The Star of the Sea (3 page)

At Queenstown a hundred more passengers came on, their condition so dreadful that it made the others seem as royalty. I saw one elderly woman, little more than an agglomeration of rags, barely gain the gangplank only to die on the foredeck. Her children beseeched the Captain to take her to America anyway. No means were available to pay for her burial but they could not support the shame of dumping her body on the wharf. Her aged and crippled husband was lying on the quayside, too afflicted by famine fever to be able for the journey, a few short hours from death himself. He could not be asked to witness that sight as one of his last sights on earth.

The Captain had refused to acquiesce. A sympathetic man, he was a Quaker by faith, but bound by a set of regulations he dared not to transgress. After almost an hour of weeping and begging, a middle course was discovered and carefully plotted. The woman’s body was wrapped in a blanket from the Captain’s own bunk, then placed in the lock-up until we had left the port, at which point it was discreetly thrown overboard. Her people had to do it themselves. No seaman could be asked to touch the remains in case of infection. It was later recounted by the Fourth Engineer, who against all advice had been moved to assist them, that they had disfigured her face terribly with some kind of blade, fearful that the current would drift her back to Crosshaven where she might be recognised by her former neighbours. Amongst those so poor that they deserve no shame, shame lasts even longer than life. Humiliation their only inheritance, and denial the coinage in which it is paid.

The batterings of recent crossings had taken their toll of the
Star
, a vessel approaching the end of her service. In her eighty-year span she had borne many cargoes: wheat from Carolina for the hungry of Europe, Afghanistan opium, ‘blackpowder’ explosive, Norwegian timber, sugar from Mississippi, African slaves for the sugar plantations. The highest and the most hideous instincts of man had been equally served by the
Star
’s existence; to walk her decks and touch her boards was to feel in powerful communion with both. Her Captain did not know – perhaps nobody knew – but she was bound for Dover Docks when this voyage was completed, there to finish out her days as a hulk for convicts. A few of the steerage people were offered work by the Captain’s Mate: coopering,
caulking, doing odd bits of joinery, stitching up shrouds out of lengths of sailcloth. These were envied by their comrades who had no trade or whose trade back in Ireland had been tending sheep: as useless an occupation aboard the ship as it would surely prove in the slums and rookeries of Brooklyn. On-board work meant extra food. For some, it meant survival.

No Catholic priest was among us on the
Star of the Sea
, but sometimes in the afternoon the Methodist minister would recite a few uncontroversial words on the quarterdeck or read aloud from the scriptures. He favoured Leviticus, Maccabees and Isaiah.
Howl, ye ships of Tarshish: for your strength is laid waste
. Some of the children found his fiery style frightening and pleaded with their parents to be taken away. But many remained behind to listen, as much to kill the boredom as anything else. A small-headed, dapper, compassionate man, he would stand on his tiptoes and conduct them with his toothbrush as they sang the adamant hymns of his denomination, the lyrics starkly majestic as granite-stone graves.

O God, our help in ages past,

Our hope for years to come;

Our shelter from the stormy blast,

And our eternal home.

Down in steerage, the Ghost slept on through the singing.

And then the darkness would descend again. He would rise from his flea-ridden heap of stinking bedding and devour his ration like a man possessed. His food was left for him in a pail beside his berth and though theft of food was far from unknown on the
Star
, nobody ever stole the Ghost’s.

He would take a drink of water. Every other day he would shave. Then he would don his ancient greatcoat, as a warrior putting on his armour of battle, and bluster his way up into the night.

The steerage cabin was situated directly below the maindeck, its half-rotted roof planks here and there as brittle as the biscuit that kept its inhabitants one swallow from death. So sometimes in steerage, as the dusk came down, they would hear the
clug
of his wooden shoe above them. A thud, and a shower of powdery splinters, causing children to chuckle into their gruel or take a kind
of delicious fright. Some of the mothers would seize on their trepidation: ‘If you’re not good this minute and do as you’re bidden, I’ll put you above for Lord Ugly to eat you.’

The Ghost was not ugly but his face was unusual. Pale as milk and slightly elongated, its features might have been stolen from several different men. His nose was bent and a little too long. His ears protruded slightly like those of a harlequin. His hair, as a hideously overgrown black dandelion, might once have belonged to a pantomime ghoul. His wan blue eyes had an unearthly clarity which made the rest of his face seem dark despite its pallor. A smell of wet ashes hung around him, commingling with the odour of the long-time traveller. Yet he was more careful than many in his habits and was frequently observed to use half his water ration to wash his comically tangled hair, as meticulous as any débutante preparing for a ball.

Tedium was the god who reigned over steerage, commanding the acolytes of restlessness and dismay. The Ghost’s eccentric demeanour soon began to attract speculation. Any assemblage comprising human beings, any family, any party, any tribe, any nation, will bind itself together not by what it shares but ultimately by what it fears, which is often so much greater. Perhaps it abhors the outsider as camouflage for its own alarms; dreading what it would do to itself were the binding to fall asunder. The Ghost became useful as the stranger of steerage, the freak come among the terrified normal. His presence helped to cultivate the illusion of unity. That he was indeed so very strange only increased his value.

Rumours adhered to him like barnacles to a hull. It was said by some that he had been a moneylender back in Ireland; a ‘gombeen’ in their slang; a hated figure. Others pronounced him the former master of a workhouse, or a landlord’s agent or a deserted soldier. A candle-maker from Dublin insisted the Ghost was an actor and swore he had seen him playing his namesake in a production of
Hamlet
at the Queen’s in Brunswick Street. Two Fermanagh girls who never laughed were certain he must have served time in a bridewell, so cold was his expression and so calloused his small hands. His apparent fear of daylight and love of the darkness led some of the imaginative to call him ‘a cithoge’; a weird supernatural of Irish legend, the child of a faerie and a mortal man, possessed of
the power to curse and conjure. Yet nobody was sure of exactly what he was, for he gave away little in conversation. Even a question of platitudinous unimportance would draw only a mumble by way of response, always evasive or too quiet to be understood. But he had the vocabulary of a scholar and was certainly literate, which many of those in steerage were not. Approached by one of the braver children, he would sometimes read in an oddly tender whisper from a tiny book of stories which he kept in the depths of his greatcoat and never allowed anyone to touch or examine.

When drunk, which was rare, he had his countrymen’s habit of talking in ironies that do not seem ironic: of turning a question back on the interrogator. But most of the time he did not speak at all. He took pains to avoid one-to-one conversation completely, and in company – which was often unavoidable, given the merciless realities of steerage – he would bow his head and gaze at the boards, as one lost in prayer or hopeless recollection.

It was said by some of the children he tolerated that he knew the names of an astonishing number of species of fish. Music, too, seemed to interest him somewhat. One of the sailors, from memory a Mancunian, claimed to have seen him studying a broadsheet of Irish ballads – and laughing at its contents for some unrevealed reason: ‘cackling like a crone on Hallowe’en night’. When asked with absolute directness he would give an opinion of a fiddler. But the opinion was always briefly expressed, and almost always approving in tone, and as happens with those who only give approving opinions, the others soon wearied of asking him.

He had something of the younger priest; an unease around women. But clearly enough he was no sort of priest. He read no breviary, dispensed no blessing, never joined in the Glory Be. And when the first of the passengers was taken by typhus, two days out of Queenstown port, he did not attend the obsequies such as they were: a dereliction that caused a certain amount of muttering in steerage. But then it occurred to someone that the Ghost might be ‘a Jewman’, or possibly even some kind of Protestant. That, too, could have explained his unease.

It was not that he did anything unpredictable – in truth he was the most predictable man on the ship. It was more that his very predictability made him strange.

It was as though he was certain that someone was watching him.

Even at that greener and youthful interval, I had happened upon men who had taken life. Soldiers.
Presidentes
. Gangsters. Executioners. Since that terrible voyage I have met many more. Some killed for money, others for country: many, I think now, because they found pleasure in killing and used money or country as varieties of disguise. But this inconsequential little man was different to all of them: this monster who haunted the decks at night. To observe him shuffling that vessel of miseries, as he shuffles, still, across my memory, even at this interim of almost seven decades, was to witness one who was curious in his behaviour, certainly; but no more than many in the strangle of poverty. No more than most, if the truth be told.

There was something so intensely ordinary about him. It could never have been guessed that he meant to do murder.

Farewell to old Ireland, the land of my childhood,

Which now and forever I’m obliged for to leave.

Farewell to the shores where the shamrock is growing.

It’s the bright spot of beauty, the home of the brave.

I will think of her valleys with fond admiration,

Though never again her green hills will I see.

I am bound for to cross o’er the wild swelling ocean

In search of fame, fortune and sweet Liberty.

¹
In my memory the sails on that ship were black, but when I consult my notes I see I am mistaken. – G.G. Dixon

T
HE
FIRST
OF OUR
TWENTY-SIX
DAYS AT
S
EA: IN
WHICH
O
UR
P
ROTECTOR RECORDS SOME ESSENTIAL
P
ARTICULARS, AND THE
C
IRCUMSTANCES ATTENDING OUR
SETTING-OUT
.

VIII NOV. MDCCCXLVII
Monday the eighth day of November, Eighteen Hundred and Forty-Seven
Twenty-five days at sea remaining.

The following is the only register of Josias Tuke Lockwood, Master of Vessel, signed and written in his own hand; and I attest it on my solemn honour a compleat and true account of the voyage, and neither has any matter pertinent been omitted.