V
THE SEA WAS LUMINOUS.
A sheet of faint opalescent light coated its calm surface, bringing with it an eerie quiet. No swells thudded against the creaking hulls, no clangs and rattles came from the rigging. The sails hung slack, with only an occasional breeze to belly them out and move the sluggish vessels forward.
Swept southwestward by the current, the fleet sailed on, the Sirius, Alexander, Scarborough and Friendship in the lead, the Charlotte and Lady Penrhyn lagging farther and farther behind, as they sailed poorly in light winds. By day the vessels kept track of one another by shooting off their heavy guns periodically. By night the Sirius mounted a bright light in her tall maintop, visible for miles as a beacon to the sternmost vessels. Lanterns hung from the rigging and along the deck of all the ships cast pools of reflected light on the still water, drawing schools of flying fish that arced over the deck to fling themselves against the sails. In the morning the crew found hundreds of the tiny winged corpses, and took them to the cook.
Down through the tropics, past the Cape Verdes, the Sirius and her following vessels sailed, through long hot days, the heat intensified rather than relieved by heavy rains and lightning storms. Schools of blue bonitos, their silver sides gleaming, flashed just beneath the surface, blue and black pilot fish surrounded the vessels, and porpoises leapt and dove in their wakes. Whales spouted, sharks appeared, some six feet long, and the crew and officers caught them with barbed hooks hung from long poles. The Charlotte’s boatswain caught sixteen bonitos one day; dolphins and sharks were also hooked and brought on board.
Apart from an occasional passing ship, the convoy encountered nothing of interest. It was as if the ships had embarked on a vast watery emptiness, devoid of singularities, wide and flat, stretching away on all sides toward an infinite horizon.
Having little else to do, after completing their daily tasks of taking sights from the sun, writing the ship’s log and marking their positions on the chart, noting the condition of foodstuffs and the supply of water, the crew fished and dozed and socialized. At the Tropic of Cancer, they carried out the ceremony usually observed when crossing the equator, “sluicing and ducking” all those on board who had never before passed the latitude, frolicking so lustily under the aegis of Neptune (complete with trident, long robe and false beard) that two of the ships, the Charlotte and the Lady Penrhyn, nearly ran into one another.1
The wind had fallen light. Thunderstorms dumped quantities of warm rain on the ships, which seemed to inch forward, as if held back by the thick sultry air. After a day or two no wind stirred and the vessels floated, dreamlike, on the flat still pool of the sea. Heat rose in shimmering waves off the calm waters, the decks of the ships baked in the sun and became too hot to walk on. Convicts, crew and marines sweltered in the humid, steaming air, bathed in sweat, unable even to sleep, so close and stifling was the atmosphere.
Crowded with her fellow convicts in the nearly airless hold, Mary could do little but sit on her hard berth and think about water. Cool water, water overflowing in abundance, water to wash over her and assuage the thirst caused by the unbearable heat. What water she was given, carefully measured out, three quarts a day, was warm, stank, and tasted foul. As water in the casks, filled on Tenerife, began to run low, the bottoms of the casks became coated with a black fungal growth, malodorous and repellent; they yielded a soupy, cloudy, reeking liquid that bore little resemblance to the water from a clear flowing stream. She drank what was given to her, gratefully, but it nearly made her gag. Moments later her thirst returned.
All her senses were assaulted, her sense of smell most rudely. The stench of the water she drank was all but overpowered by the stink of the bilge. The great heat made the rotting food, human waste and other organic matter in the bilge water putrefy at an increased pace, and as it decomposed, it sent into the stale air exhalations beyond description.
Sitting on her berth, Mary felt her baby kick. In another two or three months, she had calculated, the child would be born. How would she manage, on scant rations and too little water, with a newborn to care for? The voyage had been hard on the babies born to convict women. Most had died. Hers might well die—and she herself might die, as so many women did, in the aftermath of childbirth.
Dark thoughts such as these must have preyed on Mary as, day after blistering day, the terrible calm continued, the deck burning in the merciless sun so that the pitch caulking its seams melted and began to drop on the heads of the convicts in searing black chunks, scalding their flesh.2 At night there was no relief, only more heat, sweat, and heavy air, thick and oppressive.
Rats, roaches, lice, nits, fleas, bugs of every sort plagued the convicts, marines and crew. They crawled out from the timbers of the ship, flew in dense clouds through the heavy air, landing on exposed skin and biting, nesting, infesting. Surgeon White ordered creosote applied to the convicts’ area and the quarters of the marines and crew three times a week, had gunpowder exploded in the living quarters between the decks, and went about the ship himself applying liberal amounts of oil and tar and a solution of quicklime in boiling water. But for every bug or rat that was killed, a hundred more seemed to emerge, unscathed by any efforts at fumigation. And the heat bred other plagues: angry red rashes that appeared on the convicts’ arms and legs, necks and chests, the rot that bred in their mouths, making teeth fall out and gums turn black, headaches that no medicine could relieve and painful boils and blisters. Many of the women fainted, their fainting fits leading to convulsions.3 One of the women convicts, made desperate by thirst, went off her head and drank a harsh chemical, sublimate of mercury. Amazingly, she recovered from its effects.
As rations began to run low, all the live geese, chickens and pigs having been eaten and the ship’s stores rotting in the excessive heat, Mary’s apprehension must have grown. Would she and the others die here, in the midst of the glassy sea? Would the wind ever rise again? She drank the foul water and ate her share of the bony, dry flying fish the cook prepared, her skin itching and her baby kicking, praying for relief from the torments of the doldrums.
Accidents began to curse the fleet. Sails split or shredded and had to be replaced, one of the store ships, the Golden Grove, lost a mast three times and another, the Borrowdale, underwent a similar mishap. On the Alexander, one evening, a seaman who was taking in a sail fell overboard and sank before a longboat could rescue him. On a night of heavy seas, the cookhouse on the Friendship was swept overboard, pots, pans, trenchers, roasting spits and all. A sixty-year-old woman convict aboard the Lady Penrhyn fell down the steerage companionway and broke two ribs. And another convict on the Prince of Wales, Jane Bonner, had the misfortune to be standing in the way when a longboat got loose and rammed her against the side of the ship. It was nearly dark when the accident happened, and although Surgeon White was summoned, he could not take the risk of going in a longboat from the Charlotte to the Prince of Wales, visibility being so low. He waited until morning, by which time Jane Bonner had died.4
On the night of July 22, three marines bribed a sentinel and entered the hold where the women convicts were. All three were caught and court-martialled, one receiving three hundred lashes, another a hundred lashes as punishment. The incident was one of many. With the doldrums and the onset of accidents came disorders, unrest, suicide attempts (punished with flogging or solitary confinement), violations of orders and an edgy irritation that affected crew and convicts alike and led to outbreaks of violence. A marine on the Prince of Wales got drunk, quarreled with some of his fellow soldiers and then jumped down the main hatchway, happening to land on the wife of an officer. On Mary’s ship the Charlotte, a marine was whipped for “unsoldierlike behavior,” and the regular Saturday night drinking parties for marines and officers, captains and surgeons became ungovernable free-for-alls, with loud and abusive arguments breaking out and the men accusing one another of loutish behavior. Convicts plotted mutinies, stole scraps of metal—pots, iron hinges, brass instruments, belt buckles, pewter spoons—from which to make weapons, and manufactured counterfeit coins to use once they escaped.5
The longer the tedious and miserably uncomfortable voyage became, the more the convicts sank into depression and felt the need of a reason to live; for many, that reason was the dream and hope of revenge against the brutal officers and guards who treated them with rude contempt and carried huge sticks with which to beat them.6
Quarrels broke out between the ships’ masters and the surgeons, whom the masters habitually abused, and between the officers and the naval agent, the agent wanting to accomplish the voyage as rapidly as possible, the officers hoping to spare their ships and men and allow for long layovers in port. There were endless clashes over how much sail to carry, especially after the winds began to rise at the end of July, and over whether to tack in a squall—which the merchantmen generally did—or to head into the wind with lots of sail out, as was the naval custom at the time. The convoy had already lost a good deal of canvas through sails being blown off the yards and masts lost. With the strongest winds yet to come in the high southern latitudes, squabbles grew more vehement over the need for caution versus the temptation to try to complete the voyage in record time.
Over the long weeks of cramped, wretched sailing friendships corroded and even the most congenial shipmates tended to become irritable with one another. Surgeon White developed a toxic grudge against his assistant Surgeon Balmain. Crew members fought over insignificant incidents. There was tension aboard all the vessels, made worse by drink and by the illness and fear induced by heavy seas that battered at the ships late in July.
Amid the turmoil, it was the convicts who suffered most, and who most rejoiced when at last word was spread through the fleet that a lookout aboard the Supply had sighted land.
The cry “Land ho!” rang out at midafternoon on August 2, and on the following day, through the haze, the high eminence of Sugar Loaf could be glimpsed rising over the harbor of Rio de Janeiro.
For four weeks the convoy lay at anchor in the busy harbor, while Commander Phillip and his officers were honored and entertained by the Portuguese port officials and the ships were repaired and made ready for the most challenging part of the voyage. Cabbages, yams, bananas, guavas, lettuce, tropical fruit in abundance were brought on board, along with stringy beef and thin chickens. The water casks were filled and sweetened, and some of the sick convicts, fed on fresh rations, began to recover.
Relieved not to have to endure the constant motion of the ship, Mary rested, perhaps hoping that her baby would be born while in port. She was in her final month, and getting around was difficult. The weather was cool, the sky mostly clear. But by the time the convoy got under way again on September 4, the stormy weather typical of the South Atlantic tossed the vessels about on high seas, and water sloshed into the hold, washing Mary and the other convict women aboard the Charlotte out of their berths and making them ill.
Rain was beating at the Charlotte on the morning of September 8 when Mary went into labor. Her pains continued throughout the dark day until, toward four in the afternoon, her baby was born.
“On the evening of the eighth, between the hour of three and four, Mary Broad, a convict, was delivered of a fine girl,” Surgeon White noted in his journal.7 Mother and child lay on the hard planks in the dark wet hold, while the rain pounded against the deck and waves slapped noisily and insistently against the hull. Presently Mary could hear, over the sounds of rain and water, the cries of the mariners as they mounted the rigging to take in the sails for the night. With the canvas trimmed, the motion of the ship lessened; a gentler rocking replaced the heaving pitch and roll, almost, the new mother may have imagined, the rocking of a cradle.
Mary had decided to call her daughter Charlotte, after the ship—and the queen. She would also have her father’s name, Spence, for a record of paternity had to be kept for every child born to a female convict. Little Charlotte was a healthy baby, with a lusty cry, well made and strong. She did not appear to have suffered from being carried for nine months aboard a prison hulk and a convict transport.
Holding her baby in her arms, Mary slept, lulled by the rocking motion of the ship, the beating of the rain, the sighing and whistling of the wind, as the Charlotte moved out at speed and began to run down her eastings, headed for Cape Town.