The Portuguese Affair

by Ann Swinfen

  Captain Oliver had decreed that the sailors were to receive twice the ration of water as that which was doled out to the soldiers, since they must remain active and sail the ship for all our sakes, while the soldiers might sit idle. At this a great outcry went up, but our sickly soldiers had no strength to fight the crew. Many of them were feverish, and as their fevers grew worse, so they cried out more pitifully for water. The ration was one small cup in the forenoon and the same at dusk.

  Dr Nuñez and I did what we could to relieve the sick and injured, but had no help from Dr Lopez. Like Dom Antonio, he hid away in his cabin and we did not see them for the whole length of our voyage. Perhaps it was as well. If the men had possessed any remnants of strength, they might have turned on them as the cause of all their misery.

  ‘I cannot endure the men’s suffering,’ I cried to Dr Nuñez that first evening. I thought I had suffered strain almost past bearing during the overland forced march, but this worse, much worse. ‘I am going to give my ration of water to some soldier burning up with fever.’

  He laid his hand on my arm and shook his head.

  ‘And what will that accomplish, Kit? If you share your ration amongst so many, it will amount to no more than a few drops each, and what good will that do? If you give it all to one man or two, how much the others will resent it and condemn you! And then you will yourself become ill from lack of water, and be unable to help them. It is more important to sustain your strength, as long as you can, than to make an empty gesture, however noble it might make you feel.’

  He was right, of course. I was young and foolish and thought only of relieving my distress by the gesture, but it would have done no good. Nothing I could do would help the men in their intolerable suffering.

  I mumbled some embarrassed agreement, for I knew he spoke the truth.

  As dusk fell on the first day, the men discovered that, as well as the lack of water, there was no food on board and that they were to starve to death, unless they could survive the voyage on that meagre allowance of water. When that news became general, six men turned their faces from us and died, as much from despair as from illness. During the dark hours, the crew slid their bodies over the stern, their pockets weighed down with stones taken from the ballast. The captain said a brief prayer over each man, as we stood bareheaded and watched the bodies slip beneath the sullen grey waves of the Atlantic. I wondered whether any of the remaining men were doing the heartless calculation. The fewer of us on board would mean a slightly larger ration of water. When people are in extremis, the calculus of survival comes into play.

  We had set off with a fair wind, but on the second day the wind dropped and the heat grew more and more unbearable. Below decks in my tiny cabin, I felt as though I would suffocate. On deck the merciless sun burnt every exposed inch of skin raw red. The men would not go below to their cramped quarters, which were even worse than mine, filled with the stench of unwashed and diseased bodies. Dr Nuñez persuaded the captain to rig up a kind of awning on deck from a spare mainsail, beneath whose shade the men who could move crawled gratefully. The rest we carried and disposed there as best we could, amongst coils of rope and other ship’s gear. The sailors cursed this arrangement, which hindered their handling of the ship, but they too were growing weak now, despite their double ration of water and the period of rest and feasting they had enjoyed in Cascais. Captain Oliver called Dr Nuñez and me into his cabin during the afternoon and gave us each a little dried meat he had put by. Otherwise, he said, he had no more to eat than the rest of us.

  ‘We must keep our physicians on their feet,’ he said with a grim smile. ‘For we shall all need you before this voyage is done.’

  ‘Could we not make a broth with the meat?’ I said eagerly. ‘Then we could share it amongst all.’

  I saw that Dr Nuñez was going to raise the same objection as before, but the captain forestalled him.

  ‘No water,’ he pointed out.

  I banged my fist against my forehead.

  ‘But wait,’ I said. ‘If we took each man’s evening ration of water, and made broth with the meat, then at least they would go to their rest tonight with a little more than water in their bellies.’

  The captain and Dr Nuñez agreed, albeit reluctantly. I am sure they thought my gesture futile, but what difference did it make, after all? We were all growing dull and hopeless with hunger. Probably we would all be dead before ever we could reach England.

  I carried all the strips of dried meat down into the bowels of the Victory, to where the ship’s cook had his quarters, and explained what I wanted him to do with it. He had a cook-stove built of bricks, but there was no fire laid in it, since there was nothing for him to cook. Sitting on a stool amongst his highly polished pots and pans, he was slumped like a sack of meal, a look of total despair pulling down a mouth much better shaped for jollity.

  At my suggestion that we should make a broth, his face took on a little animation. After a moment’s thought he gave me a calculating look, then lifted the lid of a pottery crock stowed away under the table where he worked and drew out from it a single onion and half a dozen carrots.

  ‘I managed to hide these,’ he said, ‘when Drake’s men came to strip us of all our provisions for their voyage to the Azores. If we are to make one last meal, I will add these to it. There will be no further chance, for I have nothing else left but a few dried peas.’

  ‘Let us add those as well,’ I said. ‘We will make it as nourishing as we can. I will help you.’

  Like most cooks, he carried a layer of plump flesh built up over the years, which had not been sucked dry by the march from Peniche, since he had remained with the ship. No doubt he had also lived well during the stay at Cascais. He had a better chance than the soldiers of surviving this voyage, but he was going to suffer the same terrible pangs of hunger as the rest of us. Perhaps he might experience even more agony than we would, for our bodies had grown accustomed to near starvation during that hunger march.

  I sought out the bosun and explained that Captain Oliver had agreed that the evening water ration should be used for the broth. He himself carried the buckets down to the cook’s galley, as if he did not trust even me not to make off with it. While I had been gone, the cook had lit the fire in his stove and he now lifted down a great iron pot, into which the bosun poured the precious water.

  I found one of the cook’s sharp knives and set about chopping the strips of dried meat very finely, while he chopped the onion and carrots. The bosun lingered, watching us hungrily. I did not feel very sympathetic towards him. He too had rested and eaten in Cascais while we had dragged ourselves overland. As we worked, I noticed that there were some bunches of dried herbs hanging from the beam above his head.

  ‘Can we add some of those, for flavour?’ I asked. The meat and vegetables, now added to the pot, were barely to be seen.

  ‘Aye,’ the cook said, reaching up. ‘There’s thyme here, and marjoram.’

  He chopped them swiftly with that skilled rocking motion professional cooks seem to use so casually, then stirred them into the pot. It still looked more water than broth. He placed a lid on the pot and drew it to the edge of the iron grid above the fire.

  ‘Don’t want to boil away the water,’ he explained. ‘I’ll just keep ’un simmering very low.’

  The men were grateful for our attempt to provide at least something like food that evening, patiently holding out their cups for their share. Even the sailors were too weak by now to argue or push others out of the way. Despite the thin broth, barely tasting of the meat, the onion, the carrots, and the herbs, more men died in the night, and more bodies went overboard next day. The other ships in our depleted fleet were keeping pace with us, and we could see the dead from those ships following ours to the depths of the ocean.

  I began to wonder if all the ships, empty of sailors and soldiers and gentlemen adventurers, would eventually sail on by themselves over the oceans unmanned, until they fetched up on some foreign shore – the W
est Indies to the south, or Virginia and the Chesapeake, where my tutor Thomas Harriot had once voyaged to meet the native peoples, or perhaps far to the north, to Iceland, which I had heard was a strange country of volcanoes and earthquakes, of spouting geysers whose boiling water rose out of the snow fields, and of islands that sprang new-made from the sea. Perhaps the Victory would crash eventually into one of the great ice floes, inhabited, as I had read, by huge bears as white as the snows amongst which they lived.

  By now I was growing light-headed from lack of water and food. Hunger does strange things to the body. At first no more than a whisper in the stomach it grows and grows until your whole body is filled with a gnawing pain, as a glass is filled with water. The analogy of the water glass came to me as part of a weird hallucination which accompanied the hunger, a feeling that somewhere there was both food and water, if only I could find them. I had to stop myself roaming the ship, searching. Soon that pain walked everywhere with me, so that it was difficult to think of anything else, but I must think of my patients. I had to struggle to sustain my role of physician.

  My salves had been running low at Lisbon and I had had no chance to replenish them during our brief stay in Cascais. I did what I could now, for the wounded, but the men were so weak and exhausted, their bodies drying up and crying out for sustenance, that Nature’s own healing power was unable to help them.

  I thought with regret of the long cool wards of St Bartholomew’s, with their rows of tidy beds. The sisters – as we called them, after the nuns who had served there in the past – kept the bedlinen and the patients clean and sweet. In the case of many of the patients, probably cleaner and sweeter than they had ever been in their lives before. The food was plentiful and wholesome, our salves and potions, based on my father’s long and patient study of Arab medicine, were the best known to man. We had our own apothecaries, our abundant supplies of all the medicines we needed. Even in an emergency, as when the survivors of Sluys had been brought it, we were able to help most of the patients. Every week the governors of the hospital paid a visit of inspection, to check that the patients were properly cared for, were clean and fed, and that physicians, surgeons and sisters, were all mindful of their duty. That whole world of hospital medicine seemed now like a phantasmagoria, so remote was it from the squalor in which the pitiful remnant of our army lay dying and I crouched beside them, powerless.

  The next morning, I knelt by the side of a soldier with a bullet wound in his upper arm that would not heal, although I had extracted the bullet days before. He was one of those who had been discovered lying injured outside the camp after the Spanish night raid.

  ‘Do you feel pain here, or here?’ I asked, probing the lower part of his arm.

  He gazed at me with dull eyes and shook his head. ‘I cannot feel your finger, Doctor. Not separate, like. The whole arm is too b’yer lady painful!’ He tried to give me a smile, and I could have wept.

  There was no fresh water to wash the wound, but I had dipped up a bucket of salt water, and that is sometimes more efficacious. I am not sure whether it is the salt, or perhaps some essence from the seaweeds that makes it so. He endured the cleansing bravely, and when I had smeared on a little of my last, precious salve, he lay back on the deck with a sigh. I could smell the unmistakable sweet scent of gangrene setting in, like fruit beginning to rot, which mingled with the sour, sweaty stink of him. The arm ought to be amputated before the gangrene reached his heart and lungs. It is no part of a physician’s business to perform amputations, although I supposed I might do it if there was no other way. I knew there was a naval surgeon on one of the other ships. We could signal to him to come over to us, but I decided against it. The man was too weak to survive amputation. He would have died of shock before the operation was over. It was now simply a matter of how long it would take him to die.

  I could, however, give him something to ease the pain a little. In my cabin I checked my few remaining supplies. Over the flame of a candle I made an infusion of spiraea ulmaria, matricaria recutita, and humulus lupulus in my own morning cup of water, which I had not yet drunk, lacing it with nearly the last of my poppy syrup, then I returned to the deck and sat down beside the soldier.

  He roused himself again and tried to sit up, so I slid my arm under his shoulders and helped him drink the medicine.

  ‘This will ease the pain,’ I said, and he nodded.

  Then he lay there with his head on my shoulder, looking towards the ship’s bow.

  ‘Don’t suppose I’ll never see England again, Doctor.’

  ‘You must keep your spirits up,’ I said. ‘A stout heart is better medicine than any I can give you.’ I knew that I lied, and so did he.

  ‘Ah, but you’re a brave lad, Doctor, young as you are. Once I was in my right mind again, I never thanked you for the way you sucked that snake’s poison out of my leg. That was a brave thing you done, braver than any soldier.’

  I looked down at him. In all the weariness and dirt I had not recognised him.

  He nestled closer against me, and murmured, so quietly I could barely hear him, ‘You hold me soft as my Molly. And I won’t never see her neither. She warned me.’ His voice had almost faded away. ‘She warned me . . . not to come.’

  He died within the hour, and all the while I held him. I never knew his name, or where he came from, whether Molly was his wife, whether there were more orphans made by this death. When we dropped him overboard I wept, and I shut myself in my cabin for the rest of the night. I do not know why I wept, for this one man out of so many. Perhaps it was because I had saved him once before from death, but could not save him this time. Perhaps it was because he had died in my arms, like a lover. Perhaps it was because, in his wasted, filthy, wounded body, he stood for all those other poor creatures who had died shamefully, caught between their own greed and the insubstantial dreams of old men, who were exiles from a country that no longer existed, had never existed as they imagined it.

  The following day I was sitting slumped on the foredeck, partially shaded from the sun by the foresails. Captain Oliver had ordered every last scrap of canvas to be hoisted, for there was so little breeze you could have carried a candle from one end of the deck to the other and it would not have been blown out. I had spent the morning doing what I could for the sick soldiers, but we had reached a point now when I had few medicines left, even after begging all Dr Nuñez’s supplies and – through a message carried by a cabin boy – those of Dr Lopez. I had cleaned and salved what I could, but there was nothing more I could do for them. If the wind did not come soon, we would all die, becalmed here, not many nautical miles from Coruña, where the whole invasion had begun.

  I was sick at heart and found I could not endure the presence of those wasted men any more. Instead I had escaped up here to the raised foredeck, where I sat on the hot planks of the deck, leaning back against a coil of rope with my eyes shut and pretending that I could feel an increase in the movement of the wind. Behind me I heard footsteps approach, then pause as whoever it was caught sight of me. I opened my eyes.

  ‘Dr Nuñez,’ I said, drawing in my knees to get to my feet.

  ‘I don’t mean to disturb you,’ he said. ‘Please, do not move. I’ll leave you to enjoy some rest. You have been overtaxing what little strength you have left.’

  ‘Please don’t go,’ I said. ‘It is cooler here than almost anywhere. Or at any rate, not quite as hot.’ I patted the boards beside me.

  With some difficulty he lowered himself to sit next to me on the deck. I could not imagine what pains he must be enduring at his age. Intense hunger brings on excruciating pain in all the joints. It had been a courageous undertaking to come on this expedition at all, given his advanced years. He had been so full of those dreams of his youth that he must have thought it within his capability. And had things gone as planned, it would have been. A swift voyage to Lisbon as a gentleman adventurer, luxuriously accommodated about the Victory, a ship which would take no part in Drake’s firing of the S
panish fleet; a pleasant journey along the coast of Portugal and up the Tejo to Lisbon; a joyous reception in the city, followed by the crowning of the exiled king. Feasting and celebration. All of this would have made no demands even on a man of seventy.

  For a time, neither of us said anything.

  ‘It will be good to come home,’ he said at last.

  I smiled at him. Like me, he was now thinking of England as home. Those dreams of the past had been blown away, probably some time during the march from Peniche.

  ‘Mistress Beatriz will be so glad to see you,’ I said. ‘And your children and grandchildren too.’

  ‘Aye.’ He sighed.

  I knew that he suspected, like me, that we would never reach England. And indeed we would not, unless the wind came soon. The Victory could be propelled, slowly, by towing her with an oared pinnace, though she was not designed to travel far that way. She could not be rowed herself, as a galley is. This method of towing the ship was intended only for manoeuvring in the close quarters of a harbour, or to extricate her from possible danger, if the wind failed or else blew her on shore. It could never be used to move the ship for any distance at sea. Besides, our sailors, though not yet as weak as the soldiers, could never summon the strength now to row even a pinnace.

  ‘Your father will be glad to see you safe home as well, Kit,’ Dr Nuñez said.

  I nodded. ‘I am worried that he has had to carry the burden of my work at St Bartholomew’s, as well as his own, all this time. I should have returned long before this, weeks ago, had the expedition been conducted as it was planned. He has never been strong, not since the Inquisition.’