Victory (12 page)

“Ho,” he said in his round Devon accent. “Look at thee, now. Middling good, for a rope-maker's boy.”

“My mam used to make me help her with sewing,” I said, flushing. “My sisters were too little.” But then I realized with surprise that the expression on his face was not amusement, but interest.

“And hast a strong wrist? Push at my hand.” He held out his big hand with the fingers pointing upward, palm toward me, and I held mine the same way and shoved my palm at his. I didn't last long, of course; he was strong as an ox.

My uncle shook his wet head, splashing us, and began rubbing himself dry with his dirty shirt. “Arm-wrestling with a boy, William?” he said.

“Charlie,” said Mr. Smith, “I have a mind to steal this lad for a sailmaker.”

“The service owns him, not me,” said my uncle Charlie cheerfully. “We are not allowed him for roping—he has a talent for chickens.” He grinned at me. He was not totally cast down by life in the Navy, even though he sorely missed my aunt; I think he was relieved to be still doing the work in which he took such pride. And the other men liked him.

William Smith snorted. “Chickens! When we go into battle the chickens go overboard—and the sails need mending.”

“Overboard?” I said. “Is that true?” I was getting quite fond of my chickens—at least of the egg-layers, which I rarely had to kill.

“All the livestock,” said Mr. Smith. He gave me a horrid leer, rolling his eyes, but I could see he was telling the truth. “Clear the decks for action, the order goes. Pigs and cannon don't mix.”

“Oh.” I felt sad for a moment. I had heard plenty of bloody stories about battles, from sailors who loved to try and terrify the boys, but nobody had mentioned chickens and pigs.

“So tha'll need a second occupation,” said William Smith.

And that was how I came out of the bowels of the ship into the fresh air, far more often than before—for sailmaking needs space, and the sailmakers worked on deck whenever
possible. William Smith had only to mention to the bosun, who had charge of all rigging and sails, that I might be useful to him, and half my galley duties vanished away. Every ship depended for its life upon its carpenters and sailmakers, and the masters of those crafts were warrant officers, who would stay with the ship even in peacetime, when the captain and officers would be let go. William Smith got what he wanted.

The cook grumbled loudly at losing half my time, but they gave him another of the boys, Hugh Portfield from Ireland, who had been cleaning the officers' cabins, and was glad of the change. And Stephen enjoyed ordering Hugh around. I still slept with the other boys, and big William Pope and I had become almost friends. I was closest to Stephen though. His street tricks were serving him well; he was quick and crafty, good at wheedling favors out of seamen in illegal exchange for his ration of grog—which by the strange laws of the Navy he was supposed to drink himself, even though he was so small that it would make him drunk, and drunkenness was a flogging offense. He was also, I noticed, beginning to pocket an occasional treat from the supplies that passed through the galley from the purser: an egg, or a chunk of the soft bread baked for the officers, or a piece of fruit.

“Be careful,” I would say, and Stephen would laugh.

“Care killed the cat, Sam.”

“I thought it was curiosity killed the cat.”

“Well, it wasn't pinching an apple.”

We were growing up fast, we boys, in some ways. We were certainly seeing the world, as Lieutenant Quilliam had promised me. Before long we had not only passed the whole of France, Portugal, and Spain, we had reached the Strait of Gibraltar, and were sailing in past the big rocky fortress that guards the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. Gibraltar being in British hands, we fired them a salute, with no shot in the guns, and they fired one back. We sailed through the narrow strait dead true on course, with flags flying and all our redcoats lined up standing to attention, and I felt proud to be part of the ship.

It was strange to have a feeling like that. I had it again the next time we fired a salute, when we had sailed halfway across the Mediterranean, past the rocky coasts of islands whose names I didn't know, to join the fleet and our Admiral. I counted nine great ships scattered across that blue sea, and a few smaller ones, and when we had saluted one another, Lord Nelson came back aboard with Captain Hardy to take HMS
Victory
as his flagship.

Our Captain Sutton left us, with all the ship's company standing at attention and the bosun's pipe shrilling and the ship's band playing; off he went in the Admiral's barge to take command of the frigate
Amphion,
which had been Captain Hardy's ship. The men were sorry to see him go, because he was a good captain and Captain Hardy was said to be a strict man for discipline. But Nelson had chosen to have Hardy, and nothing mattered more to any of the men than the honor of being on the same ship as Horatio Nelson.

It was hard to believe that less than a year earlier I had hardly even heard of him.

When I was growing up, the only songs I ever heard were the lullabies my mother used to sing to the little ones, or the hymns in church. I still heard hymns, and sang them too, at the chaplain's service on deck on Sundays, but for the first time I discovered other music as well, in the forecastle—“fo'c'sle” for short—when the men got together just to be themselves. Three or four of them could play a pennywhistle, and one of the topmen had a fiddle and was really good. He would play hornpipes often, and some of the men would dance. And a few sang songs—sad songs usually, about their sweethearts, or some heartless girl who had forsaken them.

Jonathan Stead was one of these, to my astonishment; he had a warm, deep voice, and his mournful face made the sad songs seem even sadder. Sometimes he played a pipe between verses. It was strange to see big strong sailors sitting quietly listening to him with faraway looks and even tears in their eyes.

 

Here's adieu, sweet lovely Nancy,

Ten thousand times adieu.

I'm a-going round the ocean,

To seek for something new.

Come change your ring with me, dear girl,

Come change your ring with me,

For it might be a token of true love

While I am on the sea . . .

 

One day after supper when I was on the edge of the crowd listening to Jonathan singing in the fo'c'sle, Tommy the cook's assistant came looking for me. He pulled at my sleeve to draw me to a quieter corner, beside the black iron carronade that fired the biggest cannonballs of all the ship's guns. His shiny face was less cheerful than usual.

“Sam,” he said, “we need you help.”

I blinked at him. “Me?”

“You remember catchin' the rats?” Tommy said.

I grinned. The rats had been my only small triumph in my days as cook's boy, aside from the chickens—well, in fact because of the chickens. Rats are a major pest on board ship, second to nothing but the maggots and weevils in ship's bread. When food supplies are loaded into the ship's hold before a voyage, there are always a few rats inside the bags of vegetables or fruit who have nibbled their way in from the warehouse or some farmer's barn. And once they are on board, they live down there in the hold with the stores and they eat, and breed. When I was working in the galley, somehow a few of them made their way up to my chicken coops, and began stealing eggs and even chicks. The cook had a cat called Pricker, but she was fat and spoiled and paid the rats no attention. So I had rigged snares, the same kind I had always used on the farm to catch rabbits, and one after another I had caught seven big rats. The cook had been
so impressed that he didn't yell at me for a whole week, and the chickens were left in peace again.

I said to Tommy, “I remember.”

“Well, they back,” Tommy said. “And they big trouble. They ate a whole pan of slush two days back, and Mr. Carroll got so mad at me—”

Now I was close, I could see that one of his eyes was puffy and half shut. I was furious.

“He hit you!”

Tommy looked down. “Well, he was mad. And there wasn't no rat to hit.” He looked up at me again, through the good eye. “Sam—come set you traps, huh?”

So after supper next day I slipped down to the galley, after cleaning away the spoons and platters and helping stow the mess table. Tommy had found me some wire and I had a spool of yarn from my uncle, and the cook willingly gave me a hunk of cheese—elderly cheese, stinking now as it molded in the Mediterranean heat. But the stink was fine for catching rats. I set snares all over the galley, and next day we found them all full of dead rats—except for one snare with a horrid bloody foot in it, where the desperate rat had gnawed through its own leg to get away.

I did this three days running, with help from Stephen. By the third day I found he was selling dead rats to some of the crew, who carried them off and roasted them for supper.

“Roasted
rats
?” I said.

Stephen shrugged. “They're fine fat rats, raised on the ship's vittles same as us. Fresh meat, Sam. You should skin
them, like you used to skin your rabbits. Use those sailmaker needles and thread to make a ratskin jacket. Or a hat to cover your own little rat's tail.”

He gave my new pigtail a tug, and I punched him, and we rolled around thumping each other and laughing, until Tommy came shushing us because the cook, full of grog, was taking a nap.

But the rats kept coming. They were multiplying in the hold faster than we could catch them. Then they started attacking the chicken coops again, and Mr. Carroll said Mr. Burke the purser was getting worried about the amount of his stores they were gobbling up.

HMS
Victory
had been at sea for eight months now and the stores needed replenishing anyway. It was spring, and the weather was changing; you could feel warmth in the air, and the seas were less often stormy. We were sailing east, on our endless crisscrossing of the Mediterranean Sea, waiting for the French fleet to put out from Toulon. At supper one night Mr. Hartnell said he had heard we were to put in at the Maddalena islands, off the northern tip of Sardinia, to take on fresh water and meat, and a stock of the onions and lemons that the Admiral had us eat to keep off the scurvy. Two days later, sure enough, we were anchoring off the rock-edged harbor of a green island, with a great scurrying aloft as the men lowered sail, and a great treading of feet round the capstan as we dropped anchor. There was no talking or shouting at times like that: only the shrilling of the bosun's calls, the shouted orders that went between them,
and the creaking and rattling of rigging and chain and sails.

Then names were called for three crews of men to go ashore in the boats to pick up supplies, and to my astonishment I was among them.

“You're so lucky!” Stephen whined. “Why you? It's not fair!”

William Pope said, “I'll tell you why. He's young and he's strong and they know he won't run away, because of his uncle. And because he's an enlisted man—if he deserted, he could hang.”

I'd had no thought of deserting, but hearing this certainly encouraged me to banish the thought if it ever came into my head.

William gave me his shoes to wear that day, though I was used to going barefoot. “Those rocks will be sharp,” he said. “And wear your jacket in case the weather turns dirty.”

“Yes, mother,” I said.

William said, “And bring back my shoes or I'll beat you silly.”

I was put in the same boat as one of the quartermasters, Arthur Lessimore, a big, grizzled fellow who was a friend of my uncle's. He put me beside him because he had a mind to teach me to row. The oar was far too heavy for me to move on my own, but I did learn the motions. And it was a good thing he was beside me when we climbed up onto the rough stone jetty in the harbor, because to my surprise I had a hard time keeping my balance. I wobbled about and clutched at Lessimore's arm, and he laughed at me.

“Have to get your land legs back, Sam. Me too. It's a long time since we walked on something that didn't move.”

Maybe that was when I began to realize that I was truly becoming a sailor.

Once we were in the scrubby little town, where everyone on the island seemed to be jabbering away at us in Italian with something to sell, I found that Lessimore was in charge of buying live poultry, and that I was there to help him. The chicken boy again. I was soon busy tying hens together in bunches by their legs, with yarn looped so as not to hurt them. Most of them came out of the cart of a skinny old fellow with a red scarf tied round his head, who spoke no English. His face was as lined as a raisin, and he had very few teeth. Lessimore had just enough words of Italian to be able to speak to him, and I discovered that the Italian word for chicken was
pollo
.

Two little dogs were scuttling round under the wheels of the old man's cart, runty creatures with no tails, dirty white and as skinny as he was. They never made a sound, though they bared their teeth at any other dog that came near them. They didn't bother me but they were always under my feet—I had to kick at them to get past. But then a wagon stopped beside us to unload sacks of vegetables for the ship, and both dogs dived underneath it and disappeared for a long time. The poultryman didn't call them; he paid no attention. After a while I noticed that they were back, and that one of them was carrying a dead rat in its mouth.

This got me to thinking.

“Mr. Lessimore,” I said, “look at that!”

Lessimore was sweating like a pig from helping load sacks into the boat. That was ordinary seamen's work, but he was a good-hearted fellow and just wanted the job done. He straightened up and looked at the dog.

“Ugliest creature I ever saw,” he said.