Broad could also see Mr Allgood, and it was Allgood who broke the spell. After the timeless, awful, pause he lifted his great head to heaven and opened his mouth.
From it came not a shout, not a cry, but a deep, throbbing groan. Then the boatswain raised his huge hand slowly to his face and pressed it to his eyes.
As if in answer to the groan, a groundswell of noise came from the ship’s people. It came from many, many throats, not loud in each, but building up to a sighing, pulsing sound. Still nobody moved, but the noise got louder and louder. Beside Jesse, red-haired Peter added a new note of his own, a shrill, piping, monotonous scream. The thin noise was taken up by other boys, and then by men. A sense of hysteria grew. Broad felt himself grow light, and mad, and hollow. The body of men began to sway. The noise took on a baying tone, a lonely howling.
With a sudden, swift movement, the captain pitched the belaying pin over the side and drew his sword.
‘Craig!’ he yelled. ‘Do your duty!’
The captain of marines jumped. He looked at the swaying body of men. He turned abruptly to his soldiers.
‘Cover them, cover them!’
The marines moved their muskets to their shoulders quickly and efficiently. Broad saw a line of muzzles, behind the glittering steel of the bayonets. But his mouth was still open, sound was still pouring from it. With the other bodies all round him, the swaying got greater and greater.
Captain Swift had perched himself on a rail at the bulwarks so that he looked down at the men. He screeched to Craig: ‘Fire, damn you! Fire! They have gone mad!’
Craig looked bemused. He stared down at the moving, ululating body of seamen. His sword wavered. Gradually, the men started to move forward.
‘Fire, damn you! Fire!’ screamed Daniel Swift. His face was black with rage, his sword trembled violently in his fist.
The marine officer raised his sword in a decisive sweep. ‘At the front rank!’ he cried. ‘Prepare to fire!’
With an amazing suddenness, the noise ceased. The ship’s people, as if at a signal, became deathly quiet. The swaying continued, but only from momentum. It slowly got less, until they were still. A bitter curtain of spray drenched men and soldiers as they silently faced each other.
Swift turned from the people to the officer of marines.
His voice was thick.
‘Fire, damn you Craig. Fire, I tell you.’
Broad saw the marine officer swallow. He looked at the captain, then at his red-coated men. The sword wavered.
Slowly his mouth opened.
But Swift spoke before him, choking this time on the word.
‘Fire!’
There was a single bang, and a gasp from the ship’s company. Broad and many around him uttered small cries of shock. Everyone looked about to see who had been hit, who had fired. A small cloud of blue smoke was torn away aft. It had come from one musket, from one soldier. Broad stared at the man, a tall, ordinary-looking fellow. The other marines were staring too, and exchanging frightened glances. The man looked sick, panicky; but defiant.
And who was shot? Broad tore his eyes off the man who had fired, as a ragged shout went up.
Captain Craig’s sword dropped with a clang, bounced once, and landed at the feet of Henry Joyce, who was in the front row. The captain of marines, without uttering any sound, crumpled at the knees and fell to the deck. He did not move again.
Jesse Broad’s voice joined in the howl that burst from the people.
His body joined in the mad lunge towards the quarterdeck. Like those all him round, he became blind to reason or thought in the great surge aft. He did not find a weapon, like many of the others; he did not tear at flesh with his bare hands, for which he later thanked God. But he did become a wild man, a screaming, vengeful thing. He was part of the explosion of hate, revenge, and energy that tore through the Welfare.
After the first madness, though, he became lost in the confusion. The marines on the quarterdeck had opened fire, that much he could tell. There was a volley of shots, and the acrid smell of burnt powder. But whether they were firing at the people, or at each other, or both, he did not know. Balls whistled about the crowded decks, and he saw two men fall. Peter fell too, not from a wound but from his great weakness after the flogging. Broad tried hard to reach him, but the lad disappeared under dozens of trampling feet. It was impossible to break through the struggling hordes.
A great roaring, of many seamen, was split by screams. At one moment, pushed out of the mass as it staggered drunkenly on the rolling deck, Broad saw a dreadful sight: Higgins, the third lieutenant, was caught by a mob at the mizzen shrouds. He was trying to beat them off with an iron belaying pin, yelling the while. As Jesse watched, the pin was jerked from his hand and five or six seamen grabbed him. Within a split second he was upended, taken by feet and hands, and sent spinning over the side into the grey rollers.
A frantic cannonade went up from the canvas shortly after this. Broad saw that the wheel had finally been abandoned. He wondered dully if the man had been killed, or had at last been jerked out of the reverie of concentration that had held him for so long. There was another thunderous clapping, and the decks shook ominously, stirring his seaman’s instincts. Even under short sail, in this wind the Welfare was in deadly danger. Caught by a gust, blown across sea and wind, she might roll her masts out, or even roll over. He thought of Matthews, wondered where he was. Christ, he had wanted this mutiny, had wanted the decks thick with blood, had he not? Well, thick they were, and slimy, and where was Matthews now?
Down below, a separate rampage took place. William Bentley, hidden in the alcove in his uncle’s cabin, heard and vaguely saw awful things. He heard the smashing of wood and the breaking of glass as men sought the first liquor they could lay their hands on. He heard the laughter and the screams as the second lieutenant was woken from his drugged sleep and stabbed and beaten to death. He heard the awful pulsing roars from the deck above, and the gunfire.
Bentley did not blame himself for cowardice. He had heard the beginning of the affair, and he had gone to his uncle’s cabin in mental agony, to seek the pistols. But he had not known on whom they should be turned. What had happened up there? What had brought about that terrifying noise? Had Thomas Fox been shot? Or his uncle? He had stared long at the big horse-pistols, strange and out of place in the hands of a boy at sea. He felt a boy; a lost boy, dreadfully alone. As the mutiny got under way, as the ragged shooting, and the roaring of so many men rolled in waves down the hatchways, as dozens of armed seamen burst about the officers’ accommodation, he knew that he could do nothing at first but hide. If he could help to fight the mutiny it must be later. To show himself now would just mean instant death.
It was the loss of the helmsman that indirectly brought the fighting to an end. Jesse Broad had made contact with Matthews at last, and the two of them had got behind one of the boats to talk. The struggle was still raging aft, with the opposing sides more clearly defined. A knot of men, with Mr Robinson and Daniel Swift certainly among them, were holding out fiercely around the mizzen mast. They were under heavy attack from a far greater number of seamen and marines, led by Henry Joyce and his cronies. Cutlasses had been broken out, and the musketry was far more sporadic. The marines who had stayed on the side of authority were using bayonets.
‘We must try to stop it somehow,’ said Jesse Broad. ‘It is horrible. It is unbearable.’
‘Aye,’ Matthews replied, shaking his long, sombre head. ‘It is a bloodbath. Believe me, I had not this sort of villainy in mind.’
‘Ah, but the villain himself, the villain himself,’ said Broad. ‘My poor Thomas, that luckless boy.’