victoria_vn: переводы

→Meanwhile Steuermatrose Mayer had been summoned. He was the crew’s Proviant Kommission delegate for the month: the rating elected every four weeks by regulation to oversee the quality and quantity of the rations served out and thus to discourage pilfering and corruption among the ship’s provisioning officers. He blenched visibly as he smelt the con-tents of the cask.

→CI V I LISAT ION AGA I N

→18

→We spent the next five days working our way down the Liberian coast well out of sight of land. Both watches had been ordered to stand by for landing operations, but as yet there was no indication where we were heading.

→Rumours soon spread via the galley that this personage was in fact an illegitimate son of our Captain, fathered on an African princess twenty-five years before when “der Alte” had been exploring in Africa. But this was discounted by the more geographically literate on the grounds that Slawetz had been in East Africa, not West. In the end the matter was resolved by Max Gauss, who had been detailed to clean the cabin and had found a very splendid gilt-embossed visiting card which he showed to us. It read Dr Benjamin Saltfish MA (Oxon ) D. Phil (Harvard ). Foreign Minister of the Federated Kroo Coast State. We had no idea what he might be doing aboard our ship. But we did know that on the last day of our visit the cipher books had been taken out of the ship’s safe, and that Linienschiffsleutnant Svoboda had gone ashore to send a number of very long telegrams in code from the post office on Kissy Street. Something was afoot.

→We had also acquired living freight at Freetown. The Foreign Ministry emissary Count Minatello had been ashore on the second day, wearing a white suit and an outsize solar topee with a neck cloth hanging down the back, just to be on the safe side. He had stayed two days in Freetown’s one cockroach-infested hotel and had come back aboard accompanied by a young black man: a slim and self-consciously elegant fellow with a straw panama, a gold-headed cane, a monocle and a cigarette holder, and also a gaudy tropical flower in his buttonhole. This mysterious passenger said nothing to anyone and disappeared as soon as he came aboard into a spare cabin, where he took his meals.

→We departed from Freetown on 17 July amid a downpour almost as intense as the one that had greeted our arrival. Everyone was back aboard safely, and, apart from a great many aching heads and a number of anx-ious young men examining themselves for the first sores and discharges, no one seemed any the worse for our courtesy call. Professor Skowronek had arrived back a few hours before we sailed. He had set off inland with a party of five men as soon as we arrived and had now reappeared with his assistants carrying a padlocked wooden box. It was only a couple of days after we sailed that the news began to spread through the lower deck that the box contained six or seven human skulls which the Professor had now cleaned and arranged along one of the shelves in his laboratory, which was kept locked most of the time. This caused some consternation: it is a longstanding superstition among seamen that to sail with dead men’s bones aboard brings bad luck.

→This advertisement impressed us both greatly, and we reached the jetty only just in time to avoid a drenching which would probably have put the pair of us in need of Mr Bungie’s discounted sympathy within a few days. Death and funerals seemed to be a major preoccupation in Freetown, the whole place suffused with a morbidity that was almost Viennese in its gruesome relish. But I suppose that this was only to be expected in such a pestilential climate. Years later when I was briefly seconded to the Royal Navy at Gosport I talked about West Africa with a naval pensioner who had served on the anti-slavery patrols from Freetown half a century earlier. He told me that the orders for the day had once read “Port watch will go ashore at eight bells to dig graves; starboard watch will work as usual making coffins.”

→Bungie will do the rest by giving you decent funeral, With small discount—that’s Bungie all over.

→Save small, pay honest debts: that’s the gentleman. Then be praying for the happy death.

→Do not live like a fool and die like a great fool. Eat and drink good grog.

→Undertaker’s advice:

→Builder for the Dead, Repairer of the Living, Supplied with hearse and uniform at any moment. Been born sympathetic, promise to carry out this great Sympathetic function, To bury dead like good Tobias of old

→Bungie the
Sympathetic
Undertaker

→There had been nothing worth buying as souvenirs, so we had done little except take a few snapshots with my camera and send postcards to our families from the main post office, dropping them into a red-painted pillar box with the VR monogram. We were generally rather disappointed with the place as well as being exhausted by the mournful, clammy, grey heat. As we hurried down the street we stopped, and gazed in wonderment. The shack was called “Refreshing Bungalow” and outside it was a hand-painted sign so magnificent that despite the imminent downpour I just had to write it down in my notebook. It read:

→Vultures were everywhere: much smaller than I had imagined, and really quite extraordinarily shabby-looking fowl when walking about on the ground picking around among the rubbish. Gauss and I made our way down the main thoroughfare, Kissy Street, from the clock tower towards the wharf where the boat lay that would take us back aboard. We were going to have to hurry, because out to sea a great mass of indigo clouds announced the approach of yet another rainstorm.

→It was only on the last afternoon of our visit that we cadets were given a couple of hours’ liberty to look around Freetown unsupervised, while the drinking dens and houses of ill-repute were closed for the af-ternoon. It really was a most curious place and not in the least how I had imagined Africa: not a grass hut in sight but only ramshackle, muddy streets—Clarence Street, Hanover Street and Bond Street—of brick and clapboard houses with cast-iron lamp posts and helmeted English-style policemen strolling their beats among the refuse and the water-filled pot-holes.

→We cadets were kept under close supervision for most of the visit, working aboard the ship until the second afternoon when we were ordered to change into our best whites to attend a garden party at Gov­ ernment House, up on a hill above the town and just below an enormous military hospital built that size (we understood ) to take the fever cases. It was infernally hot and humid even if the rain had let up for a few hours. But our bandsmen did their excellent best—Strauss, Zeller, Millöcker and the lot—sweating like so many boiled puddings in their high-collared tunics.

→The Governor and his wife made small-talk with us and were delighted to find that we spoke such creditable English; like-wise the representatives of local society, the ladies dressed in voluminous petticoats and flounces and ostrich-plumed hats which must have been perfect torment to wear in such a climate. Most of the people of Freetown, we understood, were the descendants of slaves set ashore from ships captured by the Royal Navy. But there were also guests from among the inland tribespeople: dignified blue-black Muslims from up on the plateau and Mende chieftains from the interior. Among them were two splendid-looking girls of about sixteen, the daughters of an inland chief, who were at boarding school on the Isle of Wight and home now for the holidays.

→They both laughed. “Oh, it’s not so much the heat, it’s these clothes, you see? When we’re home from school in our village our mama makes us go about naked like the others. She says that unmarried girls wearing clothes leads to immorality.”