Killigrew and the North-West Passage Read online

  He had been in the navy for fourteen years now and had finally earned himself a petty officer’s badge of distinction on the sleeve of his blue jacket. His shipmates jeered at him when he told them that one day he would be a boatswain; they had never heard of a black warrant officer. Molineaux knew he could do the job as well as any white man, if they let him; perhaps better than any white man. He was sick of white coves looking down on him simply because of the colour of his skin, treating him as if he was ignorant, despite the fact he read poetry by Milton and Coleridge when they struggled to reach the end of the ‘Naval Intelligence’ column in The Times. He would become a boatswain, and prove to the Admiralty there was nothing a white man could do that a black man could not do better.

  Beyond the dogs’ cages, he joined his messmates at one of the tables suspended from the deck head outside the galley. There were no gunports in the Venturer’s sides, and with the hatches sealed against the cold the only light came from the guttering pusser’s dips that flickered fitfully in lanterns hung at strategic points around the mess deck, casting pools of thin yellow light that only seemed to emphasise the darkness around them.

  Seth Endicott was holding forth on the subject of Frau Weiss’ sexuality, which a few minutes spent in her presence made him an expert on, while Mick O’Houlihan decorated an ivory cheroot case he had carved with scrimshaw work and pretended to listen by occasionally saying, ‘Uh-huhn.’ They both acknowledged Molineaux with a nod, and Endicott resumed his discourse.

  ‘Don’t be fooled, Mick. She may come across as a frosty bitch, but I’ll bet she’s as randy as a rabbit in bed.’

  ‘I thought you always said it was quiet, sweet gals that turned out to be the most passionate,’ O’Houlihan said with a smile. Like Molineaux, he knew Endicott well enough to take the Liverpudlian’s self-proclaimed carnal expertise with a bushel of salt.

  ‘Same difference,’ Endicott retorted dismissively. ‘She was giving me the eye, Mick. I could tell.’

  ‘Don’t talk daft, man,’ said Able Seaman Hughes. ‘A woman like that wouldn’t look twice at a cove like you. And do you know why?’

  ‘Here we go,’ groaned O’Houlihan.

  ‘Because – in the eyes of the likes of her – you’re inferior. It’s all right for oppressed working-class proletarians to work and slave so that bourgeois capitalists like her can benefit from the fruits of your labours, but if you should aspire to share in those fruits she’ll slap you down soon enough.’

  ‘Bloody hell, he’s off again!’ groaned Endicott. ‘Someone stuff a sock in his trap!’

  ‘It’s true, I tell you!’ protested Hughes, and reached inside his jacket to draw out a well-thumbed copy of a political pamphlet he was constantly quoting at his shipmates. ‘You should read this, Seth. You might learn something.’

  Molineaux snatched the pamphlet from his hand. Hughes tried to grab it back, but Endicott and O’Houlihan seized him, giving Molineaux a chance to peruse the pages. ‘Oi! Give it back, you thieving pig!’ squealed Hughes.

  ‘You told us we should read it, didn’t you?’ said Molineaux. ‘Let me read it out to the others.’ As he scanned the pages, the other men on the mess deck gathered round. ‘Here’s a good bit. Listen to this, lads: “The Bourgeoisie substituted shameless, direct, open spoliation, for the previous system of spoliation concealed under religious and political illusions. They stripped off that halo of sanctity which had surrounded the various modes of human activity, and had made them venerable, and venerated. They changed the physician, the jurisprudent, the priest, the poet, the philosopher, into their hired servants…”’

  ‘What’s a juris-whatsit when it’s at home?’ asked Endicott.

  ‘Highfalutin’ word for a land-shark, shipmate. And I bet you’d have to look a long time to find one with a halo.’ Molineaux tucked the pamphlet inside his jacket. ‘I think I’ll hang on to this, Red. I’ve a feeling it’ll come in handy next time I visit the head.’

  ‘Give it back!’ repeated Hughes, struggling to free himself from Endicott and O’Houlihan. ‘That’s my personal property, that is!’

  ‘But sure, Red, are ye not the one who’s always tellin’ us that all property is theft?’ O’Houlihan pointed out.

  ‘Yur,’ agreed Molineaux. ‘And I’m thieving it. So put that in thi’ pipe and smoke it!’ he added, borrowing one of the boatswain’s favourite phrases – not to mention his broad Yorkshire vowels. Molineaux’s skilled mimicry never failed to reduce his shipmates to tears of laughter.

  ‘You bastard!’ yelled Hughes. ‘I’ll report you to the cap’n, so I will!’

  ‘And won’t he be impressed when he finds out ye brought seditious material on board?’ said O’Houlihan. ‘Sure, the man’ll like as not be congratulatin’ Wes here for consficatin’ it, so.’

  Molineaux took the pamphlet out again and threw it at Hughes. ‘Keep your bloody book. I don’t want it anyhow. I’ll wipe my flanky on good British oakum, none of your foreign gammon, thank you very much!’

  ‘Bastards!’ Once Endicott and O’Houlihan had released him, Hughes bent down to retrieve his pamphlet. ‘You’re nothing but lackeys of your own capitalist oppressors. I’m telling you, boys, the day will come when the likes of those bourgeois pigs are strung up from the lampposts of London! ’ He flung an arm in the direction of the officers’ quarters. Before it could reach its fullest extent, however, it met an immovable barrier: the chest of Mr Thwaites, the boatswain.

  ‘All right, lads, simmer down. What’s all this about? What’s the book, Hughes?’

  ‘It’s mine, Mr Thwaites.’ Hughes tried to thrust the pamphlet inside his Guernsey, where he wore it next to his heart, but in his panic to hide it from the boatswain’s view as quickly as possible, he repeatedly caught it against the neck of his shill underneath.

  Thwaites laid his cherriculum – a short cane covered with the cured hide of a bull’s pizzle, the boatswain’s staff of office – across Hughes’ chest. ‘I didn’t ask whose it were, I asked what it were.’ He held out his left hand. ‘Let me see.’

  Realising he had no choice but to obey, Hughes placed the pamphlet in Thwaites’ hand. The boatswain tucked his cherriculum under one arm so he could leaf through the pages until he came to a passage that caught his eye. ‘“We have followed the more or less concealed Civil War pervading existing Society, to the point where it must break forth in open Revolution, and where the Proletarians arrive at the supremacy of their own class through the violent fall of the Bower-jee-oysee.”’

  ‘It’s pronounced Bourgeoisie, Mr Thwaites,’ Molineaux explained helpfully. ‘It’s French. It means “the middling sort”.’

  Thwaites glared at him. ‘I know what it means, Molineaux. This is seditious material, Hughes. Where did thee get this?’

  The Welshman hung his head. An awkward silence settled over the mess deck: the other hands knew that Hughes was in trouble this time and no mistake. While some felt his comeuppance was long overdue, they were sorry for it: apart from his tedious parroting of Communist dogma, Hughes was not such a bad cove.

  But the seaman was oblivious to their sympathy as he quailed before the boatswain’s glare. ‘Well, lad? Speak up! Did thee bring this book on board?’

  ‘Is everything all right here, Bosun?’ As everyone watched Thwaites browbeat Hughes, no one had seen Mate Sebastian Cavan enter the main deck.

  ‘I caught Hughes wi’ this, sir,’ explained the boatswain. ‘Seditious material, sir, intended to foment mutiny on one of Her Majesty’s ships.’

  Only recently commissioned, Cavan was not yet twenty, a handsome young man with all the self-assurance of one to the manor born – his father owned large swathes of Ireland, by all accounts – who had served as a midshipman on Molineaux’s last ship. He had been a shy, awkward, downy-cheeked youth of fifteen when HMS Tisiphone had sailed from Portsmouth in October 1848. By the time the sloop had returned from a cruise of the Far East and the South Seas lasting two and a half years, Cavan had been a self-assu
red young man, tried and tested in skirmishes with pirates and other desperadoes. But he wore his self-assurance lightly, maintaining an easy command over men three times his age, neither looking down on them as his social inferiors nor earning their contempt by trying to be overly familiar.

  He took the pamphlet from the boatswain and glanced at the flyleaf.

  ‘“The Manifesto of the German Communist Party”. Oh, it’s all right, Bosun. I lent it to him. It’s mine.’

  ‘Yours, sir?’ Thwaites said dubiously.

  ‘Yes. All a load of gammon, of course, but one needs to read these things to keep abreast of what the enemy that lurks on the fringes of our society is up to. Isn’t that right, Hughes?’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ Hughes tugged his forelock furiously.

  From the expression on Thwaites’ face, it was clear he was not taken in, but he could hardly gainsay an officer. Nonetheless, Cavan had gone out on a limb for Hughes. As a commissioned officer – albeit a junior one – he might outrank the boatswain, but Thwaites would not look kindly at being made to look a fool in front of the men. He could make trouble for the mate if he wanted to, and he was just vindictive enough to do so. As much as Molineaux admired Cavan’s sand, he could not help wondering if the mate appreciated how dangerous an enemy he had made.

  Cavan’s next words probably did not help either. ‘Well done, though, Bosun. We need to be vigilant at all times. You never know when the enemy within will strike next. Carry on.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ rumbled Thwaites, and from that moment onwards Molineaux knew that the boatswain would be looking for any opportunity to pay Cavan back.

  Dismissed, Thwaites made his way topsides. Cavan turned to head aft.

  ‘Sir?’

  Cavan turned back. ‘Yes, Hughes?’

  ‘Can I have my book back, sir?’

  Molineaux suppressed a groan. The Welshman just did not know when to keep his trap shut.

  But Cavan only smiled. ‘I think I’d better hold on to this for now, don’t you?’ He tucked the book inside his coat. ‘We don’t want you getting into any more trouble, do we? Next time I may not be able to bail you out.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ Hughes grovelled obsequiously. ‘Thank you, sir. God bless you, sir.’

  Cavan headed aft.

  ‘They’re the devil, aren’t they, those capitalist bourgeois oppressors?’ Molineaux remarked laconically.

  ‘I just used him, the way his kind have been using us working-class proletarians for centuries,’ sneered Hughes. ‘When the revolution comes, the likes of him will be the first to be strung up from the nearest lamppost.’

  Molineaux smiled. ‘Yur, right.’

  Chapter 3

  A Piece of Cake

  Killigrew winced as Strachan probed his bruised chest with his fingers. ‘No bones broken, at any rate,’ opined the assistant surgeon. ‘You may have cracked a couple of ribs, though. How in the world did you do it?’

  ‘I think it happened when I dropped on that iceberg.’

  ‘When you dropped on that iceberg? That was yesterday afternoon! And you helped haul the sledge for a dozen miles after that. Faiks, man! Why did you no’ say something?’ As always when he was agitated, Strachan’s native Perthshire accent crept more strongly into his voice.

  ‘Didn’t want the hands to think I was scrimshanking, did I? What can you do for me?’

  ‘Apart from recommend a doctor who specialises in mental cases? I’ll bind you up; it’s the standard treatment for cracked ribs, though I’m dubious of the benefit. As with most injuries, the best medicine is time. You’ll heal soon enough. I’d better tell the Old Man that you’ll not be fit for duty for a couple of weeks—’

  ‘Don’t you dare! Pettifer needs all the help he can get, until we rejoin the rest of the squadron. I can’t afford to spend time on the sick list.’

  Strachan sighed. ‘Will you at least try to get some rest, stop pushing yourself all the time?’

  Killigrew smiled. ‘I’ll try.’

  Strachan set to work winding a bandage tightly around the lieutenant’s chest. ‘How’s the lassie settling in?’

  ‘Fine, I think. Difficult to tell – she’s not what I’d call garrulous.’

  ‘Hardly surprising. English isn’t her first language, she’s probably in a state of shock after her ordeal on the ice, and now she finds herself on a naval ship of a foreign power, surrounded by strangers. I don’t suppose she happened to mention how she got that blue eye?’

  ‘I’d assumed that she fell and bruised her face when the Carl Gustaf was nipped.’

  Strachan shook his head. ‘That bruise is at least four days old. I know contusions, Killigrew. By the hookie! I should do the number of times I’ve treated you after you got into a fight, or fell off a mountain, or… or swung on to a passing iceberg like something out of a Walter Scott novel! You know I only volunteered to come on this expedition with you because I thought this would be the only place on earth where you could steer clear of trouble? More fool me!’

  ‘You only volunteered to come on this expedition because you want to write a book on Arctic zoology,’ Killigrew corrected him.

  ‘It’s nearly seventy years since Pennant wrote the standard reference. And some of it is, frankly, nonsensical. Besides, with the advances in methods of scientific investigation made in the intervening years, I’m sure I can shed new light on the various little-known, little-studied species that inhabit the Arctic wilderness.’

  Strachan had first come into contact with the flourishing world of science while studying to become a fellow of the Royal Society of Apothecaries at the Edinburgh School of Medicine. His studies had included courses on anatomy, botany, chemistry, materia medica, and the theory and practice of physic; but there were other, new fields of investigation opening up for those of an enquiring mind.

  The Admiralty had equipped the ships of Belcher’s squadron with all manner of scientific instrumentation, but in its infinite wisdom it had not thought to appoint the Venturer with a science officer. It had been thanks to Killigrew – who had mentioned Strachan’s scientific interests to Pettifer when the commander had asked him if he could recommend anyone as an assistant surgeon – that the Scotsman had been offered the position. When Strachan had tried to assure the captain that he would not let his scientific investigations interfere with his duties as assistant surgeon, Pettifer had pooh-poohed the suggestion. ‘Nonsense, nonsense! Let us hope your duties as assistant surgeon do not interfere with your scientific investigations!’

  Strachan had almost finished binding Killigrew’s chest when there was a knock at the door. ‘Come in!’

  The Venturer’s clerk entered. In his early twenties, Nicodemus Latimer had a soft, pink face beneath an unruly thatch of hair so fair it was almost white. Killigrew had heard Strachan described as having a schoolboyish enthusiasm for science, although he could not see it himself; he doubted there were many schoolboys as studious and hardworking as Strachan. Latimer, on the other hand, fit the bill far better: feckless, idle, work-shy, scruffy, inky-fingered; if there was an overgrown schoolboy on board the Venturer, it was the clerk.

  ‘Sick parade is at half-past eight in the morning, Latimer,’ sighed Strachan.

  ‘It’s an emergency, Pills!’ protested the clerk. ‘I think my teeth are coming loose. They’re all wobbly!’ Latimer opened his mouth so that Strachan could feel for himself.

  The assistant surgeon sighed. ‘All right, let’s have a look, shall we?’ He took a dentist’s probe from a drawer. ‘Open wide.’

  Strachan poked and prodded about inside Latimer’s mouth with the probe, while the clerk whimpered at the slightest touch of probe against gum. ‘You have the healthiest teeth on board, Latimer,’ he said at last. ‘The only thing you’re suffering from is an acute case of chronic hypochondria.’

  ‘But they’re all wobbly!’

  ‘Of course they are. Teeth are supposed to give a little in their sockets. Otherwise they’d break every time you bit
down on something hard.’

  The clerk looked disappointed. ‘You don’t think it’s scurvy, then?’ Strachan smiled patiently. ‘I think it’s a little early in the expedition for any of us to be coming down with scurvy.’ He turned to Killigrew. ‘Some fool thought of including a medical dictionary amongst the books we have in the ship’s library, and Latimer here’s been reading it.’ He turned back to the clerk. ‘Have you been suffering from any other symptoms?’ He pulled Latimer’s head down so he could root around in his hair. ‘Blood seeping from the hair follicles? Skin haemorrhages? Jaundice? Swollen legs? Pain in the joints?’

  ‘That’s it!’ exclaimed Latimer. ‘I’ve got this terrible pain in my knees. Give it to me straight, Strachan. I can take it. It’s scurvy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Drop your pantaloons, let’s take a look at your legs.’

  Rubicund at the best of times, Latimer turned beetroot. ‘In front of Mr Killigrew?’

  ‘I’ll avert my gaze, if it will make you feel better,’ offered the lieutenant. ‘I know it will make me feel better to look away!’

  ‘Now drop your pantaloons.’

  The clerk complied.

  ‘The knobbliest knees in the navy,’ said Strachan.

  ‘They’re not knobbly,’ said Latimer. ‘It so happens I have water on the knee.’

  ‘Water on the brain, more like. Pull up your pantaloons. There’s nothing wrong with you.’

  ‘Tell them they can put that on my tombstone.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Strachan. ‘“Nicodemus Latimer, eighteen thirty to nineteen ten. There was nothing wrong with him, except knobbly knees. His loss will be greatly mourned by many a bookmaker.”’