James came to London in the evening of a lengthening spring day. The colliers, as many as two hundred, gathered in the wide mouth of the Thames estuary, waiting for the tide and a favourable wind that would take them upriver to the Pool of London. James was below deck while the colliers waited. He couldn’t see but he could hear the lap of the tide against the timbers of the Freelove.
Along with the other apprentices, James had helped load the coal, shovelling it into the hold, breathing in its black dust. The weather was good and they’d done the journey in five days. He’d stood watch, a senior member of his team ringing a bell each time the half-hour sandglass emptied. They kept a count of them, waiting for the eighth bell that would signal the end of the watch. The journey had been hard work with little sleep, yet James was exhilarated by it.
James took every opportunity for learning. He observed the leadsman in the forechains swing the length of line with knots at regular intervals, and the leaden drogue at the end, watched the line being reeled in again and heard the shout: ‘Six knots!’
They had barely left Whitby when James went aloft for the first time at sea, a topman called Ned climbing behind him. James looked up to the tip of the mast, a hundred feet or so in the air. He thought of the great tree at Marton, the way he had found one foothold after the other till he’d finally reached the top.
Those apprentices who were not working gathered around, watching and waiting. ‘Mind you don’t heave your dinner all over us,’ one of them called as James grabbed hold of the ratlines, feeling the tar-covered rope under his grip and thinking about the rough texture of tree bark. He had hardly climbed two or three steps before he realised that this was an entirely different proposition to climbing a tree. The heavy rope seemed suddenly flimsy but James kept going, feeling the increasing sway of the ratlines the further he went.
About halfway up he stopped, overcome with dizziness. His friends below had their hands to their mouths shouting something he couldn’t hear. ‘Look at your hands,’ he heard Ned’s voice. He was gripping the ropes so hard his hands were almost welded to them. Beneath the grime of coal dust his knuckles stood out white.
‘Keep going.’ Ned was directly behind him. James swallowed the dizziness, prised one hand off the rope and reached up, thinking only of the way he had climbed at Marton, thinking only of the tree. Then his leg found the next foothold.
‘That’s it, all the way to the top.’ Men had fallen from aloft, to their death, but James promised himself he would not be one of them. Up he went, into the sky.
He was almost to the yardarm. ‘Now lean backwards and hoist yourself onto the platform.’ James did as he was instructed, trusting the rope, trusting Ned’s voice, trusting himself. ‘That’s it, lad. You’re there.’
The ship pitched and rolled but Ned was with him now and the two of them bent over the spar and untied the knots holding the canvas. James saw the minuscule figures on deck looking up but he was in a different world. A gull passed not two feet from him. He heard its cry and saw the way its wings caught the wind and soared. Saw its legs tucked underneath its body. James was in the air with it, in the element of birds.
‘All done, lad,’ said Ned. ‘I can see you’ve taken to life aloft. Aye, it’s a fine day for it. It’ll be a different matter in the squalls and rain. When it’s freezing cold and you have to chip ice off the shrouds. C’mon, time to go back down.’
They descended backwards, James looking up at the mast pointing into the sky, wondering how to determine the arc of its sway. A mathematical problem Mr Rowland had never set for him.
James thought of that moment up in the spacious sky when the tide brought the convoy of colliers upriver. The Thames was so thick with ships and boats of every kind that its murky waters were only just visible. There were ships from across the Atlantic, from Jamaica and the West Indies, bringing tobacco, indigo, cotton and corn. Sugar, rum, coffee and ginger. There were North Sea cats like the Freelove bringing coal; lighters which took the coal from the ship to the wharf. Brigs, sloops, barges and all manner of small craft. Behind it all lay London, the river and its traffic part of the great city’s fabric.
Through the grid of masts were labyrinths of narrow streets, beggars, thieves, and ladies of the town. Every second house on the waterfront seemed to be an alehouse or tavern. Beyond would be the fine buildings, wide thoroughfares carrying lords and ladies in carriages. In the distance, against the pale sky, James made out the dome of St Paul’s. No-one else in James’s family had ever travelled this far, had ever been to London, and now he was here. He hadn’t even set foot on solid ground yet he was swept up in the excitement of the metropolis. It buzzed in the very air.
Through all the busyness on shore, James’s eyes settled on one thing. Near a set of steps that led up from the river, a hanged man was being taken down from the gibbet. ‘Execution Dock,’ said Ned. ‘They hang there over the river till three tides have washed over them. An example should any of us seamen get a notion to go pirating or smuggling. Captain Kidd was hanged from that very gibbet.’ James watched the body being dumped on a cart and wheeled away. ‘But don’t be dwelling on the dead,’ his companion went on. ‘There’s plenty of life to be had in London. Once we come ashore. But the coal goes first.’
When the Freelove had called into Yarmouth, Captain Jefferson had forwarded by land the official papers to the agent in London, who then set wheels in motion—arranging a buyer for the coal and organising the unloading of it, so that everything was done with as much haste as possible to avoid delays that cost money. The delivery of coal was the object of the journey and that was uppermost in the mind of the captain, not furnishing a holiday in London or a tour of its fleshpots for the seamen. Not that you had to go on a tour to find ladies of the town, Ned told him. They came looking for you. Thronging like a pack of seagulls round the docks of the riverside, their beady eyes on the lookout for tasty morsels such as a seaman with a pocket full of wages. Pounce on him before he had a chance to do the alchemist’s trick of turning silver into ale.
‘Here’s the lighter heading our way,’ Ned pointed out.
The river was so full of traffic that James was surprised craft could move at all, but the vessels did inch their way along, accompanied by much cursing and shaking of fists and manoeuvring of oars. Eventually the lighter carrying a gang of coal heavers, bristling with shovels, made its way alongside the Freelove. The heavers came aboard, at least ten of them, men with faces as hard as their muscles, bringing with them, in the soup of smells, the strong stale odour of sweated ale.
They wasted no time erecting wooden platforms from the hold to the deck; nimble work it was, from the heavy-built men as well as those sinewy as scrawny chickens. Then they began shovelling. James heard the crunch, the impact of metal on coal, as he shovelled alongside them. The bracing salt-sprinkled air that had filled his lungs for the past five days was replaced by the grit of coal dust. He worked methodically, saying nothing, thinking he’d rather be back shovelling muck, at least that was softer, and though you breathed the smell, at least you didn’t breathe in particles of it. As the heavers worked, grunting and cursing, the smell of their sweat grew so strong that James could taste it in the back of his throat.
A boat arrived with pints of ale, rowed across from the alehouse, the price of which would be taken out of the heavers’ pay. It was thirsty work and they drank at the rate of a pint an hour. Sweat dripped onto the coal and into the men’s boots, and onto each other as shovel-loads of coal flew through the air. James worked away, as hard as the heavers, figuring the quicker the job was done, the quicker ashore. He put his back into it, as he did with everything. Unlike this gang of heavers, in a year or so, when his apprenticeship was finished, he would no longer have to shovel coal. In the darkness of the hold he tasted his own salty sweat as it ran down his face, and saw drops of it glisten on the lumps of coal on the shovel. Where would that sweat be carried to? Would it find its way into the fires of a lord or a poor man? Would it be used to steam-power a pumping engine or sail away to the lands beyond the Atlantic? With these thoughts, and with his arms and his back, and the arms and the backs of all of them, the mountain of coal became a hillock, a small mound and eventually it was no more.
When James’s feet landed on the slipperiness of Execution Dock Stairs, he felt like Gulliver dropped by a giant orc into the marketplace of a new and exotic land. An old woman with no teeth but a loud voice yelled, ‘Cabbages, cabbages, fresh from the gardens.’ They may have been fresh from the gardens some days ago but presently they wore the same film of coal dust as everything else.
A man with a tray of oysters was deftly opening six of them for a customer, holding the creatures in a leather-gloved hand and prising the shells apart with a knife that could cause trouble. ‘Oi! I’ll ’ave you,’ he roared, bringing his knife down between the fingers of a small hand reaching up for an oyster. The hand disappeared immediately and a young boy scrambled his way through the crowd.
‘Shine your shoes, mister?’ offered a voice somewhere else. James kept his hands firmly in his pockets, so that other hands couldn’t find their way in. It seemed the only place free of the crowd was the gibbet, not six feet away from the Stairs, empty now, waiting for its next lodger.
‘Move along there, lad,’ said Ned, coming up behind him. ‘Push your way through and don’t pay any mind to what’s for sale,’ he added as two ladies of the town appeared from nowhere, thrusting themselves at the newly arrived sailors, giving off a whiff of gin as they laughed saucily and made cow’s eyes.
James and Ned sidestepped another pair of ladies whispering promised pleasures into the ears of two mariners newly arrived from Canada. The men were showing the ladies furred pouches and telling them that they were fashioned from the testicles of bears.
James and Ned waited for a carriage to pass then crossed the road, stepping over the flow of effluent in the middle of it. ‘Here we are,’ said Ned when they reached the corner of Wapping High Street and Brewhouse Lane. ‘This is your lodgings.’ James looked at the big brass bell above the entrance to the alehouse, then back to the river. It was only a short distance away, yet with the crowd and the noise and everything going on, it seemed to take an age. ‘As good a house as any is the Bell,’ said Ned.
James stooped as he entered the low doorway. He and Ned pushed through the heat and noise inside, making their way to the bar. Standing on the serving side of it was a man with grey hair and side whiskers, along with a couple of serving wenches, pouring ale into mugs and sliding them across the bar as fast as they were ordered.
‘A new apprentice of Mr Walker’s,’ Ned introduced James to the man. ‘This here is Mr Blackburn. He’ll look after you all right.’
James thought of offering his hand to Mr Blackburn but let it drop to his side when he saw what a grimy paw he’d be offering his host. Instead, he merely nodded.
He looked around and recognised some of the coal heavers he’d worked with, pints of ale in front of them, well on the way to being drunk and without the benefit now of hard work to sweat it out of them. They’d come straight to the alehouse, spending more time here than they did in their humble abodes. If you wanted work, you stayed where the publican who organised it would notice you. The coal heavers were presented with more pints of ale and continued slaking a thirst that was bottomless.
There were a few landmen in the alehouse but most of the customers were seamen, judging by the loose-legged trousers and short jackets. Practical working clothes that wouldn’t get caught in winches and ropes and all the other traps on board ship.
Mr Blackburn slid a pint of ale in front of James. ‘A glass of London hospitality,’ he said, although it would be Mr Walker paying for it.
James looked at his hands again. ‘Much obliged to you. I’ll wash some of this off first,’ he said. ‘Don’t want to dirty your mug,’ he added.
‘No-one minds the coal around here,’ said Mr Blackburn. ‘It’s the living of all of us, one way or the other.’ James looked at the pint of proffered ale, wondering what to do. He was dog-tired from shovelling the coal and having had no more than four hours sleep at a spell during the voyage. But he was in London, and he didn’t want to miss a minute of it. He looked around for Ned and found him renewing his acquaintance with a young woman whose bosoms rose out of her dress like two plump doves. Everyone, even the women, seemed to be covered in coal dust. That might be all right for the riverside, but James intended exploring every inch of London and he didn’t want to go about looking like a coal heaver.
‘I’ll wash up first, if you don’t mind.’ James saw the ale go to someone else.
‘Up the stairs, first room on the left for you apprentices. You’ll find a pitcher of water. Mind you don’t drink it though,’ he joked. ‘No-one drinks the water in London.’
James strode up the stairs, rising above the rollicking noise. He found the room Mr Blackburn had indicated, and inside it a bed, a jug of water on a stand and one straight-backed chair. Then he heard a trill, like the whistle of a bird, but not a seagull or a pigeon, which were the only birds he’d seen so far in London. He heard it again—a bird trapped inside perhaps, calling to its mate. He followed the sound down the corridor and identified the room.
It wasn’t a bird but a little girl, five or six years old, about the same age as his sister Margaret. She was kneeling on the floor, her skirts neatly about her. James could see the soles of her house slippers, the beginnings of a hole in one of them. In front of her was a box and a set of tiles which spelled out ELIZABETH.
She sensed his presence and turned, looking up at him, twin pools of blue in a small pale face. ‘I . . . I thought I heard a bird,’ James began. ‘I was going to open the window and let it fly out.’ He looked at the red and green painted bird in the child’s hand.
‘It’s Sam,’ she said, holding it up. ‘He’s made of wood, and can’t fly. Unless I make him.’
‘Yes, of course,’ James said, feeling foolish. He’d been taken in by a child’s plaything. She sat perfectly still, waiting for him to leave. Thankfully Ned was not here to witness the scene. He could imagine the jibes, there’d be no end to it.
James Cook crept back down the corridor, hearing the door shut quickly behind him.