Free A Commonwealth of Thieves by Thomas Keneally

these orders was fear of that great eroder of human flesh and spirit, scurvy, almost inevitable on even shorter voyages than this.
    The run down the Channel took three days, with great sickness amongst the women on the
Lady Penrhyn,
the new-built ship whose timbers were still howling and settling and whose master, William Sever, was unfamiliar with her. Uncontrollable seasickness filled the low-roofed prison deck with its acid, gut-unsettling stench, and spread rapidly down the crammed lines of women starboard and port. On top of that, the escort
Hyena
had to take the
Lady Penrhyn
in tow to keep her up to the other ships.
    Phillip was to find a companion spirit in John Hunter, captain of
Sirius,
Phillip's flagship. The sea had claimed Hunter's ultimate affection over competing passions for music, the classics, and the Church of Scotland. His first shipwreck, when sailing with his father, a ship's master, had been on a howling Norwegian coast at the age of eight. Once rescued, he had been saved from hypothermia by being clasped to a Norwegian woman in a warm bed, an experience which seems to have reinforced his suspicion that the sea was his true mother. Just over fifty and no ninny, he was the sort of officer others might describe as the navy's backbone.
    The fleet hove to some two hundred miles west of the Scilly Isles and
Hyena
departed, taking Phillip's last dispatches. By now, Phillip knew that there was a range of speed and performance between the various ships. Apart from the
Lady Penrhyn,
the transports
Charlotte
and the
Prince of Wales
were slowed by heavy seas, and their convicts suffered the worst discomfort and seasickness in storms. The deep-laden store ships,
Borrowdale, Golden Grove,
and
Fishburn,
were susceptible to storm damage to masts and rigging. The
Alexander, Scarborough,
and
Friendship
were the three fastest transports. The handiest sailer was the little snub-nosed tender,
Supply,
which could reconnoitre ahead and double back to round up stragglers, but could safely carry little sail in really big seas. At first, Lieutenant King could not see much sense in
Supply,
since she was not big enough to carry a significant amount of stores. But he now thanked God for the existence of this tough and speedy little sloop.
    By 3 June, the eleven ships reached Teneriffe in the Canary Islands, after a journey on which the irons of the convicts, except those under punishment, had been totally removed, and a routine for allowing the transportees on deck in fine weather had been established.
    Sailors generally had two hammocks, which were regularly scrubbed and aired each day in nets hung in the rigging around the deck. In well-run ships, convict bedding was also aired and dried in the nets. But despite all such care a number of males had died on the
Alexander,
which was the unhealthiest ship in the fleet. She had lost twenty-one convicts to fever, scurvy, pneumonia, and the bloody flux (dysentery) in the few weeks since sailing and had a further twenty-one on the sick list.
    South of Teneriffe the weather was extremely hot and characterised by calms and rain storms. In the calms, amidst the cram of bodies, the air below decks reached fierce temperatures, and a skirt of stinking waste and garbage surrounded each ship. Wind sails were rigged like great fans, and swung across the deck to blow air below, and while the convicts exercised or slept on deck, gunpowder was exploded again in their prison to disperse evil vapours. The marine officers on
Friendship
found the ship infested with rats, cockroaches, and lice, but the women convicts still needed to be battened down on their ill-ventilated deck at night, to prevent “a promiscuous intercourse taking place with the marines.” By such a term, prostitution might have been meant, yet the rigour of separation between the sexes must have varied from ship to ship, to account for the pregnancies of convict women. In prison and on the convict decks of the fleet, experienced