Neil Hanson - The Custom of the Sea

Stephens checked the ship’s longitude against his calculations, and then they all helped with the gruelling process of taking on water. The stanchions were taken down and the empty butts hauled out of the hold. The water-sellers rowed them away, scoured them with sand, then refilled them with sweet water from the springs in the hills above Funchal. All four members of the crew were required to haul them back on board, straining on the ropes against the dead weight of the casks as they dragged them over the rail before lowering them back into the hold.

Tom bought fresh fruit and vegetables from one of the boatmen and a sackful of limes to flavour the drinking water. He also bought a pig, bartering with tobacco for everything he needed.

All four men sent messages home. Richard posted his letter to the Matthewses, and Brooks also scribbled a note, shielding it from the others with his arm and concealing the name and address on the envelope Tom sent Philippa a terse cable, ‘All is well,’ but he also wrote her a long letter, pressing hibiscus and bougainvillaea petals between its pages. Some were stained with tears. When he had sealed the envelope, he walked to the bow and stood there alone, his back to his crew, staring out over the ocean that separated him from home.

Stephens sent an even longer letter to Ann, explaining for the first time his plan to emigrate and asking her if she and the children would join him in Australia. He told her to send a reply to the Cape. Since the mails went by fast steamship, it would reach Cape Town before the Mignonette’s scheduled arrival date.

They sailed at eleven thirty that morning, having remained in port only twelve hours. Ahead lay the horse latitudes, north of the Tropic of Cancer. Stephens was able to fix their position again six days later, when they passed within sight of San Antonio, the northernmost island of the Cape Verde group. Still well stocked with water and supplies, Tom did not put into port, preferring to make all speed for the Cape.

That night he saw a group of stars as bright as any in the sky, just above the southern horizon. He had heard seamen talk of it in the night watches, but had never before laid eyes on the Southern Cross. Every mile they sailed to the southward sent it higher in the sky, climbing the vault of the heavens.

It was both a link to their destination and a reminder of how far they had already travelled from their home. On cloudy nights the darkness was total, almost palpable, and Tom could feel as well as know the thousands of miles of sea that separated him from his loved ones.

He kept every possible inch of sail on the Mignonette , making over a hundred miles a day as the wind drove them on. Dolphins continued to play around the yachts hull and flying fish arched from the sea in graceful parabolas. They skimmed the crests of the waves, barely seeming to touch the water before they were airborne again on their outspread wings.

Three flying fish crossing on the wind during the night flew into the sails and fell stunned to the deck. Brooks collected and cooked them and after each subsequent moonless or cloudy night, there was always a small harvest of fish to be gathered from the deck.

In twelve days they saw only one ship, an Italian barque out from Liverpool, but on Sunday 14 June Tom heard a call, ‘Sail ho!’ and hurried on deck.

‘Where away?’

‘Starboard beam.’

A barque was cleaving the water towards them. He saw the English colours at the masthead and stifled a pang of homesickness at the thought of its homeward-bound crew. The barque’s deckhands were scrambling aloft to reduce sail and Tom set Brooks and Richard to work to do the same.

He hailed the barque as the two vessels nosed towards each other, rocking gently in the moderate swell. ‘Captain Dudley of the Mignonette . What ship are you?’

‘Captain Fraser of the Bride of Larne , forty-one days out from Liverpool. Where are you from?’

‘Southampton, bound for New South Wales.’

‘Are you in need of anything?’

‘Thank you, we have letters for home, but all our wants are already supplied.’

As soon as the sails were furled, the ship’s dinghy was lowered and Tom and Stephens rowed across to the barque with the crew’s letters. Tom shared a drink with Captain Fraser, exchanging news of sea conditions and ships they had sighted, while Stephens and the mate of the Bride of Larne argued over their conflicting estimates of their present longitude. There was over a hundred miles’ difference between the two, but with the benefit of a recent fix on their position in the Cape Verde Islands, Tom was sure that Stephens was not in error.

They parted company with Captain Fraser at four that afternoon. As they rowed the dinghy back to the Mignonette , Tom saw a pilot fish in the water. ‘Look sharp,’ he said. ‘I never saw a pilot fish that wasn’t close-followed by a shark.’

As they scrambled up on to the deck, they saw a grey swirl in the water and the dinghy banged against the hull as the wake of the shark shook it. The fin broke surface, laying a thin trace of foam across the swell as the great fish passed in front of the bow and moved back along the other side of the ship. Tom saw Brooks and Stephens exchange a glance. A shark circling a boat was regarded by all seamen as a sure omen of a death on board.

On the following Tuesday, 17 June, twenty-nine days after leaving home, the Mignonette crossed the equator at a longitude of twenty-six degrees, forty minutes west, by Stephens’s reckoning. He and Brooks had both crossed the Line many times before but for Tom and Richard Parker it was their first time.

With no alcohol on board, there was none of the usual drunken ritual to celebrate the crossing, but even the normally unbending Tom submitted to the indignity of a commemorative ducking from his crew.

Brooks and Richard took the next watch. It was a warm night with only a light breeze and there was little to do but keep a hand on the helm as they talked, passing the night hours with tales of the sea.

‘So, Dick,’ Brooks said, ‘you’ve crossed the Line. You’re a proper seaman now. What’s your mind? Will you be staying with us in New South Wales, or is the sea in your veins?’

The boy flushed. ‘There’s more of the world I’d like to see first.’

Brooks glanced at him and smiled. ‘Don’t be too eager to sign your life away. There are many worse captains than Tom Dudley. I’ve been on ships that I would have cut off a hand to leave — a tyrant for captain, brutes for officers and a rabble of footpads and cutpurses for crew, sold to the ship by the crimps.’

He broke off to relight his pipe, confident he had the boy’s whole attention. The blue smoke drifted upwards, barely troubled by the faint breeze. ‘The crimps always had a piece of paper with what they said was the man’s mark, but the officers were never too choosy. They had a crew and that was all that concerned them.

‘I’ve known of men who went to a tavern for a wet when they were paid off from one ship, and woke the next morning to find themselves at sea on another with empty pockets, and working the first month for nothing to pay the cut of the crimp who’d robbed them and put them there.

‘In some ships the food was so mean and putrid it would have starved a rat, and the cost was still docked from your wage. I sailed on one where the captain was so close-pursed that we ran out of rations ten days from land. We were so hungry we ate our tobacco and a leather wallet.’ He intercepted Richard’s doubtful look. ‘It is as true as I’m standing here. The water ran out five days later. We caught and killed six rats, drank their blood and ate their flesh.’

Richard shuddered, but Brooks was now warming to his theme. ‘Desperate men will resort to even harder measures. A ship I heard tell of, the Frances Mary , was hit by a monstrous wave that smashed the spars, swept every object, including the ship’s boats, from the deck and stove in the stern. One man was drowned by the wave, another was found dead, dangling from the rigging. The survivors including the captain’s wife and another woman, Ann Saunders, huddled together on the forecastle in a tent they made from a scrap of canvas. Two vessels passed them, but they offered no help and sailed on.