The Sugar Islands Page 7

  ‘Don’t you wait to see what’s happened. Run while you still can. Through there, behind that row of tents.”

  Roger had not the mental vigour to resist.

  Three hours later in a small inn half-way down one of the dark, narrow, winding Marseilles streets, he leant back against the wall a head whose throbbing grew every second more intolerable.

  At his side a sailor, incapable with drink, was lying on the floor, his head rested in the lap of a blowsy but pleasant-faced young woman who stroked his hair and looked down commiseratingly at him.

  ‘It’s his last night here,’ she explained. ‘His ship sails at dawn.’

  He was young, at the most nineteen. His large eyes were wide with misery. With his arms clutched round the girl’s knees, he sobbed imploringly.

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ he said.

  The girl looked moodily at Roger.

  It’s after seven,’ she said. ‘In an hour or so they will be coming after him. They know where he is. He’s been nowhere else since his ship came in. He’s spent every penny here. That’s why he’s signed on again. He never meant to. It’s best to help him to forget.’

  She poured him out a neat glass of cordial and held it to his lips. At one gulp he swallowed it, shuddered a little, began to talk wildly, then incoherently, finally subsiding into sleep.

  She looked down at the drooped blond head. ‘And the funny thing is that as like as not there’re plenty of people in the town who’d be ready to change places with him. People in trouble who’d like to get away from it.’

  ‘I guess.’

  As he looked at the tumbled figure, he wondered what trouble he had brewed for himself back there in the hills, and asked himself what point there was in waiting to find out.

  ‘What’s the ship called?’ he asked.

  ‘The Bordelais.’

  ‘Where’s she bound?’

  ‘For the South Seas.’

  To Roger the word symbolized romance; adventure; an escape from the smug, the conventional, the prudent; from the memory of disgrace.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Renal.’

  ‘I think I’ll borrow it for a little. Let’s get his clothes off.’

  And so in the small, damp, ill-lit bar Roger Vaisseau stripped himself of his smart jerkin, pulled on the yarn stockings, the blue shirt, the cotton waistcoat, the canvas breeches, the blue neckcloth, the striped shaggy cap, and walked out into the narrow street.

  He had no difficulty in finding the Bordelais. She stood in the November dusk, an imposing shadow, with her sail-filled masts and cannon-charged flanks and ornately embellished poop. From the deck came the sound of singing. There was a group gathered by the quay. At the head of the ladder a large-chested, large-thighed mariner was standing.

  ‘So it’s you, is it?’ he called out at the sight of Roger. ‘We didn’t expect to see you at this hour, nor sober either. We were just going to send the boys out for you.’

  In silence Roger began to climb the ladder.

  ‘Come alone, too, have you?’ the man called out. ‘Quarrelled with your love-bird?’

  Roger made no reply. The man whose clothes and name he bore had spoken with a Breton accent. He was not going to invite detection.

  ‘Grown sullen, have you!’ his cross-examiner continued. ‘Or perhaps you can’t speak for choking. Let’s see if there are any tears.’

  At the head of the ladder a lamp was swinging. The first mate peered down into the face that approached his rung by rung. He drew back as Roger stepped aboard the ship.

  ‘Now what’s his little game?’ he said. ‘You’re no more Renal than I am.’

  ‘These are Renal’s clothes, and all that you want is strong limbs within them.’

  ‘That’s as may be. What have you done with Renal?’

  ‘What’s that to do with either of us. I’m here.’

  The first mate pushed his head forward. It was a young man’s face, but heavy drinking and the long night watches at the helm had drawn hard lines between the nose and mouth. Across the forehead a Spanish quarrel had traced a long wide furrow. It was a hard, weather-beaten face.

  ‘So you want to be a sailor, do you? Well, let’s see if you are fit to be one.’

  Without warning he jabbed his left fist at Roger’s face. Roger was unprepared and in the uncertain light of the swinging lantern it was by chance mainly that he warded off the blow. As it was the blow staggered him, sending him off his balance unguarding him for the right swing that lifted him off his feet and flung him dazed and shaken against a pile of ropes.

  The first mate wiped his hands together.

  ‘You’ll do,’ he said. ‘You stopped the first blow, and you’ll know who’s master here.’

  §

  In addition to Renal’s name and clothes, Roger acquired a musket, a knife, a cutlass, some clothes, and a third share in a hammock slung from two beams in a narrow cabin, down whose centre ran a long deal table, and which housed the entire crew with the exception of the four officers. It was ventilated by a narrow shaft, and by the stairway which led from the kitchen to the hold. In the cold weather it was draughty. In the warm weather it was stifling. In all weathers it smelt intolerably. Luckily one was only in it when one slept.

  His day was divided into shifts: eight hours on, four hours off. Of the eight hours a day that one was off duty, two were occupied with meals, cleaning, and inspections. The captain believed that hard work alone could keep a crew out of mischief.

  ‘He’s a swine,’ one of the sailors informed Roger. ‘Every inch of him. He’s a good sailor. That’s all that can be said for him.’

  More than his share of work seemed to come Roger’s way. It was his business both to sweep out the cabin and to fetch the food from the kitchens. The crew ate twice a day: in the morning at ten o’clock; in the evening shortly before sundown. It was for the evening meal that meat was served. Roger would be roused from his sleep to fetch it. The slab of salted meat would be laid upon the deck. To one man would be given the task of dividing it into portions. So that the portions might be accurate one of the sailors stood with his back to the carver. ‘Whose piece is this?’ the carver would ask as each piece was severed. And the sailor would call out whatever name came into his mind.

  It was Roger’s job to fetch and take away the platter of food for every meal.

  ‘Why should I always have to do that job?’ he asked. ‘Why shouldn’t it be taken in turns?’

  ‘It will be,’ they answered, ‘when you have proved yourself a sailor.’

  ‘And how am I to prove myself?’

  ‘By swarming to the end of the mainmast yard-arm.’

  With steady eyes Roger looked up at the mainmast as it towered a hundred feet above him. The day was rough; the canvas sails were stretched; the ship was keeling over in a steady fifteen degrees roll. There were drops of rain in the wind. ‘Very well,’ said Roger.

  The beginning was simple. Though the ladder swayed beneath him and the roughness of the cold rope cut against his feet, he clambered swiftly to the division of the spar. Then he paused. Below he could see the upturned faces of his comrades. In front of him the yard-arm stretched, greasy and cold and wide. He had not realized as he stood on the deck how much the ship was rolling. It seemed to him that by no means within his power would he be able to save himself from sliding headlong down that slippery surface into the sea. He paused, but he did not for one second consider the possibility of returning to the deck. It was simply that he preferred to face his fate before he went to meet it. He looked down the long straight spar, then leaning over and clasping it to his stomach, he began to swarm towards the end.

  If he had not realized as he had stood upon the deck the extent to which the ship was swaying, neither had he realized as he had rested against the juncture of the spar how, as the ship swayed downwards, it would seem as though the whole ship were diving into the sea, so that he would seem to be clinging to the prow of some vast airship tha
t was plunging into the green churned waters that heaved below him; so that he would think, with the yard-arm pressed against his stomach, his arms and hands numb, his feet tingling and his head singing, how much more simple it would be to let go and drop into that chill greenage and be engulfed; so much easier than fighting his way inch by precarious inch to the yard-arm’s end.

  To the watchers below, however, no sign of this irresolution was apparent. They saw the young man creep slowly but steadily down the yard-arm’s length, then slowly and steadily work his way back to the juncture and with a laugh swing down the rope ladder to the deck.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘have I proved myself a sailor now?’

  §

  It was for a rough life that he had proved himself.

  The captain had been described to him as a bully.

  He was.

  Of the last thirty years of his life twenty-eight years had been spent at sea. He had no ties, no family, no friends. The sea was the one thing he loved. He loved it on cold, rainswept days when the ship was jerked by short gusty wavelets; loved it on days of storm when the huge grey wall of the sea rose above the yard-arm and the ship pitched and rolled in the quicksand-bottomed troughs of water; loved it on the calm, blue, windless days, when the sails hung slack upon the masts and the crossing of the deck was like hot iron beneath his feet; loved it on the days of wind and sun, when the ship, heeled slightly over with the masts full-rigged, cut through the sea’s blue carpet with the soft swish of tearing silk.

  For long hours he would lean over the larboard taffrail, gazing out to the grey or blue horizon. Then he would go back to his cabin and pore over charts that he alone on that ship understood completely; on one side of him the instruments he guarded jealously; on the other a glass of grog.

  For his sailors he had no personal regard. They were the slaves of the ship, the servants of the sea. Every morning he read prayers to such of the crew as were not on duty. Wet or fine he would keep them standing or kneeling on the deck while he read in a rum-roughened voice the exhortations to virtue that thundered from that lined, bearded face like Hadean menaces.

  If I hear any of you using the name of Our Blessed Saviour in blasphemy,’ he would conclude, I’ll string him up against that mast and thrash him.’

  The crew knew that he was not threatening idly. He was a strict, a brutally strict, disciplinarian. He appeared to be disappointed when there was no excuse for punishment. A man who was late for duty, or was found smoking after sunset, was ducked three times without discussion from the bowsprit. Once he saw a man throw overboard the red contents of a mug. ‘Hi, there,’ he shouted out. ‘Who’s that wasting wine? String him up, you men.’

  ‘But they were the dregs,’ the sailor pleaded. ‘They were the end of a barrel.’

  ‘Who are you to say that the dregs aren’t good enough? They’re wine. They’re wet. If you prefer water there’s the sea and plenty of it. Over with him, boys.’

  Once he came across a sailor sparring with a drawn knife. The sailor protested that it was in fun, that he was not fighting.

  ‘Fun,’ roared the captain. ‘I’ll have no fun of that sort on my ship. I know that kind of fun. Up against the pole with him.’

  On another occasion he found two men really fighting. He made no inquiries into the rights and wrongs of it. ‘Strip them,’ he shouted. ‘Ropes round their wrists and ankles, weights round their bellies.’

  Savagely he looked the naked and manacled figures up and down.

  ‘You ought to be grateful to me for this,’ he snarled. ‘If I hadn’t interfered one of you would have been killed for certain. As it is you both may live.’ With an incredibly sinister hiss his voice underlined the ‘may’. ‘Over with them, boys.’

  By heels and wrists they were lowered from the bowsprit, the weight drawing down their bellies in a curve.

  They sank the instant they touched water. The men holding the ropes walked away, the one to the larboard, the other to the starboard; they pulled till they found resistance. Then, still pulling, they struggled their way to the stern, dragging their comrades’ bodies along the barnacle-knotted keel. At the stern, they dragged up and flung upon the deck the half-drowned, mangled creatures.

  There was not much unblemished. Their backs and arms and legs were torn and bruised; raw, bleeding, tattered flesh. It would be days before they could wear a shirt. The captain surveyed his handiwork with satisfaction. ‘That will be a lesson to you others,’ he said. ‘Get about your jobs quietly.’

  One evening there was an ugly quarrel: knives were drawn; a man lay motionless on the deck.

  There was silence round him as he lay there; silence as the captain strode down from his bridge towards the prostrate body; lifted an arm; dropped it with a thud upon the deck; straightened himself and looked between the eyes the hard-breathing sailor who stood by with naked and stained knife.

  ‘Dead,’ said the captain. ‘You know what that means. Tie them up.’

  It was the law of the sea that no man questioned. Two sailors bent, lifted the dead body, stood it back to back against its late antagonist, tied ankle to ankle, wrist to wrist, then gave a heave and wrench.

  There was a cry as the two bodies struck the weed-covered, oily water. There was a second or two of splashing as the live man tried to keep himself afloat, threshing with his fettered limbs, treading with his laboured feet. Then the weight of the other body pulled him down. With a gurgling cry he sank. The ripples swayed sluggishly against the scattered seaweed, then sluggishly the banks of seaweed swung back and closed again. The crew, leaning over the side, waited for the drowned bodies to rise; waited in vain.

  That evening the men grumbled over their salt fare. ‘He needn’t have done that,’ they said. ‘It’s the law, we know it. But he needn’t have done that.’

  Contemptuously Roger listened to their grumbling. ‘If you feel like that, why don’t you do something?’ he asked.

  ‘What can we do ?’

  ‘He’s one, you’re many.’

  The bearded seamen looked at him with shocked surprise.

  ‘I shouldn’t let the first mate hear you talk like that,’ they said. ‘You know what the penalty is for mutiny.’

  ‘Talking’s not mutiny.’

  ‘Near enough, my son, on a ship like this.’

  So Roger held his peace as the ship raced its way through mounting seas towards the Straits of Magellan.

  To him it was incredible that the blue lake whose gentle washing of the gold Mediterranean coast he had watched from his village square, could achieve such turbulent effects of terror. It was magnificent; it was terrible. At times the ship would plunge between waves so high that they would feel themselves becalmed, with not a breath of air blowing on them, and the sails hanging slack upon the masts. Then a second later they would be shot skywards so that they would have the sensation of standing on the edge of a turreted battlement. At their back would be the wail of the wind against the canvas, and streaming over the bows a river of crested foam. For days they were battered, driven, drenched, and shaken. For days they shivered in wet clothes in the fetid fo’castle. The cold of the Antarctic was upon them. Even the fiery rum that burnt their throats only momentarily warmed their veins. With numb and frozen fingers they clawed at the hard ropes, swarmed over the slippery masts. Their heads ached with noise and want of sleep. There were set, sullen looks upon the seamen’s faces. ‘We were better off ten days ago,’ they said. ‘At any rate we were warm then.’

  Their meals had ceased to be of pleasure to them. They just wolfed their stew hurriedly before a lurch of the ship should spill a valued morsel. Provisions were running short. They had eaten, during the days of doldrums, the food that they had shipped from the Guinea coast. Their biscuits were maggoty. There were two kinds of maggots. The grey maggots were tasteless and could be ignored. The white maggots had a bitter flavour. When white maggots emerged from the biscuit they knew that all that was nourishing in the biscuit had been consumed.
They made no more bones about the eating of the maggots than would their relatives in Europe over a ripe cheese. In the Sargossa they had finished their last jar of butter. It had melted in the heavy heat. As they approached the last half-pound the yellow cream was filled with hair. At the bottom of the jar they found a dead mouse, completely bald, that had fallen into the jar, sunk, and been suffocated. They put the mouse into a stew; Roger had the luck to draw it. It tasted excellent. ‘As it should do,’ he answered, ‘considering the good stuff it has been nourished in.’ It was indeed the general view that the mice and rats were the best food upon a ship since they had fattened upon the ship’s provisions. They were hard to catch, however. Two or three a day would be a whole ship’s catch. More days than not the crew went hungry.

  In shivering, surly clumps they would huddle together grumbling.

  ‘We’re pretty fair fools, aren’t we?’ they would say. ‘Letting ourselves be led out here, just so that some merchant in Marseilles can buy himself another house. We’re treated like slaves. We are slaves with a captain such as ours.’

  Every day the cold grew more intense; the soaked clothing seemed a frailer protection against the wind; the food grew scantier; the crew grumbled more. There was water to drink now; and they were no longer afraid of the thirst that strong liquor woke in them. But the liquor was running short. The captain on his bridge learned of this with a wry face.

  ‘Warm liquor’s more important than warm clothing. We shouldn’t have relied on our getting plunder in so soon.’

  The outlook was difficult and he knew it. But he was not showing any sign of nerves before the men. In his detached, indifferent fashion he would stand upon his bridge, his hands clasped upon the balcony. Then he would turn back to his cabin, and with a glass of grog beside him study his maps and charts. To the men he betrayed no sign of doubt.

  All the same there were rumours below decks that things were not well. The other officers, it seemed, had been trying to persuade the captain to round the Horn instead of sailing through the Straits. The Straits were dangerous and uncharted; they were narrow, with strong tides and uncertain anchor-ground, with contrary winds and sudden gales blowing from the sn6w-bound mountains. Nor could they be sure that were they forced to land they would be kindly treated by the native Indians, who had starved where they had not slaughtered the garrison with which Spain had attempted to block up the passage to other nations. The rounding of the Cape was a tough business, they maintained, but it was safe. And, once in the South Seas, the rich coasts of Peru would be at their mercy, and there would be the Manila galleons to be plundered on their way to Acapulco.