by Ann Swinfen
I grabbed my medicine satchel.
‘Someone is hurt,’ I said. ‘I have to go. I may be able to help.’
Simon grabbed my arm. ‘There is a surgeon in the crew,’ he said. ‘There’s no need for you to risk your life up there.’
I shook his hand off. ‘I’ve seen him,’ I said. ‘I would not place high hopes in his skill.’
Master Holme looked angry. ‘The Company would never employ a man who was incompetent.’
‘He may be competent,’ I said, ‘when he is sober, but I have observed that he is a little too fond of his beer. There is no need for anyone else to come. I am only going to see if I am needed. That was the cry of a man badly injured.’
Before they could stop me, I was through the door and shut it behind me. I leaned back against it, my eyes closed, and drew a deep breath. In front of the others I could pretend to calmness, but my heart was pounding so hard I though I should see it fluttering my doublet, and the palms of my hands were sweating. I rubbed them on my breeches. I could not hold my instruments or open a jar of salve if my hands were damp.
I climbed the few steps up to the deck, for the cabin was sunk about four feet below it, while another shallow flight led up to the captain’s cabin above.
‘What are you doing?’ The pilot officer grabbed me by the shoulders and was about to throw me back down the steps.
‘I am a physician,’ I gasped, twisting away from him. ‘I’ve come to see if I am needed.’
‘Oh, in that case . . .’ He pointed to where two men were carrying another to the far side of the deck and laying him down in the shelter of the pinnace that was lodged there.
‘Jos Needler is hit,’ he said. ‘Those bastards are firing scrap shot, not balls. They aim to kill us, but keep the ship intact, so they can seize it. Jos stopped a fistful of broken iron. I doubt there’s much you can do for him.’
‘Your own surgeon?’ I said. ‘I would not trespass where I’m not wanted.’
He gave a sharp bark of laughter. ‘Nothing but a b’yer lady coward. Locked himself in his cabin. Never been to sea before. Never seen fighting. You go right ahead, Master Alvarez, and welcome.’
I wasted no time, but scrambled across the deck to where the injured man had been laid. Some of our own rigging had been brought down, and the deck was strewn with debris. Instinctively I ducked as a cannon ball shot over my head and landed in the sea beyond the ship. It seemed the pirates were using balls as well as scrap.
The sailor Jos was bleeding badly when I reached him. His left side and thigh were a mass of torn cloth, blood, and fragments of metal embedded in his flesh. The two men who had laid him here were gazing at him helplessly.
‘Here, you,’ I said, ‘dip me up a bucket of sea water and fetch a mug of small ale. And you,’ I pointed to the other man, ‘lift his head and shoulders.’
I unbuckled my satchel and took out my flask of poppy syrup. When the first sailor returned, I reached out my hand for the ale without looking up, then added a generous dose of poppy syrup.
Jos was wild-eyed and moaning, but I slipped my own arm under his shoulders, while the sailor held him up.
‘Now, Jos,’ I said, ‘this will ease the pain a little, then I am going to remove these bits of metal those bastards have peppered you with. Do you understand?’
He nodded, and made a valiant effort to hold back his moans. As he drank the dose from the cup I held, his teeth clattered again the rim.
The whole ship shuddered as another volley was fired. The bucket slopped over and I found I was kneeling in water, but there was no time to worry about that.
I fumbled in my satchel until my hand closed over my larger tweezers.
‘I’m going to start removing the metal now,’ I said. ‘It will hurt, but remember, each time you feel it hurt, it’s one more piece gone. Right?’
He did his best to give me a smile. ‘Right, doctor.’
‘I need you both to hold him still,’ I told the sailors. ‘He’s bound to flinch. He can’t help it.’
I began at once. Each piece I pulled out, I set aside in a small pile. It would give Jos some satisfaction to see it all. If he recovered. About ten pieces came out easily, then I moved on to those more deeply embedded. In some cases I had to enlarge the lesion with a surgical knife in order to catch hold of the piece with my tweezers. One of the sailors found it too difficult to watch and fled to vomit over the side of the ship, but by now Jos had swooned away with pain and shock, helped by the poppy juice.
Finally there was only one fragment left. It was long and thin, and had penetrated deeply into the man’s side. I wiped my face with the back of my hand, and realised I had smeared myself with blood. Both my hands were covered with it.
‘It looks like a dagger blade,’ the remaining sailor whispered. ‘Has it killed him?’
‘Not yet,’ I said grimly, though I did not like Jos’s pallor and the ragged sound of his breathing. ‘Pray that it has not penetrated his lung.’
He took me at my word and closed his eyes, his lips moving in a silent prayer. I drew the bucket of sea water close and laid a fist full of clean bandage beside it, for when I drew this vicious spike out, a rush of blood would follow. I eased the opening a little wider, then gripped with my tweezers and pulled. At first it resisted me, then it came out smoothly, like the dagger blade it resembled. Blood poured out over my hands and on to the deck. At once I swabbed the place with cloths soaked in sea water, for sea water has curiously curative properties.
‘I shall need to stitch this,’ I said.
‘Here.’ The voice came from behind me.
I twisted round and saw Simon kneeling on the deck, holding out my suturing needle, ready threaded.
I nodded my thanks. I did not know how long he had been there, or when he had taken the needle and thread from my satchel, but he had saved me precious moments. I wiped the blood away again from the wound, then began to stitch it as swiftly as I could, but carefully. When I was finished, I laid my ear on Jos’s chest, to listen to his lungs. As I did so, I realised that the noise of cannon fire had ceased, but I had no time to think of that.
There were still the remaining wounds to clean, though no others needed stitching. Then I salved the whole area liberally, and wound bandages first round Jos’s chest and side, then round his upper leg. The sailor who had been sick had returned and helped the other two lift and turn the injured man until I was satisfied that the dressings were firm and would stay in place.
‘Can you carry him to somewhere clean and quiet?’ I said. ‘What he needs now is rest. He should recover, provided that filthy metal carried no infection.’
‘Our quarters a’nt too bad, doctor.’ It was the sailor who had helped me throughout. He looked a little green about the mouth, and he was clearly relieved it was over.
‘I’ll come and see him in an hour or two, when the poppy syrup has worn off. Here.’ I bundled up the pieces of metal in a cloth. ‘He might like to see these, to know just how much of the enemy’s shot he stopped.’
I got to my feet with a groan. My knees were numb with kneeling so long, my hose and breeches were soaking. I looked around in surprise. ‘Where are the pirates?’
‘One sunk, the rest fled,’ Simon said. ‘And our men are repairing the small amount of damage they did to us.’
We watched the two sailors carry the injured man away, then I plunged my bloody hands into the bucket and rubbed them hard until they were clean.
‘Why did you keep the fragments of metal for him?’
‘It was something I learned when my father and I treated the wounded soldiers after the siege of Sluys,’ I said. ‘Strange as it seems, they liked to keep the pieces of metal or shot that wounded them.’
Simon shook his head. Like me, he clearly found it strange.
‘Will he live?’
I tipped the blood-stained water into the sea. ‘I think so. It was a nasty injury and he’ll have scars all down his side, but I think he will survive.’
‘No thanks to the ship’s surgeon,’ he said.
There was some damage to the Bona Esperanza, but it was not serious, nor any impediment to our continuing.
‘We will sail on at once for the Lofoten Islands,’ Captain Turnbull said. ‘We can carry out our repairs there. I want to be well away from this part of the sea, in case those devils have more friends nearby.’
The sailors were soon scurrying to replace a shredded foresail and to make a jury rig where the yard of one of the topsails was broken. Within less than an hour we were making our way swiftly northward again. The cannon were withdrawn, the gun ports fastened, and down on the gun deck the gunners and their boys were setting up fresh powder kegs and crates of shot, in case we should be attacked again.
My fellow passengers were loquacious in their relief, chattering and grinning, as if the frightening encounter had been a game, but I remembered the same almost hysterical reaction after the battle off Gravelines two years before. For myself, I found I had begun to tremble, so I took myself off to my cabin to wait quietly until I needed to visit Jos.
By the time I made my way to the sailors’ quarters, we were speeding north again under full sail, as if nothing had happened. Jos was the only man seriously injured. Two had been struck when pieces of the topsail yard feel on the deck, but they were merely bruised. Another said he had been grazed by a musket ball, but he had wrapped a rag around the place himself and declared he needed no physician’s help. The pirates had never come near enough to make accurate use of their muskets, so he had simply been the unlucky victim of a random shot. Their cannon had also been of inferior quality and shorter range than ours. The other ships in our fleet had fired on the two smaller pirate vessels, which had fled as soon as they realised how well armed we were. The leading ship, which had attacked us, had been sunk by two of our cannon balls which had struck it below the waterline, but I had been so absorbed in physicking Jos that I had been unaware of what was happening.
As I made my way along the gun deck to the far end where Jos lay in a hammock, I heard the pilot officer speaking to the master gunner.
‘Brutes,’ he said. ‘The two remaining ships never stopped to pick up their own men from the water.’
‘All drowned, then?’
‘We saved three. We’ll keep them in chains till we return to London. They can face trial there. Two are Danish, but one is a damned rogue Englishman.’
‘If I was them,’ the gunner said, ‘I’d rather have drowned at once out here than gone back to that.’
I walked on, feeling sick. I knew what would happen to the men. They would be chained to posts driven into the river at Wapping and left till they had been covered by high tide three times. I agreed with the gunner. Better to have drowned at once, and swiftly.
Jos was awake, but still drowsy from the poppy syrup.
‘This is all looking clean,’ I said, ‘but I will keep an eye on it for the next few days, until I can take the stitches out. You are to stay here and not work until I give you leave.’
‘Stitches?’ He looked fuddled.
‘I had to stitch up the worst injury, but it has come together cleanly. You were lucky. That shard of metal just missed your lung.’
‘Would that have killed me, doctor?’
‘Aye,’ I said briskly, ‘but it did not. You will be whole and fit for work in a week.’
He gave a rueful grin. ‘Officer won’t let me lie abed till then.’
‘I’ll tell him. Better to have you a fit man than a dead one.’
‘Aye.’ He laughed then. ‘Mebbe he’ll see the sense in that.’
Like all the sailors, he slept in a hammock slung from the beams that supported the deck overhead. It was hardly a luxurious bed for a wounded man, but he was used to it, so I supposed it would do him no harm. I went in search of the sailor who had physicked himself.
‘Let me see what lies under that dirty rag,’ I said, pointing at his right arm.
He was a surly fellow and snarled at me. ‘I don’t need no doctor. Keep your hands off me.’
‘Do you want to lose that arm? Because from the filth on that rag you have tied round it, you’ll be infected by tomorrow and dead in three days’ time.’
That shocked him (though I may have exaggerated somewhat) and he held out his arm reluctantly. I unwound the torn piece of cloth, which looked as though it might have been used to wipe out a gun barrel or something worse. I handed it to a passing boy.
‘Take this to the cook and tell him to put it on the fire.’
He was so surprised that he ran off to do what he was told without a word.
The arm was already inflamed from elbow to shoulder.
‘You’re a fool,’ I said. ‘That musket ball did not just graze you. It’s embedded in your flesh.’
A guilty look flashed in his eyes and I realised he was one of those who will do anything, even pretend they are not injured, for fear of falling into the hands of a physician or (more often) a surgeon.
‘Don’t you take a saw to me!’ He snatched his arm away. ‘I seen that before. And seen a man die of it, after. I can get it out with my knife.’
‘Are you left-handed?’ I demanded. ‘I thought not. And if you start poking about in that wound with your filthy knife, which I don’t suppose has been washed for the last ten years, you’ll give yourself gangrene for sure.’
‘You doctors. You’re all the same. Nothing but butchers. You’ll say I have gangrene and get out your saws.’ He cupped his hand protectively over the wound.
So that was the problem.
‘Of course I am not going to amputate.’
I was tired and I knew I sounded exasperated. ‘Sit down on that keg over there and I’ll remove the musket ball. You are lucky. It hasn’t gone deep, so it should not have done any damage to the muscle, but it will soon go bad if it is left there.’
Glowering at me suspiciously, he sat down on the powder keg and I got out my forceps. The musket ball was too large for the smaller tweezers.
‘Now, are you brave enough to keep still for me, or shall I call a couple of your fellows to hold you down?’
‘I a’nt no coward!’
He held out his arm, but I noticed he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. I smiled to myself. I reckoned I had taken his measure fairly accurately. Fortunately, the ball had not gone deep and I was able to seize hold of it without too much probing. It slithered out and fell to the floor, rolling away into a dark corner. He gave one involuntary grunt, but that was all. I cleaned and salved the wound, and decided it did not need stitching.
When I had bound it with a clean bandage, I said, ‘You can open your eyes now. I have done.’
His eyelids flicked up, and he gave me a sheepish look. ‘Is that all?’
‘That’s all. Keep it clean and it should heal in a few days. If it troubles you, come and find me.’
‘Where’s the devil that did it?’
‘The musket ball? It rolled away over there.’ I pointed.
As I made my way from the gun deck, I saw that he was on his hands and knees, searching the dark corner.
It took us four more days to reach the Lofoten Islands. The wind was steady, the weather fair, and we sighted no more pirates, though we did see one Scottish merchant vessel sailing south. The Bona Esperanza and the Scotch ship hove to, and her captain came aboard our ship. He and Captain Turnbull were in conference for nearly an hour, dining in the captain’s cabin. As he left, the Scottish captain bowed and shook Turnbull’s hand.
‘I thank ye for the warning about yon pirates,’ he said. ‘I’ll be on the lookout. Forbye, I’ll head further west instead of keeping to the Norway coast. I can make for Shetland instead. Better to fetch into home waters as soon as possible.’
‘Aye,’ Captain Turnbull said. ‘Though if only their two smaller ships are left, you may not need to worry.’
‘Those Danes – getting above themselves, they are.’
‘We do not know if they
were all Danes. That kind of rabble tends to hail from the scum of every country.’
I noticed he did not mention that one of the prisoners was an Englishman.
The Scotchman paused as he was about to climb down the rope ladder to his pinnace.
‘Mind how ye go near the Lofoten Islands,’ he said. ‘The Moskstraumen is the worst I’ve ever seen it this year.’
‘It is usually bad in July and August,’ Captain Turnbull said.
‘Aye, but not like this. We kept well out to sea, but I swear it must have been five miles across. God go with ye, then.’
‘And with you.’
The Scotchman disappeared from sight as he climbed down the ladder, and soon we could see him being rowed back to his ship. The Bona Esperanza came about and began to head north again. The last we saw of the other ship, she was setting a new course to the west.
‘What is this Moskstraumen they were speaking of?’ I asked one of the sailors. He was the man who had helped me with Jos.
‘It is a terrible thing, master. A place in the sea between a headland in the Lofotens and a small offshore island called Mosken. They say there is a monster hides in the deeps of the sea there, and stirs it up into great cross currents and whirlpools, so big they can catch a ship and suck it down to the very bottom of the ocean.’ He shuddered, and he raised his hand as if to cross himself, then thought the better of it. ‘They also call it the Maelstrom. It can be five miles across, like the Scotchman said.’
‘Five miles!’ Guy had overheard and looked out across the sea in horror. ‘But I thought we were heading for these Lofoten Islands.’
‘We are. The Moskstraumen is at the southern end of the group. Reckon the captain’ll swing right out to the west and then make landfall much further north. The rest of the place is fair enough,’ the sailor conceded. ‘And we can buy fresh food. The Norways are decent enough people. Not like those Danes.’
He ran off and Guy looked at me with raised eyebrows. ‘I do not like the sound of this Moskstraumen or Maelstrom, or whatever it is called. It can suck down whole ships!’ He wrapped his arms around himself and shivered. ‘I did not agree to come on this voyage merely to end up in a watery grave.’