“What will they do?” I asked.
“The captain will tie a rope about this waist,” explained Stempel. “Lamb will be dropped into the sea and dragged by rope beneath the keel of the ship and brought up the other side.”
Mr. Hines had contentedly continued his meal and pointed his knife at me.
“On a ship this size, he will drown, if the barnacles don’t slice him to ribbons.”
I stood, taking up my plate and saw the other men staring at me in silence.
“No one blames you, lad,” said Hines. “They were all happy with this game.”
We were all called on deck to witness the keelhauling. Mr. Lamb was stripped of his clothing then bound around the waist. His legs were tethered to keep him from swimming. The long rope was looped over the ship’s stern and run to the other side. As the captain gave the order, Mr. Lamb was tossed over the larboard rail, while the men on the starboard side hauled as fast as their arms were able.
The hauling took an eternity. I could only imagine his body turning and twisting along the hull, beating over the keel, and then up again. Mercifully, Mr. Lamb was finally brought up the side, pulled over the rail and lowered onto the deck, still bound by the ropes.
He was dead. Seawater trickled from the corners of his blue lips. His face and torso were scarified by a hundred bleeding cuts. Captain Hearne examined the man, then looked about until his eyes fell on Mr. Brooks.
“Mr. Brooks,” said the captain in a firm voice, “I charge you with the responsibility of giving this man his burial and of disposing his possessions.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” replied Mr. Brooks.
In short order a piece of canvas was brought on deck, folded like a coarse pillow, and handed to Mr. Brooks. There was a cannonball resting on top of it. Twine and a large canvas needle were delivered by the purser, and also given to Mr. Brooks. The captain retired to his cabin, but Mr. Whitehead and Mr. Grimmel stood by observing.
“I’ve not had practice at this sort of thing,” remarked Mr. Brooks to Mr. Whitehead.
Mr. Grimmel stepped forward.
“Mr. Wren and I will assist you, Mr. Brooks.”
“I’m indebted to both of you,” said Brooks softly, not meeting our eyes.
The three of us crossed the twenty paces to where the body lay. Mr. Lamb’s skin was waxy, grey and livid. Mr. Brooks spread out the canvas beside the body.
“Place Mr. Lamb atop the canvas, sir,” directed Mr. Grimmel, “and lay the cannonball at his feet. Wrap the canvas snug about him and sew him up from the bottom.”
“Would you be kind enough to take hold of his legs, Mr. Wren?” asked Brooks.
The two of us laid the body onto the canvas. Mr. Brooks took the cannonball and positioned it carefully. With me holding the canvas ends firmly over the corpse, Mr. Brooks began to sew the material together, using broad stitches. The canvas was thick and unyielding, and I noticed that Mr. Brooks had twice impaled one of his fingers in an effort to drive the needle home. Slowly, Mr. Lamb’s body was enshrouded up to his chin.
“Sir, you will close his head but not the face, said Grimmel. “That last stitch goes through the nose, Mr. Brooks.”
“The nose?” repeated Mr. Brooks vaguely.
“Aye, sir. To make certain the man is not still alive.”
The task ended, a board was set up atop one of the larboard rails. Mr. Brooks and I then lifted Mr. Lamb onto the board, held by two ordinaries.
“Wait!” declared Mr. Brooks suddenly. “We must say a word for him and a prayer.”
“I knew him, sir,” offered Mr. Grimmel. He stepped forward and rested his hand lightly upon Mr. Lamb’s chest. “Mr. Lamb served ably and dutifully in the Dutch Wars. He was faithful to King and Country. His nature was at times hard, yet I never saw him decline to come to the aid of a fellow sailor in battle or on shore. I saw him once save a man from being carried overboard in high seas, when, at his own risk, he took hold of this fellow’s hair and pulled him aboard. I recall him twice being wounded by French guns, yet keeping to his station. Now we will deliver him up into the forgiving arms of the good Lord and hereafter keep his memory.”
Mr. Brooks recited the “Our Father” in a subdued voice. The board was then tilted and Mr. Lamb was sent overboard.
Mr. Brooks and I went down to the lower deck, past the rank stench of the manger, to an area where a large number of footlockers were neatly lined up toe to toe. Holding his lamp up, Mr. Brooks read the names roughly inscribed on them until he came to “Mr. Lamb.”
The two of us took hold of the locker and dragged it to the upper deck. The bright light exposed all the nicks, scratches and flaws of the chest and gave it the aspect of a gnarled old man who had been snatched by his heels from his cozy bed.
The sell-off was announced and a group of sailors assembled on the deck in a solemn hush. There was a glass bottle, boots, a deck of greasy game cards, stockings, a hair brush, two jaundiced old whale bone pipes nibbled to the nub; a bundle of faded scarves, a balding seal skin jacket, several knit caps, a fragment of scrimshaw, a pleasantly sketched picture of a woman, a tiddly suit and a handful of coppers. This sad little troop represented all of the worldly riches of this gentleman’s estate. Without their owner, they were as worthless as dust.
Mr. Brooks seemed at a loss as to where to begin the auction, then lifted the tiddly suit up by its sulking shoulders.
“A shore suit, gentlemen,” Mr. Brooks called out, “is our first article.”
“Two pence!” someone called back.
One by one the articles were sold off. The sum total was less than a pound. Mr. Lamb had no family or relations, so the money was held in trust with the captain, intended for the Sailor’s Home.
Order on board had been restored. The keelhauling had a powerful effect on the men. Mr. Brooks, however, thereafter seemed a much-altered man. He said little to anyone beyond the necessary orders of the day. I would frequently find him staring vacantly out at the water like a brooding gull.
I believe he had cut a truce of sorts—with himself, with me, and with all men aboard.
Chapter 8
The Carcass
Our first sight of land appeared as little more than a string of lint on the horizon. For two days Mr. Grimmel shadowed the landfall at a safe distance. On the third day we edged closer as we neared Fuzhou Bay. A long column of clouds appeared at sunrise on peaceable march eastward in an otherwise flawless sky, suffused with color around their edges and deep into their bosoms; lavender, then lavender damasked with pink and fiery gold. At the head of this army the clouds on point had their bellies slit open as if by a sharp saber, and a rainy mist was falling like a ruby curtain toward the earth, which was roasting with reds and yellows. As if to verify my own delight, I glanced about the rail at the awed faces of my comrades, all of us lit by this marvelous palette.
Sharply rising mountains soon appeared, sweeping pinnacles chasing toward the horizon. One hue would settle over them and vanish so subtly that the eye had not time enough to take it in before the next was unfolding and already dissipating. Finally the green stayed, set off by the silky black shadows of the beaches.
In composition it was a sunrise unlike any I’d seen in England. And for an instant my heart rejoiced with the anticipation that my dreary world had new expectations. I thought of Lord Douglas’s advice that I must succumb to my new life. The spectacle before me was a door bidding me to enter.
“That’s China, Mr. Wren,” whispered Mr. Heath, who stood smiling beside me at the rail. “Fuzhou Bay. Isn’t she a sight?”
A cry came down from the lookout.
“Smoke two points off the larboard!”
We followed our noses and discovered that the smoke was coming from a ship, which was beating lifelessly against a jagged line of rocks near shore. The belly was smoldering, heaving black locks into the wind. The exposed hull was shot through with cannonballs.
I was ordered to the bow where Captain Hearne, Mr. Whitehead and Lord
Douglas stood.
“There is your Lark, Lord Douglas,” said Hearne in a calm voice. “Hellish bad luck, my lord.”
Greyson was peering through the captain’s glass with a look of rising anguish.
“We must see what’s aboard her, Captain,” said he, snapping the glass closed. “We’ll need a boat.”
“What was aboard her?”
“The details for Amoy’s fortresses,” declared Greyson with growing urgency. “We must get them. I will lead the search party myself.”
Hearne’s eye swept cautiously about the bay. There was not a ship in sight.
“Very well, before we abandon this adventure,” said Hearne, “you’ll have your look.”
“The mission will not end here, Captain,” replied Greyson hotly. “Plans or not, we will press on.”
Captain Hearne called out the leadsmen to guide the Sovereign as close as we could to the Lark without scraping bottom. A boat was lowered and Greyson and six other men began to row toward the smoking ship. With one of the men remaining in the boat, Greyson and the others climbed aboard the vessel with grappling hooks and disappeared within. We waited as half of an hour passed with no sign of Greyson and his party.
“We are in an exposed position here,” Hearne remarked. “We may require those royals after all, Mr. Whitehead. We may need to send every spare man aloft.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” responded Whitehead. “Mr. Wren, you’ll get your first taste of the yard arm today.”
At that moment a cry came down from the lookout.
“Ship on the horizon!”
Hearne turned his glass on the horizon.
“Could be a trader, sir.”
“That’s no trader, Mr. Whitehead,” Hearne shot back. “She’s a warship, a frigate,” Hearne replied, adding with a cynical note: “Our Dutch friends.”
“Look, sir—she runs!” said Whitehead.
“Nay, she doesn’t run,” said Hearne, lowering the glass. “Frigates are the eyes of the squadron. Her duty is to find the enemy and report back. She’s on us, Lieutenant!”
A pistol shot was given to warn the boarding party to return. The man in the boat heeded the shot.
Mr. Whitehead sounded the order to prepare to sail. Within seconds our topmen, including myself, were scaling the trembling ratlines. Higher and higher I climbed, hand over hand, seeing only the next fading rung before my fingers.
“No stumbling, lads!” Whitehead sang out to the climbers. “Keep steady! Your necks depend upon it!”
With my whole being tremulous with fear, I reached the lofty royals, which were nearly beyond my shaky grasp. I had seen this operation a thousand times on all the other sails and understood the task. The sail booms on the royals had to be unhitched at the pole hoops, swung out and secured. This required two men. The others would shin out on the boom, and then fan out on the foot-rope; on orders, they would slip the gaskets and we would unfurl the sail. I breathlessly watched as my valiant comrades took hold of the yardarm and began to fan out along the swaying ropes. The foot-rope dipped and swayed, would draw itself taut of a sudden, then go limp again, with dreadful volatility. One blunder would mean annihilation. The fright inside me acted like a knife, slitting the cords of my brain to the rest of my body, so that my limbs seemed helplessly independent. The men on deck far below me were as featureless as sparrows.
“Move out, my friend,” said one of the topmen behind me in a kindly voice. “Lean into the boom and rest yourself by your armpits, then reach your feet out until you feel the braid of the rope. Don’t lift your feet away from it. Slide your feet along.”
I took hold of the yardarm and pulled myself up to the armpits, as he instructed. I then reached out my naked feet to find the rope, but found myself flailing wildly.
I shouted to the fellow behind me in shameless panic.
“I can’t find the rope! I can’t find it!”
“Hold steady, lad,” he replied.
Finally, as if of its own accord, the rope found my feet and I followed the others out toward the mast. A second pistol shot sounded, and I glimpsed over to see that only a few of the men who’d made up boarding party had returned to the boat. Greyson was not among them.
When we were all in position one of the men shouted down that all was ready.
A third shot sounded below. Minutes passed and I kept my cheek straining into the yard to keep my balance. I was afraid to look to the right or the left. When I finally did, I saw Greyson and his men rowing back to the Sovereign.
Jacob Hearne was a man of moods and extremities. An absence of occupation was his great enemy and boredom his hell. In war, when the drums are beating high and the battle flags unfurled and the howl and hiss of combat is all about; in this unbearable, compressed air men can become slaves to the furies of passion. Jacob Hearne was no slave, but met those passions with a tranquil heart, for as the pressure of the atmosphere rose, the weight of his courage increased by the pound inch. His voice never sounded fear nor rose in emotion, but became the clarion call to all under his command. This was Hearne at his most noble.
Out of the haze on the horizon seven warships appeared, square away, and tacking down hard against the ocean breezes. Yards of sea shot up beneath their bows. Behind the leading frigates, three trim third-raters were backing the advance.
“Pack on sail, boys!” bellowed Hearne. “We need every inch of muslin! Let fall the main sails!”
One, two, three—main, mizzen and fore mains fell and cracked in glorious procession without a jam-hitch or a bight. The Sovereign tugged forward and gained speed.
“They close on us!” a voice somewhere behind me cried out.
The order was given and suddenly I could hear the pop of canvas all about me. The spread of the sails blinded me to everyone below. A shot from the eager frigate sounded and a cannonball ripped a hole in our topsail. I did not see them, but three more cannonballs went ringing past me, by size, sounding out like notes on a trumpet. I could hear chaotic voices hard by against the beating of the wind and sail.
“Scoff the iron, men!” Hearne shouted from somewhere. There was a lull as we waited Hearne’s order. Then it came: “Royals—Let fall!”
We slipped the gaskets from the bunting and shoved the sails over, leaning out head over heels by our waists. The newborn sails swarmed and roiled and gasped wildly in the drafts, then, miraculously, they snapped and sneered. Downy sail swallowed me. More calmly now, I edged back to the mast.
I could not see the blue sea or the sky, but I knew both were rushing past, for the Sovereign lifted her prow defiantly and took flight on angels’ wings. Through a flapping wedge in the sheets I descried one of the third-raters striving to cut us off. We shouldered past her. As we passed her prow, Captain Hearne raked her bow with a clean volley, shattering her figurehead and severing two of her jibs.
The Dutch squadron sloughed in our wake, receding all the while until they disappeared into the broth.
Chapter 9
Amoy
All senior officers were summoned to the captain’s cabin, along with Lord Douglas. I was ordered to attend and make a report of the meeting, which hinted its seriousness. Nothing had been salvaged from Lord Douglas’s expedition to the Lark. Hearne was impatiently rapping his fingers against the table as everyone assembled. His eyes were as hard as flint. Before Greyson could take his chair, Hearne was on him.
“My lord, you boarded the Lark, a poor choice to begin with, and then you had the temerity to ignore our warning shots.”
“I didn’t ignore them, Captain,” replied Greyson in a deferential voice. “I didn’t hear them.”
“You alone?” pressed Hearne. “Three shots!”
“I alone, yes, Captain. I was below deck.”
“Your delay nearly caused the lives of this crew, sir,” said Hearne. “This voyage is your wager, but we will not—”
“The King, sir, is—”
Hearne hammered his fist against the table, cutting Greyson off.
“I comprehend you, Captain,” returned Greyson, but his resoluteness of spirit did not at all appear shaken. One sensed wheels were turning and calm stratagems hatching. He was a man of business indeed.
“You will be confined to your quarters until further notice.”
Lord Douglas looked about the room at the others, then offered a genteel bow.
“Very well, Captain.”
Greyson left, and after a moment’s silence in which Captain Hearne collected himself, he leaned his head into his hand and spoke.
“This fellow has become a bone in my throat, gentlemen,” said Hearne. “I’m too old a dog to be diplomatic. I have always believed that truth cuts the straight and narrow.” He lifted his eyes to us with a glint of embarrassment. “But a captain should always hold his tongue. I apologize to you all, gentlemen.”
“No need to, sir,” declared Mr. Brooks.
“Thank you, Mr. Brooks,” replied Hearne. “Well, friends, the maps to the placement of the fortresses of Amoy were with the Lark and are now not available to us. What say you if we abandon this mission and hunt higher ground?”
Mr. Whitehead was the first to speak.
“I believe, Captain, it would not weigh in our favor to concede.”
“What would we concede?”
“Captain, we are all sailors,” answered Whitehead. “We appreciate our position, but we adhere to our professional conduct. At this point I believe we would be contravening orders.”
“I agree,” said Grimmel. “They’d go hard on our crew. Lord Douglas is a tenacious fellow, Captain. He’d see to that.”
“It is conceivable, gentlemen, that we will be walking into a trap, you understand.”
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