The Ballad of Desmond Kale (48 page)

WARREN INCHCAPE COULD NOT TELL. One day he might. One day he might tell. One day he might tell how it was — that he was one of the larboard watch. That the men of the larboard watch were called up early by means of a great yelling and running along the decks above their heads. How they did not know what it was coming upon them, but through a sailor's understanding penetrating their sailors' half sleep they were aware of a great danger at sea. From the dark, from the night, a force akin to another world looming upon this one rose before them. A rent opened in the fabric of the heavens! ‘Look up!' they cried, and saw the mate standing forward, on the starboard bow, and calling out, ‘
Luff! Luff!
'

One day Warren might tell how everybody ran forward, and stared into the dark water. How there was a steady breeze (they were on their starboard tack) and absolute darkness just penetrated by a floating star. Only it was not a star, but a light, a ship's light that the mate must have seen before anyone else and sensed in the night, apprehended it as they all did now, with horror. Another ship bearing down on them, on a beam reach in towering silence! They
heard the flap of her topsails and were relieved for the moment that she seemed smaller in reality than she seemed in the gloom when she was an instinctive presence, and might be going about. And how they were wrong about that: because advancing across the waves she was a knife, an arrow, a ram. How they heard a voice echoing their mate's with ‘Luff! Luff!' from the other ship. And how that must have been Captain Martin Sykes. How it must have been that man at the helm and as helpless as anyone but he was never going to admit he was wrong, and would need the best story of himself to tell his ship owners when he returned to Boston. How if there was a drowsy lookout on one ship there was a sleepy lookout on the other, and the two vessels coming along and expecting in a few days to meet up with each other in their arranged encounter. How instead of their arranged encounter it was this disarranged encounter and all too terribly soon.

After that? Noise. Blows. Timbers falling around the ears. A strange smell of dust and powder over the wet sea. Loudness of material and men falling into the water. How if there was to be an account of the loss of seventy-eight men, some pigs, some cats, some parrots and some rats, the only one to tell the tale would be Martin Sykes and he would have his side of it — because Warren and Titus would never say anything. They had seen too far and gone too far and wanted towards home. As for the
Betsy
of New Bedford, she was spread far and wide in all her missing parts and crew, a hundred fathoms down.

A raft of lashed planks, half awash, saved them, and their sea chest that floated up from the wreckage. The chest's gunwales, more often than not, were down a foot under water. They'd seen their precious biscuits, threads and nails for fishing lines, tobacco tins, and whatnots sink to the bottom. Maybe they were wanted by
the drowned crew waving from the deep. The only good things apart from their chest, that never once capsized, so saved them, were flying fish they grabbed and tore to pieces, and a few squalls of rain, that they drank with their mouths open as it torrented down. Up came the sun after each night into a terrible day, to fry their brains and forget them who they were.

There was a way Titus had, though, of facing terror straight, in trust of his soul's brother, Warren, even when the sharks grazed against the bones of their legs, and made ready to come back for a decent bite, by swimming out wide with their fins slicking above water. At the very last did Titus scream — and just as well — because by then their floating sea chest was close to the
Salamander
, which they were too blinded to see was near them. They said it was Titus's screams that made them look out.

The two castaways were found floating, holding to the sea chest, a weak hail from where the
Salamander
was hove to for her repairs, a whole two weeks after the cataclysm. By immense good chance circling currents had brought them back to the bearings where the two ships ripped through each other.

The two sailors clutching wreckage were brought on board. They were almost deprived of their senses but not quite. Otherwise this story would have no ending known. All the port bow of the
Salamander
was ragged and fractured in her raking of the other ship. Her port anchor was completely gone and its weight, thrown into the other vessel, must have played a main part in taking the
Betsy
down. A huge length of the port bulwarks was taken off her and carried away. All the lower yardarms were broken in the same direction, but none of this was discouraging to Sykes holding to his purpose of staying at sea and catching seals. During her repairs the
Salamander
stood off a lonely atoll south of cannibal islands
located a week's sailing to the north of Cape Brett. It was a scribble on a chart, known as a haven for whalers and their shoddier ilk, sealers. Sykes still had a load of skins to carry and would not seek harbour for them: the next lot he was determined would be stowed on her open decks. And he had two extra crewmen hauled from the hungry sea to make sure he did it.

Before they hove into view, a body had been fished floating from the water, the only one found. It was the swollen form of a hairy man wearing a medallion around his neck proclaiming him the
Betsy
boxing champion, and that was the only evidence remaining of any ship at all until the two named creatures swam up, one of them wearing a triangular hat, a cream silk vest, and a white sash around his black, burning throat — hence to be nicknamed Admiral. The other with no trousers and a hideously swollen scrotum — hence to be named Pepperpots. Their skeletal hands clung to their ship's chest with a Christian cross pokerworked into its wood and some ciphering on its lid. It was hoisted aboard and found to be empty. Upon the information that a boxing champion had been drowned, Pepperpots looked startled and for the first time a bit of life came into his eyes.

‘What is the matter?' said Sykes, with cunning particularity. ‘Did he have you?'

‘Nay, I had him,' said Pepperpots, baring a grin, though without knowing what he meant, at all, until his memory came back to him, in shreds and tatters. So that was who took his medal, the one he'd felled in fair contest on a far happier ship.

The sealer was a brig of handsome make, a battered salt and sunwhite craft with rakish masts and yards and manned by a crew of deserters and escaped convicts of several nations. At the end of her repairs she was jury rigged, but workable. Only her moods
made her truly ugly and they were vile moods indeed. Against each and every man aboard it served their Massachusetts man, Martin Sykes, to hold resentments enough to be sure they wouldn't run. All including Pepperpots and Admiral had prices on their heads or warrants out against them in various ports. After being cruelly used ashore men laid cruelty on others on the high seas, as if their due. Because it served his ship, Sykes allowed his crew free run against each other, though to be doubly sure of their displeasure, he stayed away from civilised ports for as long as he could, only once in a while consulting the ship's almanac where an appointment was laid down and where if he wished to continue sealing he would have his goods taken off his decks. He slung his skins to other ships while moored in lonely places and thus stayed abroad while his cargo was traded to port. There was a harbour north of the Bay of Islands he used, another at Van Diemen's Land, and a shelter somewhere about Bass Strait, between Van Diemen's Land and New Holland where wild seas clashed, tore, tossed and fumed over shallows.

When the name Botany Bay was whispered around, Admiral and Pepperpots experienced a thrill of silence, lest they betray their hopes: for if they did cut loose they would have their best chance of a homecoming in the Bass Strait.

Among that crew, tormenting them was a sport, and the captain the biggest bully of all. But a lesson was soon learned: it was better to mess with their carnal virtue than attempt destroying their hopes of getting themselves free and back to where they started. They never admitted where that was, for fear they'd never be taken there, except sometimes Pepperpots' eyes rolled up in his head; and he bleated with forgotten joy as he counted whales and porpoises, their backs gleaming, their heads spuming a haze of breath into the grey salt air. How he herded them with his eyes, sorted them in his
heart until they reckoned he was a shepherd wrenched from his lubberly beginnings by circumstances too miserable to be told.

Strength regained, Admiral was a hellcat; he couldn't be stopped by any fist, nor by the bosun's whip either, as he took whatever lashes were laid on him for being insolent and nimble — along his legs, upon his thin scarred shoulders, and even on the soles of his naked feet as he lay on his back repelling attackers of his enraged pride. Only Pepperpots was able to calm him, at such times, and that was by sitting attentively to him, and saying nothing, not even looking at him, but twiddling his bulky toes and finding a point on the far horizon to fix his eyes on, where he might see hope in the shape of islands or the long smoky edge of somewhere. If anyone came near them again he jumped up and challenged them even if it was their captain himself. An almost crazed passion of justification existed between the pair of them.

So vitriolic was Sykes's blame on the
Betsy
and her two survivors that no reply was possible from any person, leastwise a pair of half-drowned sailors, in defence of themselves and the truth that their
Betsy
was rammed by the
Salamander
and not the other way around. Sykes cursed them as two of the worst luck bringers that were ever flung alive upon the waters. Wasn't it their watch? Hadn't they been on deck?

They weren't confessing it. Either that, or all memory of what happened was wiped from their brains by the horror of their experience, the wreck, the drownings, the loss of shipmates, the loss of a good captain when his ship broke under him in a reasonable calm sea and its various parts sunk to the bottom, except for a few spars and bits of baggage. Then all those two weeks of being maddened with thirst! vomiting sick from hunger! attacked by sharks! being covered in buboes and scalding rashes! dying!

They believed it was hard for them to die at sea after every way they tried.

One day on the
Salamander
Pepperpots stroked his fingers through the fur of a seal skin, a wonder to himself as well as to the ship's master, who stood nearby.

‘Why, these hairs are all silken,' he said, ‘they are flat, pointed, harsh.' And this from an ordinary seaman, who was marked by a blistery scorched face and his rib and arse bones chafed, his powers of discrimination dimmed almost to extinction!

‘Tell me what you know,' said Sykes, his interest piqued by one so lately waterlogged.

Pepperpots turned the external coat into folds and gave a deeper interpretation. He could not use his eyes too well, they were sore. Smoothing his finger and thumb in the material he said, ‘There is a variable quantity of wool in here. The curves are not thickly set.'

‘Curves? I should think not. A fur is good and straight.'

Pepperpots recited his understanding, which was less like intelligence and more like comfort: ‘In the matter of wools, if the curves are not very thickly set, the serrations are not very numerous. So it might be covered in scales, this fur, but not serrations. It says why its hairs lie all in the same way, and don't tangle to form a mat — why seals' coats are worn by people as they are on the animal, not greatly changed, except for being cut, and sewn. There are no hooks to bind it.'

AFTER THEIR BLISTERS HEALED IT was seen that Pepperpots's ogling features were covered in a reddish, frosted fuzz of beard. Across the side of his scalp, white as oyster meat, was a thick scar where his hair refused to grow back after he was struck his injury when he ran forward to assist. The skin where it healed pulled his eyelids up, leaving him with an affronted sort of expression, and meant when asleep his eyes stuck partly open, in a slit of watchfulness that had the benefit of warning off anyone wanting to sort through his belongings or his mate's.

When Admiral's blisters healed he was seen to be blacker than when he was burnt: a truly black man, indeed, of which race, though, was the subject of passionate ignorance. It made Admiral the lowest on the ship but with his preposterous three-cornered hat he showed refusal to accept how lowly he was. As the castaways were roughened by weather, hard usage, illness and injury, they looked about forty bleary years old, but they were mere mother's sons, both of them, and still short of twenty years of age.

‘Where are you from, jackass,' said Sykes, ‘where's your home
port, suckling?' Wrenching Pepperpots's ear, he marched him up and down along the deck but learned nothing.

After the iron rule of his ship as a means of sadistic enjoyment, the leading motive of Martin Sykes was commerce. When they found a place to hunt seal, his motive was to prevent anyone else from getting skins. His idea was, that no foreigner had right to privilege near any colony that he declared his own. From the decks of the
Salamander
he scanned the blear horizon and sent his boats on.

 

One day Pepperpots and Admiral were among those in the first boat away. The two close shipmates had made a practice of never taking more nor less than most of what they needed for their living needs in a boat running into a surf. It might be their last chance every time, and like the rest of their crew, they did not always make it back to their vessel at night, but slept in the sea grass, among dunes, or curled in a rocky cave echoing with breakers.

On boards at their feet that day they had all their worldly goods in a calico sack. They had some salt pork between them, a flask of rum, a sharpening stone, a sealing knife, a sealing club, a few poor souvenirs of happier times, and a lump each of dark tobacco. They had little to protect them from the weather in the coming night ashore. They each carried a tin canister of water since a time they were driven crazed by thirst, and whenever there was a squall of rain they always cupped their hands and licked their paws like cats, to save it. Pepperpots owned the clothes he stood in, and that was all, while Admiral — of lean and agile pretension — had a bedroll tied with a leather thong, hitched tight to his backbone.

Only closer inspection might have shown that the way Admiral carried himself, with a careful, forced, and upright gait —
sometimes he couldn't help tilting — was a sign that his bedroll contained something much heavier than the precious sea commander's outfit, for which he was mocked, and which he was wearing — quite sadly bedraggled.

At their back, bucking an easterly swell, the
Salamander
rode with jabbing persistence against a grinding anchor chain on a shallow bottom. They were well enough away from her, and today the two mariners jabbed their fingers secretly in the air and swore silently it was the last they would look back on her.

They had not come as close before to such a difficult beach for setting down. Hummocks and dunes were all the land to be seen past the edge. It was a bay so constantly beaten by strong winds and high seas that their captain believed the seals inhabiting it were sure to remain unmolested until none were to be found anywhere else. The only trouble with his thinking was that seals everywhere were getting into shorter supply, the traders hungrier for them. Indeed had they only known it, in the bays over from this one were six different gangs of men belonging to a Port Jackson sealer, moored from sight, who were there on the same business as themselves, and all of them running short of provisions and on the point of eating seabirds and seals if they didn't find better relief from their wants.

This was the leading boat coming away from the
Salamander.
Four men rowed, one worked a steering oar, while a sixth crouched in the bows looking out for trouble. The other boats followed, some with the intention of standing off to drive the seals back onto land when the killing began. Others would land and begin the dirty work of sticking them and skinning them, leaving their carcases to rot, their fishy dark meat being no use to anyone except the carrion birds and island rats, once the skins were taken.

They watched the
Salamander
shrinking behind them as their boat wallowed in a swell behind breakers, trying for a chance to get in among the rocky platforms. The easterly wind drove the seals up on land. There were a good many of them flopped and basking, shining their backs, their noses and long whiskers aligned to the wind in the direction of possible threat. They had heavy necks and thick manes and looked like a colony that had not been attacked too many times, as they were plentiful with the shore fairly free of bones. They were dense with variations in colour from dark black-brown to golden. Seal fur was wanted for its strength of insulation in coats, hats and mufflers, and for high, warm boots of style. Skins would be bloodily piled at the tide line by sunset. Bull seals raised themselves on their tails, scarred in their fights for females, having chunks torn from their hides and rendering them less desirable as skins. In pauses between waves thumping, males could be heard barking their challenges and the men were ready with theirs. Bull seals went for their opponents throwing their heads up and rising chest to chest, biting each other around the neck and shoulders, making guttural sounds and very preoccupied they were, as the first of the boats came in on a surge and was hauled up the rubble beach to sit above the tide line.

From there the
Salamander
was far off but they knew the eye of Martin Sykes was upon them, his telescope raised and lowered every few minutes and his last and most trusted boat's crew of cutthroats standing by to be sent after stragglers, who might decide that a low piece of land lying in the southern oceans was better than their ship to live on.

There were sealers who lived on land the whole year, maintaining depots, and saving themselves the discomfort of ever having to go back to sea. They kidnapped women for their comfort. This day
when Pepperpots and Admiral came stepping on sand, leaping from the boat, plunging up to their chests in foam, they were soon enough looking around for a rock, a lump of coral, the thighbone of a seal, or a piece of driftwood to use as a weapon. There were seals and there were men who lived among seals.

As for the seals, it was bloody work ending their animal life and stepping in blood and salt water. They got among them chasing them down, slaughtering them and skinning them between rocks and leaving their carcases to rot in the wind. It was bloodier, colder work than dealing with sheep ever was, and while there was plenty of barking there wasn't any dog to do it better.

As for men — it was men the
Salamander
's crew feared most: each other first and then rival gangs from rival ships who might appear any time and dispute the harvest. Pepperpots and Admiral weren't so sure if they feared other men more than their own men. Other men were likely to beat them and press them into their gangs but other men's gangs were likely to go home to port. There were signs of men around, a cold fire where mussel shells were cooked, and footprints in sand. If their men ran for their boats it might be better for the two sailors where they were. They were always ready for it anyway.

In a pause between killing they were both flat on their bellies watching ahead. A gap in the dunes showed a lumpy dark shape nosing around. ‘It ain't no seal,' said the Admiral. ‘It must be someone.' The figure dropped from sight. So they scurried forward and scrambled to the top of the dune. There they saw a man watching towards them, but through careful manoeuvering they had put their backs to the eastern light and weren't seen. The man must have thought he was safe, then, because he lifted an arm in a signal. He was joined by a few men raising themselves out of the
tussocks, all carrying weapons. They set off moving at a jog trot in a westerly direction. It was clear their plan was to round on the
Salamander
men from the leeward side. They would reach them in less than quarter of an hour and each man jack of them would have his hands full.

Having seen what was up, the two friends turned and looked at each other, thinking the same wild thought, and then they ran forward into a hollow of the dunes, a scoop of land at the very narrowest part of the island, and hidden from Sykes's telescope. They climbed the next dune and from there got themselves a surprise as they looked down into the next narrow, sheltered hollow. It was a thrusting animal coming along a sandy track, a womback, and didn't that mean they were in their own country? And wasn't it very tame, quite fearless as it ambled forward into Admiral's arms? Admiral grasped it behind its neck bones, pushing its trunk backwards and forwards as if he'd just met a great old friend and had all the time in the world to greet him. Pepperpots looked to their safety while the womback butted. On hands and knees Pepperpots advanced to the crest of the last dune. There was a wide expanse of ocean to the north and a narrow stretch of beach below. Was there any guard posted? Nobody was seen. Certainly there were no men on that beach, but drawn up on the sand, with its sails furled, was their salvation — a ship's whaleboat about fifteen feet in length!

With a garbled cry of wonder Pepperpots tumbled over the edge of the dune and plunged downwards, running. He crossed the tide line in a few wet strides and was at the bow of the boat. It was heavy on the sand. He dared not yell out to Admiral, but whistled piercingly like the whistling kite, hoping he was heard above the chop of the waves, and spent a few minutes untying knots and
readying canvas, glancing around all the time and hardly believing the find. Shouldering the vessel around to face the sea was difficult heavy work and could not be done until Admiral appeared running backwards across the sands, scanning the skyline as he came, and lurching in such a particular disorganised way owing to his bedroll's heft across his back. About that bedroll, which seemed to have grown into Admiral's spine, he carried it so much, Pepperpots thought if there was anyone watching they would surely divine that held in the precious bundle of constant keeping was more than just the finery of a sea commander's clothes and a triple-cornered hat — that sewn into the pouches of the bandolier was coinage of weight and worth. It was held since their sea chest was thrown on the ballast of the
Salamander
. They took their time and removed its false floor, securing their fortune.

Almost buried to the ankles in wet sloppy sand they got the boat turned athwart and heaved her, lurch by lurch, until a foaming wash of tide lightened her timbers and she began floating in a few inches of water. Pushing hard they drifted her across a stretch of shallows until the easterly, no longer blocked by the dunes, combed her stern, smacking the sails. As she began briskly moving, the two clambered aboard and fell into the bottom, from where one grabbed the tiller and the other hauled in the sheets, working the canvas from an almost lying position inside the hull. Anyone chancing to see them would think the craft had got an idea of its own freedom into its head, and was gone skimming over the ocean unattended.

 

They sailed for an hour not daring to speak. It was well past noon when the seal island shrank to a low pale band on the horizon.
Pepperpots was half blinded by glare but Admiral screwed up his eyes and spoke: the moored
Salamander
, he said, was visible but hardly bigger than a freckle at one end of the island, while the strangers' ship at the other end of it, where the
Salamander
hadn't been able to see it, was no bigger than a pin head. Neither ship showed signs of putting out boats to give chase.

‘And pray God they never will, pray God there's some kind of battle royale goin on,' said Pepperpots as he leaned back, keeping the sail trimmed, and grinned his salt lips. ‘It will take all their attention, battling for seals. They might miss us by now, seeing as how we showed em the seal fighters we were. By tomorrer they won't know where we's gone, even if we don't know where we are ourselves, cept heading away. I trust our captain's come ashore to get his share of harm. I'd be disappointed if he ain't. I can see his head being split open. I am almost pleased enough to sail back there an shake the hand of the man who done it, who was a big enough fool to leave his boat unguarded.'

Admiral cried out, ‘Ooh yah!' and was busy untangling a fishing line in his lap, that he'd found in a storage hatch. It was a generously supplied boat they had, and if they were caught, they'd be in worse trouble for stealing it than any sort of trouble they'd known before. There were other good things in there, under that hatch. Admiral was at the business of hauling them out when the wind changed aft, almost knocking them down. Pepperpots shouted a warning, hauled in ropes, pushed hard at the tiller, came around, the small craft bobbling and wobbling, and it was all right, only busy with slamming this way and that. They hadn't seen it coming, feathering across the green stirred sea: they were in for a time of it.

Wind belted from the south-west and settled in with a howl, bringing whitecaps. Admiral kept his head down. Eventually the
two battered mariners looked at each other again with dripping faces and had the same thought. It was that any two who'd sailed a sea chest in a circle of the ocean, ballasted by stolen coin, and lived to make towards home, would be well able to span the whole world in a whaleboat with a standing lugsail and ready rigged as a yawl, when it came to trouble worse than this. For there was a feeling within the narrow ribs of their vessel that its rules of ownership were changed for the good, and a few other rules of ownership were changed as well, and with a little more luck changed for ever. They lifted their eyes to each other and dared their souls to return, that had deserted them for so long.