The fire worm, p.9
The Fire Worm, page 9
In the year of the French Revolution theAdventure , out of Newcastle, was lost on Herd Sand over the river. Out of the thousands of spectators present, not one person dared offer help at any price. One by one, the frozen and exhausted crew had dropped from the rigging to their deaths, till none remained to save.
In the wake of that tragedy a committee of South Shields gentlemen raised a public subscription and offered a prize for the plan of a safety boat, small and of shallow draught. The initiative came from Nicholas Fairlies, JP, who was later murdered near Jarrow Slake.
Only two real contenders were in the running for the prize. One was shipwright Henry Greathead. The other was Willy Wouldhave. Journeyman painter and jack-of-all-trades, Willy was poor and uncouth, flighty and brilliant, heedless of the morrow, as bouncy as india-rubber, and habitually foul-mouthed toward his so-called superiors.
Willy’s humble model was buoyant and self-righting. Mr. Greathead’s professional model floated bottom-up. So the committee awarded a consolation prize of two guineas to Willy, and commissioned Mr. Greathead to get on with the job — which he did after adopting Willy’s notion of a curved keel.
Honours, medallions, gifts, and grants were heaped upon Mr. Greathead by a grateful Lloyd’s and Trinity House and Parliament, and even by Czar Alexander I of Russia; though these did not prevent Henry Greathead from going bankrupt, thus achieving almost the same condition as Willy had existed in all along. Willy died penniless in 1821.
The fate of the true inventor of lifeboats was much in Harriet’s mind. Willy’s only daughter, who eked a living in penury as a seamstress in South Shields, had only lately been granted fifteenpence a week by the parish in recognition — which made Harriet consider her own circumstances, and the matter of the testimonial fund …
Within an hour, the great majority of passengers and crew seemed to have been taken safely off, and the ship had broken up entirely. Perhaps a thousand spectators watched. Amongst them, enlarged by the telescope, Harriet had spotted the unmistakable shape of Shanky Elwes. He had stared avidly as waves claimed the cargo.
Dinner, of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, was understandably delayed beyond the usual hour of four. After she had dined, Harriet was able to observe files of men and women and boys passing along the sands and over the ridge, laden with bundles of sailcloth, shoulder-loads of planks, armfuls of spars.
Gladly she barred her shutters, closed the curtains, and lit the gaslight.
The wailing wind slackened. In the wee hours of the morning, still tormented and twisted by discomfort, she arose to see the sky calm and clear, the sea a pond flecked with driftwood, and a gibbous moon climbing over the ruins of the Priory in the black-blue heaven. This spectacle soothed her spirit so that finally she slept.
Chapter Eleven
Wild beast shows were by no means unknown on Tyneside. Back in 1568, an Italian exhibited the corpse of a monstrous serpent fully sixteen feet long, with the girth of a horse. This creature had supposedly gobbled up a thousand Ethiopians and ravaged their country, until the Turkish authorities put paid to it.
In 1732 a giant cassowary was on view in Newcastle, along with a huge vulture, several big cats, a Mountain Monster, and a possum with a false belly where her young could take refuge.
1734: a camel. 1747: a rhinoceros visited Newcastle. 1750: a porpoise, accompanied by a mermaid and a mummy.
In 1780: a zebra — plus the return of the Grand Cassowar. The six-foot-high bird would visit the house of any noblemen or gentleman upon payment of one guinea (up to a total of twenty-four guests, a shilling a head thereafter). While the bird stood in the drawing room being admired, its proprietor Mr. Pidcock would declaim a poetical effusion, ending up:
“Yet each brute seen on this terraqueous ball,
The beauteous Cassowar exceeds them all!”
Mr. Pidcock invested his guineas and shillings wisely. He was back in 1799, accompanied by an extremely sagacious elephant, though this did not enter drawing rooms.
The prime entrepreneur was definitely George Wombwell. Shoemaker by trade, he was enraptured at London Docks by sight of the first pair of boa constrictors ever imported. He bought them for seventy-five pounds, and within weeks had gained his investment back. Soon whole menageries of his beasts were touring the British Isles. Not without ultimate tragedy; Chuby the elephant killed George’s nephew in ’42, while a tigress fatally mauled his niece.
A beast-tamer ran such risks. In the revised, expanded edition ofThe World as Will and Idea , Schopenhauer related how an inquest was held at the Phoenix Inn, Morpeth, in August 1830. One Baptist Bernhard of Venice had been vengefully crushed by an elephant, into whose cheek the Italian had inadvertently stuck a fork four years earlier.
(By 1830 Shanky Elwes had long since quit Morpeth Gaol, however his genteel son Henry was working as an under-boots at the Queen’s Head in Morpeth. The sensitive and penniless boy originally scraped a living by carrying coals. Then he had signed on board a collier, only to be appalled by the obscene crudities of his shipmates. Being an under-boots was paradise, after that.)
The coroner fined the guilty elephant five shillings — the money to be devoted to pious purposes. This was a so-called deodand penalty, invoked whenever dumb chattels caused the death of a sapient being. Yet as Schopenhauer pointed out, the elephant had acted with intelligent premeditation.
And let’s not forget Hilton and Wright’s menagerie, which gave pride of place to a large Siberian wolf kept in the same den as a sheep beneath a sign,The Scriptures Fulfilled .
However, no tamer of beasts was more notable than Isaac Van Amburgh, and no show more splendid nor better publicized. Van Amburgh could bend any known creature to his will with preternatural panache.
Van Amburgh’s grandfather had begun life as Tangborgon d’Oom which meant “Great King of the Woods” in the language of the Tuscorara Indians, of whom he was one. Tangborgon happened to save a Dutch settler from a lethal attack by two wild pumas, and was invited by the grateful fellow to his home in Kentucky. The Indian converted from paganism, adopted the name Vorboys Van Amburgh, settled down, and got married. Yet baptism did not dispel his power over the beasts, which his grandson Isaac inherited much enhanced.
As a child, Isaac wasn’t interested in childish games, only in flies and wasps and maybugs. As a boy, he became lord of the rats and mice in the local storerooms. The rodents would all dance to his tune. By the age of twelve, the wildest horses of Kentucky were being brought to Isaac to be broken. He was in such demand that he could have been set up for life.
Yet he was restless. Roaming the Kentucky woods in his spare time, he tamed foxes and ferrets, coyotes and wild pigs, and wolves. He established a Forest Police of animals. If any carnivore made off with a goose or a lamb, Isaac and his brute constables would trace and punish the criminal, and as often as not recover the victim in one piece, and even alive. So the local people swore on oath.
Presently Isaac joined Titus’s Menagerie, the largest in America and in the whole world. Immediately he distinguished himself by taming an intractable lioness, sticking his head inside her mouth as proof.
In ’38 Titus shipped Van Amburgh over to England in company with his most impressive lions and tigers, who would obey their tamer’s slightest nod. The twenty-seven-year-old beastmaster was lionized, painted by Landseer on a commission for the Duke of Wellington, and was showered with money by young noblemen for instructing them in the art of taming. Only the caution of the London magistrates stopped Isaac from ascending in a balloon over Vauxhall together with his favourite tiger, then jumping out by parachute. Deprived of Isaac’s gaze, the tiger might have eaten the balloon pilot, causing the contraption to descend who knew where, releasing jungle violence upon the city.
On a fair June morning, Jane was out at the farthing pant to fetch water for her aunt’s establishment. So was a whole queue of hinnies, bickering about priority at the wretched pump and gossiping about Van Amburgh’s show, which was at last about to arrive in Shields.
“They say as he gans in the cage wi’ the Bengal tiger, an’ then torns his back —”
“Will ye let me gan forst, Missus Jackson? Aa’ve left the bairn in the cradle, an’ there’s nebody else in the hoose.”
“Aa divvent believe ye!”
The superintendent of the pant, widow woman Hulme, presided in a sentry box within easy reach of the pump, cannily turning it off after each customer and on again only on receipt of a farthing. Her key was as big as a bargee’s windlass.
Mrs. Jackson duly tendered her coin and the slow process of filling her six-gallon skeel began.
It was just such a skeel which Willy Wouldhave had helped a woman hoist on to her head at the Field House Well — after he had first observed how a bit of broken wooden dish which happened to be afloat in it always turned itself points-upward no matter how he interfered. This inspired his idea for the self-righting lifeboat. Out of a skeel, a new concept of keel.
At last Mrs. Jackson’s container was full. Gripping the wooden tub by its single handle, and her other hand beneath, she weightlifted the burden up on to the cushion perched on her head, and waddled away. All hinnies in quest of water wore those padded weezes on their crowns in place of their usual bonnets. The queue shuffled forward.
“Can Aa pay ye tomorrow, Missus Hulme?”
“Aa durna, hinny! They’re varry partiklor at the offis.”
The huge key was not turned. The petitioner trudged away toward the closest free public pant, a third of a mile away.
“Hullo, Jane,” said Harry Bell.
“Ye shouldn’t be here!” she hissed. “Watter is women’s work.”
“Oh aye, an’ yor skeel weighs a ton. Aa’ll carry it for ye, an’ divvent argue.”
Jane didn’t argue, since she dreaded the strain of hoisting the skeel. Miss Martineau said that Jane’s muscles looked like strings of dough; and Jane rarely more than half filled her skeel, provoking her aunt to fury.
“Me and me Mam’s gannin’ to see the beasts arrive this arternoon. When Mam delivers Missus Halliday’s milk an’ eggs, she’ll ask if ye can gan alang with us.”
So in spite of Mrs. Halliday’s peevish complaints, Mrs. Bell and Harry and Jane took the horse omnibus that afternoon to Chirton Green, where crowds were gathering. …
Here came Van Amburgh now along the road, driving a team of ten fine vigorous horses harnessed two abreast. Those mettlesome cream-and-piebald stallions obeyed the least flick of his reins like docile ponies! Behind followed a procession of caravans which were decorated green and gold and pulled by other fine steeds, their harness ornamented with silver.
“Wey, it’s Cleopatra’s royal progress!” exclaimed Mrs. Bell.
It was indeed. Save that in place of a barge, there were caravans hauled by equine slaves. Rather than the Nile, the Tyne glinted in the distance. Instead of a “serpent of Old Nile,” those wagons conveyed royal beasts that roared and growled ferociously.
Isaac Van Amburgh wore a suit of silk fleshings, a dashing scarf, and a shirt of pale blue satin. He didn’t look particularly muscular — in fact not robust at all. Yet his eyes: his eyes commanded. There was iron in his gaze, and there was Indian magic.
The procession turned into the field. With military precision camp was quickly pitched. The great marquee was raised.
All of the borough’s hucksters and hawkers were circulating to sell toy harlequins, flags to wave, wind wheels and paper serpents, sugar fish, chocolate lions, fudge bears, and marzipan tigers and cigars. And oh yes, Shanky Elwes with a top hat on his head was stalking amidst the parked caravans and the penned horses and the rising Big Top. He hummed to himself. To Harry’s eye, Elwes looked intent on some scheme.
It couldn’t have been more than an hour till the first crowd was admitted.
“Eeee!” cried Mrs. Bell, as Van Amburgh bounded into the cage.
“Eeee!” agreed the crowd; then hushed.
The tamer walked toward the wild beasts. He held out his whip at belly height, and kept his gaze fixed on the grumbling animals. Though not hefty, Van Amburgh stood just short of six feet tall. His silk-and satin-clad body seemed to crackle withwill .
He called out loudly, “Trajan!” — and the fully-grown Bengal tiger advanced and obediently leapt over the whip.
“Jezebel!”
The tigress took her turn.
Next the lioness, Sheba, followed by two leopards, Nero and Hannibal. All leapt the whip. But the full-maned old lion Samson lay glaring murderously at Van Amburgh, refusing to shift. Van Amburgh cut at Samson with the whip. Roaring like a discharge of cannon, Samson was on his feet …
“Me blood’s freezin’!” Mrs. Bell gripped her son’s arm tight.
“What’s happenin’?” begged Jane. Her eyes had blurred.
The lion sailed over the whip and returned to his place.
An assistant pushed a hoop through the bars. While Van Amburgh brandished this, one by one his beasts leapt through it, even Samson. The man’s gaze constantly darted, arrowing at each animal in turn.
“He must be magnetizin’ them!” declared Jane. “Wi’ mesmerism!”
Indeed, the whip did appear to Harry like the needle of a compass as it swiveled from one fierce brute to the next. With soft taps of that whip, Van Amburgh tumbled each animal till all lay on their sides or on their backs. They were like some basketful of gigantic, diverse kittens. He lay down amongst the recumbent beasts, striking one pose then another. He pressed cheek to jowl with Jezebel. Samson’s mane served as a pillow. Leaping up, he stepped upon the prostrate lion and the tigress, one foot balanced on the head of each.
“Wey, what a power has Man!” sighed Mrs. Bell. “What a dominion!”
Now Van Amburgh knelt and teased Trajan’s jaws wide open with the whip butt. He placed his head inside the tiger’s mouth. The beast’s great teeth were poised around the tamer’s skull, which they could crush in a trice. Trajan rolled his fiery coals of eyes, yet otherwise moved not a muscle.
At last Van Amburgh backed away. Throwing open the iron wicket of the cage, he leapt out fast as lightning; fastened the barrier, turned and bowed. In that same instant the wild animals threw themselves at wicket and cage wall, shaking the iron rods so violently that these seemed to bend beneath the blows. The enraged roaring competed with the thunder of applause.
As the stream of amazed and satisfied spectators left the marquee, a second crowd just as huge thronged outside waiting for the next performance.
“Wey, what’s it like?”
“Bloody smashin’, man!”
Harry drew Jane aside. “Aa have to hang aboot. It’s aboot ye-knaa-who. Aa’m shore he’s up to somethin’. He’s aal anxious and excited.”
Jane’s eyes shone in a watery way. “Yor so clever, Harry. An’ brave.” Her best bonnet was askew. “Ye dee what ye have to. But be careful!”
“Aa have me jacky-legs, if need be.” Harry patted his coat pocket, feeling the shape of the clasp knife. “Mam,” he said, “Aa’ve some important business. Will ye see Jane hyem?”
“Business, is it? Ye wouldn’t be thinkin’ o’ running’ away wi’ the circus, would ye?”
“Na, Mam. Ye knaa Aa’m gannin’ to run away to sea!”
Mrs. Bell chuckled. Her husband, Captain Bell, was skipper of the snow-brigAmphitrite , plying between the Tyne and London, and Harry was due to follow in his father’s footsteps after his next birthday.
“Only if that’s aal reet wi’ Jane here,” she said, “you bein’ hor escort.”
“It’s aal reet, Mrs. Bell,” Jane assured her.
So Mrs. Bell gave her blessing, and Harry melted away into the crowd.
“If ye like,” Mrs. Bell said heartily to the girl, “Aa’ll buy ye a bag o’ winkles to eat as wor gannin’ alang.”
“Aa wish ye was me aunt,” replied Jane, with a sniffle.
“An’ ye can tell me aal aboot this mesmerization, an’ why Miss Martineau’s folks is so keen to stop hor.”
It was early evening when Shanky Elwes at last ascended the steps of Van Amburgh’s personal caravan. Penned in their individual cages again, the big cats growled and roared impatiently while a couple of men made the rounds with pails of meat or offal.
Harry ambled to the far side of the caravan and lounged by an open, net-hung window, nonchalantly nibbling at a marzipan tiger.
“ … a wager,” he heard, “which I am sure that a redoubtable gentleman such as yourself will not decline! No indeed; lest it become known to the public that there is one instance where you dared not meet a challenge — one case where your magic fails you. Magic is decidedly needed, make no mistake, sir! Magic!”
For a person who could shout so stentoriously, Van Amburgh’s voice in reply was surprisingly soft. A gentle American burr. Harry pressed closer.
“Have you perhaps discovered a unicorn, Sir William? Look closer, and you may find that it is one of your Chillingham wild white bulls which has lost a horn! I am curious to see those on our route from Alnwick to Berwick. And to take a walk amongst them. The aboriginal ox, eh? Too pugnacious to serve men’s will.” The American chuckled.
“This is nothing of the sort,” said Elwes. “This is no natural creature. It is a supernatural beast; and I have seen it for myself in its cave home by the sea. Underneath the ruins of the Priory, below the lighthouse. I shall wager my twenty sovereigns to a hundred of yours that you cannot exert your will over it.”
“Odds of one to five? That rather puts you at the advantage, Sir William.”
“Not in the least! Yours is the fame, and the rich reputation. To wager at evens would diminish your glory, should word of this venture ever leak out.”
“This would be a secret wager? Why should I be interested in secrecy?”
“On account of the satanic nature of this beast,” replied Elwes, “and the scruples of the Godfearing people of this town.”
“Your cave denizen is notorious?”
