Chapter Eleven #2
It had been four years then since he had fled his family home, and he had long since overcome his initial awkwardness and ignorance and become, with Cowper’s gentle advice and encouragement, an apt and useful sailor, able to splice and hitch a rope, reef or furl a sail, sniff a freshening wind, read the clouds and stars, and know as well as if he had been born to it the difference between a scow and a brig, or a belaying pin and a cant hook.
Coming back from Gothenburg that late spring with a cargo of iron and deals, their ship, the Mary and Elizabeth, was struck hard by a gale that continued for eight days unceasing.
Everything loose was swept off the decks, and it was impossible for the cook to make a fire, so they were forced to eat raw flesh or go hungry.
All of them, from the captain on down, were weary and weakened in mind as well as body by this ordeal, or else, when they reached the Norfolk coast and saw the cutter approaching through the fog, they likely would have realized what it meant and tried to take flight.
Instead, they trusted that it was only what it seemed, the pilot come to guide them safely into harbor, and so, by the time the two vessels were side by side and they saw the redcoat marines with cutlasses and muskets who had been crouching down leap up, it was far too late for escaping.
Captain Barnstable argued and raged against the officers, calling them villains and the enablers of tyranny, but that was all in vain.
They put Hearn and Cowper and one other man, Simon Derwent, onto the cutter in irons and left the four who remained to guide the ship home.
The prisoners were taken directly to a guard ship near the harbor and held there in a cell belowdecks with several others who had been snatched off a Greenland whaler two days before.
Hearn, once the first shock of it had passed, thought that if he and Cowper could stay together at least, it might not be so bad in the navy, since it was commonly believed that the rations were better there, and the possibility of prize money was enough to outweigh the added dangers.
Cowper, however, could not be reconciled to such a fate and was fiercely set against it.
He had no wish to die, he said, or lose a limb in battle with the French or perish of the country fever on some slave-filled island a thousand miles from home.
“We must find a way to escape from this place, Tom,” he said, “because once they put us aboard a man-of-war, our fate will be sealed.” Hearn tried to dissuade him from such a rebellious course, but Cowper was determined and would not listen to reason.
He talked with the whaling fellows, who resented their unjust confinement quite as much as he did, and together they hatched a plan to break out of their prison cell that same night and steal one of the ship’s wherries to make a quick escape.
It began as they intended. By feigning sickness, they easily tricked the nearest sentry into unbolting the cell door, and then quickly and quietly overpowered him.
Cowper, having claimed the sentry’s musket for himself, went up on deck and, as soon as he felt sure it was safe to proceed, gave the signal for the others to join him.
The four whalers climbed up the ladder first, then Derwent, and finally Hearn.
On the deck in the darkness, Cowper smiled at Hearn quickly and pointed where to go.
“Over there, Tom,” he said. “The others are already safe in the boat.” Hearn stood up and had started to move when an unfamiliar voice, loud and impatient, called out suddenly from behind them:
“Are you still over there, Jack Sullivan? Where in the Lord’s name have you got to now?”
Cowper grabbed Hearn’s arm and tugged him downward, and they crouched there together by the open hatchway in an anxious silence, watching as the dancing yellow beams of the aft sentry’s bull’s-eye came gradually closer and closer, then paused.
There was no moon to see by, but in the shivering lamplight, through drapes and swags of gray and black shadow, they could make out the guardsman’s face and upper body clearly enough.
He was a young man with dark whiskers, stout and thickset, and his blue military tunic was faded and shabby.
“Who goes there?” he shouted. “Who is that? Show yourselves!”
Hearn, when he heard these words and understood they had been discovered, assumed they had no choice but to surrender, but Cowper, to Hearn’s great surprise and alarm, immediately jumped to his feet and shouted back that he had a loaded musket in his hands and would shoot the sentry dead if he dared come any closer.
The sentry stood stock-still with his mouth wide open and the lantern still raised up high in his left hand.
“There’s a good lad,” Cowper said calmly, keeping his eyes fixed on the other man and his musket raised. “No need to be brave. You stay just as you are.”
As the sentry watched, they started moving slowly and cautiously backward, across the deck, until they reached the larboard gunwale.
Hearn swung his right leg across, then his left, but in that moment, just as he started to lower himself down, there was a bright orange flash and a thunderous roar and Cowper, who was standing right beside him, flung his hands in the air and twisted about as if dancing a wild, drunken reel.
The men below in the wherry, understanding that some disaster had just occurred, urged Hearn to jump, but the sight of his bloodied friend slumped against the bulwark fixed him in place and the two sentries, the one they had seen and the one they had missed, realizing that the escaping prisoners were now helpless and at their mercy, charged forward in tandem and, hissing and spitting out curses, knocked them down and began to beat them with their cudgels.
Three days later, after Stephen Cowper, who had expired from his wounds, had been swiftly buried in a common grave and the whalers and Derwent had been found and returned to captivity, Tom Hearn, still bruised and bewildered, was taken before the captain of the guard ship and sentenced to be flogged for his part in the attempted uprising.
Before passing judgment, the captain, whose pewter hair was thinning at the crown and temples, and who gazed at the prisoner through pale green, impassive eyes, with a look of stern and long-suffering indifference, reminded him that the British navy was the finest and most powerful in the world and its power rested on the unquestioning obedience of all those who served.
Any act of impudence or revolution, however futile or insignificant its consequences, could not be allowed to pass unpunished.
“You and I are both small parts of one greater body and cannot separate ourselves from it without inviting our own destruction,” he said complacently, as if reciting the words of an antique creed. “If you only remember that in future, you will avoid a great deal of confusion and pain.”
Hearn didn’t try to disagree with this verdict, nor to plead for any special mercy, because he knew it would do him no good at all.
Cowper’s sudden, violent death had left him numb and helpless but also newly and dreadfully afraid.
He had the sense, as he stood in the captain’s tidy, modest cabin, of being caught in the cogs of a great and unstoppable engine that might crush him and grind him to pieces at any moment.
His current sorrow, intense and overwhelming though it was, seemed tiny and trivial compared to the relentless and implacable might of the forces that had brought it about.
If he had still had his old faith intact, he might have taken strength and comfort from the thought that beyond any worldly powers lay the mysterious and beneficent power of God, the Creator of the world, but as it was, in this moment of confusion, sadness, and terror he had nothing solid to reach for, only a disabling sense of his own smallness and uncertainty.
When he looked outside himself, he saw a world that could destroy a man like him easily and without compunction, and when he looked within he saw only the swirling sands of doubt.
Stephen Cowper, by the manner of his life and death, had taught him that affection could be deep and satisfying but also horribly fragile and easily destroyed.
There was no safety in it, no guarantee of lasting peace or happiness.
That is the hard but undeniable truth, he thought as they bound him tight to the capstan and the first sharp blow of the whip fell across his bared back, and from this day on, for the sake of my survival and my sanity, I must keep it always fresh and lively in the forefront of my mind and learn to abide in a close-guarded solitude according to its severe and monkish rule.
Later, after he had recovered sufficiently from the flogging to be made use of again, Hearn was sent aboard the Blanford, a frigate of twenty-four guns under the command of Commodore Guay.
The war with the French was already underway by then, and the Blanford, after lying for a month and a half at Spithead, set sail that June for the West Indies as escort for a convoy of English merchantmen.
Once at sea, Hearn performed his duties blamelessly, but even in moments of danger or excitement, the numbness of grief and the sense of living always at one remove from his fellows never left him.
He thought of Stephen Cowper constantly in those days, rehearsing their old conversations in his mind and measuring the value of every new opinion or encounter by his sense of whether his friend would have approved of it.
Sometimes, in the forecastle, between watches, lying half asleep in his hammock, he would think he heard Cowper’s cheerful, mocking voice threaded amid the tangled voices of the other men who were playing at cards or talking together, and the familiar sound of it, like a snatch of old music, would scare him and make him tremble.
After fending off the attentions of a band of French and American privateers and pausing a week for water at Saint Kitts, the Blanford arrived safe at Jamaica on July 12, 1760, and dropped anchor in the English harbor at Port Royal.
While there, as they waited for the ship’s hull to be scraped clean of weed and barnacles and a broken topmast to be removed and replaced, Hearn fell ill with the country fever and was sent to the town hospital.
He lay for a fortnight in a dusty hallway on a narrow iron bed, attended by a clan of silent Negro women clad all in white.
While his illness raged and he hovered between life and death, his drifting and delirious mind spewed forth, like an impish dramaturge, visions of Stephen Cowper so vivid and complete that Hearn could not doubt that they were real.
He felt his friend’s touch again, firm and confident, and smelled the sour must of his hair and skin.
So long as this delirium lasted, it was as if death were just a foolish trick someone had played on them both, a nonsense that no one could truly believe in, but afterward, as the sickness ebbed away and he slowly began to recover his strength and his wits, these bright visions faded too, and because he knew that his memories of Cowper would never be as strong and perfect again, he felt like he had suffered a second kind of wounding almost as deep and painful as the first. As he began to eat again and slowly walk about the empty corridors unaided, Hearn thought of the faraway future and wondered vaguely whether this sense of relentless and perpetual sorrow that lived inside him now like a stubborn and uninvited guest would ever leave him, and if it did, what strange new passions might rise up to take its place.