‘They do say, Tommy,’ piped up Peter gaily, ‘as how you’ll be made to run the gantlope for the affair of them four chickens.’
‘Hush hush,’ said Grandfather Fulman. ‘Leave it be, Peter.’
‘Well, ’tis only a rumour I dare say,’ Peter added, a little chastened. But after a short while he chattered on.
‘Old Butterbum will put it to the gentlemen, you see, that by stealing them, you was robbing your shipmates and so must run it. Well that’s a fine joke, for when did we taste chicken last?’
‘Now shut your silly mouth,’ said Fulman harshly.
Surprisingly, Thomas spoke. It was the first time he had uttered a word to his messmates for days. He did not look up, however, and his voice was thin with misery.
‘What is a gantlope, Peter?’ he said. ‘And why must I run it?’
Everyone stared at him. Except for Peter, who rattled on in delight.
‘Oh it is terrible, a terrible thing,’ he said, the words tumbling over each other in his excitement. ‘You will be carried in a barrel like a king, and all your shipmates will line the decks, all the people in two great rows. Each man shall have a rope’s end, including me an’all I do suppose, and we must give you great blows on the head as you go along – carried, you will be, in a barrel.’
He paused for breath. No one tried to stop him. No one tried to speak or move.
‘We must all beat you hard, see, Tom, or else we shall get beat in turn. And the master-at-arms shall walk ahead of you backwards, with his sword at your throat, to make sure you are not drawn through the lines too fast. Oh aye, I forgot – and you shall receive a half-dozen with the cat before you get in your barrel.
‘And…’ His voice was tailing off. He seemed seized with sudden awareness of what the words all meant. ‘And afterwards too… Another half a dozen… Oh.’
His eyes were wide and horrified. His mouth hung open.
He was spilling his wine.
Thomas Fox was moaning quietly, the Irishman’s arm around his shoulder.
Nineteen
As the Welfare slowly approached the Line, as she lost all last vestiges of steady, useful wind and entered the band of hot, light, fluky airs known as the doldrums, Broad lost all traces of the strange contentment he had intermittently felt at the mere fact of being a seaman at sea.
Whereas before the ship had plunged and sung, filling him with wild joy despite himself by her living, vibrant beauty, she was now a floundering, sluggish thing. The fitful breezes left her alone for hours on end, then took her briefly and cruelly, often aback. The thrum of taut cordage and bellying sails had been replaced by the slap of idle ropes against swinging spars, the flapping of heavy, leaden canvas that hung like dense sheets from the creaking yards. She was becalmed, bewildered, the wild fronds of green weed floating out along her sides to prove how little headway she was making. Usually it was none. And these doldrums went on and on. She lopped interminably in the brazen sea, glowing with heat, the bright, harsh sun bubbling the pitch on her deck planks, bleaching even the tarred ropes that swung uneasily aloft.
Below decks it was bad enough. As they had driven down into warmer latitudes the heat in the men’s living quarters had risen day by day. At night, at first, it had grown cooler, with damp, salt air blowing softly through the open ports and hatches. But for days the night air had been as hot as that which stirred by day. On the upper deck it was stifling, almost unbreathable. But below it was far worse. Every man lived in a bath of sweat and grime, every article of clothing was stinking and stiff with salt. The drinking water was undrinkable, had been for ages; the beer was condemned; the wine and grog aggravated thirst, not assuaged it.
Then there were the bugs. The bugs, the lice, the cockroaches. The biting, stinging, stinking insects. Not a piece of bedding that did not have its full complement of ‘passengers’. Not a shirt or pair of trousers. The men spent hours every day searching seams, bursting blood-filled bodies, heaving useful items over the side. But the invaders marched on, invincible. The stench of cockroaches, the buzz and tick as they flew about in the dark and bumped into things, was awful. Even on deck, where many men now slept, they nibbled at dirty ears and eyebrows, chewed at calloused skin.
From the bilges, the underlying smell of sewage that Broad had noticed right from the first, had taken on a new power. It overlay everything, and with a vengeance. The foetid shingle, mud and stones that kept the Welfare upright and made her sail so stiff, was warm and rotting. All the filth and slime washed from the decks above over the years was cooking gently, exhaling a charnel-house odour that could all but be felt. The biscuit, stored in porous bags in the bread-room deep in the hold, took on the smell. The weevils and maggots thrived on it; but the most hardened seaman found his staple revolting now it reeked so strong of excrement.
At the instigation of Mr Adamson, the captain allowed – or rather ordered – that the living areas should be scrubbed thoroughly every day with lashings of water, then sprinkled with vinegar. This had the effect of keeping the men busy all the time, so was allowed to be a good thing. It also, however, kept them below decks, kept the living spaces constantly damp and steamy, and kept the bilges in a never-ending turmoil as the pumps removed the cleansing-water that had flowed into them. Daily the smells were revolved, churned, renewed. As to the vinegar – well, maybe it fought the vapours that were said to spread diseases; but the ‘wildlife’, against all predictions, seemed to like it as well as the dirt it was meant to replace.
The rotting of the food, already well advanced, increased rapidly.
Cheese and butter there were in the stores, as well as opened casks of salted pork and beef. The former items went off very rapidly, with a smell so greasy and pervasive from the rancid butter that much of it went over the side, to the purser’s eternal misery. The cheese became uneatable unless soaked in wine for days. Broad had never believed the tales of seamen making buttons and model ships from lumps of cheese; but in the doldrums he found it true. As for the pork and beef – well, some of it had already achieved several years of age. But even so, one or two barrels went rotten. He marvelled at the power of a maggot’s jaws.
In the sick-bay there were many men. Ulcers were the most common complaint, along with boils and general sores. Jesse Broad spent two days in there after a languidly swinging block had rendered him unconscious for twelve hours and affected his sight. The surgeon, as gay as ever, had treated him like an old friend, plied him with special stocks of brandy instead of the rotgut he doled out to other men. It was apparently his only real answer to the diseases he was faced with. His small stocks of garlic and other beneficial herbs had gone long before, he was no great believer in the effectiveness of bleeding (having seen it, he said, kill more than it had cured) and he had a fixed hatred of quackery. Broad got out as soon as he could see half-straight. He would rather risk death from double-vision and walking overboard than stay among the dirty, groaning men.
Below decks it was bad enough, in the sick-bay it was dreadful. But aloft it was worse. Captain Swift, and his officers, and his young gentlemen, and his warrants, saw to that.