by Trevor Hoyle
At long last – and about time too – Frank Kersh has it made.
THE VOYAGE OUT
1
The wooden gangplank was scored with deep ruts. Saraheda Cawdor caught the heel of her shoe in one and nearly tripped. The strip of fetid green water below looked uninviting, to say the least. A foul stench rose up from rotted food and other garbage thrown overboard from the ships provisioning in Plymouth harbour. And there were suspicious-looking brown objects floating in it too that she didn’t dare examine too closely.
A few yards behind her, Jefferson Cawdor, loaded down with tied and knotted bundles, a leather valise under one arm, a rolled sheaf of architect’s drawings under the other, could only look on helplessly.
‘Daniel, watch for your mother!’ he cried out to his son in alarm.
At the top of the gangplank, the nine-year-old boy turned and held out his hand. His mother grasped it gratefully. Lifting the hem of her coarse broadloom skirt, she unwedged her heel and tottered the final few paces, landing in an ungraceful heap on the deck of the Salamander.
Saraheda didn’t care for her lost dignity. At least she was safely on board and not in that foul, stinking privy – for that’s what it smelt like.
She and her husband piled their possessions in a spare corner. There was hardly a square foot of free space anywhere: bales, barrels, chests, trunks, and all manner of goods and chattels covered the sloping deck. There were wire cages with chickens, and three pigs in a slatted wooden container. From a lower deck she heard the mournful mooing of cows. Were these for the voyage, Saraheda wondered, or as breeding stock in the New World?
‘You’d best stay here,’ Cawdor said, ‘while I go ashore for the rest of it. And keep an eye on my drawings and prints. Without them I’ll be back to stonemasonry!’ He stood aside for a seaman bent double under a brass-bound chest, and disappeared down the gangplank.
‘Daniel, stay close!’ Saraheda warned her son, who was already searching round with the gleam of exploration in his eyes. The vessel seemed to her like a helter-skelter madhouse. Men hung high above from ropes. Officers in stiff-collared uniforms shouted and gesticulated from the bridge. Supplies swung overhead on block and tackle. All this clamour and confusion of preparing for a long sea voyage was new and strange: Saraheda had visions of her son vanishing into the wooden bowels of the ship, never to be seen again.
It must surely calm down, she hoped, when they set sail. Three months of this mayhem couldn’t be endured.
‘Mother, where do we sleep?’ Daniel inquired. He had clambered up on a bale for a better look. ‘Are there proper beds, with pillows and covers? How do you stop rolling out? All this stuff!’ he exclaimed, gazing about. ‘It’s a wonder we don’t sink.’
‘Please, Daniel. I ask one favour of you. Don’t talk of sinking.’
Saraheda made room to sit on a wooden cask, and then changed her mind. The cask stank of pickled herrings. She found another place to sit, fanning herself. ‘Your father has told me in great detail about the depths of the vast and mighty Atlantic. Deeper, he says, than the highest mountains. With large fish and all manner of strange creatures. This diverts him. He thinks it wonderful and mysterious. But I do not. And I like even less any chatter about sinking into these depths, wonderful and mysterious though they might be.’
‘What creatures? With teeth and claws? And a slimy tail?’
Evidently his imagination was as excitable as his father’s. They were both, the pair of them, she thought, utter romantics. Jefferson looked upon the voyage to the New World as a great adventure – dismissed the perils, the vast unknown, with a wave of his hand. This was the eighteenth century! The age of discovery! What man alive could fail to be fired by it?
Saraheda liked to attend to more practical matters. She viewed life as a series of obstacles, of snares and traps, that had to be dealt with and overcome, sensibly and pragmatically. But this adventure was of a different magnitude. So far she hadn’t had to deal with anything of the size, not to mention the depth, of the Atlantic Ocean.
She said, ‘I imagine such creatures would find little boys a tasty tidbit.’
‘I’m too big to be little,’ Daniel said loftily, with the certainty of nine-year-old logic. He wrestled with an imaginary beast. ‘I’d kick its teeth out, throttle it, and swing it round by its tail.’
‘Standing on the waves, I expect,’ his mother said tartly. ‘For you swim, as I recall, like a stone. From top to bottom.’
Daniel scowled at her. She knew that he hated such niggling details to spoil his fantasy.
‘See if your father is coming. We must find our quarters and get our things stowed away. I heard someone say we sail on the evening tide.’
Already the sun was quite low in the sky. It had been a glorious August day, with soft breezes pushing white puffs of cloud across a limpid blue sky. Saraheda wondered about the climate of Virginia; she had heard it was as hot as Africa.
Daniel ran to look over the side, which he could just manage by standing on tiptoe. He had to dodge out of the way as two seamen in ragged shirts and grimy breeches charged along the narrow alleyway, lugging heavy coils of rope. One of them swore at him. Daniel knew it was an oath, though he didn’t know its meaning.
Just then, a short, stocky, round-shouldered man appeared up the gangway, bowed down with all manner of strange objects – wooden brackets, tripods, iron stanchions, plus a large sack that clinked metallically. He swayed and staggered under his load, face red and wet with perspiration. One of the larger objects – a tubular device three feet long, slung across his back – got jammed between the wooden posts. Daniel, quick to see the man’s dilemma, jumped forward, pushed the tube so that it pointed upward, and the man came on in a headlong rush, falling to his knees.
‘Phew, what a scrape! Thank you, boy – help me up, I’m done in!’
Back on his feet, the man reverently placed each of the objects on the deck, muttering to himself as he checked them off He was especially careful with the heavy, clinking sack, treating the contents as if they were finest bone china.
‘Holy Saints, nothing broken, I hope and pray. Delicate materials, these, my lad, worth their weight in gold.’
‘What are they?’ Daniel asked, goggle-eyed.
The man mopped his face and the shiny top of his head with a square of striped cloth, which looked to Saraheda like the remnants of an undergarment. She hid a smile behind her hand. He was younger than she had supposed – his premature baldness had deceived her into thinking him well on in years. Now she saw that he had pale, smooth, cherubic features and large brown eyes, which he blinked slowly and dreamily as he gazed around. Red hair sprouted above his ears and lay in long strands over Ms collar.
‘These, young sir,’ he informed Daniel, ‘are items of mechanical apparatus for studying the heavens. Some of which are of my own invention,’ he added proudly. Delving into the sack, he held up a circular dial made of copper, inscribed with numbers and symbols. ‘With this I can compute the velocity and magnitude of the fixed stars, and also predict their courses at any time of year.’
‘How many stars are there?’ Daniel asked.
‘Ah! Now then. How many would you say?’
‘Scores and scores.’ Daniel tried to think of a sufficiently large number. ‘Five hundred or more.’
The man looked smug. ‘So far we have observed and catalogued over seventeen hundred. And with my telescope here I can observe many hundred more. One day I hope to have a star named after me. Gryble’s Star. And to formulate new laws and processes, as my friend and mentor, John Michell.’
‘You will find many new stars in the Colonies,’ Daniel said. ‘All those on the farther side of the Earth.’
Gryble smiled. His face lit up like a full moon.
‘Perhaps some,’ he conceded. ‘But you must remember that the Earth turns upon an axis, so that we view all parts of the heavens available to us in this hemisphere. And furthermore –’
It seemed to Sarah
eda that Gryble was about to embark on a treatise. She cut in. ‘Mr Gryble, sir, we have to find our quarters and stow our belongings. Will you explain these matters to my son, Daniel, at some later time? We have many weeks of shipboard life in front of us, and I imagine many long days to fill. He is much interested, I can see.’
‘Holy Saints, madam, I run away with myself. Attend to your mother, boy – Daniel, is it? We’ll have ample opportunity for discourse.’
The ship was almost prepared. Already most of the supplies on deck had been taken below. High in the rigging, men were unfurling the vast yardage of canvas sails, which cracked and boomed as the breeze caught them, blotting out the sky.
The Salamander began to strain at the leash, every inch of her, it seemed to Saraheda, creaking and groaning like a soul in torment. On the middle deck, where they were shown their cubicle, the noise was so great she thought the walls were about to split and briny water come rushing in.
As they made their belongings secure in various lockers and crannies, she said to her husband reprovingly, ‘I thought you said sea-voyaging was a quiet and soothing recreation? What with all this racket, we’ll have to stuff our ears in order to sleep!’
‘Not once at sea,’ said Cawdor, who had sailed twice before, to Ireland. ‘When the ship is in her natural element and running free before the wind, she’ll quiet down. It’s very soothing, I promise. You’ll sleep sweetly. Better than with a dose of laudanum.’
She didn’t say anything, but privately Saraheda was appalled by their dingy, cramped quarters. She could, quite literally, touch the slanting walls with her arms not fully extended. The bed (so called) was a wooden frame fastened to the floor, with a piece of dirty canvas hooked to each corner. Daniel’s was a straw pallet which took up the rest of the floor, and so had to be stowed away when not in use to get the door open. There was no illumination. Candles were not permitted, due to the danger of fire. With the door shut, it was very nearly pitch-dark, suffocatingly airless, and warm as an oven.
And the smell. The smell was like no other stench. Worse than rotting carcasses. Or a pig’s boudoir. In fact she tried and failed to identify its several components. A mixture of slaughterhouse and cesspit was her nearest approximation. Within minutes it seemed to have infiltrated every pore, so that she would never be clean again.
That was something else that plagued her. There was nowhere to wash. Not a bucket nor a basin, nor pump for fresh water. Every drop they needed, for drinking and ablutions, Saraheda now stupidly realised, had to be brought aboard and preciously hoarded in casks.
She was thunderstruck by yet another thought: Where in damnation was the privy in this creaking, straining, slanting world?
‘Come on,’ Cawdor said. ‘Let’s not miss our leave-taking. We’ll not taste the delicate airs and see the green fields of old England ever again in this lifetime.’
He meant it kindly, as a valediction, and was astounded to see his wife burst into tears.
‘What’s the trouble? Hey, hey, hey – don’t weep, woman, we’re getting away from the close-minded bigots that persecute us. Aren’t you glad?’
‘Oh yes,’ Saraheda sobbed. ‘Oh yes. I am. But it’s to the end of the world we’re voyaging, over an ocean filled with slimy monsters, and not a pot between us to piss in!’.
Cawdor roared with laughter. He hugged her to him in the cramped, airless cubicle. ‘Don’t fret, darling wife. They have a place called “the head” for the natural functions. You’ll not arrive in the New World with piles and constipation, I promise you.’
He laughed again, and hugged her until she felt her ribs creak, while Daniel shrank into the corner, reddening with embarrassment, wondering about how strange and childish were the actions of grown-up, adult people.
2
They went up on deck and leant against the bulwark, Daniel perched on a coil of rope, watching the jumbled roofs and rising smoky swirl of Plymouth ebb away. It was a soft, balmy evening, the air like velvet, and Saraheda had to clench her fists to check more convulsive sobs.
The last of Old England. From this moment they were exiles. Like others, of different faiths – Catholics, Baptists, the new Methodists – they were fleeing the vehement hatred that had caused houses to be burnt and people to be stoned to death in the streets. Theirs was the Telluric Faith, founded on Stonehenge and Glastonbury, a belief in the pantheistic truths from centuries before organised religion. Before even Christianity. It didn’t matter what religion, or what belief you held: providing it was different from the orthodox, that was reason enough, in this golden age of enlightenment, to condemn it and hound it out.
Saraheda had agreed with Jefferson that they must go. Though the tales she had heard of the Colonies were not comforting. Tribes of Red Indian savages, seven feet tall, with hair standing on end, attacked settlements, raiding and pillaging. There was even talk of rebellion by the existing settlers. Not a year ago, in December, a party had boarded a ship in Boston harbour and thrown the entire cargo of Indian tea into the bay. Someone called Patrick Henry, she had heard, had renounced the sovereign rule of George III over the thirteen colonies, saying he wasn’t just a Virginian, but an American, and declaring, ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’
Now they were leaving for this alien country. Of course they hoped for a better life – Jefferson passionately believed it had to be freer, more tolerant, after what they had endured during the last few years. What he didn’t know, and Saraheda was loath to tell him, just at present, was that (by her own reckoning) she was nine weeks pregnant.
Cawdor hoisted Daniel on to his shoulders and encircled his wife in his broad arm. The vessel was turning about, drawn towards the harbour entrance by lines trailing from longboats. The sun struck the sails and suffused them in glowing pink. They billowed out, like the rosy cheeks of a baby.
Saraheda glanced up at her husband. She could tell from the sparkle in his brown eyes beneath the heavy dark brows, from the upward tilt of his jaw, that the scene deeply satisfied him. He was a hard man to read usually, his expression sober and watchful, his emotions held in check. Now, the breeze ruffling the tangle of dark-brown hair that grew thick and ragged on his collar, he was gazing around with rapt intensity as if hoping to retain every last detail. All the passengers were up on deck. At the front half of the ship, marked off by a white line painted across the deck, were the poorer emigrants, travelling steerage. Here were the artisans and clerks and minor officials, plus some religious groups in drab, austere clothing. On the quarterdeck were the quality: gentlemen in coats of blue and scarlet, edged with brocade, wearing silken hose and powdered wigs. Their wives and daughters wore full dresses with delicately flounced lace chokers, and held parasols to shield their white skins from the sun’s rays.
Except one woman, standing alone, who wore a shawl of fine black lace thrown casually across her bare shoulders. She didn’t look to be of English origin, with her long mane of black hair and tawny complexion. At any rate, she must be of mixed parentage. Apart from her striking brown-skinned appearance, no English woman of her station would dare to be seen in public in such a state of nonchalant disregard for fashion and propriety.
A sharp dig in the ribs brought Cawdor back to his senses.
‘You should be more subtle in your ogling,’ Saraheda remarked dryly. ‘It’s a wonder she didn’t feel your eyes burning right through her.’
‘Looking never did any –’ Cawdor began with a boyish grin but, before he could finish, Daniel let out a yell.
‘Mr Gryble! Mr Gryble, you’re being robbed!’
A grimy-faced urchin of about eight or nine was on his hands and knees, rooting in Gryble’s sack. Gryble whirled round from the rail. He made a grab, but by then the boy was up and running, dodging lithely this way and that. With Daniel still on his shoulders, Cawdor stuck out his foot and the boy went arse over tip. Something clattered from his hands and rolled into a drainway.
Daniel leapt down to retrieve it, and as he did so the boy went
for him like a wild animal, spitting and snarling and kicking with mud-spattered feet. Daniel went down under the battery. The boy was a ragamuffin, bred and trained in the streets, and it was no contest. Cawdor hauled him off by the scruff. The boy wriggled and jerked like a marionette, letting fly with a string of foul abuse. Then sucked in his cheeks and gobbed in Cawdor’s face.
‘Throw him over the side!’ somebody called out. The passengers nearby were enjoying the commotion. Cawdor was tempted to take the advice. Instead he calmly wiped the spittle away, and then had to veer aside as the boy clawed at him with strangely misshapen hands. The knuckles were bent out of their natural form, jutting whitely, and he had an extra, sixth finger on the outside of each hand, like a withered hook.
‘Do you belong to anyone, boy, or are you a foundling?’ Cawdor asked.
‘Lemme down, lemme down!’
‘Not till I get an answer.’
‘I shit on yer mother’s grave. I piss on yer father’s memory. That’s yer answer.’
‘Give ’im the nine-tails!’ somebody shouted furiously. ‘Till he’s raw. That’ll teach ’im a jot of respect for his elders.’
Cawdor turned him upside down and, clamping the struggling boy’s ankles firmly in his fist, carried him across to the herring barrel, prised the lid off with his knife, and dropped him in.
‘Goddamnation, he’ll make the fish smell,’ a voice complained.
‘And I bet he’s pox-ridden,’ somebody muttered.
Saraheda was comforting a shaken Daniel, and wiping his bloody nose. Cawdor said, ‘Don’t coddle him. Next time he’ll have to fend for himself.’ But he was pleased to see that his son was dry-eyed, and looked more angry than scared. The boy was no namby-pamby weakling. And, at his age, Cawdor doubted whether he himself would have stood much of a chance against the six-fingered ruffian.