I felt excessively nervous when I first set out toward the Dockyard. I had never before shown myself in public in male attire, and imagined that everybody who looked at me saw that I was a girl. I was somewhat reassured, however, by a hulking fellow in leggings crossing the road and asking me for a pipe of tobacco. I told him I had none. ‘A cuss’d lie,’ he roared fiercely. ‘Gi’ us the plug out of your jaws, you damn’d shellback!’ I pushed on. He shouted after me, and, though his language was by no means refined, I did not dislike to hear him, for what he said left me in no doubt that he took me for a sailor.
I came to a place where I got a view of the Warrior, and I saw the convict ship close alongside of her with some of her yards braced forward clear of the pole masts of the hulk. It was blowing very fresh and bitterly cold, and the yellow ripples ran in little showerings of spray. I walked to where the wherry was to be had, and with some trouble, after waiting and looking about me, found a waterman.
‘Put me aboard the Childe Harold,’ said I.
‘Do you belong to the ship?’ said he.
‘Yes.’
‘If you’ll stand a drink I’ll save you a couple o’ bob,’ he exclaimed; and I guessed by the way he looked at the water that he preferred to lounge in the warmth of a public-house to taking a fare.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Tell the sentries you belong to the ship, and they’ll let you go aboard through the hulk.’
‘No, I want to go aboard in my own way.’
‘Come along, then.’
I got into his boat and, after he had breathed upon his hands and beaten his breast hard, he fell to his oars. I looked eagerly at the ship as we approached. The consuming anxieties I had endured for weeks and months, compressed into ten minutes of sensation, would not have been harder to bear than what I now felt. The waterman pulled under the stern of the Childe Harold; a figure standing on the quarter was visible; I believed it was Will at first; he turned, and I saw he was not my cousin. A flight of gangway steps ran down the side of the ship, with a grating at bottom, close upon the water, to step on. The boat swung to, and the waterman waited for me to step out. I gave him two shillings, and kept my seat whilst I ran my eyes along the line of the bulwark rail.
Where was Will? Was he not keeping a look-out? Had I arrived sooner than he expected? Nay, was he on board? And, as I thus thought, my heart sinking like lead in my breast with a sudden weight and passion of despair, the dear fellow stepped into the gangway and looked down.
He looked down, but he did not know me. I cried out: ‘Will, oh, Will! There you are! There you are!’
He stared again, but answered no further than by beckoning, whilst he bent his neck inward to glance forward and aft along the decks. A soldier, but without a musket, showed at the side at this instant, and looked over into the boat, whistling. ‘Come up!’ said Will. I sprang on to the grating and ascended the steps.
‘How are you, old fellow?’ exclaimed my cousin, grasping me by the hand, and shaking it warmly, admirably acting the part of one who receives a welcome visitor. ‘This is how we barricade the convicts, do you see? How are all at home? On my word, this is kind of you! My quarters are forward! Come along and smoke a pipe, and then I’ll show you the ship!’
The soldier lounged across the deck and leaned against the barricade, looking at the great hulk, whose topmost tier of grated ports, and whose dingy height of bulwarks and rude, hut-shaped structures forward seemed to tower to half the height of the convict ship’s lower masts. I darted a swift glance round, and observed two figures on the poop, both young fellows. Some soldiers stood forward near the convicts’ galley. A small group of men—lumpers or riggers—at the main hatch within the barricade inclosure were smoking and talking. I had no eyes for anything but the people who were visible. A heavy silence hung upon the hulk, and, saving the voices of the group at the hatchway, all was still on board the Childe Harold, so that you plainly heard the hissing of the strong wind in the rigging, and the quick, fretful splashing of water rippling swift betwixt the two ships.
‘Your visit is exactly timed,’ said Will. ‘The captain’s ashore; the chief mate’s below; the second mate’s indisposed in his cabin, and the third mate’s in the hold. Come!’
He motioned with his hands, as though he showed me the ship. A woman stepped out of one of the galleys with a bucket of hot water, and passed us. She was a pretty young woman, and she glanced at me with a faint smile as she went by.
‘That’s a soldier’s wife,’ said Will, speaking fast but softly, and pointing as though he still showed me the ship. ‘There are several on board, and a number of kids. You’ve well timed your arrival. What marvellous courage you have, and how confoundedly well you look! There never was a smarter sailor—to the eye. Where have you been? Your skin’s brown. Been abroad? Surely not. You haven’t had time. The ship’s almost empty, you see. The crew’ll join at Gravesend, as I told you they would. We have a few runners on board from Deptford, and twenty soldiers in charge of a captain and subaltern—Lord, how I hate soldiers! The convicts embark this afternoon or to-morrow morning. There are only three apprentices, including me, this voyage; two are aft there on the poop. It don’t matter if you are seen. They’ll think you went ashore by way of the hulk. But I must get you below before the chief mate comes on deck. I’m supposed to be keeping a look-out at the gangway, and I mustn’t be missed.’
All this he hurriedly said as we walked forward to his quarters, which, as you may remember, were in a wing of the forecastle on the port or left-hand side. He slid the door open in its grooves and we entered. A couple of hammocks swung under the ceiling; three sea chests were secured along the bulkhead; a little flap table hung opposite those chests, and the rest of the cabin’s equipment consisted of shelves containing tin dishes, pannikins, knives and forks, and such things.
‘I should like to give you a kiss, Marian,’ said he, ‘but it would seem unnatural in that dress.’
I answered by giving him a hearty hug.
‘What pluck you have, dear girl!’
‘Will, we should lose no time.’
‘But some things must be said,’ he exclaimed. ‘Is there still doubt of Tom’s being one of them, d’ye know?’
‘None,’ and I repeated what the deputy-governor had said.
‘Still, I’ll watch the men as they come aboard,’ said he. ‘Where have you been since you left Stepney?’
‘In a lodging at Woolwich.’
‘What a wonder you are!’ He stepped back to run his eye over me and said: ‘They’ll never discover your sex whilst you stick to that dress.’
‘Do your father and mother know I’ve left home?’
‘Yes. Stanford called upon them. They plied me close, but I could not tell them what had become of you. They’ll board the next ship for Tasmania and see if you’re in her. Mother was at Deptford to bid me good-bye. She’s very well, thank God. And so’s father.’ He put his head through the door to peep along the decks, then pulling a piece of paper from his pockets, said: ‘See here, Marian; look at this sketch well, that you may remember it. It is the interior of your hiding-place. This square’s the hatch; those wormy-looking things on the left are coils of rope; those are cases and beyond are bolts of canvas. This stuff amidships is a quantity of twine. To the right are more casks; fresh water, of which we shall need plenty and to spare with two hundred and thirty convicts aboard, not to mention soldiers and sailors and women and children. This tracing is meant for spare sails. They’ll make you a comfortable bed. I’ve cut this end adrift,’ said he, putting his finger on the tracing, ‘so that you will be able to lie down and cover yourself over after groping and feeling about a bit. It’s devilish dark; that’s the worst of it. And here’s a great timber which terminates on deck in what we call a knight-head.’
‘I know,’ said I.
‘You’ll find your stock of food and water stowed close against that timber, shored and hidden by a coil of rope.’ He opened his chest and handed me a knife for cutting tin. ‘You’ll want this,’ said he, ‘for the canned grub; it’s mostly soup and bully. You’ll find a pannikin for the water. I’ll visit you as often as I can. Have you a watch?’
‘No. I’m a stowaway. I have run away in poverty and must act the part. Keep this for me, Will,’ and I gave him what money I had.
‘The cook’s mate will be up and down for coal,’ said he, pocketing the money. ‘You’ll get light when they lift the hatch, then you’ll hear voices and see people. Shrink out of sight. Lie small, or all this trouble will have been for no good.’
‘If it should happen that Tom’s not one of them, you’ll contrive to let me know before we’re out of the Channel?’
‘Trust me, old girl.’
‘If he is one of them, you’ll let me know when it will be safe to come out of hiding?’
‘Trust me there, too.’ He put his head out to take another look at the decks, and then said: ‘You’ll have to fib, Marian, when you’re brought out. I’m sorry, but it must never be known that I’ve had a hand in hiding you. You will say, when questioned—and it won’t be far from the truth, either—that you bribed one of the Deptford riggers to provision you. If they find the bottles and the tinned stuff, they’ll go into the matter closely. We may contrive that they shan’t find anything; if they do, your yarn must be called “The Rigger Corrupt; or, The Lie and the Lumper.” Now wait.’
He went into the forecastle and returned. ‘The coast’s clear. Come along!’
I followed him instantly. It was but a step from his cabin to the forecastle entrance. The gloomy interior was empty and silent. Betwixt the giant windlass and the hawse-pipes were stretched the massive links of the chain-cable. I heard the tramp of a few soldiers overhead, marching to and fro to keep themselves warm.
‘Take that end of the hatch-cover and lift with me,’ said Will, in a voice of excitement, looking behind him.
I put my hand to the cover, and between us we raised it. The hatch was little more than a man-hole, big enough to admit two men at a time.
‘Now look!’ cried Will. ‘Have you the heart? It’s not too late! See how black it is! And you may be obliged to remain down there a fortnight!’
‘Give me your sketch of the inside,’ said I.
He quickly handed it to me. I looked at it and then put it in my pocket, and, without another word, I put my foot on the ladder of rungs nailed to the bulkhead, and in a moment was at the bottom.
‘Keep that hatch open whilst I take a short look,’ I softly exclaimed.
‘The mate’s calling me,’ he answered. ‘I’ll come again, if possible, later on;’ and he closed the hatch.
The blackness was utter. I had heard tell of dark rooms in which jail-prisoners were locked up for punishment, but no dark jail-cell could be blacker than the blackness of this ship’s store-room. I stood for some time motionless under the hatch where I had stopped when Will shut me down; I hoped to get the use of my eyes, and imagined that this profound dye of blackness might be owing to my coming out of the light into it. The silence was that of a burial-vault: I heard the swift beat of my heart in my ears and nothing more. After a bit, small, delicate worms or fibres of fire began to tremble and crawl upon the blackness. I knew them to be the phosphorus in my vision, and heeded them not, but winked with a fancy of extinguishing the strange flames.
I now moved a little way forward, stooping, with my arms outstretched, and touched what I might know by the hempen smell and the feel of the stuff was a mass of twine. It was dry, and I seated myself upon it. I will not say that I was without fear; my heart beat very fast. And yet even at this early affrighting stage—for it was not only blackness; it was loneliness also—I rejoiced in the thought that I was in this hiding-place at last; that every difficulty had been overcome; that a most heart-breaking burden of anxieties had fallen from me with my descent into this hold, and that presently my dearest and I would be together in the same ship, with a future of possibilities before us such as I could only have sighed for and wept for and grieved myself into the grave for had I remained at home.
I then bethought me: Suppose the hatch should be suddenly opened, I shall be discovered. I carefully lighted one of my little wax candles, and, holding it up, looked around. The flame was small, but it enabled me to see as much as I needed. Will’s drawing of the interior was exact. To the left were the casks and coils of rope and bolts of canvas, and in the middle more coils of rope and a mass of twine and a quantity of canvas buckets, lanterns and so forth, and to the right were the fresh-water casks and the sails. Candle in hand, I easily made my way to that part of the sails which Will had cut adrift. I looked, and beheld stowed in the place Will had indicated a quantity of black bottles and tins, and a sack which I put my hand upon and found half full of ship’s biscuits.
Still keeping the candle burning, I seated myself on the loosened portion of the sail, and found I could easily draw canvas enough over me to conceal me in an instant at the first alarm or to keep me warm when I slept. I then blew out the light and replaced the candle in my pocket, very grateful that I had had foresight enough to provide me with the means of seeing when I needed my eyes. The blackness was at first insupportable, and again and again my hand sought my pocket for a candle; but I restrained myself when I reflected this was but the beginning, and that if I burnt out my stock of candles quickly I might have to lie for a week or ten days or perhaps a fortnight in this blackness. I comforted myself, however, by reflecting that there would be noise enough overhead to relieve this fearful oppression of stillness and loneliness when the crew came on board.
I use the word ‘oppression.’ It was physical. My spirits were easy. My conscience slept. What had I done that it should rebuke me? I was proving myself faithful to the man I had sworn to be true to, and whom I loved with all the heart which was my life, and with all the soul which was my intelligence. I was offending no father, grieving no mother, and, as to my uncle and aunt, I knew this, that whilst I chose to hold myself betrothed to a convict, it was all one to them whether I followed him in my own fashion or waited at home for his return.
By-and-by I thought I would make an experiment, and creeping out of the sail and groping about I touched a tin of preserved meat. In those times provisions were not delicately tinned as they are now. It was a common practice then to seal up whole joints of cooked legs of mutton and roast sirloins of beef in tins. Some of the tins Will had stowed for me with the aid of his corrupted lumper or rigger were of the size of small drums, others were little; these contained a sort of soup, well-known at sea, called soup and bouilli. The first tin I touched was one of them. I opened it easily with the knife, and found the contents solid enough to be removed in wedges. I then felt for a biscuit, and made my first meal. I was obliged to light a candle to seek for the pannikin; I counted fifteen quart bottles of water, one of which I opened, being thirsty. All these things were well hidden within the embrasures of the timbers and by the ropes and other matters which fenced them round about. I groped my way into the sail again after blowing out the candle, always taking care to command as much of the slack of the canvas as would enable me to hide in a moment if the hatch should be lifted.
Here now was I, fairly warm, tolerably provided for, suffering from nothing worse—but then to be sure nothing worse in its way could well be imagined—than an overwhelming oppression of silence and a blackness deeper than blindness. How does the ordinary, the average stowaway manage, I remember wondering? He sneaks in his rags into dark, rat-hidden holes, and lingers without food or water for days. Yet it is contrived; the stowaway is the commonest incident of ocean life: sometimes, indeed, he is found a skeleton at the bottom of a chain-locker; but it is the rule with him to emerge ribbed, gaunt, half-nude; he is then set to work, and lands well-lined with ship’s beef and pork to flourish perhaps in a country where he is wanted.
On a sudden I heard a strange noise. I had been some hours in this place when I caught the sound. It was a sort of dull tremble, regular in its pulse, with a metallic note threading it. I pricked my ears and strained them hard, and my heart then began to beat fast; no, I could not mistake! The sound was the tread of many shackled feet passing over the deck and descending the hatchway and coming into the prison, whose foremost bulkhead partitioned off the hiding-place in which I lay. The noise continued like a flowing of water. I heard no voices, not the dimmest echo of a human cry, nothing but the dim thrill of the tramp of many feet with irons.
Perhaps an hour may now have passed. Suddenly the hatch was thumped as though kicked, and the cover lifted. I pulled the sail over me, leaving a corner for one eye to peep out, and lay motionless.
‘I’ll fetch it,’ cried the familiar voice of Will. ‘I saw the stuff stowed, and know where it is. Here, give us hold of the lantern and stop where you are.’
His figure descended; he then raised his arm and received a lighted lantern. I dimly discerned the shadow of another figure in the hatch, the square of which lay in a faint gray. Will stepped from under the hatch, holding the lantern, and then put the light down beside a cask, so that the shadow of the cask was upon that part where I was. He moved here and there in a seeking attitude till he had approached the sail close; then said in a whisper: ‘Where are you, Marian?’
‘Hang me if you don’t roll up as though you were the sail itself,’ said he. ‘How do you like it?’
‘It’s horribly black and lonesome, but I’m content. I’d not be elsewhere.’
‘The convicts are aboard, and Butler’s one of them. I saw him and nodded. He looks well—I mean pretty well.’
I started up and cried: ‘Will, if you see him to speak to, don’t tell him I’m here. He loves me too much to suffer it. He’d betray me. He’d get me sent ashore.’
‘I don’t think so. I’ll not say a word. No chance indeed; you mayn’t talk to ’em. I can’t stop. The mate sent an apprentice here for a canvas bucket. I took the job to give you the news and see how you are. Anything you want, Marian?’
‘Nothing, Will.’
‘I forgot to tell you there’s the handle of a scrubbing brush lying near your provisions; you’ll easily get it by feeling. You’ll need it to knock with should you want to get out. Bless you, my brave old woman!’ and so, whispering, he took a stride, picked up a bucket, handed it and the lantern up, and sprang through the hatch, which immediately afterward was closed.
The news of Tom being in the ship so cheered up my heart that I could have sung aloud amid that black silence. I kept my eyes shut that I might not see the blackness, and tried to figure the interior of the prison ship. What sort of quarters had the convicts? Should I ever have a chance of viewing the ’tweendecks? I recollected that Will had told me the prison—by which I understood the cell in which the convicts would be confined for punishment—was just the other side of the bulkhead or partition. I strained my ears, thinking I might catch a sound of the felons talking. The fancy seized me to draw close to the partition; I got out of the sail and felt along it, knowing that the extremity would bring me to the bulkhead. Putting out my hands, I felt the bulkhead, pressed my ear to the solid wooden wall and listened, but heard nothing; nothing, that is, resembling a human voice. But I caught a sort of scuffling sound, very dim and weak, as though of many feet in motion; it was a wild, strange noise to listen to in that blackness.
I groped my way back to where the sail was loose, and lay down and covered myself as before. I had thought to find the atmosphere ice-like, yet I was not cold, being warmly clad, with plenty of sail-cloth to cover me besides. I kept my eyes closed to lighten the weight of the blackness upon the brain. My thoughts were with Tom, with our visit to this ship in the docks, with my home in Stepney. It was like taking a bruising load off my heart, to think of my sweetheart as having left the grim and horrible hulk for good, as having turned his back for ever upon the killing labour of the dockyard. It was as though he had taken one long step toward freedom. I shuddered, and my soul was sick with loathing when I thought of the hulk, of the four hundred or five hundred wretches imprisoned throughout the long winter’s night in her, of the squalid rows of houses and dismantled craft along shore, of the mud and drizzle and the fogs upon the flat and reeking lands and the bleak spirit of the streaming yellow Thames in all things, soaking chill to the core of whatever the eye rested upon, giving a sterner significance even to man’s deepest intent of degradation.
And then I wondered what would happen when I showed myself or was discovered. What kind of work would they put me to? Would they force me to reveal my sex? I hoped not; I prayed not: for the discovery might lead to their finding out that I was a convict’s sweetheart, and they would land me at the first port the ship touched at and ruin my scheme, and separate me, perhaps eternally, from Tom.
I fell asleep. I could not name the hour. Time had no being in that blackness. A noise awakened me. Instinct was alert even in my slumber, for the instant I awoke I pulled the canvas over my head, leaving one corner for my eye, and lay still as a corpse. The hatch was open and a figure stood under it.
‘Hand the blooming shovel down,’ the fellow called out. ‘Never keep poor convicts awaiting for their breakfisses. Time enough to sarve ’em so when they becomes pious and turns ’spectable sailor-men. Blowed if this ’ere hatch ain’t froze! Len’s a hand to lift the cover.’
A second figure dropped below. The light was so dim in the hatch above that I could distinguish nothing but the shadowy shapes of the two fellows. The hatch in the deck of the store-room was lifted. One man climbed out and handed down a shovel and a lantern, and the other descended with them into the fore-peak. A bucket was let down, and I heard a shovelling of coal in the bowels below. Presently a faint cry sounded. The bucket was drawn up, emptied into some noisy receptacle above, and lowered again. This business lasted nearly half an hour; the fellow below uprose with the shovel and lantern and put the lower hatch on, swearing to himself. He then climbed through the second hatch, which he also closed, and my hiding-place was plunged afresh into blackness.
I gathered from their speaking of the convicts’ breakfast and from their procuring coal, no doubt for the galleys, that it was early morning, and that I had slept through the night. A long, dreamless, death-like sleep it must have been in that black and silent place. The moment I sat up I was sensible that the ship was in motion. I seemed to feel that she was being strained as though dragged. Subdued noises broke from various parts of her, the creak of timber and of bulkhead; but the ship floated without the least motion; indeed, I was sure she could not long have left her berth alongside the hulk.
I lighted a candle, drank from a bottle of the water, and, having helped myself to some meat and a biscuit, I extinguished the candle and broke my fast in blackness. I did not now find this blackness the great oppression it had at first proved. I have heard that the governor of a jail considered three days of confinement in a black cell a trifling punishment until he tried it. He caused himself to be locked up for twenty-four hours; at the end of that time he could stand the blackness no longer, and he was ever after of opinion that twenty-four hours was as long as it was safe to keep a man locked up in the blackness at one stretch.
This may be true of prison blackness. Speaking for myself, I ceased to suffer, after a time, from privation of light; though under that ship’s forecastle, with the hatch on, the blackness was as intense whilst the silence had been as profound as ever human ingenuity could contrive with bricks and mortar ashore. But, then, I had a moral support which the prisoner would be without. I was animated by the strongest of human passions; it gladdened me, moreover, to feel that I was sharing in my sweetheart’s suffering and exile; and then, again, what I was enduring was of my own seeking, long awaited with impassioned eagerness.
By-and-by the sensation as of the ship being strained or dragged ceased, and the noises made by the timbers and in the hold were silenced. I guessed by this we had brought up off Gravesend, and roughly worked out a notion of the hour by first supposing that we had started from Woolwich at seven and that we had towed at the rate of five miles an hour. Gravesend is about eighteen miles from Woolwich by water, and therefore I reckoned the hour to be drawing on to eleven o’clock. All this while I lay close in the sail; I never knew the instant when the hatch would be thrown open. All was still overhead, so I judged that the crew were not yet come on board.