by Cameron Nunn
Will had never felt so alone.
Every convict has a number. It’s sewn on our slops and we must answer to it when called. It were early April when the wardsman called out a list of eight numbers to be taken to the docks and I were among them. Every few days some were taken to the hulks and new prisoners arrived. If there were hope while men awaited trials, it’d been washed out now. Each man awaited the same sentence, to be taken to the hulks and at His Majesty’s pleasure to be sent to New South Wales or Van Diemen’s Land. Clothed in grey, we looked like ragged, half-starved pigeons walking around the frozen yard. I were told that winter don’t come to the north side of Newgate, it just never leaves.
Eventually I were called and we were assembled in the yard. There we were fitted with heavy irons, each linked to the person in front. We were led through the tunnels of Newgate and into an empty hay cart. The chain were then passed through several iron loops attached to the side of the wagon to make sure escape were impossible.
“Do you know which hulk we are to be taken to?” I asked the driver.
Amos had it on authority that I were near certain to be taken to the Euryalus, a boys’ hulk moored at Chatham, near the new dockyard.
“No hulks,” the driver called back, once we were secured and moving. “I’m taking you to the Marquis of Hastings. They had to take some prisoners to the infirmary boat and needed fresh passengers for the trip.” He snorted.
“When are we to sail?” I asked, hoping desperately I’d see Amos at least once before we did.
“I only deliver the passengers. Them what knows these things decides when she sails.” With that he fell silent.
It were a cold morning and the fog poked icy fingers around our hands and down the backs of our slops. As we headed down Newgate Street, the prison appeared squat and black in the morning mists. Behind it, the top of the Old Bailey were just visible. London were waking from its sleep. I tried to hold the pictures in my mind so I wouldn’t be a stranger when I returned. Seven years need not be forever, I kept reminding myself. As we headed through Cheapside, buildings as familiar as old friends came and went. No one in the cart spoke. There were naught left to say. Eyes of shopkeepers and masters and apprentices and charwomen followed us briefly before returning to their own worlds.
The surgeon who inspected us were about Bran’s age but slender with blond hair and large sideburns. We all stood before him, our numbers scratched into his book. There were none of the swagger left in any of us. I were the first. Behind me were the boot thief, sniffling and shivering.
“Have you been in prison before?” he asked, scrawling notes in his book.
“No, Sir,” I lied.
“You are fifteen years old. Is that correct?”
“I think so, Sir.”
“Do you have a trade?”
“Sailmaking,” I said. “Not that I were ’prenticed or such but I can work canvas.”
“But not properly apprenticed.” He continued to write. “Have you been ill since you were committed to prison? Fever? Swellings?”
“No, Sir.”
“Can you read or write?”
“No, Sir.” I wanted to say that a man didn’t need to read or write if he’d a tongue and a mind for words but I didn’t wish to make trouble.
“You are sentenced to seven years for feloniously stealing twenty-five pounds of lead sheeting. Is that correct?”
“Yes, Sir.”
He read the notes and without glancing up said, “Your prison record indicates your behaviour was good in Newgate. I need hardly remind you that the same will be expected on board the Marquis of Hastings. In fact your station and treatment in the colony will be dependent on the record I give the governor.”
He looked careful at each of us. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, Sir.”
The Marquis of Hastings were a three-masted barque. Amos had made me memorise ships as they sailed up the Thames. He’d make me guess their tonnage and tell me how they’d set their sails for different winds. She lay miserable in the docks awaiting the last of her human cargo. I wanted to tell Amos all about her, as though I were back in his workshop and he were testing me with his games. “Four hundred and fifty tons, you think, do you?” I could hear his voice. He’d suck heavy on his pipe. “I think ye’d be right. Now, how would she set when the wind freshens leeward?”
And so I were led to the lower deck and into the cells. Lanterns burned on the stairs and midway along the wide passage what separated iron cells to the right and left. Down the centre ran long mess benches. There were no portholes on the lower decks, making it like night through the day. Each cell held about eight who sat on wooden berths staring silently out of the shadows. Boys were separated from the men at the bow of the ship, near the infirmary. The cage were unlocked and I stepped into the gloom. My eyes were already adjusting to the darkness below deck. I could see figures lying or sitting on the stacked beds, but no one made a move until the footsteps of the guard retreated.
The boy what first approached were a good head taller ’n me. He were big across the shoulders and had enormous pale fists what reminded me of cabbages. I’d seen him before, that day outside Amos’s workshop. He were the boy in the shadows. Every cell chooses a mess captain, but more importantly every cell has a nob or top boy, and every boy has a place in the order from nob to dog.
“I stabbed a man, you know,” he said by way of introduction. “What did you do, steal from your old ma?” It were a form of challenge to find out where I were to fit into the order. He smiled, inviting me to have a go.
“Bluey hunting,” I said, as calm as possible.
In prison introductions are made by crime, by gang and by location. Each boy tries to note themselves. It were unlikely that Cabbage Fists ever stabbed anyone but to call him on it would’ve been a challenge and so we play the game until the order is settled. A challenge might be to short serve someone their rations, or insist they swap berths or move off the end of the bench. For the time being, I’d have to play dog.
The cabbage-fisted boy folded his arms and looked me over again. “I’m the nob here. You remember that. Where’re you from?”
“St Giles.”
“Devil’s Acre,” he spat back in return. The threat had gone out of his voice, content I weren’t going to challenge him.
It were up to the others now to decide where I’d fit. He pointed out how things worked, but mostly what he were in charge of deciding. His name were John, he later told me, and he were a blacksmith’s boy, but from that moment I always thought of him as Cabbage Fists. Three of the others knew each other and had been caught stealing a till from a baker’s shop on Fleet Street. One were from Lancashire and the other two were Scots from Edinburgh. All seven of them had been on the Euryalus before being sent to the transport.
The bunks at the back of the cell were two deep and end to end with boards what separated sleepers so that each platform held four. In the space in front of the bunks were three low stools and a small table. Unlike the rest of the ship, our cell were timbered up on either side to try and prevent communication with the older convicts in the cell beside.
Below deck is a shadowy world. Soldiers move among flickering lanterns like demons checking on the souls in hell. The general murmur of voices ebbs as they pass. You can hear them approach, not by the sounds of footsteps but by the approaching hush. The sounds of the dock are hundreds of miles away. They belong to the world of free men. Below deck belongs to the sounds of the slaves and the ever-constant slapping of water against timber.
We sailed the next day. The rock of the boat changed from side to side to dipping and rising in the bow. Timbers creaked in new ways and the sounds of the docks became a fading dream. Hatches were opened above and wilted light made its way below decks. For the first time I could see the whole dismal corridor of cells. Like Noah’s Ark, we were divided according to our kind – a giant human circus. And so we slid, shameful, out of London, pulled along by the eel of a river
, washed out to sea like the rest of London’s sewers.
The ship rolled and bucked on the waves and its unhappy cargo heaved every part of our lives into the privy buckets. The lower decks gagged with the smell of puke and misery. There weren’t a single man not drained to his very core.
“We’ve got to get our sea legs,” I said, trying to sound like I’d some authority. Amos told me most men take a few days to get used to the roll of the oceans. All the time, we were kept in cells, as they call it.
On the third morning, the ocean had settled to a gentle rock and we were woken and brought on deck for prayers and exercise. Moving from the shadows below to the bright sunlight were like coming face to face with God. Around us there were naught but ocean. We stood in rows and numbers were called. We were so emptied of every part of life that it were all we could do to stand. The surgeon led the prayers in which he told us of the many blessings what God had given. Even now God looked upon the souls of those on board to sift the penitent from the wicked. If that were true, I wondered that God didn’t just sink the ship then and there.
For an hour each day we walked in circles around a sealed off section of the lower deck; a swivel gun in constant watch and soldiers with bayonets fixed, lining each end. On the upper deck the officers formed a kind of gallery, staring down upon us. The boys, as we were called, weren’t ironed, but the rattle of iron as men climbed the ladder and then shuffled their way around the deck created an orchestra of misery. A drum pounded to keep the marching steady. Bedding were aired, privy buckets emptied and floors scrubbed with salt water. Punishments were read out and administered for those who’d talked during divine service, or answered insolently to a guard or any other number of petty things. None of this took away from the incredible boredom what sat over everyone and everything. For hours each day we sat in the stale air beneath decks.
And so we whispered.
We planned how we’d escape as soon as the ship were docked in Botany Bay; how we’d live by plunder and return to England richer ’n kings. We whispered stories of our crimes, each time bigger ’n the last. You’d have thought we were all grand highwaymen, the way we bragged about what we’d done. I told them the stories Amos had told me with as much colour as he would’ve used. And when I ran out of Amos’s stories, I began to make up my own. I told them I’d been to sea before I were arrested and seen stranger things than most men had seen in their life. I told them about how my boat had been wrecked off the coast of Africa and how we’d escaped from cannibals who were seven foot tall. But they liked it best when I made up stories with them as highwaymen on Hampstead Heath or as part of the swell mob what robbed the king of his golden snuff box. It were through the stories Cabbage Fists became my ally and I ceased to be dog.
It happened one day when rations were being set out. Cabbage Fists put a larger portion in my tin plate. The boy from Lancashire who we called Dibbs stood up and said it were more ’n my share. Cabbage Fists picked up Dibbs’s plate and tipped it on the floor. They stood staring at each other for a while. Dibbs glanced around to see who’d support him but everyone stared silent at the table.
“Dogs eat off the floor,” Cabbage Fists said coldly.
Dibbs were a big lad but no match for Cabbage Fists and he knew it. No one were going to support him, so he climbed up onto the bunk and sulked. That day the order changed. No one challenged my new-found place because Cabbage Fists had decided. There were naught more to discuss.
As we sailed, the weather became hotter and below decks more unbearable. Sails were set up to try and catch air and force it below but it were little comfort. They extended the time each day we could spend above deck. Ulcers broke out on the men what were fitted with heavy chains where they chafed and rubbed, and men complained of all sorts of maladies. A rumour spread that a group were going to seize the ship and sail it to China. I don’t know if it were true. Men talk about all sorts of wild schemes. There are also them what hope to profit by reporting such things, whether it be true or not. While we sweated below deck, I told stories and hoped and feared that we’d soon arrive.
A convict transport is little more ’n a tub of pus and disease, bobbing helpless on the oceans, so it were no surprise when the bloody flux broke out. We were five days after leaving the Cape when God began to sift the penitent from the wicked. Within a day the infirmary were full and they stopped bringing others in. Instead, they began putting the sick together in cells. They were given laudanum but soon that were all used up. Cells were scrubbed every day and bedding were brought on deck for airing. Privy buckets were rinsed constantly to try and clear the foul stench. All that done naught to stop the infection.
I cannot begin to describe the stench of shit and puke what turned the whole of the boat into a putrefying privy bucket. It bled into the timbers and leaked back into the air, filling below deck with a yellow-brown miasma. Naught could shake away the smell. Yet for reasons I cannot tell, as sickness stalked up and down the centre alley, picking prisoners at will with his long yellow fingers, he poked at the bundle of human rags in our cell and thought us not worth his while. Each day the surgeon checked the rolls of the sick and the healthy with careful precision. Each day our cell counted eight above deck. Cabbage Fists carried a holy medal what he said brought him luck. I never seen him religious but he’d call upon the saints with that medal round his neck. Amos would’ve called it papist superstition. Amos hated Catholics, like he hated the French and the Irish. As the numbers of sick doubled, Cabbage Fists became more ’n more convinced our cage would be protected because of his charm, and for a time even I believed it might be true.
Then the storm hit.
If sickness had chosen some and spared others, God had weighed the whole cargo of sinners and found naught but wickedness and had decided to send the whole ship to the ocean floor. For six days we sat in pitch darkness while the ocean lifted us on foamy hands and smashed the boat against its belly. Amidst the pounding, timbers stretched and bent in tight agony. All lights below decks had been put out at the first sign of a storm and the hatches above had been secured.
“I think we’ll all be drowned,” Cabbage Fists shouted. His voice were distant, shut out by the smashing of waves. As he spoke the ship were picked up and rolled near side on. We grabbed whatever we could to stop us tumbling about like apples in a barrel. Then we were upright again for a second before we were tipped the other way.
“The ship’s made of oak,” I shouted, trying to sound as confident as I could. “Unless we strike rocks, or the chain pumps fail, she’ll hold together. Besides, we’ve got your holy medal.”
Once more the ship heaved and we were forced to grab hold of the bars with both hands. They’d have struck the sails as soon as the gale hit. A ship will right itself with such a heavy load below the water line. But with each turn the ocean flooded in from the top deck and the hull oozed continuously, so we were wet through.
In the darkness we couldn’t tell night from day. It were only after, I found how long we were caught in that storm. Only the surgeon and a small party of marines moved continuously along the central passageway. He carried a candle but it were constantly going out with every tumble of the boat. The sickness had not fully passed and now, in the tempest, the task of separating the sick and caring for them were nigh on impossible. As the storm continued there’d be broken bones for certain to add to the misery, but that mattered for naught if God had decided to drown us anyway. It were some small comfort to see the surgeon moving up and down, grasping the bars as he moved along, as though he were climbing a ladder what kept swaying to and fro.
The wind raced, screaming shrill above and around. Suddenly, there were a breaking of timbers and a sound like the ship were splitting in two.
“It’s nothing,” I called out to Cabbage Fists before he could ask again.
By now I were so sick that even when the salted beef and water were brought along, I could hold naught down. Then the ship turned on its side once more, more ’n it’d ever
done before. Men tumbled and screamed. Water rushed in. We were held in this position with the ocean deciding whether to capsize us entirely, and then we were upright again.
I cannot say exactly when the storm eased. It seems impossible to imagine but even while we were being tossed about like bobbing driftwood, I’d fall asleep in short bursts until a tumble of bodies and timbers woke me again. This time when I awoke it were different. The sea had lost its fury. One of the hatches had been opened and a feeble light shone down. As the day progressed more hatches were opened. For the first time I could see what the storm had done below deck. Stores were scattered everywhere. In some cells there were barely two pieces of timber still nailed together. Perhaps it were a miracle, but our cell remained near intact. Even more surprising, everyone in our section seemed largely unhurt. Perhaps Cabbage Fists bore a charm after all. He’d a lump on his forehead the size of a small turnip where he’d hit something in the tumbling. Cell by cell the surgeon worked his way along the deck, checking each of us by turn, continuing to separate the healthy from the injured. At the same time the first hot food were brought down from the galley. Now the smell of oatmeal porridge carried with it a hope we were saved.
It were hours before we were taken up on deck and it were only then we could see the damage what the storm had done. The sky were still the colour of lead but the anger had gone from it and small patches of light cut through like God’s fingers. The mizzenmast had been sheared off two yards above the deck. The prisoners’ yard had been swept clean and the gunwales on the port side were naught but fragments of splintered timber. Where crates and supplies had been above deck there were nothing, but it were likely they’d have been broken up and taken below as the storm hit. Already the ship’s carpenter were busy directing sailors and a small group of convict men in repairs. But the ship sat even-keeled in water and the two remaining masts still had their spars in place.
