The East Indiaman Read online

  One hot afternoon, as the watch slumped on deck having spent an hour trimming the sails in anticipation of a breeze which seemed to falter a mile short of them, McClusky turned in a fury upon Hooker and declared that he could no longer tolerate the man’s stink.

  Hooker, who had just followed McClusky on deck stood for a moment non-plussed, scarcely able to accept the vituperation. The hot weather and the consequent reduction in outer garments had made the mountainous man’s condition worse and sorely tried the tolerance of his fellow voyagers.

  ‘I come on deck,’ McClusky railled, ‘to avoid the stink down below and then you follow me, damn you for a festering bastard!’

  Stunned, Hooker looked around. His insensitivity and self-denial, allied to a lack of awareness as to the distasteful pungency of his bodily smell, meant that he had little appreciation of the nature of his offence. The man on the tiller gazed fixedly at the compass, even thought the schooner had no steerage way upon her and rolled with a wearing and wearying slatting of gear and sails. From the forward limit of his pacing an astonished Harper, who had the watch, spun round to regard the two men standing aft by the companionway, while the other seamen on watch, together with the idlers lying about the deck in various stages of indolence, stared with interest at the principals in this promising altercation. The dacoits, whose customary airing place was, by mutual, consent right forward, stirred and three came aft to their master’s defence.

  Seeing himself the cynosure for all eyes, Hooker’s ire broke from the confines of surprise and reticence. He confronted the impudent counting-house clerk before him, pulling himself up to his full six and a half feet of outraged and trembling corpulence

  ‘Do you address me, sir?’ he raged with a sudden anger, ‘do you, damn you?’

  ‘I do sir,’ the provoked McClusky bellowed back, ‘for you have the stink of a corpse about you!’

  ‘Why, damn your insolence…!’

  Hooker lumbered forward, a vast and sweating mountain of a man, but McClusky, half his age and several stones lighter, dodged away. Immediately a cheer went up from the now alert and diverted crowd, followed by cries encouraging McClusky to greater mischief.

  But as McClusky retreated along the deck, he was suddenly seized from behind by two of the dacoits while the third, grabbing McClusky’s hair, jerked his head back and put a knife at his throat. The former clerk froze in this hostile embrace.

  As Hooker closed with his victim and the watchers froze, Zachariah Harper recalled himself to his duty and with a rapidity surprising in such a large man, interposed his own bulk between the constrained McClusky and the triumphant Hooker.

  ‘Now hold on there,’ Harper remonstrated. ‘First of all Mr Hooker there sure is a body of opinion on this vessel that you have about your person a distinct air akin to putrefaction…’ Hooker was about to explode when Harper, almost his equal in height and a far fitter man, held up a powerful arm. ‘Mr Hooker! Recall I command the deck, sir!’

  ‘And I command your damned pay…!’

  ‘Be circumspect, damn it…!’

  ‘Stop!’ The curt order cut through the hot air. Kite stood at the after companionway, his shirt stuck to his body. He had been dozing uneasily below when the altercation on deck had disturbed first Sarah and then her husband. Ordering his wife to remain where she was to restrain Rose Hooker from any intemperate outburst, he ran up the companionway ladder to intervene. Kite had caught the two large men on the point of trading blows for insults. Just beyond Harper, McClusky’s face was white with terror as the dacoit’s knife glittered at his throat.

  Summing up the situation in an instant, Kite advanced on the dacoits and, without taking his eyes off them, said, ‘Josiah, I’d be obliged if you’d call your dogs off this instant!’

  Hooker mumbled a few words of Hindi and the three men let McClusky go. Released, the young man stumbled forward and fell abjectly on his knees. Kite ignored him as, gasping with shame and terror McClusky clambered slowly to his feet. Kite rounded upon Hooker and Harper.

  ‘Now gentlemen,’ he said in a low voice, ‘let us have an end to this immediately. I am going to order the watch to man the fire-buckets. Then I am intending to strip myself of my clothes and order water thrown over me. I shall scour myself until I feel clean and both of you are going to do likewise.’ Kite stared at each of the antagonists in turn and then regarded McClusky. ‘You shall join us too, McClusky, but first go below and present my compliments to my wife and Mrs Hooker. Ask them to remain below but beg two bars of soap from my wife and bring them here. D’you understand me?’

  ‘Yes, Cap’n,’ said the humiliated clerk.

  Kite caught the eye of a watching seaman. ‘Ah, Stocks, do you and your mates stand by to fling the contents of the fire buckets over us. We are minded to bathe. You may have some sport in the matter, if you wish. Now gentlemen,’ Kite returned his attention to the two big men who stood at his either elbow, ‘let us divest ourselves.’

  He took off his shirt and, folding it laid it over the gunwhale of the chocked boat in the larboard waist. Around the three men the dacoits and the crew watched with interest. ‘Zachariah…’ Kite growled through clenched teeth, ‘oblige me, if you please.’

  With a marked reluctance Harper hesitated and then, as Kite stepped out of his breeches to a general snigger, he followed suit. More laughter accompanied this indecent exposure, but Stocks had already mustered his fellow seamen and, grinning widely a quintet of them were assembling in a circle round the three gentlemen, giggling at the natural state of them. Kite’s taut lean body appeared almost slight by comparison with the heavily muscled Harper. Both had the weather-beaten head and forearms of seafarers, whereas Hooker’s flesh, for all his years in the Indian sun, bore a pallid sheen which, it was immediately obvious, gave off a revoltingly sweet and obnoxious odour. Caught in the creases and folds of his lardy and corpulent mass, this subcutaneous secretion was revealed as the source of his unpleasantness. As for Hooker’s face, it was scarlet with humiliation and embarrassment.

  McClusky arrived with the soap, his face distorted with distaste at the manifestation of Hooker’s problem. Ignoring the appalled young man, Kite retained one bar for himself and conspicuously handed the second to Hooker. ‘There, Josiah,’ he said in a low and insistent tone, half-gagging at his proximity to the obese monster, ‘do you rub with the utmost vigour or, by God, I shall have you publicly scoured to put an end to this unpleasantness.’

  ‘But this is an outrage Kite, damn you…’ Hooker hissed miserably, tears filling his eyes and the beginnings of sobs racking his wobbling frame.

  ‘You do most assuredly stink villainously, Josiah,’ Kite muttered, his teeth clenched and his nose wrinkled, ‘and I shall have an end to it or prove it unavoidable.’ Kite turned to McClusky and raised his voice. ‘Come Michael, let us see what sort of a figure you cut. Hurry up now, there’s a good fellow.’

  The silly jest provoked a laugh among the assembled men as McClusky stepped out of his breeches. Kite looked at Stocks. ‘You may soak us and then stay your hands while we soap ourselves. Afterwards, when I give the signal, you may throw as much water as you can draw from the sea and as fast as you can lift it.’

  A gleeful mood of anticipation swept through the seamen. Then the first buckets were emptied over the four figures. Led by Kite they began to lather themselves, Kite’s bar of soap passing first to Harper and then to McClusky. Kite, keeping his eye on Hooker, kept chiding him. ‘Come sir, more ginger if you please, rub-a-dub-dub, sir, we are not three but four in the tub!’

  Curiously the onlookers watched the folds of Hooker’s skin exfoliate a grubby smegma. The obese figure seemed to possess recesses hitherto unknown to the human species, a corpulence long unexposed to the light of day or unexplored by soap and water. To Hooker’s personal and malodourous exudations were added his neglect of even a primitive hygiene and it was as though he sloughed off an entire epidermal layer so that afterwards, recalling the strange events of that
afternoon, the seamen pointed to a darker portion of Spitfire’s deck, nicknaming it ‘Hooker’s grease-pan’, or ‘Greasy shoal’.

  As Kite, Harper and McClusky completed their soaping, the sky grew suddenly dark and the first drops of rain began to fall. So absorbed in the incident and the subsequent ablutions had they all become, that no-one had noticed the rapid approach of the cloud. The great cumulo-nimbus towered high into the sky but behind its vast shadow it drew not only rain but a sudden, chilling drop in the temperature and a squall of wind. Within half a minute the hitherto becalmed Spitfire was driving along, her over-canvassed hull trying to bury its lee rail so that a roil of foaming water roared alongside, bursting over the rail and causing pools to form between the guns.

  The sudden heel threw McClusky, Hooker and his unhandy dacoits off their feet and they tumbled to leeward, falling into the water swirling in the scuppers amid cries of dismay that echoed the screams of the frightened women below. Harper, giving out his wildest Iroquois whoop to which his nakedness added a bizarre aptness, leapt for the tiller, his face cracked into an immense grin. Kite grabbed the gunwhale of the boat and kept his feet, stung by the icy chill of the rain which now turned into hailstones.

  These beat a tattoo on the deck and felt like a flogging on the bare flesh. Hooker, McClusky and the dacoits now howled with real pain as Kite, gasping with the sharp agony, ducked under the bilge of the chocked boatto the barely suppressed amusement of the soaked but gleeful crew.

  Then it was all over; the bulk of the cloud had passed above them a mile away and the sun was abruptly warm upon their shoulders, setting the deck steaming and, as Hooker, McClusky and the Indians picked themselves up on the levelling deck, they were confronted with the near hysterical laughter of the ship’s company.

  ‘You crowd of damned racoons!’ Harper began, but then his natural sense of humour prevailed and he joined in the hilarity. Kite too found the welcome warmth of the sunshine restored his spirits in an instant. After some ten minutes of this mayhem, Kite bellowed for silence.

  ‘Very well, my lads. Now let us pipe down. The watch on deck will take a wash like this every morning until we are ten degrees beyond the Tropic of Capricorn.’

  And thus did Kite cure Hooker’s skin condition and improve the cleanliness of his crew, burying in the jolly mood of levity the discomfiture of Josiah Hooker who, though he crawled below still humbled by what he had been forced to do, had the presence of mind to return on deck once he had dressed himself, and was thus held by the men to have behaved like a thorough sportsman. An Englishman could pronounce no greater compliment, and since he afterwards stunk no more than anyone else on board, Josiah Hooker’s dignity was thereby saved.

  Chapter Seven

  To The Indian Sea

  ‘Sarah?’

  Kite addressed the shadowy figure approaching him from the companionway. The night air was like velvet on the skin and overhead the sky was ablaze with stars. There was sufficient light to throw shadows on the pale plane of the deck and Sarah’s face took form as she drew close to him above the fluttering dressing gown she wore. Kite left the helmsman leaning sleepily against the tiller as Spitfire, her sails drawing in the light but steady breeze, ran northwards towards the Indian coast.

  They were well north of the Equator, having doubled the Cape of Good Hope weeks earlier, standing well to the south of the Dutch territory and enduring three weeks of strong wind and heavy, following seas before turning to the northwards, passing east of Madagascar and the off lying French-held archipelago of La Réunion and Île de France. Mercifully they ran for day after day without the sight of a sail.

  They had had one scare before leaving the Atlantic; forty-odd hours of intense anxiety only a few days after the extraordinary dousing of Hooker. After clearing the Doldrums they had been frustrated by the wind. Ostensibly the south-east trade, the wind had stubbornly remained in the south, forcing them to make excessive westing and to pass well north of St Paul’s Rocks before they could consider tacking. Thus they drew close to the north east coast of Brazil which, like the Cape Verde Islands, was a neutral Portuguese colony. Unfortunately Cabo São Roque was also the cruising station of a Spanish frigate which caught sight of them and gave energetic chase. Putting about, they had stood to windward, hoping that their ability to sail closer to the wind would allow them to escape, but the Spaniard had pressed them hard for almost two days. Then, by the greatest good fortune, they had raised the tall ‘Pico’ of Fernando de Noronha and were able to lay a course towards it. The crooked finger of this ancient volcanic core, its surrounding slopes long since eroded, beckoned them on and in due course they had run in under the guns of Forte De Remedios and the neutral shelter of the Portuguese flag flying above it.

  For three days the Spanish cruiser had stood on and off, just beyond cannon shot in the hope that Kite would be driven out to fall under her guns, but the Portuguese governor proved sympathetic and had ordered a warning shot fired over the schooner, dissuading the Spanish commander from pressing his quarry. The governor was content that the little British schooner, declared by her owner to be private yacht with no mention of her letter-of-marque-and-reprisal, to remain at anchor. The governor’s co-operation had been ensured by a generous gift from Hooker’s chest, which had been received by His Excellency, or so that worthy man declared upon his honour, on behalf of the white church that stood on one side of the Placa dos Armas.

  ‘We should not despise him,’ Kite had remarked pointedly when Hooker had expressed his disbelief, ‘for we have concealed enough about ourselves to risk charges of dissimulation.’

  During this enforced wait, Spitfire’s crew had landed and filled their water casks, a fortunate consequence of this impasse and one that determined Kite to press on directly for India without making a further stop if it were at all possible. In the end his patience had been rewarded; the frigate had withdrawn to the north west and, after a further precautionary wait of three days to ensure she had truly gone, Kite had finally ordered Spitfire’s anchor weighed. Her sails were hoisted, her guns saluted the Forte de Remedios and, coasting along the northern shore of the island, the schooner had doubled Ponta da Sapata. Here they had found the wind blowing strongly from the south east and, two hundred miles to windward of the Brazilian mainland, Spitfire headed south and began to reel off the knots.

  Gradually, as the southern latitude increased and the wind backed, they had fetched a course more to the eastward, passing well off St Helena and in due course they had driven far enough south to pick up the prevailing westerlies. Having then stormed through the great Southern Ocean for twenty-two days of running their easting down, Kite and Harper had agreed on their longitude exceeding that of Rodriguez, easternmost of the French islands, whereupon they had hauled up to the northwards. It had been a passage to delight the true seaman, with strong but not overwhelming winds. The Spitfire had behaved gallantly, taking care of all but one of her company. the exception had been Maggie who, in one particularly boisterous bout of squally weather, had been thrown across the cabin and fetched up heavily to leeward. The consequence of her untimely tumble was a miscarriage from which she was slow to recover, but which Sarah and Nisha concealed from Kite and Hooker, once they had discovered the source of poor Maggie’s indisposition.

  Now Kite, along with all on board, was anxious to reach Bombay, for their water was running very low, and the mood of expectation aboard the schooner had become almost palpable. Happiest, it seemed, were Hooker’s dacoits, for whom this was a return to their native land, if not to their homes; for the seamen the anticipation of fleshpots and the excitement of meditated indulgence after a long passage brought broad smiles to their sun-burnt faces. Kite was uneasily aware that they had borne much temptation for, despite her androgynous garb, no man aboard Spitfire could be insensible to Sarah’s allure or to Rose Hooker’s voluptuously exotic form.

  He felt lust prick now as Sarah came up to him in the starlight, and it struck him that his own anticipatio
n, surmounting his anxiety over the dwindling water, was a compound of his love for Sarah and his hopes for rejuvenating his fortunes in India. As Sarah took her place beside him at the rail it occurred to him that he should let slip the preoccupations and concerns of his duty sot hat, like the dacoits and the common seamen, he too might revel in the prospect of arrival on a foreign shore.

  ‘Too beautiful a night for sleep,’ he remarked. It was part question, part statement but he knew the moment the words had escaped him that she was burdened by uncongenial thoughts of her own, and instantly regretted his levity. The presence of Sarah on board, he had long-since realised, brought a weight of responsibility which often offset the privilege of pleasure that came with her. ‘You are troubled my dear…’

  ‘It is nothing.’

  He gave a low laugh and remonstrated, ‘come, Sarah, you cannot fool me. You too often sleep the entire night through not to have some perturbation disturbing you now. What is it? Do confide it in me.’

  Sarah sighed. ‘It is too silly, William.’

  ‘Ahh, it is intuition,’ he mocked her gently.

  ‘No,’ she said sharply, hesitated, then added, ‘well it is intuitive, but I should rather you considered it as insight…’

  ‘Into what? The future?’ He smiled in the night, staring at her as she stared out over the dark sea with its occasional white wave-cap and the bow wave curling away into the wake with a dim yet perceptible phosphorescent fire as Spitfire drove with apparent effortlessness through the fathomless ocean. He saw her shake her head and caught the familiar scent of her hair.

  ‘I sense the past as it casts its shadow over the future.’

  ‘Come, m’dear, you talk in riddles. I am not good at riddles at the best of times and decidedly not in the small hours of the night, no matter how beautiful that should be.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘I am just worried about what is to happen to us in India.’