Going to the Sea

Chapter 3

I came in darkness, in great pain, and bound hand and foot. I lay somewhere in the belly of the unlucky ship. The whole world heaved up, then rushed down. I could hear the scurryings of the rats of the ship that sometimes ran across my face. I was sick and hurt, confused, angry and miserable. I fainted again.

I was awakened by the light of a hand-lantern shinning in my face. A small man of about thirty, with green eyes, stood looking down at me.

“Well,” said he, “how does it?”

I answered with a sob. He felt my pulse and forehead, and washed and dressed the wound on my scalp. My head was bleeding profusely and filled with a horrid giddiness.

The man with the green eyes left and returned with the captain.

“I want that boy taken out of this hole and put in the forecastle,” the man said.

“Here he is, here he shall stay, Mr. Riach,” said the captain.

“The lad will die,” said Mr. Riach.
Hoseason grumbled, “Put him where you please!” Saying so, he climbed the ladder. My ropes were cut, and I was carried on a man’s back to the forecastle.

It was a blessed thing to open my eyes the next day to daylight and to find myself among other men. The forecastle was a roomy place. It was set all about with berths, in which the men who were not on duty were seated smoking, or lying down asleep. One of the men brought me a drink of something healing which Mr. Riach had prepared and told me to lie still.

Here, I lay for many days and came to know my companions. They were a rough lot. Some of them had sailed with pirates and seen things that should not be spoken. The ship was bound for the Carolinas, where white men were still sold into slavery on the plantations. My wicked uncle had sold me to Hoseason for a salve.

Ransome came in at times from the roundhouse, sometimes nursing a bruise from Mr. Shuan. Ransome also drank, and he talked of his father, who had made clocks and kept a bird in the parlour. In his years of hardships, he had forgotten his childhood. He seemed such an unhappy, friendless boy.

No class of man is altogether bad, but each has its own faults and virtues. These shipmates of mine were no exception to the rule. They were rough and bad, I supposed. But they had many virtues. They were kind when it occurred to them, simple even beyond the simplicity of a country lad like me, and had some glimmerings of honesty.

There was one man, of maybe forty, who would sit for hours and tell me of his wife and child. He was a fisherman who had lost his boat and thus been driven to the deep sea voyaging.

His wife waited in vain to see her man return, but he would never again make the fire for her in the morning, nor take care of the child when she was sick. Indeed, many of these poor fellows (as the event proved) were upon their last cruise; the deep seas and cannibal fish received them.

I did my best in the small time which allowed me to make friends with the unfriended creature, Ransome.

But his mind was hardly human. He had strange ideas about the dry land, picked up from the sailor’s stories. He thought it was a place where lads were put to some kind of slavery, called a trade, and where apprentices were beaten and clapped into foul prisons. In a town, he thought every third house was a place where seamen would be drugged and murdered. I would tell him how kindly I had been treated on the dry land he was so afraid of, and how well fed and carefully taught by my friends and parents. If he had been recently hurt, he would weep bitterly and swear to run away. But if he was in his usual crackbrain humour, of if he had a glass of spirits in the roundhouse, he would laugh at the idea of living on land.

It was Mr. Riach who gave the boy drink. No doubt, he meant it kindly, but it was a pitiful thing to see this poor creature staggering, and dancing, and talking he knew not what.

Some of the men laughed, but not all, others would grow as black as thunder, thinking, perhaps, of their own childhood or their own children. They bid him stop that nonsense and think what he was doing. As for me, I felt ashamed to look at him.

All this time, the Covenant was meeting continual headwinds and tumbling up and down against headseas, so that the scuttle was almost constantly shut and the forecastle lighted only by a swinging lantern on a beam. There was constant labour for all hands; the sails had to be made and shortened every hour. The strain told upon the men’s temper. There was a growl of quarrelling all day long from berth to berth. I was never allowed to set my foot on deck.

I grew weary of my life and impatient for a change.

And a change I was to get, but I must first tell of a conversation I had with Mr. Riach which put a little heart in me to bear my troubles. I got him a bit drunk, pledged him to secrecy, and told him my whole story.

He declared it was like a ballad and said that he would do his best to help me.

“And in the meantime,” said he, “keep your heart up. You’re not the only one, I’ll tell you that. There’s many a man hoeing tobacco overseas that should be mounting his horse at his own door at home—many and many! Look at me. I’m a lord’s son and more than half a doctor, and here I am, mate to Hoseason!”
I thought it would be civil to ask him for his story.
He whistled loud.

“Never had one,” said he, “I like fun, that’s all,” And he skipped out of the forecastle.

One night, about eleven o’ clock, a man of the watch came below. A whisper went about, “Shuan has done it at last.” The scuttle was flung open, and Captain Hoseason came down the ladder and walked straight up to me.

“My man,” said he, “we want you to serve in the roundhouse. You and Ransome are to change berths. Run away after with you.”

Two seamen appeared carrying Ransome in their arms. The boy’s face was as white as wax and had a look on it like a dreadful smile. The blood in me ran cold. I brushed by the sailors and the boy, and ran up the ladder onto the deck.

The roundhouse, where I was now to sleep and serve, stood some six feet above the decks. Inside were a fixed table and bench and two berths, one for the captain and one for the two mates to share. There were lockers from top to bottom and a second storeroom underneath it. All the best meat and drink and all the gunpowder were there. Almost all the firearms were set in a rack on the roundhouse wall.

A small window and a skylight gave it light by day. After dark, a lamp burned.

Mr. Shuan was sitting in the lamplight at the table with the brandy bottle and a tin cup. He was a tall man, strong and very drunk.

The captain leaned on the berth beside me, staring darkly at the mate. Mr. Riach came in. He gave the captain a look that meant the boy was dead, caught the bottle away from Mr. Shuan and tossed it into the sea.

Mr. Shuan was on his feet. He meant to harm Mr. Riach.
“Sit down!” roared the captain, “You sot and swine, do you know what you’ve done? You’ve murdered the boy!”
“Well,” he said, “he brought me a dirty cup.”

The captain, I and Mr. Riach all looked at one another for a second with a kind of frightened look. The murderer cried a little. Then Hoseason made him take off his sea-boots and go to bed.

That was the first night of my new duties. I had to serve at meals and be at the call of the three men always. It was hard work. All the day through I would be running with a drink to one or another of my three masters.

At night I slept on a blanket thrown on the deck boards of the roundhouse. But I was well fed, and I could have been drunk from morning till night, like Mr. Shuan, if I had wanted to be. I had good company in Mr. Riach, who had been to college and talked to me like a friend.

But the shadow of poor Ransome lay on all four of us, and on me and Mr. Shuan most heavily. And

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