From
January of 1787
until
January of 1788
At dawn the tranfportees were culled, a total of 60 men in their habitual groups of six, leaving another 73 convicts looking vastly relieved at being passed over. Who, how or why the ten groups chosen to go from the Ceres orlop had been selected no one knew, save that Mr. Hanks and Mr. Sykes had a list and worked from it. The ages of those going varied from fifteen to sixty; most of them (as all the old hands knew) were unskilled, and some of them were sick. Mr. Hanks and Mr. Sykes ignored such considerations; they had their list and that, it seemed, was that.
William Stanley from Seend and the epileptic Mikey Dennison were hopping from foot to foot in glee because they were not on the list. Life on the Ceres orlop was comfortable, there would soon be fresh fleeces.
“Bastards!” Bill Whiting hissed. “Look at them gloat!”
The door opened; four new convicts were thrust inside. Will Connelly and Neddy Perrott squawked simultaneously.
“Crowder, Davis, Martin and Morris from Bristol,” explained Connelly. “They must have been sent from Bristol just for this.”
Bill Whiting gave Richard a broad wink. “Mr. Hanks! Oh, Mr. Hanks!” he called.
“What?” asked Mr. Herbert Hanks, who had been liberally greased in the palm by Mr. James Thistlethwaite and had promised to do his utmost to favor Richard’s and Ike’s groups if they were among those to go. That he was inclined to honor his promise lay in the fact that Mr. Thistlethwaite had whispered of additional largesse after they had gone if his spies informed him that what could be done had indeed been done. “Speak up, cully!”
“Sir, those four men are from Bristol. Are they going?”
“They are,” said Mr. Hanks warily.
The old, merry Whiting looked sideways at Richard, then the round face assumed an expression of diffident humility for Mr. Hanks. “Sir, they are but four. The thing is, we do so hate being parted from Stanley and Dennison, Mr. Hanks, sir. I wondered…?”
Mr. Hanks consulted his list. “I see that the two who were to go with them died yesterday. They is four too many or two too few, whichever way youse looks at it. Stanley and Dennison will round it off real nice.”
“Got you!” said Whiting beneath his breath.
“Thankee, you bugger!” said Ike through his teeth. “I was looking forward to life without that pair.”
Neddy Perrott giggled. “Believe me, Ike, two craftier shits than Crowder and Davis do not exist. William Stanley from Seend will meet his match and more.”
“Besides, Ike,” said Whiting, smiling angelically, “we will need a couple of workers to mop the deck and do the washing.”
The convicts to go were fitted with locked waist bands and locked manacles, but no extensions to their ankles; instead, a long chain was passed from one waist to the next and fused each six men together. Weeping and wailing because they had not sufficient time to gather all the things they needed, Stanley and Dennison were hitched to the four newcomers from Bristol.
“That makes sixty-six of us in eleven groups,” said Richard.
Ike grimaced. “And at least that many from London.”
But that, as they found out later, was not the case. Only six groups of six were chosen from upstairs, and by no means confined to the true flash coves of an Old Bailey conviction and the London Newgate; most were from around London and many of those from Kent of the Thames, particularly Deptford. Why, no one knew, even Mr. Hanks, who simply followed his list. The whole expedition was a mystery to all who had dealings with it, whether a part of it or whether remaining behind.
His box and two canvas sacks by his side, Richard told the orlop transportees off: one gang from Yorkshire and Durham, one from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, one from Hampshire, three from Berkshire, Wiltshire, Sussex and Oxfordshire, and three from the West Country. With an occasional oddment. But Richard’s puzzle-loving mind had long ago made certain deductions: some parts of England produced convicts galore, while others like Cumberland and a large tract of counties around Leicestershire produced none at all. Why was that? Too bucolic? Too sparsely populated? No, Richard did not think so. It depended upon the judges.
Two big lighters lay alongside. The three West Country groups and the two groups from around Yorkshire were loaded into the first-a tight fit-and the six remaining groups were squeezed perilously into the second boat. At about ten o’clock on that fine, cold morning the oarsmen stroked off downriver toward the great bend in the half-mile-wide Thames just to the east of Woolwich. Traffic was light, but the news had gotten around; the denizens of bum boats, dredges and other small craft waved, whistled shrilly and cheered, while the men on the dangerously overloaded second boat prayed no one sailed past close enough to create a wake ripple.
Around the curve lay Gallion’s Reach, an anchorage for big ships occupied on that day by two vessels only, one about two-thirds the size of the other. Richard’s heart sank. The larger vessel had not changed a scrap-a ship-rigged barque standing about fourteen feet from gunwales to water, which meant she had no cargo aboard-no poop and no forecastle, just a quarterdeck and a galley aft of the foremast. Stripped for speed and action.
His eyes met those belonging to Connelly and Perrott.
“Alexander,” said Neddy Perrott hollowly.
Richard’s mouth was a thin line. “Aye, that’s her.”
“Ye know her?” asked Ike.
“That we do,” said Connelly grimly. “A slaver out of Bristol, late a privateer. Famous for dying crews and dying cargoes.”
Ike swallowed. “And the other?”
“I do not know her, so she ain’t from Bristol,” said Richard. “She will have a bronze plate screwed to her hull at the stern, so we ought to be able to see it. We are going to Alexander.”
The nameplate said she was Lady Penrhyn.
“Out of Liverpool and built special for slaving,” said Aaron Davis, one of the newcomers from Bristol. “Brand new, by the look of her. What a maiden voyage! Lord Penrhyn must be desperate.”
“No sign of anyone going aboard her,” said Bill Whiting.
“She will fill up, never fear,” said Richard.
They had to get themselves and their gear up a rope ladder to an opening in the gunwale amidships, a twelve-foot climb. Those ahead of his group were not encumbered by boxes, but even when their chains became entangled in the rungs and supports no one appeared in the gap above to help.
Luckily the chain connecting them ran free and distance between each of them could be expanded or contracted. “Bunch up and give me all the chain,” said Richard when their turn came. He tossed both his sacks up, used his manacles to cradle his box, and scaled those few feet in a hurry to make sure no one already up had the presence of mind to pinch one of his sacks. Once aboard, he gathered in his stuff and took the boxes his fellows handed up to him.
Alexander’s two longboats and her jollyboat had been taken off the deck and put in the water, so there was room for Richard to move his three West Country groups out of the way. Confusion was his initial impression; knots of scarlet-coated marines stood about looking like thunder, two sashed marine officers and two corporals manned a small scatter cannon swiveled on the quarterdeck rail, and a motley collection of sailors hung from the shrouds or perched on various kennels like spectators at a boxing match in a meadow.
What happens now? As there was no one to ask, he watched the confusion grow ever worse. Long before all eleven lots of convicts were on the deck the place resembled a menagerie-an impression added to by dozens of goats, sheep, pigs, geese and ducks running all over the place pursued by a dozen excited dogs. Feeling someone watching him fixedly from above, he lifted his head to see a large marmalade cat balanced comfortably on a low spar surveying the chaos with an expression of bored cynicism. Of gaolers there were none; they had stayed behind on Ceres, responsibility for the transportees ended.
“Soldiers,” whispered Billy Earl from rural Wiltshire.
“Marines,” corrected Neddy Perrott. “White facings on their coats. Soldiers have colored facings.”
Finally a first lieutenant of marines descended in a snappy fashion from the quarterdeck and surveyed the scene with a nasty look in his pale blue eyes. “My name,” he bellowed with a burr in his voice, “is First Lieutenant James Shairp of the 55th Company, Portsmouth! Ye convicts are under my command and will answer to no one except His Majesty’s Marines. It is our duty to feed ye and keep ye from annoying anybody, including us. Ye will do as ye are told and not speak unless ye are spoken to.” He pointed to a yawning hatch aft of the mainmast. “Get yourselves and your rubbish below, one lot at a time. Sergeant Knight and Corporal Flannery will precede ye and show ye where ye are to be stowed, but before ye move I will inform ye what the business is. Ye will go to the berths the sergeant assigns ye and ye will not change from those berths because ye will be counted and told off by number and by name every day. Each man is allowed twenty inches, no more and no less-we have to fit two hundred and ten of ye into a very small space. If ye fight among yourselves, ye will be flogged. If ye steal rations, ye will be flogged. If ye answer back, ye will be flogged. If ye want what ye are not allowed, ye will be flogged. Corporal Sampson is the company flogger and he takes pride in his work. If ye like to lie down-and lie down is all ye will be able to do-then do not court a bloody back. Now get going.” He turned on his heel and marched back to the quarterdeck and the scatter cannon.
Though Scotch convicts were nonexistent, Richard recognized the speech pattern by now, particularly Shairp’s constant use of “ye.” The old form of “you” was slowly disappearing; he used it himself, but not when “you” needed special emphasis. So this marine officer was a Scotchman; he had heard that most marine officers were.
Sergeant Knight and Corporal Flannery disappeared down the hatch. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, thought Richard as everyone hung back. He jerked his head and led his three groups to the six-foot-square opening in the deck. God help us and God save us! he prayed, handed his box to Bill Whiting behind him, dropped his two sacks down the hatch, and leaned over it. About four feet below him was a narrow plank table; he sat on the edge of the opening and dropped neatly onto it, reached up for his box, and waited until Bill had enough slack on the chain to follow. All six got down, each stepping off the table onto a bench and thus to the deck, where they found themselves penned in by another table and set of benches. Everything seemed bolted to the floor, for nothing moved a fraction of an inch when shoved.
“Get over!” barked the sergeant.
They got over and stood in an aisle of deck less than six feet wide. Looking forward into the darkness, they were on the left, or larboard, side. Fixed to the larboard hull were two tiers of platforms very similar to those on Ceres, save that these were double. Each was firmly braced by stanchions and had a curved outer edge which followed the line of the hull, and they were actually quite beautifully made. No one would be able to dismember them in a fit of lunacy. At ten-foot intervals the platforms were partitioned off; the top tier was a little over two feet below the upper deck, the bottom tier was a little over two feet above the lower deck, and the distance between the two tiers was a little over two feet. As even Ike Rogers could comfortably stand upright in the aisle between the beams, Richard calculated that the ’tween decks height was close to seven feet; his head cleared the beams themselves with half an inch to spare.
“These are yer cots,” said the sergeant, a villainous individual who grinned to display the rotten teeth of a heavy rum drinker as he pointed at the tiers. “You lot, up on top, first cot agin the bulkhead, and gimme yer names and numbers. Corporal Flannery here is an Irishman and writes a treat. Look sharp, now!”
“Richard Morgan, number two hundred and three,” said Richard, put a foot on the lower platform and hauled himself and his goods onto the top platform, the other five following; they were still chained together. Ike’s six were directed into the adjoining top “cot,” partitioned off from theirs by thin boards down the middle of a beam that ran from larboard to starboard hull. Stanley, Mikey Dennison and the four late arrivals from Bristol were put into the cot below theirs; underneath Ike were six Northmen including the two sailors from Hull, William Dring and Joe Robinson.
“Cozy,” said Bill Whiting with a rather hollow chuckle. “I always wanted to sleep with you, Richard my love.”
“Shut up, Bill! There are plenty of sheep on deck.”
Six of them were crammed into a space ten feet long, six feet wide and twenty-seven inches high. All they could do unless they lay down was to sit hunched over like gnomes, and, sitting like gnomes, each of them tried to cope with leaden despair. Their boxes and sacks occupied room too-room they did not have. Jimmy Price began to weep, Joey Long and Willy Wilton in the next cot were howling-oh, dear God, what to do?
Across the three tables and six benches in the middle was another double tier of platforms on the starboard side; even craning into the darkness did not reveal how far the chamber extended or what it really looked like. A steady trickle of chained men were dropping onto the middle table, then were herded into the aisle and inserted into a cot. When six of their eleven groups had been put on the larboard side, Sergeant Knight started directing men to starboard and again filled up the cots from the stern bulkhead forward-up, up, down, down.
Over the worst of his shock, Richard summoned the will to act. Did he not, all of them would be in tears, and that he could not have. “All right, first we deal with our boxes,” he said crisply. “For the moment we stack them upright against the hull-there will be just enough room between them to put our feet. ’Tis lucky we put the solids in the boxes and filled at least one sack with clothes and rags, because a soft sack will be a pillow.” He felt the coarse matting under him and shuddered. “No blankets as yet, but we can bundle for warmth. Jimmy, stop crying, please. Tears do nothing to help.” He eyed the beam where the partition was between them and Ike’s cot. “That beam will take extra things once I manage to get out a screwdriver and hooks-cheer up, we will manage.”
“I want my head against the wall,” said Jimmy, snuffling.
“Definitely not,” said Will Connelly firmly. “We put our heads where we can hang them over the edge to puke. Do not forget, we are going to sea and we will be doing a lot of puking for a while.”
Bill Whiting achieved a laugh. “Just think how lucky we are! We puke on those below us but they cannot puke on us.”
“Good point,” said Neddy Perrott, and leaned his head over. “Hey, Tommy Crowder!”
Crowder’s head appeared. “What?”
“We get to puke on you.”
“Do, and I will personally fuck ye!”
“In fact,” said Richard cheerfully, interrupting this exchange, “there is a lot of beam vacant-all the way to the starboard cots. We may be able to build some sort of shelf off it on either side to hold spare stuff-even our boxes, certainly our sacks of books and spare dripstones. Yon Sergeant Knight looks as if he would not say no to an extra pint of rum, so he might be willing to gift us with planks, brackets and rope for trussing. We will manage, boys.”
“Ye’re right, Richard,” said Ike, poking his head around the partition. “We will manage. Better this than the nubbing cheat.”
“The hangman’s rope is the end, I agree. This will not last forever,” said Richard, glad that Ike and his boys were listening.
The prison was almost pitch-black; its only light came from the open hatch to the deck above. And the stench was frightful, a stale foulness that was a mixture of rotting flesh, rotting fish and rotting excrement. Time passed, how much of it was impossible to tell. Eventually the hatch was closed with an iron grille that permitted some light and a hatch in the forward end of the chamber was opened. From where they huddled this extra illumination still did not tell them what their prison was like. Another stream of convicts dribbled in, voices muffled, attenuated; many wept, a few started to scream and were suddenly silenced-with what and by whom, the six in Richard’s cot had no idea. Except that what they felt, everybody obviously felt.
“Oh, God!” came Will Connelly’s voice, loud in despair. “I will not be able to read! I will go mad, I will go mad!”
“No, you will not,” said Richard strongly. “Once we settle in and stow our things properly, we will think of things to do with the only instruments we have left-our voices. Taffy and I can sing, so I am sure can others. We will have a choir. We can play at riddles and conundrums, tell stories, jests.” He had made his men change places so that he now sat against Ike’s partition. “Listen to me, all of you who can hear! We will learn to pass the time in ways we have not yet dreamed of, and we will not go mad. Our noses will get used to the smell and our eyes will become sharper. If we go mad they win, and I refuse to allow that. We will win.”
No one spoke for a long while, but no one wept either. They will do, thought Richard. They will do.
Two strange marines came aft from the forward hatch to take off their waist bands and the chain connecting them together, though the manacles remained on. Free to move now, Richard came down off the platform to see if he could locate the night buckets. How many were there? How long would they have to last between emptyings?
“Under our platform,” said Thomas Crowder. “I think there is one for each six men-at least there are two beneath this cot. Cot! What a divine description of something Procrustes would have been proud to invent!”
“Ye’re educated,” said Richard, perching his rump on the edge of the lower tier and stretching his legs out with a sigh.
“Aye. So is Aaron. He is a Bristolian, I am not. I was-er-apprehended in Bristol after I escaped from the Mercury, is all. Got snabbled doing some dirty work there. Our accomplice-Aaron was in it too-was a snitch. We tried a bit of hush money-would have done the trick in London, but not in Bristol. Too many Quakers and other autem cacklers.”
“Ye’re a Londoner.”
“And ye’re a Bristolian, judging by the accent. Connelly, Perrott, Wilton and Hollister I know, but I never saw you in the Bristol Newgate, cully.”
“I am Richard Morgan and I am from Bristol, but I was tried and convicted at Gloucester.”
“I was listening to what ye said about passing the time. We will do it too if there is not enough light for cards.” Crowder sighed. “And I thought Mercury was Satan’s ferry! Alexander will be hard going, Richard.”
“Why did ye think it would be otherwise? These things were built to house slaves, and I doubt they could have jammed many more slaves in than they have us. Save that we do have those three long tables there, so I presume they feed us seated.”
Crowder sniffed. “Marine cooks!”
“Surely ye did not expect the cook at the Bush Inn?” Richard went up to impart the news of the night buckets and got his dripstone out. “Now more than ever we have to filter our water, though we need not fear anyone will encroach on our space or steal our things.” His white teeth flashed in a smile. “Ye were right about Crowder and Davis, Neddy. True villains.”
They were fed by lamplight and two surly private marines who seemed extremely disgruntled. Though each table was 40 feet long and a total of six narrow benches was provided, the three tables were men from end to end; counting heads, Richard thought that Alexander had taken about 180 men aboard that sixth day of January, 1787. That was 30 short of the total Lieutenant Shairp had mentioned. Not all were from Ceres; there were a few from Censor and rather more from Justitia, though not all the Justitia men managed to drag themselves to the tables. Some kind of sickness was among them, marked by a low fever and aching bones. Not the gaol fever, then. It was there too, however, because it always was.
Each man was issued with a wooden bowl, a tin spoon and a tin dipper which held two quarts [2] comfortably; two quarts were the day’s ration of water per man. The food consisted of very hard, dark bread and a small chunk of boiled salt beef. Those with poor teeth fared badly, were reduced to trying to break up their bread with their spoons, which bent and twisted.
But there were advantages to being near the after hatch of the prison. I will now, Richard decided, risk a flogging by standing up and offering to help these young marines do a task they have no skill at whatsoever.
“May I give ye a hand?” he asked, smiling deferentially. “I used to be a tavern-keeper.”
The sullen face nearest him looked startled, was suddenly quite attractive. “Aye, it would be appreciated. Two of us to feed near two hundred men ain’t enough, that is certain.”
Richard passed bowls and dippers down for some time in silence, having deftly established a routine between himself, the youth he had addressed and his equally young confrere. “Why are you marines so unhappy?” he asked then, voice low.
“’Tis our quarters-they are lower down than yours are and nigh as crowded. We do not eat no better either. Hard bread and salt beef. Except,” he added fairly, “that we get flour and a half-pint of drinkable rum.”
“But ye’re not convicts! Surely-”
“On this ship,” said the other marine, snarling, “there is little difference between convicts and marines. The sailors are quartered where we should be. The only light and air we get comes through a hatch in the floor of their place-they are abaft of this bulkhead in steerage, while we are down in the hold. Alexander is supposed to be a two-decker, but no one mentioned that the second deck is being used as a hold because Alexander carries a lot of cargo and has no proper hold.”
“She is a slaver,” said Richard, “so she does not need a true hold. Her captain is accustomed to putting the hard cargo on his orlop, the negroes in here where we are, and the crew in the stern compartment. Hence no forecastle for the crew. The quarterdeck is the captain’s.” He looked sympathetically curious. “I take it that he is accommodating your officers on the quarterdeck?”
“Aye, in a cupboard, and with no access to his galley, so our officers have to mess with us,” said the disher-up of salt beef and bread. “They are not even allowed to use the great cabin-he keeps that for himself and the first mate, a very grand fellow. This ain’t like any ship I have ever been in. But then, ’tis the first ship I have been in what did not belong to the Navy.”
“Ye’ll be below the water line when the cargo is aboard,” said Richard thoughtfully. “She will be carrying a mighty big cargo if she is contracted to cargo as well as convicts. I would reckon she will have near twenty thousand gallons of water alone if the legs are two months long.”
“Ye know a lot about ships for a tavern-keeper,” said the lad scooping out water.
“I am from Bristol, where ships matter. My name is Richard. May I know yours?”
“I am Davy Evans, he is Tommy Green,” said the water-scooper. “We cannot do much about our situation here, but when we get to Portsmouth next week ’twill be different. Major Ross will soon tidy Captain Duncan Sinclair up.”
“Ah yes, the Commandant of Marines and Lieutenant-Governor.”
“How d’ye know that?”
“From a friend.”
So a great many questions have been answered, Richard reflected as he filtered his water. The owners grabbed at the tender, falsified a few little details about Alexander’s history, and chose to ignore the fact that she would have to accommodate marines as well as convicts. Yon lads are right-the contractors see little difference between marines and convicts. So we are for Portsmouth next week, and a captain named Duncan Sinclair is as sure to be Scotch as a man named Robert Ross, Commandant of Marines. The confrontation between them will be horrible. If I remember my Newton, the irresistible force will collide with the immovable object.
Alexander did not sail for Portsmouth that week, the next week or the week after that; she still sat at anchor in the Thames. On the 10th of January she did get under way to an accompaniment of moans and whimpers from those who expected to be seasick, but she sailed only as far as Tilbury, and that by courtesy of a towline from a tender. Still well inside the sheltered waters of the Thames, hardly even rocking.
By now there were 190 convicts on board, though a couple had died and Lieutenant Shairp had delegated the top tier of a midline set of platforms forward of the tables as a receiving place for the sick in an attempt to contain whatever was threatening to rage. This total of 190 would fall by one, be added to by two as the days went by, so that even precise men like Richard finally gave up trying to count at around 200.
The presence of manacles was bitterly resented, but Sergeant Knight (very co-operative about planks, brackets and whatever else was needed in return for rum money-nor were Richard’s men the only ones to make use of the sergeant’s little weakness) refused to remove these exasperating restraints. Until convict discontent boiled into a very vocal and terrifying demonstration of anger on the release of one man, pardoned. A maddening, relentless banging, shouting and thumping began. When the marines came down to issue food and water they descended in force, perched the scatter cannon on the hatch border and circled it with muskets. Only then did they realize how few of them there were to control 200 furious men.
As it was his ship, Captain Duncan Sinclair ordered that the convicts be taken permanently out of their manacles and paraded on deck twelve at a time for a few minutes during each day. However, an escaped convict would have cost him £40 out of his own pocket, so Sinclair had the marines and some of his crew man the ship’s boats, then had them row in constant circles around Alexander.
Those few minutes on deck were among the best Richard had ever experienced. His fetters felt like feathers, the freezing air smelled sweeter than wallflowers and violets, the turgid river was a ribbon of liquid silver, and the sight of the animals frisking cheekily a greater pleasure than bedding Annemarie Latour. It seemed as if half the marines owned at least one dog, as did some of the crew; there were liver-colored hounds, dewlapped bulldogs, silly spaniels, terriers and a great many mongrels. The big marmalade cat had a tortoiseshell wife and a family of six, and most of the ewes and sows were gravid. Ducks and geese roamed loose, but the chickens were penned in a coop near the crew’s galley.
After that first walk the foetid prison was more bearable, a sentiment Richard was not alone in feeling. The demonstration had died down the moment hands were freed of manacles, and the deck privilege was not withdrawn.
On his third outing Richard finally saw Captain Duncan Sinclair, and stared in amazement. Hugely fat! So fat that all his pleasures were certainly of the table-how did he piss accurately when his arms couldn’t possibly reach his penis? Looking very humble and as if the word “escape” were not a part of his vocabulary, Richard clinked across the deck to take a turn from larboard to starboard below the quarterdeck upon which Captain Sinclair stood. For a moment his eyes met a pair of extremely shrewd grey ones; he bowed his head respectfully and moved away. Not a mere tub of lard, for all his size… Lazy to the point of inertia he may be, but when the Devil takes the reins and drives, I will warrant he can rise to the challenge. What a to-do there will be in Portsmouth when he and the Commandant of Marines clash over whereabouts the marine contingent will sling their hammocks! A pity that I will never know what passes between them, albeit I am bound to learn the outcome. Davy Evans and Tommy Green will be dying to tell me.
Toward the end of January two more ships hove to off Tilbury Fort, an oversized sixth-rater and a neat-looking sloop. When it came time for Richard’s turn on deck he went straight to the rail near the bows and stared at them intently; rumors of their advent had already spread around the prison. By mutual agreement Richard and his five companions separated the moment they emerged on deck, hugging a tiny span of freedom from proximity to each other. Since no one had yet tried to escape, the marines were more relaxed about their guard duty; provided that the convicts were quiet and orderly in their progress, no one bothered them. Thus Richard stood alone, his hands on the rail, gazing. And had no inkling that he was one of the human cargo the sharp eyes of the crew had singled out as interesting.
“They are our escort to Botany Bay,” said a voice in his ear. A pleasant voice containing a great deal of charm.
Richard turned his head to see the man who had been pointed out to him as Alexander’s fourth mate. She carried a very big crew for this mammoth voyage, hence four mates and four watches. Tall, willowy, with a handsomeness some would have called slightly pretty, and like Richard in coloring-very dark hair, light eyes with jet lashes. His eyes were the blue of cornflowers, however, and merry.
“Stephen Donovan from Belfast,” he said.
“Richard Morgan from Bristol.” Edging a little away from Mr. Donovan to make it appear as if they were not teamed up for a chat, Richard smiled. “What can ye tell me about them, Mr. Donovan?”
“The big one is an old Navy storeship, the Berwick. She has just undergone a refit to turn her into a sort of a ship of the line and she has been renamed Sirius, since that is a southern star of first magnitude. They have given her six carronades and four six-pounders as armament, though I hear that Governor Phillip is refusing to sail with less than fourteen six-pounders. I do not blame him, when ye think that Alexander has four twelve-pounders as well as the scatter cannon.”
“Alexander,” said Richard deliberately, “is not only a slaver out of Bristol, but was once a privateer with sixteen twelve-pounders. Even with four she will outgun most of those who try to take her-if they can catch her, that is. She’s capable of near two hundred nautical miles a day in the right wind.”
“Ah, I do like a Bristol man!” said Mr. Donovan. “A seaman?”
“Nay, a tavern-keeper.”
The vivid blue eyes rested on Richard’s face with a caress in them. “Ye look like no tavern-keeper I have ever seen.”
Quite aware of the overture, Richard feigned bland ignorance. “It runs in the family,” he said easily. “My father is one too.”
“I know Bristol. Which tavern?”
“The Cooper’s Arms on Broad Street. My father still has it.”
“While his son is being transported to Botany Bay. For what, I wonder? There is no look of the booze bibber about ye and ye’re an educated man. Are ye sure ye’re a simple tavern-keeper?”
“Absolutely. Tell me more about yon two ships.”
“Sirius is about six hundred tons, a wee bit under, and she is carrying mostly people-wives of marines and the like. She has her own captain, one John Hunter, who is commanding her alone at the moment. Phillip is in London battling the Home Department and the Court of St. James. I hear her surgeon is the son of a doctor of music and takes his pianoforte with him. Yes, she is a good old girl, Sirius, but on the slow side.”
“And the sloop?”
“The tender Supply, a very old girl indeed-one might say, at near thirty, past her last prayers. Commander’s name is Lieutenant Harry Ball. This will be a cruel voyage for her-she has never been farther from the Thames than Plymouth.”
“Thank you for the information, Mr. Donovan.” Richard stood straight and saluted him in naval fashion before shuffling away.
And that is a kind of man loves being at sea, but never in the same vessel for more than two voyages. Loves come and go for Stephen Donovan, who is married to the sea.
Once back in the gloom of the prison Richard related his news about their naval escorts. “So I imagine we will be off any day now, at least to Portsmouth.”
Ike Rogers had his own item to impart. “We will have women at Botany Bay,” he said with great satisfaction. “Lady Penrhyn is carrying naught but women-a hundred of them, ’tis said.”
“Half a one for each Alexander man,” said Bill Whiting. “It would be my luck to get the half that talks, so I think I will stick to sheep.”
“There are more women going from Dunkirk in Plymouth.”
“Together with more sheep and maybe a heifer, eh, Taffy?”
On the first day of February the four ships finally sailed, having been delayed twenty-four hours by a merchant seaman pay dispute-very common.
It took four days of placid sailing to cover the 60 miles to Margate Sands; they had not yet rounded the North Foreland into the Straits of Dover, but a few men were seasick. In Richard’s cot all was well, but Ike Rogers became ill the moment Alexander felt a slight sea and continued very poorly until some hours after the anchor went down off Margate.
“Peculiar,” said Richard, giving him a little filtered water to drink. “I fancied that a horseman would not turn a hair at the sea-riding is perpetual motion.”
“Up and down, not side to side,” whispered Ike, grateful for the water, all he could keep down. “Christ, Richard, I will die!”
“Nonsense! Seasickness passes, it lasts only until ye get your sea legs.”
“I doubt I ever will. Not a Bristolian, I suppose.”
“There are many Bristolians like me who have never been aboard a ship afloat. I have no idea how I will fare when we get into real seas. Now try to eat this pap. I soaked some of the bread in water. It will stay down, I promise,” Richard coaxed.
But Ike turned his head away.
Neddy Perrott had come to an arrangement with Crowder and Davis in the cot below; in return for a loud warning whenever someone above was going to puke, William Stanley from Seend and Mikey Dennison would be delegated to clean the messes off the deck and empty the night buckets. Against the stern bulkhead on either aisle was a 200-gallon barrel full of sea-water which the convicts could use to wash themselves, their clothes and the premises. It had been a shock to discover that the night buckets had to be emptied into the lead-lined scuttles which ran below the bottom platform against larboard and starboard hulls; these drained into the bilges, which were supposed to be evacuated daily by means of two bilge pumps. But those with experience of ships like Mikey Dennison vowed that Alexander’s bilges were the foulest they had ever, ever encountered.
During January they had had to use the emptied night buckets to flush the excrement away down the scuttle drains, which meant they had nothing bigger than a two-quart dipper for all other sorts of washing. Inspecting at Margate and revolted by conditions in the prison, Lieutenant Shairp issued an extra bucket to each cot and also provided mops and scrubbing brushes. That meant a bucket for bodily waste and deck scrubbing and a second for washing clothes and persons.
“But that ain’t going to help the bilges,” said Mikey Dennison. “Bad!” Dring and Robinson from Hull agreed fervently.
While ever there was daylight outside, a few faint rays percolated through the iron grilles which closed off the hatches; at sea, said Lieutenant Shairp, no one would be allowed on deck for any reason. Which meant that in this winter season the 200 men in Alexander’s prison were far longer in utter blackness than in that comforting grey gloom, though sailing helped the monotony. Heeling into a bigger swell as Dover and Folkestone passed, they rounded Dungeness into the English Channel. Richard felt queasy for a day, dry-retched twice, then recovered feeling remarkably well for a man who had eaten naught except hard bread and salt beef for over a month. Bill and Jimmy were the sickest, Will and Neddy only a trifle greener than Richard, while Taffy existed in some kind of Welsh ecstasy because there was still nothing to do, but at least they were moving.
Ike Rogers grew steadily worse. His lads nursed him devotedly, Joey Long most devotedly of all, but nothing seemed to help the prostrated highwayman find his sea legs.
“Eastbourne just went aft, Brighton is next,” said Davy Evans the marine to Richard as the days wore into their third week at sea.
Convicts started to die on the 12th of February. Not of any familiar disease, but of something bizarre.
It started with a fever, a runny nose and a soreness beneath one ear, then one chop began to swell just as it did when a child caught the mumps; swallowing and breathing were not impaired, but the pain of that aching, tender mass was intense. As the side affected deflated, a worse swelling came up on the other side. By the end of two weeks it too shrank back to normal and the sufferer began to feel better. At which moment his testicles commenced to puff up to four and five times their usual size, with such pain that none of the victims screamed or thrashed about; they lay as still as possible and whimpered as their fevers rose again, higher this time than in the beginning. About a week later some recovered and others died in agony.
Portsmouth at last! The four ships anchored at the Mother Bank on the 22nd of February, a boat trip away from shore. By this time the appalling swelling disease had spread to the marines and one of the sailors was sickening. Whatever it might be, it was not gaol fever, the malignant quinsy, typhoid, scarlet fever or the smallpox; a whisper began that it was the Black Death-hadn’t that produced hideous buboes?
Three of the crew deserted as soon as they could beg a boat ride ashore, and the marines were so terrified that Lieutenant Shairp departed immediately to find his superiors, Major Robert Ross and First Lieutenant John Johnstone of the 39th Company of Marines, based at Plymouth. Three marines were sent to hospital, and more were ailing.
The next day Lieutenant John Johnstone-another Scotchman-boarded in the company of a Portsmouth doctor, who took one look at the victims, withdrew in a hurry with his handkerchief plastered over his nose, sent more marines to hospital, and declared that in his opinion the disease was as malignant as it was incurable. He did not employ the word “plague,” but this omission only served to highlight his private diagnosis. All he could suggest was that fresh meat and fresh vegetables be served to everybody on board at once.
It is like Gloucester Gaol, thought Richard. As soon as that place held more people than it could bear, it produced a disease to cull the flock. So too with Alexander.
“We will stay well if we remain where we are, confine our exercise to deck we have washed, wipe our bowls and dippers out with oil of tar, filter our water and keep taking a spoonful of malt extract. This disease came aboard from Justitia, I am sure of it, which means it is forward.”
That evening they ate hard bread and boiled beef as usual, but the beef was fresh rather than salted, and a pot of cabbage and leeks came with it. They tasted like ambrosia.
After that they were forgotten, as was the order to supply fresh food. No one came near them save for two terrified young marines (Davy Evans and Tommy Green were gone) deputed to feed them salt beef and the inevitable hard bread. The days passed in a dull, brooding silence broken only by the moans of the sick and an occasional terse conversation. February turned into March, and March dragged away while the sick continued to die and were simply left where they lay.
When finally someone opened the forward hatch it was not to remove the bodies; 25 new convicts were thrust into the freezing, filthy air of the prison.
“Fucken Christ!” came the voice of John Power. “What do the fucken buggers think they’re doing? There is sickness down here and they fill us up to overflowing again! Christ, Christ, Christ!”
An interesting man, John Power, thought Richard. He rules up forward, the flash boy from the Old Bailey and the London Newgate who usually speaks in plain English. Now he possesses not only the hospital platforms, but a new detachment of inmates. Poor bastard. Alexander had trimmed from 200 down to 185, now there are 210 of us.
By the 13th of March four more men were dead; six corpses lay on the hospital platforms, several of them there for over a week. No one could be persuaded to come down and touch them; by now it was commonly known that the disease was plague.
Not long after dawn on the 13th of March the forward hatch was opened and a party of marines wearing gloves and with scarves muffling their faces took the six bodies away.
“Why?” asked Will Connelly. “Not that I am sorry to see them go, mind. Just-why?”
“I would say that one of the big wigs is coming to visit,” said Richard. “Tidy up, lads, and look bursting with health.”
Major Robert Ross arrived shortly after the bodies had gone, accompanied by Lieutenant John Johnstone, Lieutenant James Shairp and a man who appeared to be a doctor, judging from his manner. A slender, handsome fellow with a long nose, enormous blue eyes and a pretty little curl of fair hair on his broad white brow. They brought lamps and an escort of ten marine privates, who preceded them down the after hatch and filed along larboard and starboard aisles like men being sent to their doom, young enough to be intimidated, old enough to know what sort of specter squatted here.
The chamber filled with a soft golden glow; Richard finally saw the shape of his fate in all its terrible detail. The sick now occupied all 34 berths which sat isolated in the middle section forward of the tables; beyond them, where the foremast went through near the bows, was a bulkhead much narrower than the one astern behind Richard’s cot. The double tier of platforms was continuous all the way around, it contained no break whatsoever. That is how they do it! That is how they have managed to squeeze 210 poor wretches into a space 35 feet at its widest and less than 70 feet from end to end. They have packed us in like bottles on shelving. No wonder we die. Compared to this, Gloucester Gaol was a paradise-at least we got out into the fresh air and could work. Here is only darkness and stench, immobility and madness. I keep prating to my people of survival, but how can we survive this place? Dear God, I despair. I despair.
All three of the marine officers were Scotch, Ross having the broadest burr and Johnstone the least. A dour and sandy man, Ross, slight of build, nondescript of face save for a thin, determined mouth and a pair of cold, pale grey eyes.
First he toured the establishment in a leisurely fashion, commencing on the starboard side. He walked as if participating in a funeral, head going from side to side with clockwork timing, steps slow and deliberate. At the isolation cots he paused, it seemed quite without fear, to examine the sick in company with his medical man, murmuring inaudibly to this attractive fellow, who kept shaking his head emphatically. Major Ross continued around the curve between the isolated platforms and those at the foremast, then began to walk down the larboard aisle toward the stern.
At Dring below and Isaac Rogers above he stopped, looked down at the deck beneath his feet, gestured to one of the privates and directed that the boy should pull out the night buckets, which had been emptied and rinsed out. His eyes rested on Ike, trembling as he lay with his head on Joey Long’s lap.
“This man is sick,” he said to Johnstone rather than to the doctor. “Put him with the others.”
“No, sir,” said Richard instantly, too shocked to think of prudence. “It is not what you think, we have none of that down here. He nearly died from seasickness, that is all.”
An extraordinary look came over the Major’s face, of horror and comprehension combined; he reached up and took Ike’s hand, squeezed it. “I know what ye go through, then,” he said. “Water and dry biscuit, nothing else helps.”
A marine major who got dreadfully seasick!
The eyes traveled then to Richard’s face, to all the faces in those two last upper cots, assimilating the cropped hair, the damp clothing and rags strung on lines between the beams, recently shaven chins, a certain air of pride having nothing to do with defiance. “Ye have kept very clean,” he said, and plucked at the matting. “Aye, very clean.”
No one replied.
Major Ross turned and stepped onto a bench just where the open hatch provided him with a little fresh air. He had not betrayed a sign of disgust at the vapors which swirled through the prison, but he did seem more comfortable on this perch.
“My name,” he announced in a parade-ground voice, “is Major Robert Ross. Commandant of Marines on this expedition, and also Lieutenant-Governor of New South Wales. I am the sole commander of your persons and your lives. Governor Phillip has other concerns. Mine are all ye. This ship is not at all satisfactory-men are dying in her and I intend to find out why. Mr. William Balmain here is surgeon on Alexander and will commence his duties tomorrow. Lieutenant Johnstone is senior marine officer aboard and Lieutenant Shairp is his second-in-command. It seems ye have had few fresh provisions in over two months. That will be rectified while this ship is in port. This deck will be fumigated, which will necessitate the removal of most of ye to other accommodation. Only those seventy-two men in the cots adjacent to the stern bulkhead will remain on board and will be expected to help.”
He gestured to his two lieutenants, who sat down together at the table alongside his booted feet and produced paper, ink and quills out of a writing case Lieutenant Shairp carried. “I will now proceed to take a census,” the Major said. “When I point at a man, he will give me his name and the name of the hulk from which he boarded. You can start.” He pointed at Jimmy Price.
It took a very long time. Major Ross was thorough, but his two scribes were as awkward as they were slow; writing was clearly not a pleasure. Some twenty names into the procedure and Major Ross stepped down to con what his scribes were producing.
“Ye illiterate boobies! What did ye do, buy your commissions? Numskulls! Idiots! Ye could not find a fuck in a bawdy house!”
Phew! thought Richard. He has a shocking temper, and he cares not at all that he has just humiliated his junior officers in front of a parcel of convicts.
Oh, but when the marines departed the darkness was hard to bear! A veil had been lifted to reveal the prison in all its monstrous, festering hideousness, but the golden light had been kind and the sight of so many men hunched in their cots round-eyed as owls had somehow reduced danger to human proportions. With the going of the last lamp, what was left could not be imagined, let alone seen or palpated. The night had come, and despite Major Ross’s promise of fresh food, no one had thought to feed them anything.
In the morning the move began through the forward hatch; the sick were handled through gloves and scarf masks, those who did the handling insensitive to the screams of agony which shifting them provoked. By noon the only men left in the prison were located in the three double cots on starboard and larboard at the stern bulkhead. A great deal of lamplight had been provided; minus most of the convicts it was easy to see what kind of cesspool two-and-a-half months on board had created. Vomit, feces, overflowing night buckets, filthy decks and platforms.
Then it was their turn to move, but through the after hatch. I do not care, thought Richard, who steals what below; they are welcome to it, for I will not leave one of mine on guard down there alone. Though as long as the rumor of plague is about, our things are probably safe.
Fumigation consisted of exploding gunpowder in every part of Alexander below her upper deck and sealing the hatches fast.
They lay in a calm stretch of water well offshore, which was a fascinating sight: great bastions and fortresses bristling with gigantic guns ringed the place around, for this was England’s naval headquarters and stood looking south past the Isle of Wight to the French coast at Cherbourg, where the ancient, traditional enemy lay watchful. Where or what kind of town was Portsmouth was a mystery beyond the mighty fortifications, some of them older than the time of Henry VIII, some of them still under construction. Was it here that Admiral Kempenfeldt and 1,000 men went down on the Royal George only five years ago? Careened for a leak, the biggest firstrater England had ever built filled up through her thirty-two-pounder portholes and sank in a swirling vortex.
Johnstone and Shairp had a difference of opinion as to whether the convicts left on board should be manacled; Johnstone prevailed and hands stayed free. Having lost the argument, Shairp took the jollyboat and went to visit a congenial colleague aboard another vessel bound for Botany Bay. There were several such now, one of them almost as large as Alexander.
“Scarborough,” said fourth mate Stephen Donovan, cradling the big marmalade cat in his arms. “Yonder is Lady Penrhyn-ye know her-and the addition, Prince of Wales. They could not manage to get all aboard five transports, so she is the sixth. Charlotte and Friendship have sailed to Plymouth to pick up those on Dunkirk.”
“And the three loading from lighters closer in shore?” Richard asked, turning his head to glare a fierce warning at Bill Whiting, who looked as if relative liberation might loosen his tongue in a Miss Molly jest Miss Molly Donovan might not appreciate.
“The storeships-Borrowdale, Fishburn and Golden Grove. We are to carry sufficient supplies to last for three years from the time we reach Botany Bay,” said Mr. Donovan, eyes caressing.
“And how long does the Admiralty think it will take to get to Botany Bay?” asked Thomas Crowder, smarming sweetly.
As Crowder was not to Mr. Donovan’s taste-too simian-the fourth mate chose to direct his answer to Richard Morgan, whom he found very fascinating. Not so much because of his looks, though they were wonderful-more because of his aloofness, his air of keeping most of what he thought to himself. A head man, but of far different kind from Johnny Power, whom all the crew knew well. A Thames seaman with the sense not to talk flash, Power and sailors had a natural affinity.
“The Admiralty estimates that the voyage will take between four and six months,” Mr. Donovan said, pointedly ignoring Crowder.
“It will take longer than that,” said Richard.
“I agree. When the Admiralty does its calculations it always thinks that winds blow forever in the right quarter-that masts never snap-that spars never come adrift-and that sails never split, fall in the slings or work loose from the reefing pendants.” He tickled the loudly purring cat beneath its chin.
“No dog?” asked Richard.
“Bastards of things! Rodney here is Alexander’s cat and the equal of any dog aboard, which is why they don’t mess with him. He is named after Admiral Rodney, with whom I served in the West Indies when we thrashed the Frogs off Jamaica.” He lifted his lip at a hovering bulldog; so did Rodney, whereupon the bulldog decided it had urgent business elsewhere. “There are twenty-seven dogs aboard, all of them belonging to the marines. They will soon diminish. The spaniels and terriers ain’t too bad, they rat, but a hound is simply shark bait. Dogs fall overboard. Cats never do.” He kissed Rodney on top of his head and put him on the rail to illustrate his contention. Indifferent to the lapping water below, the cat settled with paws tucked under and continued to purr.
“Where have they sent the rest of the convicts?” asked Will Connelly, rescuing Richard, who moved unobtrusively away.
“Some to The Firm, some to Fortunee, the sick to a hospital ship and the rest to that lighter there.” Mr. Donovan pointed.
“For how long?”
“I suspect for one or two weeks at least.”
“But the men in the lighter will freeze to death!”
“Nay. They put them ashore each night in a camp, manacled and chained together. Better to be on a lighter than on a hulk.”
The following day Alexander’s surgeon, Mr. William Balmain, brought two other doctors aboard, apparently to look at the ship, since the sick convicts were gone. One, whispered Stephen Donovan, was John White, chief surgeon to the expedition. The other, they could see for themselves, was the Portsmouth medical man Lieutenant Shairp had called in when Alexander first arrived.
Having received no work orders yet, the convicts stood about in close proximity to the doctors and listened to what was said; the equally curious crew were genuinely too busy to eavesdrop-cargo was arriving in lighters.
The Portsmouth doctor was convinced the illness was a rare form of bubonic plague; surgeons White and Balmain disagreed.
“Malignant!” cried the doctor. “It is bubonic!”
“Benign,” said the surgeons. “It is not bubonic.”
But all three concurred about preventative measures: the ’tween decks would have to be fumigated again, scrubbed thoroughly with oil of tar, then thickly coated with whitewash-a solution of quicklime, powdered chalk, size and water.
Left on board to supervise the loading of cargo, Stephen Donovan was not amused; the decks were piling up with casks, kegs, sacks, crates, barrels and parcels.
“I have to get them below!” he snapped to White and Balmain. “How can I do that when ye’ve got them hatches battened all day for your wretched fumigations? There is only one thing will rid Alexander of what ails her, and that is better bilge pumps!”
“The smell,” said Balmain loftily, “is due to dead bodies. A week or two at sea after extensive fumigation will remove it.”
White had wandered away to discover how the crew could load cargo through an intervening prison; a look below showed him that the tables and benches in the prison had been removed to reveal six-foot-square hatches beneath them exactly in line with those on the upper deck. Winched inboard on davits, even the gigantic water tuns were dropped straight into the orlop hold. He came back with his air of brisk superiority very much to the fore, brushed Balmain and Donovan aside, and issued orders.
The 36 starboard prisoners were despatched into the prison to mop, scrub and sponge the place with vinegar before fumigation with gunpowder; the 36 larboard convicts were sent down into the marines’ quarters below steerage, there to do the same.
“Christ!” squeaked Taffy Edmunds. “Poor little Davy Evans was right-we convicts are in heaven compared to this, though ’twould be nice to sleep in hammocks.”
The hold floor was awash in bilge overflow which stank worse than the prison compartment and released gases which had turned the pewter buttons on those brave scarlet coats as black as coal. The ’tween decks was scarcely six feet, which meant bending to pass under the beams, as on Ceres.
Thus it was that Richard and the larboard convicts were made privy to what took place between the irresistible force and the immovable object; Major Ross and Captain Sinclair came to grips in the marines’ hold under the fascinated eyes of 36 men. This stupendous battle was heralded by the arrival of the Major at the bottom of the wooden ladder from the crew’s quarters above.
“Get your bloated blubber down here, ye torpid bag of shit!” Ross bellowed. “Come and look, damn ye!”
And down the ladder on dainty booted feet came Captain Duncan Sinclair, for all the world like a glob of syrup trickling down one side of a smooth string. “No one,” he puffed, reaching the deck below, “speaks to me like that, Major! I am not only captain of this ship, but also one of her owners.”
“Which only makes ye all the more guilty, balloon-arse! Go on, look around ye! Look at where ye expect His Majesty’s Marines to live for God knows how many months! Almost three months already! They are sick and very afraid, for which I do not blame them one wee bit! Their dogs are better off-so are the sheep and pigs ye have aboard to pile on your own overloaded table! Sitting up there like King Muck of Dunghill Palace with a night cabin, a day cabin and the great cabin all to yourself, and my two officers in an airless cupboard! Eating with the privates! It will change, Sinclair, or I will personally spill your swollen guts into this liquid shit!” He put his hand on his sword hilt and looked perfectly capable of following the threat with the deed.
“Your men stay here because I have no other place to stow them,” said Sinclair. “As a matter of fact, they are occupying valuable space my firm contracted to fill up with more useful cargo than a lot of thieving, rum-swilling twiddle-poops not clever enough to get into the Navy nor rich enough to get into the Army! Ye’re the entire world’s leavings, Ross, you and your marines! ’Tain’t for nothing they call an empty bottle a marine! Cluttering up my crew’s galley, letting two dozen dogs shit from bowsprit to taffrail-look at my boot! Dog turd, Ross, fucken dog turd! Two of my hens dead, four of my ducks, and one goose! Not to mention the ewe I had to shoot because one of the fucken bulldogs got its teeth in and would not let go! Well, I shot the fucken dog first, ye Lowlands bastard without a mother!”
“Who’s the Lowlands bastard, ye Glasgow bitch’s by-blow?”
A pause ensued as both the combatants searched wildly for a new and mortally wounding thing to say and the convicts stood as still as statues for fear they might be noticed and sent on deck.
“The Lords of the Admiralty accepted Walton’s tender, which was specific about Alexander’s appointments,” said Sinclair, eyes two blazing slits. “Blame your superiors, Ross, do not blame me! When I heard I was to have forty marines as well as two hundred and ten convicts, I was not a happy man! The marines stay right here, and ye can like or ye can lump it.”
“I do not like it and I will not lump it, ye elephant’s arse! Ye will shift my lads up into steerage and accommodate my officers properly or I will have words to say from Governor Phillip all the way to Admiral Lord Howe and Sir John Middleton-not to mention Lord Sydney and Mr. Pitt! Ye have two choices, Sinclair. Either put your crew down here and my marines where they are, or move the stern bulkhead of the prison twenty-five feet forward. Now that the fleet has Prince of Wales, the displaced convicts can go to her. And that,” said Ross, brushing his white-gloved hands together, “is that, suet-face!”
“It is not!” Sinclair snapped through his teeth; the sight of so much adiposity in such a ferment was Homeric. “Alexander was contracted to transport two hundred and ten convicts, not one hundred and forty convicts and forty marines in a space belonging to seventy more convicts! The purpose of this expedition is not to cosset a parcel of scabby marines, but to get as many of England’s felons to the far end of the earth as possible. I will keep my entire contracted complement of convicts and-if ye like-I will take full responsibility for their confinement through the agency of my crew. It is very clear and simple, Major Ross. Move your precious marines off Alexander. I will lock the convicts in the prison permanently and feed them through the hatch bars for the duration, which does away with the need for marine guards.”
“Lord Sydney and Mr. Pitt would not approve,” said Ross, on safe and sure ground. “They are both modern men who insist that the convicts be delivered at Botany Bay in better condition than ye used to deliver your slaves to Barbados! If ye lock these men in for as much as a year, they will half of them be dead on arrival and the other half fit only for a Bedlam. Therefore,” he continued, looking as malleable as a cast-iron thirty-two-pounder, “it might behove ye to build yourself a poop roundhouse and a forecastle within the next month. Ye may then move yourself one deck up to live in solitary splendor and turn your quarterdeck over to my officers. Do not forget, Sinclair, that ye have also to accommodate the ship’s surgeon, the naval agent and the contractor’s agent, all of whom have quarterdeck rank. They will fill it without your presence, ye cheeseparing bile bag! As for your crew-put them where a crew belongs, in a forecastle. My enlisted men can then move up into steerage and I will undertake to provide them with a galley stove on which they can cook for themselves and the convicts. Thus your crew can keep their galley, you can build yourself a new one in your roundhouse, the officers can use the quarterdeck one, and Alexander will turn into something like a ship rather than a slaver, ye fat flawn!”
The grey slits of eyes had changed during this masterly speech, from furious rage to a more natural cunning. “That,” Sinclair said, “would cost Walton’s at least a thousand pounds.”
Major Ross turned on his heel and mounted the ladder. “Send the bill to the Admiralty,” he said, and disappeared.
Captain Duncan Sinclair looked at the ladder, then suddenly seemed to see the silent ring of men around him for the first time. “Ye need a bucket chain to get rid of this overflow,” he said to Ike Rogers curtly, “and while ye’re about it, lift that hatch over there and start baling out the starboard bilge. Some more of ye can bale out larboard. Tip fresh sea-water in and bale until the bilge water is clear. I can smell it on the quarterdeck.” He stared at the ladder again. “You, you and you,” he said to Taffy, Will and Neddy, all much of a height, “get your shoulders under my arse and push me up this fucken ladder.”
Once the sound of his progress upward had faded, the convicts collapsed into shrieks of laughter.
“I thought,” gasped Ike, “that for a moment there, Neddy, ye were going to tip him flat on his puss in the bilge water.”
“I was tempted,” said Neddy, wiping his eyes, “but he is the captain, and ’tis best not to offend the captain. Major Ross don’t care who he offends, so much is sure.” He giggled. “An elephant’s arse! Oh, it fits! Getting him up that ladder near killed us.”
“Major Ross won the engagement,” said Aaron Davis thoughtfully, “but has bared his arse to the Admiralty boots. If Captain Sinclair goes ahead and builds a roundhouse and a forecastle, the Admiralty will refuse to pay the bill and Major Ross will be in a kettle of boiling water.”
“Somehow,” said Richard, smiling, “I cannot see Major Ross’s arse bare for anybody’s boot. His spotless white breeches will stay up, mark my words. He was right. Alexander cannot hold so many people without a roundhouse and a forecastle.” He huffed. “Who wants to be on the bucket chain? If, that is, we can persuade Lieutenant Johnstone to let us have more buckets, for I will not use the prison ones on this disgusting foulness. Bristolians, we head the chain at the bilges themselves. Jimmy, go and smile at the pretty Lieutenant for more buckets.”
Captain Sinclair made his renovations, but for a great deal less than £1,000. While the convicts kept on board toiled with oil of tar and whitewash, the loading of cargo went on around them, which gave them a good idea of what was stowed where. The spare masts were lashed on deck below the boats, whereas spars, sails and rope went below; the 160-gallon water tuns, by far the heaviest objects, were put in clusters among other, lighter cargo. Cask after cask of salt beef and salt pork came aboard, sack after sack of hard bread, dried peas and the chickpeas called calavances, kegs of flour, bags of rice, and a great many parcels sewn in coarse cloth and inked with the name of the owner. There were also bales of clothing the sailors called “slops,” apparently destined for the convicts when their present clothing wore out.
Everybody knew that there were pipes of rum aboard; neither crew nor marines would stand for a dry voyage. Rum was what made the miseries of cramped quarters and poor food bearable, so rum there had to be. But it did not go into the general holds, either beneath the prison or steerage.
“He is clever, our big fat captain,” said William Dring from Hull with a grin. “Right up forward there is another hold in two decks. Top one is for firewood-they pack it everywhere around bowsprit and partnerson. Bottom deck has an iron cover and that is where rum is. Cannot be got at from prison because bow bulkhead is a foot thick and stuffed with nails, just like stern bulkhead. And cannot be got at from firewood hold without shocking racket. Rum on issue is in big cupboard on quarterdeck and captain doles it out himself. No one can steal it because of Trimmings.”
“Trimmings?” asked Richard. “Sinclair’s steward?”
“Aye, and completely Sinclair’s creature. Spies and pries.”
“He is using his own chips to do the alterations,” said Dring’s friend Joe Robinson; seamen, they had scraped acquaintance with the crew. “He took five convicts as well, all fit to hammer in nails. Got ’em off lighter and Fortunee. Forecastle is just a forecastle, but some real pretty mahogany panels have gone up roundhouse way. Captain pinched all the great cabin furniture, so Major Ross has to obtain more for quarterdeck and ain’t happy about it.”
Major Ross was never happy. His displeasure extended a great deal further than Captain Duncan Sinclair and Alexander, however. The new battle, as several marines informed the convicts (gossip was everybody’s main recreation), was to have the expedition’s rice exchanged for wheat flour. Unfortunately the contract with Mr. William Richards Junior had been drafted in the same format as for the transportation of Army personnel, which had enabled the frugal purveyor of food to convicts and marines alike to substitute rice for some of the flour. Rice was cheap, he had a warehouse full of it, and it stowed smaller because it expanded in cooking. The issue was that rice did not prevent scurvy, whereas flour did.
“I do not understand,” said Stephen Martin, one of the two quiet Bristolians sent down with Crowder and Davis. “If flour can prevent scurvy, why cannot bread? ’Tis made on flour.”
Richard tried to remember what Cousin James-the-druggist had said about such matters. “I think it is the baking,” he said. “Our bread is hard-sea biscuit. There is as much barley and rye in it as wheat, if not more. Flour is ground wheat. So the-the antiscorbutic must be in wheat. Or it might be that the flour is made into dumplings in stew or soup and does not cook long enough to ruin whatever it is prevents scurvy. Vegetables and fruit are best, but no one gets those at sea. There is a pickled cabbage called ‘sour crout’ my cousin James imports from Bremen for some of the Bristol sea captains because it is cheaper than extract of malt, which is a very good antiscorbutic. But the trouble with sour crout is that sailors loathe it and have to be flogged to eat it.”
“Is there anything ye do not know, Richard?” asked Joey Long, who deemed Richard a walking encyclopedia.
“I know hardly anything, Joey. It is my cousin James is the fount of knowledge. All I had to do was listen.”
“And ye’re very good at that,” said Bill Whiting. He stood back to survey their work, which was almost done. “There is one grand thing about all this whitewash. Even when the bars are down on the hatches, there will be a lot more light inside.” He threw an arm about Will Connelly’s shoulders. “If we sit at the table right under the after hatch, Will, we will have enough light to read.”
The entire complement of convicts were back on board shortly into April, while the erection of forecastle and roundhouse went on apace. Had the convicts only known it, Major Ross was still to write to the authorities about conditions on Alexander, preferring that the alterations be too far along to stop before he roared. Captain Sinclair had chosen to build his crew’s new quarters inboard, allowing a three-foot-wide gangway along either side for easy access to the bows, where the crew’s holes were situated. For those convicts left aboard Alexander during the hygienic measures it had been bliss; the hatches were open and they too could use the crew’s holes rather than their night buckets. The hatch forward of the foremast was now sheltered with a house (a structure a little like a dog kennel with a curved roof) to afford the cooks weatherproof access to the firewood hold; the hatch just in front of the quarterdeck which led down into the steerage compartment was also housed, whereas the two hatches above the prison were simple deck hatches, equipped with iron grilles over which a solid cover could be battened.
They will be battened down, thought Richard, whenever the seas break over the deck, and we will be absolutely blinded for however long the tempest lasts. No light, no air.
Despite fresh meat and fresh vegetables every day and despite being permitted onto the deck in small groups for air and exercise, the sickness aboard Alexander continued. Willy Wilton died, the first casualty among the West Country people, though not of the mumpish disease. He had caught cold in the perishing weather and it settled on his chest. Surgeon Balmain applied hot poultices to draw out and loosen the phlegm, but Willy died during much the same treatment a free Bristolian would have received from his doctor. Poultices were the only remedy for pneumonia. Ike Rogers grieved terribly. He was not the same man Richard had met in Gloucester Gaol; that blustering pugnaciousness was all bluff. Underneath was a man who worshiped horses and the freedom of the road.
Others died too; by the end of April the month’s toll among the convicts stood at twelve. And sickness was spreading through the marines as well-fevers, lung inflammations, deliriums, paralyses. Three terrified privates absconded, a fourth on the last day of the month. A sergeant, a drummer and fourteen privates had been shipped off to hospital and replacements were hard to find. Alexander was getting a reputation as the death ship of the fleet-a reputation she was to keep. Every so often all but the original convicts (now 71 men, with Willy Wilton dead) were sent elsewhere and the vinegar, fumigation, scrubbing with oil of tar and whitewashing began all over again. Each time Richard’s larboard group found the bilges fouled.
“She may as well not have bilge pumps,” said Mikey Dennison in disgust. “They do not work.”
Three more men died. The toll now stood at fifteen dead since the 1st of April, and the number of convicts had shrunk from 210 to 195.
On the 11th of May, more than four months after boarding the death ship, news came that Governor Phillip had at last arrived on his flagship, Sirius, and that on the morrow the fleet of eleven ships would sail. But it did not. The crew of the storeship Fishburn had not been paid and refused to leave until they were. The occupants of the Alexander prison lay in their cots to sleep, finally provided with blankets-one per two men. Perhaps that was some kind of reward for having been stripped and searched-what for, nobody knew. Only that with Major Ross there to supervise, no one was rectally examined. Nor was anything confiscated.
About an hour after dawn on the 13th of May-summer solstice was coming, so dawn was early-Richard woke to find Alexander moving, her timbers creaking, a faint sighing of water nudging her sides, the slightest roll. Enough for Ike, already puking, but they had dealt with that by giving him poor dead Willy’s wooden eating bowl, which Joey Long had undertaken to empty into the night bucket whenever necessary.
Robert Jefferies from Devizes died that day of pneumonia; the blankets had come far too late for many men.
Once through the Needles at the western end of the Isle of Wight, which happened on that same day, Alexander grew more frisky than at any time on the slow sail from Tilbury to Portsmouth. She rolled a lot and pitched a little, which sent most of the convicts to their cots in the throes of sickness. Richard became conscious of nausea, but not to a degree beyond controlling, and it passed within three hours after a single dry heave. Maybe sea legs grew automatically on Bristolians? The other Bristolians-Connelly, Perrott, Davis, Crowder, Martin and Morris-were in similar case to himself. It was the country boys seemed the worst, though none was as bad as Ike Rogers.
The next day Lieutenant Shairp and Surgeon Balmain came down the after hatch more awkwardly than in still water, but with sufficient dignity to look impressive. The two privates with them collected the body of Robert Jefferies while Shairp and Balmain negotiated the heaving aisle by hanging on to platform edges, Shairp very careful not to put his hand on anyone’s vomit. The order was the same: get out and clean your deck, get out and empty your night bucket, get out and clean your cot, I do not care how sick you think you are. If you have puked on your blanket, wash it. If you have puked on your matting, wash it. If you have puked on yourself, wash yourself.
“If they do that every day the place will stay clean,” said Connelly. “Oh, I do hope!”
“Do not hope,” said Richard. “This is Balmain’s doing, not Shairp’s, but Balmain is not a methodical man. Luckily the food has already been puked up, so the worst we will have to cope with is shit. They will just lie there and shit themselves, and half of them at least have never had a wash in their lives. If we are clean and our cleanliness is spreading, it is because of my cousin James and the fact that I badger all within hailing distance so much that they fear me more than they do a wash.” He grinned. “Once they get used to washing, they start to like being clean.”
“You,” said Will Connelly, “are a very strange man, Richard. Deny it as much as ye like, but ye’re definitely the head man on the larboard side.” He closed his eyes and concentrated upon his internal mechanisms. “I feel well, so I am going to try to read.” He sat on the bench along the central table right under the open hatch with the three volumes of Robinson Crusoe, found his place in the first and was soon absorbed in it, apparently quite oblivious to the ship’s motion.
Richard joined him with his gazetteer of the world; the coats of whitewash had made all the difference.
By the time Alexander passed well to the south of Plymouth most of the men had found their sea legs, though Ike Rogers and a handful of others had not. It was even possible to walk the aisles once a man got used to the way the deck rose to meet his feet, then fell away from beneath them. And thus it was that Richard, exercising, made the acquaintance of John Power, the forward head man.
Power was a fine-looking young fellow, lithe and supple as a cat, with a fierce look in his dark eyes and a curious habit of making highly expressive gestures with his hands as he talked. Very Frog, very Italian, not at all English, Dutch or German. He had an air of someone under pressure, not with anxiety or ill temper but rather with colossal energies and enthusiasms. And his eyes said that he liked to take risks.
“Richard Morgan!” he said as Richard passed by his cot, the top corner one where the forward bulkhead met the starboard hull. “I bid ye welcome to enemy territory.”
“I am not your enemy, John Power. I am a quiet man who minds his own business.”
“Which is the larboard side. Very neat and clean and tidy, I am told. Bristol fashion, real shipshape.”
“I am indeed a Bristol man, but visit us and see for yourself. ’Tis true we keep ourselves to ourselves-but then, we none of us speak the flash lingo.”
“My men like to talk flash, though I do not much care for it myself-sailors hate it.” Power slipped off his cot and joined Richard. “Ye’re an old man, Morgan, now I see ye close up.”
“Eight-and-thirty last September, though so far I have not felt my years overmuch, Power. My strength is a little diminished after nigh five months of Alexander, but we did get some work to do in Portsmouth, which was a help. They always put Bristolians on bilge duty-our noses are immune to the foulest airs. Did ye go to the lighter, The Firm or Fortunee?”
“The lighter. I get on well with Alexander’s crew, so my men never experienced Portsmouth’s hulks.” He heaved a great sigh, hands signaling exultation. “As soon as maybe I intend to work on Alexander as a seaman. Mr. Bones-he is third mate-promised. Then I will get my strength back.”
“I had thought we would be below deck for the whole voyage.”
“Not if Mr. Bones is right. Governor Phillip says we are not to be allowed to waste away, he needs us fit enough to work when we reach Botany Bay.”
They reached the starboard bulkhead barrel of sea-water and turned to walk forward. Power glanced sideways at Will Connelly hunched over Mr. Daniel Defoe. “Do all of ye read?” he asked with a tinge of envy.
“Six of us do, and five of us are Bristolians-Crowder, Davis, Connelly there, Perrott and me. The odd man out is Bill Whiting,” said Richard. “Bristol is full of charity schools.”
“London has almost no charity schools. Though I always thought it a waste of time to read books when the signs above any sort of shop tell a man what is inside.” The hands waggled wryly. “Now I think it would be good to read books. It passes the time.”
“When ye’re aloft ’twill not seem so dreadful. Are ye married?”
“Not I!” Power turned his thumbs down. “Women are poison.”
“Nay, they are just like us-some good, some bad, and some indifferent.”
“How many of each kind have ye known?” asked Power, smiling to reveal strong white teeth-not a boozer, then.
“More good than bad, and none indifferent.”
“And wives?”
“Two, according to my records.”
“And of records, Lieutenant Johnstone tells me, there are none!” Power clenched his fists in glee. “Can ye imagine that? The Home Office never got around to sending Phillip a list of us, so no one knows what our crimes are, nor how long we have to serve. I intend to take advantage of that, Morgan, the moment I reach Botany Bay.”
“The Home Office sounds as efficient as the Bristol Excise Office,” said Richard as they reached Power’s cot and he climbed into it without seeming to move at all. As graceful as Stephen Donovan, whose company Richard was missing now that they were below. A Miss Molly he might be, but he was well read and not a convict, so could talk of something other than prison.
Richard walked back to his own cot in a thoughtful mood. An interesting snippet, that no one in authority had any idea of the nature of convict offenses, the time each still had to serve… It might work as Power confidently expected it would, but there was also the possibility that the Governor might make an arbitrary decision to the effect that all convicts were to serve fourteen years. No one would want hordes of convicts claiming to have served their time within six months or a year of arriving. Which thought told Richard why they had been searched in Portsmouth. It cost money to buy passage home on a ship; they all knew that a return fare was not a part of the Parliament’s plan. Someone in Phillip’s retinue was shrewd enough to guess that there might be quite a lot of men and women concealing a nest egg aimed at buying passage home. Ye should have done a Mr. Sykes, Major Ross! But that brutish ye’re not, for all ye must have known. I have read ye aright: a man with a code of honor, a fierce partisan and protector of your men, a Scotch pessimist, violent-tempered, salty-tongued, not hugely ambitious, and prone to seasickness.
On the 20th of May, while Alexander frisked into a strong swell and driving rain, the convicts were brought up on deck a few at a time to have their leg irons removed. The sick went up first, even including Ike Rogers, so bad that Surgeon Balmain had put him on a glass of potent Madeira wine twice a day.
When Richard’s turn came he emerged into a minor gale; it was impossible to see anything beyond the ship and a few yards of white-capped ocean, but the skies wept fresh, wholesome, genuine, honest-to-goodness water. Someone thrust him down onto the deck with his legs extended in front of him. Two marines sat on stools side by side; one slid a broad smith’s chisel under the fetter to pin the cuff to a sheet of iron and the other smashed his hammer down on its butt. The pain was excruciating because the force of the blow was transmitted to his leg, but Richard didn’t care. He lifted his face to the rain and let it cascade over his skin, his liberated spirit soaring into the grey tatters of cloud. One more excruciating pain as his other leg came free and there he was light-footed, light-headed, soaking wet, and utterly, blissfully, perfectly happy.
Someone, he had no idea who, gave him a hand to help him up. Dizzily he wavered on feathers to get himself out of the way and come to terms with the fact that he, who had been ironed for thirty-three months, was suddenly stripped of them.
Once back in the prison he began to shiver, took his clothes off, wrung the sweet clean water out of them into his dripstone, draped them across a line between the sea-water barrel and a beam, dried his body with a rag and donned a brand-new outfit. It was that kind of day, a milestone.
In the morning he looked at his friends and tried to see each of them as he saw himself. How did they feel? What did they think about the enormity of this great experiment in human lives? Had any of them realized that home was probably gone forever? Did they dream? Did they hope? And if they did, what did they dream about, hope for? But he couldn’t know because none of them knew. If he had voiced those questions, asked them outright, they would have answered in the way men always did: money, property, comfort, sex, a wife and family, a long life, no more troubles. Well, he hoped and dreamed of all those things himself, yet they were not what he yearned to know.
All of them looked at him with trust and affection, and that was somewhere to start, though nowhere to finish. Somehow each of them had to be made to see that his own fate was in his own hand, not in Richard Morgan’s. The head man on the larboard side was perhaps a father, but he could not be a mother.
They were now allowed on deck provided that the whole prison did not appear there at one time, and provided that they kept out of the crew’s way. Though John Power, fizzing with joy, was let work as a seaman, as were Willy Dring and Joe Robinson. However peculiar Richard found it, by no means every convict wanted to go above. Those still seasick he could understand-the Bay of Biscay had felled some unaffected until then-but now that they were free of their irons others were content to lie about in their cots or congregate in groups around a table to play cards. Of course it was still squalling and blustering, but Alexander was not a hefty slaver for nothing. It would take bigger seas than she was ploughing through at the moment to swamp her decks and elicit the order to batten down the hatches.
By the time that the command came from Lieutenant Johnstone that men might proceed on deck, the weather was clearing rapidly; they had been fed and watered with the inevitable hard bread, salt beef and horrible Portsmouth water. Six marine privates were delegated to tip buckets of salt water into the prison barrels, and stiff, proper Lieutenant Shairp stalked up and down the aisles commanding slack cots to clean their decks and platforms. Secure in the knowledge that Shairp would have no complaints about their area, nine of Richard’s eleven hauled themselves through the hatch with a wave for Ike and Joey Long.
A rush to the rail, there to look at the ocean for the first time. Its grey was suffusing with a steely blue and still bore many white-caps, but the horizon was visible and so were other ships, some to larboard, some to starboard, and two so far astern that they were hull down, only their masts showing. Close by was the other big slaver, Scarborough, a magical sight with her sails filled, pennants flying in some unknown sea code, her blunt bows biting at the swell, which ran on her starboard stern beam in communion with the wind. She had a larger superstructure than Alexander, which perhaps was why Zachariah Clark, the contractor’s agent, had elected to sail in her instead. The naval agent, Lieutenant John Shortland, was another had defected; he was in Fishburn the storeship, though one of his two sons was second mate in Alexander. The other was aboard Sirius. Nepotism reigned.
As at Tilbury, Richard’s six parted company the moment they smelled fresh air and a chance to be relatively alone. Richard hauled himself atop one of the two longboats tied upside down athwart the spare masts and counted ships. A brig about half the size of Alexander was at the head of the field, then came Scarborough and Alexander, after them the two-masted sloop Supply clinging to Sirius like a cub to its mother. Behind them was a ship he thought Lady Penrhyn, then the three storeships, and those two sets of masts on the horizon. Eleven vessels if none were out of sight.
“Good day to you, Richard Morgan from Bristol,” said Stephen Donovan. “How do your legs feel?”
Half of Richard wanted to be alone, but the other half was very glad to see Miss Molly Donovan, whom he read correctly enough to think was too intelligent not to know that his sexual inclinations were not shared. So he smiled and nodded with the correct degree of courtesy. “In regard to the sea or the irons?” he asked, liking the sensation of lifting and dropping.
“The sea is no grief, that is evident. Irons.”
“Ye would have to have worn them for three-and-thirty months to understand how I feel without them, Mr. Donovan.”
“Three-and-thirty months! What did you do, Richard?”
“I was found guilty of extorting five hundred pounds.”
“How long did ye get?”
“Seven years.”
Donovan frowned. “That makes little sense to me. By rights ye should have hanged. Were you reprieved?”
“No. My original sentence was seven years’ transportation.”
“It sounds as if the jury was not very sure.”
“The judge was. He refused to recommend mercy.”
“Ye do not look resentful.”
Richard shrugged. “Why should I be resentful? The fault was my own, nobody else’s.”
“How did ye spend the five hundred pounds?”
“I did not try to cash the note of hand, so I spent naught.”
“I knew ye were an interesting man!”
Disliking the memories this conversation provoked, Richard changed the subject. “Tell me which ship is which, Mr. Donovan.”
“Scarborough keeping pace with us, Friendship in the lead-a snappy little sailer, that one! She will show the rest a clean pair of heels all the way.”
“Why exactly? I am not a seafaring Bristolian.”
“Because she is-shipshape. Her steering sails provide just the right proportionate area for holding in a zephyr or a gale.” He stretched out a long arm to point at Supply. “Yon sloop is rigged brig-fashion, which don’t suit her one wee bit. Since she has a second mast, Harry Ball would have done better to rig her as a snow. She’s a slug as soon as the seas turn heavy because she’s so low in the water and she cannot crowd on enough sail. Supply is a light-wind sailer, at home in the Channel, where she has had her career. Harry Ball must be praying for good weather.”
“Is that Lady Penrhyn behind the Royal Navy pair?”
“No. Prince of Wales, the additional transport. Then Golden Grove, Fishburn and Borrowdale. The two snails in the rear are Lady Penrhyn and Charlotte. Were it not for them we would be farther along, but the Commodore’s orders are specific. No ship is to be out of sight of the rest. So Friendship cannot set her topgallants and we cannot set our royals. Ah, ’tis good to be at sea again!” The brilliant blue eyes spotted Lieutenant John Johnstone emerging from the gentleman’s domain of the quarterdeck; Stephen Donovan leaped down with a laugh. “There is naught more certain, Richard, than that I will see ye some day soon.” And off he went to join the marine commanding officer, with whom he seemed on excellent terms.
Two of a kind? Richard wondered, not moving from his perch. His belly rumbled; in all this wondrous air he needed more food, but more food he was not going to get. An underweight pound of hard bread and more like half than three-quarters of a pound of salt beef a day, plus two quarts of Portsmouth water. Not nearly enough. Oh, for the days of the Thames bum boats and a good lunch!
All the convicts save the seasick or ill were conscious of perpetual, griping hunger. While he and the others from the larboard cots toward the stern were on deck, some of the starboard lazybones opposite them had manufactured a jimmy out of an iron bolt on the mainmast and levered up the hold hatches dotted at intervals along the aisles. They found no rum; they found a cache of bread sacks. But there was always a snitch somewhere. The next moment a dozen marines were piling down the after hatch to snabble the thieves as they feasted and threw the rock-hard little loaves blithely to any imploring hands or voices.
Six men were hauled onto the deck, there to face Lieutenants Johnstone and Shairp.
“Twenty lashes and back into irons,” said Johnstone tersely. He nodded to Corporal Sampson, who had appeared out of the after hatch house with his cat. Not, as Mr. Thistlethwaite had once put it, a four-legged creature that said meow. An instrument with a thick handle of rope coiled around a central core and nine thin hempen strings knotted at intervals and ending in a bead of something lead-colored.
Richard’s first impulse was to bolt back into the prison, only to find that everybody was being driven on deck to witness the floggings.
The six men were stripped to the waist-twenty lashes were not considered sufficient to bare buttocks as well-and the first victim was tied over the curving roof of the after hatch house. The thing whistled, and it did not require much effort in the plying. A whip, a cane or a cudgel raised welts and a bludgeon one massive bruise; this vile implement broke the skin with its first stroke, and where the very small bulb of lead at the end of each of its nine tails struck the body, a great scarlet lump arose in the same instant. Corporal Sampson knew his job; the marines were flogged too, usually to the tune of twelve lashes but sometimes many more. Each stroke landed in a slightly different place, so that by the twentieth the man’s back was a grid of bloodied stripes and lumps the size of a baby’s fist. The victim got a bucket of salt water on the mess which set him to screaming thinly, then his place was taken by the next. While Corporal Sampson ploughed indifferently-he did not appear either to love or hate what he did-through the six, those he had finished with were fitted with locked fetters and a Ceres length of chain. No one sent them below; Lieutenant Johnstone simply nodded dismissal to his flogger and the dozen green-hued privates.
Richard’s gorge rose. He jumped off the longboat and walked quickly to the rail, leaned over it and retched. But as he was too hungry to have anything to bring up, he contented himself with staring down into the water a scant ten feet below him. Water, he noticed as his eyes focused, so pure that the translucent jellyfish everywhere in it were like delicate ghosts, umbrellaed in sheerest silk, with long trails of lustrous frilly tentacles abandoned to the tug of ship and current.
Something went “Whoof!” so suddenly that he jumped; a long, sleek, iridescent body shot past and rose clear of the sea’s surface in an arc of absolute freedom, total joy. A dolphin? A porpoise? There were others frolicking, a great band of them playing chasings with dirty, decrepit Alexander.
The tears poured down his face, but he made no attempt to wipe them away. All of this was a part of this. The beauty of God and the ugliness of Man. What place could Man have in such a gorgeous universe?
The floggings sobered everyone as Alexander continued on her way south toward the Canaries, which was just as well; John Power had learned from his friend Mr. Bones that a convict he knew slightly, Nicholas Greenwell, had been pardoned the day before the fleet left Portsmouth and was smuggled off in secret. Lieutenant Shairp had remembered the discontent following the pardon of James Bartlett while Alexander had lain off Tilbury.
“I never noticed the fucken bastard was missing at first, then I assumed he’d died,” Power said to Richard and Mr. Donovan up on deck where the wind blew their words away. “Bastard! Oh, bitch! I should have been pardoned, not Greenwell!”
Power constantly maintained that he was innocent, that it had not been he who was with Charles Young (of whose present whereabouts he knew nothing) when a quarter-ton of rare wood belonging to the East India Company was spirited off a London wharf in a boat. The watchman had recognized Young, but would not swear that Power was the second man. As usual, the jury hedged its bets by returning a verdict of guilty; best be on the safe side in case the second man had been Power, even if the watchman was not sure. The judge, concurring, handed down seven years’ transportation.
“It should have been me!” Power cried, his dark face twisted in pain. “Greenwell was a robber, pure and simple! But I ain’t got his connections, just a sick dad I am not there to look after! Bitch, bugger, fuck ’em all!”
“There, there,” soothed Donovan, suddenly very Irish, for all that he said he was a good Protestant Ulsterman. “Johnny, ’tis too late to cry. Remember the cat and get yourself home the minute your sentence is over.”
“My dad will be dead by then.”
“Ye cannot say that for sure. Now do what Mr. Shortland told ye to do, else ye’ll be back to idleness.”
The rage simmered down, the pain did not. John Power surveyed the tall fourth mate with eyes full of tears, then marched away.
“It is a wonder,” said Richard thoughtfully, deciding it was high time things were brought into the open, “that ye do not fancy him. Why a stringy old man like me?”
The too-handsome face aped astonishment but the eyes danced. “If I do fancy ye, Richard, ’tis an unrequited passion. Even a cat can look at a king.”
“Bog trotter.”
“Mud skipper.”
“What is a mud skipper?” asked Richard, intrigued.
“A miraculous fish-out-of-water I read of. Maybe ’twas Sir Joseph Banks described it, I do not remember. It skips on mud.”
More deaths had occurred; there were now 188 convicts left on board Alexander.
At about the moment that Thomas Gearing from Oxford was in extremis, Teneriffe loomed out of fog and drizzle so quietly that the inmates of the prison, ordered below, scarcely knew when their ship made harbor.
Having had little to do for three weeks save feed the convicts and dwell upon their own injuries, the marines now went seriously on duty. Their most onerous task at sea was to boil up kettles of the salt beef chunks which Sergeant Knight was supposed to weigh up on the scales Lieutenant Shortland, the naval agent, had himself checked. As the naval agent was not present to witness this ritual, however, Sergeant Knight simply chopped the beef or pork into half-pound bits for the convicts and pound-and-a-half pieces for the marines. The convicts were supposed to get pease or oatmeal as well, but Sergeant Knight confined such treats to Sundays after prayers had been said. He was fed up with playing nursery maid to a lot of felons before Alexander put to sea-scales, for pity’s sake! Even if Lieutenant Shairp came down to watch, Knight made no attempt to weigh or be fair about the rations, and Shairp said not a word. Better fucken not say a word!
Above and beyond the differences natural in a group of almost forty men unable to escape from each other’s company, the marines were very unhappy. Moving up into steerage should have mollified them, but it did not. Oh, it was a great deal more comfortable to occupy that peculiarly shaped space wherein the ceiling was far larger than the floor, admittedly. But the tiller came inboard along the ceiling-and groaned-and screeched-and clattered hollowly-and occasionally walloped a body swinging aloft in his canvas nest when the helmsman swung the wheel hard over just as the sea was running the wrong way. They had air and light from several ports, the stink was not unbearable, and the crew had been decent enough to leave steerage relatively clean.
Yet what they did not have far outclassed all of these improvements: they were not getting their full half-pint of rum every day. Captain Duncan Sinclair, in whose purlieu the liquor lay, had taken it upon himself to water the rum down to what was known as “grog.” There had been a furious outcry about it before Alexander left Portsmouth and for a few days thereafter the rum was served the way it was supposed to be served-neat. Now they were back on watery grog, had been since the Scillies. No dreamless sleeps despite the tiller, and definitely no kindly thoughts. On board ship rum was the beginning and end of all earthly pleasures to a sailor or a marine, and now both kinds of seafaring man were on grog. The hatred for Sinclair among crew and marines was as immense as it was intense. Not that Sinclair cared, dwelling on high in a roundhouse he had turned into a fortress. A little further into the voyage he intended to start selling the rum he was currently hoarding. If the bastards wanted a full half-pint of neat rum, then they could pay for it. He had to pay for his roundhouse, as he knew perfectly well that the Admiralty would not.
Now, with port in Santa Cruz attained, was the prospect of going ashore to find as much rum as a marine could drink-and Major Ross issued orders that no marine was to have much shore leave! Lieutenant Johnstone had informed them in his languid voice that a full guard would have to be mounted during daylight hours, as Governor Phillip did not want the convicts confined below decks interminably. Further to that, Johnstone announced, Governor Phillip and his aide-de-camp Lieutenant King were expected to come aboard at some unpredicted time while at Teneriffe. So woe betide the marine whose choking black leather stock was not properly fastened around his neck or whose knee-length black leather spatterdashes were not properly buttoned. The ship was stuffed with the most desperate criminals, said Lieutenant Johnstone with a weary wave of his hand, and Teneriffe was not far enough away from England to relax. Sergeant Knight, facing court martial over his grog protests, was not a happy man. Nor were his underlings.
To make matters worse on Alexander, the ship had not inherited one of the senior officers. Now that they were deliciously tucked into cabins on the quarterdeck, Lieutenants Johnstone and Shairp were not in any way dependent upon their subordinates for any of their creature comforts. They had servants (officers’ servants were always crawlers) and a galley of their own, the chance to keep their own livestock on board to supplement their table, and the use of a ship’s boat if they felt like visiting friends on one of the other transports while Alexander was at sea. What the privates, drummers, corporals and lone sergeant had not taken into account was the remorseless nature of their task, to feed and guard nearly 200 felons. Port, they had been sure, would see the felons locked up. Now they discovered that this lunatic governor insisted the felons have freedom of the deck even in port!
Of course the rum came on board the moment the crew was set at liberty, the marines having contributed to a pool which ensured that, shipbound or no, they would still be able to moisten their parched throats with something stronger than Sinclair’s fucken grog. Luck served them another good turn when, late in the afternoon of the 4th of June, Alexander was the first ship Governor Phillip and his party boarded to inspect. Captain Sinclair actually waddled out of his roundhouse to converse politely with the Governor while the convicts were lined up on deck under the eyes of the marines on duty, eyes bloodshot and breath reeking, but leather stocks and spatterdashes perfect.
“It is a tragedy,” said Phillip, walking around the prison, “that we cannot afford better accommodation for these fellows. I see fourteen too sick to parade and I doubt there is room for more than forty men at a time to get a little exercise in these aisles. Which is why they must be given as much freedom of the deck as is possible. If ye have trouble,” he said to Major Robert Ross and the two Alexander lieutenants, “double-iron the offenders for a few days, then see how they go.”
Lined up with the other convicts on deck wherever there was space to stand, Richard found himself looking at a man who could have been Senhor Tomas Habitas’s brother. Governor Phillip had a long, curved, beaky nose, two vertical worry lines hedging in the bridge of that nose, a full and sensuous mouth, and a balding dome of head; he wore his own hair, curled into rolls above his ears and confined in a queue on the back of his neck. Richard remembered that Jem Thistlethwaite had said that the Governor’s father, Jacob Phillip the language teacher from Frankfurt, had fled Lutheran-inspired persecution of German Jews. His mother was respectably English, but her relative Lord Pembroke had not seen fit to assist the promising young man educationally or financially, nor had he given Arthur Phillip a push up the naval ladder. All done the hard way, including a long stint in the Portuguese navy-yet another link with Senhor Habitas. As he stood there understanding that this was as close as he would ever get to His Excellency the Governor of New South Wales, Richard felt oddly comforted.
Phillip’s aide-de-camp and protégé, Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, was still in his twenties. An Englishman who probably had quite a lot of Celt in him, judging by the way he talked constantly and enthusiastically. The English showed in his meticulous recounting of facts, figures, statistics as the party toured the deck. Major Ross clearly despised him as full of waffle.
Thus it was Tuesday before the convicts had the leisure to look at Santa Cruz and what parts of Teneriffe their moorings in the harbor revealed. They had been fed that midday with fresh goat’s meat, boiled pumpkin, peculiar but edible bread and big, raw, juicy onions. Neither vegetable found favor with many, but Richard ate his onion as if it were an apple, crunching into it and letting the juice run down his chin to join the tears its vapors produced in abundance.
The town was small, treeless and very tired and the land around it was precipitous, dry, inhospitable. Of the mountain Richard had so hoped to see after reading about it, nothing was visible above a layer of grey cloud which seemed to hang over the island only; the sky out to sea was blue. Teneriffe had a lid jammed upon it like the hat on a donkey he saw near the stone jetty, the first truly novel impression he had of a non-English world. Bum boats either did not exist or were turned back by the longboats patrolling the area where the transports were all moored together. Alexander lay between two anchor cables suspended taut from the sea bed by floating kegs; because, one of the more sober sailors explained to him, the harbor bottom was littered with sharp chunks of iron the Spanish (who brought it out as ballast) simply dumped into the water as they took on cargo. If the cables were not kept taut, the iron tended to fray them.
They had chosen a good time of year to arrive, he learned from another sailor who had been here several times; the air was warm but neither hot nor humid. October was the most unendurable month, but from July to November hideous winds blew as hot as a furnace from Africa, and carried on them a wealth of stinging sand. But Africa was several hundred miles away! A place, he had always believed, of steaming jungles. Obviously not at this latitude, which was fairly close to the place where Atlas held the world up on his broad shoulders. Yes, he remembered, the deserts of Libya went all the way to Africa’s west coast.
On Wednesday, Stephen Donovan came down to the prison to find him shortly after dawn.
“I need you and your men, Morgan,” he said curtly, mouth tight in displeasure. “Ten of ye will do-and make it lively.”
Ike Rogers was a little better with every day that passed at anchor; yesterday he had eaten his onion with such relish that he found himself the recipient of several more. The pumpkin had also been devoured, though he seemed to have no appetite for meat or bread. His loss of weight was increasingly worrisome: the full, brash face had fallen away to bones and his wrists were so thin that they were knobbed. When Joey Long refused to leave him, Richard decided to take Peter Morris from Tommy Crowder’s cot.
“Why not me?” demanded Crowder peevishly.
“Because, Tommy, the fourth mate does not come down into the prison looking for men to clerk for him. He is wanting labor.”
“Then take Petey with my blessing,” said Crowder, relaxing; he was in the midst of delicate negotiations with Sergeant Knight which might lead to a little rum, even if at an inflated price.
On deck the ten convicts found Mr. Donovan pacing up and down looking like thunder. “Over the side and into the longboat,” he rapped. “I have barely enough sober men to bring the empty water tuns up, but none to take the tuns to the jetty and fill them. That is going to be your job. Ye’ll be under orders from the cargo hand, Dicky Floan, and ye’re going because there are not enough sober marines to put a guard on you. How many of ye can row?”
All the Bristol men could, which made four; Mr. Donovan, an abstemious man, looked blacker. “Then ye’ll have to be towed in and out-though where I am to find a lighter to do it, I have no idea.” He spotted the naval agent’s second-mate son and grabbed him. “Mr. Shortland, I need a towing lighter for the water tun longboat. Any suggestions?”
After a moment of frowning thought Mr. Shortland decided upon nepotism and flagged Fishburn, where his father was ensconced. Fishburn answered so promptly that not more than half an hour went by before Alexander’s longboat, loaded with empty tuns all standing upright, was towed away jettyward.
For such an arid and desolate place Teneriffe had excellent water; it came down from a spring somewhere in the interior near a town called Laguna, was conduited through the customary elm pipes (imported, Richard imagined, from Spain) and ran out of a series of mouths dispersed along a short stone jetty. Unless some ship were filling its tuns, the water dissipated in the salty harbor. Since leaving Portsmouth Alexander had used 4,000 gallons, so there were 26 of these 160-gallon receptacles to fill, and each one took two and a half hours. The system was quite ingenious, however, and permitted the filling of six tuns at once; had the Spanish put in a wooden jetty on piers, a boat containing tuns could actually have maneuvered itself underneath and filled all its tuns without man-handling either boat or tuns. As it was, the longboat had been stacked with six tuns on either side and had to be turned constantly to part-fill the tuns on one side, then turn the boat around and part-fill the tuns on the other side. Otherwise the weight-a full tun weighed over half a ton-would have capsized them. Hence the need for ten men to labor, pushing, pulling and oaring the longboat around, mindful of the fact that Donovan had said they had to finish filling the tuns that day. Tomorrow was booked for Scarborough.
The second Alexander longboat was brought in by another towing crew and contained fourteen tuns. Hoping for a little shore time, the towing crew was ordered to haul Alexander’s first boat back. Not an order the men would have taken from everybody, but were obliged to; it came from Mr. Samuel Rotton, one of the master’s mates off Sirius, and supervisor of watering. A sickly fellow, he did his job beneath the shelter of a green silk umbrella borrowed from delightful Mrs. Deborah Brooks, wife of Sirius’s boatswain and a very good friend of the Governor’s.
“Is she?” Richard asked Dicky Floan, who knew all the gossip.
“Oh, aye. A bit of naughty there, Morgan. All of Sirius is in the know, including Brooks. He’s an old shipmate of Phillip’s.”
Darkness had long fallen before the last tun was filled, and the ten convicts were trembling with fatigue. They had not been fed and for once Richard’s scruples had had to be set aside; it was impossible to labor in the sun, veiled though it was most of the time, without drinking, and the only water to drink came from the pipe originating at Laguna’s spring. They drank it.
Returning to Alexander well after eight, draped over the tuns in exhaustion, the convicts found that the harbor had come alive with a horde of tiny boats, each dewed with twinkling lights, and fishing for something that apparently was not catchable during the day. A fairyland of bobbing lamps, the occasional golden gleam of nets glittering with whatever milled inside them.
“Ye’ve done remarkable well,” said the fourth mate when the last of them, Richard, had clambered clumsily up the ladder. “Come with me.” He walked off toward the crew’s mess in the forecastle. “Go in, go in!” he cried. “No one has fed ye, I know, and there is not a marine sober enough to boil anything on their wretched stove without setting fire to the ship. Crew’s not in any better condition, but Mr. Kelly the cook kindly left ye food before retiring to his hammock cuddling a bottle.”
They had not had a feast like that one since leaving Ceres and their bum boat lunches six months ago-cold mutton that had been roasted, not boiled-a mess of pumpkin and onion stewed with herbs-fresh bread rolls slathered in butter-and the whole washed down by small beer.
“I do not believe the butter,” said Jimmy Price, chin shining.
“Nor did we,” said Donovan dryly. “It seems the butter loaded for the officers was put in the wrong sort of firkins-perishables are supposed to go into double-lined containers, but the contractors cut corners as usual and used ordinary ones. So the butter is on the turn and the whole fleet has been issued with it to get rid of it before it spoils. Then the coopers will get to work to make proper butter firkins-which cannot be filled until we get to the Cape of Good Hope. There are no milch cows this side of it.”
Bellies full, they stumbled back to their cots and slept until the church bells woke them at midday Angelus. Shortly after that they ate again, goat’s meat, fresh corn bread and raw onions.
Richard gave Ike the fresh, buttered bread roll he had purloined the evening before and hidden in his shirt. “Do try to eat it, Ike. The butter on it will help ye.”
And Ike did eat it; after three days and four nights at anchor he was beginning to look better.
“Come look!” cried Job Hollister, excited, sticking his head inside the hatch.
“Ain’t she grand?” he asked when Richard appeared on deck. “I never saw a ship half her size in Bristol, even at Kingsroad.”
She was a Dutch East Indiaman of 800 tons and dwarfed Sirius, though she sat a little lower in the water-on her way home, Richard decided, laden with the spices, peppercorns and teak the Dutch East Indies produced in such abundance-and probably with a chest of sapphires, rubies and pearls in her captain’s strong-box.
“Going home to Holland,” said John Power, pausing. “I would bet she’s lost a fair number of her crew. Our East Indiamen do, at any rate.” Mr. Bones beckoned, Power scampered off.
Secure in the knowledge that the official inspection was not going to be repeated, the marines had settled down to drinking now that Sergeant Knight’s rather impromptu court martial had concluded with no more than a disciplinary rap over the knuckles; privates like Elias Bishop and Joseph McCaldren had had a hand in Alexander’s “grog rebellion” as well, had expected 100 licks of the cat, and were profoundly glad that marine officer sympathy was more with them than with Captain Duncan Sinclair. The two lieutenants had hardly been aboard, busy dining with their fellows on better ships or dickering for goats and chickens in the Santa Cruz marketplace, not to mention journeying inland to see the beauties of a fertile tableland on the mountain’s flank.
Some of the convicts had managed to obtain rum as well, and Scarborough was selling Dutch gin she had picked up floating at sea off the Scilly Isles. To English palates, very harsh and bitter; English gin was as sweet as rum, the main reason why so many men (and women) had rotten teeth. Tommy Crowder, Aaron Davis and the rest in the cot below were snoring on rum they had bought from Sergeant Knight; in fact, the snores which emanated from the Alexander prison were louder than they had been since embarkation. On Friday only those like Richard who preferred to keep their money for more important things were on deck at all, and on Friday night the ship’s timbers reverberated.
They were five hours into Saturday morning’s daylight when the very haughty and superior first mate, William Aston Long, came looking for John Power.
The faces turned to him blankly were patently innocent; Mr. Long departed looking grim.
Several marine privates, stupid from drink, began yelling that they had better get their fucken arses on deck, and look lively! Startled, the convicts tumbled out of their cots or from around the tables; they were expecting to be fed at any moment.
Captain Duncan Sinclair emerged from his roundhouse, his face pouting in extreme displeasure.
“My dad had a sow looked just like Captain Sinclair,” said Bill Whiting audibly enough for the thirty-odd men around him to hear. “Don’t know why all the huntsmen talk about wild boars-I never knew a wild boar or a bull could hold a candle to that awful old bitch. She ruled the yard, the barn, the coops, the pond, the animals and us. Evil! Satan would have given her a wide berth and God did not want her either. She would charge at the drop of a hat and she ate her piglets just to spite us. The boar near died of fright when he had to service her. Name was Esmeralda.”
From that day on Captain Duncan Sinclair was known to the entire complement of Alexander as “Esmeralda.”
Heads aching, tempers ruined, those marines not ashore were put to turning the prison inside out, and when it yielded nothing, to turning every other place inside out. Even rolled sails on spars were searched for John Power, who had disappeared. So, when someone thought to look, had Alexander’s jollyboat.
Major Ross came aboard during the afternoon, by which time the hapless marines had managed to look as if they were halfway sober. Lieutenants Johnstone and Shairp had been summarily ordered back from Lady Penrhyn, where they were in the habit of dining with marine captain James Campbell and his two lieutenants. Because of the “grog rebellion” Ross was in no mood to suffer more trouble from this most troublesome of the fleet’s eleven ships. The convicts kept dying, the marines were the worst assortment of malcontents the Major had ever encountered, and Duncan Sinclair was the bastard son of a Glasgow bitch.
“Find the man, Sinclair,” he said to that worthy, “else your purse will be the lighter of forty pounds. I have reported this matter to the Governor, who is not pleased. Find him!”
They did, but not until after dawn on Sunday morning, with the fleet ready to sail. Enquiries aboard the Dutch East Indiaman had revealed that Power had arrived alone in the Alexander jollyboat and begged for work as a seaman on the voyage to Holland. As he was wearing the same kind of clothes as the many English convicts the Dutch captain had seen on the English ships, he was courteously refused and told to be on his way. Not before someone, moved at the sight of his terrible grief, had given him a mug of gin.
It was the jollyboat the search parties from Alexander and Supply found first, tied by its painter to a rock in a deserted cove; Power, sound asleep thanks to sorrow and Dutch gin, was curled up behind a pile of stones, and came quietly. Sinclair and Long wanted him given 200 lashes, but the Governor sent word that he was to be put into double irons and stapled to the deck. The stapling was to last for twenty-four hours, the irons were to remain on at the Governor’s pleasure.
Alexander put out to sea. Chips, the ship’s carpenter, stapled John Power to the deck by screwing down his manacles and fetters, thus pinning him prone and face down. The orders were that nobody was to go near him on pain of the cat, but as soon as night enfolded the ship Mr. Bones crept to give him water, which he lapped like a dog.
The weather was fine, sunny and gently windy the moment the fleet extricated itself from Teneriffe’s morning overcast. This time sight of the island stayed with them for a full three days, a vision that late afternoon rendered unforgettable. Pico de Teide reared up 12,000 feet clear from the ocean, its jagged tip shining starkly white with snow, its waist encircled by a band of grey-hued cloud. Then in the setting sun the snow glowed rose-pink, the cloud crimsoned, and what looked in the ruddiness like molten lava poured down one flank all the way to the sea, some flow of ancient rock whose uniqueness had never been obliterated by sun, wind or blasts of sand from the far off African deserts. So beautiful!
On the morrow it was still there, just farther away, and on the third day out, with the wind freshening and the sea getting up, it looked as if the straight and steady hand which had drawn the horizon had been suddenly jarred to produce a tiny fang. Teneriffe was 100 miles away when the horizon became perfect again.
On the 15th of June they crossed the Tropic of Cancer, an event marked by much ceremony. Every soul on board who had not been south of this imaginary line was obliged to stand trial before none other than Father Neptune himself. The scene on deck was set with shells, nets, seaweed and a huge copper tub filled with sea-water. Two sailors blew on conches while a fearsome individual was carried from the forecastle on a throne made from a barrel; it took a hard look to recognize Stephen Donovan. His head was crowned with seaweed and a jagged brass ring, his beard was seaweed, his face, bare chest and arms were blue, and from the waist down he was clad in the tail of a swordfish caught the previous day, flesh and guts scooped out to accommodate his legs. In one hand he bore his trident, which was actually Alexander’s grains-a three-pronged, barbed instrument the sailors successfully used to spear big fish. Each man was brought forward by two blue-painted, seaweed-draped sailors, asked if he had crossed the line, and if he said no, was thrust into the copper of sea-water. After which Father Neptune slapped a bit of blue paint on him and let him go. The best fun for the audience was watching Lieutenants Johnstone and Shairp get dunked, though both knew enough about the ceremony to wear slops.
Rum was issued-and continued to be issued-to all hands, including the convicts; someone produced a penny whistle and the sailors fell to dancing in their strange way, bobbing up and down with arms folded, jigging in circles, teetering from one foot to the other. From that they passed to chanties, after which the convicts-the crew heard them singing often-were begged for a song or two. Richard and Taffy sang a lay by Thomas Tallis, passed into “Greensleeves,” and brought the rest into it to sing tavern ballads and popular ditties. Everybody was served a brimming bowl of Mr. Kelly’s swordfish chowder, which soaked up the hard bread and actually made it seem tasty. On nightfall lamps were lit and the singing continued until after ten o’clock, when Captain Sinclair sent a message through Trimmings, his steward, that all hands except the Watch were to go to fucken bed.
They picked up the northeast trades, which carried them on south and west at a goodly rate. No square-rigged ship could sit with the wind directly behind her sails; it had to blow on the leading edge of the sail, which meant more to the side or beam. An ideal wind blew from abaft the beam, somewhere between the stern and the midships. As the natural tendency of winds and currents pushed ships toward Brazil and away from Africa as they went down the Atlantic, everyone was aware that sooner or later the fleet must arrive at Rio de Janeiro. The vexed question was, when? Though every water tun was full when they left Teneriffe, Governor Phillip thought it prudent to top up the casks again in the Cape Verde Islands, owned by Portugal and positioned almost directly west of Dakar.
On the 18th of June in blowy, hazy weather, the Cape Verde Islands began to pass-Sal, Bonavista, Mayo. Alexander was scudding along at the rate of 165 nautical miles a day, which were 190 land miles. Though mileage was not counted as the actual miles sailed; only those miles which proceeded in the right direction were. On some days a ship might achieve a minus mileage, having spent her time going backward when latitude and longitude were determined at noon. Sea days were noon to noon, when the sun could possibly be shot with a sextant for latitude; accurate longitude was calculated from the chronometers, of which the fleet possessed only one set aboard Sirius, the flagship. As soon as longitude was known on Sirius it was signaled to the other ten ships by flying the appropriate flags.
Big and mountainous St. Jago loomed on the morning of the 19th of June. All went well until the fleet, close together, rounded the southeastern cape to make harbor in Praya. Suddenly they were becalmed, stripped of all wind save what seamen called “catspaws”-little puffs from all points of the compass. To make matters worse, a strong swell was running inshore and breaking upon the reefs; after a few tentative essays the Governor, seeing Scarborough and Alexander within half a mile of the surf, ordered the fleet back to sea. There would be no additional water.
Then Alexander got into trouble again. Lieutenants Johnstone and Shairp had a good thing going with Lady Penrhyn, always one of the two laggards. Both groups of marine officers owned sheep, pigs, chickens and ducks; they not only cooked for themselves, they killed for themselves. Captain, mates and crew had their own stock on board, and so jealously was fresh food regarded that fish caught by the crew were not shared with the marines, and vice versa. There were always several expert fishermen among the crew, but the marines had come equipped with hand-lines, hooks, floats and sinkers for fishing as well. If a convict was discovered to be a handy fisherman, he too would be pressed into service in return for fish-chowder on the convict menu that day or the following one.
The fowls were comfortably consumed by the marine officers of one ship, but in these tropical latitudes a whole carcass of mutton or pork would spoil before it could be eaten. It might have seemed the sensible thing to a hungry convict like Richard Morgan that the marine officers should negotiate with the captain and crew of their vessel to share meat. But no. What belonged to the marine officers would be eaten by none except marine officers. So when Johnstone and Shairp killed a pig or sheep (the goats were kept for milk), they hung a tablecloth over the stern of Alexander; on seeing it, Captain Campbell and his two lieutenants would send a boat to pick up their half of the kill. Similarly, whenever Lady Penrhyn hung a tablecloth over her bows, Alexander’s lieutenants took a boat to Lady Penrhyn to pick up half the kill.
To the great joy of Johnstone and Shairp, on the 21st of June Lady Penrhyn hung out a tablecloth. The two marines promptly commandeered a longboat and went to collect their share of the feast. Governor Phillip, Captain Hunter, Major Ross, Judge Advocate David Collins and various other senior persons aboard Sirius watched with amazement as Alexander’s marine officers set off gaily into the teeth of a huge swell running from the northwest. Skillfully rowed by twelve marine privates, the longboat made the round trip and arrived safely back to Alexander. While it was being stowed in its usual resting place on deck, Johnstone and Shairp drooled at the prospect of succulent pork loins and Teneriffe onions braised in goat’s milk.
Captain Sinclair sent for them.
“Sirius,” he said in a monotone, “is awash in flags. I suggest ye go up to the poop and read what they are saying.”
The two first lieutenants mounted the steps to the poop, where Sinclair kept his chicken coop, a pen of sheep and goats, and six plump porkers in a mudless sty well shielded from the sun and having a salt water pool so that the pigs could submerge their knees and keep their body temperature down.
“No boat is to leave Alexander without specific permission from the Governor,” said the flags.
Such brevity could not convey any emotion whatsoever, but Major Ross rectified this omission a little later in the day when he and a Sirius longboat visited Alexander.
“Ye pair of fucken cretins, I’ll flay ye until your ribs show!” he roared, as usual in front of anybody who cared to listen; his conveyance was heaving up and down larboard and he was not about to waste his valuable time by hauling the miscreants into the privacy of the quarterdeck to tell them what he thought of them. “I do not give a fucken shit what Campbell and his ninnies on Lady Penrhyn have to do with ye, or ye with them-this fucken traffic will cease forthwith!”
Back he marched to the rope ladder, down it and into the Sirius longboat without picking up so much as a single drop of sea foam; then it was off to Lady Penrhyn to repeat his sentiments.
Since the marine underlings were laughing quite as hard as the crew and convicts, Lieutenants Johnstone and Shairp shut themselves into the quarterdeck and contemplated suicide.
While the northeast trades held the fleet made good time, but toward the end of June the steady wind failed and progress depended upon whatever breeze could be found. This involved a great deal of tacking and standing; the helmsman would bring the ship onto a different tack and then everybody would wait to see if it brought a wind with it which would send the ship in the right direction. If no such wind appeared, the ship was again turned a little, and the waiting began once more. Tack, stand, tack, stand…
Richard had been put on fishing detail, not so much because he demonstrated any degree of luck as because he was so patient; when people like Bill Whiting decided to fish, they expected a bite within a minute of sending the line down, and refused simply to stand, leaning on the rail with line in the water, for hours if necessary. With the sun directly overhead, deck was not such a comfortable place anymore, particularly for fine white English skins. In that respect Richard’s luck held; he had pinkened on the voyage to Teneriffe but then darkened slowly to a good brown, as did Taffy the dark Welshman and others who tended to dark hair. For the fair and freckled Bill Whiting and Jimmy Price came a long period during which they had to retire below, there to nurse pain and blisters, suffering sparing applications of Richard’s salve and the calamine lotion Surgeon Balmain slapped on heartlessly.
So when Richard saw the sailors rigging canvas awnings from the stays to the shrouds or any handy projection which would not inconvenience men climbing aloft, he was very pleased.
“I did not know Esmeralda was so considerate of sunburn,” he said to Stephen Donovan.
Donovan hooted with laughter. “Richard! Esmeralda don’t give a fuck about shelter! No, we are getting close to the line Line-the Equator-which is why we spend so much of our lives becalmed. Esmeralda knows the storms are about to start, is all. The awnings are to catch rain-water-see? They put a tun at the lowest corner to take the runoff. ’Tis an art to string the canvas-old pieces of sail-so that it forms a saucer with just one edge sagging to form a funnel. We have lost the trade, I think, and so does dear Esmeralda.”
“Why are ye fourth mate, Mr. Donovan? It seems to me as I go about the deck that ye carry almost as much weight as Mr. Long, and certainly more than Mr. Shortland or Mr. Bones.”
The blue eyes crinkled up at their corners and the mouth wore a smile, but to Richard it looked a little bitter.
“Well, Richard, I am an Irishman of sorts, and despite time with Admiral Rodney in the West Indies, I belong to the merchant sail. Esmeralda put me on as second mate, but the naval agent wanted a berth for his son. Esmeralda got very piggy when he was informed that Mr. Shortland would be coming aboard as second mate-he and the father, Lieutenant Shortland, had a rare old barney. The result was that Lieutenant Shortland thought it better to shift himself to Fishburn. But the son stayed. Mr. Bones was not about to give up his third mate’s ticket, so I became fourth mate. There is one of us for each Watch, ye might say.”
Richard frowned. “I thought the captain was master of his own ship and had the final say.”
“Not when ye’re in partnership with the Royal Navy. Walton’s want to do more of this transportation work-that is why Captain Francis Walton, one of the family, is master of Friendship. Esmeralda Sinclair is a partner in Walton & Company. Ye’d find, if ye looked hard enough, that almost all the masters of the transports and storeships are shareholders in their companies.” Donovan gave a shrug. “If the Botany Bay experiment is a success, there will be a brisk trade in shipping convicts.”
“It is nice to know,” Richard grinned, “that we miserable wretches bring prosperity to some people.”
“Especially to people named William Richards Junior. He is the contractor-and the one ye have to thank for the food ye get, God rot the bastard to Hell forever. And, God, send us a fish or two!”
The line in Richard’s hand jerked. So did the one Donovan was holding. A whoop went up from a sailor farther astern; they had come into a huge school of albacore, and hauled the big fish in at such a rate that those standing watching were put to baiting hooks so the lines could go down again before the fish were gone. By the end of this exhilarating spurt of activity there were over fifty large albacore flipping and flapping around the deck, and sailors and marines were sharpening their knives to clean and scale and fillet. A task not allowed to convicts, devoid of knives.
“Chowder aplenty tonight,” said Richard with satisfaction. “I am glad too that we do not eat at midday anymore. A man sleeps better on a full belly. I know our lieutenants complain that these beautiful creatures are dry eating, but the meat is fresh.”
The sea was great company; something was always happening in it. Richard had grown used to the sight of huge porpoises and somewhat smaller dolphins chasing, playing and leaping far out of the water, though they never ceased to fascinate. Life for sea dwellers, he fancied, could not simply be a matter of survival. These creatures enjoyed themselves. Nothing as carefree as a leaping porpoise could possibly not know pleasure in the act, no matter what dour men like Mr. Long said about the leap being a device to frighten predators away, coming down with such a splash and rumpus.
Birds were always present in sometimes great numbers-pintada birds, various petrels, even gulls. As Alexander was not liberal with scraps save when fish guts were tipped out, Richard learned that the presence of lots of birds meant there were schools of fish about, usually too small to bother catching.
He saw his first shark and his first whale on the same day, one of great calm, just a long swell rolling too placidly to break into ruffs of foam. The water was like crystal and he longed to swim in it, wondered if perhaps somewhere along the way Mr. Donovan or some other sailor would teach him to swim. What puzzled him was why they never went over the side, even on days like this, when a man would have no trouble climbing back on board.
Then along it came, this chilling creature. Just why the mere sight of it should freeze him to his marrow he did not understand, for it was beautiful. He saw its fin first, cutting through the water like a knife. The fin stood two feet into the air, heading for a bloody mess of albacore ruins bobbing along their side and in their wake. The thing swam past like a dark shadow and seemed to go on forever; it was, he estimated, twenty-five feet long, as round as a barrel in its mid section but narrowing to a pointed snout in front and terminating in a slender, tapering tail equipped with a forked double fin as rudder. A dull black eye as large as a plate broke the mass of its head, and just as it came up with the fish guts floating in a tangle it turned over on its side to scoop the mess into a vast maw armed with terrible teeth. Its belly flashed white, then the albacore remains were gone; it gulped down every bit it could find, then cruised off into the gentle wake to see if there were more goodies near the ships in Alexander’s rear.
God Jesus! I have heard of whales and I have heard of sharks. I knew that a shark is a big fish, but I never dreamed they came as large as whales. Now that is a thing does not know joy. Its eye said that it has no soul.
The whale erupted into the air perhaps a cable’s length from the ship, so suddenly that only those like Richard fishing from the starboard side saw the mighty creature breach the surface in a shimmering explosion of water. A beaky head, a small eye that sparkled cognizance, a pair of speckled flippers-it just kept coming up and up and up, forty feet of it in ridged, blue-grey glory, its hull as barnacled as any ship’s. When it fell it crashed in clouds of spray and disappeared; a moment’s breathless wait and the magnificent fluked tail towered, poised like a banner, before it smacked with a clap like thunder amid dazzling rainbows of foam. The leviathan of the deep, grander than any ship of the line.
Others appeared, spread all over the sea like an etching he had seen of grazing elephants, spouting fountains of mingled air and water, sailing along majestically or breaching the surface in those gargantuan dances. A mother and child sported around Alexander for a long while; she was terribly scarred as well as barnacled, her calf was flawless. Richard wanted to go down on his knees to thank God for so honoring him, but he couldn’t bear not to watch for as long as the whales remained. Where was their fleet going? Like the porpoises and dolphins, the whales were joyous voyagers.
The squalls began not long after the wind died, and had to be used. They arrived out of a clear sky, the clouds piling up fast, curling dark blue billows tipped with pure white fans, and growling ominously. Then a huge gale descended, the sea turned into a fury, the rain teemed down, lightning flashed, thunder boomed. An hour later saw the sky blue and the ship becalmed again.
A number of convicts and marines were sleeping on deck, though it surprised Richard that more men did not choose to do this. The convicts at any rate were accustomed to sleeping on hard flat boards, yet most elected the stinking prison as soon as darkness fell, which it did at these latitudes with stunning swiftness. There was comfort in a hammock, no matter how stifling the weather, but his fellows-he could only conclude that men feared the elements.
Not Richard, who would find a piece of uncluttered deck out of the way of seamen’s feet and lie watching the fantastic play of lightning in and out of the clouds, waiting to be drenched to the skin, waiting to feel his heart stop with the shock of flash and thunderclap together if the storm drifted overhead. The best of all was the rain. He brought his soap with him and stowed his clothes under the edge of one of the longboats, loving the feel of sudsy lather, knowing the rain would last long enough to rinse it off. He brought anything washable up-the matting, everyone’s clothes, even the blankets in spite of bleating protests that they were shrinking rapidly.
“If it is not screwed or nailed down, Richard, ye take it up and wash it!” said Bill Whiting indignantly. “How can ye stay out in the open? When the ship is struck and we sink, I want to be below to start with.”
“The blankets have shrunk as far as they are going to, Bill, and I do not understand why ye fret so. Everything is dry again in an hour. Ye do not even know that I have taken the stuff, ye’re so busy snoring.”
The fact that Bill had regained his cheek was an indication of how often they were eating fish, an aspect of transportation across the King’s herring pond which Richard had not thought to take into account. The bread was very poor by now, full of grossly wriggling mites he preferred not to see, a reason why most men now ate it with their eyes closed. It had gone softer, apparently a signal for these noisome things to start multiplying. Nothing could live in salt meat, but the pease and oatmeal had their share of livestock. And Richard’s group was running low on malt extract.
“Mr. Donovan,” he said to the fourth mate who was by rights second mate, “when we reach Rio de Janeiro would ye do me a good turn? I would not presume to ask, save that I trust ye and can trust no one else going ashore.”
That was true. Those hours and hours of fishing together had forged a friendship as strong, Richard felt, as any between himself and his men. Stronger, even. Stephen Donovan had both weight and lightness, sensitivity and keen humor, and an uncanny instinct for divining what was going on in Richard’s mind. More a brother than William had ever been, and somehow it had ceased to matter that Donovan did not regard Richard in the light of a brother. At first the convicts, near and far, had had a fine time of it poking fun at Richard because of this odd friendship, and his absences on deck during the night had lent an interesting nuance. To all his tormentors Richard turned a blind eye and a deaf ear, too wise to react defensively, with the result that as time went on everybody settled down to accept the relationship as a simple friendship.
They were fishing on the day that Richard put his request; one of those distracting days when nothing would bite. Donovan was wearing a straw sailor’s hat and so was Richard, who had bought his from the carpenter’s mate, more addicted to rum than the sun.
Donovan made a small sound of pleasure. “I would be delighted to do ye a good turn,” he said.
“We have a little money and there are things we need-soap, malt extract, some sort of old woman’s recipe for nips and stings, oil of tar, new rags, a couple of razors and two pairs of scissors.”
“Keep your money, Richard, to buy your passage home. I will be glad to get what ye want without payment.”
Shoulders hunched into his neck, Richard shook his head. “I cannot accept gifts,” he said emphatically. “I must pay.”
One eyebrow flew up; Donovan grinned. “D’ye think I am after your body? That is hurtful.”
“No, I do not! I cannot accept gifts because I cannot give gifts. It has nothing to do with bodies, damn ye!”
Suddenly Donovan was laughing, a clear sound the sky snatched and hurled away. “Oh, my dialogue is grand! I sound like a young maiden in a lady’s magazine! Nothing is more ridiculous than a Miss Molly in the throes of unrequited love! Take the gift, ’tis meant to ease your lot, not load ye down with obligations. Did ye never notice, Richard? We are friends.”
Richard blinked quickly, smiled. “Aye, I know it very well. Thank you, Mr. Donovan, I will accept your gift.”
“Ye could give me a greater one.”
“What?”
“Call me Stephen.”
“It is not fitting. When I am a free man I will be glad to call ye Stephen. Until then I must keep my place.”
A shark cruised by, as hungry as everyone else on this fishless day. A shovel-nose, not above twelve feet long. In this ocean, a tadpole. It turned, gave them an expressionless stare, went off.
“That thing is evil,” said Richard. “A whale has a knowing twinkle in its eye, so does a porpoise. That thing looks from out of the pits of Hell.”
“Oh, ye’re a true product of Bristol! Did ye never preach?”
“No, but there are preachers in the family. Church of England ones. My father’s cousin is rector of St. James’s, and his father preached in the open air at Crew’s Hole to the Kingswood colliers.”
“A brave man. Did he live through it?”
“Aye. Cousin James was born after it.”
“Are ye never plagued by the flesh, Richard?”
“I was once, with a woman who could open the gates of paradise to any man. That was terrible. Going without is a nothing.”
Something tugged at Donovan’s line, and he whooped. “A bite! There is a fish down there!”
There was. The shark had come back and taken the bait. Also the hook, float and sinker. Donovan plucked his hat off, stamped on it and cursed.
Perhaps it was the weather, sultry, hot, airless; or perhaps Alexander had simply given death a short holiday before the old troubles began afresh. On the 29th of June the convicts began to die again. Surgeon Balmain, who loathed going into the prison because of the smell, was suddenly obliged to spend a great deal of time there. His physics did little, nor did his emetics, nor did his purgatives.
How easily superstitions took hold! Just as the sickness started Alexander ploughed into a solid sea of brilliant cobalt blue, and the unaffected convicts, crowding on deck to see, were immediately convinced that this was the manifestation of a curse. The sea had turned to blue pebbles and everyone was going to die.
“They are nautiluses!” cried Surgeon Balmain, exasperated. “We have encountered a great shoal of nautiluses-Portuguese men o’ war! Bright blue jellyfishy creatures! They are natural, they are not evidence of divine displeasure! Christ!” Waving his arms about, he disappeared to despair in the privacy of his cluttered cabin on the quarterdeck.
“Why do they call them Portuguese men o’ war?” asked Joey Long, yielding his place to Richard, whose turn it was to nurse Ike.
“Because Portuguese ships of the line are painted that same shade of blue,” said Richard.
“Not black with yellow trim like ours?”
“If they were painted the same as ours, Joey, how would anybody tell friend from foe? The moment there is powder smoke all about, ’tis very hard to distinguish flags and badges. Now take a turn on deck, there’s a good fellow. Ye spend too much time below.” Richard sat beside Ike, stripped off the shirt and trowsers and began to sponge him down.
“Balmain is an idiot,” Ike croaked.
“Nay, he is simply at his wits’ end. He don’t know what to do for the best.”
“Does anybody? I mean anybody at all, anywhere at all?” Ike had leached away to skin stretched over bones, a collection of sticks wrapped in parchment; his hair had fallen out, his nails had turned white, his tongue was furred, his lips cracked and swollen. Though Richard found the most horrifying talismans of his illness in his nude, shrunken genitals; they looked as if they had been tacked on like an afterthought. Oh, Ike!
“Here, open your mouth. I have to clean your teeth and tongue.” Touch gentle, Richard used a screwed-up corner of rag moistened in filtered water to do what he could to make the highwayman’s day more bearable. Sometimes, he thought as he worked, it is worse to be a big man. If Ike were the size of Jimmy Price, it would all have been over long since. But there was a sizable mountain of flesh there once, and life is tenacious. A very few give up without a protest, but most cling to whatever is left like limpets to a rock.
The smell was worsening and its source was the bilge water. Though he had been a naval surgeon for seven years and had staffed a surveying expedition to the west African coast at the time when the Parliament had still thought of using Africa as a convict dumping ground, Balmain found Alexander a task beyond his abilities. At his insistence wind sails had been installed in the suffocating corners of the prison-useless canvas funnels supposed to deliver a good draft of air through a hole bored in the deck. Captain Sinclair had protested vigorously for such a torpid man, but the surgeon would not back down. Perturbed because Alexander was now nicknamed the Death Ship, Sinclair gave way and ordered Chips to deface his deck. But very little if any fresh air came prisonward, and men continued to come down with fever.
Thin though he was, Richard was well. So too were his cot mates and the four others in Ike’s cot. Willy Dring and Joe Robinson had abandoned below deck entirely, which left three others (they had lost a man outside Portsmouth) to spread out in a space designed for six at twenty inches apiece. The cot belonging to Tommy Crowder and Aaron Davis had such a good thing going with Sergeant Knight that they lived very comfortably. Despite these good indications, Richard’s instincts told him that the new outbreak of disease was going to be a bad one.
“Save for whoever is nursing Ike, we move onto the deck and we catch as much rain-water for ourselves as we can,” he ordered.
Jimmy Price and Job Hollister began to whimper, Joey Long to howl; the rest looked mutinous.
“We would rather stay below,” said Bill Whiting.
“If ye do, ye’ll catch the fever.”
“You said it yourself, Richard,” Neddy Perrott snapped. “As long as we filter our water and keep everything clean, we will live. So no deck. ’Tis fine for you with your skin, but I burn.”
“I will come up,” said Taffy Edmunds, gathering a few things. “You and I have to practice for the concert. We cannot let our ship be the only one unable to get a concert together. Look at Scarborough. She has a concert every week. Corporal Flannery says that some of the acts are so polished they have to be seen to be believed.”
“Scarborough,” said Will Connelly, “might have more convicts than we do these days, but the reason they are well is because they are spread between the lower deck and the orlop. We’re jammed in half the space Scarborough has because we’re carrying cargo too.”
“Well, I for one am very glad that Alexander has cargo in her orlop,” said Richard, giving up the fight, which he could see was pointless. “Look what happened to the marines when they were one deck farther down. Scarborough’s bilge pumps work. It all goes back to the master. They have Captain Marshall, we have Esmeralda, who don’t care if his bilge pumps work as long as his table groans. Alexander’s bilges are absolutely fouled.”
By the 4th of July another man had died and there were thirty men on the hospital platforms. It was, thought Surgeon Balmain, as if the whole of Alexander’s hull was packed solid with corpses in the worst stage of decomposition. How could these unfortunate wretches live amid the putrescence?
The next day two orders came from Sirius. The first said that John Power was to come out of his irons; the moment he was unlocked he was back to report to Mr. Bones, nothing having been said to forbid his working. The second order displeased Lieutenants Johnstone and Shairp hugely. The water ration for every man in the fleet (women and children got less) was to go from four pints to three pints, be he sailor, marine or convict. One pint was to be issued at dawn to all convicts, two pints in mid afternoon. A detail to be under the supervision of a marine officer, with two marine subordinates and two convicts as witnesses; the marines and convicts were to be changed each and every time to prevent cheating or collusion. The holds were to be locked, the water tun in use locked and kept under strict guard. Custody of the keys went to the officers. Additional water for the coppers and kettles was to be issued in the morning, together with water for the animals. Animals drank copiously; cattle and horses got through ten gallons per day per head.
Three days later the calms and storms vanished and the southeast trades began to blow. This despite the fact that the ships had not yet crossed the Equator. Spirits picked up immediately, though the fleet was hard-pressed to maintain its course in terms of real miles, which were less than 100 a day. Alexander ploughed into a huge head swell, her rigging creaking, parallel as usual with Scarborough the concert ship, Sirius and Supply not far behind, Friendship out in front, the swell over her bows in masses of spray she shook off as a dog does water.
When the silver buttons on Johnstone’s and Shairp’s scarlet coats began to blacken and the smell was pervading the quarterdeck almost as badly as below deck, the two lieutenants and Surgeon Balmain went as a deputation to see the captain, who received them and dismissed their complaints as nonsense. What concerned him was that the convicts were stealing his bread and ought to be flogged within an inch of their lives.
“You ought,” said Johnstone tartly, “to thank your stars that they are not stealing your rum!”
The dirty teeth showed in a smile of pure pleasure. “Other ships may have trouble with their rum, sirs, but my ship does not. Now go away and leave me alone. I have given the starboard bilge pump to Chips to fix, it is not working properly. That, no doubt, accounts for the state of the bilges.”
“How,” said Balmain through his teeth, “can a carpenter fix an object whose capacity to work depends upon metal and leather?”
“Ye had better pray he can. Now go away.”
Balmain had had enough. He flagged Sirius and received permission to take a boat to Charlotte and the Surgeon-General, John White. With Lieutenant Shairp in command, the longboat headed away into the swell; Charlotte, a heavy sailer, was lagging far behind. The trip back to Alexander was frightful, even for Shairp, who never turned a hair in the worst seas. So when Surgeon White clambered up Alexander’s ladder he was not in a good mood.
“You Bristol men, ye’re wanted,” said Stephen Donovan. “In steerage with Mr. White and Mr. Balmain.”
Strictly speaking, thought Richard, who had learned a lot about pumps during the time he had spent with the absconding Mr. Thomas Latimer, Alexander’s pumps should have been down a deck to reduce the height of the column of bilge water they had to lift, but she was a slaver and her owners did not like low holes in the hull; the truth was that no one had ever worried much about the bilges between dry-dockings for careening.
There were two cisterns in the marines’ steerage compartment, one larboard and one starboard, each equipped with an ordinary suction pump owning an up-and-down handle. A pipe led from each cistern and emptied through a valve into the sea. The starboard pump had been dismantled; the larboard one refused to budge.
“Down we go,” said Surgeon White, face ashen. “How does a man exist in this place? Your men, Lieutenant Johnstone, are to be commended for their forbearance.”
Richard and Will Connelly took up the hatch and reeled. The hold below was in utter darkness, but the sound of liquid slopping around the water tuns was audible to the rest, hanging back.
“I need some lamps,” said White, tying a handkerchief over his face. “One of us is going to have to go down there.”
“Sir,” said Richard courteously, “I would not put a flame in there. The air itself would burn.”
“But I must see!”
“There is no need, sir, truly. We can all hear what is going on. The bilges have overflowed into the hold. That means they are completely fouled. Neither pump is working and may never have worked-the last time we were in here we cleared the bilges by bucket. We have had this problem since Gallion’s Reach.”
“What is your name?” asked White through his mask.
“Richard Morgan, sir, late of Bristol.” He grinned. “We men of Bristol are used to fugs, so they always put us on bilge duty. Though cleaning them by bucket will not remedy anything. They have to be pumped, and pumped every day. But not with suction pumps like these. They take a week to evacuate a ton of water, even when they are working properly.”
“Is the carpenter capable of fixing them, Mr. Johnstone?”
Johnstone shrugged. “Ask Morgan, sir. He seems to know. I confess I know nothing about pumps.”
“Is the carpenter capable of fixing them, Morgan?”
“Nay, sir. There are so many solids in the bilge that pipes and cylinders of this size will block at every lift. What this ship needs are chain pumps.”
“What does a chain pump do that these cannot?” White asked.
“Cope with what is down there, sir. It is a simple wooden box of much larger internal size than these cylinders. The lifting is done by means of a flat brass chain strung over wooden sprockets at the top and a wooden drum at the bottom. Wooden shelves are linked to the chain so that on the way down they flop flat, then unfold on the way up and exert suction. A good chips can build everything except the chain-it is so simple a device that two men turning its sprocketed drum can lift a ton of water in a minute.”
“Then Alexander must be fitted with chain pumps. Is there any of the chain aboard?”
“I doubt that, sir, but Sirius has just undergone a refitting, so she is bound to have chain pumps. I imagine she will have chain to spare. If she does not, some of the other ships might.”
White turned to Balmain, Johnstone and Shairp. “Very well, I am off to Sirius to report this to the Governor. In the meantime the hold and bilges will have to be baled out. Every marine and convict who is not sick will take his turn, I will not have these Bristol men forced to do it all,” he said to Johnstone. He turned then to glare at Balmain. “Why, Mr. Balmain, did ye not report the situation a great deal earlier, if it has been going on for over seven months? The captain of this vessel is a slug, he could not move out of his own way if the mizzen fell on his roundhouse. As surgeon, it is your clear duty to preserve the health of every man on board, including convicts. Ye have not done that, and so I will tell the Governor, rest assured.”
William Balmain stood flying a scarlet flag in each cheek, his handsome countenance rigid with shock and anger. A Scotchman, he was six years younger than the Irishman White and they had not taken to each other upon meeting. To be dressed down in front of two marines and four convicts was disgraceful-that was the kind of thing Major Ross did to feckless subordinates. Now was not the time to have it out with White, but Balmain promised himself that after the fleet reached Botany Bay he would have satisfaction. His large eyes passed from one convict face to another in search of mirth or derision, but found none. He knew this lot for the oddest of reasons: they were never sick.
At which moment Major Robert Ross arrived at the bottom of the steps, curiosity stirred because Shairp had been gallivanting all over the ocean again. One sniff was sufficient to acquaint him with the problem; Balmain withdrew stiffly to his cabin to sulk and plot revenge while White explained what was going on.
“Ah yes,” said Ross, staring at Richard intently. “Ye’re the clean head man, I remember ye well. So ye’re an expert on pumps and the like, are ye, Morgan?”
“I know enough to be sure Alexander is in sore need of chain pumps, sir.”
“I agree. Mr. White, I will convey ye to Sirius and then on to Charlotte. Mr. Johnstone and Mr. Shairp, get everybody onto baling out the bilges. And cut two holes in the hull lower than the ports so the men can tip the stuff straight into the sea.”
Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, arriving with Major Ross and Surgeon-General White the next day, took one look at the larboard pump Richard had removed and dismantled, and gave vent to a noise of derisive disgust. “That thing could not suck semen out of a satyr’s prick! This ship is to be fitted out with chain pumps. Where is the carpenter?”
English meticulousness combined with Celtic enthusiasm worked wonders. Royal Navy and therefore senior in rank to a marine lieutenant, King remained on board long enough to be sure that Chips understood exactly what he was to do-and was capable of doing it-then left to report to the Commodore that in future Alexander ought to be a far healthier ship.
But the poison was in her timbers, so Alexander never was a truly healthy ship. The gaseous effluvia which had lain everywhere below gradually dissipated, however. Living inside her became more bearable. And was Esmeralda Sinclair pleased that his bilge problem had been solved at no cost to Walton & Co.? Definitely not. Who the hell, he demanded from his poop perch (Trimmings had inspected and reported), had cut two fucken holes in his ship?
The fleet crossed the Equator during the night between the 15th and 16th of July. On the following day the ships ran into their first roaring gale since leaving Portsmouth; the hatches were battened down and the convicts plunged into utter darkness. To those like Richard who spent all their time on deck it was a nightmare alleviated only by the fact that the worst of the stench had gone. The sea was running off the larboard bow, so Alexander was pitching more than rolling, an extraordinary sensation alternating between crushing pressure and weightlessness as she reared into the air and slammed with a noise like a huge explosion back into the sea. At right angles to the motion, they rolled from the bulkhead to the partition. Seasickness, deemed a thing of the past, erupted again; Ike suffered terribly.
Too terribly. As the fleet emerged from the storm with its rain butts filled sufficiently to permit ordinary water rations again, it became clear to everyone, even the desolate Joey Long, that Isaac Rogers was not going to live.
He asked to see Richard, who crouched opposite Joey, cradling Ike’s head and shoulders on his lap.
“The end of the road for this highwayman,” he said. “Oh, I am so glad, Richard! Be glad for me too. Try to look after Joey. He will feel it.”
“Rest easy, Ike, we will all look after Joey.”
Ike lifted one skeletal arm to indicate the shelf along the beam. “My boots, Richard. Ye’re the only one big enough to wear them and I want ye to have them. As they are, whole and complete. Ye know?”
“I know. They will be used wisely.”
“Good,” he said, and closed his eyes.
About an hour later he died, not having opened them.
So many men had died aboard Alexander that her sailmakers had had to beg old canvas from other ships; clad in clean clothes, Isaac Rogers was sewn into his envelope and carried on deck. As he owned a Book of Common Prayer, Richard read the service, committing Ike’s soul to God and his body to the deep. It slid off the board and sank immediately, weighted down with basalt stones collected off the same beach in Teneriffe where John Power had slept. The Death Ship had run out of metal scraps.
Surgeon Balmain ordered another fumigation, a scrub with oil of tar, a new coat of whitewash. His was rather a lonely life, stuck on the quarterdeck with only two marine lieutenants for company. They messed separately from him and shared absolutely nothing with him. Like Arthur Bowes Smyth, the surgeon on Lady Penrhyn, Balmain sustained himself with an interest in the many sea creatures they chanced upon, and if they were small enough, preserved them in spirits. Admittedly it was a great deal easier to descend into the prison these days of chain pumps, but he was still smarting from Surgeon White’s jawing and determined that it would not be his fault if the wretched convicts kept dying.
When a convict using the crew’s holes in the bow was washed overboard by a freak wave, the complement went down to 183.
At the beginning of August the fleet made landfall at Cape Frio, a day’s sail to the north of Brazil’s chief city. But the high, jagged mountains of that coast behaved as had St. Jago’s peaks; once around the cape the wind failed into catspaws and calms. They groped down to Rio de Janeiro, not reaching it until the night between the 4th and 5th. The season was winter now: Rio de Janeiro was so far south of the Equator that it lay just to the north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Out of the realms of both crab and sea goat. The passage from Teneriffe had taken 56 days and they were 84 days out of Portsmouth, figures which rounded neatly into 8 weeks and 12 weeks. And 6,600 land miles.
Permission to enter the colonial domains of Portugal had to be secured, a time-consuming business. At three in the afternoon the fleet crossed the mile-wide bar between the Sugarloafs to the thunder of a thirteen-gun salute from Sirius answered by the guns of Fort Santa Cruz.
From dawn on, everyone on Alexander had crowded to the rails, fascinated by this alien, fabulously beautiful place. The south Sugarloaf was a thousand-foot-tall egg of pinkish-grey rock crowned with a wig of trees, the north Sugarloaf less spectacularly bare. Other crags reared, their tops sheared and jarred, flanks thick with lushly green forests, flashes of brilliant grassland, jutting grey, cream, pink faces of rock. The beaches were long, curved and yellow-sanded, creamy with surf where the ocean beat in, still and placid once across the bar. They dropped anchor not far inside, opposite one of the many fortresses erected to guard Rio de Janeiro from maritime predators. It was not until the next day that the eleven ships were towed to their permanent moorings off the city of São Sebastião, which was the proper name for urban Rio. It occupied a squarish peninsula on the western shore and sent tentacles of itself into the valleys between the peaks all around.
The harbor was alive with bum boats, most of them paddled by near-naked negroes, each craft sporting an awning painted in bright colors. Richard could see the spires of churches crowned with golden crosses, but of other tall buildings Rio had few. No one had forbidden the convicts access to the deck, nor had they been ironed, even John Power. A patrol of longboats rowed constantly around the six transports, however, and turned the bum boats away.
The weather was fine and very hot, the air still. Oh, to be allowed ashore! Not possible, all the convicts understood that. When midday came they were served with huge pieces of fresh beef, pots of yams and beans, messes of rice and loaves of strange-tasting bread made, Richard was told later, from a root called “cassada.” But all that was as nothing when the boats arrived and laughing negroes threw hundreds upon hundreds of oranges up onto the deck, making a game of catchings out of it, white teeth flashing in ebony faces. Richard knew of oranges, as did a few others; he had read that some great houses contained “orangeries” and had once seen an orange displayed by Cousin James-the-druggist, who imported lemons to obtain their oil. Lemons were less perishable.
Some of these oranges were six and seven inches in diameter, deep and rich in color; others were almost blood-red and had blood-red flesh inside. Having discovered that the unpalatable skin peeled off easily, the convicts and marines gorged on oranges, ravished by their sweetness and juiciness. Sometimes they ate fat, bright yellow lemons to cut the saccharine taste of so many oranges or sucked at less juicy limes, which lay somewhere between the astringency of a lemon and the syrup of an orange. They never got tired of the citrus, could not get enough. Finding that the palest fruit had been picked before it was fully ripe, Neddy Perrott began at the end of their third week in Rio to stockpile any succulent globes he thought might last a few days; once made aware of it, more convicts followed suit. And a number of men, including Richard, saved orange and lemon seeds.
Every single day they got fresh beef, fresh vegetables of some kind, and fresh cassada bread. Once the marines found out that Rio rum might be poor in quality but was almost as cheap as water, discipline and supervision of the convicts was close to nonexistent. The two lieutenants were hardly ever on board, nor was Surgeon Balmain, who took himself off on country expeditions to look at enormous, brilliant butterflies and flowers of waxen glory called orchids. Hungry for pets, the crew and marines often came back bearing quite tame parrots of gorgeous colors; only two of the dogs were left, the rest, as Donovan had predicted, bait for sharks. Rodney the cat, his wife and rapidly growing family were thriving. Alexander might be more sanitary now, but she was full of rats and mice.
There was a less attractive side to Rio; it was a cockroach paradise. England did own a very small and meek creature in the roach, but these things were giants that flew, clattered, and oozed the same kind of evil intent that sharks did. Aggressive and clever, they would charge a man rather than run away. From Sirius’s top echelons all the way down to Alexander’s most picked-on convict, men were driven to the verge of dementia by cockroaches.
Most shipbound people slept almost nude on deck, though not as peacefully as at sea. Rio never went to bed. Nor did it ever grow dark; the churches and other buildings were illuminated all night. As if the few Portuguese and their innumerable black slaves feared what lurked amid the nocturnal shadows. After hearing some creature emit a bloodcurdling sound halfway between a shriek and a roar in the small hours of one night, Richard began to understand why they kept darkness at bay.
At least two or three times a week there were fireworks, always in honor of some saint, or the Virgin, or an event in the life of Jesus Christ-there was nothing sober or toned down about Rio’s religious life. This offended Knoxian individuals like Balmain and Shairp, who regarded Catholicism as immoral, degenerate and satanic.
“I am surprised,” said Richard to John Power as they watched colored sparks and tendrils float down from a skyrocket, “that ye’ve not tried to escape, Johnny.”
Power looked wry. “Here? Not speaking Portuguese? I would be snabbled in a day. Apart from Portuguese slavers and cargo snows, the only ship in port is an English whaler having her bottom scraped. And she is to take a party of naval invalids from Sirius and Supply home with her.” He changed the subject, obviously too painful. “I see that Esmeralda is neglecting his ship as usual. He never makes any attempt to scrape her.”
“Didn’t Mr. Bones tell ye? Alexander is copper sheathed.” Richard flicked his chest, sticky with orange juice. “I am going over the side to wash.”
“I did not know ye could swim.”
“I cannot. But I dunk myself in the water and hang on to the ladder. In the hope that sooner or later I will be able to do without the ladder. Yesterday I let go and actually kept afloat for two seconds. Then I panicked. Today I might not panic.”
“I can swim, but dare not,” said Power ruefully. Slack discipline or no, Power had his own guard.
Richard was in the water one day when Stephen Donovan returned in a hired boat. He had not succeeded in swimming; as soon as he let go of the ladder he began to sink. With a boat coming in he had to get out, and was ready to when he saw who stood in its bow.
“Richard, ye idiot, there are sharks in this harbor!” said Donovan, gaining the deck. “I would not continue were I you.”
“I very much doubt that any shark would fancy my stringy frame in the midst of the bounty Rio harbor offers,” grinned Richard. “I am trying to learn to swim, but so far I am a dismal failure.”
Donovan’s eyes twinkled. “So that if Alexander goes down in an ocean gale ye can swim for Africa? Fear not, Alexander has a good tumblehome hull and she’s shipshape in spite of her age. Ye could lay her right over on her beam until her spars went under or poop her in a following sea, and she’d not sink.”
“No, so that when we get to Botany Bay and perhaps buckets are in short supply, I can at least bathe in sea-water without needing to worry about being over my head in a hole. There may be lakes and rivers there, but Sir Joseph Banks does not mention them. In fact, he indicates that fresh water is exceeding scant-just a very few small brooks.”
“I understand. Look at yon dog Wallace.” He pointed to where Lieutenant Shairp’s Scotch terrier was striking out for the ship alongside a hired boat, encouraged by a laughing Shairp.
“What about Wallace?”
“Watch him swim. Next time ye go down the ladder to brave the sharks, pretend that ye’ve got four legs, not two. Tip yourself onto your belly, stick your head up out of the water and move all four of your limbs like a duck’s paddles. Then,” said Donovan, bestowing a silver sixpence upon a beaming black man after he put a heap of parcels on the deck, “ye’ll swim, Richard. From Wallace and four legs ye’ll go easily to treading water, floating, all the tricks and treats of swimming.”
“Johnny Power swims, yet he is still with us.”
“I wonder would he have come so tamely in Teneriffe if he had known what I found out today?”
Alerted, Richard put his head to one side. “Tell me.”
“This fleet sailed from Portsmouth with what cartridges the marines had in their pouches and not a grain of powder or a single shot more.”
“Ye’re joking!”
“Nay, I am not.” Donovan began to chuckle, shaking his head. “That is how well organized this expedition is! They forgot to supply any ammunition.”
“Christ!”
“I only found out because His Excellency Governor Phillip has managed to purchase ten thousand cartridges here in Rio.”
“So they could not have contained a serious mutiny on any one of these ships-I have seen how our Alexander marines care for their pieces and ammunition-there would not be one cartridge worth a man’s spit.”
Mr. Donovan glanced at Richard sharply, opened his mouth to say something, changed his mind and squatted down near the parcels. “Here are some of your things. I will pick up more tomorrow. I also heard talk of sailing.” He piled the bundles into Richard’s arms. “Oil of tar, some ointment from a crone so hagged and ugly that she cannot help but know her craft, plus some powdered bark she swears cures fevers. And a bottle of laudanum in case aqua Rio spreads the dysentery-the surgeons are suspicious of it, Lieutenant King sanguine. Lots of good rags and a couple of fine cotton shirts I could not resist-got a few for myself and thought of you. For coolness and comfort in hot weather, cotton has no equal. Malt is proving elusive-the surgeons got to the warehouses first, damn their eyes and cods. But dry some of your orange and lemon peels in the sun and chew them. ’Tis common sailor talk that citrus prevents the scurvy.”
Richard’s eyes dwelled upon Donovan’s face with affection and gratitude, but Donovan was too wise to interpret what they held as more than it actually was. Friendship. Which was to die for with this man, who must surely have loved, but was not willing to do so again. Whom had he lost? How had he lost? Not the woman who had opened the gates of sexual heaven. That, from the expression on his face, had revolted him. Not any woman. Nor yet any man. One day, Richard Morgan, he vowed, I will hear all of your story.
As he went to leave the ship the next morning, he found Richard waiting for him by the ladder.
“Another favor?” he asked, looking eager to do it.
“No, this I must pay for.” Richard pointed to the deck and bent down as if something of interest lay there. Donovan hunkered down too; nobody saw the seven gold coins change hands.
“What is it ye want? Ye could buy a topaz the size of a lime for this, or an amethyst not much smaller.”
“I need as much emery powder and very strong fish-glue as it will buy,” said Richard.
Mouth slightly open, Donovan looked at him. “Emery powder? Fish-glue? What on earth for?”
“It would probably be possible to buy them at the Cape of Good Hope, but I believe the prices there are shocking. Rio de Janeiro seems a much less expensive place,” Richard hedged.
“That does not answer my question. Ye’re a man of mystery, my friend. Tell me, else I’ll not buy for ye.”
“You will, you know,” said Richard with a broad smile, “but I do not mind telling you.” He looked out across the bay toward the northern hills, smothered in jungle. “I have spent a great deal of time during this interminable voyage wondering what I should do when finally we reach Botany Bay. There are hardly any skilled men among the convicts-we all hear the marine officers talking, especially since arriving in Rio, what with all the visiting goes on. Little Lieutenant Ralph Clark never shuts up. But sometimes our ears glean a useful item between his whines about the drunken antics on Friendship’s quarterdeck and his fond moans about his wife and son.” Richard drew a breath. “But do not let me start on marine second lieutenants! Back to what I began to say, that there are hardly any skilled men among us convicts. I do have some skills, one of which I will certainly be able to use, as I imagine there will be much tree felling and sawing of timber. I can sharpen saws. More importantly, I can set the teeth on saws, a rarer art by far. It may be that my cousin James managed to get my box of tools somewhere aboard these ships, but he may not have. In which case, I cannot do without emery powder and glue. Files I imagine the fleet must have, but if it has been as sketchily provided with tools as it has been poorly victualled, no one will have thought of emery powder or fish-glue. Hearing the news about musket cartridges has not exactly cheered me either. What did they expect us to do if the Indians of New South Wales are as fierce as Mohawks and besiege us?”
“A good question,” said Stephen Donovan solemnly. “What d’ye do with emery powder and fish-glue, Richard?”
“I make my own emery paper and emery files.”
“Will ye need ordinary files if the fleet has none?”
“Yes, but that is all the money I can spare, and I will not encroach further on your generosity. I am hoping for my tools.”
“Getting information out of you is like squeezing blood out of a stone,” said Mr. Donovan, smiling, “but I am a little ahead. One day I will know all.”
“It is not worth hearing. But thank you.”
“Oh, I am your servant, Richard! Were it not for having to search high and low for your medicaments, I would never have found half the fascinating sights I have seen in Rio. Like Johnstone and Shairp, it would have been coffee houses, sticky buns, rum, port and smarming up to Portuguese officials in the hope of being dowered with precious little keepsakes.” And off he went down the ladder with the careless ease of someone who has done something ten thousand times, whistling merrily.
On the last Sunday in Rio the Reverend Mr. Richard Johnson, chaplain to the expedition and noted for his mildly Methodical view of the Church of England (very Low!), preached and gave service aboard Alexander to the accompaniment of blatantly Catholic church bells clanging and cascading all over town. The decks were being cleared, a sure sign that sailing time was imminent.
They began the business of getting eleven ships out of Rio de Janeiro’s island-littered harbor on the 4th of September and completed it on the 5th, having remained at anchor for a month of oranges and fireworks. Fort Santa Cruz and Sirius outdid themselves with a twenty-one-gun salute. Water rationing to three pints a day had already been instituted, perhaps an indication that the Governor concurred with the surgeons about the quality of Rio’s water.
By nightfall land was out of sight; the fleet headed out to find its eastings in the hope that the 3,300 land miles to the Cape of Good Hope would be a swift passage. From now on it would be eastward and southward into seas charted as far as the Cape, but not populous. Thus far they had encountered a Portuguese merchantman occasionally, but from now on they would see no ships until they neared the Cape and the route of the big East Indiamen.
Richard had his replenished stocks plus emery powder, glue and several good files; his chief worry was the dripstones, of which he still had two spares but his five friends had none. If Cousin James-the-druggist was right, they had to be nearing the end of their usefulness. So with Mr. Donovan’s help he rigged up a rope cradle and trailed one dripstone in the sea, praying that a shark did not fancy it. One shark had fancied a pair of marine officer’s trowsers being towed behind for a good bleaching, snapped the line in half, swallowed the trowsers and spat them out in disgust. As it would a dripstone. But once the line was gone, so was the item attached to it. After one week he pulled it out and screwed it to the deck to get plenty of sun and rain. A second one went in for a long bath. He hoped to get through all of them before any started showing signs of deterioration.
As they drew farther south, still waiting on the great current which would assist them to cross from Brazil to Africa, they began to see groups of spermaceti whales, also heading south. Massive creatures, they had snouts which in profile looked like small cliffs, beneath which sat ludicrously slender lower jaws armed with fearsome teeth. Their tails were blunter, their flukes smaller, and they were less acrobatic than other whales they had seen. The usual marine life of porpoises, dolphins and sharks were there aplenty, but edible fish were harder to catch because they were sailing faster and into heavy swells. Sometimes a school came along to provide fish-chowder, but the fare was mostly salt meat and hard bread seething with weevils and worms. No one had much of an appetite. The convicts did have a large sack of dried citrus peelings, however, and shared it out to chew on, a small piece every day.
Gigantic sea birds called albatrosses grew more and more numerous as they inched southward, but when an ambitious marine got out his musket because he fancied roast albatross for dinner, the crew restrained him in horror; it was bad luck to the ship to kill one of these kings of the air.
The new sickness broke out among the marines first, but soon spread into the prison. So it was back to fumigating, scrubbing and whitewashing. The central isolation platforms were full once more and one convict died in the midst of a roaring gale. Surgeon Balmain-happier to visit in these days of sweeter smells-spent a lot of time between the prison and steerage. Whenever the weather permitted it he ordered yet another fumigation, scrub, and whitewash, though clearly the ritual did nothing save steal a little more light for Richard, Bill, Will, Neddy and others to read by if the deck was a shambles of sail and sailors. It turned out during this series of blows that Captain Sinclair was no mean sailor himself; he would make sail the moment the wind was right, then shorten sail not many minutes later if the wind went sour. Make, shorten, make, shorten, make… Little wonder that John Power, Willy Dring and Joe Robinson never made an appearance in the prison. The mates could use all the hands they could get. Nothing was worse than having too few hands to get a decent rest between watches.
By the end of September the equinoctial gales died a little, the seas became easier, deck accessible. In fair weather or foul she sailed well, did Alexander, so at no time did the seas break over her hard enough to batten the hatches. That fate had happened only the once since leaving Portsmouth.
Looking as exalted as he did exhausted, John Power returned to the prison from time to time once his services were not so much in demand, as did Willy Dring and Joe Robinson, who seemed edgy and restless; they made no attempt to go forward and join Power’s clique around the bow bulkhead, which puzzled Richard, who had expected that shared work would see them grow increasingly friendly with their fellow sailor. Instead, they looked uneasy whenever they saw him.
Things went along much as they had for weeks on end-an excursion on deck to fish or pat animals, a read, a singsong, talk between groups, games of dice or cards, some sort of struggle to eat; they were all growing thin again, the little bit of padding acquired in Rio dwindling on that terrible diet. No one near the stern bulkhead on the larboard side noticed anything different-no change in the atmosphere, no furtive whispering, no descending into the hold to steal bread-well, who would want to? Willy Dring and Joe Robinson had gone to earth in their cot and seemed to sleep or doze constantly; that last was the only symptom Richard noticed, and he dismissed it as odd but not really remarkable. They had worked hard for two solid weeks.
Then on the 6th of October and not very far from the African continent, a party of ten marines descended into the prison and took John Power away. He went fighting, was knocked senseless and lifted out through the after hatch while the convicts stared in amazement. A few minutes later the marines were back to remove two men from Nottingham, William Pane and John Meynell, whose cot was next to Power’s. Then-nothing. Except that Power, Pane and Meynell never came back.
Richard got most of the story from Stephen Donovan and a little from Willy Dring and Joe Robinson.
Power and some of the crew had planned a mutiny which hinged on the fact that two-thirds of the marines were not fit for duty.
“A wilder, more harebrained scheme I have never heard of,” said Donovan, confounded. “They simply intended to take over the ship! Without any method to their madness at all, at all. I was not in on it, I would stake my life young Shortland was not, and his eminence William Aston Long would not so demean himself-he is up for a master’s ticket when he gets home, besides. Old Bones? He says not, though I do not believe him and nor does Esmeralda. Once the quarterdeck and the scatter cannon were secured, the idea was to batten the marines and the convicts in below deck, take the helm and steer for Africa. Presumably Esmeralda, Long, Shortland, self and the dissenting crew were to be locked up with you lot in the prison. I doubt any murder was planned.”
“Do not go away,” said Richard, and went back to the prison to beard Willy Dring and Joe Robinson.
“What did you know about it?” he demanded.
They looked as if an enormous weight had been lifted from them.
“We heard about it from Power, who asked us to be in on it,” said Dring. “I told him he was mad, and to give it up. After that he made sure he spoke to no one while we were about, though he knew we’d not do the whiddle on him. Then Mr. Bones dismissed us.”
Richard returned to the deck. “Dring and Robinson knew, but would not be in on it. Bones I think was. What happened?”
“Two convicts informed on him to Esmeralda.”
“There are always snitches,” said Richard, half to himself. “Meynell and Pane from Nottingham. Bad bastards.”
“Well, Dring and Robinson adhered to the code of honor among thieves, whereas this other couple are in the business of earning official commendations and better food. Ye called them bad. Why?”
“Because there have been other snitchings. I have had my suspicions about them for some time. Once the names are known, it all falls into place. Where are they now?”
“Aboard Scarborough, to the best of my knowledge. Esmeralda took a longboat to see His Excellency the moment the pair informed. I went along to heave him up ladders. Sirius sent two dozen marines and the sailors whom the snitches named were arrested. About Mr. Bones and some others-we have no proof. But they will not try it again, no matter how much they hate Esmeralda for watering the rum and then selling it to them.”
“What of Power?” Richard asked, throat tight.
“Gone to Sirius, there to stay stapled to the deck. He will not come back to Alexander, that is certain.” Donovan stared at Richard curiously. “Ye truly do like the lad, don’t ye?”
“Aye, very much, though I could see he’d end in trouble. Some men attract trouble the way a magnet does iron nails. He is one. But I do not believe that he was guilty of the crime he was convicted for.” Richard brushed his eyes, shook his head angrily. “He was desperate to get home to his sick dad.”
“I know. But if it is any consolation, Richard, I think that once we get beyond Cape Town and there is no chance for Johnny to return home, he will settle to being a model convict.”
It was not much consolation, perhaps because Richard felt that he himself had not fulfilled his filial obligations; most of his thoughts lay with Cousin James-the-druggist, not with his father.
There was one thing he could do to help John Power, and he did it without a qualm: he let the names of the snitches be known from one bulkhead to the other. Snitches were snitches, they would snitch again. When Scarborough came into Cape Town the word would travel to her. Pane and Meynell would be known for what they were to every convict at Botany Bay. Life for them would not be easy.
Surgeon Balmain had the answer for the general mood of gloom and depression in the prison; he made them fumigate, scrub and whitewash again.
“I want,” said Bill Whiting passionately, “to do two things, Richard. One is to grab fucken Balmain, explode gunpowder in his face, scrub him with oil of tar and a wire brush, and paint him solid white. The other is to change my fucken name. Whiting!”
Cape Town was beautiful, yes, but could not hold a candle to Rio de Janeiro in the judgment of the convicts, doomed always to look, never to sample. Not only had Rio been visually stunning, but it had also been filled with happy and natural people, with color and vitality. Cape Town had a more windswept and bleakly dusty kind of appeal, and its harbor lacked those hordes of gay bum boats; what black faces they saw did not smile. This might have been a simple reflection of its sternly Calvinistic, extremely Dutch character. Many buildings were painted white (not the favorite color of Alexander’s convicts) and there were few trees inside the town itself. A grand mountain, flat and bushy on top, reared behind the tiny coastal plain, and what the books said about it was quite true: a layer of dense white cloud did come down and spread a cloth over Table Mountain.
They had been 39 days at sea from Rio and arrived at the height of the southern spring on the 14th of October. It was now 154 days-22 weeks-since the fleet left Portsmouth and it had sailed 9,900 land miles, though it still had a long way to go. At no time had the eleven ships become separated; Governor/Commodore Arthur Phillip had kept his tiny flock together.
For the convicts, making port consisted in decks which didn’t move and food which didn’t move. The day after they arrived fresh meat came aboard, accompanied by fresh, soft, marvelous Dutch bread and a few green vegetables-cabbage and some sort of strong-tasting, dark green leaf. Appetites revived at once; the convicts settled to the critical business of trying to put on enough condition to survive the next and final leg, said to be 1,000 miles longer than the trip from Portsmouth clear to Rio.
“There have been but two voyages gone where we are going,” said Stephen Donovan seriously, wishing Richard would let him donate some butter for their bread. “The Dutchman Abel Tasman left charts of his expedition more than a century ago, and of course we have the charts of Captain Cook and his subordinate Captain Furneaux, who went down to the bottom of the world and a land of ice on Cook’s second voyage. But no one really knows. Here we are with a great host aboard eleven ships, attempting to reach New South Wales from the Cape of Good Hope. Is New South Wales a part of what the Dutch call New Holland, two thousand miles west of it? Cook was not sure because he never laid eyes on any southern coast joining the two. The best he and Furneaux could do was to prove that Van Diemen’s Land was not a part of New Zealand, as Tasman had thought, but rather the southernmost tip of New South Wales, which is a strip of coast going over two thousand miles north from Van Diemen’s Land. If the Great South Land exists, it has never been circumnavigated. But if it does exist, then it must contain three million square miles, which are more than in the whole of Europe.”
Richard’s heart was not behaving placidly. “You are saying, I think, that we have no pilot.”
“More or less. Just Tasman and Cook.”
“Is that because the explorers all entered the Pacific Ocean by sailing around Cape Horn?”
“Aye. Even Captain Cook chose Cape Horn most of the time. The Cape of Good Hope is regarded as the way to the East Indies, Bengal and Cathay, not to the Pacific. Look at this harbor, filled with outgoing ships.” Donovan indicated more than a dozen vessels. “Yes, they will sail east, but also north, taking advantage of an Indian Ocean current to get them as far as Batavia. They will reach those latitudes at the beginning of the summer’s monsoon winds and will be blown farther north. The winter trades send them home, laden, with three great currents to help them. One runs south through a strait between Africa and Madagascar. The second sweeps them around the Cape of Good Hope into the south Atlantic. The third carries them north along the west coast of Africa. Winds are important, but currents are sometimes even more important.”
Donovan’s seriousness had increased, which worried Richard. “Mr. Donovan, what is it ye’re not saying?”
“Aye, ye’re a clever man. Very well, I will be frank. That second current-the one which flows around the Cape of Good Hope-flows from east to west. Wonderful going home, Hell outbound. There is no avoiding it because it is over a hundred miles wide. Going northeast to the East Indies it can be overcome. But we have to seek the great westerly winds well south of the Cape, and that for a mariner is a far harder task. The length of our last leg will be much increased because we will not find our eastings in a hurry. I have sailed to Bengal and Cathay, so I know the southern tip of Africa well.”
Curiosity suddenly piqued, Richard stared at the fourth mate in some wonder. “Mr. Donovan, why did ye sign on for this vague voyage to somewhere only Captain Cook has been and seen?”
The fine blue eyes burned brightly. “Because, Richard, I want to be a part of history, no matter how insignificant a part. This is an epic adventure we have embarked upon, not a trudge to the same old places, even if those places have alluring names like Cathay. I had not the connections to midshipman into the Royal Navy, nor to get myself on some Royal Society expedition. When Esmeralda Sinclair asked me to come aboard as second mate, I leaped at the chance. And have suffered my demotion without protest. Why? Only because we are doing something no one has ever done before! We are taking over fifteen hundred hapless people to live in a virgin land without having done any sort of preparation. As if we were shipping ye from Hull to Plymouth. It is quite insane, ye know. The height of madness! What if, after we get to Botany Bay, we find it is not possible to scratch a living? ’Tis too far to go on to Cathay with so many people. Mr. Pitt and the Admiralty have thrown us onto the lap of the gods, Richard, with no forethought, no planning, no compunction. An expedition of skilled craftsmen should have gone two years earlier to tame the place a little. But that did not happen because it would have cost too much money and not ridded England of a single convict. What d’ye truly matter? The answer to that is-ye don’t matter beyond a parliamentary enquiry or two. Even if we perish, this expedition is great history and I am a part of it. And happy to die for the chance.” He drew a breath and smiled brilliantly. “It also offers me an opportunity to join the Royal Navy as something like a skilled man of officer material. Who knows? I may end up commanding a frigate.”
“I hope ye do,” said Richard sincerely.
“I would give it all up for you,” Donovan said mischievously.
Richard took the statement literally. “Mr. Donovan! By now I know ye well enough to understand that your deepest passions are not of the flesh. That is a typical Irish exaggeration.”
“Oh, flesh, flesh, flesh!” Donovan snapped, tried beyond calm endurance. “Honestly, Richard, you could give lessons to a papist celibate! What do they do to people in Bristol? I never met a man so riddled with guilt about what are natural functions as you are! Don’t be such a dolt! The company, man, the company! Women are no company. They are hamstrung into smallness. If poor, they drudge. If well off, they embroider, draw and paint a little, speak Italian and issue orders to the housekeeper. Of good conversation they have none. Nor are most men satisfactory company, for that matter,” he said more evenly, putting a rein on his temper. He tried to look carefree. “Besides, I am not a true Irishman. There is much Viking blood in Ulstermen. Probably why I love going to sea to visit new and strange places. The Irish in me dreams. The Viking needs to turn dreams into realities.”
But the realities of Cape Town were not the stuff of dreams. The Dutch burghers who ran the town (which had a considerable English population, there to look after the interests of the Honourable East India Company) rubbed their hands in glee at the prospect of fat profits and prolonged the negotiations for victualling the fleet into weeks. There had been a famine-the harvest had failed two years in a row-animals were in short supply-and so on, and so forth. Governor Phillip sat through meeting after meeting with calm unimpaired, perfectly aware that these were tactics aimed at securing higher prices. He had never expected it to be otherwise at Cape Town.
Perhaps too he understood better than some of his subordinates that these long stops in port were all that kept the convicts-and the marines-going. It had been he who had arranged for the oranges, the fresh meat and bread, whatever vegetables were to be had. The maritime world was not organized to carry hundreds of passengers for a year. Therefore let them fuel their bodies on decent food in port for long enough to sustain them on the next leg: a thought the convicts and marines had conceived for themselves.
Captain Duncan Sinclair had a furious quarrel with the agent for the contractor, Mr. Zachariah Clark, and rejected the first shipment of newly baked hard bread as rubbishy sawdust. He was busy loading as many animals as his decks could carry, mostly sheep and pigs, half of which were Publick Sheep and Publick Swine, and had to be preserved for Government use at Botany Bay. Chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys went on as well; the poop looked like a farmyard, as did what was left of the quarterdeck; Sinclair’s view forward from his roundhouse now consisted of woolly bottoms. Bales of hay and sacks of fodder were stored under the lower platforms in the prison, leaving scant space for night buckets and the additional belongings many of the convicts had evicted from their cots to make extra room for sleeping. The thieves among them were well known by this time; it was an easy matter for a deputation to visit each of the light-fingered ones until property was retrieved. Most thefts were of food caches and rum illicitly purchased through Sergeant Knight, in great trouble for it thanks to a marine private snitch. Even after so many months at sea, there were those who would almost kill to obtain rum.
None of the Brazilian parrots had survived, but Wallace the Scotch terrier and Lieutenant John Johnstone’s bulldog bitch, Sophia, remained. She was pregnant, apparently by Wallace (Shairp thought it exquisitely funny), and everybody on board was dying to see what the progeny would be like. Rodney the cat’s family had been reduced by gifts of catlings to other ships, but he and it were waxing fat.
When the at-sea provisions started to arrive at the end of the first week in November, Captain Sinclair had the crew scrub that part of Alexander’s hull not sheathed in copper. Inspired by this activity, Surgeon Balmain ordered a fumigation, scrub and whitewash below deck, marines’ steerage as well as the prison. His head was full of the delightful excursions he had taken out of the town to the foothills, choked with the glory of exotic bushes and shrubs in profligate spring flower-and what strange blossoms! Many of them looked like pastel-colored astrakhan mounds framed by giant petals.
“I knew there was something I meant to ask Mr. Donovan to do in Cape Town,” said Richard, savagely slapping a paint brush. “Tell all the vendors of whitewash that our surgeon was not authorized to buy an ounce of the stuff!”
The fleet left that shippy harbor on the 12th of November as a Yankey merchantman from Boston sailed in; its crew crowded to gape, never having witnessed such a mass exodus from any port. Port had occupied thirty days, and every ship was crammed full. The women convicts had been moved off Friendship to make room for sheep and a few cattle; Lady Penrhyn carried a stallion, two mares and a colt for the use of the Governor; other ships held more horses and cattle; there were sheep, pigs and poultry everywhere, and water was looming as a huge problem. A great deal of attention was paid to the accommodation of the horses, which could not be permitted to lie down or move more than a couple of inches in any direction; a horse with sufficient space to be tipped off balance was a dead one. Cattle too were pampered as much as possible.
That last leg commenced exactly as Stephen Donovan had said it would. Every wind as well as the current ran against the fleet. Nor did they do so modestly; minor gales blew and whipped up heavy seas. The susceptible became seasick all over again. Finally the Commodore ordered the fleet into Sirius’s wake, and there the eleven ships remained while Captain John Hunter, master of Sirius, strove fruitlessly to find a favorable wind. The gales died a day later and the agony of standing and tacking began, never with much if any good results.
In thirteen long days they had managed to get a mere 249 miles southeast of the Cape. Water was back to three pints a day, which every soul aboard every ship found intolerable; four pints were not enough. Alexander’s lieutenants groaned at this order, to be policed as in earlier periods of rationing, which turned it into a proper business. Sergeant Knight had been suspended from duty indefinitely, which meant the lieutenants had to rely upon three very mediocre corporals to do water duty with them while Knight, not at all dismayed by his suspension, lay in his hammock and snoozed on the rum he was buying from Esmeralda against his marine pay. Major Ross had thought that suspension without pay would curb Knight’s activities, but he had no idea how much money Knight had made on the voyage selling rum to men like Tommy Crowder.
Whales abounded. The fascinated convicts spent hours on deck during those first two weeks, trying to count them. The ocean looked as if it had been strewn with boulders spouting fountains, for they were mostly spermaceti whales. A new kind of porpoise appeared, very large and blunt-snouted; some sailors called them “grampuses,” though there was some debate as to what exactly was a grampus. The sharks were so big that they sometimes attacked a small whale, leaping out of the sea to crash with open jaws on the whale’s head, leaving gaping, bleeding craters behind. If they were thresher sharks they also used the long blade uppermost on their tails to cut and slash. On one unforgettable moonlit night, as restless as he was sleepless, Richard saw a titanic battle go on in the midst of the silver sea between a whale and what he swore had to be a giant cuttlefish, its tentacles wrapped around the whale’s body. Then the whale sounded and bore its foe down into the depths. Who knew what might lurk in a realm where leviathans were eighty feet long and sharks close to thirty?
Rumors began to fly that Governor Phillip intended to split the fleet, take two or three ships and go on ahead as rapidly as he could, leaving the laggards to come on behind. Charlotte and Lady Penrhyn were hopeless, the storeships tended to be slow, and Sirius was a bit of a slug too. The navigators had tried every way they knew to find a favorable wind, including having all vessels stand facing in different directions, with no success.
Two weeks at sea, and they had a little luck at last, found a good fair breeze and surged southeast in company at eight knots an hour. The seas were so enormous, however, that Lady Penrhyn-carrying Phillip’s precious horses-first stood over on her side far enough to dunk the gunwale and the ends of the spars under, then was pooped when a massive wave crashed down on her stern and ran right through the ship. She took on so much water that all hands were put to the pumps and baling buckets. But the horses had not suffered at all, nor had the cattle.
Then the wind swung against once more. Bowing to the inevitable, Governor Phillip decided to separate the fleet. He would remove himself to Supply and take Alexander, Scarborough and Friendship with him, while Captain Hunter on Sirius took command of the seven slower ships. Supply would forge on ahead alone; Lieutenant John Shortland, the naval agent, would board Alexander and command Scarborough and Friendship from her, keeping those three vessels together.
This decision of the Governor’s was not without its critics. Many of the naval, marine and medical officers felt that Phillip should have split the fleet after Rio de Janeiro if he intended to split it at all. A course that was not in Phillip’s nature, thought Richard, overhearing Johnstone and Shairp grizzling because they would now have to share their quarterdeck heaven. Phillip was a mother hen who hated the idea of abandoning any of his chicks. Oh, how he would worry! His segment carried the bulk of the male convicts, who could be put to work at Botany Bay without the chaos of women and children; he estimated that this first segment would make harbor at least two weeks before Hunter’s segment arrived.
Convicts who were known to be gardeners, farmers, carpenters and sawyers (appallingly few) were removed to Scarborough and Supply, though Alexander patently had more room. But no one wanted valuable men put into the Death Ship’s prison. Alexander’s quarterdeck, however, was now overcrowded. Lieutenant Shortland transferred himself and a mountain of gear from Fishburn; Zachariah Clark, the contractor’s agent, was dismissed from Scarborough to Alexander when Major Ross usurped his Scarborough cabin; and Lieutenant James Furzer, the marine quarter-master (an Irishman, horrors!), was also shifted to Alexander. William Aston Long naturally refused to give up his bit of the quarterdeck, so-so-!
“I almost died of laughing,” said Donovan to Richard on deck as they watched the longboats ply back and forth. “The two Scotch marines detest the new Irish one, Clark is a very odd fish at the best of times, and Shortland is not pleased at being on the ship he was supposed to be on in the first place. Young Shortland has moved in with Papa, and Balmain is furious because he has had to throw out a lot of his collection of specimens, which clutter up every corner of the great cabin. Mr. Bones and I are delighted to be where we have always been-in the forecastle.”
“Won’t they love it when Wallace decides to yowl at the moon around two on a calm night?”
“That is not the worst. Sophia snores like thunder and has made her nest on Zachariah Clark’s cot, from which he is too afraid of her to move her.”
The parting happened during the morning of the 25th of November in the midst of a calm sea and little wind. Once everybody else had been transferred, Governor Phillip left Sirius in a longboat to the sound of three lusty cheers from every soul left aboard her. He returned the salute and was rowed swiftly to Supply. From what Donovan had said, a grand sailer in light conditions, a wet and wallowing one in foul weather. A brig-rigged sloop which ought to have been a snow.
By half after noon Supply was gone and the three other Racers (as they had been christened), with Alexander in the lead, had also made way. The oddest aspect of the exercise was that the moment Phillip had transferred to Supply, a fine fair wind sprang up and Hunter decided to chase the Racers. So the seven laggards were visible until the morrow, then went hull down over the horizon until the ocean engulfed the tips of their masts. In this sort of weather Supply had no trouble forging ahead; by nightfall she was gone and Alexander, Scarborough and Friendship cruised along abreast of each other just a cable’s length apart-exactly two hundred yards.
Two days later they were back to standing and tacking.
“I do not believe that eastings exist,” said Will Connelly to Stephen Donovan, who had come off watch and gone to the rail to see if he could find a fish for his dinner.
Donovan laughed softly. “We are about to find them, Will-and with a vengeance. See yon brown birdies?”
“Aye. They look like swifts.”
“Mother Carey’s chickens, the prophets of gales-real gales. And the day is greasy. Very greasy.”
“What is ‘greasy’?” asked Taffy Edmunds, delegated to look after the quarterdeck sheep in tandem with Bill Whiting-a choice which had provoked considerable mirth in the prison but did not displease the shepherds, both farm boys far too canny to admit that they were farm boys.
“It is a fine day, not so?” Donovan asked, teasing.
“Aye, very fine. The sun is out, there is no wind.”
“Yet the sky is not blue, Taffy. Nor is the sea. We seamen call such days ‘greasy’ because sky and sea look as if smeared with a thin film of grease-dull, no life in them. By afternoon there will be a few frail white clouds scudding like sheets of paper in a wind because there will be a big wind up there pushing them-a wind too high for us to feel. By early tomorrow we will be in the midst of a mighty gale. Secure your stuff and prepare for hatches to be battened down. In a few hours ye’ll know what finding the eastings can be like.” Donovan yipped joyfully. “A bite!” He hauled in a fish somewhat like a small cod and danced away.
“You heard him,” said Richard. “We’d best get below and warn the rest what is to come.”
“Greasy,” said Taffy thoughtfully. He went off toward the quarterdeck, where Bill was strewing fodder from a bucket. “Bill! Our sheep! Bill, we are in for the mother of all blows!”
They ate that day at the same hour as those thin high clouds were scudding, but no one came to feed them on the following day. The gale kept getting worse, throwing the ship around like a tiny ball; her sides boomed and reverberated like the inside of a drum, though the hatches had not yet been battened down.
At about the moment when the denizens of the prison realized that they would get nothing to eat until the weather died a little, Richard stood on the table and poked his body out of the after hatch, clinging to it for dear life, to witness the ocean hanging over Alexander from four directions at once. The temptation was too much; he levered himself out onto the deck and found a spot out of harm’s way against the mainmast, there to watch the sea come at the ship without rhyme or reason. There were head seas, beam seas and following seas, but this was all of them simultaneously. The rigging creaked and groaned in agony, though he could only hear it above the howling wind and roaring sea by pressing his ear to the timber of the mainmast; water cascaded off the sails while sailors spidered from spar to spar shortening some sail and reefing in others completely. The bows and bowsprit would go right under, then rear up amid flurries and vast washes even as a second wave thundered on larboard, a third wave on starboard, and a fourth on the stern. Prudently Richard had used a piece of rope to tie himself securely; these monstrous waves crashed across the deck with massive force no man lower than a spar could resist without a lifeline.
Impossible to spy Scarborough or Friendship until an immense surge carried Alexander with it up onto its crest, there to dangle for just long enough to see poor Friendship rolled right on her side, the seas breaking clean over her. Down slid Alexander into a trough, decks running a foot deep in water, then up, up, up-oh, it was wonderful! And what a seaworthy old girl Alexander was, poison-soaked timbers and all.
They had battened down the hatches just after he had left the prison, though he never noticed, too entranced with the immensity of what was surely one of the mightiest tempests that ever blew. When night fell he loosed himself and crawled, exhausted and blue with cold, under one of the longboats, where he made himself a warm and fairly dry nest amid the hay. Thus he slept through the very worst of it and woke in the morning, still very cold, to find the sky blue but not greasy and that mammoth sea still running, though less chaotically. The hatches were open; he slid down onto the table and twisted to the deck feeling as if he had just midwifed the birth of the end of the world.
The cries of joy which greeted him astonished him; from Rio onward he had fancied that the rest were growing more independent.
“Richard, Richard!” cried Joey Long, hugging him with tears running down his cheeks. “We thought ye drowned!”
“Not I! I was too busy watching the storm to notice them at the hatches, so I was marooned. Joey, calm yourself. I am well, just wet and cold.”
While he rubbed himself vigorously with a dry rag he learned from the others that John Bird, a convict up forward, had broken into the hold and passed out bread.
“We all ate it,” said Jimmy Price. “No one fed us.”
Which did not stop Zachariah Clark from demanding that John Bird be flogged for stealing the contractor’s property.
Lieutenant Furzer, who turned out to be a curious mixture of compassion and confused inertia, calculated the amount of bread missing and announced that it was about the same amount as would have been issued had it been issued. Therefore, he said, no punishment would be administered, and today every convict would receive a double portion of salt meat as well as hard bread.
Despite that quarrel with Zachariah Clark in Cape Town, Captain Sinclair had recognized a soul mate in rapacity; no sooner had Clark moved onto Alexander’s quarterdeck than Sinclair started inviting the contractor’s agent to share his sumptuous dinners-in return for a blind eye about rum. As Sophia was using Clark’s cabin as a childing room, Esmeralda graciously consented to let Clark sleep in his day cabin, not really needed. So when Sinclair heard of Furzer’s verdict he sent a message to the marine through Clark to the effect that John Bird be flogged for the unauthorized appropriation of the contractor’s property.
“Nothing is missing that ought not to be missing,” said Furzer frostily, “so why don’t ye go off and toss your tossle, arsehead?”
“I shall report your impudence to the captain!” Clark gasped.
“Ye can report it until ye’re blue in the cods, arsehead, but that ain’t going to change a thing. I decide about the convicts, not fucken fat boy Esmeralda.”
Every sailor aboard Alexander was eager to tell anybody prepared to listen that the blow had been the worst he had ever, ever encountered, chiefly due to those awful seas coming from all points of the compass at once-ominous, very ominous. Word was flagged from Scarborough that all was well; poor Friendship was in worse case, having been pooped as well as right over on her beam-nothing on board her was dry from animals to clothing to bedding.
But the eastings had been found and the three ships, keeping abreast of each other with a cable’s length in between, ploughed forward to log up a minimum of 184 land miles a day. They were now down at 40° south latitude and inching steadily farther south than that. Early in December came an even worse gale than the famous one, but at least it blew itself out faster. The weather was freezing cold, despite the summer season; the truly impoverished and less farsighted convicts huddled together for warmth in their thin contractor-issue linen slops, though thanks to the number of deaths there were spare blankets. The hay came in handy.
Dysentery broke out among convicts and marines; men started to die again. Then came news from Scarborough and Friendship that they had dysentery too. Richard insisted that every drop of water his men drank be filtered through the cleaned dripstones. In these tossing seas that meant a few spoonfuls at a time. If all the ships were suffering, whatever water they were on was contaminated. Surgeon Balmain did not order fumigation, scrubbing and a new coat of whitewash, probably because he realized that did he, mutiny would break out.
Though Friendship had set more sail than at any time during the voyage so far, she could not keep up with Alexander and Scarborough, flying along at 207 and more land miles a day. Almost a week into December and the weather warmed a little; Shortland ordered the two big slavers to slow down and let Friendship catch up. Then came a morning of dense, pure white fog that glowed from within like a gigantic pearl, eerie, beautiful, dangerous. The three ships loaded their guns with powder only and fired regularly while a sailor rang Alexander’s bell in its belfry on the starboard rail, clang-clang-long pause-clang-clang. Muffled booms and faint clang-clangs drifted back from Scarborough and Friendship, which kept as true to course as Alexander, a cable’s length apart. Then at ten o’clock the fog lifted in a twinkle to reveal a fine, fair day and a fine, fair breeze.
Great drifts of seaweed appeared-a sign of land, said the sailors, though no land was sighted, just large numbers of grampuses having terrific fun streaking around, under and between the three ships forging along together. The seaweed became mixed with broad trails of fish sperm in meandering ribbons, of what kind no one knew. Somewhere to the south was the Isle of Desolation [3] where Captain Cook had once spent a very strange Christmas Day.
Two days later the entire sea turned to blood. At first the awed and fascinated occupants of Alexander thought it must be blood from a slain whale, then realized that no leviathan could exsanguinate enough to dye the water scarlet as far as the eye could see. Yet another mystery of the deep they would never solve.
“I understand at last,” Richard said to Donovan, “why ye itch to see foreign places. I was never visited by a wish to go any farther from Bristol than Bath because that was my narrow, familiar world. A man cannot help but grow when he is plucked out of his narrow, familiar world. Either that, or like some in the prison below, he will die of the uncertainty. Place is very strong in people. It was in me, perhaps still is.”
“To have a sense of place is common, Richard. That I have none may be thanks to poverty and a burning desire to be free of it, get out of Belfast, out of anywhere tied me down.”
“Did ye go to a charity school, then?”
“No. A kind gentleman took me under his wing and taught me to read and write. He said-and rightly so-that literacy would be my ticket to better things, whereas booze is a ticket to nowhere.”
Donovan was smiling as at a fond memory; reluctant to probe, Richard changed the subject.
“Why is the sea turned to blood? Have ye seen it before?”
“Nay, but I have heard of it. Sailors are a superstitious lot, so ye’ll find most of them describe it as a sign of doom, or the wrath of God, or a portent of evil. For myself-I do not know, except that I believe it is as natural as wanting sex.” Donovan wriggled his brows expressively and grinned at Richard’s discomfort, knowing full well that Richard hated being called a prude chiefly because he knew that at heart he was a prude. “Perhaps some huge convulsion on the sea floor has thrown up a mass of red earth, or perhaps the blood is composed of tiny red sea creatures.”
They ran into more gales, always terrible. In the midst of one memorable squall Alexander sustained her only accident of the voyage by carrying away her fore topsail yard in the slings, which meant that the short chains tethering the wooden yard to the mast snapped and the sail, still attached to its yard, flew free. Scarborough and Friendship backed their main and fore topsails to halt onward progress and waited until the sail was caught-a risky business-and the slings were reconnected.
Then right on the summer solstice it rained-after which it snowed heavily-and followed this up with a bombardment of hailstones the size of hen’s eggs. Nothing the sheep felt, but for pigs and men, a bruising nuisance. The joys of summer at 41° south! 41° north was the latitude of American New York and Spanish Salamanca, where it did not snow heavily at the time of the summer solstice. Perhaps being on the bottom of the world was more than a metaphorical upside-down? The bottom of the world, thought many of the sailors, marines and convicts, must be a lot heavier than the top could possibly be.
By Christmas Day the three ships were at 42° south and maintaining their 184-land-mile-a-day average through dirty weather. The most enormous whale of the entire voyage followed the trio while the light lasted; he was a bluish-grey in color and well over 100 feet long. As well then that apparently he was just wishing them a merry Christmas, for he would have made shivered timbers out of little Friendship.
Christmas well-being reigned in the prison. Served in the mid afternoon, dinner consisted of pease soup flavored with salt pork, the usual chunk of salt beef and the usual small loaf of hard bread. The treat was in receiving a full half-pint of neat Rio rum each. They also got a chance to win one of Sophia’s pups. She had produced five healthy offspring in Zachariah Clark’s cot, Surgeon Balmain acting as midwife. They were extraordinary. Two looked like pug dogs, two rather like stiff-haired terriers with overslung lower jaws, and one was the image of Wallace. Lieutenant Shairp, the proud surrogate father, gave Balmain the pick of the litter; he chose a puggy one. So did Lieutenant Johnstone, the proud surrogate mother. That left Lieutenant John Shortland and first mate Long to take the salmon-jawed pair.
Things became complicated when Lieutenant Furzer refused to accept the Wallace look-alike because he looked so Scotch (though he did not say that-it was Christmas, after all).
“What shall we do with him?” asked Shairp.
“Esmeralda and his bum boy Clark?” asked Johnstone.
The entire quarterdeck sneered.
“Then I have a mind to give young MacGregor to the prison for Christmas. No convict has a dog,” said Shairp.
The entire quarterdeck thought this an excellent idea, worth toasting in a postprandial amalgam of port and rum.
On Christmas Day the two marine parents appeared in the prison as soon as dinner was finished, Shairp carrying little MacGregor. Both officers were falling-down drunk, though that was not an occurrence peculiar to the festive season. No one ever got any sense out of a marine officer after dinner time on any ship save Friendship, where the lemonade-sipping Ralph Clark used his rum ration to trade to carpenters for writing cases and bureaus, and convicts for tailoring everything from shirts to gloves.
The lots for MacGregor were cast using four decks of cards: those who drew an Ace of Diamonds were in the running. To whoops and cheers, three men showed an Ace of Diamonds. Shairp, sitting on the table, then asked for three straws, though he was so drunk that Johnstone had to wrap his hand around them snugly.
“Long straw wins!” cried Shairp.
Joey Long drew it, weeping in delight.
“The long straw to Long!” Shairp was so amused that he fell off the table and had to be helped tenderly to his feet by Richard and Will, while Joey took the wriggling scrap and covered it in kisses.
“We will keep him with his mama until we get to Botany Bay,” caroled Johnstone. “Once ashore, MacGregor is yours.”
God could not have been kinder, thought Richard as he drifted into a rummy sleep, for once not consumed with a desire to get up on deck. Since Ike died, poor simple Joey has had no purpose. Now he has a dog to love. God has emancipated one of my dependents. I pray the others are as fortunate. Once we leave these confines it will be much harder to keep together.
The pace increased to over 207 land miles a day until the end of December; the weather was as foul as it could be-heavy seas, squalls, howling gales. At south of 43° the winds really roared.
1788 arrived in filthy weather with the wind against; the New Year storms blew on the bow as the latitude crept up to 44°. Then along came a breeze so fair that it shoved the three ships along at 219 miles a day. As the southern capes of Van Diemen’s Land were expected at any time, Lieutenant Shortland signaled that cables were to be put to anchors just in case. The gale increased and Friendship lost her fore topmast studding sail boom and rent the canvas to pieces, but still no land.
Afraid of reefs and uncharted rocks, at seven in the evening of the 4th of January, Shortland ordered the ships to stand to. Next morning came the long awaited cry: “Land ahoy!” There it was! The southernmost tip of New South Wales! A massive cliff.
Once around the southeast cape their course altered radically from east to north by northeast; the last 1,000 miles to Botany Bay were the most frustrating of the whole voyage, so near and yet so far. The winds were against, the currents were against, everything was against. On some days the three ships ended miles south of yesterday’s position, on other days they stood and tacked, stood and tacked what seemed eternally. Then there were days when the winds were, as the sailors put it, “horrible hard-hearted.” One night Friendship split her fore top main stay sail, followed by her peak halyard in the morning. They would inch up to 39°, fall back to 42°. Friendship’s main stay sail split to shreds-her fifth sail disaster since Cape Town. They battled to make any kind of headway.
Though this lack of progress did not dampen the spirits of the convicts the way it did those of the ships’ navigators, lack of palatable food had much the same effect. There were brief glimpses of New South Wales, too far away to gauge what sort of land it was. Luckily a new delight arrived; countless seals frisked and frolicked around the ships, absolute clowns as they floated with their flippers on their chests, dived, twisted, huffed and snuffled. Gorgeous, jolly creatures. And where they were, so too were hordes of fish. Chowder appeared on the menu again.
By the 15th of January they had struggled north to 36°and at noon saw Cape Dromedary, which Captain Cook had named for its resemblance to the Ship of the Desert.
“Only a hundred and fifty miles to go,” said Donovan, off his watch and ready to fish.
Will Connelly sighed; the weather was so hot, albeit cloudy, that he could not settle to read, had elected to fish instead. “I am beginning to believe, Mr. Donovan,” he said, “that we will never get to Botany Bay. Four more men have died since Christmas Eve and all of us below know why. Not fever or dysentery. Just despair, homesickness, hopelessness. Most of us have been in this terrible ship for over a year now-we boarded her on the sixth of January last year. Last year! What an odd thing to say. So they died, I believe, because they had passed the point where they could credit that a day would dawn when they were not in this terrible ship. A hundred and fifty miles, ye say. They may as well be ten thousand. If this year has taught us nothing else, it has shown us how far it is to the end of the world. And how far away is home.”
Donovan’s mouth tightened; he blinked rapidly. “The miles will pass,” he said eventually, eyes riveted on his line, floating from a small piece of cork. “Captain Cook warned of this counter current, but we are making headway. What we need is a fair breeze out of the southeast, and we will get it. A sea change is coming. First a storm, then a wind out of the southeast. I am right.”
They tacked and stood, tacked and stood. The seals were gone, replaced by thousands of porpoises. Then, after a suffocatingly hot and humid day, the heavens erupted. Red lightning of a ferocity and brilliance beyond English imagination empurpled clouds blacker than Bristol smoke, cracked with deafening thunder; and it began to rain a wall of solid water, so hard that it fell straight down despite a wildly blowing northwest wind. At an hour before midnight, with dramatic suddenness, the show was over. Along came a beautiful fair breeze out of the southeast which lasted long enough to see white cliffs, trees, yellow cliffs, trees, curving golden beaches, and the low, nuggety jaws of Botany Bay.
At nine in the morning of the 19th of January, 1788, Alexander led her two companions between Point Solander and Cape Banks into the reaches of a wide, poorly sheltered bay. Perhaps fifty or sixty naked black men stood gesticulating on either headland, and there at rest on the bosom of choppy steely water was Supply. She had beaten them by a single day.
Alexander had sailed 17,300 land miles [4] in 251 days, which amounted to 36 weeks. She had spent 68 of those days in port and 183 of them at sea. All told, 225 convicts had sampled her, some for a single day; 177 arrived.
The anchors down and Lieutenant Shortland gone in the jollyboat to Supply to see Governor Phillip, Richard stood alone at the rail and gazed for a long time at the place to which, by an Imperial Order-in-Council, he had been transported until the 23rd of March, 1792. Four years into the future. He had turned nine-and-thirty in the south Atlantic between Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town.
The land he surveyed was flat along the foreshores, slightly hilly farther away to north and south, and it was a drab, sad vista of blue, brown, fawn, grey and olive. Blighted, juiceless.
“What d’ye see, Richard?” asked Stephen Donovan.
Richard stared at him through eyes misted with tears. “I see neither paradise nor Hell. This is limbo. This is where all the lost souls go,” he said.