Beneath The Locust Tree
Chapter One:
The Storm Before The Calm
My first encounter with Samuel Taylor Coleridge took place courtesy of a lemon. We knew of the presence of a celebrated guest on the Speedwell but for the first thirty-six hours after leaving Portsmouth we saw little of him. Of course we could hear him. The whole ship could hear him. Napoleon could probably hear him in Paris. I know it takes some time for an inexperienced sailor to become used to the torments of the sea but our paying passenger seemed to be finding his sea legs exceedingly slowly: and he was doing it at a volume that would wake up Guy Fawkes.
The sound of the man’s restless emetic outpourings rang across the ship for the entire first day and night of our voyage. They competed with the bleating from the sheep in the hold who seemed to be enjoying its voyage even less than him. On deck we would wince as each heave and retch heralded another torrent of sickness emerging from the man’s tortured torso.
“Has he finished?” Captain Findlay said to me during a prolonged pause. There had been no sound for an hour so either he was better or he was dead. I was about to go down to check on his well-being when there came a shout of “Oh my Lord, not again” and we were subjected to another hour of sonorous hurling.
Admittedly these were not ideal circumstances for a man to set out on his first sea voyage, but sometimes the gods are in your favour and sometimes they’re not. After all, this is the English Channel and the weather hasn’t been kind of late. We’d managed to set sail during a moment of calm but after no more than an hour’s sailing a fearsome gale seized the Speedwell and threw it westwards at a rare speed. Even seasoned sailors began to look somewhat pea-coloured in the cheeks; and for the man in the guest cabin it brought on one of the longest periods of illness I have ever heard.
Such is life. If you’re going to travel through one of the most temperamental stretches of water in the world then there’s every chance something like this might happen. It’s no shame: anyone can suffer from seasickness. Vice-admiral Nelson is renowned for being a bad sailor so if it can happen to him it can happen to anyone.
This sorry situation continued until the Wednesday morning. Finally after a day and a night of turmoil the wind died down and dawn revealed a clear, cloudless sky and a shimmering bright sea. Behind us the southernmost tip of the English mainland receded: ahead lay a journey that would take us south to Gibraltar where we were scheduled to make our first stop.
After one last heave a welcome silence descended on the ship. Eighty crewmen greeted this new development with glad hearts and the hope that the man in the passenger cabin might survive his ordeal. Then, finally, the voice that would become so familiar to me announced its presence to the ship.
“Oh my word,” he shouted. “I had no idea it was possible to disembogue SO MUCH DETRITUS! This is disgusting. ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING! The colours, the consistency, the…everything…it’s all quite repellent.”