‘Which was the captain’s cabin?’ said Tom.
We looked into it; it had been sacked like the rest; the lockers opened and the contents looted; the lid of a large sea-chest was smashed as though by a chopper; but they had left the nautical instruments alone, perhaps guessing their importance. The chronometers were safe; there were sextants in their cases on a shelf; the nautical books of reference were untouched; but the charts had been emptied out of their bags, as though the convicts supposed more was to be found inside them than rolls of paper.
We stepped on to the main-deck. The barricades had been beaten down, and the decks were covered with chips and fragments of timber. I now understood what had occasioned the pounding noise I had heard. A dreadful stain of blood marked the spot where the quarter-deck sentry had been felled. A couple of convicts stood with muskets and fixed bayonets at the main-hatch. Some food and bottles of beer were beside them, and they drank and ate, and chatted in harsh syllables. The doors and barricade arrangements here had been demolished. Gratings covered the hatch. The cage-like bars which descended to the lower-deck, with the doorway to admit of the passage of but one man at a time, still remained. I supposed that the door in the steerage bulkhead was secured and guarded.
Thirty or forty convicts lingered about this part of the ship. They seemed the quietest portion of the vile rabble. They hung in groups or marched up and down in little gangs. Some were dressed in the clothes of the soldiers. Others, again, wore the jackets and coats of the seamen and soldiers. It was clear that the forecastle and barracks had been stormed and plundered, though possibly the chests of the loyal portion of the crew only had been rifled.
I looked about me for the sailors, and counted five or six talking to a little crowd of convicts near the ship’s galley. I saw nothing of Mr. Balls nor the other petty officers of the vessel. Tom said he supposed they had been driven below with the orderly part of the crew and were in the prisoners’ quarters together with the captain, the doctor, Captain Barrett, the survivors of the guard, the women, and others.
There might have been fifty or sixty convicts upon the poop. I spied Will standing beside a convict right aft. I took the man to be a convict until I had stared awhile, and then I saw it was Mr. Bates, the chief mate, who had evidently been forced to change clothes with a felon. Will, however, was dressed as usual. The wheel was deserted. The calm was profound; the sea flat and sheeting into the dim, hot distance like a surface of quicksilver. The sun was now high and pouring in splendour into the vast mirror of the deep, and his light was stinging with heat, early as the hour yet was.
A convict, flushed with drink, reeled up to me and shouted: ‘Here’s one that ain’t of us! Change clothes, my beauty! Off with them duds!’ and he pulled at his own coat in a drunken, wrestling way to remove it.
Tom took him by the throat, and, running him backward until he was abreast of the convicts’ galley, flung him into the door with a bitter curse, and the fellow fell with a crash. My sweetheart shouted to the mob of convicts who stood near the ship’s galley with the sailors:
‘Keep that drunken ruffian off me or I shall kill him! D’ye know my compact? If this lad is touched or hurt’—and he stepped back to put his hand on my shoulder, whilst he roared out these words in a voice of fury—‘you shall sail the ship amongst you! You shall run her ashore and drown every mother’s son aboard! You shall run her into a man-of-war, and find as many gibbets as you have necks!’
As he spoke, the drunken convict staggered out of the galley with blood on his face from his nose: he cursed wildly and incoherently, and was approaching Tom in a fighting posture.