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One bell of the afternoon watch

18th March 1753

Aboard Oraclaesus

The Atlantic

Flint’s leg-irons were secured by the curled-over end of an iron bar. Billy Bones got the bar nicely on to the small anvil he’d brought below for purposes of liberation, took up the four-pound hammer, frowned mightily for precision…and struck a great blow.

Clang! said the irons.

“Another,” said Flint.

“Aye-aye, Cap’n!”

Clang!

“Ahhh!” said Flint, and pulled the straightened bar through the holes in the loops that had encircled his ankles before hurling the irons with passionate hatred into the dark depths of the hold, where they rattled and clattered and terrified the ship’s rats as they went about their honest business.

“Dear me,” said Flint, not unkindly, “I do apologise, Lieutenant!” For the hurtling iron had knocked off the hat, and nearly smashed in the brow, of the goggle-eyed young officer of marines – he looked to be about seventeen – who knelt holding a lantern beside Billy Bones.

“You do give your parole?” said the lieutenant. “Your parole not to escape?”

“Of course,” said Flint, ignoring the nonsensical implication that there might be some place to escape to, aboard a ship at sea. He sighed, and stood, and stretched his limbs, then turned to the lad as if puzzled: “But has not Mr Bones already made clear,” he said, “that Captain Baggot was about to order my release?”

“Was he?” said the lieutenant, weighed down by responsibility and peering at Billy Bones as they got to their feet. Billy, for his part, was bathed in the warm smile of a man entirely free of responsibility, since all future decisions were now in the hands of his master.

In fact, Billy Bones was so happy that he was quite taken by surprise: “About to release Cap’n Flint?” he said doubtfully. But a glimpse of Flint frowning nastily was sufficient to restore his memory. “Ah!” said Billy Bones. “‘Course he was, Mr Lennox!” And recalling his manners, he jabbed a thumb at the red-coated officer. “This here’s Mr Lennox, Cap’n, sir…the senior officer surviving.”

“Senior officer…surviving?” said Flint, relishing the concept, before correcting Billy Bones. “You will address Mr Lennox as ‘sir’, for he bears His Majesty’s commission.”

“Oh!” said Bones, peering at the skinny youngster. Flint was right: he was out-ranked! Billy had never risen higher than master’s mate, a rank far below a marine lieutenant. This lapse of protocol embarrassed him, for contrary forces were now at work within Billy Bones. He was still Flint’s man, but – being aboard a king’s ship once more – he was starting to think in the old ways: the navy ways he’d followed before Flint.

“Beg pardon, sir, I do declare,” he said, saluting Lieutenant Lennox.

“Granted, Mr Bones,” said Lennox.

“Aye-aye, sir,” said Billy Bones, and attempting reparation in words, added: “At least you’re one o’ them what’s immune!”

“Am I?” said Lennox, and looked at Flint, sweating in anxiety.

“Oh, yes,” said Flint, placing a comforting hand on Lennox’s shoulder. “If you have not yet succumbed, then you are safe.” He nodded gravely. “For reasons known only to God, some ten men in every hundred are safe.”

Lennox closed his eyes and trembled in relief. “What about the rest?” he asked. “Will they die?”

“Yes,” said Flint, “most of them. I am very sorry.”

Lennox bowed his head and shed tears for his comrades. But so wonderful was the prospect of escaping the hangman that Flint had to pinch himself to affect solemnity and crush the urge to laugh! Merriment would not do: not now. It would undoubtedly upset Mr Lennox, who must be kept sweet until such time as Flint’s freedom was assured – and that time was some way off as yet.

“Come, Mr Lennox,” said Flint, with every appearance of kindness, “let us go on deck. I must know the worst, if I am to be of any help.”

Soon, Flint did know the worst, and it was a very dreadful worst. It was so bad that even he was shaken.

The ship stank worse than a slaver, and it echoed with a dreadful, communal moan, like a long discord of bass violins, which was the constant, unceasing groan of the dying: one voice starting up as another paused to draw breath, and dozens more in the background, over and over in a hideous choir of grief and pain.

The lower deck was a fetid dormitory of helpless men, swinging side by side, in massed, packed hammocks slung fore-and-aft from the deckhead beams, some with just eighteen inches of width per man. Such closeness was normally prevented at sea by the traditional watch system, which had half the hands on deck while the others slept, giving a comfortable thirty-six inches per man. But now, with most of the crew too sick to move or even to go to the heads, the lower deck was crammed – stinking, roiling, foul – with slimy hammocks that dripped a vile liquid mixture of urine, vomit and excrement.

That was bad enough, but the mutilating horror of the disease itself, on the faces and arms of the victims shivering in their blankets – cold in the steaming heat of the lower deck – was atrocious to behold. Some were in the full-flowering pustular rash of the disease, others were shedding skin in sheets, leaving raw, bleeding wounds. Still others were already – and very obviously – dead, with the tropical climate working upon them and rendering their bodies swollen and black.

Flint, Lennox and Bones, having come up from the hold, stood by the main hatchway plumb in the middle of the swaying hammocks and festering bodies. They crouched under the low deckhead and flinched from contact with the horrors around them and their stomachs heaved, for the stench was hideous beyond belief.

“God save us!” said Flint. “Can nothing be done with the stink?”

“No, sir,” said Lennox. “The fit hands won’t go below to clean and swab.”

“Won’t they, though?” said Flint. “We’ll see about that!” He affected grim resolve, but bells of joy rang inside his mind. Lennox – senior officer surviving – had just called him sir! Unlike Billy Bones, Flint had been a sea-service lieutenant, outranking the marine equivalent. Perhaps Lennox knew that? More likely he was desperate for someone to take over. It didn’t matter. Not so long as he said sir.

“Come!” said Flint. “We must go on deck.”

The three climbed the ladder up to the maindeck, with its lines of broadside guns, which was open to the skies at the waist, apart from the ship’s boats lashed to the skidbeams that spanned the gap. So the air was fresher, but conditions were as bad as the lower deck, with a dozen or more dying men wallowing in their own filth. One was sitting with his back against the mainmast, moaning and cursing in the ghastly act of peeling the skin from his hands so that it came off whole, like a pair of gloves.

Flint heaved at the sight: sudden, violent and helpless. He threw up over his shoes and shirt and coat-front, and staggered to one of the guns and sat on the fat barrel and glared at Billy Bones.

“Water!” he said. “Get water!” Lennox stood dithering while Billy Bones dashed off, and Flint stared up and down the ship. All the precision and cleanliness of a man-o’-war was gone. The deck was in vile disorder, with tackles and gear left muddled and un-secured. And the awful stench of the lower deck rolled up from below. Flint blinked. He who was so fastidious was be-smeared with his own vomit. He was ashamed. Ashamed he’d disgraced himself and…possibly…just possibly…he was ashamed of what he’d done in bringing the smallpox aboard.

But then Billy Bones was back, labouring with a full bucket of fresh water, and Flint was kneeling over it and ducking his head in it, and scrubbing himself clean.

“Ohhhh!” said Flint and shuddered, and shivered and shook. But then he mastered himself. He buttoned up his coat. He made himself as tidy as he could. He put on his hat. “Quarterdeck!” he said. “Come on!” And briskly he led the way up a ladder to the larboard gangway, and then aft past the barricade, to the quarterdeck, the capstan, the binnacle and the ship’s wheel, where a group of men were huddled with gaunt, frightened faces. They were mostly lower-deck hands, barefoot and pigtailed.

By sheer, ingrained habit of discipline, the appearance of Lennox in his officer’s coat and gorget had the hands saluting and standing to attention, each making an effort to hold up his head. They looked mainly to Lennox, but glanced at Flint and ignored Billy Bones completely.

Careful now, thought Flint, for he needed these men. “Who’s officer of the watch?” he said to Lennox.

“Me, sir!” said an elderly man with a long coat and a tricorne hat.

“Who’s he?” said Flint to Lennox.

“Baxter, sir. Ship’s carpenter, sir,” said Lennox.

“The carpenter? Are there no navigating officers?”

“All sick, sir. He’s the best we’ve got.”

“What of the captain and the lieutenants?”

“Bad sick, sir.”

“Sick but alive?”

“Yes, sir, thank God, sir.”

“Hmm…then how many fit men do we have aboard?”

“Don’t know, sir,” said Lennox, but Baxter stepped forward and saluted politely.

“Us here, sir. Us, an’ them there,” he said, and pointed.

Flint looked and saw a man in the foretop, and five hands standing by to trim the rigging if need be, although the ship was snugged right down under minimum possible sail: just close-reefed fore and main topsails.

“What course are you steering?” said Flint, and so it went on. The more questions Flint asked, the more Lennox deferred to him, and the more the hands took note, and spoke direct to Flint, and he to them, and Lennox gratefully stood back. Thus – cautiously at first – Flint took over. He straightened his back, he clasped his hands behind him…and…after a break of some four years devoted to other pursuits…he resumed his career as a British naval officer: pretended to, at any rate.

“So!” he said. “I have seen the disgraceful condition of this ship and am resolved to put it right in the name of King George, God-bless-him!”

“God bless him,” murmured the hands miserably.

“God bless him!” roared Flint. “And damn him as don’t!”

“God bless him!” they cried, for Flint had them in his eye now, and so did Billy Bones, who instinctively stood beside Flint, with scowling brow and fists clenched in the old way that had never failed him…and Mr Lennox looked on, like a three-legged horse at a steeplechase.

“I’m Flint,” said Flint. “You don’t know me yet, but soon you shall, and I’ll start by sending a team below with mops and buckets to clean away the filth. For I tell you two things: first, that you’re all safe from the pestilence, and second, that no man ever born shall suffer as any of you shall suffer who disobeys my orders!”

Lennox gaped, for there wasn’t even a token resistance from the men. But he looked at Flint and Bones again and understood. They were the very incarnation of the officer caste that the lower deck was bred up to obey. Meanwhile, Flint was still speaking…

“Mr Lennox himself shall lead you to your duties!” he said.

“Aye-aye, sir!” they said.

“Oh?” said Lennox, and “Aye-aye, sir!”

Soon, the bucket brigade was below, while the carpenter and two hands kept the ship on course, enabling Flint to have a private word with Billy Bones, aft at the taffrail.

“Where’s Ben Gunn, Mr Bones? You said he came aboard! He survived the smallpox as a child, so he should be among the living.”

“Oh, him!” said Bones contemptuously.

“What of him?”

“Went over the side, Cap’n, when we was putting to sea.”

“Did he now?”

“Aye, Cap’n: the minute he heard you was aboard.”

Flint laughed. “The old rogue! Did he drown?”

“No, Cap’n! Last seen swimming for shore. Going strong.”

“Pity. His was a mouth to be closed. Still –” Flint shrugged and turned to other matters “we have begun well, Mr Bones,” he said, “but the problem is hands!”

“Hands to work her, sir?”

“Aye, Mr Bones.” Flint looked at the ship with her towering masts and broad yards. She was the biggest vessel he’d been aboard for years, and a seaman’s delight. Over eight hundred tons burden, and mounting twenty-eight twelve-pounders, she was a superb modern frigate: lavishly equipped and even boasting copper plating on her hull – a recent innovation which gave greater speed than a normal hull and complete freedom from the ship-worm, that menace of tropical seas that burrowed into timber hulls and ruined them.

“Oraclaesus,” said Flint, savouring the name. “She came to the island with two hundred and fifty-one men aboard, including a commodore, a captain, three sea-service lieutenants, a sailing master, a lieutenant of marines – our Mr Lennox – and six midshipmen…” He smiled. “After misfortunes ashore, she came away with one hundred and eighty-five men, having lost her commodore, a lieutenant, three mids and a miscellany of foremast hands and marines.”

Billy Bones shook his head in wonderment.

“How d’you know all that, Cap’n?”

Flint sighed. “Have I not told you, Mr Bones, that I listened to those who came to feed us during our captivity?”

“Oh!” said Billy Bones. “I see.”

“Good. And do you also see that, once the smallpox has done its good work…” But here Flint swallowed and faltered, having seen the awful reality of the death he’d inflicted upon this splendid ship.

He looked away.

He hadn’t always been a villain.

There had been a time when he was proud to serve his king.

He felt the pull of being a king’s officer once more.

Even though it was supposed to be a pretence and a sham.

For he’d served aboard ships like this one, had Joe Flint. And aboard this particular ship the crew were England’s finest: mostly lads in their teens and twenties. They were hand-picked volunteers, to a man.

And Joe Flint trembled on the brink of remorse.

He trembled a long, hard moment… then:

“Urrrrgh!” he growled like an animal. Ordinary men wrestled with conscience, but Flint – who was neither ordinary, nor normal, nor even entirely sane – turned upon his in selfish fury. Why should he feel sorry? He who’d been robbed of a vast treasure? He who’d been brutally rejected by the only woman he’d ever loved? No! He spat upon conscience, he spurned it and reviled it, he seized it by the throat…and strangled it.

“Huh!” he said, and grinned, and pulled Billy Bones’s nose.

“Ow!” said Bones.

“So,” said Flint, “our situation is this: the smallpox should have killed nine out of ten, but we were lucky – I counted nineteen men on deck, plus the lieutenant. But that is still dangerously few for so great a ship as this.”

“Aye!” said Billy Bones. “I’d want fifty at least, just to sail her, and a hundred or more to man the guns.”

“Indeed, Mr Bones.” Flint looked out to sea. “Ah!” he said. “See those ships?”

“Aye, sir. Thems are Bounder and Jumper, the sloops in company with us.”

“Each having some fit men still aboard.”

“The which we can employ, Cap’n?”

“Yes. But we must avoid gentlemen with long coats.”

“Officers, Cap’n?”

“Indeed, for they might think it their duty to remind the hands of what I am.”

“What about them below? Cap’n Baggot and the rest?”

Flint smiled. “Those unfortunate officers who are ‘bad sick but still alive’?”

“Aye, Cap’n.”

“Why, Mr Bones, you and I shall visit them…to ease their suffering.”

Billy Bones bit his lip and looked at his boots.

“Especially,” said Flint, “we must visit Lieutenant Hastings and Mr Midshipman Povey, those old shipmates of ours who were witnesses to our past actions, and thereby have the power to put a rope around my neck.” He nodded: “And yours, too, Mr Bones. We must see to Hastings and Povey first of all, for our lives depend upon it!” He smiled. “What a blessing it is that we have them safe aboard this ship, laid in their hammocks and awaiting our visit!” He even laughed.

“Oh!” said Billy Bones, suddenly remembering something.

“What?” Flint frowned. Billy Bones radiated guilt.

“Well, Cap’n…I meant to say…”

“Say what?”

“Well, Cap’n, it were a great struggle, a-gettin’ of the squadron to sea…”

“Yes?”

“What with so many sick aboard all three ships…”

“So?”

“So Bounder, there –” Billy Bones looked at the distant sloop “– well, she had no navigating officer, and what with Mr Povey being so clever a young gentleman, and all others laid on their backs…”

“So?”

“So Mr Povey was given command of Bounder and is aboard her now.”