Battle Fleet (2007) (6 page)

This fight had drawn upwards of a hundred people. One bird eventually ran from the battle. But even then its torment was not over. The other bird was held before it. ‘It’s their tradition,’ explained Evison, who had been too wrapped up in the fight to notice I’d
turned away. ‘The winner has to have enough strength left to peck the loser three times. Only then is he declared the victor.’

Evison found his bearings and we headed up a hill away from the harbour, then along a well-beaten path from the main settlement. The chief merchant here was a Dutchman and we soon arrived at his house. It was built in a native style, and was quite grand with a large straw roof and low walls, but light and spacious inside.

Waiting for us were several of the local chiefs. Unlike the almost naked people on the street, these men were dressed in beautifully embroidered waistcoats that stretched down to their knees. Their legs were covered by long cotton drawers, but none wore shoes or stockings. The room we entered was decorated in the native style, with little in the way of furniture but many plump silk cushions, bordered with fine gold and silver thread.

As the merchant made his introductions, the chiefs all put their hands together and lifted them to their head. This gesture, I was told later, was known as the salem.

We were offered a choice of coffee or toddy – a spirit distilled from palm juice. ‘Have the coffee,’ whispered Evison. ‘The other stuff will floor you.’

Our refreshment arrived in fine bone china cups, decorated in the English floral style. This was the sort of
tableware our village parson would provide for eminent visitors. It seemed strangely out of place in this exotic location.

I sat back to watch Evison negotiate. He had buckles, nails and cloth to sell, and from the start he made it clear that Spanish dollars were the only currency he would trade in. They started haggling over pepper. The merchant suggested twenty dollars per pecul. Evison offered ten and budged slightly to twelve. So it went on.

‘Spice above any other item, Witchall. Any Captain will prefer spices. Try not to pay more than a dollar per catty. Good cinnamon will always fetch twelve to fourteen shillings a pound. Cloves a little more. Nutmeg less. Mace is more valuable, and you’ll pay twenty to twenty-five shillings a pound for that.’

I listened, marvelling at these facts and figures, accumulated in a lifetime’s trading. After Evison had inspected the goods, he bought several barrels of pepper, cinnamon and nutmeg. He marked each with an elaborate chalk signature over the lid and asked for them to be taken to the quayside ready for loading on to the
Orion
.

Then we were taken to another house further up the hillside to look at some cloves, which we were assured had been brought fresh from the islands to the north. ‘They’ve a lot of them,’ said Evison to me, ‘and they’re
keen to sell at a generous rate.’

There were four barrels, and the lid was taken off one so we could inspect them. Evison picked them up and ran the small woody buds through his fingers. ‘When you buy cloves they must feel slightly oily to the touch, leaving a little residue on the hand, and be easily broken.’ He snapped one open and held it up to my nose. ‘They smell fine, now place one on the tip of your tongue. It should taste hot, aromatic, so that it almost burns the back of your throat. A fresh clove has fragrance and yields a thick reddish oil when you squeeze it gently.’

Then, much to the consternation of our host, Evison put his arm into the barrel as far as it would go. He pulled out a handful and regarded them carefully. Then he shook his head. ‘No, sir, we will not be taking these,’ he said brusquely. We left with only the merest hint of a goodbye.

I asked him what had happened. ‘It’s an old trick the Dutch play,’ he said. ‘They put fresh cloves at the top of the barrel. But the rest are a mixture of fresh and distilled. They’ve taken them and extracted their juices – you can tell by their paler colour, shrivelled appearance and the fact that many have lost the bud on top. The Dutch sell their cloves by weight, so this makes them an extra profit. There’s another trick they play where they soak them in water to
make them heavier, but that’s easy enough to spot when you squeeze them.’

When we returned to the harbour, Hossack had brought the
Orion
up to the quayside. I spent the afternoon helping to load spices into our hold, and making final preparations for
Orion
to leave Coupang. Richard had not yet come back and the thought of having to say goodbye to him lowered my spirits. Just as I was beginning to worry that I had missed his return when I was ashore with Captain Evison, I saw him hurrying down to the harbour.

I asked Evison for permission to go ashore to say goodbye. As I ran down to Richard, he caught sight of me and stopped in his tracks. He looked suitably solemn for such a sad occasion but as I came close his face broke into a great big grin. ‘I’m not going, Sam,’ he said. ‘There’s an American ship just sailed, and they say there might not be another for six months or even a year. I don’t want to be stranded here that long. I’ll pick one up back in London.’ I cheered out loud and gave him a big hug. ‘Here, steady on,’ he said. ‘I thought you British were meant to be reserved.’

We had one more stop before we could set sail for home – the port of Bencoolen in Sumatra. I asked the Captain what we might find there. ‘Pepper – can’t have too much
pepper, and more nutmeg, cloves, hopefully good ones this time, camphor, timber – the most beautiful teak in the world, and dragon’s blood.’

‘So whose job is it to catch the dragons?’ asked Bel.

Evison wasn’t used to having his leg pulled. Perhaps he thought it was a serious question. ‘It comes from the dragon’s blood palm, lass. A very efficacious crimson powder. It’ll cure the pox or the flux and you can even use it to colour your paints and plasterwork.

‘There’s gold here too – somewhere up in the heart of the island.’ He looked over to the shore. Dense jungle began at the very lip of the sea, with just a short strip of sandy beach along the tide line. ‘But there’s headhunters too, and cannibals. So I wouldn’t like to go to the trouble of finding it.’

Staring into that mysterious interior I felt a deep, almost overwhelming curiosity. Earlier we had sailed past steep mountains that plunged down into the water like the most formidable cliffs you’ve ever seen. I would go, I wanted to say, just to find out what was there. Headhunters with spears. Would they be any match for our pistols, muskets and cutlasses? ‘We could come back here, maybe, when we’re older,’ I said to Richard. ‘Go and search for that gold.’

From the ship, Bencoolen looked much the same as Coupang. Evison took me and Richard ashore again, but this time we came with six of the toughest-looking
seamen on the
Orion
. ‘There’s plenty here who’ll be out to rob us, so we’ll need to have our wits about us,’ said Evison. We all carried pistols and cutlasses.

They were quite a different kettle of fish in this port. The buildings here seemed to be in a poor state of repair and many of the natives dressed in filthy clothes and looked as though they never had enough to eat. These ragged people had a desperate look about them, and clamoured around us asking for money. I searched their faces, wondering who among them would turn on us when we refused them. I was extremely glad we had come as a gang.

‘Most of them are slaves to opium. It’s what they do instead of drink,’ Evison explained as we walked through dirt-strewn tracks to the merchant quarter. We passed one beggar lying in the gutter. It was difficult to tell whether he was dead or alive.

‘Don’t go trying it, Sam, I beg you,’ said the Captain. ‘They say it’s like the most wonderful dream you ever had, then you want to do it again and again and it enslaves you. The rich ones here, they’re slaves as much as the poor. But they have money to pay for it and servants to run their homes and businesses. The poor, they live like starving beggars just to scrape together the money to buy some.’

Our visit did pass without incident, though I was glad to be back on the ship. It seemed strange to be among so
many people with glazed, faraway eyes. Our trade completed and our hold full of goods, we sailed on along the island chain, heading for the Indian Ocean. So far, luck had been with us.

There was an unnatural stillness in the sky – no seabirds circled our ship. They knew something bad was coming our way. The animals in our manger sensed it. The sheep and goats lay down in the straw, tense and wary. The hens on deck stopped clucking. Even Sydney stopped chattering. He kept flapping his wings trying to get away. I took him and his perch down below to my cabin and that calmed him.

Thunderstorms had come and gone all the time we sailed through the East Indies – they were just part of the climate here, along with the clammy heat and the
occasional whiff of volcanic sulphur. The rain would come down in sheets, the sky would rumble and flash. Then, an hour later, it would be a breezy bright day again. But this one, coming over the horizon on our larboard side, seemed particularly ominous. The sky had the strange inky purple glow which seemed to be a feature of storms in these parts, and the moisture in the air was so dense you could taste it on your tongue.

Evison had us spend the day preparing for the storm. We brought down the canvas from the lower sails, then the lower yards too, leaving only the topsail yards and canvas to provide some control of the ship if we should drift dangerously close to the shore. It was a difficult job with this crew, lowering the heavy canvas and wood to the deck, and I was relieved when we had accomplished it without injury. The deck was cleared of all the birds and plants. Anything there that wasn’t tied down was going to be swept away.

Night fell with such all-enveloping blackness I could have believed we had been cast into some purgatorial void. Then the ship was lit by a majestic flash of lightning, which spread across the sky like an upturned, bare, satanic tree. This was lightning I had never seen before – not white but blue.

That first bolt was our sign to go below – with only a handful of men on the weather deck left to stand watch. The hatches were battened down and all lights
extinguished. Bel and Lizzie sought me out and we sat together in the dark. ‘I’ve been in much worse storms than this,’ I said, trying to reassure them. ‘We’ll be fine.’

Still, I muttered a thankful prayer that we were a good distance from land and only if the storm lasted several days were we likely to be driven ashore. I muttered another one too, beseeching the Lord to safeguard our wormy hull. If the timbers cracked open as we lurched between the waves, the ship would be lost with all hands.

Rain lashed the ship until the timbers were sodden, seeping down to the stinking hold, drenching every living thing, from bilge rat to Captain. We worked the pumps until our hands were bleeding and blistered, trying to keep down the rising water in the hold. Evison even enlisted the help of the passengers to take their turn. Some complained haughtily that they had paid for their passage and were not going to do the work of common sailors. But when Bel and Lizzie offered to do their share on the pump handles it shamed them into helping out. ‘Come on, Mr Ellis,’ I heard Lizzie say to one of the passengers, ‘it will take your mind off the seasickness.’ There was plenty of that too – making the dark, airless deck an even viler place to wait out this ordeal.

Then came the thunder, creeping nearer, an unseen menace, loud enough to shake the strakes from the hull. As the thunder passed over our heads, lightning split the
sky so close I imagined the ship hit and shattered into a million pieces. Actually, this
was
worse than any storm I had endured before.

A rumble of thunder seemed to steal the air from the atmosphere and a blinding flash of light shook the ship from foretop to keel. We heard a creaking, splintering of wood and the braces and shrouds and ratlines shrieking in their posts. A brief silence followed. Then a huge crash rocked the ship from bow to stern.

One of the passengers screamed.

‘That’ll be a mast,’ I said to Bel. ‘I’m needed on deck.’

I was almost knocked off my feet by the force of the wind and drenched in a second by sheets of blinding rain. Gigantic waves towered above the weather deck on either side. I saw at once the mainmast had been struck close to the deck and toppled. The smell of it smouldering caught in my nostrils. Evison and the officers were out on deck, frantically trying to save their ship. The mast had fallen over the larboard fo’c’sle, mangling the rigging of the foremast and smashing one of the ship’s boats. Now the topmost part of the mast lay broken in the sea, with the canvas on the upper yard soaking up water and giving it greater weight to drag the
Orion
down. The lower part stood crooked above our heads, trailing a tangle of ropes. Leaning over the rail, I could see the larboard gun ports perilously close to the waterline.

I seized a boarding axe and I began to hack away at the shrouds and ratlines still holding the upper mast to the ship. Richard and John Garrick joined me. Other men hacked at the mast itself, close to the rail. The three of us made quick work of the ropes, though I’ll never understand how we managed to miss each other’s flailing arms with our axe strokes. As we cut through, the mast splintered and the stout lower portion crashed down on to the deck. The remaining rigging attached to the upper mast was quickly severed and with a noticeable lurch the
Orion
raised itself in the water.