Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

“Is that Lady Penrhyn behind the Royal Navy pair?”

“No. Prince of Wales, the additional transport. Then Golden Grove, Fishburn and Borrowdale. The two snails in the rear are Lady Penrhyn and Charlotte. Were it not for them we would be farther along, but the Commodore’s orders are specific. No ship is to be out of sight of the rest. So Friendship cannot set her topgallants and we cannot set our royals. Ah, ’tis good to be at sea again!” The brilliant blue eyes spotted Lieutenant John Johnstone emerging from the gentleman’s domain of the quarterdeck; Stephen Donovan leaped down with a laugh. “There is naught more certain, Richard, than that I will see ye some day soon.” And off he went to join the marine commanding officer, with whom he seemed on excellent terms.

Two of a kind? Richard wondered, not moving from his perch. His belly rumbled; in all this wondrous air he needed more food, but more food he was not going to get. An underweight pound of hard bread and more like half than three-quarters of a pound of salt beef a day, plus two quarts of Portsmouth water. Not nearly enough. Oh, for the days of the Thames bum boats and a good lunch!

All the convicts save the seasick or ill were conscious of perpetual, griping hunger. While he and the others from the larboard cots toward the stern were on deck, some of the starboard lazybones opposite them had manufactured a jimmy out of an iron bolt on the mainmast and levered up the hold hatches dotted at intervals along the aisles. They found no rum; they found a cache of bread sacks. But there was always a snitch somewhere. The next moment a dozen marines were piling down the after hatch to snabble the thieves as they feasted and threw the rock-hard little loaves blithely to any imploring hands or voices.

Six men were hauled onto the deck, there to face Lieutenants Johnstone and Shairp.

“Twenty lashes and back into irons,” said Johnstone tersely. He nodded to Corporal Sampson, who had appeared out of the after hatch house with his cat. Not, as Mr. Thistlethwaite had once put it, a four-legged creature that said meow. An instrument with a thick handle of rope coiled around a central core and nine thin hempen strings knotted at intervals and ending in a bead of something lead-colored.

Richard’s first impulse was to bolt back into the prison, only to find that everybody was being driven on deck to witness the floggings.

The six men were stripped to the waist-twenty lashes were not considered sufficient to bare buttocks as well-and the first victim was tied over the curving roof of the after hatch house. The thing whistled, and it did not require much effort in the plying. A whip, a cane or a cudgel raised welts and a bludgeon one massive bruise; this vile implement broke the skin with its first stroke, and where the very small bulb of lead at the end of each of its nine tails struck the body, a great scarlet lump arose in the same instant. Corporal Sampson knew his job; the marines were flogged too, usually to the tune of twelve lashes but sometimes many more. Each stroke landed in a slightly different place, so that by the twentieth the man’s back was a grid of bloodied stripes and lumps the size of a baby’s fist. The victim got a bucket of salt water on the mess which set him to screaming thinly, then his place was taken by the next. While Corporal Sampson ploughed indifferently-he did not appear either to love or hate what he did-through the six, those he had finished with were fitted with locked fetters and a Ceres length of chain. No one sent them below; Lieutenant Johnstone simply nodded dismissal to his flogger and the dozen green-hued privates.

Richard’s gorge rose. He jumped off the longboat and walked quickly to the rail, leaned over it and retched. But as he was too hungry to have anything to bring up, he contented himself with staring down into the water a scant ten feet below him. Water, he noticed as his eyes focused, so pure that the translucent jellyfish everywhere in it were like delicate ghosts, umbrellaed in sheerest silk, with long trails of lustrous frilly tentacles abandoned to the tug of ship and current.

Something went “Whoof!” so suddenly that he jumped; a long, sleek, iridescent body shot past and rose clear of the sea’s surface in an arc of absolute freedom, total joy. A dolphin? A porpoise? There were others frolicking, a great band of them playing chasings with dirty, decrepit Alexander.

The tears poured down his face, but he made no attempt to wipe them away. All of this was a part of this. The beauty of God and the ugliness of Man. What place could Man have in such a gorgeous universe?

The floggingssobered everyone as Alexander continued on her way south toward the Canaries, which was just as well; John Power had learned from his friend Mr. Bones that a convict he knew slightly, Nicholas Greenwell, had been pardoned the day before the fleet left Portsmouth and was smuggled off in secret. Lieutenant Shairp had remembered the discontent following the pardon of James Bartlett while Alexander had lain off Tilbury.

“I never noticed the fucken bastard was missing at first, then I assumed he’d died,” Power said to Richard and Mr. Donovan up on deck where the wind blew their words away. “Bastard! Oh, bitch! I should have been pardoned, not Greenwell!”

Power constantly maintained that he was innocent, that it had not been he who was with Charles Young (of whose present whereabouts he knew nothing) when a quarter-ton of rare wood belonging to the East India Company was spirited off a London wharf in a boat. The watchman had recognized Young, but would not swear that Power was the second man. As usual, the jury hedged its bets by returning a verdict of guilty; best be on the safe side in case the second man had been Power, even if the watchman was not sure. The judge, concurring, handed down seven years’ transportation.

“It should have been me!” Power cried, his dark face twisted in pain. “Greenwell was a robber, pure and simple! But I ain’t got his connections, just a sick dad I am not there to look after! Bitch, bugger, fuck ’em all!”

“There, there,” soothed Donovan, suddenly very Irish, for all that he said he was a good Protestant Ulsterman. “Johnny, ’tis too late to cry. Remember the cat and get yourself home the minute your sentence is over.”

“My dad will be dead by then.”

“Ye cannot say that for sure. Now do what Mr. Shortland told ye to do, else ye’ll be back to idleness.”

The rage simmered down, the pain did not. John Power surveyed the tall fourth mate with eyes full of tears, then marched away.

“It is a wonder,” said Richard thoughtfully, deciding it was high time things were brought into the open, “that ye do not fancy him. Why a stringy old man like me?”

The too-handsome face aped astonishment but the eyes danced. “If I do fancy ye, Richard, ’tis an unrequited passion. Even a cat can look at a king.”

“Bog trotter.”

“Mud skipper.”

“What is a mud skipper?” asked Richard, intrigued.

“A miraculous fish-out-of-water I read of. Maybe ’twas Sir Joseph Banks described it, I do not remember. It skips on mud.”

More deathshad occurred; there were now 188 convicts left on board Alexander.

At about the moment that Thomas Gearing from Oxford was in extremis, Teneriffe loomed out of fog and drizzle so quietly that the inmates of the prison, ordered below, scarcely knew when their ship made harbor.

Having had little to do for three weeks save feed the convicts and dwell upon their own injuries, the marines now went seriously on duty. Their most onerous task at sea was to boil up kettles of the salt beef chunks which Sergeant Knight was supposed to weigh up on the scales Lieutenant Shortland, the naval agent, had himself checked. As the naval agent was not present to witness this ritual, however, Sergeant Knight simply chopped the beef or pork into half-pound bits for the convicts and pound-and-a-half pieces for the marines. The convicts were supposed to get pease or oatmeal as well, but Sergeant Knight confined such treats to Sundays after prayers had been said. He was fed up with playing nursery maid to a lot of felons before Alexander put to sea- scales, for pity’s sake! Even if Lieutenant Shairp came down to watch, Knight made no attempt to weigh or be fair about the rations, and Shairp said not a word. Better fucken not say a word!