FIFTEEN
At least I thought I was on the Emperor. I hoped so anyway. With my head throbbing, I pulled myself out of my hammock, put my boots to the deck and was sent flying forward.
My fall was broken—by my face. I lay groaning on the planks for a moment or so, wondering why I felt so drunk when I didn’t remember doing any actual drinking. Except, of course, I wasn’t drunk.
But if I wasn’t drunk, why was the floor moving? It tipped this way and that and I spent a moment or so waiting for it to settle until I realized that the constant rocking was exactly that. Constant. It wasn’t going to stop.
On unsteady feet that shuffled and danced in the sawdust I straightened, hands out like a man trying to negotiate a balancing beam. My body still hurt from the beating I’d taken but I was on the mend, my wounds a day or so old.
What hit me next was the air thick with a smell. No, not a smell. A stench.
Oh my days, it stank. A mix of shit, piss, sweat and sea-water. A smell I came to learn was unique to the below decks of a ship. Just as every butcher’s shop, every tavern has its own smell, so does every below decks. The frightening thing was how quickly you got used to it.
The smell was of men, and on the Emperor there were 150 of the blighters, who when they weren’t manning their positions, hanging from the rigging or crowded into the galleys, would sleep cuddled up to carriages on the gun-decks, or in hammocks much like the one I’d woken up in.
I could hear one of the crew, sniggering in the shadows as the ship lurched and I was thrown against a wooden support then just as violently slammed into a column opposite. Sea legs. That was what they called it. I had to get my sea legs.
“Is this the Emperor?” I said into the murk.
The creak of the ship. Like the smell and the sea legs it was something I’d get used to.
“Aye, you’re on the Emperor,” came the reply.
“I’m new on the ship,” I called into the darkness, clinging on for dear life.
There was a rasping chuckle. “You don’t say.”
“How far are we from land?”
“A day. You were brought on asleep or unconscious. Too much booze, I’d say.”
“Something like that,” I replied, still hanging on to the support for dear life. My mind went to the events of the last day or so but it was like worrying at an open wound. Too soon, too painful. I’d need to try and make sense of what had happened. I’d need to face the guilt, and I’d have letters to write. (Letters I wouldn’t have been able to write without Caroline’s tuition, I reminded myself, with a fresh feeling of regret.) But all that would have to wait until later.
From behind me came a grating, wrenching sound. I swung round and squinted in the half-light, and when my eyes adjusted I could see a capstan. From above I could hear feet and the raised voices of men at work on the deck above. The capstan groaned and creaked and turned.
“Heave,” came the shout from above. “Heave.” Despite everything the sound of it made me a wide-eyed little boy again.
I cast my gaze around. Either side were the rounded shapes of the carriage-guns. Their barrels shone dully in the dark. At the other end of the deck I could see where a rope ladder hung from a square of daylight. I headed there and climbed to the quarter-deck above.
I soon discovered how my ship-mates had earned their sea legs. Not only did they sport a different style of dress from men of the land—short jackets, checked shirts, long, canvas breeches—but they had a different style of walking too. Their entire bodies seemed to move with the ship, something that happened entirely by instinct. I spent my first couple of days on board being tossed from pillar to post by the heaving waves beneath us, and had to grow accustomed to the sound of laughter as I sprawled yet again to the deck, time after time. But soon, just as I got used to the smell below decks, the constant creak of the hull, and the sense that the whole sea was kept at bay by a few puny planks of wood and coats of caulking, I also learnt to move with the motion of the water and with the Emperor. Soon I too walked like every other man on board.
My shipmates were nut-brown, every single one of them. Their faces were lined and weathered and some of the older men had skin like melted candles. The older ones were quiet, mainly, their eyes hooded and cautious.
Most wore scarves or handkerchiefs tied loosely around the neck, had tattoos, beards and wore gold earrings. There were older crewmates aboard, their brown, weather-worn faces like melted candles, but most were about ten years older than I was. They came from all over, I soon discovered: London, Scotland, Wales, the West Country. Many of our number were black, around a third of them, some of whom were runaway slaves who’d found freedom on the seas, treated as an equal by their captain and ship-mates—or should that be, treated as the same level of scum by their captain and ship-mates. There were also men from the American colonies, from Boston, Charleston, Newport, New York and Salem. Most seemed to wear weapons constantly: cutlasses, daggers, flint-lock pistols. Always more than one pistol, it seemed, which I soon found out was due to the danger of the first one failing to fire because of a damp charge.
They liked to drink rum, were almost unbelievably coarse in their language and the way they spoke about women, and liked nothing better than a roaring argument. But what bonded them all were the captain’s articles.
He was a Scotsman. Captain Alexander Dolzell. A big man, he rarely smiled. He liked to adhere to the articles of the ship and liked nothing more than reminding us of them. Standing on the sterncastle deck, his hands on the rail as we stood assembled on the quarter-deck, main deck and forecastle, warning us that any man who fell asleep on duty would be tarred and feathered. Any man found with another man would be punished with castration. No smoking below decks. No pissing in the ballast. (Of course, as I’ve already told you, that particular article was something I carried over to my own commands.)
I was fresh, though, and new on board ship. At that stage of my career I don’t think it would even have occurred to me to break the rules.
I soon began to settle into the rhythm of life at sea. I found my sea legs, learnt which side of the ship to use depending on the wind and to eat with my elbows on the table to stop my plate from sliding away. My days consisted of being posted as lookout, or on watch. I learnt how to take soundings in shallow waters and picked up the basics of the navigation. I learnt from listening to the crew, who when not exaggerating tales of going into battle against the Spanish, liked nothing better than to impart nuggets of nautical wisdom: “Red at night, sailor’s delight. Red in the morning, sailors take warning.”
The weather. The winds. What slaves we were to it. When it was bad the usual cheery atmosphere would be replaced by one of grim industry as the day-to-day business of keeping the ship afloat in hurricane winds became a matter of simple survival, when we would snatch food in between maintaining sail, patching the hull and pumping out. All done with the quiet, concentrated desperation of men working to save their own lives.
Those times were exhausting, physically draining. I’d be kept awake, told to climb the rat-lines or man pumps below decks, and any sleep would be snatched below decks, curled up against the hull.
Then the weather would abate and life would resume. I watched the activities of the older crewmates, their drinking, gambling and womanizing, understanding how relatively tame my own exploits in Bristol had been. I thought of those I used to encounter in the taverns of the West Country, how they considered themselves to be hardened drinkers and brawlers, if only they could have been here to see my ship-mates in action. Fights would break out over nothing. At the drop of a hat. Knives pulled. Blood drawn. In my first month at sea I heard more bones crunch than I had in the previous seventeen years of my life. And don’t forget, I grew up in Swansea and Bristol.