Morgan’s Run (46 page)
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!