Jacques-Louis rides the outgoing tide, a recipient of the leniency of transportation d eparting England for the term of his life. He is on a ship— the Rochester . Whoever Rochester was. He who lifted his head above the common tide of humanity such that a ship bore his name. Rochester the ferryman, and every man aboard dreaded the destination, anticipating the voyage only as r eprieve from the years of incarceration within Millbank Prison. Jacques-Louis listens to the creaking timber and the groaning of men. He hears some talk of a time beyond their sentence when they might at last be free. There are stories of good land for farming. Some pretend it is all a great adventure and are the quickest to lose spirit as sickness and stench prevails. His hammock sways. He is lucky to have a hammock, not like those squeezed together four men to a bunk, sixteen inches of berth per man, lice and fleas and count yourself lucky. But they fare better than the poor sops too ill to do anything but lie upon the floor in vomit and faeces as the sea begins to heave. All of them chained at the ankles. Storms assail the Rochester down the coast of Africa. The hatches are closed and covered with tarpaulins so that no glimmer of light can penetrate the hold, nor ventilation relieve the fetid air. The menu is salt beef and gruel, the meat quickly rancid, the bread moulded and tough as old leather. The crew are reviled by their cargo and afraid of them, too. The scant water rations, lowered down in barrels, slop and spill. The sailors above laugh. When the weather clears, they are beset by a calm that continues for days and weeks as the vessel limps with flaccid sails towards the Cape of Good Hope. Grim men and soft sob for their mothers, for wives and children and the fate that has befallen them. ‘Calm water makes for turbulent souls,’ declares the captain, and refuses to open the hatches. The airless putrescence below decks intensifies. Men
who are not normally godly pray fervently . They pray regardless of guilt or innocence, family , church, village, language or station in life. When the hatches are at last opened, buckets of salt water are poured onto them. The men below scrabble for the chance to clean themselves, to see sky and daylight, to breathe sweet untainted air. Afterwards they lie wet, half-naked, starved, many raving mad. Some have long forgotten all kindness and expect only misery. This is what a rash moment, a folly, a misconceived plan, an act of violence or the sheer bad luck of the wrongfully convicted has brought them. The surgeon superintendent makes a game of giving some of them lime juice and others not—to test his theories on scurvy, he says, though the treatment is well known. Once a week he descends into the prisoners’ quarters with a kerchief wrapped around his nose and mouth, his watery eyes glistening in the light of the lamp he carries. He inspects the bleeding gums of the afflicted, the red and blue marks that splatter their skin. ‘Most interesting,’ he says. The rum emanates from him as if he has long laid with the bottle. They are young, mostly, and Jacques-Louis an old man in comparison. They have been hungry in their villages and towns. There are a few from Scotland, but nothing like the numbers from Ireland and England. Many, it seems to him, bear the guilt of being without any gainful purpose but to survive. Few of them are able to read. But they are alert to one another . Alert to the risk and the reward of choosing any bond of companio nship. A surfeit of power lying dormant in rage and nonchalance. Finding a patron with greater strength, greater violence, could bring reward, but there is always a cost to such alliances. Some simply choose helplessn ess. But many give thought to how they might turn the canker of imprisonment into something of use. Jacques-Louis had gone willingly into prison. He had asked for death and been sentenced to death. He had lived for months in anticipation of the st eps and the noose. Yet here he is, sailing to another destiny . He had been gifted a life of privilege and education. He had learned the voyages of conquest and exploration that had changed the world. He was a boy orphaned by a sharpened blade, only to come back, after all, to a blade he had asked a boy to sharpen.
Rounding the Cape of Good Hope at last, they are allowed on deck to see the endless ocean. Jacques-Loui s’ body uncoils painfully from the stoop of confinement. They are assembled to watch the flogging of five members of the crew for a suspected mutiny, and another flogging for a theft of some possession of the captain’ s that has not been recovered. Seeing each other in the sunlight, Jacques-Louis finds it hard to have any dislike for his fellow convicts. They are simply men, regardless of crime or social standing. None unmoved as they watch their persecutors stripped and scored. At the Cape they are k ept below decks for three weeks while rations and supplies are r eplenished. The noises of harbour and township are tantalisingly close. Hatches are k ept closed for fear of some re volt. One hundred and seventy-seven men wait, unable to stand to full height or lie to full length, unable to move without touching another man. In his fleeting dreams, Jacques-Louis finds himself a boy again on his way to Calais in a trunk. His mother lies beside him, her severed head in the crook of her arm. His father insists on a conversation but Jacques-Louis cannot make out the language he speaks. The men lying close by curse him. ‘Save your ravings for the pleasures that await you, you fool,’ hisses one man whose front teeth are missing. Jacques-Louis thinks to do something with his mind, to recite a verse or two. Something to allay the torpor of time. He can feel himself becoming unhinged, splitting into another self, and there is nowhere he might walk to wrench himself back or away. He hears a poem and remembers the habit of the words. Where had it gone, the book Caroline had sent to him? Where had all his books gone from his study? The way of all his possessions. Everything he and Hannah had created had been lost to his madness. He had squandered it all on one plan or another , believing he might yet create some windfall whereupon he and Henriette, Caroline and Augusta might go back to France. But he had been deluded. He had taken advice from those who were nothing but scoundrels, liars and blackguards. The past was dispersed, engulfe d. In his mind he hears Caroline’ s voice alongside his own. She is there with him, reassurance in a place no woman would dare enter , and as he speaks, the men nearby grow quiet and listen. ‘ And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow , And every day , for food or play , Came to the mariner ’s hollo! In mist or cloud, on mast or shr oud, It perched for vespers nine; Whiles all the night, thr ough fog-smoke white, Glimmer ed the white Moon-shine. “God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends that plague thee thus! Why lookest thou so?”—W ith my cr oss bow I shot the albatr oss. ’ ‘Louder ,’ one says. ‘Anything to speed this intolerable delay .’ ‘What says the Frenchman?’ someone calls from the de eper darkness. ‘Go back. Once more.’ They lie in their squalor overlooked by Table Mountain, though they know it not, and Jacques-Louis begins. ‘ It is an Ancient Mariner , And he stoppeth one of thr ee ...’ Word travels through the hold that the Frenchman is speaking a rhyme. A poesy. Coleridge’ s poem is too long for perfect recollection, but it soothes Jacques-Louis to recite the story of a rash act born of delusion, the mariner ’s complicity unforgiven, his damnation unexpiated. A ballad recounted as prophecy and confession. The men about him r epeat the lines, as if the poem holds some spell to ke ep at bay their own dread shadow . Even the ship, subdued and constrained by two great anchors resting on the sea floor, seems to listen to the mariner ’s tale. ‘ I looked to heaven and tried to pray But or ever a prayer had gushed, A wished whisper came and made My heart as dry as dust.
I closed my lids and k ept them close, And the balls like pulses beat, For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky Lay like a load on my weary eye, And the dead wer e at my feet .’ Jacques-Louis’ voice reaches another prisoner , John Bird, formerly a solicitor and amateur thespian in Bath convicted of highway robbery , though he was drunk and persuaded by friends, he says to the nodding men. Bird is a man with a large soft face and a broad body that would certainly have been larger if it had not lived on the rations of a hulk for more than three years. Such men fared less well in their allocated sle eping space, but the poem rouses him. He knows much of the verse and fills in the gaps when Jacques-L ouis’ memory falters. Together the two men lull their listening companions, alleviating their thoughts from thirst, heat and madness. Some begin to learn the verse, it being a way to pass the time. They are each the mariner . R epentant or unr epentant, returned to society , none will be unburdened of the past. ‘ And the bay was white with silent light, Till rising fr om the same, Full many shapes, that shadows wer e, In crimson colours came. A little distance fr om the pr ow Those crimson shadows wer e: I turned my eyes upon the deck— Oh, Christ! What saw I ther e! Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat, And by the holy r ood! A man all light, a seraph-man, On every corse ther e stood. This seraph-band, each waved his hand, No voice did they impart— No voice; but oh! The silence sank
Like music on my heart.’ The sense of something happening below disconcerts those above. Perhaps it is the precursor to some kind of uprising. The captain descends and asks what mischief is afoot. He will put them all on quarter rations, desist from sending down water at all, until someone owns the subterfuge that he believes is brewing here. There is a long silence. The captain declares that he will have his way, and begins to return up the ladder. No water until a confession is forthcoming. Jacques-Louis speaks. He says it is but a poem, and no harm is meant, just a way to pass the time. Bird begins to speak, but Jacques-Lo uis silences him, saying there is none to blame but him. The captain has him hauled up onto the deck. Jacques-Louis r epeats that he speaks only a poem. The captain demands to know which one. Jacques- Louis tells him and the captain pales. He will not have that doomed verse on his ship. He orders seventy-five lashes. Jacques-Louis is a Frenchman, after all, and everyone knows sedition and re volt are in their blood. Many an Englishman has died at their hands. Jacques-Louis is stripped of the putrid shirt he wears and tied to a mast. His arms are bound tight and he has no power to cringe or stir. He knows the code. A prisoner is to utter no word or sound when the lash strikes, no cry, for it will grieve the oppressor if they cannot find satisfaction in the harm. But he fails. He grapples with a new kind of pain. Not merely the ripping of his flesh and the humiliation of his screams, but the betrayal of all self-possession that has ever been his, witnessed by the captain, the crew and all his fellow prisoners. ‘He did more to his victim,’ he hears one sailor say . And there is a chorus of ‘ayes’ from the other sailors, and the lash spits its fury again and again, as if he will be forever on this deck, against this mast, his heart like the mariner ’s, dry as dust. He is washed down with salt water stinging as if a thousand bees have swarmed upon him. His head is shaved and he is returned to the hold and locked within a solitary box where he must crouch for days. The men whisper snatches of verse to console him, but he begs them to cease. He can feel his wounds festering. Maggots writhe in his flesh. He cannot bear the
stench of his own rot. He catches his piss in his pannikin and attempts to pour it onto his wounds. He is a boy in a trunk, without light or solace, voyaging into the unknown, impotent and haunted. He knows his predicament is sharp. His heart pounds, racing, slowing, racing. He tries to move and perceives that he is as light as a moth. Are there people gathered about him? He can hear the voices of an assembly . It sounds like the choir in the cathedral at Reims where his family name is carved into a pew . He sees his mother in her veil, a yellow dress and small silken shoes. Her hair hides beneath her bonnet. Henriette is bending towards her and putting a wafer into their mother’s mouth, as if today Henriette is the faithful administrator of the word of God. When she sees Jacques-Louis there, writing her name in the incense, she crosses herself and smiles. ‘ Bonjour , mon frèr e .’ ‘ Bonjour , ma sœur ,’ he r eplies. She rustles in her purple cassock. ‘Have you been well?’ she asks. ‘Not really ,’ he says. ‘ Et toi? ’ ‘I am as I have always been. I am the harbinger of my own majesty and the raven call of my own doom. Do you know I have transformed your daughter from the fate you offered her tending the sick and the wounded? I have given her a life in which she can acquire the fruits of those born to privilege. She is so good at it. A mistress of guile and ploy who never loses her nerve.’ ‘Am I dead?’ he asks. ‘No,’ she says. ‘You always spent too much time thinking on such things. Believing your one mind could solve the mysteries of the universe. Yet what did you really do? Did you ever stop to think what it is to be a woman? If a man decides that you must die, he will almost certainly be successful. I know your brain was injured. I know Hannah was dead. But you found out that a woman you believed loved you was also earning her living discreetly and quietly with other men. London gives women very few options, in case you didn’t notice, brother. When did such things become so very important? Pride. R eputation? We lost all that a long time ago.’ Leaning forward , she places a wafer on his tongue and says, ‘I cannot forgive you. In that moment on the bridge, I will never believe you did not know that you could be someone else.’
When he is released from the box at last, he can barely hold his bread ration. For the rest of the voyage, he makes no sound. He will not speak another word of Coleridge, nor any poem, for many years to come. There is a quicker movement in the ship, the sound of orders being given, shorter waves that denote landfall. When they are allowed up from the hold, the sunlight is so bright it burns their eyes, and for minutes the world is devoid of colour. They cannot move for the tightness in their limbs. Many crawl to the edge of the deck to be lowered into the longboats that will row them ashore. Jacques-Louis is one of these. Nine of them have been wrapped in cloth and given to the sea, including John Bird, who was pissing blood and languished in a fever, dying two days before they disembarked. Pine trees edge a small settleme nt of low white buildings. Sloping fields run into hills yellowed by summer . The sea crashes along the rugged coast. Jacques-Louis can see gardens, a flogging triangle and a yard he will come to know. Yet was there ever such a sky at dusk in England? The beauty of the place is undeniable, and Jacques-Louis feels some vestige of himself return that he thought was ever lost, but it is quickly subdued. He is chained from dawn to dusk to the long line of men who carry rock, break rock, drag rock from the shore at high tide and low. Most days the wind is ceaseless, the wet and heat, too. When the day is done, they make their meagre meals upon cookstoves in the yard, before they are locked into the barracks. Eight hundred men close in the warm pitch black until the morning bell. And so do the days become years.