Birds were always present in sometimes great numbers—pintada birds, various petrels, even gulls. As Alexander was not liberal with scraps save when fish guts were tipped out, Richard learned that the presence of lots of birds meant there were schools of fish about, usually too small to bother catching.
He saw his first shark and his first whale on the same day, one of great calm, just a long swell rolling too placidly to break into ruffs of foam. The water was like crystal and he longed to swim in it, wondered if perhaps somewhere along the way Mr. Donovan or some other sailor would teach him to swim. What puzzled him was why they never went over the side, even on days like this, when a man would have no trouble climbing back on board.
Then along it came, this chilling creature. Just why the mere sight of it should freeze him to his marrow he did not understand, for it was beautiful. He saw its fin first, cutting through the water like a knife. The fin stood two feet into the air, heading for a bloody mess of albacore ruins bobbing along their side and in their wake. The thing swam past like a dark shadow and seemed to go on forever; it was, he estimated, twenty-five feet long, as round as a barrel in its mid section but narrowing to a pointed snout in front and terminating in a slender, tapering tail equipped with a forked double fin as rudder. A dull black eye as large as a plate broke the mass of its head, and just as it came up with the fish guts floating in a tangle it turned over on its side to scoop the mess into a vast maw armed with terrible teeth. Its belly flashed white, then the albacore remains were gone; it gulped down every bit it could find, then cruised off into the gentle wake to see if there were more goodies near the ships in Alexander’s rear.
God Jesus! I have heard of whales and I have heard of sharks. I knew that a shark is a big fish, but I never dreamed they came as large as whales. Now that is a thing does not know joy. Its eye said that it has no soul.
The whale erupted into the air perhaps a cable’s length from the ship, so suddenly that only those like Richard fishing from the starboard side saw the mighty creature breach the surface in a shimmering explosion of water. A beaky head, a small eye that sparkled cognizance, a pair of speckled flippers—it just kept coming up and up and up, forty feet of it in ridged, blue-grey glory, its hull as barnacled as any ship’s. When it fell it crashed in clouds of spray and disappeared; a moment’s breathless wait and the magnificent fluked tail towered, poised like a banner, before it smacked with a clap like thunder amid dazzling rainbows of foam. The leviathan of the deep, grander than any ship of the line.
Others appeared, spread all over the sea like an etching he had seen of grazing elephants, spouting fountains of mingled air and water, sailing along majestically or breaching the surface in those gargantuan dances. A mother and child sported around Alexander for a long while; she was terribly scarred as well as barnacled, her calf was flawless. Richard wanted to go down on his knees to thank God for so honoring him, but he couldn’t bear not to watch for as long as the whales remained. Where was
their
fleet going? Like the porpoises and dolphins, the whales were joyous voyagers.
The squalls
began not long after the wind died, and had to be used. They arrived out of a clear sky, the clouds piling up fast, curling dark blue billows tipped with pure white fans, and growling ominously. Then a huge gale descended, the sea turned into a fury, the rain teemed down, lightning flashed, thunder boomed. An hour later saw the sky blue and the ship becalmed again.
A number of convicts and marines were sleeping on deck, though it surprised Richard that more men did not choose to do this. The convicts at any rate were accustomed to sleeping on hard flat boards, yet most elected the stinking prison as soon as darkness fell, which it did at these latitudes with stunning swiftness. There was comfort in a hammock, no matter how stifling the weather, but his fellows—he could only conclude that men feared the elements.
Not Richard, who would find a piece of uncluttered deck out of the way of seamen’s feet and lie watching the fantastic play of lightning in and out of the clouds, waiting to be drenched to the skin, waiting to feel his heart stop with the shock of flash and thunderclap together if the storm drifted overhead. The best of all was the rain. He brought his soap with him and stowed his clothes under the edge of one of the longboats, loving the feel of sudsy lather, knowing the rain would last long enough to rinse it off. He brought anything washable up—the matting, everyone’s clothes, even the blankets in spite of bleating protests that they were shrinking rapidly.
“If it is not screwed or nailed down, Richard, ye take it up and wash it!” said Bill Whiting indignantly. “How can ye stay out in the open? When the ship is struck and we sink, I want to be below to start with.”
“The blankets have shrunk as far as they are going to, Bill, and I do not understand why ye fret so. Everything is dry again in an hour. Ye do not even know that I have taken the stuff, ye’re so busy snoring.”
The fact that Bill had regained his cheek was an indication of how often they were eating fish, an aspect of transportation across the King’s herring pond which Richard had not thought to take into account. The bread was very poor by now, full of grossly wriggling mites he preferred not to see, a reason why most men now ate it with their eyes closed. It had gone softer, apparently a signal for these noisome things to start multiplying. Nothing could live in salt meat, but the pease and oatmeal had their share of livestock. And Richard’s group was running low on malt extract.
“Mr. Donovan,” he said to the fourth mate who was by rights second mate, “when we reach Rio de Janeiro would ye do me a good turn? I would not presume to ask, save that I trust ye and can trust no one else going ashore.”
That was true. Those hours and hours of fishing together had forged a friendship as strong, Richard felt, as any between himself and his men. Stronger, even. Stephen Donovan had both weight and lightness, sensitivity and keen humor, and an uncanny instinct for divining what was going on in Richard’s mind. More a brother than William had ever been, and somehow it had ceased to matter that Donovan did not regard Richard in the light of a brother. At first the convicts, near and far, had had a fine time of it poking fun at Richard because of this odd friendship, and his absences on deck during the night had lent an interesting nuance. To all his tormentors Richard turned a blind eye and a deaf ear, too wise to react defensively, with the result that as time went on everybody settled down to accept the relationship as a simple friendship.
They were fishing on the day that Richard put his request; one of those distracting days when nothing would bite. Donovan was wearing a straw sailor’s hat and so was Richard, who had bought his from the carpenter’s mate, more addicted to rum than the sun.
Donovan made a small sound of pleasure. “I would be delighted to do ye a good turn,” he said.
“We have a little money and there are things we need—soap, malt extract, some sort of old woman’s recipe for nips and stings, oil of tar, new rags, a couple of razors and two pairs of scissors.”
“Keep your money, Richard, to buy your passage home. I will be glad to get what ye want without payment.”
Shoulders hunched into his neck, Richard shook his head. “I cannot accept gifts,” he said emphatically. “I must pay.”
One eyebrow flew up; Donovan grinned. “D’ye think I am after your body? That is hurtful.”
“No, I do not! I cannot accept gifts because I cannot give gifts. It has nothing to do with bodies, damn ye!”
Suddenly Donovan was laughing, a clear sound the sky snatched and hurled away. “Oh, my dialogue is grand! I sound like a young maiden in a lady’s magazine! Nothing is more ridiculous than a Miss Molly in the throes of unrequited love! Take the gift, ’tis meant to ease your lot, not load ye down with obligations. Did ye never notice, Richard? We are friends.”
Richard blinked quickly, smiled. “Aye, I know it very well. Thank you, Mr. Donovan, I will accept your gift.”
“Ye could give me a greater one.”
“What?”
“Call me Stephen.”
“It is not fitting. When I am a free man I will be glad to call ye Stephen. Until then I must keep my place.”
A shark cruised by, as hungry as everyone else on this fishless day. A shovel-nose, not above twelve feet long. In this ocean, a tadpole. It turned, gave them an expressionless stare, went off.
“That thing is evil,” said Richard. “A whale has a knowing twinkle in its eye, so does a porpoise. That thing looks from out of the pits of Hell.”
“Oh, ye’re a true product of Bristol! Did ye never preach?”
“No, but there are preachers in the family. Church of England ones. My father’s cousin is rector of St. James’s, and his father preached in the open air at Crew’s Hole to the Kingswood colliers.”
“A brave man. Did he live through it?”
“Aye. Cousin James was born after it.”
“Are ye never plagued by the flesh, Richard?”
“I was once, with a woman who could open the gates of paradise to any man.
That
was terrible. Going without is a nothing.”
Something tugged at Donovan’s line, and he whooped. “A bite! There is a fish down there!”
There was. The shark had come back and taken the bait. Also the hook, float and sinker. Donovan plucked his hat off, stamped on it and cursed.
Perhaps it
was the weather, sultry, hot, airless; or perhaps Alexander had simply given death a short holiday before the old troubles began afresh. On the 29th of June the convicts began to die again. Surgeon Balmain, who loathed going into the prison because of the smell, was suddenly obliged to spend a great deal of time there. His physics did little, nor did his emetics, nor did his purgatives.
How easily superstitions took hold! Just as the sickness started Alexander ploughed into a solid sea of brilliant cobalt blue, and the unaffected convicts, crowding on deck to see, were immediately convinced that this was the manifestation of a curse. The sea had turned to blue pebbles and everyone was going to die.
“They are nautiluses!” cried Surgeon Balmain, exasperated. “We have encountered a great shoal of nautiluses—Portuguese men o’ war! Bright blue jellyfishy creatures! They are natural, they are not evidence of divine displeasure!
Christ!
” Waving his arms about, he disappeared to despair in the privacy of his cluttered cabin on the quarterdeck.
“Why do they call them Portuguese men o’ war?” asked Joey Long, yielding his place to Richard, whose turn it was to nurse Ike.
“Because Portuguese ships of the line are painted that same shade of blue,” said Richard.
“Not black with yellow trim like ours?”
“If they were painted the same as ours, Joey, how would anybody tell friend from foe? The moment there is powder smoke all about, ’tis very hard to distinguish flags and badges. Now take a turn on deck, there’s a good fellow. Ye spend too much time below.” Richard sat beside Ike, stripped off the shirt and trowsers and began to sponge him down.
“Balmain is an idiot,” Ike croaked.
“Nay, he is simply at his wits’ end. He don’t know what to do for the best.”
“Does anybody? I mean anybody at all, anywhere at all?” Ike had leached away to skin stretched over bones, a collection of sticks wrapped in parchment; his hair had fallen out, his nails had turned white, his tongue was furred, his lips cracked and swollen. Though Richard found the most horrifying talismans of his illness in his nude, shrunken genitals; they looked as if they had been tacked on like an afterthought. Oh, Ike!
“Here, open your mouth. I have to clean your teeth and tongue.” Touch gentle, Richard used a screwed-up corner of rag moistened in filtered water to do what he could to make the highwayman’s day more bearable. Sometimes, he thought as he worked, it is worse to be a big man. If Ike were the size of Jimmy Price, it would all have been over long since. But there was a sizable mountain of flesh there once, and life is tenacious. A very few give up without a protest, but most cling to whatever is left like limpets to a rock.
The smell was worsening and its source was the bilge water. Though he had been a naval surgeon for seven years and had staffed a surveying expedition to the west African coast at the time when the Parliament had still thought of using Africa as a convict dumping ground, Balmain found Alexander a task beyond his abilities. At his insistence wind sails had been installed in the suffocating corners of the prison—useless canvas funnels supposed to deliver a good draft of air through a hole bored in the deck. Captain Sinclair had protested vigorously for such a torpid man, but the surgeon would not back down. Perturbed because Alexander was now nicknamed the Death Ship, Sinclair gave way and ordered Chips to deface his deck. But very little if any fresh air came prisonward, and men continued to come down with fever.