By Fickle Winds Blown

by Maryk Lewis

rope passed through the ship, end to end. Timbers creaked alarmingly. Caught by the stern, but with the bows free, she was pushed lengthwise across the river. The passengers gave a concerted groan, sure that their ship was about to be wrecked before their voyage had even begun.

  Like a weight on the end of a pendulum, the ship swung from the pile, the bows describing a wide arc, pointing north-west, and north, and north-east, and east, until the ship had turned right around, and was heading bows first down the river.

  “Prepare to cast off, Mr Smettley, if you please.”

  “What happens if he doesn’t please?” Jess asked.

  “The captain stops being quite so polite,” the boatswain replied, and the sailors toiling at the capstan laughed knowingly.

  Filthy, dripping mud and slime, the anchor rose out of the water. The boatswain dropped a wooden wedge into the groove the anchor chain ran in, and belted it home with a sledge hammer. The chain was caught tight. The anchor was left hanging from the bows of the ship, while the sailors abandoned the capstan, and hurried, running, jumping down the ladders, to the foredeck.

  Other sailors had released sails on both the foremast and the mizzen. In both cases the sails dropped from an upper yard, like washing on a clothesline, and flapped in the wind for a moment, before the sailors on the deck caught the sheets, the dangling ropes, and hauled in the bottoms of the sails so that they could be tied to the yard below. Caught at head and foot, the sails filled with wind, and bellied out.

  “Cast off aft!” There was no ‘if you please’ about that. A sailor near the stern swung a sledge hammer, a wooden wedge flew out, and one end of the straining hawser snapped whip-like out across the water, went limp, and flopped into the river. The bight commenced to slide around the pile, making its own little whirlpool

  Suddenly the ship came alive. One moment it was just a collection of timbers floating on the scummy river, and the next it was some magical creature spreading its wings to the wind, driving its stem into the tide.

  The tide?

  The tide had changed underneath them. No longer were they being pushed by water running downstream. Now the ship actually sailed into a stream running the other way. Looking over the side at the water close by, they seemed to be travelling at tremendous speed. Looking at the piles standing in the water as they passed them by, it was obvious that their true speed was only a walking pace. Two speeds then; one through the water which was itself moving, and a quite different speed when measured against the bottom of the river.

  “It feels different,” Jess said to Mr Milburn, the only member of the crew left on the forecastle.

  “We have steerage way on,” he smiled, looking very pleased with the way things were going. “We’re going fast enough for the rudder to start working, so now we can steer her wherever we want her to go.”

  Everything seemed to be happening at once. Passengers were crowded along the gunwales, spread over the hatch covers, crammed into odd corners, trying to keep out of the road of hurrying sailors, and yet miss nothing of their departure. Heaving men were still tightening the clews of the sails already set, others were scrambling up the main mast to spread the mainsail, the biggest sail on the ship. At the stern the hawser was coming in, some of the single men helping the sailors to walk the dripping coils up the deck.

  “That hawser got a good stretch,” Jess observed, “but that wasn’t the point, was it. It was just there to turn the ship around.”

  “You’re learning, little lady,” the mate grinned. “The bo’s’n was just teasing. You tell him you want to see him tie a knot in it.”

  “It can’t be done, I suppose.”

  “Not any kind of knot that would be of any use to us. There’s an eye spliced into one end. We just put that over a post or bollard. Otherwise we just catch the run of the hawser in a jamb cleat wherever we want to fix it.”

  “Would the bo’s’n tie a knot in it if I asked him?”

  “I doubt it,” the mate laughed, “and nor would Midshipman Smettley. He spent ages last trip trying to do a towing hitch with it around the mizzen mast.”

  They were moving steadily down river, keeping to the right-hand side of the channel, staying inside the line of piles which marked where the water began to get too shallow for a ship of their draught. At a bend in the river the mate called for a team of sailors to brace the yards around a little, so that the wind would continue to catch the sails at the right angle. With the mainsail beginning to draw, their speed picked up still more.

  “We’re not likely to get lost with all those posts to guide us,” Samantha ventured, shy with the mate because he was a man of such importance on board.

  “Piles,” he corrected absently, intent on the set of the sails. “We’ll not get lost with Captain Hedley anyway. He knows this river like the back of his hand. He served his apprenticeship on one of those coal barges you’ve seen.”

  Down by the deck housing Sarah appeared from the galley and beckoned. Immediately Jess headed down the nearest ladder, and found her way, dodging back and forth, along the crowded deck.

  Nobody among the passengers wanted to go below. None of the sailors could be spared to. More than three hundred souls were somewhere topsides on the ship, and movement, except for the sailors, was difficult. People were careful not to hinder the sailors. The safety of everybody was in their hands, and there wasn’t a person present unaware of the fact.

  England was sliding away behind them, port and starboard. To Sarah and Jess that meant less than it did to most of the other passengers. Their homeland was Ireland, a land now only a memory. They were over the worst of the shock of leaving, but they could understand the strained, tearful faces of their new companions.

  “Tea’s up,” Sarah said. “Help me get this urn along to the main hatch. Folk will start finding their pannikins once they see what we’re about.”

  “May I help?” Samantha asked.

  “Thank you,” Sarah acknowledged. “Could you bring that milk jug, please?”

  Their arrival caused a stirring among the passengers. Space was found for the urn on the cover of the main hatch, and various folk were dispatched below to find the mugs and cups the passengers were expected to provide for themselves.

  The sight of his little sister pouring milk for the steerage passengers was too much for Charles. He bolted for the poop deck to tell his parents what she was doing. Soon he was back, puffed up with righteousness.

  “Father says you must stop that,” he announced loudly enough for several steerage passengers to hear. “It’s not proper for persons of our class. You must come and deport yourself with dignity on the poop deck.”

  Samantha went pale. She handed the milk jug to Jess without a word. Her eyes said much though. Then she obediently followed her brother through the press back to the stern of the ship.

  “You got milk for a person of my class, missy?” a man brought Jess back with a jerk to the task in hand. “You don’t want to get close with them toffs, lass. They ain’t our kind.”

  Eleven

  All afternoon the ‘Haldia’ slipped down the London River, overtaking smaller craft, being passed by others moving upstream. After a time, the banks fell away to either side, low, more and more distant, harder to see in the haze. Gradually the passengers lost interest, and began to go below to sort out their belongings, find all the things they would need for the voyage.

  The first evening meal was to be provided by the cook, an enormous Irish stew with suet dumplings, and freshly baked bread. Plum duff would follow. Sarah and Jess were raked in to help prepare the vegetables. An elderly woman, seventy years old Sarah knew because her age was on the passenger list, was also there to help, along with half-a-dozen younger women from the single-women’s quarters. These were the women who had come alone on the voyage, and who seemed to know nobody. Matron Greeley had found them, and set them to work. They seemed glad to have something to do.

  On the deck, just outside the galley, they set to work with peeling knive
s, dixies, and sacks of vegetables. In no time at all they were chattering away in the accents of Shetland, and the Irish counties, laughing with each other at the mistakes they made as they tried to make their speech more English, so that they could all understand each other.

  While they worked, the ship pushed further and further out into the Thames Estuary, passing marked shallows while the tide was high, reaching for open water before it fell again.

  As soon as they had finished the vegetables, Jess went with Sarah into the single women’s quarters, and marked off the list while Sarah organised the women into cooking parties, seven to a party, and eleven parties in the hold. The cook had fed them this first night out, but for the rest of the voyage the steerage passengers would prepare all their meals for themselves. For this, each party was issued a set of mess utensils...1 Mess Kit with Iron Handles, 2 gallons, and so on, as Sarah had discovered in Mr Smithers’ office two nights ago...was it only that long?

  All the cook would do for them after this, was to put on the stove what they brought to him, and take it off again when they came back for it. Everything else they had to do for themselves, planning, preparation, cleaning up. Angus MacGillivray’s skills were henceforth reserved for the cabin passengers and the crew. Even with the help of two stewards, who had come aboard with the passengers, the cook would be more than