The Black Rocks of Morwenstow

by John Wilcox

  Wilson screwed up his eyes. ‘Have you got involved in this tribunal?’

  ‘No, and I don’t want to be. I know nothing about any plan to deliberately drive the ship on to the reef. I wasn’t on watch when it happened. The first I knew was the crash when we hit the rocks. It threw me out of my bunk.’

  ‘Did your skipper try and get her off?’

  ‘Not that I remember. There wasn’t much he could do, I guess. He just signalled for help from the Bahamian ship nearby.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Wilson let his gaze wander around the room. ‘Sounds fishy to me, son. What are your plans now, then?’

  Josh gave a sad smile. ‘Try and find a ship that can take me home and then get the hell out of here. I’ve been away for nearly two years, sailing round the China Seas and other parts of the East. I’ve got a fiancée that’s been waiting for me for all that time and I don’t want to be drawn into hanging on here and giving evidence at this damned tribunal.’

  ‘Got any money to pay for your passage?’

  ‘Well, I managed to get my wages out of the Jenny Lee’s agent here so I have some money, but I want to hang onto it to pay for the wedding and to find a place for Mary when I’m away after we’re married. Would you know of a ship in port that needs a second mate?’

  ‘Got your ticket?’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m qualified.’

  ‘Well …’ Wilson drew out the word and rubbed a hand over his chin. ‘There is a brig in the harbour that’s due to sail for Bristol, Gloucester or somewhere like that the day after tomorrow and I hear she’s short-handed. But I doubt if you’ll get a second mate’s berth. She only runs to about ten hands in all.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. I’ll ship as a deckhand if I can get a berth.’

  ‘Right. She’s called The Lucy and she’s alongside the main jetty here. Just walk down the dockside until you come to her.’ He frowned. ‘Don’t know much about the skipper – a Yankee called Lucas – but I hear he’s a bit of a queer bird. Know anything about the Bristol Channel? I remember it can be a real bitch when a nor’westerly blows.’

  ‘I’m from Somerset, so I know it quite well.’

  ‘Good. That should help you. Now I’ve got to get back to the bar, or Bessie will start giving pints away to good-lookin’ sailors.’ He extended a hand. ‘Good luck to you, lad. Remember me to good old England.’

  ‘Let me buy you a drink before I go.’

  ‘Better not. It doesn’t do to get a woozy head in this bar. No. Off you go now. Go find The Lucy. Oh, and keep a weather eye peeled for that mad bugger Louis. He likes to carry a grudge.’

  ‘I will. Thanks, Al – particularly for what you did back there.’

  Carefully folding The Times and slipping it into his trouser pocket, Josh made for the door and, once outside, drew in the sea air thankfully. Humid or not, it was better than the fug of the bar.

  The Lucy was not difficult to find. She was secured alongside the quay and she sat virtually motionless, for there was no swell inside the harbour. Josh walked away a little and, from a doorway, carefully studied the brig.

  She carried four square sails on each of her two masts, although now, of course, they were furled and lashed rather slackly, Josh noted, to the yards. An immensely long bowsprit pointed upward from the prow above a figurehead fixed beneath it. The ship was rigged to carry a fore and aft triangular sail between the masts and a furled jib and staysail on stays from the foremast to the bowsprit and a gaff-rigged spanker on the main boom down aft. Viewed in profile, The Lucy’s lines were elegant, with a sharply raked bow and an overhanging stern from which a jolly boat hung from davits. She had been painted with a fashionable white strip along her length just under the gunwale, giving her the touch of an old frigate from Nelson’s time. But Josh noted that the strip needed repainting and there was a slight air of neglect about the ship overall. The anchor and what could be seen of the chain cable was well rusted and the ropes by which she was held against the dockside were frayed. What was it that Al had said about the skipper – ‘he was a bit of a queer bird …?’ A lax one, too, by the look of it.

  Josh left the protection of the doorway and approached the gangway. He noted a man on deck, wearing the peaked, if battered, cap of an officer. ‘Permission to come on board, sir,’ he called.

  The reply was not welcoming. ‘What’s yer business?’

  ‘I understand you’re short-handed. I’d like to sail with you.’

  The mate walked across to the head of the gangway and stared across at Josh. ‘Last ship?’ he asked laconically.

  ‘The Jenny Lee, out of London. Last port Cape Town. She struck a reef here three days ago.’

  ‘You’ve signed off from her?’

  ‘Aye, sir. I have my papers. I’ve got a second mate’s ticket, too.’

  The mate looked skywards. ‘Ah, we’re not looking for officers, sailor. There’s not room for another mate. It’s just me and the skipper.’

  ‘But don’t you need another watchkeeper?’

  That seemed to have struck home, for sailing ships usually had three watches with an officer of sorts in charge of each. The master stayed aloof from such duties. ‘Wait there,’ said the mate. ‘I’ll find the captain.’

  He returned within three minutes. ‘Come on board and follow me,’ he said.

  The two made their way aft. ‘Where are you bound?’ asked Josh.

  ‘Gloucester.’

  ‘What are you carrying?’

  The mate gave him a sharp look as if to say ‘Mind your own business’ but thought better of it. ‘Cotton,’ he said. ‘Millions o’ bales of the bloody stuff.’

  The master’s cabin was small but well lit with a stern window looking out over the hanging jolly boat. Josh detected a smell of whisky pervading the interior. Captain Lucas had obviously been lying on his bunk because his breeches were undone and his shirt open and hanging over his belt. He had not shaved between the luxurious sideburns that hung over his jowls and his eyes, which eyed Josh incuriously, were sunken. Unsteadily, he walked towards a chair stationed behind a crowded desk and sat in it heavily. He made no gesture for Josh to take the chair facing him.

  ‘All right, Mr Mitchell,’ he said to the mate. ‘Get back to your work.’

  The mate knuckled his forehead and left the cabin.

  ‘So, you were on the Jenny Lee?’ Captain Lucas spoke in the flat, nasal tones of the north-eastern states of America.

  ‘That’s right, Captain. I sailed as second mate on the passage from Canton.’

  ‘Aren’t you goin’ to be called as witness in this damned enquiry that’s being held?’

  He unstoppered a wide-based ship’s decanter that stood on his desk and poured himself a tumblerful. Josh smelt whisky again, but he was not asked to join the captain.

  ‘I have received no summons,’ he said. ‘I am just anxious to get out of here to get back to England. I have been away from home for nearly two years now. I am due to be married when we reach land.’

  Lucas looked up, a half-smile on his lips. ‘I wouldn’t hurry if I was you, sonny. Marriage ain’t exactly what it’s made out to be.’

  ‘That may be well so, sir, but I am anxious to see my girl again.’

  ‘Huh. Right. How long have you been at sea and what ships have you sailed in?’

  ‘Went to sea when I was twelve as cabin boy on a big East Indiaman. I’m twenty-five now. Served as a deckhand in a variety of ships: barquantines, topsail schooners, brigs – brigs mainly. Just like The Lucy. Studied for my tickets and have made second mate so far. I mean to be a master.’

  Lucas took a long draught of the whisky and wiped his mouth with a grimy hand. ‘Do you, now. Don’t be in too much of a hurry. You might regret what you wished for. Well, I’ll take you on. Have you sailed the Bristol Channel?’

  ‘Many times, sir. I was born in Somerset.’

  ‘Ah, that might just come in handy. You’ll ship as a deckhand with a deckhand’s pay.’ He leant forward. ‘But in vie
w of your experience, I’ll make you watchkeeper and, if you prove yourself worth it, I’ll give you another two pounds on top at the end of the voyage. Agreed?’

  ‘Agreed, sir.’

  ‘Right.’ From among the mess of papers on his desk he drew forward a large daybook. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Weyland. Joshua.’

  ‘Very well, Sign here.’

  Josh did so.

  ‘Welcome aboard, Joshua Weyland. Now, go and get your gear and stow it in the fo’castle. Then report to the mate. If we get a decent offshore wind, we’ll sail at dawn. There’s not much tide to worry about here.’

  ‘Thank you, Captain.’

  There was a spring in Josh’s step as he made his way back to the office of the Jenny’s agent where he had been allowed to stow his canvas bag safely for two nights, while he slept in a dosshouse near the dockside. Saving money until he got home was ever-present in his mind. Picking up his belongings and returning the copy of The Times, he walked on to his miserable so-called lodgings and collected the small washbag that he had left there and turned back to The Lucy. He was on his way home at last!

  It was his heavy kitbag, in fact, which saved him. Walking down a backstreet on his way to the dockside – a dark street so narrow that he could almost touch the sides with outstretched arms – he stumbled over a cobblestone, just as a knife hurtled over his arched back and buried itself, quivering into a doorway.

  Instinctively, Josh picked up his bag to provide some sort of defence as he whirled round. He just had time to see Louis rushing at him, a second knife in his hand. Josh threw the bag at the feet of the big man, causing him to trip and sprawl on the wet cobbles.

  Immediately, Josh leapt upon him and thrust his own knife just under Louis’s ear. ‘Now, listen,’ he hissed. ‘If you move, I’m going to slit your throat from ear to ear. Understand?’

  The man nodded, still gasping for breath.

  ‘Good. Now keep listening. If I so much as catch sight of you again in this town I will kill you, as sure as God made little apples. Now, just to say goodbye to you and to stop you following me, I’m going to give you a little parting present. Just remember that Limeys can fight too, you great hulking brute.’

  Turning quickly, Josh thrust the knife deeply into the calf of the big sailor. Louis’s howl was loud enough to fetch the US militia from its new guardhouse, so Josh jumped to his feet, swung his bag onto his shoulder and hurried away.

  Once he had crossed The Lucy’s gangplank he allowed himself to feel safe and pushed his way, nodding, past the hands working on the deck until he reached the fo’c’sle, the crew’s quarters in the bow. Like all fo’c’sles it was dingy, dark and smelling of perspiration, damp and tobacco, but to Josh it felt like sanctuary. Breathing heavily, he made a pillow of his kitbag at the end of what was an unoccupied bunk, laid down his head upon it and closed his eyes for a moment to regain his breath.

  Then he sprang up, pulled out his belongings from the bag, changed into working clothes – old shirt, leggings, overalls and a woollen hat – and threw the rest of the bag’s contents into the wooden locker under his straw mattress. He saw with relief that there was a small hinge and padlock on the locker, with a key in the lock. Carefully he placed an oilskin bag, containing his second mate’s ticket, his letters from Mary and his savings of thirty guineas in gold coins, underneath his clothes at the bottom of the locker and locked it.

  Then, with a huge sense of relief, he turned out on deck to report to the mate. He was not sorry to leave Key West behind him. He was at sea again, where, despite the wrecking of the Jenny Lee, at least he felt secure and at home.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Well before the sun rose, the crew of the The Lucy answered the cry of ‘All hands on deck to make sail’ and both watches (there were only two for this voyage, it seemed) swarmed up into the rigging to set the royals and the topgallants so that, when the early morning offshore wind arrived to please Captain Lucas, the canvas bulged obligingly and the vessel eased away from her berth with hardly a ripple.

  Lucas may not have been the most demanding of skippers or Mitchell the most houseproud of mates, but they seemed to know their business, for they took The Lucy unerringly between the coral reefs and half-islands that studded the surface of the sea off Key West.

  As the brig began to heel to the wind, Josh watched with interest as she passed several of what he presumed to be wrecking schooners, returning to harbour. They seemed comparatively flimsy craft, with little freeboard, so indicating that they would be wet boats in a seaway, and carrying plenty of fore-’n-aft canvas. All of them were making good headway, creating creaming bow waves and leaving straight wakes astern of them.

  He wondered how vessels with such little freeboard would be able to stow the cargoes they salvaged from the stricken ships they serviced. They would surely have to make many trips to the wrecks.

  Josh shook his head. What a strange business, with so-called ‘wreckers’ being licensed to do their scavenging work! When he was growing up in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, he had heard stories from the past of how the wild men of the North Cornish coast would set up lights on the cliffs to offer false hope of safe anchorages to storm-swept ships coming in from the Atlantic. Their skippers, expecting protected harbours, would instead be lured onto the rocks of that forbidding coastline. But that, he knew, was long ago. It wouldn’t happen now.

  Or would it? He seemed to remember, before he set sail for the East, reading a reference from a Constabulary Force Commission report that spoke of men onshore ‘using every endeavour to bring a ship into danger rather than help her’, so that she could be wrecked and plundered.

  It was true that he knew of no cases of wrecks being caused by false lights onshore. But then the Cornish coast, both north and south, was thinly populated and poorly policed and it would be no surprise therefore if such cases were never, or rarely, brought to court. There was, of course, a law against the practice, which offered death as the penalty for such transgressions. Yet why should such a law be put onto the Statute Book for a crime that was never committed?

  Smuggling was a different matter, which, despite the efforts of the newly established coastguard, flourished throughout Devon and Cornwall and, indeed, on most of the coasts of Britain. Certainly in the south-west it was regarded as a right, a respectable source of income for the people of the peninsula. As, of course, was wrecking – their word for salvaging and making off with the cargoes and sometimes the very structure of the ships that were tossed onto their cruel coasts. He had heard that many houses in Cornish villages near the coast had been constructed of timber broken off the wrecks.

  A wry grin crept across Josh’s lips as, high aloft, he shuffled along the mainsail yard, his boots swaying on the ‘horse’ – the safety footrope hung under the yards – to cast off the lashings and let the slack mainsail fall. How many different interpretations there were of the word wrecker! But he had had enough of the whole murky business and he was glad to leave behind him in the Florida Keys his own experience of the practice.

  The wind was fair and before long they were completely clear of the Gulf of Mexico and its encircling Keys and the skipper ordered a course to the north-east to take them across the Atlantic to their next landfall at the tip of Cornwall.

  Josh was glad to feel the fresh, keen air of the ocean on his cheeks and to see the smudge of land that was the mainland of Florida sink below the horizon. Whenever sailing with a new ship he was glad to get away from land so that, if the weather turned dangerous, they would have plenty of sea room. Autumn was the season for hurricanes in the Caribbean, he knew, and it was best to test The Lucy’s seaworthiness out in the open sea when and if they were caught in these vicious storms.

  That afternoon he took his first trick on the wheel. He was less than pleased at the ship’s response to the small adjustments he made to keep her on course. She seemed sluggish and unresponsive, compared to the Jenny Lee, perhaps because the keel of his new ship was c
oated with barnacles. Another example of the poor maintenance operated by Captain Lucas?

  Down below, he met the men of his watch for the first time. They were the usual mixture of nationalities to be found in a ship far from its base: Englishmen, of course, but also an American from Boston, a Lascar and a large, genial Dane from Copenhagen. He took to the Scandinavian right away and afterwards they sat together on deck as The Lucy heeled slightly to the gentle wind and the stars began to twinkle as they peeped down at them from between the sails.

  The Dane, Jorgen Grumm, looked at his watchkeeper with interest. He saw a fresh-faced, brown-eyed young man in what appeared to be the peak of physical condition: about five feet ten inches tall, broad shoulders, no beer-drinker’s belly, but a muscular stomach and slim hips.

  Equally, Josh considered the Dane. He was built like a Viking, well over six feet tall, with the bluest of eyes, and legs and arms that took him over the rigging with ease and grace.

  ‘Have you sailed with this skipper and mate before, Jorgen?’ he asked.

  The Dane puffed on his pipe and nodded. ‘Oh ja. I joined ship at Oslo, made the passage to London and then to here.’

  ‘Are they good sailors, would you say?’

  The Dane shot him a quick look from under his bushy eyebrows. ‘Why you ask that?’ he said. ‘You got good reason to ask, eh?’

  ‘No, well, not exactly. It’s just that the ship doesn’t look as though it’s as well maintained or even sailed as well as it should be.’ He pointed upwards. ‘Look at that mains’l. I would say that the trim is not set to get the best out of her. What do you think?’

  ‘I tink you are right,’ he nodded again. ‘I saw it earlier. These officers are – what do you say in English – a bit sloppy, I tink.’

  ‘Did you have any weather coming over?’

  ‘No. Sea very calm.’

  ‘So the skipper and mate weren’t exactly put under any strain?’

  ‘No. But they do nothing wrong, as far as I can tell. I tell you one ting, though.’ He lowered his voice. ‘The skipper, he drinks. Whisky, I tink.’