went away down the river on a straight course for Dungeness, where the
steamer cast us adrift. Until we were clear of soundings I saw little of
the convicts. We met with very heavy weather, and most of the prisoners
lay as sea-sick as young ladies in their gloomy quarters. I had occasion
once in this time to enter the barracks, as the soldiers’ bulkheaded
compartments were called, where I got a sight of the convicts in their
’tween-decks. The soldiers slept under the booby-hatch in cabins rudely
knocked up for their accommodation. Their quarters were divided from the
prison by an immensely strong barricade bristling with triangular-headed
nails, and loopholed for muskets, so that, in the event of a disturbance,
the soldiers could fire upon the convicts within without passing the
barricade. There was a strong door on the starboard side of this
barricade, at which a sentinel with a loaded weapon was posted day and
night.
I forget the occasion of my going below. It was blowing strong, and
a high sea was running, the ship was labouring heavily, and the
straining and groaning of the bulkheads and temporary fastenings were so
distracting that I could easily believe the convicts supposed the ship
was going to pieces. I put my eye to a loophole in the barricade and saw
the picture. Sleeping-shelves for the reception of six men in a row ran
the length of the ’tween-decks on either hand in two tiers. There was a
suffusion of pale light round about the main-hatch, but it was like a
sulky, thunderous twilight elsewhere, in the midst of which the shapes
of the prisoners moved or lay motionless as though they were phantoms
beheld in a dream, tragically coloured by storm, by the cannon-like
roar of hurling seas, and the wild springs and dives of a ship in angry
waters. That scene of ’tween-decks is the most memorable of my life’s
impressions; but I have no words to communicate it. It was not so much
the details of the picture itself—the pale light under the hatch, the
spirit-like figures of the felons, the lines of glimmering bunks, the
bulging bulkheads of the hospital in the gloomy corner right forward; it
was the deep human meaning that I found in it—the fancy of the sins, and
the conscience, and the memories, the burning hopes, the biting griefs
which made up the human life contained in that shadowy timber sea-tossed
jail; this it was that gave to the scene its marvellous impressive
significance.
Many of the prisoners were under life sentences; some were being exiled
for fourteen, and some for terms of seven years. Never a man of them all
would probably see England again. Indeed, it used to be said that not one
in every hundred transported convicts returned to his native country.
When we got out of the Channel we met with quiet weather. The prisoners,
heavily ironed, were brought up to help to do the ship’s work and take
exercise. They were put to assist the seamen in washing the decks
down. They were also set to various jobs calculated to prove useful to
themselves. It was a strange sight to a sailor’s eye to see the convicts
in their barricaded enclosure scrubbing with brushes at the planks,
their chains clanking as they toiled, the burly boatswain of the ship
bawling at the top of his pipes as he swished the water along, warders
(themselves picked convicts) roaring commands to their fellow-prisoners;
you saw the red coat of a sentry, the gleam of his bayonet on the
forecastle; such another sentry clasped his musket at the main-hatch, and
a third stood at the gate of the quarter-deck barricade. Overhead swelled
the white sails, lifting to the milky softness of topgallant-sail and
royal; the blue sea flashed in silver glory under the newly risen sun;
smoke blew briskly away from the chimneys of the convicts’ and the ship’s
cabooses; you saw the cook leaning out of his galley door watching the
scrubbing convicts: aft, on the sand-white stretch of poop, the captain
and the surgeon in charge of the prisoners would be walking, whilst the
mate of the watch, with one arm circling a backstay, might be standing
at the poop-rail talking to Captain Gordon or the subaltern, answering
questions about the ship, the names of sails, her rate of progress, or
with long outstretched arm pointing into the dark blue far recess to
some growing star of canvas, or to some blackening fibre-like line of
steamer’s smoke.
It was not until we had closed the Madeira parallels, where the
weather was hot and the azure slope of billow winked with the leaps of
flying-fish, that the doctor gave orders for the convicts’ irons to be
removed. The whole of the prisoners were massed on deck and harangued
by him before they were freed. Dr. Saunders had a stern face; he was
a dark-skinned, smooth-shaven man, with heavy eyebrows and a lowering
look, and I thought him a bully until I had sat a few times at the table
when he was present, and exchanged a few sentences with him on deck, and
then I guessed that he was belied by his expression of feature and was a
good man at root, kind, and even warm-hearted, though sternly masked for
professional and penitentiary purposes. He addressed the mass of upturned
faces on the quarter-deck, sermonized them indeed, assured them that it
grieved him as much to hear the clank of their chains as the wearing of
the irons oppressed and degraded them. He begged them to live on good
terms with one another, to guard against evil language, to love God and
keep His Word, and so to resolve as to assure themselves in the time
coming, in a new land, in the day of their enlargement, of an honourable
and prosperous future. Some listened doggedly, some as though they would
like to laugh out, some with a little play of emotion in their faces.
They then went below, and their irons were taken off.
Until we reached the latitude of (call it) 5° N. all went as things
should with us. The convicts were orderly and seemed well under the
control of the doctor. Every day schools were held above or between
decks; addresses on all sorts of topics were delivered to the prisoners
by the doctor; Divine service was celebrated three times on Sundays;
you’d sometimes hear the fellows down the hatchways singing psalms
of their own accord. The doctor once at table with a well-pleased
countenance told the captain that one of the worst of the many ruffians
who were being lagged was now become the most penitent of all the
prisoners.
“He talked to me about his past,” Dr. Saunders said, “with the tears in
his eyes, and in a voice broken by grief. I have great hopes of the poor
fellow. Time was, and not long ago, when I looked upon him as a Norfolk
Islander: I should never be surprised to hear that he was favoured when
out in the colony and was doing exceedingly well.”
“Is it the square powerfully-built man, pitted with smallpox, with little
black eyes, and a coal-black crop of hair?” asked Captain Gordon.
The doctor inclined his head.
“His name’s Simon Rolt,” said Lieutenant Venables. “I was in town at the
time of his trial, and, having plenty of leisure, went one day down to
the Old Bailey. He was convicted——”
Dr. Saunders lifted his hand with an expressive look. Indeed, it was
never his wish that the prisoners should be named, and he was deaf to all
inquiries concerning the crimes for which they were being transported.
Well, we had been driven by prosperous winds to the parallel of 5° N.
Here the breeze failed. It was the zone of equatorial calms, where the
dim, hot, blue water fades out into a near silver faintness of sky,
and where the lofty white canvas of the stagnated ship melts into the
azure brine under her, like quicksilver cloudily draining through the
keel. For the past week the heat had been fierce; but always had there
been a breeze to fill the windsails and render the roasting atmosphere
of the ’tween-decks endurable. But now, when the wind was gone, the
temperature was scarcely to be supported, even by the most seasoned of
our lobscousers. The pitch lay like butter in the seams of the planks;
the wheel, flaming its brass-clad circle to the small high sun, turned
red-hot in the grip of the helmsman; the tar came off the rigging in
strings upon the fingers like treacle, and the hush of the heat lay upon
the plain of ocean as the silence of the white desert dwells upon its
leagues of dazzling sand.
I had charge of the ship during the second dog-watch, that is, from six
to eight. Some little time after sundown, and when the sky over our
mastheads was full of large, dim, trembling stars, whilst the sea floated
from alongside in a breast of ink into the obscurity of the horizon, Dr.
Saunders approached Captain Gordon, who was talking to the commander of
the ship close to where I stood, and exclaimed—
“The heat is too much for the people below. A hundred and twenty souls in
those low-pitched contracted ’tween-decks! The sufferings of slaves in
the Middle Passage can’t be worse.”
“What’s to be done, sir?” said Captain Wickham. “The wind don’t come to
the mariner’s whistle in these times.”
“We must have detachments of them on deck,” said Dr. Saunders. “We
must let a third of them at a time breathe the open air and relieve
the demands upon the atmosphere below. It may be done,” he added, with
perhaps the least hint of doubtfulness in his manner.
Captain Wickham did not speak.
“It ought to be done,” said Lieutenant Venables, crossing the deck out of
the shadow to port with a lighted cigar in his mouth. “It’s hell, Gordon,
in the barracks.”
“You’ll want the guard to fall in, doctor?” said Captain Gordon.
“Oh yes, if you please.”
The necessary orders were given; five or six soldiers mounted the poop
ladder, and ranged themselves along the break, the muskets loaded and
the bayonets fixed as usual. The doctor left the deck, and in some ten
minutes’ time a file of shadowy figures wound, serpent-like, past the
main-hatch sentry into the barricaded enclosure. They broke into little
companies, and all were as still as the dead; but I could _feel_ in
their postures, in their manner of grouping themselves, the exquisite
relief and delight they found in drinking in the moist night air.
This detachment remained an hour on deck. When they went below, and the
next lot came up, the time was half-past eight. I had been relieved at
eight bells by the chief officer; but the heat in the cabin was so great
that after I had stayed a few minutes in my berth I filled a pipe and
went on to the quarter-deck, where I stood smoking in the recess under
the poop. The quarter-deck barricade was about six feet tall, and the
figures of the convicts behind it were not to be seen where I stood.
Nothing was visible but the stars over either bulwark-rail, and the
festooned cloths of the main course on high, and the dim square of the
becalmed topsail above it floating up and fading in the darkness of the
night.
All on a sudden an odd, low whistle sounded forward or aft—I can’t tell
where; an instant later the figure of a convict sprang on to the top of
the starboard bulwarks, where, poising himself whilst you might have
counted ten, he shrieked aloud, “O God, have mercy upon me! O Christ,
have mercy upon me!” and went overboard.
Silence lasting a moment or two followed the splash; the hush of
amazement and horror was broken by loud cries from the convicts, sharp
orders delivered over my head in the voice of Captain Gordon, followed
by the tramp of the soldiers striding quick to the break of the poop
clearly to command the people within the barricades with their muskets.
I heard Mr. Barlow, the mate, roar to the man at the wheel, “Do you see
anything of him there?” And Captain Wickham shouted once or twice, “Man
overboard! Aft, some hands, and clear away the starboard quarter-boat.”
Meanwhile I had observed the form of Dr. Saunders rush down the poop
ladder and run headlong past the sentry into the barricaded enclosure,
where now at this time his stern, clear voice rang out strong as he
ordered the convicts to fall in and return to their quarters.
I sprang to the side to look for the man that was gone, but saw nothing.
The sea was like black slush: there was scarce an undulation in it to
flap the softest echo out of the lightest canvas. I saw no fire in the
water. Something was wrong with the quarter-boat. They were a long time
bungling with the falls, and I heard the voice of an enraged seaman
harshly yell, “Who the blooming blazes has bin and stopped ’em in this
fashion!”
“Jump for the port boat, men! jump for the port boat!” shouted Mr.
Barlow. “The man’ll have sounded the bottom whilst you’re messing about
with those tackles.”
I ran on to the poop to lend a hand. The captain, quickly making me out,
told me to get into the boat and take charge. We were lowered, and rowed
away round the vessel under her counter to look for the man to starboard,
from which side he had jumped. The oars as they dipped made no fire in
the water. We headed for the spot whence the convict had sprung, and then
worked our way along the bends and afterwards went a few strokes astern,
and then rowed round to port, conceiving that the poor devil might have
risen on t’other side the ship.
“Do you see anything of him?” shouted Captain Wickham.
“Nothing, sir.”
“Hook on! He’s gone—there’s no more to be done,” called down the captain.
We had spent half an hour in the hunt and the man was undoubtedly drowned.
Who was the convict that had destroyed himself? After I had regained
the ship, and whilst I was ordering one of the boat’s crew to go aft
and coil away the end of the starboard main-brace, which I had noticed
hanging over the side, the doctor arrived on the poop, walking slowly.
The guard was by this time dismissed: all was silent and motionless on
the main-deck betwixt the barricades; the only figures down there were
the main-deck and quarter-deck sentries; but there was much stir forward
upon the forecastle, where the sailors were stepping from side to side,
peering over the rail with some fancy, no doubt, of catching sight of the
floating body of the drowned convict.
The doctor, Captain Wickham, Captain Gordon, and the subaltern came
together in a group within easy earshot of where I stood.
“It’s the man Simon Rolt,” said the doctor. “I shall be blamed for
allowing the convicts to come on deck after the regulation hours.”
“Rolt! D’ye mean your religious enthusiast, doctor?” said Captain Gordon.
“Lucky he was the _only_ one!” exclaimed the commander of the ship.
“Suicide should be contagious in this heat amongst fellows primed with
such memories as sweeten the sleep of your people.”
“I would rather have lost five hundred pounds than that it should have
happened,” said Dr. Saunders.
“Do the prisoners take it quietly?” inquired Captain Gordon.
“As I could wish,” answered the doctor. “They seemed awed and frightened.”
The conversation ran thus for awhile. The party then went below to drink
some grog, and after finishing my pipe on the quarter-deck I turned in.
I was aroused at midnight to take charge of the ship. I walked the deck
until four, and nothing whatever happened saving that at about five bells
there suddenly blew a fresh little breeze out of the north-west gloom: it
brightened the stars, and the night felt the cooler for the mere sound of
foam alongside. This breeze was blowing when I left the deck, and we were
then moving through the water at five knots.
At six o’clock I was awakened by the chief officer putting his hand upon
my shoulder. The look in his face startled me, and instantly gave me my
wits.
“Mr. Barker,” said he, “the captain lies dead in his bunk. He’s been
strangled—garrotted somehow. Come along with me. Who in the devil’s name
done it?”
I sprang out of my bunk and clothed myself quickly. The morning had fully
broken: it was another brilliant day and the wind gone, and my cabin
porthole glowed in a disc of splendour against the sea under the sun. I
followed the mate to the captain’s cabin. The poor man lay with his face
dark with strangulation: his features were convulsed and distorted, his
eyes were starting from their sockets, and froth and blood were on his
lips. Dr. Saunders stood beside the body: it seems that the mate had
roused him before coming to me.
“Is he dead, sir?” inquired Mr. Barlow.
“Ay; he has been throttled in his sleep. This must be the work of one of
your crew,” said Dr. Saunders, speaking low and deliberately, and sending
a professional glance under a frown full of thought and wonder at the
corpse.
“Why one of the crew,” cried Mr. Barlow, “in a shipload of convicts? With
ten soldiers and a sergeant besides?”
“Convicts!” exclaimed the doctor. “You’ll not wish me to believe, sir,
that the guard is in collusion with the prisoners? And you’ll have to
prove _that_ to persuade me this is the work of a convict.”
Mr. Barlow retorted; whilst they argued the dreadful matter I looked
about me, but witnessed nothing to speak to a struggle. Through the large
open stern window the silver-blue sea was sheeting to the horizon, and
the cabin was full of the light glowing upon the water. I was very well
acquainted with the furniture of the captain’s cabin, which was right aft
on the starboard side; everything was in its place. The doctor exposed
the throat of the body, and showed us certain livid marks, which he said
signified that the captain had been killed through compression of the
windpipe by a pair of giant-strong hands. Powerful indeed the murderer
must have been to destroy so vigorous a frame as Captain Wickham’s in
silence, suffocating him as he lay, with never a sound to penetrate to
the adjacent cabins where Gordon slept and Dr. Saunders and Lieutenant
Venables.
I roused those officers; they viewed the body, and then the lot of us
went into the cuddy, where we held a council. Dr. Saunders again asserted
that the murder must have been done by one of the sailors—at all events
by some one belonging to the ship. The mate would not hear of this. Yes,
if there was nobody but the ship’s company in the vessel, then indeed the
murderer would have to be sought for in the forecastle.
Captain Gordon said that he knew his men; he’d stake his life upon their
dutifulness and loyalty.
“If the murderer is one of my people,” said Dr. Saunders, “he passed
the sentry to enter the cuddy. How was _that_ managed unless the sentry
permitted him to pass?”
“The sentry might have been dozing,” said I.
“No, sir,” cried Lieutenant Venables, bringing his fist in a passion on
the table; “you are a sailor, Mr. Barker; you don’t know soldiers.”
“Could the convict have returned to his quarters unobserved even
supposing him to have slipped past a nodding sentry? A preposterous
conjecture!” exclaimed the doctor. “How would he know where the captain
slept? The murderer is no convict, Gordon.”
It was settled that the mate and I should overhaul the ship’s company
for evidence, whilst the doctor and the military officers made inquiries
for themselves amongst the prisoners and soldiers. I followed the mate
on deck. He called to the boatswain to pipe all hands. The whole of the
crew assembled on the quarter-deck, and Mr. Barlow told them that Captain
Wickham had been murdered. He added that the ship must be searched from
end to end, and he called upon the crew to do their utmost to help me and
the boatswain to ransack the forecastle for evidence.
“I have no fear of the result, my lads,” he exclaimed. “If the doctor and
military officers can clear the guard and prisoners, so much the better;
it is my duty as your acting commander to see _you_ cleared also, anyhow,
and smartly, too, if you’ll help.”
The men sung out to me to come forward at once; many were their
exclamations charged with the heavy oaths of the forecastle; and as they
rolled forwards I heard them swearing that if the convicts hadn’t done it
then the murderer was one of the _guffies_ (soldiers).
Well, the boatswain and I thoroughly searched the forecastle, but it was
a fool’s quest after all; we hardly knew what to look for. The sailors
heartily helped us, threw open their chests, pulled their hammocks to
pieces, forced us to overhaul their persons, but what for? It was not as
though literally blood had been shed. There was no knife with damning
signs upon the handle and blade to seek for. The only weapons used had
been the hands. Our search, then, forward was wholly profitless.
I was an hour in the forecastle, and when I went aft the doctor and
officers were still hard at work questioning and hunting after evidence
below. They came to Mr. Barlow presently, and told him that they were
fully satisfied the murder had not been the work of a convict. As to any
of the soldiers being concerned—Captain Gordon indignantly refused to
discuss the subject, nay, to listen to a syllable from us mates on that
head.
“Is there nobody missing forward amongst the crew?” the doctor asked.
“Nobody,” answered Mr. Barlow. “And how does it stand with _your_ people?”
“Every man jack can be accounted for, of course.”
“Search the ship!” exclaimed Captain Gordon.
“For what?” rejoined the mate. “There’s no man missing; we’re seven weeks
out; what do you expect, gentlemen, to find hidden below at this time of
day?”
“I’m for searching the ship, nevertheless,” said Captain Gordon. “Good
God! when such a murder as this has been done, would you stop short just
when discovery may be within reach of another stride?”
The mate, with some colour in his cheek, answered, “The ship shall be
searched.”
I headed one little gang and the boatswain another, and we thoroughly
overhauled the hold from the fore to the after peak. The ship’s lading
consisted of agricultural implements and light Government commodities for
the colony. Her after-hold was filled with provisions, barrels of flour,
casks of rum, great cases of tinned meat, and other such things. A large
portion of the steerage, too, under the cuddy was filled with Government
stuff, mattresses, blankets, and so forth, not to mention three hundred
sets of irons.
Our search occupied some time: there was much ground to cover. Perhaps
we did not seek very strenuously. For my part, I never for a moment
imagined that there would or could be any one not belonging to the ship
in hiding below. Suppose a stowaway: it would scarcely serve his purpose
to make his first appearance on deck as a murderer, and the murderer of
the captain of the ship of all men! And yet, though I felt quite certain
that the criminal was not amongst our crew, I was equally sure he was not
amongst the prisoners. One had but to reason a little to understand that
it was not the work of a convict. Every night the ’tween-decks prison
gate that gave upon the barracks was strongly secured. No convict could
have made his way through it, and beside it was posted the sentry.
Equally well secured and guarded was the main-hatch entrance. The
murderer, then, was not a convict. Was he a soldier?
We buried the body of the captain that morning, and Mr. Barlow took
command of the ship. When night came a sentry was posted at the cuddy
door (this was in addition to the usual guard), and the sergeant received
instructions to make the rounds of the cuddy from time to time to see
that all was well. In this work he would be assisted by the mate of the
watch and by the ship’s boatswain, who would now serve as second mate.
The night passed quietly. From time to time Captain Gordon or Lieutenant
Venables illustrated his restlessness by coming on deck and flitting
about, calling to the cuddy-door sentry and asking me questions. This was
during my watch, during the silent passages of which I deeply pondered
the matter of the murder, but could make nothing of it. Had it been done
by some one walking in his sleep? Some one of us who, utterly unconscious
of his deed, had viewed the corpse of the strangled captain with horror
and astonishment?