Morgan’s Run (53 page)

Whales abounded. The fascinated convicts spent hours on deck during those first two weeks, trying to count them. The ocean looked as if it had been strewn with boulders spouting fountains, for they were mostly spermaceti whales. A new kind of porpoise appeared, very large and blunt-snouted; some sailors called them “grampuses,” though there was some debate as to what exactly was a grampus. The sharks were so big that they sometimes attacked a small whale, leaping out of the sea to crash with open jaws on the whale’s head, leaving gaping, bleeding craters behind. If they were thresher sharks they also used the long blade uppermost on their tails to cut and slash. On one unforgettable moonlit night, as restless as he was sleepless, Richard saw a titanic battle go on in the midst of the silver sea between a whale and what he swore had to be a giant cuttlefish, its tentacles wrapped around the whale’s body. Then the whale sounded and bore its foe down into the depths. Who knew what might lurk in a realm where leviathans were eighty feet long and sharks close to thirty?

Rumors began
to fly that Governor Phillip intended to split the fleet, take two or three ships and go on ahead as rapidly as he could, leaving the laggards to come on behind. Charlotte and Lady Penrhyn were hopeless, the storeships tended to be slow, and Sirius was a bit of a slug too. The navigators had tried every way they knew to find a favorable wind, including having all vessels stand facing in different directions, with no success.

Two weeks at sea, and they had a little luck at last, found a good fair breeze and surged southeast in company at eight knots an hour. The seas were so enormous, however, that Lady Penrhyn—carrying Phillip’s precious horses—first stood over on her side far enough to dunk the gunwale and the ends of the spars under, then was pooped when a massive wave crashed down on her stern and ran right through the ship. She took on so much water that all hands were put to the pumps and baling buckets. But the horses had not suffered at all, nor had the cattle.

Then the wind swung against once more. Bowing to the inevitable, Governor Phillip decided to separate the fleet. He would remove himself to Supply and take Alexander, Scarborough and Friendship with him, while Captain Hunter on Sirius took command of the seven slower ships. Supply would forge on ahead alone; Lieutenant John Shortland, the naval agent, would board Alexander and command Scarborough and Friendship from her, keeping those three vessels together.

This decision of the Governor’s was not without its critics. Many of the naval, marine and medical officers felt that Phillip should have split the fleet after Rio de Janeiro if he intended to split it at all. A course that was not in Phillip’s nature, thought Richard, overhearing Johnstone and Shairp grizzling because they would now have to share their quarterdeck heaven. Phillip was a mother hen who hated the idea of abandoning any of his chicks. Oh, how he would worry! His segment carried the bulk of the male convicts, who could be put to work at Botany Bay without the chaos of women and children; he estimated that this first segment would make harbor at least two weeks before Hunter’s segment arrived.

Convicts who were known to be gardeners, farmers, carpenters and sawyers (appallingly few) were removed to Scarborough and Supply, though Alexander patently had more room. But no one wanted valuable men put into the Death Ship’s prison. Alexander’s quarterdeck, however, was now overcrowded. Lieutenant Shortland transferred himself and a mountain of gear from Fishburn; Zachariah Clark, the contractor’s agent, was dismissed from Scarborough to Alexander when Major Ross usurped his Scarborough cabin; and Lieutenant James Furzer, the marine quarter-master (an
Irishman,
horrors!), was also shifted to Alexander. William Aston Long naturally refused to give up his bit of the quarterdeck, so—so—!

“I almost died of laughing,” said Donovan to Richard on deck as they watched the longboats ply back and forth. “The two Scotch marines detest the new Irish one, Clark is a very odd fish at the best of times, and Shortland is not pleased at being on the ship he was supposed to be on in the first place. Young Shortland has moved in with Papa, and Balmain is furious because he has had to throw out a lot of his collection of specimens, which clutter up every corner of the great cabin. Mr. Bones and I are delighted to be where we have always been—in the forecastle.”

“Won’t they love it when Wallace decides to yowl at the moon around two on a calm night?”

“That is not the worst. Sophia snores like thunder and has made her nest on Zachariah Clark’s cot, from which he is too afraid of her to move her.”

The parting happened during the morning of the 25th of November in the midst of a calm sea and little wind. Once everybody else had been transferred, Governor Phillip left Sirius in a longboat to the sound of three lusty cheers from every soul left aboard her. He returned the salute and was rowed swiftly to Supply. From what Donovan had said, a grand sailer in light conditions, a wet and wallowing one in foul weather. A brig-rigged sloop which ought to have been a snow.

By half after noon Supply was gone and the three other Racers (as they had been christened), with Alexander in the lead, had also made way. The oddest aspect of the exercise was that the moment Phillip had transferred to Supply, a fine fair wind sprang up and Hunter decided to chase the Racers. So the seven laggards were visible until the morrow, then went hull down over the horizon until the ocean engulfed the tips of their masts. In this sort of weather Supply had no trouble forging ahead; by nightfall she was gone and Alexander, Scarborough and Friendship cruised along abreast of each other just a cable’s length apart—exactly two hundred yards.

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.