center.
“Kill the swine!” Huggins shouted, leaping forward and leading a surge of flesh toward the soldiers. Half out of their minds with thirst the mass of prisoners unleashed their hatred for authority and made a rush toward the middle of the raft from all sides.
A volley of musket fire cut holes in their ranks, and the unexpected resistance stunned them momentarily.
Ramsey had passed on Dorsett’s alarm to Scaggs and Sheppard. The infantrymen, muskets loaded and bayonets fixed, waited along with Scaggs and his crew, who had been armed with the soldiers’ sabers, the carpenter’s hammers and hatchets, and any other weapon they could scrape up.
“Don’t give ’em time to reload, boys!” Huggins roared. “Strike hard!”
The mass of maddened mutineers rushed forward again, met this time with thrusting bayonets and slashing sabers. Yet, nothing diminished their rage. They threw themselves against the cold steel, several of them grasping the sharpened blades in their bare hands. Desperate men grappled and sliced each other on a black sea under the eerie moonlight.
The soldiers and sailors fought furiously. Every inch of the raft was occupied by men fighting savagely to kill each other. The bodies piled up, entangling the feet of combatants. Blood flowed on the deck planking, making it difficult to stand if not impossible to rise after falling. In the darkness, now oblivious to their thirst and hunger, they blindly fought and slaughtered. The only sounds made by the combatants were the cries of the wounded and the moans of the dying.
The sharks, as if sensing a bounty, began circling ever closer. The high-pointed fin of the Executioner, the name the seamen gave the great white, silently carved through the water less than five feet from the raft. None of the unfortunates who fell in the water climbed on board again.
Pierced by five saber wounds, Huggins staggered toward Dorsett, a large splintered board in an upraised hand. “You bloody traitor!” he hissed.
Dorsett hunched and held the knife out in front of his body. “Step forward and die,” he said calmly.
Infuriated, Huggins yelled back. “It is you who will feed the sharks, highwayman!” Then he put his head down and charged, swinging the board like a scythe.
At the instant Huggins lunged at him, Dorsett dropped to his hands and knees. Unable to check his momentum, the enraged Welshman stumbled over him and fell, crashing heavily to the deck. Before he could raise himself up, Dorsett had leaped on the immense back, reversed the knife in his hand and slashed Huggins’ throat.
“You’ll not be dining on the ladies this night,” Dorsett said fiercely as Huggins’ body stiffened before going limp in death.
Dorsett killed three more men that fateful night. At one stage of the battle he was assaulted by a small group of Huggins’ followers who were set on ravaging the women. Foot to foot, man to man, they struggled and labored to murder each other.
Betsy appeared and fought at his side, screaming like a banshee and clawing at Dorsett’s enemies like a tiger. Dorsett’s only wound came from a man who gave out a fiendish yell before biting him cruelly in the shoulder.
The bloody brawl raged on for another two hours. Scaggs and his seamen, Sheppard and his infantrymen, fought desperately, beating off every assault and then counterattacking. Again and again the mad rush was pushed back by the ever-thinning ranks of the defenders who desperately clung to the center of the raft. Sheppard went down, garroted by two convicts. Ramsey suffered severe contusions and Scaggs had two ribs broken. Sadly, the convicts had managed to kill two of the women and toss them overboard during the melee. Then at last, having been decimated with dreadful casualties, one by one, two by two, the mutineers began ebbing back to the outer perimeter of the raft.
By daylight the dead were seen sprawling grotesquely around on the raft. The stage was set for the next hideous act of the macabre drama. As the surviving sailors and soldiers looked on incredulously, the convicts began cutting up and devouring their former comrades. It was a scene out of a nightmare.
Ramsey made a rough count of the remaining survivors and was shocked to see that only 78 out of the 231 were still alive. In the senseless battle, 109 convicts had perished. Five of Sheppard’s soldiers had vanished, presumably thrown overboard, and Ramsey counted 12 of the Gladiator’s crewmen dead or missing. It seemed inconceivable that so few could have subdued so many, but the convicts were not trained for combat as were Sheppard’s infantrymen, or as physically toughened by hard work at sea as Scaggs’ crew.
The raft rode noticeably higher in the water now that its passenger list was sharply scaled down by 126 or so. Those parts of the corpses not eaten by the mob, crazed by the agony of hunger, were thrown to the waiting sharks. Unable to stop them, Scaggs restrained his revulsion and looked the other way as his crewmen, also maddened by the demands of shrinking stomachs, began cutting the flesh from three of the bodies.
Dorsett and Betsy and most of the other women, though weakened by the relentless torment of starvation, could not bring themselves to survive on the flesh of others. A rain squall came up in the afternoon and slaked their thirst, but the hunger pangs never let up.
Ramsey came over and spoke to Dorsett. “The captain would like a word with you.”
The highwayman accompanied the first officer to where Scaggs was lying, his back against the aft mast. Surgeon-Superintendent Gorman was binding up the captain’s rib cage with a torn shirt. Before the dead were rolled into the sea, the ship’s surgeon stripped the bodies of their clothes to use as bandages. Scaggs looked up at Dorsett, his face taut with pain.
“I want to thank you, Mr. Dorsett, for your timely warning. I daresay the honest people who are still left on this hellish vessel owe their lives to you.”
“I’ve led a wicked life, Captain, but I don’t mingle with foul-smelling rabble.”
“When we reach New South Wales, I’ll do my best to persuade the governor to commute your sentence.”
“I’m grateful to you, Captain. I’m under your orders.”
Scaggs stared at the small knife that was shoved into Dorsett’s belt-sash. “Is that your only weapon?”
“Yes, sir. It performed admirably last night.”
“Give him a spare saber,” Scaggs said to Ramsey. “We’re not through with those dogs yet.”
“I agree,” said Dorsett. “They’ll not have the same fury without Jake Huggins to lead them, but they’re too unhinged by thirst to give up. They’ll try again after dark.”
His words were prophetic. For reasons known only to men deranged by lack of food and water, the convicts assaulted the defenders two hours after the sunset. The attack was not as fierce as the night before. Wraithlike figures reeled against each other, recklessly clubbing and slashing, the bodies of convicts, sailors and soldiers intermingling as they fell.
The convicts’ resolve had been weakened by another day on the raft without food or drink, and their resistance suddenly faded and broke as the defenders counterattacked. The enfeebled convicts stopped and then stumbled back. Scaggs and his faithful seamen smashed into their center as Dorsett, along with Sheppard’s few remaining infantrymen, struck from the flank. In another twenty minutes it was all over.
Fifty-two died that night. With the dawn, only twenty-five men and three women were left, out of the seventy-eight from the night before sixteen convicts, including Jess Dorsett, Betsy Fletcher and two other women; two soldiers and ten of the Gladiator’s crew, including Captain Scaggs. First Officer Ramsey was among the dead. Surgeon-Superintendent Gorman was mortally wounded and passed on later that afternoon like a lamp that slowly runs out of oil. Dorsett had received a nasty gash in his right thigh, and Scaggs had suffered a broken collarbone to add to his broken ribs. Amazingly, Betsy had emerged with only minor bruises and cuts.
The convicts were thoroughly beaten; there wasn’t one who didn’t suffer from ugly wounds. The insane battle for the raft of the Gladiator was over.
By the tenth day of their grisly ordeal, another six had died. Two young lads, a cabin boy no more than twelve and a sixteen-year-old soldier, decided to seek death by throwing themselves into the sea. The other four were convicts who perished from their wounds. It was as if the rapidly dwindling number of survivors were watching a terrifying vision. The sun’s blazing torment returned like a burning fever accompanied by delirium.
On day twelve they were down to eighteen. Those who could still move were in rags, their bodies covered
