SHE ATTENDS CHURCH SERVICE AND WITNESSES A TRAGEDY
At lunch that day the doctor congratulated himself warmly upon the
success of the ducking punishment. ‘I never doubted,’ said he, ‘that
it would fail in the case of female convicts. Two buckets they told
me sufficed for the most clamorous of the foul-mouths. But I had my
misgivings as to its efficacy with male prisoners. I am satisfied. The
fellow below seems to have been soaked into repentance. I spoke to him
in the prison a little while since, and he humbly begged my pardon and
promised never to use another oath again.’
‘It’s a goosefleshing discipline,’ said Captain Barrett! ‘but they’ll
make a joke of it in the tropics.’
‘Is this box arrangement your only punishment, Ellice?’ said the
subaltern.
‘We have thin water-gruel,’ answered the doctor. ‘I know a man who
became sincerely religious after two days of thin water-gruel. Then
there are the irons which I have struck off, with or without the
addition of handcuffs. Then there is the prison. Separation works
wholesomely. Loneliness is good physic for the felon mind. Finally,
there’s a black-list, in which I enter the offender’s name for
submission to his Excellency the Governor at the end of the voyage.’
The subject was then changed. To this brief talk I listened greedily,
forgetting Will’s hint that I should carry a deaf face. I met the
doctor’s eyes, but my duties dismissed me to the galley, and I was out
of the cuddy while the meal lasted.
That afternoon, whilst I was rubbing the shining length of cuddy-table,
the doctor came from his cabin. He looked at me a moment or two and
then approached. There was a sort of kindness in his manner; he even
put on a grave, condescending smile when he addressed me. It was
seldom that Doctor Russell-Ellice smiled.
‘I am glad to believe,’ said he, ‘that I was mistaken in you. One of
the apprentices, who, I understand, is very respectably connected, has,
I hear, some knowledge of you. But, young man, you should have chosen
any vessel sooner than a convict ship to hide yourself in.’
I cast my eyes down.
‘I observe that you take a great interest in all conversation that
relates to convicts. I am willing to believe you honest. You will
therefore give me, truthfully, your reason for the interest you take in
the prisoners?’
‘It is curiosity more than interest, sir. I have often read and heard
about convict ships. I cannot help feeling curious and listening and
looking about me.’
He stared at me searchingly and seemed satisfied. But I noticed
with some alarm that he observed my face with unusual attention,
taking the lineaments, so to speak, one by one. He then glanced down
me--afterwards let his eyes rest upon my hands, and all this in
silence which might have filled an interval of nearly a minute.
‘What’s your age?’ he asked.
This was forcing my hand; but then I was a woman, and no woman is
expected to tell the truth when she is asked her age.
‘I am seventeen, sir.’
‘You do not seem to have been ill-used,’ said he, again gravely
smiling. ‘A plumper, healthier young fellow I never met. What made you
run away?’
‘I wished to go to Hobart Town.’
‘Would not your friends have equipped and sent you out respectably had
you made known your wishes?’
‘My stepfather is no friend of mine, sir,’ I answered.
He asked me what I meant to do when I arrived in Tasmania, and after
putting many questions, most of which I answered, he bade me tell him
what my religion was, in what churches I worshipped, and then began
to lecture me; indeed, to sermonise me as though I had been a convict
under him. I listened with a hung head and composed face, but I
could not draw my breath freely till he was gone, for all the time he
addressed me his dark, scrutinising eyes seemed to search into my very
conscience. And then again I feared his perception as a medical man.
Next day was Sunday. The captain sent word forward, and the
instructions reached us aft, that the whole of the ship’s company were
to attend Divine service on the poop at ten o’clock. It was again a
bright and beautiful day. When I went on deck in the early morning,
I was in time to behold a most glorious pink and silver sunrise; our
coppered forefoot had cloven the first of the warm parallels, and
already the flying-fish were darting from the froth of the curl of the
low wave; the ship was heaped with gleaming spaces of canvas to her
trucks, and was leaning over to the pressure of the cordial breath of
the north-east trade-wind. She was sailing fast; the sea was smooth,
and the spitting of the narrow band of passing brine was like the sound
of satin torn by the hand; and satin-like was the long gleam of the
water, with a few small seabirds swiftly winging along it in chase.
The routine, I observed, was the same as on other days. The convict
deck-washers, superintended by the captains of deck, helped the watch
to wash down as usual; the cooks were admitted past the sentry, and
speedily a cloud of black smoke was blowing from the prisoners’ galley
chimney. When the decks had been swabbed, the convicts in divisions
were turned up to wash themselves, and at eight o’clock they went to
breakfast.
It was whilst the messmen were standing in a compact row beyond the
main-hatch door waiting for their cans of cocoa, that I saw Tom. He was
one of the messmen. I found an excuse to pass him thrice, that I might
greet him with my eyes and observe him. I saw passion and grief and
love in his face when our gaze met, though neither of us durst venture
on more than a passing look. It half broke my heart that I should be so
close to him and yet unable to speak. Whilst he waited with the rest
I could, indeed, have made shift to pass him a fourth time, but the
strain was so terrible that I feared myself. I felt a swelling within
me as of hysteria, an ungovernable madness to rush to him, to fling my
arms about his neck, to hold him to me. So I passed into the cuddy,
and a little later the body of prisoners went below and, saving the
sentries, the inclosure was empty.
After the cuddy breakfast was over, whilst taking some dirty dishes
forward, I met Will near the galley. He said, softly: ‘I was on the
poop watching you when you walked up and down past Butler to look at
him. Old woman, these are risks and you mustn’t run ’m. There are eyes
aboard here sharper than that chap’s bayonet.’
‘I’ll run no risks, and all’s well so far, Will.’
‘What about that letter you were telling me of? I dread to hear of your
attempting to give it to your sweetheart.’
I looked at him with a smile. He asked me if I slept comfortably, if
his clothes fitted me, if I had seen the prisoner boxed up and washed
down yesterday, and so on. ‘You’ll be up on the poop for prayers at
four bells,’ said he. ‘Lord!’ he added, bursting into a nervous laugh.
‘To think of only two in this ship knowing what you are! To think of
you, a young man as habit is bringing me to fancy you, being the real
and original Marian of the milk and buttercup holiday times! What would
mother say to see you as you stand here now, as complete a shell-back
to the eye as that second mate there, with a big basket of dirty dishes
alongside of you lugged all the way from the cuddy by your own little
hands? And all for love--all for love! By glory! But the woman that
could make me dress up as a girl and follow her to sea in a convict
ship would have to sink down straight from heaven. This earth couldn’t
manufacture her.’ He rounded on his heel and went off.
Some time before ten o’clock the ship’s bell was rung; presently Mr.
Balls’s silver pipe sang in shrill whistlings through the ship. Mr.
Stiles had ordered me below to ‘clean myself,’ as he called it, and on
my return I followed him and Frank on to the poop. The scene was one
of extraordinary life and full of brilliant colour. I never can forget
that picture of this first Sunday morning I passed on board a convict
ship.
When I gained the poop, the ship was crowded with people in motion. The
whole of the crew, in such clean Sunday clothes as they could muster,
were coming aft. The convicts, in a seemingly endless procession, were
passing through the door of the hatch and massing themselves behind
the quarter-deck barricade with their faces aft. The guard, saving
the sentries on duty, were drawn up in a line on the poop, giving an
amazing brightness to the scene with their red coats, shakos, and
sparkling arms. Their officers were in full dress, and the doctor in
the uniform of a surgeon of the Royal Navy. The commander of the ship
stood near the doctor. Behind the soldiers were women and children.
Aft, at the extremity of the poop, his figure rising and falling
against the dim azure over the stern, stood the solitary figure of the
helmsman grasping the wheel, whose brass-work flamed in the sun, and
abreast of him paced the second officer, who had charge of the ship.
The sailors came tumbling up the lee poop-ladder, and soon all the
forward portion of this raised deck was crowded with people.
Such a sight as it was! But I beheld a horror in the beauty of it. Oh,
the very spirit of horror itself entered the beauty of that spectacle
of shining ship and radiant uniforms and glowing sea out of the mass
of human misery and sin down on that main-deck there. I had a clear
view of the convicts. I ran my eye over the line of faces whilst I
sought for Tom, and my very heart shrank within me at sight of the
countenances my gaze briefly settled on. Prejudice, grief and rage may
have made me find the villainous looks of numbers more villainous than
they were. I viewed them as my sweetheart’s associates, as ruffians and
crime-laden scoundrels, into whose vile company my honest, pure-minded
sailor, my innocent, injured Tom, had been thrust to toil in irons
with them, to lie at night with them, listening to their talk.
The solitary occupant of the forecastle was the sentry. He walked the
deck from one rail to the other, sometimes halting to survey the scene.
The doctor stood amidships of the break of the poop and began to read
in a loud, firm, but slightly nasal voice from the Book of Common
Prayer. Every head was bared. The convicts gazed intently up at the
reader. There was a pathos in the wondering, staring looks of many of
them--a something of childishness that sat strangely on their faces, as
if their gross, unlettered ignorance was to be astonished and pleased
by the cleverness of a man who read without difficulty, as though he
perfectly understood the meaning of what he delivered. Barney Abram was
in the front rank of the mass of men. His gaze was fixed on the doctor;
his posture was one of humility. I observed that he occasionally nodded
as though in appreciation when the doctor paused upon a passage and
looked at the convicts. Tom was behind. I saw him with difficulty. The
least movement of my head blotted him out by bringing the heads of men
in front between us.
The picture was memorably impressive. I have it now bright in my mind’s
eye, all the hues as gay as the shining colours in the silver plate of
a daguerreotype. Nothing disturbed the stillness upon the ship but the
voice of the doctor. Yes, you heard a soft, creaming noise of running
waters, and at intervals a gentle flap from aloft, and sometimes there
would break in a homely sound from the live-stock forward. Never had
the sea looked so wide nor our ship so lovely. The feathering billows
ran chasing in flashes and gleams into the south-west, where the ocean
trembled in a dark blue, with a horizon firm as though ruled upon the
delicate azure of the heavens. Southeast, under the sun, it was all
blinding splendour--sheer dazzle that streamed to the tall, leaning
weather side of the ship and broke from the bow in sudden light like
molten silver.
When the doctor had recited as much of the Liturgy as he thought proper
to deliver, he paused to breathe a while and drink from a glass of
water which stood at his feet. He then began a sermon. He was in the
midst of his discourse, to which the prisoners appeared to listen
with close attention, Barney Abram occasionally nodding in approval
or admiration as before, when a convict, who stood close against the
barricade on the port-hand side--I mean that fore-and-aft barricade
which formed the gangway alley, as I call it--tossed up his arms and in
a loud, deep-chested, tragedy voice cried out:
‘I could tell a story
Would rouse thy lion-heart out of its den,
And make it rage with terrifying fury.’
The doctor stopped.
‘Silence there!’ roared a voice.
‘Who was that?’ exclaimed the doctor.
‘Thomas Garth, sir,’ responded a convict, standing near the prisoner
who had broken out.
The doctor stared for a while in the direction of the man as though
waiting to see if this extraordinary offence of interruption would be
repeated. The convict was clear within my view; he was the tall, dark,
handsome man whom I supposed, and, indeed, rightly supposed, to be
the tragedian that one of the soldiers had told me was amongst the
prisoners. After an interval of two or three minutes, all remaining
quiet, the doctor resumed; but scarcely had he pronounced a dozen words
when I saw the actor throw up his right arm, and, whilst he brandished
his left fist, making the strangest, maddest faces in doing so--and at
this moment I see the lunatic fire in his eyes as he rolled them along
the line of us who stood at the break of the poop--he burst out:
‘Oh, dismal! ’Tis not to be borne! Ye moralists!
Ye talkers! What are all your precepts now?
Patience! Distraction! Blast the tyrant, blast him!
Avenging lightnings, snatch him hence, ye fiends!
Nature can bear no more.’
‘Seize that man!’ roared the doctor, who seemed instantly to understand
what had come to the unhappy wretch.
But a man who goes on a sudden raving-mad is not very easily seized.
This convict was immensely strong; his chest, bulk, and stature
were assurance of that. All in a moment half a dozen prisoners were
rolling upon the deck, beaten down by the madman’s fists and elbows
as though they had been children. With agility that might be possible
only to such madness as was in him, the man sprang, grasped the top of
the barricade, and with a kick of his feet vaulted into the gangway
between. He ran a few yards forward, sprang upon a scuttle-butt and
gained the bulwarks, on which he stood erect, holding by nothing,
swaying his fine figure with the movements of the ship, laughing the
shocking laughter of madness and shaking his clenched fists at the poop.
‘Seize him!’ shrieked the doctor, nearly throwing me as he rushed to
the poop-ladder.
‘Come down!’ roared the sentry on the forecastle, and the bayonet
flashed as he swept his piece from his shoulder to level it.
‘Quick, or he’ll be overboard!’ bawled Captain Sutherland.
The swaying figure on the bulwark-rail roared with maniac laughter.
‘Come down, or I’ll fire!’ shouted the forecastle sentry.
‘He’s mad! He’s mad!’ went up in the very thunder of noise from the
mass of the convicts.
It was then that I heard Captain Barrett cry to the sentry not to fire;
but the man did not hear; he stood at a considerable distance from
the poop, and the roar of the convicts was in the air as the captain
shouted. The soldier fired. I screamed with the voice of a woman when I
beheld the spit of the flame and the blue wreath of the smoke.
‘Oh, Jesu!’ cried the convict. He turned slowly, as though to look at
the man who had shot him, and fell backward into the sea.
The women behind the line of guards shrieked, and some of them fainted.
My knees failed me, and I sank down in the horror of that moment,
clutching at a stanchion of the brass rail. Captain Barrett delivered
an order swiftly and fiercely, and the armed guard came with a hurried
tramp to the brass rail, the outermost one on the left thrusting me
with his foot to get me out of the road. Sick and terrified as I was,
my wits were sufficiently collected to mark an ugly movement among the
prisoners, an indescribable stir of figures, quick turnings of the
face and eyes, as though the many-headed beast sniffed blood and saw
its chance. It might have been that they were enraged by the slaying of
the maniac, yet nothing more sinister, nothing more deeply tragic in
its suggestions than that stir of agitation, those sudden, wild, eager
looks and movements of the head could be imagined.
The man had fallen overboard on the weather side of the ship. The
sailors assembled on the poop rushed to the rail when the man reeled
and dropped; they shouted as they stood looking; the captain sped to
the grating abaft the wheel and gazed astern there, calling to know
if anyone saw anything of the man. Twenty throats were bawling: some
saw him; some said he had gone down like lead; some that he had been
shot through the heart, and that there would be nothing to pick up.
Meanwhile the ship was sweeping swiftly and smoothly onward; the white
brine spun in sheets past the quarters, and the ridged seas of the
trade-wind beat their plumes of snow into showerings of spray against
the coppered bends of the heeling vessel. The spread of canvas was
great--the studding-sails were out besides. The seamen would have
needed a clear deck to bring the ship to the wind, and the convicts
still stood massed, covered and overawed by the soldiers at the line of
the break of the poop--every man so grasping his musket as to be ready
to take aim at the word of command.
The time was wild with confusion and terror; the sailors continued
to shout as they looked astern. Some of the children were yelling
loudly with fright on the poop; sharp, harsh cries resounded from the
main-deck, where I saw the doctor thrusting in amongst the convicts,
whilst a few of the men whom he had appointed ‘captains’ appeared to be
shoving and pushing and marshalling the prisoners so as to form them
into some sort of marching order for the descent of the main hatch.
Captain Sutherland came hastily forward to the rail and looked down
upon the convicts. He then shouted to his chief mate, who was standing
near a quarter-boat to windward.
‘Send all hands forward, Mr. Bates! Send all hands forward, sir!
There’s nothing to be done!’ and he motioned significantly toward the
main-deck.
And, indeed, until the convicts were all in their quarters below,
nothing was to have been done, for the seamen must have gone amongst
them to haul and drag upon certain of the gear. At the foot of the
mainmast, for example, were belayed many ropes, all belonging to the
vast spread of sail stretching on high overhead, and this mast stood
within the barricades. What might have happened had the sailors rushed
in amongst the convicts to bring the ship to the wind?
Captain Sutherland stood pale and still at the head of the poop-ladder;
the ship’s company were streaming forward through the gangway galley,
and when I quitted the poop in the tail of the procession of women and
children, the captain, the officers, and the line of soldiers, who
stood in a posture to instantly cover the convicts, alone remained on
that deck.
I stood in the recess along with Frank and some of the soldiers’
wives, waiting to see what was going to happen within the barricades.
One of the convicts had been killed or stunned by the maniac, and lay
as motionless as a log. The sentinel who had shot the man trudged the
forecastle with frequent looks in the direction of the main-deck, as
though prepared at any instant for a call to level his piece afresh.
The women near me jabbered incessantly, and every tongue wagged in
defence of Murphy, as they called the soldier.
‘God pity me!’ exclaimed Frank, looking at the woman. ‘But it vhas
murder to shoot a madman.’
‘Mind your own business!’ cried one of the women, angrily. ‘It’s the
duty of a soldier to obey orders, and the orders of a sentry are to
shoot down any convict who gets over the barricade and attempts to
leave the ship. So there!’ she cried spitefully. I believe she was
Murphy’s wife. ‘How was the sentry to know he was mad? If a soldier
don’t obey orders he stands to be shot himself. So there.’
‘It vhas murder,’ said Frank, and, smiting his thigh, he cried, ‘she
makes my blood boil.’
‘If you calls it murder again,’ said another of the women, ‘I’ll speak
to the sergeant, and he shall talk to you. You’re a low German fellow,
and us soldiers’ wives are not to be insulted by the likes of you.’
‘So there!’ cried the woman who had just spoken, spitting the words at
the young fellow.
Meanwhile sharp orders were being delivered within the barricade. I
took my chance of being reprimanded from the poop and went a little
way along the alley, and saw all the convicts still massed, but in
motion; they were descending the hatch, but one at a time, for there
was room for no more. The body of the fellow who had been stunned was
held by four of the prisoners. The doctor stood alone and apart within
the inclosure, looking at the men as they swarmed slowly toward the
main-hatch, filtering to their quarters. He was white, but stern and
collected. Sometimes he spoke, pointing or moving his hand as though
to insist on more order. He seemed a fearless figure, and though I
disliked him, I could not but admire him. There were scores, perhaps,
amongst those felons who would have made no more of felling him and
kicking out his brains than of dashing an egg to the deck.
I did not see Tom, so I went back to the recess, and just then an
apprentice struck six bells. Ten minutes later, every convict was below
and the main-deck clear; but I observed that when the guard came off
the poop one of the soldiers passed through the quarter-deck gate to
double the sentry at the main-hatch, and I heard another tell one of
the women, as he went below to the barracks, that he was to do duty as
second sentry at the prison door of the steerage bulkhead.