Over the Seas

by Josephine Bell

  ‘Sandy! Sandy! To thy left hand! To thy left!’

  He realised then that the waves had flattened, that his weary strokes were driving the laden boat more swiftly. But he dared not pause in his rowing, which had become quite mechanical for he knew if he did so he would collapse over his oars and fail to begin again.

  The voice guided him, a high voice, vaguely familiar. Some boy, but his wandering mind could not place any young boy apart from the Indians. His surroundings were growing familiar, too, the shores of the creek, growing nearer as it narrowed, until his oars touched, and as he lifted them and the boat ran on to the sand he found a small hand closing over his, checking his movement, while Polly Sugden heaved at the boat while she cried out again and again, ‘God be thanked! Oh God be thanked! Thou’rt safe, Sandy. Safe! And we thought thee lost, as well.’

  He could not remember later how between them they dragged the boat and its burden above the tide mark. Polly had fastened her skirts high to wade out to him as he was drifting, hardly able to pull, past the mouth of the creek. She had run there from the beacon fire, when those who tended it had given up the work. Dawn was near, they said. They could see nothing on the water and the Indians had already brought news of bodies discovered on the shores beyond the settlement.

  As Polly already knew, they saw nothing because they looked in the wrong place, out into the bay. Alec was at that time farther to the north of them and close in to land. She had gone down to the shore alone, frantic with fear and careless of anything but the need to find him. He had left as she knew on the evening before to find his friends. She never had the least misgiving that he would return to report utter failure. But as the hours passed she began to fear that his life, too, might be in danger.

  So when she saw from the beach the state he was in, his hair and beard dark with salt water, his face grey with exhaustion, his clothing soaked, his boat a shambles, she was torn between thankfulness and pity. At that moment her romantic girlish dreams fell from her, never to return. This was not only her hero, he was her man. Struggling to guide him in, to help him haul the boat higher up the beach, she discovered the sturdy Yorkshire countrywoman’s strength she had never before fully used. When Alec, before that, rising stiffly from the thwart where he had sat for those four gruelling hours, dropped the oars he still grasped in fingers too cold and stiff to loose them and fell full length from the boat to the sand, she managed to persuade him to rise, she took the oars to safety first, then with him hauled at the boat and not until it was safe let him sink down again on the dry sand above the tide. She pulled off his wet jacket and shirt and wrapped him in her cloak that she had thrown down when she went into the water to turn the bows of the boat to land.

  She dared not leave him to get more help, but she tended him until he recovered partially from his first stupor of exhaustion. He was then restless and confused, babbling about his childhood’s home in Pittenweem and St Andrews and a girl called Janet. During this time he clung to her hand and would not free her.

  At last he fell into a heavy sleep and she herself dozed, though cramped by her position, supporting his heavy head and shoulders against her and unable to release her hand from his grip.

  Mistress Sugden with John Laydon and an unwilling William Trent found them at mid-morning. Alec woke then, weak but fully alert. He understood at once where he was and how he came there. He was ashamed to be found thus, declared he had suffered a slight return of the ague that attacked them all after great exertion or exposure, but asked immediately if they had news of Master Scrivenor and his companions. When they told him, with much painful hesitation that several Indians had arrived in James Town before dawn to report finding the bodies of white men on the shore to the north of the settlement Alec nodded, staring down the waters of the creek.

  ‘Washed from the middle of the bay by the in-flowing tide,’ he said slowly. ‘As I feared. As I feared from the start.’

  He seemed to want to get up, but suddenly he turned again, crying out, ‘So I have now no friend but thee, Poll!’ He laid his drawn, beaten face against her breast and broke into hard weeping.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The bodies of the two councillors and four of the fishermen were brought in and laid in the church while coffins were quickly made for them. Young Gosnold and the other three of the boat’s crew were never found.

  Nor was the true cause of the disaster. Though he was not a professional seaman Master Scrivenor was competent enough, Alec maintained at the inquest called for by Councillor Winne. The squalls had been severe; there had been considerable risk in going out at all. This could have accounted for the accident, but Alec felt bound to put other matters before the company assembled. Though he had lost the most part of the wreckage he had salvaged from the waves and brought ashore, the nature of the objects remaining suggested a calamity not unlike that he had himself suffered. Matthew Scrivenor’s craft had probably also been dismasted, causing some aboard her to be thrown out at once and lost and the rest left to struggle with the foundering, perhaps capsizing hull, until they too were washed away. If this was the true story, why had the mast broken? Perhaps for the same reason his own had cracked and snapped off.

  ‘That being …?’ asked Councillor Winne.

  ‘By deliberate intent,’ Alec said boldly. ‘If it please you to look at the stump, sir, it is clearly half sawn and half splintered. There be those who plot and plan and would gladly rid—’

  ‘Enough,’ Master Winne ordered, frowning. ‘We are gathered here to inquire into the death of these unfortunates, not to put forward dangerous surmises. Also this relates to thine own misfortune, Master Nimmo.’

  ‘The like may have drowned my friend,’ said Alec, his face whitening as anger seized him, his blue eyes sharp with rage.

  ‘Can we prove it?’ Master Winne asked, more kindly. ‘The damage to your boat, maybe. But theirs? It is all conjecture there. We have no proof. Even thy belief in a dismasting is not proved, nor can be. As for deliberate wrecking—’

  He left the rest unsaid and the various murmurs of agreement and growls of approval from his hearers convinced Alec that nothing more would be done to discover the true cause of the disaster.

  All the same an account of what he had said went round the settlement, being taken in various ways. It was true that Alec had enemies, especially George Tucker, who had resented Alec’s prominence from the day of his arrival. There were, too, followers of Captain Ratcliffe who had suffered by the latter’s eclipse, who were haters of Captain Smith, resenting the old soldier’s promotion, his constant plans to make them work, his new plantation where he forced them to dig and sow, to hoe and tend crops that they would presently be expected to harvest for the next winter. All this despite the expected arrival, the imminent arrival, of that great new fleet of fresh settlers with all the replenishment it would mean and with an appointed governor to displace the tyrant, whose term as President of the Council was nearly over.

  Those who liked and admired Alec for his energy and courage were willing enough to inspect his little boat and confirm that the damage to her mast, the cause of its breaking off, was partly man-made. Some evilly-disposed person had indeed sawn it to weaken it and covered the mark of the cut with a smear of the tar Alec had used as a coating. It was a deliberate attack upon his safety.

  By whom? Perhaps an Indian, some suggested. This was possible, because by now many tools, supposed to be forbidden in trade, had been exchanged for food during the last winter months. None chose to name a suspect. The community was too small. All shrank from starting a real blood feud, particularly with Alec Nimmo, who being a Scot was supposed to be particularly prone to that form of perpetual quarrel. Certainly gentle Master Winne, who kept himself informed about Alec’s movements, had no desire to see the settlement break into warring factions. The thought of such an outcome filled him with horror. The drowning was bad enough.

  So the matter was allowed to rest; the usual apathy sank it deep into the monotonous p
ast and the settlement forgot mere had been a mystery, a taint of positive human wickedness. They remembered only a disaster made notable by the victims of it. God’s purpose must, as always, have directed the elements to strike, just as it struck humbled mortals with death from disease or from the enmity of the natives. Death was so frequent, so usual a visitor in James Town.

  But Alec continued to grieve and in his desolation continued to seek Polly’s company. He had learned from Mistress Forrest that the beacon had been lighted at Polly’s insistence. She had refused to go to bed but had visited the Laydon’s house and forced John, with Anne’s support, to rouse up enough helpers to collect fuel and build a pile of it on the shore near the fishing boats’ harbour. When the men wanted to leave it for their beds, she scolded them in so furious, so passionate a manner, they had to obey her.

  Alec was both deeply touched and very grateful for this proof of her devotion. Since his business lay with the sea and fishing and boats, his fresh interest in her, born of this knowledge and in memory of her gentle care after his exhausted, grief-stricken landing, led him to engage her continued interest in his work. It was Polly who shaped and sewed the canvas for a new sail, pushing the great needle with a leather protecting her palm, dragging the greased thread taut with fingers that burned and were often cut by it. He taught her to splice ropes, to whip their ends, to bind reeds into fenders to keep the fishing boats from chafing as they lay alongside the landing stage near the salting and smoking sheds.

  As a reward he sometimes took her for a short sail on a sunny evening, when a light breeze from the sea cooled the land that had lain burning in the summer heat under a white-hot cloudless sky. When the wind failed Alec would drop the sail and taking the oars turn the little boat and row back to the settlement with Polly holding the tiller under his direction.

  She had never known such happiness. Nor such health. Naturally strong and used to hard work about the house and in the dairy, even serving behind the bar at the Cow and Calf, she had fretted at her comparative idleness in James Town. Her mother’s fears for her safety, redoubled since the attack by the Paspaheghs, had restricted her exercise and almost begun to undermine her health. But this was all changed; she was out more than she was in.

  Mistress Forrest saw it all with alarm. She spoke severely to her friend.

  ‘I wonder at thee, Meg,’ she said one morning. ‘Where before thou keps’t Poll so mewed up her winter pallor was as striking as any great lady with her face lead-coated, now she is as brown as one of our men or as those saucy squaws that come into the town to steal.’

  ‘She goes with none but our Sandy,’ Mistress Sugden answered with a laugh. ‘I give thanks to Our Lord nightly that he notices her at long last. For she hath loved him dearly since the very morning he came walking over the dale to offer the work of his hands for his bread.’

  ‘Aye, she is useful to him about the boats,’ Mistress Forrest protested. ‘But there’s nought else in it. And tongues wag for that is never woman’s work and maybe shame for her at the end of it.’

  ‘I’ll trust yon lad till he betrays us,’ Meg Sugden answered calmly. ‘He may still look on her as some kind of sister, but ‘tis not in nature his manhood willna get the better of him in t’ finish. There’s more than one of they fishermen speaks to her, she tells me. Happen Sandy’ll come to his senses when she lets him know of that.’

  ‘You have advised her in this?’ asked Mistress Forrest stiffly.

  ‘Nay, madam, I’m no bawd!’ her friend cried, quite shocked at such a suggestion. Then she sighed. ‘The good Lord will decide it. I would I had as much patience as my Poll. When she longs for any particular thing, then is she most quiet and most obstinate. So I continue to hope.’

  ‘And I will watch most anxiously,’ Mistress Forrest said as she left her.

  Polly was aware of her mother’s impatient hopes but she had no intention of using guile or subterfuge in the conquest of Alec. She now looked upon it as certain, but not to be hurried on. Her one anxiety lay in Captain Argall’s news of the great company, now daily expected, but a good deal overdue. If many women were included among the new settlers there might be a fresh face as lovely as his Katharine of ill fame or his Janet of boyhood memory.

  For Alec, during those peaceful sails on summer evenings, had opened his overcharged heart to the girl who had saved him from the sea and from his despair. She had listened quietly, asking an infrequent question to show she was listening with understanding, but otherwise subduing her envy of Kate’s beauty and Janet’s still potent image of first love.

  It was not until August that four ships of the expected fleet arrived. Sir Thomas Gates in Sea Venture was not one of them.

  They brought a tale of shipwreck and disaster that drove the little colony into fresh depths of despair and misery. Using the new route discovered by Captain Argall, the ten ships had made rapid progress, until near the Bermuda islands a hurricane overcame them, scattering the fleet, driving them apart, blowing them, wrecked, upon reefs of the islands. These four had mended their damage, managed to get to sea again and had now arrived, having lost some of their complement of settlers, both men and women, a large proportion of the farm animals they carried and a good part of their stores, some of the latter spoiled, some consumed during the extended voyage.

  In ten days’ time two more of the missing ships arrived in like condition to the first four. And still there was no sign of Sea Venture with the newly appointed Governor. Worse still these latest arrivals included Captain Ratcliffe, Master Martin and Gabriel Archer, those trouble-makers who had so nearly destroyed the settlement the year before with their intrigues and dangerous plots.

  President Smith was disgusted and profoundly discouraged. He gathered about him those loyal followers who still remained and explained his views. He was the sole councillor left in James Town now, for the gentle Master Peter Winne had died of a fever not long after the accident that carried off Scrivenor and Waldo.

  These wicked men have not lost their ambition,’ Captain Smith told his friends. ‘Also they seek revenge for their former failures and humiliations. They have no position here now, but they will look to receive it when Governor Gates arrives, if ever he doth and is not lost at sea, as we must fear. Therefore we must avoid all kinds of quarrel, forbear to answer any provocation they may make. We must continue those works I have begun this summer for our support in the coming winter.’

  ‘Surely we must seek out all new craftsmen and such as will promote our welfare,’ Alec suggested. ‘Already we have nigh on five hundred fresh souls. Among them surely—’

  ‘This is true,’ said John Laydon. ‘I have been approached by several glaziers and engaged their services. We shall no doubt be building fresh houses for this multitude, which I look to supply with windows and still have glass to export to England.’

  Others claimed already to have met husbandmen, herdsmen and farm labourers who were eager to develop the plantations, now some thirty to forty acres, that Captain Smith had ordered to be laid down to corn.

  ‘Not that it will sustain us all in our present numbers,’ the President told them. ‘But we do increase. Our three hogs have become sixty, our chickens nearly five hundred. The weirs and nets for river fishing are in use. Sandy’s business doth flourish. My sweet-water well is dug. So that when my term endeth in September—’

  He was interrupted by an outcry and many voices exclaiming, ‘’Twill be renewed!’ ‘Who else—?’ ‘John Smith for ever!’

  ‘I thank ye all’ the captain said. ‘But we be few and I think my enemies be many. However, until Sir Thomas arrives, or we know him to be lost, I will continue, for there is no one who can displace me until Gates cometh or we have other orders from London. The governor for life is to be my Lord de la Warr, who hath been appointed under the King. Gates stands in his stead until my lord be ready to sail.’

  The position was unsatisfactory as all the former settlers agreed. They were very critical of the conduct of the
ten ships when they heard that the three admirals supposed to guide them, Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers and Captain Christopher Newport, their old friend, had all been together in Sea Adventure against orders from the Company and very much against common sense.

  ‘Captain Newport would never let himself be run ashore on a reef,’ Mistress Sugden exclaimed, when she heard this aspect of the bad news. ‘Happen they two knights overbore his better judgement. We suffer again from our new complement of young gentlemen.’

  ‘Idle as ever!’ said Polly, strongly. ‘Gathering like sheep before the Town Hall with their elegant clothes and their silly hats!’

  ‘Waiting for the old sheep dog to bite their heels and make them move,’ said Alec with a grim smile.

  ‘That is no way to speak to thy President,’ rebuked Mistress Forrest. ‘Moreover I know a number of those gentry and they be neither idle nor ill-conditioned. Only ignorant of our situation here, they tell me, for they came intent upon exploration, with James Town for a secure base and they find us scarce able to continue for want of food and from disease.’

  ‘We do none too badly now ’tis summer,’ Polly protested. ‘Especially now we have our goat. Her kids should be here full soon, when I will make us all butter and cheese.’

  William Trent said nothing, but he was absent from home for two weeks after this conversation and came back with a load of hay for the goat on his back, since pasture was so poor at the settlement even for a goat that eats scrub down to the roots and thrives on it. Of the other farm animals, a few sheep and kine, some dogs, a horse belonging to Captain Ratcliffe, some were put in care of the new farmers, some belonged to the young adventurers and the horse was looked after by the groom engaged in England for the purpose.