CHAPTER XXXVIII
SHE ESCAPES FROM THE CONVICT SHIP WITH HER SWEETHEART AND OTHERS
Mr. Bates and Will arrived, each bearing a burden of clothes from the slop-chest. I advised the mate to go behind the mizzen-mast and shift his convict clothes at once. He seemed unnerved and wanting in spirit, as though broken down by the scenes and sights of the day and night, and obeyed me as if I had been Tom or his captain. Will was dressed as throughout; it had strangely happened that no convict had forced him to exchange clothes. He went to Tom’s cabin and brought up my bundle and monkey-jacket; the latter I slipped on, throwing Tom’s convict coat overboard with passion and loathing. Will told me that only two or three men were now awake in the cuddy; one had fallen under the table just as he had passed up through the steerage hatch.
I quitted the wheel to look through the skylight, but the waking men sat too far aft to be seen; I heard the murmur of their fuddled voices, and was sure by the tones that the noise must cease in a few minutes. The picture remained as I have described it; the convicts lay over the table and in twenty various postures. Under the table, and betwixt the table and the bulkhead, they were heaped up as though slaughtered. A dreadful smell rose through the open skylight. Fragments of broken pipes, shreds of wearing apparel, capsized pannikins and hook-pots, overset pails of rum covered the deck and table. I was sure that Tom was right in thinking that when those senseless, beastlike shapes came to be looked at in the morning, many would be found corpses. Mr. Bates, having changed his clothes, stood beside me dressed in a suit of black cloth and a cloth cap. He said: ‘Shall Johnstone and I start on provisioning the boat? I shouldn’t like to act without instructions from Butler.’
‘No time should be lost,’ I answered; ‘but where will you find provisions, Mr. Bates?’
‘We’ll look around,’ he said. ‘I hope it mayn’t come to our having to break out fresh stores.’
‘We shall want nothing if the brig receives us,’ said I.
‘True; but we must go away well provisioned nevertheless.’
Just then Tom came along the poop. He sprang on to the hencoop and placed some parcels in the boat, joined us and said: ‘I’ve secured the chronometer, a sextant, some charts and a tinder-box. All’s quiet now in the cuddy. What a terrible scene! I was obliged to tread upon the bodies of men to look into the cabins. Many lie capsized upon their backs, their legs upon the seats. The light’s bad, yet I made out Abram on the deck of a berth. There’s a whole hundred and thirty people below in that cuddy! Would any man credit the story of such a wholesale drugging and damning by drink? They lie thick under the break there, and the main-deck’s strewn with them. The forecastle’s empty. But all’s not quiet yet in the ship,’ said he, speaking very quickly and softly. ‘A fellow under the bulwarks yonder sat up and called me by name. I took no notice. Two or three men just now staggered off the gratings on the main-hatch to seek more comfortable resting-places. We must wait awhile.’