Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [44]
He was impatient for the sea again. At forty-three, Hughes was a stranger on land. Brief, violent debauches at her dirty edges was all in twenty-five years he had known of her. When there was nothing left to spend there was no reason for being ashore. Penniless, light-headed with drink and venery, Hughes signed for the first ship he could get, so long as she was an ocean-going vessel. That this one was a slaveship made little difference – he had been on slaveships before.
He looked towards her now, where she lay out in the road. He could make out her deck lamps, their lights softened and diffused by the vaporous air surrounding her; she was enveloped in the mist of her own breath. She was a new-built ship and her timbers were breathing – Hughes knew this well enough. New timber would always steam on a cool night. But there are different sorts of knowledge and he had no doubt either that the Liverpool Merchant was panting for the open sea.
FOURTEEN
Late on the following day the wind changed direction slightly, veering between west and south. Thurso, checking stores with his gunner, a lanky man named Johnson, between decks in the after part of the ship, felt the change at once, in the way she settled between wind and tide. He felt it in the balance of his body, as one might feel a change in the rhythm of music, though nothing showed in his face or changed in his voice.
‘Wind coming round ahead of us, Capting,’ the gunner ventured, and received the full glare of the small eyes.
‘When I want your opinion of the weather, or anything else, I’ll ask for it.’
‘Aye-aye, sir.’
Later, in the forecastle, Johnson was to relate, with suitable embellishments, this brief exchange, laying the first strand in the tissue of gossip, bravado, calumny and indirect abuse which is spun hour by hour and breath by breath among the crew of a ship and is that ship’s unwritten journal, voluminous, untrustworthy, dissolving like a dream when the ship reaches port and the crew is disbanded. ‘Turned on me like a tiger, he did, only because I spoke first. I tell you, he is goin’ to be a tartar, this one. It wasn’t just lettin’ me know who is skipper. He was savage like, as if he would have had me seized up straight away for a good dozen.’
Shortly after midnight they cast off from the Pier Head. Running under her topsails against the flood, obedient to the cables that towed her, the Liverpool Merchant headed slowly towards the estuary. On the ebb she moored at Black Rock and waited for a change in the wind in company with two small brigs and a Danish schooner bound for Dublin.
They were obliged to stay here for the two days following. The pilot-boat came in from Liverpool with supplies of powder and bread and two sides of beef. Simmonds saw to the hoisting in of these, with Thurso’s eye upon him; the ship was fully loaded now and there was need for care in the stowage if she was to handle properly in the seas she would meet.
There was work enough apart from this to keep the crew busy. Barton, his ear always alert for the hoarse voice from the quarterdeck, saw to the rigging of the jib boom and had the sails fixed on the longboat. Men were set plaiting rope yarns for cordage and making deck swabs out of old rope. Calley could not master this so soon and had to begin with something simpler; as a first step towards the delights he had been promised he found himself, in company with a ragged, shivering runaway of fourteen named Charlie, untwisting old ropes to make oakum for caulking seams and stopping leaks. Libby, the big, one-eyed Londoner, veteran of several slaving trips, was given a special task – one which he was well qualified for, having once been bosun’s mate on a seventy-four-gun frigate. He was set down on the main deck, in full view of all,