‘From want of water, some drank their own urine and sea-water. They crawled on their hands and knees around the deck and died raving mad. The first perished after a week — his body was thrown over the side. The next died ten days later, after they had been adrift for seventeen days. He was quartered and hung up for food. The next day another man died and his liver and heart were eaten. Over the next twelve days, another seven men perished. All were bled and eaten.
‘When the cook died, his betrothed, Ann Saunders, snatched the cup from the mate, cut her late intended husband’s throat and drank his blood, insisting she had the greatest right to it. She claimed that it was “God’s will” that the blood should not pass her for another.
‘She had more strength in her calamity than most of the men. She performed the duty of cutting up and cleaning the bodies. She would sharpen the knives, bleed the man in the neck, drink his blood and cut him up.
‘The captain’s wife also ate the brains of an apprentice who had survived three previous shipwrecks. She declared them “the most delicious thing she had ever tasted”. Only six were still alive when they were picked up by a frigate.’
Stephens had been below, but he had come on deck while Brooks was talking. He lounged against the rail, smoking his clay pipe and studying Richard’s half-frightened, half-sceptical expression. ‘It’s a true enough tale, lad, and there are many others who have suffered the same fate.
‘I once sailed on a collier, the Euxine. She was built as a paddle-steamer, but when I joined her, the engines had been removed and she worked under sail. She left South Shields ten years ago this month past, captained by Peter Murdock. She was bound for Aden with a cargo of coals for the steamships that refuelled there. I should have been on that voyage, but I heard of a better berth on a bigger ship and did not sign articles with the Euxine.
‘On the first of August, the cargo shifted in heavy seas. The next three days were spent levelling it in the holds — terrible work — but four days later smoke was seen coming from the hatches. The coal had caught fire of itself, as happens often enough on such ships. They battened down the hatches and changed course for St Helena but they could not control the fires and on the eighth of August all thirty men abandoned ship.
‘They stayed close by, hoping the fires would die out, but by morning the ship was ablaze from stem to stern and they set out in a convoy of three boats for St Helena. The last boat, under the command of the second mate, James Archer, with seven men aboard, lost contact with the others that night.
‘At first there seemed little cause for alarm. Their boat was a thirty-footer, with two masts and a fore-boom, carrying mainsail, staysail and jib. They had tools, a sextant, chronometer and chart, and they were well provisioned — a ham, a cheese, two cases of biscuits, tins of meat, four pounds of plug tobacco. They had only two small casks of water, however, and it was rationed to a pint a day per man.
‘Twelve days’ sailing brought them close to the latitude of St Helena, but the second mate was a poor navigator and he could not find land. After two days he gave up the search and resolved to sail northwest-by-north, using the trade winds to make for Brazil. It was a distance of more than two thousand miles.
‘They cut rations to half a biscuit and one cup of water a day, but the weather worsened and on the twenty-seventh of August, just an hour before midnight, the boat capsized. The boatswain was drowned — I was told he had thrown himself overboard while at the helm, leaving his fellows to their fate.
‘The others righted the boat but soon afterwards it capsized again, and then again. A boy who had shipped as able seaman also drowned but the other five clung to the boat all night, then righted it in the morning. Their plight was now dreadfuclass="underline" they had lost everything — masts, sails, sextant and all their food and water.’ He broke off to scan the sea ahead of them, as Richard waited, wide-eyed. ‘On the last day of August they agreed to draw lots. The first one to draw the short lot three times would be killed. Amongst the men was Francis Gioffous, a small Italian boy of about thirteen years, who spoke hardly any English.’
He paused and tapped the side of his nose. ‘He wasn’t a popular member of the crew. He was the unlucky person on each of the first two drawings, then refused to cast a third lot. One of the crew then drew for him and once more the shortest stick was in that man’s hand — or so it was said. They left the boy to pray while they looked for a sail one last time, then a crewman killed him.’
He gave a grim smile. ‘Leastways, that was the second mate’s version. I heard it from one of the other crew that the boy jumped overboard after the second lot was drawn. They seized him before he could drown himself, dragged him back on board and murdered him. His throat was cut with such force that he was decapitated. They drank the blood, ate the heart and liver and put the body and limbs into the lockers of the boat. Five hours later they saw a sail and were rescued by a Dutch barque, the Java Packet, bound for Batavia.’
Despite the warmth of the night Richard shivered. ‘What happened to the men?’
‘They reached Batavia early in November and Singapore a week later. They were held for a few days, then sent back to England. There was even talk of trying them for murder, but they were released as soon as they reached London.’
He ruffled the boy’s hair. ‘You’ll have heard many a tall tale on the night watches, Dick, but these are true. It is the custom of the sea, and has been practised more times down the centuries than there are stars in this sky above us.’
Chapter 7
The Mignonette was into the doldrums now, the region between the south-east and north-east trade winds, where the ocean surface was fretted into clashing cross-seas and troubled by eddying currents, and brief, fitful squalls from every point of the compass were interspersed with long periods of flat calm.
Before morning even the faint breeze had died away. The four men slept on the open deck, out of the stinking heat below decks. The sails hung limp and heavy around the mast and the lassitude extended to the crew. Stephens leaned against the helm with a vacant look on his face, Richard picked a few desultory strands of oakum and Brooks made slow work of patching a sail. Only Tom still moved with restless energy, pacing the deck, tugging at the rigging, testing the shrouds and stays and scanning the horizon around them.
In mid-afternoon, an hour before the first dog-watch, a lazy breeze got up and a cloud appeared to westward, spreading and darkening as it sped towards the ship.
‘All hands, turn to,’ Tom called.
They pitched the oakum and mending kit down the companionway and closed the slide over it. They had only moments to shut the hatches, douse the sails and lash all solid before the squall was on them, roughening the surface of the sea and filling the remaining canvas with a wind so warm it brought no relief from the heat.
All the men stripped off their clothes, their torsos white against their sunburned, sea-blacked arms and faces. The fat drops of tropical rain felt warm on their skin and rinsed the salt from their bodies.
Almost before the squall was past, Tom called, ‘Loose the sails,’ striving to squeeze every ounce of momentum from it to drag the yacht on its slow way southwards, out of the doldrums and into the region of the trade winds; but almost at once the wind died away. The rain-soaked planking began to steam as the heat drew the moisture from it and within a few minutes it was as if the squall had never been.