‘Just the same, we want away.’ Jim twisted his cap in his hands. ‘You gave your word to our father.’
‘Indeed I did, and none can say that Tom Dudley doesn’t keep his word, but I would be disappointed to lose you. I’ll be taking on an extra pair of hands, a mate, before we sail. The leaks will be plugged and the work less hard. Will you not sail with me? Australia could be the making of you.’
‘We know our mind on this, Captain Dudley. It is not to be altered.’
Tom hesitated a moment longer, then gave a resigned shake of his head. ‘So be it, then. I’ll pay your wages and your fare back to Tollesbury, unless you’re looking to join another ship here?’
‘We plan to.’
‘Then I’ll speak for you with any captain you find.’ He held out his hand. ‘Good luck. Come and find us in Sydney, if your voyages should ever take you that far.’
Tom had the Mignonette hauled out at Fay’s Yard in Northam. He knew it by reputation as the best, and best-value, yard in the area. He paced up and down alongside the yacht as it lay on its side, its keel exposed, while the shipwright peered at the timbers and prodded them with the blade of his knife. ‘The garboard strakes are rotten. They’ll have to be replaced.’
Tom nodded, already knowing that much. ‘Use what you can of the existing timbers when you’re replacing them,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to lose the profit on the voyage before I’ve even set sail.’
The man grunted, still probing the timbers with his knife. ‘The keel-wood’s soft too.’
‘If I replace that, I’ll be sailing her to the colonies for nothing. Can you make it sound without replacing the keel?’
The shipwright glanced at him. ‘I can, but it’ll not last many more winters.’
Tom smiled. ‘It’ll not need to. They tell me there’s no such thing as winter where this yacht’s bound.’
‘Just the same, tell the owner the keelwood needs watching. If it rots much more the ship’ll open up like a dock whore’s legs. Anything else?’ ‘Yes, shorten the bowsprit by a couple of yards, and take the mizzen mast out of her as well. I want her cutter-rigged. She’s over-canvased, good sailing in light winds, but top heavy in a big blow.’
A mizzen sail slightly improved a yacht’s handling on the wind and the yawl rig also increased the overall spread of canvas, or enabled a captain to carry a smaller, more easily handled mainsail, but with a crew of four the weight of even a saturated mainsail would present no difficulties and the Mignonette already carried more sail than would be safe in the conditions they would face in the Atlantic and Southern oceans.
‘The mizzen mast and the bowsprit are easy enough done, at any rate,’ the shipwright said.
‘And you’ll allow me the value of the mast against the new planking?’
He laughed. ‘I will, such as it is. Twenty-year-old sticks have no great value, except as firewood. Is that everything?’
‘No, put a coat of copper paint on her hull. It’ll keep the barnacles from fouling her. I need every scrap of speed she can give me.’ He paused. ‘And you could spread word that I’m looking for a crew — mate, able seaman and a boy. We’re bound for New South Wales. I’ll pay well for the right men and the provisions will be ample and good.’
‘No salt-horse, then?’
He shuddered at the thought. ‘None of that. Fresh pork while it lasts and canned beef after that.’
Chapter 3
Tom returned home while the repairs to the Mignonette were carried out but he was back in Southampton on Wednesday 14 May to begin the search for a new crew. It was a still morning and a pall of smoke hung over the city, drifting over the rooftops to merge with the river mist.
The streets were jammed with traffic. Carts, carriages and hansom cabs rattled past, horseshoes striking sparks from the cobbles, and the warm smell of dung mingled with the acrid stink of soot and smoke in the air.
Lower on the hillside, the streets leading down to the quays were full of a jostling tide of people, most of them pinched and poor-looking. The gutters of the meaner streets ran with filth, and the dark alleys and refuse-strewn courts stank of stale urine. There were piles of human excrement, crawling with flies.
Like every port, the warren of cobbled streets, lanes and alleys surrounding the wharves and warehouses was crowded with taverns and grog shops. Some had purpose-built pits in which dog-, cock- and rat-fights were staged. There were scores of brothels and the music-and dance-halls were also thinly disguised knocking-shops. Many of the prostitutes were little more than children.
The scabrous business of the port was conducted side by side with more respectable trades — shipping agents, ship’s chandlers, roperies and sail lofts, provision merchants, marine stores, pawn shops and curiosity shops full of shells, coral, native artefacts and seamen’s carvings, scrimshaws and ships in bottles.
As in every port, there was a tattoo parlour, where drunken young seamen were brought for one of their painful rites of initiation. As well as nautical motifs, like mermaids or anchors, many had a large crucifix tattooed on their chest, in the hope of ensuring a Christian burial if they were wrecked or drowned and washed up on a heathen shore.
The tattoo parlour also pierced ears, and even before drink and whores, a single gold earring would be a young seaman’s first purchase after being paid off from his maiden voyage. Unlike coin, the gold he wore in his ear could not readily be spent or stolen, but it was the currency that might save him from starvation or secure him a passage home if cast up or abandoned on some distant coast.
The boarding-houses, slums and tenements that accommodated the seamen between ships were also home to stevedores, labourers, lumpers and hauliers, watermen, warehousemen, ballast men and colliers, balladeers and broadside-sellers, the mudlarks who scoured the harbour and riverbeds for valuables at low tide, and the beggars, thieves and whores who preyed on all of them.
A number of seamen’s charities, including Sailors Homes, the British & Foreign Sailors Society, the Royal National Institute for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck and the Destitute Sailors Asylum, had been set up in the first half of the century. The more prudent seamen found lodging with them, or in the decent boarding-houses run by former sailors and offering a clean, comfortable bed and a decent meal.
Others were rat-infested slums and rookeries, their floors crowded with filthy straw mattresses open to people of both sexes and all ages. Young children would sleep alongside drunken men and whores, destitutes on parish relief, the sick, the crippled, the old and the dying. The worst were run by the ‘land sharks’ — crimps and boarding-house masters — who made their living by selling drunk, drugged or unconscious seamen to captains of outward-bound ships.
Fishermen, merchant seamen or anyone else foolish or unfortunate enough to be loitering near the dockside had always been ripe for the press-gangs dragooning men into service with the Royal Navy. If there were insufficient men to be found there, they would move inland. If they still could not find enough victims, it was not unusual for gaols like Newgate and the Fleet to be emptied of able-bodied prisoners.
The practice of press-ganging men for the Navy had been in existence for centuries, but that of crimps snaring crews for merchant ships was a largely nineteenth-century evil. Crimps, or more usually their runners, would meet inbound ships, often boarding them with grappling irons and offering liquor and the best whores in town as inducements to seamen to jump ship with them at once. The men were often only too willing to make shore at the first opportunity and most captains turned a blind eye, either bribed to win their acquiescence or merely relieved to be free of the burden of paying the crew during the largely idle time in port before the next voyage.