THE CONVICT SHIP

VOL. II.

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. II.

London CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY 1895

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

CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME

THE CONVICT SHIP

CHAPTER XVIII SHE IS TAKEN BEFORE THE COMMANDER

I was awakened from a deep slumber by the glare of a lantern upon my eyes, by the weight of a heavy hand upon my shoulder, and by a deep voice roaring out: ‘Here y’are, then! Another convict, is it? Who’s to say what’s right aboard a craft where everything’s wrong? Out you come, my lively!’ And, still half asleep and blinded by the light and deafened by the fellow’s roaring voice, I was dragged as though I had been a child out of the sail and held erect.

A second man holding a lantern raised it to my face and peered at me. I had seen both fellows in this place before; they were the boatswain and the sailmaker.

[2]‘What are you a-doing down here?’ said the sailmaker.

The boatswain now let me go, and I stood upright before the two men, still dazed and horribly frightened, though my wits were slowly returning.

‘I’m doing no harm,’ said I, blinking at the light, which, as it was held close, put an insufferable pain into my eyes. ‘I hid myself. I want to get to Australia.’

‘Australia, is it?’ thundered the boatswain. ‘Why, you young rooter, d’ye know we ain’t bound to Australia? Where did ye come aboard?’

‘Woolwich.’

‘D’ye know this is a convict ship?’

‘Yes, I know it.’

‘Has he been a-broachin’ of anything?’ said the sailmaker, holding high the lantern and slowly sweeping its light round the interior.

‘What are ye?’ said the boatswain, whose voice was louder than that of any man I had ever heard or could dream of.

‘A runaway boy,’ said I. ‘Take me on deck. I’m sick for the want of light.’

[3]‘Sails, d’ye hear him?’ said the boatswain. ‘By the great anchor, as my old mother used to say, but here’s one I allow as has squeezed through the hawse-pipe on his road to the quarter-deck, for, hang me, if he hain’t a-hordering of us already.’

‘What’s your trade, Jimmy?’ said the sailmaker, addressing me. ‘Nuxman or jigger, or are you a lobsneaker, hey? Self-lagged, by the Lord!’

‘Come along aft and see the capt’n,’ said the boatswain.

He then spoke to the sailmaker about the sails which they had apparently descended to view, and, catching me by the arm, walked me under the hatch, where he came to a stand.

‘Been here since Woolwich, ye say?’

‘Yes,’ I answered.

‘All in the dark?’

‘Yes.’

‘What have you eaten and drunken?’

‘I brought some food with me.’

‘Are you one of a gang?’ And here he rolled a pair of large glassy eyes over the casks and coils of rope. He was a very[4] powerful seaman, deeply bitten by small-pox and without a right ear.

‘I am alone,’ said I.

‘Up ye go!’ he cried, and he partly hoisted and partly tossed me through the hatch on to the upper deck.

It was broad day, though the interior of the forecastle into which I had emerged was gloomy. Beyond the forecastle-entrance the white and windy sunshine was coming and going to the frequent sweep of clouds athwart the sky. The brightness of that light thrilled my eyes with pain, and I turned my back upon it, putting my hand to my head for a few moments.

‘’Tisn’t everybody, mates, that goes to sea afore the mast as signs on,’ said the boatswain, generally addressing a few sailors who had risen from their sea-chests or lounged out of the shadow forward to look at me.

‘If this here was a female convict ship, Mr. Balls,’ said one of the men, ‘you’d find that that there covey was after one of the gals.’

‘Let him wash hisself,’ said another seaman,[5] speaking with his hands plunged deep in his pockets, ‘and there’ll be nothen likelier aboard us. Dummed if he don’t remind me of my Mary Hann.’

‘Let’m sit,’ said another of the sailors. ‘I’ve got a drop of grog in my chest. I started on my first voyage in the fore-peak and knows what head seas mean down there to a country stomach.’

‘Sit and breathe,’ said the boatswain, backing me to a chest. ‘Fetch your sup along, Joe. He don’t look much of a rascal, do he?’ And I observed that he eyed me very closely and with looks of surprise and doubt which somewhat softened the fierceness of his one-eared, glassy-eyed face.

I was glad to sit. My strength had been fearfully overtaxed by confinement and by my mental sufferings and want of air. I was afraid I should faint and my sex be discovered. A pannikin with a dram of black rum in it was given to me. I smelt the fiery stuff and asked for water.

‘Neat, my warrior, neat, and down with it!’ cried the fellow who had given me the[6] rum. ‘Water’s for washin’ in. Don’t talk of rum and water. Soap and water, my heart; that’s it.’

‘Give the lad water,’ said the boatswain. ‘Blowed if I’m going to take him aft drunk.’ One of the fellows brought a pannikin of water and turned a small quantity into the rum. I looked up into his face and thanked him with a smile and drank.

‘Ever at sea afore, Jacky?’ said a sailor.

‘D’ye hear the grit of old hoss in his squeak that you asks that?’ said the deep-lunged boatswain.

‘And to think,’ said a surly-looking sailor, ‘that the town-crier’s still a-ringing for him and his grandmother still a-calling at every public-house to see if he ain’t there!’

‘What d’ye say to a rinse, bo’, afore ye lays aft?’ said the fellow who had offered me the rum. ‘A clean face may stand the little chap in with the old man,’ said he, addressing the boatswain.

‘Have a clean-up, young ’un, afore I takes ye aft?’ said Mr. Balls.

‘Yes,’ I answered.

[7]The boatswain stepped out, and in a few moments returned with a tin dish of cold water and an old towel. ‘Turn to now and polish away,’ said he. ‘Bear a hand. A clean face is like a clean shirt; it gives a man a chance.’

I dipped a corner of the towel into the water and rubbed my face, and when I had looked at the towel I judged I had wanted washing very badly indeed. By this time some fourteen or fifteen seamen had come about me; they lounged and stared, and commented freely in growling, very audible voices upon my appearance and new suit of pilot cloth. It was the forecastle dinner-hour, whence I concluded the time was something after twelve. Nearly all the ship’s company were below, some seated on their chests, eating, a few in their hammocks, smoking, and looking at me over their swinging beds; some, who had drawn close, brought their dinners in their hands, a cube of beef or a hunch of pork on a biscuit, that served as a trencher; these fellows flourished sheath- or clasp-knives, and they chewed slowly, as men whose teeth[8] had long grown artful and wary in the business of biting on shipboard.

The interior was indeed a grim, gloomy, massive picture; the men were rudely and variously and some of them half savagely attired; the place was roofed with hammocks; tiers of bunks arched into the head where they vanished in the gloom. A lamp swung under a great beam, and its light was needed, despite the brightness of the day outside, and of the shaft of daylight that floated through the open scuttle forward and hung in the obscurity like a square of luminous mist, as a sunbeam streams through a chink of closed shutter. A number of stanchions supported the upper deck, and suits of oilskins hung upon nails swayed against these wooden supports like hanged men as the ship bowed and lifted her head. The atmosphere was scarcely supportable with its mingled smells of strong tobacco and the fumes of the kids or tubs in which the greasy boiled meat had been brought in.

‘Aft with us now, youngster,’ said the boatswain, ‘and give an account of yourself.[9] And may the Lord ha’ mercy on your soul! This here’s a convict ship; there’s nothen going under six dozen. Everything over that’s a yard-arm job.’

He grasped me by the arm and walked me out of the forecastle, but not, I thought, with the temper he had dragged me out of my hiding-place with. By this time my sight had strengthened, and, though the broad daylight outside brought the tears to my eyes, the pain passed in a moment or two.

I glanced at the deck of the ship, but should not have known the vessel as the Childe Harold. Strong barricades, studded with iron spikes, had been erected a little way abaft the foremast and upon the quarter-deck, leaving a narrow open space betwixt this after-fencing and the front of the cuddy. Each barricade had a gate. At the after-gate stood a red-coated sentry, with a loaded musket and fixed bayonet. At the great central or main-hatch stood another sentry. In the recess formed by the overhanging lap of the poop-deck was a stand of arms. The barricades made a huge pen of the waist, main-deck, and part of the[10] quarter-deck. On the left or port side ran a strong barrier, like a great fence, leaving a narrow gangway betwixt it and the bulwark. This I afterwards understood was to enable the sailors and others to go backward and forward without constantly obliging them to pass the sentries and enter the space barricaded off for the convicts.

I glanced behind me as I walked with the boatswain, and saw a sentry stationed at the forecastle, and two more, each with muskets and fixed bayonets, paced the break of the poop athwartships to and fro in a regular, pendulum, sentinel swing, which brought them crossing each other always in exactly the same place. I had young, very keen eyes. All these points I had collected before we had gone half the length of the main-deck gangway. Not a convict was to be seen. I had caught a sight of two men walking together on the poop right aft, near the wheel, and I also saw Will on the poop standing to leeward beside another young apprentice; and on the other side of the deck, at the head of the poop-ladder, was the officer of the watch.

[11]As I advanced with the boatswain I saw Will look, make a step toward the brass rail which protected the fore-end of the raised deck and stare a moment; he then wheeled round, walked to the side and gazed at the white wash of passing water. The ship was under a great spread of canvas, heeling over and sailing fast, and the yeasty swirl alongside was swift and dazzling. I could not see the horizon over the weather bulwarks; but to leeward it was all open sea, green, ridging and flecked, with a cold blue sky over the trucks and many large white clouds sailing down into the west. Two or three women, with shawls over their heads, sat on the edge of a little square hatch under the break of the poop; some children were running about near them. These women stared very hard at me as I passed.

‘Hullo, bo’sun!’ called out the man who was standing at the head of the poop-ladder. ‘What have you got there?’

‘A stowaway, sir.’

‘When did you find him?’

‘Just now, sir.’

[12]‘Where?’

‘Under the forecastle.’

‘Step him up here.’

The boatswain made me ascend the poop-ladder, himself following. This was a deck well remembered by me; I had spent a long hour upon it with Tom and Will when we visited the ship in the docks. All was unchanged here; the boats swung in their davits; the sweep of deck went white as a freshly peeled almond to the grating abaft the wheel; the skylights sparkled and the bright brass binnacle-hoods mirrored the sun in crimson stars. On high the full-breasted canvas rose in space after space of milky softness with a stately swaying of the button of the truck, as the ship leaned to the sea and lifted to windward again.

The person who had ordered the boatswain to bring me on to the poop was, as I afterward got to know, the second mate, Mr. Thomas Masters, a full-faced man, short and strong, his nostrils tinged with purple, no visible throat, and a strange, leering smile upon his mouth when he looked or spoke.[13] Will left the poop by the other ladder; his fellow-apprentice leaned against the lee rail staring at me. The second mate turned his face in the direction of the two men whom I had observed walking aft abreast of the wheel.

One of these two cried out: ‘Who’s that, Mr. Masters?’

‘A stowaway, sir,’ answered the second mate.

Both persons approached. As they advanced along the deck, a third man came up out of the cuddy or saloon through the companion, and joined them. The three stepped up to me. One was Joseph Sutherland, the captain of the vessel, a lean man with a slight stoop, about forty years of age. His face was thin; the skin had a look of leather from long exposure to weather; his eyes were a weak blue with a tear in each corner, which kept him mopping with a pocket-handkerchief. Yet I liked the expression of his face; there was the heart of a man in it.

The second person was Surgeon Russell-Ellice, R.N., the doctor who had supreme charge of the convicts. This man was without[14] any hair on his face; and the hair on his head was cropped as close as mine was or a convict’s. He had large, soft brown eyes and a brown skin, blue on the cheeks and lip, where he shaved. His mouth was firm, with an expression that seemed to lie between scornfulness and self-complacency. He had a manner of thrusting out his chest and backing his head when he spoke, and of so holding himself when he stood or walked as to stretch the inches of his stature to their limits.

The third person was Captain James Barrett, of the —th Regiment of Foot. He was the captain in charge of the guard. He was of the average type of British officers; smart, well-dressed, good-looking, with a glass which he put into his eye to examine me.

I ran my gaze over the faces of these three, not then knowing who they were, though I guessed by their air that they were chiefs in the ship. I did not feel afraid; my end had been triumphantly accomplished. I needed but look over the rail on either hand to know that we were out upon the wide ocean, that, though England indeed could not[15] be very far astern, yet the land was as far away for my purpose as if it had been a thousand leagues distant. And then there was the consideration of my sex to give me nerve; these people were gentlemen. I had but to declare myself to make sure of tender usage. But though I did not mean to do this, and prayed heartily that no occasion might arise to force me into it, yet the sense of it was a refuge that wonderfully supported my spirits, the more particularly now that I had observed there were women on board and quarters where, should the worst come to the worst, I could live with my own sex.

The captain and the doctor (as I shall henceforth call Surgeon Russell-Ellice for the sake of brevity) eyed me all over for some moments without questioning me—the captain with looks of surprise and wonder that came very nearly to commiseration, the other with frowns and suspicion like fire in his gaze.

‘What are you doing on board my ship?’ said Captain Sutherland.

‘I wish to get to Australia, sir,’ said I.

[16]‘What! Without paying? Do you know that this is a convict ship?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I could have him brought to the gangway for this,’ said the doctor. ‘Has he been searched, bo’sun?’

‘No, sir.’

The doctor stamped his foot. ‘Search him!’ he cried.

Captain Sutherland looked on as though he recognised a superior in the doctor. At this moment Will came up to the lee ladder and leaned beside the other apprentice, listening and watching. The boatswain threw open my pea-jacket and drove his huge hands into my pockets. I was thankful not to feel the blood in my cheeks; had this piece of rude handling reddened my face the doctor would have found me out. His soft but scrutinising eyes were upon me.

‘He’s a plump young man,’ exclaimed Captain Barrett, in an aside to the commander of the ship. ‘What’s in your hold to make him fat?’

The boatswain drew out my handkerchief,[17] the two new clay pipes I had put in my pocket that I might seem a man when the crowning occasion arose, and the tinder-box and matches. Happily I had left the little parcel of candles in the sails. The boatswain dived his immense tarry fingers into the pockets of my waistcoat and found nothing.

Whilst I was being searched I observed that one of the sentries who marched athwart the poop was the man who had looked over the rail when I was in the boat alongside off Woolwich. I met his glance and saw he did not remember me. I never once turned my eyes in the direction of Will.

‘Is that all?’ said Dr. Russell-Ellice.

‘That’s all, sir,’ replied the boatswain, replacing my cap on my head, after feeling the lining.

‘Where do you say this lad was found?’

‘Just for’ards of the bulkhead under the fo’c’sle.’

‘It’s a store-room,’ said Captain Sutherland.

‘Has it been searched?’ exclaimed the doctor.

[18]‘I dunno what ye mean by searched,’ answered the boatswain sullenly, resenting as a merchant seaman the imperious manner of the Royal Naval surgeon.

‘Captain,’ cried the doctor. ‘You know what I mean; explain to this man.’

‘Have you overhauled the store-room, Balls, for others of this fellow’s pattern?’ said the captain.

‘No, sir.’

‘Then go with the sergeant of the guard,’ said the doctor; ‘examine every nook and corner, and make your report.’

‘Ay, ay, sir,’ answered the boatswain very sulkily again, and swinging round on his heels he quitted the poop with a sullen walk eloquent of malediction. The doctor drew back as if he would admit it was now the commander’s right to ask questions. Captain Barrett gazed at me strenuously through his eye-glass. His intent regard made me feel very uneasy.

‘What’s your name?’ said Captain Sutherland.

‘Simon Marlowe, sir.’

‘What are you?’ I hung my head. ‘No[19] need,’ he exclaimed, ‘to ask if you were ever at sea; your hands are like a woman’s.’

‘He’s a deuced good-looking chap, doctor,’ said Captain Barrett in another aside. ‘Plump as a partridge, by the great horn spoon! What runs a chap to fat down in your hold, captain?’

‘What have you come to sea for?’ said the captain, speaking with a severity whose forced note my ear could not miss. Indeed, he seemed to find a sort of pleasure in looking at me.

‘I want to get to some friends in Tasmania, sir,’ I answered.

‘What names?’

I was ready for him; for weeks I had been rehearsing too diligently the part I was now playing not to be ready. ‘Satchell, sir.’

‘Where do they live?’

‘At Hobart Town.’

‘What’s their address, boy?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I’ll find out when I arrive.’

The doctor grinned gravely.

‘“Arrive!”’ cried the captain. ‘How do[20] you know I’ll allow you to arrive, as you call it? “Arrive,” you monkey! You’ve committed a felony; you’ve broken into private premises; for all I can tell, you may have broached the cargo of the ship. There are men in that prison down there,’ said he, pointing to the main-hatch, ‘who are being transported for life for smaller crimes.’