The story so far… John, the carpenter on a ship leaving London bound for Adelaide, has noticed an attractive young woman, Bess, on deck among the steerage passengers who boarded the day before. He’s approached her and tried to impress by referring to their route, with apparent knowledge, to the colony of South Australia.
She inspected him keenly. ‘You’ve sailed to South Australia before?’ Her eyes widened; was this a chance to ease her fears of what lay ahead?
‘No,’ John confessed, flustered by her directness, ‘never sailed to any of the colonies…’ The woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘Fact is,’ he continued quickly, ‘I’m the ship’s carpenter but all my carpentry’s been done ashore, as a shipwright.’ He was going to say ‘master shipwright’, his recently acquired title still one of intense pride, but he thought that would be lost on her. ‘My first voyage as a ship’s carpenter, but I’ve sailed with the Royal Navy out of Portsmouth in my earlier days.’
If he had been trying to impress this woman, mention of the Navy seemed to have done the trick. The woman’s open-eyed look returned.
‘Well, you’re an important person on this ship. Beggin’ your pardon if I’m takin’ up your time chatterin’ away.’ She glanced around nervously. ‘Last night the cap’n come into our quarters and said there’s a matron in charge of all us single girls. Made ’er stand up – scowly old bitch. We was told by ‘er we mustn’t mix with the crew, so maybe me ‘n you shouldn’t be talkin’, or I’ll get scolded.’ She hesitated. ‘But then, you’re not crew, you’re the carpenter so I s’pose that’s all right. And I can’t see that matron woman on deck.’ She grinned with a conspiratorial giggle that both excited and discomfited John.
‘Not a lot for me to do now so I can talk. Another steam tug will come to tow us out into the channel but there’s no sign of it yet. In any case, I ‘spect we need more wind than we have here if we’re to raise sails after we get towed out.’ He licked his finger and raised it in a mock attempt to assess the wind direction and speed, as he’d seen others do during his navy training. ‘We may be waiting anchored in the channel awhile.’
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