Another one dead. The corpse, wrapped in canvas and weighted with a cannonball, lies on the deck of the Calcutta as the good Reverend Robert Knopwood prepares to send it over the side and down into the black depths. It is late Saturday morning, 7 May. A northerly wind carries showers and gloom. This is the third death in four days and Knopwood is becoming a dab hand at this.
‘Unto Almighty God,’ he says, as the ship sways and heaves through a north-easterly swell. ‘We commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the deep, in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world the sea shall give up her dead …’
The body under that shroud is Stephen Byrne, a 36-year-old silk weaver and thief. The Calcutta’s third lieutenant, Nicholas Pateshall, is about to scribble in his diary that Byrne has died from ‘mere disability brought on by seasickness’. Yesterday it was John Thomas, a butcher sentenced to seven years for stealing seeds. The day before, Knopwood had sent Ann Stocker into the deep. That had been an upsetting afternoon for everyone. The first death of the journey, little more than a week from home, and a heavily pregnant woman at that. Ann had decided to make this trip with her husband while he served 14 years for possessing forged bank notes. But she had fallen sick immediately after leaving Portsmouth and her deterioration had been swift.
She is not the only one to fall prey to the roiling seas. It has been rough and wild and even experienced sailors have been looking a touch green. A few nights ago the officers were forced to sleep in the wardroom. You’ve experienced conditions like this before – that ocean crossing to the Netherlands was almost as bad as the battles that followed. But there are hundreds of convicts here who have never been to sea before and that smell rising up out of the decks below … it no longer carries with it the strong scent of tar and turpentine, does it?
You’re going to meet more than your share of reverends and priests and other servants of God in the years to come. But none of them will come close to good old Bobby Knopwood. That nosey kid scampering around on deck – little Johnny Fawkner – will regard Knopwood as a fraud in the years to come, a man who can never look you straight in the face, who always tilts his head to the side and peers elsewhere while you’re talking to him, as if he has a dark secret that someone might see by looking deep into his eyes. Might be one of the kid’s more accurate character assessments. Could be that Knopwood is hiding something. He’s certainly one of those old school reverends, a sermoniser who will invoke the wrath of God from the pulpit, then that night reach for a second bottle of wine as a busty woman reclines in his lap.
The man has a daughter back in England he has hardly seen. He’s the third and only surviving child of a well-off family from Norfolk who blew much of his inheritance gambling and drinking with a crowd of royals and had to become a naval chaplain to make ends meet. He knows how to cosy up to power, does Bobby. In his cabin is a copy of David Collins’ book. What better way to win a seat most nights at the Lieutenant-Governor’s table?
When he is not carousing into the night – ‘Where I dine I sleep,’ he likes to say – Knopwood is a fastidious diarist with a maddening habit of misspelling names and obsessively recording weather conditions he crimps from the ship’s log. When the Calcutta and Ocean arrive at Tenerife in the Canary Islands off Africa’s west coast for a brief stay, he accompanies Collins and Captain Woodriff on land to meet a British shipping agent. They make their way into the centre of town when Knopwood realises they are treading on ground reeking of history. ‘We landed on the very place where Lord Nelson lost his arm … Here it was that British seamen and Marines were repulsed when they attached [sic] Santa Cruz …’
Is there anyone in Britain who is not familiar with what happened six years earlier? In a battle with the Spaniards for control of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Horatio Nelson had stepped ashore to personally take charge after several British attacks had been fought off by the Spanish. Nelson was immediately hit by a musket ball in his right arm. Bleeding heavily, the rear admiral was taken back to his ship where he refused to be helped aboard.
‘Let me alone!’ he yelled. ‘I have got my legs left and one arm. Tell the surgeon to make haste and his instruments.’
The surgeon, seeing the ball had caused a compound fracture above the elbow and severed an artery, amputated Nelson’s arm without anaesthetic. Within 30 minutes the admiral was back shouting orders, ignoring the pain. This was old school stuff and Nelson a tough old bastard, even by the standards of the day. A year later he is shot in the head during the battle of the Nile, and despite a three-inch hole exposing the inside of his skull leaves hospital after just a few weeks.
It will take more than that to stop him. In 1805 – when you have used up your fair share of luck, too – Nelson will run out of his. Up against the weight of a combined French and Spanish fleet in the battle of Trafalgar he will be shot through the spine by a marksman and fall to the deck of the Victory.
But even then he will remain true to form. Kneeling on the deck, one hand supporting him from totally collapsing, he looks up and says with some surprise in his voice: ‘I do believe they have done it at last … my backbone is shot through’. He will linger below decks for a few more hours; still shouting orders until his body finally surrenders and is taken back to England in a casket filled with brandy, camphor and myrrh.
This is an age for such men. There are fools and tyrants aplenty, of course. But it’s also a time for heroes, no matter how absurd and ridiculous they may act and sound. It’s as if some of them have sprung to life from the dulled imagination of a hack novelist, wielding their swords and refusing to blink as they charge forward into perils unknown. Perhaps they all sense that an era is coming to an end, that the world is shrinking, that their maps with uncharted territory will no longer be marked with ‘Here be Dragons’ and that all too soon there will be fewer places left to discover and explore. Wars will be fought from a distance; enemies will remain out of sight. It’s as if they know this and have decided to go out in style with preposterous displays of courage and bravery. Horatio Nelson is hardly in a league of his own. You, William Buckley, are about to undergo an experience they will talk about for centuries. And you’re not alone on the Calcutta when it comes to such things, either.
Have you met the ship’s first lieutenant, James Hingston Tuckey? Easy to find, although probably not the sort of fellow you would feel comfortable lounging about with on the swaying deck, helping to keep him steady as he fills his journal with the sights and sounds of this voyage. He’s a tall, 27-year-old Irishman clinging to handsomeness. But years at sea in service to the Crown are taking their toll. His hair is thinning and greying and his right arm is next to useless. It was broken six years ago by a gun burst during a native uprising just off a small island in Indonesia. There was no doctor on board so he set the snapped limb himself as best he could and waited until he returned to England to have it broken and reset. His liver is a bigger problem. ‘Hepatic derangement’, they call it – chronic liver disease that has kept him invalided for the past two years. He is only now returning to sea and the complaint will plague him for the rest of his life.
But if his body is failing him, Tuckey, a keen diarist, remains an optimist. Even by the flowery writing standards of the day there is more than just a dollop of the Romantic poet in him; he could be an apprentice to Wordsworth or Coleridge, roaming the world’s seas, wide-eyed and consumed by the rapture of the endlessly curious traveller.
Here he is observing you and the other convicts boarding the Calcutta as she leaves England: ‘Among the convicts on board were some who, by prodigality and attendant vices, had degraded themselves from a respectable rank in society and were indebted to the lenity of their prosecutors alone for an escape from the last sentence of the law.’
‘Some of these men were accompanied by their wives who had married them in the sunshine of prosperity, when the world smiled deceitfully and their path of life appeared strewed with unfolding flowers; in the season of adversity they would not be separated but reposed their heads upon the same thorny pillow …’
‘… those alone who know the miserable and degraded situation of a transported felon can appreciate the degree of connubial love that could induce these women to accompany their guilty husbands in exile …’
While you’re stuck here on the Calcutta, Tuckey goes ashore when the ship anchors off Santa Cruz. But don’t worry. He’s taking notes and his journal will not disappoint. He visits a local church and will wonder at the ‘deeply imprinted superstition’ of the Catholic faith: ‘Children, before they can scarce speak, are taught to set a sacred value on the ridiculous grimace of devotion and a father brings his boy, not three years old, to lisp his Ave Maria and count his little rosary before the altar.’ And having stood through those ceremonies on deck as Knopwood sent all those bodies into the deep, Tuckey is … well, he’s become a downright enthusiast for the way the locals treat their dead. Bodies in coffins with no lids that are then ‘filled up with quicklime which, decomposing the flesh, the bones are afterwards removed to a general charnel-house. This example deserves to be universally followed but the prejudices of education, which teaches us to consider disturbing the dead as a species of horrid sacrilege, still wars against our better judgment and perpetuates the noisome and acknowledged evil of crowded churchyards.’
While the officers enjoy the layover on land in Santa Cruz, there is respite, too, for the convicts, an opportunity to wash clothing with fresh water – ‘an indulgence,’ writes Tuckey, ‘the benefits of which cannot be too highly valued … cleanliness is the only preventative of disease’.
That, and the decent quantity of lemons and vegetables being hauled on board.
They call scurvy the sailor’s disease and there are already early signs of it among some of the convicts: a handful with bleeding gums, others who can feel their teeth beginning to loosen. Nothing too serious, however, not like the full-blown effects when the fever sets in and the mouth and eyes are constantly dry and before you know it the sufferer is experiencing delusions and massive personality swings as their skin turns yellow and the convulsions set in.
Remarkable how a disease like this – a chronic lack of vitamin C so easily cured by citrus and vegetables – has remained one of the great mysteries in the Age of Sail for so long. It is only in the past few years that the British Navy has made it mandatory for ships on long voyages to be well stocked with remedies. For hundreds of previous years the Navy assumed it would lose up to half of its sailors on any lengthy sea journey. One estimate puts the number of deaths at sea between the years 1500 and 1800 at two million.
The Calcutta leaves Santa Cruz and sails toward Rio, the Atlantic an endless, watery bone yard of forgotten souls.
The Reverend Knopwood sends another couple of bodies into the deep and then watches with great interest as a marine found guilty of sleeping at his post while supervising the convicts receives 24 lashes for neglect of duty. Knopwood may be a man of God, but he is not merciful. He will act as a magistrate in the coming years and never flinch from ordering a prisoner to be whipped.
So he must be avidly looking on as some of the crew with the help of a few convicts go fishing for sharks. Here is something just as grisly, just as absorbing, as watching a man having his back flayed.
Best leave it to Tuckey to describe the feverish scene: ‘Often the day’s allowance of meat is sacrificed to bait the hook intended to trap their hungry adversary; while … harpoons attend their operations and the deluded victim is dragged on board, no pack of hungry fox-hounds can be more restless till they receive the reward of their labours, than the sailors to tear out the bowels and examine the stomach of the shark.’
When the equator is finally crossed after days of alternating calm and squalls, the tedium of the voyage is broken by the time-honoured ceremony of ‘crossing the line’. Tuckey watches on as ‘the ugliest persons in the ship are chosen to represent Neptune and Amphitrite (but the latter name being rather too hard of pronunciation is always familiarized into Mrs Neptune); their faces are painted in the most ridiculous manner and their heads are furnished with swabs well-greased and powdered … a large tub of salt water is prepared with a stick across it, on which the visitor is seated; Neptune’s barber, after lathering his face well with a mixture of tar and grease, performs the operation of shaving with a piece of rusty iron hoop and when clean scraped … he is pushed backwards into the tub and kept there until completely soaked.’
Within days the Calcutta is in Rio, stocking up with sugar, rum, coffee and livestock. But the South American city – the key port for ships sailing the Atlantic – has a more exotic attraction. Not that you will be given an opportunity to indulge in its offerings. So let Tuckey describe it to you. The geographer inside him has been nudged aside by an amateur anthropologist.
‘The women wear their waists very short, their bosoms much exposed … the features of the females can in no instance that I saw claim the title of beautiful and even very few reserve the epithet of pretty … their eyebrows are fine arched, their eyelashes long and silken, their hair is long, black and coarsely luxuriant; and if we may judge from … frequent application of fingers, not always without inhabitants.’ Tuckey has done his research while on land in Rio and thinks the ‘premature ripeness’ of the local women is all down to the delicate soil and the genial warmth of the sun which, after ‘a momentary bloom sinks them towards decay; at fourteen they become mothers, at sixteen the blossoms of their beauty are full blown and [at] twenty they withered like the faded rose in autumn’.
Tuckey is a single man. He does not have many years left to live – a little over a decade – and it’s as if he, too, understands time is short and he needs to cram as much into life as he can, to forge a reputation as one of the 19th century’s true adventurers. In just two years’ time the Calcutta will be captured by the French – hostilities resumed shortly after the ship’s departure from England – and Tuckey will be imprisoned for eight years until the war with France finally ends. He will marry a fellow prisoner during his long incarceration and two of their children will die once they are released and endure a difficult journey home. But once he is back in Britain he will be named commander of one of the first expeditions to explore the mysterious Congo in the deep heart of Africa.
There will be some back in England who will question why a man so severely weakened by chronic liver disease and a useless arm is appointed to such an important role, despite his impressive credentials as a geographer. Others will suggest it will be compensation for all those years as a prisoner of war.
Whatever the reason, it is easy to picture Tuckey there in the dense, almost impenetrable jungle, pith helmet and calf leather boots to his knees, face red from the heat, intoxicated by the perils of what lies beyond, notebook in one hand to record any sudden inspirations of purple prose, the other weakened arm helplessly swatting away mosquitos, all the while urging his lads to push further into the unknown.
Deeper they will go, too, more than 150 miles inland. But there’s something missing in Tuckey’s journal about this African expedition. There’s none of the usual whimsy, no poetry or soft observations from the heart that fill his journal on this voyage to Port Phillip. He is worn out. The majority of his men are dying of fever and eventually Tuckey will have to be carried back to his ship where, at the age of 40, he will die of ‘exhaustion’.
It’s starting to grow cold. The Calcutta has gone from Rio down to the Cape of Good Hope for a final chance to replenish supplies before the long, torturous leg across the Indian Ocean to Port Phillip. It is late August and you have been at sea for almost five months. Misery – never far away – is beginning to set in. A 16-year-old forger from London, Johnny Cashman, has thrown himself overboard after stealing the watch of surgeon Bromley. Nerves are strained – a Dutch commodore threatens Woodriff and Collins that he will seize their ship because war has been declared. But Woodriff, who receives unanimous support from his crew and the convicts that they will defend the Calcutta to the last man – stares down the threat and the Dutchman capitulates, saying he does ‘not wish to capture such a large number of thieves’.
By the time you leave the Cape pessimism is growing. The Ocean, with its cargo of supplies and cranky settlers, has not been seen since Rio and there are fears the slow-moving ship already lies in a frigid grave. Small irritations escalate into full-blown fights among crew, convicts and marines, some of which can only be resolved by the cat-o’-nine-tails.
The seas grow rough and are littered with chunks of ice. Cattle on board will soon die from the conditions and on the horizon the dark sky will merge into the equally dark, swirling water of the Indian Ocean. It will look as if the Calcutta is sailing straight toward a black wall.
The Reverend Knopwood has been reading David Collins’ account of the First Fleet’s journey to New South Wales – what better way to prepare for another evening of flattery and fawning at the Lieutenant-Governor’s table? A passage from that book has caught Knopwood’s eye. It’s the voice of a much younger, more idealistic Collins from 16 years earlier. Knopwood appropriates it for himself for his own diary entry on this Thursday, 16 August 1803.
‘On our departure from the Cape it was natural for us to indulge at this moment a melancholy reflection … the land behind us was the abode of a civilized people. That before us was the residence of savages. When, if ever, we might again enjoy the commerce of the world was doubtful and uncertain. The refreshments and the pleasures of which we had so liberally partaken at the Cape and Simon’s Bay were to be exchanged for coarse fare and hard labour at Port Phillip, and we may truly say all communication with families and friends now cut off, we were leaving the world behind us to enter on a state unknown.’