Blood Diamond Chapter 2

Daniel Feelding was a young man from a good family. His back was straight, his limbs were strong and he looked a man in the eye and shook his hand firm. He was not the sort you would expect to find working a passage as an able seaman on a 740-ton Indiaman returning from Madras to England, through the wild African seas off that barbarous green coast, laden with tea for the drawing rooms of London.

But Daniel Feelding was on the ship for the same reason he found himself now bobbing like a coconut in the wild ocean – he was a young man of strong will that must have its head, even in the teeth of his own best interests. Daniel Feelding had always loved the sea, at least as much as his father, Jacob Feelding, abhorred it. For Jacob, Daniel’s future as a landowner and the inheritor of the Feelding estates and fortune was clear and perfectly mapped out. When it became evident to Daniel that his father would never buy him the naval commission he so ardently craved, Daniel Feelding packed only the clothes he would need and a handful of coppers, and hired himself to the sea.

Thrice Daniel had plied this route between India and the Old Country, and his obvious qualities and appetite for hard work had seen him rise from apprentice to ordinary foremast man to able foremast man to midshipman. He was free, the savour of salt and the far blue horizon was on his lips and by the end of an 18-month voyage he could saunter from the ship with a little over £20 in his pocket, and all the world at his feet. This, Daniel Feelding told himself, even when labouring on a scorched deck under a blazing tropical sun, was the life.

Many an hour did Daniel pore over charts of that vast and unknown continent they skirted on their way to the Indies, marvelling at the blank spaces, the unnamed lengths of shoreline, wondering at the darkness and blank secrecy of the interior. Who lived there? What strange creatures and beasts roamed those empty areas of parchment, driven by what passions and customs and mysteries?

This was his first voyage on the Rosanna. She was a beautiful three-masted square rigger and he had boarded at her anchorage on the Hooghly River in India, midway between Calcutta and the sea. They set sail from the subcontinent at Madras and turned with the trade winds westwards. There was no finer sound to Daniel Feelding than the crack of canvas as the topgallants unfurled and the great clouds of white canvas filled and billowed above. They had passed through the Bay of Bengal, close to the Coromandel Coast, passing by Ceylon on the long road homeward, with escorts of porpoise and wheeling terns.

But every sunny day on the Indian Ocean has its dark breath of cloud. The lowest position on any Indiaman, lower even than the apprentices, is the ship’s boy.  On the Rosanna this was the lad Jim Larkin, a slight boy with fair hair and face permanently sooted, bow-legged and not above thirteen years old. Being the smallest and weakest and least important crewman, he was naturally a target for the cruel and the cowardly. And of those there was none crueller and none more cowardly than Gaffer Skelton. Skelton was a brutish man with twice-broken nose and ginger hair that was close-cropped on his head but grew in carroty sheets on his forearms. He was named Gaffer for his legendary skill with a boathook, amply demonstrated one short shore-leave in a dispute with an Indian in a bar-room brawl in Valparaiso – so the stories went - but no one had ever seen him settle a dispute with bare-knuckles and a level arena and an opponent his match in size and weight.

Skelton had been a midshipman, but on the voyage out had been punished and stripped to able seaman after an incident below decks which was the subject of much speculation and rumour. Such a man always finds it easier to bear his own unhappiness by meting some of it out upon another, and it was not long before Skelton had Jim Hawkins in his line of sight.

Twice while still in port Daniel had seen Skelton fetching young Hawkins aside with a hobnailed boot, and once had seen him cuff the boy hard enough to send him reeling across the cuddy, spilling his broth.

“That’s enough, Skelton,” Daniel had said on that occasion, standing up, and making a show of rolling the sleeves of his woollen jersey. “If it’s fisticuffs you’ll play, why not play them with a grown man? I’m available if you’re in the mind for exercise.”

Skelton’s eyes had flashed and a pink flush had risen in his wattles, but he had turned away and grumbled something low into his dinner bowl. But after that there could be no doubt that Skelton and Daniel were on a collision course, and on the second week from port the collision occurred. Taking a turn one evening on the quarterdeck, before the mainmast, Daniel heard the sound of a low cry from below. It did not come from the passenger’s cabins, aft on the gun deck, and it did not sound as though it were the sort of cry given lightly.

Daniel went below and back toward the galley, and there in the smoky yellow light of a tallow candle, he saw them. Jim Hawkins was cowering in a corner, blood trickling from his nose and mouth, and standing over him were Skelton and his crony Walter Feazle.

“Now then,” Skelton was saying to the cowering boy. “Will you be doing as you’re told, or will you be having more of the same before?”

In one hand Skelton held a wooden belaying pin, smeared with young Larkin’s blood, and with the other hand he fumbled at the waistband of his trousers.

“All right, Skelton, that’s enough,” Daniel said in a quiet voice.

Skelton and Feazle swung to look at him.

“This is none of your concern, Feelding,” Skelton said. “Or is the boy your own private bailiwick? Is that it? Share alike, Feelding, that’s the motto on the Rosanna.”
He turned back to leer at the cowering boy and Daniel took a step forward.

“Shall we see how courageous you are without a boathook to hand, Skelton?” said Daniel softly.

Skelton chuckled, low and mirthless, and suddenly, without warning, turned and swung the belaying pin. It was well the room was so small, for Skelton could get no swinging-room, and the blow glanced sidelong off Daniel’s temple. He saw a bright burst of light in his head for a moment but he threw up an arm to ward off the next blow, and as his head cleared, he brought up a knee sharply into the on-rushing Skelton.

Skelton gave a low “whoof” and crumpled, but under the weight of his lunge they both tumbled backward into the companionway. The sound of the clatter brought other men to watch, and the low space was soon ringed with spectators. The fight was quickly over. Skelton was experienced but he was a coward, and once Daniel had removed the pin from his hands and thrown it skittering into the crowd, he saw the look of fear rising in Skelton’s eyes. Daniel kept his distance, making sure Skelton couldn’t use his weight, flicking out his left hand into Skelton’s face, cutting his cheek and his lip and causing the blood to flow from his nose like spilled claret. When Skelton tried to rush him he stepped to one side and kicked at Skelton’s right knee. The leg buckled and the man dropped and Daniel caught his chin with a fast rising knee. Skelton gave a groan and lay upon the wooden floor like, as one of the men declared gleefully, “a gaffed porpoise himself”.

Daniel won the fight that night, but at the same time he won an enemy whose memory was long and whose heart was dark and, from all that concerned ship-mates murmured in his ear as warning, Skelton was not a man to let time heal his wounds. 

But the depth of his hatred, and the extent to which Skelton was chafing under the mockery of his shipmates, who had long been waiting for someone to deal him just such a public lesson, Daniel could not have expected. Daniel had no inkling of the depth and blackness of those basest of human emotions, not until the sneak attack in the dark of the night that left him clinging to a half-sinking barrel, in the midst of the wild southern sea.

Copyright Rannulph Moore

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Ranulph Moore describes himself as an explorer, who became a writer to purge himself of the adventures that were crowding his life. He says he has seen it all, in a life spent observing the lives of others.
He will travel anywhere – as long as he can make a decent cup of tea and launder a linen jacket. He describes Africa as one of his great loves. He has spent time in every country on the continent.
If he can’t find a good champagne, he has been known to resort to gin. He has homes in Paris, Jura and Cape Town. At present, he lives in Madagascar, where he is researching his latest book.
Read an interview with Rannulph Moore.