A Burial at Sea

“Ship all lit up, sails slack, the men saving their second ration of grog for just now…”

“Still, the ship looks wonderful with the lanterns.”

“To each their own, Mr. Lenox.”

Nearly every Lucy was on deck now, and to Lenox’s surprise a group of them began singing. The melody caught on, and soon more than half the men had joined in. It was a long, flowing ballad called “Don’t Forget Your Old Shipmate.” Lenox tried to memorize the first verse as the next several proceeded: “We’re the boys that fear no noise/Whilst thundering cannons roar, And long/We’ve toiled on rolling wave, And soon/We’ll be safe on shore,/Don’t forget your old shipmate, Folde rol…”

By the time he had this committed to memory he was in time to hear a verse that gave him a pang for Jane, when the men shouted the word, “Plymouth”: “Since we sailed from Plymouth Sound, Four years”—here many shouted “days!”—“gone, or nigh, Jack, Were there ever chummies, now, Such as you and I, Jack? Don’t forget your old shipmate, Fal dee ral dee ral dee rye eye doe…”

After some two dozen verses of this song a small faction broke out singing a frankly pornographic ditty called “The Mermaid,” which was the cause of tremendous merriment and laughter. Then a smaller group, admired by all the others, sang in wonderfully mellow voices a song about Admiral Benbow. This was the leader of a fleet whose subordinates had rebelled against him and refused to fight the French, a refusal for which they had been court- martialed. If anyone other than Lenox saw the irony of the Lucy’s crew singing a song about insubordination, they didn’t show it. But Lenox reminded himself to bring up Benbow to his nephew. The admiral had been born to a tanner, a birth no doubt lower than Billings’s.…

Suddenly the song broke off and the master’s mate, a fellow with a booming voice, called them to order. All the officers turned forward and watched; for a moment the ship was entirely silent.

“The contestants!” he said.

Up the main hatchway—the passage from the main deck to below deck—came a parade of two dozen men, all of them grinning fearlessly. (Their bravery in part liquid, Lenox suspected.) Last among them was McEwan, and though in proportion he was not dissimilar to an ox, he was the only man in the group who didn’t look to possess that beast’s natural strength.

“And now, a game of Follow the Leader! Place your final bets, sirs!”

“Hey now!” called out Martin, but good-naturedly, and the sailors laughed.

“The nominee of the first mess, sponger Matthew Tart, to lead the first round, time to be no more than two minutes and thirty seconds! Ready, gentlemen? Yes? In that case proceed to the cathead at the fore of the ship, as per tradition, and keep an eye on Mr. Tart.”

“Christ in the waves,” muttered Tradescant, who was behind Lenox.

“Something the matter?”

“I always have to treat one or two of the buggers.”

“I still don’t know the game.”

Now he learned. Matthew Tart, sponger of the Lucy’s first gun, took his hand off the cathead and with no little speed began to shimmy up the foremast, hiking his haunches up behind him with his arms and then pushing with his feet. When he was halfway up, not far from the perch where Halifax had been murdered, Tart leaped forward into thin air and then, after an excruciating second or so, grabbed onto a thin rope. He traversed this hand over hand to the mainmast, flung himself onto the rigging there, and then dropped in a somersault onto the deck just beside the sunlight of the captain’s dining room. From there he walked on his hands to the aft of the ship, the sailors congregated on deck respectfully making way for him, all silent, and when he had reached the taffrail launched himself clear off the ship.

There was a gasp. Lenox half stood, while beside him Carrow emitted a hoarse chuckle.

Then Tart’s head popped up. He was evidently perched on the Bumblebee, the jolly boat stowed behind the ship’s back rail.

It had been a spectacular performance, and the ship cheered Tart with universal admiration.

Each of the two dozen men followed him now, attempting to traverse the Lucy exactly as Tart had: for such was the game. One slipped on the foremast, to general groans, and two others failed to walk on their hands. Another refused to jump onto the covered jolly boat. “Which I’ll do anything, but I ain’t going overboard this ship. I can’t swim,” he said, and was mocked for his sincerity.

The last man to go was McEwan. From the second his steward’s hand left the cat’s head Lenox found himself not breathing. But he needn’t have worried. McEwan, for all his size, was as nimble and agile as a monkey. He made it through the first course in the quickest time, and rewarded himself with a chicken leg from his pocket, to general good-natured jeering.

The second round began, and Lenox found that he was enjoying himself immensely. So were the other officers, who gasped when a contestant almost fell and cheered when the round’s leader did something spectacular.

They went places on the Lucy that Lenox hadn’t even thought existed: up and down the bowsprit, hanging upside down by their legs, all across every mast and rope that would hold a human’s weight, in and out of every boat slung up on deck. They went on their hands, on their legs, on one foot, and holding a flag. They went quickly and slowly—sometimes too slowly, as in the third round two men were ejected for dawdling. A great popular favorite from the eighth gun was disqualified for using his hands to brace himself as he walked along the ship’s rail, and attempting the same trick a man came perilously close to falling off the side of the ship.

By the fifth round there were four men left. Easily the best of them, to Lenox’s shock, was McEwan. He had earned the crowd’s support early on, perhaps because he cut such a rounded, unathletic figure, and despite it moved with the ease of a man taking a Sunday stroll through Hyde Park.

It was McEwan’s turn to lead now. With startling quickness he climbed hand over hand up the mainmast. When he was no more than a fattish dot in the sky, it seemed, far up in the crow’s nest, he hooked his legs over the ledge of the crow’s nest and waved down. Then he let go.

The sound of two hundred and nineteen men gasping at once must have filled McEwan’s ears as he fell. One poor soul, a leading seaman named Peter Lee, cried out “No, not McEwan!” in a high-pitched squeal, an utterance that he would find it difficult to live down for the rest of the voyage.

For one horrifying moment Lenox felt sure that his steward was going to crash heavily into the deck, mangled out of all recognition, for the sake of a game. Just when it seemed as if he had been falling for about ten minutes, however, McEwan reached out a hand with almost casual grace and found a length of rope. Having caught on to this he made his way to the mainmast, and then, as something like an encore, climbed down it backwards—that is, with his face pointing toward the deck and his legs toward the sky.

When he achieved the deck there was a moment of breathless silence, followed by overwhelming applause, wave after wave of it, always getting louder just as you thought it might begin to fade. McEwan continued to bow and wave with great grace. When all eyes turned to the other competitors, some moments later, they, in a unanimous gesture, bowed to Lenox’s steward, admitting their defeat.

Even Carrow was grinning. “Wish I had bet on him. Couldn’t, as an officer, of course.”

“I did!” said Lenox.

“He hasn’t played for four or five years. Did the same thing last time. Poor Pimples gave terribly long odds, didn’t he? Then again memories are short, and two of the other fellows had won it in recent years. Still—such a performance!”

The performer waddled over toward Lenox now, shaking hands distractedly along his way. “There,” he said, “aren’t you glad of that ten bob now, sir?” he asked.

“I congratulate you, my good man—but here now, why are you a steward? You should be up amongst the tops all the time.”

“Oh, no, sir. Much more comfortable below deck, you see. Always a bite to be had when one feels peckish. Speaking of which, sir, could I fetch you a glass of wine or a biscuit?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

After the singing had gone on for some time longer, and in fact grown quite maudlin, the officers began to go