The Hills of Singapore Read Free Page A

ceiling, allowing her to sleep through the constant rolling of the vessel, rather like a baby in a crib. In the day it was tied fast to the wooden side with hooks. A table and chair, bookcase and washstand were nailed securely to the floor. A small bathtub, her bedding and utensils, candles and candlesticks and the all-important chamber pot completed her belongings.
    It had all been intensely exciting, the captain greeting them, a majestic figure, like a king to his court, the bustle and noise of Gravesend, the port seething with activity around this ship towering over her, its guns ranged along its bulwarks, grizzled sailors with gold rings in their ears swarming. Then came the hustle and bustle of setting up the cabin, meeting her companions on this long, long voyage, the departure from London, sailing down the Thames like Queen Elizabeth in this mighty ship, the lurch as they hit the open water of the Channel. The reality had hit very quickly in a storm in the Bay of Biscay.
    The constant rolling of the ship, even on calm seas, had been comically ridiculous. Dressing and undressing became acts of supreme hardship: no sooner did one lift a leg or let go of the chair then one was flung to one side, only to slide back into the canvas walls at the next motion of the vessel. For the first two weeks she had been covered in bruises. She learned to dress speedily, either sitting in her swinging bunk or on the floor, one leg looped round the chair.
    The noise in the roundhouse was a constant aggravation. The cabins were separated by a mere width of canvas. Every sneeze and yawn was heard, the snores like thunder, the sounds and smells of every bodily function magnified in the cramped environment. After a mere few days at sea however, and upon examination of the other accommodations, Charlotte had been eternally grateful to the agent and to Robert.
    Beneath the roundhouse was the great cabin, where the single gentlemen travellers stayed. Because the great cabin was closer to the waves, in rough weather the windows were screened to prevent the sea coming in. These window screens were known as “dead lights” and didn’t always fit very well, with the result that passengers, their bedding and other possessions became soaked.
    But even this was better than where the less affluent men were accommodated. In this dark, fustian place amidships, reeking of human stenches, slung around the gun placements were quarters the other men shared, all sleeping slung from hammocks twelve inches from the ceiling, rolled into tubes like bats in a cave.
    Robert, she knew, had travelled this way, and when she thought of this her heart became raw with love and pity for him, and tears welled and never once, not ever once, during the entire voyage did a complaint pass her lips. But for him she would have travelled in some cave-dark, stifling cabin or worse, in steerage, in the bowels of the ship, amongst the rats and the bilge water, cheek by jowl with the poorest passengers. Compared to the heat, noise and stench of below decks, her cabin had been a palace.
    However, human nature decrees that despite our comparative good fortune we are not always happy with our lot, and time hung heavy for all on such a long journey. The ship grew salads and vegetables in boxes of earth on the upper deck, and Charlotte tended these, attempting to save them from the salt air, and occasionally took one or two of the goats on a tour of the deck for some exercise or played with the young steerage children who were permitted on deck for fresh air but corralled like the goats. She fed the poultry in the hencoop. She tried not to get attached to the sheep and lambs which would end up on the plate, but she allowed herself to care for the little goats which supplied milk for the children.
    Everyone from the upper deck cabins ate in the cuddy by the cook’s galley, under the poop. The food grew progressively worse the further they ventured from land. A breakfast at