“You heard him,” said Richard. “We’d best get below and warn the rest what is to come.”

“Greasy,” said Taffy thoughtfully. He went off toward the quarterdeck, where Bill was strewing fodder from a bucket. “Bill! Our sheep! Bill, we are in for the mother of all blows!”

They ate that day at the same hour as those thin high clouds were scudding, but no one came to feed them on the following day. The gale kept getting worse, throwing the ship around like a tiny ball; her sides boomed and reverberated like the inside of a drum, though the hatches had not yet been battened down.

At about the moment when the denizens of the prison realized that they would get nothing to eat until the weather died a little, Richard stood on the table and poked his body out of the after hatch, clinging to it for dear life, to witness the ocean hanging over Alexander from four directions at once. The temptation was too much; he levered himself out onto the deck and found a spot out of harm’s way against the mainmast, there to watch the sea come at the ship without rhyme or reason. There were head seas, beam seas and following seas, but this was all of them simultaneously. The rigging creaked and groaned in agony, though he could only hear it above the howling wind and roaring sea by pressing his ear to the timber of the mainmast; water cascaded off the sails while sailors spidered from spar to spar shortening some sail and reefing in others completely. The bows and bowsprit would go right under, then rear up amid flurries and vast washes even as a second wave thundered on larboard, a third wave on starboard, and a fourth on the stern. Prudently Richard had used a piece of rope to tie himself securely; these monstrous waves crashed across the deck with massive force no man lower than a spar could resist without a lifeline.

Impossible to spy Scarborough or Friendship until an immense surge carried Alexander with it up onto its crest, there to dangle for just long enough to see poor Friendship rolled right on her side, the seas breaking clean over her. Down slid Alexander into a trough, decks running a foot deep in water, then up, up, up—oh, it was wonderful! And what a seaworthy old girl Alexander was, poison-soaked timbers and all.

They had battened down the hatches just after he had left the prison, though he never noticed, too entranced with the immensity of what was surely one of the mightiest tempests that ever blew. When night fell he loosed himself and crawled, exhausted and blue with cold, under one of the longboats, where he made himself a warm and fairly dry nest amid the hay. Thus he slept through the very worst of it and woke in the morning, still very cold, to find the sky blue but not greasy and that mammoth sea still running, though less chaotically. The hatches were open; he slid down onto the table and twisted to the deck feeling as if he had just midwifed the birth of the end of the world.

The cries of joy which greeted him astonished him; from Rio onward he had fancied that the rest were growing more independent.

“Richard, Richard!” cried Joey Long, hugging him with tears running down his cheeks. “We thought ye drowned!”

“Not I! I was too busy watching the storm to notice them at the hatches, so I was marooned. Joey, calm yourself. I am well, just wet and cold.”

While he rubbed himself vigorously with a dry rag he learned from the others that John Bird, a convict up forward, had broken into the hold and passed out bread.

“We all ate it,” said Jimmy Price. “No one fed us.”

Which did not stop Zachariah Clark from demanding that John Bird be flogged for stealing the contractor’s property.

Lieutenant Furzer, who turned out to be a curious mixture of compassion and confused inertia, calculated the amount of bread missing and announced that it was about the same amount as would have been issued had it been issued. Therefore, he said, no punishment would be administered, and today every convict would receive a double portion of salt meat as well as hard bread.

Despite that quarrel with Zachariah Clark in Cape Town, Captain Sinclair had recognized a soul mate in rapacity; no sooner had Clark moved onto Alexander’s quarterdeck than Sinclair started inviting the contractor’s agent to share his sumptuous dinners—in return for a blind eye about rum. As Sophia was using Clark’s cabin as a childing room, Esmeralda graciously consented to let Clark sleep in his day cabin, not really needed. So when Sinclair heard of Furzer’s verdict he sent a message to the marine through Clark to the effect that John Bird be flogged for the unauthorized appropriation of the contractor’s property.

“Nothing is missing that ought not to be missing,” said Furzer frostily, “so why don’t ye go off and toss your tossle, arsehead?”

“I shall report your impudence to the captain!” Clark gasped.

“Ye can report it until ye’re blue in the cods, arsehead, but that ain’t going to change a thing. I decide about the convicts, not fucken fat boy Esmeralda.”

*    *    *

Every sailor aboard Alexander was eager to tell anybody prepared to listen that the blow had been the worst he had ever, ever encountered, chiefly due to those awful seas coming from all points of the compass at once—ominous, very ominous. Word was flagged from Scarborough that all was well; poor Friendship was in worse case, having been pooped as well as right over on her beam—nothing on board her was dry from animals to clothing to bedding.

But the eastings had been found and the three ships, keeping abreast of each other with a cable’s length in between, ploughed forward to log up a minimum of 184 land miles a day. They were now down at 40° south latitude and inching steadily farther south than that. Early in December came an even worse gale than the famous one, but at least it blew itself out faster. The weather was freezing cold, despite the summer season; the truly impoverished and less farsighted convicts huddled together for warmth in their thin contractor-issue linen slops, though thanks to the number of deaths there were spare blankets. The hay came in handy.

Dysentery broke out among convicts and marines; men started to die again. Then came news from Scarborough and Friendship that they had dysentery too. Richard insisted that every drop of water his men drank be filtered through the cleaned dripstones. In these tossing seas that meant a few spoonfuls at a time. If all the ships were suffering, whatever water they were on was contaminated. Surgeon Balmain did not order fumigation, scrubbing and a new coat of whitewash, probably because he realized that did he, mutiny would break out.

Though Friendship had set more sail than at any time during the voyage so far, she could not keep up with Alexander and Scarborough, flying along at 207 and more land miles a day. Almost a week into December and the weather warmed a little; Shortland ordered the two big slavers to slow down and let Friendship catch up. Then came a morning of dense, pure white fog that glowed from within like a gigantic pearl, eerie, beautiful, dangerous. The three ships loaded their guns with powder only and fired regularly while a sailor rang Alexander’s bell in its belfry on the starboard rail, clang-clang—long pause—clang-clang. Muffled booms and faint clang-clangs drifted back from Scarborough and Friendship, which kept as true to course as Alexander, a cable’s length apart. Then at ten o’clock the fog lifted in a twinkle to reveal a fine, fair day and a fine, fair breeze.

Great drifts of seaweed appeared—a sign of land, said the sailors, though no land was sighted, just large numbers of grampuses having terrific fun streaking around, under and between the three ships forging along together. The seaweed became mixed with broad trails of fish sperm in meandering ribbons, of what kind no one knew. Somewhere to the south was the Isle of Desolation* where Captain Cook had once spent a very strange Christmas Day.