Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
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"Stap my vitals" Neal cried, and I knew he was quoting Otway. He dropped his broken trap beside him on the stone steps, and suddenly and surprisingly he held in his hand a long, thin-bladed knife, with which he went at the broken cord, trimming and splicing it as neatly as any bos'n on the river.
"Where'd you get that knife?" I asked. I held out my hand for it, but the boy made a quick movement and the knife vanished.
"It belonged to my father," he said. "My father says even big men'll shy away from a knife."
His reference to big men floored me, but somehow the mention of his father made his possession of that long thin knife seem excusable, if not exactly reasonable; so I forgot the knife and sat there beside him on the steps of Ballast Quay with the cool scent of the sea drifting past us, borne by the swift tide, which held the bows and the riding sails of all the brigs and schooners and frigates and ships-of-the-line, lying off the Naval Hospital, as steady and true as though carved and mathematically placed there by one of the hospital's ancient pensioners.
Neal's father, he said, had once been a strolling player. Then, when Neal's mother died, his father enlisted in the St. George's Light Dragoons. Later his father joined the
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Navy because he thought it offered more opportunities for prize money. After he had been wounded in an engagement, he was admitted to the Naval Hospital, where his scanty allowance barely enabled him to buy tobacco for himself and supply Neal with a weekly two shillings on which to live in a room on Fisher's Alley.
Thus, Neal said, he counted himself fortunate to receive seven shillings a week from Mr. Penkethman, even though that pay was three weeks in arrears.
When the tide was wrong, so that the fops and rakes couldn't sail down from London to Greenwich and sail back again to London the same night, the theatre was closed and he was free to fish for Mr. Langman. On theatre days he fished for himself and turned over his catch to Mr. Penkethman's players, who repaid him by teaching him how to walk and enunciate and have stage manners.
There was something about the way he said the words "fops" and "rakes" that made me wonder what he or his father had endured at their hands; but when I asked him that question, he said abruptly that the whitebait had stopped running. Would I, he asked me, take him as far as Watling Stairs? When I said Yes, he neatly slid the dinghy off the step without any help from me. Watling Stairs, Neal said, was where Langman daily went to collect the catches of his fisherboys.
I saw Neal meet Langmana swarthy tall man with a dubious half-smile on one side of his mouth; and I never dreamed, as I watched him empty Neal's little bag of fish into a larger sack and give him a few coins from a leather wallet, that I'd ever see that troublesome man again.
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Chapter 2
Through all my boyhood and youth Greenwich and its waterfront had been my stamping ground.
Everything about the river was familiar and fascinating to methe merchantmen and ships of war that moved perpetually or lay at anchor all around the tip of the Isle of Dogs and up past Deptford on the one hand and down past Woolwich on the other: the constant movement of watermen bearing gentlemen on an outing to see the beauties of the palaces: the watermen's hoarse crying of "Oars, Sculls! Sculls, Oars!"; the sloops, loaded with brightly dressed men and women, who, screaming like seagulls, waved at me as I passed; the towering three-deckers, with their carved and gilded stern galleries and their bright red sides: their fluttering lines of newly washed sailormen's togs: the never ending passage up and down gangplanks of women and hucksters, wives, trulls, boatmen, visitors: the vessels battered from long voyages beating up to their anchorages; those setting off for unknown ports with new canvas gleaming from their squared yards and noisy with the shouts of angry mates and drunken sailors.
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They were sights and sounds to which I looked forward all through each long winter, when I crouched beside my sea-coal fire in Christ Church, reading and forever reading those tiresome books that had been preserved for generations in the Bodleian's underground caverns.
Greenwich being what it was, I never defied my father's orders to stay indoors after dark; for sailors, whether King's men or merchant seamen, were a scurvy lot, and one who ventured on the streets at night too often found himself in the grip of a press gang, beaten black and blue, stripped of his clothes, and thrown into a vermin-ridden cable tier so far below the water line that his cries were as nothing compared with the gurgle of the tide against the bow.
Greenwich, the life of the river and particularly the life of the theatre, concerning which Neal Butler had spoken so familiarly, was heaven to me by comparison with Oxford.
My professors, my tutors, seemed to me like drone bees, living on some invisible college pollen; whereas actors from Drury Lane and the Haymarket, greatest of England's theatres, by contrast were truly alive.
Even at Oxford I suffered with those actors from the influx of Italian opera singers, who squalled so loudly as to threaten the existence of English players whose education in squalling was neglected.
The truth was, I was stage-struck. Aristophanes to me was a long-dead shadow who had written about frogs; but Penkethman, known by reputation to all of us in the Buskin Club, was Pinky, a genius who now was doubly a genius for having conceived the idea of coming to Greenwich for the summer with scenery such as had been first
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invented at Christ Church by Inigo Jones, and with all the machines, devices and appurtenances necessary to cause sprites to fly through the air and demons to rise from the earth.
When, that night, I guardedly told my father about Neal Butler, I emphasized his association with Penkethman's players more than I did his aptitude as a catcher of whitebait or his association with Langman; for my father said, "Pah!" and immediately used the very words that Neal himself had used, "Fops and rakes!"
"This boy isn't a fop or a rake," I said. "He's no more a fop or a rake than I was at his ageor than I am now."
"He's an actor, isn't he?" my father asked, putting his hands on the table and thrusting his head toward me, as he did when he'd caught a witness in an outrageous evasion of the truth. "That's what actors are forever representing, isn't it?" he demanded. "Pint-sized clowns in tatters and tarnished gold lace, making faces and laughing like hyenas at their damned dull witlessness. Overdressed harridans with breasts half exposed, pretending to be Sir Courtly Nice's mistress, or aping a droopy doll, all prunes and prisms, fainting if a man says, 'Split me'! Players with perukes two feet high and scented with pulvillio and essence, screeching and squalling, 'A harse! A harse! My kingdom for a harse!' Otway had the right word for 'em! Punks, my dear Miles, corrupting the morals and principles of the youth!"
"But, sir," I protested, "this boy isn't that sort. If I had a brother, I'd be proud if he were like Neal Butler: looked like him: behaved like him. He's as uncorrupted as can be!"
I told him how the boy had shied away from menot
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frightened exactly, but wary, as if he'd had occasion to question the motives of someone.
"I liked him the moment I saw him," I said, "and so would you, unless I'm greatly mistaken. There's something about himsomething that makes you sure he'd be good at anything to which he turned his hand. Even the whitebait seemed to be attracted to him. He had a little trap with the edges bent upa sort of wire platter with a cord at each corner. The four cords were lashed to a larger cord, and the large cord was fastened to a short pole. I think it must have been instinct that told him when to pull that trap! He certainly couldn't see the whitebaitat least I couldn't. The water was brown, as it always is when the tide first turns. I think he might become a great actor."
My father snorted. "He'll probably grow up to rewrite Shakespeare, like so many damned foolsDryden and Tate and D'Urfey, for example!"
"Or like Cibber," I said. "The Tatler seems to like Cibber, and the Butler boy mentioned Otway with a good deal of respect. Was Otway a damned fool?"
He pulled off his tie-wig to rub his short gray hair with an impatient hand. "I've no objection to buying this boy's whitebaithave 'em every day for a week if you'd like; but don't for God's sake take a child's opinions about the stage and about actors. They're punks, all of 'em, just as Otway said. Punks, my boy!"
He cogitated for a moment. "Well, not all of 'em ex-
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actly. I saw Betterton as Falstaff once, and damn near died laughing!"
I left my dinghy at the Hospital Yard the following afternoon with no thought of Neal Butler except that, with the tide flowing an hour earlier, he had probably netted enough whitebait to let me have as much as I wanted.
He hadn't though. When I caught a barge to Deptford Steps, Neal was where I'd seen him the day before, and on the step above him, in the blue-sleeved summer waistcoat and blue yarn socks of a pensioner of the Naval Hospital, was a lopsided man with a long yellow mustache and clumps of yellow fuzz protruding so far below the round, flat-topped black hat that they covered his ears. His look of being overloaded on one side was due to the way he carried his right shoulder somewhat lower than his left, as if he were about to reach down with his right hand and haul up an anchor.
Neal gave me that quick smile of his, but before he could speak, the lopsided man leaned forward, looked almost fiercely at me and spoke my name.
"Yes," I said, "I'm Miles Whitworth, and you must be Mr. Butler."
"Swede, not 'mister,' " the yellow-haired man said. "Swede Butler. Moses was my name; Neal's too; but they called me Swede because of my hair. I never thought much of Moses. There must have been something wrong with him if it took him forty years to get the Children of Israel out of the Wilderness. Neal dropped the Moses because Penkethman told him to."
That name-changing habit of actor-managers had often
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touched me on the raw. They never had the brains to understand that the actor makes the name: not the name the actor. Moses ButlerNeal Butlerwhat's the difference! It's the inner fire that an audience sees and feels: not the label by which a bailiff knows him!
"I wonder what Anne Bracegirdle's real name is?" I asked Swede.
"I won't even try to guess," Swede said. "I only want to know who my boy takes up with."
"I don't wonder," I said. "Your boy has a knack for catching whitebait. He has a way with him, too."
"Aye," Swede said. "He tells me your father's a magistrate. He tells me you're a member of Christ Church, in statu pupillari." He paused, as if surprised at his use of the Latin phrase: then again stared at me almost fiercely. "And he says he thinks you're an actor."
"That's putting it too strongly, Swede," I said. "We have a club at Christ Churchthe Buskin Club. We read plays, and once or twice we've staged one in the Hall; but I hope to write 'em rather than recite 'em."
"Good!" Swede said. "You need fish to fry and I need the advice of someone who isn't an actor. I've been an actor myself, and I wouldn't take an actor's advice any more than I'd take a sailor's. Do you suppose your father would trade a bit of advice for some of Neal's whitebait?"
"I'm sure he would," I said. "He'll take to Neal just as quickly as I did."
Swede put a big hand on his son's shoulder. "Pick up your fishes, boy. We'll go see Mr. Whitworth. Perhaps he can work out a future for youone that won't leave you rolling in a gutter or living like a beggar in a naval hospital."
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Chapter 3
John Dean was an old friend of my family, a sea captain from Twickenham, a little upriver from London, but he loaded and unloaded his cargoes at Greenwich, and always came to our house, before starting on a cruise, to have vessel and cargo insured. I know my father thought highly of him, and frequently ventured a moderate sum, which Dean would invest in coffee or tea or spices, thus providing education-money to be used by me at Oxford.
Behind our house on Church Lane was a walled arbor from which we caught glimpses of the river; and my father and Captain Dean were sitting there when I brought Neal and Swede Butler to the garden.
When Captain Dean saw us, he folded a paper and got up to go, but my father stopped him. "Unless I'm mistaken," my father said, "Miles has found us some whitebait, and we'll have it for supper, with pickle sauce. You'll get no dish to touch it on your Nottingham Galley nor in any tavern, for that matter. Maybe, after you've let out your belt a fathom or two, you'll stretch that insurance by a hundred pounds or so."
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Dean, a large calm man, smiled at us, and settled back comfortably in his chair. ''Whitebait!" he exclaimed. "I'd run a mile a day for a platterful, but I've got a mate who cheats fisher-boys out of nearly all they can netmakes a small fortune selling it to taverns for ten times what he pays for itso there's never any left over for me. Yes, I'll stay with pleasure, Charles, and you ought to put your chopped pickle in sour cream if you want a proper sauce."
I shook hands with Captain Dean, and my father got up to look at Neal Butler, who made him the politest of bows and held out his poke of whitebait-filled sacking.
When my father fumbled in his pocket, Swede Butler stepped forward and touched his hat. "Sir," he said, "my boy and I ask you to accept it in place of a fee."
"This is Swede, Neal's father," I explained. "He asked me whether you'd trade him some advice in return for Neal's catch. He wants the advice for Neal. Neal's a good boy, and I told Swede you would."
"You did, did you?" my father asked. "That's the value you put on my advice, is it? A sack of minnows?"
"No," I said. "I thought you might earn two people's affection, and some entertainment as wellif Neal recites his Italian epilogue for you. That's fairly good pay, isn't it?"
My father put his hand on Neal's shoulder. "I'm mighty pleased with your whitebait," he said. "I'll ask you to take it to the kitchen and give it to Mrs. Buddage. She's our cook. She'll rinse your piece of sacking, so you can have it to use again. Oh, and could you remember to tell her that Captain Dean says to make the sauce out of chopped pickle and sour cream?"
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"And just a little chopped onion," Captain Dean said.
"Sour cream, chopped pickle, chopped onion," Neal repeated, and somehow he enunciated the words in such a way as to make my mouth water.
He marched obediently toward the kitchen, and even his manner of walking, though unaffected, was a pleasure to the eye.
"Quite a boy," my father said to Swede.
"Yes, sir," Swede said. "I don't know where he gets it. Maybe from his mother. She'd have been a player herself, and a good one, too, if a gallery hadn't fallen on her when we were playing the Angel InnDuke of Norfolk's servants, sir. I couldn't bring up a baby, Mr. Whit-worth, so I left Neal with his grampa and granma outside of Norwich and took to the Army. Then I tried the Navy and got to be captain of the foretop on the Minerva till a French musket ball caught me in the shoulder and put me in the hospital yonder." He nodded in the general direction of the palaces on the water-front.
"What's your problem, Mr. Butler?" my father asked.
"Well, sir, here it is," Swede said. "This boy has something I've never put to proper use. I've taught him to read and write: he's the quickest study I ever saw, and I've seen some good ones. If I could be in the theatre with him, I wouldn't mind so much; but I'm too banged up to be any good to a young man like Penkethman. So Neal's going it alone in the theatre, paid about half the time if he's lucky, and nothing much ahead of him but getting to be a beggar, depending on benefit performances, which is charity, no matter how you look at it. I know the end of itwork a fifth of the year, and never save a penny: get