The Master's Tale--A Novel of the Titanic

by Ann Victoria Roberts

  The cook was traditionally the doctor aboard – why this should be, I’m not sure, unless it was his involvement with food, and by association, medicines. Perhaps it was simply that he was the most dispensable member of the crew. And I, being the least experienced, was detailed, with Jim, to care for the invalids. As the days passed we could tell the older chap was getting better, but not the other. He had periods of delirium in which he raved about a girl called Dorothea. Some of the stuff he came out with was downright embarrassing. Jim laughed, said he’d like to meet her, but it seemed all wrong to me for a gentleman to talk like that. Anyway, I was still calling him Mr Jones and Lieutenant Jones, trying to get him to eat, until he said one day, ‘It’s Harry. For God’s sake call me Harry.’ So after that we were on first name terms.

  In his saner moments he talked about his family back home in Cheshire, the fact that his father was a wine and spirits merchant with a business in Liverpool. I talked about my parents and Mother’s little shop in Hanley. We both agreed that we’d wanted something different. He’d gone into the army; I’d escaped to sea. Despite the difference in our social stations, for those few weeks we had common ground.

  The other chap improved and was soon sitting out on deck, sunning himself. We got poor Harry’s fever down, but to my dismay he didn’t seem to get better. We did our best with hot poultices and – in desperation – some herbal remedy the Chinese labourers swore by, but his wheezing and choking got worse. If Harry was gaunt when he came aboard, as the days passed he seemed to be drying up like an autumn leaf.

  Breathing was such an effort it was hard to watch him. He reminded me of my father in his last days, so I suppose I should have been prepared. But although Jim tried to warn me, when the end came it was horrible. I was nobody’s idea of a nurse but I’d tried my best to keep him alive, to cheer him up and ease his suffering. In one sense it was a relief to know it was over, but I felt responsible, felt I’d let him down.

  The presence of death aboard was almost palpable. We were all bowed down. My father’s passing was at the forefront of my mind. At the time, maybe I’d been too scared to believe he was dying. My mother and half-sister did the nursing while I went off to the forge. When my father died, I took my cue from Mother and did not give way to grief. Instead, I tried to shut him out of my mind. Strange to say, out there in the middle of the Pacific I was suddenly inconsolable, weeping like a child for the kind father who’d supported me when I needed him most, the father I’d never appreciated until after he was gone.

  Home seemed an awful long time ago. At my lowest, I wondered if I’d ever see it again.

  The carpenter found some rusted anchor chain and a few bolts to add weight to the body. Then he took palm and needle to sew poor Harry into his canvas shroud. And then, in the traditional way, Joe put the final stitch through his nose.

  ‘Just to be sure,’ he said grimly. ‘They reckon it wakes all but the truly dead.’

  The shock of it stopped my grief at once.

  ~~~

  We buried the poor fellow at sea. With the ship hove to and rolling gently on the long Pacific swells, we all, including our Chinese brethren, stood around the makeshift bier on the foredeck. Knowing so little of the young lieutenant, Joe could hardly deliver a eulogy, but he said a few words about his courage before opening the Prayer Book to the burial service.

  Many of crew had been feeling edgy, but through the sighing of the wind and the slapping of waves, the old familiar phrases spread their calm and reassurance. ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live… We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out…’

  Bowed in prayer or respect, several heads nodded at that. ‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live,’ Joe intoned, ‘and is full of misery…’ More nods, more sighs, but a moment or two later we all took a sudden step forward as the ship lurched on a particularly big swell. My brother’s voice took on a note of urgency as he nodded to the carpenter.

  ‘We therefore commit his body to the deep…’ On the next roll the carpenter raised the plank. ‘…looking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ…’ On a heartfelt, Amen, the weighted body of Harry Jones was eased over the side. It went with barely a splash.

  It was Christmas Eve too, which made it even more dispiriting. Not that it felt anything like Yuletide at home. The only wrapping up we did was of Harry’s uniforms and personal possessions. Joe did a rough sketch of the North Pacific chart, noting the position in Latitude and Longitude, so his family would know exactly where he’d been consigned to the deep.

  Jim the cook pulled the necks of some hens which had stopped laying, and since they were too scrawny to roast, made a rich chicken broth for our festive meal. There was a special plum duff for afters, dressed with a piece of red silk ribbon, courtesy of one of our Chinese passengers. We raised a smile and a bit of a cheer for the cook and toasted each other with a drop of rice wine.

  My first Christmas at sea – the first of many – and it was nothing like I’d imagined. I went to my bunk that night feeling very sorry for myself. I’m glad to say that no other Christmas ever quite matched it for gloom.

  ~~~

  In his delirium, Harry Jones had babbled a lot about the girl who’d jilted him and broken his heart. They say hearts cannot be broken, but she’d broken his hopes and affections, which is much the same. I longed to get hold of that girl and tell her how he’d suffered. After we buried him I took her address from his notebook, thinking I’d write an account of his last days and send it to her. I began, but it was harder than I thought. In the succeeding weeks at least a dozen ruined pages were torn into confetti and thrown over the side.

  Seafarers are a superstitious lot, and Harry’s unfortunate death aboard the Senator Weber was blamed for a host of things from minor accidents to bad weather. The crew began to talk up a storm and none of it was good. Items disappeared and were blamed on poor Harry’s ghost. Turned out one of the crew was thieving, but that wasn’t proved until we reached California and by then the culprit had disappeared ashore.

  After the strangeness of Hong Kong, San Francisco was a heaving, brawling, drunken party of a place, with loose women and gaming tables in every bar. Like all the sin that was ever preached against it was terrifying and tempting all at the same time. I dare say I might have been dragged in head first, but I had a brother as my conscience. Next time round in Frisco turned out differently but, as I say, this was my first trip and Joe was determined to keep me on the straight and narrow.

  Our thief – one of the Hong Kong replacements – disappeared ashore, along with several others, seduced, as Joe said, by silver-tongued con-men into believing they could make a fortune on the gold-fields. Not just the deck hands, either. Our young 3rd Mate – not much older than me – appeared to have been similarly tempted.

  ‘They’ll learn,’ the Mate growled, chomping on his pipe stem, furious at having to whip another crowd of what he called idle, good-for-nothing lead-swingers, into some kind of shape. We signed several to replace the absconders but even so we were short of our full complement. And being short-handed meant I was promoted to acting 3rd Mate. Dizzying heights for a first-tripper, but Joe was keen to impress upon me that it was largely because he needed someone he could trust.

  ‘You’ve done well, lad,’ he said that evening before we sailed. ‘I’m right pleased with the way you’ve come on…’

  I thought I would never stop grinning. I’d been studying hard all the way across the Pacific, blessing those old Arabs who’d named the stars while discovering how to use them. Running down the coast of South America I would have to learn a whole lot more, but – interrupting my leaping plans, Joe brought me back to earth.

  ‘Hold fast – I don’t need another navigator, I just need you to keep a watch. And it won’t be easy,’ he warned
. ‘Going from apprentice to 3rd Mate in one trip is a big jump. You’ll be on the bridge eight hours a day – 8:00 to 12:00, morning and evening – and you’ll be responsible for the safety of the ship. I’ll be here, of course – you can call me at any time. In fact,’ he added heavily, ‘I’d rather you disturbed me for no reason at all, than if you didn’t, and a squall turned me out of my bunk…’

  He told me a lot more, of course, but that was the essential part – keep watch, and report anything out of the ordinary. For the rest of the time, as ever, I’d be at the Mate’s disposal. It sounded fair enough to me. What I didn’t bargain with was the hostility from our original crew. Those who’d taken me in, shown me the ropes, accepted me as one of themselves. Suddenly I was raised to the quarterdeck. Become an officer who might in theory order them aloft or even below to the bilges, a man who should have had more experience than they, but who was, in fact, a boy on his first trip.

  In reality, it was the Mate did the ordering, and he was usually on deck unless he was sleeping. Even so, the first time I came up against my old adversary, Scouser Rudge, I thought twice about ordering him off his perch. The other men were putting weight on the heavy yards to bring them round, while he was just idling, every so often glancing my way out of the corner of his eye, as if waiting for me to challenge him. Surreptitiously I looked for the Mate but he was nowhere to be seen – similarly the 2nd Mate. But I knew I couldn’t let Rudge be – like it or not, he had to be told.

  ‘Lend a hand there,’ I called from the quarterdeck, trying to sound forceful.

  It was as though I’d not spoken. I called again, louder this time, and at that he did look up. But he didn’t rise. Just turned away.

  What to do? Shout? Make a fool of myself? No, it was clearly confrontation time. I’d socked him once before: I would have to do it again. Not literally – I was, after all, trying to be a ship’s officer. And he was pushing me.

  Descending the quarterdeck steps, I was quaking. With no idea what to say, I felt it would have been easier to drag him off his seat and thrust him in the direction of the men working up for’ard. But I couldn’t do that. I clasped my hands behind me, leaning close to Rudge as the ship began to come about. I heard the Mate’s voice from somewhere aft, urging the others to look lively. Suddenly I was saved.

  ‘Hear that, Rudge?’ My voice was sharp: too close to ignore. He looked up then. I smiled. ‘Mr Parsons says to look lively. I should if I were you – otherwise you’re liable to find yourself logged.’

  With a huff of disgust, the man hauled himself to his feet. I stood back. ‘Aye, aye – sir,’ he said with all the contempt he could muster.

  He ambled off. I regained the quarterdeck, trembling but relieved.

  ‘Next time, kick his arse!’ the Mate said in my ear. I jumped and he grinned. ‘Well done, lad. You’re starting to get the idea.’

  ~~~

  In ballast as we left Frisco, we were heading south, this time to the Chincha Islands off Peru, for a lucrative cargo of guano.

  We could smell the islands at least a couple of days before we saw them, the ammoniac stink growing stronger by the hour. Great cliffs loomed over the horizon, with at least a dozen other iron-hulled ships waiting to load. What we’d come for looked like white powder, but was in fact the mined and crushed deposits of centuries of bird-lime. Fishy, smelly, sea-bird-droppings. Joe called it the richest fertiliser in the world – almost worth its weight in gold, he said. I wondered why we couldn’t have carried the real thing.

  ‘But gold won’t increase your crops,’ he replied, ‘and it’s not much use for making gunpowder.’ He gave me a sidelong look. ‘Refine this stuff, mix it with the right ingredients, and what you get is gunpowder. That’s why it’s worth a fortune – everybody wants it…’ I could see he was already calculating the profits – and his own bonus for bringing it back.

  All kinds of steam-driven equipment cut and ground the stuff – while labourers from all points of the compass trundled it from one loading point to another. Receiving our cargo from the cliffs by canvas chutes was simple enough, but the crew – working as trimmers in the holds – could only bear fifteen or twenty minutes at a time below deck, so it was a slow job. For weeks the Senator was covered in that stinking, revolting stuff: decks, rigging, cabins, bunks. And for all Jim’s obsessive cleaning in the galley, it was even a devilish sort of seasoning on our food.

  The stink was even worse ashore, although not so bad as it was in the hold. Supervising the crew, timing their shifts, I had cause to be thankful that our old 3rd Mate had absconded in Frisco. Otherwise I’d have been below with the rest.

  South of the Equator I learned the path of the southern stars, but as we dropped through the latitudes towards Cape Horn, I dreaded the coming challenge.

  The handful of shipmates who’d stood the course from Liverpool were not slow in relating the worst tales they could remember. Getting back at me for my promotion. Even so, I understood from Mr Parsons that with no land-mass to break the tempests whirling around the globe, the weather in the southern ocean could be appalling. Add to that the terrifying bleakness of Tierra del Fuego, where the wrecks were legendary and great jagged rocks like monstrous teeth lay bared and waiting for the unwary – well, you’ll understand how such places strike the fear of God into a man.

  Taking the Clipper route, from the Pacific into the Atlantic with the wind at your back, was the easy option; the other way, beating against the wind, ships could be torn apart. Joe said some shipmasters simply gave up after a while, preferring to turn and run before the wind, achieving the Pacific by the longer but less violent passage.

  I’m glad to say my first experience was difficult more for a lack of manpower than excess of weather, although battling Cape Horn short-handed in the southern winter felt very much like an initiation into the arcane arts of seamanship. Nevertheless, we did it.

  Jim the cook had doused the galley fire beforehand, so we’d been living on cold porridge and bean stew for days, washed down with cold tea. Afterwards, somewhere off the Falkland Islands we had our first hot meal – a sea-pie made of meat and onions and some kind of pepper they grow in Chile. It was so good I can almost taste it now, that and the celebratory mug of hot cocoa made richer with goat’s milk and a dash of rum.

  The weather was with us after that. We made good speed, arriving in Antwerp at the end of October. Handing over the ship’s log, Joe reported the death of Lieutenant Harry Jones to the British Consul. After that it was a matter of preparing the Senator Weber for laying-up and a winter of repairs.

  ~~~

  When we finally reached home, we had been away twenty months. We arrived to an emotional welcome, Mother overjoyed to see her two sons safe and sound. She even hugged me and shed a few tears – couldn’t stop exclaiming how well I looked, how much I’d grown and filled out. I was so full at that, I almost shed tears myself; and so eager to relate my adventures I couldn’t stop talking, wanting to tell her everything at once.

  But I’d barely got started when she dashed off to serve a customer in the shop. When she came back she’d reverted to her usual self. ‘Well,’ she said, giving me a critical glance, ‘you can get that straggly beard shaved off at once. You’re not at sea now.’ No, I knew I was home.

  Joe had married his Susanna a month or so before we sailed, and on his return found himself the proud father of a bonny one-year-old son. There was much to celebrate with that, and I must say Christmas that year was the best ever, with a fine turkey, and all of us crammed around the table in the back room. By tacit agreement, however, when asked our whereabouts the previous Christmas, Joe and I said mid-Pacific, and skated over the details.

  ~~~

  It was so good to be back I thought I’d never want to leave again. But three months in Hanleyanley was too much for me. It was grey even when the sun shone. I missed the open sea and the sky; I’d forgotten how small the house was, and how irksome the demands of the business. Added to which my mother seemed t
o forget that I’d become a man while I was away, treating me as she’d always done, like a bothersome child who must be set employment to keep him in line.

  In Hanley I’d become a stranger almost, and with no regular employment was frequently at a loose end, envied by old pals working long hours in the potteries. In truth, with the first signs of spring I was pleased to be going back to sea. In Antwerp, the Senator Weber had been laid up, having her bottom scraped and treated, her decks re-caulked, and canvas repaired. Joe went aboard a week or so ahead of me, and just after my nineteenth birthday I re-joined the ship in Cardiff, where she was loading a cargo of pig-iron for the Far East.

  I was thrilled to be signed on as 3rd Mate, and a return to Hong Kong seemed fitting, somehow. In the New Year Joe and I had returned Harry Jones’s possessions to his parents in Cheshire. The interview was as sad and difficult as I’d imagined, and their distress redoubled my sense of injustice. I made another attempt to write to his girl, but then it occurred to me that by the time she received my ramblings I would probably be in Hong Kong myself. So I waited, and planned to seek her out in person.

  Of course, making a vow like that and carrying it through are two completely different things, and what seems reasonable out at sea somehow becomes more complicated when faced with reality.

  8

  Hong Kong’s waterfront at night was just as I remembered: narrow streets, paper lanterns, strange symbols painted on sign-boards; the clacking of mah-jong tiles and the mouth-watering scents of food drifting across the water. In bars and chop-houses along the Queen’s Road I caught half a dozen different tongues and saw as many nationalities passing by. As before, old Chinamen in caps and high-necked tunics went hobbling up and down the alleys, white stockings gleaming like glow-worms in the dark.

  The colony had grown a little since my first visit two years before, although the settlement was still small. Apart from the garrison and naval base at Victoria, the British residents were mainly merchants and their families. The other Europeans seemed to be a mixed bag of traders and refugees from Macau. There were few women of the professional sort – or so the men complained – since the Chinese mostly kept their wives and daughters locked up. Other than the sampan families, that is, but they lived on the water and seemed a different breed.