Neil Hanson - The Custom of the Sea

Before he joined the ship, Richard walked over Pear Tree Green to the churchyard. He took his bearings from an ornate, four-sided obelisk, a memorial to a prominent local family, engraved with the names of generations of dead. His eye lingered for a moment on one of the inscriptions ‘…and their children, Rebecca aged one day, Caleb aged three days, Reuben aged six months and Alice aged one year and ten days’.

His sympathy for the losses suffered by that family was tinged with resentment: even those brief lives had left some mark upon the world. No stone or tablet recorded the burial place of his parents. He walked towards the east window of the church, overlooking the little school that he had briefly attended, and stopped by a sloping patch of grass studded with spring flowers. He bowed his head over the grave and said a farewell to his father and to the mother he barely remembered, then turned and walked away under the arch of yews shading the church gate.

The ancient pear tree on the green was in flower and the scent of the blossom was carried to him on the wind from the sea. He walked down Sea Road towards the quayside, passing the uneven, sloping green where, on Saturday afternoons, his father had earned extra coppers for himself and guineas for the local gentlemen who wagered on his skill with a cricket bat.

At the bottom of the hill, he crossed the railway track and reached the huddle of houses and taverns along the shorefront between the slip and the ferry landing. Only a foot or so of seaweed-encrusted timber showed above the water on the slipway. The low sun glinted on the water and the ferries on their endless shuttling across the Itchen cast long shadows on to the far bank.

He caught the next ferry over to Northam, alighting near the copse of masts of the yachts pulled out of the water for repairs and careening at Fay’s Yard. Near the bottom of the slip, the Mignonette’s own tall mast bobbed in the current as the tide began to turn. Downstream, the muddy course of the Itchen merged into the broad expanse of Southampton Water.

Richard relieved the watchman on the yacht and stowed his sea-chest and gear under the cramped berth allocated to him, the smallest, hard-up against the chain-locker in the head. In rough seas, the deafening rattle of the cable against the sides of the locker would make it all but impossible to sleep, but as the youngest, most junior member of the crew, he had no choice but to accept the dog’s berth on board.

Brooks and Stephens arrived much later, each escorted to the yacht by Tom and still casting frequent glances back towards the shore. After his experience that morning, Tom chose to have the dinghy hauled aboard at once. It required careful handling, for it was a frail craft, ‘clinker built’ from layers of overlapping, downward-facing planks of quarter-inch mahogany, fixed by clenched copper nails.

Once the dinghy had been stowed over the fore skylight, there was no turning back for the crew. The only way off the ship was to swim for the shore, and of the four, only Tom had ever learned to swim. Many seamen deliberately chose not to do so, fearing that, if shipwrecked, they would deprive themselves of a swift, merciful end, only to endure the horror of shark attacks or the slow torture of starvation instead.

Tom called them together around the helm. ‘We’re a small ship and we have a long voyage before us, but do your duty like men and we’ll do well enough. If we all pull together you’ll find me a fair and friendly captain.’ He smiled. ‘Friendlier than I’ve had need to be today at times. Now we’ve said our farewells, there’s a fair wind to speed us and a new land waiting for us. To work, there’s much to be done before we’re ready to make sail.’

They sailed from Fay’s Yard on the afternoon tide, casting off at high water at five thirty. Brooks and Richard — the strongest pair — worked the windlass to raise the anchor. It was heavy work. It weighed a hundredweight and hung from 300 feet of chain. The windlass rang like a bell as it turned, sending the rusty iron links of the cable clattering into the chain-locker one by one. The anchor at last broke surface and swung dripping from the bow. Brooks and the boy ran to catch it, their trousers flapping loose around their legs. They lashed it tight against the hull as Tom gave the steam-tug, the Mezphi , the signal to tow the Mignonette clear of the Itchen.

Gulls wheeled and cried overhead as they moved downstream. Richard looked back beyond the huddled houses at the water’s edge, over the rising ground and the green fields studded with clumps of trees. Before they slipped from sight, he caught a last glimpse of Pear Tree Green and the dark huddled mass of the yews surrounding the church.

Tom had the helm as the Mignonette dropped her tow in Southampton Water, near the moored battleship, HMS Hector . He gripped the rail of the bulwarks as he glanced back towards the shore, feeling the reassuring warmth and solidity of the weathered wood under his hand. ‘All ready? Hoist sail.’

He heard the whine of rope through the blocks as his men hauled at the halyards. No two ships ever sounded the same; by the time they had been at sea a few days he would know the sounds of the Mignonette so well that he could pick it out from other ships with his eyes closed.

The heavy mainsail was hoisted and sheeted home. The jibs and topsail followed and as the sails filled, the Mignonette leaned over before the wind, rolling with the groundswell as they met the open water. With all plain sail set in the south-east breeze, their point of departure had soon disappeared from sight and the coastline lay like a bank of low cloud on the sea.

Tom gave an approving nod as he watched his crew. Stephens and Brooks were both cool and slick in their work, but they also took time to guide the eager if inexperienced Richard.

They would work the standard hours — four hours on watch, four hours off, seven days a week — a minimum of eighty-four hours a week, and much more in bad weather. The watches ran from midnight to midnight and a bell was rung every half-hour: one bell at the end of the first one, up to eight bells, which signalled the end of the watch.

Tom and Richard took the first watch, but the other two also remained on deck, reluctant to go below while the familiar coastline remained in sight. The mixture of emotions was the same for all of them, regret at leaving loved ones behind, and excitement, coupled with a little fear at the journey ahead.

At the end of the first watch, Tom handed over the helm to Stephens and went below to inspect his kingdom. The familiar musty smell of below-decks greeted him: old, damp wood, men’s stale sweat, tar from the ship’s caulking, and no matter how often the pumps were manned, there was always the faint but acrid odour of bilge water.

His cramped cabin, aft behind the companionway, contained only his berth, a straight-backed wooden chair and a map-table already spread with charts and the ship’s log, weighted down with pieces of pig-iron.

The table stood directly under the aft skylight, the only source of light other than a single lantern hanging from the cross-beam. The sextant and chronometer were stowed beneath the table, though as mate, Stephens, not Tom, had the responsibility of calculating the ship’s position and keeping the log.

The galley and food-store, Brooks’s domain, stood at either side of the narrow, dark passage leading towards the crew’s quarters, roughly partitioned out of the hold where Essex fishermen had once stored their catch. A kettle was warming on the iron stove. The plank walls and ceiling of the galley were stained and smoke-blackened, and so steeped with the odour of bacon grease that no amount of cleaning or fumigation could remove all trace of it.