Victory (8 page)

“Not those, they're the layers. Here—” I opened a cage with black and whites like those we used to kill on the farm for dinners at the great house. I grabbed one of the hens and brought it out, kicking; then I held it across to Stephen. “You want to wring its neck?”

He shook his head, staring. He was a real city boy, you could tell. He'd probably never even seen a live chicken before. I didn't blame him for not wanting to kill it; that was
the one job on the farm that I had really hated. But I'd had to do it then, and I had to do it now.

My father had been able to grab a chicken's head in his big hand and swing its body round in a swift circle to break its neck in a flash, but my hands weren't strong enough to do that. Next to the cages there was a block of wood, stained dark; I knew what that must be for. “Hold tight,” I said to Stephen, “very tight”—and I put the struggling hen into his hands, stretched its neck out over the block and brought down the axe as hard as I could, to kill it fast. To my relief the head fell away—and Stephen shrieked, for the headless bird in his hands was still kicking, with blood splashing out. They often do that, even after they're dead. Just as Stephen dropped it I shoved the bucket underneath, and as it went on twitching in there he turned his head away and retched. But he didn't throw up, though his face was pasty white.

“Good,” I said, to encourage him. “Now one more.”

And we did it again. As the second hen's body was bouncing around on top of the first, Tommy came up the stairway with a bucket of hot water in one hand and a mop in the other. He looked at the birds, nodded, and took the axe out of my hand.

“Clean up well when you done,” he said. He had a funny accent, like singing. “All this ship have to be clean as a whistle, all the time, or we get the cat.”

“The cat?” I said.

“Cat-o'-nine-tails,” Tommy said, and made a horrible
face. “Flogging, by a whip wi' nine lashes to it. Or for boys, a beating with cane.”

He put the mop into Stephen's hands, and we both knew without speaking that we would make sure to use it well.

So then I got the birds into the bucket of water while it was still hot, and showed Stephen how to pluck the feathers. He was slow and clumsy but he tried hard, and I began to think he might be better than his sly looks. He was a city boy sure enough; he said he had been living on the streets for half a year after running away from home. He was thirteen years old but very small for his age. He had been caught stealing bread, and put into the Navy instead of prison or a poorhouse.

But we were all in prison on this ship, really.

When we delivered the two naked hens to the cook, with their giblets and feathers clean and separate, I suppose he thought we were worth having as help. He set me to feeding the chickens, cleaning out their cages and collecting the eggs—with promises of a beating if I ever broke or stole one—while Stephen scoured pots and scrubbed the tiled floor. Within a day we were mucking out the pigs and the sheep too, and we soon found we had one of the worst jobs on the ship.

I had to be out of my hammock before sunrise and get to the galley by four in the morning. That was when Mr. Carroll and Tommy began to light the fire and heat water for the men's breakfast. After that the whole day was full of messy, reeking work, through dinner at noon, supper at
four o'clock and bedtime at eight. As boys we were classified as “idlers”—a poor joke, considering how hard we worked. Idlers are the lowest form of life in the Royal Navy: the people who do all the jobs that have nothing to do with sailing the ship. And as third-class boys—there were three classes—we were the lowest of the low.

About thirty of us boys slept on the upper gundeck, right underneath the ship's deck, in canvas hammocks slung above the shining black cannons that poked their muzzles out all along both sides of the ship. They were big guns, firing iron balls that weighed twelve pounds each—though the guns on the decks below were much bigger, twenty-four-pounders on the middle gundeck and huge thirty-two-pounders on the lower. When they had gunnery practice Stephen and I had to keep out of the way, but the noise was stupendous and I longed to watch those powerful cannons being fired. Nearly every other boy was attached to a gun crew as a “powder monkey,” to fetch gunpowder every time the gun was fired. I was very envious of them.

The leader of the boys seemed to be a redhead called William Pope; he and a bunch of his friends bossed us all around. They stole anyone's jacket or shirt if they fancied it, or any little keepsake a boy had from home, like a knife or a kerchief, making me almost glad I had nothing but the clothes I stood up in—and slept in too, most nights. We had to wash our clothes and ourselves once a week for inspection, but otherwise there wasn't time. Stephen and I smelled bad as a result, so the bigger boys made life miserable for us.
Even though some of them had disgusting jobs of their own, they would scream and honk and hold their noses when we came near.

“Shite smells bad enough,” said William Pope, shoving me away from him as I passed, “but pig-shite is worse!”

So we had to sling our hammocks in a tiny cramped space next to the far bulkhead, just the two of us. Though maybe that was better than hanging close-packed like the others, so tight together that if you so much as coughed you would set the whole line of hammocks swinging.

I had never thought, at home, that I would ever miss our crowded straw mattress. I wondered often if my little sisters missed me, and whether they had to go to school now unprotected—or if they went at all. As for my mother, I ached with longing when I thought of her, and sometimes—quietly, in the dark—I wept.

It was a dark, stuffy, tilting world we boys lived in. Up on deck the business of the ship went on: every officer and man followed his exact ordered routine, and the real sailors, the topmen, the fo'c'slemen and the afterguard, clambered up and down the rigging of those towering masts amazingly fast, controlling the sails. The ship's whole true life was up there. But I was hardly ever free to go up to the fresh air; Mr. Carroll always had some nasty below-decks work for me to do.

I was the boy in Mr. Carroll's mess—the men all ate their meals in groups of four or six, called messes, and many of them had a boy attached, to do the dirty work. We did
jobs like cleaning out the spittoon, the bucket they spat tobacco-juice into. One of their two pleasures was chewing a chunk of solid tobacco, very slowly, spitting out the brown juice from time to time until the tobacco disintegrated and the bits had to be spat out too. The other pleasure was drinking rum, which was issued to every man jack of us twice a day—half a ration for boys—diluted with water and called grog. You could drink your grog there and then or keep it for a swap. Most of us boys swapped it, though we were also allowed to have money added to our pay instead of being issued grog.

Mr. Carroll was given so many tots of grog in exchange for little treats from the galley that he was nearly always half drunk. He was clever at keeping himself sober at inspection time, when any visibly drunk man would be ordered a dozen lashes, but Stephen and I knew all too well that he would be drunk half an hour afterward, raging at us and at Tommy. Once he broke a big wooden ladle over my back, and once he threw a pot of hot water at Stephen, scalding him so badly that he had to go to the surgeon for the hurt skin to be dressed. Stephen told the surgeon it was an accident. I had argued that he should say what really happened, and he said I was a fool; that the cook would deny it and call him a lying little rogue, which any officer would believe because there would be no proof against it, and then the cook would beat him half to death. He was probably right.

But worse than the cook was one of the midshipmen, Oliver Pickin. HMS
Victory
had about twenty midshipmen;
they were in training to be officers someday, but they had to learn to do everything the sailors did, including climbing to the tops of the masts. Some of them were as young as Stephen and me, some were quite old, but most were young men, wild and rash and looking for anyone they could mistreat in the way that they were often mistreated themselves. Oliver Pickin reminded me of my brother Dick; he was about the same size and just as mean-spirited. The only time I felt sorry for redheaded William Pope was when young Mr. Pickin one day got William a dozen strokes of the cane for failing to salute him. Of course William hadn't saluted him; he'd been staggering along with an armful of hammocks that stopped him from seeing anything, let alone saluting it.

Within four weeks of our sailing from Chatham we were headed south through stormy weather into the Bay of Biscay. We had put in to Portsmouth and Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson had come aboard. I knew by now that Nelson was the hero of the Royal Navy, and of all England too, though back on the farm I had scarcely even known that we were at war with the French. He had won great victories at the Battle of the Nile and at Copenhagen, and lost his right arm and the sight of his right eye in battle, and all the men loved him. When they talked of “the Admiral” it was Nelson they meant, even though there were full admirals like Lord Collingwood who held higher rank.

At first, I saw no more of Lord Nelson than a small figure on the quarterdeck at inspection, with stars and decorations
gleaming on his blue coat. That first day he came aboard, war was declared on France again after a few weeks of peace, and all the men cheered. Then we sailed across the English Channel to meet Lord Collingwood's fleet, and the Admiral left us again before we even found them. Word was that he was taking command of the fleet in the Mediterranean, and was in a hurry to get down there and fight the French. So he went aboard Captain Hardy's frigate
Amphion,
smaller and faster than big old
Victory,
and they sailed south.

When Captain Sutton found Lord Collingwood, we were sent south too. The wind was good but strong, and these were stormy waters, so
Victory
's decks were wildly atilt most of the time, a hard matter for those of us set often to carrying things (and harder still for the sailors sent up the rigging.) Lurching over the deck one day with two buckets of swill for the pigs, I was passing Oliver Pickin and an older midshipman, Mr. Harrington, when a furious gust of wind sent Harrington and me both tumbling on top of Pickin, with the pigswill from my buckets splashing over all three of us.

Pickin cried out in fury, and scrambled up and began lashing at me with his cane. Harrington protested: “Oliver, for God's sake—the boy fell, and so did we—it's not his doing!”

Pickin was beside himself. “Clumsy little whoreson—”

“Stop!” yelled Harrington, and held his arm.

And Pickin did stop, but glared at me as I scurried away to find a mop, and I knew he would not forget.

Nor did he. Two days later word came to the galley that the captain's cook wanted a dozen eggs, and Mr. Carroll sent me up with them. It was a long way, the captain's quarters being in the stern of the ship and the galley way forward. I was making my way cautiously along the deck, holding the wooden rack of eggs with both my hands, when the whistles of the bosun's mates shrilled for the men to reduce sail. I stood frozen beside one of the great deck-top carronades as dozens of seamen came running for the rigging, and seeing my plight they tried to steer clear of me. Most of them were good fellows when sober, and knew from their own experience what a whipping I would get if I broke even one of those eggs.

But when I dodged out again, a foot was stuck suddenly between my own, and tripped me, and the eggs and their frame went smashing down on the deck as I fell. I wailed in horror, and as I scrambled up, a hand took tight hold of my ear. “It's the clumsy pig boy!” cried Midshipman Oliver Pickin, grinning, and I knew beyond doubt that it was his foot that had brought me down.

I wrenched my head away. “You tripped me! You did that!”

“Are you accusing me, brat?”

“Those eggs were for the
captain
—”

Pickin looked round, his face full of triumph and malice. “Insolence to an officer!” he cried. He grabbed at a couple of sailors who were running for the mast. “Clap hold of him, you!”

A bosun's mate was in full cry after the sailors, flicking at them with his cane. “Up with you, you idle scum! Aloft there!” He paused as he saw Pickin.

“Insolence!” the midshipman was yelling. “Insolence! A bar in his mouth for three days! You—take this fellow's name!”

The bosun's mate looked at me and at Pickin, and I knew there was nothing he could do for me: Oliver Pickin was a bullying malicious midshipman but he was an officer, and the rules of the Royal Navy were rock hard.

And so it was that for two full days and nights I had to go about the ship with a five-inch iron bolt forced across my open mouth and tied with yarn behind my head, like a bit in the mouth of a horse. I could neither eat nor drink, and at night I could not sleep for the pain. Stephen and two or three of the other boys were good to me, and gently spooned water into my mouth so that I should not totally parch, but I was wretched beyond belief. I felt there was no hope in life; that I was doomed to the Navy and its injustices forever. I thought seriously of throwing myself into the sea, where I should drown very fast because I could not swim.

I crawled into a corner of the gundeck alone, in despair, and I wept.

And there my uncle found me. In all the weeks since we were pressed, we had seen each other only for brief moments, through the demands of his work and my own, and though he knew of the bad state I was in, there was nothing he could do about it. This time, though, as he
looked into my dirty distorted face, there was an angry set to his mouth that I had never seen before.

“I know what led to this, Sam,” he said. “One of my mates was watching. I think I can do something. Have faith—by tomorrow there may be help.”