At first the dead were given travesties of a decent burial, slipped through the storm-broken bulwarks into the icy wastes of torn and maddened water, but this ceased after one of the corpses was thrown inboard again by a foaming sea, and washed about in the scuppers of the waist. From then on the dead were left to lie until there was a lull, however small, when they were heaved overside without ceremony.
Rheumatism became as great an enemy as the sea.
Every man on board periodically lost the use of one or both his hands, while the older men were confined to their hammocks for days on end, with some never emerging alive.
Bronchitis took its toll, so did pneumonia. Bentley, when he recovered from the glancing blow he had received in the bows before Allgood had pulled him to the foredeck by his line, became bronchitic. His chest collapsed, his shoulders hunched, and he lay wheezing and puking in the cabin, alone for twenty hours a day. Once he asked Broad, in a rare moment of conversation, why the attack had happened, despite all Broad’s explanations of the minds of the people, and his own forgiveness. The sailor stared in disbelief.
‘Oh you foolish boy, you foolish boy. Can you not accept the fact of hatred?’ he said. ‘Men hate, Mr Bentley, men hate. I told you to take care.’
Mr Allgood, now fully the boatswain again, complete with blue coat and rope’s end, fought both tempests and his people like a demon. He straddled the deck, a colossus; lent enormous strength to every task, inspired men to move and climb and haul when they were almost too exhausted to breathe. When the battered Welfare began to take in heavy water through her straining seams, he kept the pumps working by some sort of miracle. It was as if all his mighty energy, all the immense physical and mental power of the man, was flowing out to ship and crew. He was brutal and inspiring, a terror and a hope. Without him she could not have gone on. But there was something inhuman in the way he achieved it.
By the end of the third week of storms, the finish was in sight.
Men were so weak that few could climb aloft to man the yards. The level of water in the holds was increasing, slowly but surely, and clearly beating the pumps. On the twenty-third day Mr Adamson the surgeon died, which had an oddly terrible effect on men’s spirits. Morale was zero. The ship was beaten. The fight was almost over.
They buried Mr Adamson with pomp, as the Welfare laboured uncomfortably, hove-to. Many men wept openly, and a gun was fired. Then a small cask of brandy was broached in his memory. The men were mustered aft to drink, and as they stood on the windswept deck, shrouded by the ice-encrusted rigging, Matthews made a short speech.
‘Men,’ he said. ‘Today we have lost a good comrade and a noble man. I fear we have lost more. Through no fault of yours, of all of you who have fought so fierce and hard, the old Horn has beaten us. I thought to have beaten him, to have sailed to safety, but we could not bring it off. We are too few to work so great a ship in such a run of weather.
‘And so – we must turn about. We must sail eastwards, and stand into danger of a different kind. If we do not turn, we shall surely die.’
He stared at the huddled groups of frozen, sodden men.
Most of them were looking at the deck.
‘All is not lost, believe me,’ he said. ‘Many things may happen, and there are many places, friendly places, where we may go. We will talk of that later, we will plan out the alternatives. I still have hope, and so, I trust, will you. But first; we must turn. That is inevitable. May God be with us all.’
Thirty-One
This time there were no cheers after Matthews had said his piece. The brandy was quickly finished, the cask tossed overboard, and the weary seamen manned the gear to wear the ship. Once they had got wind and sea behind her the motion eased, but even under minimal canvas she tore along like a racehorse. Despite this lessening of the strain on men and tackle, the cold remained appalling, and although they had longer spells of uninterrupted sleep, they lay in soaking, freezing blankets that crackled with rimed ice.
The greatest and most pressing problem was the state of the vessel. She was making water fast, despite a twenty four-hour pumping watch. The carpenter and his best mate had gone with Swift, and the men left were not particularly skilled. One was a weak fellow too, and took to drink when the going got hard. Jesse Broad, who had built many boats in his day, turned-to with a caulking gang, but they did not beat the worst. Some seams near the keelson were gushing through the filthy bilge-muck at great pressure. It could be slowed but not defeated.
On the second morning after they had turned and run, the mizzen topmast carried away in a squall, springing the mizzenmast itself in the event. The mighty strain put on the sprung timber by the canvas made its lifespan most uncertain, but without the mizzen the Welfare would be desperate hard to manage. It was a sail that in normal circumstances she would have done without on the leg she was making, but the leaking seams, her bad trim, and the damage to other sails and yards made it a necessity, even to keep her on a course.
Despite Matthews’ brave speech to the crew, he and Jesse knew their chances of escape were infinitesimal. They talked about their course of action long and feverishly, poring over charts in the swaying lamplight of the dark and gloomy cabin.
‘Well, friend, what is it to be? We can go northward, or head east. Unless this leaking tub decides to direct us straight way to the bottom.’
‘What is there northward, though?’ asked Jesse, doubtfully. ‘A few unknown islands and an unknown, unfriendly coast. Or do you think to make it to the Caribbean?’
Matthews fingered his long chin, and sighed.
‘Ah, in times gone by that would have been the place, no question. A thousand islands and ten thousand friends. Gold, lawlessness and The Account. We would have lived as pirates, even if we did no plundering.’
‘And now? That’s all well past, I guess?’
‘Oh aye, long ago. No gold, no lawlessness, just galloping disease. The Yellow Jack, the Bloody Flux – and His Majesty’s Navy by the hundred. Well, not completely true, there are still safe havens for a buccaneer. But the odds are long I think, very long.’
‘So it’s east then? East past Africa?’
‘What else? We cannot double the Horn, we cannot hide in the Carib. We have this chance only: if we pass Good Hope in safety we can blow into the Pacific east-about. If the ship doesn’t sink under us or we starve.’
There was no lightness in his face or voice.
‘Could that happen? We are sailing easy now at least, despite the weather is cruel strong. Is it very far? Will the wind and sea stay wild and cold and vicious?’
Matthews smiled briefly.
‘Is it long? Aye, long enough. First Good Hope, and that is weeks away. Then Van Diemen’s Land, and that may well be months. Then upwards and onwards into seas practically uncharted. These gales, in this season, may take us all the way. Or sink us, shake us to pieces, or whip the last stump of our mizzen overside. Broad, you did not know what you bargained for, when you went deep-sea sailing. You should have stayed at home!’
He shook his head.
‘And then again, not only repairs require that we make a landfall, neither. If we go straight past Good Hope, and sail on for the torrid zones, we’ll likely starve to death. St Mary’s, we could try, or Madagascar or Mauritius, they are nearer, but I do not know the waters, we have no charts, and we might find Frenchmen there, or even British Navy.’