The English Monster

by Lloyd Shepherd

  “These things you have told me. And still I say: the curse is yours if you can take it.”

  “And alas, I cannot. And soon, I will die.”

  Something compelled him to stand, and walk to the door. The young man’s dead eyes followed him across the room, and for a moment old Dr. Hans Sloane was terrified, because the eyes were those of a simple predator, gazing at its prey pitilessly as it gauges the distance needed for the spring and imagines the taste of flesh and sinew beneath its teeth. In that moment, Sloane realized he wanted to squeeze every drop of life out of the allocation that remained to him, and he also realized that the young man in the room with him would pour that allocation out with no remorse whatsoever. His old ears began to pick up that annoying hum which always accompanied these interviews. Even his hearing was dying.

  And then Sloane reached the door, and turned, ready to run.

  “Our decision is that you cannot be, William,” he said. “You are an aberration, even an abomination. There is nothing rational or demonstrable about your existence and your state. Should people learn of your existence, they would question everything—everything—this Society has fought to cherish and maintain for nigh on a century. We will not let that happen. You are to remain here, a secret known only to the Fellows of the Society. And we shall see what we shall see. You and I, however, will not meet again.”

  And with that, the doctor let the young man be.

  27 DECEMBER 1811

  John Harriott had known that his Waterman-Constable Charles Horton had been planning a Christmas Day trip to Sheerness, but had not been expecting to hear from the man so quickly. When Horton’s note arrived posthaste the previous evening it took the magistrate by surprise. Its contents surprised him even more:

  INFORMATION UNCOVERED IN SHEERNESS RELATING TO MURDERS. DO NOT WISH TO LEAVE, NOR TO PASS INFORMATION VIA THIRD PARTY. SUGGEST YOU ATTEND WITH ALL SPEED. HORTON.

  The words were crisply written, the handwriting precise, the tone perhaps just the wrong side of respectful. It occurred to Harriott how much he now relied on the fellow, how his odd dark intensity had become something in which the old magistrate placed enormous faith and trust. There was never any question of not going to Sheerness.

  Aaron Graham was of similar mind. Harriott had gone to his residence immediately on receiving Horton’s note, planning to ask his fellow magistrate to attend at Shadwell today in his place, while he sailed to Sheerness. Events were moving quickly in Shadwell and he felt the need for a reliable witness to them. John Williams, still locked away in Coldbath Fields following his arrest on Christmas Eve, was now the single focus of attention of both the Shadwell investigation and of London’s press. All three Shadwell magistrates were adamant that Williams was the killer, an Irish monster, despite the gaps and contradictions in his testimony, and despite the apparent lack of any accomplices, which contradicted much of the eyewitness evidence at hand. Harriott, whose doubts about Williams’s guilt were already widely known and who was, in any case, persona non grata in Shadwell, was worried about not being in London for a day or two while things developed. He would have liked to have asked Graham to keep an eye on things.

  Graham was having none of this. When he had read Horton’s note, he shouted for his manservant and immediately began plotting the trip. He’d ordered a servant out to assemble a hamper of provisions for the journey, and sent Harriott away, promising to meet him at the River Police Office at eight o’clock sharp. He had an urgent appointment that evening for dinner and drinks, but this would not delay him in the morning.

  Which is how two of London’s magistrates come to be standing on a cutter sailing downstream toward the estuary. The Antelope is the River Police Office’s only vessel of significant size. Harriott purchased her from a merchant specializing in trade with Holland only months before. He has sailed no further than Millwall on her, and is relishing a longer trip. Aaron Graham is less certain. Graham is a city man these days, his naval career a long way in the past, and he has little interest any longer in the salty arcana of the sea, unless it be on a pleasure yacht above Richmond with a hamper full of fine food and wine and, if possible, some music.

  The decision to travel by water was Harriott’s, and Graham, despite himself, was forced to agree. The road journey to Sheerness is a complicated one, requiring a great loop of travel to cross the Medway and reach the Swale Ferry just to get onto the Isle of Sheppey. It would have taken perhaps two days by coach, though the horse which Horton had sent to London, carrying his urgent message, had traveled it in a single day. A post-chaise might have been quicker, but would still have been uncomfortable, cold, and uncertain.

  And, as Harriott pointed out in the urgent discussions they’d had following receipt of Horton’s message, he did own a boat (or rather the River Police Office owned a boat, but as his enemies have previously pointed out this is not a distinction that Harriott dwells upon). His eyes had sparkled when he’d knocked on Graham’s door early yesterday evening, Horton’s note in his hand and finally, at last, some concrete action to take.

  The smart little cutter glides downstream, elegantly and effortlessly avoiding the clusters of ships around the docks and wharves on both sides of the river. Its tidy trim and bloodred sails stand out in the crowded river mist, and some of the watermen looking at the vessel from the boats and wharves appear to actually doff their caps toward it, so regal does it appear, before remembering who now owns the ship and scowling at it.

  Harriott and Graham stand in the stern of the ship. The crew consists of half a dozen men and a master. They are busying themselves with the sails and the helm, leaving the magistrates to consider the day’s undertakings. Harriott is obviously enjoying himself. Opportunities to get onto open water are few enough these days, and he still relishes the feel of saltwater on his face. Graham is uncomplaining, but his green face and desperate grip on the ship’s rail tell of his acute discomfort. Last night’s dinner and drinks weigh heavy upon him.

  They pass smoothly downriver on a falling tide, past Limehouse, Deptford, Greenwich, Woolwich, Gravesend, and out into the estuary. Even here, where the water is choppier and the wind sharper, their progress remains unhindered. The Dutch-designed boat is sturdy as well as trim, perfectly at home in the North Sea, and Harriott is delighted with her. Having departed the Police Office steps at eight o’clock that morning, they are approaching Sheerness by early afternoon.

  The two magistrates now watch as the half-built port of Sheerness comes into view around the corner of the Isle of Grain (the sunken remains of Horton’s little dinghy pass by on their starboard side, unreported and unnoticed). Graham expresses surprise and some delight at the way the clear water of the Medway creates a deep blue contrast with the muddy brown of the estuary. He has begun to recover his typical bonhomie and claps Harriott on the shoulder as the skipper maneuvers the vessel around the half-dozen hulks which surround the entrance to the new harbor.

  “Which one do you think it is, Harriott?” he asks.

  Aaron Graham’s natural intelligence and curiosity have taken over. Sheerness, the salty sea, the gusty wind, the dark forlorn hulks on the water, and the masts dotted in and around the harbor mouth—he takes all this in with the excitement of a very smartly dressed puppy, his queasiness increasingly forgotten.

  For his part, Harriott feels a sense of awesome nostalgia. The sea is one thing but here, at Sheerness, he is almost transfixed by naval memories. The hulks, with their missing masts and roofed-over decks, make him feel unaccountably sad, while the new dock rising out from amid the mess of hulks and houses seems to point to a glorious maritime future in which old sailors and superannuated colonels will play no part. He feels at once redundant and unaccountably excited.

  The cutter comes to just outside the entrance to the dock, waiting for a brig to make its way out. The brig picks its way around the hulks gathered around the entrance, and after it has passed the master of the Antelope shouts a question at Harriott, who indicates they should cont
inue.

  They creep into the half-built dock. There are two or three hulks in there, a pair of matching frigates, a smattering of Thames barges being unloaded onto the dock walls, and a large dark ugly three-masted thing which stands over to one side of the dock, against a quay below a half-built harbor wall surrounded by half-built warehouses. On the aft deck of this final ship, waving across to them calmly and slowly, stands the dark still figure of Constable Horton.

  Where the ships outside the dock had sparked nostalgia and some sadness in Harriott, the one on which his constable stands conveys something altogether different. It is devoid of personality, of any poetry at all which might inspire a sensitive response. Its lines are stout and practical and ugly. One of the three masts is missing a top-piece, and what is left of the rigging hangs from the spars and masts in a drab, inconsequential sort of way. There are gaps in the rails around the deck, and patches of unpainted or untreated wood down the sides of the hull. There is no figurehead, and no name that Harriott can see. It flies no flags. It is functionally, as far as the maritime authorities are concerned, invisible. It is a non-ship.

  Close to the harbor wall at the stern of the dark ship the cutter comes to, and the crew throw ropes onto the quayside to allow a gangway to be put in place. Harriott and Graham, followed by a waterman-constable from the Antelope’s crew, walk across the plank to the dockside. Harriott feels an enormous weight of reluctance weighing him down as he steps onto the quay. The dark ship seems to exert an awful sense of itself.

  There is another plank connecting the waist of the dark ship to the quayside, and Harriott crosses it first (his old sea legs returning unnoticed, despite a growing tightness of his chest from the unaccustomed exercise), Graham close behind. The attending constable, at a nod from Harriott, waits on the quay.

  Constable Horton offers Harriott his hand for the last few feet but the old man knocks it away peremptorily, noticing that no such help is offered to Graham.

  Now they are on the ship Harriott can get a real feel for just how parlous the vessel’s condition is. The aft deck is a wobbly, shifty-looking thing, cracked and uncared for. The same effect is apparent across the waist of the ship, and there are fragments of broken wood at the edges of most things. Most of the wood is pale, dry, and obviously rotten. There are small piles of freshly packed provisions dotted here and there, apparently awaiting stowage. From belowdecks comes a regular metallic grating noise, in rhythm with the water in the dock. There is no one else aboard.

  Horton formally greets his two superiors, then beckons them down belowdecks via a wide and still-secure ladder. He lights a candle, and in the flickering light Harriott sees the internal structure of the ship for the first time. He feels a great sense of awe and wonder wash over him.

  The innards of the ship are split into three levels: two lower decks, and the hold. Crumbling ladders go up and down between them. Both lower decks are open, with limited space for guns at either end of the ship. This is a cargo ship, not a warship. The deck space is encircled by a deep wooden shelf, some three feet off the floor of the deck and some six feet deep. Something about the layout gives the sense that it has been adapted from a previous purpose. Perhaps it was a prize; it does remind Harriott of the ugly utility of many Dutch vessels.

  Ringing the inside of the deck in two rows, one above the deck floor and one above the wooden shelf, are iron loops bolted into the hull. Some are missing, and some are hanging loosely, but the ones that are still intact are as solid and timeless as rocks. From many of these loops hang ancient, dark iron chains which swing in time with the ship’s own movement. It is these chains knocking into each other which create the metallic sound Harriott heard outside.

  They climb down a ladder to the lower deck, which replicates the layout of the one above but is darker: the open deck, the space for guns, the large wooden shelf, the iron loops, the chains. Another ladder goes down to the dark hold. No one says anything. Horton’s candle picks up enormous moving shadows down on this lower deck, as if nighttime wraiths were themselves locked into the chains and the loops, wailing their captivity.

  They climb outside into the afternoon gloom, onto the waist, and John Harriott walks back toward the stern to investigate the captain’s quarters behind the quarterdeck. He walks through another compartment with iron rings in the walls and goes through a small door into the captain’s cabin.

  There are some signs of life in here. Constable Horton has followed him in, and stands in the door while Harriott sits down on the wooden bench and looks at the scattering of bottles and candles which litter the floor. The constable indicates something carved into the wood alongside the bed. It looks like four letters superimposed upon each other.

  “P-T-S-I?” Harriott asks.

  “That’s my guess, yes, sir,” says Horton.

  “This is a slave ship,” says Harriott, to no one in particular, perhaps to himself.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Graham steps into the cabin, which now seems inordinately crowded with three men in it.

  “My God, I thought we’d seen the last of these,” he says. “Five years since the Act, and I imagined they’d all been scuppered or repurposed by now.”

  “Not this one, sir,” says Constable Horton. “In actual fact, not many of them were scuppered. Most are being used for some kind of trade, though I’m told these ships were never intended to last more than ten years. But so far, this one’s been left alone.”

  His intonation suggests a question, and Graham asks it.

  “Why not this one, Horton?”

  “It’s the Zong, sir.”

  John Harriott looks at him, open-mouthed, and then lets out a single, disbelieving ha!

  “Are you sure, Horton?” Graham asks, his urban poise replaced by an excitement and urgency which Harriott at once recognizes and misses from himself. All he feels is the old torpor returning to his bones, part exhaustion, part horror. Not this, my Lord. Surely not this.

  “Yes, sir, quite sure,” Constable Horton says to Graham. “I know several of the people here, and they have traced its history. It was to be turned into a hulk; these old slavers make good hulks provided some more room is made for English tastes. They got almost 450 slaves on here on that . . . last voyage, in a space for a dozen English families.”

  “So why hasn’t it been hulked?” asks Harriott.

  “Somebody bought it. Three months ago.”

  “Who? Who bought it?”

  “I’m still waiting for the papers to appear, but I’ve got a physical description of the main buyer. And there’s something else. He paid with Potosí pieces of eight.”

  “P-T-S-I,” says Harriott, and Constable Horton looks pleased at the speed of his thought.

  “Yes, sir. Precisely.”

  Harriott leans back against the wooden wall of the benighted vessel. The Zong. In the Lord’s name, the Zong. Here in Sheerness, this close to London, this damned vessel of Liverpool. How the hell had it ended up here? The cursed slave ship, the spur to abolitionist rage, the catalyst for laws that had banned slave trading (though not slave ownership) in the British Empire. They’d slept there, on those awful wooden racks and beneath them, their faces up against the underside of the deck or the shelf above, more slaves lying below them, their women and children amassed on the floor at their heads, chained and dying.

  And then one day, on that final voyage, a decision had been made and the ship’s crew had grabbed the sickest of them and had thrown them overboard out at sea. Almost two hundred of them. An insurance scam. They were no use to them ill on land, fetching a poor price or even dying before they got a chance to sell them. So they discarded them in order that they could claim full price against them. And when the Zong crept back into Liverpool and reported back to its owners, they disappeared into an office and began filling in the claim forms. Dead human beings, claimed on insurance.

  That had been thirty years ago. This empty vessel gave no clue to its history. Nothing breathed in its wood. It
had no business at all being here. But yet here it was, as if nothing could kill it off, as if the memories of what it had done were sustaining it into permanent existence. Any emotional resonance that remained was inside the heads of those with the imagination to picture the scenes which played out on this death-ship. Yet the resonance is there.

  Harriott is not a sentimental man. He holds no firm views on slavery. Having traveled extensively in America, he has seen how hard it is to find suitable farming labor, and as a good practical Christian sincerely believes that a slave with a humane God-fearing owner is better off than a free man running with the Godless, cannibalizing savages on the dark continent. In this he is the same as a great many important men in London, not least the brother of the Prince Regent himself (the Regent’s views, if he holds any, are not known).

  But Harriott is also a man whose personal history encapsulates entire worlds, who has encountered more races and more cultures than perhaps any man in London. Harriott values life, even the life of a poor, dying Negro out on one leg of the dread Triangular Trade, and for a while the wails of the children, the moaning of the women and the sickening flat rage of the enslaved men fill his head, and he sees their black faces plunging into the waves, their black limbs pointing up toward the sky, and dread, slack-jawed sea creatures plowing toward them, mouths opening wide. It was as clear and as awful as a gigantic painting.

  And here, in this cabin, had sat the captain who had made the decision to throw those dark, damned creatures into the waters.

  “Potosí pieces of eight,” says Graham at last, the first to struggle out of the imagined scenes which are playing out in their heads. “You imply that is significant. I confess I do not see it.”