Phillip’s aide-de-camp and protégé, Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, was still in his twenties. An Englishman who probably had quite a lot of Celt in him, judging by the way he talked constantly and enthusiastically. The English showed in his meticulous recounting of facts, figures, statistics as the party toured the deck. Major Ross clearly despised him as full of waffle.
Thus it was Tuesday before the convicts had the leisure to look at Santa Cruz and what parts of Teneriffe their moorings in the harbor revealed. They had been fed that midday with fresh goat’s meat, boiled pumpkin, peculiar but edible bread and big, raw, juicy onions. Neither vegetable found favor with many, but Richard ate his onion as if it were an apple, crunching into it and letting the juice run down his chin to join the tears its vapors produced in abundance.
The town was small, treeless and very tired and the land around it was precipitous, dry, inhospitable. Of the mountain Richard had so hoped to see after reading about it, nothing was visible above a layer of grey cloud which seemed to hang over the island only; the sky out to sea was blue. Teneriffe had a lid jammed upon it like the hat on a donkey he saw near the stone jetty, the first truly novel impression he had of a non-English world. Bum boats either did not exist or were turned back by the longboats patrolling the area where the transports were all moored together. Alexander lay between two anchor cables suspended taut from the sea bed by floating kegs; because, one of the more sober sailors explained to him, the harbor bottom was littered with sharp chunks of iron the Spanish (who brought it out as ballast) simply dumped into the water as they took on cargo. If the cables were not kept taut, the iron tended to fray them.
They had chosen a good time of year to arrive, he learned from another sailor who had been here several times; the air was warm but neither hot nor humid. October was the most unendurable month, but from July to November hideous winds blew as hot as a furnace from Africa, and carried on them a wealth of stinging sand. But Africa was several hundred miles away! A place, he had always believed, of steaming jungles. Obviously not at this latitude, which was fairly close to the place where Atlas held the world up on his broad shoulders. Yes, he remembered, the deserts of Libya went all the way to Africa’s west coast.
On Wednesday, Stephen Donovan came down to the prison to find him shortly after dawn.
“I need you and your men, Morgan,” he said curtly, mouth tight in displeasure. “Ten of ye will do—and make it lively.”
Ike Rogers was a little better with every day that passed at anchor; yesterday he had eaten his onion with such relish that he found himself the recipient of several more. The pumpkin had also been devoured, though he seemed to have no appetite for meat or bread. His loss of weight was increasingly worrisome: the full, brash face had fallen away to bones and his wrists were so thin that they were knobbed. When Joey Long refused to leave him, Richard decided to take Peter Morris from Tommy Crowder’s cot.
“Why not me?” demanded Crowder peevishly.
“Because, Tommy, the fourth mate does not come down into the prison looking for men to clerk for him. He is wanting labor.”
“Then take Petey with my blessing,” said Crowder, relaxing; he was in the midst of delicate negotiations with Sergeant Knight which might lead to a little rum, even if at an inflated price.
On deck the ten convicts found Mr. Donovan pacing up and down looking like thunder. “Over the side and into the longboat,” he rapped. “I have barely enough sober men to bring the empty water tuns up, but none to take the tuns to the jetty and fill them. That is going to be your job. Ye’ll be under orders from the cargo hand, Dicky Floan, and ye’re going because there are not enough sober marines to put a guard on you. How many of ye can row?”
All the Bristol men could, which made four; Mr. Donovan, an abstemious man, looked blacker. “Then ye’ll have to be towed in and out—though where I am to find a lighter to do it, I have no idea.” He spotted the naval agent’s second-mate son and grabbed him. “Mr. Shortland, I need a towing lighter for the water tun longboat. Any suggestions?”
After a moment of frowning thought Mr. Shortland decided upon nepotism and flagged Fishburn, where his father was ensconced. Fishburn answered so promptly that not more than half an hour went by before Alexander’s longboat, loaded with empty tuns all standing upright, was towed away jettyward.
For such an arid and desolate place Teneriffe had excellent water; it came down from a spring somewhere in the interior near a town called Laguna, was conduited through the customary elm pipes (imported, Richard imagined, from Spain) and ran out of a series of mouths dispersed along a short stone jetty. Unless some ship were filling its tuns, the water dissipated in the salty harbor. Since leaving Portsmouth Alexander had used 4,000 gallons, so there were 26 of these 160-gallon receptacles to fill, and each one took two and a half hours. The system was quite ingenious, however, and permitted the filling of six tuns at once; had the Spanish put in a wooden jetty on piers, a boat containing tuns could actually have maneuvered itself underneath and filled all its tuns without man-handling either boat or tuns. As it was, the longboat had been stacked with six tuns on either side and had to be turned constantly to part-fill the tuns on one side, then turn the boat around and part-fill the tuns on the other side. Otherwise the weight—a full tun weighed over half a ton—would have capsized them. Hence the need for ten men to labor, pushing, pulling and oaring the longboat around, mindful of the fact that Donovan had said they had to finish filling the tuns that day. Tomorrow was booked for Scarborough.
The second Alexander longboat was brought in by another towing crew and contained fourteen tuns. Hoping for a little shore time, the towing crew was ordered to haul Alexander’s first boat back. Not an order the men would have taken from everybody, but were obliged to; it came from Mr. Samuel Rotton, one of the master’s mates off Sirius, and supervisor of watering. A sickly fellow, he did his job beneath the shelter of a green silk umbrella borrowed from delightful Mrs. Deborah Brooks, wife of Sirius’s boatswain and a very good friend of the Governor’s.
“Is she?” Richard asked Dicky Floan, who knew all the gossip.
“Oh, aye. A bit of naughty there, Morgan. All of Sirius is in the know, including Brooks. He’s an old shipmate of Phillip’s.”
Darkness had long fallen before the last tun was filled, and the ten convicts were trembling with fatigue. They had not been fed and for once Richard’s scruples had had to be set aside; it was impossible to labor in the sun, veiled though it was most of the time, without drinking, and the only water to drink came from the pipe originating at Laguna’s spring. They drank it.
Returning to Alexander well after eight, draped over the tuns in exhaustion, the convicts found that the harbor had come alive with a horde of tiny boats, each dewed with twinkling lights, and fishing for something that apparently was not catchable during the day. A fairyland of bobbing lamps, the occasional golden gleam of nets glittering with whatever milled inside them.
“Ye’ve done remarkable well,” said the fourth mate when the last of them, Richard, had clambered clumsily up the ladder. “Come with me.” He walked off toward the crew’s mess in the forecastle. “Go in, go in!” he cried. “No one has fed ye, I know, and there is not a marine sober enough to boil anything on their wretched stove without setting fire to the ship. Crew’s not in any better condition, but Mr. Kelly the cook kindly left ye food before retiring to his hammock cuddling a bottle.”
They had not had a feast like that one since leaving Ceres and their bum boat lunches six months ago—cold mutton that had been roasted, not boiled—a mess of pumpkin and onion stewed with herbs—fresh bread rolls slathered in butter—and the whole washed down by small beer.
