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  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1791

  AUGUST 21

  PRESENT DAY

  AUGUST 22

  AUGUST 23

  AUGUST 24

  SEPTEMBER 3

  SEPTEMBER 4

  SEPTEMBER 5

  SEPTEMBER 7

  SEPTEMBER 10

  SEPTEMBER 15

  SEPTEMBER 16

  SEPTEMBER 17

  SEPTEMBER 18

  Illustrations and Map

  Acknowledgments

  ‘Anihinihi ke ola.

  (Life is in a precarious position.)

  —Ancient Hawaiian saying

  PROLOGUE

  When the American Association for the Advancement of Science met in Anaheim, California, in 1999 to discuss an urgent report on the impact of alien species, the scientists gathered weren’t discussing species from another planet—their report referred to species imported to the United States from other parts of this planet.

  Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel and graduate students Lori Lach, Doug Morrison, and Rodolfo Zuniga estimated the cost to the United States economy from alien species at approximately $123 billion annually—roughly the gross national product of Thailand.

  By 2005, a report called the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment revealed that biological invasions had reached epidemic proportions. At least 170 alien species inhabited the Great Lakes, a single species of American jellyfish had wiped out twenty-six species of commercial fish in the Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea now hosted over a hundred alien invaders.

  In 1988, freshwater zebra mussels sucked into ballast compartments of a ship in the Black or Caspian Sea were dumped into Lake Sinclair and eventually spread throughout the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway. From there, the mussels spread into the American river systems. A female zebra mussel typically lays 30,000 to 400,000 eggs at a time, and by 1991 the hard-shelled little mollusk had spread as far west as the Mississippi River and driven most native species to the edge of extinction. By consuming algae and oxygen and excreting ammonia, this industrious mollusk threatened the entire eastern river ecology of America as it embarked on its biological joyride. It seemed that nothing could stop the zebra mussel.

  By the year 2000, however, a cousin from the Caspian Sea, the quagga mussel, was already catching up to the zebra mussel. In only five years the quagga nearly completely replaced the population of zebra mussels in Lake Michigan, clogging irrigation intakes, infesting turtles and ships, and threatening the whole food chain.

  In the early 1990s, the western corn rootworm hitched a ride on a jet and landed in war-torn Yugoslavia. While humans were preoccupied with their brief and bloody war, the rootworm launched its own permanent one. A single pregnant female may have unleashed what is now more than a billion-dollar annual loss of crops in Europe.

  Of course, alien invaders have wreaked havoc, and driven the course of evolution, throughout the natural history of life on Earth. Five million years ago a land bridge formed between North and South America: it allowed saber-toothed cats to wipe out the flightless nine-foot-tall terror birds that had ruled South America for 20 million years.

  Only 12 thousand years ago, humans followed bison across an icy land bridge from Siberia to North America. There, they found a world ruled by saber-toothed cats. A thousand years later, the cats, woolly mammoths, giant sloths, and an entire ecosystem of interdependent fauna had vanished.

  When Columbus and other European explorers arrived in the Americas 10,500 years later, they brought with them diseases like smallpox and gonorrhea that virtually wiped out the native human populations of the so-called New World. In return, Native Americans may have gifted the Old World with syphilis. But the ships of explorers brought more than diseases to their destinations. The European black rat and the Norway brown rat came along as well, and were arguably more successful than humans in their conquest of the Americas.

  North American crayfish were imported to Europe in the mid-1800s to replace the native species, which had been wiped out by plague. Unfortunately, the plague-resistant North American species was so successful it carried the plague through all the European river systems where it was introduced, wiping out any original crayfish populations that remained.

  In the 1930s, Nazi Reich Marshall Hermann Goering decided that the clever American raccoon was an aesthetically pleasing addition to Germany’s woodland creatures. Now the American raccoon threatens to eradicate the Rhineland’s vineyards and decimates the German wine industry.

  Pet owners have introduced their share of unexpected species to their own backyards. Eugene Schiffelin, a Shakespeare enthusiast who thought all birds mentioned by the bard should inhabit the New World, released sixty starlings in Central Park one fine March day in 1890. Because of a single line in Henry IV, there are now 200 million starlings in America, all descended from Schiffelin’s original thirty pairs.

  In 2000, an aquarium owner released two adult Chinese northern snakehead fish into a pond in Maryland. Within two years, one hundred of the voracious carnivores—which grow as long as three feet and have nasty teeth with which they devour fish, amphibians, mammals, and even birds—were discovered in the pond. Officials were concerned because the primitive northern snake-head can walk on its fins and survive three days out of water—and the pond was only seventy-five yards from the Patuxent River. Though the pond was pumped full of poison, snakeheads began showing up in the Potomac, and as far south as Florida by 2004.

  The industrious honeybee that we see in our flower gardens was intentionally introduced to North America by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s and remains an indispensable partner to agriculture, having wiped out most of the native species that pollinated native plants. Not satisfied with the honey output of the Italian honeybee, bee geneticist Warwick Kerr brought queens of an African bee species to Brazil in 1956. After producing Africanized honeybees, twenty-six hybrid queens accidentally escaped. Since then, their aggressive Africanized progeny have been expanding their range northward at a rate of 375 miles a year, threatening to eradicate all Italian bee colonies in their path.

  In 1986, the Varroa “vampire” mite arrived in North America from Southeast Asia. By 2005, forty to sixty percent of North America’s beehives were wiped out by the vampire mites, and millions of hives had to be rushed from other continents to save the year’s crop.

  We are, at all times, in an astonishingly precarious position in relation to the vast web of species around us. All it takes is one new invader—a snake on a piece of driftwood, a seed in a bird dropping, or a pregnant insect in the landing gear of a jet—to throw all the old rules out. The balance that we see around us is a snapshot of a perpetual world war that is, for the most part, acted out too slowly for us to perceive. We prize the fragile ecology of the Hawaiian Islands, and yet 5 million years ago there were no Hawaiian Islands. All of their species evolved from species that were, at one time, invaders that upset the balance enough to entrench themselves and flourish, or perished in the effort.

  It is on islands, in particular, that these battles of attrition, which usually take place outside the human timescale, come into sharpest focus. On islands, the battles are swift, and the annihilations total, and dominant species with no competition often proliferate to create multiple new species.

  Travelers to tropical islands are familiar with the forms they must sign declaring that they will not transport any species to or from their destinations. In the past, however, humans deliberately brought the plants and animals in their biological entourage with them wherever they went—especially to islands.

  When Polynesians colonized the Hawaiian Islands, the chickens they brought with them carried avian pox, which swiftly decimated native bird species. Europeans would later introduce cats, p
igs, and tree snakes, with what are now predictable results.

  In 1826, the H.M.S. Wellington accidentally introduced mosquitoes to the island of Maui. The mosquitoes carried avian malaria. Entire populations of native birds, which had no immunity to the disease, were wiped out or driven to higher altitudes. Feral pigs exacerbated the problem by rooting around the forest undergrowth and creating breeding pools of standing water for the mosquitoes. As a result, twenty-nine of the island’s sixty-eight native bird species have vanished forever.

  As David Pimentel told the scientists attending the AAAS convention after presenting his findings, “It doesn’t take many troublemakers to cause tremendous damage.”

  No one could have imagined that island species could turn the tables on mainland ecologies. No one had even heard of Henders Island.

  —Elinor Duckworth, Ph.D., Foreword, Almost Destiny (excerpted with permission)

  AUGUST 21

  5:27 P.M.

  “Captain, Mister Grafton is attempting to put a man ashore, sir.”

  “Which man, Mister Eaton?”

  Three hundred yards off the island’s sheer wall, H.M.S. Retribution rolled on a ten-foot swell setting away from the shore. The corvette was hove to, her gray sails billowing in opposite directions to hold her position on the sea as the sailing master kept an eye on a growing bank of cloud to the north.

  Watching from the decks in silence, some of the men were praying as a boat approached the cliff. Lit pale orange by the setting sun, the palisade was bisected by a blue-shadowed crevasse that streaked seven hundred feet up its face.

  The Retribution was a captured French ship previously called the Atrios. For the past ten months, her crew had been relentlessly hunting H.M.S. Bounty. While the British admiralty did not object to stealing ships from other navies, they had a long memory for any ship that had been stolen from theirs. It had been five years since the mutineers had absconded with the Bounty, and still the hunt continued.

  Lieutenant Eaton steadied the captain’s telescope and twisted the brass drawtube to focus the image: nine men were positioning the rowboat under the crack in the cliff. Eaton noticed that the seaman reaching up toward the fissure wore a scarlet cap. “It looks like Frears, Captain,” he reported.

  The dark crack started about fifteen feet above the bottom of the swell and zigzagged hundreds of feet across the face of jagged rock like a bolt of lightning. The British sailors had nearly circled the two-mile-wide island before finding this one chink in its armor.

  Though the captain insisted that they thoroughly investigate all islands for signs of the Bounty’s crew, a more pressing matter concerned the men of the Retribution now. After five weeks with no rain, they were praying for freshwater, not signs of mutineers. As they pretended to attend their duties, 317 men stole furtive, hopeful looks at the landing party.

  The boat rose and fell in the spray as the nine men staved off the cliff with oars. At the top of one swell the man wearing the red cap grabbed the bottom edge of the fissure: he dangled there as the boat receded.

  “He’s got a purchase, Captain!”

  A tentative cheer went up from the crew.

  Eaton saw the men in the boat hurling small barrels up to Frears. “Sir, the men are throwing him some barrecoes to fill!”

  “Providence has smiled on us, Captain,” said Mister Dunn, the ruddy chaplain, who had taken passage aboard Retribution on his way to Australia. “We were surely meant to find this island! Else, why would the Lord have put it here, so far away from everything?”

  “Aye, Mister Dunn. Keep a close counsel with the Lord,” replied the captain as he slitted his eyes and watched the boat. “How’s our man, Mister Eaton?”

  “He’s gone in.” After an agonizing length of time, Eaton saw the scarlet-capped man finally emerge from the shadow. “Frears’s signaling…He’s found freshwater, Captain! He’s throwing down the barrecoe!”

  Eaton looked at the captain wearily, then smiled as a cheer broke over the decks.

  The captain cracked a smile. “Ready four landing boats for provisioning, Mister Eaton. Let’s rig a ladder and fill our barrels.”

  “It’s Providence, Captain,” cried the chaplain over the answering cheer of the men. “’Tis the good Lord who led us here!”

  Eaton put the spyglass to his eye and saw Frears toss another small barrel from the fissure into the sea. The men in the longboat hauled it alongside.

  “He’s thrown down another!” Eaton shouted.

  The men cheered again. They were now moving about and laughing as barrels were hauled up from the hold.

  “The Lord keeps us.” The chaplain nodded on the ample cushion of fat under his chin.

  The captain smiled in the chaplain’s direction, knowing that he’d had the shock of his life these past months observing life aboard a working ship in the King’s navy.

  With a face as freckled as the Milky Way, Captain Ambrose Spencer Henders resembled a redheaded Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar, to his crew. “An island this size without breakers, birds, or seals,” he grumbled. He stared at the faint colors swirled in the island’s cliff. Some bands of color seemed to glitter as if with gold in the last light of the setting sun. After sounding all around the island they had found no place to anchor, and that fact alone baffled him. “What do you make of this island, Mister Eaton?”

  “Aye, it’s strange,” Eaton said, lowering the glass—but a glimpse of Frears falling to his knees at the edge of the crevasse made him raise it hastily to his eye. Through the spyglass he found Frears kneeling in the crack and saw him drop what appeared to be the copper funnel he was using to fill the small kegs. The funnel skittered down the rock face into the water.

  A red flash appeared at the sailor’s back. Red jaws seemed to lunge from the twilight and close over Frears’s chest and head from each side, jerking him backwards.

  Faint shouts drifted over the waves, echoing off the cliff.

  “Captain!”

  “Eh, what is it?”

  “I’m not sure, sir!”

  Eaton tried to steady the scope as the deck rolled. Between waves he saw another man in the longboat catch hold of the lip of the fissure and scramble up into the shadow of the crack.

  “They’ve sent another man up!”

  Another swell blocked his view. A moment later, another rolled under the ship. As the deck rose, Eaton barely caught the image of the second man leaping out of the crevasse into the sea.

  “He’s jumped out, sir, next to the boat!”

  “What in blazes is going on, Mister Eaton?” Captain Henders lifted a midshipman’s scope to his eye.

  “The men are hauling him into the boat. They’re coming back, sir, with some haste!” Eaton lowered the glass, still staring at the fissure, now doubting what he had seen.

  “Is Frears safe, then?”

  “I don’t believe so, Captain,” Eaton replied.

  “What’s the matter?”

  The lieutenant shook his head.

  Captain Henders watched the men in the boat row in great lunges back to the ship. The man who had jumped into the water was propped up against the transom, seemingly stricken by some fit as his mates struggled to subdue him. “Tell me what you saw, Mister Eaton,” he ordered.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  The captain lowered the scope and gave his first officer a hard look.

  The men in the boat shouted as they drew near the Retribution.

  The captain turned to the chaplain. “What say you, Mister Dunn?”

  From the crack in the cliff face came a rising and falling howl like a wolf or a whale, and Mister Dunn’s ruddy jowls paled as the ungodly voice devolved into what sounded like the gooing and spluttering of some giant baby. Then it shrieked a riot of piercing notes like a broken calliope.

  The men stared at the cliff in stunned silence.

  Mister Grafton shouted from the approaching boat: “Captain Henders!”

  “What is it, man?”

  �
�The Devil Hisself!”

  The captain looked at his first officer, who was not a man given to superstition.

  Eaton nodded grimly. “Aye, Captain.”

  The voice from the crack splintered as more unearthly voices joined it in a chorus of insanity.

  “We should leave this place, Captain,” urged Mister Dunn. “’Tis clear no one was meant to find it—else, why would the Lord have put it here, so far away from everything?”

  Captain Henders stared distractedly at his chaplain, then said, “Mister Graves, hoist the boat and make sail, due east!” Then he turned to all his officers. “Chart the island. But make no mention of water or what we have found here today. God forbid we give a soul any reason to seek this place.”

  The hideous gibberish shrieking from the crack in the island continued.

  “Aye, Captain!” his officers answered, ashen-faced.

  As the men scrambled from the boat, the captain asked, “Mister Grafton, what has become of Mister Frears?”

  “He’s been et by monsters, sor!”

  Captain Henders paled under his freckles. “Master gunner, place a full broadside on that crevice, double shot, round and grape, if you please! As you’re ready, sir!”

  The master gunner acknowledged him from the waist of the ship. “Aye, sir!”

  Retribution fired a parting shot into the crevasse on lances of fire and smoke as she came about, blasting the cliffs like a castle’s ramparts.

  9:02 P.M.

  Captain Ambrose Spencer Henders dipped a kite-feather quill into the porcelain inkwell on his desk and stared down at the blank page of his logbook. The oil lamp swung like a pendulum, moving the shadow of the quill across the paper as he paused, weighing what to write.

  AUGUST 22

  2:10 P.M.

  The Trident cut the deep water with her single-hulled bow and turned three wakes with her trimaran stern. She resembled a sleek spacecraft leaving three white rocket trails across a blue universe. The storm clouds that had driven her south for three weeks had vanished overnight. The sea reflected a spotless dome of scorching blue sky.