Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

“Soldiers,” whispered Billy Earl from rural Wiltshire.

“Marines,” corrected Neddy Perrott. “White facings on their coats. Soldiers have colored facings.”

Finally a first lieutenant of marines descended in a snappy fashion from the quarterdeck and surveyed the scene with a nasty look in his pale blue eyes. “My name,” he bellowed with a burr in his voice, “is First Lieutenant James Shairp of the 55th Company, Portsmouth! Ye convicts are under my command and will answer to no one except His Majesty’s Marines. It is our duty to feed ye and keep ye from annoying anybody, including us. Ye will do as ye are told and not speak unless ye are spoken to.” He pointed to a yawning hatch aft of the mainmast. “Get yourselves and your rubbish below, one lot at a time. Sergeant Knight and Corporal Flannery will precede ye and show ye where ye are to be stowed, but before ye move I will inform ye what the business is. Ye will go to the berths the sergeant assigns ye and ye will not change from those berths because ye will be counted and told off by number and by name every day. Each man is allowed twenty inches, no more and no less-we have to fit two hundred and ten of ye into a very small space. If ye fight among yourselves, ye will be flogged. If ye steal rations, ye will be flogged. If ye answer back, ye will be flogged. If ye want what ye are not allowed, ye will be flogged. Corporal Sampson is the company flogger and he takes pride in his work. If ye like to lie down-and lie down is all ye will be able to do-then do not court a bloody back. Now get going.” He turned on his heel and marched back to the quarterdeck and the scatter cannon.

Though Scotch convicts were nonexistent, Richard recognized the speech pattern by now, particularly Shairp’s constant use of “ye.” The old form of “you” was slowly disappearing; he used it himself, but not when “you” needed special emphasis. So this marine officer was a Scotchman; he had heard that most marine officers were.

Sergeant Knight and Corporal Flannery disappeared down the hatch. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, thought Richard as everyone hung back. He jerked his head and led his three groups to the six-foot-square opening in the deck. God help us and God save us! he prayed, handed his box to Bill Whiting behind him, dropped his two sacks down the hatch, and leaned over it. About four feet below him was a narrow plank table; he sat on the edge of the opening and dropped neatly onto it, reached up for his box, and waited until Bill had enough slack on the chain to follow. All six got down, each stepping off the table onto a bench and thus to the deck, where they found themselves penned in by another table and set of benches. Everything seemed bolted to the floor, for nothing moved a fraction of an inch when shoved.

“Get over!” barked the sergeant.

They got over and stood in an aisle of deck less than six feet wide. Looking forward into the darkness, they were on the left, or larboard, side. Fixed to the larboard hull were two tiers of platforms very similar to those on Ceres, save that these were double. Each was firmly braced by stanchions and had a curved outer edge which followed the line of the hull, and they were actually quite beautifully made. No one would be able to dismember them in a fit of lunacy. At ten-foot intervals the platforms were partitioned off; the top tier was a little over two feet below the upper deck, the bottom tier was a little over two feet above the lower deck, and the distance between the two tiers was a little over two feet. As even Ike Rogers could comfortably stand upright in the aisle between the beams, Richard calculated that the ’tween decks height was close to seven feet; his head cleared the beams themselves with half an inch to spare.

“These are yer cots,” said the sergeant, a villainous individual who grinned to display the rotten teeth of a heavy rum drinker as he pointed at the tiers. “You lot, up on top, first cot agin the bulkhead, and gimme yer names and numbers. Corporal Flannery here is an Irishman and writes a treat. Look sharp, now!”

“Richard Morgan, number two hundred and three,” said Richard, put a foot on the lower platform and hauled himself and his goods onto the top platform, the other five following; they were still chained together. Ike’s six were directed into the adjoining top “cot,” partitioned off from theirs by thin boards down the middle of a beam that ran from larboard to starboard hull. Stanley, Mikey Dennison and the four late arrivals from Bristol were put into the cot below theirs; underneath Ike were six Northmen including the two sailors from Hull, William Dring and Joe Robinson.

“Cozy,” said Bill Whiting with a rather hollow chuckle. “I always wanted to sleep with you, Richard my love.”

“Shut up, Bill! There are plenty of sheep on deck.”

Six of them were crammed into a space ten feet long, six feet wide and twenty-seven inches high. All they could do unless they lay down was to sit hunched over like gnomes, and, sitting like gnomes, each of them tried to cope with leaden despair. Their boxes and sacks occupied room too-room they did not have. Jimmy Price began to weep, Joey Long and Willy Wilton in the next cot were howling-oh, dear God, what to do?

Across the three tables and six benches in the middle was another double tier of platforms on the starboard side; even craning into the darkness did not reveal how far the chamber extended or what it really looked like. A steady trickle of chained men were dropping onto the middle table, then were herded into the aisle and inserted into a cot. When six of their eleven groups had been put on the larboard side, Sergeant Knight started directing men to starboard and again filled up the cots from the stern bulkhead forward-up, up, down, down.

Over the worst of his shock, Richard summoned the will to act. Did he not, all of them would be in tears, and that he could not have. “All right, first we deal with our boxes,” he said crisply. “For the moment we stack them upright against the hull-there will be just enough room between them to put our feet. ’Tis lucky we put the solids in the boxes and filled at least one sack with clothes and rags, because a soft sack will be a pillow.” He felt the coarse matting under him and shuddered. “No blankets as yet, but we can bundle for warmth. Jimmy, stop crying, please. Tears do nothing to help.” He eyed the beam where the partition was between them and Ike’s cot. “That beam will take extra things once I manage to get out a screwdriver and hooks-cheer up, we will manage.”

“I want my head against the wall,” said Jimmy, snuffling.

“Definitely not,” said Will Connelly firmly. “We put our heads where we can hang them over the edge to puke. Do not forget, we are going to sea and we will be doing a lot of puking for a while.”

Bill Whiting achieved a laugh. “Just think how lucky we are! We puke on those below us but they cannot puke on us.”

“Good point,” said Neddy Perrott, and leaned his head over. “Hey, Tommy Crowder!”

Crowder’s head appeared. “What?”

“We get to puke on you.”

“Do, and I will personally fuck ye!”

“In fact,” said Richard cheerfully, interrupting this exchange, “there is a lot of beam vacant-all the way to the starboard cots. We may be able to build some sort of shelf off it on either side to hold spare stuff-even our boxes, certainly our sacks of books and spare dripstones. Yon Sergeant Knight looks as if he would not say no to an extra pint of rum, so he might be willing to gift us with planks, brackets and rope for trussing. We will manage, boys.”

“Ye’re right, Richard,” said Ike, poking his head around the partition. “We will manage. Better this than the nubbing cheat.”

“The hangman’s rope is the end, I agree. This will not last forever,” said Richard, glad that Ike and his boys were listening.