Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection: Moon Island, Sunrise, Follies

‘Yeah? Hi. Yes, I’m here. How did you know?’

He had been reading on the deck and had seen her going up to the house with Marty, nothing more complicated than that.

John wanted to know if May was going to the harbour with him to watch the Pittsharbor Day fireworks. He made regular overtures of the same kind, giving her the opportunity to talk to him if she wanted to. It left May feeling cornered, keeping the refuge of her silence. ‘I’ve got to go, he wants me,’ she mumbled to Marty.

‘You okay?’

Why were people always asking her that? ‘Yeah, thanks. Thank you for the drink. And letting me see the photos.’

The pictures of Doone were already tucked away again.

After the loss of Martin the bowman from the third mate’s boat, the Dolphin’s days at sea took on a heaviness and a monotony that the lack of wind and whales did nothing to dispel.

A sombre mood possessed every man among the officers and crew, but the worst affected of them all was William Corder. On more than one occasion good-natured Matthias Plant sought him out wherever it was he hid himself, behind the thin curtain of his bunk or up in some sheltered corner of the deck, and tried to raise the boy’s spirits by joking with him, or at the least by persuading him to share the reason for his melancholy. The mate had seen enough deaths in his years of seafaring to be by rights almost immune to tragedy, but still he was enough of a man of feeling to remember how he himself had been affected the first time he had witnessed such a loss. Yet it seemed to Matthias that the boy was overtaken by deeper sadness and anxiety than could be explained even by the terrible death of his shipmate. But whatever method of coaxing Matthias employed on him, William begged only to be left alone and retreated into the silent sanctuary of his own thoughts.

At length Captain Gunnell despaired of the poor hunting around the Congo basin and the whaling grounds of the southern Atlantic sea. He gave orders to his officers to set the Dolphin’s course westwards for the islands of Fernando de Naronha, to the north-east of Brazil. At first a fair wind seemed to promise better fortune, but after not many days the breeze died to a whisper, then failed altogether. A cruel heat descended on the ship and pinned it like an expiring insect to the harsh mirror of the sea. The foul smells and vermin bred by the heat below decks were a torture even to the experienced men, and the lack of fresh food and sweet water began to take their toll on the health of the crew.

William Corder fell ill of a fever. After insisting for two days and a night that he could stand his watch with anyone, he collapsed in a dead faint one morning while kneeling to the task of scrubbing the ship’s decks. The officer of the watch ordered him to be carried below and he was placed in his bunk to recover.

Matthias Plant was the officer of the middle watch on that same night. The sea was dead calm with not so much as a breath of wind stirring and Matthias wearily stretched out his arms on the rail, praying for a wind or at least for some thought of action that would keep his eyes from falling shut in sleep.

One of the men from the watch on deck ducked below, with the intention of lighting up his tobacco pipe at the lamp in the forecastle. A moment later there came a great shout, enough to have roused the whole ship if the sleepers had not been so drugged with heat and lassitude. The man who had gone below burst out of the forecastle scuttle. Matthias could at first make no sense of his babble of words. ‘That young fellow,’ the sailor raved. ‘The one that’s sick and lying below.’

‘What of him?’ Matthias shouted back, fearful that poor William had taken a turn for the worse. ‘Come, out with it. Are you an idiot or a native, that you can’t speak properly?’ For indeed the man was gibbering, hardly able to form his words in a manner to allow understanding. The mate took him by the throat and shook him like a dog with a rat, for his sudden anxiety for William Corder overwhelmed his habitual reason.

At last the sailor found words that could be understood. ‘That young fellow is a woman, sir.’

Matthias gaped at him like a fish, the first time in many years that he had been silenced by one of his own men.

‘Come below,’ the man exhorted him, tugging at his arm. ‘Come below if you will not believe me, and see for yourself.’

Matthias followed him at once. It was all quiet below decks save for the faint creaking of the timbers as the ship made slow headway over the flat water. The young creature they had known as William Corder lay in his bunk, with the lamp shining in on him. In the stifling heat of the night and with the burning of his fever he had thrown off his clothes, and now lay exposed to the eyes of his rough companions as a perfect and beautifully made young woman. She was lying there in restless sleep with the sheen of sweat upon her white skin.

The commotion on the deck had drawn the rest of the watch crowding into the forecastle and the watch below were stirring drowsily in their places.

Matthias swiftly pulled the curtain to shield the woman. He dispatched one of the men to rouse the Captain and sent the others back to their places in short order. He bent over the young woman and drew the tumbled bed-things over her body. Her eyelids were already fluttering, and she gave a low moan and came fully awake. Her eyes fixed on Matthias’s face with a flash of terror, then such speechless pleading that it brought a pang to his heart the like of which he had not felt since he was a young man newly in love. ‘Come,’ he said, almost adding William. ‘Your secret is discovered. This is no place for you. You must make yourself respectable and come with me to the Captain, who will see what should be done to help you.’ And all the time his mind was running over the almost incredible fact that this young woman had spent so many weeks living alongside the coarsest creatures who inhabit the forecastle of a whaling ship. What she must have seen and suffered overwhelmed him with pity.

Her eyes filled with tears at the mate’s words and she whispered, ‘I am glad I am found out, because I do not think I could have borne this life for many more days. What will happen to me, Matthias?’

He told her, ‘That is for the Captain to decide. But he is a good man, as you well know, and he will see that you come to no further harm.’

While he waited with his back turned and his eyes sternly fixed on the other astonished occupants of the forecastle, she hurried into some clothes without leaving the shelter of her bunk. Then she slipped upright and, seeing the size of her and the fragile curve of her arm and shoulder, Matthias wondered how he had ever been blind enough to have taken her for a man.

The Captain was waiting in his cabin. Shock and disbelief made his mien sterner than was usual and the poor sick girl began to shiver with fright as well as fever. ‘Sit down,’ he said, indicating the chair opposite his. ‘And you had better stay here, Mr Plant.’ Seeing her shivering Mr Gunnell took the rum bottle from its resting place and poured her a good measure. ‘Drink this. It is hardly the refreshment to offer to a lady, but I suppose you are used to it by this time.’

She took the tot and downed it, and they saw that her hands were well shaped, although badly roughened by the heavy work she had been doing for so many weeks.

‘What is your name?’

‘Sarah. Sarah Corder, sir.’

‘Well then, Sarah, you had better tell Mr Plant and myself what you are doing aboard my ship disguised as a green hand.’

‘I did my work as well as I could, sir, and as well as any of the others. Matthias … Mr Plant… will tell you that.’

She turned her face in supplication, looking to Matthias as her friend.

‘It’s true, Captain.’

‘I have no doubt. But you must tell us how you come to be here in the first place.’

Sarah took a deep breath. As she began her explanation they could see it was a relief to tell her story to listening ears that were at least half sympathetic.

It was a sad tale, but in the end the two mariners were not so very surprised by it. It was only Sarah’s bravery and determination that left them wondering.

She was a young woman of good family, from Portsmouth, Massachusetts. Her mother had died when she was a child, and she had been brought up by her elderly and somewhat strict father. When Sarah was eighteen she went to stay with some relatives of her mother’s who lived up at Portland on the sea coast of Maine. While there, she met a young man. He was a friend of a friend of the son of the family and had therefore been introduced into their circle without anyone having much knowledge of his history or connections. He was an attractive and lively young fellow, and his manners were plausible enough, so he was made welcome as such men often are when there is a need for dancing partners.

Sarah and Robert Hanner soon fell deeply in love. He begged Sarah to marry him, but he also explained that he was waiting to inherit some money from an ancient and infirm relative who lived in New York. The bequest was dependent on Robert appearing to remain just as he was, an attentive and dutiful bachelor with a care for his ailing great-aunt. Notwithstanding this, however, Robert claimed he could not live without his love. Even though they would not be able to marry just yet, for a matter of but a few weeks because it was certain that the great-aunt could not survive beyond that, he begged Sarah to accompany him when the time came for him to leave Maine and return to the city.

‘I know now that I was a fool,’ Sarah told her audience across the Captain’s polished table. ‘But I loved him and I believed what he told me with all my heart.’

The young couple ran away to New York together. No more was heard of the elderly relative. Robert Hanner did not marry Sarah, and within a matter of weeks he abandoned her and disappeared. Sarah’s father and family had cut her off, and she was alone in the world. She had a very little money of her own, and used it to try to find her lover. In the end she had hired a private detective, who traced Hanner to a shipping office where he had declared himself ready to go a-whaling.

The Captain and Matthias Plant gravely nodded their heads. In their time they had encountered many a blackguard who had taken to sea as a way of evading enemies and creditors too numerous or too troublesome to escape by a less demanding route.

‘And then?’ asked Captain Gunnell.

Her voice was soft when she answered but from the flash in her eyes neither of the two men was left in any doubt of the steel beneath Sarah’s tender skin. ‘Why, I determined that I would follow him to whichever end of the earth he had chosen. And when I found him I would make him marry me, because for all that I am a fool and a lost woman I have my strength and my wits to depend upon. God help me but I still love him, and I believe that we would make a good partnership.’ It was only at the last words that her voice wavered and the tears started to her eyes once more.

‘I am sorry for you,’ said the Captain gently.

Sarah had travelled homewards again from New York, but only as far as Nantucket, from where she was advised by the shipping office that Robert Hanner had embarked. ‘I thought that once I was in Nantucket it would be easy to find him, or to discover which ship he had signed to. But I had no idea there were so many whaling ships and such crowds of sailors, or that the life they lived would be so rough and dangerous. By this time I had no money left nor anywhere to go, and so it seemed that my only course and the sole hope of finding him was to disguise myself as a man and follow the whales, just as Robert was doing. Even when this ship set sail I thought somehow our paths would cross, but I see now that I was mistaken.’

Matthias at last understood why she always scanned the faces of the crews when the Dolphin lay near other whalers and the reason for the deep sadness that had recently overtaken her. It was no brother she had been searching for. ‘But this is a bitter, cruel life,’ she added piteously. ‘I had determined that when we reached the next port I would slip away and try to make my way home again. Then I fell ill and you discovered me.’

From the manner in which Captain Gunnell cleared his throat before speaking Matthias knew that he was as affected as he himself had been by Sarah Corder’s story. ‘A whaling ship is indeed no place for a lady,’ he declared. ‘And I must put you ashore as soon as I can. My plan is to put in to port to take on water and supplies, then I shall place you in the care of the Consul at Rio de Janeiro. It is my only course of action, Miss Corder.’

‘I understand,’ she softly answered.

It happened that there was an empty stateroom next to the Captain’s quarters. On his orders it was rapidly cleared, a pair of his own sheets were placed on the bed and the young woman was allowed to rest there in some measure of comfort and privacy. The officers of the Dolphin saw to it that she was provided with what nourishing food their limited supplies permitted and were rewarded by her almost hourly improvement.

When she was somewhat recovered she thanked them with proper warmth. ‘The officers of this ship are true gentlemen and I am in your debt for ever.’ She had a pretty smile and modest ways, and soon the other men were as much under her spell as Matthias Plant.

The weather changed within a day of Sarah’s secret being revealed. A strong north-easter helped the Dolphin to landfall at Fernando de Naronha, where much-needed water and fresh food were taken on board, then a course was set for the mainland. For most of this time Sarah kept to her cabin, but from time to time she was persuaded to take the air up on the deck. Her behaviour when she met her erstwhile forecastle companions was a picture of modest goodwill.

Sometimes when Matthias had a spare hour they would pass it together in talk, for the good mate had no doubt that she was lonely. He learned much about her childhood and the friends and companions of those early days, but she would almost never speak of Robert Hanner. Yet notwithstanding her reticence, Matthias did not believe he was ever out of her mind for more than a minute at a time. He would come upon her when she was staring out to sea or down at the ruined skin of her hands, and she would be so lost in thought that his voice would startle her. He knew then that she was thinking of her betrayer and most likely still planning how she might discover him again. Matthias felt a dreadful weight of fear and anxiety on her behalf, yet there was determination and an iron will in Sarah, as strong as or stronger than any man’s, that in some way only heightened her very womanliness.

At Rio de Janeiro the Captain sent word to the Consul, and he soon received assurance that that gentleman and his wife would receive Sarah into their own home until such time as a passage home could be arranged for her.