Late on the following day the wind changed direction slightly, veering between west and south. Thurso, checking stores with his gunner, a lanky man named Johnson, between decks in the after part of the ship, felt the change at once, in the way she settled between wind and tide. He felt it in the balance of his body, as one might feel a change in the rhythm of music, though nothing showed in his face or changed in his voice.
‘Wind coming round ahead of us, Capting,’ the gunner ventured, and received the full glare of the small eyes.
‘When I want your opinion of the weather, or anything else, I’ll ask for it.’
‘Aye-aye, sir.’
Later, in the forecastle, Johnson was to relate, with suitable embellishments, this brief exchange, laying the first strand in the tissue of gossip, bravado, calumny and indirect abuse which is spun hour by hour and breath by breath among the crew of a ship and is that ship’s unwritten journal, voluminous, untrustworthy, dissolving like a dream when the ship reaches port and the crew is disbanded. ‘Turned on me like a tiger, he did, only because I spoke first. I tell you, he is goin’ to be a tartar, this one. It wasn’t just lettin’ me know who is skipper. He was savage like, as if he would have had me seized up straight away for a good dozen.’
Shortly after midnight they cast off from the Pier Head. Running under her topsails against the flood, obedient to the cables that towed her, the Liverpool Merchant headed slowly towards the estuary. On the ebb she moored at Black Rock and waited for a change in the wind in company with two small brigs and a Danish schooner bound for Dublin.
They were obliged to stay here for the two days following. The pilot-boat came in from Liverpool with supplies of powder and bread and two sides of beef. Simmonds saw to the hoisting in of these, with Thurso’s eye upon him; the ship was fully loaded now and there was need for care in the stowage if she was to handle properly in the seas she would meet.
There was work enough apart from this to keep the crew busy. Barton, his ear always alert for the hoarse voice from the quarterdeck, saw to the rigging of the jib boom and had the sails fixed on the longboat. Men were set plaiting rope yarns for cordage and making deck swabs out of old rope. Calley could not master this so soon and had to begin with something simpler; as a first step towards the delights he had been promised he found himself, in company with a ragged, shivering runaway of fourteen named Charlie, untwisting old ropes to make oakum for caulking seams and stopping leaks. Libby, the big, one-eyed Londoner, veteran of several slaving trips, was given a special task – one which he was well qualified for, having once been bosun’s mate on a seventy-four-gun frigate. He was set down on the main deck, in full view of all, to fashion a cat o’ nine tails. This was a longstanding practice of Thurso’s, it being the captain’s fixed belief that it did the men good to see, as they went about their tasks, the plaiting of the stem, the drawing-out one by one of the nine logline branches of the whip, the ritual tying of the four knots in each. It convinced them from the start of the seriousness of his intentions.
Paris, pleased to find himself so far clear in mind and untroubled in stomach, passed the time in reading, writing the first pages of the journal he had resolved to keep and walking about on deck, where he was able to follow Libby’s progress with the fearsome whip more closely than he liked. He had discovered that the small, malodorous room below the water-line which had been allotted as sick bay was taken up with rope and tackle and spare sail-cloth. Twice he had attempted to speak to Thurso about this but the captain had bitten him off short. Nonetheless, he was determined to take the matter up again at the first favourable opportunity.
On the third day, at a few minutes after four o’clock in the morning, Simmonds, whose watch it was, felt the wind turn fair against his face. As instructed, he roused Thurso immediately. The captain waited for the top of the high water then gave orders to weigh anchor.
Paris woke to the wailing cries of Haines, the bosun. He dressed quickly and came up in the first light to a scene of uproar and apparent confusion, shouted orders he could not make out, bewildering movements about the deck. Thurso stood above, on the quarterdeck, the only motionless element in this violent pandemonium. Then Paris began to see the division of tasks among the crew as they worked to spread and loose the great square mainsails. He heard the strange, drawn-out lamentation of men heaving at the windlass and in a few minutes knew that the ship was under way, knew it from the noise of the water thrown from her bows, from the way she leaned over in the damp dawn breeze and rolled with the heavy ground swell.
And so, in the course of that morning, the Liverpool Merchant was turned loose into the Irish Sea. With her mainsails set and a fair wind from the south-east, released from tethering rope and umbilical cable, she was for the first time in her life unfettered, free – save for her own groaning tensions – between wind and current.