The Animal Stars Collection

by Jackie French

  Molineaux laughed. ‘She wants her hay! All right, Your Highness, it’s coming.’

  Isaac waited for Molineaux to order him to bring it. As master’s servant, that was his main job—to fetch and carry for the master. And to scrub, thought Isaac, when he had nothing else to do.

  But instead Molineaux stepped over to the companionway and yelled down.

  ‘Mr Monkhouse! Hay for the Goat!’

  ‘Yes, sir!’

  I’m not even important enough to fetch hay for a goat, thought Isaac, as he watched Jonathan Monkhouse clamber up the companionway, half a bale of hay in his arms.

  Jonathan was a midshipman, the bottom rung of the officer class, and a few years older than Isaac. His brother was the ship’s surgeon. Jonathan would probably be promoted to lieutenant when they got back from this voyage, thought Isaac enviously.

  Isaac would have to serve for at least two years before he could be made a midshipman like Jonathan. And if he made it to midshipman, well, after another six years he could try to take the exam to be a lieutenant. And if he passed he’d be an officer, and then…

  Jonathan flashed him a grin as he passed. Suddenly Isaac felt better. A few years ago Jonathan would have been scrubbing the decks just like him. None of the midshipmen had spoken to Isaac yet—he supposed they wouldn’t bother with a common seaman like him.

  Squelch. The sailor stepped in the goat dung, his leathery bare toes squishing it into the boards that Isaac had just scrubbed, on his way back to the gangplank.

  Isaac sighed. He scooped up the rest of the pellets and threw them overboard, then began to scrub again.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Goat

  May 1768

  ‘Eeegh!’ said the Goat with satisfaction. She settled back on her hay, and watched as her kids peered excitedly through the palings of their pen. It was good to be back on board ship, with a quarterdeck of her own.

  A ship had everything a goat needed: humans to bring hay, or dishes of dried pease, or more interesting greens when they were in port. You lay on your hay and smelled the salty sea air—and made sure no one intruded on your small territory.

  The Goat had spent most of her life at sea. She’d been little more than a kid when she’d been brought from the green fields to go around the world on the Dolphin. It had been hard at first, smelling salt and men’s sweat instead of the sweet soil and grass. But she’d got used to it.

  And then the Dolphin had returned to England, and she’d been led ashore.

  She’d hated it. Stuck in a corner of the shipyard, the grass tasting of whale oil and soot, with nothing to see except the sides of the storage sheds. They’d tethered her too. The Goat didn’t like to be tethered. She was the Goat. How dare they chain her up like a watchdog!

  Even worse, there’d been other animals nearby. Sheep and horses. There’d been too many human strangers too. The Goat didn’t like strangers, whether they had two legs or four.

  She’d missed her view. She’d been queen of the quarterdeck, the whole ship there before her. Islands, bays, the endless waves of the ocean; those were the things she was used to.

  Now she was back home, though not on the Dolphin. But this ship wasn’t so different. A bit smaller, a different shape. Its smells were the same, the scents of rope and salt, of pitch to stop it leaking, of men and sweat and the musky smell of rats. The Goat snorted when she thought of rats. No rats would dare to steal her food. She knew how to deal with rats. It was good to be back.

  She glanced at her kids. They were chewing experimentally at the wooden slats of the pen that surrounded them. Suddenly she heard footsteps coming up the stairs to the quarterdeck.

  The Goat glared. This was her deck!

  ‘Eeegh!’ she announced.

  The man stared back at her. There was nothing special about his looks. But somehow, the Goat decided, this man had an air of command. The Goat knew about leaders. In the fields where she grew up there was always one goat who climbed just a little higher than the others, and who the others followed.

  This must be the captain.

  ‘What,’ said the captain evenly, ‘is this goat doing here?’

  The officer with him cleared his throat. ‘This is the Goat, sir.’

  ‘Wallis’s Goat?’ The captain sighed. ‘It’s bad enough having a famous scientist on board. Now we have to have a famous goat. Well, Mr Hicks, she can go down onto the main deck with the other animals.’

  Mr Hicks cleared his throat tactfully. ‘The men might steal her milk down there, sir. And Mr Banks and the gentlemen will expect fresh milk when they dine with you.’

  The captain said nothing for a moment. Then he said, ‘Very well. But make sure someone cleans up after her. I’m not having goat dung on my quarterdeck.’

  ‘Eeegh,’ said the Goat. She wasn’t sure exactly what he was saying, but it didn’t sound friendly. She nipped his arm. Hard.

  ‘What the…!’ swore the captain. He glared at the Goat. ‘Just make sure she keeps inside this pen, Mr Hicks. That’s all.’

  ‘Eeegh,’ said the Goat. The pen was an indignity. But perhaps it was for the best, to keep her babies close. She gave them a sharp bleat, to let them know she was thinking of them.

  She’d had kids twice before, once before the Dolphin left and once on board. She could still remember what they smelled like, that sharp sweet scent of baby goats, the way they’d nuzzled her for their milk, just like these two were doing now.

  She could remember the anguish, too. Both times her kids had been taken from her, leaving her mourning, her udder swollen with milk, and only the calloused hands of the purser’s mate could help relieve the pressure.

  The Goat peered at the two men on her quarterdeck suspiciously. This time she would make sure that no one touched her babies.

  One of the kids nudged her suddenly, then stuck his head under her belly and began to suck. The Goat relaxed as she felt the familiar tugging, the kid’s tiny tail wiggling as it sucked. She was back where she should be, and she’d shown that man who was boss on the quarterdeck too. And her kids were safe.

  And she was going to make sure they stayed that way.

  CHAPTER 3

  Isaac

  July 1768

  By the 30th of July the Endeavour was refitted for her voyage. She’d started life as a Whitby collier called the Earl of Pembroke. Now she had an extra deck built into her beamy structure to provide more cabins and storage space. She was a broad, sturdy ship, with a flattish hull that allowed her to sail in shallow seas or to be beached if necessary—well suited to sailing in uncharted waters.

  Isaac watched as the Endeavour was loaded with the last of the stores she’d need for her years away, too—tons of coal for heating and cooking in the tiny galley down below, spar timber to repair the ship, barrels of tar and pitch for waterproofing, hemp to make new ropes and rigging, a forge to repair tools or make new ones if old ones were lost or washed overboard.

  Iron nails, fish hooks, fishing lines, hatchets, scissors…Isaac had known there’d be no ships’ chandler’s or supply stores where they were going, but he’d never really thought how everything they might need had to be stored on ship. The Endeavour even carried red and blue beads, and dolls and mirrors; the sorts of things that isolated islanders who had never seen a European ship might like to trade.

  Nine thousand pounds of flour, tons of ship’s biscuit, four thousand pieces of beef, six thousand pieces of pork, twenty bushels of salt, one hundred and seventy bushels of dried pease, stored in big wooden barrels, one thousand five hundred pounds of sugar and nearly eight thousand pounds of the smelly fermented cabbage that the Germans called sauerkraut. Malt, salted cabbage, ‘portable broth’—a mixture of the tough leaves of scurvy grass, marmalade of carrots, syrup of lemons and other vegetables, all boiled down into a dark solid—and inspissated juice of wort, all of which Lieutenant Cook hoped would prevent scurvy.

  Scurvy killed more sailors than shipwreck or enemy cannons. Men’s teeth fell o
ut, their legs and arms swelled. They grew too weak to stand. They went mad, dreaming that the sea was green fields. And finally they died.

  No one knew for sure what caused scurvy. But some men—like the captain—thought it came from not eating enough fresh food. Often a third of a ship’s crew died of scurvy, their bodies thrown overboard to float down in the deep water, till their flesh rotted or they were eaten by fish. Isaac had heard that Cook was determined no man under his command was going to die of scurvy. But the older sailors seemed sure that scurvy came from the stink of a hundred men on a small ship—sailors had always died of scurvy, and they always would.

  Isaac had shivered at that, and looked around the men crammed in the tiny galley. A third of them dead of scurvy before the end of the voyage, others washed overboard in storms…

  Which of the men spooning up their pease and pork would never come home again? Somehow it seemed impossible that one of them might be him.

  Like the rest of the crew, Isaac was paid two months wages in advance and told that he’d have no more wages till they got back to England. Most of the crew spent the last days on shore, spending their sovereigns. But there was no shore leave for Isaac. He’d said goodbye to his parents before he came aboard. While the others drank in the pubs by the docks, Isaac scrubbed or leaned on the rails and wondered what was to come.

  The Endeavour was to go to Tahiti first, that legendary land of palm trees and naked women (Isaac blushed even though he was alone) that Wallis had been the first European to visit. The Endeavour was carrying scientists like Mr Banks, who would look for new plants and animals in Tahiti, and the astronomer, Mr Green, who would measure what they called ‘the transit of Venus’—the whole reason for this voyage.

  In 1769 it would be possible to see the planet Venus cross the surface of the sun—but only from Tahiti. Isaac wasn’t sure exactly how this was going to be measured. But he did know that what they were doing was going to be important for all sailors—including him now.

  Because measuring how long it took Venus to cross the surface of the sun would somehow help the scientists work out the distance between Venus, the Earth and the Sun. And then it would be possible to work out accurately where a ship was on the surface of the Earth by using the position of the planets and stars. It was all part of the celestial navigation he would have to learn if he was to be promoted to lieutenant, or even master.

  There’d be no other chance to measure this until the next transit of Venus in 1874, or the one after that, in 2004.

  Tahiti was almost a year’s voyage from England. But the Endeavour had two years to get there, and to build an observatory for her scientists. Unlike most voyages, this one was a joint venture by the Royal Navy and the Royal Society, a club of wealthy and well-born scientists. James Cook might be captain of the ship, but the science was the responsibility of Mr Banks.

  Banks was accompanied by his scientific library, scientific equipment and four assistants—the Swedish naturalist Solander; the secretary and draughtsman Spøring; and the botanical artists Buchan and Parkinson. Banks had also brought his personal musician, to play for him while he ate, and his two greyhounds.

  The Goat had already met the greyhounds. Isaac smiled at the memory.

  The Goat had won. It would be a long time before the dogs ventured into her pen again, or tried to snap at the ankles of her kids.

  Isaac glanced over at the docks at the sound of a particularly loud and drunken laugh, then gazed back down the river. It seemed impossible on this cold damp day that someone like him would ever get to a place like Tahiti. But there were rumours that Cook had other orders too, secret orders that he wasn’t to open till they left Tahiti. And those orders would tell him where he was to take his ship next.

  Actually, thought Isaac, it wasn’t much of a secret. Like the Dolphin—like every ship that sailed into the Pacific—the Endeavour would probably be sent to look for the Great South Land. In fact Mr Molineaux said that the transit of Venus didn’t matter much at all. It was just an excuse for another expedition to look for the Great South Land.

  There’d been rumours about the Great South Land for centuries—maybe even thousands of years. It was a place of incredible wealth, with gold and spices. But first it had to be found.

  People in Europe already knew about Terra Australis Cognita—the known south land, also called New Holland. Most of it had already been mapped by Dutch captains—most of whom had ‘discovered’ it by accident, as the trade winds blew them off course onto New Holland’s west coast—and by the English pirate-turned-explorer William Dampier.

  The navigators on Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch ships had also mapped the north of New Holland, and Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had mapped Van Diemen’s Land to the south. But although Van Diemen’s Land wasn’t the barren desert that the explorers had reported in the west, there still weren’t any gold or spices—just giant trees and unfriendly locals.

  New Holland couldn’t be the Great South Land that people had dreamed of. But there was still a lot of the Pacific Ocean that hadn’t yet been seen by Europeans.

  Isaac dreamed as he scrubbed the deck for the hundredth time since he’d come aboard. Wallis had found Tahiti, with its white sand and its palm trees. Maybe Isaac would be the one to find the Great South Land! Of course if the great Pacific was just empty ocean—with no place for them to land for fresh water or supplies or repairs for the storms that might break their tiny but sturdy craft—then perhaps they’d die of thirst, or hunger. Maybe the ship would be becalmed, stranded without wind to fill her sails, till the skeletons of all aboard were bleached white by the sun.

  Or perhaps the ship would be wrecked on a tropical island, with some of those naked women he’d heard the men from the Dolphin boast about. Isaac grinned as he pushed his holystone. Even shipwreck seemed like an adventure when you were twelve, and had never been away from home before.

  He could hardly wait.

  CHAPTER 4

  Isaac

  26th–30th August, 1768

  The Endeavour sailed from Plymouth on the 26th day of August, 1768, with a good breeze in her sails, and seventy-one crew, twelve marines, eleven scientists and their servants, seventeen sheep and a small herd of cattle, four ducks and five chickens, a boar, a sow and her piglets, three cats to catch the rats that swarmed on every ship and Mr Banks’s greyhounds. And the Goat with her two kids, high on her perch on the quarterdeck above them all.

  The quarterdeck was even smaller than usual, as six tiny cabins had been built on it, for Cook, Mr Banks, Charles Green the astronomer and three of Banks’s men.

  The ducks and chickens lived on the main deck, in small hutches lashed to the mast. The other animals were crammed into small pens on deck as well. Their droppings mixed with the sea spray and the frothy mixture washed across the decks, black and stinking.

  Which meant more scrubbing. Isaac imagined himself back home, telling everyone of his adventures.

  ‘I scrubbed all the way to Rio, and then around the world…’

  Why had no one ever mentioned scrubbing when they’d described a career at sea? Isaac had longed for this day. But it was different actually being here. He hadn’t realised how hard it would be to see England fade behind them. He hadn’t realised how lonely it could be on a crowded ship, either, with no friends on board, and everyone older than he was.

  To be honest, some of the sailors scared him. They were rough, and confident, and many spoke with accents he found hard to understand. Even their songs and dances were intimidating, when you didn’t know the steps or the words.

  But mostly they left him alone, for which he was glad. He was the most junior sailor on board, but he was also from a good family, with a good education too. One day—maybe even on this ship—he’d be a naval officer and be able to command them. And so they just ignored him—mostly.

  Despite the loneliness, the food and the scrubbing, it was almost unbearably exciting to hear the rumble as the wind filled the giant sails; the yel
ls of the sailors as they scrambled up the ratlines and worked their way out along the yards to unfurl the mainsails; the squeak of the ropes and the splash of the waves against the wooden hull.

  It was a different world from anything Isaac had known. And Isaac would rather have died than show that he was scared.

  The first few days were calm as the English Channel vanished behind them, but by the 29th they were out from the Bay of Biscay. Isaac looked up at the sound of a sudden flapping, high above the ship, just as four big black seabirds flew down and perched on the rigging above him.

  One of the passing seamen laughed. He was dressed in old sailcloth, like most of the other sailors. Isaac longed for the day when the clothes from home that marked him as a newcomer would be worn out, and he’d be dressed just like all the others. ‘Them be Mother Carey’s little chickens,’ the sailor called, pointing to the birds. ‘There be a storm brewing! You best watch out. Little men like you gets washed overboard in storms!’

  His first storm! Isaac stared out at the sea and sky. It all looked peaceful, he thought, as the ship’s bell rang for supper. But he’d learned back home that birds knew what the weather would be like. He supposed sea birds knew the same.

  They did. Isaac could feel the difference in the movement of the sea as soon as the ship’s bell woke him next morning. His hammock hardly swayed. The air felt hotter, thicker, even down here below decks, where the air was always rich with the smells of sweat and damp and men. Isaac could hear the sheep bleating up on deck, as though they, too, knew a storm was approaching.

  Isaac slid out of his hammock reluctantly. He’d been dreaming of home, of his own bed with its goose-feather mattress, his pillow and sheets and Jane down in the kitchen making the toast for breakfast, with marmalade and buttered eggs.