‘Yes.’
Flood decided that the questioning was going far better than he had hoped; surely there could be no doubt of crime after today?
‘What about this?’ he said, taking the piece of rail from the bench. ‘Did you see this?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Any more than Mr Deveau,’ said Flood, in a sarcastic aside. He gestured to the court marshal, to carry it to the witness.
‘What is that mark upon the wood?’
‘It would seem to be some sort of cut.’
‘A deep cut?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you imagine would be necessary to cause such damage?’
‘Something heavy,’ said the man. ‘An axe, perhaps.’
‘Do sensible, experienced sailors go around slashing the rails of their vessels with an axe?’
Again the man frowned, imagining mockery.
‘Of course not.’
‘So how do you think it got there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘I said I don’t.’
‘Couldn’t that damage have been caused during that moment of terror which caused the crew to abandon ship?’
‘Perhaps… I don’t know.’
‘What sort of panic and terror wields an axe?’
‘I don’t understand, sir,’ protested the seaman.
‘Has it ever occurred to you, since you came upon this allegedly abandoned vessel, that the Mary Celeste could have been taken over by a hostile crew?’
‘Hostile? You mean pirates?’
‘Just hostile. The Barbary Coast has been cleared of brigands these last fifty years.’
‘But who…’ stumbled the man, and the Attorney-General took advantage of his incoherence:
‘Who indeed! Can you help this enquiry with an answer to that question?’
‘Me, sir!’ said the witness, in surprise.
‘You, sir,’ said Flood.
The man gripped the edge of the stand, his shoulders humped in helplessness.
‘But how?’
‘You were the first over the rail, were you not? A rail upon which you failed to see an axe mark which we have agreed could have come about during a moment of terror.’
‘The ship was deserted when we boarded,’ said the seaman. ‘There was nothing to tell us what had happened. Nothing at all — ’
‘So this enquiry has heard before,’ sighed the Attorney-General. ‘With an almost word-perfect repetition. How long deserted?’
‘Many days, it must have been. When Mr Deveau tested the pumps, there was a lot of water. The cabins and galley were awash.’
‘What about boats?’
‘The davits at the stern were empty. I could not tell whether a boat had been launched from them or not. There was no indication, as far as I could see, whether there was accommodation for another boat on deck. I certainly saw no block and tackle to indicate that one had been launched from the deck.’
The Attorney-General began to prepare his final question, then paused, looking to the lawyers’ benches. They had been strangely quiet today; perhaps confronted by the blatant inconsistencies in their clients’ evidence they had at last accepted the futility of objections. He decided to rephrase the point he was about to make to the witness, anxious not to blur what he regarded as an excellent cross-examination by any belated, irritating interruption.
‘You sailed from New York in the Dei Gratia on November 15?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And encountered the Mary Celeste on December 5?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And arrived here in Gibraltar on December 12?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Tell me, during those twenty-seven days did you at any time witness, or were you at any time involved in, any violent activity?’
Pisani at last stirred, about to rise, but before he could do so the seaman’s anger broke.
‘No!’ he shouted across the enquiry chamber. ‘I did nothing to harm anyone aboard the Mary Celeste.’
‘You weren’t asked if you had,’ said Flood contentedly. ‘But thank you for so openly expressing a thought which I am sure has occurred to many during the evidence we have heard so far.’
He sat quickly, still in advance of Pisani’s intervention, leaving the crew’s lawyer half out of his chair. Sir James Cochrane looked curiously towards him, but Pisani shook his head, lowering himself into his seat again.
Flood leaned forward over his bench, apparently concentrating upon his note-taking, as Charles Lund, a seaman who had been one of Deveau’s salvage crew from the Azores to Gibraltar, was sworn in and began responding to Pisani’s questions during his evidence-in-chief.
As a trained, practising lawyer, the Attorney-General had to recognise the evidence as circumstantial. But circumstantial or not, it was overwhelmingly that of crime. Either of mutiny and murder, with the connivance of the Dei Gratia crew with whom a high seas rendezvous had been arranged before the New York sailing, for the culprits to be aided by a safe landing somewhere along the coast of Spain. Or straight piracy by Captain Morehouse and his men.
There was something further he had to recognise. As well as being Attorney-General of the colony, he was also Admiralty Proctor, with responsibility to the Board of Trade in London.
And he would be grossly failing in that responsibility if, even in advance of any finding that Cochrane might return, he did not officially communicate his beliefs to London, for the authorities there to take whatever action they considered necessary. Mediterranean embassies and consulates in the area should be alerted for any sighting of the Mary Celeste crew, for instance. And Washington informed of the official view of affairs with far more force than he suspected Consul Sprague was attempting. With his constant pandering to the ship-owner and the Dei Gratia captain, Sprague showed himself too frightened of an adverse report about his personal conduct properly to carry out his duties.
It had been an onerous task, for which he had decided to give the man a bonus, but Flood had insisted upon his clerk’s taking a verbatim transcript of the evidence. He decided that he would enclose copies of that transcript with his account to London, to enable the Board of Trade lawyers to consider the facts as fully as he had and arrive at their own verdict. The advantage of such a procedure would be to obtain the agreement of other legally trained minds.
The Attorney-General suddenly became aware that the court had turned to him and realised that he was being offered the chance to question Lund. Aware that he had not been concentrating upon the man’s evidence, Flood’s clerk pushed across a sheet of hastily written but nevertheless readable notes. For the first time, Flood saw, the crew lawyer had phrased his questions in anticipation of attack, trying to minimise any damaging cross- examination by obtaining denials of accusations before any had been made. The Attorney-General smiled, looking directly at Pisani. So they were becoming worried. And quite rightly so.
‘You formed the second party to board the Mary Celeste… the salvage crew?’
‘Yes.’
‘And were aboard for some seven to eight days?’
‘Yes.’
The Attorney-General looked up from the clerk’s notes, staring directly at the witness.
‘Were you frightened?’
