* Kerguelen Island.
Two days later the entire sea turned to blood. At first the awed and fascinated occupants of Alexander thought it must be blood from a slain whale, then realized that no leviathan could exsanguinate enough to dye the water scarlet as far as the eye could see. Yet another mystery of the deep they would never solve.
“I understand at last,” Richard said to Donovan, “why ye itch to see foreign places. I was never visited by a wish to go any farther from Bristol than Bath because that was my narrow, familiar world. A man cannot help but grow when he is plucked out of his narrow, familiar world. Either that, or like some in the prison below, he will die of the uncertainty. Place is very strong in people. It was in me, perhaps still is.”
“To have a sense of place is common, Richard. That I have none may be thanks to poverty and a burning desire to be free of it, get out of Belfast, out of anywhere tied me down.”
“Did ye go to a charity school, then?”
“No. A kind gentleman took me under his wing and taught me to read and write. He said—and rightly so—that literacy would be my ticket to better things, whereas booze is a ticket to nowhere.”
Donovan was smiling as at a fond memory; reluctant to probe, Richard changed the subject.
“Why is the sea turned to blood? Have ye seen it before?”
“Nay, but I have heard of it. Sailors are a superstitious lot, so ye’ll find most of them describe it as a sign of doom, or the wrath of God, or a portent of evil. For myself—I do not know, except that I believe it is as natural as wanting sex.” Donovan wriggled his brows expressively and grinned at Richard’s discomfort, knowing full well that Richard hated being called a prude chiefly because he knew that at heart he was a prude. “Perhaps some huge convulsion on the sea floor has thrown up a mass of red earth, or perhaps the blood is composed of tiny red sea creatures.”
They ran into more gales, always terrible. In the midst of one memorable squall Alexander sustained her only accident of the voyage by carrying away her fore topsail yard in the slings, which meant that the short chains tethering the wooden yard to the mast snapped and the sail, still attached to its yard, flew free. Scarborough and Friendship backed their main and fore topsails to halt onward progress and waited until the sail was caught—a risky business—and the slings were reconnected.
Then right on the summer solstice it rained—after which it snowed heavily—and followed this up with a bombardment of hailstones the size of hen’s eggs. Nothing the sheep felt, but for pigs and men, a bruising nuisance. The joys of summer at 41° south! 41° north was the latitude of American New York and Spanish Salamanca, where it did not snow heavily at the time of the summer solstice. Perhaps being on the bottom of the world was more than a metaphorical upside-down? The bottom of the world, thought many of the sailors, marines and convicts, must be a lot heavier than the top could possibly be.
By Christmas Day the three ships were at 42° south and maintaining their 184-land-mile-a-day average through dirty weather. The most enormous whale of the entire voyage followed the trio while the light lasted; he was a bluish-grey in color and well over 100 feet long. As well then that apparently he was just wishing them a merry Christmas, for he would have made shivered timbers out of little Friendship.
Christmas well-being reigned in the prison. Served in the mid afternoon, dinner consisted of pease soup flavored with salt pork, the usual chunk of salt beef and the usual small loaf of hard bread. The treat was in receiving a full half-pint of neat Rio rum each. They also got a chance to win one of Sophia’s pups. She had produced five healthy offspring in Zachariah Clark’s cot, Surgeon Balmain acting as midwife. They were extraordinary. Two looked like pug dogs, two rather like stiff-haired terriers with overslung lower jaws, and one was the image of Wallace. Lieutenant Shairp, the proud surrogate father, gave Balmain the pick of the litter; he chose a puggy one. So did Lieutenant Johnstone, the proud surrogate mother. That left Lieutenant John Shortland and first mate Long to take the salmon-jawed pair.
Things became complicated when Lieutenant Furzer refused to accept the Wallace look-alike because he looked so Scotch (though he did not say that—it was Christmas, after all).
“What shall we do with him?” asked Shairp.
“Esmeralda and his bum boy Clark?” asked Johnstone.
The entire quarterdeck sneered.
“Then I have a mind to give young MacGregor to the prison for Christmas. No convict has a dog,” said Shairp.
The entire quarterdeck thought this an excellent idea, worth toasting in a postprandial amalgam of port and rum.
On Christmas Day the two marine parents appeared in the prison as soon as dinner was finished, Shairp carrying little MacGregor. Both officers were falling-down drunk, though that was not an occurrence peculiar to the festive season. No one ever got any sense out of a marine officer after dinner time on any ship save Friendship, where the lemonade-sipping Ralph Clark used his rum ration to trade to carpenters for writing cases and bureaus, and convicts for tailoring everything from shirts to gloves.
The lots for MacGregor were cast using four decks of cards: those who drew an Ace of Diamonds were in the running. To whoops and cheers, three men showed an Ace of Diamonds. Shairp, sitting on the table, then asked for three straws, though he was so drunk that Johnstone had to wrap his hand around them snugly.
“Long straw wins!” cried Shairp.
Joey Long drew it, weeping in delight.
“The long straw to Long!” Shairp was so amused that he fell off the table and had to be helped tenderly to his feet by Richard and Will, while Joey took the wriggling scrap and covered it in kisses.
“We will keep him with his mama until we get to Botany Bay,” caroled Johnstone. “Once ashore, MacGregor is yours.”
God could not have been kinder, thought Richard as he drifted into a rummy sleep, for once not consumed with a desire to get up on deck. Since Ike died, poor simple Joey has had no purpose. Now he has a dog to love. God has emancipated one of my dependents. I pray the others are as fortunate. Once we leave these confines it will be much harder to keep together.
The pace increased to over 207 land miles a day until the end of December; the weather was as foul as it could be—heavy seas, squalls, howling gales. At south of 43° the winds really roared.
1788 arrived in filthy weather with the wind against; the New Year storms blew on the bow as the latitude crept up to 44°. Then along came a breeze so fair that it shoved the three ships along at 219 miles a day. As the southern capes of Van Diemen’s Land were expected at any time, Lieutenant Shortland signaled that cables were to be put to anchors just in case. The gale increased and Friendship lost her fore topmast studding sail boom and rent the canvas to pieces, but still no land.
Afraid of reefs and uncharted rocks, at seven in the evening of the 4th of January, Shortland ordered the ships to stand to. Next morning came the long awaited cry: “Land ahoy!” There it was! The southernmost tip of New South Wales! A massive cliff.
Once around the southeast cape their course altered radically from east to north by northeast; the last 1,000 miles to Botany Bay were the most frustrating of the whole voyage, so near and yet so far. The winds were against, the currents were against, everything was against. On some days the three ships ended miles south of yesterday’s position, on other days they stood and tacked, stood and tacked what seemed eternally. Then there were days when the winds were, as the sailors put it, “horrible hard-hearted.” One night Friendship split her fore top main stay sail, followed by her peak halyard in the morning. They would inch up to 39°, fall back to 42°. Friendship’s main stay sail split to shreds—her fifth sail disaster since Cape Town. They battled to make any kind of headway.
