To the Ends of the Earth (7 page)

It ended at last, and I returned to my hutch, to write this entry, in, I am sorry to say, increasing discomfort though the motion of the ship is easy enough. I do not know what is the matter with me. I have written sourly and feel sour, that is the fact of the matter.

I think it is seventeen. What does it matter. I have suffered again—the colic. Oh Nelson, Nelson, how did you manage to live so long and die at last not from this noisome series of convulsions but by the less painful violence of the enemy?

I am up and about, pale, frail, convalescent. It seems that after all I may live to reach our destination!

I wrote that yesterday. My entries are becoming short as some of Mr Sterne’s chapters! But there is one amusing circumstance that I must acquaint your lordship with. At the height of my misery and just before I succumbed to a large dose of Wheeler’s paregoric there came a timid knock at my hutch door. I cried “Who is there?” To which a faint voice replied, “It is I, Mr Talbot, sir. Mr Colley, sir. You remember, the Reverend Mr Colley, at your service.” By some stroke of luck rather than wit I hit on the only reply that would protect me from his
visitation
.

“Leave me I beg you, Mr Colley—” a dreadful
convulsion
of the guts interrupted me for a moment; then—“I am at prayer!”

Either a decent respect for my privacy or Wheeler approaching with the good draught in his hand rid me of him. The paregoric—it was a stiff and justifiable dose that
knocked me out
. Yet I do have some indistinct memory of opening my eyes in stupor and seeing that curious
assemblage
of features, that oddity of nature, Colley, hanging over me. God knows when that happened—if it
happened
! But now I am
up
, if not
about
, the man surely will not have the impertinence to thrust himself on me.

The dreams of paregoric must owe something surely to its constituent opium. Many faces, after all, floated through them so it is possible his was no more than a figment of my drugged delirium. The poor, pale girl haunted me—I hope indeed she may make a good
recovery. There was under her cheekbone a right-angled hollow and I do not recollect ever having seen anything so painful to behold. The hollow and the affecting darkness that lived there, and moved did she but turn her head, touched me in a way I cannot describe. Indeed I was filled with a weak kind of rage when I returned in thought to the occasion of the service and remembered how her
husband
had exposed her to such a miserable farce! However, today I am more myself. I have recovered from such morbid thoughts. Our progress has been as excellent as my recovery. Though the air has become humid and hot I am no longer fevered by the pacing of Mr Prettiman overhead. He walks the afterdeck with a weapon provided of all things by the sot Brocklebank and will discharge a positive shower from his antique blunderbuss to destroy an albatross in despite of Mr Brocklebank and Mr Coleridge and Superstition together! He demonstrates to the thoughtful eye how really irrational a rationalist philosopher can be!

I think it is the twenty-third day. Summers is to explain the main parts of the rigging to me. I intend to surprise him with a landsman’s knowledge—most collected out of books he has never heard of! I also intend to please your lordship with some choice bits of Tarpaulin
language
for I begin, haltingly it is true, to
speak Tarpaulin
! What a pity this noble vehicle of expression has so small a literature!

Can a man always be counting? In this heat and
humidity
—

It was Zenobia. Has your lordship ever remarked—but of course you have! What am I thinking of? There is a known, true, tried and tested link between the
perception
of female charms and the employment of strong drink! After three glasses I have seen twenty years vanish from a face like snow in summer! A sea voyage added to that stimulant—and one which has set us to move gently through the tropics of all places—has an effect on the male constitution that
may
be noted in the more recondite volumes of the profession—I mean the medical profession—but had not come my way in the course of an ordinary education. Perhaps somewhere in Martial—but I have not got him with me—or that Theocritus—you remember, midday and summer’s heat
τòν Πᾶνα δεδοíκαμες
. Oh yes, we may well fear Pan here or his naval equivalent whoever it may be! But sea gods, sea nymphs were chill creatures. I have to admit that the woman is most damnably, most urgently attractive,
paint
and all! We have met and met again. How should we not? And again! It is all madness, tropical madness, a delirium, if not a transport! But now, standing by the bulwarks in the tropic night, stars caught among the sails and swaying very gently all together, I find that I deepen my voice so that her name vibrates and yet I know my own madness—she meanwhile, why she heaves her scarcely covered bosom with more motion than stirs the glossy deep. It is folly; but then, how to describe—

Noble godfather, if I do you wrong, rebuke me. Once ashore and I will be sane again, I will be that wise and impartial adviser, administrator, whose foot you have set on the first rung—but did you not say “Tell all”? You said, “Let me live again in you!”

I am but a young fellow after all.

Well then, the problem, devil take it, was a place of assignation. To meet the lady was easy enough and indeed unavoidable. But then so was meeting everyone else! Mr Prettiman paces the quarterdeck. The
Famille
Pike, father, mother and little daughters, hurry up and down the afterdeck and the waist peering on this side and that lest they should be accosted, I suppose, and
subjected
to some indignity or impropriety. Colley comes by in the waist; and every time nowadays he not only favours me with his
reverence
but tops it off with a smile of such understanding and sanctity he is a kind of walking
invitation
to
mal de mer
. What could I do? I could scarcely hand the lady into the foretop! You will ask what is wrong with my hutch or her hutch. I answer “Everything!” Does Mr Colley but cry “Hem!” on the other side of the lobby he wakes Miss Granham in the hutch just aft of him. Does that windbag Mr Brocklebank but break wind—as he does every morning just after seven bells—our timbers shudder clear through my hutch and into Mr Prettiman’s just across from me. I have had to prospect farther for a place suitable to the conduct of our
amours
. I had thought of finding and introducing myself to the purser—but to my surprise I found that all the officers shied away from mention of him as if the man were holy, or indecent, I cannot tell which, and he never appears on deck. It is a subject I propose to get clear in my mind—when I have a mind again and this, this surely temporary madness—

In sheer desperation I have persuaded Mr Tommy Taylor to take me down to the gun room which, though it has only three midshipmen instead of the more usual complement, is nevertheless so roomy it is used for the warrant officers as well, because
their
mess—I cannot go into the politics of it all—is too far forrard and has been taken over for the better sort of emigrant. These elders, the gunner, the carpenter and the sailing master, sat in a row beyond a table and watched me in a silence that seemed more
knowing
than the regard of anyone else in the ship if we except the redoubtable Miss Granham. Yet I did not pay much attention to them at first because of the extraordinary object that Mr Willis revealed as he moved his bony length towards the ladder. It was, of all things, a plant, some kind of creeper, its roots buried in a pot and the stem roped to the bulkhead for a few feet. There was never a leaf; and wherever a tendril or branch was unsupported it hung straight down like a piece of seaweed—which indeed would have been more appropriate and useful. I exclaimed at the sight. Mr Taylor burst into his usual peal and pointed to Mr Willis as the not particularly proud owner. Mr Willis vanished up the ladder. I turned from the plant to Mr Taylor.

“What the devil is that for?”

“Ah,” said the gunner. “Gentleman Jack.”

“Always one for a joke, Mr Deverel,” said the
carpenter
. “He put him up to it.”

The sailing master smiled across at me with mysterious compassion.

“Mr Deverel told him it was the way to get on.”

Tommy Taylor cried with laughter—literally cried, the tears falling from him. He choked and I beat his back more severely than he liked. But unalloyed high spirits are a nuisance anywhere. He stopped laughing.

“It’s a creeper, you see!”

“Gentleman Jack,” said the carpenter again. “I couldn’t help laughing myself. God knows what sort of lark Mr Deverel will get up to in the badger bag.”

“The what, sir?”

The gunner had reached below the table and brought up a bottle.

“You’ll take an observation through a glass, Mr Talbot.”

“In this heat—”

It was rum, fiery and sticky. It increased the heat in my blood and seemed to increase the oppressiveness of the air. I wished that I could shed my coat as the warrant officers had; but of course it would not do.

“This air is confoundedly close, gentlemen. I wonder you can endure it day after day.”

“Ah,” said the gunner. “It’s a hard life Mr Talbot, sir. Here today and gone tomorrow.”

“Here today and gone today,” said the carpenter. “Do you mind that young fellow, Hawthorne I think, come aboard at the beginning of this commission? Boatswain gets him to tail on a rope with the others, only last man like and says, says he, ‘Don’t you go leaving go no matter what happens.’ The boat begins to take charge on the yard and drops ’cause the rest jumps clear. Young Hawthorne, who don’t know the crown of a block from its arse—he come off a farm, I shouldn’t wonder—he holds on like he’s been told.”

The gunner nodded and drank.

“Obeys orders.”

It seemed the story had come to an end.

“But what was wrong? What happened?”

“Why, see,” said the carpenter, “the tail of the rope runs up to the block—swit!—just like that. Young Hawthorne he was on the end of it. He must have gone a mile.”

“We never saw him again.”

“Good God.”

“Here today and gone today, like I said.”

“I could tell you a story or two about guns if it comes to that,” said the gunner. “Very nasty things, guns when they misbehave, which they can do so in ten thousand
different
ways. So if you take up to be a gunner, Mr Talbot, you need your head.”

Mr Gibbs the carpenter nudged the sailing master.

“Why, even a gunner’s mate needs a head, sir,” he said. “Did you never hear the story of the gunner’s mate who lost his head? It was off Alicante I believe—”

“Now then George!”

“This gunner, see, was walking up and down behind his battery with his pistol in his hand. They was
swopping
shot with a fort, a foolish thing to do in my view. A red hot shot come through a gun port and takes off the gunner’s head clean as this gallantine the Frenchies make use of. Only see the shot was red hot and cauterizes the neck so the gunner goes on marching up and down and nobody notices nothing until they run out of orders. Laugh! They nigh on died until the first lieutenant wants to know why in the name of Christ the guns had fell silent in the after starboard maindeck battery, so they asks the gunner what to do but he had nothing with which to tell them.”

“Really gentlemen! Oh come!”

“Another glass, Mr Talbot.”

“It’s getting so
stuffy
in here—”

The carpenter nodded and knocked on a timber with his knuckles.

“It’s hard to tell whether the air sweats or her wood.”

The gunner heaved once or twice with laughter inside him like a wave that does not break.

“We should open a winder,” he said. “You remember the gals, Mr Gibbs? ‘Couldn’t we ’ave a winder open? I’ve come over queer like.’”

Mr Gibbs heaved like the gunner.

“Come over queer, have you? Along here, my little dear. It’s the way for some nice fresh air.”

“‘Oh what was that, Mr Gibbs? Was it a rat? I can’t abide rats! I’m sure it was a rat—’”

“Just my little doggie, my dear. Here. Feel my little doggie.”

I drank some of the fiery liquid.

“And commerce can be obtained even in such a vessel as this? Did no one see you?”

The sailing master smiled his beautiful smile.

“I saw them.”

The gunner nudged him.

“Wake up, Shiner. You wasn’t even in the ship. We hadn’t hardly come out of ordinary.”

“Ordinary,” said Mr Gibbs. “That’s the life that is. No nasty sea. Lying up a creek snug in a trot with your pick of the admirals’ cabins and a woman on the books to do the galley work. That’s the best berth there is in the Navy, Mr Talbot, sir. Seven years I was in her before they came aboard and tried to get her out of the mud. Then they didn’t think they’d careen her what with one thing and another so they took what weed they could off her bottom with the drag rope. That’s why she’s so uncommon sluggish. It was sea water, you see. I hope this Sydney Cove or whatever they call it has berths in fresh water.”

“If they took the weed off her,” said the gunner, “they might take the bottom with it.”

Clearly I was no nearer my original objective. I had but one possible resource left me.

“Does not the purser share this commodious apartment with you?”

Again there was that strange, uneasy silence. At last Mr Gibbs broke it.

“He has his own place up there on planks over the water casks among the cargo and dunnage.”

“Which is?”

“Bales and boxes,” said the gunner. “Shot, powder, slow match, fuse, grape and chain, and thirty twenty-four pounders, all of ’em tompioned, greased, plugged and bowsed down.”

“Tubs,” said the carpenter. “Tools, adzes and axes, hammers and chisels, saws and sledges, mauls, spikes, trenails and copper sheet, plugs, harness, gyves, wrought iron rails for the governor’s new balcony, casks, barrels, tuns, firkins, pipkins, bottles and bins, seeds, samples, fodder, lamp oil, paper, linen.”

“And a thousand other things,” said the sailing master. “Ten thousand times ten thousand.”

“Why don’t you show the gentleman, Mr Taylor,” said the carpenter. “Take the lantern. You can make believe as you’re the captain going his rounds.”

Mr Taylor obeyed and we went, or rather crept
forrard
. A voice called behind us.

“You may even glimpse the purser.”

It was a strange and unpleasant journey where indeed rats scurried. Mr Taylor, being accustomed, I suppose, to this kind of journey, made short work of it. Until I ordered him back he got so far ahead of me that I was left in complete, and need I say, foetid, darkness. When he
did
return part way it was only to reveal with his lantern our
narrow and irregular path between nameless bulks and shapes that seemed piled around us and indeed over us without order or any visible reason. Once I fell, and my boots trod that same noisome sand and gravel of her bilge that Wheeler had described to me on the
first day
: and it was while fumbling to extract myself from between two of her vast timbers that I had my one and only glimpse of our purser—or at least I suppose it was the purser. I glimpsed him up there through a kind of spyhole between, it may be, bales or whatnot; and since he of all people does not have to stint himself for light that hole, though it was far below deck, blazed like a sunny window. I saw a vast head with small spectacles bowed over a ledger—just that and nothing more. Yet
this
was the creature, mention of whom could produce a silence among these men so careless of life and death!

I scrambled out of the ballast and onto the planks over the
bowsed down
cannon and crawled after Mr Taylor till a quirk of our narrow passage hid the vision and we were alone with the lantern again. We reached the forepart of the ship. Mr Taylor led me up ladders, piping in his treble—“Gangway there!” You must not imagine he was ordering some mechanism to be lowered for my
convenience
. In Tarpaulin, a “gangway” is a space through which one may walk and he was acting as my usher, or lictor I suppose, and ensuring that the common people would not trouble me. So we rose from the depths, through decks crowded with people of all ages and sexes and smells and noises and smoke and emerged into the crowded fo’castle whence I positively fled out into the cool, sweet air of the waist! I thanked Mr Taylor for his convoy, then went to my hutch and had Wheeler take away my boots. I stripped and rubbed myself down with perhaps a pint of water and felt more or less clean. But clearly, however freely the warrant officers obtained the
favours of young women in these shadowy depths, it was of no use for your humble servant. Sitting in my canvas chair and in a mood of near desperation I came close to confiding in Wheeler but retained just enough common sense to keep my wishes to myself.

I wonder what is meant by the expression “Badger Bag”? Falconer is silent.