my habit of performing indiscretions at your many nunneries. It is my understanding that nuns are your personal lovers, and therefore, you deserve the first go at them. Right is right and fair is fair. And being a fair, kind spirit, I assume you would not like to see me, your humble slave, devoured in this most sickening manner. I will await the dispatch of your finest savior, be he man or flying beast. Should I perish, then this talk is all for not, and I hope your guts rot away and that the world turns to one of those Indo-Asian gods with elephants for heads…but should you save me, then I will keep my promise. I mean that with all the sincerity my heart can muster.”

Chapter I, Part IV

The next step in my father’s plan was not as fiendish, but also nowhere near as clever. A veritable marketplace of cadavers at his disposal and an ocean in his eye and in his heart, he set forth to fashion a vessel that might carry him home. No one has ever mistaken Nigel Millington for a seaman, and they certainly would not have then. Estimating his sweet England to be but a three night’s voyage from the seas of Australasia, he was convinced a primitive raft would carry him rightly were it treated to favorable currents. And what better to make a primitive raft from than primitives? In his younger days, he had seen his fair share of gangrenous bodies bob in the Thames like crabapples in a pond. Even once, he had witnessed a child pickpocket piloting the corpse of a bloated drunkard in a vain attempt to reach the South Bank while an angry mob of his victims hurled rancid cabbages at him. The urchin never made the shore, but that was inconsequential in my father’s mind. He had proved a body makes a worthy boat, and had the boy a baker’s dozen of Aboriginals to do what with, he might have been tipping a pint at the Elephant and Castle as we speak.

In homage to the deceased child, my father tied the bodies of the natives together using the stringy tendons of the kangaroo and adhesive drawn from a felled gum tree. The work was neither easy nor appealing, but toiling through the night, into the day, and on into the next night, he eventually constructed something that resembled a sea-craft. Granted, it was festering and infested with flies, but it took to water. With the dawn light beckoning him, he set the raft to sea, climbed aboard, and gave hearty shout of “Ho! You’re not rid of me yet, Victoria, you dusty hag!”

By the setting of the sun, he had traveled further than one might have estimated. Any sight of land had escaped him by mid-day. The ocean, the sky, these were his only companions.  To occupy his idle mind, he composed himself a shanty, a rousing tune that was to see him through his voyage:

 

O the ocean, she’s a saucy wench

With a frothy lip and a thrusting hip

And a wench may have an awful stench

But, dear Lord, I’ll always risk a dip

 

Poetry? Hardly, though it is the closest my father ever came. A prophecy?  Now this can be left to debate. For he did not have the chance to compose a second verse.  A dip in the ocean was a fate closer to him than he could have imagined.

Chapter I, Part III

To my father’s great surprise, the natives were not carrying him further into the heart of darkness, but instead were delivering him to the destination he had been so desperately seeking, the wide and forgiving ocean, the glittering Tasman Sea. Setting him upon the sandy beach, they could hardly have imagined the doom that lay in their new future. Perhaps they were expecting to receive a warm embrace or a hearty pat upon the shoulders. Perhaps they were expecting my father to speak in their tongue, to blather on about the nobility of jungle living. Heaven knows what such heathens think. Mark my words, though. They were not expecting what they received.

As night fell on the beach, the Aboriginals set up their camp. They bestowed upon my father the honor of sharing his bed with the evening’s kill, a 15 stone kangaroo. Knowing full well how his moonlit habits manifested themselves among a pack of dingoes, they nevertheless trusted the man not to spoil their food. He was ill, he needed warmth, and the kangaroo’s carcass provided. Do not suffer the fool that tells you a savage’s heart is as black as his countenance. The savage does know compassion and practices it liberally. What he does not practice is common sense. Any man of sound mind should know never to draw the shades on his eyes when a Devonshire rascal is about. Yet each of my father’s kind hosts did just that. They slept while he schemed.  Furthermore, they slept while he donned the skin of that mighty roo in the way one dons a cloak at a party dedicated to fancy dress. Finally, they slept while the masquerader calmly bit into their malnourished necks and removed their throats with nothing but his teeth.

Surely such a ghastly deed would evoke the manner of howls acquainted with the lunatic asylum or the efficiently run slaughterhouse? Once again, one must never underestimate my father. From the ages of nine to eleven, to repay debts acquired from hours spent in the smoky bellies of opium dens, my father was employed by a pig farmer who carried the name Fenniwick. My good friend Dickens could not have authored such a shoat. The man possessed the odor of a sulfurous bog, the appetite of a tapeworm and a complexion that would have found leprosy a blessing. He was not one to subscribe to a life of luxury. He spent his money on food, drink and little else, certainly not on instruments of ease for the lowly souls to whom he gave employment. From his vile mouth, one phrase perpetually spewed.

“What use in a blade, if you still got you your knashers?”

By knashers, he clearly was referring to teeth.  As for the reference to the blade, it is indeed unfortunate. There is one principal use for a blade on a pig farm, and on Fenniwick’s farm a man made due without the aid of steel. Early on my father perfected the skill referred to as the “snap and grumble.” Simply put, he became an executioner of swine armed with nothing but a powerful jaw, a taught and springy neck, and an unhealthy tolerance for the profane.

Suffice it to say, compared to a sty of squealing pigs, a handful of Aboriginals was barely a chore. So trained was he at his calling that my father managed to remove the throats of each sleeping man before those throats had the chance to cry foul. The only sound to be heard was the gentle tumble of their fluids from the canyons in their necks, a sound not unlike a countryside stream in the springtime, though perhaps not as pleasant. I do pity the poor souls. One only has to imagine their final moments. Before descending into the fiery depths that had always been their destination, they were struck mute, staring into the eyes of a ravenous marsupial, perhaps even wondering if their one legged friend was going to suffer a similar fate. If their naivete teaches us anything, it teaches us this. God is not without a sense of humour.

Chapter I, Part II

In a week’s time, in the thick of the Tasman forest, my father came to the conclusion that a diet of wombat droppings and eucalyptus leafs was not sufficient to sustain any life-form, even one as low as himself. What he needed was the bounty of the sea – fish, oysters, anemones.  He was aware that he was upon an island and one much smaller than his beloved Britannia (intellect did not always elude the man). He was also aware that he needed to acquire a coastline. He needed to set forth in any direction with considerable speed, a physical emotion the chains on his legs stole so viciously from him (it can be seen that deduction, of this he was also capable).  Yet here is where his dull mind took hold. Instead of removing the chain by force of rock on rock, the insufferable jester decided to remove one of his legs. Applying a tourniquet of vines to his upper thigh, he proceeded to gouge into his flesh with a sharpened kangaroo bone, found in a dingo den where he had foolishly taken shelter. Passing out for the loss blood, he awoke hours later to find a dingo had finished the task for him. His left leg was removed and the wild dog had itself a glorious feast.

Now it has been said that this should have been the end of him. Damn the man who ever uttered that phrase about my father. For it has always been false. Like the mythological phoenix, he rises from the filth of his ashes, only to emerge more ill tempered and destructive than before. For five days and five nights, in the dank of that den, unilegged and thoroughly bled, the man endured fever dreams the types of which are saved for the gothic novelties of the pervert poet.  I only write of them here to elucidate the horror of the predicament. I would not normally descend to such base trivialities. Nevertheless, it sets the scene.

Naked flesh, adrench in perspiration, writhing bodies were the protagonists of my father’s visions. Yet not the bodies celebrated by that most talented Italian, the beloved Michelangelo.  The painter closer to the spirit of these creatures was that peddler of the rank and doughy, the hog loving Rubens. Your instincts guide you right if you suspect the dreams were set within a landscape of rolling hills. Vile things did occur upon these earthy mounts and my father reveled in the visions. Yet like any fever dream, the visions were not merely the fruits of fiction. As he tumbled through his hallucinations, I fear to say he was simultaneously befouling the colony of well-fed dingoes that had grown fond of his presence. You may deem it strange. You may wonder why they had not taken their razor teeth to my father’s throat. The only explanation I can offer is that the man has often been compared to a dog, and a dog adores a dog, especially one so possessing of carnal knowledge.

After about five days, a group of native hunters happened upon this atrocity. Skilled hunters, all of them, they proceeded to spear the dingoes and knock them into the hereafter with their boomeranging sticks. It was not until later that they realized the animals were sharing pleasures with their companion, not supping upon him. So impressed were they by my father’s dominion over the fearsome dogs, that they immediately took it upon themselves to nurse him back to health. All their attempts at achieving such a level of conversation with the dingoes had ended badly, bloodily, and they were eager to learn of my father’s seduction. To them, he may not have been a pagan god figure, but he was a white light, a beacon for their foggy culture.

Wrapped in a hammock of wallaby fur, he was carried for miles, fattened on the meat of emu and the juice of rain forest plums. A band of prehistoric minstrels, the Aboriginals sang as they traveled, not the railroad spirituals of the American Negroid, but rather a form of hideous shrieking, the only purpose of which, it seemed, was to drive away civilization. It was the furthest my father had been from civilization, there in that land swarming with nettles and vines. He had reason to believe he might never again feel the comforts of a four-post bed or see the lovely snowy skin that clothes a person of the Lord. Yes, he was alive, but a life among such company is hardly worth living. A second escape had to be devised.

Chapter I, Part I

I was born at the foot of Mount Blanc, in a scourge of an inn, barely more than a stable, delivered by the local fishmonger, who declared that if there ever were a scalier and fouler smelling specimen, then he had not encountered it.  Indeed, I entered this world an unsightly child, hard-featured, possessing of a harelip. It was my misfortune to have been sired by persons of the most degenerate manner.  In short, I was a beast hatched from the dirt.

My language bothers you, I do realize. As I am also aware of our Lord’s commandments.  I follow them and trust in them as a sailor follows and trusts in the wind. Honoring my blood is not the issue. The issue is one of honesty. A gentleman is never a gentleman lest the words he gives the world carry the weight of the truth. Truth be told, my parents were abhorrent.  No other word in the King’s English could serve the vermin better. Yet to roll out the tapestry of my life, we must weave first their tawdry tales.

My father, the one legged thief from Devonshire, never baptized but carrying the name of Nigel Millington, spent the majority of his life in the antipodes. A mangy lad with a baffling catalog of diseases to his name, he was nothing less than an embarrassment of sores. In a single year alone, his body harbored scurvy, lupus, foot and mouth, consumption, syphilis and a bevy of rashes that gave his skin the complexion of an artist’s palette. Art, however, was not synonymous with my dear father. Whoring his way through childhood, he developed a habit for morphine by the age of eight and a fancy for the accoutrements of Oriental concubines before his voice even registered alto. Schooling, music, the joys of staged tragedies; these things were of little concern to him. Of the Greeks, he knew only their backward approaches to love. Of the Romans, he knew only their bacchanal urges for dizziness and regurgitation. Of our hallowed Shakespeare, he knew only one line of verse, an all but lost blunder from the rarely performed Rocco IV.  I quote, “Buggering is the noblest hobby, a gold dawn folly of bosom and rod. What say you, ladies, to a ripe harvest of my bastards?” My father was known to utter these words almost daily.

At the age of sixteen, caught with a bloom of pilfered kidney pies in his knickers, he was given the choice of gallows or exile. He chose the latter, though during my cursed childhood I often wished he had surrendered to the quick dangle. Daresay, it would have stolen me from this world, but it would have also spared the souls of many innocents.  Heaven is portlier for the actions of Nigel Millington.

His exile was to be in Van Diemen’s Land, that contemptible pock of an island populated by murderers and thieves.  On his transport my father took with him his wretchedness and one other thing, a durable pouch of gunpowder. Every morning he swallowed that pouch and every evening he expelled it, so as to keep it from the prying eyes of his uniformed hosts. The trip, a yearlong voyage of tacking the Atlantic and rounding the Cape of Good Hope, took many lives. My father’s was not among them, and his treasured companion, that vulcanite pouch, can count itself in similar luck. Traversing his intestines with the regularity of the dawn, it acquired a fleshy countenance.  Fiery and lethal, it became one with the man, not a foil, a reflection. A man requires a savior when the dire shadow looms and a savior that Chinese snuff was perpetually birthed.

Within moments of stepping foot on the exotic Australian soil, the reprehensible Millington jumped to the task of his own rescue and his criminal instincts burst forth in the form of a terrifying explosion. Tossing the sullied sack of sulfur and coal upon the glowing tobacco of one Lieutenant-Colonel Dalloway, my father gave it his best Guy Fawkes and set ablaze the milky flesh of his captors and half the human cargo that for a year counted him as a friend. Then, manacled and undernourished, he scrambled into the scrubby bush of the Great South, knowing not where to go, only knowing to go, and never to look back.

The Impetus Behind This Blog

An obscure Victorian explorer, Chauncey Millington was destined not even to be a footnote in history. Luckily, in March 2009, his memoirs were found in a steamer trunk buried beneath a pile of unclaimed freight at Shanghai harbor. They offer an unfettered view into a world just cracked open. The language is raw and the observations of this wide-eyed young man may shock modern readers, but these memoirs are an invaluable contribution to the travel literature of the time. Restoration of the manuscript is still underway, and an auction at Sotheby’s is expected. In the meantime, I will be posting the manuscript in bits and pieces, in an effort to share Chauncey’s story with the public, something he was not able to achieve during his lifetime.

A.J. Wells