The other members of the mess were silent. Doyle’s arm was round Fox’s shoulders, while Grandfather Fulman had a look of bitter gloom. The mood of the gathered seamen changed rapidly from exhilaration to commiseration. The shepherd boy’s gesture had been a bold one, but where would it lead? To a savage beating, legal and above board. Many allowed that it was mightily unfair. Some grudgingly admitted that the midshipman was sharp. But no one doubted that the affair would end disastrously.
Although it was the men’s spare time, the boatswain’s mates moved in quickly to break up this unseemly meeting, held solely to discuss the demerits of a young gentleman.
Broad saw them coming and warned the others, who melted away to the wider open spaces of the deck. They sat in silence for a while as the mates lounged self-consciously about, their rope’s ends swinging lazily.
Jesse Broad did not like to think how the silent, hopeless figure of his messmate would fare against the confident, energetic young mid. True, Thomas was older, probably a year or two, and true he was bigger, quite a bit bigger. But these advantages were nothing. He was beaten before he began, physically and in his heart. He would lie down and take anything that was dealt out. The fearful thing was, to Jesse’s mind, that the boy Bentley would have no mercy.
He would deal it out until Fox could take no more, until his humiliation was assuaged. His humiliation was as big as his pride and spirit: enormous.
When the mates were out of earshot, Peter hissed excitedly: ‘My, Tommy, this is a fine thing. We will make mincemeat of him. How I wish that I—’
Grandfather Fulman growled ‘Hold your tongue, Peter!’ with such venom that Peter was crushed.
Before the milling could take place, however, the unpredictable weather of the equatorial zones stepped in with a vengeance. Throughout the late morning and early afternoon the sky had been changing almost imperceptibly. But when the squall arrived it took everyone by surprise.
Bentley, below in the midshipmen’s berth, was still shaking with a mixture of anger and excitement when the call for all hands came. He had refused to be drawn on the subject by Simon Allen, who had been writing in his personal log and missed the whole affair, but in his head he was already planning just how and what he would do to the insolent shepherd boy. He seethed with resentment, not least at what the captain might say about his handling of the matter. Uncle Daniel had, after all, been pretty set on his little dancing band.
Almost as soon as ‘All hands’ was piped and called, he felt the Welfare give a strange shiver. Every timber began to tremble. The quiet creaking that never ceased, even when she was in a flat calm, turned immediately into a loud grumble. The two boys, halfway to the after hatchway, looked at each other in surprise. Then, stranger still, the light pouring in from above dimmed as rapidly as if someone had turned a lamp down. There was a roar, a very violent shaking, then the ship heeled suddenly over, farther and farther. Bentley and Allen both lost their footing. They went skeetering across the deck, from high to low. Stools, partitions, food pannikins and men went with them. William thought for one amazed moment that he would be thrown headlong through an open port, but at the last moment he seized a gun tackle. There was a great shouting and roaring from the men who had tumbled down with them.
As he clawed his way up the canted deck towards the hatch, the noise from above became enormous. The air was filled with darkness, shouts, the rushing of wind. Amid it all he could hear noises like gunfire, which he guessed must be sails carrying away.
On deck the chaos was complete. Broad and all the topmen had been sent aloft at the first sign. The wind rushing towards them had at first only darkened the glassy surface of the sea, pushing a small steep ledge of white water before it. Iron-red cloud had appeared out of the dull glaring sky, a hard edge of spite. The cloud had climbed with amazing speed, bringing darkness and violence.
Mr Robinson had appeared by the wheel as if by magic, sensing from within his cabin and his afternoon nap that something dire was about to happen. The helm was put hard down, hands were sent scurrying for brails, clew garnets, tacks and sheets in an instant. But the Welfare, a hive of activity, her rigging suddenly filled with panting men, sat sedate and unmoving in a stillness as yet untouched by the wall of howling air that was bearing down on her.
When the squall had reached her, Broad was on the main topgallant yard, moving out along the footropes to the yardarm. The sail beneath him was already partly clewed up, but when the wind caught its sagging belly it carried away almost instantaneously. The greyish canvas flattened itself out in front of the yard like a rigid table, there was a thunderous series of reports as it whipped in its agony, then it blew clean out of its boltropes. Broad, pressed against the yard as if by a great thrusting hand, glimpsed the tattered remains of it whip away forward.
Around and below him other men fought their own desperate battles. But the Welfare had been taken all-standing, and many of her people were half drunk. She lay farther and farther over under the press of wind. Some sails were saved but more blew out to leeward. When she slowly righted herself and began to answer her helm, lightened by the canvas brailed or torn to pieces, she had lost many of the trappings of the hot still weather she had suffered under. The captain’s awning that shaded part of the quarterdeck was gone, the lines of washing rigged by the foremast had flown merrily off, flapping their arms and legs, and even the galley chimney had come adrift and taken the plunge overside. Two men, too, one from the mizzenmast and one from the main. Jesse had watched one of them hurled from a bucking yard. His mouth had been open, but no cry could be heard. He had not known him by name.
Within an hour, the sky was black as pitch, relieved only by flickering jags of lightning. The violent wind drove torrents of rain before it, the strange motion of the ship – she was roaring through a practically flat sea at a great rate under bare poles – becoming less strange as the squall made waves, then combers, and finally a high, pounding sea. Broad and the other seamen, driven by a ferocious boatswain and his mates, got up heavy weather gear, bent new canvas ready to set, overhauled and renewed damaged running rigging, set up the stretched and sagging stays.
In the early evening, the squall left them. William Bentley, muffled in a cloak and sick as a dog once more, surveyed the chaos from the quarterdeck, which was pitching on the short, jumbled sea. But his uncle put all the midshipmen under the charge of the master then, and for hours they worked away with teams of seamen clearing, running up new gear, organising the chain and hand pumps to clear the water taken through ports, hatchways and strained seams.
By midnight they were in a great and steady wind, roaring them southwestward at a rate of knots under topsails and forecourse. Deck sports and milling were forgotten.
The change in the weather brought relief to the bored, sickened crew. The change from stifling heat below decks to bracing draughts, the change from dry, cracking skin to damp freshness, was more than welcome. The bugs, as if by a miracle, lost their taste for human flesh. The cockroaches, while vile as ever in themselves, were less in evidence, presumably preferring dark and warmth in nooks and crannies to the open decks. There was sickness, but on nothing like the earlier scale; most men could handle anything now.
And there was work. Good, hard, regular work which the seamen knew and responded to. The loss of gear may have been an unlooked-for disaster to Mr Robinson, but the men did not mind a jot. Every day they had little to think about but preparing and repairing. New sails were made, ropes were spliced, wormed and parcelled, sprung spars were fished or replaced. It was a hard, satisfying time that made the food taste bearable, and the grog like absolute heaven.