Others died too; by the end of April the month’s toll among the convicts stood at twelve. And sickness was spreading through the marines as well—fevers, lung inflammations, deliriums, paralyses. Three terrified privates absconded, a fourth on the last day of the month. A sergeant, a drummer and fourteen privates had been shipped off to hospital and replacements were hard to find. Alexander was getting a reputation as the death ship of the fleet—a reputation she was to keep. Every so often all but the original convicts (now 71 men, with Willy Wilton dead) were sent elsewhere and the vinegar, fumigation, scrubbing with oil of tar and whitewashing began all over again. Each time Richard’s larboard group found the bilges fouled.
“She may as well not have bilge pumps,” said Mikey Dennison in disgust. “They do not work.”
Three more men died. The toll now stood at fifteen dead since the 1st of April, and the number of convicts had shrunk from 210 to 195.
On the 11th of May, more than four months after boarding the death ship, news came that Governor Phillip had at last arrived on his flagship, Sirius, and that on the morrow the fleet of eleven ships would sail. But it did not. The crew of the storeship Fishburn had not been paid and refused to leave until they were. The occupants of the Alexander prison lay in their cots to sleep, finally provided with blankets—one per two men. Perhaps that was some kind of reward for having been stripped and searched—what for, nobody knew. Only that with Major Ross there to supervise, no one was rectally examined. Nor was anything confiscated.
About an hour after dawn on the 13th of May—summer solstice was coming, so dawn was early—Richard woke to find Alexander moving, her timbers creaking, a faint sighing of water nudging her sides, the slightest roll. Enough for Ike, already puking, but they had dealt with that by giving him poor dead Willy’s wooden eating bowl, which Joey Long had undertaken to empty into the night bucket whenever necessary.
Robert Jefferies from Devizes died that day of pneumonia; the blankets had come far too late for many men.
Once through the Needles at the western end of the Isle of Wight, which happened on that same day, Alexander grew more frisky than at any time on the slow sail from Tilbury to Portsmouth. She rolled a lot and pitched a little, which sent most of the convicts to their cots in the throes of sickness. Richard became conscious of nausea, but not to a degree beyond controlling, and it passed within three hours after a single dry heave. Maybe sea legs grew automatically on Bristolians? The other Bristolians—Connelly, Perrott, Davis, Crowder, Martin and Morris—were in similar case to himself. It was the country boys seemed the worst, though none was as bad as Ike Rogers.
The next day Lieutenant Shairp and Surgeon Balmain came down the after hatch more awkwardly than in still water, but with sufficient dignity to look impressive. The two privates with them collected the body of Robert Jefferies while Shairp and Balmain negotiated the heaving aisle by hanging on to platform edges, Shairp very careful not to put his hand on anyone’s vomit. The order was the same: get out and clean your deck, get out and empty your night bucket, get out and clean your cot, I do not care how sick you think you are. If you have puked on your blanket, wash it. If you have puked on your matting, wash it. If you have puked on yourself, wash yourself.
“If they do that every day the place will stay clean,” said Connelly. “Oh, I do hope!”
“Do not hope,” said Richard. “This is Balmain’s doing, not Shairp’s, but Balmain is not a methodical man. Luckily the food has already been puked up, so the worst we will have to cope with is shit. They will just lie there and shit themselves, and half of them at least have never had a wash in their lives. If we are clean and our cleanliness is spreading, it is because of my cousin James and the fact that I badger all within hailing distance so much that they fear me more than they do a wash.” He grinned. “Once they get used to washing, they start to like being clean.”
“You,” said Will Connelly, “are a very strange man, Richard. Deny it as much as ye like, but ye’re definitely the head man on the larboard side.” He closed his eyes and concentrated upon his internal mechanisms. “I feel well, so I am going to try to read.” He sat on the bench along the central table right under the open hatch with the three volumes of Robinson Crusoe, found his place in the first and was soon absorbed in it, apparently quite oblivious to the ship’s motion.
Richard joined him with his gazetteer of the world; the coats of whitewash had made all the difference.
By the time Alexander passed well to the south of Plymouth most of the men had found their sea legs, though Ike Rogers and a handful of others had not. It was even possible to walk the aisles once a man got used to the way the deck rose to meet his feet, then fell away from beneath them. And thus it was that Richard, exercising, made the acquaintance of John Power, the forward head man.
Power was a fine-looking young fellow, lithe and supple as a cat, with a fierce look in his dark eyes and a curious habit of making highly expressive gestures with his hands as he talked. Very Frog, very Italian, not at all English, Dutch or German. He had an air of someone under pressure, not with anxiety or ill temper but rather with colossal energies and enthusiasms. And his eyes said that he liked to take risks.
“Richard Morgan!” he said as Richard passed by his cot, the top corner one where the forward bulkhead met the starboard hull. “I bid ye welcome to enemy territory.”
“I am not your enemy, John Power. I am a quiet man who minds his own business.”
“Which is the larboard side. Very neat and clean and tidy, I am told. Bristol fashion, real shipshape.”
“I am indeed a Bristol man, but visit us and see for yourself. ’Tis true we keep ourselves to ourselves—but then, we none of us speak the flash lingo.”
“My men like to talk flash, though I do not much care for it myself—sailors hate it.” Power slipped off his cot and joined Richard. “Ye’re an old man, Morgan, now I see ye close up.”
“Eight-and-thirty last September, though so far I have not felt my years overmuch, Power. My strength is a little diminished after nigh five months of Alexander, but we did get some work to do in Portsmouth, which was a help. They always put Bristolians on bilge duty—our noses are immune to the foulest airs. Did ye go to the lighter, The Firm or Fortunee?”
“The lighter. I get on well with Alexander’s crew, so my men never experienced Portsmouth’s hulks.” He heaved a great sigh, hands signaling exultation. “As soon as maybe I intend to work on Alexander as a seaman. Mr. Bones—he is third mate—promised. Then I will get my strength back.”
“I had thought we would be below deck for the whole voyage.”
“Not if Mr. Bones is right. Governor Phillip says we are not to be allowed to waste away, he needs us fit enough to work when we reach Botany Bay.”
They reached the starboard bulkhead barrel of sea-water and turned to walk forward. Power glanced sideways at Will Connelly hunched over Mr. Daniel Defoe. “Do all of ye read?” he asked with a tinge of envy.
“Six of us do, and five of us are Bristolians—Crowder, Davis, Connelly there, Perrott and me. The odd man out is Bill Whiting,” said Richard. “Bristol is full of charity schools.”
“London has almost no charity schools. Though I always thought it a waste of time to read books when the signs above any sort of shop tell a man what is inside.” The hands waggled wryly. “Now I think it would be good to read books. It passes the time.”
“When ye’re aloft ’twill not seem so dreadful. Are ye married?”
“Not I!” Power turned his thumbs down. “Women are poison.”
“Nay, they are just like us—some good, some bad, and some indifferent.”
