Читать книгу The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh - James Tucker - Страница 8

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‘LAGS away!’

This was the cry which, a few nights later, warned the transportees who had been respited that the time had come for them to be taken down to the hulk on the coast, in which they would be confined until the next convict ship was due to sail. Rashleigh and more than fifty other men were crowded into two large vans, handcuffed, heavily ironed, and chained together and to the van sides. As soon as all the prisoners were thus properly secured, the vans were driven off at a brisk pace towards an unknown destination. There were several of these convict hulks on the coast, and no hint was given to the prisoners as to which of them they were bound for. Rashleigh, however, recognized through the window familiar places and buildings, and knew that they were driving down the main Portsmouth Road. With the needful changing of horses, and by driving continuously, the vans reached the dockyard late on the following afternoon, and the prisoners were at once paraded on a wooden wharf, alongside which lay the gloomy hulk of the old Leviathan.

This vessel was an ancient ‘74 which, after a gallant career in carrying the flag of England over the wide oceans of the navigable world, had come at last to be used for the humiliating service of housing convicts awaiting transportation over those seas. She was stripped and denuded of all that makes for a ship’s vanity. Two masts remained to serve as clothesprops, and on her deck stood a landward-conceived shed which seemed to deride the shreds of dignity which even a hulk retains.

The criminals were marched aboard, and paraded on the quarter-deck of the desecrated old hooker, mustered and received by the captain. Their prison irons were then removed and handed over to the jail authorities, who departed as the convicts were taken to the forecastle. There every man was forced to strip and take a thorough bath, after which each was handed out an outfit consisting of coarse grey jacket, waistcoat and trousers, a round-crowned, broadbrimmed felt hat, and a pair of heavily nailed shoes. The hulk’s barber then got to work shaving and cropping the polls of every mother’s son, effecting in many cases such metamorphoses that Rashleigh was unable to recognize numbers of those who had come aboard with him. Before leaving the forecastle, each man was double ironed, and then taken on deck to receive a hammock, two blankets and a straw palliasse.

A guard marched the laden and fettered prisoners below decks, where they were greeted with roars of ironic welcome from the convicts already incarcerated there. The lower deck was divided up into divisions by means of iron palisading, with lamps hanging at regular intervals, and these divisions were subdivided by wooden partitions into a score or so of apartments, each of which housed from fifteen to twenty convicts. As Rashleigh and his companions were marched past the occupied pens, they were greeted by a chorus of the cry, ‘New chums! new chums!’ and howls of jeering laughter. In a few minutes all the new-comers were accommodated in their new quarters.

Rashleigh got little sleep that first night, being pestered by the silly tricks of the older hands, who delighted in tormenting the raw recruits. He managed to doze towards morning, and awoke to a consciousness of a most pungent and offensive smell. He glanced over the side of his hammock and saw that most of his pen-mates were up and gathered round a wooden tub — known as a ‘kid’ — into which they were dipping spoons. As he realized that it was from the contents of this tub that the disgusting smell came, his messmates told him that this was breakfast and that he had best hurry if he wished to have any. He was hungry enough and obeyed the summons with haste. He filled a borrowed tin can with the foul-stenched mess, and took a spoonful. The taste made him splutter, being, if anything, more loathsome than its smell, and he gave up the idea of breakfast forthwith. The ingredients, he was told, were a very coarse barley, and the tough meat which was the convicts’ allowance on alternate days, boiled together until it became the malodorous, tacky mess in the tub.

The dietary on the hulk, apart from this so-called soup, was a portion of cheese of the maximum indigestibility three days per week. On the days when meat was not allowed, breakfast and supper consisted of a pint of coarse barley plain-boiled in water, and in addition each man was given one pound of black bread, with a pint of sour vinegar miscalled table beer.

Work of some kind was provided for all the convicts, a certain number being detailed in cleaning the hulk, cooking, and as servants to the officers. The rest were sent each day to labour in the dockyard in gangs. Rashleigh, without any consideration for his fitness for the work, was placed in a timber gang, and found himself yoked with about twenty others to a large truck, each man being attached by a broad hempen band which was fixed over one shoulder and under the opposite arm. The foreman of each gang was a veteran sailor of the Royal Navy, who was apt to visit upon the convicts the same kind of tyranny as he had been subject to from his officers when he had been on shipboard, though his mercy could be purchased by the price of drinks, obtainable at the local taps.

Rashleigh’s ganger was a natural tyrant who delighted in the crippling and injuring of the men in his charge. They were all ignorant of the correct way of handling timber, and he would deliberately compel his gang to proceed so awkwardly that great baulks of timber would crash from the skids and smash a leg or an arm. These injured were carried off to the hospital, where their death or recovery depended upon the whim of the naval surgeon, whose coarse joke was ‘that he was getting terribly out of practice, and the amputation of a few limbs was just the thing he needed to keep him from getting rusty.’ While Rashleigh was attached to the hulk, scarcely a week passed without some poor devil giving the surgeon the practice he required.

Rashleigh, being unused to such heavy manual work, was at once treated as a skulker and malingerer, and so came in for a double share of oppression. Overstrained, bullied, and more than half starved, he came to look forward with a feeling of relief to the day when the ship should arrive that was to take him to New South Wales. There was small comfort in this, however, as a vessel had sailed a few days before his reaching the hulk, and another was not expected to leave for three months.

The terrible strain was too much for his constitution, and he fell ill, and being transferred to the hospital ship, he was prodigally treated with purgatives, bleedings and blisterings, until he was as near dead as a man well could be. The rest, however, despite the vigorous medicinal treatment, benefited him and he managed to survive by pouring into the urinal the medicines that were given him, and after some weeks graduated to the convalescent ward.

One day three patients died, and Rashleigh was one of the gang of convalescent convicts chosen to form the burial party, over on the Gosport side, in a graveyard known as Rat’s Castle. When the grave had been dug, the guard waved a signal, and the gang sat around among the unnamed mounds, which were the graves of convicts, awaiting the coming of the boat to take them back. Rashleigh fell into a mood of profound melancholy, when suddenly the idea of escape flashed through his mind. In a glance he took in the fact that the guard was some distance away with his back turned, that the boat had not yet left the side of the hospital ship, and that most of his fellow-convicts were asleep on the ground. Ten yards away were the ruins, affording a fine screen from observation, and beyond them the water. It might be done. The irons had been struck from one leg while he was ill, the chains being attached to one side only, so that there was a good chance that he could swim in spite of them, as the weather was warm. About a mile up the shore was a thicket of osiers in which he could conceal himself while endeavouring to remove his irons.

Not giving himself time to hesitate, he slipped across to the ruins, dodged through them, flung off what clothing he could, and slipped silently into the stream, swimming away softly. No sound of an alarm came, and he proceeded painfully but surely, swimming, wading and floating, until he reached the osiers, where he found a small creek, up which he swam until he came to a thickly-wooded spot. He scrambled ashore and sat down for awhile in hiding to recover his spent strength. Urged by the imperativeness of putting as wide a distance as possible quickly between him and the hated hulk, he set to work to try to wriggle himself out of his irons. It was painful, galling work, but owing to his emaciation he managed at last to slip the fetter from his raw and bleeding ankle.

He threw the fetter and his trousers into the deep water and swam across the river, making towards a pile of buildings which he could just make out at a short distance in the gathering dusk. He found that they were cattle-sheds, but there was no house near; and in any case he was unwilling to encounter anybody in his state of complete nakedness. He decided to put in his night among the cattle. He made a deep pile of some litter, and burrowing his way into the centre of it for warmth, went to sleep until dawn. He was awakened by a boy coming to turn out the cattle. By the time he had thoroughly realized where he was, the lad had got some distance from the sheds. Rashleigh yelled to him, and the boy came up to him gaping with astonishment. Rashleigh told him the story that he was a poor sailor who, having got drunk the previous night and lain down by the water-side, had awakened to find himself stripped of all his clothes, and he begged the lad with great earnestness to find him some sort of clothes with which to cover himself until he could get to Portsmouth. The boy promised to do the best he could and set off for his master’s house, returning in about an hour with a blue smock and checked shirt and a wagoner’s hat and a pair of cord breeches and low shoes. They were all old and worn, but clean enough, and when Rashleigh had put them on, the boy told him that he could go up to the house, where he might get something to eat if he were hungry. Rashleigh thanked him and asked the way to the house, saying that he would go and wash himself in the river and follow when he was ready.

In a few minutes he had thoroughly cleansed himself and prepared to face life anew in the guise of a country bumpkin. Hungry as he was, he thought it might be indiscreet to take advantage of the hospitality suggested by the boy, as his main concern was to increase the distance between himself and the hulk. He therefore set off at a brisk pace along the stream, but after going about a mile, he heard a woman’s voice hailing him:

‘Hi, Tummas, I zay!’

At first Rashleigh did not realize that the woman was hailing him, but after walking on for awhile, he heard the voice close behind him roar out: ‘Darn thee, Tummas! Stop, I zay!’

At this he turned suddenly and found himself fronting a pretty country girl of about sixteen or seventeen years of age, who was very much out of breath and for some moments stood, gaping with astonishment at finding herself with a stranger.

‘Why,’ she stammered, ‘thee bain’t Tummas, arter all!’

‘No, I am not Thomas, my pretty dear,’ agreed Rashleigh, ‘but I would be just as willing as he could possibly be to do anything to oblige you.’

The girl was staring intently at the clothes which Rashleigh was wearing.

‘Drat it! This be so loike our Tummas’s slop. Why, I could a’most ha’ sworn to it by the patch on the back!’

‘And very likely,’ replied Rashleigh. ‘It probably was your Thomas’s slop, for it was given to me about a mile back by a boy after I had been robbed of all my clothes.’

‘What! Robbed of your clo’es, all on ‘em?’ cried the girl, shocked. ‘And did ‘em leave thee quite naked?’

‘They did so,’ answered Rashleigh. ‘And I have got a very long way to go without a penny to help myself.’

‘Poor fellow!’ said the country girl. ‘If thee’d care to come back again a bit, mother’ll give you zummat to eat, and thee looks as if thee’d be the better for that.’

Rashleigh decided that it was, after all, worth the risk, and he went with the girl to the cottage in which she lived with her mother, who listened with sympathy to the story of his night of misadventure while she prepared a substantial breakfast of bread, bacon, and small beer.

As soon as he had done, Rashleigh pleaded his need of haste and set off at once in the direction of Winchester, and on Portsdown Heath he overtook a pedlar who was burdened with a heavy bundle in addition to his pack. Rashleigh, adopting a country dialect, fell in with the man, who, finding that their destinations were in a similar direction, offered Rashleigh a shilling if he would carry the bundle for him to the end of the day. Rashleigh, being penniless, was only too glad to avail himself of the offer, and accompanied the man until evening, when he received his shilling, and the two of them went into the village inn for a bite of supper.

None of the company took any notice of Rashleigh as he entered, and having eaten his bread and cheese, he sat quietly in a corner, slowly drinking his beer. He was on the point of dozing off, when suddenly the inn door was flung open and a file of soldiers marched in and guarded both doors. The sergeant in charge of them then walked round the room, intently examining every one in the bar. Rashleigh had taken off his hat, and his close-cropped hair immediately caught the sergeant’s attention, and he asked Rashleigh his name.

‘Thomas Harper,’ he lied.

‘What are you?’

‘A labouring man.’

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Havant.’

‘Oh, do you?’ said the soldier. ‘And when were you there last?’

‘A week ago.’

‘Humph! A week ago! And where have you been since?’ pursued the sergeant remorselessly.

‘Why, at Portsmouth, if you must know,’ replied Rashleigh, who was beginning to lose his temper at the pertinacity of his questioner, who now drew his sword.

‘Yes, at Portsmouth. That is true, anyhow. I know that, because you ‘listed there.’

‘Me, ‘listed!’ cried Ralph haughtily. ‘No, indeed I did not, my good fellow.’

‘Ha, ha! my country labourer!’ said the sergeant with a laugh. ‘Whoever heard of a countryman from Havant talk in a toney tongue like that!’

Rashleigh cursed himself for a fool for allowing his anger to overcome his discretion so that he spoke in his normal London accent.

‘No, no, my fine shaver,’ continued the sergeant, ‘you never came from Havant; and now I have got you, I’ll take good care you don’t go there, neither.’

At this he gave a sign to two of his men, who seized Rashleigh and secured him with a pair of handcuffs, whereupon the whole party went outside the inn. They took possession of a hayloft and had supper brought to them, after which Rashleigh was secured to two of the soldiers by handcuffs, and the three of them lay together in the hay to sleep.

Rashleigh was more annoyed than perturbed at the predicament in which he had been placed, because he felt confident that the mistake of arresting him as a deserter must be discovered immediately he came up for examination.

They breakfasted at a very early hour the next morning, and immediately set off to march to Portsmouth. The sergeant walked alongside Rashleigh, and taunted him with his folly in trying to impose upon an old soldier by endeavouring to pass himself off as a countryman. Rashleigh answered shortly that they would soon find out their mistake.

‘Why, then,’ jeered the sergeant, ‘I suppose you are some king’s son in disguise! Well, next time you desert from the Army, I would advise you to buy yourself a wig, for it was the cut of your hair that gave you away.’

Infuriated by this reminder of his stupidity in having removed his hat the previous night, and by the sergeant’s sarcasm, he replied haughtily that he was no deserter and he had never enlisted in his life, and expressed the opinion that the life of a dog was better than that of a soldier, and for his own part he would rather turn a nightman than enlist. The sergeant flew into a rage at this insulting remark, and threatened to knock Rashleigh’s teeth down his throat if he said another word, and for the remainder of the journey the guard joined the sergeant in baiting the prisoner.

They reached the ‘lines’ of Portsmouth in the evening, and Rashleigh was confined for the night in the guard-room. Next morning he was removed to Gosport Barracks, where, as he had predicted, it was quickly discovered that he was not the deserter in whose pursuit the party had been dispatched, and the sergeant received a sound rating for his stupidity in arresting the wrong man. He was immediately set at liberty, but he had the misfortune to encounter the sergeant as he was crossing the barrack square. Rashleigh was so elated at his escape, that he could not resist the chance of abusing the man roundly for the oppression which he had heaped upon him on the trip to Portsmouth. The sergeant saw the opportunity for avenging the insult to his dignity, roared for the guard, and gave Rashleigh in charge for abusing him while on duty. He was handcuffed and confined to the watch-house, and in the evening was brought before the Mayor of Portsmouth.

His concocted story of who he was and how he came to be dressed in the clothes of a country labourer, failed properly to convince either the mayor or the clerk of the Bench, who called the sergeant to state his case. The complaint lost nothing in its voluble telling, and concluded with a statement that the prisoner had threatened to kill the witness.

‘Upon my word,’ said the magistrate, glaring at Rashleigh, ‘a very pretty fellow to abuse the honourable profession of a soldier, who spends his life fighting for his King and country, while such rapscallions as you skulk through that same country, looking for opportunities to rob their neighbour’s hen-roost. Come, what have you to say for yourself, you blackguard?’

Rashleigh’s reply was to the effect that the witness had greatly exaggerated his offence, that he had not threatened the man’s life, but had only reproached him for the harshness with which he had been treated while a prisoner under his charge.

Two or three of the sergeant’s comrades-in-arms thereupon stepped forward, offering to corroborate the accusations against the prisoner, but the Mayor, having intimated that he would not trouble them when the case was so obviously established, addressed Rashleigh.

‘Now, my fine fellow,’ he said sarcastically, ‘you thought to impose upon this court with your lying story. Well, this is the way we deal with such insufferable scamps as you—you can go to jail for a month as a rogue and vagabond who has failed to give a proper account of himself, by any manner of means. But I won’t give you that light sentence; I’ll remand you for a week as a suspicious character, and I have little doubt that before the week has passed we shall have the hue and cry after you for some villainous depredation. Take him away!’

As he was being taken from the Mayor’s court, he saw one of the guards of the Leviathan standing by, probably waiting to report the escape of a convict. This man immediately walked up to Rashleigh and scrutinized him carefully, snatching off the wagoner’s hat.

‘Aha! my pretty-spoken gentleman!’ he cried, recognizing him at once. ‘So you’re nabbed already, are you!’

In a few moments Rashleigh stood again before the Mayor, who heard with obvious delight the true identity of the fellow whom he had so shrewdly suspected. Knowing well how escaping convicts were dealt with on recapture, he was content to hand Rashleigh over to the hulk authorities for punishment. Strongly ironed and chained, he was now removed to the hulk with a pistol-barrel pressed against his temple, and was at once confined in a dungeon known as the Black Hole, situated in the ship’s eyes below water-level, and left there solitary, except for the company of droves of rats, without food. The tedious hours wore horribly away, and in the utter darkness he only learnt that the day had dawned through the sound of tramping feet on deck as the convicts set off to work. It was some hours after this before his prison door was opened by the guard, who took him up to the quarter-deck. Here, impressive and terrifying in their full-dress uniforms, were assembled the captain, his mate, the surgeon, and other officers of the Leviathan. After a very brief trial, in which he could offer only the natural love of liberty as defence, he was sentenced to receive ten dozen lashes, in the presence of all the convicts, that same day.

He spent the day until sunset in the Black Hole, and was then led up to the quarter-deck, passing between the lines of convicts who had been paraded to witness his punishment. The formality of reading over his offence and sentence was quickly performed, and the convict was ordered to strip. Naked, he was securely bound to the gratings which had been lashed to the bulwarks, and a powerful boatswain’s mate stood ready with the lash.

Rashleigh had been warned by other victims of the lash that shrieking and writhing only added to the pain, so whilst he was being secured to the grating he had caught his shirt in his teeth like a gag, so that he could not so much as whisper.

The first dozen strokes from the knotted raw-hide lash were like jagged wire tearing furrows in his flesh, and the second dozen seemed like the filling of the furrows with molten lead, burning like fire into the raw flesh. These two sensations of intense and intolerable pain alternated until the first four dozen — each of which was laid on by a separate seaman with a fresh lash — had been applied, after which his whole body seemed numbed, and the feeling during the remaining six dozen was curiously as though his lacerated and bloody back was receiving heavy thuds from great clubs.

The flogging endured for longer than an hour, and when he was unbound he collapsed insensible on to the deck, whence he was borne to the hospital ship. Resuscitation was effected brutally, and he came to his senses screaming with the pain inflicted by the salt dressing which had immediately been applied to his unsightly back. The pain caused by this rudimentary treatment was infinitely worse than anything he had felt during the actual flogging, so that he was nigh driven out of his mind by the stabbing, gnawing horrors of the action of the salt upon his wounds. He cursed and roared under the treatment, which was repeated every day as each new dressing was applied, though it was the rough stripping of the old ones from the festering back that gave Rashleigh a never-fading memory of the torture of being flayed alive.

Some tough qualities of constitution and spirit, however, brought him through his continuous ordeal, and after a month or so he was convalescent, recovering just in time to join a draft of convicts for New South Wales, by the good ship Magnet of London, Captain James Boltrope.

A vessel named Magnet conveyed despatches from Governor Darling and the Colonial Office for several years, at this period.