by John Marsden
I believe that on some vessels, malfeasors executed by order of the captain were not even afforded the privilege of a prayer being uttered over them before they were dumped in the ocean. I suppose by those standards Master Marsh should be considered more humane than some of his compatriots. Nonetheless, I found it difficult to reconcile my feelings of awe and reverence during the service of Morning Prayer the day before on the Sabbath, with my horror and revulsion at the cold-blooded manner in which a man had been cruelly executed and then consigned so rapidly to the deep. The same book had been used for both services. Yet in one service Master Marsh had read the words, ‘Come unto Me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,’ then barely twenty-fours hours later he read, ‘We give Thee hearty thanks, for that it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our brother out of the miseries of this sinful world.’
I was not aware of a man amongst our number who looked to be in accord with these latter sentiments. Judging from the expressions on the faces of the soldiers and crew, it seemed likely that they too did not feel inclined to offer hearty thanks for the despatch of poor Ffolkes. I suppose a theologian, who is much wiser than I, would explain that the man had been freed of his heavy burden by being given eternal rest, but speaking for myself alone, I did not feel pleasure at the deliverance of my brother from the miseries of this sinful world. I shivered and shook with shock for many hours after this, and for weeks could not get the image of his poor befouled body out of my mind.
Chapter 24
The weeks that now passed were placid compared to the first days of our voyage but were marked for me by a great change in my education, thanks to my friend Carmichael Lance. This period began, however, with an act of great significance for most of our number. Following upon the execution of Thomas Ffolkes, we had supposed that severe restrictions would be put upon us, partly because of the fear that Ffolkes’s action might be taken by the captain as proof that we were a violent gang of ruffians who would be forever fighting and assaulting each other, but also because of fear by the ship’s officers that the botched hanging might lead to anger and unrest among the prisoners.
Yet to our considerable surprise, Master Marsh adopted a different course. The morning following the hanging we were brought back on deck, for the third consecutive day, but this time in small groups, whereupon the irons were struck off most of us by members of the ship’s company. The feelings of felicity conveyed by this simple act are impossible to describe, but when I was given permission by the good-hearted sailors who performed the deed upon me to walk freely from one side of the boat to the other, I felt that I floated rather than walked, and indeed broke into a dance of delight, to the amusement of the watching crew members.
Only an annulment of my sentence could have given me a greater sense of liberty, and as there seemed little prospect of that, I was happy to settle for the sense of lightness conveyed by being able to exercise my limbs freely once more.
Coincidentally, a liberty of mind was to be mine also, brought about by the steps taken by Carmichael Lance to improve my education. As I lay listlessly in my hammock one afternoon, I observed him to be reading a small book. Lifting myself onto an elbow I gazed at him for some time before enquiring: ‘What is that, Carmichael? A very small Bible? Or the Book of Common Prayer?’
Without looking up he replied: ‘Neither, Barnaby.’
‘Neither?’ I was perplexed. I had not been aware of the existence of other books. ‘Then what is it?’
He put it down and looked at me. ‘There are other books than the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, my young friend.’
‘There are?’
He shook his head and smiled a little. As I got older I was becoming increasingly embarrassed by my ignorance of the world, and Carmichael, though it was never his intention, often made me feel especially embarrassed.
‘I have made enquiries among all the likely candidates on board this ship,’ he said, ‘and this is the only book I have been able to procure. I am well satisfied to have it. For a while I was faced with the awful fear that I would be bookless for the entire voyage. And that would have been insufferable.’
‘Why do you like books?’ I asked.
He paused, then answered slowly: ‘Books are little treasuries of thoughts and wisdom and beauty. Not all books are all of those things, but the seeker after truth can often find illumination in the pages of a book.’
‘Is there illumination in that book?’ I asked.
He held it with its spine towards him and studied it carefully. ‘Many would say so,’ he said. ‘And yes, I think it can be fairly described as a book that sheds light.’
‘But what do the words say?’
‘You can read, can you not?’
‘Yes. Not as well as I’d like. I can read, but I want to get better.’
He regarded me thoughtfully. ‘So, the little vagrant would like to better himself?’ he said.
It seemed a cruel observation, but I don’t think he meant it as such. I was already well aware that he came from a privileged class to which one of my background could never aspire. He treated me with great kindness, but he would have been raised to treat his horse and his dog with the same degree of benevolence. Now he handed me the book. I took it almost reverently. It was the first book I had ever handled. I had been too afraid to touch the Bibles in St Martin’s.
I looked at the spine and read the difficult words out loud. ‘Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan. What does that mean?’
‘Pilgrim’s Progress is the name of the book, and its author is John Bunyan.’
‘But what does that mean?’
‘The author? The author is the person who wrote the book.’
It had never occurred to me to question how a book was produced. I asked: ‘But how can a person write a book?’
He sighed. ‘My dear young friend, I see I need to start at the beginning.’
He went on to explain that there were hundreds of thousands of books in the world, and some of them were true accounts of events in history or the lives of famous people, such as Plutarch’s Parallel Lives or Marco Polo’s accounts of his travels in China, whilst others were made up, such as the stories of Mr Daniel Defoe and Mr Henry Fielding. ‘Have you never heard stories such as Cinderella or the Sleeping Beauty?’ he asked.
‘No, I don’t believe so.’
He then had to explain to me the nature of fiction and fairytales and myths, which I found intriguing, though rather mystifying. He went on to tell me some of the tales of M. Perrault, including the two aforementioned, and Little Red Riding Hood. I am a little afraid of exposing myself to the ridicule of my readers when I say that I listened to these stories with the utmost seriousness and took them quite literally. I found it difficult to separate fiction from fact and was greatly concerned at the predicaments encountered by the characters. I was particularly horrified at the perfidious behaviour of Cinderella’s sisters and much relieved that the Prince was not deceived by them. I thought him an admirable fellow.
I was perfectly ready to believe in a talking wolf and a godmother who could turn a pumpkin into a coach.
Carmichael was most patient with me. At some point during our conversation he formed the resolution that he would take me in hand and become my tutor. The first step in this process was to improve my ability to read, and with a text readily to hand, namely Pilgrim’s Progress, we commenced the endeavour that same afternoon.
I am afraid that my woeful ignorance of every subject except scavenging and thieving appalled Carmichael, but he stuck to his task with a kind of grim determination. Perhaps he had learned more from his father about dedication to the task of helping one’s poorer brethren than he realised. And I slowly became aware, as the voyage progressed, that whilst others around me were becoming increasingly bored by the monotony of shipboard life, both Carmichael and I, engrossed in my studies, for the most part he
ld boredom at bay.
In one respect at least Carmichael could not fault me. I became a rapacious reader, thanks to Mr Bunyan and my tutor. I was enamoured of the story of Christian and his progress, reading of his vicissitudes with alarm and his victories over temptations with joy and relief. I doubt that Mr Bunyan, for all the honours and praise heaped upon his worthy tale, has ever had a reader more deeply involved with his book than was I.
When Christian reached the Slough of Despond I became very excited, for I recognised at last the reference to this quagmire made by Carmichael as we stood at the porthole in the hour of our reunion. I think it was at this point I started to realise that a story can have something more than a literal truth. I still believed Christian to be as real as anyone I had met, as real as the convicts with whom I shared my miserable days and nights. I was appalled that his wife and children could not see the danger they were in and would not accompany him in his flight from the City of Destruction, and I shook my head with exasperation at the folly of Pliable in turning back. I felt the pleasure of Christian when the burden was removed from his back as he reached the Sepulchre, and I wondered at the weakness of Formalist and Hypocrisy in choosing the easy paths of Danger and Destruction instead of struggling up the hill called Difficulty.
Yet I also understood that the story was written as a guide to assist those such as myself who had wandered far from the path. Looking around me it was easy to identify Sloth, in the figure of the old man over there in the hammock against the wall, and Timorous and Mistrust down the end of the room, and I certainly saw plenty of examples of Formalist and Hypocrisy, who believed that they could take a shortcut by climbing over the wall. ‘Know you not that it is written, that he that cometh not in by the door but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber?’ I was surrounded by thieves and robbers; I was such a one myself; but more than that, almost all the company of convicts on board the Admiral Barrington were people who believed in shortcuts. Not for them the Hill Difficulty. They scorned it, believing that they could get all they wanted with no arduous endeavour, and so they went blithely towards Danger and Destruction, never realising the folly of their ways.
Thus I read my first novel with the greatest avidity. I read the second part as well, but I confess I did not like the story of Christiana and her four sons quite as much as I liked the story of Christian himself. And when I had finished the whole thing, nothing would do but that I had to read it again, marking as I did so with some satisfaction that I was more fluent, and recognised the difficult words more easily, than had been the case upon my first reading. This seemed to bring considerable satisfaction to Carmichael as well, who was thus rewarded for his goodness.
I believe it is thanks to these two unorthodox teachers, Mr Bunyan and Carmichael, that I became a great lover of literature and language, and hold the position I have today – and have even been emboldened to write this simple account of my own beginnings.
Chapter 25
Little did I realise as we continued our journey south that we had been unusually fortunate with the weather. I thought that the conditions we had experienced were customary for an ocean-going vessel. Although I had acquired a notion that sea travel could be treacherous, no one had explained to me, thus far in my young life, the extent of the perils.
For the first few days quite a number of men had suffered seasickness, as I have mentioned, and the sights, sounds and smells of this had contributed to the general unpleasantness in our quarters. Gradually, however, my fellow passengers became accustomed to the motion of the vessel, and this particular discomfort ceased to be a concern for most men.
At times the few convicts with maritime experience would speak of the exceptionally placid nature of our voyage thus far. I took little notice. And when, more than three weeks out from Portsmouth, the tossing of the boat became somewhat more severe, I still did not feel any great alarm.
By then all the trusted prisoners, of whom I was one and Carmichael another, were permitted to exercise upon the deck twice daily. This was a privilege much appreciated, and the highlight of every day for me, exceeding even the pleasure of reading Pilgrim’s Progress. The fresh air was like the sweetest food I had ever tasted, but there were also many remarkable sights, inducing in me the greatest excitement. I may seem like something of a simpleton if I say that amongst the most marvellous to me was that mundane presence in the night sky, the moon. To see her from the dank gutters of London, glimpsed through sooty smoke and fog, was generally nothing remarkable, but to observe her rising over the ocean, illuminating the clouds and the foam and crests of the waves, was a sight that never failed to inspire me with awe.
The stars seemed to sink into the ocean as we proceeded further south, and the day came when we could no longer see the North Star; she had dropped out of our lives, perhaps forever, an occasion that caused some maudlin reflections from some among our number but which, I must say, had little effect on me. The Southern Cross had already replaced her, and as night followed night, she gradually edged her way higher in the sky, as she was to eventually edge her way into my affections. I have to say that I have grown more attached to her than I ever was to the North Star.
I was also impressed by the number of creatures we saw, having previously supposed the ocean to be a sort of aquatic desert, bereft of life. But birdlife was numerous, and although I could identify few specimens from my own limited experience, there were plenty around me, including the friendlier of the sailors, who could tell me their names. These included albatrosses, which had enormous wings three to four yards from tip to tip; boobies, which much resembled ducks; and later in the voyage, cape pigeons, which were somewhat larger than the common pigeon to which I was accustomed in London. The sailors caught these birds, keeping the feathers so they could sell them when they got to port, to be used in ladies’ hats. The manner of catching them was most ingenious. The men threw out lines of thread with corks on the end, whereupon the birds’ curiosity got the better of them. They could not resist inspecting the corks, after which their legs became entangled in the thread and the sailors simply had to pull in the lines to complete the capture.
The albatrosses were notable not only for their size but also for their ability to fly great distances with rare rests upon the water. They were caught by more conventional methods: the sailors, and soldiers too, threw hooks baited with lumps of pork or beef over the stern of the vessel, letting the lines trail in the water. For some reason they were more successful in rougher weather, and there were days when they caught a dozen or so.
We saw stormy petrels, seahawks and those strange creatures which seem to be neither fish nor bird, the flying fish, which at times appeared in their thousands, occasioning the greatest excitement in me at least. They appeared to beat their tail on the surface of the water in order to gain height, but once airborne could travel for hundreds of feet. Some of the sailors swore that they had seen them fly for so long that they passed out of sight. Even allowing for the notorious tendency of seamen to exaggerate, I was inclined to believe their stories, for I saw them travel extraordinary distances.
Boobies appeared to hang around the bow of our boat at times, waiting for the flying fish to take to the air in order to get out of the vessel’s way, upon which the boobies would attempt to seize the fish. I thought this an ingenious tactic on the part of these dumb creatures.
One fine morning I was scrubbing the deck when I became aware that Surgeon Gossam was not far from me, leaning forward over the deck rail, gripping it as he stared at something in the distance. It was as much as my life was worth to go and see what had caught his attention, so I kept scrubbing, but I was curious and kept an eye on him. After a few minutes he glanced at me, then said suddenly: ‘What’s your name, boy? Fletch, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I replied.
‘Well, come and look at this, Fletch. It’s a sight you won’t have seen before, I wager.’
N
ervous at the notion of leaving my duty, I nonetheless had no option but to obey him. I edged over to the rail and stared out to sea, trying to find the source of his interest. But the water was calm, the sky clear, and I could see nothing worth remarking.
‘There goes one of them now,’ Surgeon Gossam said excitedly. ‘You’re a lucky boy. I wish I had my son here.’
‘But what is it, sir?’ I asked.
‘What, are you blind?’ he said crossly. ‘Can’t you see them? Whales. A goodly pod, I’d say. Watch for the spouts.’
‘The spouts, sir?’
‘The spouts!’ He was an even-tempered man, but evidently I was testing his patience. ‘The spouts. It’s how they breathe. They have a hole in the top of their heads, and they blow air and water out of it when they come to the surface. Some of them can spout fifty feet or more. See, there’s another one.’
I just caught a glimpse of a faint spray of water far in the distance. I nodded hard, trying to feign enthusiasm. ‘Yes, sir, I see it.’
He looked at me with disgust. ‘You had better go back to your scrubbing, Fletch.’
I found the dolphins and the porpoises far more interesting and attractive. The dolphins in particular came close to the ship, in large numbers, and at times appeared to be escorting us on our way. I have never seen creatures illustrate the nature of freedom more attractively than dolphins, and the contrast between the easy and graceful way in which they moved through their medium of water, and the painful and circumscribed way in which we lived our lives on land, profoundly affected me.
We frequently saw sharks as well. They were sometimes caught by the throwing of a running bowline into the sea. The shark would attempt to swim through the loop, upon which the knot would be tightened and the shark hauled on board, to be boiled and fried. Sometimes we were the beneficiaries of a part of the meat. Although reluctant to try it at first, I found it quite tolerable.
