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* where Captain Cook had once spent a very strange Christmas Day.
* Kerguelen Island.
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 i
t 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.”