The Star of the Sea (31 page)

Seven passengers died last night and were committed this morning to the mercies of the deep. Their names have been duly struck off the Manifest.

The queer stench about the vessel continues most over-poweringly and distressingly. Have ordered the boards scrubbed down thrice daily until it diminishes. Leeson reports that an unusual thing is happening in the holds. It seems they have been quite deserted by rats; but a great number of those vermin have been observed scuttling about the decks as though in a state of utmost frenzy. One child of steerage was bitten today and all have been warned not to approach if they see them. Surgeon Mangan is
extremely concerned about the increasing infestation in public areas. I have ordered the laying down of poisons.

Several reports of mysterious cries from about the ship at night; or weeping or ‘yowling’. Doubtless the usual hubbub and racket we shellback Methuselahs of the
Star
know well by now: ‘John Conqueroo’s shanty’: but louder and even more eerie than before, it is said. Apparently the Reverend Deedes was approached by some of the steerage passengers and asked if he would perform a rite of exorcism. He said he felt such a course to be rather unnecessary but conducted a service on the quarterdeck tonight. Very large attendance.

It can only be that we have struck some great sea creature, possibly a very large shark or cetacean, and killed it; portion of the fluids or membrane of same having somehow adhered to the body of the vessel. For the stench is clearly that of some dead and decomposing beast. (Needless to say, King Duffy of Haiti has his own macabre theories but a rational man had rather look to the rational world.)

For some time I have allotted one half an hour of every day for any passenger who wishes to see me – but obviously only on matters of deepest urgency. (Leeson weeds out the wheat from the chaff, a separation most necessary given more pressing demands.) This afternoon a couple from steerage presented themselves at my quarters during that period, and announced that they desired to be married. Speaking no English, they had brought with them Wm. Swales the cripple whom I have mentioned previously, as interceder. And it is a mighty good thing they thought to do so; for otherwise I would have possessed no notion whatsoever of what they were saying in their strange but not entirely unpleasant language. He wished me good afternoon and pronounced it a pleasant coincidence to see me again. And I attempted to greet the young people in their own Gaelic vernacular – ‘Jee-ah gwitch’ – with some success, I am delighted to report, for they nodded back happily and repeated it to me. ‘God be praised this day,’ Swales laughed mildly and we all looked at each other like partners waiting for a dance to start; but it did not, sadly.

Through my ragged pedagogue the young people explained they had heard it reported by many before that a Captain may
perform a marriage at sea. I advised them (again through Swales) that in actuality this is not the position (despite the romantic stuff of ladies’ fiction). Indeed I may discharge no legal ceremony of any kind (with the exception of a funeral or the execution of a prisoner in time of war); and I advised them they must needs wait until we reach New York and there seek a Credential of License from the city authorities. (As Captain Bligh used to put it, ‘a sea-wedding is only legal until the ship returns to port’.) Whatever the fashion in which Swales explained it, they looked most crestfallen to learn it. An approximation of the words he uttered to them is this: ‘Shay dear on budduck knock will bresh beah lefoyle.’
¹

I enquired as to the matter of how long they had known each other. They answered but a fortnight, having met on the ship. (He is of the Blasket Islands, she of the Arans.) I then asked if they had heard of the wise old adage: ‘He who weds in haste shall repent at his leisure’; and they said they had, so Swales attested, but had fallen helplessly in love. The youth is eighteen yrs, the girl a year younger; a dark-headed ‘colleen’ with the comeliest eyes I ever saw. One could conjecture how easily the poor lad must have been set to swooning; she reminded me of my own wife, in fact, at a tender age.

Again I advised that I had no authority to perform such a ceremony and said they must be patient another eleven days; adding that it was not very long to wait, especially for a happy couple who wished to spend all of eternity together. They went away, looking mighty downcast, but Swales requesting to remain behind for a moment.

We shared a little joke about the silliness of youthful ardour. Had I a guinea, I remarked, for every pretty girl I ever wished to wed after two weeks of kissing and boyhood foolery, I should be the richest man in Great Britain now. He gave a mighty laugh and clapped me about the back in a rather familiar way, which I did not
like. And he then said he had hoped to see me on deck over the last few days or nights and had waited for a long time but had not succeeded in seeing me until the fortuitous coincidence arose this morning of the young couple & cetera. I explained that I was rather occupied with matters below, my happy pastime of managing the ship by times interfering with my paid employment as chief barterer of falderols with the passengers, but I hoped we might soon have an agreeable little talk.

Swales said he truly was most anxious to find a position with Lord Kingscourt if possibly he could; and there was not all that long a time remaining of the voyage. His fear, he explained, was that as soon as we arrived at New York, Lord Kingscourt and his family would commence their further travels and he might lose his opportunity.

I said I had mentioned the matter a couple of nights previously but Lord Kingscourt had no need, the family already possessing a maidservant. But he had given me five shillings to give to Swales, with his blessings. This I duly handed to him. But the ingrate did not seem very happy to receive it. When I asked him what the deuce could be the matter now, he replied that he could not eat five shillings, nor even ten thousand. At that I bade him good-day. Many and great are the obligations of captaincy, but to procure employment for presumptuous dolts does not lie among them (as yet).

As he went away (and others came in), Leeson told me that he had been pestering him for several days to come in; announcing he and I to be bosum friends & cetera. I said it were a pity I could not divide myself into replicas, so that every last waffler on the ship could have one of me. Like a worm, Leeson said. (But I think he meant no offence.)

Later, in the evening, whilst taking the readings on the foredeck, I observed the young man who had wished to marry, now tenderly canoodling with a quite different goddess; a pretty little Helen with a halo of golden tresses. So Paris of the Blaskets would appear to have recuperated from whatever disappointment he felt! Yet such are the ways of younger love. Hot as the sirocco when first it blows up; but it cools just as quickly, or alters direction.

Thought he had heer’d speak of Bonaparte; didn’t know what he was; thought he had heer’d of Shakespeare, but didn’t know whether he was alive or dead, and didn’t care. A man with something like that name kept a dolly [a prostitute] and did stunning; but he was such a hard cove that if he was dead it wouldn’t matter. Had seen the Queen but didn’t recollec’ her name just at the minute; Yes, he had ’eered of God, who made the world. Couldn’t exactly recollect when he’d heer’d on him. Had never heer’d of France, but had heer’d of Frenchmen; Had heer’d of Ireland. Didn’t know where it was, but it couldn’t be very far, or such lots wouldn’t come from there to London. Should say they walked it, aye, every bit of the way.

East London street trader to the journalist Henry Mayhew Name unknown

¹
A curious remark. Possibly, according to a number of scholars of Gaelic, including Samuel Ferguson Q.C. of Belfast, ‘
Sé deir an bodach nach bhfuil breis bia le jail
.’ In English: ‘The churl [or old fool] is saying that no extra food is to be had.’ The word ‘
bodach
’ (pronounced ‘buddock’) may be related to ‘
bod
’, a low Irish colloquialism for the male genitalia. The usage is not unknown in Connemara. – GGD.

I
N WHICH THE
R
EADER IS OFFERED, FOR HIS
M
ORAL
E
DUCATION, A
SHOCKING CHRONICLE
OF THE
DESCENT OF
P
IUS
M
ULVEY INTO A
SWAMP
OF
R
UFFIANISM AND
V
ILLAINY; AND OF THE INEVITABLE
C
ONSEQUENCES WHICH MUST ATTEND SUCH A
C
OURSE
.

The night Pius Mulvey walked out of Connemara, a hurricane struck the west coast of Ireland, felling twenty thousand trees in under six hours (according to the London
Times
for the following day). The winds were fearful but the trees did the damage. They blocked the roads and tumbled into rivers; pulverised farmhouses, cottages, churches. The tornado raged up and down the western littoral, from the Skellig Islands off the coast of Kerry in the south to the northernmost tip of County Donegal. Scores of bridges collapsed or were swept away. Two men in Sligo were killed by a landslide, a woman in Clare by lightning. An aristocrat from Cashel, up at New College, Oxford, wrote in an edition of the student newspaper that the country might never look the same again.

Mulvey walked the two hundred miles from his home to the great city of Belfast in the County of Antrim, a journey which took him the best part of a month. He had never set foot in any city before, let alone one as stately and commodious as this. So prosperous, so gracious, so large was Belfast that people sometimes argued about exactly where it was; part of it in Antrim, another part in Down, everyone wanting to claim his piece. The river was so beautiful they wrote songs in its praise: the lovable old Lagan that severed the town in two. The vast granite alcazars which sentried the square seemed as wonders in Mulvey’s eyes, fortresses of marble and imperial columns; the innumerable rows of redstone houses specially
built for the labouring classes no less a matter of jaw-dropping awe. They gave you a house. They gave you
neighbours
. If Connemara was Antarctica, Belfast was Athens. So it seemed to Pius Mulvey. The vast flag of empire on the Town Hall turret was the size of his father’s field back home.

He made his way down to the bustling docklands where he found employment on a labouring gang for a time, widening and deepening the harbour. It was work he liked, uncomplicated and healthy; unlike Connemara farming, you could see the results of it. Your back might be aching by the time you knocked off; your muscles pulped, skin peeling with cold, hands blistered as those of a stigmatised hermit; but at the end of the week you got a fistful of shillings and they seemed a sweet balm to the pain. Food was plentiful and cheap in the city. If you wanted drink it was easily had; not the toxicant poteen of northern Galway, but smooth mellow ales and warming malts.

Nobody in the port cared if you came or went. Mostly they were coming or going themselves. Raised in the practically incestuous closeness of Connemara, Mulvey found the anonymity of the city a bliss. The freedom of conversation with an affable stranger: the chap who was only talking to you to kill a little time. A companion who wanted nothing and offered nothing in return. You might never set eyes on each other again and that meant you could parley without fear of a comeback. Or the freedom to engage in no conversation at all, but at least to be faced with a choice on the matter, which usually you weren’t on a mountainside in Galway. The exquisite silence of the city late at night. To saunter the ways of the sleeping metropolis; to hear your echoed footsteps on black, wet stone; to catch sight of the distant moonlit hills through a gap at the end of a terraced street, before heading back to your dockside hut with a bottle. It seemed to Pius Mulvey the life of a god.