All the Tea in China

CHAPTER SIX

“‘You’,” I said to “You” two days later, “have you never longed for a life on the ocean wave, a home on the bounding deep? Does not the blood of your sea-faring ancestors surge in your veins at the very words?” His reaction was piteous: he fell upon his knees, cowering and quaking.

“Oh Sir, pray Sir, do not send me off to one of those floating hells to be flogged and keel-hauled and worse; I have been a good boy and kept myself clean as you bade me, I do not deserve such a fate, indeed I do not!”

“Come,” I said sternly, “pull yourself together. There is no talk of hell-ships and floating orphan-asylums: I am newly appointed a supernumerary officer in a fine, lavishly-fitted opium clipper, all mahogany and brass and famed for comfort and lavish food. Why, they call it the ‘Coffee Ship’ because of the generosity with which its people are treated. All officers are expected to have a servant; the Captain keeps a butler, two Chinese boys and a wife to boot, the owners tell me. Moreover, I have just purchased a share in the venture, subject to my being able to come to terms with the Captain: my only duties are to supervise the ‘schroffs’ and the ‘comprador’s’ accounts; yours are to keep my linen clean, fetch my victuals from the galley at suitable times and, when there is a grand dinner in the Captain’s Cabin, to help wait at table. I would not have thought this too arduous for a biddable foundling such as you. However, if the spirit of adventure does not stir in your breast, if you have no lust to sniff the scented breezes of tropic isles, if, in short, you pine to return to the Foundling Hospital …?”

“Sir,” he cried, “I shall follow you to the ends of the earth, I swear I shall, for you are a good and kind master, no boy could ask for a better. Let me, I beg you, go a-seafaring in your service.”

“Very well,” I said.

“May God bless you, Sir!” he said.

I could not, at that moment, recall the useful English word ‘hrrumph’, but I made a non-committal grunt which sounded quite like it. Even in those days, long ago, I was hard, hard and had no affection to waste on little charity-school bastards.

“Tell me your name,” I said curtly, “for I have never mastered it and I need to inscribe it upon the ship’s papers this afternoon.”

He sneezed.

“Good luck,” I said civilly, “but now, the name.”

He seemed to sneeze again. My patience ebbed.

“The name, if you have one!” I cried. “Sneeze later, in your leisure time. At present, give me your name.”

He scuttled under the counter, scrabbled there a while, fished out a wax-bespattered copy of Pilgrim’s Progress. There on the fly-leaf, many times repeated, was the name “Horace Ashley Urquhart”. Clearly, there could be no such name. I looked at him sternly.

“Do you realise, ‘You’, that boys who mock their masters are often whipped?”

“Sir, it is my name, I swear.” He sneezed again. In a little while I could say it myself, in a sneezing fashion, while ‘You’ kept his face solemn.

After a while we agreed that his name was Orace, which I could pronounce without seeming ridiculous, and off we went to the East India Docks.

The East India Docks presented a scene of indescribable confusion; it was as though the Tower of Babel had collapsed alongside the Slough of Despond. A turmoil of cursing stevedores, ship’s chandlers, longshoremen, wharfingers, slop-slop touts and other desperate wastrels jostled and reviled the decent money-lenders, lodging-house crimps and pickpockets who were about their lawful occasions, while the sewage-enriched waters of the Thames flopped fatly against the filthy sides of the ships. The snarlings and shrieking of obscene words were horrifying, deafening; it was like the Stock Exchange on a hot afternoon with gilt-edged shares tumbling, I was quite “taken aback”, as sailors say. “You” — Orace, I should say — seemed not to mind, he felt at home, he had survived countless dinner-times at his charity-school.

We fought our way along our particular Dock towards the good ship John Coram, with whose master, Captain Knatchbull, I had made a tentative compact, although not yet his acquaintance. He had a forty-five per-centum share of the venture and was ready to sell me a morsel of it for £1,750, along with the right to sail as a supernumerary officer, unpaid but with merely nominal duties, the right to officer’s food for myself and ship’s rations for my servant, and, above all, the concession to buy a chest or two of opium at the Calcutta auctions on my own account and to ship home the proceeds in the form of some fine Chinese porcelains.

As we approached the John Coram we were halted by a mob of fellows who were plainly salt-water seamen, staring at a huge notice, painted on a square of old sail-cloth and displayed beside the brig next before our vessel. “THIS SHIP, THE YANKEE CLIPPER ‘MARTHA WASHINGTON’ WILL BE FIRST THIS SEASON IN THE CANTON RIVER. A FEW PRIME HANDS MIGHT STILL BE TAKEN ON: COGMEN & SEA-LAWYERS NEED NOT APPLY. FREE SLOP-CHEST & FINEST GRUB ON THE 7 SEAS”.

On the next ship — our John Coram — a little, bearded man was dancing up and down and raving through a shouting-trumpet. As he finished, the captain of the Yankee ship appeared on his bridge, spread his arms open wide in the most confidential fashion and roared in turn.

“By Gosh and by Golly, are you bully-boys about to swallow that slop? Ask that old turtle-back to show you his holds: why, they’re spading the goddam dry-rot out of her with shovels and her keelson’s as soft as a dad-blamed cabbage!”

“By thunder!” bellowed back our Captain Knatchbull, “that’s all roly-moly and Yankee spit! Just cast your eye on his bottom, that’s all I ask, his bottom!” The seamen and I walked to the edge of the dock and, to be sure, there was something like a kitchen-garden growing on the planks of the Yankee ship, for all its gleaming brasswork at the rails.

“Now,” roared on the little British captain, “come aboard a good British ship like brave British tarpaulins and make your marks on my watch-bill and your fortunes, likely enough! I’ll warrant my ship’s heart of oak is as sound as your own!”

The men shuffled and mumbled; a few of the younger ones sidled up the gang-plank of the Martha Washington, the rest put their heads together then went aboard the John Coram.

I looked at Orace. He was quaking a little.

“Be of good cheer,” I said kindly, confidently, “no one shall hurt you.” I was young then and foolish, you see, foolish.

We went aboard. At the break of the poop we were met by a great, coarse bear-like man who addressed me in a strange accent which I later learned was that of the former American Colonies of Great Britain. He was wearing a sort of uniform and so I touched the brim of my hat in a civil fashion, at which he sketched out a gesture towards the brim of his.

“Carolus Van Cleef,” I said. “Calling on Captain Knatchbull. With my servant.”

“He’s swearing in new hands,” he said curtly. “Wait here.” I thought about that. It did not seem to me a courteous reply.

“No,” I said. “I shall come back tomorrow. Pray tell him that I called.” With that I turned on my heel.

“Just a minute, brother,” he called, “don’t be so all-fired tetchy; suppose you go to Dirty Annie’s on the wharf there and get a mouthful of maw-wallop — Captain Knatchbull will be free in half an hour, I guess.”

“Very well,” I said. “Thankyou.”

Dirty Annie’s was a filthy shanty on the wharf-side: it was full of rough sailor-folk. I ordered some “Blind Scouse” for that was what was chalked on the “Ordinary” board — it proved to be a tasty and nourishing sort of vegetable stew — and some porter. There was no porter, I had to drink something called “cold four”, a thin, sour ale; I gave most of it to Orace to drink with his bread and cheese, telling him that it would make a man of him. He drank it gratefully, he was a good boy.

When we returned to the John Coram the American officer — he was, it turned out, the First Mate and named Lubbock — greeted me with a grudging civility and shewed me into the Captain’s cabin, telling Orace to remain outside the door. The cabin was sumptuously furnished; a comprador with a brown face but splendid livery gave me a chair and a glass of brown sherry or perhaps Marsala; I was young and green, I could not tell the difference. After a little while the inner door opened and the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life came in. Her breasts were trained on me like twin carronades, her hair was the colour of a lion’s mane, her mouth was a moist invitation to sin and her eyes were languorous, drowsy. My loins stirred. It seemed an age before I could collect myself and rise to my feet: she did not seem to mind, she was, perhaps, used to such an effect. Indeed, it may even have pleased her.

“Carolus Van Cleef,” I mumbled, bowing stiffly.

“I am Mrs Knatchbull. You may not call me Blanche, for you are to be only a supernumerary officer, I believe.” Her accent was not quite British, nor were her mannerisms.

“How do you do?” I said.

“Captain Knatchbull will be with you presently,” she said, “he is praying just now. He always prays after he has had his will of me; I wonder why that is?” With great sang-froid I offered her a chair and watched entranced the sinuosity with which she settled her person into it. Her great, violet eyes were fixed on me, as though awaiting an answer to her question.

“The weather is fine, is it not,” I said carefully, “for the time of the year?”

“Why do you speak of the weather?” she asked. “You are clearly not an Englishman. Who else remarks on these matters?”

I thought of saying “hrrumph” but could not, at that moment, command the pronunciation of the word. I was saved by the opening of the inner door and the entry of the small, bearded Captain.

“Carolus Van Cleef,” I said, rising to my feet again. “Supernumerary officer.”

“Queen Anne’s dead and her bum’s cold,” he retorted. “Have you any other news from the Indies?”

Clearly, this was an English joke.

“No, Captain,” I said, “except that I have come aboard.”

“Don’t trifle with me, Sir, and you call me ‘Sir’, not ‘Captain’.”

“Yes, Sir,” I said.

“No, damme! You don’t say ‘yes’, you say ‘aye aye’!”

“Aye aye,” I said, anxious to please in so small a matter.

“SIR!” he shouted.

“Sir,” I agreed. He simmered awhile, like a kedgeree-pot.

“You shall have a drink with me,” he said at last.

“Aye aye, Sir,” I said.

“Boy! Bring a jug of piss-quick, and look sharp!”

In the twinkling of an eye a smartly-liveried Chinese boy appeared with a tray. “Piss-quick” proved to be gin with marmalade stirred in and topped up with hot water. It was not very good to drink, but better than Dirty Annie’s “cold four”. Indeed, at that moment the Captain cocked an ear, leaped up and strode to the door.

“Your servant’s spewed across two square yards of my deck!” he thundered. “Fined two shillings, Mr Van Cleef!” And then, in an even greater voice: “Mr Mate! The watch is idling, get this deck swabbed if any of your quinsied cripples and quim-stickers’ touts are on their feet!” He had a fine command of language, I could not understand one half of what he said, but it was fine to hear, fine.

“Now, Sir,” he said, swallowing his glass of “piss-quick” and munching the pieces of orange-peel, “I hear you’re ready to take up a piece of my share in this venture. How’s this?”

“I have heard you well-spoken of, Sir,” I said carefully, “and that your ship is a fast and happy one. I have decided to join the venture, subject to my being satisfied that what I have heard is correct.”

“Satisfied?” he cried, raising his voice thunderously again (I could not understand how so little a man could command so great a volume of sound). “Satisfied, Sir? Does it not occur to you that this interview is so that I can determine whether I am satisfied with you?”

I thought this over carefully for in those days I was not sure how clever I was.

“Of course, Sir,” I said at last, “but you will appreciate that the money I am venturing is the whole of my fortune and I am sure that you admire prudence in so young a man as myself … who was once an entered apprentice.”

He made that English “hrrumphing” noise which I have never properly mastered, and poured himself another glass of the “Piss-quick”. Perhaps, in pouring none for me, he was admiring a young man’s prudence: for my part, I applied myself to finishing the remainder of the brown sherry which the comprador had poured for me ten minutes before.

The way I had phrased my remark about having been taught prudence was tentatively Freemasonic. Guardedly, he asked me another question. I breathed a sigh of relief to the Great Architect and answered, translating freely from the Dutch. He sent his wife out of the cabin and invited me to share a certain word with him. I demurely suggested he begin, as I had been taught, and we lettered-and-halved it. He did not like my Dutch version of the last letter, so I wrote it down on the corner of a scrap of paper. This satisfied him, especially when I tore off the scrap of paper on which I had written and swallowed it. This made him a little benign, although no less severe, and it soon became evident that he had made great progress in certain things and had passed under a certain architectural feature whilst I, because of my youth, had still to make my Mark. I hope I make myself clear but if I do not it is of no possible interest to you.

He drank some more of his nasty drink, patted his beard dry with a great pocket-handkerchief and gazed at me sternly and a little benignly.

“Well, now, young Lewis,” he said (if you are good grandchildren you will one day understand why he called me that), “I daresay you wish to look over my ship?”

“Do you think I should, Sir? I know nothing of ships,” I answered diffidently.

“Then learn, Sir, learn! Mr Mate! Pray give my compliments to the Third Officer and say that I should esteem it a courtesy if he could spare the time to wait upon me at some time during this watch.” I could hear the First Mate bellowing incomprehensibly dirty words from the quarter-deck, none of which seemed to echo the sardonic civilities of the Captain.

“My first mate,” said Captain Knatchbull almost apologetically, “is invaluable. He is, as you have seen, or will see, a mere anthropoid ape who swings himself along on his knuckles, but there is none like him for coaxing a recalcitrant watch aloft to shorten sail on a black and stormy night. His principle is that the men should be more afraid of him than of death; it seems to serve well, for the men are even less intelligent than him and are good Christians every one: they have to attest to this before signing Ship’s Articles.”

In the time that it took him to say this, the Third Mate appeared in the cabin doorway, panting for breath and tugging at a last button on his tunic.

“Ah, Mr Lord Stevenage,” said the Captain with heavy and, as it seemed to me, over-stressed civility, “pray allow me to apologise for disturbing your doubtless well-earned repose.”

The Third Mate was a young and well-enough looking fellow, perhaps five years older than me but not so well set up and at first glance seeming older still because of the lines of dissipation or illness which marked his well-bred features.

“I was not asleep, Sir,” he replied stiffly; “you will recall that I am standing both anchor watches at call until we sail.”

“So you are,” said the Captain, “so you are, to be sure. Now, let me present Mr Van Cleef, who proposes to do us the honour of sailing with us as supernumerary officer; his appointment is that of, ah, let us say, Paymaster. I know that you will be glad to share your commodious cabin with him. His servant shall sling his hammock in the disused pantry next along. Perhaps now you will favour me by showing Mr Van Cleef over and around the ship.”

The young officer opened his mouth then closed it again.

“Thankyou Mr Lord Stevenage,” said the Captain. “That will be all.”

Outside the cabin we looked at each other with entirely straight faces, silently challenging each other to display an emotion. One of us wanted to laugh, the other to curse; neither of us was sure which was which. Perhaps both for both things, I do not know now, it was long ago.

“Follow me, if you please,” he said at last. We went down the gangplank and onto the dock. I flicked an eye in the direction of Dirty Annie’s. His eye, too, flicked there momentarily but he was on duty, you understand, and British. Moreover, the Captain could have seen us through the scuttle.

“Mr Lord Stevenage,” I began.

“I say,” he said, “look, my name is Lord Peter Stevenage; it amuses the captain to address me in the droll way you have heard but I’m afraid I don’t much care about it. In front of him or the other officers you’d better call me Mister Stevenage; in private you may call me what you will.”

I looked at him. He had many pimples but in all other respects his face was frank and open, despite the marks of dissipation.

“Peter?” I said, diffidently.

“That will do very well,” he said, suddenly smiling in the most engaging way. “And what am I to call you?”

“It is some while since anyone called me Karli,” I said.

“Then Karli it shall be. Now, to our task. I have brought you onto the dock so that you may see our little ship from the outside.”

It looked an enormous ship to me but I had no experience of such things in those days. In fact it looked like a man-of-war, for there was a long line of gunports down its side.

“Yes,” he said following my gaze, “my father had her built almost like a Royal Navy corvette by old List of Wootton Creek, near Cowes, for in those days the Royal Yacht Squadron was an auxiliary fighting force. Indeed, the John Coram — although that was not her name then — fought well at Navarino in 1827. She mounted a broadside of eleven guns as well as a long brass piece amidships but now half of the ports are empty and rigged for sweeps.”

“Sweeps?”

“Long oars. Damn’ useful if you’re becalmed and drifting, especially if there’s a lorcha full of pirates about to swarm over you.”

“Ah, yes,” I said, my stomach jerking uneasily. “And your father …?”

“Had her built, yes. I lost her at cards. Now, you’d better pay attention, for the Captain may quiz you about her. She’s the only ship-rigged vessel in the opium trade; the rest are brigs and schooners and a couple of barquentines. She’s of 330 tons burthen but has little cargo-space: opium takes up very little room and, homeward bound, we carry nothing but a specie-room full of silver and a few chops of the new teas if we’re in Canton River at the right time.

“That is why, d’you see, the officers’ and crew’s quarters are so ah, commodious.” There was a note of bitterness in his voice.

“I am sorry,” I said, “that I have been foisted upon you.”

“Oh, damme, that’s all right. Glad of your company. D’you snore much?”

“I do not think so.”

“Oh, good. Now, pray observe the lines of the ship.” For quite five minutes he described and rhapsodised about the ship’s shape, using rare and wonderful words which at that time meant nothing whatever to me. “You see that, I’m sure?” he finished.

“Yes,” I said. “Or at least, I think I remember most of what you have said so far.” He made that engaging smile again.

“That’s the spirit. When we’re at sea I shall point out other, coarser vessels to you and you will understand when you compare them with what you are looking at now, from here.”

He paused for two or three minutes while I dutifully etched the image of the John Coram onto my mind’s eye — not a difficult task for one who had already learned to memorise some two hundred cryptic marks on Delft and porcelain.

“Now,” he went on, “notice her breadth of beam: this allows her to carry a great press of canvas — and her heavy armament, which you may be glad of when we find ourselves amongst the lorchas of Hok-keen and the Ladrones.”

“There cannot be too many guns for my taste,” I said frankly.

“Quite right; well said. The buggers must, at all costs, be kept at a distance, for once they’re aboard you may as well count yourself a dead man and clap a pistol to your temple, for they are fiends incarnate.”

I thought that he was trying, in a jocular, English way, to frighten me, so I said something brave and carefree, I forget what. He looked at me strangely, then changed the subject.

“The new owners have made a bad mistake, to my mind. This yacht — ship — was designed for spread of sail, not hoist. By that I mean that she was not built to carry sky-scrapers.”

“Sky-scrapers?”

“Yes. Extra sails on extension masts — moonsails, skysails and so forth. In my father’s day our masts seldom rose more than a few inches beyond the rigging that supported them; although, in exceptional summer-like weather, we sent up topgallant and royal masts in one.”

“Really?” I said without comprehension.

“Yes. But Captain Knatchbull has contracted the new Yankee disease of flying kites far above the royals on spars the weight of salmon rods, his nature is such that he can brook no rival, he would send us all to Davy Jones’s locker rather than let another ship eat the wind out of him, still less pass him.”

“These skysails and so forth are, then, a bad thing?” I asked carefully, so as to make sure. He made a sort of exploding noise.

“God’s teeth and trowsers!” he shouted. “Isn’t that just what I’ve been telling you? Damme, look at the rake of her masts! Would any sane man send up skyscrapers to top ’em? Can’t you see she’s built for spread?” Then, in a kinder voice, he added “No, I forgot, pray forgive me; no doubt you’ll see what I mean by the end of the voyage. If any of us are still alive.”

“Is the venture so desperate as that?” I asked. He recovered himself, breathed deeply.

“This is Captain Knatchbull’s fourth voyage in the country trade. He is living on borrowed time, for he is already rich; his motive now is only to excel all other captains in the trade, he cares nothing for his life or the lives of those he commands.”

“And you?” I asked.

“I? I am a ruined man. The family fortune’s entailed; the houses are mortgaged to the hilt; I cannot lie with my wife because I have the syphilis, d’you see — the Great Pox. In any case, she lies with another. And to me. Before I am thirty the signs and symptoms will become excruciating: I’d far rather take a Celestial Chinee knife in my liver then fetch up in the Incurables Hospital, sans teeth, sans nose, sans everything.”

“I am sorry,” I said, lamely.

“I’m not.”

We went up the gangplank again, he whistling merrily or so it seemed; I rather glum and wishing myself well out of this perilous enterprise.

“Cheerily now, Karli!” he cried, clapping me upon the shoulder, “don’t let me take the wind from your sails: there’s many a worse ship afloat — aye, and many a worse skipper — and this one will make your fortune if ever a ship can!” I sketched out a smile.

“That’s the thing!” he cried, “if we’re to be messmates we must keep each other jolly, don’t you see?”

He took me forward to the fo’c’sle and threw open the door. Several open-faced, clean, smiling fellows jumped to their feet with alacrity: it was clear that Peter Stevenage was popular with the crew.

“Here are our hearts of oak, Karli; at least, those who have finished wenching and come aboard. Some of them served under my father when this ship had another name and ‘RYS’ after it, eh, Tom Transom?”

“Yes indeed Mr Peter,” grinned a capable-looking old shellback, knuckling his forehead.

“Pray get on with your scrimshaw and make-and-mend, lads,” said Peter, “but first say how d’ye do to Mr Van Cleef, our new supercargo, who will be bunking and messing along with me. He is new to the sea so I look to you all to show him the ropes and spars and to cover up his mistakes until he finds his sea-legs, what?”

“That we shall, Sir,” they growled, some “making a leg”, some tugging a forelock (but in no servile way), some bobbing their heads awkwardly.

“I had thought a fo’c’sle to be a kind of hell-hole,” I remarked as we made our way aft. The place had surprised me by its roomy comfort and warmth.

“Most of them are,” he replied, “many are little better than Mayfair tenements. But this one was designed for a crack yacht, you recall, and has been enlarged by throwing into it the former officers’ quarters; we officers now live in the passengers’ staterooms aft and the captain occupies the former owners’ quarters.” He did not say this at all bitterly; my respect for him grew every minute.

“We carry a double crew, d’you see, for we need so little cargo-space; in fact we muster three strong watches so that even in the wildest weather there can always be a watch below. We are one of the few ships that can weather the Cape and every man a dry suit of slops to his back. Depend upon it, that’s a rarity!”

“I am sure of it,” I said politely.

“Moreover, every man-jack is an able-bodied seaman, salted and dried, who can hand, reef and steer and heave the lead, turn in a dead-eye, gammon a bowsprit, fish a broken spar, rig a purchase, knot, point, splice, parcel and serve as well as spin his own yarns and lines in our ropewalk.”

“Upon my word!” I murmured.

“Yes,” he went on enthusiastically — this was clearly a topic close to his heart — “I’m bound to say this for Knatchbull — Captain Knatchbull, I should say — he has kept up my father’s standards so far as crew is concerned, no cogsmen and fakers in this ship. Some of the Yankee ships that are coming into the trade now prefer to sign on a gaggle of waterfront rats, wasters, the scum of the seas who can get no other work,’ then break their spirits with brass knuckles and the rope’s-end until they will do anything — feats no true seaman in his senses would attempt — for fear of losing their rations, their tot of rum — or their front teeth. ‘Bully’ Lubbock, our ‘bucko’ first officer, used to command such a ship until he was arraigned for triple manslaughter on the Barbary Coast of San Francisco.”

“He did not, I confess, strike me as a wholly cultivated gentleman,” I said.

“He is not a gentleman of any sort,” said Peter sharply. “He is a boor, and a dangerous one. Steer clear of him, give him a wide berth and for God’s sake do not let him anger you: one proud retort from you and he will find ways of making your life a hell upon the waters.” My spirits, so recently raised, sank again. Peter, once again, clapped me upon the shoulder.

“Come, cheer up, I did not mean to daunt you. He is a well enough fellow in a rough way. Pretend to admire him and you will have no trouble. Now come and meet the doctor, the mainstay of our little ship.”

“You carry a surgeon?” I asked, surprised.

“See for yourself,” he replied, kicking hard at the door of a curious sort of round-house shed a little aft of the main-mast and roaring, in a voice new to me, “Come out of there, you black-enamelled bastard, we’ve come to hang you!” On the instant, the door burst open and a monstrous blackamoor appeared, almost naked and brandishing a meat-cleaver. On seeing Peter his face split open like a melon, displaying an inordinate number of exceedingly white teeth. He hid the cleaver behind him and spoke in a sheepish, high-pitched whine.

“Knowed it was you Maz Peter; cain’t fool ole doctor after all thiz years; anyways, I hain’t got nuthin on ma conshequence that’s hanging stuff.”

“Not even in Alabama?” asked my friend quizzically.

“Now hesh, Maz Peter; thass ole stuff, and Alabama’s a million miles away I reckon.”

“‘But that was in another country, and, besides, the wench is dead.’” This was a quotation, I could tell. Perhaps from Nimrod himself, for all I knew. “Be that as it may,” Peter went on, “this is Mr Van Cleef. He will be your friend, for he is well versed in the works of Captain Marryat, and you, in turn, are to treat him with respect — by which I mean that you are not to poison him or I shall flog you myself.” The negro cook drew himself up, so far as the galley-door allowed.

“P’ison, Maz Peter? Why, you know I haint p’isoned nobody this ten years, ’cept accidental.”

“Precisely. Let there be no accidents. By the same token, what hell’s brew is that on the mess-kid bench, smelling so vilely?”

“That hain’t no hell-brew, Maz Peter, that my famous portable soup an’ mighty glad you’ll be of it, soon as we clear the Cap Verdies.” I looked at the curious, toffee-like slabs which were cooling in shallow trays. Peter explained that this was, indeed, highly concentrated soup which would set into a tough jelly: a piece no larger than the joint of a thumb would, he promised me, make a pint of nourishing soup and was scarcely poisonous at all except for a marked laxative effect which was often welcome during a long voyage. The “doctor” gazed at it proudly, ever and again scooping off a handful of the blowflies which were revelling upon its surface and squashing them in his huge, pink palm.

Peter jingled the coins in his pocket and looked at me in a meaningful way. I understood in a moment and slipped a half-sovereign into the doctor’s hand. The hand closed upon it then opened again: the gold piece was gone! The next moment he retrieved just such a piece from my ear, with a merry chuckle. Clearly, the fellow was versed in the ancient African magic, although now I am inclined to believe that it was mere legerdemain. Be that as it may, I never laid out a piece of money so fruitfully: throughout the voyage that cook saw to it that my Dutch belly never wanted for plentiful and delicate fare. (Indeed, the whole ship’s company ate uncommonly well: the owners had the good sense — rare then and just as rare today — to know that an extra £100 laid out on galley-stuff over and above the usual rate of provisioning made for a sturdy and concentrated crew.)

From the galley we descended to the gun-deck, cable-tier and finally the hold, which was sparsely filled with cases and packages consigned to gentlemen in the East India Company’s service — much of it fowling-pieces, pistols and rifles — as well as boxes of bibles for colporteurs at the Cape and in India, crates of bottled India Pale Ale, fashionable mantle-makers’ rubbish for nabob’s ladies, china and silver-ware for their tables, hams, brandy, a few barrels of whisky (scarcely worth the carriage at 2/6d a gallon but there are Scotch officers who positively prefer it to brandy!), whalebone splints for the stay-makers, hats from Mr Lock, boots from Mr Lobb and umbrellas from Mr Briggs. My new friend explained that the vacant spaces in the hold would be filled at the Cape, for we were to take aboard a great deal of fiery African brandy, many cases of the delicious Constantia and Stellenbosch wines, bales of ostrich feathers which, although light, take up much space for they cannot be compressed, as much ivory as the owners’ agents would have been able to purchase and, with luck, some rhinoceros horns. The Chinese, he assured me with a solemn countenance, prize these last mightily: a cup made of such a horn will turn colour the moment poison is poured into it — no mandarin dares be without one — and the powder produced during the turning of the cup is worth its exact weight in gold because of its aphrodisiac properties. (I have seen rhinoceros horns as tall as a man.)

All the time Lord Peter was pouring facts and measurements into my ears; I coiled these away into my memory like a jolly jack-tar stowing an anchor-cable. At last he said that for the moment we were at the end of our task.

“Have you any questions?”

“Well, I should like to know why the ship is named the John Coram? Who was he?”

“Sir,” piped up Orace from his respectful place at my heels, “Please Sir, I know!” We turned and stared at him; for my part I had forgotten that he was there.

“Well, boy?” said Peter, not unkindly.

“Sir, John Coram was a great merchant in the City of London and Great Coram Street where your friend Mr J. lives is named after him and amongst his other philanthropical works he founded the Foundling Hospital where I was fortunate enough to receive a good education and before that he was a master ship-builder in the American Colonies please Sir.”

The extent of the child’s knowledge was less amazing than the speed at which he rattled off his lore.

“Very well!” cried Peter, giving him a halfpenny.

“You are a good boy,” I said, patting him upon the head. He did not flinch, as he would have done a few weeks before.

“Now,” said Peter, fishing out a beautiful gold repeater from his fob, “it is my watch below and I fear I must take advantage of it, for I am standing watch and watch about and ready to swoon with fatigue.”

“Why is this?” I asked, puzzled.

“Oh, I came aboard drunk three nights ago and forgot to tip my hat to the quarter-deck. Re-living old times, d’you see; had forgotten I was no longer the owner’s son. It’s of no consequence. Now, you’d better make haste and report to the old — ah, to the Captain’s cabin; he sometimes becomes a touch querulous at about this time of day. I’ll see to it that your portion of my cabin is cleared for you by tomorrow noon: I’d count it a favour if you didn’t rouse me till then. Delighted to make your acquaintance. Sure we shall get on famously.”

With that he walked away, using a sort of wooden gait which betrayed the extreme fatigue which he had hitherto concealed. I looked at Orace.

“Poor gentleman,” he said, respectfully. I said nothing; Orace probably knew more about such states than I did in those days.

In the cabin, the Captain seemed quite a different man from the irate person he had seemed to be earlier, but I was not deceived.

“Well, Sir,” he said heavily, jovially, “what d’you think of my ship? Does she please you? Could you support the tedium of a profitable pleasure-cruise with us, d’you suppose?”

My mind started framing an English sentence which would tell him to go to the devil and perform curious acts with him, but at that very moment the inner door opened a crack and Mrs Knatchbull’s lovely face appeared, wearing an expression which delicately mingled humour, exasperation and a certain, well, a certain invitation. I was vexed to find myself answering the Captain in a civil — indeed an amiable — voice.

“I shall esteem it an honour to serve under you, Sir,” is what I heard myself saying.

“Good,” he said, “good.” He said it again once or twice, as though he approved of the word “good”. Then he pulled some papers toward him and from them rattled off at great speed some antique gibberish which I could not comprehend but which, I realised later, comprised the Ship’s Articles.

“You are, of course, a practising Christian,” he muttered, dipping a great pen into an inkpot and not meeting my eye, still less my nose. I opened my mouth. He peered up at me through the thickest of his eyebrows. The faintest rustle of silken petticoats filtered through the inner door.

“Aye aye, Sir!” I said staunchly.

“Sign here,” he said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

That last evening of my life ashore I spent in the street called Strand: curiously, this word means “shore” — was that not apt?

I ate a great quantity of turbot, some boiled mutton and a few nicely-dressed woodcocks, each set upon a toast which had been spread with the bird’s “trails”, peppered. “Trails” means guts. I also drank some wine.

Then I bade a prolonged and salty farewell to the tailor’s daughter whose name I forget and, as an especial treat, to her little sister also, for who knew when next I would find such charming and biddable girls? Then I drank some more wine, I believe. (I do not remember this wine but I recall a trifling sense of malaise the next day, which convinces me that I did drink a little something.)

That next day, malaise or no, I looked to all my small business affairs, made a bargain with my landlord about the lease, sent my stock-in-trade to Mr Jorrocks’ warehouse and my new sea-chest, replete with sensible clothes and improving books, to the John Coram at the Docks. Then I went to a shop in Jermyn Street where two genial partners called Mr Paxton and Mr Whitfield selected for me one black Bradenham ham, one pink York ditto, an incomparable Stilton cheese, three salted tongues, a monstrous Bologna sausage which they assured me would travel to the Indies and be none the worse for it after a year and a tinned box of delicate sea-bread called “Thin Captain’s Biscuits”. (They assured me that, but for a printer’s error, the name would have been “Captain’s Thin Biscuits”.) When I told them that I was a friend of John Jorrocks himself and that I would pay in coined gold, there and then, they cheerfully deducted seven and one half per centum from my score. Most of their business was with the nobility, you see.

Then, on advice, I took a cab to Number 205, Regent Street, where a Mr Beattie sold me a large revolving pistol made expressly for him by J. Lang himself. It was in a mahogany case, complete with moulds for both ball and bullet, a wad cutter, powder-measures and everything else proper to such a weapon. It was very costly, but the best that money could buy. I felt something of a fool as I walked out of the shop, my pockets lighter by so many guineas. It was to be several months before I congratulated myself upon buying so reliable a weapon.

Lord Peter Stevenage roared with laughter as he saw Orace staggering up the gangplank that afternoon; the child was so heavily burdened that I was having to push from behind to keep him upright. Had I not so recently become an English gentleman I believe I would have carried some of the parcels myself.

“You luxurious bugger!” cried Peter merrily, “is this the last of your stores? Your dunnage has been streaming aboard all day, quite altered the ship’s trim, burst me if it hasn’t! Come to the cabin, if that child can still walk, and let’s overhaul this gear of yours.”

He seemed taken aback at my choice of clothing and, since he was now free of the watch, offered to take me to a ship-chandler’s slop-shop. There were many such places within a stonesthrow of the docks but Peter led me unerringly to one where, he said, the proprietor was too intelligent to rob one more than was reasonable. He made me buy two suits of oilskins, two pairs of sea-boots and some huge slabs of smelly, greasy wool which he said would prove, when unfolded, to be warm underclothing. I protested that my duties were to be mercantile rather than maritime and that I had no intention of scrambling up and down masts and riggings in the wind and weather-oh — why then should I need such things?

He looked at me strangely.

“Well,” he said, “you never know. It might come on to rain or something, d’you see. Now, you’d better have a couple of ‘thousand-milers’ — and one for the little bastard, too.” A “thousand-miler” turned out to be a sort of durable shirt made of black twill; so-called, Peter solemnly assured me, because it should be washed and changed after every thousand miles of the voyage, whether it was dirty or not. These shirts did not appear comfortable at all but Peter explained that I must ask the Doctor to put them in the copper for me when next he was boiling a “duff” or pudding: this would make the garment supple and kindly to the skin, because of the suet-grease in the water.

I made a few other purchases at his suggestion, such as spermaceti candles, sticks of coarse barley-sugar, a pocket compass with folding sun-dial attached and some strong soap containing the biniodide of mercury to combat an infestation called “the crabs” by sailor-folk.

Our cabin, when we had brought in this final consignment of my goods, seemed quite full — “something of a Hoorah’s nest” Peter called it — but he soon shewed Orace how and where to stow everything in ship-shape and seaman-like fashion and we were snug in next to no time. It was by no means a squalid little room — the fittings of brass and mahogany reminded me that this had once been the yacht of a Lord — and the hard mattress of my bunk was of good horsehair and not smelly. Peter’s possessions were few: a sea-chest of clothes, a brass-bound mahogany chest of arms, a shelf of books. Some of these last were by heathen authors, some by a person writing under the nom-de-plume of “Jane Austen” — I came to know his work well during the voyage, he had a wonderful insight into the female mind, wonderful.

Peter and I cracked a bottle of Lord Windermere’s Sercial before settling down for the night; it was rich and strong. He dowsed the candle early for we were to sail with the tide at first light.

Ships, in these nasty nowadays, are made of iron and propelled by coal. This may be a good thing, I cannot say. What I do know is that the ships of those days, real ships, wooden ships, were alive: they manifested their life in a thousand ways which at first irked — sometimes frightened — me, but later became a reassuring cradle-song when I had learned to single out each noise and understand its origin. The gurgle of the running tide past the ship’s strakes, the gentle schlipp-schlopping of the wavelets created by a passing vessel, the soft, grinding bump, more felt than heard, of a fender nudging the quay-side and the moan of standing rigging set vibrating by the wind — all these I had heard before, although on a smaller scale, but now there were countless other noises new to me. In particular I recall from that first night the placid straining and grunting of great timbers which had learned to live and work together, the rattle of the gangplank and boom of feet on the deck-planks which told of Johnny-tars rejoining ship at the last moment before midnight, the sudden clangour of the ship’s bell marking the watches and, once, the squalling scream of the ship’s cat locked in a death-struggle with some unhappy rat.

The smells, too, remain with me, although I have long since, and often, smelled worse. Peter’s hair-lotion was sharp and agreeable; it reminded me of the verbena plant in my mother’s window. Tar and timber and paint are good smells; so were the mingled richnesses of our cabin-stores, especially the Stilton cheese. The London River, laden with sewage, was less good and, when the ship pitched a little as another vessel passed, our bilges, disturbed, offered up a stench of graveyards. The ship’s cat had pissed somewhere within range of my nose: I resolved to take the first opportunity to boot it overside, for I do not love such creatures. Dogs, yes, within reason. Overriding all, strange to say, was the smell of horses from London town. It was to be a long time until I again sniffed that smell — and with pleasure.

I slept a little towards dawn, but uneasily because of the strangeness of these noises and smells, and it was soon awakened by Peter’s turning out, washing his face and dressing. His sense of time, like that of all good sea-faring men, was acute, he was ready for duty at the precise moment that three bells of the second watch sounded (this means half-past five in the morning) and a seaman thumped upon our door, calling out “Mister Stevenage to stir himself if you please, Sir!” Seeing that I was awake, Peter gave me a grimace of apology and a friendly wink as he left the cabin. He looked cheerful but old and ill.

There was no more attempt at sleeping for me: the ship resounded to the trampling. I huddled on some clothes and went on deck. A flat-footed but elaborate ballet was taking place, performed with what seemed random precision by the ship’s people, guided by strange words in a clarion voice from the Captain, repeated in even stranger language by the First Mate and retailed by Peter in some part and also by the Second, whose voice was shrill and agitated. I was pushed and trodden upon by many a seaman who had eyes only for his incomprehensible task; scuttling for refuge I narrowly escaped being sent up the foremast by a purple-visaged boatswain.

“Mr Van Cleef fined two shillings,” came the captain’s roar from the bridge, “for interfering with the working of the ship. Fined a further three shillings for being on deck without a neck-cloth and with his breeches unbuttoned.” I slunk aft through the throng of intent sailors. As I slunk I heard the Captain cry “Mr Lubbock! Mister, I say! Pray contain yourself with that down-East starter of yours, the men are working well enough.” I continued to slink. I did not, you understand, “know the ropes” at that time.

All this hubbub and bawling and trampling was of course quite incomprehensible to me, but it was not many weeks before I could tell what the men were about simply by cocking an ear out of my bunk, and could bandy such words as “garboard” and “halyard” with the best of them. At this particular time, all we were doing was hauling the ship out into the stream, heaving up the great anchor, singling-up and casting-off the shore lines and setting the fore-topsail, so that we could drop down-river to the Pool with accuracy and without feeing a pilot.

I, meanwhile, climbed sulkily back into my bunk and fell asleep again, only to start up, cracking my pate cruelly against the upper bunk, when a rattling shriek from the best-bower anchor chain betokened — to those who understood such things — that we were in the Pool of London and swinging round into the tideway.

Peter popped his head round the cabin door with a haggard grin and began to explain that — here he was interrupted by a bellow of “Cangcoxnlarbdquarboscrew” in Lubbock’s grating Yankee yell — the Mate was, in fact, summoning the Captain’s Coxswain and the crew of the larboard quarter-boat — Peter, I say, began to explain that the Captain and the First Officer would now be rowed around and around the ship and would study the trim of it. This was important, he said, for the phrase “on an even keel” is no mere form of words: a vessel down by the head is ill to steer and dangerous in heavy weather, while if it is down by the stern its sailing properties are impaired. A list to one side, too, however slight, can also slow the craft down and be a danger in heavy seas, especially when close-hauled. I nodded sagely.

Our John Coram, you understand, was a dainty and responsive ship, the men swore that she could almost talk and had a sweet and willing temperament, responding gaily to any little attentions but becoming unhappy if her trim was neglected. The consumption of stores, particularly water, as the voyage wore on, would call for many another of these rowings around the ship whenever we were in port or a dead calm.

Peter went on to give me astonishing figures about the weight of water a ship’s company can consume in a given period but I fear I must have yawned in his face for suddenly he laughed and went back to his duties.

I must have dozed. Peter aroused me in seamanlike fashion by kicking the edge of my bunk so vigorously that I started up and again cracked my head. He brought, in his own hands, our breakfast or nuncheon. It consisted of the sounds, cheeks and other delicate tidbits of fishes, fried up with pieces of onions and potatoes and anointed with the Doctor’s famous ketchup. Peter watched me narrowly, I could tell he expected me to display the signs of seasickness but I disappointed him. The sea is one of the few things which has never made me sick. I ate in an almost greedy fashion, wiping up the gravy with one or two little hot rolls which the Doctor had made. Peter, who was a poor eater, watched me with admiration.

“Well, now,” he cried when I had done, “come up on deck, there’s a place called Margate on our starboard beam and you needn’t go below again until we wear ship to round the North Foreland.”

I waved sentimentally to Margate in case the little chambermaid should be watching our bonny ship go sailing by: I much hoped that she had not foolishly allowed herself to become pregnant, because I had no recollection of her name except that it began with a “d” or perhaps a “b” and was therefore unable to help her.

Peter gave me a rude awakening the next day by emptying part of his shaving-water in a friendly fashion onto my sleeping face. I cried out many an obscene word in Dutch (and some in English which certain young persons had taught me) but when I could open my eyes I saw the pleasant, dissipated face of my friend, who was tying his neck-cloth and beaming at me kindly.

“Come, Karli,” he cried, “five minutes to wash, shave, dress and be on deck. Bustle about, do!”

“Is it pirates?” I mumbled, “Mutiny?” He laughed.

“Worse than that,” he scoffed. “It’s Sunday! Five minutes to be at the break of the poop or God forgive you, for the Captain won’t.”

I could make nothing of this, nor could I ask for explanations for he had whisked out of the cabin, but I took him at his word, except that I did not shave for my beard was light — I only needed to shave twice a week. I achieved the break of the poop in the very nick of time. The ship’s people were lined up in ranks and wearing their best slops; wearing looks, also, of pious respectability such as are proper to the English when worshipping their God, who speaks English Himself and prizes such clothes and looks. The Captain intoned many a resounding phrase, commending our voyage on this, its first Sunday, to both God and Her Britannic Majesty, but it seemed to me that his voice carried a certain irony, a want of true fervour. I observed, whilst his voice boomed sonorously over my bared head, that neither the First nor the Second Mate was present. Since the ship was hove-to this seemed strange to me but I was, of course, ignorant of the ways of sailormen. The Captain, his tone even more ironic, commanded the men to sing a certain hymn, calling for a man named Evans to “fugle a note”. The man Evans, sure enough, stepped forth from the ranks, threw back his head and delivered himself of a note approximating to that of “G” with all the brio of a barnyard fowl. He then turned about and waved his arms in such a way that the men instantly began to bellow

“All things bright and beautiful,

All creatures great and small”

with every appearance of pleasure. It was, for me, a most unhappy experience for I have ever been a lover of music.

At the very moment that the hymn finished — the men had derived great comfort from it and, who knows, perhaps a tone-deaf God in an English heaven may have been relishing it, too — the First and Second Mates tramped aft, each carrying a cloth bundle.

“Searched forrard, Sir,” bawled Lubbock; “found one flint-lock, one cap-fire and three Bulldog pistols, several spring-loaded knives, three filthy books (one illustrated), eight flat and three square-face bottles of spirit-liquor and one copy of The Seaman’s Friend by Dana.”

The Captain’s visage took on a most convincing expression of sorrow and disgust. He raised his head to the heavens.

“Oh Lord,” he roared, “look down in mercy, we implore Thee, upon our erring brethren — chuck it all over the side, Mr Mate — and help us to shew them the paths of Thy witness — yes, chuck the liquor over too, Mister — and guide their steps to Thine ineffable salvation — hold your tongues, you dogs! — Amen. I said AMEN!” he added in a voice of thunder.

“Amen,” mumbled the crew, not too surlily.

“As to those of you who have broken the Laws of God and the Ship’s Articles by bringing aboard these devil’s toys, you are pardoned, like sheep who have gone astray.” There was a gentle susurrus of relief. “All but one: the accursed sea-lawyer who owned the vile Seaman’s Friend by Dana, that primer for mutineers; he signed, as you all did, a declaration that he would be bound by King’s-ship discipline. I sentence him to a dozen with the cat but this sentence will only be carried out when next he errs. Only the First Mate and I shall know his name and there will be no victimisation — make a note, Mister Mate, if you please — but if I hear a breath of sedition from the forecastle the man will feel the sword of the Lord and of Gideon about his shoulders.” There was a long pause. I was not facing the men but I could hear the slight shuffling sound of their bare feet.

“Dismissed!” cried the Captain at last.

“Get forrard!” bellowed the mate.

They got — suddenly no longer surly nor Godly but laughing and skylarking and cheerily kicking the bums of those of their comrades whose contraband had been sequestered. Well could I see how Britannia might rule the waves for ever and that Britons never shall be slaves.

The Second Mate and I were to dine with the Captain and Mrs Knatchbull — whom I was not to call Blanche — and I presented myself at the cabin promptly at six bells of the second watch; that is three o’clock in the afternoon. This seemed unconscionably late to me but amongst Englishmen it is a matter of dignity: the later you dine, the more genteel. As I write, half a century after these things occurred, some fashionable idiots are dining as late as six o’clock in the evening and supping after the theatre by candle-light, like Spaniards. The English are quite mad, from the lowest to the highest, but I think they will conquer the world for they are the only folk (excepting the brash Americans who do not count) who know that they are right in all things. For my part, I like them, except the few clever ones.

Dinner was very good, there was a sucking pig. I had never eaten pig before and — not because the Captain was watching me narrowly — I ate copiously of it, for I am not a religious man. It was entertaining, too, to watch the Second Mate gaping at Blanche Knatchbull’s bosom as she leaned over her plate across the table from him. I sympathised; indeed, I stole a glance myself from time to time. Her nipples were of an intense terra-cotta colour and large, large. After dinner, at the Captain’s request, she favoured us with a song. It was called “Sweet Afton”. She had a splendid, rich contralto voice, exactly one semi-tone flat. The young pork in my stomach would have curdled had I not been entranced by the charming way she had of filling her lungs from time to time, for her gown was flimsy for so robust a young woman. All too soon the Captain apologised for keeping us from our duties, fishing out his great golden chronometer. As we closed the cabin door, with many a thank and bow, we heard him say, “Be ready in four and one half minutes, Blanche.” No doubt the beauty of the song had inflamed his animal passions. He was a strange man. For my part, I strode the deck for a while, admiring the often-described patterns of the scend of the sea, as well as the various kinds of blue which the sky exhibited, until I was cool enough to go below, or “downstairs” as a landlobble would say. In my bunk I began to read a book of verses by three people called Bell — one of them was called Acton, I forget the others — which had appeared in the bookseller’s just before I set out on my travels. It was abominable rubbish; a trio of thwarted virgin ladies could have written it. With their unemployed left hands.

I snoozed over this trash until awakened by Peter coming off watch and telling me that we were under all plain sail and on the larboard tack, making best use of light airs from the south-west.

“Does this mean anything?” I asked querulously. He smiled amiably.

“No, not really. What I should have said is, we’re going along the English Channel — you’ve heard of that, I’m sure? — but the wind isn’t quite behind us, so we’re sort of pointing at the South coast of England for the time being.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“It isn’t a bad thing,” he said. “We’re getting along, d’you see, but in a sort of zig-zag fashion.”

“I understand you perfectly,” I lied, “but, more to the point, will there be anything for supper?” He must have heard footsteps for he flung open our cabin door dramatically and waved in the boy Orace, who was clutching a napkin-ful of hot bread under his left arm and carrying a mess-kid full of something wonderfully savoury-smelling in his right hand. As he laid out the forks and spoons I questioned the child, as a good master should.

“Have you eaten, Orace?”

“Oh, yes, indeed, Sir. I helped the doctor for two or three hours this afternoon, peeling roots and such, and he has been most generous, giving me roasted gobbets of meat, little patties and other good things. I am quite full to the brim, Sir.”

“Good,” I said, gruffly and not without a tincture of jealousy. “But, pray, what is this mess?”

“Sir, the Doctor calls it Kari: it is a stew much liked in the Indies, he says. Pieces of mutton simmered along with rare, hot spices. There is a pot of rice underneath: you must put some of this on your plate along with the Kari but, when the Kari stings your mouth, on no account must you drink water, the Doctor says, for this will worsen the stinging.”

“Get out,” I said.

This rare, fiery dish was good. At first I was alarmed when the sweat burst out of my scalp and my teeth seemed to be loosening, but Peter, who had eaten it before, laughed merrily and told me to be of good cheer: the only evil effect might be a certain flux of the bowels next morning. As I ate, the ferocity of the spices seemed to lessen and all sorts of subtle flavours made themselves manifest. It was — is — a wonderful dish and there are many forms of it, as I learned later. (You, my grandchildren, may scoff when I say that a man might do very well if he opened an eating-house in London itself offering such exotic stews; but give the matter some thought. This suggestion may be the only legacy you will receive.)

We seemed to spend an unconscionably long time in the English Channel (I call it that because I am writing in the English language, to my best ability, and because the English have more ships of war than the French); at one time we had to cast anchor or heave-to in the shelter of the lee of an island called Wight, because the wind had veered further into the west and was now what Peter called “dead foul” for our voyage.

“Dead foul?” I asked, alarmed, for the phrase seemed an ill-omened one.

“Cheer up, Karli,” he laughed, “That’s just a sailor’s term meaning it’s blowing exactly from where we’d like to sail. It’s not worth tacking long boards in the Channel, the Captain’s decided we may as well wait for the wind to change; there’s lots of things for the men to do meantime.”

There were indeed lots to do. The sailmaker was given some handy old seamen to help him overhaul the sail-locker and to make a start on some new-fangled studding-sails; the carpenter and his mates were to make a huge ballast-box which would be lashed to the deck, full of pig-iron, and moved from port to starboard when the ship needed trimming (the Captain, meanwhile, was forever being rowed around and about the ship, squinting and glaring at her trim); I was, without being ordered so to do, peering at the trim of the Captain’s wife while pretending to check the comprador’s accounts and manifests — a hopeless task, I realised at once (the accounts, naturally) because I could tell that he was my master. A simple, gently-nurtured Jew of Holland is but a child when confronted with an experienced half-Asian comprador. I wasted no time on trying to find his small deceits — I sleep more easily without a knife between my ribs. I had already, quite against my will, earned his grave dislike when the Captain, seeking for light tasks with which I might earn my supernumerary officer’s status, had ordered me to take over the keys of the slop-chest from the comprador. The slop-chest was in fact a small room or lazarette ’tween-decks, from which, under my eagle eye, a bosun’s-mate (whom they jokingly called the “pusser”) dispensed shirts, canvas trowsers, kerchiefs, chunks of pigtail-twist tobacco, soap, lucifer matches, bandages and other comforts such as tiny packages of tea, coffee and sugar; all set against the sailors’ pay-warrants. The slop-chest did but little business so early in the voyage, for all of those tarry-breeks who could afford to do so had stocked up with such things before they came aboard, but I was shocked at the prices — and I am not one who is easily shocked at prices, as many people know to their cost. Being young and fearless, I sought an interview with the Captain — this also gave me an opportunity to eye Blanche, who seemed never wholly to close the door to her sleeping-cabin, nor ever to be more than thinly-clad during her flittings to and fro across the aperture.

The Captain listened with a face difficult to read whilst I made my case against the exploitation of his sailor-folk. My eloquence was, I need not say, marred from time to time by the fleeting apparition of Blanche across the half-opened door. When I had finished he sat for some minutes with his bearded chin sunk upon his breast. I waited respectfully, hoping that he had not fallen asleep. At last he broke silence, gave judgment.

“No piss-quick, Mr Van Cleef,” he said, “that’s an indulgence I only allow myself in port. But you’ll take a glass of schnapps with me.” It was not a question. The schnapps was good and fiery, fiery.

“Now, Mr Van Cleef,” he said, “in the ordinary way I would rebuke you for bringing into question the running of the ship, every particle of which is my responsibility and under my ceaseless surveillance. Every splinter and thread of it. Nothing escapes me.”

“Aye aye, Sir,” I replied stoutly, wondering whether his words or my sailor-like response were the more absurd.

“On the other hand,” he went on, tucking his hands behind the tails of his coat and commencing to pace both up and down the stateroom, “on the other hand you have, as an officer, an obligation, nay a duty, to bring to my attention any venalities and tergiversations on the part of your subordinates, have you not?”

“Aye aye, Sir,” I said, but his glare told me that this was, for once, the wrong thing to say. I tried “Indeed, Sir”, which seemed more palatable.

“You will therefore ascertain from the comprador,” he went on, resuming his pacing, “the exact cost price of all articles in the slop-chest. From this you will deduct ten per centum, which will be pretty well the extent to which the comprador will have lied to you.” He seemed splendidly unaware of the comprador’s presence at that very moment, refilling our schnapps glasses. “You will then add twenty per centum to the corrected cost-figure to allow for spoilage and handling and so forth. This will be the price at which the ship’s people will buy the goods. Is that clear?” Blanche’s charming form was passing and re-passing the half-opened door to the sleeping cabin; she seemed to be clad in black stockings and a petticoat of pale-green gossamer. A phrase sprang usefully to mind.

“Abundantly, Sir,” I said.

The wind remained foul and there was much to do, so we tarried another while in the bay or bight of Sandown. It rained very much as it always does near that Isle when the wind comes from the southwest. The common sailor-folk were too busy to be allowed to go ashore — indeed, they were still recovering from having been ashore before joining the ship — but we officers were told that we might take a quarter-boat to Bonchurch. Lubbock and the Second and Lord Stevenage were eager to sample the delights of the little town; I hung back, offering to look after the ship in their absence. My deeper, chivalrous reason was the thought that the Captain, too, might go ashore, leaving Blanche unprotected except for me. In the event, it was Blanche who, at the last moment, decided on a jaunt to the shore, leaving me alone with Captain Knatchbull. I strode the deck moodily, gazing at the feeble lights of land and wondering when next I would have such another opportunity to throw away. Orace found me and gave me “the Captain’s compliments and he’d esteem it a favour if you’d sup with him and play after.”

“Play after?” I asked, concealing my terror.

“Sir, yes Sir, those were his very words. He will have meant a game of chance or skill, will he not, Sir?”

“To be sure,” I said. “To be sure.”

Supper was simple but wholesome: only some ham, some pressed silverside of beef, half of a handsome game-pie, a salad of warm, vinegary slices of potatoes and watercress, a savoury morsel of toast with a strange thing upon it which looked like a cat’s turd but tasted delicious, and some of the wonderfully smelly Stilton cheese which I had learned to love. I ate well; the Captain beamed upon me.

“You play backgammon, of course?” he said. I was at a loss and mumbled that I had never heard of it but was keen to learn. When the Chinese boy brought the board in I recognised it instantly: it was the game which we call tric-trac in the Netherlands, every idle, shiftless, loafing wastrel plays it incessantly in our taverns. I was very good at it indeed, as you can imagine.

“Sir,” I said, “I now realise that I know this game a little, it was the English name which confused me.”

“Good,” he said, eying me narrowly, “I was beginning to fear that you were one of those fellows who ask to be taught a game then, having won because of the indulgence of their opponent, puts his success down to ‘beginner’s luck’ while he pockets the guineas.”

I drew myself up angrily. “Sir!” I said, for he had described the behaviour of a schnorrer, “Sir, I shall not …” He raised a hand and spoke in the friendliest fashion.

“Calm yourself, young man, I spoke provocatively to unsettle your nerves, so that you would play badly, which makes me as venal as I thought you, does it not?” I knew not what to say. “Moreover, Mr Van Cleef, pray remember that no officer may challenge the master of a ship on a point of honour — if that were permitted promotion would be too rapid and too chancy.” He laughed shrilly, as though at some memory, then collected himself. “Perhaps,” he added, soberly and, it seemed to me a little slyly, “I also made that last remark to add to your confusion, eh? Eh?”

Confused I was, and angry, but my head was clear enough to decide that it would be prudent to let the Captain win. The stakes he named were trifling, you see, and it seemed to me clear that he loved to win, since he prepared the ground so thoroughly. This art of winning games without cheating will one day be erected into a science, depend upon it. To the English, bloody war is a game but a game is bloody war.

In the event I had no need to let him win: the dice fell foul for me again and again, while for him they seemed anxious to please. Even he admitted that Lady Luck had smiled upon him and he agreed to doubling the small stakes so that my revenge might be sweetened. This next game, try as I might, I could not lose; everything fell right for me and he glared suspiciously at every clumsy move I made. I won. As a concession to my youth and poverty we had not been using the big doubling-die but now it was brought out.

From then on I fell upon evil times; try as I might I could make no headway against the cunning Captain and the malevolent dice. Every blot of mine was hit; I could re-enter not one of my stones from the bar; he blocked me, made primes again and again and, in the last game, shut me out utterly.

When it came to the reckoning I was shocked at how much I had lost: it took all my aplomb to crank onto my face the careless smile of the English milord who has lost a country estate on a hand of écarté.

“You play a capital game of backgammon, Mr Van Cleef,” he said, clapping the board shut. “I trust you will indulge me in this innocent pastime again. And here, I fancy, is my dear spouse, refreshed with such innocent dissipations as the town of Bonchurch has had to offer.” Sure enough, Blanche entered, throwing off her boat-cloak, smoothing her rumpled hair and astonishing me with a smile so unguardedly amorous, yet so enigmatic, that I stumbled as I rose, then stumbled worse over my polite goodnights.

“Yes,” said Peter, as we tumbled into our bunks, “there was a little something of a subscription ball and a dice-raffle — it was quite diverting after ship-board life but the women, oh, burst me, the women, they were like so many poll-parrots swathed in last year’s organdie. A sorry sight. No, I ‘didn’t dance with Mrs Knatchbull; indeed, I don’t remember seeing her after the first few minutes. I have the impression that Lubbock carried her off to call on some friends in Ventnor, just down the coast.”

“Goodnight,” I said. He sat up.

“Have I said something to vex you?”

“Of course not, Peter. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

If the wind in the English channel veers far enough to the west you may be sure that it will back again just so soon as the barometer rises. The Second Mate told me this while I nodded sagely, for, clearly, it meant something. What happened in the event was that the rain stopped the next day, the wind changed from the SW to the S and then to the SSE and soon we were battering our way down-Channel, close-hauled on the larboard tack, the sails booming and rigging screaming and sheets of spray knifing across the deck. It seemed a frightful storm to me, a very act of God; I did not want to drown like a rat in my cabin, I fled out. From the Second’s cabin, next door, came a noise of snoring — should I rouse him and give him time to make his peace with his Maker? The crash of a sea hitting our side made me selfish: I rushed on deck, looking wildly about me, threaded my way between thinly-clad sailors who, all oblivous of their peril, were heaving at various ropes, chanting strange words as they stamped the deck with their bare feet; and after many a drenching with spray fetched up in the shelter of the galley. Inside, the doctor was fisting out great lumps of salt pork from a keg and roughly slicing them into a pan full of frying onions. He was braced against the side or bulwark of his galley and deftly tilting the pan each time it threatened to spill over, singing a deep-voiced and barbarous song.

He rolled a kindly yellow eyeball at me.

“Hot roll in the oven, Mr Cleef, sah. Only jess the one, if yo please; rest’s fo’ the Captain’s table — Maz Lubbock’s supping in de Cabin tonight.”

This gave me two other things to think about beside a watery grave: Lubbock and a hot roll. Unwilling to offend the Doctor, I fished one out, dancing it between my fingers until I could split it open. As I did so the Doctor reached over and spooned some hot onion and pork gravy onto it; I clapped the roll together and, feeling like a schoolboy, crept out of the galley and braved the wild winds and the weather-oh until I was back in the cabin. Peter was there, towelling his naked body, some dry clothes ready beside him, the soaked ones dripping from a piece of cod-line he had rigged from the edge of my bunk to a nail in the bulkhead.

“How uncommonly thoughtful of you, my dear chap,” he said, twitching the roll from my fingers, “you are clearly learning the ways of the sea, for you know enough to greet a mess-mate coming off watch with a bite of something hot and tasty.” I did not rob him of his illusions; I fumbled in my tin box for a Thin Captain’s biscuit to gnaw while I asked him whether our frail barque would survive the dreadful tempest. He spluttered a little: I believe that, had his mouth not been full of hot bread crammed with fried onions and delicious pork gravy, he would have laughed.

“I think,” he said gravely, having swallowed the last exquisite morsel and pulled on a fresh pair of drawers, “I think that we have ridden out this particular Act of God: Indeed, for some twenty or thirty hours we may have little more than a fresh wind until we sight Ushant.”

“Ushant?” I quavered. “What is that? I supposed that we were bound for the Indies and the China Coast. Why are we going to this Ushant?”

“We are not going there, Karli, we are looking for it. So soon as we see it we shall know where we are and shall leave it, God willing, on our port quarter. It is merely a headland which we must weather, d’you see.”

“Ah,” I said in an intelligent way.

“After Ushant we shall drive sou’west across the skirts of the Bay, of course.”

“Of course, Peter. This Bay is …?”

“Biscay,” he said solemnly. “Biscay. The weather there is often calm, mild and a joy to sailors.”

“Capital!” I cried.

“But never at this time of the year,” he went on. “At just this season the seas are as high as mountains, the winds seem the bitter enemies of man and many a tall ship has sunk without trace, dragging all hands down with her to Davy Jones’s Locker.”

“But, surely …” I began.

“Yes, surely, our little ship is well-found, well-officered and well-manned: we shall probably cross Biscay with the loss of but a few of us — and we can replace the spars which will be carried away with a few weeks of labour.”

“I see,” I said nonchalantly, fumbling in the tin box for another Thin Captain’s. My voice was perfectly steady.

“That is, of course, unless we fall in with the Portuguese sardinho-fishers,” he said.

“And what might they be?” I asked, my voice still steady. He lowered his voice, leaned towards me, his eyes wide.

“Fiends incarnate!’ he whispered. “Promise me, Karli, that you will put a bullet in my head rather than let me fall into the hands of those fiends!”

“I promise,” I quavered, a fragment of Thin Captain’s falling from my nerveless lips. He burst into laughter and staggered about the floor, incapacitated by mirth. Slowly I realised that this had been an English joke. I retrieved the piece of biscuit and munched it sternly. When Peter had recovered he saw my expression and was at once contrite, for he had a kindly nature, except in dealings with his own heart and health.

“Forgive me, Karli,” he cried, “we sailors reckon that we have a right to tweak the tails of landsmen: It helps us to endure our hardships, don’t you see, and it helps you to come to terms with the sea.”

“Of course,” I said stiffly. We Sephardim are proud people, you remember, we do not carney like the base Ashkenazim of the East. For my part, I have always been a supple man and slow to take offence, but I do not care to be made ridiculous. Except when I have chosen that rôle. There was a long silence, then Peter slipped out of the cabin. I remained standing up, anger and something else taking the place of my fear. My shoulders were braced against the edge of the upper bunk, for the ship was leaning over in that direction and was also pitching, rolling and yawing erratically. I no longer cared. A tear formed in my right eye; the room was smoky from the slush-lamp. I wiped it away with a corner of the blanket. I began to think of my mother, God knows why, and found that I needed the corner of the blanket again.

Peter came in, kicked the door shut and showed me the two hot rolls he had brought. They smelt ravishing. He proffered one but, like a fool, I jerked my head away and gazed in an absurd and dignified fashion at the ceiling.

“Karli,” said Peter, “I had to give the Doctor a shilling for these. Is it so hard to take one from your mess-mate, who meant no harm?” It became clear to me that I was being what an Englishman would call a silly ass. I took a roll with mumbled thanks and bit into its hot, crusty edge gratefully. My face I still kept turned away from him, for I did not wish him to see the traces of tears upon it; he might not have realised that they were caused by the smoke from the lamp. He said nothing more, he was that rare kind of man who knows when to keep his mouth shut.

CHAPTER EIGHT

What I found remarkable about the English Channel as we tacked lustily down it towards the fabled lights of Ushant, was that it was by no means a waste of cruel waters: it was more like the Strand on a warm Saturday night. Every kind of craft was running eastward or clawing westward as though the life of England depended upon them: wallowing colliers; big, fat, important Indiamen; slovenly hoys from Cornwall dripping China Clay; Breton crabbers; smacks and hovellers without number; the entire Brixham trawler fleet, hove-to and dancing on the green waves; a dangerous, rakish Excise cutter slashing along on some desperate errand and, a sight I would give a hundred pounds to see again, the Channel Fleet majestically making its way to Spithead in line astern under all plain sail. The Second explained to me that the snowy whiteness of the sails was because, on entering the Channel, the old, brown sails would have been taken down and the best suits bent onto the yards. As I watched, entranced, a stream of signal flags rose to the main-truck of the flagship and, like magic, her yards swung — you could hear the rattling boom of the canvas from our distance of eight hundred yards — and she went about on the other tack, followed, with terrifying precision, by each ship in her wake: I swear that the stretch of water on which they went about, one after the other, was no greater than a tennis-court. That was, I think, the moment at which I stopped laughing at the English.

I had another lesson to learn, however. As we came abreast of the flagship our Captain Knatchbull grunted orders to the First Mate about dipping our ensign.

“To the flagship, Sir?”

“To each ship in turn, Mister.”

“Aye aye, Sir.”

I blushed with shame at this silly impertinence, for we were, surely, but a common trading vessel and these lordly ships the might of the British Queen. My blushes, however, turned to a blush at my own ignorance and, yes, a flush of pleasure, as the flagship’s ensign dipped gravely to us in return, followed by the same civility from each man of war as she came abreast. Our men cheered heartily, swarming up the ratlines and waving hats and kerchiefs, but our Captain stalked to the other side and gazed fixedly at the coast. He was, I suppose, regretting something, as every sensible man must from time to time.

Hour upon hour I watched, entranced, the changing pageant of this English Channel, asking a hundred questions of anyone who could pause and explain to me. Some of the more spanking merchant-craft had, like the Royal ships, already bent on their best suits of sails, all snowy-white, but most were still under working canvas, brown and weathered, patches and discoloration telling wordless tales of thousands upon thousands of perilous sea-miles. The Second Mate pointed out to me, in one of his rare moments of fellowship, a particularly foul-seeming craft, its sails of an inexplicable filthiness. He explained that it was a whaler, wallowing back from the furthest Southern seas, and that the greasy grime was from the smoke of the “trying-out” fires which rendered down the blubber from the great beasts.

“A horrid trade, young man,” he said in his lugubrious way. “Permit an older man to give you a word of advice. If ever you fall in with a whaler’s man, buy him a pot of beer but quit his company as soon as you safely can. He will be fearfully strong, easily roused to anger and possessed of a long, sharp knife. Eschew his company; he will not be sane. These words of mine are worth a guinea a box.” With that he turned away moodily. He was a strange man, not one of whom one could make a boon-companion. He was unflagging at his duties. I think that, when not on watch, he either slept or wept. Perhaps both. Certainly, I never saw him eat or smile.

The doctor respected him, which was strangely reassuring.

The lights of Ushant, when Peter dragged me out of my bunk to admire them, seemed no great thing — merely a distant twinkle on our port bow. The beauty of them, it seemed, the thing to be admired, was that we had sighted them at just the time the Captain had predicted and at just such a distance as enabled us to “weather them with plenty of sea-room” as Peter lucidly put it. After an hour or so — but it seemed longer — they were on our beam and, finally, they were but a remote glimmer on our quarter. We did not tack to port for, I was told, that would have driven us deep into the dreaded Biscay Bay itself. (I did not complain: I had no especial longing to tack to port and would have had less had I known what the phrase meant.)

We braced our yards so that we were sailing as close to the wind as our yare little ship could stand, every scrap of canvas and cordage and timber booming and shrieking and groaning as though intent on frightening the very guts out of me. Since there seemed to be little I could do to help, I retired to my bunk with an air of philosophical detachment. Biscay held no terrors for me: I was proud. There was some small difficulty attached to staying in my bunk because of the ship’s erratic and wanton motions: resourcefully, I fished out the absurd slabs of woollen underclothing from my chest and wedged them in such fashion that I could no longer fall out. I slept well.

In the dawn I was awakened by a curious dream in which I had been standing on my head. When I came to my senses I found that I was indeed doing so, although still flat on my back. My head was pressed firmly against the head-board of my bunk, taking the whole weight of my body. I realised that the ship was standing on its nose and that my last hour had come. Before I could decide what to do I found myself standing almost upright on the footboard of the bunk, although still flat upon my back. The ship was now, quite clearly, sitting on its stern. I was not to be seen at a disadvantage again and, in a few minutes, when Peter slid into the cabin, I was fully clothed and as nonchalant as any salted Jack Tar.

“Are we sinking yet?” I asked nonchalantly.

“Not yet,” he replied. “But have you heard of mountainous waves? And dismissed them as poetic extravagance?”

“Of course.”

“Then come on deck; I have a treat for you.” At his suggestion I forced my way into some stiff and crackling yellow oilskins before venturing out. I felt absurd in these but so soon as I had, with Peter’s help, fought my way like a drunken man onto deck, I was glad of them for the wind kicked me in the face, green water smashed at me from the whole length of the ship, compressed me against the bulwark of the quarter-deck and so overwhelmed me with its cold, fierce lust that I was ready to surrender my life. Peter had a firm grip of the left arm of my oilskins; he dragged me up and across the heeling deck to the weather side and fastened each of my hands around the rail. Then he took my head and rotated it towards the right, so that I was staring forrard.

My fingers clenched into the rail so hard that they must have scarred it: a mountain of a wave — I mean a mountain, there was no poetic licence about it — was reared dead ahead of us and our absurd little ship was aiming its bowsprit straight into the scend of it. It was no moment for terror: our extinction was inevitable. I watched as though mesmerised. Up and up went our bows until Peter and I were bent almost level with the deck and still the peak of the glassy green mountain was high above us. I prepared in my mind a few suitable words of gratitude and farewell to say to Peter but, before I could speak, I heard a great roar from the Captain, behind and above us on the quarter-deck.

“Mr Lubbock!” he bellowed, “Mister, I say! Your watch is idling; the lee-braces are as slack as a whore’s stays. When your men have done picking their noses, pray get them to work or they’ll suffer a fine of a shilling each. Yes, a shilling I say!”

I gazed aghast at Peter for, clearly, Captain Knatchbull was insane. Peter pursed his lips in a vexed way and, cupping his mouth, shouted in my ear “I know what you are thinking. A shilling is a little severe: the men were only sheltering in the lee of the main-mast bitts and yarning to pass the time away because there was no work on hand you see: it was Lubbock’s fault that he did not keep them busy.”

My gape of incomprehension was ill-timed for we had just then fought our way to the very top of the fearful mountain of water and its crest broke over us, sending a hundred tons of “green” the length of our deck, much of which I swallowed. When I had exuded it I glanced at Peter. His face was unnaturally straight and expressionless. Against the evidence of my senses I came to realise that these unspeakable demonstrations of Nature’s violence were neither rare nor considered perilous by those who went down to the sea in ships. We were, at that moment, pitching down the further slope of the watery mountain at such a rate and such an angle that it took all my manhood to speak casually.

“Do you have the watch, Peter?” I asked.

“No, not yet.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Fresh air, my boy, fresh air! Just fill your lungs, isn’t it splendid? Many an invalid would give a fortune for such stuff.”

I believe he said something else but it was smothered by another monstrous surge of water, bidding fair to sweep us overside. I noticed that he unobtrusively kept a firm grip of my oilskins: I appreciated this although I said nothing.

“Karli,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I have to speak seriously to you.”

“Yes, Peter?”

“We may never have the opportunity to speak in privacy again.”

“I understand,” I said fervently.

“D’you see, we shall soon be entering the Tropics, where the Lord’s writ doesn’t run, where the stars take on unfamiliar patterns and men can turn into beasts overnight. You will take my word for these things, will you not?”

“Indeed I shall, Peter,” I quavered.

“Now, more to the point, these strange Tropic manifestations work equally upon cooked meat.” He laid a friendly arm upon my shoulder. “What I am trying to say, my dear chap, is that the galley fire has been out for ten hours and that there will be but short commons for breakfast. You, however, have not one or two but, so you tell me, three salt ox-tongues in your tin shirt-box. Do you not think that you should broach one this morning, before the sands of time run out for us both?”

I boggled at this: I could not understand its relevance to our perilous state. His arm remained upon my shoulder in an avuncular fashion.

“First,” he continued, “a slice or two of delicious cold tongue will do you a power of good, d’you see. Second, to break out one of your delicious cold tongues and share it with your mess-mate would be a generous, comradely action. Third, since we are about to sink into the cold abyss of the sea …”

“Oh, shut up,” I said. “You are pulling my leg because I am but a poor foreigner. You are a five-letter man, Peter.”

“Four,” he said, diffidently.

“I meant four. And I happen to know that you have some sweet pickles in your dunnage …”

“True!” he cried happily. “What’s more, I have the crusty bottom of a loaf inside my shirt, still hot from the galley, and, under my bunk, unless unscrupulous people have purloined them, there is a crock of butter and a pot of mustard.”

“Then what the damnation are we standing here for, arguing and quaking with cold and wet?”

“Hold on to me Karli; I shall lead the way.”

No one, in the face of Peter’s good humour and careless courage, could have been so base as to fear the elements. At every instant there was sure evidence — at least, so it seemed to me — that our little craft — it seemed very little now amidst those monstrous seas — had not the least chance of living through the storm but I was shamed out of all cowardice by Peter’s pleasant teasing whenever he ducked into the cabin for dry clothes and by the child-like way he fell asleep between watches. Indeed, the very fact that he had spells between watches at all was a sort of comfort: with the ship being shaken about like dice in a cup to the incessant bellowing of the gale and the crash of seas I should have thought that every able officer and man would have been on deck, shouting useful orders or pulling at ropes or making promises to his Maker. That men could be spared from the horrors of the deck and that, when so spared, they could fold their hands in sleep was to me both a marvel and a reassurance.

Clearly, such weather could not continue: there was not enough wind on the globe nor enough rain in the firmament to sustain such savagery for many hours. I was wrong; the fury continued unabated until even I lost my fear of it and contrived to wash and shave and shift my under-linen, toppling about the cabin like a drunken man. Little Orace staggered in manfully from time to time, his face drawn and green, bearing a kid of cold food (for of course the galley fire was still dowsed) and taking away my clothes for washing. His courage helped to make an Englishman of me for the time being: it was not so much that I was loath to disgrace myself in front of him, more that I did not wish to make him unhappy at having an unworthy master. What irrational people we English are, to be sure. Perhaps you, who were born here, have not observed this but to me, born amongst the sensible Dutch canals, it is sharply apparent.

Our skirting of the Bay took an inordinate time because, as I have said, we durst not go about on the port tack and were constrained to sail close-hauled — the yards braced up, the sheets well home and the bowlines bowsed down so taut that they squealed. (This last, Peter explained, was to stop the sails shivering. I was too proud to ask him for a similar remedy for me.)

After an eternity — perhaps seventy-two hours — I awoke one morning to find that the ship was only rolling and yawing in a way which I might have thought alarming a week before but which was now no more than pleasantly lulling.

“Come along, Karli!” cried Peter, his eyes red and squinting with fatigue, “we are weathering Finisterre, and a deuced fine landfall the Captain has made, I must say, although a little close for comfort — a mere couple of cables from the breakers.”

I closed my eyes.

“Tell me when we are clear of these breakers,” I said. “It seems to me that the perils of the sea do not improve upon acquaintance. This Finisterre is just another Ushant, is it not?”

“Yes, Karli. But in Spain. It is of little interest, I agree.”

“Good,” I said.

“Of course,” he added, “when I call you again, after we are clear of the breakers, there will be no breakfast left. The Doctor has had the galley fire alight for two hours now and he will be disappointed that you would not try his kedgeree: he prides himself upon it. But it is only a savoury mess of rice and little fragments of smoked haddock and onions and such stuff, made aromatic with his kari-sauce such as is famed all over the seven seas …”

“Peter, your blandishments do not move me at all. I am not one of those who live for their bellies.”

“No, Karli.”

“On the other hand, it is important that I should not affront the Doctor, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, Karli.”

“Then I shall make the sacrifice and pretend to own an appetite. For his sake and yours.”

“What a splendid chap you are, to be sure.”

I threw a book at him and, while I was laughing, he popped a slippery cake of soap into my open mouth.

Kedgeree is very good. I reserved some for later on in the morning, to ascertain whether it is also good when cold.

It is also very good when cold.

Venturing upon deck in the mid-morning, to take the air and aid digestion, I encountered the First Mate, Lubbock.

“Good morning, Mister,” I cried airily. He stepped very close to me, I could smell the rank sweat of him.

“Only a Captain calls a First Officer ‘Mister’,” he snarled. “Nasty little snot-nosed lubbers of supercargoes call me ‘Sir’ or by the great horned toad I chew them up and spit out their gristly bits — if any.”

I had a decision to make. With an effort I met his eyes; studied the gravy-coloured whites of them.

“Thankyou, Mr Lubbock,” I said at last. “It is a fine morning, is it not?” I was ready to jump over the side if necessary, but I do not think that he recognised this. He, too, made a decision and an effort; decided to be jocular.

“Well,” he said, “bully for you to make the deck: thought the sea-sickness had turned you clear inside-out; haven’t heard the dad-blamed ship’s bell for days on account of your retching and puking.” I let that pass; it might have been an American sort of joke. Moreover, it became necessary for him at just that moment to rave and bellow at a number of seamen who were heaving at a fall — which is a kind of a rope — so I had ample time to prepare a rejoinder. He turned towards me again, affecting surprise to see me still there.

“Where are we?” I asked civilly, “Mr Lubbock?” He glared at first, then studied me intently. His small brain, I think, was puzzling out what to say to me. In the end, what he decided to say was “We are scudding south along the coast of Portugal, Mister Van Cleef. Jest as soon as the wind backs a little more we’ll likely lay a course for the Grand Canary. That’s an island, Mr Van Cleef; off the coast of Africky — belongs to the Portu-geeses.” He broke off to roar dirty words at a small gang of seamen who were trying to snub a little more of a brace: they did not seem to mind, nor indeed to pay much attention, for they were intent upon their work and had ears only for their boatswain, a cheery fellow who knew just how much they could do and would press them no further.

“Thankyou, Sir,” I said, for I was curious as to what he would think of this gratuitous form of address. He glared at me suspiciously: I gazed back amicably.

“You’re welcome,” he said, turning on his heel.

The weather ameliorated: before I was prepared for it we were entering the skirts of the Tropics; each hour of southward sailing seemed to call for the shedding of another article of clothing. Had it not been for the irksome presence of Lubbock, my worries about the Captain’s sanity, and the fretful lust which Blanche’s occasional appearances evoked in me, I swear I would have been as happy a man as my kind, careless, poxy Peter Stevenage. Only thrice a day did my horizons clear, for the Doctor’s skill and invention did not abate: each succeeding meal was a new, often bizarre, delight and, in the interims, one could always be sure that there was a “tabnab” to be had in the galley for any poor, perished, half-drowned seaman or any supernumerary officer who had had the foresight to give the Doctor a half-sovereign. These “tabnabs” were little gullet-tickling confections which the Doctor threw together when he was doing nothing else, for it was not in his nature to refrain from cooking, it was his very life, nor could he bear to waste any little oddments of food. Furthermore, he was full of concern and compassion for us all, ever concerned to make us fat and contented. He was, in a way, somewhat like my mother. My favourite “tabnab” was, without question, a little fried potato-cake with a morsel of kari’d mutton inside or perhaps a tasty scrap of cod’s sound. Sometimes, too, he would fill one’s pocket with small, folded-over pieces of pastry, filled with all manner of things, so that, munching at random, one might make a surprising, Lilliputian luncheon of marmalade, then chicken, then apple and finally fish: each course but a mouthful, each mouthful a delightful shock to the palate. Although I have never allowed myself to become preoccupied with food and drink, I must confess that the Doctor’s ministrations helped me to while away the time and forget the perils of the deep.

Meanwhile, the weather became more and more intent to please and light airs wafted us southward towards the fabled Grand Canary. Soon the sailor-folk had cast off their coarse weather-proof attire and had donned duck trowsers and straw hats, whilst we officers had our servants press our linen unmentionables and soon we revelled in the coolness of sea-island cotton shirts. Life became delicious except for those wretches who lusted after women.

CHAPTER NINE

Again it was Sunday — how far apart the Sundays seem to those of us in peril on the sea — and the Captain conducted Divine Service as though he were chewing something unpleasant. His own, private religious notions comprised some sort of hysterical mysticism but I never quite understood what they were, although he made it clear that there was no place in them for the Established Church of England, which he called “a shabby, money-grubbing conspiracy against the layman”. He had some personal agreement with God which was not clear to me. Blanche was constrained by him to attend Service, always in a light and seductive dress, “so as to give,” the Captain said, “a bad example and to keep the ship’s people’s minds off the damned, blasphemous mummery.”

After the service he read, in a high, clear voice, the Ship’s Articles and then — strangely — the Articles of War, as though he were still in command of a Queen’s Ship. This was one of his little eccentricities, I thought, but I learned later that every before-the-mast sailor had gladly signed a chit stating that he would be bound by man-o’war’s rules — which included flogging for breaches of discipline — and that this was not uncommon in East Indiamen and crack China clippers. At that time, however, my blood ran cold as he read out these Articles, for they listed countless offences and the condign punishments attached to them: each paragraph seemed to end with the words “… death or such lesser punishment …”but the men appeared to be asleep on their feet in the drugging sunshine, their half-closed eyes furtively fixed on the charming effect of the sunbeams piercing through Blanche’s clothes. She was not in the habit of standing demurely, her feet together.

When the ritual was finished and Blanche had disappeared into her cabin, the men ran back to the forecastle laughing and chattering like children released from school. One man from each mess was soon at the galley door to fill a bucket with the boiling water which the Doctor had readied; piggins were streamed overside on lines to raise sea-water and soon the ratlines were gay with the men’s laundry-work, for sailors are cleanly folk when given the opportunity: a dirty seaman soon becomes infested with vermin and will be much persecuted by his mates. At sea, moreover, there is no telling when the next chance to wash — still less to dry — one’s clothes will arrive, and a seasoned sailor loses no opportunity to fill his chest with clean, dry slops. Only those who have lived and worked and slept in sea-soaked clothes for ten days at a time can know what exquisite pleasure there is to be had from a clean, dry shirt and drawers. Later in the voyage, when the weather had been unremittingly foul and there was not a dry clout in the forecastle, the ever-kindly Doctor would often contrive to find room in his crowded galley to dry at least a strip of old cotton-goods for those who were courteous or generous towards him: these strips they would wrap about their private parts before going on watch so that at least those sensitive organs escaped, for a little while, the almost unendurable chill and chafing.

It was understood in those days that any women on board a ship would keep to their quarters after Service of a Sunday, so that the men might strip to the buff and, having washed every stitch they owned, romp naked in the sunshine. Peter and I strolled through the throng, exchanging genial and cheery words with the men. Some of these had their own little business concerns: one resourceful fellow, for instance, known to all as “Lousy”, had a charcoal-filled tailor’s ironing-goose which, for a trifling sum in coin or grog, he would run along the seams of any shirt or pair of drawers suspected by its owner of harbouring lice. Only this treatment, Peter assured me, would extirpate these small and pestilent inquilines.

Another, humbler practitioner had for his stock-in-trade only a piece of “pusser’s green”, which is a coarse yellow soap sold by purser. His practice was, having exacted a modest fee, to scrutinise his client from the soles to the scalp, dabbing deftly at fleas and other small deer. Each time he caught one he would carry the soap to his mouth, kill the flea or bed-bug with his teeth and, at the same time, re-moisten the soap with a flick of his tongue. The men did not much despise him, for it was a useful art and he was skilful at it. Orace was in the thick of things, scrubbing away with the best of them and from time to time fending off the clumsy advances of a sexual pervert. The pervert would not, in fact, be allowed to corrupt him, Peter assured me, because Orace was liked by the crew for his sunny nature.

The sexual society of a ship’s company was, you see, a delicate and tolerant arrangement because all experienced seamen knew that to live together in a forecastle for perhaps three long years calls for a spirit of live-and-let-live, so long as the eccentric’s private habits do not interfere with those of his mates, with the safe working of the ship and, above all, with their right to sleep undisturbed. Thus, the few sodomites and catamites aboard were soon recognised and tolerated so long as they kept within their own circle, did not offend others and did not shirk their work. Onanism was as necessary as going to “the head” and had only to be conducted silently if others were trying to sleep. (“When I’m at home, my wife is my right hand,” Bully Lubbock once said to me in his coarse fashion; “when I’m at sea my right hand is my wife.”) Then, during a long spell between ports, a full-blooded fellow of normal tastes might well exchange a sodomitic practice with a chum, rather than go out of his mind. This has given rise to the British saying “any port in a storm, matey”.

None of this, however, is to be taken as suggesting that ships — the John Coram in particular — were seething with animal lust. On the contrary, a good taut ship kept the men so cheerfully busy that there was neither the time nor the vitality to spare upon such trivia. It was the practice to see that the crew went to their hammocks so drugged with out-of-doors work and indigestible food that all they craved was sleep. A truly tired man, his muscles twitching with toil, his mind relaxing from perilous hours spent fighting sail-cloth in the dark, higher than a house on an icy yard and, now, his belly distended with hot burgoo or lobscouse, why, such a man wants no silken bosom to caress, he aches only for the ineffable delight of his coarse pillow and no other orgasm than that of blessed unconsciousness.

The effect is much the same with compulsory games in the English public schools, which is why they are famous for their lack of sodomy.

“Now then, my lads!” cried Peter suddenly, “all hands to skylark! Who’ll be King Arthur?”

“King Arthur”, it seemed, was a game much relished by these simple tarry-breeks. The one named to be King was soused and drenched with laundry-water by his fellows until he could contrive to make one of his persecutors laugh, whereupon he who had laughed became King in turn, and was, in turn, soused. The first to be picked was a toothless old wag who entered merrily into the sport, capering about the deck in the drollest way as he evaded the buckets of water. Cornered against the hen-coops lashed to the rail, he reached in and plucked a rooster’s feather, which he stuck between the cheeks of his bottom. He then strutted about, his neck jerking back and forth in the very manner of a cockerel, crowing shrilly until one of the lads was forced to guffaw and was duly made King. This new king, who was possessed of an inordinately long, thin member, performed so many antics with it that he soon “got his laugh” and gave place to another. So the sport went on. I believe I have said before that I shall never understand the English, they are a race apart, a race apart.

Wonderfully savoury smells were drifting from the galley and after a dangerous romp through the rigging — which seemed to delight them although they took the same risks for pay every day and night of their lives — they put on clothes and soon the duty-man of each mess reported to the cook with a great mess-kid. That day’s dinner was the Doctor’s famous Kentucky Burgoo, invented by a Colonel in Kentucky long ago, made of unimaginable things. I tried a tin platter of it and found it very good indeed. It became my favourite and I still treasure the recipe, which I shall write out at the end of this book if I live so long.

While the men ate their dinner we officers took tea with Blanche. We were but a small company for Lubbock scorned such “poodle-faking”, the Second had the watch and the Captain was “busy with his charts” — we could hear him snoring in the inner sleeping-cabin. Peter left the room for a moment to fetch a book of verses which Blanche pretended to want.

“Blanche,” I said.

“You are to call me ‘Mrs Knatchbull’.”

“Blanche, you were watching the sailormen romping naked a little while ago, were you not?”

“How dare you?” she whispered furiously.

I merely smiled.

“How do you know?” she asked.

I continued to smile.

“Well,” she murmured, “if you had been me and they were girls, would you not have watched?”

I nodded vehemently.

“Well, then. But I asked you how you knew.”

“I did not know, but I know you, Blanche.” She blushed, furious again, or pretending to be so.

“Oh no you do not, Sir! Nor shall you, if that is what you think!”

“Yes I do — and shall,” I said laconically. She marched up so close to me that her breasts nearly touched my shirt; glared at me for a moment, then kicked me very hard just above the ankle. I smiled.

“What is the name of the coarse seaman with the long, absurd, ah, thing?” she asked.

“I do not know. Let us ask Lord Stevenage when he returns.”

“I hate you.”

Dinner for us officers, later that day, was sea pie. It is quite delicious. The proper sort, such as we had, was known as a “three-decker” because it was made of layers of salt junk (pork or beef), vegetables and fish, each separated by its own pie-crust. Thus one could deal with it seriatim as a primitive meal of three courses or, if one was a connoisseur and the pie made by a reliable cook, one could cut through all the strata and have all three things delightfully mingled upon one’s plate and palate. Each of the crusts, too, had its own peculiar flavour; the pungency of that which separated the fish from the meat was particularly prized although it tasted a little rank on first acquaintance.

(“Junk”, I should explain, really meant old ropes and such stuff so hardened with salt and tar that it was cut into lengths and sold — or saved — for picking into oakum, with which ships’ seams were caulked. Ships would often carry a quantity of it in the lazaretto to give occupation for prisoners and idle hands generally. This is why “marine-stores”, which dealt in such redundant things, came to be called “junk-shops” — and why “junk-shop” has come to be a contemptuous term for an establishment purveying fine antique porcelains. Salt pork, towards the end of its long life in the barrel, develops a curious appearance and texture which irresistibly reminds one of this pensioned-off cable: hence the opprobrious but affectionate name “salt junk”. “Irish Horse” and “King’s Own” were other names which do not need explanation, I think.)

After the sea-pie we were brought duff, for it was Sunday. The men, too, had been given duff — “dog in a blanket” they called it or, if without currants, “dog’s vomit”— and although it was but a dark heavy mess of flour and beef-fat boiled in the tail of a shirt they prized it greatly, for it was their Sabbath privilege. Indeed, when anointed with a syrup made of hot water and molasses it served very well to fill up the chinks of a healthy belly, especially after taking vigorous exercise.

That night, after reading a few pages of print, Peter and I agreed to take our bedding out onto the deck, for the night was warm and seductive. We settled by the taffrail, exactly at the end of the “lubber-line” or fore-and-aft axis of the ship, for there the rolling motion is least and so digestion least disturbed. I lay on my back, wondering at the sky.

It is hard to explain how different the sky is in the Tropics at night: it is never black but a kind of rich, velvet blue, like the groundcolour of a fine Ming jar, and the stars are not cold and remote but hot, fat and within reach of an outflung hand. Until you have seen it you cannot begin to understand. The tropic sea chuckled knowingly under the ship’s counter below us and, below us too, the rudder sometimes squeaked and grunted in its pintles as the quartermaster corrected his course. With a twist of the body and a straining of the neck I could see our wake streaming out behind and flashing with phosphorus, blue and green and silver fire. I was reminded of the sequined front of the gown of a plump lady singer I had once admired in Gatti’s Music Hall in Villiers Street, by Charing Cross: it moved me almost to tears.

Since these pages are intended for the eyes of grandchildren of varying degrees of innocence and — now that the St Elmo’s Fire of authorship is, I must confess, commencing to sear my breast — it seems to me that I must eschew describing the less genteel adventures which befell me from Finisterre to Gran Canaria, lest this relation might raise a blush upon the cheek of childish purity or, worse, cause a bookseller to feel that my work was not likely to be acceptable to Mr Mudie’s Circulating Library. Suffice it to say, then, that I learned a great deal during the passage but was not able to have my will of Mrs Knatchbull, who still stoutly resisted my attempts to call her “Blanche”.

Indeed, this would have been exquisitely dangerous — having my will of her, I mean — because the ship was small, as I have said, and her husband stalked incessantly about in the course of his duties and, at the most unpredictable times, would make it clear to her that she was to be ready for his husbanding in four and one half minutes. I thought I might never learn what had to be done in this four-and-one-half minute interim but you may be sure that my imagination ran riot. Yours, too, I suspect, would also have run the same riot, for she was most desirable and, by the time I am speaking of, would make a charming grimace at me when he gave her these orders in my presence. Sometimes she would raise her eyebrows a little while looking at me enigmatically. It was quite enervating.

Peter used to look at me strangely in those days, as though marvelling at my ill temper. Fortunately, there was the ever-present spiritual consolation of the Doctor’s food: who can dwell upon the evanescent delights of the female body (“sacca stercoris, sacca vermorum”) when every few hours comes fresh and fresh some new delight to gladden the belly and fortify the animal tissues? I defy anyone to lie brooding over the bosom of his Captain’s wife when his own bosom is crammed with a breast of young lamb, boned and rolled and stuffed with forcemeat and rosemary.

So we sped southward; each one of us,I am sure, wrapt in his own preoccupation. I remember Las Palmas, the port of Gran Canaria, only because there I caught from a young person a tiresome little infestation which is of no interest and also because I bought a canary-bird which sang so indefatigably that I felt obliged, on my way back to the ship, to cool its ardour in sea-water. I did not mean it to die; I have felt unhappy about it ever since. It must have been frail, frail.

At some time soon after the Gran Canaria — I am not certain when, for I was preoccupied with certain formidable headaches I had acquired there, as well as the slight infestation (which the excellent mercury soap which Peter had urged me to buy proved sovereign for) — at some time after quitting this island, I say, we fell in with the Trade Winds, which enabled our Captain to set every scrap of sail and run south and a little east at a rate which pleased everyone on board who knew about these matters.

Porpoises, dolphins and other engaging monsters of the deep played about the ship, as though welcoming us to these latitudes, and flying-fish continually threw themselves upon the deck as willing sacrifices to the Doctor’s skillet. (They are also very good baked.)

The men were happy for, with three strong watches, there was little work: an occasional trimming of the sails and snubbing of the bowlines and, apart from that, a little painting and, of course, the continual burnishing of the bright brass-work.

The officers were happy because the men were happy and there was no wary eye to be kept upon them.

The Captain was happy because we were making wonderfully fast days’ runs southward, which seemed to be what his God wanted of him.

I was happy, in a way, because as the weather grew warmer Blanche chose to don ever more diaphanous and revealing garments although, in another way, I was miserable, for I had long been used to the solaces which the other sex affords and there was no opportunity to work my will upon Blanche — although there was no doubt in my mind that I would, sooner or later, do so. Indeed, each day my imaginative fervour became more inflamed and each night I imagined an even more vigorous consummation between us when the time should be ripe.

I read a great deal in Jane Austen and some of Peter’s heathen authors; I found one of the latter much to my taste, a poet, Catullus, who wrote a Latin that I could construe without great difficulty. One of his lines, so apt to my feelings towards Blanche, sticks in my mind to this day:

“Odi et amo. Excrucior.” — “I hate her; I love her. It hurts.”

That was not, I suppose, a novel sentiment even in ancient Rome but was expressed with a concision which few writers of our day could rival.

The days, as I have said, passed pleasantly enough and indeed uneventfully except for one diverting moment when we were close to the southernmost point of the Bight of Benin and the lookout man hailed the deck with news of a ship crossing our stern at the distance of a mile. Captain Knatchbull, to my surprise, seized his spy-glass and swarmed up the ratlines like a marmoset. In a moment he was down again, shouting a string of orders. The ship went about, the White Ensign — which we had no right to fly — was run up, powder and shot were broken out and soon a ball from our long brass carronade went screaming across the bows of the long, fast-looking vessel which was now on our starboard quarter. The vessel paid no heed, except to shake out a reef or two of sail; our second ball fell short. Shaken and dazed by the noise and the suddenness of it, I asked Peter what on earth the Captain was about. He gave me a blank, expressionless gaze and I realised that the Captain was within earshot.

“What I am about, Mr Van Cleef,” he said grimly, “is putting the fear of the Lord of Hosts into a vile slaver. Snuff the air, Sir, pray snuff it!” I snuffed. Indeed, even from that distance a loathsome stench was on the breeze.

“Those slaves are fresh from the barracoons,” the Captain rasped on, “in a week they’ll be puddled in their own excrement, and you’d smell the craft from five miles.”

This range was short enough for me; I made polite excuses and strolled as fast as one can stroll to the nearest rail.

“Go to the loo, Mr Van Cleef!” shouted the Captain. I paused, turned, gritting my teeth hard against the bile rising in my stomach.

“The loo, Karli — the loo’ard rail: never spew into the wind!” cried Peter.

Because I was — am — nimble upon my feet I contrived to reach the leeward rail in time and presently understood the seaman-like logic of their advice. (Even now you clever grandchildren smirk — I have seen you — when I use this antiquated sailorman’s word “loo” for what you genteely call the “water-closet”: if you were ever to piddle over the windward side of a ship in the roaring forties I think you might find that old men are not altogether foolish.)

That was the first time I was ever sick on ship-board (except, naturally, after drinking unwholesome liquor in foreign ports) and there was only one other time afterward and that, too, was not caused by the motion of the ship.

When I had quite voided my excellent luncheon into the deep — no one laughed at me; some of the most seasoned of the watch on deck seemed to be almost as revolted as I was — the black, rakish slaver was already almost hull-down, making best speed on the notorious Middle Passage to the West Indies. Quite sixty percent of the slaves, I am assured, will have survived to find interesting and useful work in the Americas and, as I write, I am informed credibly that their descendants are now often taught to read and write and may well, one day, prove to be the equals of their former owners. This seems strange but by no means impossible to one who, like me, has seen strange things in every quarter of the globe. Respice finem, I say, and indeed, experto crede.

We charged on southwards and, although my duties were light, I became as bronzed and weatherbeaten as any shellbacked sailor, for I often went on deck and gazed at my crew-mates sprawled aloft upon the yards, setting or furling sails at heights which would have induced acute vertigo in me. The ship’s people seemed to grumble a great deal when made to scramble up the masts to make these adjustments to the sails — the main course weighed quite one English ton when wet and there were few of the topmen who could boast a full count of finger-nails — but the Second assured me that this grumbling habit of theirs was a natural bent, it made them happy in some curious British way. They were over-fed and under-worked, the First Mate assured me: he was sometimes at his wits’ end to think how to keep them occupied with a fair wind and fine weather. It is easier nowadays in iron ships: there is always rust to be chipped off and steel masts to be scoured with sand and sacking.

Why I refer, from time to time, to “the ship’s people” rather than to “the sailors” is because “sailor” has a precise meaning at sea: it means a before-the-mast man who is making at least his second long passage — on his first he was but a “landsman”. During this, or a later voyage, he might or might not be raised to the degree of “seaman”, of which there are two grades. If a man can perform every maritime task imaginable with skill and courage and conceal his crimes from his superiors he may well attain the excellence of being rated an “ordinary seaman”. If he can add to these arts the art of surviving all perils, such as storms, bucko mates, syphilis and “nose-paint” (which means cheap liquor), he may one day reach the distinction of being called “Able-Bodied”. Few achieve this peak and those who do can rarely claim to own an entire able body: they are old and often deficient in fingers, toes, eyes and so forth. The sea is a hard mistress.

So you see that our “ship’s people” comprised landsmen, sailors, seamen, idlers (viz., carpenters, sailmakers and the like), officers, their servants and, sometimes, a supercargo such as I then was.

I cultivated, when I could, the companionship of the horniest-handed of the seamen, for these were great treasure-chests of “yarns” (this word means lovingly-polished lies). They promised me that everything on land had its counterpart in the seas: there was sea-weed, of course, a sea-devil, sea-eagles, sea-girdles, sea-dogs (but not, they assured me, sea — bitches, although I knew better), sea-hogs, sea-lions, sea-jellies, sea-horses and sea-holly, sea-mews and sea-otters, sea-snakes, sea-urchins and, needless to say, the dreaded sea-serpent itself. Every one of them had talked to a man who had seen the sea-serpent; not one claimed to have seen it himself. This disclaimer, universal amongst seafaring men, is an agreed ruse to disarm incredulity, of course.

In those long, sunny days, each one so like the other that one could not tell if one were in yesterday again or no, even an attack of flatulence brought on by the Doctor’s “shot-skilligolee” (dried-pease soup) was a memorable event. (For my part, I have no quarrel with flatulence: it is a harmless enough recreation, provides an admirable commentary to novels such as Northanger Abbey, gives no offence to oneself and little to bystanders — although Peter called me Montgolfier — and has been much praised by the American B. Franklin, who also invented tram-conductors.)

But the first great relief from the bewildering monotony monotony of sea and sun and steady wind was when we put in for water at Delagoa Bay. It seemed that sweet water was plentiful there and cheap: later in our voyage we might well be paying £1 a ton for the stuff! Even in those days I preferred richer fluids but the men needed to drink great quantities of it. It is good, too, for shaving and washing.

Delagoa Bay is not an interesting port-of-call. I found little to see, nothing good to eat and drab girls who were yellow of complexion, also ugly and tired, tired. An enterprising youth sold me his sister for the night, vowing that she was but fourteen and a virgin. I cannot be sure that he lied about her age but her virginity was less than plausible: she accepted my courteous attentions with all the sweet, coy diffidence of a sow who has too often been taken in a wheelbarrow to the boar. I did not spend the whole night with her, although I had paid for it; she made me feel “like a piece of string in a bucket of warm water” (as the rough sailormen say) and I was anxious to get back to my bar of mercury soap.

As I made my way to my cabin I encountered Blanche: she was lightly clad and seemed to be coming from the direction of the First Mate’s quarters. She smiled enigmatically at me and was gone before I could select a suitable expression for my own face. I fancy I looked shifty, simply.

“Peter,” I asked gloomily as I rolled into my bunk, “is there also such a thing as a sea-cow?”

“Indeed there is; it is also known as the dugong and many legends of mermaids are based upon …”

“Thankyou,” I said. “I only wished for a plain ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Karli.” He spoke no more that night. As I fell into a fretful doze I scratched the beginnings of my first gurrey-sore. To be Able-Bodied one should have one’s hands and forearms pocked and pitted with these sores. You will never know what they are, and you do not care to know.

I know what you care about.

CHAPTER TEN

Watered, provisioned with fresh fruit and disenchanted with the dreams of sweet femininity which some of us had been foolishly harbouring, we set sail again for the Cape of Good Hope where, everyone assured me, things would be better. They were mistaken. Cape Town — called the Tavern of the Seas — is full of dishonest people; many of them claim to be Dutch but their language is quite barbarous to a true Hollander, their religion is preposterous and their women are devout and fat — excepting the whores, who are smelly and fat. Many of these Boers, Afrikaaners as they call themselves, are Jews: the women of these, of course, are chaste and fat.

In this Town the best bargain for a lusty young man is a Griqua girl, you may depend upon it. They are astonishing, quite astonishing; it puzzles me where they can have learned such sophisticated arts of love in a community so devoted to Jehovah and fat old ladies.

Soon the rich and rare cargo of ostrich plumes and rhinoceros horns was flowing aboard and my days were much taken up with writing these things into manifests, consulting Bills of Lading and applying the blessed mercury soap whenever my duties permitted me a little leisure. To this day I never travel without a cake of such soap; it is as sovereign as Dr Collis Browne’s noted Chlorodyne, which is saving so many cholera-stricken soldiers in the Transvaal today.

There came a time when the last bale of cargo had been stowed away, the last official bribed and, for me, the last acceptable Griqua girl had revealed her most exhausting tour de force. We weighed anchor; none too soon for the crew’s health, I may say: British sailors are like animals when they see a foreign woman, animals.

Clearing Cape Town when bound for the East is, or was in those days, something of a dangerous proceeding, not as dramatic as rounding Cape Horn but still dangerous. Davy Jones’s locker there is well-stocked with the bones of fine ships and brave men. First one must fight round a thirty-mile projection of the Cape, usually against stubbornly adverse winds, then run east past Cape Agulhas, notorious for its fiendish winds, then parallel to the country’s southern shore where there is a small patch of low-lying ground between Green Point and Mouillé Point over which the fog has an evilly misleading way of clinging. A mere passenger might have thought this part of our passage merely slow and tedious but I knew Peter well by now and could see that under his ordinary air of carelessness there was now a tense preoccupation and fatigue. I noticed, too, that both he and the Second did not, at this time, take advantage of all the sleeping-times to which they were entitled — and sleep, even more than rum and dry clothes, is the sailor’s most coveted treat.

Peter Stevenage was a strange and valuable man and I often blame myself for not having prized him more at that time, when my character was being formed. He had the rarest and truest sort of charm: that is, he did not exude a charm of his own but gave you the certainty, simply with a special sort of silence, that you were charming him. This is not an art which can be learned by taking thought or by studying books; it is not an art at all, it is a gift from God, if you will pardon the expression. (There was a boy at my school who had this gift. He was neither tall nor strong nor handsome; at lessons he was always just half-way up, or down, the form. At games he was reliable but did not shine. He spoke little and never harmfully, even of us few Jews in the school, but he would listen intently to anyone who spoke to him, even the masters; this was his gift. When you had finished he would say “yes” or perhaps “no” and you would go away purged and happy, like a Papist from the confessional-box. All of us in my year would cheerfully have died for him, except that he would have thought this a bizarre thing to do. He is now, without a doubt, the teller in a bank, trusted by one and all, and goes home each evening to a fat wife in a house smelling of cabbage and children’s urine.)

Peter had been born with this happy gift of listening as though each word you spoke was powerful; his only other gift was that of a gentle, solemn mockery which prevented one from admiring him too much. This was, I am sure, deliberate. Only the strongest of men try, when they are ripe for death, to make themselves appear valueless. Peter was strong in just such a way.

The air in the Indian Ocean, when we were fairly into it, was hot and moist and cosy as the well-pissed bed of a sleepy child. There were little, desultory airs which sometimes made our sails rattle and shake but these scarcely did more than keep the quartermaster awake at his wheel.

There came a day when our diminutive Captain was pacing up and down, glaring aloft from under his chimney-pot hat in a fashion which made the more knowing of our crew suspect that a capful of wind might be signified by the barometer and that he would presently be ordering royal studding-sails, sky-sails and all the other “flying kites” that she had room for to be sent aloft, although there was small chance that any of our rivals in the trade would have found better winds.

Fate, however, was on the side of our top-men, for at noon, just as the Captain was chewing his beard in an agony of decision, the fellow at the mast-head holla’d the deck, crying a sail “fine on the port bow”. Captain Knatchbull instantly sent Peter Stevenage up the shrouds with the best spy-glass in the ship. For his part, he strolled to the starboard side, affecting to study the scend of the sea.

Two minutes later Peter was reporting: “Large Aden dhow, Sir; at about three miles. Only a scrap of sail on her and a bucket at the main-truck. Distress, Sir. No sign of life. No one at the helm, I fancy.”

“Thankyou, Mr Lord Stevenage; I am well acquainted with the meaning of a bucket at the main-truck in these waters. Pray tell the steersman to set a course to close with the, ah, distressed vessel and to heave to at one cable’s length from her.”

I followed Peter and intercepted him after he had delivered his orders.

“Why are you smiling, Peter?” I asked.

“Wait and see. And, oh, Karli, are your pistols primed, the charges dry and so forth?”

I looked at his grave face, decided that for once he was in deadly earnest, scuttled below and saw to my pistols. In a minute, one barker at each side of my belt, I sauntered on deck and joined the Captain in his scrutiny of the waves.

“Is it the plague, do you suppose, Sir?”

“They are the plague, Mr Van Cleef,” he answered tersely. I said no more, for his manner invited silence.

When we were hove-to every glass in the ship was trained upon the unlucky vessel. The only living being observable was a man in a turban and a gaudy, night-shirt-like robe, lashed to the mast and waving feebly to us.

“Gunner,” said the captain quietly, “can you put a ball through the mast?”

“I reckon I can that, Sir.”

“Then pray do so.”

“Aye aye, Sir.”

I gazed aghast as the gunner ambled towards the long brass Armstrong 68-pounder mounted on a pivot between the mast and bustled about it, testing the lock and handling the balls in the net until he chose one of perfect roundness. One of his mates came running up in list slippers (for he had been in the magazine, where a spark from a nailed shoe would send the whole ship to glory) carrying a stout cylindrical package. The gunner bit off a fragment of the cartridge-paper and poured some of the powder into the touch-hole. His mate rammed the rest into the barrel, then a wad, then the ball and another wad, thumping all well home.

“The ship’s company will wave,” said the captain. “Cheerily, now, lads!” Everyone waved in a cheery fashion to the poor wretch so near to salvation, except for me, who waved in a mystified way. The heathen waved back vigorously. The captain nodded to the gunner, who fussed a little more with his piece then snapped the lock.

When I could open my eyes again the heathen was no longer waving. This was because his head had vanished, you see. He was still tied to the stump but the rest of the mast was toppling, infinitely slowly, overside. I turned to the Captain: in my horror and agitation at his barbarous conduct I believe I was on the very point of rebuking him but, at that moment, a horrid clamour of raging screams came over the water and from behind the dhow there emerged two long boats, crammed with heathens, rowing frantically towards us. Those who were not rowing were brandishing curved swords which glistered in the sun.

“Only two boats, Sir,” said the First Mate laconically.

“Then I’ll have two guns run out, Mister,” grunted the Captain. “Fire at will. But destroy them before they come too close. I want no blood on my decks, you understand? See to it.”

The gunner was a master of his art, a master: his first shot from the carronade was a trifle high and only killed the heathen at the steering-oar but his next took her squarely in the bows and she opened out like a cabbage ready for stuffing — and, indeed, there was no want of minced meat to add kitchen-colour to the receipt. Our fellows on the gun-deck were less fortunate, or ill-trained, for their shots missed time and again so that the other boat, at which they were shooting, was soon so close that the guns would not depress low enough to bear.

“All gun crews to practise during their watches below for the next two days,” said the Captain in a disgusted voice. “Break out cold shot, if you please, Gunner.”

The next instant, it seemed, the shrieking horde were against our chains and grappling-hooks were flying — some lodged on our rail. Two of our men ambled forward nursing great cannon-balls and dropped them into the bottom of the boat. It was holed, filled and sunk in a moment but not before several of the Mahometan fiends were swarming up our side. One of our sturdy fellows sawed away at the grappling-lines with his great case-knife: he took a bullet from an ancient flintlock pistol in his shoulder but the lines were severed and the heathens fell screaming into the sea. Only one succeeded in boarding us; he rushed towards the Captain and me. There was a pistol in my hand. I aimed at his heart but my hand shook so that I shot him just above the private parts; he made an intolerable noise as he squirmed in the scuppers, voiding his bowels, his bladder and his blood most copiously. I had never killed a man before. I felt no distress, only a detached interest at how ignobly a brave man dies. I realised for the first time that Blanche was beside me, her lips parted, her eyes wide, her bosom heaving rapidly.

“Fined five shillings, Mr Van Cleef,” said the Captain crossly. “You heard me say I’d have no blood on my decks, did you not?”

I opened my mouth and shut it again. After all, I had saved his life, although I confess that my preoccupation had been more with my own.

“Go to your cabin, Blanche,” he went on. “Be ready in four and one half minutes.” He pulled out his watch.

A bored, disgusted seaman lifted my victim, still jerking and squealing, and hove him over the rail. I gazed down in horror, for the water was already boiling with sharks and other rapacious scavengers of the deep. Peter appeared beside me, put his hand on my shoulder.

“Karli, if you ever go overside in Tropic waters, pray for a shark, do. They are quick, you see. The barracoutha takes his time, goes for the titbits first, if you take my meaning. A fellow might live for half an hour with a barracoutha at him. Now, I’ve just to see the guns swabbed and secured then I’ll join you for dinner. Fish chowder today, you are fond of fish I believe?”

I think he was trying to hearten me. I forget what I said to him.

As we traversed the Indian Ocean the breezes became ever more warm and spiced. The doctor’s dishes, too, became hotter and spicier as he weaned me, not unwillingly, onto such fare. Those karis, pilaffs and tarkeeans, you see, not only disguise the odour of meat which is past its youth, they also provoke the jaded appetite in the long, languorous days and induce a wholesome, cooling sweat. How different they were from the gross Dutch food of my childhood, yet how I learned to love them! The Doctor, it was evident, grew to love me for my appreciation of his victuals and Orace was kept busy running from the galley to our cabin, carrying each day new and more bizarre confections. Peter Stevenage had a poor appetite, ruined by liquor and the pox, I suppose, but he never ceased to marvel at my adroitness with the knife and fork. He often remarked, as he passed me his scarcely-touched plate, that to watch me at the trencher was as good as a feast. I am sure that he meant this in sincerity and kindness, for there was no malice in his whole body.

Blanche, too, became warmer and spicier in the sultry air; her clothing — I observed her narrowly — was now little more than a muslin gown no less explicit than a shift. She no longer bridled when I called her “Blanche” and sometimes, when we leaned on the rail together enjoying the first cool wafts of the tropic dusk, her naked arm would rest warmly against mine and once or twice, even, I would relish the incandescence of her flank through my cotton trowsers.

I made no move, for I had decided on this as a new tactic, and I was right. She was, perhaps, piqued or perhaps she had heard about the Griqua girls in the Cape Town and thought that my lust for her had been allayed. Be that as it may, one evening as we left the rail, Blanche, inadvertently as it were or was meant to seem, brushed her splendid teats across my arm as she bade me goodnight.

Have you ever played the game where everyone holds hands and the instigator winds the handle of an electrical generating machine, in a little mahogany box, each terminal of which is held by the two people at the open end of the circle? The effect is quite formidable. One jumps. The sport has gone out of fashion, I am told, because there have been occasions when young ladies have wet themselves with the surprise and alarm of it.

The effect on me of the brief brushing of Blanche’s breasts against me was just such a shock, but without the wetting, thank God. There was, you see, not the soft, goose-feather sensation that you or I might have expected. Her teats were hard, hard, as though swollen.

“Are you well, Mr Van Cleef?” she asked, looking over her shoulder as she left me.

I mumbled something valiantly although my head was reeling.

“I’m so glad,” she said, her eyelashes flickering modestly as her large and lovely eyes rested for an instant on a territory just below my belt. “These tropic nights are replete with evil humours, are they not, and gentlemen’s clothes are so constricting. I hope you will sleep well. My husband always sleeps well but then, he is used to …these tropic nights, you understand.” I understood.

“Good night,” I said. It seemed an inadequate rejoinder but I had not been given the time to think of a better and, in any case, my mind was on lower things.

Peter was reading in the cabin. He eyed me in a friendly way.

“Are you well?” he asked.

“Uncommonly well, thankyou,” I replied evenly.

“Then why are you grinding your teeth, Karli?”

The world stood still while I decided whether to strike my mess-mate and only friend or to chew on my bile and swallow it. I made the right decision.

“It is because I am hungry, Peter,” I said.

“Karli,” he said in a grave voice.

“Yes?”

“There is something I must say to you.” I sat down.

“Yes?” I said.

“Karli, when you were out on deck communing with the, ah, spiced breezes, I made a decision.”

“Yes?” I said again.

“Yes. You see, I have been much disturbed. The long, hard, Italian sausage which has been hanging between our bunks was preying on my mind. You said, I know, that the grocer assured you that it would travel to the Indies but what do Italian warehousemen know of the Indies? In any case, we are, to speak strictly, already in the Indies. I fear for that sausage, Karli. Shall we cut it?”

He had the art, you see, of distracting a preoccupied mind.

The long, halcyon days span themselves out, each one much the same as another. It became, tacitly, an understood thing that Blanche would be at the weather rail a little before the short tropic dusk gathered and that I would be there, sometimes with Peter Stevenage, sometimes alone. We talked of many things and I found that she, too, was an admirer of “Jane Austen”, although in her sweet womanly simplicity she firmly believed him to have been a woman. But little ignorances of this kind only endeared her the more to me. All one can ask for in a woman is that she have a soft voice, a firm body and a pretty, empty head. (You will remark that I do not demand that she be complacent — every woman is unchaste if one applies oneself with zeal and patience to making her so. If you are tongue-tied and maladroit, do not attempt to practise on an ugly woman: she will know that she is but a pis-aller and there will be difficulties. Attempt, rather, a beautiful one, for she may well have a compassionate heart and her experience as a beauty will have taught her curiosity and, perhaps, a relish for carnality. You will understand all these matters when you are older, like me. By then, of course, it will be too late.)

She had, too, a passion for the poems of one Wordsworthy; a man of small talent who chose to write simple verses about idiot children, wayside weeds and large geographical features in the cold Northern parts of England. His work bore no relation to life but appealed to her charming, silly head and I indulged her in this matter. Sometimes I would recite to her, in Dutch, the English play Hamlet which I had mastered at school, but, inexplicably, she could not take it seriously. Once, when I had reached the solemn moment when the ghost says “Omlet, Omlet, ik ben je poppa’s spook …” she stuffed her handkerchief in her mouth and ran to her cabin. She was strange, strange.

Once, too, First Mate Lubbock joined us, making many an ironic remark to me. I drew the subject round to Great Circle Navigation, which I had been conning in one of Peter’s books. It was clear that Lubbock had but little knowledge in this and he soon made off, snorting vehemently.

I taught Blanche a few phrases in Dutch — although these did not mean what I told her they meant: it was pleasant to hear her say them unwittingly but also disturbing. I remember, for instance, that she mastered perfectly a sentence which she believed meant “It is a fine night, is it not: only look at the stars!” but which, in fact, meant, “Loosen my bodice, I beg you, and cover my breasts with kisses until I swoon in your arms.” When she at last pronounced it perfectly, I kissed her on the cheek, saying that this was a Dutch schoolmaster’s praise. She believed this, too, and the cheek-kissing became a normal part of our lessons. Better still, and more encouraging, her accidental brushing of her breasts against me became more frequent and once my hand was in the way. She pretended not to notice. But the ship was full of eyes — there is no privacy on so small a vessel — and I durst not make more explicit overtures.

Our first landfall for many weeks was hailed with absurd pleasure by the lookout, greeted with cheers by the jaded crew and with admiration by those of the officers who understood how skilful must have been the Captain’s navigation. It was the island of Minicoy, the most southerly of the Laccadivhs. The Captain gave the quartermaster a correction of his course but, just then, the lookout bawled “Deck, there! Sail three points on the port quarter, tops’ls just over the horizon. Ship-rigged, looks to me Sir.”

A grim glance and a nod from the Captain and Peter was swarming up the ratlines (“the lady’s ladder” we called it on the John Coram, for the rope steps were set kindly close together) and soon we could see him in the wide-circling crows-nest, training his glass on what was invisible to us. Then we saw him almost vaulting out of the nest — scorning the lubber-hole — and slithering down the rigging like a toy monkey.

On deck, panting from his exertions (for he was not well, you recall) he reported “Not ship-rigged, Sir. A barque. Baltimore-built, I fancy. Carrying top-gallants, royals, sky-sails. Fore-reaching on us, I’m afraid, Sir.”

Usually Peter spoke, even to the Captain, in a debonair, damn-your-eyes fashion: I had never before heard him use such a timid, almost cringing, tone.

The Captain’s face went white and, through his closed teeth, he said “Cattermole.” I did not understand.

Peter said, diffidently, “Yes, Sir, from what I could see of her she might well be the Martha Washington.” I still did not understand.

“Belay that course, Quartermaster,” snarled the Captain, “steer nor-nor’east until I give you a true course. Mister, kindly wear ship.” He stumped off to the little chart-room in his sleeping-cabin. The quartermaster’s face was blank as he span the wheel, the men went uncheerily about their business of wearing ship and even Lubbock seemed to have no heart for chivvying them in his usual coarse way.

“What in the devil’s name …?” I murmured to Peter.

“The ship astern of us,” he explained in an unhappy voice, “is almost certainly the Martha Washington, skippered by Micah Cattermole, Captain Knatchbull’s most deadly rival. He is young and fearless and, if he has had her bottom scraped, she has the legs of us by quite two knots. If she rounds Cape Comorin before us she will be in Calcutta three tides before us.”

“Is that important?”

“Very. The first at the opium auctions will pick up a raft of bargains and so will have cash to spare for the better quality chests at the end of the auctions. Worse, he will be in the Canton River before us and will skim the cream of the hungry market, have his bar-silver and new teas aboard and will be refitting for the voyage home before we have dropped our hook below the Two Islands.”

“I see,” I said vaguely. “And this change of course which seems to be so unwelcome to the crew?”

He took a deep breath.

“You see, Karli, in the ordinary way we would have taken the safe, comfortable, Eight Degree Channel, leaving Minicoy on our port and the Maldivhs on our starboard. But, now that we are being pressed by the Martha Washington our —” he looked about him cautiously “— our old maniac of a Captain is going to venture the Nine Degree Channel to the north of Minicoy Island. It is most hazardous. Captain Knatchbull reckons himself the only salt-water skipper who knows its little ways.” He fished out his watch. “We should be entering it just as night falls — and the wind is strengthening from the sou’west.”

I did not like the sound of any of this.

“Why is he doing this, do you suppose, Peter?”

“Because young Micah Cattermole is a dashing and hare-brained young fellow who will think that where one man can go another can follow. If he can win close enough to follow our lights he may succeed but our Captain is unlikely to help him in that way.”

“But …”

“Wait and see, Karli, and above all make no comments in the Captain’s hearing — he is a little, well, irrational, in matters concerning Micah Cattermole.”

The Captain emerged onto the poop and we heard him giving a more precise course to the quartermaster at the wheel, then bidding Lubbock have two reefs shaken out of our top-sails — reefs which had been made only an hour before on account of the freshing wind. One of the watch, as he scrambled aloft, made an audible sound of displeasure and Lubbock snarled at him, but without his usual fury. The wind was rising fast and ever larger waves began to chase our poop. The rigging began to whine and thrum and dusk gathered with the rapidity I had become so used to in those latitudes. Our ordinary sea-lights were lit and the Captain, to everyone’s mystification, ordered an extra light to be put at the mizzen-mast-head.

“And, comprador,” he said, “I want lamps burning in all cabins aft; see to it.”

I exchanged glances with Peter. He said nothing.

Soon the Captain gave a fresh course to the helmsman and the deck was an organised riot of men bracing the sails around. The wind was now, of course, on our starboard quarter and imparting an unpleasant roll and yaw to the vessel, which nevertheless flew on at unabated speed.

Peter was sent to the fore royal yard and reported that he descried the Martha Washington’s lights abaft and still, he thought, fore-reaching on us. This did not seem to displease the Captain.

The First Mate hovered, as though awaiting an order.

“Shorten sail, Sir?” he said at last, in a more diffident voice than I had ever heard him use. We were now, it was clear even to me, well into the perilous channel.

The Captain glared at him evilly. “Thankyou for your advice, Mister,” he whispered, “but giving advice to the Master of a vessel is not part of a First Mate’s duties. Pray call all hands on deck: I’ll have both bower anchors cock-a-bill and six men at the bill-boards of the sheet anchor. In exactly eight minutes I shall give orders to bring the ship up into the wind and, at precisely that moment, I’ll have every light in the ship dowsed.”

The First Mate gaped.

“And Mister, I’ll have all these manoeuvres carried out in silence, d’ye hear?”

“Aye aye, Sir.”

In just seven and one half minutes the man in the chains with the lead sang out that he had “by the mark” eight fathoms “and shoaling fast”.

To me, we were in the midst of a torrent of tearing waters buffetted by fearful winds but the Captain seemed as at home as if he were in his own parlour. Every light was dowsed in an instant; the ship came up into the wind and all three great anchors roared out together, bringing the ship up into the wind with a wrench which one would have thought would jar the very masts out of her.

There was, suddenly, no sound but the smash of the waves on our bows, no sight but the phosphorescence at our bows.

“A barrel of oil from the bows,” growled the Captain. In a minute the phosphorescence had gone and the crashing of the seas onto our stem became a mere schlipp-schlopp. We waited. We waited perhaps an hour, I cannot tell at this remove of time. Suddenly, like a ghost, a tall and lovely ship came storming past, like a vision. Her creaming bow-wave and the radiance of her wake were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen: it was like looking at a lovely, naked woman in the prime of her beauty.

She did not see us and soon vanished into the dark, leaving a dwindling wake of phosphorescence. Later, the Captain ordered the galley-stove to be re-lit and the lamps in cabins and forecastle; but not the great riding lights. Soon the watch below was piped but they were already on deck, muttering in groups.

In a wonderfully short time the cook had hot supper ready for the watch relieved but there was not the usual rush of mess-men to the galley. Indeed, I had to send an “idler” to find Orace before I could get my supper: he, like most of the men, was far forward, still staring into the darkness where the Martha Washington had sailed. I was not in the least hungry, but those in peril on the sea have a natural duty to keep up their strength, you understand. The meal was, as I recall, a “bindalooh” or sour-pork kari; very good except that the rice was over-moist. I had become a connoisseur in these matters by then.

I was lying on my bunk, meditating on the frailty of the human spirit, especially in the fair sex, when Orace rushed into the cabin without rapping and said that Lord Stevenage sent his compliments and would I join him on deck. Sighing, I struggled into a pair of trowsers and a hat (the latter was essential: the Captain insisted on his “gentlemen” saluting the quarterdeck in a proper fashion) and sought out Peter. He was in what seemed to be a heated altercation with the Captain.

“No, Mr Lord Stevenage,” the Captain was growling, “I shall not weigh anchor, nor set sail. You have, I fancy, enough seamanship to know that these waters are perilous at night and I know my duty to my owners and my crew. What you think you see may or may not be the Martha Washington: it is just as likely to be a lure set by wreckers for our destruction. If it were the Martha, we could not reach her until she were burned out and in this darkness and sea we could do nothing for survivors. You have now had more explanation than I commonly give to junior officers. Pray attend to your duties. Clear the decks of the watch below, who should be getting their sleep. Write on the watch-slate that the ship is to be ready to weigh anchor and set sail at first light.”

Just as he turned on his heel I heard Peter whisper something to him of which I could hear nothing except, it seemed to me, the word “murder”. The Captain stood still. Then he said:

“I shall make an entry in the log that I have reprimanded you, Sir.”

“Aye aye, Sir,” said Peter. The words were commonplace but they fell slowly from his lips like a curse, or perhaps a challenge.

The Captain ignored his insubordinate tone and turned on his heel; as he entered his cabin I heard him say “Blanche!”

“What in the name of God …?” I began to say.

“Go forrard, Karli, go forrard,” said Peter in a choked voice.

I jostled my way to the bows through the throng of men who had been ordered below. Over on the starboard bow there was a great glow in the sky — I could not tell how far off. Peter was at my elbow although, having the watch, he should have been aft.

“That ‘may or may not be’,” he said bitterly, “the Martha Washington. Go to bed, Karli.”

“But …”

“No, Karli. Go to bed.”

I stirred in my sleep at the sound of the great anchors being weighed at first light and at the thunder and rush of bare feet on the deck above me as sail was made and set. I slept again until Orace brought me my morning drink: bitter coffee sweetened only, with rum, for the cow had died some days before. I huddled on some clothes and went on deck. The whole ship’s company, it seemed, was staring and peering at the breakers smashing and creaming on the reef outside a low-lying island. There was nothing to see.

Then, a bellow from the look-out: “Object one point on the port bow! Piece of flotsam and what looks like a corpus, Sir!”

The Captain, who had been staring fixedly aft, received this news from the Second Mate, who had the watch. He did not look up.

“Do your duty,” he said, “take in sail, lower a boat, you know what to do, you have an Extra Master’s ticket, I believe.” He said it as though an Extra Master’s Certificate was a token for a soup-kitchen.

Within ten minutes a half-charred timber was gently swayed aboard with a shockingly charred human being adhering to it — whether lashed to it or clinging by some primal rigour it was hard to say.

The man was alive; that is to say, he was not dead. One of our fellows cried his name as “Jack Cherry of Salem!” and the man’s face split in what may well have been a smile. They brought him to the break of the poop and the Captain, for he was a Christian, came to look; bent down and asked, “What ship are you from, my man?”

The charred man eyed him with his left eye — the unroasted one — then raised himself with infinite difficulty on one elbow. A horrible noise came from his chest — I thought it was the death-rattle, but he was only gathering phlegm — then he spat full in the Captain’s face.

Bully Lubbock reached to the back of his belt for his rope’s end “starter” but the Captain checked him with a gesture.

“You’ll not lay a finger on this man!” he cried. “Have him taken to an officer’s cabin and see that the doctor and the loblolly-boy give him the best of food and care, for he is a brave fellow.” He reached behind him for the napkin, which his Chinese servant had ready, and wiped the mucus from his face.

“When he is well he may sign with us at one rating higher than on his — ah — last ship” (he could not name the Martha Washington) “or we shall put him ashore at any place he chooses between Pondicherry and Calcutta with five golden guineas in his pocket. See to it, Mister.”

They carried the man away with the tenderness which only coarse, rough men know how to exercise towards their mates. When he had gone, I looked up and saw Blanche smiling her enigmatic smile at me. That I found disgusting.

The Captain’s charity and forbearance cost him little in guineas for the man died that very evening. Next morning he was sewn up in tarpaulin with a forty-pound lump of pig-iron ballast at his foot and the sailmaker, at the end, passed the ritual last stitch through his nose, lest he were not quite dead. The Captain, despite his desperate lust for making sea-miles had the ship hove-to and the yards cock-billed and read the Service with some colour of sincerity. The sail-maker had cobbled up a Yankee flag and the canvas parcel slid out from under it in quite the proper fashion. But the men, I noticed, were not watching the committal to the deep; their eyes were on the Captain. I looked at Peter but could not catch his eye. I looked at the Second: he looked in my direction, certainly, but his eyes were fixed on something quite one hundred miles away. I detected an uncomfortable feeling throughout the ship’s company. Even the Doctor, who, being but a black man, could not attend a Christian burial — if that is what it was — lurked plainly to be seen in the entrance of his galley and his big, red lips, which I had never before seen without a grin upon them, were pursed and puckered into an expression which I could not read at all.

That evening I was loafing on the quarterdeck and trying to draw the taciturn Second into conversation.

“Why,” I asked pettishly after exchanging a few commonplaces, “are my toes so sore? I have never suffered from soreness of the toes in my life.”

“Sleep in socks or sea-boots,” he said and crossed to the weather-rail. Baffled, I followed him.

“I confess I do not understand,” I said meekly. He did not turn his head but gave me a sidelong stare with his pale eyes. He was a sidelong sort of man.

“Cockroaches,” he said. “They love the hard skin on a man’s feet but, after a few days at sea, you’re thoroughly pedicured and must protect your feet or the little buggers will munch their way up to your ankles.”

I digested this revolting fact, then, since this was almost the longest sentence I had ever heard him utter, I was emboldened to confide that I was not wholly clear about the events of the previous night. Again he gave me that pallid stare; clearly, he was deciding whether to answer me or not. Finally he said,

“Mr Van Cleef, do you know what a vigia is?”

“No,” I said unhesitatingly, because this was true.

“It is a mark on a map. A Portugee word, meaning ‘watch out’. The Frogs call it an ‘ouvre l’oeil’, which amounts to the same thing. It means that there’s a reef or shoal or some other hazard — or at least that the master of some ship, some time, has fancied that he’s seen something of the sort. Nine times out of ten it was just a dead whale or a raffle of unsunk wreckage or the sea breaking on some heavy-heeled floating spar; further south it may have been the last of a ’berg; off the West Coast of Africa just a floating island that some river has spewed out. Often as not it’s just the effect of too much rum.” He fell silent. I prompted him, asking why these interesting facts were connected with what I wanted to know. He heaved a deep, patient breath.

“Our Captain,” he said, “has a passion for these waters we are in; his charts are a mass of pencilled-in vigias — you may have observed this morning that he was tacking about like a spaniel in a turnip-field. Captain Cattermole — the late Captain Cattermole we must now call him — was a dashing young man who believed in nothing but survey-proven shoals on clean charts. Also, he believed that he could follow where Captain Knatchbull led. Furthermore, as you must have noticed, Captain Knatchbull was not, in fact, leading. R.I.P.”

“I have the impression,” I said carefully, “that Captain Cattermole was a well-liked man …?” But I had pushed too far.

“Mr Van Cleef, I have the watch and must ask you to delight me with your conversation at some time when the safety and the working of the ship are not in my hands. If you wish to hear an encomium on Captain Cattermole I suggest you offer a glass of spirits to O’Casey, the red-haired top-man, who sailed with him through three voyages. His watch is below and he will have eaten by now. Indeed, that is the fellow, there, lounging with his pipe in the lee of the foremast-bitts. Goodnight.”

I began to believe that our chat was at an end so I returned his goodnight and, consumed now with curiosity, I did indeed procure a tin cup of rum and strolled forrard.

The man O’Casey was an Irish and so had a great gift for speech, although some of this was not always easy to comprehend. I listened politely for a while as he extolled the beauties and virtue of a place called Tralee, then delicately raised the subject of Captain Cattermole.

“Captain Cattermole?” he said, “Captain Cattermole? A fine raparee of a man: had he but been born in Kerry he would have been perfection itself.” Two fat tears rolled down his weathered cheeks. “A brave bull of a man,” he went on; “when he was in port you could see the women dancing round him like coopers round a cask. When the wind broke from his splendid, God-given arse it would part the thickest of thickets and topple the tallest forest tree. Did he but belch in a genteel fashion the foundations of the poor-house would mutter and crumble and all the old and needy would bless themselves, thanking God for such rich enjoyment. Did he but pick his teeth, why, every cur and cat for miles around would scramble to the feast, leaving their dinners. As to his coupling, when he could bring his lovely mind to it, he was like one of them great steam locomotives working off a grudge against the buffers. I had that from one of his very wives herself.”

“A bigamist, then?” I asked idly.

“God save ye, no, a good Cartholic, never more than one wife at the same time at all. It’s just that he was hard on wives, wasn’t I telling you? It might be four he wore out or it might be five and never a child could he get out of any one of them. There’s little scraggy fellers that have their cabins so full of gossoons that they’d splash out between your toes but Jack Cattermole could never get one out of a woman, bump away as he might.”

“Indeed,” I said in a suitable voice.

“‘Indeed’ is the very two words in it,” he replied.

The Irish have a wonderful command of language, wonderful. If ever they learn to read and write there will, one day, be great literature from them, mark my words.

I bade O’Casey goodnight and repaired to my cabin, there to chew reflection’s solitary cud until supper-time.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

We rounded Cape Comorin as neatly as any seaman could wish and were soon making long slants up the Coromandel Coast under all plain sail and sometimes with royals set, accordingly as the wind veered from the east through south to the west. It was an easy, leisurely time, even for the common sailor-folk, but it was plain even to me that they no longer went about their business with their usual “cheerily-oh”.

One night, when we had left Madras’s lights on our port quarter and had no landfall to look for until Vizagapatam, Peter fished out from under his bunk a black, fat-bellied bottle of something called “Van Der Hum’s” which he had prudently laid in at the Cape. It was too sweet for my taste but rich, rich; also as strong as the thighs of a Griqua girl — Peter warned me to turn my head away from my glass when lighting a cheroot, lest my breath should ignite. I was, even in those my salad days, abstemious in all things, but on that night I felt his need to be joined by a friend in becoming a little drunk, and could not deny him so small an act of amity.

“The men,” I said in an off-hand fashion, when Peter had drunk quite one third of the potent bottle, “the men seem to have lost some little of their, ah, zest. Is it not so?”

He looked at me owlishly.

“Seamanship, Karli, is a sort of Freemasonry — are you at all familiar with the word?”

“I have heard it,” I answered guardedly, for I had long ago “tried” him in a veiled way and knew that he was not of our Craft.

“Well, d’you see, Karli, although those Yankees aboard the Martha Washington were, in a way, our deadly rivals, nevertheless many of our people had sailed with many of theirs and there is scarcely a man aboard who has not caroused or brawled with a Martha Washington man in one or another port of the Seven Seas.”

He paused a long while, drinking some more of the villainous Van Der Hum. I did not, for once, say anything, although I wished to tell him about my talk with the Irishman O’Casey.

“So you see, Karli, they feel that our Captain’s little ruse, which lured them onto a coral reef and sent them flaming down to hell, does not seem to them a legitimate ruse de guerre, for there is, you see, no war in progress — only a sordid struggle for commercial advantage in selling poison to heathens. Their sullenness probably arises from a belief that our Captain is a murderous, fucking little maniac.”

I thought about this carefully; slowly, too, for I had drunk my share of the Van Der Hum. At last I said, “And Peter, is our Captain, in fact, a murderous, fucking little maniac?”

Peter rose to his feet, stoney-faced, his eyes like ice.

“Mr Van Cleef,” he said, in a thin, unpleasant voice, “I shall, since you are my mess-mate, pretend that I did not hear that question. However, I cannot promise that I shall overlook any future impertinences of the kind.”

After collecting my thoughts, I too rose. I bowed, but only from the neck, as I had seen Lord Windermere bow.

“I apologise, Lord Stevenage,” I said stiffly. “Pray believe that it was the wine which spoke and not I.”

“Sit down, Karli, there’s a good fellow. And my name’s Peter. And let us kill this bottle before it kills us.”

We drank — in perfect friendship. I shall never understand the English. (There was a time when I thought that I would never understand women, but now, after having owned and trained perhaps twenty spaniels, the female mind is an open book to me. All they ask from life is something to adore and fear: it is as simple as that. But the English men — no one will ever understand them, least of all their women. It is, of course, possible that there is nothing to understand and perhaps, too, that is their great strength. Who can tell?)

By the time Orace entered to put me into my nightshirt I was in the mood to throw pieces of Italian sausage at him and he stalked out, looking very English although but a bastard and small of stature. Peter and I finished the bottle and fell asleep in our clothes. He probably washed his face first, for he was English, English.

The last leg of our passage to Calcutta was “sailed large” for we caught the first of the hot, south-west monsoon and snored up the Coromandel Coast in great style, the sea making a pleasing hiss under our forefoot as it shored through the swell. Not a reef would the Captain allow in her sails although, when the wind stiffened at nightfall, he would sometimes reluctantly have the royals stowed.

From time to time, when no one could observe, I made something of a friend of the strange Irish O’Casey. (I say “when no one could observe” because I was, you see, an officer and he but a common seaman and, to boot, not even English, although he spoke a tongue of which many of the words seemed to be English.) His gift of language was enviable; he could hold me spellbound by the hour although I did not understand one half of what he said. Better, he had great store of mournful ballads, all evincing a terrible homesickness for his land, which is an island off the coast of England, just as England is an island off the coast of Holland. Although, whenever he had a few pounds in his pocket after a voyage, he would go to his home and lord it as long as the money lasted, he would always sing of it as though he was an eternal exile. I remember, but indistinctly, many of these sad songs; in particular one in which he vowed to cross the sea to Ireland even at the closing of his days in order to see the women in the uplands dropping praties on the gossoons making water in the bog. I did not understand this wish but it never failed to bring tears to my eyes. There will one day be an Irish Empire, you may depend upon it.

There was, in truth, little else to keep my mental faculties awake: one day of scudding through a tropical sea is much like another; one balmy, breathless tropic eve, spangled with improbably large stars, is hard to distinguish from its fellows and one hot, tossing, sleepless night spent lusting after a woman who is in bed with a Sea-Captain a few yards above one’s head is only a little more hellish than the last. Having exhausted the tepid pleasures of “Jane Austen” and vainly attempted to woo sleep with the incomprehensible logic of Norie’s Seamanship, I was at last forced to borrow a tattered copy of the Bible from the fo’c’sle.

I learned to love this book. There is no finer compendium of factual and fictional lore to be had, with the possible exception of Captain Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights, which is unexpurgated. I took care to eschew the more inflammatory passages, such as the Song of Solomon and certain parts of Ezekiel, but my state was such that even when trying to drug myself with the lists of the ancestors of Abraham, I found myself not so much marvelling that Nahor begat Terah but wishing that I could be relishing the begetting-act myself. Such is the magic of the written word.

Our course often took us within sight of shore but this was rarely more than a smudge on the horizon to port, although sometimes we could glimpse white, sandy beaches and palm-trees. Once, when we were in shoaling water and about to change course to starboard, the look-out bellowed “Shipwrecked mariner clinging to wreckage, five cables distant, fine on the starboard bow!” The Captain used his telescope and held course until we came up with the wretched fellow, then had the yards backed and hove-to. This surprised me for by then it was evident that the mariner was by no means shipwrecked, but the master of the most primitive craft you can imagine: he was seated astride a log, half awash, which was attached to a smaller log by means of a sort of basket-work structure which supported a large stone and a length of line.

“A pearl-fisher, Mr Van Cleef,” said the Second curtly, in answer to my question. “Ancient, pre-Dravidian race; ugly. The stone gets him down to the oyster-beds, d’ye see. Bad life. Never make old bones.” The fellow was by now swarming up a rope which had been tossed to him and soon stood on our deck in a puddle of water. He was, indeed, notably ugly and of a deep, blue-black hue. His features could only have been acceptable to others of his race. He was entirely naked and, after one glance (which lasted quite five seconds) Blanche fled modestly from the scene. His male member was pitifully small, resembling nothing so much as a wrinkled hazel-nut but this, I supposed, was due to long immersion in the water. He wrung out his long hair onto the deck but this elicited no more than a low growling sound from Captain Knatchbull who, clearly, was determined to show the man civility.

“Greet him,” he growled to the comprador, who addressed a few words of some lingua franca to the fisherman, with an air of great disdain such as you might see in the demeanour of an English parlourmaid bidden to do some task which was “not her work”. The black man’s face burst open into an enormous smile, made the more interesting by the lack of his front teeth and the fact that the remaining ones were of a rich scarlet colour.

He rattled off some words in what must have been a language because the comprador made shift to understand them. A pannikin of fresh water was brought and the man drank it off with every sign of relish.

“No fresh water on this coast,” vouchsafed the Second. “They have to catch the dew.”

After more exchanges the man reached behind him and began to explore the terminus of his digestive tract, bestowing on us all the while that nightmare smile. One of the Captain’s Chinese boys fetched a bucket of sea-water, into which the fisherman dropped the fruits of his rummaging. After rinsing, the nasty nuggets proved to be three pearls. I knew little of such things at the time, but still, perhaps, more than most Gentiles. One was a very fine rose-coloured stone, one a large one but of bad colour and the third smaller but of a most perfect roundness and luminosity. The Captain proffered a half-guinea, somewhat worn and bent. The pearl-fisher gazed at it, horror-stricken, then threw himself upon the deck, patting the Captain’s boots and shrieking in a dignified fashion.

“Well?” asked the Captain of the comprador.

“He says, Sir, you are his father and mother and he is your dog.” The Captain brushed aside the interesting suggestions, ignoring their implications.

“What does he want?”

“He says, Sir, that he wants two whole guineas and a piece of cloth. Thick guineas, he says and new cloth.”

After more shrieking and growling a deal was struck: the blackamoor took two half-guineas, one of them thick, a sprinkle of small silver coins and a short yard of red flannel from the slop-chest. He also begged a wisp of cotton, in which he wrapped his bullion before committing it to the vault where he had kept the pearls. As soon as he was over side the Captain called all officers to the break of the poop. There was a custom in these affairs, it seems.

“Order of seniority,” rasped the Captain. “I claim the pink pearl at half a guinea.” He aimed his eyebrows at us. No one demurred.

Lubbock had next pick. He was, as I have told you, not clever and he claimed the large, ill-coloured stone at the cost of a guinea and a crown. The Second, with a gloomy air which, I fancy, concealed a certain pleasure, pouched the smaller, beautiful pearl for an outlay of half a guinea. The money was then ritually divided between the three, after deducting the initial outlay: each received six shillings and eightpence. It was a glum Carolus Van Cleef who sulked in his cabin that afternoon.

We took in sail and cruised slowly up that coast, taking soundings, for the rest of the day. Sure enough, just before evening another log-borne fisherman was sighted and taken aboard. He had four pearls. “Our turn this time, Karli,” murmured Peter.

The Captain claimed the finest for a half guinea again but then it was “reverse order of seniority” which meant that I had first choice. To everyone’s amusement I selected a large, misshapen pearl of varied colour and secured it for three half-crowns. Such “baroque” pearls are despised in England but I knew how much they were prized by jewellers in Augsburg and Amsterdam. (If ever you are privileged to call on my young friend Ferdinand de Rothschild at Waddesdon, his château, you will be shown wonderful examples, wonderful.) The remaining two might have been brothers, they were not large but perfectly matched. It was conceded that they might be considered a single lot and Peter gave two pounds. Dear fellow, he thought that I had stood back from them out of courtesy to him.

I supped heartily that night and with great contentment. I washed my pearl again, for I am a fastidious man, and admired it for an hour, while Orace sewed me a little bag made out of the tail of my silk shirt so that I could hang it about my neck. Pearls are happiest when close to the warmth and natural grease of the human skin, everyone knows that.

We reached the end of the pearling-coast and clapped on sail again until there came a day when we found ourselves at the Mouths of the Ganges and hove-to at the entrance to the Hooghly River awaiting a pilot, while our Captain paced up and down, munching his beard impatiently. Even he, let alone anyone in his senses, would not try to navigate the Hooghly unassisted, for the whole stretch of it is a treacherous maze of mud-and sand-banks, forever shifting. The pilot-cutter came dancing out to us the next morning and a little tea-coloured man skipped aboard, nodding and becking daintily but with a curious dignity, and introducing himself as “Mister Pilot D’Souza”.

“Well, Mister Pilot D’Souza,” growled our Captain, “pray take the conn and get this bucket up to Shalimar Point as soon as may be: I want my hook in Garden Reach before dark.”

The little man was wonderfully skilful; he rapped out orders to the helmsman in an unending succession all day long, leading our ship in the most improbable directions along and across the vast, muddy river. The Captain stood behind him for much of the time, sometimes snorting but never once contradicting an order. The pilot asked for a new helmsman every hour or so, for the work was testing, and this was not denied him. Sure enough, we dropped our anchor just before dusk and the Captain immediately called away his gig to set the pilot ashore. At the last moment, he decided to join him and bade the First Mate to join the party. I think he wanted to make sure that no other skipper in the trade was there before him.

Peter Stevenage had the anchor-watch and, after having the boarding-nets spread (for there are thieves in Calcutta), he retired to the taffrail for a snooze. The Second was in his cabin as usual, moodily pulling the wings off flies, I fancy. In the circumstances, my usual little meeting at the rail with Blanche was in more darkness than usual and more private. I taught her a new Dutch sentence in which one or two words were so close to English that I think she must have suspected that it cannot really have meant “Where is there a good milliner in this town?” This night my schoolmasterly kiss strayed to her lips and was answered warmly although it was clear that she had never been taught to kiss in the way that lovers do. I taught her. She had misgivings at first but was soon an adept pupil, so engrossed in this new art that she seemed unaware that my hand had firmly captured one of her delightful breasts. Her breathing quickened but all of a sudden she broke away, bade me goodnight and fled to her cabin. I was puzzled and chagrined as I stood by the rail alone, until I heard what she must have heard sooner: a boat approaching, the oars propelled by the long Navy-stroke which our Captain always insisted on.

I, too, fled, but to the galley to see what was for supper. The doctor had bought from a bum-boat some hens and coconuts and was confecting a kari-stew of these which ravished my nostrils. (How strange it is that language has words for being deaf, dumb and blind but no word for the shocking deprivation of being without the sense of smell! To speak plainly, I would rather be dumb, although not deaf, because I love to hear what certain grandchildren murmur behind my back: I should not like to write an ill-considered will.)

I found Peter on the poop and we leaned and gazed in silence at the thousands of little flickering lights which flowered and died in the great heathen city, listened to the strange sounds of drums and wailing music which wafted across the water to us and, when a little off-shore breeze arose, snuffed the scented air — an air laden with spices, woodsmoke, rotting fruit and shit. It was a magical moment and my spirits were exalted beyond the plane of mere human existence and its attendant lures of Captain’s wives.

“Are there many whores in Calcutta?” I asked Peter at last.

“More than you could pleasure in a life-time, Karli. The best and safest are the temple-prostitutes: to them it is a religious rite.”

“Do you mean that it is free?”

“Of course. But, of course, you must make a donation to the temple treasure, that is only civil. Besides, it does save your throat from being slit on the way home.”

“That seems prudent,” I said.

Later, I ate great store of the hens seethed in spices and coconut-milk but when I went to bed my thoughts turned again to Blanche and my supper lay surlily on my stomach like a hastily-chewed dead dog. Sleep was slow to come and, when it came, was visited with evil dreams. Peter woke me up once or twice, saying that I had been speaking unguardedly in my sleep. I took my bedding onto the deck but certain flies stang me so bitterly that I fled back to the hot and fusty cabin.

Promptly, as the ship’s bell struck to signify the end of the watch at noon, next day, the Captain made his appearance on the deck in a splendid uniform, gallooned with gold braid, that I had never seen before. Lubbock was awaiting him, also clad in some sort of marine finery which made him look quite gentlemanlike. They were attended by the comprador and the Captain’s two Chinese boys, all bedecked in silks and marvellous head-cloths. The Second glumly joined the glittering throng, wearing a rusty garb of antique cut, made all the more shabby-looking by the splendid sword at his hip. The Captain was off to inspect the first wares at the opium auction.

Peter, who once again had the anchor-watch — an undemanding chore — confided to me that he proposed to become a little drunk.

I do not much love to become drunk of an afternoon when the weather is hot, so I took but a glass with him before retiring to the lazaretto to check the slop-chest stores, the comprador being ashore, you see.

There Orace found me, fast asleep upon a pile of oilskins, an hour or two later. He looked at me curiously as I rubbed my eyes, for he was growing up fast, then delivered his message. “Mum” — by which he meant the Captain’s wife — “sends her compliments and wishes you to take a dish of tea with her in half an hour.”

“Very well, Orace. Have I any clean linen?”

“In course, Sir.”

“Then come to the cabin and dress me suitably for tea-parties.”

Having shifted my linen and shaved, I gave Orace a pile of clothes for him to attend to and warned him that I wished to see them back spotless in precisely two hours: no more and no less.

“Aye aye, Sir,” he replied smartly in the maritime fashion he was now affecting.

Blanche was sitting behind the tea-table primly — or as primly as a young woman can sit who is wearing a light tea-gown of a kind which makes it evident that she is, indeed, young and a woman.

“The servants are all ashore,” she said, still primly, “and I do not make tea well. Perhaps you will be content to share a glass of white Cape wine with me?”

I mumbled assent and we drank the delicious wine. The English, particularly the English women, have a notion in their strange heads that slightly-sweet white wine is not an alcoholic beverage. I already knew that this was an error for I was not, in those days, a naturalised Englishman. I drank frugally.

After a little the conversation drew around to Dutch customs. She reminded me, in an off-hand fashion, that I had been telling her the night before that Dutchmen kissed in a different fashion from Englishmen. I did not, of course, refresh her memory that I had demonstrated this Continental practice, for that would have been uncivil. I walked around the table and lifted her in my arms. Laying her gently on the sofa I began to teach her how Dutchmen kiss desirable women. She had, I think, been considering the matter, for now she seemed quickly to master the art of it, so much so that at times I had difficulty in drawing breath. So engrossed was she that, when her silk gown slid away from her shoulders and my hands took both of her naked breasts and gently squeezed them, she seemed quite unconscious of the action but continued with her lesson. When she began to tremble and hold me fiercely I drew away and said, half-jokingly:

“Blanche, be ready in four and one half minutes.”

To my astonishment she rose instantly and flew into the sleeping-cabin as I drew out my gun-metal watch. The four and one half minutes seemed long, long: I believe I could have recited the whole of the Torah before the minute hand erected itself to the desired mark.

On that very instant I opened the door of the sleeping-cabin and stepped in, closing it behind me.

What met my eyes made me stagger back against the door in astonishment, not unmixed with salacious delight, to speak plainly.

Blanche was spread-eagled face down on the great, gaily-painted Indian bedstead, each ankle and wrist manacled to one of the corner-posts. She wore silk stockings but no drawers: this was plain, for her silk gown was hoisted up to her waist. There was a pillow under her loins which raised her rump in the most engaging fashion and another was under her face. This other pillow, as I realised when I saw the array of whips and canes on the little table beside the bed, was for her to scream into. I gazed, entranced, at her superb bottom and noticed that it was all traced and laced with long stripes and scars and cicatrices, some old, some fresh and pink.

“Please only use the little green one at first, Karli,” she said in a voice muffled by the pillow. I found it: a beautiful little terrier-crop with a silver horse’s-head handle and the lash bound with green velvet. In a spirit of experiment I laid it across her croup a few times in a sheepish fashion. She wriggled, as though impatiently. I have never much enjoyed giving pain (except to my own descendants) but the situation was so novel and picturesque that I laid on even harder, watching with undeniable interest the way her enviable nates blossomed into a deep rose-colour.

My interest — and the strokes of the whip — diminished after a while and she turned her head from the pillow and gazed at me wonderingly.

“Why are you not …?” she said, puzzledly.

“Not what?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, in some confusion, her cheeks as pink now as her bottom, “you should be, well, your clothes should be unfastened and you should be, that is, ah, holding your person. Do you not know how to make love?”

I began to understand.

“Blanche,” I said lovingly, passing a hand gently over her rosy bum, “Blanche, let us have a little lesson. Let me teach you how we make love in Holland?”

We unclasped the absurd manacles and fetters and I turned her the right way up. That is to say, upon her back. We rehearsed, for a while, that way of kissing which was so new to her, then I applied my attentions to her unusually fine teats. This, too, seemed something of a novelty to her but, after a token protest, she submitted to it.

“What are you doing?” she cried a little later, “it is you that must hold that, not I …” But she grew reconciled to this, too. The crux came presently.

“Karli, you must not touch me there, you must not, you must … my God, what are you doing, that is wicked, it is against religion, it is beastly, it is what horses do, I have seen them, it is abominable, stop, stop, it hurts; stop, I beg you!”

“Stop?” I asked, in a kindly, considerate way. She breathed deeply, perhaps three breaths.

“Stop stopping is what I meant, Karli.” She said this in a small voice.

I stopped stopping. Incredibly, but demonstrably, she was — had been until that afternoon — a virgin. After some little time we both had need to stop. I explained certain things to her.

“And am I now deflowered, Karli?”

“I think so.”

“Should we not make sure?”

We made sure; it was even better than the first time. Then we fell asleep. Then she awoke me, seeming concerned that the deflowerment might not have been permanent. This time, although it was perhaps a little uncomfortable for her, I made it very certain indeed. I left her in a deep sleep and went to the galley, for I was hungry, hungry. I have no recollection of what the food was except that it was good and that, for once, I ate greedily.

The Captain returned at dusk in a state of satisfaction equalling mine, although I would not have exchanged my reasons for gratification with his. He had indeed been the first Western buyer in the market — the auctions were due to begin within the week — and he had already set our Calcutta schroff to work at suborning everyone concerned and, in particular, the venal auctioneers. Also, he had contrived to buy for ready gold a few chests of the very primest opium — grown and dried by private horticulturalists of course, for the stuff grown under the aegis of the Honourable East India Company was not subject to unofficial dealings. (Unless your schroff had the ear of a penurious official and a bag of gold to chink into that ear, you understand.)

The Yankee clippers of Russell & Co., and those slower ships of Dent & Co. and Jardine Matheson, were evidently days behind us and, although the auctions would not commence until there was a decent quorum, we had our foot in the doorway first and your honest Oriental respects the first man to bribe him — especially when he has had to give a receipt. The Parsee firm of Bonajee were already there, of course, but at this time they were only dipping the toes of their mighty banking firm into the evil footbath of opium and their ships were few and old and ill-crewed.

As the Captain, having delivered his news with unwonted friendliness and condescension, bade us goodnight, he pulled out his great watch and I heard him say “Blanche, be ready in —” only to be cut off short, to my delight, with her snappish rejoinder that she had a severe headache.

In our little cabin, I rummaged in the tin shirt-box for some delicacies to augment our dinner that night: Peter was enchanted at my change of mood.

“Is it that you feel riches already within your grasp, Karli?” he asked with his mouth full.

I answered him ambiguously for my mouth, too, was as full as my wicked heart.

At dawn the next morning we made a full boat: Captain Knatchbull and Blanche — who, indeed, may have had a headache for there were dark circles under her lovely eyes — Lubbock, Peter, me, the comprador and the Captain’s servants and our new schroff, a base, ill-made looking little man who was clever. The lugubrious Second was left with the anchor-watch.

To speak plainly, Calcutta was a disappointment. There were some fine European buildings and some Indian temples adorned with carvings which were so explicit in their indecency that I might almost have averted my face, had it not occurred to me that Oriental ingenuity might well have a lesson for me, even me. A side-glance at Blanche shewed that she was averting her face so determinedly that she had clearly glimpsed these carvings and was now convinced that it was I, and not her husband, who had the right of it in such matters.

Nevertheless, the city was a disappointment. Where were the scented arbours, the jewelled birds, the shameless, bare-breasted, nard-anointed houris I had dreamed of? This city was a crammed turmoil of white-swathed figures, screaming and chaffering and jostling in a humid air laden with the stench of dead dogs and human excrement. To have walked those streets would have been unthinkable, but we were drawn in a small procession of little chariots like the bathing-machines of the wonderful Margate itself, each pulled by a horse of amazing thinness who could yet break wind again and again in the most striking manner. I recall wondering what such decayed horses could be fed upon in so stricken a city.

We were entertained in a huge, cool hall by some petty merchant princeling of John Company — the tea, we were assured, was cooled by snow brought two hundred miles from the Hills — then sauntered out into a great cloistered enclosure, shaded by awnings, where the very opium itself was laid out in neat batches. The fat, dark cakes of the Patna stuff, the lovely, polished balls of best Benares — oh, I came to know them all, all. And their values, you may be sure.

Peter was in a strange mood of bitter elation. “Look, Karli,” he murmured, “here is England’s greatness and the pride of commerce. Enough poison to corrupt and ruin a great Empire. (No, the Chinese Empire, Karli, do not be obtuse: how could the British Empire ever fall?) The Celestial One has banned opium from all his territories — he has heard of the havoc it has wrought in Formosa — but although he is well-informed, he is ill-served by a system of mandarins whose only concern is to become rich as quickly as may be. They send out a brace of war-junks as a sort of token; they fire off an antique cannon or two, we return fire in an aimless sort of way and, honour appeased, they make best speed for shelter. The Emperor receives reports of bloody battles in which the Western-Oceans devils were routed and we then comfortably make our bargains. It’s a shabby business but everyone becomes rich. Honour is out of date, you see, Karli.”

“I am sure you are right, Peter,” I said.

“So am I,” he said. Then he laughed but not merrily.

I liked Peter much but did not always understand him in those days. I understand now but, as in the matter of sex, such understanding comes too late in life. By the time that you, too, understand these things it will be too late for you, too. This gives me a wry pleasure similar to that which my poxy friend Peter exhibited to my incomprehension that day.

The Captain strolled grandly about the courtyard, followed by his splendidly-clad entourage, and made some more illicit forward bargains. Being sure that he would recall that we had both been entered, passed and raised through certain Degrees of a Craft which I may have referred to before, I gladly allowed him to make similar bargains for me, to the limit of the sum I had set aside for this. His aspect towards the dusky vendors was implacable but I could tell, although not understanding the tongues, that he was shrewd, shrewd.

There is a strange repast called “Tiffin” in those climes which consists of pleasant cold curried dishes and a great deal of Dry London Gin with interesting sparkling waters added. Peter and I made a hearty meal. Indeed, so soon as we had returned to the ship, we found a compulsion to sing songs. Peter had learned his in a county called Harrow; mine were from Holland but, once translated, there seemed to be little difference in their content. I recall that we made many a protestation of undying friendship before we fell asleep and, for I wished to emulate these fine men from Harrow County, I too washed my face in a thorough, English way and removed all my clothes before donning the smocked, silken nightshirt which some generous soul had placed beneath my pillow.

We remained some days in Calcutta until the formalities of the auctions were over and our Captain had availed himself of all opportunities to twit the arriving skippers on their tardiness. He did this with much dignity and met their rebukes without ever raising his voice above a scream.

I essayed a little whoring but only half-heartedly. The brightest memory I carried away from Calcutta was of a young or youngish person (it is very hard to discern ages in those latitudes) who contrived to ingest, as it were, a pile of silver coins (she spurned copper) in the most improbable direction and then to receive the attentions of a donkey, after which she retrieved the coins from the donkey’s ear. Clearly, this was sleight of hand. I can think of no other explanation.

When I say that my whoring was half-hearted I mean, of course, that I had by then fallen in love with Blanche. It is not every day that one has the delight of instructing a hearty, nubile virgin of nearly thirty into the raptures of adultery. She was an apt and eager pupil. Sometimes I feared that the Captain would catch us in the very act but more often, as she became more adept, I feared for my own health. Peter marvelled at how soundly I slept of nights.

The ship’s people, who have a sort of scuttlebut telegraph, nudged and winked as I strolled the deck.

The day before we were due to drop down the Hooghly to commence the perilous part of our voyage, I was standing idly at the port rail, watching the lumpers fetch in the last of our stores (the chests of the drug were already safe stowed) and keeping half an eye on the comprador and schroff who were checking these incoming things against the bills and quietly snarling at each other. I knew that I could go over the bills at leisure, for these two hated each other and there was no likelihood of collusion; or, if there was, it would be at so rarefied and convoluted a level that my simple Dutch mind would never reach the bottom of it. Indeed, on that warm and languid morning, my simple Dutch mind was reaching more toward the charming bottom of Blanche than concerning itself with any petty cheatings that these two might be arranging in the matter of pigs and poultry and pigtail-twist tobacco.

My eye fell upon a group of sturdy seafaring men on the dock who were eyeing our ship with admiration.

“Sir!” cried one of them, “Sir?”

I realised that he was addressing me.

“Yes?” I cried in a haughty, officer-like way.

“Sir, this is the sweetest ship we have seen upon the seas and we beg permission to come aboard and admire of her, Sir.”

I knew not what to say but Lubbock, who had the watch, saved me the decision.

“Come aboard, my bullies!” he bellowed sweetly, “I can tell at a glance that you are kernoozers of a vessel’s lines. Come aboard and squinch at her from truck to keelson, for you’ll never see a better — even in a Marblehead yard. Jest take your boots off at the head of the gangway for we dearly love our decks and don’t like to work our men too hard a-scrubbing of them. There’ll be a pannikin of something strong in the fo’c’sle for you when you’ve looked your fill.”

They trooped aboard, doffing boots and caps. Their praise was boundless, although expressed in language of a dirtiness new to me. The costly mahogany and brass-work excited their fierce admiration, while the capacious fo’c’sle sent them into raptures. An hour later, three of them left with many a thankful word; the other five were in the cabin, signing not only the Ship’s Articles but also the document which laid down that they realised the sovereign merits of flogging and were happy to submit to British Navy rules, waiving their rights as private mariners.

The First Mate was postively jocund when I next met him on deck.

“From here on out,” he condescended to tell me, “we’d be glad of a double crew. Wait and see, sonny, wait and see. These five shagamores will be first-class topmen as soon as I’ve beaten the bug-juice out of them and now we’ll have three strong watches. They were shanghaied here by Martin Churchill, or maybe Black Jack himself, the finest crimps in New York, and they’ve jumped ship. Cain’t say as I blame them. They reckon this bucket will be a floating paradise after what they bin through. They reckon.” He laughed a soft, unpleasing laugh.

“What is bug-juice?” I asked.

“Rum. Or something like it.”

“And you have coaxed these sturdy shell-backs to sign on because they are capable seamen?” I asked. He gave me a look which was hard to interpret.

“I’ve took them, Mr Van Cleef, for the same reason the Kentucky thief took the hot stove: there was nothing else to be had that season. They’re waterfront scum, two shades worse than bilge-rats and they don’t fool me worth a nickel. They don’t know timber from canvas and they don’t want to learn.”

“But you’ll teach them, I daresay, Mr Lubbock?” I ventured.

“No. I ain’t about to teach them. I’m going to bloody learn them. Before we’re in the Canton River I’ll have them dancing on the cro-jacks like Maggie May in scarlet drawers.”

“Indeed,” I said politely. He turned on his heel. I reflected that such a man ought not to be allowed to live.