by Avi
What then were the conditions that we felons enjoyed during the voyage of the Owners Goodwill?
Item: There was no saying how long the voyage would take, seven weeks or seven months. The time lay with the whim of the winds and the captain’s nautical skills. Of course, some ships simply sank.
Item: As I mentioned, because there were no windows on our lower deck, it was difficult to say what time of day or night it was. At best, my close confinement was dim during days and darkful at night. Indeed, day and night seemed to merge. Time became an unending fog. But then, as the saying goes, an idle man needs no clock.
Item: Without portholes on our deck, there was no ventilation, so that the air we breathed was never fresh but always foul, the stench altogether turpie.
Item: Each day at noon (I believe) I was fed a scant pound of bad bread—oft weighted with wiggly worms—plus oversalted and putrid meat. Daily drink—if I got it—consisted of a slight pint of foul water.
Item: We slept upon the bare deck planks.
Item: Some of us were dressed in shirts and trousers of canvas. Some, like me, had shoes. Many wore naught but shreds and went barefoot. Regardless, in a short time, all clothing (including mine) was reduced to rags, tatters being the universal fashion of the poor.
Item: There were more lice than men. During the voyage countless days were filled by catching and crushing them. Many an hour passed with the only sound being click, click, click.
Item: Buckets of feces and urine were always open, and since we were chained, few of us could use those pails and perforce, did without.
Item: None of us were clean. Many had open, rottenish sores, which offered their own offensive stench. Some had wounds that festered with pale yellow maggots, which had more life than their hosts.
Item: A fair number of my fellow convicts, having spent months in abysmal London prisons, were famished when they boarded. Several were ill with diseases I am unable to name. I do know that on the Owners Goodwill seasickness became the norm. Jail-fever, better known as typhus, was also common. What’s more, during our voyage, those who had been ill generally became worse. I cannot say what caused me to stay healthy. Perhaps it was because I was in the London prison for such a short time, and Father purchased my food.
Item: No physician was on the ship.
Item: In the first two weeks of our voyage, a few felons perished. That was the fate of both a frail lad of six and an eighty-year-old man, the bookends, if you will, of our company. Their corpses were stuffed into sacks, weighted with ballast stones, and dropped into the sea without benefit of clergy or kindness. We all assumed others would die before we reached America and could only pray that we would be spared.
In short, the only thing that distinguished our situation from Hell was that with us, it was always cold.
Was anyone happy to be leaving England? During our first night on the ship—once we were all chained down, the hatches bolted tight and daylight banished—our deck was filled with weeping, praying, and lengthy lamentations, punctuated now and again by halting hymns sung woefully off-key, more like the howls of dogs than a musical chorus of pious men.
I beg your forgiveness for providing all these gross details, but truth is often held up as a shining ideal. Most people, when they ask for truth, think of it as something good. You may trust me when I remind you that truth can also be horrific.
My father had a motto: “People care nothing for suffering. To get on you must mask your heart with false smiles.” On the Owners Goodwill, this belief—as you shall see—was put to an extreme test.
Chapter Six
In Which I Reveal My Life as a Convict.
My fellow shipboard convicts were all males. When we departed from England, the youngest was that boy of six, who had tried to steal a small saucer from a Covent Garden coffee shop. He had been knocked down (and heroically captured and arrested) by a courageous young aristocrat with a long, sharp sword.
Our eldest felon was the stooped and grizzled man of eighty years who attempted to make away with a woman’s penny-purse along the Strand in London. When a hue and cry was sounded, a righteous (and riotous) mob tripped the fellow up by his antique heels. No matter that the penny-purse the old man stole proved empty. The jury—after a meticulous trial of five minutes—found him profoundly guilty and the wise judges, determining what was right and fitting, sentenced him to a full seven years of hard labor in America.
As I already informed you, both boy and old man died during the first weeks of our voyage. I prayed they moved out of our floating hell to a fair heaven. Hardly a wonder that many a time I often wept, fearful I would die.
It was hard to know which shocked me more, the crimes (big and small) of my fellow convicts or the legal system that branded them as felons. What was even more appalling: I was considered one of them.
How came this policy of punishment by transportation? The government theory was, it decreased Great Britain’s criminal population, gave felons a humane chance of life, provided needful labor to the colonies, and was cheaper than maintaining prisons in England.
I leave it to your own intelligence to decide which the foremost reason was.
How did felons feel? Transportation was considered such a dreadful existence that some begged to be hanged.
How did I feel? The change in my life from my time in Melcombe Regis had happened so quickly—a matter of weeks—that I was bewildered, frightened, and considered myself abandoned. While I could understand the word—“felon”—whereby I had been labeled, there seemed to be no reason for it. It was as if my body was in one world, even as my thoughts remained in another. I hardly knew myself.
But perhaps because I was so young, small for my age, had a winsome smile, and was a friend to all, the men of my mess liked to talk to me, to impart what they thought was knowledge. What I learned mostly was that when my elders gave me advice, the guidance they offered was nothing they themselves had followed. It was that old adage: “What you might have done might have made you mighty.”
In my own mess of fellow convicts, the crimes we had committed were varied. Three had been forced off their farms and walked to London in hopes of continued existence. Unable to find employment, they were arrested when they sought unlawful ways to keep themselves from starving to death.
One man in my mess had been a masked highway robber, the wearing of a mask in itself being a hanging offence, never mind the wealth he stole. Another had filched an infant’s cushion—measuring six inches by six inches—from a sedan chair.
Hardly a wonder that the English laws to protect property were called “the bloody codes.”
No matter the crime, we felons were all treated with brutal equality. Food was thrown at us. Questions refused. Hurts or illnesses ignored.
One exception: Our captain—Mr. Krets—took particular pleasure in abusing one of my messmates who had the legal name of John Trevis. For reasons I never learned, Mr. Trevis preferred to be called Moco Jack.
(Perhaps to disguise themselves, felons often took different names. One William Hudson was known as “Thickhead,” without his head being unusual in any way that I could observe.)
Moco Jack was a small, skinny man—dry boned as people might say—a spiderish sort of fellow, all elbows and knees, shanks and arms. He had intense black eyes, was as bald as a stone, and had a reddish scar across his forehead, which enhanced his palpable fierceness. Forever sullen, he never, that I saw, so much as smiled. To look upon him and hear his talk was to grasp that he was one third anger, another third resentment, and the final third a deep reservoir for revenge.
That Moco Jack and I were chained together was pure chance. It meant however that I told him about my wrongdoings. He told me about his.
“My crime?” he informed me. “When I didn’t move fast enough from a London constable’s path, he called me a base brute. I struck him and that one blow is costing
me seven years of my life. But I promise you, I shall live to return to London, seek him out, and suck him dry of blood.”
Moco Jack was forever urging us felons to rise up and mutiny, to take command of the ship and liberate ourselves. All of us cherished the idea, but none had the will to run the hazard. Speaking for myself, I was too fearful of failing and having my punishment increased by more years of hard labor. I suspect others felt the same.
Another felon’s story had greater impact on my life.
Rufus Caulwell was a man in his forties who, in London, had been apprehended for stealing a ten-ounce bag of barley with which he intended to feed his famished children and wife. He had not learned civilization’s code of decency: that it is far better to let your children and wife waste away with hunger than steal a halfpenny’s worth of food. For Mr. Caulwell’s vile transgression against the social order, he had been sentenced to seven years’ transportation.
“I don’t intend to stay in America long,” he confided one day in a rough whisper.
“How so?”
“In Newgate prison I met a man who knew a man who said he had a way to get back to England from America.”
“And what is that?” I said, eager for ideas.
“A swamp.”
“A swamp? What’s a . . . swamp?” I asked, never having heard the word.
“A kind of American forest where the land isn’t land, but water.”
“Do such places truly exist?”
“Absolutely,” he assured me.
“And where might you find this . . . swamp?”
“In America.”
“Isn’t America a vast place?”
“Never mind. I’ll find it.”
“And when you do, what then?”
“I shall discover my way.”
“I wish you well,” I said.
While I found it impossible to believe this story, I tucked it into a corner of my memory, keeping swamp as some kind of fairy-tale place. In this fashion, I learned that when prisoners are confined to small spaces, their minds travel to large worlds of their own invention.
In sum, on the Owners Goodwill there was death behind me, death in front of me, and death all around me. The only hope was a swamp, but I did not believe such a place truly existed.
And then, midst all this wretchedness, far worse arrived when—in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—we were hit by that dreadful storm.
Chapter Seven
The Affrightful Storm.
As the storm roared and tumbled the ship into complete disorder, down on the tween deck, our pleas and entreaties for release continued unabated, along with banging on the overhead hatch by those who managed to reach it.
“Let us out.”
“Open the door.”
“Unchain us.”
After what seemed an eternity, the way to our deck was opened and the first mate, Mr. Babington, appeared along with the cascading sea. In one hand, he held a small lit candle lantern. In his other hand was a key. The way he staggered about upon the rolling deck suggested he was jagged with drink.
The convicts threw questions at him:
“What is happening?”
“Are we about to sink?”
He provided no answers—save his frightened face—but stumbled around, mess by mess, and sprang our locks. The moment each group was released they raced for the companionway and clamored up.
At last my group was freed, and despite the wild heaving of the ship, I managed to reach the steps, and mounted as fast as I could until I came out upon the open main deck. It was so appalling that my immediate thought was that it would have been far better—and safer—if I had remained below.
The sea itself was a boiling cauldron of huge, froth-edged waves, which came crashing down upon the ship like heavy hammers and then swept across the deck with fearsome power. Just as I reached the top deck one of those colossal waves struck, then receded so quickly it sucked one of my brother felons into the sea, never to be seen again in this mortal world. His glugging screams of terror haunted me for many a day. Needless to say, our rescue jolly-boat was gone, though in that raging sea, it would have been useless.
Fierce rain attacked from the starboard side, piercing us like icy needles while the freezing wind howled the collective roars of a hundred wild beasts. So intense was the force of winds that to breathe I had to turn and cover my mouth and nose with a curled hand. Being small and light, I was obliged to cling to something—anything—to remain on the ship.
As for our sails, they had already been torn into tiny threads while the ropes and rigging were little more than lashing whips.
Woven into the shrieking winds came desperate cries of people pleading for God Himself to provide protection.
As for what I felt, aghast is too small a word. Try terrified. Though only twelve years of age, I was forced to consider: What would it be like to drown?
The constant wash of the sea over the Owners Goodwill was such that it was hard for me to distinguish if we were on the sea or already beneath it. It was as if the great waters that cover most of the earth resented our tiny claim of safety and sought to dissolve us into her lower depths.
To give my condition a truer sense, we were in the midst of “chaos,” a Greek word that means the unformed matter of the world before God gave it shape, or so my father had taught me. At that hour, I felt as if the earth had reverted to that soulless state. Our safe ship seemed little more than a tiny thimble adrift upon the vastness of the salted sea.
No surprise then that my life appeared likely to be over. Yet, mark me, I treasured being alive. I therefore grasped ropes, rails, shrouds, shreds of sails, or my equally unfortunate shipmates, be they fellow convicts or sailors.
Then, as if from far away, I heard the voice of the captain cry: “Man the pumps. Man the pumps.”
That call meant we were taking on water at a disquieting rate, either by rain, seawater falling down through hatches, or water leaking in via cracks upon the hull itself. No doubt the wild movements of the whirligig that our ship had become had sprung the planking, popping out the oakum used to seal the ship like so many lemon pips. We were becoming a sieve and liable to sink at any moment.
As for those pumps, they were crude machines used to empty the ship’s hold of excess bilge water, or in this situation, the sea itself. These pumps were in the very bottom of the vessel, the most dangerous place to be. If the ship began to go down, there would be no way to get out. Yet there was no means of keeping the Owners Goodwill from sinking other than working these pumps. Am I clear? To avoid the greatest danger, some of us needed to go where the danger was even greater.
It was Mr. Babington, the first mate (no doubt shoved into sobriety by fulsome fright), who assembled the pump crew. Or rather, he snatched such men—sailors or felons—as he could and ordered them below. One of the persons he grabbed was me.
Please note: We convicts, on our way to enslavement, were being asked to save our own lives so we could live to be enslaved. Yet let it also be said, no one, least of all me, hesitated. Better to do than dilly-dally. In times of menace no moment is more precious than now. The past, in such a crisis, is irrelevant. And nothing seems more distant than the future. Therefore, I was willingly pushed down the steps, one of perhaps a dozen soggy souls. It felt wonderful to get away from the cutting winds and rain.
Deeper and deeper into the mungy hold we went, our way lit by two swaying lamps, their frail flames fluttering like feeble butterflies. As we made our way down the sheer steps it was necessary to cling to whatever would give stability, be it ropes, the man before (or behind) me, or the risers themselves.
When we reached the lowermost hold, it was to witness yet another pitiless place; it was as if we had descended into the belly of a monster, its food undigested. Not only was the air dungy and cold, stinking beyond all measure, we fou
nd an ocean of water swilling about in frothy, filthy waves. When I stepped into its coldness I sank to my chest and my teeth began to clatter like Spanish castanets.
The cargo—boxes, bales, and barrels—had, for the most part, broken free and was being thrown about in utter riot. I had come from a place where I might have been drowned to somewhere I could just as easily be crushed. The terror I felt on deck was in no way reduced.
Could anything live in such a place? Well, yes. I saw rats aplenty, some already drowned, others clinging to what they could. Indeed, rats and people were not so different save in size. But then the true equalizer of all God’s creatures is fear. I was altogether sure I had come to the place where I must die among rats.
Chapter Eight
In the Bottommost Part of the Ship.
Our first difficulty was to find the pumps. If we did find them, there was nothing to say that they—on this shameful ship—were in working order.
I had no idea who located them, but Heaven be praised they were located and discovered to be intact. These two pumps consisted of a pair of wooden cylinders into which rods had been placed. These rods had leather disks the circumference of those cylinders. When moved up and down by handles, the rods (with the leather disks) drew up the water and forced it through leather pipes and out of the ship.
Four of us set directly to work, two at either end of the pump’s handles. Mind, while some of us worked the pumps, others stood about and shielded us from the cargo flying about.
As I pumped furiously and mindlessly, my eyes fell on a spot on the inside planking of the hull, where I perceived water dripping through. While we were pumping water out, water was leaking in. Impossible to say which had the greater volume or the faster flowing.
