Morgan's Run Read online

  Three days later the calms and storms vanished and the southeast trades began to blow. This despite the fact that the ships had not yet crossed the Equator. Spirits picked up immediately, though the fleet was hard-pressed to maintain its course in terms of real miles, which were less than 100 a day. Alexander ploughed into a huge head swell, her rigging creaking, parallel as usual with Scarborough the concert ship, Sirius and Supply not far behind, Friendship out in front, the swell over her bows in masses of spray she shook off as a dog does water.

  When the silver buttons on Johnstone’s and Shairp’s scarlet coats began to blacken and the smell was pervading the quarterdeck almost as badly as below deck, the two lieutenants and Surgeon Balmain went as a deputation to see the captain, who received them and dismissed their complaints as nonsense. What concerned him was that the convicts were stealing his bread and ought to be flogged within an inch of their lives.

  “You ought,” said Johnstone tartly, “to thank your stars that they are not stealing your rum!”

  The dirty teeth showed in a smile of pure pleasure. “Other ships may have trouble with their rum, sirs, but my ship does not. Now go away and leave me alone. I have given the starboard bilge pump to Chips to fix, it is not working properly. That, no doubt, accounts for the state of the bilges.”

  “How,” said Balmain through his teeth, “can a carpenter fix an object whose capacity to work depends upon metal and leather?”

  “Ye had better pray he can. Now go away.”

  Balmain had had enough. He flagged Sirius and received permission to take a boat to Charlotte and the Surgeon-General, John White. With Lieutenant Shairp in command, the longboat headed away into the swell; Charlotte, a heavy sailer, was lagging far behind. The trip back to Alexander was frightful, even for Shairp, who never turned a hair in the worst seas. So when Surgeon White clambered up Alexander’s ladder he was not in a good mood.

  “You Bristol men, ye’re wanted,” said Stephen Donovan. “In steerage with Mr. White and Mr. Balmain.”

  Strictly speaking, thought Richard, who had learned a lot about pumps during the time he had spent with the absconding Mr. Thomas Latimer, Alexander’s pumps should have been down a deck to reduce the height of the column of bilge water they had to lift, but she was a slaver and her owners did not like low holes in the hull; the truth was that no one had ever worried much about the bilges between dry-dockings for careening.

  There were two cisterns in the marines’ steerage compartment, one larboard and one starboard, each equipped with an ordinary suction pump owning an up-and-down handle. A pipe led from each cistern and emptied through a valve into the sea. The starboard pump had been dismantled; the larboard one refused to budge.

  “Down we go,” said Surgeon White, face ashen. “How does a man exist in this place? Your men, Lieutenant Johnstone, are to be commended for their forbearance.”

  Richard and Will Connelly took up the hatch and reeled. The hold below was in utter darkness, but the sound of liquid slopping around the water tuns was audible to the rest, hanging back.

  “I need some lamps,” said White, tying a handkerchief over his face. “One of us is going to have to go down there.”

  “Sir,” said Richard courteously, “I would not put a flame in there. The air itself would burn.”

  “But I must see!”

  “There is no need, sir, truly. We can all hear what is going on. The bilges have overflowed into the hold. That means they are completely fouled. Neither pump is working and may never have worked—the last time we were in here we cleared the bilges by bucket. We have had this problem since Gallion’s Reach.”

  “What is your name?” asked White through his mask.

  “Richard Morgan, sir, late of Bristol.” He grinned. “We men of Bristol are used to fugs, so they always put us on bilge duty. Though cleaning them by bucket will not remedy anything. They have to be pumped, and pumped every day. But not with suction pumps like these. They take a week to evacuate a ton of water, even when they are working properly.”

  “Is the carpenter capable of fixing them, Mr. Johnstone?”

  Johnstone shrugged. “Ask Morgan, sir. He seems to know. I confess I know nothing about pumps.”

  “Is the carpenter capable of fixing them, Morgan?”

  “Nay, sir. There are so many solids in the bilge that pipes and cylinders of this size will block at every lift. What this ship needs are chain pumps.”

  “What does a chain pump do that these cannot?” White asked.

  “Cope with what is down there, sir. It is a simple wooden box of much larger internal size than these cylinders. The lifting is done by means of a flat brass chain strung over wooden sprockets at the top and a wooden drum at the bottom. Wooden shelves are linked to the chain so that on the way down they flop flat, then unfold on the way up and exert suction. A good chips can build everything except the chain—it is so simple a device that two men turning its sprocketed drum can lift a ton of water in a minute.”

  “Then Alexander must be fitted with chain pumps. Is there any of the chain aboard?”

  “I doubt that, sir, but Sirius has just undergone a refitting, so she is bound to have chain pumps. I imagine she will have chain to spare. If she does not, some of the other ships might.”

  White turned to Balmain, Johnstone and Shairp. “Very well, I am off to Sirius to report this to the Governor. In the meantime the hold and bilges will have to be baled out. Every marine and convict who is not sick will take his turn, I will not have these Bristol men forced to do it all,” he said to Johnstone. He turned then to glare at Balmain. “Why, Mr. Balmain, did ye not report the situation a great deal earlier, if it has been going on for over seven months? The captain of this vessel is a slug, he could not move out of his own way if the mizzen fell on his roundhouse. As surgeon, it is your clear duty to preserve the health of every man on board, including convicts. Ye have not done that, and so I will tell the Governor, rest assured.”

  William Balmain stood flying a scarlet flag in each cheek, his handsome countenance rigid with shock and anger. A Scotchman, he was six years younger than the Irishman White and they had not taken to each other upon meeting. To be dressed down in front of two marines and four convicts was disgraceful—that was the kind of thing Major Ross did to feckless subordinates. Now was not the time to have it out with White, but Balmain promised himself that after the fleet reached Botany Bay he would have satisfaction. His large eyes passed from one convict face to another in search of mirth or derision, but found none. He knew this lot for the oddest of reasons: they were never sick.

  At which moment Major Robert Ross arrived at the bottom of the steps, curiosity stirred because Shairp had been gallivanting all over the ocean again. One sniff was sufficient to acquaint him with the problem; Balmain withdrew stiffly to his cabin to sulk and plot revenge while White explained what was going on.

  “Ah yes,” said Ross, staring at Richard intently. “Ye’re the clean head man, I remember ye well. So ye’re an expert on pumps and the like, are ye, Morgan?”

  “I know enough to be sure Alexander is in sore need of chain pumps, sir.”

  “I agree. Mr. White, I will convey ye to Sirius and then on to Charlotte. Mr. Johnstone and Mr. Shairp, get everybody onto baling out the bilges. And cut two holes in the hull lower than the ports so the men can tip the stuff straight into the sea.”

  Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, arriving with Major Ross and Surgeon-General White the next day, took one look at the larboard pump Richard had removed and dismantled, and gave vent to a noise of derisive disgust. “That thing could not suck semen out of a satyr’s prick! This ship is to be fitted out with chain pumps. Where is the carpenter?”

  English meticulousness combined with Celtic enthusiasm worked wonders. Royal Navy and therefore senior in rank to a marine lieutenant, King remained on board long enough to be sure that Chips understood exactly what he was to do—and was capable of doing it—then left to report to the Commodore that in f
uture Alexander ought to be a far healthier ship.

  But the poison was in her timbers, so Alexander never was a truly healthy ship. The gaseous effluvia which had lain everywhere below gradually dissipated, however. Living inside her became more bearable. And was Esmeralda Sinclair pleased that his bilge problem had been solved at no cost to Walton & Co.? Definitely not. Who the hell, he demanded from his poop perch (Trimmings had inspected and reported), had cut two fucken holes in his ship?

  The fleet crossed the Equator during the night between the 15th and 16th of July. On the following day the ships ran into their first roaring gale since leaving Portsmouth; the hatches were battened down and the convicts plunged into utter darkness. To those like Richard who spent all their time on deck it was a nightmare alleviated only by the fact that the worst of the stench had gone. The sea was running off the larboard bow, so Alexander was pitching more than rolling, an extraordinary sensation alternating between crushing pressure and weightlessness as she reared into the air and slammed with a noise like a huge explosion back into the sea. At right angles to the motion, they rolled from the bulkhead to the partition. Seasickness, deemed a thing of the past, erupted again; Ike suffered terribly.

  Too terribly. As the fleet emerged from the storm with its rain butts filled sufficiently to permit ordinary water rations again, it became clear to everyone, even the desolate Joey Long, that Isaac Rogers was not going to live.

  He asked to see Richard, who crouched opposite Joey, cradling Ike’s head and shoulders on his lap.

  “The end of the road for this highwayman,” he said. “Oh, I am so glad, Richard! Be glad for me too. Try to look after Joey. He will feel it.”

  “Rest easy, Ike, we will all look after Joey.”

  Ike lifted one skeletal arm to indicate the shelf along the beam. “My boots, Richard. Ye’re the only one big enough to wear them and I want ye to have them. As they are, whole and complete. Ye know?”

  “I know. They will be used wisely.”

  “Good,” he said, and closed his eyes.

  About an hour later he died, not having opened them.

  So many men had died aboard Alexander that her sailmakers had had to beg old canvas from other ships; clad in clean clothes, Isaac Rogers was sewn into his envelope and carried on deck. As he owned a Book of Common Prayer, Richard read the service, committing Ike’s soul to God and his body to the deep. It slid off the board and sank immediately, weighted down with basalt stones collected off the same beach in Teneriffe where John Power had slept. The Death Ship had run out of metal scraps.

  Surgeon Balmain ordered another fumigation, a scrub with oil of tar, a new coat of whitewash. His was rather a lonely life, stuck on the quarterdeck with only two marine lieutenants for company. They messed separately from him and shared absolutely nothing with him. Like Arthur Bowes Smyth, the surgeon on Lady Penrhyn, Balmain sustained himself with an interest in the many sea creatures they chanced upon, and if they were small enough, preserved them in spirits. Admittedly it was a great deal easier to descend into the prison these days of chain pumps, but he was still smarting from Surgeon White’s jawing and determined that it would not be his fault if the wretched convicts kept dying.

  When a convict using the crew’s holes in the bow was washed overboard by a freak wave, the complement went down to 183.

  At the beginning of August the fleet made landfall at Cape Frio, a day’s sail to the north of Brazil’s chief city. But the high, jagged mountains of that coast behaved as had St. Jago’s peaks; once around the cape the wind failed into catspaws and calms. They groped down to Rio de Janeiro, not reaching it until the night between the 4th and 5th. The season was winter now: Rio de Janeiro was so far south of the Equator that it lay just to the north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Out of the realms of both crab and sea goat. The passage from Teneriffe had taken 56 days and they were 84 days out of Portsmouth, figures which rounded neatly into 8 weeks and 12 weeks. And 6,600 land miles.

  Permission to enter the colonial domains of Portugal had to be secured, a time-consuming business. At three in the afternoon the fleet crossed the mile-wide bar between the Sugarloafs to the thunder of a thirteen-gun salute from Sirius answered by the guns of Fort Santa Cruz.

  From dawn on, everyone on Alexander had crowded to the rails, fascinated by this alien, fabulously beautiful place. The south Sugarloaf was a thousand-foot-tall egg of pinkish-grey rock crowned with a wig of trees, the north Sugarloaf less spectacularly bare. Other crags reared, their tops sheared and jarred, flanks thick with lushly green forests, flashes of brilliant grassland, jutting grey, cream, pink faces of rock. The beaches were long, curved and yellow-sanded, creamy with surf where the ocean beat in, still and placid once across the bar. They dropped anchor not far inside, opposite one of the many fortresses erected to guard Rio de Janeiro from maritime predators. It was not until the next day that the eleven ships were towed to their permanent moorings off the city of São Sebastião, which was the proper name for urban Rio. It occupied a squarish peninsula on the western shore and sent tentacles of itself into the valleys between the peaks all around.

  The harbor was alive with bum boats, most of them paddled by near-naked negroes, each craft sporting an awning painted in bright colors. Richard could see the spires of churches crowned with golden crosses, but of other tall buildings Rio had few. No one had forbidden the convicts access to the deck, nor had they been ironed, even John Power. A patrol of longboats rowed constantly around the six transports, however, and turned the bum boats away.

  The weather was fine and very hot, the air still. Oh, to be allowed ashore! Not possible, all the convicts understood that. When midday came they were served with huge pieces of fresh beef, pots of yams and beans, messes of rice and loaves of strange-tasting bread made, Richard was told later, from a root called “cassada.” But all that was as nothing when the boats arrived and laughing negroes threw hundreds upon hundreds of oranges up onto the deck, making a game of catchings out of it, white teeth flashing in ebony faces. Richard knew of oranges, as did a few others; he had read that some great houses contained “orangeries” and had once seen an orange displayed by Cousin James-the-druggist, who imported lemons to obtain their oil. Lemons were less perishable.

  Some of these oranges were six and seven inches in diameter, deep and rich in color; others were almost blood-red and had blood-red flesh inside. Having discovered that the unpalatable skin peeled off easily, the convicts and marines gorged on oranges, ravished by their sweetness and juiciness. Sometimes they ate fat, bright yellow lemons to cut the saccharine taste of so many oranges or sucked at less juicy limes, which lay somewhere between the astringency of a lemon and the syrup of an orange. They never got tired of the citrus, could not get enough. Finding that the palest fruit had been picked before it was fully ripe, Neddy Perrott began at the end of their third week in Rio to stockpile any succulent globes he thought might last a few days; once made aware of it, more convicts followed suit. And a number of men, including Richard, saved orange and lemon seeds.

  Every single day they got fresh beef, fresh vegetables of some kind, and fresh cassada bread. Once the marines found out that Rio rum might be poor in quality but was almost as cheap as water, discipline and supervision of the convicts was close to nonexistent. The two lieutenants were hardly ever on board, nor was Surgeon Balmain, who took himself off on country expeditions to look at enormous, brilliant butterflies and flowers of waxen glory called orchids. Hungry for pets, the crew and marines often came back bearing quite tame parrots of gorgeous colors; only two of the dogs were left, the rest, as Donovan had predicted, bait for sharks. Rodney the cat, his wife and rapidly growing family were thriving. Alexander might be more sanitary now, but she was full of rats and mice.

  There was a less attractive side to Rio; it was a cockroach paradise. England did own a very small and meek creature in the roach, but these things were giants that flew, clattered, and oozed the same kind of evil intent that sharks did. Aggressive and
clever, they would charge a man rather than run away. From Sirius’s top echelons all the way down to Alexander’s most picked-on convict, men were driven to the verge of dementia by cockroaches.

  Most shipbound people slept almost nude on deck, though not as peacefully as at sea. Rio never went to bed. Nor did it ever grow dark; the churches and other buildings were illuminated all night. As if the few Portuguese and their innumerable black slaves feared what lurked amid the nocturnal shadows. After hearing some creature emit a bloodcurdling sound halfway between a shriek and a roar in the small hours of one night, Richard began to understand why they kept darkness at bay.

  At least two or three times a week there were fireworks, always in honor of some saint, or the Virgin, or an event in the life of Jesus Christ—there was nothing sober or toned down about Rio’s religious life. This offended Knoxian individuals like Balmain and Shairp, who regarded Catholicism as immoral, degenerate and satanic.

  “I am surprised,” said Richard to John Power as they watched colored sparks and tendrils float down from a skyrocket, “that ye’ve not tried to escape, Johnny.”

  Power looked wry. “Here? Not speaking Portuguese? I would be snabbled in a day. Apart from Portuguese slavers and cargo snows, the only ship in port is an English whaler having her bottom scraped. And she is to take a party of naval invalids from Sirius and Supply home with her.” He changed the subject, obviously too painful. “I see that Esmeralda is neglecting his ship as usual. He never makes any attempt to scrape her.”

  “Didn’t Mr. Bones tell ye? Alexander is copper sheathed.” Richard flicked his chest, sticky with orange juice. “I am going over the side to wash.”

  “I did not know ye could swim.”

  “I cannot. But I dunk myself in the water and hang on to the ladder. In the hope that sooner or later I will be able to do without the ladder. Yesterday I let go and actually kept afloat for two seconds. Then I panicked. Today I might not panic.”