Jamrach's Menagerie

by Carol Birch

  We were on our beam ends, right over on our side with the waist of the ship awash. I saw Gabriel fly over the helm, and Mr Rainey running backwards on his heels with his arms whirling. His face was stiff, features set in rock, though pure horror stared out of his eyes. I saw Wilson Pride swim out of the cookhouse door, and a tide of rats washed past me on a shivering black stream. Still screaming, whoever it was, a shocking scream, a stabbing scream, a bad-hurt scream. Who? I took a mouthful of sea, it went up my nose and burned me. Abel came sliding along the upper deck, shouting: ‘The boats! The boats!’ and I heard the captain’s voice come deep and loud as a foghorn through a mist of spray. A hand grabbed my collar and hauled me away.

  ‘Jump to, Jaf!’ Dan said brightly. ‘There’s work to be done,’ and he shoved me along before him. I saw one of our whaleboats carried away and another stove in, smashed to match wood against the gunwale. We lurched along the side of the cookhouse. A great commotion was taking place beneath our feet.

  The mainmast broke with a great crack, toppling like a tree, lifted and blown away like a twig by the wind. Up on the listing quarterdeck they were hanging onto the last two whaleboats. That’s not enough, I thought. Dag was there with Tim, grappling with rope, Rainey with blood running down his head, the captain with his face sagging and his eyes bleak, shouting: ‘Aft! Aft!’ into the wind. Simon was cutting the lashing off the other boat. There was a water cask and a musket and a quadrant in theirs, a bundle of hardtack and a tub of boat nails in ours. Henry Cash in soaking shirt and breeches emerged from the aft companionway, as if from a flooded underground cave, pushing Joe Harper’s toolbox up in front of him, shaking water from his eyes. Gabriel jumped down from the rail and grabbed his arms to haul him out, but Henry was for going back down. You could see him drawing in the air to last another minute or so, pushing back the flat dark hair from his forehead and blinking hard. He looked very young suddenly.

  Someone still screamed. Who?

  ‘Mr Cash!’ Rainey bellowed through the din. ‘Come aft now, that’s enough!’ and the Captain still calling:

  ‘Aft! All hands aft!’

  ‘Where’s Sam?’ Rainey jumped down into the water. ‘Is Skipton up?’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Sam!’ yelled Rainey. ‘Sam Proffit!’

  Yan, wild-eyed, came running with the compasses from the binnacle and flung them in our boat.

  ‘Cash!’ roared the mate and captain together.

  I saw the boys falling and stumbling aft along the tilted line of the larboard deck: Skip, freed from the irons, thank God, to take his chances with the rest of us; Abel Roper and Martin Hannah; Felix and Billy; Joe Harper still with Simon’s fiddle in his hand. John Copper waded in the flotsam of cookhouse debris and dead rats that nudged the quarterdeck like a school of curious fish. Who was it, screaming still? Who was it? The cookhouse wall burst. Barrels rolled out on the surge and went floating joyfully away to freedom or bowling down the deck to send everyone a-scatter and knock Joe’s legs from under him, so that the poor fiddle went flying once more and Joe turned a watery somersault over the barrel and landed crash on his face on top of the water. Henry said something to Gabriel and went under once more.

  ‘Cash!’ Mr Rainey bawled into the wildness. A mad, staring, bloodied man.

  ‘Keep by the boat, boys,’ Dan told us.

  With a crack like nothing more than a broken stick, the mizzenmast snapped near the bottom and fell across the drowned hatch. Gabriel, barefoot, fell upon the mast and began hauling and straining at it. First he tried to lift it, then he tried to roll it, but it wouldn’t budge. Big Martin Hannah, vaguely smiling still, threw in all his weight, and Skip jumped in to help him, but nothing was moving that mast and Henry was never coming up again. The sea lapped over the transom, poured up the deck and swirled about the submerged companionways, and a collossal shift took place in the heart of the ship as three or four hundred barrels of oil moved as one with a sound like the end of all days. Sound: the sea, the wild wind, the voices of our crew as the brittle wooden speck we lived on rolled over like the slippery pole at the fair, and the sky flew up as the swingboat soared.

  But it never came down again.

  The spars cut water. The boats bounded eagerly. ‘We’re going down!’ John Copper screamed from below, kicking out, swimming. Tim grabbed me, his arms round my shoulders. Wilson Pride fished an axe from the floating soup and hacked at spars, expressionless. Gabriel waded for the fiddle. Dan pushed us about. The whole world broke open.

  Parts of the ship went dancing away. Henry Cash was under the water. Henry Cash was dead. Gabriel crying, wading for Simon’s fiddle.

  Tim held onto me, his eyes shining with a horrified, slightly gleeful excitement. Mr Rainey clouted me on the back of the head. ‘In the boat,’ he said. I seemed to move slowly as if I was in a dream. There I was going out again, dimming down like a trimmed lamp. Not here, here but absent. Turn away, Jaf. Turn aside and watch. Save me from gut fear. Uncreep my flesh.

  There was no more screaming. The fo’c’s’le was under. She listed. Impossibly more, she listed. Dan and the captain, as if no more than a whale jaunt was at hand, gave orders, straight, mad in the face of madness as if it was normal, this groaning of the quarterdeck, this drenched mob of us. And Henry Cash under the deck, under the water. We lowered away and took our places. Steerage was under. Two boats we had left, not enough. We had Rainey and Dan and Gabriel. Yan was holding a hog. Our boat listed as we drifted out, and the sea threw us up and down, and the wind shrilled at us. Me and Tim were together in the middle of the whaleboat, and we pulled because Dan told us to, pulled like hell with some mad strength come into our arms.

  We got away and rested on our oars, watching as the Lysander fell over completely and lay on her side with a great slosh and a groan, the tip of the foremast under.

  Our two boats came together.

  The ship had settled, an upright pointed crag upon the ocean, surrounded by its widening circle of flotsam. Those three great whirling waters were far away now, and the wind had dropped like a fall into unconsciousness. A silence made of sea-soughing filled the world. No one spoke. My eyes were full of seawater and I blinked them clear and looked around. Dan had us both, me and Tim, one arm round each of us. ‘Oh boys oh boys oh boys oh boys,’ he whispered. I saw Yan’s face, a wild thing with glittering eyes and lips drawn back from the teeth, Gabriel’s, blank, flat, tear-streaked. Gabriel still somehow had Simon’s fiddle, cradled against his wide ragged chest. Alongside us in the other boat I saw the captain gripping the gunwale, the fierce jut of his jaw, and Wilson Pride, Dag Aarnasson, John Copper, Simon Flower, Skip, all alike turned stupid against the vast impossibility of it all.

  Where were the others?

  No one appeared on the high crag of quarterdeck. No one at all. I saw a head swimming, but it was only one of our hogs striking out bravely for salvation, trotters paddling furiously.

  ‘Simon!’ said Gabriel. ‘I got your fiddle.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Here you are.’

  Passing it over, hand to hand.

  ‘Billy!’ shouted Dag, rising, pointing. ‘Billy! Billy Stock!’

  Swimming through the spars and floating planks, through bobbing casks and sodden sheets, Billy Stock beating back the water with his sturdy brown arms, coming strong towards us. His head kept going under. All of us grabbed oars and rowed and drew near, shouting to him, stretching out our arms to pull him in. His face was intent, going under, coming up, intent on some invisible thing an inch or so in front of his eyes. He just kept going. Dan got him and hauled him over, he and Rainey laid him in the bottom of the boat on his face and set about getting the water out of him, thumping him on the back.

  ‘That’s it, get it up,’ said Dan.

  Billy coughed and choked.

  ‘That’s the way,’ Rainey said.

  He’d been swimming so strongly. It was as if he’d used himself all up in the water and now he was
in the boat there was nothing left. He coughed and choked and sneezed blood out of his nose, then pitched forward out of Dan’s grip onto his face in a spew of thin green vomit. Rainey picked him up and looked into his eyes, taking him by the shoulders. Billy’s eyes had gone funny: dull and troubled, still and intent. His skin shone.

  ‘Mr Stock,’ Rainey said, ‘this will not do, you must be a man, Mr Stock, and fight back.’

  But Billy’s eyes turned white and rolled up and back in his head, and his head lolled back upon the thin stalk of his neck. Mr Rainey got down in the boat and Billy’s head rested against his arm.

  ‘Come, come, we can’t do without our Billy Stock,’ said Rainey.

  But Billy just stayed that way, with his eyes gone like white slits in his brown face.

  ‘Oh, Billy,’ said Rainey sadly. ‘Oh, child.’

  ‘Is he dead?’ cried a shrill voice. Skip.

  ‘Dead,’ said Dan.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ said Rainey, laying Billy down in the bottom of the boat and, thank God, closing his eyes. Now it looked just as if he was sleeping.

  ‘Mr Rainey,’ came Captain Proctor’s voice, clear and sharp, ‘bring your boat round, you’re drifting.’

  ‘Is he dead?’ cried Skip again, high as a girl. ‘Is it my fault? Oh, my God, my God, is he dead and is it my fault?’

  If there is anything to be learned from my story perhaps it is this: never go to sea with a madman. Then again, as Gabriel once warned me, I have found that the seas positively seethe with them. Skip was one certainly. Was that why it came to seem that it was indeed his fault? Because it did, even though we all knew that his freeing of the dragon had nothing to do with anything that followed.

  ‘It is not your fault, Mr Skipton,’ the captain said, ‘contrary to what you might believe, you do not control the weather. For God’s sake, keep your mouth shut if you want to stay alive. Mr Rainey, we must look for survivors and salvage whatever we can. We’ve a long journey ahead of us but it’s nothing that can’t be done.’

  Over on the horizon the sky was dark. It started blowing again, and the rain came down and turned into hail.

  10

  Miraculous that one poor head can carry so much.

  I see my old shipmates so clear, a strange mustering, like old times, old times only yesterday. We stand together on the tilted deck, wide-eyed as children, waiting to be told what to do. The hail pings off the deck and hits our eyes.

  Henry was under the deck, Billy was in our boat. Dag said the foremast fell on Sam and the water went over him. Simon said he and Abel Roper brought Mr Comeragh up and put him in the waist boat, but then the big one hit and the boat was taken. Tossed but sound, carried far away, and in it Mr Comeragh with his big-nosed smiling face and dark eyes. How did he feel? Best to lie in the bottom and let the sea have its way and pray, then maybe or not you’d discover yourself alive in the following calm.

  There were no more.

  Mr Rainey’s face was bloody as hell. Captain Proctor took control. ‘This is a disaster,’ he rasped, eyes narrowed and blinking at the hail. ‘Not the first and not the last.’ A coughing fit took him and it was a moment before he could continue. ‘We will bring these boats safe to shore with all hands. There is no doubt – no doubt at all – that this is well within our reach.’

  Hail, blinding.

  ‘Some of our friends have died.’ He opened his mouth again but nothing came out, then he sighed, closed his eyes for a second, opened them again and licked his lips. ‘We will give decent burials to all we can find.’ His eyes were firm and steady, but pulled down at the corners and weepy. He’d managed to keep his glasses on, God knows how. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘we have work to do.’

  We had Joe’s toolbox, hatchets, needle and twine, a quadrant, two compasses, lanterns, two pistols and a musket, some powder, two terrified hogs. The captain put me, Tim and John to making new sails from what we could save of the old. Wilson Pride went among the rigging, chopping at spars, while Simon and Dan and Captain Proctor himself, cack-handed, set about the making of masts. We needed Joe. Yan was on lookout. Gabriel fished for barrels of water. Rainey got Skip hacking holes in the deck, and he went down himself with Dag and started bringing up boxes of hardtack. We did not mention what had happened. Hey ho, it was just another day and we were doing what we were told. All our tobacco was gone. I would have killed for a pipe, sitting there pricking my fingers bloody, wielding my needle. I could have cried, thinking of sweet smoke, the loveliest thing in the world. The sky too was the colour of smoke, with blue inside the blackness, shining. I was in a state of dreamy infancy. John Copper was joining the sides of a small sea shroud for Billy. The hail had eased to soft rain and I was in bits: one of me on a great adventure, one of me shivering on the sea like sunlight, one of me working on a gloomy afternoon in Jamrach’s yard with dear old Crabbe and Bulter …

  My God, Crabbe and Bulter! My eyes filled with tears at the sudden thought of them.

  ‘Hey Tim,’ I said, ‘do you remember Crabbe and Bulter?’

  Tim turned his head and smiled. ‘’Course I do. Crabbe and Bulter.’

  ‘Those were the days,’ I said.

  ‘Indeed they were.’

  One of me still on the ship last night before I came down from the mast, one of me brooding over the waters. My invisible fellows walked and talked as ever in my brain as if nothing had happened.

  ‘Who’s Crabbe and Bulter?’ John Copper asked.

  ‘Used to work with us,’ Tim said.

  Skip appeared.

  ‘Hey Skip,’ I said, ‘I’ve got your book.’

  Dragons, demons, winged eyes, faces in extremity.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  I gave it to him.

  ‘No pencil though,’ he said and smiled.

  So on and on floated the day. We built up the sides of the boats, a foot or so, more fore and aft, and loaded them deep as we dared. The hardtack was stowed well aft away from the spray, wrapped in canvas. Water, a couple of barrels for each boat.

  Mr Rainey and Simon put Billy in the shroud. They just did it, a job, Simon holding it open, Rainey putting him in, their faces admitting nothing in or out. Then Mr Rainey gathered Billy up and brought him into our boat and we rowed out a little way with the captain’s boat following, and came together as the rain faded away and the first hint of sunset appeared.

  The captain said:

  ‘We now commit to the deep, oh Lord, the body of your servant, William Stock, our shipmate. Lord, accept him and have mercy on his soul. Our Father, which art in heaven …’ and we all joined in mumbling the Lord’s Prayer, and I thought: Goodbye, Billy, and remembered his face as he threw up in a bucket, angry, tear-filled eyes. A small silence, then Mr Rainey slid him into the sea and the sea swallowed him.

  The last of the ship was like the dying of a whale. She bled thick yellow blood from her every seam, from her dead eyes, from her heart. All the oil we’d taken since we left the Greenland Dock. It spread about us on the sea, and she went down slowly into it, shining.

  Gone.

  That moment, ocean around, sky above. Too big.

  The captain consulted the quadrant. Rainey went into his boat and they had a silent powwow. Seemed not to agree, I thought, but at last Mr Rainey came back with his face hard, sucking his lip. The captain said we’d make southeast a few miles away from this place then hove to for the night and take stock in the morning. At least the rain had stopped.

  Fix sails, men.

  We were six to a boat. On oars, me and Tim, Dan and Gabriel, Yan and Rainey. On theirs, Skip and Simon and John, Dag and Wilson and the captain. Mr Rainey was by the steering oar. The captain held his musket tight. Our makeshift masts served. I don’t know how far we sailed. It was a black night and nothing was real. Somewhere we hove to and I fell into a thirsty sleep. We’d had a little water before we turned in, but the captain said we had to be very careful with it, plan for the worst and hope for the best. I felt sick and couldn’t eat the h
ardtack. We slept hungrily, desperate for oblivion. Long before daylight I came half awake and started going over and over a list in my mind, but I was still exhausted and kept losing track and having to start again so it went on for ever. Who’s gone? Sam Proffit. Mr Comeragh. Felix Duggan …

  It seemed important to me that I should think of these people one by one, enumerate, as it were, the things I knew about each. Sam Proffit: old black man, watery eyes, small. Mr Comeragh: has a young son. Felix. Felix Duggan. What do I know about him? Nothing. Round head, pulls faces. Sam, Felix, done them. Mr Comeragh. Billy: his white eyes. Henry Cash: sleek wet head, shoulders rising out of the water, pushing before him the toolbox. What would we have done without the toolbox? Our saviour. Know nothing about him, never liked him. Thought he was a smug bastard. Sleek wet head, an otter, going down for more, looking younger than before. Who’s next? Joe. Joe Harper. Last I saw of Joe he was splashing face down when the barrel knocked him off his feet. He was holding Simon’s fiddle, but it went flying. Where was he? Where was Mr Comeragh? Where were Abel Roper, Felix Duggan, Martin Hannah? Going over each lost man in my mind, over and over like counting sheep, asserting their existence and the impossibility of its end.

  A whaleboat is a canny thing, twenty-six feet long, slim and beaked and swift. Ours were chimeric, burdened with masts and sails never meant for them, built up, patchwork prowed, laden well beyond their means. Nothing like a whaleboat for skipping over the waves, but these new craft were cumbersome. We laboured west all day till the sun went down. The moon was in the east.

  ‘Ever see that, boys?’ Dan says. ‘Moonbow. Rainbow at night.’

  The moonbow shone on the western horizon, painted on cloud. Under the bow the sky was paler.

  ‘Let’s assume it augurs hope,’ said Rainey in a faintly sarcastic tone, ‘like Noah’s rainbow.’ His face was hawkish and red. He’d wiped away the blood, and had a rough plaster above his beady left eye, which dribbled constantly into the bruised skin about it.