But now the storm was approaching, the moon’s light was growing weak and the stars over our mastheads dim and spare. The lightning was incessant; its flashes glanced into the remotest recesses of the north and brought out the horizon there in gleams of sulphur. The hum of the thunder was deep and ceaseless, with many savage cracks and rattling peals. I cannot tell what progress the eclipse had made by this hour; the moon hung distorted in the sky like a dim silver shield with its sides hacked, and the night looked wild with her and the gathering tempest.
I heard the commander of the ship address the doctor, who called to the captains of the division to march the prisoners below; and he added that the last of the divisions could not be brought up, as sail was to be reduced and room was wanted. Moreover, in a very short time the moon would have vanished. Now followed a lively time. The prisoners’ inclosure being clear, Mr. Bates, at the head of the poop-ladder, began to shout out orders; all hands were on deck and all hands were wanted. ‘Clew up the royals and furl them! Down flying and outer jibs and topgallant staysails! Clew up topgallant sails and furl them! Main-clewgarnets and let the sail hang!’ So ran the orders; the lightning played upon the figures of the seamen as they trotted aloft; the moon turned a watery, silvery, oozing, draining through the film of the advanced shadow of the storm, then vanished behind a jagged peak of cloud, and the night-dye sank upon the ocean in deepest shadow, the deeper for the play of the lightning; after each flash the blackness thrilled with the blindness of the vision.
The women came off the forecastle, and I entered the cuddy. The steward told me to turn up the lights, and Captain Barrett and Lieutenant Chimmo, descending the companion-steps at that moment, called for brandy and seltzer, which I procured for them. The steward bade me be at hand; if there was a gale of wind in the storm, I, with the rest of the ‘idlers,’ would be wanted. I hung about in the recess, and all the time I wondered whether the convicts would rise in the morning, whether their friends amongst the crew were to be depended upon; whether this storm of thunder and lightning would work a change in the prisoners’ intentions by terrifying them; and I also strove to imagine the programme that had been concerted, what part the confederate seamen were to play; whether the guard would find time to arm and turn out, and if so, whether the uprising would not be suppressed by their coolness and discipline and by the support of the loyal part of the crew.
The storm was now overhead; the ship was clothed in lightning and the thunder was deafening and frightful. The whole fabric trembled to every explosion as though the broadside of a three-decker had been fired into her. There was no wind. The men had come from aloft, and the ship stood motionless and upright under her three topsails, the courses hanging festooned in their gear. I crouched in a corner of the recess, amazed and bewildered. I had always from a child been frightened of lightning, and here now was lightning that was like one vast sheet of flame; the heavens were sheeted with its blinding blaze; it was so continuous that you saw the ship as by sunshine; the whole vessel crackled with sparks and explosions, fireballs ran down the chain-topsail sheets, played about the pumps, sparkled and snapped on the boom-irons at the yardarms, and the sea that had been silent roared back in echo to the thunder and spread out in a wide field of blue light that came and went, sometimes showing in a leap of light that was as the flash that it mirrored, then blackening for a breath or two, during which you saw nothing but the fireballs running over the ship.
It rained and hailed suddenly with incredible fury. The decks smoked; by the lightning flashes you saw the spray of the cataractal fall rising like steam to above the height of a man. Just then the ship was struck; I heard a crash and splintering on high, and a great bulb of blue fire fell down the rigging over the side into the sea, where it burst like an exploded cannon. The mate overhead shouted, and the boatswain who was forward bawled in answer.
Captain Barrett and the subaltern stood at the cabin table; they had emptied their tumblers and put down their cigars, and looked pale and glanced often up at the skylight, into which the lightning streamed in an almost continuous living dazzle. I hung in the cuddy door for shelter from the smoking wet; a head showed in the booby-hatch and cried out: ‘The doctor wants some brandy; bring down half a tumblerful at once.’ I ran to the table, took a glass from a swing tray, and half filled it with brandy. The steward at that moment coming up through the steerage-hatch called to me: ‘Hi, you there! What are you about? Liquoring up unbeknown instead of being at your prayers?’
Lieutenant Chimmo grinned dismally.
‘The doctor’s in the barracks and wants brandy,’ said I.
‘Curse it, what’s wrong?’ exclaimed Captain Barrett, and instantly ran to the booby-hatch, followed by the subaltern.
‘Get on, then, get on!’ shouted Mr. Stiles, who had been drinking.
I ran with the brandy to the hatch, and seeing nobody to hand it to, descended. The scene of this interior of bulkheaded steerage was extraordinary; a lantern burnt dimly, its light was paled by the electric fires, which sparkled all over the prison bulkhead as though the wood was alive with the phosphoric lights of decay and rot. The bulkhead was studded with mushroom-headed nails, and every nail was tipped with fire. The sight was fearful; I thought the ship was burning. The women and the children were gathered in a heap in one corner, holding to one another, as though the vessel was about to founder; no child cried; the roar of the thunder seemed to have frightened the infants into silence.
A man lay on his back against the prison door, which was a little way open; the doctor bent over him and Captain Barrett and the subaltern stood close looking down. Such of the guard as were below were grouped with the women and children; they seemed dazed. The prostrate man was a soldier; doubtless the sentry stationed at the prison door. His musket, with its fixed bayonet, lay at a little distance from him, and I saw threads of fire writhing upon the bayonet.
‘Here’s the brandy!’ cried Captain Barrett.
The doctor looked up, and extended his hand for the glass. This brought me close to the door, and for a minute or two I had a clear view of the ’tweendecks prison. The cage-like barricade at the main-hatch was full of great nails, and every nail glowed as though red-hot. I don’t know where the lightning found entrance. It flashed through the blackness of this floating dungeon as if half a dozen hatches lay open to the sky. Wherever there was iron for the electric fires to catch hold of a small blue brilliant blaze was burning, inexpressibly wild and awful to behold. I clearly saw the whole sweep of the deck—the tiers of sleeping shelves stretching on either hand, the tables, the bulkhead of the prison and whatever else there was of grim and odious furniture in that interior. Numbers of the convicts lay motionless upon their faces on the deck; many crouched in squatting postures, with their hands to their heads; a few stood erect, defiant, as though waiting and heedless of what was next to happen. One of these, I might be sure, was Tom.
No imagination could feign the terror which the figures of the prostrate and crouching convicts expressed. You needed to witness the scene, as I did, by the terrific lights that illuminated the prison and by the ceaseless glittering of the lightning streaming through the interior in shocks and explosions of dazzling light. And the roar of the thunder heard in this resonant cavity was more dreadful to listen to than the stupendous voice of it on deck, whilst a deep and ceaseless note was added to the detonations by the Niagara-like fall of hail and rain upon the echoing planks.
‘Is he dead, doctor?’ asked Captain Barrett.
‘No,’ said the doctor. ‘Have this door shut, sir, and let another sentry be posted. You can leave the brandy and go,’ said he to me; on which I returned to the cuddy and stood as before near the doorway.
I believe this terrible storm had reached the height of its rage when the ship was struck. Its fury was now waning, though the soot in the north continued to vomit sheets of flame and the thunder-shocks striking the level of the breathless sea were as the noise of the rending of mountains. I have heard of but one such another storm in which a convict ship bore part. The vessel was the Earl Grey, with two hundred and sixty-four prisoners on board. The year was, I believe, 1842, and the ship was bound, as the Childe Harold was, to Van Diemen’s Land. Dr. Browning, who was the surgeon-superintendent, mentions the storm in his account of the voyage, but he saw nothing of it, owing to his suffering from an affection of the heart which obliged him to keep his cabin. This I regret, as I should have been glad to know how the prisoners under his charge behaved on that occasion.
It was now about a quarter to eleven; the rain had ceased, but the decks were full of water, which cascaded continuously into the calm sea through the scupper-holes. The captain and his mates kept the poop. I heard the squelch of their tread as they tramped to and fro in their sodden boots. Suddenly an order was shouted, and in a few minutes two or three men came aft, one of them holding a lantern. They gathered about the pump and the second mate left the poop and joined them. I could not see what they did, but after a short interval the second mate went on the poop again, and the men, one of them swinging the lantern, walked forward.
A little clock hung under the break of the poop in the cuddy recess hard by the soldiers’ arms; a bull’s-eye lamp cast a light upon its face; this lamp was used for heaving the log, for writing up the log-slate and the like, and the clock for keeping the ship’s bells. A figure came off the poop to see the time; he was draped in streaming oilskins, which flashed out to the lightning, but his face was so muffled by his sou’-wester, that I looked two or three times before I knew him to be Will. I was still alone in the cuddy; Frank and the steward were probably in the steerage; I took a step or two that carried me to the door and pronounced Will’s name.
He drew close and said: ‘What do you think of this?’
‘It is awful,’ said I.
‘It might have been worse than awful!’ he exclaimed. ‘The ship has been struck! Luckily, the thunderbolt went overboard. Had it gone through the bottom we should have followed it; nothing could have saved us. But it’s all right with the old hooker; the well’s just been sounded again and she’s as dry as a rotten nut.’
I looked at him eagerly; my heart all at once grew so full, that I felt I must speak or shriek out; I set my teeth on my lip and bit till I tasted blood, and clenched my hands till my arms stiffened as though I had been poisoned, whilst I turned my head that he might not see me. He said: ‘I must be off. Why don’t you go to bed? There’s nothing to keep you up. A fine night’ll be coming along by eight bells and they’ll be making sail.’ With that he went up the ladder.
I had barely arrested speech in myself: but for that supreme effort I should have warned him, and he would at once have carried the news to the captain.
I stood in the door, gazing at the ship that flashed out and vanished, no longer scared by the flames and the thunder. I could think of nothing but what to-morrow was to bring forth. Men in scores lay below in the prison quarter, stricken into motionless logs by fright. Were they and the like of them capable of a victorious uprising? And suppose the ship seized, what was to follow? I dared not think how the convicts might serve those who were not of them. I asked myself: If they put Tom in charge of the ship, what will he do with her, and how will he act so as to escape from the ruffians and secure his own liberty? Then I thought to myself: he is an innocent man now, though suffering as a criminal; but if the ship is seized by the convicts, he’ll be taken as having helped them, as being one of the two hundred and thirty, as being the one who navigated the ship afterwards, and who was as answerable as any of the rest for all that happened. He will then be a criminal in terrible earnest. Indeed, the business might bring him to the gallows. But then, thought I, he is a convict now in any case. He cannot be worse off. He never can—he never would—return home. Whatever happens cannot blacken his future. The darkness over which that lightning is flashing is not deeper. If the convicts rise, he may escape and get his liberty, free himself from his felon clothes, and hide with a changed name in a foreign country. Oh, cried my heart, God grant that I may be spared to escape with him wherever he goes!
Thus ran my thoughts. After all these years, I put them dully and coldly; but they boiled in me then. They were as the electric fluid itself whilst I stood in the doorway of that cuddy, mechanically watching the great fabric of the ship glancing out green and violet and yellow to the lights of the storm over the bow.
Shortly after eleven the sky cleared in the south; the clouds rolled away in black masses into the north, and the moon shone out, and the sea was again beautiful with her light. A soft wind blew and the decks grew busy with the life of seamen’s figures running here and there, and pulling and dragging and making sail to the noise of hoarse cries and choruses. The steward lurched up to me, and his breath filled the atmosphere around with a smell of spirits. He said, with a hiccough: ‘You can turn in.’ So I went below and lay down, fully clothed, in my bunk, but not to sleep.