dropped dead while he was reading to one of the older children. There was no warning. One moment he was cheerfully reeling off a passage he had prepared, and the next he was a heap on the deck.
Mr Milburn was the first to him, the older child standing back shocked. The boy on the deck was like a limp piece of string, floppy, loose...dead as a doornail.
Doctor Reade had a name for it, but Gil had enough Latin to know that the name simply meant plain dead, with no real explanation as to why.
After a night laid out in the sail locker, the boy’s body was committed to the sea the next morning. The boatswain sewed him into a shroud of fine canvas, with an iron fire bar sewn in to make sure he sank, and the last stitch through the boy’s nose to make sure he really was dead. It was not that the sailors didn’t believe the doctor, rather that there was a way of doing things at sea, and this was how a body should be prepared for burial.
It was a very sad affair. The whole ship’s company assembled on the main deck, except for the helmsman and the look-outs. The body rested on a door held balanced on the gunwale. Captain Hedley stood at the head, a Bible in his hands, though he had no need to look at it. He recited the burial service from memory, with never a mistake.
“I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord;” Captain Hedley intoned, “he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.”
“I know that my Redeemer liveth and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth, and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.”
“The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to take unto Himself the soul of our dear brother, James Edward, here departed, we therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking to the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead.”
When he came to the part about committing the body to the deep, the two sailors holding the door tipped it, and the canvas-wrapped bundled slid off, and splashed into the sea, where it went straight down and out of sight in seconds. There was a concerted groan, and those not already crying, burst into tears.
There was no school that day. School had stopped instantly the day before, with the announcement of the boy’s death, and did not resume until the day after the funeral. It was a miserable time for everybody, the boy’s family most of all.
A ship that they sighted ahead of them during that time, one they were catching up on, turned away out of their path when their flag was seen to be at half-mast. Flag signals were exchanged, but only from an increasing distance. Those on the other ship had no wish to intrude on their grief, or so the ‘Haldia’s passengers were told. In fact the superstitious sailors on the other ship wanted nothing to do with a vessel which might still have a dead body on board.
Things brightened up when yet another ship was sighted on the following day. The ‘La Tasse D’or’ out of Calais for Bombay was a ship about their own size, so when they tacked to come together Captain Hedley challenged them to a race, until their courses parted on the other side of the Horn of Africa. It made an interesting three days for the people of both ships. Passengers on the ‘Haldia’ contributed to the cause by staying, whenever they could, on the windward side of the ship. Their weight held her more upright, so that the sails could catch more of the wind. At the end of the third day, after much tacking and manoeuvring, with neither ship losing sight of the other, darkness fell without the passengers being able to tell which ship was in front.
Captain Hedley claimed victory. No doubt the other ship’s captain did the same for his people. During the night the French ship headed up into the Indian Ocean, while the ‘Haldia’ ran on for the bottom of Australia.
A concert, postponed from two days before, kept spirits up. Winds from astern drove them swiftly over a glorious blue sea.
Schoolwork, readings, formal talks, treasure hunts, deck quoits; one thing followed another day after day, and still the ship raced on before the wind, measuring off the miles at a prodigious rate.
Bridget Earnshaw’s team won a competition for the best plum duff. Everybody had a sample of every pudding, and had to vote for the best two. Of course everybody voted for their own and one other. It was the second choices which carried the day. The prize consisted of the ingredients for another plum duff.
Only twice did the wind fail them in the long haul around the Southern Ocean, once off the south-west corner of Australia, and the second time in the seas to the south of Tasmania. Each time the wind veered, and grew stronger; not that it hadn’t been strong enough already. Then it died away abruptly, and left them becalmed for perhaps twenty minutes or half-an-hour, before it came at them again from the other side.
During the calm below Tasmania Jess was working in the galley, and had a bucket of potato peelings to throw over the side. Somebody, carrying away a dish of breakfast bacon, had spilled some grease on the deck just outside the galley door. Jess slipped on it as she stepped over the galley combing. Before she could fall, a strong hand had her by the elbow, and steadied her.
“No need to dive over the side again, young lady,” the boatswain told her. “The sharks can find enough to eat without you.”
“Are there sharks in these seas?” Jess asked.
“Whoppers,” the boatswain replied. “There’s some been following us for the past couple of days, although the rough weather has tended to make them swim deep.”
“Oh,” said Jess, and looked doubtfully over the side. It all looked like the usual empty sea to her. “Where are they?”
“Throw your potato peelings over, and see what happens.”
“They won’t eat potato peelings.”
“No, but they’ll come to see what they are.”
Jess emptied her bucket over the side, and watched. In seconds a long grey shape glided up out of the depths. A black fin broke the surface, and tipped away from her to sink below again as the shark rolled to taste the peelings. Huge, sharply pointed teeth lined a gaping maw.
Jess recoiled in horror.
“Only a tiddler,” the boatswain laughed.
“It’s bigger than you are,” she protested. “Twice as big.”
“Not as big as that fellow out there,” he said, pointing.
A stone’s throw out from the becalmed ship an enormous bluish-grey back was surging past, sinking, rising, sometimes standing a foot out of the water. It was at least half as long as the ship at the waterline. Beyond it was another nearly as big, and further out more of them, though not so easily seen.
“Sarah! Sarah!” Jess shouted into the galley. “Everybody, come and see the sharks!”
There was a clatter of feet on the decks, and Sarah, carrying a dish cloth, and everybody else within earshot, came rushing out to see what all the fuss was about.
Mouths fell open. People gaped.
“That’s not a shark,” Sarah claimed. “It has no dorsal fin.”
“Then what’s that?” Jess demanded, as a great black triangle rose up out of the sea on the other side of the first of the creatures. A second and a third followed. Further out there were more of them. “Those are sharks.”
Obviously they were different to the gigantic things with the grey backs; black, and not half their size, but huge even so. When one launched itself at the nearest of the greys, a patch of white showed on the side of its head, and more showed on its underside. That one must have been all of twenty feet long.
Jess’s was not the only face that went white.
“Those aren’t sharks. Those are killer whales, and they’re attacking some blue whales,” the boatswain explained.
“Killer whales? Sharks? What does it matter?” Jess gulped. “I’ll be inside the galley, if anybody wants me. I think I’ll stay there until we reach Lyttelton!”
Twenty Five
Far from hiding herself away in the galle
y, Jess was out and about as much as ever for the rest of the voyage. Early one morning she was the first on deck when the call came that New Zealand was in sight, not that there was much to be seen.
Rain was sheeting down. Bush-clad mountains loomed through it, vague, mist shrouded, dark, dark green. Savage waves lashed the rocky coast at their base. No flat land showed anywhere.
“This is the wild end of the country,” Mr Milburn said, “the south-west corner. It takes the brunt of all the worst weather. It’s much kinder around the other side.”
The passengers certainly hoped so.
Later in the day they passed a fishing boat in the strait between the South Island and Stewart Island. It was making for a port at the southern end of the larger island. It was three months almost to the day since, off the Canaries, they had seen a vessel so small.
In spite of the rain, the crew were forever asking passengers to move so that they could work the ship. Nobody wanted to go below. They were all too anxious to see what they could of their new home.
Nearly all they did see was bush-clad. The whole country wasn’t covered in bush, but from out at sea hillsides were what was in sight, and hillsides did tend to be forested.
That night there was only an outline of hilltops or mountains against the stars. There were no lit-up towns, as there would have been in Britain. If there were people ashore, then they left no candles in their windows, no braziers marking the coast. Lighthouses