In Distant Waters

by Richard Woodman

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Hogan . . . you can’t get away with this . . .’

  ‘You’re alone Cap’n . . . that’s enough for me. Sure, Oi’ll fix me own way to die.’

  ‘What about Witherspoon?’ Hogan grinned. It was clear he knew of Drinkwater’s fear of the other man.

  ‘Or Oi’ll fix yours for you, Cap’n!’ Hogan lunged again. His reach was long and Drinkwater fell back, slipped and swiped wildly with his sword. He felt the blade crash against the bayonet and the strength of his opponent as Hogan met the pressure. Drinkwater’s mangled right arm was unequal to the contest. He saw victory light Hogan’s eyes and felt the resistance of rock against his back.

  ‘Now, you English bastard!’

  Hogan drew back the bayonet to lunge, his teeth bared in a snarl that bore all the hatred inherent in his heart. Desperately Drinkwater flung himself sideways, falling at his adversary’s feet, the wet slime of the rocky ledge fouling him. He rolled madly, aware that he was somehow in contact with Hogan’s feet. He kicked, and suddenly found the edge of the cave. A second later he felt the icy cold of water close over his head. The sudden shock electrified him. An instant later a great, irresistible pressure bore down upon him, punching and bruising him so that, for a moment he thought he was being beaten by Hogan until the roaring in his ears proclaimed the source of the pain was the waterfall itself. Then he was subject to an immense rolling motion and vast pressure. Darkness engulfed him as the force of the water thrust him down, rolling him over yet again, but this time in an involuntary way, shoving his aching body so that his lungs began to scream at his brain to let them have air.

  He was drowning!

  Such were the powerful reflexes tearing at the muscles of his chest that opposition to them was impossible. Blinding lights filled his head, the roaring of the water became intolerable. He could resist no longer. He opened his mouth and dragged water into his lungs.

  Mount saw a figure suddenly rise, bursting from the surface of the dark pool some five yards below the fall itself. He levelled his gun, but his finger froze. So far out of the water was the man flung, welled up as strongly as he had just been thrust down, that Mount saw instantly that it was the captain.

  A few minutes later Mount had dragged his gasping commander to the side of the pool. Drinkwater lay over a rock, his body wracked by helpless eructations as he spewed the water from himself. After a few minutes, as Mount alternately stared from Drinkwater to the ledge beside the waterfall on the far side of the pool, Drinkwater’s body ceased its painful heaving. He looked up, pale and shivering, a mucous trickle running down his chin. His shirt was torn and Mount saw the scars and twisted muscles that knotted his wounded shoulder. Instinctively he saw the captain incline his head to the right, indicating the shock of the chill in those mangled muscles.

  ‘Hogan’s got your musket . . . his powder’s spoiled . . .’

  ‘What about Witherspoon?’

  ‘Didn’t see him . . . think I may have winged him with my first shot . . .

  ‘I’ll get support, it’s getting dark . . .’

  ‘No! We must . . .’

  But he got no further. A loud bellow, a bull-roar of defiance, it seemed, came from the waterfall. Both men looked round and Mount scrambled to his feet.

  From behind the silver cascade, glowing now with a luminosity that it seemed to carry down from higher up the mountain where the last of the setting sunlight still caught the stream, Hogan emerged. He bore the musket in one hand and in the other the limp figure of Witherspoon.

  It seemed to the still gasping Drinkwater, that the darkest of his suspicions had been correct. The bull-roar had not been of defiance, but something infinitely more elemental. It had been a howl of grief, animal in its intensity. The drooping body of Witherspoon was undoubtedly that of a dead lover.

  Such was instantly obvious to Mount too. Without hesitation the marine officer raised his big pistol.

  ‘Sodomite!’ he snarled, and took aim.

  In the almost complete gloom the two officers were quite hidden from Hogan. The Irish giant had no thoughts now, beyond the overwhelming sense of loss. The desperate venture on which he and his lover had set out that morning had seemed worth the hazard. Patrician would not stay. Hogan read his commander for a man of resolution, and nothing waited for Hogan over the Pacific horizon beyond the chance of death by wounding, death by disease or death from one or another of the multiple foulnesses that haunted His Britannic Majesty’s fleet. The island, though, offered a bold man everything. He could have outwitted fate and lived, like Crusoe, upon such a spot until he met death in God’s time, not King George’s. It would have worked but for Lieutenant Mylchrist.

  His frame was wracked by monstrous sobs as he dragged the dead body of his lover out of the cave. It only seemed another paroxysm of grief when Mount’s ball shattered his skull, and smashed his brains against the cliff behind him.

  Shaking from cold and shock Drinkwater followed Mount gingerly back across the stream. Once again he approached the entrance to the cave. In the last of the daylight the two officers stood staring down at their victims.

  ‘God’s bones,’ muttered Drinkwater crouching down before his legs gave under him. His first shot had indeed hit Witherspoon, hit the breast and heart. Witherspoon must have died instantly, so silently that even Hogan himself had not realised until after Drinkwater’s escape, the damage that single shot had done. For Witherspoon’s breast was exposed as Hogan had desperately sought to stem the bleeding wound. The shirt was torn back and the two officers stared down at the shapely breasts of a young woman.

  CHAPTER 4

  March 1808

  The Chase

  ‘I’m damned if I understand why we’re not cruising off the Isthmus,’ complained Mount as he lounged back in his chair and awaited the roast pig whose tantalising aroma had been permeating the ship for much of the forenoon. ‘It is common knowledge, even to Their Lordships, that Panama is the focus of Spanish power.’

  ‘I think you jump to conclusions, Mount,’ replied Fraser, cooling himself with an improvised fan fashioned from a sheet of discarded cartridge paper. The wardroom was insufferably hot, even with a windsail ducting air from the deck, and its occupants were as frayed as the end of the canvas pipe itself. ‘Besides, preoccupations with opportunities for prize-money are an obstruction to duty.’

  ‘Don’t preach to me, Fraser . . .’

  ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen . . . such querulous behaviour . . . it’s too exhausting by far . . . be so kind as to leave the preaching to me.’

  ‘God save us from that fate,’ said Mount accepting the glass from King, the negro messman, and rolling his eyes in a deprecating fashion at Fraser. Both officers looked at the temporiser in their midst.

  The Reverend Jonathan Henderson, chaplain to His Britannic Majesty’s frigate Patrician, laid a thin, knotted finger alongside his nose in a characteristic gesture much loved by the midshipmen for its imitable property. It invariably presaged an aphorism which its originator considered of importance in his ministry. ‘I am sure they know what they are about and it will avail us nothing if we quarrel.’

  ‘What else are we to do, God damn it?’ said Mount sharply.

  ‘Come, Mr Mount, no blasphemy if you please.’

  ‘I’m a military man, Mr Henderson, and accustomed to speak my mind within the mess, and I’ve been too long at sea to have much faith in the wisdom of Their Lordships.’

  ‘If you’re referring to my relatively short career . . .’

  ‘Short? Good God man, you’ve not been at sea for a dog’s watch! What the devil d’you know about it.’

  ‘Come sir, I was chaplain to the late Admiral Roddam . . .’

  ‘Admiral Roddam? He spent the American War swinging round his own bloody chicken bones and port bottles until they had to move the Nore light to mark the shoal . . . Admiral Roddam . . . hey King, refill my glass and deafen my ears to sacerdotal nonsense.’

  Henderson looked furiously
at the grinning negro and rounded on Mount.

  ‘Mr Mount, I’m a man of God, but I’ll not . . .’

  ‘Gentlemen, pray silence . . . you raise your voices too loudly.’ Fraser straightened up from the rudder stock cover from which vantage point he had been trying to ignore the petty squabble.

  ‘There has been a deal too much argument since that business at Juan Fernandez . . .’

  ‘There is usually a deal too much argument when empty vessels are banging about.’

  ‘Very well, Mr Lallo,’ snapped Fraser at the surgeon who, until that moment, had occupied a corner of the table with his sick-book, ‘belay that.’ Lallo shrugged and pocketed his pencil. ‘Tell us how Mylchrist is.’

  ‘He’ll live, but his shoulder’ll be damned stiff for a good while.’

  ‘Like the captain’s.’

  ‘Aye, like the captain’s.’

  ‘But he’s over the worst of the fever?’

  Lallo nodded and a silence fell as they considered the events on the island. In the days that had followed their departure from Juan Fernandez the echoes of the affair had petered out except when conversation aimlessly disturbed it. Among the people it had lit another portfire of discontent, for two-thirds of the ship’s company had not enjoyed the liberty of that first watch-ashore. Nevertheless, the nature of the incident had had less lasting impact on the men than upon the officers. The hands had preoccupations other than sentimental considerations over a pair of love-lorn deserters. In the collective wisdom of the crew there was an easier acceptance of the vagaries of human nature. Their lives were publicly lived, crude in their exposure and therefore the revelation of Witherspoon’s sex came as less of a shock than the vague realisation that they had, perhaps, been made fools of.

  Among the officers the reaction had been different. It was to them truly shocking that a woman, even a woman of the lowest social order which it was manifestly obvious that Witherspoon was not, should be driven to the extremity of resorting to concealment on a man-o’-war. Many and various were the theories advanced to explain her action. None was provable and therefore none was satisfactory. To some extent it was this inexplicable nature of the affair that made it most irritating. Unlike the people, the living conditions of the officers were such that they could function as individuals. The solitude of their tiny cabins enabled them to think in privacy and in privacy thoughts invaded unbidden. Of them all James Quilhampton had been most deeply stirred.

  It had been Quilhampton who had climbed back up the dark valley and found Mount and Drinkwater, and the dead bodies. It had been Quilhampton who had organised the burial party and stood beside the chaplain as he performed his first real duty since recovering from the sea-sickness induced by the doubling of Cape Horn. The two lovers had been buried that night and the sky above the lantern-lit burial-party had been studded by stars. This involvement had revived thoughts of his own hopeless love affair, left far behind on the shores of the Firth of Forth and long-since repudiated when the news that Patrician was bound for the distant Pacific had plunged him into extreme and private depression.

  Now he rose from his cot, disturbed by the squabble in the adjacent wardroom, and emerged from his cabin into the silence that had followed it.

  ‘You make as much noise as a Dover-court,’ he muttered sleepily, slumping down in his chair and staring at the table cloth before him, his nose wrinkling to the smell of roast pork.

  ‘You shouldn’t be sleeping James, my boy, when you can be drinking,’ said Mount, pushing an empty glass towards him and beckoning King.

  ‘Fill Mr Q’s glass, King.’

  ‘Yes sah . . . Missah Q?’

  ‘Oh, very well . . . have you shrub there, King? Good man . . .’

  ‘I was just saying, James, that it’s damned odd we aren’t attacking the Dons on the Isthmus . . .’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake don’t start that again . . .’

  ‘Hold on, Fraser, it’s a perfectly logical military consideration, isn’t it James?’

  Quilhampton shrugged.

  ‘He’s still dreaming of the lovely Catriona MacEwan,’ jibed Fraser grinning.

  ‘Well, he’s precious little to complain of since he was the last of us to have a woman in his arms,’ agreed Mount.

  ‘Except Hogan,’ said Quilhampton.

  ‘Ah, you see, he was thinking of the fair sex . . . an inadvisable preoccupation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. What you should be considering is what the devil we’re doing so far north . . .’

  ‘If I remember correctly, Mr Q,’ broke in Lallo, ‘the captain was about to confide in us when the recall guns were fired on the desertion of those two . . .’ Lallo hesitated.

  ‘Persons, Mr Lallo?’ offered Henderson.

  ‘Exactly, Mr Henderson . . . now tell us . . . that confidence was interrupted, but you are in the captain’s pocket enough to get furlough in Edinburgh town . . . What’s this about Russians?’

  ‘I’ve no more influence over the captain than you, Mr Lallo; indeed I’ve a good deal less, I dare say . . .’

  But their deliberations were cut short, for faintly down the cotton shaft of the windsail came a cry: ‘Sail . . . sail ho! Two points on the larboard bow!’

  They forgot the roast pork and the glasses of shrub and sherry. Even the Reverend Mr Henderson joined the rush for the quarterdeck ladder adding to the clatter of over-turned chairs and the noise of cutlery as the dragged table-cloth sent it to the deck. King stood shaking his head and rolling his eyes in a melancholy affectation. Only Quilhampton remained impervious to the hail of the masthead lookout.

  His only reaction was to bring his wooden hand down on the table in a savage blow, bruising the pine board and giving vent to the intensity of his feelings. For underneath his personal misery, below the strange disturbance caused by the desertion on Juan Fernandez, lay the knowledge that most oppressed him and of which he had been dreaming fitfully as he had dozed on his cot. More than any other officer, it was James Quilhampton who best understood the smouldering mood of the men. It had been Quilhampton alone who had defused the incipient mutiny aboard the Antigone the previous summer. Very little had happened to placate the men since Drinkwater’s bounty, paid out of the captain’s own pocket, had eased tension for a while. But the money had been paid to the whores of Sheerness and any good that Drinkwater’s largesse had achieved had long since evaporated. Somehow the affair at Juan Fernandez had crystallised a conviction that had come to him as he had held the tawny-haired Catriona in his arms on his departure from Edinburgh, the conviction that Patrician was unlucky and that she would never return home.

  Captain Drinkwater had been more relieved than otherwise at the discovery of Witherspoon’s sex. No captain, particularly one engaged on a distant cruise in the Pacific, relished the discovery of sodomitical relationships within his crew any more than he relished the problem of desertion. The fact that Witherspoon was a woman made Hogan’s action understandable and lent a measure of reason to the twin absenteeism that stemmed from passion, not mutiny. What Drinkwater had dreaded when he learned of the failure of two hands to muster, was a sudden, unpredictable revolt among the men. His orders were difficult enough to execute without the ferment that such a disorder would cause, a disorder which might threaten not merely his command, but his very life. He was not untouched by the tragedy that had happened beneath the waterfall, but he perceived again the workings of providence and when he had entered the initials D.D. against the two names in the ship’s muster book, his sense of relief had been very real. In the margin provided for remarks, he had added: Killed while resisting arrest, having first Run.

  It was a poor epitaph. A poetaster might have conjured up a romantic verse at the tragedy; a venal commander might have kept the two names on the ship’s books and drawn the pay himself, or at least until he had repaid himself the cost of the sword he had lost in the pool beneath the waterfall. But Drinkwater felt only a further sadness that Hogan and Witherspoon had gone to join those damned
souls who awaited judgement in some private limbo, watched over by the guardian angels of the Admiralty. Such, at least, had been the incongruous core of Mr Henderson’s homily on the subject. Drinkwater had begun to doubt the wisdom of Their Lordships in soliciting the aid of the Established Church to subdue the convictions of men forced into His Britannic Majesty’s Navy. Drinkwater considered such solecisms foolish; ignorant diversions from the grim realities of the sea-service. He was concluding his private remarks in his journal when he heard the cry from the masthead.

  ‘He has a wind, by God!’

  ‘By your leave, Mr Hill, a rest for my glass on that stanchion.’

  ‘Of course sir . . . he has a wind . . .’

  ‘So you said . . . a devil’s wind, too, what d’you make of him?’

  ‘I reserve my judgement, sir.’

  ‘Eh? Oh, you refer to that fellow we saw off the Horn?’ Drinkwater caught the stranger in his image glass. To whatever the sail belonged, it was not a black-hulled two-decker. ‘By the spread of her masts and her stuns’ls, I’d wager on her being a frigate . . . and Spanish?’

  ‘Yes . . . yes, I’d not dispute that, sir.’

  ‘Spanish frigate, sir.’

  Drinkwater looked aloft. In the mizen top Mr Frey looked down, smiling broadly and Drinkwater was aware that the deck was crammed with officers and men milling about, awaiting news from the privileged few at posts of vantage or with glasses to their eyes. He caught the ripple of eagerness that greeted the news, saw the smiles and sensed, despite everything, the metamorphosis that transformed his ship at the sight of an enemy.

  ‘Very well, Mr Frey, you may come down and hoist Spanish colours! Clear for action and beat to quarters!’ Then he raised his glass again and studied the enemy, hull up now, crossing their bow from the west. ‘Mr Frey should know a Don when he sees one, Mr Hill, given his time watching ’em at Cadiz . . . oh, for a breeze!’