by Carol Birch
‘I applaud you, gentlemen, on a magnificent performance,’ the captain said, his eyes travelling over all of us, his face revealing nothing. We, who didn’t know, took our cues from those more experienced hands who laughed, instinctively knowing somehow that this was a good-natured jibe and not rank sarcasm. A hint of a smile appeared upon the captain’s face. ‘We shall get along,’ he said, with his eyes never lighting anywhere, ‘if we all remember one thing.’ Long pause, roaming eyes. ‘A ship is a dangerous place, a whale ship especially so.’ Long pause. ‘You will obey orders from myself and any of the mates instantly. There will be no exceptions. It’s as simple as that.’
He had a clear ringing voice, well spoken, stronger and far more impressive than his face, which was too boyish for a captain’s. The dog, lolling with a stupid expression against his leg, did nothing to lessen the impression. He talked enthusiastically for ten minutes about duty and obedience and pulling together, and said that those of us who’d not sailed before would be given minders, and were to do what we were told. ‘Some of you will know that this voyage has a secondary purpose,’ he said. ‘We have on-board Mr Rymer’ – a nod towards Dan – ‘whose commission is to hunt wildlife. When we reach the Dutch East Indies we will be briefly diverted somewhat from our primary concern, which is, of course, to take as many barrels of oil as we can. But that need not concern any of you now. You are whale catchers and that is a great and dangerous profession. Your job now is to learn everything you possibly can as fast as you can.’
There was a law on ship as tight as any, he said, with clear rules and clear punishments for the breaking of them. It was very simple. These rules could be consulted at any time as a copy of them was permanently on display in both steerage and fo’c’s’le. Anyone who could not read could avail himself of the help of a reader.
‘Commit them to memory,’ he said. ‘They are now your Bible. And this!’ – as if from nowhere a terrible flail appeared in his hand, produced with the flourish of a conjurer procuring a gasp from the crowd – ‘is what the law of the ship demands be used upon any who break those rules. Any. No exceptions.’
He held it aloft, an evil hairy leather thing folded back upon itself.
‘Take a very good look at it now, because I am going to stow it away and I sincerely hope it will not be seen again for the duration of this voyage.’
The whip passed slowly back and forth before our following eyes.
‘Enough of that!’ He tossed it to Mr Comeragh, who looked surprised but caught it deftly. ‘Mr Rainey,’ the captain said, turning politely towards him, ‘assign boats.’
Mr Rainey produced a list and read out names. Now that he was not shouting and screaming, it was possible to see him as something more than a gargoyle. Thick-lipped, overbold of features, he was both handsome and ugly and looked as if life displeased him. Linver, Brown, Rymer, all of us were on Mr Comeragh’s boat, I’m glad to say, and a great relief it was too. Comeragh was best of the three. And when the watches were called, I was on Comeragh’s watch too, but they’d put Tim and Dan on Rainey’s. I wondered if that meant they were better than me, but I was glad I wasn’t on Rainey’s watch.
‘This old crock,’ said Gabriel, the tall black, the young one muscled like a wrestler. ‘What was I thinking? Bet she don’t make it as far as the Cape.’
‘She’ll do,’ said Dan. ‘She’s old, but she’s been well cared for.’
‘Don’t see many like this now.’
‘True enough. Soon won’t be any.’
That first supper on deck, all of us from fo’c’s’le sitting next to the tryworks round a huge lump of salt pork that sat like a rock upon a tub they called the kid. We cut strips from the pork with our knives and put them on our plates. The salt in the meat curdled my tongue.
‘Proctor’s not in charge,’ said Gabriel.
‘No. Rainey’s the man,’ said a brown-haired Yorkshire boy who’d come down with the ship from Hull. ‘He’s got the upper hand. Rainey’s the one you want to watch.’
‘You think so?’ asked the boy Rainey clouted, jiggling his knees. He was a year or two older than me. His name was Edward Skipton, but everyone called him Skip.
‘Yes I do.’ The Yorkshire boy set his cup down. ‘I was with him on the Mariolina two years gone. He was second mate then. He knows what he’s about, he does, does Rainey. Proctor’s near green as you.’
‘And I’m greener than the rushes,’ Skip said quietly.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Tim was trying to break off a flat piece of hardtack with his teeth and nearly breaking his jaw.
‘Rainey’s hard,’ said the Yorkshire boy, ‘but he’s not the worst. This is no bad ship, this is a playground, this is. You’re lucky.’
Gabriel agreed. ‘Proctor will be glad of Rainey. Proctor’s not cut out for a captain.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Tim.
Gabriel speared a lump of meat with his knife. He was older than us, fully a man. ‘I’ve seen a few,’ he said, leaning back and pulling out a plug of baccy.
First watch was larboard watch, and that was me. It was a fine night, big white stars and a moon. Everyone up on deck mooching about, Felix Duggan fooling with his broom, Comeragh playing with the dog. The cook, a huge Caribbean with a face that never smiled, standing in the cookhouse doorway smoking a pipe. At first it was all wonderful, heady stuff, this gently rolling ship life, the sticky black water brightly roiling under the ship’s lantern, the tap tap tap of a hammer somewhere, the creaking and the cracking of spars and timbers. Till step by tiny step, a sneaky progress not to be marked or checked till much too late, a disease crept in on me. The peaceful rise and fall of the rail, the stains on the timbers of the deck, the slip-slap-slop of water like the sloshing of the water on the green-slime piles of a Bermondsey wharf. I closed my eyes. In the dark, everything moved, rose and fell and reared and dipped. Life seemed long and strange and difficult. What is it? My forehead, raging hot, burst out in cold sweat. Oh no, not this. I was sick, that’s what it was.
I opened my eyes. No one else looked sick. If I could hang on till midnight, end of my watch. Please not me. Not me. Be strong. Up and down, up and down went the dark blue horizon. We were out in the channel, far out at sea it felt to me, though that’s a laugh when you think how far we had to go. Shit. It was coming. No help for it. I ran to the side of the ship and threw out liquid. Just liquid. Good. That’ll do. But then it came again, bigger, great undigested and undigestible slivers of hardtack that had refused to be chewed, slimy pink worms of pork flesh that stuck between my teeth and made me gag anew.
Skip saw.
‘Once it’s up and out it’s all over,’ he said as I wobbled back from the rail.
Well, that was a damned lie.
I learned something hard in those first couple of days. Being sick didn’t get you off work.
Comeragh came by. ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘Let it pass. Every captain was a green boy once, don’t you know.’
It passed, but not for ever. I remember little, just the decks alive, the sea calm and shifting, the rolling wallow of our passage through the waves and the strange sea light that seemed to sing. Half asleep, I gazed upon the rails rising impossibly, falling impossibly, nothing ever still. I was glad again I was on Comeragh’s watch. Sure, he’d clipped me, but not too hard. It passed as all things must, till midnight freed me and I staggered queasily down into the fo’c’s’le and into my bunk. I stumbled in the dark and knocked against someone who groaned. My mattress was spiky. The darkness rocked me like a mother. The timbers creaked. The smell, thick, oily, bloody and juicy, a smell of smoke and bodies, salt and tar. I cried for my ma. I slept with both eyes closed and every sense awake. My dreams were full of lost baby creatures that whimpered and sucked upon bottles. Soft-fingered, they lay on their backs, helpless, surrendered, hurt by an enormity of loss beyond their understanding. How did I know this? I did not. Inside my head was a swelling and a writhing. Every now and then I awoke, sinking and rising. Ishb
el came. Sang, Come to me my darling, come to me, dear. She stroked my head against her breast and opened her bodice to me, and when morning came, I hung over my bunk and moaned. The moan was answered by another. I looked up and saw a young black boy leaning over the side of his bunk, throwing up into a wooden bucket held by Chinese Yan, who squatted by his side, rumple-haired and near naked. The foul sweetness of vomit thickened the air. The ship lurched. Someone somewhere retched, something splashed, someone groaned. I opened my throat and a hacking sound came out, a sound like a dog choking on a bone. Yan turned his head, muttering softly in his own strange choppy language, and with one swift movement deposited the bucket under my face. I looked down into the lumpy rejects of the black boy’s stomach, closed my eyes and pitched up my guts.
Well, would you not just know it? Tim, in all his golden glory, never was sick. No, never, never in any storm, never in any lasting swell. And there was me and seven or eight more that day weeping, drooling, flung inside out and purged like evil from a perfect world.
The open hatchway shed lurid daylight on us from above. Kill me now. I can’t get up. Ma, come, put your cool sweet hand on my head and croon and say: Poor little Jaf, stay in bed and try and sleep again. My mattress stank. And there with his grinning clown face was Mr Comeragh, crying, ‘Up! Up now, boys! No more of this.’
Yan left me and the black boy sharing the bucket.
‘Look sharp, Jaf,’ said Comeragh cheerfully. ‘Come on, Bill.’
How we got on deck I’ll never know, but we did somehow. There was no mercy, none at all: you worked and you threw up in the bilges and you worked, and that was that. Felix Duggan, cabin boy, a whey-faced kid of fourteen with big soft lips, was first to the masthead that terrible morning. His mouth was open, his lower lip hung sickly. Ach, I thought, ach, take me home, take me home and never let me see the sea again. Could you ever get sick of the sight of the sea? she’d said, standing beside me on Tower Bridge. Oh yes, dear Ishbel. Yes, I could.
‘This is stupid.’ Felix scowled and kicked his toes against the mainmast, blinking tears from his eyes. ‘Why me? Why not you?’ he appealed to Henry Cash, a watchful, supercilious sort who’d earned his sea spurs some years ago and made sure everyone knew, though how he did this I’ll never know because he hardly ever talked to anyone. ‘You’re not sick. He’s not sick,’ pointing at Tim. ‘Why me?’
‘Search me,’ said Henry Cash, cool as mint. ‘Go and ask Rainey, I dare you.’
‘There’s no whales in these seas,’ said the Yorkshire boy who’d sailed with Rainey before. John Copper. I was getting their names by now.
‘Who says?’ said Cash.
‘See?’ Felix wiped his nose angrily. ‘What’s the point of looking for whales that aren’t there?’
‘I suppose the captain will be judge of that,’ Cash said, smiling smoothly and walking away.
‘Off to lick Rainey’s arsehole,’ muttered John Copper.
‘He better watch his head if I’m sick up there.’ Felix spat viciously on the deck, and with laboured movements commenced the climb up the mast for his two hours.
‘There’s no whales in these seas,’ John Copper repeated. ‘Who says? Who says? Proctor? He don’t know. There’s no whales in these seas.’
Nor were there, not that we saw, not till after Cape Verde. And by then I was in love with a sailor’s life. There were times some nights when I knew that at last I’d reached that place towards which I’d been drawn from the womb. The fo’c’s’le was another womb, and I wouldn’t have been anywhere else, not up in steerage where Dan was, even though he got to eat his dinner up near the cookhouse. Too close to the captain and the mates, steerage, you’d have to watch yourself. We had the best of it in fo’c’s’le. We had Sam’s eerie singing, and a Cape Cod boy called Simon Flower who played the fiddle. The talk went round and round, and the smoke would mix in clouds and threads above our heads; and in those clouds and threads I saw blue worlds, misty uplands, an ever-changing landscape, until early one morning fourteen days from home there came the cry of Land Ho from Gabriel on watch aloft, and they appeared on the horizon, real as the timbers beneath my feet.
Great blue mountains, layers and layers of purple and grey and lilac and rose in the sky. I ran for my old telescope, Dan Rymer’s telescope. They were beautiful, the Azores. The weather was soft and sweet and warm. We anchored off Horta on Faial Island. I saw white buildings and the steeple of a church and the great cone of a mountain stark against the clear sky, fluffy white clouds massed around its base. I’d never seen a mountain before, and this one was a volcano. Gabriel pointed. ‘Pico Alto’, he said. He’d been before. But it was not here on this island, it was over the sea, though it looked so close it might have gobbled us all up in its hot belly. I said something about how peculiar it was that people went on living so close to such things, all the time knowing they could suddenly explode and drown them all in ash and fire, and he laughed and nudged me with his elbow. ‘And the world goes on,’ he said.
A great grey crag rose up behind the town. I have come to foreign parts, I said to myself. To where the strange tongues begin, the unknown ways, where mountains spew smoke and fire and even the earth underfoot is of a different substance.
We would buy vegetables and hogs for oil, the captain said. First light tomorrow we’d leave. We left Yan and our cook, Wilson Pride, and a couple more on-board and rowed ashore after breakfast in the whaleboats. I’d never rowed in my life before and my shoulders ached like hell by the time we reached the crowded harbour, rolled our barrels up the beach and tapped them, and gathered round to wait for Proctor to sort things out with whoever it was he had to sort things out with.
We waited an hour. People came down, barefoot women with dark eyes and black hair, shouting to one another in loud rasping voices, old men, crones in shawls, high-pitched children mobbing us in shrill sing-song. They brought potatoes and onions, beans and figs and apples, wild-eyed fowl complaining in wooden cages. I could make out nothing of their speech, a hoarse-throated mixture of English and Portuguese, but John Copper had some of the language. ‘Não ainda,’ he told them, good-natured, ‘logo, logo’, and I made up my mind to listen hard wherever I went and try to pick up all I could of the various tongues. If I was to be a rover, and I was, it would be necessary. They could have been birds for all I understood of them, these foreign people. What good was that? Plain, unremarkable John Copper earned my admiration with his skill.
The people drew back respectfully when the captain came walking down the beach with Rainey and Comeragh and Henry Cash, the dog trotting circles as if rounding them up, running ahead, running back.
‘Samson,’ Proctor called, ‘heel, heel!’
We brought ourselves to attention with the dog and awaited orders.
Captain Proctor said all was in order for trading. Simon Flower was to take charge of the measuring with Martin Hannah. Those who wished could take a run ashore, those who wished could return to the ship. ‘I want fair trading,’ he announced, his pale, freckled hand tickling the back of the dog’s ear, ‘and may I take this opportunity’, clearing his throat, ‘to remind those of you who choose to stay ashore, that you are guests upon this island. Any misdemeanours …’ he paused ‘… of any kind …’, panting moistly, soft-eyed, Samson whined, ‘… will be punished with utmost severity.’
He scanned us with his pale questioning blue eyes as if searching for dissent.
‘Utmost severity,’ he repeated thoughtfully.
Mr Rainey stepped forward from the small line-up of him and Comeragh and Cash. Why Cash? Standing there with his cool half smile, as if he was a mate already.
‘If I might comment,’ Mr Rainey said.
‘Most certainly, Mr Rainey,’ replied Captain Proctor pleasantly.
‘It occurs to me that Copper might be a wiser choice than Hannah, sir. Copper has a smattering of the native tongue. Hannah, I believe, has none.’
There was an odd moment. Captain Proctor’s hand stopped f
ondling his dog. Cash gave a slight nod, and Comeragh looked away. The captain’s eyes flickered, he adjusted his hat. ‘Thank you, Mr Rainey,’ he said smoothly, ‘a good suggestion. Copper, Flower – fair dealing.’
It was a good choice. John Copper knew what he was about. He told me later he’d worked on his aunt’s fish stall in Hull since he was about six years old. John measured fairly with quart pot and pint cup, a frown of concentration pleating the skin between his eyes. It was funny to hear him switch between his native Yorkshire and pig Portuguese as he haggled gamely with the noisy women. ‘Três, senhora, três so! Bastante! Obrigado, obrigado, depois por favor.’
The rest of us who’d gone ashore were free to roam around the town, and a sweet little town it was, full of narrow cobbled lanes and donkeys and flowers and small white houses with patterned tiles upon the walls. Some of the buildings were grand, with fine balconies that overhung the road, flowers cascading, but mostly the houses were poor, and the children who peeped out of their doorways were barefoot and raggy, with bright, dark eyes. The men were shabby. The women carried pots on their heads and wore long cloaks with stiff hoods in spite of the warmth of the day. But there was nothing in the shops we wanted, and anyway we had no money. So after a while me and Tim strolled out of town along a narrow climbing lane hedged with great clumps of pink and purple flowers, and we saw a wooden plough drawn by two oxen, and a couple of men digging in the fields. High bamboo hedges divided the land. Here and there were cottages with scabby thatched roofs.
We climbed till the land became woody. Big rocks poured water down into the gulleys at the sides of the track.
‘To think there’s this,’ I said. ‘All the time.’ It seemed to me for one moment that unhappiness was a nonsense. I thought of my mother gutting fish in Limehouse and Ishbel coming off Quashies’ stage.
