THE CONVICT SHIP

VOL. I.

NEW LIBRARY NOVELS.

UNDER SEALED ORDERS. By Grant Allen. 3 vols.

A LONDON LEGEND. By Justin H. McCarthy. 3 vols.

THE TREMLETT DIAMONDS. By Alan St. Aubyn. 2 vols.

THE DRIFT OF FATE. By Dora Russell. 3 vols.

BEYOND THE DREAMS OF AVARICE. By Walter Besant. 1 vol.

THE MINOR CHORD. By J. Mitchell Chapple. 1 vol.

HIS VANISHED STAR. By C. Egbert Craddock. 1 vol.

ROMANCES OF THE OLD SERAGLIO. By H. N. Crellin. 1 vol.

VILLAGE TALES AND JUNGLE TRAGEDIES. By B. M. Croker. 1 vol.

MADAME SANS-GÊNE. By E. Lepelletier. 1 vol.

MOUNT DESPAIR. By D. Christie Murray. 1 vol.

THE PHANTOM DEATH. By W. Clark Russell. 1 vol.

THE PRINCE OF BALKISTAN. By Allen Upward. 1 vol.

London: CHATTO & WINDUS, Piccadilly.

THE CONVICT SHIP

BY W. CLARK RUSSELL AUTHOR OF ‘THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR’ ‘MY SHIPMATE LOUISE’ ‘THE PHANTOM DEATH’ ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES—VOL. I.

London CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY 1895

PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON

CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME

THE CONVICT SHIP

CHAPTER I HER FATHER’S DEATH

I was in my twenty-fourth year when I underwent the tragic and amazing experiences which, with the help of a friend, I propose to relate in these pages. I am now seventy-seven; but I am in good health and enjoy all my faculties, saving my hearing; my memory is brisk, and my friends find it very faithful, and what is here set down you may accept as the truth.

It is long ago since the last convict ship sailed away from these shores with her horrid burden of guilt and grief and passions of a hundred devilish sorts; I don’t know how long it is since the last of the convict ships passed down Channel on her way to colonies[2] which were like to become a sort of shambles—for they were hanging half a score of men a day for murder in those times—if this horrid commerce in felons had not ended; when that ship had weighed and sailed she passed away to return no more as a prison craft. When she faded out of sight she was a vanished type, and when she climbed, moon-like, above the horizon under full breast of shining canvas, she was an honest ship again, never more to be debauched by opportunities to tender for the transport of criminals.

Before I lift the curtain upon my ship, the Convict Ship in which I sailed, I must hold you in talk concerning some matters which go before the sailing of the vessel; for I have to explain how it came about that I, a woman, was on board of a convict ship full of male malefactors.

I was born in the parish of Stepney in the year 1814. My father was Mr. Benjamin Johnstone, a well-known man—locally, I mean—in his day. He had been put to sea as a boy very young; had risen steadily and[3] made his way to command, saved money with a liberal thriftiness that enabled him to enjoy life modestly and to hold the respect of his friends. He built a little ship for a venture, did well, bought or built a second, and at the age of forty-five owned a fleet of four or five coasters, all trading out of the Thames. He purchased a house at Stepney for the convenience of the district.

At Stepney in my young days lived many respectable families, and I don’t doubt that many respectable families still live at Stepney; but it is true that all that part of London has sunk since I was a little girl, and the sort of people who flourished in the east in the beginning of the century have now gone west with the jerry trowel and the nine-inch wall. My father’s house in Stepney might have been a lord’s in its time. It was strong as a fortress, cosy and homely, rich within doors with the colouring of age. It still stands; I visited it last year, but it is no longer a private house.

I was about twelve years old when my father died. The manner of his going was[4] very sudden and fearful, and, old as I am, when I think of it I feel afraid, so haunting is youthful impression, the shock of it often trembling through the longest years into the last beats of one’s heart. My cousin, Will Johnstone, had been brought over from his house near the Tower to spend the afternoon with me. He was between six and seven years of age, a fine little manly boy, the only son of my father’s brother, William Johnstone, a lawyer, whose house and office were near the Tower. This little Will and I sat at the table in the parlour, playing at some game, and very noisy.

It was a November afternoon, the atmosphere of a true London sullenness; the fire burnt heartily, and the walls were merry with the dance of the flames, and the candle stood unlighted upon the mantelpiece. My father sat in an arm-chair close to the fire; he smoked a long clay pipe, and his eyes were fixed upon the glowing coals. He was a handsome man; I have his image before me. He had the completest air of a sailor that is to be figured. I seldom see such faces[5] as his now. But then faces belong to times. My father’s belonged to his century; and you would seek for it there and not before nor after.

He sat with his legs crossed and his eyes upon the fire. Suddenly looking around, he cried, with some temper: ‘Not so much noise, little ’uns! not so much noise, or you’ll have to go to bed.’ Then his face relaxed, and I, with my child’s eyes, saw he was sorry for having spoken so sharply. ‘Little ones,’ said he softly, ‘let’s have a game. Let’s see who can go to sleep first and keep asleep longest;’ and dropping his hand so as to bring the pipe from his mouth, he sank his chin and shut his eyes, and snored once or twice as a make-believe.

I sank my head and closed my eyes as father had, and little Will shammed to be asleep. We were silent a minute or more. The pipe then fell from my father’s hand and lay in halves upon the floor. There was nothing in this. It was a common clay pipe, and father would break such things pretty nearly as often as he smoked them. I now[6] peeped at Will; he was peeping at me. The child giggled, and burst into a little half-suffocated laugh.

‘Hush!’ said I; and now, being weary of this sort of sport, I looked at father and cried out: ‘I can’t sleep any longer.’

He never answered, so I stepped round the table to his chair to wake him up, and pulled him by the arm, and still he would not answer. I climbed upon his knee, and just then a bright gas flame spurted out of a lump of coal, and I saw his face very clearly. What was there in it to acquaint my childish sight with the thing that had come to him? I fell from his knee and ran to the door, and shrieked for mother. She was in the next room, or back parlour, talking with a woman hired to sew.

‘Mother,’ said I, ‘father can’t wake up.’

‘What do you mean, Marian? Where is he?’

‘We have been playing at sleep, and he can’t wake up,’ said I, and I began to cry.

She went into the room with a fear and wildness in her manner, stopped to lean upon[7] the table and look at her husband, and in that pause I see her now, though it did not pass beyond the space of a few heart-beats. She was about thirty-five years of age, a very fine figure of a woman indeed, with a vast profusion of yellow hair, of which she was exceedingly vain, often changing the fashion of wearing it two and three times in a week. The firelight was upon her face, and she showed like marble as she gazed at father with a hand under her left breast. Then running up to him she looked close, cried out, and fell in a swoon upon the floor. Will and I were horribly frightened, and screamed together. This brought the servants and the sewing-woman to us. A doctor was sent for, and when he arrived and examined father he pronounced him dead.

It was characteristic of my mother that she should faint when she looked at my father and believed him dead, though for all she knew he might have been in a fit, wanting instant attention to preserve him from death. She was a tender mother, and, I believe, did her best to be a good wife; but[8] she had not strength of character; she was pretty and thought herself beautiful, and was more easily to be cheated by flatterers than any woman I ever met in my life. Her weakness in this way was the cause of much unhappiness to me, of many a bitter secret tear some years after my father’s death, as I will explain a little way farther on.

CHAPTER II HER MEMORIES

I missed my father out of my life as though the sun had gone out of the heavens. I had been far more of a companion to him than my mother. I had venerated him as something superior to all created beings; which, I dare say, was not a little owing to his stories of the sea, to the various wonders he was able to recount, and to his descriptions of distant lands, as remote as the stars to my young imagination. The company he kept was nearly wholly composed of sailors, sea captains, either retired or actively employed. My mother would often be out visiting, passing an evening at a card party, or at a dance at some neighbour’s when our parlour, which was long and wide, but low-ceiled, like a ship’s cabin, would be half-full of father’s nautical friends. I’d sit and listen then to[10] their talk; for mother being absent there’d be nobody to bid me go to bed—as to father, he would have let me sit until he went to bed himself. Thus it was I heard so much talk of the sea, that I was able to discourse on ships and rigging, on high seas and gales of wind,

on icebergs, whales and uncharted shoals, as though I had never lived out of a forecastle. Indeed, I knew too much. I was often pert, lifted up my shrill voice in correction of some old captain, and so would raise a very thunder of laughter and applause in the room.

Again, I was often my father’s companion in the trips he made in his own coasters down the river. Those excursions were the golden hours of my childhood. We’d row on board a little brig weighing from the Pool, and stay in the ship till we were off Gravesend, where we’d land. Mother never joined us. When the wind caused the vessel to lay over she said it made her sick. I dare say it did.

Father’s little fleet was mainly composed of coasters, as I have said, grimy of deck for the most part, with a strong smell of the bilge[11] in the atmosphere of their darksome cabins, wagons in shape and staggerers in their gait, with a lean and coaly look aloft as they heeled, black and gaunt, from bank to bank of the river over the smooth stream of ebb or flood. But those trips made choice hours to me, and are sweeter than the memories of sport in the summer grass and of hunts in the rank growths of ditches and the country hedge.

I remember that during one of these trips we nearly ran down a large boat when we were not very far from Woolwich, lying over with the wind ahead and the water spitting briskly at our forefoot. I went to the side to look; she was a big boat with soldiers in her, and full of strange-looking men in gray clothes and a sort of Scotch cap. I saw the irons upon those men as the boat swept close past and heard the clank of the chains as the wretches shrank or started in terror at the sight of the mass of our bare, black hull, rolling like a storm-cloud almost right over them. Father was below. I asked Mr. Smears, the master of the brig,[12] who stood close alongside of me in a tall, rusty hat and a stout coat that descended to within a foot of his heels, what boat that was.

‘A convict boat, missy,’ he answered.

‘What are those people in her?’

‘Rogues all, missy—rogues all.’

‘Where are they going to?’ said I.

He pointed to a great wooden hulk that lay off Woolwich, the hull of a man-of-war, made hideous by a variety of deck erections, and by rows of linen fluttering betwixt the poles which rose out of her decks.

‘That’s where they’re going to,’ said Mr. Smears. ‘And shall I tell ’ee who’s the skipper of that craft? ’Taint no Government bloke—let ne’er a man believe it! The skipper’s name begins with a D and ends with a h-L. I’m not going to say more, missy. Father’ll supply ye with the missing letters. Yond skipper’s name begins with a D and ends with a h-L, and them livelies in gray,’ said he, nodding toward the boat we had nearly run down, ‘are his young ’uns, and they do credit to their parient, if looks ain’t lies.’

[13]Then, starting up, he cried: ‘Ready about, lads!’ and a moment later the helm was put down and our canvas was wildly shaking, and then the brig heeled over and with steady sails ripped through the yellow lustrous surface of the river’s breast on her slanting course down Woolwich Reach.

I did not long look at the great hull of the old man-of-war and her hideous deck erections and her flapping prison linen. I was a child, with a child’s eye for beauty, and my gaze would quickly wander from the prison-ship which I was altogether too young to quicken and inform with the loathsome fascination one finds in all such abodes of human crime and miserable mortal distress; I say my eye would quickly turn from that horrible floating jail to the fifty sights of movement and colour round about; to the hoy with its cargo of passengers from Margate and a fiddle and a harp making music in the bows lazily stemming Londonward; to the barge going away with the tide, sending a scent of rich country across the wind from its lofty cargo of hay on whose summit lies a[14] man on his back, sound asleep; to the large ship fresh from the other side of the world with sailors dangling aloft, and a merry echo of capstanpawls timing a little crowd of men running round and round her forecastle; the wife of the captain aft talking to a waterman in a wherry over the side, and the captain

himself, baked brown by the suns of three or four great oceans, excitedly stepping from rail to rail in a walk of impassioned anxiety and impatience.

I have the words, you see! Does the language of the deep sound strange in the mouth of a woman? The wives and daughters of military men may deliver themselves in the speech of the barracks and nobody thinks anything of it. Why should not the daughter of a sailor and the wife of a sailor possess the language of her father and of her husband’s profession, and talk it whenever the need arises without raising wonder?

After my father’s death, his little fleet of ships were sold, in accordance with the direction of his will. The thing was bungled. My mother was a poor woman of business. She[15] fell out with my uncle, William Johnstone, over the sale of the vessels, and put the business in the hands of a broker, who robbed us. Yet, when the estate was realised, we were pretty well to do. The freehold in Stepney was to come to me at the death of my mother. Under my father’s will there was a settlement that secured me three hundred pounds a year. The trustees were two sea-captains. My mother was well provided for; but one saw, by the terms of my father’s will, that he had no confidence in her. Yet he did not stipulate that she should not marry again; though, had I been older at the time, I should have looked for some condition of the sort, for he was very jealous. In fine, and what I have to relate obliges me to dwell upon these trumpery particulars, my father’s will gave me his house at my mother’s death, and secured three hundred pounds a year to me in any case when I should become of age

or on my marriage, the interest meanwhile to grow and be mine; and then, at my mother’s death, a portion of what had been willed to her was to revert to me, and the remainder[16] was to be distributed amongst two or three poor and distant relations and a few charities, all of them maritime.

Thus, at my father’s death, I might fairly have been described by a forward-looking eye as what you would call a tolerably fair match; and at the age of seventeen I deserved to be thought so, not only because of my money and the pleasant old house that would be mine, but because of my good looks. At seventy-seven there can be no vanity in retrospect. Moreover, since this story is to be told, you shall have the whole truth. At seventeen, then, I was a tall, strong, well-made girl, broad, but in proportion, and they used to tell me that I carried my figure with the grace of a professional dancer. I was exactly opposite to my mother in colour. My hair was black as the wing of a raven; my eyes very black and filled with a strong light, which brightened to a look of fever in times of excitement; my complexion was pale but clear; my teeth large, white, and regular, and I showed them much in talking and laughing. I’ll not deny that my[17] charms—and handsome I truly was—inclined to coarseness; by which I mean that they leaned toward the manly rather than the

womanly side. My voice was a contralto, and when I sang I would sink to a note that was reckoned uncommonly deep for a girl.

My father had been dead about five years, when, one afternoon, my mother came to me in my bedroom. She was in her bonnet and outdoor clothes, and I instantly noticed an agitation in her manner as she sat down beside the dressing-table and looked at me. I forget what I was about, but I recollect ceasing in it and standing up with my hands clasped, whilst I viewed her anxiously and with misgivings.

‘Marian,’ said she, with a forced smile, ‘I have come to give you a bit of news.’

‘What, mother?’

‘My hand has been asked in marriage, dear, and I have accepted.’

I felt the blood rush to my face, and then I turned cold, and, pulling a chair to me, sat down, but I did not speak.

[18]‘Do you hear me, child?’

‘Your hand has been asked in marriage?’ said I. ‘By whom, mother?’

‘By Mr. Stanford,’ she answered, lowering her voice and sinking her eyes.

‘Mr. Stanford?’ I cried. ‘The doctor?’

‘Whom else?’ she replied, looking at me again and forcing another smile.

I was thunderstruck. Never for an instant had I suspected that there was more between them than such commonplace, matter-of-fact friendship as may exist between a medical man and those whom he attends. Mr. Stanford was the doctor one of the servants had run for when my father died. He had attended us during the preceding year, and he had prescribed for mother and me since, so that at this date we had known him six years. He was a widower and childless, and lived within ten minutes’ walk of our house. Occasionally he had looked in upon us, and sat during an evening for an hour or so; sometimes he had dined with us and we with him; but never had I observed any sort of behaviour in him or mother to hint at[19] what was coming—at what, indeed, had now come.

I should be needlessly detaining you from my own story to repeat all that passed between my mother and me on this occasion. I was beside myself with anger, mortification, jealousy—for I was jealous of my father’s memory, abhorred the thought of his place being taken in his own house and in the affection of the wife whom he had loved, by such a man as Mr. Stanford. Nay, but it would have been all the same had Mr. Stanford been the greatest nobleman or the first character in Europe. I should have abominated him as an intruder, and have yearned for the hands of a man to toss him out o’ window should he dare to occupy a house in which my father was as real a presence to my heart as though he were still alive and could kiss me and make me presents and carry me away out of the gloomy streets into the shining holiday road of the river.