Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley (24 page)

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Authors: Kenneth Roberts,Jack Bales,Richard Warner

Tags: #Survival After Airplane Accidents; Shipwrecks; Etc., #Nottingham (Galley) - Fiction, #Transportation, #Historical, #Boon Island (Me.) - Fiction, #Boon Island, #18th Century, #Survival After Airplane Accidents; Shipwrecks; Etc - Fiction, #Survival After Airplane Accidents; Shipwrecks; Etc, #Shipwrecks, #Fiction, #Literary, #Sea Stories, #Historical Fiction, #Shipwrecks - Maine - Boon Island - History - 18th Century - Fiction, #test, #Boon Island (Me.), #General, #Maine, #History

BOOK: Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
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Page 130
it's time for him to go to work for me in the autumnand the work he's doing now is training of a sort: teaches him how to hold a tea-cuphow to seem to be at ease when he isn't."
When Swede looked dubious, my father seized his hand and shook it, tapped Neal lightly on the shoulder, and said, "See them to the door, Miles."
To Neal he added, "I'll remember to speak to Langman, so don't forget to bring us whitebait whenever you can."
Captain Dean got to his feet. "Just a moment," he said. "I've been thinking about that mate of mine, and about Swede's experience on the
Minerva
. How do you spend your days in the Naval Hospital, Swede?"
Swede laughed. "I spend 'em in the hardest kind of work, Captain. Doing nothing. Describing my aches and pains to others who have worse aches and pains."
"
Do
you have aches and pains?" Captain Dean asked.
"Everybody who does nothing has aches and pains."
"You don't look to me as if you had as many aches and pains as any one of my crew has. How'd you like to ship with me on the
Nottingham
Galley? I'd be glad to have you along, just to have the benefit of your advice. I'd sign you on as first lieutenant. We've got ten guns and a gunner who contrived to blow his eyes full of powder."
Swede looked from Captain Dean to Neal and back again. "Why," he said slowly, "I think that might be a good thing if my boy's going to help Mr. Whitworth. I felt like being a pensioner before my shoulder healed, but I don't feel like it any more. I think it would be a good thing all around if Neal had a first lieutenant as a father instead of a pensioner."
I thought, as I led Neal and his father to the street, how
 
Page 131
odd it was that, because the tide had thrust my dinghy against Deptford Steps, the lives of two people had been alteredand greatly for the better, I earnestly hoped. How many people's lives that tide had altered, I couldn't dream. We never know: we never know!
 
Page 132
Chapter 4
That was the beginning for my father, as well as for Captain Dean and me, of a course in the most popular of London's plays. Penkethman's playhouse was next door to the Hospital Tavern, and I'm bound to say Penkethman did well as a manager, for he went out of his way to add to his Drury Lane and Haymarket regulars, bringing in promising drifters from strolling companies like those in Dublin, Bath and Bristol. The plays he presented were held to be the best, and certainly Penkethman knew how to read his lines in such a way as to make words of no consequence seem irresistibly droll.
The curtain rose at five or six o'clock three times a week, and for a guinea apiece, the three of us had tickets that entitled us to see twenty-one plays. We by no means saw twenty-one, for our playgoing came to a sudden and unexpected end with the production of
The Walking Statue
on the last Saturday in July, the twenty-ninth; but until that day we talked theatre as though we ourselves were actors: of Penkethman as Daniel in
Oroonoko,
of Penkethman as Calico in
Sir Courtly Nice,
with Powell
 
Page 133
playing Sir Courtly: of Penkethman as Squib in
Tunbridge Walks,
of Penkethman as the painfully comical shepherd in
The Libertine Destroyed:
of Mrs. Kent's artistry as Caliban in
The Tempest
and of Mrs. Baker's beauty as Miranda: of the vast promise of Lacy Ryan in
The Fair Quaker of Deal:
of Penkethman as Fribble in
Epsom Wells,
and Spiller in
The Emperor of the Moon
and
The Recruiting Officer
.
If I were an artist, I could have drawn pictures by the score of those play nights in Greenwich: of wherries, barges and galleys unloading their tumultuous, half-drunken pleasure-seekers at King's Head Stairs while the hot July sun was still high enough to make the massed vessels in the river stand out sharply in black and white, and while the fishermen along the quays were still turbulent and noisy: of Londoners, both men and women, outside the doors of the innumerable Greenwich taverns, some standing, some sitting at little tables because the taverns were so crowded, each with a dish of whitebait and a tankard of ale before him, and each one tossing crisp morsels into himself with a great show of daintiness and refinement.
Even the sounds and odors of Greenwich on those play nights were fascinatingover everything the savory fragrance of the whitebait: and in the foreground the peculiar mangled gabbling of Londoners, who think of everyone beyond the sound of Bow Bells as being half witless and speaking a language incomprehensible to gentlefolk: the penetrating perfumes of the silk-clad playgoers: the squealing of orange and apple women who pushed through the crowds, crying their wares and reminding all hearers that there was nothing like an orange for throwing at actors:
 
Page 134
the common sailors in blue and white striped trousers and coats always too big or too small, and caps made from pieces of stocking: the naval officers with tangled golden swabs on their shoulders, and half-moon hats the size and shape of the shallops that are forever running errands between barges and docks.
To me the most memorable of play-night pictures were those of the playhouse itselfthe shouting, catcalling, orange-throwing roisterers in the gallery, the subdued and honorable citizens of Greenwich in the pit, the affected ladies in the boxes above the stage, and the incredible fops grouped on either side of the stage itself, and frequently all across the front of the stage, so that occupants of the pit had difficulty in seeing the movements of the actors. Some nights those wretched fops formed a background entirely around the rear of the stage, if the play was one that had made a reputation for itself at Drury Lane.
Some of these fops became as well known to us, by sight, as Penkethman, Powell, Spiller or Neal. All of them affected little mannerisms and great ones, too, for that matter. Their wigs without exception were enormous, sometimes tinted in strange blues and reds. Their speech seemed to be marked with peculiar sibilances and lisps; their gestures, as when they tossed back the lace from their wrists, or took snuff with a flourish such as a dancer makes when she poises herself for a pirouette, were airy and womanly. They were forever making play with perfumed handkerchiefs, touching them to their lips, or whisking imaginary nothings from their sleeves or weskits.
Sometimes they traveled in pairs, and sometimes singly, but even in the latter case they made a pretense of being
 
Page 135
disdainfully amused by those about them, bowing here: bowing there: staring out at those of us in the pit through quizzing glasses, as at animals in cages.
We had names for themSugar-leg for one who was constantly admiring his not too slender ankle: Jackdaw for one who was constantly bursting into cackles of laughter: Tintoretto for a little man with painted cheeks and lips who stood motionless for long periods of time, staring, so far as we could see, at nothing, his face a mask that never moved.
Only twice in all the nights we watched Mr. Penkethman's players at their antics did we see Neal on the stage, and on both occasions he recited that epilogue of Cibber's about the Italian opera singers, reading his lines in a way that brought smiles to the faces of those who listened, and downright guffaws when he lapsed from his lines into that queer running outburst of imitation Italian. On each occasion he was got up in the same costume: a blue gown, voluminous around the hips, with a pointed stomacher, a high collar that rose almost to the top of his head in back, and on his wig of auburn curls a little cap that looked as though made of pearls.
Mr. Penkethman, he told us, had begged the cap from some lady of title, for the especial purpose of being worn by the person who recited this epilogue. His youth and the soft brown of his face gave him the look of an Italian beauty; and when, at the close of the epilogue, he gathered up those full skirts and curtsied deep to the audience, he was as pretty a picture as a Rembrandt portrait of a young girl, glowing with reflected lightas pretty, surely, as Anne Bracegirdle was supposed to be. I found it difficult to believe that he was the same boy who had pulled white-
 
Page 136
bait from the Thames with his little four-cornered trap and had shied away from my outstretched hand on the afternoon when I had first seen him.
Sometimes, after the play, we waited for Neal and he walked home with us to tell us some of the many things concerning which my father, both as a magistrate and as an interested human being, was profoundly curious. He probed into Neal's mind to discover how some of the plays we had seen had impressed him, and we soon learned that allusions which seemed offensive to my father had appeared to Neal to be simply amusing, or just so many words written by an author and recited by an actor in order to further the action of the play.
''I suppose it's amusing in
Venice Preserv'd,
" my father asked politely, "when an actor says, 'In what whore's lap have you been lolling? Give but an Englishman his whore and ease, beef and a sea coal fire, he's yours for ever.' "
"Sir," Neal said, "that was a Frenchman said that. The answer was 'Frenchman, you are saucy!' " He seemed puzzled that my father should have questioned the speech.
We discovered how Penkethman's players had built up their wardrobes by begging discarded gowns and gentlemen's silks from such people of high station as were fascinated by theatrical mattersas so many of them were.
We learned how benefits were arranged to increase the pay of various actorsbenefits to which the actors themselves sold tickets, running after the carriages of rich folk, begging them to subscribe, or calling at houses to sell tickets as a fishmonger might solicit patronage.
Such a benefit, Neal said, might bring as much as one hundred guineas to an actor, and make all the difference between a season without profit, or one that would let
 
Page 137
him live in comfort for two months or more if he were so unfortunate as to be unable to obtain work.
On one subject he was silent. He recognized, from our descriptions, the fops who had caught our attention by their posturings and grimacings as they stood in the stage entrances. He nodded understandingly at our imitations of Sugar-leg and Jackdaw; but when my father described the mask-like face of the little man we called Tintoretto, Neal's face and eyes were expressionless. He seemed almost to have stopped breathing.
We found out nothing at all from Neal when we first mentioned Tintoretto to him; but we learned a little morenot much, but more than enoughabout him on the twenty-ninth of July, when Penkethman's company performed
The Gamester
and, as "a cup of tea," threw in a second play,
The Walking Statue
, with the gibberish-interlarded epilogue which Neal recited to appreciative laughter.
The Walking Statue
had been a great favorite at Drury Lane and was equally so in Greenwich. The words "a cup of tea," we knew from Neal, had come to be actors' slang for anything likable. Tintoretto, obviously, was not Neal's "cup of tea."
Probably my father and Captain Dean and I would have waited for Neal, the night of July 29th, and walked him home with us if it hadn't been for that epilogue, which made it necessary for Neal to get out of his costume and makeup. Unfortunately the night was warm and all three of us were eager for a bottle of chilled claret; so home we went.
When we got there, we did something we seldom didopened our downstairs windows. This was a dangerous
 
Page 138
practice in Greenwich, as it was in any naval town, because of the almost unbelievable number of thieves, streetwalkers, wandering Jews, irresponsible sailors and light-fingered dockyard workers who roamed the streets at all hours of the night, alert to snatch anything from an unguarded room, provided only that the anything was small enough to be lifted through an open window.
We sat there in the semidark, listening to Captain Dean's comments on his
Nottingham
and his forthcoming voyage to America. Every sea captain considers his own vessel somehow superior to every other vessel, no matter how much larger; and I could sense how Captain Dean felt because of knowing how much finer my own dinghy was, in sailing qualities and clean lines, than larger shallops and even some yachts.
Since the
Nottingham
was a galley, Captain Dean explained, she was fitted with oars for rowing when necessary, and with guns so that she could fight if forced to do so, and she was faster than a running vessel, which is fast enough to sail without convoy. That meant she was designed to make quick voyages with small cargoes.
Behind Captain Dean's talk I was conscious of all the night-sounds of Greenwichthe bells from the vessels in the river; the distant shouting from taverns; the clatter of hoofs: the rattling of wheels of after-theatre carriages on the cobbles of the river frontwhen suddenly I heard something I didn't like at all. Captain Dean and my father heard it too, and liked it as little as I; for their heads turned slowly and questioningly toward each other.
What we heard was halfway between a gasp and a gurgle, as though someone had started to shout, and had been prevented by a gush of liquid in his throat.

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