Nelson: The Poisoned River (5 page)

Ten

Hastie, in washing down the captain’s torso in the morning, and sponging him liberally with vinegar and camphor oil, was pleased to see the progress he was making. Nelson was impatient with his friend’s attentions, but had more confidence in him than in Dr Dancer.

This
man, official surgeon or whatever, was getting cockahoop about the possibilities now that the men were all on shore, and in later discussions about lightening the loads to be borne upstream even suggested they leave the medical supplies behind in Greytown.

‘Is
that wise, doctor?’ said Nelson, circumspectly. ‘I am not a medical myself, but-’

Dancer
interrupted.

‘Indeed
you are not, with respect sir, and neither is your Liverpool apprentice. Now we are free of the filthy bilges and cramped quarters on the ships we will be new men, I do assure you. And once we have gone a few leagues up the river, these damn swamps will be also gone. No effluvium, no
malaria
. It is good physicians’ Latin!’

The
reloading under naval orders went on apace, until a signal gun at the entrance warned of an approaching sail. There was great excitement and a call to arms, but the vessel revealed herself to be a sloop from Port Royal, with despatches from the governor.

As
joint commander now, Nelson was invited by Polson to read the letter, which was dated a scant three weeks before. Nelson made a rueful face.

‘And
we took fifty days,’ he said. ‘Please God the rains will be as tardy in arriving.’

The
dispatch from General Dalling made no mention of the time they may have spent in getting to the river, and assumed much that was embarrassing. He was confident they had already taken the fort some thirty miles from Greytown, and may even have crossed Lake Nicaragua. The sacking of Granada, as Morgan the Buccaneer had done ‘with ease’ a hundred years before was also mentioned, and even the possibility that Polson had reached the Pacific coast.

Dalling,
a man of rumbustious imagination, also hinted that when Polson had laid the groundwork, and enjoyed the credit for that part of it, Dalling himself would come across the water at the head of a permanent army to hold the Spanish Main for England. In pomp and glory.

‘Well?’
said Polson, when they had finished reading. Nelson’s response was very dry.

‘I
think we should get moving, sir,’ he said. ‘According to Governor Dalling, we are woefully in arrears.’

The
next decision was that Captain Despard should make the first sortie, with a canoe of Indians, to scout out the channels and the deeper water beyond. When Mr Pilot Hanna suggested he come too, Nelson brusquely vetoed it.

‘These
native men are local, sir,’ he said. ‘As is their knowledge. You, with respect…’

But
he did not need to finish, for Hanna had walked off. He stepped out abruptly, but he did not flounce. Tim Hastie detected some measure of relief in him.

The
order of the sailing after that was worked out by depth, and weight of oarsmen. Hanna insisted that big vessels had been recorded as completing the full one hundred miles or so to Lake Nicaragua, whatever the state of the rains. When Nelson mentioned rapids and shallows, he pooh-poohed this too.

‘Of
course there are such things,’ he said. ‘It is a river, sir, an inland river. There are rapids, shallows, cataracts. But nothing – nothing – that we cannot overcome. The natives trade along it all the year. The Spanish have built a fort at San Juan. Thirty miles, sir, without an obstacle. I warrant you, I will stake my wig on it.’

Nelson,
who was bewigged, did not point out that Hanna was not. Indeed, Hastie had opined the night before that perhaps the man’s stupidity was a product of the sun’s rays constant on his naked dome. Despard was contented, though.

‘Captain,
we are a strong force. I have never known a river yet in all America that good soldiers cannot overcome. And sailors, too. I will scout ahead, and report back if we find anything untoward.’ He laughed. ‘Without Mr Hanna on our side, I am sure the task will be much eased, sir. I shall go.’

The
big boats were loaded first, and set off in advance of the smaller ones. The logic was that if and when they stuck, the canoes and the pitpans would come up to lighten them, and ease their passage. Nelson suggested that some medical supplies at least could be stowed in the canoes, but here again a clash ensued.

‘I
have told you, sir,’ said Dr Dancer, ‘they are extraneous. Once we are upriver a few miles they will not be needed. We will be clear of the effluvia, we will be beyond disease. You are a sailor, sir, while I trained under the most eminent of physicians for many years. You must place your trust in me.’

Hastie
stared at his captain, and tried to speak him with his eyes. His own bag was stuffed with medicaments, at the expense, even, of extra underclothes. But Nelson’s way, he knew, was not to quarrel on marginalities, but to save his powder for the bigger fights. And time was ticking on.

‘We
need food for invalids,’ said Nelson. ‘Men will die if they cannot digest.’ He shrugged. ‘I bow to your knowledge and experience.’

‘Sugar,
sago, oatmeal,’ said Dancer, triumphantly. ‘They all take space, sir. They are all of dubious advantage. You are the fighter, sir. Would you not place greater store in ammunition?’

The
Hinchinbrook’s boats, however – the cutter and the pinnace – took on a disproportionate amount of ‘food for weaklings’ as the surgeon was later heard to disparage it. Being great seaboats, and exceeding buoyant for their shallow draught, they took on a disproportion of most things, in fact. As Nelson had observed, the larger native craft, although ideal for a river in full flood, were cripplingly deep, while the canoes and pitpans were not designed to carry bulk.

The
other craft designed by men from the Old World, Captain Collins’s Royal George, the ammunition carrier Chichito, and the ‘floating dung cart’ Lord Germain, filled Colonel Polson and the other soldiers with deep satisfaction as they took on more and more and more of everything. Deep was the key, however. Even with his small experience of the way of ships, Hastie recognized and understood the growing gloom among the seamen. And Captain Nelson, backed up by Collins, had to positively insist at one stage that the ships could take no more.

‘We
cannot leave guns, sir!’ said Polson. ‘Do you say we don’t take cannons and their balls?’

‘No
such thing, sir. Except that today, we take no more. Today we must set forth. My boatswain is ready, sir, with his call. My two vessels with our fifty men are going, sir. If you remain that is your decision, but I would wish you joy of it. Speak now, or forever hold your peace!’

He
gave the signal, and the boatswain shrilled the order. First the pinnace, then the cutter, backed off from the shore. With their heavy oars in hand, the sailors boomed out three rousing cheers.

From
the denseness of the wooded shores the birds shrieked and screamed and whooped the chorus. Of the two sets of creatures, they made most sound, by far.

Eleven

Tim Hastie, born in Wales and years in Liverpool, had never seen or imagined anything like the lower reaches of Rio San Juan. He was in what Nelson called the ‘well’ of the cutter, which was the roomy area between the stroke oar thwart and the small afterdeck, which in turn covered an area for stowing dunnage. The man who had the tiller could stand if he so desired, or sit or squat cross-legged on this deck. Also in the well were Nelson himself, a stout seaman with a long pole for punting off the ground or river bank, and a lugubrious marine.

He
was one of the shorter soldiers from the Hinchinbrook, but still his shanks and armaments fitted uncomfortably in the well. His musket already had its bayonet fixed, and on his knees were laid two large pistols, primed but not yet (please God, thought Tim) primed to fire. He had a wig on, and a cocked hat, and sweat was running out from under it.

His
task, as he well knew and Nelson made well clear, was to keep a lookout for anything suspicious on the banks, and draw a bead in case the order came to take a shot. Polson had repeated, since the expedition had made first camp, that the dangers in the forest were many, but unknown. The local Indians, while not unfriendly, had been unwilling to leave their homes ‘for glory,’ and who indeed could blame them? The other native men, Mosquitoes and a few of indeterminate caste and parentage, either spoke no ‘useful’ language (Polson), or chose to pretend they didn’t. Mistrust and unpleasantness between the factions was already rife.

Hastie,
not for the first time, wondered how he had come to this. The heat, the drink, the levels of exhaustion of the last few days, had made him prone to slipping into dreams. He was now rated officially (Nelson said) as surgeon’s mate, although he was unclear how this could be, or who indeed would pay him. He had joined the 69th in Liverpool as a volunteer, marched to Portsmouth with the army, and somehow been adopted or coerced to tend to Nelson when his intermittent sickness had first come back upon him. Hastie had tried, once, to ask Colonel Polson officially what the position was, but Polson, harassed and overworked beyond belief, had looked at him with unseeing eyes, and muttered words of formless confidence. Tim did not even care to go further into his status, even in his private journal. He was, somehow, in limbo.

When
he opened his eyes and focused on an empty, staring pair, his tired brain said nothing to him for a moment. And then he jumped, as if he had been stabbed, and let out a cry. Nelson, right beside him, gave a bark of laughter.

‘Wake
up, Tim,’ he said. ‘It is a crocodile. Be polite, or he will snap your head off. It is not a jest, I promise you.’

It
was a jest, Tim hoped, but as he jerked upright, the long, strange, silent head slid backwards. First the squareness of the skull went under, then the plank-like jaw, then the upturned nostrils, bejeweled with yellow fangs. Last to disappear were the eyes, as pale and soulless as he thought that death must be.

‘Shoot
it!’ he said. It came out as a croak. The soldier’s eyes turned onto his, mournful and uninterested. ‘Shoot it, it’s a crocodile! Did you not hear?’

‘Or
perhaps an alligator,’ said the stroke oar, conversationally. ‘Mebbe a cayman. Be buggered, sir, if I can tell the differ. Ain’t seen one in Portsmouth ’arbour, though. Not even on the Turktown side.’

‘Turks?’
Hastie’s confusion grew. ‘Sir? Captain Nelson?’

The
oarsmen on the nearest thwarts were laughing happily. A bloody foreigner! From bloody Liverpool!

‘Gosport,’
said Nelson. ‘Just don’t ask me why. The other side of Portsmouth harbour, a God damn long way off the Barbary. And from the Isle of Wight come Corkheads. It makes Norfolk seem quite civilized, sometimes. You there. Number three oar, larboard side. I could keep a better stroke than that when I was ten.’

‘Beg
pardon, sir. May I rot for it!’

More
laughter. Nelson and his men were like a village music band. A large fish jumped clean from the water by the captain’s hand and flopped back with a splash.

‘Damn
me!’ he cried. ‘Next time we bring a net!’

Tim
Hastie was recovered. His dream had faded. He studied the brown and swirling waters of the river hoping to see more things weird and wonderful. He could not believe how bold the animals appeared to be. On the bank, once his eyes had adjusted to the violent light and alternate deep black shadows, he could see a positive menagerie. Like greasy lizards the crocs (or caymen? A word that he had never heard of) slipped up and down the slopes, indifferent to each other, indifferent to the world. Until he saw a snout, an eye, a nostril trailing behind a gaudy, handsome duck not twenty feet away, and the trail became a mighty swirl, and the snout a giant scissor, and the top jaw came down on the duck like a guillotine. There was no squawk, although a jet of blood sprang through the air, and mixed into the water as the long head disappeared. Tim saw a feather float down on a zephyr.

‘Bugger!’
said Nelson. ‘Easy all, easy. Mr Coxswain, steer for that boat there. Aye, there, damn you! Can’t you see the fellow is aground?’

It
was a larger pitpan, more a bongo it would appear, when they had learned the native terminology. It was carved from a log, twenty five feet or more, with eight paddles on either side and the gunwales built up like fortress walls.

‘A
native boat, and run aground already,’ Nelson said. ‘That scoundrel Hanna deserves a whipping round the fleet. Oh God, a hundred miles of this? I’d rather swim across the Western Ocean!’

Because
their coxswain was a man of skill, because there was a lookout on the bow, because the cutter did not draw too much, they got up to the stranded boat. Before they could offer proper help another was aground, and then another. All around were cries of anger and frustration.

‘Back
gently,’ Nelson said, almost a whisper. ‘Handsome now, my lads – if we get stuck on the pudding dough it’s overboard all hands, and I have got my best shoes on this morning.’

Almost
as a counterpoint, Hastie saw another bloody flurry, another swimming bird snatched under, and this time a churn of snapping fish. He gasped as he saw silver bodies snake and wriggle, saw fins and tails below the surface, saw a hint of many mouths.

‘Sir!’
he said. And Nelson smiled.

‘No
danger, Tim,’ he said. ‘Unless you’re bloodied. Then I’m told they’ll nip your bollocks off. It’s better to be careful than to swim.’

The
stroke oar grunted. He had a sense of humour.

‘They
can clear the meat from off a bone in twenty seconds,’ he said laconically. ‘Well, bones in fact. I’ve seen a pig gone in a drunkard’s fart. Nothing left but squeak.’

‘And
if the fish don’t get you, the leeches will,’ said the next man forward. ‘They take blood out like a chain pump. Stay warm and dry is my advice to you, Tim. You ain’t got much flesh on you to start with.’

‘Way
enough,’ the coxswain said. ‘Alongside, sir? Or lie off a bit?’

Nelson
looked around him and assessed. For the moment, there seemed more hulls aground than floating. Some of the soldiers in a nearby bongo were shouting as if drunk. Maybe they were, indeed. But not drunk enough yet to go overboard.

‘Captain
Collins!’ Nelson shouted. Then: ‘Stow your noise there, men, I need to be heard on the Royal George. Captain Collins! Have you got Mr Hanna there on board you?’

The
Royal George was half a cable’s length astern of the cutter, and as Nelson spoke to her she went aground, with a clearly visible shock. A sudden shriek of parakeets rose simultaneously, sounding remarkably like mocking laughter. The stroke oar whooped, and Captain Nelson cursed him, mildly.

‘Shut
your mouth, man. The whole damn lot of them are going on the mud. Collins! Where is our bloody pilot?’

The
‘bloody pilot,’ unsurprisingly, was nowhere to be found. What point in any case, the thing was plain as daylight. They were at a bend in the river, and the scoured channel was on the unexpected side. Each vessel would need to work over to it.

At
first, men tried with oars and paddles, then reversed them and thrust down with their looms. The results were different from hull to hull, only that a stench of fresh-turned mud arose, and white men turned black or pie-bald as the filth was flung around. Some boats, mainly the pitpans and canoes, worked free, the bongos and the European hulls did not.

Here
again the navy and the army men were different. The army men, of whatever rank, seemed mesmerized by the environment. They sat unmoving while the natives on each boat thrust and splashed and rocked to get their vessels free. Their clothing was an appalling hamper to them. Stiff coats, white breeches, shiny boots and shoes. Many still wore wigs.

‘God’s
balls and pudden!’ shouted Nelson’s coxswain. ‘Beg pardon, sir, the bastards need to get their feet on ground!’

Tim
watched in horror as the Indians nearest to him leapt off their pitpans, off their bongos, off the largest of the canoes. They sank up to their waists, splashing and whooping, throwing enormous flurries of mud and spray.

‘They
will get eaten, sir! Oh God, a crocodile, sir, look!’

Not
one but many crocodiles. They slipped and scuttled down the river banks as if to launch themselves out to the feast. The Indians left on the hulls began to smack the surface with the blades of paddles, then the white men followed suit with oars. One marine, without an order, levelled his musket and let off a shot.

Success!
Like an enormous, twisted loop a crocodile burst from the water, mouth wide open, blood pouring from its eye. Immediately, to enormous cheers, more crocs, more alligators, shot towards it and engaged their fangs. All around, from the soup of mud and blood, small silver fish sprang and snapped, to be snapped up in their turn.

‘Dog
eat dog,’ the stroke oar said. ‘Like Saturday night on Portsmouth Hard when the fleet’s home, Tim. So you can swim quite safe, you see.’

Two
minutes later, his point was proved. Tim Hastie was up to his waist in water. One hand clamped to the gunwale, one to his breeches-front. Oh Sarah, Sarah, he cried inwardly. I hope I’m fit to marry, after this!