should be two boys!” Captain Tunstall insisted from the quarterdeck as the crewman and David climbed the shipside ladder.
“Bloody hell!” the crewman hissed. In panic he turned to David, demanding an answer. “Where’d the little bastard go!”
“Don’t know sir, he’s been gone six months,” David answered carefully.
“Damn, damn, damn!” the captain growled. “Back to the school and see if you can’t find where the mutinous beggar went. And you, my young fellow!” he ordered, “follow the mate to your quarters below.”
David followed obediently, hoping the crewman might somehow find Sam. The headmaster would never tolerate a runaway and even less a deserting apprentice, David reasoned. Maybe the headmaster knew of Sam’s whereabouts all along.
Captain Tunstall ordered that David be kept in his quarters until the Prince Rupert was put to sea. The second mate led him to the lower deck.
“Not a proper place to sling a hammock,” the seaman confessed. “No portals or vents, but ‘tis dry and warm enough. Mind don’t soil the sailcloth with your shoes or the master sailmaker ‘ll stitch ye to the top gallants,” he said, latching the door as he left. David sat silently and listened to a chorus of rumbles and shouts while the last of the Prince Rupert’s provisions were stowed away. Eventually he struggled into a hammock and half-heartedly ate some of the cook’s hard biscuit. He saved the remainder in his coat pocket, but there was faint hope of sharing it with Sam. The scent of Stockholm tar and new sail-canvas filled his nostrils as he drifted into sleep inhaling the ship’s stale air.
Next morning he woke to the clanging of the ship’s bell and the sway of his hammock. He was still alone, and the Prince Rupert was rolling her way to open water. “Show a leg! Out and down!” a great and terrifying voice called. “Up all hammocks!” the first mate ordered, and David rushed to his feet.
“Seven bells.’Tis morning watch in half an hour, lad. Quick. Come to the table,” summoned a gentler voice, as the ship’s cook peeked around the bulkhead and handed David a bowl of thick porridge. “Take a place at that last table there,” he said, motioning to a crowd of men already huddled over their gruel at the mess tables. David and the men ate in silence, and no heads lifted to acknowledge the newcomer.
“Third watch on deck!” the first mate’s command boomed down the main hatch. David raced to finish his breakfast as the crew scurried to place their bowls in the cook’s washtub. He joined the rush up the main hatch ladder. On deck, each seaman hustled to his station while David remained awkwardly wondering where to go.
“To the holystones!” ordered the captain. A seaman jumped smartly into action. David watched him take a bucket of sea water and a pumice stone and begin to scrub the forecastle decks along with several other men already on their knees. He followed the men’s hands, scrubbing in small circles, grinding the wooden deck into milky grey puddles until the sweeping of their hands melded with the dizzying roll of the ship. Before the Prince Rupert entered the Channel swell, his stomach was knotting in nauseous pulses. He fought the sensation until involuntary convulsions finally sent him for the rails, where he spilled his porridge into the English Channel.
“Seasick? N’er mind,” jibed a seaman while continuing to scrub. “The admiral himself spends some time bent over the rails till he gets his sea legs. Welcome aboard, your bloody Lordship,” he scowled. David leaned over the railing again to the laughter of the crew and spent the remainder of the watch imitating the admiral. At nightfall, he fell exhausted into his hammock.
The next day he had thankfully given himself to the motion of the ship and was put to work doing some of the normal shipboard activities like cutting sail patches or scraping varnish from weathered yards. Toward afternoon, a small ship sailed to within hailing distance. It was a Dutch lugger, and by the shouting between ships, David understood the Dutchman was selling contraband gin. The ships steered off, putting a safe distance between them. The Prince Rupert’s gunner and four eager deckhands climbed into a boat that was lowered over the side. Smooth and synchronous strokes on the oars had them to the lugger in a short time. On board, the gunner was quickly handed a taste of gin from a bottle snatched by the Dutch captain from a full case. “Hurry!” said the captain in rough English. “De Revenue Cutter he’s cruising near at hand! Ve must luff off. You must go!” The gunner hastily paid a guinea for the whole case and the men loaded their prize into the launch.
“Better ’n pay’n London prices,” remarked the second mate on the Prince Rupert’s main deck as the precious cargo was hoisted aboard. The case of gin bottles clanked safely onto the grating, but the satisfaction of the gunner was soon spoiled when the old carpenter suspiciously uncorked a new bottle and took a short swig. “Sea water!” he spat. “You try another.”
“All bloody sea water!” cursed the gunner as he spat out another mouthful. But it was too late. The Dutchman had gone on a fast tack more than a kilometre off Prince Rupert’s stern. The gunner and his men were in a fighting mood, but Captain Tunstall ordered a steady course. Although the crew would be irritable and restless without their gin ration, he wanted to put in at Stromness by June 1. The latest Company dispatch from London would be waiting. It contained his final instructions before their Atlantic crossing.
Davids mood lifted as sunrise revealed the hills of Scotland lying blue on the horizon. This was his first glimpse of anywhere outside of London. The crew scrambled aloft and let out sail at the mate’s sharp command, and the Prince Rupert rolled into the steep choppy seas off the Islands. A fresh wind kept them tacking as they laboured to windward until nightfall.
At 9:00 p.m. the dark silence was broken by the clattering chain as Prince Rupert’s anchor plunged toward the muddy bottom of Stromness harbour. David found the stillness of the harbour a relief after the constant sway and roll of the last six days and nights under sail from London. He climbed into his hammock wondering what the light of next day would reveal about this quiet place. He was wakened in the morning by smoke. By its smell, it was not from the galley fires, but an acrid sweet smoke from some different fire. David went on deck to investigate and was struck by a barren landscape.
“No trees,” he said aloud to no one in particular.
“That’s so people here won’t spoil their clothes trying to climb them,” a sailor answered.
On the treeless shore, David saw the smoke’s source. Five stone kilns were bellowing black clouds from smouldering seaweed as the wet green harvest was rendered by fire into fertilizer. He watched men and women struggling back and forth on the distant foreshore, carrying baskets of dripping seaweed to the kilns. Somehow harvesting seaweed made sense here, for nothing else but short green stubs of grass seemed to grow on the rocky grey landscape. Even the tiny cottages dotting the shoreline of small islands in the bay were made of rock and had sod covering their roofs.
Other ships were anchored in the bay. All were Hudson’s Bay vessels waiting at this remote station tucked into the Orkney Islands on the west coast of Scotland. They too waited for the last dispatches from London. The village of Stromness was a customary stopover for Hudson’s Bay ships bound for the New World. Over the next few days they would take on water, buy fresh-caught herring, and stow away their final provisions. At the head of the bay, just beyond two small islands, was a friendly cluster of small brick houses with slate roofs. Smoke from peat fires rose lazily from their chimneys and drifted down over the stone seawall at the harbour’s edge. Behind the village, the hills lay low and misty.
At a warehouse, Prince Rupert safely bought genuine contraband from the steady supply smuggled into Stromness harbour from Holland. The crew loaded several kegs of “Comfort”
