New Wiki Coffin story

The Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine has turned up trumps again.

After a long hiatus, where a Wiki Coffin story I had written for them ("Robber Crabs") was turned into a promotion for The Beckoning Ice instead, they have published yet another of my half-Maori, half-Yankee hero's adventures.

Wiki Coffin, as his fans already know, is the illegitimate son of an American trading captain, who was silly enough to think that his childless, legal wife would be delighted when he took the boy back home to Salem. Understandably, the instant she had the chance, her husband having sailed off, she shipped the boy on her brother's elderly whaleship, Paths of Duty, which was where Wiki's colorful career as sleuth-seaman began.

That first story was called "Brethren of the Sea."  This latest, the eighth published by this addictive little magazine, is called "The Botanist."  And, like the previous three, it takes place in the exotic waters of the South East Indies.  And again Wiki is in the company of his unlikely best friend, George Rochester, scion of an elite Boston family of lawyers.

Wiki shook his head, “No.  Absolutely not.  Categorically and absolutely no.”

“But you could prevent a vile murder,” George protested.

“By dressing up as a pantomime sailor?  You must be joking!”

Wiki Coffin and his friend, Midshipman George Rochester, were perched in the maintop of the great United States frigate Potomac, and the view was tremendous. The frigate was anchored off Batavia, the Dutch trading hub on the northern coast of Java, and the city with its grid-like pattern of canals and streets lay ahead.  Sternward of the ship, to the north, the cranes and ropewalks of the ship-outfitting islands were silhouetted against the milky horizon.  All around, the great bay was a bustle of ships of all nations, with humbler coastal craft anchored closer to the city.  

Wiki could see the pinisi schooner that had carried him here. They had arrived just this dawn after a pleasant sail from Sumatra to Java, with sacks of pepper on board, and he could see dots of men unloading them. The crew had been small, the captain amiable, and the food very good, and he would have stayed to help unload, and for the next voyage, too, if he had not spied the frigate as they had tacked inshore.

It had been quite a surprise to find the Potomac here.  When Wiki had left Singapore, the frigate had been weighing anchor for South America, so Wiki had not expected to see his friend again for months, if not years.  Naturally, no sooner had he disembarked from the pinisi, than he had taken a bumboat out to the frigate, and climbed the precipitous side.  The bo’sun — or whatever rank the top-hatted fellow at the gangway might have claimed — had recognized Wiki without hesitation, and pointed him at George, who was striding away from the quarterdeck, having just come off duty.  

By mutual consent, they had scooted up the main mast, and here they were, exchanging gossip and news just as if they had left the conversation just the day before. Though, as Wiki remembered it, the last time they had been together on this ship, George had taken him down to the orlop, where the midshipmen lived, in the dank bowels of the frigate.  He was relieved to be up the mast in the fresh air, instead, chatting and relaxing one hundred and fifty feet above the sea.

Before he had revealed his strange idea, George had had lots to relate. Triumphant from the conquest of five pirate strongholds — not that Wiki had noticed any evidence of the Potomac’s vengeful foray during the pinisi’s call at the coast— Captain Downes and his crew had grandly progressed along the coast of Sumatra, through the Straits of Sunda, and then along the northern coast of Java, flying the Stars and Stripes every inch of the way.  Many a broadside had been fired as an exercise — but also, incidentally, to impress the locals.  George had described with great animation the energy of the seamen and marines who had aimed and shot their muskets in perfect time with each other.  And now they were here at Batavia, where George had found a letter from his grandfather.

And so they were back to the reason George had hailed Wiki so gladly, with such open relief....

Buy the magazine to read the rest.