Captain Cook's Apprentice by Anthony Hill

Author:Anthony Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143789512
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

Northwards Endeavour men sailed through May, towards nightmare visions of their own destruction. Northwards, as day by day the outline of the land was fished from the sea: caught in their nets of compass bearings and mapping grids, tagged with names that still fringe the charts . . .

Port Stephens – named for the secretary of the Admiralty, a friend of Isaac’s father . . . Cape Byron and Mount Warning where New Holland swings nor’-nor’-west, as if on a needle point. Moreton Bay . . . the jutting promontory of Sandy Cape, where they found shoal water – and not long after that, the first of the coral reefs.

Now, in tropical seas, the boats were out all day sounding a passage for the ship through a maze of shallows and coral out-crops hidden just below the surface. Leadsmen cast from the ‘chains’ – the channel platforms which secured the rigging on either side of Endeavour’s bow – and the sweating air rang with their calls . . .

By the mark thirteen!

Deep nine!

At night they usually anchored safely offshore. Sometimes they sought refuge in sheltered bays – but mosquitoes, mangrove swamps, and lack of fresh water made them inhospitable places to stay.

Heat, and the slow-going strain of feeling their way along the coast, began to tell on men’s nerves – sailors and officers alike. Isaac noticed they drank more heavily, became more quarrelsome, jostled to assert themselves in cramped, confined spaces. And at a place called Bustard Bay, named for a bird that Mr Banks shot and had cooked into a pie, animosities erupted in an act of violence that threatened the Captain’s authority.

His clerk, Richard Orton, had been drinking all evening in the Midshipmen’s quarters below the foredeck. He was a rather vain young man, and a fractious drunk. The drunker he got, the more he argued with his companions – especially the American, James Magra, and his mate Patrick Saunders. Midshipman Magra had once cut the clothes off Orton’s back in their drunken frolics, and had been heard boozily to say that he’d murder Dick Orton – ‘if Ah weren’t afeared of hangin’ fer it.’

Awake in their hammocks, Isaac and Nick were distantly aware of them quarrelling again in the forecastle. Eight bells had sounded and the middle watch gone on deck, before the lads heard Orton stumbling down the companionway and into his cabin aft to sleep off the grog.

But oh! the shrieks next morning when Orton woke to find not only had his clothes been cut off again, but that someone had also sliced into both his ears. Blood had spurted from the lobes and down his neck, staining the blanket. Half-conscious with pain and a hangover, this time Orton thought he really had been murdered.

The Captain was furious when he heard about it.

‘Mr Orton is not a man without his faults!’ he exclaimed, ‘and his injuries are more apparent than real. But this breach of discipline is a direct challenge to me as commander of this ship.

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