Hamnet(48)
‘I see.’ The captain cuts him off by turning away from him, towards his charts, the matter dealt with, as far as he is concerned.
The second officer clears his throat. ‘We shall, sir,’ he says, ‘arrange a sea burial.’
The midshipman is wrapped in a sheet and brought up on deck. The sailors nearby cover their noses and mouths with cloth: the corpse is excessively odorous. The captain gives a short reading from the Bible; he, too, is struggling with the dead man’s smell, despite twenty-five years at sea and more watery funerals than he can recall.
‘In the name of the Father,’ the captain enunciates, raising his voice above the sounds of discreet retching at the back, ‘the Son and the Holy Ghost we commend this body unto the waves.
‘You,’ he gestures at the two sailors nearest him, ‘take the . . . do the . . . ah . . . yes . . . overboard.’
They dart forward and, with green faces, lift the corpse up and over the side.
The choppy, pleated surface of the Mediterranean folds over the body of the midshipman.
By the time they reach Constantinople, with an order to collect a consignment of furs from the north, the cats are all dead and the rat population is becoming a problem. They are eating through the crates and getting at the dried-meat rations, the second officer tells the captain. There were fifteen or sixteen of them in the cook’s quarters this morning. The men are demoralised, he says, keeping his eyes on the line of horizon out of the window, and several more have fallen ill overnight.
Two more men die, then a third, and a fourth. All with the same Afric fever that swells the neck and turns the skin red and blistered and black in places. The captain is forced to make an unscheduled stop in Ragusa, to take on more sailors, for whom he has no references or recommendations, which is the kind of hasty, slipshod seamanship he likes to avoid.
These new sailors are shifty-eyed, snaggle-toothed; they keep to themselves and speak very little, and only in some kind of Polack language. The Manx crew distrusts them on sight and will not communicate with them, or willingly share quarters.
The Polacks, however, are skilled at killing rats. They approach it as a sport, baiting a string with food, then lying in wait with an enormous shovel. When the creature appears – sleek, with drooping belly, gorged as it is on the sailors’ rations – the Polacks leap on it, shouting, singing, and beat it to death, rat brains and entrails sprayed on the walls and ceilings. They then cut off the tails and string them to their belts, passing around a clear liquid in a bottle, from which they all drink.
Turns your stomach, one of the Manx sailors says to the cabin boy, watching from across the cabin. Doesn’t it? Then he swats at his neck, his shoulder; the place is overrun with fleas. Damned rats, he growls to himself and turns over in his hammock.
At Venice, they don’t plan to dock for long – the captain is keen to get his cargo back to England, to recoup his fee, to get this hellish voyage over with – but while the unloading and loading take place, he gives an order to the cabin boy to find some cats for the ship. The cabin boy leaps eagerly down to the dockside; he is more than keen to leave the ship, its cramped, low ceilings and stink of rat and fever and death. Today two more men are confined to their quarters with fever, one a Manxman, like himself, the other one of the Polacks, his rat-tail adorned belt hung up beside him.
The boy has been in Venice once before, on his first voyage, and it is as he remembers it: a strange, hybrid place, half of sea, half of land, where the steps of houses are lapped by jade-green waters, and windows are lit by the guttering flares of candles, where there are no streets but narrow alleyways, leading off each other in a dizzying labyrinth, and arch-backed bridges. A place where you might very easily lose your way among the fog and the angled squares and the high buildings and tolling church bells.
For a moment he watches the crew, who are hauling crates and sacks between them, shouting in a mixture of Manx and Polack and English. A Venetian man pushes a cart towards them, loaded with boxes; he too starts shouting, in Venetian. He is gesturing to the sailors, to his boxes, while gripping his cart, and the boy sees that the first two fingers of his hand are missing and the rest of the hand is of a strange, puckered texture, like melted candlewax. He is calling to the sailors, gesturing at the ship with his good hand, at his boxes, and the boy can see that the cart is about to lurch sideways, that the boxes will soon be spilt all over the dockside.
He leaps forward, rights the cart, grins at the surprised face of the man with the mangled hand, then darts away because he has seen, underneath a stall selling fish, the whiskered, triangular faces of several cats.
Unbeknown to them both, the flea that came from the Alexandrian monkey – which has, for the last week or so, been living on a rat, and before that the cook, who died near Aleppo – leaps from the boy to the sleeve of the master glassmaker, whereupon it makes its way up to his left ear, and it bites him there, behind the lobe. He doesn’t feel it as the cool air of the misty canal has rendered his extremities sensationless, and he is intent only on getting these boxes of beads aboard the ship, receiving his payment, then returning to Murano, where he has many orders to fulfil and the fire stokers are sure to be fighting again, during his brief absence.
By the time the ship is rounding the heel of Sicily, the second officer has fallen ill with the Afric fever, his fingers purple and black, his body so hot that the sweat drips through the knots of his hammock to the floor below. They bury him at sea, along with two Polacks, outside Naples.