The Sea Officer Bentley Thrillers

by Jan Needle

  *

  It was a false dawn in other ways too. That afternoon the glass began to fall. It fell like a stone, plummeted until Matthews could hardly trust his eyes. He called Broad and Allgood to look at it, and to have a conference.

  ‘By tonight we will be fighting,’ he said. ‘I had hoped for good weather for a fair bit longer. Once this starts, however, the chances of it stopping are remote. We are closing the Cape. If this is a westerly gale it will be the first of many.’

  Allgood grunted.

  ‘She will be ready, sir, never fear. Perhaps it is a blessing in disguise. The scum are getting restive, they need some good hard work. Some discipline.’

  He turned to Broad.

  ‘Beg pardon, sir. With respect to your sentiments, I crave permission to use the lash. If it comes on foul, I will need to make up a rope’s end, sir. Me and my mates.’

  Broad and Matthews exchanged glances.

  ‘We are undermanned, sir,’ said Allgood. ‘The good hands are spoiled by the bad. We must have rope’s ends at least, my mates and me. It is imperative.’

  ‘Mr Allgood,’ said Broad, almost helplessly. ‘We are not in the Navy now. It is not our way, it is impossible.’

  The great bulk gave its queer, characteristic shrug.

  Allgood stared through him.

  ‘Beg pardon, sir, but we are in the Navy. Once in the Navy, always in the Navy. Is permission refused, sir?’

  ‘Just get her ready to face a storm, Mister,’ said Matthews. ‘We’ll think of other problems later. Get port-lids down and proofed, hatches battened, storm gear bent, everything.’

  ‘Aye aye sir.’

  ‘For God’s sake, man!’ said Broad. ‘For God’s sake stop calling us sir!’

  ‘Aye aye sir,’ said Allgood, and turned away. He did not appear to realise he had said it.

  Broad set about securing everything in the cabin, thinking about Allgood. The man was cracked, for definite. No, no he was not. Broad was pretty sure he knew what was going on in his mind. Allgood had decided that nothing had happened. He had sunk his shame in a return to the old routine:. He was boatswain of the Welfare, sailing round the Horn. With lousy weather ahead, and a crew of idle scum.

  He would pull her through if it were humanly possible. He would serve his officers to the best of his ability. He would show the men no mercy except when they deserved it, give them no praise they had not earned. Well, thought Jesse, it could not save him from the gallows if they were ever caught, but it might, just possibly, stop that ever happening.

  The storm was a solid Cape Horn westerly. It blew for hour after hour with a ferocity that a near-water man like Broad could scarcely believe possible, and the temperature started a slow dive that went on over the next few days. The Welfare fought and fought, her crew becoming gradually exhausted as they worked four hours on, four hours off, with not-infrequent calls for all hands. When the gale blew itself out, a new greyness had stamped itself on all their features, but they had hardly time to dry themselves and to eat a proper meal before the next westerly began to blow.

  They were truly in the latitudes of the Horn.

  Broad thought that he had seen the worst, but Matthews had no such illusions. As they approached the Cape the weather deteriorated and deteriorated and deteriorated. The galley fire went out and could not be relighted, the living accommodation became thick with mildew that later turned to slimy ice, the men in the sick-bay began to take turns for the worse. In the middle of the fourth successive storm Mr Marner, the drunken old schoolmaster, died on a mouthful of brandy, to be joined over the next seven days by six other men. They left their comrades, wounded on the day of the uprising, praying that they would follow them soon, and God was in the mood, apparently, to answer their prayers.

  At first the dead were given travesties of a decent burial, slipped through the storm-broken bulwarks into the icy wastes of torn and maddened water, but this ceased after one of the corpses was thrown inboard again by a foaming sea, and washed about in the scuppers of the waist. From then on the dead were left to lie until there was a lull, however small, when they were heaved overside without ceremony.

  Rheumatism became as great an enemy as the sea.

  Every man on board periodically lost the use of one or both his hands, while the older men were confined to their hammocks for days on end, with some never emerging alive.

  Bronchitis took its toll, so did pneumonia. Bentley, when he recovered from the glancing blow he had received in the bows before Allgood had pulled him to the foredeck by his line, became bronchitic. His chest collapsed, his shoulders hunched, and he lay wheezing and puking in the cabin, alone for twenty hours a day. Once he asked Broad, in a rare moment of conversation, why the attack had happened, despite all Broad’s explanations of the minds of the people, and his own forgiveness. The sailor stared in disbelief.

  ‘Oh you foolish boy, you foolish boy. Can you not accept the fact of hatred?’ he said. ‘Men hate, Mr Bentley, men hate. I told you to take care.’

  Mr Allgood, now fully the boatswain again, complete with blue coat and rope’s end, fought both tempests and his people like a demon. He straddled the deck, a colossus; lent enormous strength to every task, inspired men to move and climb and haul when they were almost too exhausted to breathe. When the battered Welfare began to take in heavy water through her straining seams, he kept the pumps working by some sort of miracle. It was as if all his mighty energy, all the immense physical and mental power of the man, was flowing out to ship and crew. He was brutal and inspiring, a terror and a hope. Without him she could not have gone on. But there was something inhuman in the way he achieved it.

  By the end of the third week of storms, the finish was in sight.

  Men were so weak that few could climb aloft to man the yards. The level of water in the holds was increasing, slowly but surely, and clearly beating the pumps. On the twenty-third day Mr Adamson the surgeon died, which had an oddly terrible effect on men’s spirits. Morale was zero. The ship was beaten. The fight was almost over.

  They buried Mr Adamson with pomp, as the Welfare laboured uncomfortably, hove-to. Many men wept openly, and a gun was fired. Then a small cask of brandy was broached in his memory. The men were mustered aft to drink, and as they stood on the windswept deck, shrouded by the ice-encrusted rigging, Matthews made a short speech.

  ‘Men,’ he said. ‘Today we have lost a good comrade and a noble man. I fear we have lost more. Through no fault of yours, of all of you who have fought so fierce and hard, the old Horn has beaten us. I thought to have beaten him, to have sailed to safety, but we could not bring it off. We are too few to work so great a ship in such a run of weather.

  ‘And so – we must turn about. We must sail eastwards, and stand into danger of a different kind. If we do not turn, we shall surely die.’

  He stared at the huddled groups of frozen, sodden men.

  Most of them were looking at the deck.

  ‘All is not lost, believe me,’ he said. ‘Many things may happen, and there are many places, friendly places, where we may go. We will talk of that later, we will plan out the alternatives. I still have hope, and so, I trust, will you. But first; we must turn. That is inevitable. May God be with us all.’

  Thirty-One

  This time there were no cheers after Matthews had said his piece. The brandy was quickly finished, the cask tossed overboard, and the weary seamen manned the gear to wear the ship. Once they had got wind and sea behind her the motion eased, but even under minimal canvas she tore along like a racehorse. Despite this lessening of the strain on men and tackle, the cold remained appalling, and although they had longer spells of uninterrupted sleep, they lay in soaking, freezing blankets that crackled with rimed ice.

  The greatest and most pressing problem was the state of the vessel. She was making water fast, despite a twenty four-hour pumping watch. The carpenter and his best mate had gone with Swift, and the men left were not particularly skilled. One was a weak fellow
too, and took to drink when the going got hard. Jesse Broad, who had built many boats in his day, turned-to with a caulking gang, but they did not beat the worst. Some seams near the keelson were gushing through the filthy bilge-muck at great pressure. It could be slowed but not defeated.

  On the second morning after they had turned and run, the mizzen topmast carried away in a squall, springing the mizzenmast itself in the event. The mighty strain put on the sprung timber by the canvas made its lifespan most uncertain, but without the mizzen the Welfare would be desperate hard to manage. It was a sail that in normal circumstances she would have done without on the leg she was making, but the leaking seams, her bad trim, and the damage to other sails and yards made it a necessity, even to keep her on a course.

  Despite Matthews’ brave speech to the crew, he and Jesse knew their chances of escape were infinitesimal. They talked about their course of action long and feverishly, poring over charts in the swaying lamplight of the dark and gloomy cabin.

  ‘Well, friend, what is it to be? We can go northward, or head east. Unless this leaking tub decides to direct us straight way to the bottom.’

  ‘What is there northward, though?’ asked Jesse, doubtfully. ‘A few unknown islands and an unknown, unfriendly coast. Or do you think to make it to the Caribbean?’

  Matthews fingered his long chin, and sighed.

  ‘Ah, in times gone by that would have been the place, no question. A thousand islands and ten thousand friends. Gold, lawlessness and The Account. We would have lived as pirates, even if we did no plundering.’

  ‘And now? That’s all well past, I guess?’

  ‘Oh aye, long ago. No gold, no lawlessness, just galloping disease. The Yellow Jack, the Bloody Flux – and His Majesty’s Navy by the hundred. Well, not completely true, there are still safe havens for a buccaneer. But the odds are long I think, very long.’

  ‘So it’s east then? East past Africa?’

  ‘What else? We cannot double the Horn, we cannot hide in the Carib. We have this chance only: if we pass Good Hope in safety we can blow into the Pacific east-about. If the ship doesn’t sink under us or we starve.’

  There was no lightness in his face or voice.

  ‘Could that happen? We are sailing easy now at least, despite the weather is cruel strong. Is it very far? Will the wind and sea stay wild and cold and vicious?’

  Matthews smiled briefly.

  ‘Is it long? Aye, long enough. First Good Hope, and that is weeks away. Then Van Diemen’s Land, and that may well be months. Then upwards and onwards into seas practically uncharted. These gales, in this season, may take us all the way. Or sink us, shake us to pieces, or whip the last stump of our mizzen overside. Broad, you did not know what you bargained for, when you went deep-sea sailing. You should have stayed at home!’

  He shook his head.

  ‘And then again, not only repairs require that we make a landfall, neither. If we go straight past Good Hope, and sail on for the torrid zones, we’ll likely starve to death. St Mary’s, we could try, or Madagascar or Mauritius, they are nearer, but I do not know the waters, we have no charts, and we might find Frenchmen there, or even British Navy.’

  Broad drummed his fingers.

  ‘But we cannot make land at Cape Town. For Captain Swift is heading there.’

  ‘Indeed. We must sail further on. And trust in hope.

  There should be islands on the way, I guess, if we can find ’em. But there is another point. You talk of Swift, and Cape Town. There is another point.’

  Broad looked at the lean, unhappy face before him, the plumes of steaming breath from Matthews’s nostrils.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘If he does achieve a landfall there, what will he be doing next? Taking a cure? Writing letters home to wife and family?’

  Broad blew out his breath between his teeth. ‘Exactly,’ said Matthews. ‘He will be buying a Dutch ship, or conferring with a Navy captain, or laying off a course to hit Cape Horn. He might be plugging westward as we talk. And here are we, my friend, blowing eastwards at a rate of knots.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Jesse Broad.

  ‘Good God? If God is good to us, that bastard Swift will be an hundred fathom deep by now, his bones picked clean. That is my prayer.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Is there no other way?’ said Broad, at last.

  ‘Do not stop thinking,’ replied Matthews. ‘Nor shall I. The alternatives are not of the most numerous. But do not stop thinking.’

  He gave a sudden laugh, almost a jolly sound.

  ‘Hey, man, no despair! Things may go hard with us, but while there’s breath there’s hope. We may yet bring it off, you know. It is far, far, far from an impossibility. Work on the men, my friend, work on the men.’

  *

  As Broad stood on the quarterdeck a few days later, that advice echoed round his head. The decks ahead of him were clear of human life, except for the muffled figure at the wheel. The sea was a grey and empty waste, wild, unfriendly, alien. Welfare staggered along under close-reefed fore and main topsails, burying her head often in the steep backs of seas that had swept under her. The wind was very strong, moaning in the ice-encrusted cordage, and very, very cold. It bit into him through his great cloak, made the bones of his skull ache.

  Below decks, he knew, the aspects were even more desolate, although wind and sea were hidden. The interior of the ship had become like a mortuary, with the smell of death heavy in it, mixed with the smell of mildew, and wet, rotting things. She was cold, cold as the tomb, and the stoves that they tried to keep alight in galley and lower deck made little difference; appeared, if anything, to accentuate the creeping, seeping misery.

  There was another smell down there as well, and it was this that exercised his mind. It was the smell of disaffection, the smell of incipient revolt. The smell of mutiny.

  At first it had been confined to small groups of the people. Fights had broken out at more and more frequent intervals. Knives had been used. One man had lost two fingers, another had been deeply slashed right across his ribs. Rum had been at the root of it, and rum was flowing freer now. The cold made it inevitable, necessary. Without large issues, Broad and Matthews knew, one of two things would happen: either men would start to die of cold and misery, or the rum room would be plundered. They could not keep it guarded at all times; manpower was too precious.

  But there was more to it than drunkenness, however much the two of them tried to wish it away. The mood among the crew was getting hopeless. With the hopelessness came anger. And the anger was beginning to find a direction. The old ringleaders were behind it, and they were spreading terror to the other men. There was a growing mood of hatred and despair, coupled with another growing mood of violence and wild danger. The society was crumbling.

  So Jesse watched and waited. He and Matthews had spoken to some men, not just those who were helping to run the ship, and had realised their great desire to be loyal. But they were afraid of Henry Joyce and company, lived in fear of cold steel in the watches of the night. Joyce and Madesly and their friends were swaggering, openly stealing rum and rations from the weaker men. The marines, unofficered, lost, unarmed, could not be counted on. In the day-to-day details of this struggle, in the working of the ship, Allgood stood alone as a fount of the old discipline. He was, in truth, a mighty figure.

  William Bentley, although not deadly ill, could not be let to leave his bed these times, nor would Broad have let him quit the cabin had he been mobile. As the Welfare laboured eastward through the vicious waters, her little world hung in the balance. Outside her, in the southern ocean, all was chaos. Inside, chaos waited.

  To the boy, it was a slow, profound revelation. At first, racked by bronchitis, he had been unable to take in the hours of talk, of worry and consideration, that the two men went through. But when the ship was running headlong before wind and sea, when the motion was easier and his illness not so strong, he propped himself on an elbow, sipping a littl
e rum, and took a silent part in their deliberations.

  They were not always sober, despite the dangers that they hourly faced, and both rambled about life in England and about their work. William, like Broad before him, began to see the crime that had been committed against Matthews. Taciturn and modest as he was, it transpired over many talks that he was a sailing merchant with great prospects. Not only were these all lost to him, but there were losses to the nation to be considered. He and two cousins had fitted out a ship for a voyage to the East that would probably have made a fortune – a fortune plucked from the enemy’s holdings, more than likely. He had also done great services as a navigator and cartographer and hoped to make a survey of the little-known waters he would trade in. As for Broad, the musings on his illicit trade with France, his view that a transitory war did not make the opposing races monsters but merely good men badly led, filled Bentley with a great unease. One night Broad spoke a quiet monologue about his wife and child, about a Hampshire village, about boatbuilding and fishing. He spoke about a man called Hardman, whom he had loved. He painted such a picture of this fine and jolly seaman that William would have given his right arm to meet him. When he asked what he might be doing now, however, Broad gave a start, not realising the midshipman had been listening. Then told him he was dead, with a sad, ironic smile.

  Broad even had compassion for Joyce. For Joyce, for Madesly, and for all the others of the people, however debased they seemed to Bentley.

  ‘But surely they are scum?’ he said. ‘No, sir, forgive me! With the best will in the world – surely, merely scum?’

  He reddened under Broad’s steady gaze. Then Jesse nodded.

  ‘From the quarterdeck, most seamen look like scum,’ he said.