Voyage of Malice

by Paul C R Monk

  Mrs van der Veen said in French, ‘I shall bring you vials of perfume, which will at least sweeten the air around you, as well as other provisions. Please tell us what you need most.’

  ‘You are kind, my good lady,’ said one Huguenot woman.

  ‘A splendid idea,’ said Madame Fesquet. ‘It will distance the bad smells that breed disease.’

  Mademoiselle Duvivier said, ‘The disease is also brought by the vermin, I fear. As Jesus tells us to travel through life in a clean body, we should very much like to embark on our voyage in a clean cabin.’

  ‘We have been enclosed in this cabin for the past four weeks,’ said Jacob. ‘Alas, in spite of our demands, we are deprived of water and rags for swabbing.’

  ‘I will ask the captain to see to it that you are equipped,’ said Mr van de Veen, who then let his wife translate.

  *

  By the following morning, not only was the Huguenots’ wish for water and cloth granted, but more visits followed from other Dutch and English contingents, and continued throughout the Huguenots’ stay in Cadiz harbour. Each visit uplifted their spirits, like a rag of blue sky in an otherwise murky firmament. They saw each visit as a ray of God’s love that galvanised their faith and filled their souls with new courage. It meant He had not abandoned them. Now they could embark on the long, perilous voyage across the great sea, secure in the knowledge that their place in heaven was assured. What, after all, was earthly suffering compared to eternal life?

  The visiting parties also brought very earthly provisions: dried sausage, cheese, bread, fruit, clothing, writing kits. They even managed to smuggle in miniature Bibles and a few other books for the voyage, one of which would shape the course of Jacob’s destiny.

  The book in question was at first given to Professor Bourget by a rosy-faced Englishman with sparse white hair for whom Jacob acted as interpreter. Delpech still possessed remnants of English, having learnt it as a young man when his father had taken a position there in 1663 to learn about medicine. However, the book was of no use to the professor, a surgeon who knew only his mother tongue, German, Latin, and Greek. Jacob’s father had been a physician and herbalist, and during previous conversations with Bourget, it had come to light that Delpech had always nurtured a fond interest in the Lord’s natural world. So it was without regret that the professor gave the book to Jacob.

  It was an old book that the elderly Englishman had kept since his younger days. He had spent half his career as a ship’s surgeon for the East India Company. The book was The Surgeon’s Mate.

  *

  On the twenty-first of November, one month to the day of her arrival, the pink lowered her sails and turned her prow towards the open sea.

  Jacob Delpech was eager to reach the New World. Before setting out from the Bay of Cadiz, he had been able to converse in his broken English with a Dutchman by the name of Marcus Horst, who was familiar with the West Indies. ‘There are a great many islands, large and small,’ he had said. ‘You must hold firm. It would not be so difficult to escape to an English settlement by cargo ship. From there you can gain passage aboard a ship bound for London or Amsterdam.’

  La Marie and La Concorde were escorted by Le Solide, commanded by Admiral Chateaurenaud, chief of the French fleet. As they left the Bay of Cadiz, Jacob knelt with a group of fellow inmates to give thanks to God for the reprieve before the storm, and for the rays of light that had brought them comfort, hope, and their Holy Bibles.

  The sound of the key in the lock made Jacob look up in time to see the door swing open. Next thing, he saw two men, two buckets, and a shaft of seawater.

  ‘Enough of yer jabbering to false gods!’ bellowed one of the guards.

  ‘Or we’ll come in and search yer all for fake Bibles,’ said his mate. ‘And if we find any, it’s twelve lashes for heresy!’

  TWO

  Jacob had known about the perils of sailing near the Barbary Coast for a long time—which was why, as a merchant, he had always shipped goods overseas from the west coast via Bordeaux.

  He was sure that, should by misfortune they be captured, the King of France would find no reason to send his ambassador to Mulay Ismail to part with wealth or Muslim slaves in exchange for a few Huguenot bourgeois, no matter what their standing in society had once been.

  Understandably, then, Jacob and those who knew anything about international affairs inwardly gave praise once they had sailed clear of the Gulf of Cadiz, unmolested by Barbary corsairs.

  But the moment Le Solide veered northward towards the coast of Portugal, La Concorde put all sails to the wind south-westward, and La Marie was soon left alone amid the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. They would not encounter land for six long weeks. Six weeks of being rocked and tossed about at the bow of the ship—the worst part, the part usually reserved for animals—with nothing to engage the eye but sea and sky.

  Noah had endured a similar voyage, Jacob often philosophised; the Ark could not have been any more seaworthy than this pink. So he resigned himself to patience and prayer, and surreptitiously read books and his Bible whenever the light and the swell permitted. But even this was made impossible much of the time by the roasting heat of the sun, augmented by the heat of the kitchen stove only six feet above their heads. It was like sitting inside a furnace and so insufferable at times that the men were obliged to remove their shirts and tunics, drenched as they were in sweat. To compensate for their natural modesty, women were given the areas out of the direct sunlight and furthest away from the heat emanating from the stove above.

  The only resort was to remain as still as possible, which became increasingly difficult given the atrocious proliferation of fleas that feasted on legs and other body parts come nightfall. And the itchiness the morning after was always more intolerable than the precedent.

  One stifling afternoon, three weeks out of Cadiz, despite a constant urge to scratch his fleabites, Delpech sat, knees forming a V, perusing The Surgeon’s Mate. With a steady wind in her sails, La Marie was able to hold an even keel, which made a change to the sporadic blasts of the night before. Most of the cabin was in slumber. Jacob was trying to decipher the chapter entitled Of Salts and Their Virtues—which gave him cause for a rare chuckle given that they were surrounded by the stuff—when a terrible cry of despair broke the creaking, snorting, catnapping silence. Lifting his head from the page, he saw a young woman jump up in a dim corner across the cabin and scream out: ‘I cannot go on, I cannot. I am being devoured. Oh Lord, have pity! God help me, please!’

  He recognised Madame Gachon, normally a quiet, obliging lady, whose two children had been taken from her to be raised in the ‘true’ religion back in France. She then flung off her bonnet, stripped off her dress from neck to waist, and dashed topless to the porthole opposite where Jacob was sitting.

  Jacob sensed in his bones what she was about to attempt. But the surprise of seeing the poor woman half-naked and the horrible seeping carbuncles on her upper body had him mesmerized. And for an instant he was unable to react to the impending tragedy. Before anyone else had fathomed what all the fuss was about, she had hoisted herself through the square porthole in an attempt to reach the solace of the sea.

  At last, throwing his book aside and heaving himself up, Jacob called out: ‘Grab her!’

  An old man dozing close to the gun port sprang up like a coiled snake and managed to latch onto her ankles before she disappeared completely through the hole. With the help of another man, he managed to pull her back inside the cabin as she drummed her fists wildly against the side of the hull.

  They were laying her down on the rough timber boards, careful to avoid her arms lashing out, when two guards came bustling through the door, buckets at the ready, as if to put out a fire.

  ‘She tried to jump out the porthole,’ said Jacob, who was at present struggling to hold down her arms while Mademoiselle Duvivier and Madame Fesquet were trying to pull up her dress to cover her bare torso. The tortured soul was now in tears, writhing like a
captured beast and tossing her head from side to side in a frenzy, crying out for the peace of Christ.

  ‘Shut your bloody bone box and move over, unless you want another hiding!’ said one of the guards. Jacob edged back a step, but stood ready to intervene even if it meant taking a beating.

  ‘I’ll give her a mouthful of sea all right, if that’s what she wants!’ said the other guard.

  With deliberate, almost lascivious slowness, they poured the contents of their buckets up and down the length of Madame Gachon’s body, reducing the flow to a trickle when they reached her open dress, her rash along her white belly, and her half-bare breasts.

  ‘For the sake of common decency, that’s enough, Sir, I beseech you!’ said Jacob. Huguenot men had positioned themselves ready to pounce should the situation deteriorate. Sensing they may have gone too far, the guards more hastily finished emptying their buckets.

  But the debasing punishment of pouring seawater in Huguenots’ faces, which still kept the thugs amused, now seemed to instantly quell the woman’s delirium. She stopped crying out, only snuffled now as the cool water splashed onto her skin. She let her arms lie limp, so that the unwavering ladies could thread them into her dress, and cover her torso.

  ‘She does it again, we’ll bound her up and leave her on Dominica with the savages!’ bellowed one of the guards, puffing out his chest. Looking around with his hand on his scabbard, he backed out of the cabin with his mate.

  Dominica was a Caribbean island inhabited by ferocious savages known as Caribs. It was one of the places the guards repeatedly said they would leave women who refused to attend the Catholic mass once on land. The men would simply be hanged, they said. These were ongoing threats they had concocted to put the ‘fear of God’ into their captives. But what can these heathens know about Christianity, let alone the fear of God? thought Jacob, who had previously told his fellows to dismiss their menaces as mere hogwash.

  The women took over operations as Madame Gachon began to come back to her senses. They helped her return to her place. Jacob went back to his book.

  But he could not help revisiting in his mind the neat bands of weals on the poor woman’s torso where the fleas had eaten into her flesh, and the large weeping carbuncles that had formed here and there. The excruciating itching and pain they must have caused her, along with the intolerable heat and the confinement of her clothing, would have driven anyone to distraction, which was why the poor woman had sought comfort in the wide ocean.

  But what gave Jacob the most matter for reflection was the effect of the seawater. It had seemed to bring her instant relief and had visibly quashed the distress and itchiness of her sores. No, her intention had not been to kill herself—for that was a crime in the eyes of the Lord—but to instinctively seek a cure from the ocean.

  Jacob turned back to the page where the author was praising the virtues of salt. He read: All those which are vexed with any disease, proceeding of grosse crudity, or unnatural humidity, as rheumes, itch, scurve, ring-worms, or the like noysome greefes: let them make a bath of common sea salt.

  Delpech sat in wonder as the confirmation of his deduction hit home. He then explained his theory to Professor Bourget and a few others who cared to listen.

  ‘Salt has indeed been used since ancient times for its virtues,’ said Bourget, who had been seasick throughout the voyage so far, and was only able to concentrate his thoughts for minutes at a time.

  ‘And it is all around us,’ said Jacob.

  *

  That night, after the buckets were emptied and returned to the cell, instead of using them all for their usual purpose, they kept one back for their experiment.

  Men tied their shirts together to form a line. To the end of this line, Jacob tied the bucket, which he lowered through the porthole until it broke the water’s surface. Then he hoisted it back up. In this way they were able to discreetly retrieve the providential brine.

  Delpech and Bourget applied cloth soaked in seawater to the men’s sores. Mademoiselle Duvivier and Madame Fesquet did likewise for the women. And indeed, to everyone’s amazement, after the initial sting, the itchiness subsided, and the fleas did not bite so much during that night. ‘Why, bless me soul,’ said Bourget the next morning. ‘Dear Delpech, you are right. Fleas are averse to salt!’

  Every night thereafter, they carefully retrieved buckets full of ocean water. They doused their wounds and swabbed the planks, and some even soaked their clothes in it. Salt is not comfortable, but the discomfort it caused from dryness was but a small tithe to pay for the protection it gave against the evil of fleas, and the horrible pustules they caused on the skin.

  Jacob linked the series of events which had led to his revelation: Madame Gachon exposing her sores; her uncontrollable attraction to the sea; Jacob reading the very pages that spoke about salt; having the book in the first place; saving the poor woman; her being soaked in seawater; and Jacob falling upon the very paragraph that dealt with itching and the like.

  Surely, then, the woman’s momentary folly was a manifestation of God’s grace, was it not? It had given them the cure to their greatest discomfort. And the ongoing voyage became more tolerable, or rather, less of a nightmare for it.

  Whenever they were caught praying henceforth, they no longer felt humiliation at seawater being thrown into their faces. Instead they felt the grace of God.

  *

  The stench was intolerable at the best of times, what with the buckets of defecation seldom being emptied till evening. But at no time was it more asphyxiating than when the gun port flaps were closed, mostly due to big swells, but also due to the cruelty of the guards—although, in some ways, the dim light and the appalling smell were lesser evils than the blazing rays of the sun.

  It was impossible to read once the wooden flaps were lowered, so Jacob found plenty of time for introspection.

  He was going to die, no matter what, and so was everyone else. But where did the Christian soul go? He knew not; the Bible only gave a few lines in Revelation. Would the celestial city be anything like the one described in The Pilgrim’s Progress? Since the stopover in Cadiz, John Bunyan’s book had been passed round to the few who could understand English. Jacob had read it, and it gave him hope, especially when Christian was helped out of the Slough of Despond. Is that not where he and his fellow Huguenots found themselves now? Although their slough was an ocean!

  Jacob Delpech often set to thinking about the coming of Christ, the birth of Christianity, the gospel, and the inception of the Holy Roman Church. He reflected on the ungodly crimes to which the Church had turned a blind eye, and the assassinations it had sanctioned. He mulled over the wars of religion, and the Saint Bartholomew massacre where French Catholics had cold-bloodedly slaughtered thousands of Calvinists. He thought about how the pope had congratulated the French king by sending him a golden rose. Pope Gregory had even issued a medal to commemorate the event. When, as a young lad, Jacob first learnt of the horrific binge of killing, he could hardly believe his ears. Then one day he saw one of these medals with his own eyes. On one side it showed the head of Pope Gregory VIII, and on the other an angel brandishing a cross and a sword while standing over a group of slaughtered Protestants. It was struck with the words Ugonottorum strages 1572, which meant ‘Slaughter of the Huguenots 1572.’ And so here was proof of the pope’s benediction, and consequently of the Church’s involvement.

  How could such an institution have been allowed to breed hatred in the name of Christ and get away with it for centuries? How could it preach humility when it was adorned with gold? How could it be allowed to give Christendom such an appalling reputation for so long? Jacob was confused.

  He prayed that God would enlighten him. As he was trying to put his thoughts into perspective, he began to doze off. A dark cloak of morbid matter seemed to encroach upon his mind like a black eagle folding its wings over him. Then he heard the high screech of a gull, and a distant human voice.

  ‘Land ahoy! Land ahoy!’
<
br />   Jacob roused from his slumber amid the general agitation. He shielded his eyes from the light as the wooden flaps were pulled open. He then hoisted himself onto his feet and staggered to the porthole, where he set his sight upon a faraway lump on the horizon. He was looking at the New World for the first time. It was the afternoon of January 2, 1688.

  THREE

  By morning, once the mist had lifted, Jacob and a few other porthole viewers perceived not a clump of vegetation but a full-blown island densely clad in rainforest. Its sheer mountain cliffs fell abruptly into the sea. This was the most mountainous island of the Lesser Antilles. This was Dominica, home to the warrior tribes of the Caribs, who had lent their name to the Caribbean Sea.

  This was the island the guards had referred to time and again. The place where they threatened to maroon the women who would not stop singing psalms, where the insolent young ladies would be tamed by the savage men, and the old maids gutted, grilled, and eaten.

  But La Marie sailed on past the spectacular landscape of lush woodland and waterfalls where nature still ruled in all its primal glory. She headed northward on the leeward side of Marie-Galante, the French-occupied island, flat as the galette that the natives called cassava bread. It sat like an antithesis of Dominica. Even from the gun port, Delpech could easily spy the ox-powered mills dotted here and there among the patchwork of flat, laboured fields.

  His thoughts turned to the fields of his native Tarn and Garonne: the waving wheat and the corn on the cob; the orchards of apples, pears, and plums; the peachy brick farm buildings that housed his farmhands; his ancestral home and his townhouse in Montauban. He wondered how the harvest had been over the past two years. Who was taking care of business now? Yet something told him he need not worry, that he would most likely never see his homeland again. But as long as he could recover his wife and his children, he knew he would still have the resilience and energy to build another patrimony, another home, wherever on earth that may be.