Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

On Wednesday, Stephen Donovan came down to the prison to find him shortly after dawn.

“I need you and your men, Morgan,” he said curtly, mouth tight in displeasure. “Ten of ye will do-and make it lively.”

Ike Rogers was a little better with every day that passed at anchor; yesterday he had eaten his onion with such relish that he found himself the recipient of several more. The pumpkin had also been devoured, though he seemed to have no appetite for meat or bread. His loss of weight was increasingly worrisome: the full, brash face had fallen away to bones and his wrists were so thin that they were knobbed. When Joey Long refused to leave him, Richard decided to take Peter Morris from Tommy Crowder’s cot.

“Why not me?” demanded Crowder peevishly.

“Because, Tommy, the fourth mate does not come down into the prison looking for men to clerk for him. He is wanting labor.”

“Then take Petey with my blessing,” said Crowder, relaxing; he was in the midst of delicate negotiations with Sergeant Knight which might lead to a little rum, even if at an inflated price.

On deck the ten convicts found Mr. Donovan pacing up and down looking like thunder. “Over the side and into the longboat,” he rapped. “I have barely enough sober men to bring the empty water tuns up, but none to take the tuns to the jetty and fill them. That is going to be your job. Ye’ll be under orders from the cargo hand, Dicky Floan, and ye’re going because there are not enough sober marines to put a guard on you. How many of ye can row?”

All the Bristol men could, which made four; Mr. Donovan, an abstemious man, looked blacker. “Then ye’ll have to be towed in and out-though where I am to find a lighter to do it, I have no idea.” He spotted the naval agent’s second-mate son and grabbed him. “Mr. Shortland, I need a towing lighter for the water tun longboat. Any suggestions?”

After a moment of frowning thought Mr. Shortland decided upon nepotism and flagged Fishburn, where his father was ensconced. Fishburn answered so promptly that not more than half an hour went by before Alexander’s longboat, loaded with empty tuns all standing upright, was towed away jettyward.

For such an arid and desolate place Teneriffe had excellent water; it came down from a spring somewhere in the interior near a town called Laguna, was conduited through the customary elm pipes (imported, Richard imagined, from Spain) and ran out of a series of mouths dispersed along a short stone jetty. Unless some ship were filling its tuns, the water dissipated in the salty harbor. Since leaving Portsmouth Alexander had used 4,000 gallons, so there were 26 of these 160-gallon receptacles to fill, and each one took two and a half hours. The system was quite ingenious, however, and permitted the filling of six tuns at once; had the Spanish put in a wooden jetty on piers, a boat containing tuns could actually have maneuvered itself underneath and filled all its tuns without man-handling either boat or tuns. As it was, the longboat had been stacked with six tuns on either side and had to be turned constantly to part-fill the tuns on one side, then turn the boat around and part-fill the tuns on the other side. Otherwise the weight-a full tun weighed over half a ton-would have capsized them. Hence the need for ten men to labor, pushing, pulling and oaring the longboat around, mindful of the fact that Donovan had said they had to finish filling the tuns that day. Tomorrow was booked for Scarborough.

The second Alexander longboat was brought in by another towing crew and contained fourteen tuns. Hoping for a little shore time, the towing crew was ordered to haul Alexander’s first boat back. Not an order the men would have taken from everybody, but were obliged to; it came from Mr. Samuel Rotton, one of the master’s mates off Sirius, and supervisor of watering. A sickly fellow, he did his job beneath the shelter of a green silk umbrella borrowed from delightful Mrs. Deborah Brooks, wife of Sirius’s boatswain and a very good friend of the Governor’s.

“Is she?” Richard asked Dicky Floan, who knew all the gossip.

“Oh, aye. A bit of naughty there, Morgan. All of Sirius is in the know, including Brooks. He’s an old shipmate of Phillip’s.”

Darkness had long fallen before the last tun was filled, and the ten convicts were trembling with fatigue. They had not been fed and for once Richard’s scruples had had to be set aside; it was impossible to labor in the sun, veiled though it was most of the time, without drinking, and the only water to drink came from the pipe originating at Laguna’s spring. They drank it.

Returning to Alexander well after eight, draped over the tuns in exhaustion, the convicts found that the harbor had come alive with a horde of tiny boats, each dewed with twinkling lights, and fishing for something that apparently was not catchable during the day. A fairyland of bobbing lamps, the occasional golden gleam of nets glittering with whatever milled inside them.

“Ye’ve done remarkable well,” said the fourth mate when the last of them, Richard, had clambered clumsily up the ladder. “Come with me.” He walked off toward the crew’s mess in the forecastle. “Go in, go in!” he cried. “No one has fed ye, I know, and there is not a marine sober enough to boil anything on their wretched stove without setting fire to the ship. Crew’s not in any better condition, but Mr. Kelly the cook kindly left ye food before retiring to his hammock cuddling a bottle.”

They had not had a feast like that one since leaving Ceres and their bum boat lunches six months ago-cold mutton that had been roasted, not boiled-a mess of pumpkin and onion stewed with herbs- fresh bread rolls slathered in butter-and the whole washed down by small beer.

“I do not believe the butter,” said Jimmy Price, chin shining.

“Nor did we,” said Donovan dryly. “It seems the butter loaded for the officers was put in the wrong sort of firkins-perishables are supposed to go into double-lined containers, but the contractors cut corners as usual and used ordinary ones. So the butter is on the turn and the whole fleet has been issued with it to get rid of it before it spoils. Then the coopers will get to work to make proper butter firkins-which cannot be filled until we get to the Cape of Good Hope. There are no milch cows this side of it.”

Bellies full, they stumbled back to their cots and slept until the church bells woke them at midday Angelus. Shortly after that they ate again, goat’s meat, fresh corn bread and raw onions.

Richard gave Ike the fresh, buttered bread roll he had purloined the evening before and hidden in his shirt. “Do try to eat it, Ike. The butter on it will help ye.”

And Ike did eat it; after three days and four nights at anchor he was beginning to look better.

“Come look!” cried Job Hollister, excited, sticking his head inside the hatch.

“Ain’t she grand? ” he asked when Richard appeared on deck. “I never saw a ship half her size in Bristol, even at Kingsroad.”

She was a Dutch East Indiaman of 800 tons and dwarfed Sirius, though she sat a little lower in the water-on her way home, Richard decided, laden with the spices, peppercorns and teak the Dutch East Indies produced in such abundance-and probably with a chest of sapphires, rubies and pearls in her captain’s strong-box.

“Going home to Holland,” said John Power, pausing. “I would bet she’s lost a fair number of her crew. Our East Indiamen do, at any rate.” Mr. Bones beckoned, Power scampered off.

Secure in the knowledge that the official inspection was not going to be repeated, the marines had settled down to drinking now that Sergeant Knight’s rather impromptu court martial had concluded with no more than a disciplinary rap over the knuckles; privates like Elias Bishop and Joseph McCaldren had had a hand in Alexander’s “grog rebellion” as well, had expected 100 licks of the cat, and were profoundly glad that marine officer sympathy was more with them than with Captain Duncan Sinclair. The two lieutenants had hardly been aboard, busy dining with their fellows on better ships or dickering for goats and chickens in the Santa Cruz marketplace, not to mention journeying inland to see the beauties of a fertile tableland on the mountain’s flank.