The Spitfire had not escaped unscathed from her encounter with the American privateers. In addition to the shot-hole in the hull and the torn copper sheathing, her the beaten-in bulwarks, damaged boat, rent foresail and wounded main boom, her main topmast was found to have a ball embedded in it and the morning following the action announced the fact by carrying away. A second ball was found in the lower mast which fortunately stood the strain after it had been fished.
Thus shorn of her main upper spar and labouring under an over-full bilge, the British schooner sought a refuge in Porto Grande in the Cape Verde Islands, where Kite knew he could take water. There was, as far as Kite could see of the barren looking mountains of the island of São Vicente, precious little verdant about them, but he was able to work Spitfire inshore, anchor and careen her sufficiently to get at the shot-hole. Anticipating a prolonged stay in Indian waters he had also taken aboard a quantity of copper and from this prudently laid-in stock, replaced the missing sheets which had been torn away during the ten day passage from Madeira to São Vicente.
Unfortunately he was was short of a spar suitable to replace Spitfire’s heavy lower mainmast. However, hearing of the arrival of a large British convoy under the escort of a naval squadron at the neighbouring island of São Tiago, he ordered Spitfire under weigh as soon as she was fit for sea and arrived there on 12 April, hoping to purchase a suitable spar from one of the convoy.
Porto Praya Bay was crowded with anchored merchantmen and their escort, a small squadron of men-of-war. Besides frigates and sloops, Kite counted five ships-of-the-line, the chief of these being the 74-gun Hero, flying the broad pendant of a commodore. Passing through the anchored shipping, Kite brought Spitfire up to her own anchor close inshore and then, having hoisted out the repaired boat, made the rounds of the nearest merchantmen. He soon learned that the expedition was commanded by Commodore Johnstone and was bound for the Cape of Good Hope with the intention of taking that province from the Dutch. The merchantmen in convoy were therefore almost exclusively troop-transports or military store-ships and well provided.
Kite had little trouble finding a master willing to sell him a spar and in due course had this hoisted over-board and towed back alongside Spitfire. He then set the hands to work. The new spar was pulled ashore and drawn up onto the beach. Here, amid a curious little crowd of on-lookers, it was cut to the appropriate size. Meanwhile on board the old mast was stripped of its rigging and all accessible iron-work and this latter was then taken ashore to be fastened to the replacement. By the evening of the 15th, having entirely stripped down the damaged mast and erected a short sheerlegs across the deck of the schooner, Kite’s crew prepared to withdraw it the following morning. The transfer of the upper iron-work, once completed, would ready the new spar for substitution and these two tasks were expected to take the whole of the 16th, the hoisting in of the new mast and re-rigging being completed two or three days later. It was thus in considerably high spirits that all hands turned in that night. Kite lingered a while on deck, staring up at the distant constellations wheeling over head. Beside him stood McClusky, less impressed by the firmament than his master, but pleased that Captain Kite had acknowledged his ability.
‘You shall keep our anchor-watch while we employ the people so busily throughout the heat of the day, Michael,’ Kite had said, ‘and we shall turn you into a second mate before we reach Bombay, should you so desire.’
The quondam clerk, who alone among the Spitfire’s people had regretted the failure of the American privateersmen to board and allow him to prove his personal valour in hand-to-hand combat, expressed the fact that he should like nothing better.
‘Is it true that the Indian Seas are as warm and pacific as these hereabouts, Captain Kite?’ he asked, for the novelty of standing on deck at midnight in his shirt-sleeves impressed McClusky.
‘I am given to understand they are warmer, Michael, though, like the West Indies they are occasionally subjected to wild and boisterous hurricanoes.’
McClusky did not think there was much to worry about in a wind described as wild and boisterous, and what he had gleaned during his years in Captain Kite’s counting house about the West Indies, suggested that much money and rum were the chief exports of such tropical places. He expressed his satisfaction and gratitude to Kite who, giving the matter little thought, wished McClusky a good night and left him to his lonely vigil.
Michael McClusky, whatever dreams of glory had been hatched out of his new situation in his imagination, remained at heart a counting house clerk. He possessed no ingrained instinct as a seaman and was incapable of remaining absolutely alert throughout the night. Nevertheless he was not irresponsible and woke from a fitful slumber on the after grating, gritty eyed and possessed of a sudden anxiety. He could not at first say where this apprehension came from; it was not entirely his own guilt, for he was not that sensitive to such matters, but he felt a genuine unease worming in his guts. Rubbing his eyes he stared about him: it was already light but the sun had yet to rise. The deck looked as it had at midnight under the light of the lantern. Then he knew why he had woken and what had woken him, for the thunder came again, rolling across the bay so that McClusky jumped to his feet and stared wildly about him.
To seaward, beyond the veritable forest of masts and yards that marked the anchored British shipping, the pale squares of sails stood into Porto Praya Bay. Two ships approached, each flanked by blooms of smoke, evidence of their hostile intent. The fact that they were grossly outnumbered seemed not to deter them, for they had caught Commodore Johnstone and his men-of-war napping. From where he stood, McClusky could see only the bold vanguard of the enemy, unaware that other enemy vessels were offshore. Nevertheless, the noise of the guns spurred him to action and he called all hands on deck.
There was little that anyone aboard the Spitfire could do; they were mere spectators as the two large French ships-of-the-line, followed by a frigate, came to their anchors amid the British shipping. The most advanced opened a furious cannonade on the British ships anchored on either beam, while the second, penetrating deeper into the road, anchored ahead of his commodore, but then seemed less anxious to get into action. The frigate’s part was less spectacular as she engaged an Indiaman from the convoy and then, having grappled her, withdrew to seaward. Far in the distance two other ships-of-the-line could now be seen, identified through the tangle of the anchorage by the pale rectangles of their wind-filled sails.
The engagement did not last long. Once the British seamen had manned their guns and returned the cannonade, the French ships weighed, set sail and retired, taking with them a solitary prize of the grappled Indiaman. The ships offshore never got into action and the mood in the anchorage was one of jubilation that the ‘impudent Frogs’ had been driven off. Owing to their preoccupation in drawing the damaged mainmast and preparing its replacement, less thought was given to the morning’s thunder in the bay aboard Spitfire than in any other British ship assembled off Port Praya.
But in fact the apparently indecisive action in the Cape Verde Islands was to have a profound effect, for Commodore Johnstone had been discomfited. He remained at Porto Praya for a further fortnight and then, aware that the French would beat him to the tip of Africa, he threw up his intention of taking Cape Province from the Dutch and headed for home. The French Commodore, a certain Pierre André de Suffren, had scored a notable success over the Royal Navy of Great Britain. It was not to be the last.
The action off Porto Praya was soon forgotten aboard the Spitfire. If it kindled further dreams of glory in the heart of Michael McClusky that was because he was no seaman and had little or nothing to do with the stepping and rigging of the new main-mast. In fact as the crew toiled, McClusky retired to his hammock, having stood the night watch alone. Here he lay for a while, contemplating the future and wondering whether he might reap some real profit from his master’s adventure until he fell asleep.
For Kite, Harper and the schooner’s company, the intense labour of refitting the ship filled all their waking hours. With the new mast stepped, the standing rigging had to be set up and rattled down. Then the topmast had to be sent aloft and its rigging set up, before the score or so of blocks were moused and then the halliards and topping lifts rove through them. Next, the throat halliard was used to lift the heel of the heavy boom and secure it to the goose-neck, situated on the lower mast about a man’s height above the deck. Once the boom was in position and its outer extremity topped up onto the gallows, the gaff saddle could be lodged about the mast, the mainsail relaced, hooped and tensioned along the boom prior to hoisting. At last, in the fresh breeze that blew constantly down from the heights of the island and kept the anchored vessels head to wind, the sail was set flapping.
Kite and Harper regarded it and pronounced themselves satisfied, but that was not the end of their labours. When the hands had completed this complicated and laborious task it was again necessary to top up their water casks before sailing. While Kite and the schooner’s company had been busy, Hooker, his wife and Sarah, taking Maggie to attend them, had, on the invitation of a Portuguese merchant, made an excursion into the island, dining with Senhor Soares and his family. Soares offered them a few days welcome hospitality and here, on the eve of their departure, Kite joined them for dinner, enjoying for a few brief hours the riches of the shore.
After dinner, looking down over the bay from the cool elevation of the merchant’s house, Kite stared at the anchor lights of the mass of shipping twinkling in the velvet darkness of the tropical night. From his vantage point at the window he was seeking out the glim in Spitfire’s forward rigging.
‘Cannot you forget the ship,’ William, Sarah called softly from the bed.
He turned and saw the pale shape of the netting over the bed and through the gauze, the stirring figure of his naked wife.
‘Sarah…’
‘Come, my darling…’ She parted the netting and, slipping off his breeches, he slid beside her as she reached up for him and prompted a ready tumescence. It was the first time they had made love since the death of little Emma.
From São Tiago they carried the north east trade winds south towards the Equator. In latitude 8º North the wind faltered and then died. They had entered the Doldrums and after a few days in the stultifying heat, the lack of a breeze and any progress shortened tempers and brought to a head a simmering matter of contention.
One hot afternoon, as the watch slumped on deck having spent an hour trimming the sails in anticipation of a breeze which seemed to falter a mile short of them, McClusky turned in a fury upon Hooker and declared that he could no longer tolerate the man’s stink.
Hooker, who had just followed McClusky on deck stood for a moment non-plussed, scarcely able to accept the vituperation. The hot weather and the consequent reduction in outer garments had made the mountainous man’s condition worse and sorely tried the tolerance of his fellow voyagers.
‘I come on deck,’ McClusky railled, ‘to avoid the stink down below and then you follow me, damn you for a festering bastard!’
Stunned, Hooker looked around. His insensitivity and self-denial, allied to a lack of awareness as to the distasteful pungency of his bodily smell, meant that he had little appreciation of the nature of his offence. The man on the tiller gazed fixedly at the compass, even thought the schooner had no steerage way upon her and rolled with a wearing and wearying slatting of gear and sails. From the forward limit of his pacing an astonished Harper, who had the watch, spun round to regard the two men standing aft by the companionway, while the other seamen on watch, together with the idlers lying about the deck in various stages of indolence, stared with interest at the principals in this promising altercation. The dacoits, whose customary airing place was, by mutual, consent right forward, stirred and three came aft to their master’s defence.
Seeing himself the cynosure for all eyes, Hooker’s ire broke from the confines of surprise and reticence. He confronted the impudent counting-house clerk before him, pulling himself up to his full six and a half feet of outraged and trembling corpulence
‘Do you address me, sir?’ he raged with a sudden anger, ‘do you, damn you?’
‘I do sir,’ the provoked McClusky bellowed back, ‘for you have the stink of a corpse about you!’
‘Why, damn your insolence…!’
Hooker lumbered forward, a vast and sweating mountain of a man, but McClusky, half his age and several stones lighter, dodged away. Immediately a cheer went up from the now alert and diverted crowd, followed by cries encouraging McClusky to greater mischief.
But as McClusky retreated along the deck, he was suddenly seized from behind by two of the dacoits while the third, grabbing McClusky’s hair, jerked his head back and put a knife at his throat. The former clerk froze in this hostile embrace.
As Hooker closed with his victim and the watchers froze, Zachariah Harper recalled himself to his duty and with a rapidity surprising in such a large man, interposed his own bulk between the constrained McClusky and the triumphant Hooker.
‘Now hold on there,’ Harper remonstrated. ‘First of all Mr Hooker there sure is a body of opinion on this vessel that you have about your person a distinct air akin to putrefaction…’ Hooker was about to explode when Harper, almost his equal in height and a far fitter man, held up a powerful arm. ‘Mr Hooker! Recall I command the deck, sir!’
‘And I command your damned pay…!’
‘Be circumspect, damn it…!’
‘Stop!’ The curt order cut through the hot air. Kite stood at the after companionway, his shirt stuck to his body. He had been dozing uneasily below when the altercation on deck had disturbed first Sarah and then her husband. Ordering his wife to remain where she was to restrain Rose Hooker from any intemperate outburst, he ran up the companionway ladder to intervene. Kite had caught the two large men on the point of trading blows for insults. Just beyond Harper, McClusky’s face was white with terror as the dacoit’s knife glittered at his throat.
Summing up the situation in an instant, Kite advanced on the dacoits and, without taking his eyes off them, said, ‘Josiah, I’d be obliged if you’d call your dogs off this instant!’
Hooker mumbled a few words of Hindi and the three men let McClusky go. Released, the young man stumbled forward and fell abjectly on his knees. Kite ignored him as, gasping with shame and terror McClusky clambered slowly to his feet. Kite rounded upon Hooker and Harper.
‘Now gentlemen,’ he said in a low voice, ‘let us have an end to this immediately. I am going to order the watch to man the fire-buckets. Then I am intending to strip myself of my clothes and order water thrown over me. I shall scour myself until I feel clean and both of you are going to do likewise.’ Kite stared at each of the antagonists in turn and then regarded McClusky. ‘You shall join us too, McClusky, but first go below and present my compliments to my wife and Mrs Hooker. Ask them to remain below but beg two bars of soap from my wife and bring them here. D’you understand me?’
‘Yes, Cap’n,’ said the humiliated clerk.
Kite caught the eye of a watching seaman. ‘Ah, Stocks, do you and your mates stand by to fling the contents of the fire buckets over us. We are minded to bathe. You may have some sport in the matter, if you wish. Now gentlemen,’ Kite returned his attention to the two big men who stood at his either elbow, ‘let us divest ourselves.’
He took off his shirt and, folding it laid it over the gunwhale of the chocked boat in the larboard waist. Around the three men the dacoits and the crew watched with interest. ‘Zachariah…’ Kite growled through clenched teeth, ‘oblige me, if you please.’
With a marked reluctance Harper hesitated and then, as Kite stepped out of his breeches to a general snigger, he followed suit. More laughter accompanied this indecent exposure, but Stocks had already mustered his fellow seamen and, grinning widely a quintet of them were assembling in a circle round the three gentlemen, giggling at the natural state of them. Kite’s taut lean body appeared almost slight by comparison with the heavily muscled Harper. Both had the weather-beaten head and forearms of seafarers, whereas Hooker’s flesh, for all his years in the Indian sun, bore a pallid sheen which, it was immediately obvious, gave off a revoltingly sweet and obnoxious odour. Caught in the creases and folds of his lardy and corpulent mass, this subcutaneous secretion was revealed as the source of his unpleasantness. As for Hooker’s face, it was scarlet with humiliation and embarrassment.
McClusky arrived with the soap, his face distorted with distaste at the manifestation of Hooker’s problem. Ignoring the appalled young man, Kite retained one bar for himself and conspicuously handed the second to Hooker. ‘There, Josiah,’ he said in a low and insistent tone, half-gagging at his proximity to the obese monster, ‘do you rub with the utmost vigour or, by God, I shall have you publicly scoured to put an end to this unpleasantness.’
‘But this is an outrage Kite, damn you…’ Hooker hissed miserably, tears filling his eyes and the beginnings of sobs racking his wobbling frame.
‘You do most assuredly stink villainously, Josiah,’ Kite muttered, his teeth clenched and his nose wrinkled, ‘and I shall have an end to it or prove it unavoidable.’ Kite turned to McClusky and raised his voice. ‘Come Michael, let us see what sort of a figure you cut. Hurry up now, there’s a good fellow.’
The silly jest provoked a laugh among the assembled men as McClusky stepped out of his breeches. Kite looked at Stocks. ‘You may soak us and then stay your hands while we soap ourselves. Afterwards, when I give the signal, you may throw as much water as you can draw from the sea and as fast as you can lift it.’
A gleeful mood of anticipation swept through the seamen. Then the first buckets were emptied over the four figures. Led by Kite they began to lather themselves, Kite’s bar of soap passing first to Harper and then to McClusky. Kite, keeping his eye on Hooker, kept chiding him. ‘Come sir, more ginger if you please, rub-a-dub-dub, sir, we are not three but four in the tub!’
Curiously the onlookers watched the folds of Hooker’s skin exfoliate a grubby smegma. The obese figure seemed to possess recesses hitherto unknown to the human species, a corpulence long unexposed to the light of day or unexplored by soap and water. To Hooker’s personal and malodourous exudations were added his neglect of even a primitive hygiene and it was as though he sloughed off an entire epidermal layer so that afterwards, recalling the strange events of that afternoon, the seamen pointed to a darker portion of Spitfire’s deck, nicknaming it ‘Hooker’s grease-pan’, or ‘Greasy shoal’.
As Kite, Harper and McClusky completed their soaping, the sky grew suddenly dark and the first drops of rain began to fall. So absorbed in the incident and the subsequent ablutions had they all become, that no-one had noticed the rapid approach of the cloud. The great cumulo-nimbus towered high into the sky but behind its vast shadow it drew not only rain but a sudden, chilling drop in the temperature and a squall of wind. Within half a minute the hitherto becalmed Spitfire was driving along, her over-canvassed hull trying to bury its lee rail so that a roil of foaming water roared alongside, bursting over the rail and causing pools to form between the guns.
The sudden heel threw McClusky, Hooker and his unhandy dacoits off their feet and they tumbled to leeward, falling into the water swirling in the scuppers amid cries of dismay that echoed the screams of the frightened women below. Harper, giving out his wildest Iroquois whoop to which his nakedness added a bizarre aptness, leapt for the tiller, his face cracked into an immense grin. Kite grabbed the gunwhale of the boat and kept his feet, stung by the icy chill of the rain which now turned into hailstones.
These beat a tattoo on the deck and felt like a flogging on the bare flesh. Hooker, McClusky and the dacoits now howled with real pain as Kite, gasping with the sharp agony, ducked under the bilge of the chocked boatto the barely suppressed amusement of the soaked but gleeful crew.
Then it was all over; the bulk of the cloud had passed above them a mile away and the sun was abruptly warm upon their shoulders, setting the deck steaming and, as Hooker, McClusky and the Indians picked themselves up on the levelling deck, they were confronted with the near hysterical laughter of the ship’s company.
‘You crowd of damned racoons!’ Harper began, but then his natural sense of humour prevailed and he joined in the hilarity. Kite too found the welcome warmth of the sunshine restored his spirits in an instant. After some ten minutes of this mayhem, Kite bellowed for silence.
‘Very well, my lads. Now let us pipe down. The watch on deck will take a wash like this every morning until we are ten degrees beyond the Tropic of Capricorn.’
And thus did Kite cure Hooker’s skin condition and improve the cleanliness of his crew, burying in the jolly mood of levity the discomfiture of Josiah Hooker who, though he crawled below still humbled by what he had been forced to do, had the presence of mind to return on deck once he had dressed himself, and was thus held by the men to have behaved like a thorough sportsman. An Englishman could pronounce no greater compliment, and since he afterwards stunk no more than anyone else on board, Josiah Hooker’s dignity was thereby saved.