Mr Darwin's Shooter (8 page)

They weathered howling destruction in the Bay of Biscay, making course for Lisbon. Fear could be read in sailors' faces but the one face to watch was John Phipps's, that never showed anything but faith in his God's intentions.

Covington puked and moaned. Watched England sink like a plate in the suds. Felt he was being stolen but the feeling did not last. With stomach cramps doubling him over he learned to scramble and fetch. With a bar of holystone he scuffed decks hairier than any storms, and whenever he faltered looked around for John Phipps, his begetter in the life of the sea, and was rewarded by the sight of him, who was always in the act of obeying an order, running along deck in bare feet, hauling on sheets or hoisting himself up into the ratlines, his dark narrow face raised to the sky and seawater running down his beard.

When Covington was over his first spewing he knew he would be strong. He was hungry and chewed on a heel of bread and a rind of damp cheese. When the sea rose in a green wall, striped with foam, it amazed him and he started singing. He and his small friend Joey Middleton, who was in the same mood, practised sliding between-decks. Their bark, the
South Sea Castle
, flicked about like a fly in a bottle, and the worse it got the more they hooted and hurrahed, calling on the heavens to do their utmost. They were
like infants in a playpen the way they carried on. It made John Phipps somewhat proud. His band of pilgrims were all ship's boys now, nippers, odd-jobbers, and officers' servants. They spread their joy and it was a happy vessel. It was good to hear Phipps's accents of the countryside when the watch was changed at four in the morning, and the boys were called to vacate their hammocks:

‘Oi, sleep any longer and ye all shall be hanged. Come on rascals, Slow-pace Dell, out of there Foul-wind Wingate and Crook, tip you over Sleepy-head Middleton, will you?' When Phipps came to Covington he prodded him on the buttocks. ‘Is it the girl called Dull?'

‘Aye, and if you keep it up I will kiss you.'

When they were some way out from England their Christian captain faced his duty and called for the cat-o-nine-tails to punish shoregoing offenders. A few had rioted in Portsmouth and delayed the sailing.

It was fearful to watch. The bosun's mate braided a whip from rope and quarter-inch line, and fitted a red baize cover to the handle. The boys saw drunkards and malingerers baring their backs and taking their punishment with a rag between their teeth. ‘Here is an example for you, a foretaste of hell,' said Phipps. Bare human skin was a delicate parchment exposed to an underlining of blood and lymph by the dozen strokes the bosun's mate made. The captain and the surgeon watched as the cat was applied with pernickety precision. The very first lick caused a man to jerk his body around, while on the last he slumped. The sight made all the boys sick and they swore it would never be them. Covington stared in pity. Animals herded by his Pa in the Bedford stockyards were never flayed as fiercely, because their hides were differently valued.

The great trust that Covington had in the world's advancement of his fate, that he was born to and found only rarely shaken, he brought with him from Bedfordshire to the sea. It only rarely rankled that his duties were all odd jobs, and that his cheerfulness was taken advantage of in the same way his big brothers had used him. He swabbed decks, nailed boards, mended barrels, carried buckets of food to the officers' wardroom— and longed to be chosen for the clerk's job of transcribing the ship's log, so he could show his full mettle—but, whenever a messy task was to hand, such as plucking a fowl or despatching a goat, his butchering sire was invoked, and Covington was called upon to wield the knife.

When he came up for air he struggled forward along the spray-whipped deck and clung to the bowsprit. It was his instinct to dive into water to clean blood from his arms. The whim had to be fought aside, even on a ship sailing the depths of the ocean. Covington dangled over the lively green swirls watching the ship's figurehead dip and dive. She was a maid with hair streaming back, with small bold breasts and although she was just a piece of wood painted in simple colours, he fell in love with her, imagining himself to sleep at nights stroking her. She had fluted nostrils, dozy eyes, and a wide strong forehead.

A feeling Covington had in dreams of celestial highways
and lightbeams in clouds was translated into his experience of naval voyaging. Later there would be ghostly passages through narrows, blue fire trickling around masts in electrical disturbances; and there would be a giant ray flapping under the ship—it would be as big as the ship itself—and when the undersea animal turned and came beating its way back towards them as if to engulf all their timbers in its maw, Covington would have to be restrained from jumping overboard because of a wild conviction that got hold of him that he should wrestle with the creature and save them all. It would be his third ship by then.

The young man climbing the stile—John Bunyan's Christian rendered in coloured glass-panes—appeared at sea one day when Phipps threw Covington a rope as he staggered along the deck, and saved him from spinning overboard.

‘Thank Christ, John, it was you,' the boy spluttered, his hero-worship at its peak.

‘You thanked the right one first,' Phipps confided in him: ‘As for me, had I a thousand gallons of blood in my body, I could spill it all for the sake of the Lord Jesus.'

That night when Covington stretched himself to sleep he pictured Phipps wielding his sword repelling enemies, and the great admiral, the one that John knew, coming across the water on a shining barge to see all was well. This was the way Covington stayed safe on his path—his adventure out from home. John Phipps had Christ and Covington had John Phipps understanding Christ, and that was the truth of the matter.

Hammocks were piped down and it was sleep, palms held together under their chins in an attitude of trust. The sails leaned them into the night, high-walled and straining as the helmsman brought the vessel constantly up to the weather. Trickling and sloshing sounds accompanied them the whole way. They heard the vessel's timbers groaning apart, admitting water, creaking shut.

There was always a bias of gravity to one side or the other of a ship, a slope running up or down determining which way the boys went scuttling, with tin pots and lanterns clanking, and loose items sliding across the under-deck to tumble around their ears. There was always a dampness, too. Below decks it was dark like the lock gates where Covington used to swim. The oak planking was always wet and looming, threatening to split. Yet it was strange, considering the violence of the sea: there was always a feeling of safety, too. Everything could be trusted to have a good end.

One day when Covington took his turn with Phipps at the bilge-pump, and Phipps asked him why he grinned when the work was so tedious, Covington said, ‘I am always full of good notions that come into my mind to comfort me as I pump.'

‘You have a great innocence,' said Phipps. ‘Be sure that you don't get taken for a fool.'

Covington laughed at this, and stamped on Phipps's toe.

Phipps saw to it that they messed together, all five boys in a bunch, and saw to it that the one-armed cook never held back on the duff, the sea pie or the lobscouse, nor pease soup or even grog, much watered, when his boys scrambled for their dinner. They called at Madeira for victualling and ate grapes for the first time, also figs, melons and dates. They kept oranges in nets hung thick above their heads, and had a rule of honour that they were to eat one only when it started to go bad. The other two mess-mates were Door and MacCurdy, foretopmen with John Phipps. They were great simple West Country fellows and like big brothers to the boys. While Door carved the meat MacCurdy wore a blindfold and called out names, so that nobody could say they were given short rations through malice, or were given too much through being favourites. When excitement mounted Joey Middleton danced on their mess table, ducking and weaving to avoid the lantern and
overhead beams—then went crouching with his back bent like a frog, as hands reached out and grabbed him by the skinny ankles.

When they came into the hot latitudes, Phipps taught them how to make palm leaf hats, as favoured in the Caribbean islands. In talk of those islands Joey Middleton's hopes of finding his father, the red-headed sailorman, were dashed, because the
South Sea Castle
made her course in a contrary direction, past Brazil on a survey of ports ever-southwards. Covington learned carpentry and odd jobs in that first season away, and learned to play the fiddle with seaman Door his teacher—long afterwards being able to recapture his days afloat from a sniff of tar and a shaving of timber, and from the quick bounce of a well-powdered bow on catgut.

They were starting to be sailors and Covington felt pride in his new craft. As their Sea-Daddy John Phipps oversaw the boys' cleanliness and their clothes, teaching them to cut out jackets, shirts and sailcloth trousers, and to sew, and to wash it all in a sea-bucket, and to mend their clothes as neatly as apprentice tailors might.

Phipps was a great one for avoiding any show of favourites, although Covington had a vanity that he was the one. If he played ‘To Be A Pilgrim' in a key of G on his fiddle, low as a bullfrog growling, it brought tears to Phipps's eyes. Their special closeness was Covington's secret and at first made him proud, then careless, then itchy at the restriction. For he grew past the conceit Phipps had that they were all his honest pilgrims. Covington had too much blood in his body: it pounded him along.

Part of their orders as naval surveyors was the getting of creatures. On a wooded island a party went ashore with guns and ropes. John Phipps was well known as a countryman and favoured by the officers for the hunt. Phipps named Covington his offsider. They chased pigs with the help of a slavekeeper's dogs and cornered a great tusker. Covington went in with the knife while ropes held the animal down. It took six men to carry the boar back to the beach, where it was divided into portions and rowed to the ship. There were fights over the crackling after the cooks had done their best, and the bones were cleaned for the surgeon to measure and compare. This wooded island off Brazil was the first place where Covington ever ate a banana. It prickled the back of his throat and gave him a rash on his arm. It was the first place he ever saw a slave, a tall man and black as a moonless coalheap, with skin of sweating lacquer as he ran with the dogs on long swift legs. Phipps fumed at the practice of slavery, and gave them his earful about it: ‘See how he's bred for the chase.' But his indignation wore thin with the boys when they saw the slave whooping with joy in the hunt. He was in there for the kill, and as one of the officers said, ‘Went in as well as ever I saw a man in my life.' Besides, Covington saw the hut where the man lived. It was all done up comfortably.

‘Ignorance is your name,' said Phipps to Covington, ‘and as your name is, so are you.'

Covington whistled and jumped in the longboat, standing in the bow with his bloodstained arms folded as the oarsmen rowed them back to their vessel. He found he could give John Phipps the freeze, and make it last for days.

Though they broke that coolness soon enough, when Covington saw Phipps hanging upside down from a hatch and laughing in his face. It was in a storm.

‘Are you afraid, Syms Covington?'

‘Not if you aren't afraid.'

‘And why am I not afraid?'

‘Because of the admiral who sails with you, John.'

‘And who is he?'

‘He is a revelation of Christ to our souls indeed.'

Phipps made an action of kissing his hand.

 

One day they hooked a great shark and brought it smacking up onto the deck. The boys were ordered to do their worst. They sat on it straddled in a row, singing a shanty, cutting chunks from its flesh while it was still kicking. Most of their days they lived around the mess table, in knots of alliance or in brotherly rivalry, buzzing to get the approval and admiration of the older men, and then spending time imitating those older men in their swagger and being cuffed around the ears for it. They were all on top of each other in the vessel as Covington was with Mrs Hewtson's sprogs. Was there never any leaving home in this world?

Because their survey ship zigzagged around and retraced her steps taking chartings, other ships from England passed them and letters from Mrs Hewtson and packets of plumcake wrapped in muslin awaited them at several ports of call. Though Covington was generous in all ways, this cake he kept to himself, nibbling at mouldy portions with his
elbows tucked to his sides, his wispy-whiskered chin covered by a hand to hide his actions.

During their time at Rio he made a good bargain, and bought a dancing master's fiddle that fitted in the pocket of his seaman's jacket. They said he would play tunes into heaven—he had the knack. ‘In the book of Revelation the saved are compared to a company of musicians that play upon their trumpets and harps and sing their songs before the throne.'

It was at Rio that Wingate, Crook and Dell left the ship to join another bound for England. Now in that secret society of prayer in the Bedford style there was just Covington, Joey Middleton, John Phipps and the sailmaker, Mr Harper, who wrestled with his conscience all the time and was a serious devotional man. Then they, too, changed ship, the close bunch of them along with Seamen Door and MacCurdy, taking berths on the survey vessel
Adventure
, under Captain Phillip Parker King, a colonial-born officer of modest temperament and good navigating skills. They were to make their way farther south.

King had his son aboard, Phil, who was a midshipman and the same age as Covington—thirteen, now—and so they were like a family of scrappy brothers all in their various cramped messes, boys doing their growing and their bullying and their mauling of each other as they bobbed around muddy river mouths learning to be tars. King was boastful and tricky to play with, being the captain's son, having a spirit that checked itself when others wanted any game to continue. The point came in their japes when King fell silent and dropped his easiness, lowering his chin and clenching his knuckles white: ‘I say you fellows enough is enough, and I really think we shall lose our goat overboard if we set her loose, and you, Covington, get the bucket off her tail.'

‘I didn't tie it on.' Nor would he ever, either, knowingly
taunt a dumb beast. ‘
I
didn't tie it,' he repeated, levelling his gaze at King.

‘Quick now, or
it
shall get you a flogging.'

It was King who'd slipped the knot, giggling with excitement, his sallow eyes flicking around the faces of the gathered boys in his haste to get their approval, which he then so snivellingly traded away.