scratcher appearing before me with whiskers sprouting in all directions,” he roared. “Take him away and shave him.”
Two husky attendants grabbed Gil, and threw him fully dressed into the bath of sea water, where they ducked him thoroughly. Then they hauled him out again, and used a ship’s paint brush to lather his face with the froth from the barrel. A blunt barrel stave was used to shave it all off again.
Dripping, Gil was thrust back in front of the king again.
“Much better,” was the verdict. “Never let me see you appear before me again in such a disgusting condition.”
Poor Gil was by then in much worse condition than he had been on his first appearance, a point not lost on his pupils who were fairly screaming with delight.
Sarah had to pay with a kiss. Somehow she had expected that that might be the case, and had come ready prepared. Her lips were painted with scarlet grease paint from the supply kept for concert performers. She left King Neptune with a brilliant outline of her lips on his cheek.
Jess had the back of her supposedly dirty neck scrubbed with a feather duster.
Next day, with the ship festooned with drying washing from all the clothes soaked and dirtied in the line-crossing festivities, they entered the doldrums.
The trade wind died away. The sea sank to a sullen rolling. Air in the holds and cabins was hot, damp, and seemingly hard to breath. On deck it was little better, but a number of folk spent the night up there, trying to sleep on blankets spread on the scrubbed planks.
All the day after that again was the same, a dead ship tossing about on a listless sea. There was little work for the crew to do. Lessons were boring. Nobody wanted to do anything in the heat but sit, and fidget, and grumble.
The only person on board who seemed to appreciate the conditions was wee Matilda Earnshaw. She began to take an interest in life, and loudly demanded feeding.
“Oh well,” said Sarah to Ken MacGovern, leaning on the gunwales late the second night of it. “At least we’re in the Southern Hemisphere now. We’ve got that far.”
“I’m afraid not,” Ken replied. “Since the wind died, the currents have carried us back across the line again. We’re back in the Northern Hemisphere. We have it all to do again.”
“I don’t have to have my neck scrubbed again, do I?” Jess queried.
Twenty Three
Six hot, sticky, irritable days later they found the southern trade winds. In the meantime the few puffs of humid air that had come their way at all, had done nothing to push them on the way they wanted to go.
Nothing anybody did held any interest. People played chess, or whist, or any of the other games brought along to pass the time, but there was little enjoyment in it. They were too uncomfortable. Doctor Reade was handing out a physic for headaches left, right, and centre.
When the sails filled, and the ship danced away again, everybody breathed a concerted sigh of relief.
Immediately school lessons picked up again. Those who had by then learned to sign their names, began to press for more, to actually learn to read. Gil did not think that possible in the time they had left, for he knew that adults had much more difficulty than children in learning the skill, and he was not happy about the disappointment they would face, when they reached their destination still unable to make much sense of a simple item in a newspaper. Instead, he suggested that they should learn arithmetic. The numeration system was something they could learn in the time available, especially as most of them could already add, and knew some of the multiplication tables.
White Eye’s Maori teaching also gained in popularity, and some, like the Gordon sisters, were soon stringing together some simple sentences, such as “Come for food,” or “Show me where the house is.”
Day after day the ship reached across the wind, without a change of sail, her course a straight line for the southern tip of Africa. Now and then a sheet would be tautened a little, a tiny adjustment made in the draw of a sail, but not a single change of tack was called for in hundreds of miles.
And then their second big storm hit.
Wet decks became no place for children. For those in steerage, school was reduced to a few slates of exercises done by the light of candle lanthorns, or taking a turn at reading aloud from one of Captain Hedley’s books. For all the other people confined in the gloom of the hold, those readings were the best part of the day. Conversations generally held little interest any more, for most people had long since run out of small talk. The readings not only held interest in themselves; they provided something else to talk about.
In the great cabin school ran more normally, because there was more light. The portholes were larger, and more generously provided. Keeping the slates on the table was the main problem, but the griddles took care of that.
One of the most successful time-fillers, introduced at that time, was the formal talk. Every adult passenger, and all the older children, had to give one. Literate people had to write notes in advance, setting out the main points of what they would say. Those who couldn’t write memorised their talks, and practised in odd corners with the help of a few friends. The talks could be on any topic except politics or religion. Either descriptions of the places they had come from, or dissertations from the men on their jobs, trades, or professions, were the most commonly chosen subjects. Not many of the women could be persuaded to give a talk. Few had any work other than housekeeping and farm chores to talk about, and none of them wanted to talk about those. True, the women exchanged recipes, and housekeeping hints, but they had no wish to give a formal talk about them. Matron Greeley certainly could have, but then everybody could see for themselves all the things that she did day in and day out. Also, of course, she was crew, and therefore exempt.
A very well received talk was from Kevin Mabon on the work of a blacksmith. Everybody expected him to say that he hammered out horse shoes, and a few plough shares, and that was that. When he went on to talk about the different kinds of metal he worked with, their compositions, and how they could be used, they discovered that there was much more to being a blacksmith than any of them had ever thought. One of the things he planned to do in New Zealand was set up a foundry to cast cogs and gears for all the new kinds of machinery that farmers were beginning to use in that country.
“You’ll maybe have a use for a partner,” one of the Scottish passengers, Dougal MacKenzie, suggested to him afterwards. “If you can cast those cogs and gears, I can mill them, and build them into suitable machines.”
Several business arrangements were made like that during the course of the voyage, and some of the businesses that were to become large concerns in New Zealand were born that way on one immigrant ship or another.
Kevin Mabon’s talk was so well received in the main hold, he was called on to repeat it in the great cabin. In that way, he had customers lined up for his work, before he even set foot in the land where it would be done.
“One of our problems,” Mr MacKenzie warned,” will be that we’ll have nobody to work for us. Few of the men aboard are going halfway round the world in order to work for somebody else. Some of the womenfolk, yes, but nae the men. These young fellows, they’ll work for others only until they have a few bawbees aside, and then they’ll be out on their own.”
“Aye, and mostly in farming at that,” Kevin agreed. “They’ll not want to learn the skills that we must have. You and I, my friend, will have to do all our skilled work ourselves, or else find more partners.”
The wild winds drove the ship far to the westward, so far indeed that their destination was closer to them measuring westward around the world, than it was to the east, the way they were meant to be going.
“Things will change further south,” Ken MacGovern shouted above the howl of the wind one evening as he passed Sarah between the main hold and the deck housing.
She paused, as the storm had stopped her speaking to him at all in the past two days, and he was not likely to get another chance in the near future. They turned their backs to the
driving spray, huddled into their oilskins, their heads almost hidden in the hoods.
“I understand it will get colder,” she shouted back.
“Yes, but in the roaring forties and the furious fifties, the latitudes forty and fifty degrees south of the equator, the wind will nearly always be going our way,” he replied. “We’ll fairly skip along then. Even the worst weather will only push us along all the faster. Things will improve after this storm, you’ll see. We’ve done the worst part of our journey now.”
“I shouldn’t have thought we were half-way yet,” she called.
“Not in distance,” he agreed, “but we’ve always found our main difficulties in the part we’ve already completed.”
Later Sarah repeated to Jess what Ken had said. They were in the galley at the time, and Angus and the stewards were included in the conversation.
“That’s true,” Angus confirmed. “The other thing is that the pattern for the rest of the journey is now all settled down. All the passengers, and the new people in the crew, know the routines, and more or less now we’ll just do the same things day after day until we get there.”
That might have been true for most of the people on board, but it was not entirely true for Sarah, the doctor, and the matron, as Sarah very quickly found out.
A young woman was groaning with a stomach pain, when Sarah