The Quick Boat Men, page 4
The rain had stopped and the skies were clear. A cold wind whipped the top of the bow wave to a feathery spray. As the Dolly Colgate felt the open sea, she dug her nose into the waves, and the spray blew back into glittering rainbow-coloured fans. She creaked and groaned like a living thing. Around the masthead wheeled the gulls, brilliantly white in the morning sunlight against the dark clouds.
The bosun arrived with a chipping hammer and Edward was sent to hack at the paint on the poop. Within an hour he had enormous blisters on his hands.
‘Keep going,’ the bosun said. ‘They’ll get hard in time.’
The blisters burst and began to bleed, and the day became one of sheer agony. The evening was a dark shadow ahead of him. He had seen nothing of Francis Xavier McWilliams except at mealtimes when he sat opposite Edward, nursing a splitting headache.
On his bunk after supper, Edward took out the only book he had brought with him – a pocket copy of Omar Khayyám Gussie had sent via Sam.
‘This your first thrip, bhoy?’
Looking up, he saw McWilliams’ bright red face and black hair upside-down within an inch or two of his own. Blue eyes rimmed with red glittered at him.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Youse get lotsa trouble first thrip. What’s that you read?’
‘It’s called The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,’ Edward said nervously.
‘The rubber what?’
‘Not rubber anything. Rubáiyát. It’s a poem. Persian.’
‘Yerrah, bhoy, ye have the Persian?’
‘It’s been translated into English. By a chap called Fitzgerald.’
‘Oirishman?’
‘I expect so.’
‘’Tis great poets the Oirish are. What’s that rubber t’ing like?’
Edward started to read it aloud.
‘Awake! For Morning in the bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight…’
McWilliams swung down from his bunk and sat next to Edward. ‘I know a poem,’ he confided, as Edward closed the book.
Shutting his eyes he began to quote:
‘The last rose o’ summer
Left bloomin’ alone,
All her lovely companions
Is faded an’ gone.’
‘Tom Moore,’ Edward said.
‘Is it now?’
‘A great poet.’
‘Oirish.’
‘That’s right. Go on.’
‘I don’t know no more. Say a bit o’ that rubber fella again.’
Edward obliged.
‘The darlin’ craytur. Ye know any more poems, bhoy?’
‘I know Cassius’ speech from Julius Caesar.’
‘Where’s Julius Caesar?’
‘It’s not a place. It’s a man. It’s a play.’
They went through chunks of Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, even The Song of Solomon. Edward had had them all hammered into his head at school.
‘Sure, I like that Song o’ Solomon,’ McWilliams said. ‘The fella who wrote that musta been a sailor. That’s how sailors t’ink when ’tis hot and they’re lyin’ in their bunks in the middle o’ the night.’ He tapped his chest. ‘I know the Hail Mary. Hail Mary, full of grace–’ He stopped as if he weren’t sure of it after all. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ he tried, ‘pray for our sins, now and at the hour of our death.’
‘Santa Maria,’ Edward said. ‘Madre di Dio, prega per noi peccatori, adesso e nell’ ora della nostra morte.’
‘What the devil’s that?’
‘Same thing. In Italian.’
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, ye have the Italian as well?’
‘I learned it from my mother. She was Italian. She’s dead. So’s my father. I’m an orphan.’
McWilliams eyed him. ‘Ye’re terrible big for an orphan, bhoy. Tell me, how do yez say “I love you” in Italian?’
‘Ti amo. Ti adoro. No potrei vivere senza di te. Something like that. Why?’
‘I got a girl in Naples.’ He fished in his locker, and took out a small box, from which he removed a wallet. From the wallet he took a sheet of paper carefully wrapped in tissue paper.
‘’Tis a love letter, so ’tis. You t’ink you can read it for me. I ain’t never read it before.’ The letter was opened as carefully as an ancient script and spread out on the bench.
‘It came just as we was leavin’. What’s it say?’
‘“Carissimo Xavier – ”,’ Edward began to read.
‘Always called me Xavier,’ McWilliams explained. ‘Afther St Francis Xavier. ’Tis a saint he was. Saints is important in Italy, y’see. Next time I’m in Naples oi’ll show her what this saint is made of.’
‘I shouldn’t if I were you,’ Edward said. ‘She writes that her husband’s found out and he’s going to shoot you.’
McWilliams’ jaw dropped, then he grinned. ‘Sure, there’s other fish in the sea. You speak any other languages?’
‘A bit of French and German.’
‘We’ll make a grand partnership,’ McWilliams said. ‘Wherever the ship puts in, you talk to the girls and I take ’em to bed. And anybody who messes wit’ yez, I tear ’em to pieces.’
Four
For eighteen months the Dolly Colgate ploughed around the Middle and Far East before docking in Cape Town. After a wild night on the town, McWilliams ended up carrying Edward back to the docks draped over his shoulder like a sack of corn, only to discover that the three teenage boys in the crew had gone missing.
There had been no sign of a disagreement at any point during the trip, but it had emerged that they thought South Africa was a land of opportunity.
‘You can still make a fortune in the diamond fields,’ one of them had said, and they had obviously decided to try.
‘The bastards have gone up-country,’ the bosun said sourly. ‘We’ll never find ’em. And neither will anybody else.’
The captain raged up and down the bridge and cursed the mate, who took it out on the bosun who lashed into Edward, because he was the most junior member of the crew.
The ship was delayed for three days until new crew were found. They were all old shell-backs soaked in beer and rum and when two of them failed to turn up as the ship was about to leave Port Elizabeth, Edward decided he had had enough.
When they put in to Durban, he and McWilliams walked off, went to a pawn shop where Edward got rid of his watch and McWilliams a gold chain and cross which had belonged to his mother, and took a train to Johannesburg. That was where the diamond fields were. Stepping on to the platform, they did a jig together, cavorting wildly to the amusement of other passengers.
‘’Tis a quare old place,’ McWilliams said, gazing about him at the mine headings. ‘But ’twill make us a fortune, bhoy.’
Unfortunately, Johannesburg was going through a slump and there were riots. The unemployed – whites as well as blacks – were demanding jobs. And the antagonism that had existed between Boer and Briton during the recent war in South Africa only exacerbated the ill feeling. More than once, finding themselves on the edge of an angry crowd, Edward and McWilliams had to bolt down a side street to avoid being flattened by a blow from a police truncheon.
Within a month they were back on the coast, broke, hungry and searching for a ship. Moreover the police were looking for Paddy McWilliams over a little business of a fight in a backstreet shebeen.
‘Sure, thim cops would disbelieve the blessed saints thimselves,’ he panted as they hurried for the docks. As they ran, they got caught up with a group of cadets from a Portuguese training ship, Vasco da Gama, who had been enjoying a night ashore. When they reached the ship, they slipped on board with them. The cadets enjoyed the joke and looked after them, but, when the ship reached Cape Town, Edward and Paddy were tossed ashore by the indignant officers. The Cape Town police took a lenient view, and suggested it would be a good idea to find another berth – within twenty-four hours.
The only ship available was a four-masted barque, the Culloden, which appeared to be going north towards England. Though they didn’t fancy spending their time at sea climbing rigging, there wasn’t much choice.
By this time, the blisters on Edward’s hands had toughened into callouses and the foul language that had shocked him at first came as easily to him as it did to everyone else.
But once more, Edward and Paddy found they had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. The quarters in the Culloden were more cramped than in the Dolly Colgate, and the food was filthy. The crew were a mixed bag. There was a black West Indian, a Frenchman, a German mate, and a vociferous Russian cook called Pushkov who had fled Russia in 1905. He claimed to be from the mutinous Russian cruiser, Potemkin, whose crew had murdered their officers, and become the centre of an attempt at revolution in Odessa.
Pushkov couldn’t cook to save his life, but he was intelligent and, speaking a little English, managed to communicate with Edward, who was the only man on board he would acknowledge as his intellectual equal. In a mixture of English, French, German and Russian, they exchanged reminiscences of what life had been like before they had gone to sea. They were both homesick and Pushkov often melted into tears.
‘You different,’ he said. ‘Anglichanin very stiff. No tears. Zhelavu schastiya. Very upper lip.’
Climbing the rigging made Edward’s stomach churn and he decided it would be wise to return to steam as soon as possible. The first time up the mast left him with a thumping heart. The lower part of the climb wasn’t difficult but at the top was a roughly semi-circular platform of gratings. To get on, he had to climb outwards on the rope ratlines with his back almost parallel with the deck. As he paused, Edward was hailed by a shout from the mate on the deck below.
‘Go on. If you fall, you’ll only fall in the water. It’s only fifty feet. Mebbe you could turn it into a dive.’
Gradually he grew used to the climb and, though he always hated it, he learned to do it with some efficiency. But in bad weather the forecastle was a heaving, groaning hell-hole, a steaming dive where the condensation dripped off the bulkheads and the men lay watching the oilskins and dirty clothing swinging backwards and forwards in monotonous arcs to the pitch of the ship. In cold weather the Culloden was an ice box so that their clothes were never dry and Edward shivered beneath his two inadequate blankets and swore he’d never go to sea again.
But, almost against their will, he and McWilliams learned the functions of the multifarious ropes, the difference between a brace, a halliard and a downhaul, between a royal and topsail, between a staysail and a spanker, a crossjack and a topgallant. They experienced gales that put the fear of God into Edward as the Cape Horn waves came over the deck big as houses, grey, forbidding and ugly. The hawse-pipes were blocked with wood stoppers, lifelines were up and wire safety nets rigged to prevent anyone being washed overboard, while the cargo in the hold was held in place with railway sleepers lashed with chains and secured with wedges driven home with sledge hammers. More timbers were laid across the hatch covers and lashed to ring bolts as the ship drove headlong before the wind, rolling her lee rail to scoop up avalanches of green water.
Unfortunately the ship wasn’t going to England as they’d thought, but to Australia initially and, following the winds, they were never far north of 60 degrees south, travelling via Geelong and east – about Cape Horn across the southern oceans. Nowhere en route did they encounter glamorous places or beautiful girls, and in the end they found themselves back in Cape Town where they had started.
The desire to go home was becoming an obsession. Both men walked off the Culloden and signed on a tramp steamer, Magdalen Gladbrook, which was due to head north for Swansea within twenty-four hours. Like all tramps, she was finding her cargoes wherever she could, and dropping them where she had to. They unloaded tobacco in Freetown and, picking up coconut fibre, headed for Dakar where they loaded castor beans. At Dakar, they received orders to proceed to Alexandria to pick up a cargo of Egyptian cotton for Rio de Janeiro.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Edward. But at least he was glad of the calm of the Mediterranean as they chugged past the Balearics, the southern tip of Sardinia, Sicily, Malta and Crete.
In Alexandria, they lay alongside a small barquentine, the George V. Cotterill, due for England as soon as she had discharged her cargo. Stores and gear were being replenished in Egypt because they were cheaper there and her owners were mean. The master, a man called Budd, received Edward and Paddy with joy because two of his men had just gone into hospital after an accident. Both men clearly knew their way round a sailing ship. Budd asked no questions and welcomed them aboard.
‘The Medway, boys,’ he said. ‘You’ll be home with your loved ones before you know where you are.’
Budd was an old man who had been passed over for promotion to a bigger ship, and had a habit of going to his cabin during increasingly frequent periods of depression to lose himself in a bottle of whisky.
The first mate was a bully who had the sourer members of the crew threatening to push him overboard one dark night when no one was looking. But none of them ever tried, because he was a giant of a man and they were all terrified of him. His weakness was the opposite sex and he vanished ashore every night looking for the drinking dens where the women were as wild as the men.
The weather was hot for late autumn, and there was no sign of seasonal rain. With every day that passed the heat increased until the very air seemed to have burned away. There were rumours of disease in the poorer quarters of the city.
Several nights after they had signed on, McWilliams dragged Edward with several more of the crew in tow along to a place where he claimed girls did the most extraordinary things for the amusement of sailors. As they approached the dive, down a dark and narrow street, an Egyptian staggered against them. He was well-dressed and was carrying an armful of books. As he stumbled past, he dropped his books, then his knees slowly gave way, and he collapsed full length on the pavement, his face in his own vomit.
‘Ah, the curse of dhrink,’ McWilliams said sympathetically.
They were about to go to his assistance when a man pushed them away.
‘You British?’ he said. ‘Then keep away. It’s cholera.’
Paddy and Edward decided to give the show a miss, and went back to the ship, where there were fierce arguments on deck and in the forecastle.
‘Plague’s brought by rats,’ someone said.
‘It ain’t plague,’ someone else retorted. ‘I saw that in China. That feller was just sick. Somethin’ he ate.’
A British doctor from the Embassy appeared to examine them. They were lined up on deck and checked one by one, but there was nothing he could find wrong, though he made their hair stand on end with his stories about the effects of cholera.
‘Any sign of diarrhoea?’ he asked Edward.
‘No.’
‘Thank God for that. That’s how it starts. Perspiration, a feeling of faintness, unsteady limbs, a fluttering in the stomach, then a prodigious emptying of the bowels followed by abdominal cramps, a desperate thirst, vomiting, retching and the massive evacuation of a colourless liquid from the rectum.’ He turned to Budd. ‘Miraculously, you have no signs of it aboard your ship, Captain. It’s playing the very devil in the shanty areas.’
Budd’s face fell and he headed for his cabin and the whisky bottle.
‘He looks as if the cook’s spat in the stew and t’rown the ladle at the ship’s cat,’ McWilliams said.
They still had most of a mixed cargo to unload but, because of the epidemic, labour was hard to find. The dockworkers had disappeared to their own quarter of the city. Because he could speak a little French, it was Edward who was sent by Captain Budd to the agent’s office to chivvy him into finding help.
It was while he was away from the ship that McWilliams vanished. There were rumours that he’d been waylaid and left for dead, but Edward knew his disappearance sprang from something far less dramatic. Unlettered and superstitious, he could face danger and bad weather, anything the mate could throw at him, but he couldn’t face the prospect of an epidemic.
Five
The George V. Cotterill remained alongside despite the noisy demands from the forecastle that she should leave. Business in the city was still being carried on, newsboys cried the names of papers and urchins scrambled for discarded cigarette ends. But the cafés were empty and cabs stood idle in ranks. A few shops had shut and people hurried past, not even stopping to talk.
With the increasing number of deaths, rumours spread, many of them wildly exaggerated. Gradually the city became isolated. The streets no longer grated under the wheels of waggons bringing in food. Bonfires were lit in the streets in the belief that the smoke would ward off the pestilence. But still the deaths continued and even the quacks, hawking their medicines in the streets, fell dead and were buried with the money still in their pockets because no one would touch it.
The heat was intense, but there was a storm building up in the west. Edward could sense it. Edward prayed the ship would leave because he was terrified. While he had been in the agent’s office one of the clerks had collapsed. He had seen him for two or three days, looking as if he were disappearing pound by pound, his eyes slowly receding into his head. As the clerk fell off his stool, he almost knocked Edward over. Turning on his heel, Edward had fled.
Now there were reports of other outbreaks in the eastern end of the Mediterranean – in Istanbul, Smyrna, Beirut and Alexandria, all destinations for the George V. Cotterill. In the end a deputation was sent to Captain Budd demanding the crew should be free to leave. Budd’s eyebrows vibrated and his face grew red.
‘Are you lot telling me what to do?’ he roared.
‘Yes.’
‘A ship has to give notice of her arrival and departure,’ Budd yelled. ‘Nationality, tonnage, cargo, where she’s been, where she’s going, when she leaves and how long she plans to stay. I’m the master of this ship and I don’t ask the piss-arsed members of the crew what I should do.’
