Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

“Then Alexander must be fitted with chain pumps. Is there any of the chain aboard?”

“I doubt that, sir, but Sirius has just undergone a refitting, so she is bound to have chain pumps. I imagine she will have chain to spare. If she does not, some of the other ships might.”

White turned to Balmain, Johnstone and Shairp. “Very well, I am off to Sirius to report this to the Governor. In the meantime the hold and bilges will have to be baled out. Every marine and convict who is not sick will take his turn, I will not have these Bristol men forced to do it all,” he said to Johnstone. He turned then to glare at Balmain. “Why, Mr. Balmain, did ye not report the situation a great deal earlier, if it has been going on for over seven months? The captain of this vessel is a slug, he could not move out of his own way if the mizzen fell on his roundhouse. As surgeon, it is your clear duty to preserve the health of every man on board, including convicts. Ye have not done that, and so I will tell the Governor, rest assured.”

William Balmain stood flying a scarlet flag in each cheek, his handsome countenance rigid with shock and anger. A Scotchman, he was six years younger than the Irishman White and they had not taken to each other upon meeting. To be dressed down in front of two marines and four convicts was disgraceful-that was the kind of thing Major Ross did to feckless subordinates. Now was not the time to have it out with White, but Balmain promised himself that after the fleet reached Botany Bay he would have satisfaction. His large eyes passed from one convict face to another in search of mirth or derision, but found none. He knew this lot for the oddest of reasons: they were never sick.

At which moment Major Robert Ross arrived at the bottom of the steps, curiosity stirred because Shairp had been gallivanting all over the ocean again. One sniff was sufficient to acquaint him with the problem; Balmain withdrew stiffly to his cabin to sulk and plot revenge while White explained what was going on.

“Ah yes,” said Ross, staring at Richard intently. “Ye’re the clean head man, I remember ye well. So ye’re an expert on pumps and the like, are ye, Morgan?”

“I know enough to be sure Alexander is in sore need of chain pumps, sir.”

“I agree. Mr. White, I will convey ye to Sirius and then on to Charlotte. Mr. Johnstone and Mr. Shairp, get everybody onto baling out the bilges. And cut two holes in the hull lower than the ports so the men can tip the stuff straight into the sea.”

Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, arriving with Major Ross and Surgeon-General White the next day, took one look at the larboard pump Richard had removed and dismantled, and gave vent to a noise of derisive disgust. “That thing could not suck semen out of a satyr’s prick! This ship is to be fitted out with chain pumps. Where is the carpenter?”

English meticulousness combined with Celtic enthusiasm worked wonders. Royal Navy and therefore senior in rank to a marine lieutenant, King remained on board long enough to be sure that Chips understood exactly what he was to do-and was capable of doing it-then left to report to the Commodore that in future Alexander ought to be a far healthier ship.

But the poison was in her timbers, so Alexander never was a truly healthy ship. The gaseous effluvia which had lain everywhere below gradually dissipated, however. Living inside her became more bearable. And was Esmeralda Sinclair pleased that his bilge problem had been solved at no cost to Walton & Co.? Definitely not. Who the hell, he demanded from his poop perch (Trimmings had inspected and reported), had cut two fucken holes in his ship?

The fleetcrossed the Equator during the night between the 15th and 16th of July. On the following day the ships ran into their first roaring gale since leaving Portsmouth; the hatches were battened down and the convicts plunged into utter darkness. To those like Richard who spent all their time on deck it was a nightmare alleviated only by the fact that the worst of the stench had gone. The sea was running off the larboard bow, so Alexander was pitching more than rolling, an extraordinary sensation alternating between crushing pressure and weightlessness as she reared into the air and slammed with a noise like a huge explosion back into the sea. At right angles to the motion, they rolled from the bulkhead to the partition. Seasickness, deemed a thing of the past, erupted again; Ike suffered terribly.

Too terribly. As the fleet emerged from the storm with its rain butts filled sufficiently to permit ordinary water rations again, it became clear to everyone, even the desolate Joey Long, that Isaac Rogers was not going to live.

He asked to see Richard, who crouched opposite Joey, cradling Ike’s head and shoulders on his lap.

“The end of the road for this highwayman,” he said. “Oh, I am so glad, Richard! Be glad for me too. Try to look after Joey. He will feel it.”

“Rest easy, Ike, we will all look after Joey.”

Ike lifted one skeletal arm to indicate the shelf along the beam. “My boots, Richard. Ye’re the only one big enough to wear them and I want ye to have them. As they are, whole and complete. Ye know?”

“I know. They will be used wisely.”

“Good,” he said, and closed his eyes.

About an hour later he died, not having opened them.

So many men had died aboard Alexander that her sailmakers had had to beg old canvas from other ships; clad in clean clothes, Isaac Rogers was sewn into his envelope and carried on deck. As he owned a Book of Common Prayer, Richard read the service, committing Ike’s soul to God and his body to the deep. It slid off the board and sank immediately, weighted down with basalt stones collected off the same beach in Teneriffe where John Power had slept. The Death Ship had run out of metal scraps.

Surgeon Balmain ordered another fumigation, a scrub with oil of tar, a new coat of whitewash. His was rather a lonely life, stuck on the quarterdeck with only two marine lieutenants for company. They messed separately from him and shared absolutely nothing with him. Like Arthur Bowes Smyth, the surgeon on Lady Penrhyn, Balmain sustained himself with an interest in the many sea creatures they chanced upon, and if they were small enough, preserved them in spirits. Admittedly it was a great deal easier to descend into the prison these days of chain pumps, but he was still smarting from Surgeon White’s jawing and determined that it would not be his fault if the wretched convicts kept dying.

When aconvict using the crew’s holes in the bow was washed overboard by a freak wave, the complement went down to 183.

At the beginning of August the fleet made landfall at Cape Frio, a day’s sail to the north of Brazil’s chief city. But the high, jagged mountains of that coast behaved as had St. Jago’s peaks; once around the cape the wind failed into catspaws and calms. They groped down to Rio de Janeiro, not reaching it until the night between the 4th and 5th. The season was winter now: Rio de Janeiro was so far south of the Equator that it lay just to the north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Out of the realms of both crab and sea goat. The passage from Teneriffe had taken 56 days and they were 84 days out of Portsmouth, figures which rounded neatly into 8 weeks and 12 weeks. And 6,600 land miles.

Permission to enter the colonial domains of Portugal had to be secured, a time-consuming business. At three in the afternoon the fleet crossed the mile-wide bar between the Sugarloafs to the thunder of a thirteen-gun salute from Sirius answered by the guns of Fort Santa Cruz.

From dawn on, everyone on Alexander had crowded to the rails, fascinated by this alien, fabulously beautiful place. The south Sugarloaf was a thousand-foot-tall egg of pinkish-grey rock crowned with a wig of trees, the north Sugarloaf less spectacularly bare. Other crags reared, their tops sheared and jarred, flanks thick with lushly green forests, flashes of brilliant grassland, jutting grey, cream, pink faces of rock. The beaches were long, curved and yellow-sanded, creamy with surf where the ocean beat in, still and placid once across the bar. They dropped anchor not far inside, opposite one of the many fortresses erected to guard Rio de Janeiro from maritime predators. It was not until the next day that the eleven ships were towed to their permanent moorings off the city of São Sebastião, which was the proper name for urban Rio. It occupied a squarish peninsula on the western shore and sent tentacles of itself into the valleys between the peaks all around.