The Voyage: Part I

By Robert Vincent

It is 1832 as the USS Hayes sails the Indian Ocean, guided by its lord and master, Captain Gellins. Meantime a shipmate is wrongly accused of stealing and faces the fatal lash. Likewise, he is just one of many who have been accused of false charges: others who have already met their end at the gratings; all from the lies supplied to the captain by shipmate Penderghast. Who can tell what will happen if certain other shipmates take the law into their own hands to try and right this injustice.

And if the plot succeeds, what may follow?

The Voyage: Part I is the tale of a young sailor’s journey as he becomes embroiled in events beyond his control and through an act of sacrifice ironically unleashes an ancient curse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jul 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781480898943

Robert Vincent

Robert Vincent is the author of several screenplays, novels, and dramatic works. He is also the writer and illustrator of a children’s book. Robert and his wife, Kathy, live in Los Angeles California.

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Copyright © 2021 Robert Vincent.

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without the written permission of the author except in the case of

brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents,

organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products

of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-9895-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9896-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9894-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020921474

Archway Publishing rev. date: 06/18/2021

CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1 A Visit from a Portuguese Count and His Family aboard the USS Hayes Sailing in the Indian Ocean

Chapter 2 Farewell, Pat Tobin

Chapter 3 1827

Chapter 4 My New Home

Chapter 5 Serving the British Crown

Chapter 6 My Chum Jamie Dundas

Chapter 7 I Catch another Ball

Chapter 8 A Haircut Then onto the Wardroom

Chapter 9 Holystoning off British America

Chapter 10 Jamie and I Say Goodbye to the Burrows

Chapter 11 A Sad Homecoming

Chapter 12 A Symposium aboard the USS Hayes

Chapter 13 The Conspirators

Chapter 14 Christmas Eve

Chapter 15 Captain Gellins

Chapter 16 Able Seaman Jonas Penderghast

Chapter 17 The Scuttlebutt

Chapter 18 Illusion

Chapter 19 Fright Grips the Hayes

Chapter 20 A Meeting with the Master-at-Arms

Chapter 21 A Meeting with King Liar

Chapter 22 Batavia Refuses Us

Chapter 23 A Return Salute from Government Hill

Chapter 24 The First Night in Singapore

Chapter 25 Rome before the Romans

Chapter 26 Following the Crowd

Chapter 27 King Liar Passes Me By

Chapter 28 A Becket 14 Circumstance

Chapter 29 An Innocent Man Hides Out

Chapter 30 A British Master Ogletree

Chapter 31 Catching the Prey

Chapter 32 The Deed

Chapter 33 Escape

Notes

To

Kathy

I write from beyond the grave, of many characters to this tale, nay confederates to his scheme; but only one enemy: who was once my dearest friend and hers. From the other side of the chasm, then, I recall his curse.

—The narrator

PROLOGUE

Glasgow, Scotland

1846

N ot a soul could have scored him better. He kept him alive when he did so, his mind binding the hands and feet, while the blade ripped at the body. With his eyes he magnified the distress of his victim as it came out in rivers, and when he was through emptying out most of the human reservoir, though saving some for the sake of showmanship, he was quite bloody himself. With magical fingers, then, not only did he close the wounds, but miraculously cleaned himself thereafter, where not a spot of it was left about. He reclothed the judge therewith and put a new and downright bonny-looking crease into his white silk cravat, but kept for himself a leg to chew on later. The leg was clothed in trouser and boot and propped up in an armchair shoved in the corner of the room.

Later in the night, from a blue and white flowered teacup, the ragged-looking Scotsman served himself a very red tea on the now-spotless execution table. While sipping the tea, he peered at the rope staked out tightly over the sill of the open window and waited while humming lowly.

Outside the executioner’s top-floor apartment, the body of Ballie (Judge) Brodie dangled in a light wind. The late-night Glasgow streets were all but deserted save for two ladies who’d sauntered underneath the window of the apartment building. They stopped their stroll, howbeit, only after one of them felt a drop of rain fall onto her forehead out of a cloudless autumn sky. She wiped it clean, but when she discovered that it was not rain at all but blood, she gazed up finally, saw the rest of it drip from the corner of the one-legged corpse’s mouth, and screamed.

Not long after, while still humming the tune that survived in his throat, the same butcher—his scant beard and long silver hair flowing—was whisked through the barely lit corridors of a prison by two guards from the tollbooth in Dumbarton. The guards appeared to be in a special hurry to be not only rid of him, but also to place his soul, as swiftly as God should allow, behind the bars of an awaiting jail cell.

The trio grew to silhouettes making their way down a corridor, with the last silhouette belonging to overly stout sheriff substitute William J. Carrick, who stopped himself halfway down and with some effort wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. By now, another guard named Gull had joined him.

Whit’s his crime? asked Gull.

Urr ye kenspeckle wi’ Baillie Brodie? asked Carrick.

Aye whit o’ him? Gull asked.

Well, he is nae more, Carrick replied, as the two turned round and went the other way.

Finally, the prisoner was secured behind the bars with but a trace of him noticeable against the darkness of his cell. The other two guards who’d ushered him to his impermanent destiny stood outside the cell and curiously beheld what they could of its present tenant, who they’d decided by now was a horrifying lunatic.

This cell wull nae haud me, groaned the prisoner.

By God’s grace let us hawp ye’r wrong, said one of the guards.

God? God hud his son taken fae him. ‘N’ noo mines fae me. Ah telt him lang syne he’d nivver be rid of me. ‘N’ ah’ament wrong. ‘N’ th’ plan is set, replied the prisoner. Fate haes set it fur me, he said. ‘N’ be it kent, It’s his fault noo. Nae mines.

Whit plan? asked the other guard.

Th’ plan tae catch up wi’ mah eternal enemy. Fur if ah cannae hae her, nor wull he, said the prisoner.

Hae wha? asked one of the guards.

Ye hae na power tae dae any sic thing behind they bars, replied the other guard.

Yer wrong, knave. He wull come tae me yin day. ‘N’ then at anither time, ah wull gang tae him. Ah’ve th’ upper huan in this world. ‘N’ah shall abide by it, said the prisoner.

At this, one of the guards tapped the other upon the shoulder and then did the same to the side of his own head as if to suggest that the prisoner was plumb mad, and encouraged the other guard to follow him straight away from the man’s cell.

On their way back down the corridor, one guard turned to the other.

Eternal enemy? he asked with bewilderment.

He’s a frightening soul, said the other guard.

He wull nae hae her! He wull nae! Och whit a frightful fankle he’s created fur his, self! Fate is his enemy noo! Fate is his enemy. Nae me! the prisoner shouted from the darkness.

Wis that ballie murdurred nae yin wha wis pairt o’ that blood swallowin society? asked one of the guards.

Aye. ‘N’ whin thay fun his body, nae a drap o’ blood wis in it, to except the drops that came fae his geggy, rejoined the other guard.

Dae tell irony? declared the guard.

Aye, came the reply.

A blood swallowin devil then he is. Whit’s his name? asked the guard.

Dundas, replied the other guard. Tobias Dundas.

Let him hae free passage ’til th’ end! shouted the prisoner.

Whit’s his motive then? asked the guard.

With that, the other guard apparently in some sort of anxious and fixed contemplation, paused ere replying: Ah, wonder.

Ah ah’ll follow him into the ages if ah hiv tae and kill him the best wye ah ken fit! came the final words from the lunatic.

Their mouths agape, the guards looked behind themselves once more down the dark corridor.

CHAPTER 1

A Visit from a Portuguese Count and

His Family aboard the USS Hayes

Sailing in the Indian Ocean

1832

Someone had to kill Jonas Penderghast. All five hundred aboard knew it, long ere they roused Pat Tobin from his bed and spread-eagled him on the spar for his anointing. Neither Tobin nor anyone else, barring our Lord and Master Captain Gellins, knew what lay in store for him, but all of us suspected that the chances of Pat Tobin seeing another sunrise were remote.

Now a certain German highbrow will tell you that, while you may exhaust the body, you cannot do the same to the will, ever. For it lives on after the flesh is spent—nay, ¹ the blind English poet ² calls it unconquerable. What’s more, it stubbornly fights the possibility of death. Thus some of us that said were guessing it was sheer will keeping Pat Tobin uncommonly mute, as the boy customarily had a good deal to say. Yet for the present he remained terribly quiet while stretched to the shrouds.

A landlubber might ask how a lashing to the death is possible, but a sailor should laugh at it. Likewise, if the wrong captain gets wind of it, it’s tantamount to the shark that smells blood a mile off, as from it springs easy condonation.

So Pat Tobin, feeling that his quietness would better his chances of surviving the lashing, continued his silence through forenoon and well into the afternoon.

During that day, we went about our business. Around five bells (forenoon), the packet bark Cumberland had brought herself leeward of our consort the William Few, and we were given our letters. Typically, the crew would be jolly over the circumstance. But Tobin’s possible death sobered many otherwise somewhat merry temperaments.

Sometime in the afternoon, a reception of officers was formed on the quarterdeck to greet Count Espiga, a nobleman of Portugal, with his wife and young daughter. Captain Gellins, in full uniform, greeted the young diplomat and his family, the whole coterie dressed to the nines despite the heat. From his personal supply, the captain presented a bottle of French wine to the count and his family. Gellins, as we’d known him to this point, was a rather parsimonious chap, and I suspected that he cared little about the count and his family and that the wine he chose had probably turned already, rendering his gracious greeting with the highborn family as mere pretense.

And not surprising to any of us, the count outdid our lord and master by presenting him with a fruit basket of persimmons, kiwi, peaches, and strawberries, along with a bronze paperweight in the shape of a rooster and a bottle of Spanish red wine as well as one of Madeira.

The