Here’s adieu, sweet lovely Nancy,
Ten thousand times adieu.
I’m a-going round the ocean,
To seek for something new.
Come change your ring with me, dear girl,
Come change your ring with me,
For it might be a token of true love
While I am on the sea . . .
One day after supper when I was on the edge of the crowd listening to Jonathan singing in the fo’c’sle, Tommy the cook’s assistant came looking for me. He pulled at my sleeve to draw me to a quieter corner, beside the black iron carronade that fired the biggest cannonballs of all the ship’s guns. His shiny face was less cheerful than usual.
“Sam,” he said, “we need you help.”
I blinked at him. “Me?”
“You remember catchin’ the rats?” Tommy said.
I grinned. The rats had been my only small triumph in my days as cook’s boy, aside from the chickens—well, in fact because of the chickens. Rats are a major pest on board ship, second to nothing but the maggots and weevils in ship’s bread. When food supplies are loaded into the ship’s hold before a voyage, there are always a few rats inside the bags of vegetables or fruit who have nibbled their way in from the warehouse or some farmer’s barn. And once they are on board, they live down there in the hold with the stores and they eat, and breed. When I was working in the galley, somehow a few of them made their way up to my chicken coops, and began stealing eggs and even chicks. The cook had a cat called Pricker, but she was fat and spoiled and paid the rats no attention. So I had rigged snares, the same kind I had always used on the farm to catch rabbits, and one after another I had caught seven big rats. The cook had been so impressed that he didn’t yell at me for a whole week, and the chickens were left in peace again.
I said to Tommy, “I remember.”
“Well, they back,” Tommy said. “And they big trouble. They ate a whole pan of slush two days back, and Mr. Carroll got so mad at me—”
Now I was close, I could see that one of his eyes was puffy and half shut. I was furious.
“He hit you!”
Tommy looked down. “Well, he was mad. And there wasn’t no rat to hit.” He looked up at me again, through the good eye. “Sam—come set you traps, huh?”
So after supper next day I slipped down to the galley, after cleaning away the spoons and platters and helping stow the mess table. Tommy had found me some wire and I had a spool of yarn from my uncle, and the cook willingly gave me a hunk of cheese—elderly cheese, stinking now as it molded in the Mediterranean heat. But the stink was fine for catching rats. I set snares all over the galley, and next day we found them all full of dead rats—except for one snare with a horrid bloody foot in it, where the desperate rat had gnawed through its own leg to get away.
I did this three days running, with help from Stephen. By the third day I found he was selling dead rats to some of the crew, who carried them off and roasted them for supper.
“Roasted rats?” I said.
Stephen shrugged. “They’re fine fat rats, raised on the ship’s vittles same as us. Fresh meat, Sam. You should skin them, like you used to skin your rabbits. Use those sailmaker needles and thread to make a ratskin jacket. Or a hat to cover your own little rat’s tail.”
He gave my new pigtail a tug, and I punched him, and we rolled around thumping each other and laughing, until Tommy came shushing us because the cook, full of grog, was taking a nap.
But the rats kept coming. They were multiplying in the hold faster than we could catch them. Then they started attacking the chicken coops again, and Mr. Carroll said Mr. Burke the purser was getting worried about the amount of his stores they were gobbling up.
HMS Victory had been at sea for eight months now and the stores needed replenishing anyway. It was spring, and the weather was changing; you could feel warmth in the air, and the seas were less often stormy. We were sailing east, on our endless crisscrossing of the Mediterranean Sea, waiting for the French fleet to put out from Toulon. At supper one night Mr. Hartnell said he had heard we were to put in at the Maddalena islands, off the northern tip of Sardinia, to take on fresh water and meat, and a stock of the onions and lemons that the Admiral had us eat to keep off the scurvy. Two days later, sure enough, we were anchoring off the rock-edged harbor of a green island, with a great scurrying aloft as the men lowered sail, and a great treading of feet round the capstan as we dropped anchor. There was no talking or shouting at times like that: only the shrilling of the bosun’s calls, the shouted orders that went between them, and the creaking and rattling of rigging and chain and sails.
Then names were called for three crews of men to go ashore in the boats to pick up supplies, and to my astonishment I was among them.
“You’re so lucky!” Stephen whined. “Why you? It’s not fair!”
William Pope said, “I’ll tell you why. He’s young and he’s strong and they know he won’t run away, because of his uncle. And because he’s an enlisted man—if he deserted, he could hang.”
I’d had no thought of deserting, but hearing this certainly encouraged me to banish the thought if it ever came into my head.
William gave me his shoes to wear that day, though I was used to going barefoot. “Those rocks will be sharp,” he said. “And wear your jacket in case the weather turns dirty.”
“Yes, mother,” I said.
William said, “And bring back my shoes or I’ll beat you silly.”
I was put in the same boat as one of the quartermasters, Arthur Lessimore, a big, grizzled fellow who was a friend of my uncle’s. He put me beside him because he had a mind to teach me to row. The oar was far too heavy for me to move on my own, but I did learn the motions. And it was a good thing he was beside me when we climbed up onto the rough stone jetty in the harbor, because to my surprise I had a hard time keeping my balance. I wobbled about and clutched at Lessimore’s arm, and he laughed at me.
“Have to get your land legs back, Sam. Me too. It’s a long time since we walked on something that didn’t move.”
Maybe that was when I began to realize that I was truly becoming a sailor.
Once we were in the scrubby little town, where everyone on the island seemed to be jabbering away at us in Italian with something to sell, I found that Lessimore was in charge of buying live poultry, and that I was there to help him. The chicken boy again. I was soon busy tying hens together in bunches by their legs, with yarn looped so as not to hurt them. Most of them came out of the cart of a skinny old fellow with a red scarf tied round his head, who spoke no English. His face was as lined as a raisin, and he had very few teeth. Lessimore had just enough words of Italian to be able to speak to him, and I discovered that the Italian word for chicken was pollo.
Two little dogs were scuttling round under the wheels of the old man’s cart, runty creatures with no tails, dirty white and as skinny as he was. They never made a sound, though they bared their teeth at any other dog that came near them. They didn’t bother me but they were always under my feet—I had to kick at them to get past. But then a wagon stopped beside us to unload sacks of vegetables for the ship, and both dogs dived underneath it and disappeared for a long time. The poultryman didn’t call them; he paid no attention. After a while I noticed that they were back, and that one of them was carrying a dead rat in its mouth.
This got me to thinking.
“Mr. Lessimore,” I said, “look at that!”
Lessimore was sweating like a pig from helping load sacks into the boat. That was ordinary seamen’s work, but he was a good-hearted fellow and just wanted the job done. He straightened up and looked at the dog.
“Ugliest creature I ever saw,” he said.
“But it’s a ratter. And we have a swarm of rats on board.”
“We have cats for that, Sam,” said Lessimore wearily, so I decided to keep my ideas to myself.
“What’s the Italian for dog?” I said.
“Cannay,” said Lessimore. “
Let’s have those chickens, smart now.”
But I had sixpence in my pocket from our rat sales, and a piece of ship’s bread that William had given me, and there was something I wanted to do with them. It was only when we were back in the ship’s boat, pulling toward Victory, that Arthur Lessimore realized what I was holding under my coat. The ugly little dog was cuddled up against me quiet as could be, partly because it was hoping for more bread and partly out of astonishment at finding itself cuddled by anyone in the world.
“Are you mad, boy?” said the quartermaster. “Over the side with it, this minute!”
I knew he had a soft spot for me though, so I tried to sound as young and trusting as I could. “Oh please sir, let me keep it. Just to give it a try against the rats. Surely Mr. Burke would be much obliged if we could save his stores.”
Walter Burke, the purser, was not the most popular man in the ship because pursers were famous for watering the wine and giving short weight—but his gratitude could be a valuable thing.
Arthur Lessimore gave a snort; I wasn’t sure whether it was agreement or laughter. “Keep your jacket closed,” he said.
And the dog must have understood the value of not being seen or heard, because he was still and quiet as a mouse all the way over the side of the ship and down into the hold. That was where Tommy and Stephen and I took him. Then I let him go. We stood there, watching. He nosed about for a bit, and then he slipped gently behind a barrel—and there was a rattling flurry of movement back there, and a high screech, and out came my Cannay, dragging a rat almost as big as himself.
He did this five times in succession, and then we took him and the rats up to the galley and showed them to the cook.
“I’ll be damned,” said Charles Carroll, and he went to the steep tub where the salt port was soaking, hooked out a lump of it, set it on a chopping board and hacked off a piece the size of his fist. He dropped the pork back into the tub and gave the piece to Cannay, who was watching him, quivering. I can’t think of anything nastier than raw fatty salt pork—it was terrible even after it was cooked—but the little dog wolfed it down, looked up at us and, having no tail, wagged his rear end.
The cook’s fat tabby cat Pricker came sidling round into the galley and saw Cannay. Her tail went straight up in the air and she hissed at him.
“Best hold your tongue, cat,” said the cook. “And take lessons from this little bugger.”
And so an ugly little Sardinian dog came to live on board HMS Victory for a while, to join the pigs and goats and sheep, chickens and ducks and cats—and the green parrot belonging to the topman Richard Bacon, which could make a noise like a drumroll, squawk out “Splice the mainbrace!” and sing a shanty that would have made the chaplain have a fit. Cannay spent a lot of his time in the hold, and I spent a lot of my time cleaning up after him, but the rat population shrank to a much lower level. Even the cat Pricker, inspired or jealous, began catching a few.
Our income from dead rats went down, but it was worth it to be rid of the certain sight of those pairs of red eyes gleaming out from the dark corners of the hold. Cannay was wonderful. And I think the Navy gave him the best time of his life.
Though I was working some of the time with Mr. Smith and the sailmakers, I was not in the end written down as his apprentice, because it turned out that my hands weren’t big enough to handle the needles and leather palms that have to be used in working with canvas. I could only sew lighter stuff. I was just too young for proper sailmaking—even though I had already grown out of the clothes issued to me when I first joined the ship. Lieutenant Quilliam had stopped in front of me at one Sunday morning inspection and poked his cane at my shirtsleeves, which now ended halfway up my forearms.
“Sam Robbins,” he said, “you look like something out of the poorhouse. Go to the purser for a new set of slops—I will write you a permission.”
“Aye aye, sir,” I said reluctantly—for the clothes you were issued by the purser would be charged against your pay, on that distant day when the ship came back to port and its crew was paid off. So for a while I looked very smart with new blue trousers and two new striped shirts, though they needed a lot of washing because I was still looking after the poultry when Mr. Smith had no need of me. We no longer had to muck out the pigs, though; they had all been eaten.
Autumn came again, and more storms with it, and one tossing day Colin Turner fell down a hatchway and broke his arm. It was bound to a piece of wood and he was back about again within a week, but the surgeon forbade him to use the arm—and that was a piece of luck for me, because Colin was powder monkey to the number six gun on the lower gundeck, and they put me there in his place. I was delighted. Now I really felt I belonged to the ship.
We lived our whole lives with and around guns, on the Victory. She bristled with cannon, those three decks of them, with the biggest guns down on the lowest of the three. Two decks below that, under the waterline and safe from cannonshot, was the grand magazine where all the powder and shot was kept. You couldn’t get anywhere near the magazine without permission, and there were guards to keep everyone away; one accidental spark there, and the whole ship could blow up. Even a rat gnawing through a gunpowder bag and leaving a little explosive trail could be a disaster, so the magazine walls were lined with copper to keep the rats out.
When the drum beat to quarters—calling us to battle stations—everyone on the ship had his own precise duties. We had seen no real action on Victory since the day I came aboard, but gunnery practice was endless; the Admiral wanted us ready. The men knew he was sick to death of waiting for the French Navy to come out of Toulon harbor and fight—but when they did come, he was bound and determined to win.
Up to now my job had been to run to the galley at the call of the drum, to help Mr. Carroll and Tommy put out the cooking fires, and then to stay there, after filling buckets with fresh water to be set beside each gun during the action for the men to drink. Other people would be filling tubs with salt water pumped from the sea, to put out fires, wetting down the sails, scattering wet sand on the decks. The whole ship was stripped for action in a sort of whirlwind, mess tables and officers’ furniture whisked out of the way, the cannons released and run out, and all the gunners’ supplies put in place. Most of the men stripped to the waist too, and tied scarves round their ears to keep out at least a bit of the tremendous roar of the guns.
Before my first practice, Jonathan, who was part of the number six gun crew, told me I should strip too now that I was part of active duty.
“Your shirt gets in the way,” he said. “And the surgeon’s happier without it.”
“The surgeon?”
“If you take a musket ball in the chest, a piece of your shirt likely goes in with it. The surgeon may cut the ball out, but if he don’t see that bit of cloth, the wound goes bad and you die.”
“Oh,” I said shakily, and ever afterward whipped off my shirt the moment the drums began beating out Hearts of Oak for quarters.
Down on the lower gundeck there were thirty great black cannon, each firing a thirty-two-pound ball that could smash a huge hole in the side of an enemy ship, or knock down a mast with a direct hit. It took fourteen men to load and fire each gun, and my job was to keep them supplied with the gunpowder that fired the shot. Behind each cannonball they loaded a cartridge, a flannel cylinder as long as my forearm, packed tight with gunpowder.
Jonathan handed me a long wooden box. “This is your cartridge case,” he said. “Your salt box, they call it. You carry the cartridge in there at all times—otherwise, a spark hits it and it blows up and takes you with it.”
I was listening very hard, half excited, half scared.
“I am the powderman of the crew,” he said. “I stand here by the breech, I give you the empty case, you run like the clappers down through the hatchway to the orlop deck. Each hatchway has wetted blankets hanging, against sparks. Dick Bacon is the next man in our line, he’ll be waiting for you there with a new cartridge from the magazine, in
its case. You swap cases and you run back here with the new one and give it to me. Got that?”
“Aye aye, sir,” I said.
“I give you the empty case, you run again—the gun is loaded, it fires, and if the recoil caught you it would smash you to bits, but by then you are running back for the next cartridge—and so it goes. Understand?”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“And wear shoes. A powder monkey with a broken toe is no use to anyone.”
“Thank you, Jonathan.”
But I wasn’t prepared for the crashing thunderous reality of gunnery practice, the stinking black smoke filling the decks and hatchways, the flurry of boys and men running to and fro for cartridges and shot, the murderous backward leap of the recoiling guns. At every practice there was some sort of accident, a limb broken by a jumping gun, a terrible burn from powder exploding. And this wasn’t even real action.
The gun crews loved gunnery practice though, and before long so did I. Each crew competed with the next, for speed and accuracy, and the officers watched us like hawks and toured the gundecks, cursing and threatening us and urging us on. I ran and jumped and dodged, I wanted to be the quickest powder monkey on the ship.
Once I came skidding up to my gun with a full cartridge case just at the moment when the bosun’s pipe shrilled for a cease-fire, and the shouts rang out “Belay there!”—and I found myself facing gold braid and blue jackets as I cannoned full into two officers. I was so full of excitement that I was still laughing with delight, even as I raised my head and looked up into the strong stern face of Captain Hardy.
I stood frozen, clutching my salt box, but before the captain could say a word there was a laugh from the smaller man beside him, and a voice, soft and rather light, with a faint country accent:
“That’s the face of my fleet, Hardy, look at the joy in it! What’s your name, boy?”
I looked at the pale face and the pinned empty sleeve and I knew it was Vice-Admiral Nelson. And he was smiling at me.
I touched my fingers to my forehead in a panic, and my voice came out in a squeak. “Sam Robbins, Your Honor.”