‘Well, that is kind and handsome in the mess,’ said Jack. ‘I shall introduce him this evening – he is a very learned cove, and excellent company. I say,’ he said, stretching, ‘what an amazingly spacious berth this is. In the Sovereign you could scarcely eat for the elbows each side of you.’
‘You expect to have elbow-room in an Indiaman – she’s only a cursed Indiaman really, you know,’ said Cozens. ‘But you wait till the soldiers come aboard – we shall have a charming great crowd –’ He was interrupted by a quartermaster, who, standing in the doorway and putting his knuckle to his right-hand eyebrow, cried in a harsh, complaining tone, ‘Now, Mr Byron, sir, what about this here chest? It can’t lay about on deck all day,’ – winking and nodding in order to make it clear that he was not in earnest.
‘Why, it’s Rose,’ cried Jack, recognising an old shipmate. ‘How are you, Rose? I’m very glad to see you. As for my chest, stow it in …’ and then, conceiving that it might be tactless just now to shout about his cabin, he got up, and said, ‘Come along, I will show you. How do you come to be aboard, and are there any more old Pembrokes?’ he asked, leading the way – the Pembroke had been his ship before the Royal Sovereign. The quartermaster had been sent into the Wager, Jack learnt, because he had experience of stowing a siege-train, and one of the Wager’s chief purposes in life was to carry battering-pieces to argue with the Spaniards on the Pacific – a much more convincing argument, in the eyes of all her crew, than the bales of trade-goods, broad-cloth, beads and basins that filled the after-hold and even part of the bread-room.
‘I will show them to you, if you like,’ said the quartermaster, having filled the cabin with Jack’s sea-chest, ‘for we are going below directly, to make all fast, and it will be the last any man-jack will see of ‘em until’ – here he shaded his mouth with the back of his hand – ‘we’re in the Great South Sea.’
‘Not the same as the dear old Pembroke,’ observed Jack, as they passed along the roomy bays on the gun-deck, where the men slung their hammocks.
‘Not the same by no means,’ said Rose emphatically; and after he had shown Jack the hold and some of the finer points of stowing a very heavy and dangerously movable cargo, he returned to this subject. The dear old Pembroke might have been a pig in a cross-sea, he said, and she might have had the narrowest cruel hatches known in creation; there was certainly no room in her for a man to spit, as he might say, in a manner of speaking; she was an unhealthy ship, with mould three fingers deep on the beams, and the dear old Pembroke was obliged to be pumped morning, noon and night; but he would rather have the old Pembroke than a dozen Wagers, however dry and well found. Because why? Because the Pembroke’s crew, though an ill-faced parcel of thieves to be sure, were men-of-war’s men. You knew what to expect. With the people of this ship you did not know what to expect: he had never seen anything like it. In thirty-one years odd months of service he had never seen anything like it. ‘It is not that they are pressed men,’ he said – ‘we are all pressed men, more or less. But I tell ‘ee, Mr Byron, if anything untoward or nasty, as I might say in a manner of speaking – if anything should happen, with such a pack aboard, why, mark my words –’ Here he raised the lantern to give solemnity to his foreboding, uttered a terrible scream, clawed the air past Jack’s left ear, struck his head against an upper-futtock rider and fell trembling in the bilge.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Tobias, just behind Jack, ‘but can you tell me where the midshipmen are to be found?’
‘No,’ said Jack, speaking with the harsh pipe of a very aged man; ‘there ain’t none left, your honour, in consequence of salt being sprinkled on their victuals, whereupon they died in terrible agony.’
‘Jack,’ cried Tobias, with unfeigned relief, ‘I could not find my way to the top floor.’
‘In my opinion,’ said Jack, ‘you would get lost in an open boat.’
‘I was trying to get back to the place where I last saw you,’ said Tobias.
‘What made you think that I would be crawling about the hold?’ asked Jack; and when he thought of the hideous lingering end that might have come about he grew angry and said, ‘Don’t you know that this part of the hold is going to be sealed? What do you think would have happened to you? You would have been starved, and the rats would have eaten you.’
The quartermaster was also extremely vexed at having taken him for the ghost of his deceased wife’s sister, and he wanted to know whether Mr Barrow knew the difference between up and down – a difference clear to quite unintelligent people. They both set about him: they repeatedly asked him what he thought he was doing in the hold – his being in the hold particularly exasperated them, and his inability to explain how he got there. ‘Why not the forepeak? Or the bread-room? There would be some sense in that.’
When they had badgered him enough, both being impressed by the enormity of what might have happened, they undertook to explain what he should have done.
‘You come out of the cockpit,’ said Jack.
‘Or orlop, as you might say,’ added Rose.
‘And there’s the whole length of the gun-deck before you.’
‘No, Jack,’ said Tobias, ‘I assure you there was not a gun there.’
‘Bah,’ said Jack impatiently. ‘Of course not. You don’t expect guns on the gun-deck of a one-decker, do you?’
Tobias admitted that he had thought it rather likely – that he could not otherwise see the value of the name.
‘Guns on the gun-deck,’ said the quartermaster, with intense relish. ‘He looked for to find ‘em there; hor, hor.’
‘We only call it the gun-deck,’ explained Jack. ‘The guns are all on the upper-deck and quarter-deck, which is natural in a one-decker. The Wager is a one-decker, Toby.’
‘But there are at least four storeys, or decks, as you say in your jargon,’ cried Tobias, with some indignation.
‘Ah,’ replied Jack at once, ‘we only call her a one-decker, you see.’
‘Guns on the gun-deck; heu, heu, heu,’ said the quartermaster to himself. ‘Rich. Very rich, heu, heu, heu.’
‘Now you come out of the cockpit,’ Jack began again.
‘No, Mr Byron, sir,’ interposed the quartermaster, ‘you might as well save your breath. There are minds that reason cannot reach, no, nor kind words persuade: they have to be drove – took by the hand and shown each halliard and brace or deck, as the case may be. And,’ he added, with a recollection of beating the bounds of the parish in his long-distant childhood, ‘it is best to whip them right severely when you are a-doing of it. And some there are,’ he concluded, ‘who can never be brought to understand what you tell them, not if it is ever so.’
It is very clear that Tobias belonged in this last hopeless category, and that he would go on looking for guns on the gun-deck out of mere ill-will and brutish stupidity to the end of his days. And as they ascended through the body of the ship, with occasional glimpses of the light of day through various gratings and ports, Tobias was inclined to agree with this harsh estimate of his abilities. It seemed to him that he would never be able to make out this maze of ladders, dank recesses and unlit passages.
Yet what will not custom do? Or, as one might say, how prepotent is not habitude? Long before the squadron sailed, Tobias knew his way perfectly well, and when, after they had spent forty days at sea, he heard the cry of ‘Land ho, on the starboard bow,’ he darted below for a telescope; not finding it in their cabin, he recollected that he had taken it down to the cockpit to clean the lenses with spirits of wine, and he ran down there and back without the slightest conscious thought – his feet found their own way, counted the steps from the quarter-deck to the upper-deck and from the upper-deck to the gun-deck – they brought him to and from with automatic ease, although the Wager was rolling with her usual heavy skittishness.
It was only a little more than a month, but already it seemed natural to him that the deck should perpetually move under his feet, that he should be sick if it moved more than a c
ertain amount, and that he should begin his day at one bell in the forenoon watch, stationed abaft the foremast, while the loblolly-boy beat with a pestle upon a brass mortar and cried
‘Pills
For all ills.’
In these forty days he had grown accustomed to the ordered routine that underlay the apparently chaotic running about and noise of the ship’s work. He was no longer amazed that Jack should appear at all hours of the day or night, coming or going, according to his watch, or that he himself should be precipitated from his bed, now and then, in lively weather. And such is the force of custom that both he and his stomach accepted salt pork on Monday, salt beef on Tuesday, dried peas on Wednesday, salt pork on Thursday, dried peas on Friday, salt beef on Saturday, salt pork on Sunday, and so on in a sequence varied only by their private stores – a not inconsiderable variation, however, for their sailing had been so delayed that Jack’s grandfather had had time to come down and see him, as well as two uncles and a cousin, all of whom had been pretty liberal in the way of presents; these presents had mostly been converted into food and drink (a very prudent measure), and although they had made great inroads, there still remained a coop of hens in the gangway, a contemplative pig below, and in their cabin, besieged by rats, a whole Cheshire cheese, the better part of an enormous keeping cake from Medenham, and some strong, flat, greyish objects of surprising weight, baked by Georgiana’s maiden hand and decorated with calcined raisins, lovingly arranged in the form of conventional trees.
It was forty days since they had at last set sail from St Helen’s, after several ignominious false starts; and for Jack at least they had been forty very full days. The Wager, like all the other ships in the squadron, was undermanned; not only was she undermanned, but a great many of the crew were landsmen, and they had to be taught their duty – unwilling, seasick and frightened pupils, many of them, and some uncommonly brutal in their stupidity and resentment. This would have made her voyage troublesome in any case, but as it fell out, foul weather had met them on almost every single day since the signal for their departure had broken out from the Centurion’s mizzen, and this had made it exceedingly laborious and exasperating. The passage to Madeira might, with a fair wind, have taken no more than twelve days or a fortnight of easy sailing; but it had taken forty, and everybody aboard was thoroughly displeased – apart from anything else, it was generally understood that if they did not reach the high southern latitudes before January, they would have missed the only good season for sailing round the Horn.
These forty days had been hard and frustrating: Captain Kidd, Mr Bean, his lieutenant, and Mr Clerk, the master, were good-tempered men, but the effort of driving this new crew, and of keeping exactly to their allotted station in spite of every difficulty, had worn them to a pitch of hard ferocity that would have surprised their friends at home. But it was wonderful to see how this cloud of depression lifted from off the ship at the cry of land: it was just at two bells in the morning watch, at five o’clock in the first grey of the dawn, when one can see farthest – and although this is ordinarily a time when even the hardened mariner is feeling a little jaded, within a minute of the look-out’s cry the decks were alive with the watch below, all looking as bright and pleased as the watch on duty.
Tobias was up already, although he belonged to neither watch and could have lain abed until the noise of breakfast. He grudged every waking hour that kept him from watching the sea or the sky, and at the time land was seen he was in the act of trailing a jelly-bag along the surface from the larboard cathead in the hope of catching some of the very small pedunculated cirripedes that he had found, the day before, in the stomach of a dissected procellaria. At the cry he abandoned the pedunculated cirripedes, fetched his telescope, and climbed laboriously into the foretop, where he knew he would find Jack: this was nominally Jack’s watch below, but Tobias did not now have to be told that it was only called below, and that in fact Jack would station himself in one of the highest convenient parts of the ship.
It was doubly certain that Jack would be up there today, for it was for this particular morning that he had foretold the landfall. He prided himself on his skill in navigation – an art, rather than a science, for at that time one of the most important factors in finding your longitude at sea was your own personal judgment of the ship’s way – and he had been rather more public and confident in his prophecy than was altogether wise: he had stationed himself in the foretop very early that day, willing Madeira to rise above the south-western horizon with all the power available to him.
‘There you are, Toby,’ he cried, hearing a familiar snorting on the shrouds. ‘Have a care, now,’ he said, leaning over the edge, as anxious as a hen. Toby was a wretched topman; he climbed stiffly, with pale determination, munching as he came, and he took no notice whatever of Jack’s agitated warnings to take care, to mount one ratline at a time, to hold the shrouds, to wait for the roll. He had early discovered that height terrified him, and every day, seasick or not, he had, with rigid obstinacy, crept painfully up to the foretop, there to exult in silent triumph, with the view of the whole squadron before him if the foresail happened not to be set (the Wager came last in the line) or the great expanse of sea to the windward if it were – a sea that might at any moment disclose a whale in its bosom, or a wide-ranging sea-bird upon its surface. Jack lived in terror of the day when Tobias should decide that the top was not enough, and he threw out many hints to the effect that an ascent of the topmast would be gross folly, and an attempt upon the topgallant masthead criminal ostentation; but he doubted their utility – even now he had another example of his friend’s odd kind of courage, for Tobias’ head came through the lubber’s hole, followed by the rest of his person and the telescope. The lubber’s hole is a square space cut in the broad platform that forms the top; it is conveniently situated there, at the head of the shrouds of the lower mast, so that anyone who wishes to go up into the top may do so with comparative ease and safety: but, of course, it is never used. An old lady visiting the ship might possibly go through it, or an admiral with a reputation so well established that he could afford any eccentricity; but everybody else reaches the top by the futtock-shrouds, an uncomfortable assemblage of ropes that run from near the masthead below out to the edge of the top, so that a man climbing them must of necessity hang backwards.
‘Why do you not use the futtock-shrouds?’ Cozens had asked, winking round the table in the midshipmen’s berth, after the first time that Tobias had been seen to go aloft.
‘It would frighten me too much,’ Tobias replied, adding with the utmost candour, ‘I am of a very timid disposition: I am far from being so brave and fearless as you.’ This last had quite dumb-founded Cozens, who had not been at all sure how to take it, and who had finished by laughing in an uncertain and particularly vacant manner.
So every day Tobias came up through the gate of ignominy: and on this day, the twenty-fifth of October, 1740, according to the old, or Julian, style of reckoning, he had the infinite gratification of seeing a remote, dark lowering on the rim of the sky, which was Madeira, the first milestone on their great journey to lands and seas unknown.
Chapter Five
THE CHARMING TOWN of Funchal was unusually animated, for not only were there a good many privateersmen and the crews of two East India Company’s ships ashore, but also every one of the fifteen hundred seamen and five hundred soldiers of Commodore Anson’s squadron who could get leave.
Jack was one of these: he sat now on the terrace of a wine-shop, sheltered from the brilliant sun by a vine, sipping a glass of the best Madeira and surveying the bay, with the men-of-war and the merchant ships and the boats that plied to and fro. There was music behind him and on either side, while before him, in the open courtyard of a tavern at a lower level, there was music again, and dancing. The scene was one of universal gaiety; yet Jack looked upon it with a dark and bilious eye – he watched the people in the street below with indifference, and he watched his shipmates dancing the pim
ponpet in the tavern below that with real dislike. The pimponpet may be described, according to the most accurate definition current at the time, as ‘a Kind of antic Dance, when three Persons hit one another on the Breech with one of their Feet.’ The three persons were Cozens and the two junior lieutenants of marines from the Wager, and they trundled indefatigably round and round, rising at every fifth note to kick one another, with roars of laughter: round and round they went, cheered by a motley crew of bo’sun’s mates, shiny young gentlemen with curls from the lower parts of the town, and inebriated seamen.
‘You may say what you like,’ he said to Keppel, ‘but at least the Centurion is run as a man-of-war and not an infernal merchantman. You would not believe the airs our gunner gives himself: it is perfectly monstrous that a gunner should be a watch-keeping officer. And then your berth may be pretty crowded – I dare say it is – but it is crowded with tolerably agreeable fellows, I believe; you do not have to put up with a great oaf like that.’ He nodded in the direction of Cozens, still bounding tirelessly about. ‘Nor with a dismal Scotch crow, who is never content unless he is slighted or put-upon.’ Draining his glass and thumping it down in a very ill-humoured way, he asserted that it would have been far better if the Lords of the Admiralty had made up their minds in the first place whether the Wager was to be a store-ship or a man-of-war. ‘She can’t be both,’ said he, ‘for it is against nature, and every man aboard feels it, whether he knows it or not. What is more,’ he added, with the inconsequence of exasperation, ‘the bo’sun is a thorough-paced villain, and our solitary lieutenant is an old woman – a pitiable creature.’
‘What a foaming rage you are in,’ said Keppel, looking at Jack with some wonder. ‘But if you want more lieutenants, you are very welcome to every single one of ours – a parcel of scrubs, I assure you, and not a seaman among them.’ This vile slander was still quivering upon the outraged air when the first lieutenant of the Centurion passed by in the street below, and his keen eye, turning by chance upon Keppel, seemed to pierce his being for evidence of sin. ‘That is to say,’ said Keppel, in a somewhat daunted tone, ‘I am sure you do not have to come down on people so unholy severe, merely on account of a trifling error in steering.’ Keppel, in charge of the Centurion’s cutter, had been distracted by the remarks of a privateer’s boat at the wrong moment, and he had rammed his parent ship with extraordinary violence, which was no way to make the first lieutenant love him.