A Brig of War nd-3

by Richard Woodman

  'Keep her off the wind, sir, they are fine on the weather bow,' he yelled down.

  Hellebore steadied with the wind on her beam. The watches below, summoned for whatever eventuality that might arise, were crowding excitedly forward. Drinkwater saw an arm outstretched, someone down there had spotted the boat. Mindful of his dignity he descended to the deck.

  'Afterguard! Main braces! Leggo and haul!' Hellebore was hove to as the main topsail and topgallant cracked back against the mast, reining her onward rush and laying her quiet on the starboard tack some eighty yards from the boat.

  They could see it clearly now as its occupants got out a couple of oars and awkwardly pulled the boat to leeward.

  'Ere, there's bleeding women in it!' came a shout from forward as the Hellebores crowded the starboard rail. A number of whistles came from the men, accompanied by excited grins and the occasional obscene gesture. 'Cor ain't we lucky bastards.'

  'Don't count yer luck too early, one of 'em's pulling an oar.'

  'An 'hore on an oar, eh lads?'

  'If them's whores the officers'll 'ave 'em!' The ribald jests were cut short by Drinkwater's 'Silence! Silence there! Belay that nonsense forward!'

  He and Griffiths exchanged knowing glances. Griffiths had refused to sanction celebrations on the equator for a good reason. 'They'll dress them powder monkeys up like trollops, Nathaniel, and all manner of ideas will take root… forget it.' They had forgotten it then but now they were confronted with a worse problem.

  There seemed to be three women in the boat, one of whom was a large creature whose broad back lay on an oar like a regular lighterman on his sweep. She had a wisp of scarlet stuff about her shoulders and it was the waving of this that had saved their lives. Exciting less interest there were also six scarecrows of men in the boat which bumped alongside the Hellebore. The brig's people crowded into the chains and reached down to assist. There was much eager heaving and good natured chaffing as the unfortunate survivors were hoisted aboard. ''Ere, there's a wounded hofficer 'ere.' A topman jumped down into the boat and the limp body of a red-coated infantry captain was dragged over the rail.

  Appleby was called and immediately took charge of the unconscious man; in the meantime the other nine persons were lined up awkwardly on deck. They drank avidly from the beakers brought from the scuttlebutt by the solicitous seamen. The six bedraggled men consisted of two seamen and four private soldiers. The soldiers' red coats were faded by exposure to the sun and they wore no cross-belts. They were blear-eyed, the skin of their faces raw and peeled. The two seamen were in slightly better shape, their already tanned skins saving them the worst of the burning. But it was the women who received the attention of the Hellebores.

  The big woman was in her forties, red-faced and tough, with forearms like hams and a tangled mass of black hair about her shoulders. She tossed her head and planted her bare feet wide on the planking. Next to her was a strikingly similar younger version, a stocky well-made girl whose ample figure was revealed by rents in the remains of a cotton dress. Her face was burnt about the bridge of her nose and slightly pockmarked.

  Beside him Drinkwater heard Griffiths relieve himself of a long sigh. 'Convicts,' he muttered, and for the first time Drinkwater noted the fetter marks on their ankles. The third woman was a sharp faced shrew whose features fell away from a prominent nose. She was about thirty-five and already her dark eyes were roving over the admiring circle of men.

  'Which of our men is the tailor, Mr Drinkwater?'

  'Hobson, sir.'

  'Then get him to cobble something up this very day to cover their nakedness; he can use flag bunting if there's nothing else, but if I see more than an ankle or a bare neck tomorrow I'll have the hide off him.'

  'Aye, aye, sir.'

  'And turn the two midshipmen out of their cabins. They can sling their hammocks in the gunroom. I want the women accommodated in their cabins,' he raised his voice, 'now you have had something to drink which of you will speak? Who are you and whence do you come from?'

  'We come from His Majesty's Transport Mistress Shore, captain,' replied the big woman, clearing her throat by spitting on the spotless deck. The officers started at this act of gross impropriety for which a seaman would have had three dozen lashes. Griffiths merely raised his voice to send the off-duty watches below and to get the gobbet swabbed off His Majesty's planking.

  'Do not do that again,' he said quietly, 'or I'll flog you. Now why were you adrift?'

  'Ask the sojers, captain, they're the blackguards who…'

  'Shut your mouth woman,' snapped one of the soldiers appearing to come out of a trance. Drinkwater guessed the poor devils had been sick as dogs in the boat while the indomitable spirit of this big woman had kept them all alive. The woman shrugged and the soldier took up the tale, shambling to a position of attention.

  'Beggin' your honour's pardon, sir, but I'm Anton, sir, private soldier in the New South Wales Corps. Forming part of a detachment drafted to Botany Bay, sir. The officer wot's wounded is Captain Torrington, sir. We was aboard the Mistress Shore, sir, twenty men under the Cap'n. The main guard consisted of French emigré soldiers and some pardoned prisoners of war, sir, who had volunteered for service with the colours,' Anton turned his head to express his disapproval of such an improvident arrangement and caught himself from spitting contemptuously at the last moment. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

  'Beg pardon, sir… these dogs rose one night and under a French gent called Minchin they overpowered the guard, murdered the officers of the ship and took her over.'

  'You mean they overpowered the whole crew?'

  'It were a surprise, sir,' Anton said defensively, 'they put twenty-nine off in the longboat and twelve of us away in the cutter… two of 'em died, sir.'

  'How many days were you adrift?'

  'Well, sir, I don't rightly…'

  'Twenty-two, Captain,' said the big woman, 'with a small bag of biscuit and a small keg o' water.'

  Griffiths turned to Drinkwater. 'Have the men berthed with the people, the soldiers to be quartered in the tops, the two seamen into the gun crews. As to the women I'll decide what to do with them tomorrow when they are presentable. In the meantime, Mr Lestock, we will now be compelled to call at the Cape.'

  Drinkwater and Lestock touched their hats and moved away to attend their orders.

  Manifold and strange are the duties that may befall a lieutenant in His Majesty's service, Drinkwater wrote in the long letter he was preparing for Elizabeth and that he could send now from the Cape of Good Hope. It was two days after the rescue of the survivors of the Mistress Shore. Already they had been absorbed in the routine of the ship. Drinkwater had learned something of their history. The big woman and her daughter were being transported for receiving stolen goods, offenders against the public morality who had yet thought their own virtue sacrosanct enough to have denied it to the treacherous Frenchmen. So spirited had been their resistance that Monsieur Minchin had wisely had them consigned to a boat before they tore his new found liberty to pieces. The woman was known as Big Meg and her daughter's name was Mary. They were decked out in bizarre costume by Hobson since when Big Meg was also known as 'Number Four', the greater part of her costume having been made from the black and yellow of the numeral flag.

  Both Meg and her daughter adapted cheerfully to the tasks that Drinkwater gave them to keep them occupied. They chaffed cheerfully with the men and appeared to maintain their independence from any casual liaisons as Griffiths intended. This the men took in good part. There were women aboard big ships of the line, legitimate wives borne on the ship's books and of inestimable use in tending the sick. They became mothers to the men, confessors but not lovers, and stood to receive a flogging if they transgressed the iron rules that prevailed between decks. But on Hellebore a more delicate situation existed. While the women might be thought to be everybody's without actually being anybody's, while they were willing to banter with the men, their effect was salutary. E
ven, despite the roughness of their condition, the nature of their convictions and their intended destinations, improving both the manners and the language of the officers. Rogers paid a distant court to Miss Mary who was much improved by some crimson stuff Hobson had laid his hands on which had been tastefully piped with sunbleached codline. Opinion was apt to be kind to them: there were, after all, kindred spirits on the lower deck. If they were guilty in law there was in them no trace of flagitiousness.

  Big Meg and her daughter picked oakum and scrubbed canvas, scoured mess kids, mended and washed clothes, while the third woman assisted Appleby. Her crimes were less easy to discover. A sinister air lay about her and it was darkly hinted by her companions that abortion or murder might have been at the root of her sentence of seven years transportation, rather than the procuring commonly held to be her offence. Certainly she claimed to have been a midwife and Appleby was compelled to report she had a certain aptitude in the medical field.

  Knowing Appleby's distrust of the sex in general, Drinkwater was amused at his initial discomfiture at having Catherine Best as his assistant. His mates found their unenviable work lightened considerably and that in the almost constant presence of a woman. Catherine Best made sure that her presence was indispensible and whatever her lack of beauty she had a figure good enough to taunt the two men, to play one off against the other and secure for herself the attentions of both. But this was not known to the inhabitants of the gunroom.

  'Ha, Harry, it is time you damned quacks had a little inconvenience in your lives,' laughed Drinkwater as he directed a thunderstruck Appleby to find employment for the woman.

  'I emphatically refuse to have a damned jade among my business… if it's true she's a midwife then I don't want her on several accounts.'

  'Why the devil not?'

  'Perceive, my dear Nathaniel,' began Appleby as though explaining rainfall to a child, 'midwives know very little, but that little knowledge being of a fundamental nature, they are apt to regard it as a cornerstone of science and themselves as the high priestesses of arcane knowledge. Being women, and part of that great freemasonry that seeks to exclude all men from more than a passing knowledge of their privy parts, they dislike the sex for the labour they are put to on their behalf and can never tolerate a man evincing the slightest interest in the subject without prejudice .'

  Drinkwater failed to follow Appleby's argument but sensed that within its reasoning lay the cause of his misogyny. He was thinking of Elizabeth and her imminent accouchement. He did not relish the thought of Elizabeth in the hands of someone like Catherine Best and hoped Mrs Quilhampton would prove a good friend to his wife when her time came. But he could not allow such private thoughts to intrude upon his duty. He was impotent to alter their fates and must surrender the outcome to Providence. For her part the woman Catherine Best attended to Captain Torrington and earned from Appleby a grudging approval.

  The men who had been rescued were soon indistinguishable from Hellebore's crew, the soldiers as marines under Anton, hastily promoted to corporal. Captain Torrington emerged from his fever after a week. He had been thrust twice with a sword, in the arm and thigh. By great good fortune the hasty binding of his wounds in their own gore had saved them from putrefaction, despite the loss of blood he had suffered.

  The sun continued to chase the brig into southerly latitudes so that they enjoyed an October of spring sunshine. The beautiful and unfamiliar albatrosses joined them, like giant fulmars, elegant and graceful on their huge wings. Here too they found the shearwaters last seen in the Channel, and the black and white Pintada petrels the seamen called 'Cape pigeons'.

  They sighted land on the second Sunday in October, Griffiths's sonorous reading of Divine Service being rent by the cry from the masthead. At noon Lestock wrote on the slate for later transfer to his log: Fresh gales and cloudy, in second reefs, saw the Table land of the Cape of Good Hope. East and half North eight or nine leagues distant. In the afternoon they knocked the plugs out of the hawse holes and dragged the cables through to bend them on to the anchors. The following morning they closed the land, sounding as they approached, but it was the next afternoon before they let go the bowers and finally fetched an open moor in twenty-two fathoms with a sandy bottom. To the north of them reared the spectacular flat-topped massif of Table Mountain. Beneath it the white huddle of the Dutch-built township. Drinkwater reported the brig secure. The captain's leg was obviously giving him great pain.

  'Very good, Mr Drinkwater. Tomorrow we will purchase what fresh vegetables we may and water ship. If any citrus fruits are available we will take them too. Do you let the purser know. As for our guests we will land them all except the seamen. They will stay. I wish the gig to be ready for me tomorrow at eight of the clock. I will call upon the Governor then; in the meantime do you direct Rogers to salute the fort.'

  'Aye, aye, sir.' He turned away.

  'Mr Drinkwater.'

  'Sir?' Griffiths was lowering himself on to his chair, his leg stiffly extended before him. An ominous perspiration stood out on his forehead and his flesh had a greyish pallor.

  'There are Indiamen inshore there, three of them. I am sure one of them will carry our mails to England.'

  'Yes, sir. Thank you.'

  As he sat to finish the long letter to Elizabeth the first report of the salute boomed out overhead.

  Chapter Six

  The Cape of Storms

  October-November 1798

  Drinkwater woke with a start, instantly alert. He stared into the inky blackness while his ears strained to hear the sound that had woken him. The ship creaked and groaned as the following sea rolled up astern and passed under her. It had been blowing a near gale from the south-west when he had come below two hours earlier and now something had woken him from the deepest sleep. Whatever the cause of his disturbance it had not alerted those on deck, for there were no shouts of alarm, no strident bellows of 'All Hands!' He thought of the ten cannon they had struck down into the hold before leaving the Cape a week ago. There had been barely room for them and they were too well lashed and tommed to move. It might have been the boats. They had both been taken out of the davits and turned keels up either side of the capstan, partially sheltering the canvas covered grating amidships, in the room made by the absent six-pounders. He doubted they would have sent such a tremble through the hull as he was now persuading himself he had felt.

  Then it came again, a slight jar that nevertheless seemed to pass through the entire hull. It had a remorseless quality that fully alarmed Drinkwater. He swung his legs over his cot and reached for his breeches and boots. The source of that judder was not below decks but above. Something had carried away aloft. In the howling blackness of the night with the roar and hiss of the sea and the wind piping in the rigging, those on deck would not be aware of it. He pulled on his tarpaulin and turned the lengths of spunyarn round his wrists. The bump came again, more insistent now but Drinkwater was almost ready. Jamming his hat on his head he left the cabin.

  He was doubly anxious, for effective command of the brig was his. Griffiths had been afflicted with malarial fever, contracted long ago in the Gambia, which returned to incapacitate him from time to time. He had been free of it for over a year but as Hellebore reached into the great Southern Ocean, down to forty south to avoid the Agulhas current, and made to double the Cape before the favourable westerlies, it had laid him delirious in his cot.

  The wind hit Drinkwater as he emerged on deck and pulled the companionway cover over after him. Holding his hat on he cast his eyes aloft, staggered over to the foot of the mainmast and placed his hand upon it. He could feel the natural tremble of the mast but nothing more.

  A figure loomed alongside. 'Is that you, Mr Drinkwater?'

  'Yes, Mr Lestock,' he shouted back, 'there's something loose somewhere, but I'm damned if I know where.' He turned forward as a sea foamed up alongside and sluiced over the rail. The first dousing after a dry spell was always the worst. Drinkwater shuddered under the su
dden chilling deluge. He was cursing foully as he reached the foremast and looked up. The topgallant masts had been sent down and he saw the topmast sway against the sky. The racing scud made it impossible to determine details but the pale rectangle of the triple-reefed topsail was plain. The instant he put his hand upon the mast he felt the impact, a mighty tremble that shook the spar silently, transmitting a quiver to the keelson below. He looked up again, spray stinging his eyes. It crossed his mind that Lestock had furled the forecourse since the change of watch. Drinkwater would have doused the topsail to keep the centre of effort low. Lestock seemed to do things by some kind of rote, an old-fashioned, ill-schooled officer. He felt the shudder again and then he saw its cause.

  Above him the bunt of the fore topsail lifted curiously, the foot forming a sharp hyperbola rather than an elliptical arc. The foreyard below it looked odd, not straight but bending upwards.

  'Mr Lestock!' Drinkwater turned aft. Somewhere in the vicinity of the jeers the big yard had broken, only the forecourse furled along it was preventing it from breaking loose. 'Mr Lestock!' Drinkwater struggled aft again, tripping over the watch huddling abaft the boats.

  'I think the foreyard has carried away near the slings. One end seems to be fast under the jeers but t'other is loose and butting the mast. You can feel it below. We must get the fore topsail off her. Don't for God's sake start the braces; the whole thing will be down round our ears. Let the ship run off dead before the wind under the fore topmast staysail and rouse up all hands.' He was shouting in Lestock's ear but someone heard the cry for all hands and in a second the duty bosun's mate was bellowing down the companion-way Drinkwater grabbed one of the seamen.