THE STORES WERE REPLENISHED, the ship was repaired and we were back at sea before I even knew it, but there was a right to-do just as we were about to set sail that left the captain in a dark mood for days afterwards. I was clearing away the plate and cup he’d used for his lunch – which usually consisted of only a piece of fish and a potato, as he never ate much in the middle of the day – when he looked up from writing in his log, and at first he was full of life and cheer, so pleased was he that we were setting sail again.
‘Well, Master Turnstile,’ said he to me, ‘what did you make of Santa Cruz, then?’
‘I can’t rightly say, sir,’ I replied, quick as you like. ‘On account of only seeing it from a distance and never having set foot on dry land throughout our stay. However, I must admit that it looked pretty as a picture from the deck of the Bounty.’
The captain placed his quill down on the desk for a moment and looked across at me with the hint of a smile across his lips, and he narrowed his eyes as he stared, which caused my face to take on the reddenings so bad that I looked away and started to tidy things close to hand so that he wouldn’t notice.
‘Was that sauce?’ he asked me after a moment. ‘Were you saucing me, Master Turnstile?’
‘Not I, sir,’ said I, shaking my head. ‘Begging your pardon, sir, if my words escaped me with a little more harshness than I had intended. I only meant that I find myself in the position of being unable to answer your original query on account of my having no first-hand experience of the place itself. Mr Fryer and Mr Christian and Mr Heywood, on the other hand—’
‘Are all officers in His Majesty’s navy,’ he interrupted me, a cooler tone creeping into his voice now. ‘And as such have certain rights and duties to perform during a stay in port. You’d do well to remember that if you aspire to higher office yourself. It’s what you might call the benefit of hard work and promotion.’
His words took me aback a little, for I confess that I had never considered such a notion. If I was honest with myself, which was something I always tried to be, I was rather enjoying my time as the captain’s servant – there were many and varied responsibilities associated with the position and, in truth, none were too onerous in comparison with the tasks of the ABs – and it gave me a certain standing among the crew, with whom I was beginning to mix with greater confidence and success. But aspirations towards a life as an officer? I wasn’t sure if that was something that was in the destiny of John Jacob Turnstile. After all, it had only been a couple of days since I had been considering making my escape from the ship entirely and setting off for the life of a deserter in Spain – a fine existence, I felt. Filled with adventure and romance. The truth was that when it came to a face-off of loyalty between the king’s expectations and my own selfish desires, I rather thought that old George didn’t stand a virgin’s chance in a whorehouse.
‘Yes, sir,’ said I, collecting some of his uniforms from where he had cast them aside and separating them into two piles: those I would need to launder, a thankless job, and those that could manage another tour of duty.
‘It really was a very fine place,’ he continued, returning to his log. ‘Unspoiled is how I am describing it here. I rather think that Mrs Bligh would enjoy a sojourn there; perhaps I might return with her as a private man in later life.’
I nodded. The captain spoke of his wife from time to time and wrote to her frequently in the hope that we might pass a frigate returning to England who could take our messages with her. The small pile of letters that had sat in the drawer of his desk for weeks had vanished now, left in the safe hands of the Santa Cruz authorities, no doubt, and it looked to me as if he was about to begin a new collection immediately.
‘Mrs Bligh is in London, sir?’ I asked in a respectful tone, taking care not to step over the invisible line that existed between the two of us, but he nodded his head quickly and seemed pleased to talk of her.
‘Aye, that she is,’ he said. ‘My own Betsey. A fine woman, Turnstile. It was a fortunate day in my life when she agreed to plight her troth to mine. She awaits my return along with our boy, William, and our daughters. A fine fellow, is he not?’ He turned the portrait of the boy in my direction and it was true, he seemed a likely chap, and I told him so. ‘A few years younger than you, of course,’ he added, ‘but I suspect you would make good friends if you were in his acquaintance.’
I said nothing to that on account of it being unlikely that a fellow from my society could ever be friends with a fellow from his, but the captain was behaving in such a pleasant fashion towards me that I thought it would be churlish of me to say as much. Instead I turned for one final look around the cabin to make sure that everything was in order, at which time I was surprised to notice by the small window a number of pots, which had been taken from the great cabin next door and were sitting there now on full view, filled to the brim with earth and with small seedlings starting to peep through the soil.
‘I see you are observing my garden,’ said the captain cheerfully, standing up from behind his desk and stepping across the cabin to look down at them. ‘Quite a sight they make, do they not?’
‘Are these plants the focus of our mission, sir?’ asked I in my ignorance, and the words were barely out of my mouth when I realized how stupid they sounded, for there were many hundreds of pots empty next door still, and if this was all that was needed what a waste of time and energy the whole voyage would have been.
‘No, no,’ said he. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Turnstile. These are a few mere trifles I discovered in the hills yesterday when Mr Nelson and I went a-botanizing.’
Mr Nelson was a figure who came and went from the captain’s cabin with regularity but who, at first, had appeared to me to have no official responsibilities. I had recently learned from Mr Fryer, however, that he was the ship’s gardener and that his duties would commence properly when we had achieved the first part of our mission, of which I was still in virtual ignorance.
‘I thought to plant a few seeds,’ said the captain, fingering the damp soil in the pots carefully, ‘just to see whether they might flourish on board. In this first pot I’ve placed a bellflower, an exotic creature which produces edible berries when ripe. Are you familiar with it?’
‘No, sir,’ said I, for I knew as much about plant life as I did about the mating habits of dormice.
‘It has a beautiful flower,’ said he then, turning it ever so slightly towards the porthole. ‘Yellow as the sun. You never saw such luminescence. In this second is an orobal. Have you made any study of exotic flora at all, Turnstile?’
‘No, sir,’ said I again, looking at the tiny seedling planted there and wondering what might shoot from it.
‘You might know the orobal as ginseng,’ he replied, and I shook my head again and he looked puzzled. ‘Honestly,’ he said then with a shake of his head, sounding for all the world as if this was a matter of enormous surprise to him. ‘What do they teach you in the schools these days? The education system is in the doldrums, sir. I tell you, the very doldrums!’
I opened my mouth to inform him that I had never seen the inside of a classroom, but held my counsel for fear that it may be considered sauce again.
‘The orobal is a wonderful plant to cultivate,’ he told me then. ‘It is a diuretic, you see, which is of course of great use on a voyage like ours.’
‘A what?’ I asked, unfamiliar with the word.
‘A diuretic,’ he repeated. ‘Really, Turnstile, must I explain everything? It has pain-relieving properties and can induce sleep in a poorly man. I think it might prosper too, if attended to correctly.’
‘Shall I be watering these plants for you, then, sir?’ asked I.
‘Oh, no,’ said he, shaking his head quickly. ‘No, you may leave them as they are. It’s not that I don’t trust you, you understand; on the contrary, you are proving a very fine servant’ – there was that word again, one I did not enjoy – ‘but I think I would rather enjoy tending to them myself and nurturing them to growth. It gives me a hobby, you see. Don’t you have hobbies, Turnstile? Back home with your family in Portsmouth, didn’t you have entertainments of your own? Frivolities that passed your time?’
I stared at him, surprised by his own naïveté, and shook my head. This was the first time that the captain had asked me about my life back in England, or my family, and I realized immediately that he was under the false impression that I was in possession of one. Of course, he had not conversed with his friend Mr Zéla before my appearance on board the Bounty – I had merely been sent on board at the last moment to step into the shoes of the slippery donkey who had cracked his legs – and if he had, perhaps he would have known a little more about my situation. As it was, he assumed that all lads had a similar upbringing to his own, and in this he was sadly mistaken. The rich always consider lads like me to be ignorant, but they display just as much ignorance at times, albeit of a very different type.
The notion of family was a strange one to me. I had known no such joy myself. I could recall neither father nor mother; my earliest memories were of a washerwoman in Westingham Street who let me sleep on her floor and eat from her table if I brought home fruit from the stalls for her supper, but she sold me to Mr Lewis when I was nine years old and told me as I was dragged away from her that I would be happy and well looked after at his establishment. There was no family back home for me. There was love, of course, of a sort. But no family.
‘Now, this might interest you, Turnstile,’ the captain was saying to me, and I blinked back into the here-and-now; he was touching the leaves of a small plant in the third pot with care. ‘The artemisia. When it prospers, it is a great help to the digestive system of any man who finds himself in difficulties, as I recall you were when we first set sail. It could be of great use if—’
The lesson was interrupted at that moment by a sharp rap on the cabin door and we turned round to see Mr Christian standing there. He gave a brief nod to the captain and ignored me altogether, as was his wont. I think he considered me to be of slightly less interest than the wood panelling on the walls or the panes of glass in the windows. ‘The ship is setting sail, sir,’ he said. ‘You wanted to be informed.’
‘Excellent news,’ said the captain. ‘Excellent news! And what a worthwhile stay it was, Fletcher. I hope you thanked the governor for all his kindnesses?’
‘Of course, sir.’
‘Very good. Then, you may sound the gun salute at your convenience.’ The captain turned back to his plants, but, realizing that Mr Christian had not stepped away, he turned round again. ‘Yes, Fletcher?’ he asked. ‘Was there something else?’
Mr Christian’s face bore the look of a man who had a secret to impart and little wanted to be the messenger of it. ‘The gun salute,’ he said finally. ‘Perhaps we should keep our powder dry for now?’
‘Nonsense, Fletcher!’ said the captain with a laugh. ‘Our hosts have been of great assistance to us. We cannot part without a gesture of respect; how would such a thing look? You’ve seen it done before, of course. A mutual salute, ours to offer thanks, theirs to send us on our way with Godspeed.’
There was a noticeable hesitancy on Mr Christian’s part, one that I’m sure both the captain and I were aware of, and it hovered in the air like a bad smell from a pestilent duck until the master’s mate opened a window to clear it. ‘I’m afraid there won’t be a return of salute, sir,’ he said finally, looking away.
‘No return?’ asked the captain, frowning and stepping towards him. ‘I don’t understand. You and Mr Fryer gave the governor our parting gifts?’
‘Yes, sir, we did,’ he replied. ‘And of course Mr Fryer, as ship’s master, discussed the matter of the salute with the governor, that being his place as the officer of rank. Shall I fetch him and have him explain?’
‘Damn and blast it, Fletcher, I care not whose place it is,’ snapped the captain, whose voice was growing more and more testy as the minutes passed; he did not like to be kept in the dark about matters that were taking place around him, particularly when he perceived a slight. ‘I simply ask you why the salute shall not be returned when I have just given orders that—’
‘It was to be returned,’ said Mr Christian, interrupting him. ‘Six shots apiece, as is standard. Unfortunately Mr Fryer was forced to reveal the fact that … due to the circumstances of our ship and your own ranking …’
‘My own ranking?’ Bligh asked slowly, as if he was trying to rush forward in the conversation himself to discover where it might be leading. ‘I don’t …?’
‘As lieutenant, I mean,’ explained Mr Christian. ‘Rather than captain. The fact of the ship’s size not meriting a—’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr Bligh, turning away now so that neither of us could observe his phizzy, his voice growing gloomier by the minute. ‘I understand fully.’ He coughed several times and closed his eyes for a moment as he held a hand across his mouth. When he spoke again, his tone was low and depressive. ‘Of course, Fletcher. The governor will not return a salute to one of lesser rank than he.’
‘I’m afraid that’s rather the long and the short of it,’ said Mr Christian quietly.
‘Well, Mr Fryer spoke correctly in informing the governor,’ said the captain, although he did not sound as though he believed a word of it. ‘It would have been highly inappropriate and if he had discovered the truth subsequently, then it might have damaged his relations with the crown.’
‘For what it’s worth, sir—’ began Mr Christian, but the captain held a hand up to silence him.
‘Thank you, Mr Christian,’ he said. ‘You may go on deck now. Mr Fryer is up there, I presume?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then, he may stay there, damn his boots, for the time being. Set the pace, Mr Christian. See that the men are keen.’
‘Aye, sir,’ he replied, turning then and leaving the cabin.
I stood there awkwardly, shuffling from foot to foot. I could see that the captain felt humiliated by what had transpired but was trying not to show any such emotion on his face. The issue of his own status was one that clearly rankled him, particularly as the fact of it was common currency among the men. I tried to think of what to say to make matters better but could think of nothing at all until I happened to look to my left again and saw salvation there.
‘And this pot, Captain,’ said I, pointing to the fourth and final pot on the mantel. ‘What does this contain?’
He turned his head slowly and stared at me, as if he had forgotten my presence entirely, before looking towards the pot that I had indicated and shaking his head. ‘Thank you, Turnstile,’ he said in a deep and troubled voice. ‘You may leave now.’
I opened my mouth to say more but thought better of it. As I left, and closed the cabin door behind me, I could feel the ship setting off quite smoothly into the sea again and caught a final vision of the captain sitting down behind his desk and not retrieving his quill, but, rather, reaching across for the portrait of his wife, and running his finger gently along her face. I shut the door firmly and resolved to go on deck and keep my eyes focused on the land as it disappeared behind us, for the devil only knew when I might catch sight of it again.