During January they had had to use the emptied night buckets to flush the excrement away down the scuttle drains, which meant they had nothing bigger than a two-quart dipper for all other sorts of washing. Inspecting at Margate and revolted by conditions in the prison, Lieutenant Shairp issued an extra bucket to each cot and also provided mops and scrubbing brushes. That meant a bucket for bodily waste and deck scrubbing and a second for washing clothes and persons.
“But that ain’t going to help the bilges,” said Mikey Dennison. “Bad!” Dring and Robinson from Hull agreed fervently.
While ever there was daylight outside, a few faint rays percolated through the iron grilles which closed off the hatches; at sea, said Lieutenant Shairp, no one would be allowed on deck for any reason. Which meant that in this winter season the 200 men in Alexander’s prison were far longer in utter blackness than in that comforting grey gloom, though sailing helped the monotony. Heeling into a bigger swell as Dover and Folkestone passed, they rounded Dungeness into the English Channel. Richard felt queasy for a day, dry-retched twice, then recovered feeling remarkably well for a man who had eaten naught except hard bread and salt beef for over a month. Bill and Jimmy were the sickest, Will and Neddy only a trifle greener than Richard, while Taffy existed in some kind of Welsh ecstasy because there was still nothing to do, but at least they were
moving.
Ike Rogers grew steadily worse. His lads nursed him devotedly, Joey Long most devotedly of all, but nothing seemed to help the prostrated highwayman find his sea legs.
“Eastbourne just went aft, Brighton is next,” said Davy Evans the marine to Richard as the days wore into their third week at sea.
Convicts started to die on the 12th of February. Not of any familiar disease, but of something bizarre.
It started with a fever, a runny nose and a soreness beneath one ear, then one chop began to swell just as it did when a child caught the mumps; swallowing and breathing were not impaired, but the pain of that aching, tender mass was intense. As the side affected deflated, a worse swelling came up on the other side. By the end of two weeks it too shrank back to normal and the sufferer began to feel better. At which moment his testicles commenced to puff up to four and five times their usual size, with such pain that none of the victims screamed or thrashed about; they lay as still as possible and whimpered as their fevers rose again, higher this time than in the beginning. About a week later some recovered and others died in agony.
Portsmouth at last! The four ships anchored at the Mother Bank on the 22nd of February, a boat trip away from shore. By this time the appalling swelling disease had spread to the marines and one of the sailors was sickening. Whatever it might be, it was not gaol fever, the malignant quinsy, typhoid, scarlet fever or the smallpox; a whisper began that it was the Black Death—hadn’t that produced hideous buboes?
Three of the crew deserted as soon as they could beg a boat ride ashore, and the marines were so terrified that Lieutenant Shairp departed immediately to find his superiors, Major Robert Ross and First Lieutenant John Johnstone of the 39th Company of Marines, based at Plymouth. Three marines were sent to hospital, and more were ailing.
The next day Lieutenant John Johnstone—another Scotchman—boarded in the company of a Portsmouth doctor, who took one look at the victims, withdrew in a hurry with his handkerchief plastered over his nose, sent more marines to hospital, and declared that in his opinion the disease was as malignant as it was incurable. He did not employ the word “plague,” but this omission only served to highlight his private diagnosis. All he could suggest was that fresh meat and fresh vegetables be served to everybody on board at once.
It is like Gloucester Gaol, thought Richard. As soon as that place held more people than it could bear, it produced a disease to cull the flock. So too with Alexander.
“We will stay well if we remain where we are, confine our exercise to deck we have washed, wipe our bowls and dippers out with oil of tar, filter our water and keep taking a spoonful of malt extract. This disease came aboard from Justitia, I am sure of it, which means it is forward.”
That evening they ate hard bread and boiled beef as usual, but the beef was fresh rather than salted, and a pot of cabbage and leeks came with it. They tasted like ambrosia.
After that they were forgotten, as was the order to supply fresh food. No one came near them save for two terrified young marines (Davy Evans and Tommy Green were gone) deputed to feed them salt beef and the inevitable hard bread. The days passed in a dull, brooding silence broken only by the moans of the sick and an occasional terse conversation. February turned into March, and March dragged away while the sick continued to die and were simply left where they lay.
When finally someone opened the forward hatch it was not to remove the bodies; 25 new convicts were thrust into the freezing, filthy air of the prison.
“Fucken Christ!” came the voice of John Power. “What do the fucken buggers think they’re doing? There is sickness down here and they fill us up to overflowing again! Christ, Christ,
Christ!
”
An interesting man, John Power, thought Richard. He rules up forward, the flash boy from the Old Bailey and the London Newgate who usually speaks in plain English. Now he possesses not only the hospital platforms, but a new detachment of inmates. Poor bastard. Alexander had trimmed from 200 down to 185, now there are 210 of us.
By the 13th of March four more men were dead; six corpses lay on the hospital platforms, several of them there for over a week. No one could be persuaded to come down and touch them; by now it was commonly known that the disease was plague.
Not long after dawn on the 13th of March the forward hatch was opened and a party of marines wearing gloves and with scarves muffling their faces took the six bodies away.
“Why?” asked Will Connelly. “Not that I am sorry to see them go, mind. Just—why?”
“I would say that one of the big wigs is coming to visit,” said Richard. “Tidy up, lads, and look bursting with health.”
Major Robert Ross arrived shortly after the bodies had gone, accompanied by Lieutenant John Johnstone, Lieutenant James Shairp and a man who appeared to be a doctor, judging from his manner. A slender, handsome fellow with a long nose, enormous blue eyes and a pretty little curl of fair hair on his broad white brow. They brought lamps and an escort of ten marine privates, who preceded them down the after hatch and filed along larboard and starboard aisles like men being sent to their doom, young enough to be intimidated, old enough to know what sort of specter squatted here.
The chamber filled with a soft golden glow; Richard finally saw the shape of his fate in all its terrible detail. The sick now occupied all 34 berths which sat isolated in the middle section forward of the tables; beyond them, where the foremast went through near the bows, was a bulkhead much narrower than the one astern behind Richard’s cot. The double tier of platforms was continuous all the way around, it contained no break whatsoever. That is how they do it! That is how they have managed to squeeze 210 poor wretches into a space 35 feet at its widest and less than 70 feet from end to end. They have packed us in like bottles on shelving. No wonder we die. Compared to this, Gloucester Gaol was a paradise—at least we got out into the fresh air and could work. Here is only darkness and stench, immobility and madness. I keep prating to my people of survival, but how can we survive this place? Dear God, I despair. I despair.
All three of the marine officers were Scotch, Ross having the broadest burr and Johnstone the least. A dour and sandy man, Ross, slight of build, nondescript of face save for a thin, determined mouth and a pair of cold, pale grey eyes.
First he toured the establishment in a leisurely fashion, commencing on the starboard side. He walked as if participating in a funeral, head going from side to side with clockwork timing, steps slow and deliberate. At the isolation cots he paused, it seemed quite without fear, to examine the sick in company with his medical man, murmuring inaudibly to this attractive fellow, who kept shaking his head emphatically. Major Ross continued around the curve between the isolated platforms and those at the foremast, then began to walk down the larboard aisle toward the stern.
At Dring below and Isaac Rogers above he stopped, looked down at the deck beneath his feet, gestured to one of the privates and directed that the boy should pull out the night buckets, which had been emptied and rinsed out. His eyes rested on Ike, trembling as he lay with his head on Joey Long’s lap.
“This man is sick,” he said to Johnstone rather than to the doctor. “Put him with the others.”
“No, sir,” said Richard instantly, too shocked to think of prudence. “It is not what you think, we have none of that down here. He nearly died from seasickness, that is all.”
An extraordinary look came over the Major’s face, of horror and comprehension combined; he reached up and took Ike’s hand, squeezed it. “I know what ye go through, then,” he said. “Water and dry biscuit, nothing else helps.”
A marine major who got dreadfully seasick!
The eyes traveled then to Richard’s face, to all the faces in those two last upper cots, assimilating the cropped hair, the damp clothing and rags strung on lines between the beams, recently shaven chins, a certain air of pride having nothing to do with defiance. “Ye have kept very clean,” he said, and plucked at the matting. “Aye, very clean.”
No one replied.
Major Ross turned and stepped onto a bench just where the open hatch provided him with a little fresh air. He had not betrayed a sign of disgust at the vapors which swirled through the prison, but he did seem more comfortable on this perch.
“My name,” he announced in a parade-ground voice, “is Major Robert Ross. Commandant of Marines on this expedition, and also Lieutenant-Governor of New South Wales. I am the sole commander of your persons and your lives. Governor Phillip has other concerns. Mine are all ye. This ship is not at all satisfactory—men are dying in her and I intend to find out why. Mr. William Balmain here is surgeon on Alexander and will commence his duties tomorrow. Lieutenant Johnstone is senior marine officer aboard and Lieutenant Shairp is his second-in-command. It seems ye have had few fresh provisions in over two months. That will be rectified while this ship is in port. This deck will be fumigated, which will necessitate the removal of most of ye to other accommodation. Only those seventy-two men in the cots adjacent to the stern bulkhead will remain on board and will be expected to help.”
He gestured to his two lieutenants, who sat down together at the table alongside his booted feet and produced paper, ink and quills out of a writing case Lieutenant Shairp carried. “I will now proceed to take a census,” the Major said. “When I point at a man, he will give me his name and the name of the hulk from which he boarded. You can start.” He pointed at Jimmy Price.
It took a very long time. Major Ross was thorough, but his two scribes were as awkward as they were slow; writing was clearly not a pleasure. Some twenty names into the procedure and Major Ross stepped down to con what his scribes were producing.
“Ye illiterate boobies! What did ye do, buy your commissions? Numskulls! Idiots! Ye could not find a fuck in a bawdy house!”
Phew! thought Richard. He has a shocking temper, and he cares not at all that he has just humiliated his junior officers in front of a parcel of convicts.
Oh, but when the marines departed the darkness was hard to bear! A veil had been lifted to reveal the prison in all its monstrous, festering hideousness, but the golden light had been kind and the sight of so many men hunched in their cots round-eyed as owls had somehow reduced danger to human proportions. With the going of the last lamp, what was left could not be imagined, let alone seen or palpated. The night had come, and despite Major Ross’s promise of fresh food, no one had thought to feed them anything.
In the
morning the move began through the forward hatch; the sick were handled through gloves and scarf masks, those who did the handling insensitive to the screams of agony which shifting them provoked. By noon the only men left in the prison were located in the three double cots on starboard and larboard at the stern bulkhead. A great deal of lamplight had been provided; minus most of the convicts it was easy to see what kind of cesspool two-and-a-half months on board had created. Vomit, feces, overflowing night buckets, filthy decks and platforms.
Then it was their turn to move, but through the after hatch. I do not care, thought Richard, who steals what below; they are welcome to it, for I will not leave one of mine on guard down there alone. Though as long as the rumor of plague is about, our things are probably safe.
Fumigation consisted of exploding gunpowder in every part of Alexander below her upper deck and sealing the hatches fast.
They lay in a calm stretch of water well offshore, which was a fascinating sight: great bastions and fortresses bristling with gigantic guns ringed the place around, for this was England’s naval headquarters and stood looking south past the Isle of Wight to the French coast at Cherbourg, where the ancient, traditional enemy lay watchful. Where or what kind of town was Portsmouth was a mystery beyond the mighty fortifications, some of them older than the time of Henry VIII, some of them still under construction. Was it here that Admiral Kempenfeldt and 1,000 men went down on the Royal George only five years ago? Careened for a leak, the biggest firstrater England had ever built filled up through her thirty-two-pounder portholes and sank in a swirling vortex.