Amanda, Clarissa and the two maids hurried to their cabins, but Georgina stood her ground. Charles touched her on the arm and said: "M'dear, this is no place for you. I pray you join the others."
She shook her head. "Nay, Charles; I intend to remain, and have a reason for so doing." Her knuckles showed white from the force with which she gripped the poop-rail and she turned her face away so that her glance was averted from the horrid scene below her; but otherwise she never moved a muscle, even when after the nineteenth stroke Bloggs began to scream and call on God to help him. At the thirty-fourth stroke he fainted, and Captain Cummins, evidently feeling that he had sufficiently exerted his authority, called to the bos'n to have him cut down.
As his lacerated body slumped on the deck, Georgina's voice rang out sharp and clear. "Have that man carried to the empty cabin next that of my woman!"
The group of seamen about Bloggs looked up at her in astonishment, then towards the Captain for a confirmation of her order. He turned upon her, his coarse face reddening slightly, and exclaimed : "My lady, 'tis not fitting that one of the hands should occupy an after cabin. He'll do well enough in the fo'c'sle, when the doctor's had a look at him."
"You heard what I said!" she snapped. "See to it that I am obeyed!"
"Madam!" he protested angrily. "This is no affair of yours, and . . ."
"Don't Madam me!" Her half gipsy blood was on fire and her black eyes blazing as she cut him short, then flung at him: "I am set on this and mean to have my way. Cross me, and when I return to England I'll see to it that your owners put you on the beach forthwith."
It was a very awkward situation. Roger was in full sympathy with Georgina's generous impulse but, all the same, he thought it most regrettable that by this public quarrel she should risk humiliation or, if she won her point, undermine the Captain's authority. Fortunately Charles stepped into the breach and in his quiet good-humoured voice said to the irate Cummins:
"Her ladyship intends no criticism of your handling of the ship's affairs, Sir: but her susceptibilities have naturally been much affected by this unhappy scene; and there is reason behind her contention. None of us questions your right to punish as seems fit to you; but you must agree that there is no warrant for withholding merciful ministrations from a sufferer after the punishment has been inflicted. . Need I say more to ensure your acceding to her ladyship's wishes?"
Captain Cummins accepted the olive branch. The words that conveyed it were soft-spoken enough, but he had noted a certain hardness in the young Earl's brown eyes, and in those days an Earl was still a power to be reckoned with. Shrugging his broad shoulders he signed to the men to cany the unconscious Bloggs to the cabin next to Jenny's.
Without a glance at the Captain, Georgina went down to the cabin, had Jenny boil water, tucked up her own voluminous skirts, and washed the still seeping blood from Bloggs's lacerated back with a very mild solution of salt, then made him as comfortable as possible there and left Jenny in charge. Two days later he was about again, apparently little the worse for his awful thrashing, and in the meantime Jenny had learnt quite a lot about him.
She said that he declared himself his own worst enemy from the violence of his temper; and that although it was true that he had been forced to run away to sea on account of having half-killed his squire, the gentleman had .brought his beating on himself by turning a poor old invalid woman out of her cottage. He could both read and write, was a follower of the Methodist persuasion and, a rare thing in those days, had forsworn the liquor. His account of conditions before the mast was truly heartrending and, as a convinced disciple of Tom Paine, he had dedicated himself to the course of securing the 'rights of man' for the underdog, even if in the last event that meant resorting to force.
Georgina retailed this to the others with some misgivings; as although she and Charles regarded themselves as responsible for the well-being of their dependants, they both held to the tradition that the lower orders should be content to remain in the station to which God had called them. Roger heard it with considerably more concern, as it bore out the forebodings he had felt about the Dissenters' meetings which Bloggs held on Sundays.
His uneasiness was increased by the fact that on the Sunday following Bloggs's flogging, five more of the crew failed to attend the Church of England service but joined the Dissenters; and after prayers were over the dozen-odd men continued their meeting squatting on the deck, smoking their clay pipes and talking in low voices.
He had no grounds for supposing that Bloggs was preaching mutiny but he could make a very good guess at the kind of talk that went on at these discussions, and he had practical experience of the sort of horrors which might result from a general acceptance of Bloggs's doctrines. Only too often he had seen well-intentioned men undermine authority among the illiterate masses, then be swept aside by unscrupulous ruffians who led frenzied mobs to commit the most brutal excesses; so he decided to take an early opportunity of having a talk with Bloggs.
It came that afternoon when the burly quartermaster did his next trick at the wheel. Sauntering up, Roger dropped into conversation with him and, after a few casual remarks, began to ask about the conditions of the crew.
The subject was one on which Bloggs had plenty to say. He described the year-old salt pork, bullet-hard peas, grey-coloured duff and weevily biscuits that they had to live on as 'enough to turn a man's stomach', and their quarters as 'scarce fit for animals'. Roger had already noticed that as soon as the ship reached a warmer latitude nearly all the men spent the nights on deck, and now Bloggs told him that they did so only to escape the bugs, fleas and rats that infested their airless foul-smelling den which had neither light nor warmth, or even space enough for all the off-duty watch to stretch out in comfort at one time. In the tropics it was customary for them to sleep near naked, but from the start of the voyage to its finish they never took off all their clothes, and their only faculties for washing were in a bucket of sea water that had been hauled up from over the side.
In Circe and many ships like her, Bloggs said, the crew's lot was made still harder by unnecessarily harsh treatment, as some Captains allowed, and even encouraged, the mates and bos'n to belabour the men with ropes' ends when hauling on tackle, although in the long run it did not make them work any better. They were expected to take blows and abuse without protest, and the least sign of resentment was sufficient to get them clapped into irons. At times a man was picked on for some very minor slackness and given twenty-four hours in the hole just to ginger up his mates; and during the present voyage the only days on which there had not been one or more men in irons, for slight offences, were those of the tempest.
The wages of an ordinary seaman were three pounds a month, and with the object of preventing them from deserting they were not paid until their ship returned to her home port. Despite that, many of them preferred to forgo their earnings on the outward voyage rather than remain in a bad ship or under a tyrannous captain; and there were so many of both that nearly a third of all the seamen who went out to the West Indies deserted ship when they got there. Some of them took a chance on signing on for a return passage in another vessel, but the great majority elected to join the lawless thousands already there, as beach-combers, smugglers of contraband to the Spanish mainland, or in privateers which were often little better than pirates.
Obviously matters were even worse than Roger had supposed and he made no attempt to defend the shipowners, who through meanness or neglect were fundamentally responsible; but he did put it to Bloggs, as tactfully as he was able that, however strong the men's grounds for complaint might be, no good could come of encouraging them to hold meetings, at which their natural tendency would be to exaggerate their grievances and in time become obsessed with them.