Kensuke’s Kingdom

Everyone warned us against it. Grandma came visiting and stayed onboard. It was all quite ridiculous, she said, reckless, irresponsible. […] Icebergs, hurricanes, pirates, whales, supertankers, freak waves — she heaped up horror upon horror, thinking to frighten me and so frighten off my mother and father. She succeeded in terrifying me, all right, but I never showed it. What she didn’t understand was that we three were already bound together now by a common lunacy. We were going, and nothing and no one could stop us. We were doing what people do in fairy tales. We were going off to seek adventure.

Stella Artois barked her farewells at them, and at every boat we passed in The Solent. But as we were sailing out past the Isle of Wight, she fell strangely quiet. Maybe she sensed, as we did, that there was no turning back now. This was not a dream. We were off around the world. It was real, really real.

I’m looking at my log now. The paper is a bit crinkled and the pages are yellowed with age. My scribbly writing is a little faded, but it’s mostly quite legible. What follows are just a few chosen extracts from this log. The entries are quite short, but they tell the tale. This is how I recorded our great journey. This is how it was for an eleven-year-old boy as we rode the wide oceans of the world onboard the Peggy Sue.

Mom gets quite snappy with us sometimes when we don’t do things right. Dad doesn’t seem to mind, not out here, not at sea. He just winks at me and we forget about it. They play a lot of chess together, when it’s calm enough. Dad's winning so far, five games to three. Mom says it doesn't bother her, but it does. I can tell.

We only spent a couple of days in La Coruña. Mom slept a lot. She was really tired. Dad did some work on the rudder cable while we were there. He’s still not happy with it, though. We set off for the Azores two days ago.

We passed south of an island called St. Helena a few days ago. No need to stop. Nothing much there, except it's the place where Napoléon was exiled. He died there. Lonely place to die. So, of course, I had to do a history project on Napoléon. […]

I saw a sail today, another yacht. We shouted Merry Christmas and waved, and Stella barked her head off, but they were too far away. When the sail disappeared, the sea felt suddenly very empty.

Off Perth, Australia. Until today it has been nothing but empty ocean all the way from Africa. I love it more and more when it’s just us and Peggy Sue and the sea. We all do, I think. But then, when we sight land, we always get so excited. When we saw Australia for the first time, we hugged one another and jumped up and down. It’s like we’re the first sailors ever to discover it.

But I was happy to get back to the Peggy Sue. I missed her while I was gone, like I miss Eddie.

I’ve been sending him cards, funny animal cards, if I can find them. I sent him one of a wombat. I saw a wombat too, and hundreds of possums and tons of kangaroos. And they’ve got white cockatoos in Australia like we’ve got sparrows at home — millions of them.

But out here it’s gulls again. Wherever we’ve been in the world there’s always gulls.

The sun was blazing down. I had not really felt the burning heat of it until then. I scanned the horizon. If there was a sail somewhere out there in the haze, I could not see it. And then it came to me that even if I were to see a sail, what could I do? I couldn’t light a fire. I had no matches. I knew about cavemen rubbing sticks together, but I had never tried it. I looked all round me now. Sea. Sea. Sea.

Nothing but sea on all sides. I was on an island. I was alone.

“Water, we’ll need water. But so do those monkeys, right? We’ve just got to find it, that’s all. And there must be food, too –– fruit or nuts, something. Whatever it is that they eat, we’ll eat.”

It helped to speak my thoughts out loud to Stella, helped to calm the panic that came over me now in waves. More than anything, it was Stella’s companionship that helped me through those first hours on the island.

The jungle droned and cackled and croaked, and all night long the mosquitoes were at me, too. They whined in my ears and drove me crazy. I held my hands over my ears to shut out the sound of them. I curled myself around Stella, tried to forget where I was, to lose myself in my dreams. I remembered then that it was my birthday, and thought of my last birthday back at home with Eddie and Matt, and the barbecue we’d had in the garden, how the hot dogs had smelled so good. I slept at last.

The next morning […] It took me some moments to remember where I was, and all that had happened to me. I was suddenly overwhelmed by one cruel reality after another: my utter aloneness, my separation from my mother and father, and the dangers all around me.

It came to me suddenly that I had seen the old man’s face somewhere before. I had no idea how that could be. As I lay there pondering this, I felt the piece of glass in my pocket pressing into my hip. My spirits were suddenly lifted. I still had my fireglass. I would build my fire again, but this time somewhere he wouldn’t discover it. I would wait for a ship to come, and until then I would survive. The old man had survived in this place. If he could, I could. And I could do it alone, too. I didn’t need him.

It wasn’t only the old man’s laws or the howling of the monkeys […] that prevented me from venturing into his side of the island; it was the orangutan, too. […] I kept wondering, too, what other creatures might lurk unseen, waiting to ambush me in the dark damp of the forest. If the constant jungle talk was anything to go by, the place was crawling with all sorts of dreadful creatures.

Just the thought of the orangutan and the terrors of the unknown in the forest were quite enough to deter me, enough to stifle both my curiosity and my courage. So I kept largely to my beach, my cave, and the forest track up to my hilltop.

Until now, except for occasional gut-wrenching pangs of homesickness and loneliness, I had by and large managed to keep my spirits up. But not any-more. […] I felt more and more isolated, more and more wretched. In the end I decided not to go onto Watch Hill anymore, that it just was not worth it. Instead I stayed in my cave and curled up on my sleeping mat for long hours during the day. I lay there drowning in my misery, thinking of nothing but the hopelessness of it all, how I would never get off this island, how I would die here, and my mother and father would never even know what had happened to me. No one would, except the old man, the madman, my captor, my persecutor.

A large, translucent white jellyfish was floating right beside me, its tentacles groping at me. I tried to swim away, but it came after me, hunting me. I was stung again, in my foot this time. The agony was immediate and excruciating. It permeated my entire body like one continuous electric shock. I felt my muscles going rigid. I kicked for the shore, but I could not do it. My legs seemed paralyzed, my arms, too. I was sinking, and there was nothing I could do about it. I saw the jellyfish poised for the kill above me now. I screamed, and my mouth filled with water. I was choking. I was going to die, I was going to drown, but I did not care. I just wanted the pain to stop. Death I knew would stop it.

I do not know for how many days I lay there, drifting in and out of sleep, only that whenever I woke, Kensuke was always there sitting beside me. He rarely spoke and I could not speak, but the silence between us said more than any words. My erstwhile enemy, my captor, had become my savior. He would lift me to pour fruit juice or warm soup down my throat. He would sponge me down with cooling water, and when the pain was so bad that I cried out, he would hold me and sing me softly back to sleep. It was strange. When he sang to me it was like an echo from the past, of my father’s voice, perhaps –– I didn't know. Slowly the pain left me. Tenderly he nursed me back to life.

It was a picture of a tree, a tree in blossom. His smile said everything. “For you. Japan tree,” he said. “I, Japanese person.” After that, Kensuke showed me all the paintings he did, even the ones he later washed off. They were all in black-and-white wash, of orangutans, gibbons, butterflies, dolphins, and birds, and fruit. Only very occasionally did he keep one, storing it away carefully in one of his chests. He did keep several of the tree paintings, I noticed, always of a tree in blossom, a “Japan tree,” as he called it, and I could see he took particular joy in showing me these. It was clear he was allowing me to share something very dear to him. I felt honored by that.

Every day, dawn to dusk, I translated the world around him into English. We did what we had always done, but now I talked all the while and he would echo every word, every phrase he wanted to. […] Sometimes as I enunciated a new word, I noticed that his eyes would light up. He would be nodding and smiling almost as if he recognized the word, as if he was greeting an old friend. […] Now at last we could talk more easily to each other, the long silence in which our friendship had been forged was over. It had never been a barrier between us, but it had been limiting.

“Soon engine stop, but ship not go down. Big wind come, big storm. I think I die for sure now. But sea take ship and bring me here on this island. Ship come onto beach, and still I am not dead.

“Very soon I find food. I find water also. I live like beggar man for long while. Inside I feel bad person. I think, all my friends dead, all my family dead, and I alive. I not want to live. But soon I meet orangutans. They very kind to me. This very beautiful, very peaceful place. No war here, no bad people. I say to myself, Kensuke, you very lucky person to be alive. Maybe you stay here.”

“You go to sea, little turtle,” he said. “You live there now. You soon be big, fine turtle, and then one day you come back and see me maybe. […] You know what they do, Mica. Mother turtles, they lay eggs in this place. Then, one nighttime every year, always when moon is high, little turtles are born. Long way to go to sea. Very many die. So always I stay. I help them. I chase birds away, so they not eat baby turtles. Many years from now, when turtles are big, they come back. They lay eggs again. True story, Micasan.”

[…] We found several too weak to make the journey, and carried them down into the sea ourselves. The sea seemed to revive them. Away they went, no swimming lessons needed. We turned dozens right-side up and shepherded them safely into the sea.

“It stop when it stop, Micasan […]. You cannot make rain stop by wanting it to stop. Besides, rain very good thing. Keep fruit growing. Keep stream flowing. Keep monkeys alive, you also, me also.”

“I am too old for that new world you tell me about. It is very exciting world, but it is not my world. My world was Japan, long time ago. And now my world is here. I think about it for long time. If Kimi is alive, if Michiya is alive, then they think I am dead long time ago. I would be like ghost coming home. I am not same person. They not same, either. And, besides, I have family here, orangutan family. Maybe killer men come again. Who look after them then? No, I stay on my island. This is my place. This is Kensuke’s Kingdom. Emperor must stay in his kingdom, look after his people. Emperor does not run away. Not honorable thing to do.”