Morgan’s Run (39 page)

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* 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.

* The modern imperial liquid measures of pint, quart and gallon are larger than the American, but in the eighteenth century are likely to have been the same as the modern American; leaving the British fold in 1776 meant that the United States of America kept many of the old British ways, probably including measures. Thus Richard’s quarts were likely to have contained 32 fluid ounces, not the modern imperial 40 fluid ounces.

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.”