The two men burst into a storm of oaths, and the little wood rang with forecastle and ’longshore imprecations. When they had exhausted their passions they knelt and drank from the spring of water, then walked to the boat, launched her, and returned to the cutter.
They arrived in England safely in due course, but some time later Reuben was obliged to compound with his creditors. Christian Hawke died in 1868 on board ship, still a carpenter.
THE TRANSPORT “PALESTINE.”
In the spring of 1853 the hired transport Palestine, which had been fitting out at Deptford for the reception of a number of convicts, was reported to the Admiralty as ready for sea.
The burthen of the Palestine was 680 tons, and the number of felons she had been equipped to accommodate in her ’tween-decks was 120. My name is John Barker, and I was second mate of that ship. Her commander was Captain Wickham, and her chief officer Joseph Barlow. The Palestine was an old-fashioned craft, scarcely fit for the work she had been hired for. Official selection, however, was probably influenced by the owners’ low tender. Good stout ships got £4 7s. 6d. a ton; I believe the Palestine was hired for £3 15s.
A guard from Chatham came aboard whilst we were at Deptford, consisting of a sergeant and ten privates, under the command of Captain Gordon and Lieutenant Venables. Shortly afterwards Dr. Saunders, R.N., who was going out as surgeon in charge of the convicts, took up his quarters in the cuddy. On the day following the arrival of the doctor and the guard, we received instructions to proceed to Woolwich and moor alongside that well-known prison-hulk H.M.S. Warrior. It was a gloomy, melancholy day; the air was full of dark vapour, and the broad, grey stream of the river ran with a gleam of grease betwixt the grimy shores. A chill wind blew softly, and vessels of all sorts, to the weak impulse of their wings of brown or pallid canvas, dulled by the thickness, sneaked soundlessly by on keels which seemed to ooze through a breast of soup.
I had often looked at the old Warrior in my coming and going, but never had I thought her so grimy and desolate as on this day. A pennant blew languidly from a pole-mast amidships; she was heaped up forward into absolute hideousness by box-shaped structures. Some traces of her old grandeur were visible in a faded bravery of gilt and carving about her quarters and huge square of stern, where the windows of the officials’ cabins glimmered with something of brightness over the sluggish tremble of wake which the stream ran to a scope of a dozen fathoms astern of her rudder. All was silent aboard her. I looked along the rows of heavily grated ports which long ago had grinned with artillery, and observed no signs of life. Indeed, at the time when we moored alongside, most of the criminals were ashore at their forced labour, and those who remained in the ship were caverned deep out of sight hard at work at benches, lasts, and the like in the gloomy bowels of the old giantess.
The Palestine sat like a long-boat beside that towering fabric of prison hulk. We were no beauty, as I have said, and the little vessel’s decks were now rendered distressingly unsightly by strong barricades, one forward of the foremast, leaving a space betwixt it and the front of the topgallant forecastle, and the other a little abaft the mainmast, so as to admit of some area of quarter-deck between it and the cabin front. Each barricade was furnished with a gate; the main-hatch was fortified by oak stanchions thickly studded with iron nails, the foot of them secured to the lower deck. This timber arrangement resembled a cage with a narrow door, through which one man only could pass at a time. The main-hatch was further protected by a cover resembling a huge, roofless sentry-box. To this were attached planks of heavy scantling, forming a passage which went about ten feet forward; there was a door at the end of this passage, always guarded by a sentry with loaded musket and fixed bayonet.