The Convict Ship, Volume 1 (of 3)

by William Clark Russell

‘All in the Downs the Fleet lay moored,’

and so with a laugh changed the subject.

It was towards the close of the month of August when my sweetheart bade me farewell on his departure to Liverpool to take command of the Arab Chief. I had passionately desired to go with him; but my aunt could not accompany me, and I was without a friend of my own sex able just then to leave home. My wish was overruled by my uncle and aunt. Tom himself did not favour it, though his longing for me to be with him to the last was as keen as mine, and so I took my farewell of him in my uncle’s home. He held me in his arms whilst I cried till I thought my heart would break. He kissed me again and again, bade me keep up my spirits, to consider that that day a year I should have been his wife some months. He begged me to remain faithful to him, and told me there never would be a minute when I should be out of his thoughts; and solemnly asking God to look down upon me, to guard me against all evil and sickness, to look down upon him, to protect and bring him back in safety to me, he pressed a last lingering kiss upon my lips and left me alone with my tears and my memories.

I received several letters from him whilst he was at Liverpool. He wrote in good spirits, called his ship a beauty, and said that of her kind she was the most admired of anything that had been seen in the Mersey for years. There was but one drawback. The mate of the barque was a Mr. Samuel Rotch. Tom had met this man some five or six years before in South America, and had had an unpleasantness with him there. He did not tell me what that trouble was. Afterwards Rotch had served under him, and there was a further difficulty.

Mr. Rotch, he said, was a man of his own age, soured by professional disappointments, but a shrewd, intelligent person, and an excellent seaman. He had rather that the owners had appointed any other man as mate. But he believed that there was some sort of distant relationship between Rotch and one of the firm; and as the man had once before got into trouble in consequence of his representations, and was poor, with a wife and two children to support, he had resolved to leave matters as he found them.

I showed this letter to my uncle, and asked him if he thought that Mr. Rotch had it in his power to make Tom unhappy or the voyage uncomfortable. He laughed, and answered:

‘Your Tom will have gone to sea with irons and bilboes, depend on ’t. Do you know that the power of the shipmaster when at sea is greater than that of any despot in the world, from the czar down to the shirt-maker’s sweater? I have always contended that legally the master mariner is much too much empowered. He can flog, he can starve, he can iron the devils under him, and justify any atrocity by an entry in the log-book and the testimony of one or two witnesses who would poison their mothers for a bottle of rum. How, then, should this Mr. Samuel Rotch be able to disturb the peace of your sweetheart? Your anxiety puts the boot on the wrong leg, my dear. It is for Mrs. Rotch to be uneasy.’

The next letter I received from Tom was dated at sea a few leagues from the Scilly Islands. He had brought his topsail to the mast, he wrote, to send his letter by a little coasting schooner that was inward bound. He blessed me, and sent me many messages of love, and wrote in high spirits of his ship and crew. Rotch was very civil and alert, he said, his crew as willing and active a body of men as ever he had had charge of, and his barque was a clipper, the swiftest fabric that was ever bowed by a breeze of wind.

‘I don’t mean to spare her,’ he wrote, ‘and she knows it. If there’s virtue in sail-cloth, my beloved, she shall walk. She shall whiten old ocean for your sake, my darling, though it should come to my holding on with my royals when we ought to be under double reefs.’

I laughed when I read his sea-terms, for I understood them; yet I pouted, too, for I was fool enough to feel jealous of his admiration for his barque. He ought to admire nothing living or dead but me, I thought to myself. He may go and fall in love with his ship, and think her mistress enough for him, and then I kissed his letter and read it again and yet again, and counted how many days had gone since he had left me, and how many weeks must pass before he would return.