A Brig of War

below and to get the gobbet swabbed off His Majesty's planking.

'Do not do that again,' he said quietly, 'or I'll flog you. Now why were you adrift?'

'Ask the sojers, captain, they're the blackguards who…'

'Shut your mouth woman,' snapped one of the soldiers appearing to come out of a trance. Drinkwater guessed the poor devils had been sick as dogs in the boat while the indomitable spirit of this big woman had kept them all alive. The woman shrugged and the soldier took up the tale, shambling to a position of attention.

'Beggin' your honour's pardon, sir, but I'm Anton, sir, private soldier in the New South Wales Corps. Forming part of a detachment drafted to Botany Bay, sir. The officer wot's wounded is Captain Torrington, sir. We was aboard the Mistress Shore, sir, twenty men under the Cap'n. The main guard consisted of French emigré soldiers and some pardoned prisoners of war, sir, who had volunteered for service with the colours,' Anton turned his head to express his disapproval of such an improvident arrangement and caught himself from spitting contemptuously at the last moment. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

'Beg pardon, sir… these dogs rose one night and under a French gent called Minchin they overpowered the guard, murdered the officers of the ship and took her over.'

'You mean they overpowered the whole crew?'

'It were a surprise, sir,' Anton said defensively, 'they put twenty-nine off in the longboat and twelve of us away in the cutter… two of 'em died, sir.'

'How many days were you adrift?'

'Well, sir, I don't rightly…'

'Twenty-two, Captain,' said the big woman, 'with a small bag of biscuit and a small keg o' water.'

Griffiths turned to Drinkwater. 'Have the men berthed with the people, the soldiers to be quartered in the tops, the two seamen into the gun crews. As to the women I'll decide what to do with them tomorrow when they are presentable. In the meantime, Mr Lestock, we will now be compelled to call at the Cape.'

Drinkwater and Lestock touched their hats and moved away to attend their orders.

Manifold and strange are the duties that may befall a lieutenant in His Majesty's service, Drinkwater wrote in the long letter he was preparing for Elizabeth and that he could send now from the Cape of Good Hope. It was two days after the rescue of the survivors of the Mistress Shore. Already they had been absorbed in the routine of the ship. Drinkwater had learned something of their history. The big woman and her daughter were being transported for receiving stolen goods, offenders against the public morality who had yet thought their own virtue sacrosanct enough to have denied it to the treacherous Frenchmen. So spirited had been their resistance that Monsieur Minchin had wisely had them consigned to a boat before they tore his new found liberty to pieces. The woman was known as Big Meg and her daughter's name was Mary. They were decked out in bizarre costume by Hobson since when Big Meg was also known as 'Number Four', the greater part of her costume having been made from the black and yellow of the numeral flag.

Both Meg and her daughter adapted cheerfully to the tasks that Drinkwater gave them to keep them occupied. They chaffed cheerfully with the men and appeared to maintain their independence from any casual liaisons as Griffiths intended. This the men took in good part. There were women aboard big ships of the line, legitimate wives borne on the ship's books and of inestimable use in tending the sick. They became mothers to the men, confessors but not lovers, and stood to receive a flogging if they transgressed the iron rules that prevailed between decks. But on Hellebore a more delicate situation existed. While the women might be thought to be everybody's without actually being anybody's, while they were willing to banter with the men, their effect was salutary. Even, despite the roughness of their condition, the nature of their convictions and their intended destinations, improving both the manners and the language of the officers. Rogers paid a distant court to Miss Mary who was much improved by some crimson stuff Hobson had laid his hands on which had been tastefully piped with sunbleached codline. Opinion was apt to be kind to them: there were, after all, kindred spirits on the lower deck. If they were guilty in law there was in them no trace of flagitiousness.

Big Meg and her daughter picked oakum and scrubbed canvas, scoured mess kids, mended and washed clothes, while the third woman assisted Appleby. Her crimes were less easy to discover. A sinister air lay about her and it was darkly hinted by her companions that abortion or murder might have been at the root of her sentence of seven years transportation, rather than the procuring commonly held to be her offence. Certainly she claimed to have been a midwife and Appleby was compelled to report she had a certain aptitude in the medical field.

Knowing Appleby's distrust of the sex in general, Drinkwater was amused at his initial discomfiture at having Catherine Best as his assistant. His mates found their unenviable work lightened considerably and that in the almost constant presence of a woman. Catherine Best made sure that her presence was indispensible and whatever her lack of beauty she had a figure good enough to taunt the two men, to play one off against the other and secure for herself the attentions of both. But this was not known to the inhabitants of the gunroom.

'Ha, Harry, it is time you damned quacks had a little inconvenience in your lives,' laughed Drinkwater as he directed a thunderstruck Appleby to find employment for the woman.

'I emphatically refuse to have a damned jade among my business… if it's true she's a midwife then I don't want her on several accounts.'

'Why the devil not?'

'Perceive, my dear Nathaniel,' began Appleby as though explaining rainfall to a child, 'midwives know very little, but that little knowledge being of a fundamental nature, they are apt to regard it as a cornerstone of science and themselves as the high priestesses of arcane knowledge. Being women, and part of that great freemasonry that seeks to exclude all men from more than a passing knowledge of their privy parts, they dislike the sex for the labour they are put to on their behalf and can never tolerate a man evincing the slightest interest in the subject without prejudice .'

Drinkwater failed to follow Appleby's argument but sensed that within its reasoning lay the cause of his misogyny. He was thinking of Elizabeth and her imminent accouchement. He did not relish the thought of Elizabeth in the hands of someone like Catherine Best and hoped Mrs Quilhampton would prove a good friend to his wife when her time came. But he could not allow such private thoughts to intrude upon his duty. He was impotent to alter their fates and must surrender the outcome to Providence. For her part the woman Catherine Best attended to Captain Torrington and earned from Appleby a grudging approval.

The men who had been rescued were soon indistinguishable from Hellebore's crew, the soldiers as marines under Anton, hastily promoted to corporal. Captain Torrington emerged from his fever after a week. He had been thrust twice with a sword, in the arm and thigh. By great good fortune the hasty binding of his wounds in their own gore had saved them from putrefaction, despite the loss of blood he had suffered.

The sun continued to chase the brig into southerly latitudes so that they enjoyed an October of spring sunshine. The beautiful and unfamiliar albatrosses joined them, like giant fulmars, elegant and graceful on their huge wings. Here too they found the shearwaters last seen in the Channel, and the black and white Pintada petrels the seamen called 'Cape pigeons'.

They sighted land on the second Sunday in October, Griffiths's sonorous reading of Divine Service being rent by the cry from the masthead. At noon Lestock wrote on the slate for later transfer to his log: Fresh gales and cloudy, in second reefs, saw the Table land of the Cape of Good Hope. East and half North eight or nine leagues distant. In the afternoon they knocked the plugs out of the hawse holes and dragged the cables through to bend them on to the anchors. The following morning they closed the land, sounding as they approached, but it was the next afternoon before they let go the bowers and finally fetched an open moor in twenty-two fathoms with a sandy bottom. To the north of them reared the spectacular flat-topped massif of Table Mountain. Beneath it the white huddle of the Dutch-built township. Drinkwater reported the brig secure. The captain's leg was obviously giving him great pain.

'Very good, Mr Drinkwater. Tomorrow we will purchase what fresh vegetables we may and water ship. If any citrus fruits are available we will take them too. Do you let the purser know. As for our guests we will land them all except the seamen. They will stay. I wish the gig to be ready for me tomorrow at eight of the clock. I will call upon the Governor then; in the meantime do you direct Rogers to salute the fort.'

'Aye, aye, sir.' He turned away.

'Mr Drinkwater.'

'Sir?' Griffiths was lowering himself on to his chair, his leg stiffly extended before him. An ominous perspiration stood out on his forehead and his flesh had a greyish pallor.