Broad drummed his fingers.
‘But we cannot make land at Cape Town. For Captain Swift is heading there.’
‘Indeed. We must sail further on. And trust in hope.
There should be islands on the way, I guess, if we can find ’em. But there is another point. You talk of Swift, and Cape Town. There is another point.’
Broad looked at the lean, unhappy face before him, the plumes of steaming breath from Matthews’s nostrils.
‘Which is?’
‘If he does achieve a landfall there, what will he be doing next? Taking a cure? Writing letters home to wife and family?’
Broad blew out his breath between his teeth. ‘Exactly,’ said Matthews. ‘He will be buying a Dutch ship, or conferring with a Navy captain, or laying off a course to hit Cape Horn. He might be plugging westward as we talk. And here are we, my friend, blowing eastwards at a rate of knots.’
‘Good God,’ said Jesse Broad.
‘Good God? If God is good to us, that bastard Swift will be an hundred fathom deep by now, his bones picked clean. That is my prayer.’
There was a long pause.
‘Is there no other way?’ said Broad, at last.
‘Do not stop thinking,’ replied Matthews. ‘Nor shall I. The alternatives are not of the most numerous. But do not stop thinking.’
He gave a sudden laugh, almost a jolly sound.
‘Hey, man, no despair! Things may go hard with us, but while there’s breath there’s hope. We may yet bring it off, you know. It is far, far, far from an impossibility. Work on the men, my friend, work on the men.’
As Broad stood on the quarterdeck a few days later, that advice echoed round his head. The decks ahead of him were clear of human life, except for the muffled figure at the wheel. The sea was a grey and empty waste, wild, unfriendly, alien. Welfare staggered along under close-reefed fore and main topsails, burying her head often in the steep backs of seas that had swept under her. The wind was very strong, moaning in the ice-encrusted cordage, and very, very cold. It bit into him through his great cloak, made the bones of his skull ache.
Below decks, he knew, the aspects were even more desolate, although wind and sea were hidden. The interior of the ship had become like a mortuary, with the smell of death heavy in it, mixed with the smell of mildew, and wet, rotting things. She was cold, cold as the tomb, and the stoves that they tried to keep alight in galley and lower deck made little difference; appeared, if anything, to accentuate the creeping, seeping misery.
There was another smell down there as well, and it was this that exercised his mind. It was the smell of disaffection, the smell of incipient revolt. The smell of mutiny.
At first it had been confined to small groups of the people. Fights had broken out at more and more frequent intervals. Knives had been used. One man had lost two fingers, another had been deeply slashed right across his ribs. Rum had been at the root of it, and rum was flowing freer now. The cold made it inevitable, necessary. Without large issues, Broad and Matthews knew, one of two things would happen: either men would start to die of cold and misery, or the rum room would be plundered. They could not keep it guarded at all times; manpower was too precious.
But there was more to it than drunkenness, however much the two of them tried to wish it away. The mood among the crew was getting hopeless. With the hopelessness came anger. And the anger was beginning to find a direction. The old ringleaders were behind it, and they were spreading terror to the other men. There was a growing mood of hatred and despair, coupled with another growing mood of violence and wild danger. The society was crumbling.
So Jesse watched and waited. He and Matthews had spoken to some men, not just those who were helping to run the ship, and had realised their great desire to be loyal. But they were afraid of Henry Joyce and company, lived in fear of cold steel in the watches of the night. Joyce and Madesly and their friends were swaggering, openly stealing rum and rations from the weaker men. The marines, unofficered, lost, unarmed, could not be counted on. In the day-to-day details of this struggle, in the working of the ship, Allgood stood alone as a fount of the old discipline. He was, in truth, a mighty figure.
William Bentley, although not deadly ill, could not be let to leave his bed these times, nor would Broad have let him quit the cabin had he been mobile. As the Welfare laboured eastward through the vicious waters, her little world hung in the balance. Outside her, in the southern ocean, all was chaos. Inside, chaos waited.
To the boy, it was a slow, profound revelation. At first, racked by bronchitis, he had been unable to take in the hours of talk, of worry and consideration, that the two men went through. But when the ship was running headlong before wind and sea, when the motion was easier and his illness not so strong, he propped himself on an elbow, sipping a little rum, and took a silent part in their deliberations.
They were not always sober, despite the dangers that they hourly faced, and both rambled about life in England and about their work. William, like Broad before him, began to see the crime that had been committed against Matthews. Taciturn and modest as he was, it transpired over many talks that he was a sailing merchant with great prospects. Not only were these all lost to him, but there were losses to the nation to be considered. He and two cousins had fitted out a ship for a voyage to the East that would probably have made a fortune – a fortune plucked from the enemy’s holdings, more than likely. He had also done great services as a navigator and cartographer and hoped to make a survey of the little-known waters he would trade in. As for Broad, the musings on his illicit trade with France, his view that a transitory war did not make the opposing races monsters but merely good men badly led, filled Bentley with a great unease. One night Broad spoke a quiet monologue about his wife and child, about a Hampshire village, about boatbuilding and fishing. He spoke about a man called Hardman, whom he had loved. He painted such a picture of this fine and jolly seaman that William would have given his right arm to meet him. When he asked what he might be doing now, however, Broad gave a start, not realising the midshipman had been listening. Then told him he was dead, with a sad, ironic smile.
Broad even had compassion for Joyce. For Joyce, for Madesly, and for all the others of the people, however debased they seemed to Bentley.
‘But surely they are scum?’ he said. ‘No, sir, forgive me! With the best will in the world – surely, merely scum?’
He reddened under Broad’s steady gaze. Then Jesse nodded.
‘From the quarterdeck, most seamen look like scum,’ he said.
‘And yes, of course, to you sir, so they are. Henry Joyce is scarcely human, nor Madesly neither. But for Christ’s sake man, how are we treated? Not just him, them, but everyone? We are all scum in the officers’ eyes, all scum. Degraded, humiliated, starved, beaten, made drunken animals. I wonder they bother to pay us off when war is over. We could be salted down to feed the next generation.’
Matthews laughed loudly. William smiled a small, sly smile.
‘But you are officers now, friend. You and Mr Matthews. Do you still feel so much for them? Truly?’
‘I feel nothing for them,’ Broad said, ‘but pity. They are more sinned against than sinning, and that is truth.’
‘One does not have to do anything very wrong,’ added Matthews, sombrely, ‘to find oneself in the Navy. Here is Jesse Broad. And here am I. Our lives, young man, are finished.’
Bentley had nothing more to say. They seemed more sad than angry with their fate. But also to accept it. As they accepted the dirt, and lice, and cold, and sores.