The Star of the Sea (2 page)

A PREFACE;
IN WHICH ARE SKETCHED CERTAIN
R
ECOLLECTIONS OF
THE STAR OF THE SEA;
THE
CONDITION OF HER PASSENGERS AND THE EVIL WHICH STALKED AMONG THEM
.

All night long he would walk the ship, from bow to stern, from dusk until quarterlight, that sticklike limping man from Connemara with the drooping shoulders and ash-coloured clothes.

The sailors, the watchmen, the lurkers near the wheelhouse would glance from their conversations or their solitary work and see him shifting through the vaporous darkness; cautiously, furtively, always alone, his left foot dragging as though hefting an anchor. A billycock hat was crumpled on his head, a ragged scarf wound around his chin and throat; his tattered military greatcoat so utterly dirty it was impossible to imagine it ever having been clean.

He moved with a deliberation that was almost ceremonial, a curious strain of threadbare stateliness: as a king in a story in disguise among his lessers. His arms were very long, his eyes needle-bright. Frequently he had a look of bewilderment or foreboding, as though his life had come to a point that was beyond explication or was drawing ever closer to such a point now.

His mournful face was disfigured with scars, cross-hatched with the blemishes of some affliction much exacerbated by his bouts of furious scratching. Though slender in build, made like a feather-weight, he seemed to carry an indescribable burden. Neither was it a matter of his deformity alone – a distorted foot in a brick of a wooden clog which was stamped or branded with a capital M – but the air of anguished expectancy he bore; the perpetually frightened watchfulness of the abused child.

He was one of those men who attract great attention by making a great effort to attract none. Often, although they could not explain it, the sailors had a sense of his presence before seeing him. It became
their amusement to wager on his whereabouts at a given hour. ‘Ten bells’ meant down by the starboard pigpens. Quarter after eleven found him up at the scuttlebutt where by day the destitute women of steerage prepared what little food they had – but even by the third night out of Liverpool the contest had lost its power to kill the time. He walked the ship as though following a rite. Up. Down. Across. Back. Stem. Port. Stern. Starboard. Materialising with the stars, stealing below with the sunrise, he came to be known among the ship’s nocturnal denizens as ‘the Ghost’.

Never did he engage the sailors in conversation. The night-stragglers, also, he completely eschewed. Not even after midnight would he speak to another, when anyone still above boards would talk to anyone else; when the dark, wet deck of the
Star of the Sea
saw a fellowship seldom apparent by daylight. Gates were left open at night on the ship; rules relaxed or quite ignored. It was illusory, of course, this witching hour democracy; darkness seeming to obliterate station or creed, or at least level them down to a point where they were not worth acknowledging. An acknowledgement in itself, perhaps, of the axiomatic powerlessness of being at sea.

At night one sensed the ship as absurdly out of its element, a creaking, leaking, incompetent concoction of oak and pitch and nails and faith, bobbing on a wilderness of viciously black water which could explode at the slightest provocation. People spoke quietly on the decks after dark, as though fearful of awakening the ocean to savagery. Or one pictured the
Star
as a colossal beast of burden, its rib-timbers straining as though they might burst; flailed by an overlord into one last persecution, the hulk half dead already and we passengers its parasites. But the metaphor is not a good one for not all of us were parasites. Those of us who were would not have admitted it.

Below us the depths which could only be imagined, the gorges and canyons of that unfathomed continent: above us the death-black bowl of the sky. Wind pounded down in an outrage of screams from what even the most sceptical mariner was careful to term ‘the heavens’. And the breakers thrashed and battered our shelter; like wind made flesh, incarnate and animate, a derision of the hubris of those who had dared to invade them. Yet there was an all but religious tranquillity among those who walked the decks at night:
the angrier the sea, the icier the rain, the more palpable the solidarity among those withstanding them together. An admiral might chat to a frightened cabin boy, a hungry man of steerage to a sleepless Earl. One night a prisoner, a maddened violent Galwayman, was brought from the lock-up to take his doleful exercise. Even he was included in this communion of the somnambulant, quietly conversing and sharing a cup of rum with a Methodist minister from Lyme Regis in England who had never tasted rum before but had often preached its evils. (Together they were observed kneeling on the quarterdeck and quietly singing ‘Abide With Me’.)

New things were possible in this Republic of night-time. But the Ghost showed no interest in possibility, or novelty. He was immune; a crag in the vastness surrounding him. Prometheus in rags, awaiting the avid birds. He stood by the mainmast watching the Atlantic as though expecting it to freeze over or bubble with blood.

Between first bell and two bells most would slip away; many alone but some together, for tolerances flowered under night’s kind cover; nature and loneliness bedfellows in the dark. From three until first light, little happened on deck. It rose and it fell. It climbed. It plunged. Even the animals slept in their cages: pigs and chickens, sheep and geese. The clang of the watch-bell would sometimes puncture the ceaseless and numbing susurration of the sea. A sailor might sing shanties to keep himself awake: he and a comrade might tell stories to each other. From down in the lock-up the madman was intermittently heard, yelping like a wounded dog or threatening to brain the other prisoner with a handspike. (There was, at that time, no other prisoner.) A couple might be glimpsed in the shadowed alleyway formed by the aft wall of the wheelhouse and the base of the funnel. Still he would stand, that man from Connemara, gazing out at the awesome darkness; facing like a figurehead into the sleet, until the webs of the rigging emerged from the murk, so black against the reddening sky of dawn.

Just before sunrise on the third morning, a seaman approached to offer him a pan of coffee. Beadlets of ice had formed on his face, on the back of his coat and the brim of his hat. He did not accept the benevolence nor even acknowledge it. ‘As poor as a pox-doctor’s clerk,’ the Mate remarked, watching him shuffle silently away.

The sailors sometimes wondered if the Ghost’s nightly ritual was
a religious observance or exotic self-punishment, such as the Catholics of Ireland were whispered to favour. A mortification, perhaps, for some unspeakable transgression, or ransom for the souls ablaze in Purgatory. They believed strange things, these Aboriginal Irish, and a mariner whose profession took him among them might expect to witness strange behaviour. They talked in a nonchalant, matter-of-fact manner about miracles; saintly apparitions; statues that bled. Hell was as real as the city of Liverpool, Paradise as mappable as Manhattan Island. Their prayers were like spells or voodoo incantations. Maybe the Ghost was a holy man: one of their gurus.

Among his own tribe, too, he evoked confusion. The refugees would hear him opening the hatch, hobbling down the ladder and into the gloom of candles; his hair wild, his clothes sodden, his glazen eyes like those of a half-dead mackerel. They knew it was dawn when they saw him coming, but he seemed to bring below the stinging cold of the night. Darkness clung around him, a cloak of many folds. If there was noise, as there often was even at dawn – a huddle of men colloguing, a woman deliriously chanting the Mysteries – his arrival would cause much of it to die. They watched as he shivered the length of the cabin, as he dragged himself down through the bundles and baskets, flaccid with exhaustion, dripping and coughing, a battered puppet whose strings had been cut. He would peel the drenched coat from his shuddering torso, fold it and roll it to the shape of a bolster and slump in his blanket to sleep.

No matter the happening, he would sleep all the day. Invulnerable to the noises of babies or seasickness, to the quarrels and tears and fighting and gaming that made up the clatter of life below decks, to the roars and oaths and wooings and ragings, he would lie on the boards like a corpse. Mice scuttled over him; he never gave a twitch; roaches ran under the collar of his semmit. About him the children would canter or puke, men would scrape fiddles or bellow or argue, women would haggle for a little spare food (for food was this waterborne dominion’s only currency, its disbursement a matter of fevered speculation). From the heart of the din came the groans of the sick, rising like prayers from their paltry bunks; the sick and the healthy sleeping side by side, the tormented moans and fearful invocations mingling with the buzzing of the innumerable flies.

The line for the only two water closets in steerage formed directly
past the coffin lid of squalid floor that the Ghost had silently claimed as his berth. One lavatory was cracked, the other clogged and overflowing; the cubicles infested with legions of hissing rats. By seven in the morning the ammoniac stench, constant as the cold and the cries of steerage, would have invaded that floating dungeon with savage force, would be filling it up like an erupting spirit. The stink had an almost corporeal presence; it felt like something you could grasp in gluey fistfuls. Rotten food, rotten flesh, rotten fruit of rotting bowels, you smelt it on your clothes, your hair, your hands; on the glass you drank from and the bread you ate. Tobacco smoke, vomit, stale perspiration, mildewed clothes, filthy blankets and rotgut whiskey.

The portholes intended to ventilate steerage would be thrown open in an attempt to quell the astounding putrescent reek. But if anything, the breeze seemed only to make it worse, blowing it into the hollows and alcoves. Saltwater would be sluiced over the boards twice a week, but even the freshwater stank of diarrhoea and had to be laced with vinegar before it could be faced. The malicious fetor oozed its way around steerage, a steaming, noxious, nauseating vapour that stung the eyes and inflamed the nostrils. But that choking effluvium of death and abandonment was not baneful enough to wake the Ghost.

Since the start of the voyage he had remained imperturbable. Just before noon on the morning we left Liverpool a great shout had gone up from a group on the maindeck. A barquentine had been sighted approaching from the south, heading up the coast towards Dublin.
The Duchess of Kent
was her honoured name. She had carried the remains of Daniel O’Connell, M.P. – ‘the Liberator’ to Ireland’s Catholic poor – from his death-place at Genoa in August of that year, to be laid to rest in his motherland.
¹
Seeing the ship was like seeing the man; so it appeared from the passengers’ tearful praying. But far from joining the Novenas for the fallen champion, the Ghost had not even come up on deck to watch. Heroes did not interest him as much as sleep; nor did their hallowed vessels.

At eight o’clock the galley crew distributed the daily ration: half a pound of hardtack and a quart of water for each adult, half that
banquet for every child. Roll call was taken at a quarter after nine. Those who had died the night before were removed from steerage to await disposal. Sometimes the slumbering Ghost was mistaken for one of them and required the protection of his dilapidated fellows. The plywood bunks would be hastily hosed down. Swabs were mopped across the boards. Blankets would be collected and boiled in urine to kill the lice that spread scabies.

After they had eaten, the people of steerage would dress and wander up to the deck. There they would walk in the clean, cold air; would sit on the boards and beg from the sailors; would watch through the cast-iron double-locked gates as we First-Class passengers took pastries and coffee under the shelter of the silken awnings. Exactly how the cream was kept fresh for the rich was often vigorously discussed by the poor. A bead of blood dropped into the mix was said by some to be effective.

The first days passed with agonising slowness. To the passengers’ stupefaction, they had learned at Liverpool that the ship would be taking them back to Ireland before setting out to confront the Atlantic. The news led to frustrated drinking among the men, which in turn had led to frustrated fights. Most in steerage had sold all they owned to gather the fare across to Liverpool. Many had been robbed in that unhappy and violent city, swindled into parting with their few possessions; sold heaps of crudely stamped pewter washers which they were informed were American dollars. Now they were being carried back to Dublin, from where they had fled in the weeks before, resigned – or endeavouring to become resigned, at least – to never setting eyes on their homeland again.

But even that small blessing was to be denied them. We had chopped across a filthy-tempered Irish Sea and docked at Kingstown to take on provisions; then crept down the jagged south-east coast, making for Queenstown in the county of Cork. (Or ‘Cobh’, as it is known in the Gaelic language.) Seeing Wicklow glide past, or Wexford or Waterford, seemed to many a bitter taunt, a poultice being ripped from a putrefying wound. A consumptive blacksmith from the town of Bunclody jumped the upperdeck rail near Forlorn Point and was last seen swimming weakly towards the shore; every last shred of his will employed to bring him back to the place where his death was certain.