As we sailed out into the Atlantic I stood, not at the bow rail of the Victory – how ironically she now seemed to be named – but at the stern rail. I watched as the coastline of Portugal dwindled and sank into the sea. I was certain now that I would never see my sister Isabel again.
Chapter Seventeen
Every detail of that voyage back from Portugal is burned into my memory as a slave’s brand is burned into his skin for life, yet at the same time it has also a strange quality of unreality. How could that ship of skeletons ever have made that journey and reached England? To call it a nightmare is to belittle the horror. We talk of nightmares when we mean no more than bad dreams, troublesome the next morning, but soon vanishing away. Those of us who survived that voyage were marked by it for the rest of our lives as if we had passed through the torments of Hell itself.
By noon on the very first day of the voyage, barely out of Cascais, the men began to realise the desperate state of affairs. No food was distributed to them for a midday meal, and when they called frantically for water, it was rationed out by the ship’s bosun. When Dr Nuñez had spoken to me of there being nothing to drink, he meant that there was no wine or ale. There was a little water. A very little. We had ten barrels of brackish water aboard the Victory, and I suppose the other ships must have had the same. It was brackish because first our sailors and then the rest of our expedition had made such demands on the water supply of Cascais in the terrible heat of midsummer that every sweet well had been drunk dry. All that remained were those that were near the shore and from time to time became tainted with sea water. It was not so salt as to make us ill, but it barely satisfied thirst, even aggravating it.
Captain Oliver had decreed that the sailors were to receive twice the ration of water as that which was doled out to the soldiers, since they must remain active and sail the ship for all our sakes, while the soldiers might sit idle. At this a great outcry went up, but our sickly soldiers had no strength to fight the crew. Many of them were feverish, and as their fevers grew worse, so they cried out more pitifully for water. The ration was one small cup in the forenoon and the same at dusk.
Dr Nuñez and I did what we could to relieve the sick and injured, but had no help from Dr Lopez. Like Dom Antonio, he hid away in his cabin and we did not see them for the whole length of our voyage. Perhaps it was as well. If the men had possessed any remnants of strength, they might have turned on them as the cause of all their misery.
‘I cannot endure the men’s suffering,’ I cried to Dr Nuñez that first evening. I thought I had suffered strain almost past bearing during the overland forced march, but this worse, much worse. ‘I am going to give my ration of water to some soldier burning up with fever.’
He laid his hand on my arm and shook his head.
‘And what will that accomplish, Kit? If you share your ration amongst so many, it will amount to no more than a few drops each, and what good will that do? If you give it all to one man or two, how much the others will resent it and condemn you! And then you will yourself become ill from lack of water, and be unable to help them. It is more important to sustain your strength, as long as you can, than to make an empty gesture, however noble it might make you feel.’
He was right, of course. I was young and foolish and thought only of relieving my distress by the gesture, but it would have done no good. Nothing I could do would help the men in their intolerable suffering.
I mumbled some embarrassed agreement, for I knew he spoke the truth.
As dusk fell on the first day, the men discovered that, as well as the lack of water, there was no food on board and that they were to starve to death, unless they could survive the voyage on that meagre allowance of water. When that news became general, six men turned their faces from us and died, as much from despair as from illness. During the dark hours, the crew slid their bodies over the stern, their pockets weighed down with stones taken from the ballast. The captain said a brief prayer over each man, as we stood bareheaded and watched the bodies slip beneath the sullen grey waves of the Atlantic. I wondered whether any of the remaining men were doing the heartless calculation. The fewer of us on board would mean a slightly larger ration of water. When people are in extremis, the calculus of survival comes into play.
We had set off with a fair wind, but on the second day the wind dropped and the heat grew more and more unbearable. Below decks in my tiny cabin, I felt as though I would suffocate. On deck the merciless sun burnt every exposed inch of skin raw red. The men would not go below to their cramped quarters, which were even worse than mine, filled with the stench of unwashed and diseased bodies. Dr Nuñez persuaded the captain to rig up a kind of awning on deck from a spare mainsail, beneath whose shade the men who could move crawled gratefully. The rest we carried and disposed there as best we could, amongst coils of rope and other ship’s gear. The sailors cursed this arrangement, which hindered their handling of the ship, but they too were growing weak now, despite their double ration of water and the period of rest and feasting they had enjoyed in Cascais. Captain Oliver called Dr Nuñez and me into his cabin during the afternoon and gave us each a little dried meat he had put by. Otherwise, he said, he had no more to eat than the rest of us.
‘We must keep our physicians on their feet,’ he said with a grim smile. ‘For we shall all need you before this voyage is done.’
‘Could we not make a broth with the meat?’ I said eagerly. ‘Then we could share it amongst all.’
I saw that Dr Nuñez was going to raise the same objection as before, but the captain forestalled him.
‘No water,’ he pointed out.
I banged my fist against my forehead.
‘But wait,’ I said. ‘If we took each man’s evening ration of water, and made broth with the meat, then at least they would go to their rest tonight with a little more than water in their bellies.’
The captain and Dr Nuñez agreed, albeit reluctantly. I am sure they thought my gesture futile, but what difference did it make, after all? We were all growing dull and hopeless with hunger. Probably we would all be dead before ever we could reach England.
I carried all the strips of dried meat down into the bowels of the Victory, to where the ship’s cook had his quarters, and explained what I wanted him to do with it. He had a cook-stove built of bricks, but there was no fire laid in it, since there was nothing for him to cook. Sitting on a stool amongst his highly polished pots and pans, he was slumped like a sack of meal, a look of total despair pulling down a mouth much better shaped for jollity.
At my suggestion that we should make a broth, his face took on a little animation. After a moment’s thought he gave me a calculating look, then lifted the lid of a pottery crock stowed away under the table where he worked and drew out from it a single onion and half a dozen carrots.
‘I managed to hide these,’ he said, ‘when Drake’s men came to strip us of all our provisions for their voyage to the Azores. If we are to make one last meal, I will add these to it. There will be no further chance, for I have nothing else left but a few dried peas.’
‘Let us add those as well,’ I said. ‘We will make it as nourishing as we can. I will help you.’