Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [23]
EIGHT
Work on the ship continued; she rose on her stocks from day to day, proceeding by ordained stages from notion to form. Like any work of the imagination, she had to maintain herself against disbelief, guard her purpose through metamorphoses that made her barely recognizable at times – indeed she had looked more herself in the early stages of the building, with the timbers of the keel laid in place and scarphed together to form her backbone and the stem and sternpost jointed to it. Then she had already the perfect dynamic of her shape, the perfect declaration of her purpose. But with the attachment of the vertical frames, which conform to the design of the hull and so define the shape of it, she looked a botched, dishevelled thing for a while, with the raw planks standing up loose all round her. Then slowly she was gripped into shape again, clamped together by the transverse beams running athwart her and the massive wales that girdled her fore and aft. She was riveted and fastened with oak trenails and wrought-iron bolts driven through the timbers and clenched. And so she began to look like herself again, as is the gradual way of art.
William Kemp was present at every stage. Garrulity grew upon him. With his tricorn hat tilted back, his sober, expensive, negligently worn clothes, his short wig emphasizing the dark flush of his face, he held forth to the people of the yards, the shipwrights and their labourers, the fitters, the rope-makers – he would talk to anyone connected with the ship, down to the lad heating tar to calk her seams.
With business associates he was voluble about the opportunities just then afforded. There was no shortage of examples among their common acquaintance. Old Jonathan Horstmann who, as everyone knew, began as a tallow chandler in a back-street shop and bought a thirtieth share in one of the first slavers to sail out of Liverpool, had just died, leaving near a quarter of a million. Less than three years previously, the Wyatt family had fitted out four ships for the transport of twelve hundred negroes to the Caribbean. They had made no less than six voyages since, on the regular circuit. ‘I was talking to Ned Wyatt only last week,’ Kemp said. ‘It brought the family return enough on those six voyages to stock another dozen vessels in the West Indies with rum and sugar.’ He raised his hands to make a quick shape of wealth. ‘Now I ask you, where else can you get profits like that?’
In part it was superstition; much of that talking was like the babble of a spell to keep off demons. He was not desperate, however, during these days, merely rather feverish and talkative. Those who afterwards asserted otherwise did not know him. Poverty was distant, his success had been complete. His life was miraculous to him. He had limped into Liverpool as a boy of twelve, barefoot and penniless, and picked up a sort of living along the docks until he was big enough to get work as a labourer. He had put his pennies together. With his first five pounds he had bought a share in a consignment of hayforks and scythe-blades for the colonists in Virginia. The profits from this bought sugar in Jamaica which was then resold on the Liverpool Exchange. This trebled his capital. He repeated the venture with a larger stake and went on repeating it until he was strong enough to go into cotton. Markets for English