Copyright Oggbashan October 2017
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. The events described here are imaginary; the settings and characters are fictitious and are not intended to represent specific places or living persons.
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Clang!
Clang! Clang!
Clang!
How could I sleep with that irregularly tolling bell sounding every time I thought it had stopped? I peered at my watch. It was three thirty in the morning, late June, pitch black beyond my tent, and cold and raw outside. I snuggled back into my sleeping bag and tried to cover my ears to shut out the mournful bell.
I woke bleary-eyed hours after dawn. Automatically I cooked myself a breakfast and ate it before I was really aware that I was up and about. I couldn't hear that bell but the memory still clanged in my head.
I hadn't visited this part of South Wales before. Until last night I had been enjoying the area. It isn't an obvious tourist destination but the scenery and buildings were just as attractive as better known places but with less people. I was camping in a field behind the public house. My car was parked beside my tent.
I had intended to move on today but I was tempted to stay. Amanda, the landlord's daughter, had booked me in a few nights ago. They were quiet and I had time to talk to her once I had erected my tent. She was helping out while her mother was away visiting Amanda's grandmother. Amanda works in Bristol a few miles from me but had taken a few days off. I'd like to see more of Amanda. I might stay as long as she does.
I washed up and left for a refreshing walk to the sea nearly a mile away and along the coastal path. When I reached the sea the tide was ebbing down the Bristol Channel. The tides here are dangerous, running fast either way, and very easy to misjudge. Today I would stay on the path at the top of the cliffs except where small streams trickled down valleys far too large for them.
I had nearly forgotten that irritating bell when I returned to my tent at dusk. I cleaned myself up and changed into more respectable clothing. Tonight the pub would provide my evening meal.
It was far too early when I entered the bar. The landlord was stacking clean glasses on shelves.
"Hello, Henry," he said. "Fed up with your own company? The meals don't start for a couple of hours yet."
"I know, Mr Jones" I said. "I want to have an early night. I was kept awake last night by a bell ringing somewhere."
The landlord looked at me as if he hadn't seen me before.
"What did it sound like?" He seemed genuinely concerned.
"A slow irregular clanging," I replied. "A deep note but irritatingly random. Every time I though it had stopped; it started again..."
"That'll be the bell buoy on Bell Rock then," Mr Jones said. He seemed relieved. Why?
"The bell buoy? What bell buoy? I haven't seen a bell buoy."
"You wouldn't. It isn't there anymore. It was removed in the 1960s when they modernised the buoy system for the Bristol Channel."
"Are you telling me that I heard the ghost of a bell buoy?"
"Yes. All of us hear it from time to time. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't toll a message of doom. It just is."
"Why was there a bell buoy?"
"I'll tell you what, Henry. I'll lend you one of my books about this area. It has several chapters about the Bell Rock and the shipwrecks there. I have to get on before the dining room starts to fill. What are you drinking?"
"A pint of your local bitter, please."
"OK. I'll get the book then pull your pint." He turned towards the kitchen area. "Amanda? Can you take over for a minute or two?"
Amanda pulled my pint. Her father took longer than I had expected. Amanda and I discussed Bell Rock and the recent weather which had been unusually wet for late June.
When the Mr Jones returned, Amanda went back into the kitchen. The book was a modern paperback reprint of the original published in the 1960s. It was fairly thick with several pages of old photographs of the local coastline.
"Could I buy a copy of this locally?" I asked as I sipped my pint.
"I can sell you that one for eight pounds ninety-nine," he answered. "I have a stock of them. The author used to be a regular."
I paid for the book. I sat in a chair by the log fire and started to read. I continued over my meal. The landlord and Amanda were busy with the evening diners.
Bell Rock had originally been called Yns Iestyn after an anchorite who had his cell on what was then an island. In the fifteenth century, long after Iestyn had died, a storm swept the anchorite's cell and the top soil off the island. Over the years the sea had eroded the rest until the island became a heap of jagged rocks only visible at low water. The name changed to Iestyn's Rocks until the early nineteenth century when a prison transport hit them. The Esmeralda, bound for New South Wales with women sentenced to transportation, struck the rocks on a dark stormy September night after leaving Bristol, the Esmeralda's last port of call in England. Most of the crew and the women prisoners drowned. A few were saved. After that shipwreck the rocks were renamed 'Esmeralda Rocks'.
Within a year a public subscription had raised money for the rocks to be marked with a bell buoy that was anchored off the rocks while the wreck of the Esmeralda was still visible. Gradually the locals started referring to Esmeralda Rocks as Bell Rock because a superstition against mentioning the Esmeralda had grown. The book referred me to Chapter 11 for the details of the Esmeralda legend. I decided to leave Chapter 11 until later.
It was obvious I wouldn't have a chance to talk to Amanda tonight. Back inside my tent I poured myself another pint of the local bitter from a four-pint carryout jug. I continued reading and drinking until I fell asleep.
I had a dream. The third officer of the Esmeralda, Richard Jenkins, sat in my tent and began to tell me his version of the wreck.
"The Esmeralda was an unlucky ship even before I joined her at Gravesend," he started. "She had been stranded on Maplin Sands in the Thames Estuary by her previous captain, an easy thing to do when the owners wanted fast passages whatever the weather. Two of the crew had been sent out into the fog to seek help. They were never seen again, unless you count their cries to their shipmates during the dog watches.
The government had chartered her to transport convicted women to Australia to provide servants and wives for the settlers and freed convicts. The Esmeralda waited at Gravesend for months but too few women were sentenced to transportation. Only half full we were ordered to sail to Chatham. In Chatham the magistrates convicted almost every woman who was brought before them to be transported on the Esmeralda, no matter how trivial her crime, or even if she was innocent. The same happened in Ramsgate, in Dover, in Portsmouth and Southampton.
The Esmeralda was becoming a political scandal so we were ordered to miss every other scheduled port except Bristol. There, women had been brought from courts all over the West Country. Once loaded we would have one hundred and twenty women prisoners, five female wardresses with a male warder officer, eighteen crew and three officers.
We were going to sail on the tide on the Monday morning but on Sunday afternoon there was a demonstration and near riot in Bristol, complaining that wives, daughters and sweethearts were being unjustly convicted to make up the Esmeralda's cargo. It was probably true. The local magistrates had to call out the militia to stop the rioters who were in the docks and very close to the Esmeralda. They ordered our captain to leave at once even though the tide wasn't ideal. We managed to clear Avonmouth just before dusk and set sail for the West, straight into a storm.
If everything had been as it should have been, we would have been able to claw our way down the Bristol Channel and out into the open sea. But the rioters had managed to pass some tools to the women prisoners. Ever since the first prisoners were brought on board at Gravesend, they had been preparing to break out of their confinement before we left English waters.
I and the Captain were off watch now that we were in the open channel. He and I had been on duty all day. I had fallen on my bunk fully dressed, too tired to change. The Mate and the quartermaster were in charge.
I don't know how to say this, but the Captain was not alone in his cabin. He had taken a mistress, Rose, from among the prisoners, and also provided himself with a maid called Abigail, Rose's younger sister. The Mate also had a mistress, Rose's sister Sarah. I was considered too young and anyway my berth was too small for such indulgences even if I could have been allowed them.
Rose plied the Captain with wine to celebrate leaving England and then they made love, again and again, until the Captain was insensible with wine and exhaustion. She bound and gagged him, lashed him to his bunk, took his keys, opened the arms chest and hid pistols under her dress. She roused Sarah and Abigail and armed them as well.
In the darkness on the quarterdeck Sarah distracted the Mate. The Mate was still trying to navigate the ship, impeded by Sarah's caresses until Rose dropped to her hands and knees behind him. Sarah pushed him backwards and all three women fell on him. Sarah smothered him with her skirt while the others tied him up.
The quartermaster was left at the wheel unaware that his officer was a helpless bundle behind him.
The three women crept to the door leading to the below deck cells. The warder was already drunk and the four women warders were asleep. Why shouldn't they be? They were out at sea and the women were locked in their cells for the night.
Sarah took the keys from the hook beside the warder and all three crept downwards. Quietly they released all the hundred plus women prisoners who made their way up to the warders' area. The warder and the women warders were overpowered, gagged and bound with long strips of cloth that the women had made on the voyage so far, and taken down to a cell to be locked in.
"What of the crew?" you might ask. What were they doing while the women captured the ship?
The quartermaster was faced by several women wielding pistols. When he protested that the ship was in danger he was told to keep quiet. He wouldn't, so he too was overpowered and tied in a bundle on the quarterdeck.
The crew were busy aloft, reefing the sails down against the increasing storm. Whatever was happening on deck wasn't important. A cannon shot might have alerted them but nothing less.
As each member of the crew regained the deck he was swamped by female bodies, gagged swiftly, carried below decks and lashed tightly into a hammock before the hammock was slung from the deck beams. Very soon all eighteen crew were silently struggling in their enveloping hammocks, helplessly swinging with the ship's movements.
I was still asleep while this was happening. I had slumped on my bunk fully clothed, too tired to even shed my shoes.
I was the women's last target. My cabin door burst open. I didn't have time to sit up before a woman's body slammed into me. Another woman pressed a folded cloth over my mouth while a third wrapped me inside my bedding with coils of thick cord. She had mummified me before I had a chance to struggle.
"Richard!" Rose hissed into my ear. "The ship is ours. Everyone else is captured. We want you to tell us what to do to get to a port in Wales or Ireland."
