The Unknown Shore (10 page)

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Tobias, just behind Jack, ‘but can you tell me where the midshipmen are to be found?’

‘No,’ said Jack, speaking with the harsh pipe of a very aged man; ‘there ain’t none left, your honour, in consequence of salt being sprinkled on their victuals, whereupon they died in terrible agony.’

‘Jack,’ cried Tobias, with unfeigned relief, ‘I could not find my way to the top floor.’

‘In my opinion,’ said Jack, ‘you would get lost in an open boat.’

‘I was trying to get back to the place where I last saw you,’ said Tobias.

‘What made you think that I would be crawling about the hold?’ asked Jack; and when he thought of the hideous lingering end that might have come about he grew angry and said, ‘Don’t you know that this part of the hold is going to be sealed? What do you think would have happened to you? You would have been starved, and the rats would have eaten you.’

The quartermaster was also extremely vexed at having taken him for the ghost of his deceased wife’s sister, and he wanted to know whether Mr Barrow knew the difference between up and down – a difference clear to quite unintelligent people. They both set about him: they repeatedly asked him what he thought he was doing in the
hold
– his being in the
hold
particularly exasperated them, and his inability to explain how he got there. ‘Why not the forepeak? Or the bread-room? There would be some sense in that.’

When they had badgered him enough, both being impressed by the enormity of what might have happened, they undertook to explain what he should have done.

‘You come out of the cockpit,’ said Jack.

‘Or orlop, as you might say,’ added Rose.

‘And there’s the whole length of the gun-deck before you.’

‘No, Jack,’ said Tobias, ‘I assure you there was not a gun there.’

‘Bah,’ said Jack impatiently. ‘Of course not. You don’t expect guns on the gun-deck of a
one-decker,
do you?’

Tobias admitted that he had thought it rather likely – that he could not otherwise see the value of the name.

‘Guns on the gun-deck,’ said the quartermaster, with intense relish. ‘He looked for to find ‘em there; hor, hor.’

‘We only
call
it the gun-deck,’ explained Jack. ‘The guns are all on the upper-deck and quarter-deck, which is natural in a one-decker. The
Wager
is a one-decker, Toby.’

‘But there are at least four storeys, or decks, as you say in your jargon,’ cried Tobias, with some indignation.

‘Ah,’ replied Jack at once, ‘we only
call
her a one-decker, you see.’

‘Guns on the gun-deck; heu, heu, heu,’ said the quartermaster to himself. ‘Rich. Very rich, heu, heu, heu.’

‘Now you come out of the cockpit,’ Jack began again.

‘No, Mr Byron, sir,’ interposed the quartermaster, ‘you might as well save your breath. There are minds that reason cannot reach, no, nor kind words persuade: they have to be drove – took by the hand and shown each halliard and brace or deck, as the case may be. And,’ he added, with a recollection of beating the bounds of the parish in his long-distant childhood, ‘it is best to whip them right severely when you are a-doing of it. And some there are,’ he concluded, ‘who can never be brought to understand what you tell them, not if it is ever so.’

It is very clear that Tobias belonged in this last hopeless category, and that he would go on looking for guns on the gun-deck out of mere ill-will and brutish stupidity to the end of his days. And as they ascended through the body of the ship, with occasional glimpses of the light of day through various gratings and ports, Tobias was inclined to agree with this harsh estimate of his abilities. It seemed to him that he would never be able to make out this maze of ladders, dank recesses and unlit passages.

Yet what will not custom do? Or, as one might say, how prepotent is not habitude? Long before the squadron sailed, Tobias knew his way perfectly well, and when, after they had spent forty days at sea, he heard the cry of ‘Land ho, on the starboard bow,’ he darted below for a telescope; not finding it in their cabin, he recollected that he had taken it down to the cockpit to clean the lenses with spirits of wine, and he ran down there and back without the slightest conscious thought – his feet found their own way, counted the steps from the quarter-deck to the upper-deck and from the upper-deck to the gun-deck – they brought him to and from with automatic ease, although the
Wager was
rolling with her usual heavy skittishness.

It was only a little more than a month, but already it seemed natural to him that the deck should perpetually move under his feet, that he should be sick if it moved more than a certain amount, and that he should begin his day at one bell in the forenoon watch, stationed abaft the foremast, while the loblolly-boy beat with a pestle upon a brass mortar and cried

‘Pills

For all ills.’

In these forty days he had grown accustomed to the ordered routine that underlay the apparently chaotic running about and
noise of the ship’s work. He was no longer amazed that Jack should appear at all hours of the day or night, coming or going, according to his watch, or that he himself should be precipitated from his bed, now and then, in lively weather. And such is the force of custom that both he and his stomach accepted salt pork on Monday, salt beef on Tuesday, dried peas on Wednesday, salt pork on Thursday, dried peas on Friday, salt beef on Saturday, salt pork on Sunday, and so on in a sequence varied only by their private stores – a not inconsiderable variation, however, for their sailing had been so delayed that Jack’s grandfather had had time to come down and see him, as well as two uncles and a cousin, all of whom had been pretty liberal in the way of presents; these presents had mostly been converted into food and drink (a very prudent measure), and although they had made great inroads, there still remained a coop of hens in the gangway, a contemplative pig below, and in their cabin, besieged by rats, a whole Cheshire cheese, the better part of an enormous keeping cake from Medenham, and some strong, flat, greyish objects of surprising weight, baked by Georgiana’s maiden hand and decorated with calcined raisins, lovingly arranged in the form of conventional trees.

It was forty days since they had at last set sail from St Helen’s, after several ignominious false starts; and for Jack at least they had been forty very full days. The
Wager,
like all the other ships in the squadron, was undermanned; not only was she undermanned, but a great many of the crew were landsmen, and they had to be taught their duty – unwilling, seasick and frightened pupils, many of them, and some uncommonly brutal in their stupidity and resentment. This would have made her voyage troublesome in any case, but as it fell out, foul weather had met them on almost every single day since the signal for their departure had broken out from the
Centurion’s
mizzen, and this had made it exceedingly laborious and exasperating. The passage to Madeira might, with a fair wind, have taken no more than twelve days or a fortnight of easy sailing; but it had taken forty, and everybody aboard was thoroughly displeased – apart from anything else, it was generally understood that if they did not reach the high southern latitudes before January, they would have missed the only good season for sailing round the Horn.

These forty days had been hard and frustrating: Captain Kidd,
Mr Bean, his lieutenant, and Mr Clerk, the master, were good-tempered men, but the effort of driving this new crew, and of keeping exactly to their allotted station in spite of every difficulty, had worn them to a pitch of hard ferocity that would have surprised their friends at home. But it was wonderful to see how this cloud of depression lifted from off the ship at the cry of land: it was just at two bells in the morning watch, at five o’clock in the first grey of the dawn, when one can see farthest – and although this is ordinarily a time when even the hardened mariner is feeling a little jaded, within a minute of the look-out’s cry the decks were alive with the watch below, all looking as bright and pleased as the watch on duty.

Tobias was up already, although he belonged to neither watch and could have lain abed until the noise of breakfast. He grudged every waking hour that kept him from watching the sea or the sky, and at the time land was seen he was in the act of trailing a jelly-bag along the surface from the larboard cathead in the hope of catching some of the very small pedunculated cirripedes that he had found, the day before, in the stomach of a dissected procellaria. At the cry he abandoned the pedunculated cirripedes, fetched his telescope, and climbed laboriously into the foretop, where he knew he would find Jack: this was nominally Jack’s watch below, but Tobias did not now have to be told that it was only
called
below, and that in fact Jack would station himself in one of the highest convenient parts of the ship.

It was doubly certain that Jack would be up there today, for it was for this particular morning that he had foretold the landfall. He prided himself on his skill in navigation – an art, rather than a science, for at that time one of the most important factors in finding your longitude at sea was your own personal judgment of the ship’s way – and he had been rather more public and confident in his prophecy than was altogether wise: he had stationed himself in the foretop very early that day, willing Madeira to rise above the south-western horizon with all the power available to him.

‘There you are, Toby,’ he cried, hearing a familiar snorting on the shrouds. ‘Have a care, now,’ he said, leaning over the edge, as anxious as a hen. Toby was a wretched topman; he climbed stiffly, with pale determination, munching as he came, and he took no notice whatever of Jack’s agitated warnings to take care, to mount
one ratline at a time, to hold the shrouds, to wait for the roll. He had early discovered that height terrified him, and every day, seasick or not, he had, with rigid obstinacy, crept painfully up to the foretop, there to exult in silent triumph, with the view of the whole squadron before him if the foresail happened not to be set (the
Wager
came last in the line) or the great expanse of sea to the windward if it were – a sea that might at any moment disclose a whale in its bosom, or a wide-ranging sea-bird upon its surface. Jack lived in terror of the day when Tobias should decide that the top was not enough, and he threw out many hints to the effect that an ascent of the topmast would be gross folly, and an attempt upon the topgallant masthead criminal ostentation; but he doubted their utility – even now he had another example of his friend’s odd kind of courage, for Tobias’ head came through the lubber’s hole, followed by the rest of his person and the telescope. The lubber’s hole is a square space cut in the broad platform that forms the top; it is conveniently situated there, at the head of the shrouds of the lower mast, so that anyone who wishes to go up into the top may do so with comparative ease and safety: but, of course, it is never used. An old lady visiting the ship might possibly go through it, or an admiral with a reputation so well established that he could afford any eccentricity; but everybody else reaches the top by the futtock-shrouds, an uncomfortable assemblage of ropes that run from near the masthead below out to the edge of the top, so that a man climbing them must of necessity hang backwards.

‘Why do you not use the futtock-shrouds?’ Cozens had asked, winking round the table in the midshipmen’s berth, after the first time that Tobias had been seen to go aloft.

‘It would frighten me too much,’ Tobias replied, adding with the utmost candour, ‘I am of a very timid disposition: I am far from being so brave and fearless as you.’ This last had quite dumb-founded Cozens, who had not been at all sure how to take it, and who had finished by laughing in an uncertain and particularly vacant manner.

So every day Tobias came up through the gate of ignominy: and on this day, the twenty-fifth of October, 1740, according to the old, or Julian, style of reckoning, he had the infinite gratification of seeing a remote, dark lowering on the rim of the sky, which was Madeira, the first milestone on their great journey to lands and seas unknown.

T
HE CHARMING TOWN
of Funchal was unusually animated, for not only were there a good many privateersmen and the crews of two East India Company’s ships ashore, but also every one of the fifteen hundred seamen and five hundred soldiers of Commodore Anson’s squadron who could get leave.

Jack was one of these: he sat now on the terrace of a wine-shop, sheltered from the brilliant sun by a vine, sipping a glass of the best Madeira and surveying the bay, with the men-of-war and the merchant ships and the boats that plied to and fro. There was music behind him and on either side, while before him, in the open courtyard of a tavern at a lower level, there was music again, and dancing. The scene was one of universal gaiety; yet Jack looked upon it with a dark and bilious eye – he watched the people in the street below with indifference, and he watched his shipmates dancing the pimponpet in the tavern below that with real dislike. The pimponpet may be described, according to the most accurate definition current at the time, as ‘a Kind of antic Dance, when three Persons hit one another on the Breech with one of their Feet.’ The three persons were Cozens and the two junior lieutenants of marines from the
Wager,
and they trundled indefatigably round and round, rising at every fifth note to kick one another, with roars of laughter: round and round they went, cheered by a motley crew of bo’sun’s mates, shiny young gentlemen with curls from the lower parts of the town, and inebriated seamen.

‘You may say what you like,’ he said to Keppel, ‘but at least the
Centurion
is run as a man-of-war and not an infernal merchantman. You would not believe the airs our gunner gives himself: it is perfectly monstrous that a gunner should be a watch-keeping officer. And then your berth may be pretty crowded – I dare say it is – but it is crowded with tolerably agreeable fellows, I believe; you do not have
to put up with a great oaf like that.’ He nodded in the direction of Cozens, still bounding tirelessly about. ‘Nor with a dismal Scotch crow, who is never content unless he is slighted or put-upon.’ Draining his glass and thumping it down in a very ill-humoured way, he asserted that it would have been far better if the Lords of the Admiralty had made up their minds in the first place whether the
Wager
was to be a store-ship or a man-of-war. ‘She can’t be both,’ said he, ‘for it is against nature, and every man aboard feels it, whether he knows it or not. What is more,’ he added, with the inconsequence of exasperation, ‘the bo’sun is a thorough-paced villain, and our solitary lieutenant is an old woman – a pitiable creature.’

‘What a foaming rage you are in,’ said Keppel, looking at Jack with some wonder. ‘But if you want more lieutenants, you are very welcome to every single one of ours – a parcel of scrubs, I assure you, and not a seaman among them.’ This vile slander was still quivering upon the outraged air when the first lieutenant of the
Centurion
passed by in the street below, and his keen eye, turning by chance upon Keppel, seemed to pierce his being for evidence of sin. ‘That is to say,’ said Keppel, in a somewhat daunted tone, ‘I am sure you do not have to come down on people so unholy severe, merely on account of a trifling error in steering.’ Keppel, in charge of the
Centurion’s
cutter, had been distracted by the remarks of a privateer’s boat at the wrong moment, and he had rammed his parent ship with extraordinary violence, which was no way to make the first lieutenant love him.

Jack was about to reply when the sound of Cozens’ laugh interrupted him, a braying noise that echoed far and wide. ‘Bah,’ cried Jack, ‘that flaming ape has begun again.’ Cozens had worn out the two redcoats, and he was circling with Morris, the thin midshipman, now much attached to him, and the shiniest of all the locals.

‘You are in a bad way – quite hipped,’ said Keppel. ‘I think you ought not to drink any more of that stuff until we have had something to eat.’

Jack very deliberately filled his glass, and looking Keppel firmly in the eye he drank it down. He would not for the world have admitted that he was either hipped or in a bad way, but in fact he was both. To begin with, he was far too hot: secondly, he had wandered about all the forenoon, and although he had very much
enjoyed showing Tobias sugar-cane and custard apples and bananas growing, thirty-six varieties of horse-flies, leeches and mosquitoes had bitten him; he was itching all over, and he was tired out. Thirdly, he had appointed with his friends to meet at this place for dinner, and he had now been waiting for more than an hour, intolerably hungry. Lastly, he had spent his time drinking sweet Madeira; it is a delightful wine to drink in small quantities, with cake, but drunk by the pint upon an empty stomach it has the most dismal effects.

So what with fatigue, sticky heat, irritation, faintness from want of food, unbearable itch and nausea, Jack was indeed in a bad way: it was this that led him to speak so venomously of his shipmates, for in general he never did – in general he was a very tolerant person, uncensorious and easily amused – by no means a backbiter. He felt a little uneasy, even now, and he said, ‘I do not mean Cozens is a bad-hearted fellow. Not at all. Only he has such a flow of animal spirits that he is obliged to make a vast brutish noise all day and night – practical jokes every day of the week – and the least drop of brandy or rum goes straight to his head, and then we have a scene. But he means no harm, and the men love him.’

‘There they are,’ cried Keppel, pointing through the crowd of Portuguese, Lascars, Barbary Moors, Negroes and English seamen to where Ransome and Tobias came down the hill, riding in an ox-drawn sledge, the usual conveyance of those parts.

‘At last,’ said Jack angrily. ‘Damn their impertinence: two hours late. This will need a great deal of explanation.’ He was prepared to be offended and disagreeable, but as they came nearer, grinning all over their faces, loaded with the animal, vegetable and mineral productions of Madeira and looking thoroughly delighted, he found that his surliness vanished of itself, and he was unable to do more than curse their vitals with his ordinary benignity.

He and Keppel instantly began ordering dinner: they added O to any vaguely French or Latin word they happened to remember, and shouted very loud and clear in imperfect English when the foreign words ran out.

‘You bring um soupo et pano first,’ explained Keppel, ‘then pisces fresco – you got um, pisces fresco? And vino blanco: not sweet, seco.’

‘Me no want vino,’ said Jack. ‘Vino for the other senhores, comprenny?’

‘And then carno, viando. Not goat. No capricorno.’

‘Oh no,’ put in Ransome, looking sharp and attentive, ‘no capricorno.’

The ordering took a long, long time, but eventually their meal arrived, capricorno or not, and they ate it with immense zeal. Food always had a mellowing effect on Jack: by the end of the first dish it could scarcely be detected that he had ever been out of humour; by the end of the seventh he was restored to all his usual complaisance, and beamed greasily upon the assembled company.

‘What is meant by the owner of a vessel?’ asked Toby, suddenly speaking for the first time.

‘The captain,’ they replied.

‘Are you making game of me?’ he asked, looking at them very narrowly. His trusting nature had been much imposed upon, and with advancing age he was growing wary and suspicious.

‘No, no; I assure you that it is so,’ said Keppel. ‘We call him the owner, although the ship is the King’s. Ain’t it so, Ransome?’

‘Yes, cully,’ said Ransome reassuringly. ‘It’s a kind of joke. Hor, hor.’

‘It is a joke, Toby: he is only
called
the owner for a joke,’ said Jack. ‘But what about it?’

‘Well, the owner of the
Gloucester
is going home. He has a very obstinate marasmus.’

‘How do you know?’

Toby was surprised to find his news received with such attention; he told them that Mr Eliot and the other surgeons had been called in that morning and that their unanimous verdict was that Captain Norris must return to a northern climate at once; he assured them that a recovery was probable, and he would have explained the nature of the disease, supposing that to be the reason for their interest. He had yet to learn that the strongest passion in a naval bosom is concerned with promotion, and that although none of his hearers yet had his commission they were all thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the service, and regarded the sweeping-off of a post-captain with the same ghoulish delight as if they had been lieutenants and therefore in line for an upward step. Besides, the question had an immediate bearing for Jack and Tobias, in that their captain would certainly be changed.

‘Mitchel will have the
Gloucester,’
said Keppel, who was a walking compendium of naval seniority, ‘and Mr Kidd will go to the
Pearl.’

‘Yes. You’ll lose your captain, cock,’ said Ransome.

‘I had not thought of that,’ said Tobias. ‘I am concerned to hear it.’

Captain Dandy Kidd was an old friend of Mr Eliot’s; they had been shipmates in many commissions, and, as Mr Eliot had often told his mate, the lot of the surgeon aboard the
Wager
was unusually agreeable for this reason – nowhere else would they have such liberty for philosophical experiment, nor such facilities.

‘It will be Captain Murray for us,’ said Jack sombrely, and in a low tone he added, ‘They say the
Tryall
is not a happy ship.’

‘He’s all right,’ said Keppel. ‘It is his first lieutenant that is so disagreeable.’

‘A proper – he is,’ said Ransome. ‘I served along of him in the
Royal Oak.
A wery spiteful cove, as loved to see a man flogged: there was a landsman, name of Murdoch – Stanley Murdoch – that we had pressed out of a Scotch smack from Leith for London: he was a passenger in it. He did not like being pressed, and he said something disrespectful. “Oh,” says the lieutenant, “do you presume to say that to me? I’ll serve you out,” says he, “you fat dog.” This poor Murdoch was heavy; not paunchy, but thick, and he wheezed something cruel when made to run or go aloft – asthma. It was “Murdoch, lie aloft,” every day; and as he always kept a flogging for the last man off the yard, it was Murdoch copped it every morning. One day the poor soul tried to jump for the main topgallant backstay, to be down sooner, for he was rendered desperate, you understand; but being a landsman, he missed it.’

‘Poor wretched Tryalls,’ said Keppel, ‘they will have to make the best they can of it, for he’s the senior lieutenant, and must succeed. An’t he the senior lieutenant in the squadron, Ransome?’

‘Who?’ asked Ransome, who had stepped away to stare better into the harbour.

‘Cheap.’

‘I dare say he is,’ said Ransome, considering. ‘He was made master and commander when they took the Salee rover with the boats, in thirty-six; so I dare say he is. God help his crew, when he comes to be captain.’

‘Did you say Cheap?’ asked Tobias. 

‘Yes.’

‘A squat, thick-bodied, yellow-faced man with a cast in his eye? Speaks with a rude northern accent?’

‘Yes. He is from Scotland, and he is no beauty.’

‘Toby,’ cried Jack, ‘what have you been doing?’

‘I only begged him to hold my serpent while I stepped into the boat: I spoke very civilly – bowed, desired him to excuse the freedom, and would he hold my serpent while I stepped into the boat? He replied with a very cynical degree of asperity, damning my eyes, damning my blood and liver, no he would not hold my serpent and who did I think he was? I told him, an ill-looking fellow, that had yet to be taught the usages of civilised society.’

‘Oh dear me,’ said Keppel, in the middle of an appalled silence.

‘What happened then?’ asked Jack.

‘Nothing. The boat rowed away. But I called out after him that he need not have been so afraid – the serpent was comatose, and in any case it was a coluber. He called back in a great passion; he mentioned his name and said he would remember me; but I was resolved not to notice him and I walked off directly. The Portuguese in his boat – it was a bum-boat – were infinitely diverted by his passion: the Portuguese are a good-natured, amicable nation, as far as I can see.’

‘So they are, cully,’ said Ransome, ‘and I would advise you to spend the rest of your days among ‘em, rather nor set foot aboard the
Tryall.
Because why? Because he would learn you the usages of the gunner’s daughter, that’s why.’

‘It is very ridiculous and illiberal, this fear of serpents,’ said Tobias. ‘I remarked upon it to the commodore  …’

‘Oh no,’ cried Jack, with a strangled shriek of protest.

‘Yes,’ said Tobias. ‘Mr Anson was just putting off in his boat – no, in his barge,’ Tobias corrected himself, with a smile, for he knew Jack liked him to use the correct nautical terms. ‘So I told him that he would oblige me extremely by carrying me as far as the
Wager,
if it lay in his way. Yet even he seemed shy of the snake, though I told him how innocent it was: but the commodore is a very polite man – he told me something of the habits of the frigate-bird, and said he hoped to see some as soon as we were south of the thirtieth
parallel. He bade me keep an account of the longitude and latitude at which each sea-bird was found, as being an observation useful to sea-faring men.’

‘Well, I am glad you approved of his manners,’ said Jack; and turning to the others with quiet despair he said, ‘You see how it is? I try day and night to teach him the difference between an admiral and a swabber’s mate; I entreat him to mind his duty towards his betters, and what happens? “Just pull me across to the
Wager,
Anson, my good man; and hold this serpent while you are about it.” Next it will be “Captain Murray, I will trouble you for the use of your state-room, if you please, to keep my luminous squids in.” Oh damn your eyes, Toby, have I not told you a thousand times not to speak to your superiors unless they speak to you first? I don’t believe he thinks he has any superiors, Heaven preserve him.’

‘In Plato’s Republic  …’ began Tobias.

‘But you are not in Plato’s loathsome vile republic,’ cried Jack. ‘You are in the Royal Navy, and must never speak to anyone. At least, nobody above you in rank.’