Meihan Boey
Issue 1: RISE, July 2023
I was born in 1595, because the Earl of Cumberland did not want to pay Queen Elizabeth I for one of her ships.
It was Queen Elizabeth who named me, when George Clifford (that is my owner, the Earl of Cumberland), like the overbearing, arse-licking, obnoxious fop he was, graciously gave her that pleasure. Now, some of you are young, and do not know her; Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I was a very fine lady, my friends. Not a nice lady, mind you – the Queen of England cannot be nice – but a very fine one, and her sense of humour was as sharp as the thorns evil gossipmongers like to claim lined her virgin cunny.
Anyway, as I was saying. My lord the Earl of Cumberland would not pay Her Majesty the Queen for a ship (and she needed the money), and instead chose to build his own, a 38 gun ship weighing 900 tons, a beast of a sea monster, to ride across the world and tame the savages. And when he had the temerity to ask Her Majesty to name me, as compensation for the four thousand pounds in hard cash she would much rather have had, she rose to the challenge, and named me The Scourge of Malice.
That is the name I was christened, my friends, and my lord the Earl of Cumberland had to like it or lump it. I suppose he liked it well enough, really. He had that sort of personality.
I was the largest ship that had ever been built by an English subject. I say built, but of course my lord Cumberland did not actually build me. Hundreds of ordinary folk put me together, from the lumberers who brought down half a forest for my beams (including the highest tree they could find for my mainmast), to the shipwrights who put me together nail by nail, to the weaving and sewing of my sails and ropes. My Lord Cumberland had the pleasure of wandering about the dock, ordering fellows about, demanding this and that, and they all had to doff their hats and bow and pretend he knew what he was talking about. Then, fortunately, they ignored everything he said, and built me properly. It is just as well they did, my friends, or you would not be hearing my story now!
You perhaps might be wondering why my lord Cumberland had me built in the first place. Had he nothing better to do with his time and money?
In short, he did not. George Clifford launched me from Deptford Dock in 1595, and I became the head of his expedition, for the very fine and noble pursuit of raiding the Spanish Main. Why did he wish to raid the Spanish Main? Well, for something to do.
Ah, my friends, you should have seen us! I, and three others only a little less in tonnage than I, set sail on a warm morning. Quite apart from the posturing, grandiose fool excitedly making a nuisance of himself on my deck, I was filled with joy to be finally freed from my bonds, and launched upon the salty brine, and to fill my hungry sails with fresh wind. We made good time, my companions and I, as the men sang rude ditties to the rhythm of the waves, and the stiff and steady breeze granted us smooth passage. My lord Cumberland was very happy. He would be a swashbuckling hero, a dashing privateer, a name to be feared, on the Spanish Main!
However, as I have said, Her Majesty the Queen had a sense of humour. We sailed very happily along, and when we reached Plymouth (which is not, my friends, at all close to the Spanish Main), and my lord Cumberland was really getting excited… she sent word that she wished my lord to turn back.
What could he do? He turned back.
He cursed, he swore, he asked God to rain fire down upon that red- bewigged bitch Queen; but he turned back. So I my lord and I returned to London, while the three other ships I was meant to lead, continued on their adventure without us.
Poor Georgie Clifford. Strike me blind but you would not believe it – Georgie Clifford did not get to sail properly on his favourite boat until three years later (he broke me, at one point, trying to get away in the middle of a violent storm, and had to turn back to repair me – this was not Queen Elizabeth’s fault, but I have no doubt she must have laughed til she soiled her royal drawers).
But the Queen could not tease him forever. My lord Cumberland was, after all, one of her official champions; one of his duties, and the excuse he had used to build me, was to reclaim Brazil from the Spanish, in Her Majesty’s name. In 1598, Her Majesty finally deigned to allow her champion to fulfill this duty, and off he went.
I sailed at the head of twenty vessels; and this time, I made it across the sea. It was a very expensive voyage, my friends, but my lord was so delighted to undertake it, he minded not the expense. After all, he was quite sure of his victory – what were the Spanish, but a bunch of filthy, ragtag, oily-haired ruffians? What could they do against the might of the English?
And so my lord sailed proudly, confidently, to reclaim the islands for his Queen. My lord also, I regret to say, proudly, confidently, nearly got himself drowned in the San Antonio channel, before he got within smelling distance of the land he was meant to liberate for the Queen. Now that would have been an excellent end to his ambitions.
Nevertheless! nevertheless, friends, we made it to shore at last, where my exhausted and annoyed crew and passengers spilled from my hold, and my lord Cumberland decided to besiege the castle of El Morro. It sounds like a prudent, wise decision; it was made because it was the only decision. The men were too tired to fight.
Fortunately, the Spanish were equally tired. They left.
Victory! Victory for my lord Cumberland! He occupied the town, in the name of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I.
Sixty-five days later, after six hundred men had died (two hundred died in glory, four hundred died in shit, my friends, for ’twas a plague of dysentery), my lord Cumberland hastened back to the safety of my captain’s cabin, surrounded by my guns, and we turned right around, and sailed for home.
Oh, but it was not all in vain! No! We brought with us the loot of El Morro. Ah, a grand haul. Cathedral bells, which I suppose at least served as ballast, and eventually yielded some iron and tin; and a marble windowsill my lord took a fancy to. The marble windowsill was wrapped in straw and laid in my hold, where it took up a prodigious amount of space, and bewildered all the sailors who stubbed their toe upon it. There were also two thousand captured slaves, but since they were no less afflicted with dysentery than the men who had captured them, it was a futile entry into my lord’s ledger. He brought not a single soul home that was worth the price of their capture.
After this voyage, Georgie Clifford decided that a pirate’s life was not for him (or a privateer, or a sailor, or an explorer, or an adventurer). Excessively out of pocket, my lord put my up for sale for four thousand pounds; when a fellow came along who was interested, my lord Cumberland let me go for thirty-seven hundred pounds, and was obliged to be grateful.
This man represented a brand new enterprise. It was called the East India Company, and I was to undertake the company’s very first voyage.
Ah, my friends, it is the dream of every sailing vessel to be a part of history! I used to talk about it a great deal with a friend I saw often in Plymouth. A slender, hardy creature was she; like me, she longed for adventure. She, too, wished to travel across the world; to brave mighty storms, and seek new lands; to bring glory and fame to her captain. Her name was the Mayflower; her dream would come true; brave little ship, she reached the promised land, and gave up her life for the sake of her passengers. No nobler duty is there, for souls such as ours.
But my adventure began earlier than my friend’s. In 1600, as I was saying, I changed hands, and became the first ship of the nascent East India Company.
The Scourge of Malice was felt to be an inappropriate name; I was renamed, with less bleak humour and more, well, direct aggression, the Red Dragon. I suppose it had something to do with the Welsh roots of some of the East India Company’s stakeholders, but I was not fond of the name – I had been named by the Queen, how dare they presume to change what she had declared! – but I had no voice in the matter. The Red Dragon – sometimes merely The Dragon – was my name, henceforth.
I cannot lie – I was a little apprehensive. The voyage my new owners intended for me, was not appropriate to a ship of my great tonnage. The idea was to forge a route all the way to the kingdoms of Indochina, to trade spices and silks and slaves, all the goods upon which Her Majesty’s prosperity rested. It would have been better to be smaller, faster, lighter, and – a very pertinent point, and one which my lord Cumberland might have paid greater attention to – employ a far smaller crew, with the equivalent savings in salaries. But in the end, I won the day, for the very good reason that I was available to sail at the pleasure of my new owners.
I was given into the hands of Captain James Lancaster, whose references did not fill me with vast confidence, I must say — his last voyage to the East Indies ended in cannibals and plunder — but he was, after all, the first of Her Majesty’s subjects to successfully make it to the East Indies and back to begin with. He only had twenty five men left (he had started out with three fully-manned ships) — but he made it back.
I could only hope he would manage, this time, to keep his men alive, for I was far too large to manage with a crew of twenty five.
We set sail in February, accompanied by three smaller ships – Ascension, Susan, and Hector – all of whom were very excited. The weather was fine, the sea was calm, and the men were in good spirits, including Lancaster himself, who was in the captain’s quarters inspecting a box of lemons.
We were all ready for adventure, but my friends, adventure was not ready for us. First the winds would not cooperate, and we dawdled about the English Channel for two months, pissing into the wind. Hector and I became great friends, which was just as well, for even after we cleared the channel, we ended up falling into the Doldrums for a month, in that still and windless place that was the bane of all sailors.
You may imagine the confidence of the sailors was waning, somewhat; but Lancaster and his lemons were not done yet.
Lancaster’s lemons were a bit of a sore point with my crew. Directly reporting to Captain Lancaster, they could not avoid his insistence upon dosing every single man and boy with the stuff. My hold was filled not only with lemons, but with bottled lemon juice – bottled at great expense, for it took a tremendous amount of labour to juice enough lemons to fill even a single pint bottle, never mind enough for an entire crew.
All aboard the Red Dragon were obliged to follow Lancaster’s lemon regimen. This started every morning – when the bulk of the crew came on duty, they were obliged to do so hungry. This was a hard thing to impose upon a sailor, between the long days of largely monotonous labour, the deprivation of bedroom company, and the rationing of rum — to not even be permitted to have breakfast, and to instead have to dose oneself with three spoonfuls of pure lemon juice and wait til noon for a crust of bread, was apt to give rise to some mutinous muttering.
By the time we reached the Cape of Good Hope, however, Lancaster’s lemons had demonstrated their merit.
The sea is full of dangers, but it is not drowning that sailors fear most; it is disease. I have told you about dysentery; I must now describe another unpleasant condition, commonly called scurvy. Dysentery makes you shit; scurvy makes you bleed. Teeth and hair fall out, skin breaks likes paper, and one dies in fever and convulsions. An inelegant, unheroic way to die.
It was Captain Lancaster’s firm belief that lemon juice, taken on an empty stomach for full absorption, was an effective preventative to the disease. He had all sorts of outlandish theories why this might be, which greatly bewildered the sailors; but the end result of the Lancaster lemon regime was beyond question.
Scurvy struck, as it often does on long sea voyages; but it largely struck the crew of Susan, Ascension and Hector. The sailors in my crew were, by and large, unaffected. By September 1601, as we arrived at Table Bay, we had lost 108 men to scurvy; none of them were on the Red Dragon.
After that, you may be sure my crew stopped grousing about Lancaster’s lemons.
We arrived, at last, on the fifth of June, on the island of Sumatra. My Captain, Lemons Lancaster, promptly went off in search of the first King he could find willing to strike a deal; he did so with the fascinated and friendly Alauddin Shah, a handsome fellow whose warmth and hospitality did not, in fact, extend to him signing over all the wealth of his kingdom, as Lancaster was hoping. Instead, the shrewd fellow magnanimously waived customs dues, then waved us off with a few bits and bobs in “treasure” that did not even fill the hold of my much smaller friend, the Susan.
The Captain remonstrated; the East India Company’s first voyage would be their last, if they did not return with enough goods to save all shareholders from bankruptcy.
Alauddin Shah, in a kindly and sympathetic tone, said “That is a pity. Goodbye, have a safe trip home.”
Well! What to do? There was no other option, my friends. Lemons Lancaster took a page from my lord Cumberland’s books, and off we went privateering.
We headed down the Strait of Malacca in search of victims, and found one in the shape of a Portuguese carrack called the São Thomé. She was very large, as large as I, and very full. She had come from India laden with valuable textiles, spices, and other delectable cargo. After some persuasion from my 38 guns, and the business end of Captain Lancaster’s musket, all these good things were transferred to my hold.
My friends, Susan, Ascension and Hector, met with some success of their own in various ways. By the time the Captain decided to head home, all of us were well-laden with riches, and Lancaster had written promises of friendship from two Kings, besides, that he could bring back to the Queen. You might think it slim pickings, friends, but those two precious bits of paper, carefully sealed in oiled scroll-cases, were worth far more to my good Queen Bess than the uncertain results of all of Georgie Clifford’s endeavours.
We were, therefore, in excellent spirits as we set off. But no journey of this kind can be called a success, my friends, if your end point is not the same as your start. And my end point was almost at the bottom of the sea in the Cape of Good Hope.
The storm that came upon us was so sudden and swift, that the Captain’s frantic instructions to push hard to port! hard to port! only resulted in my rudder breaking off in the surging current. Without a rudder, I lost all sense of direction; I plunged, I lurched, I tipped my men and my cargo overboard, unable to control where I was going or what I was doing. My masts rattled and my sails tore; the men, desperate, begged to be transferred to Hector, who was close enough to paddle for, even as the ship’s carpenter tried frantically to improvise a rudder.
I braced myself to be abandoned. Alas, alas, such a undignified end! To be brought down by the crack of a rudder, on the very cusp of a grand and glorious homecoming!
But Captain Lancaster would not abandon me.
“Nobody leaves her,” he roared, as he seized hold of the ropes alongside his men. “We shall yet abide God’s leisure.”
“But the Hector is leaving!”
“Let them leave. They have a right to save themselves. But we stay with the Dragon!”
And they stayed with me.
All night they struggled; every man still alive had tied himself to my deck, as I plunged and surged helplessly upon the waves. They scrabbled and scrambled, they heaved and ho’d, they cursed and screamed, they prayed and wept. I was very tired, and they were very tired, and Captain Lancaster was very tired, yet still we battled on, through the storm, through the night.
It was many hours later when I saw the first light of day break through the clouds. I felt the wind begin to abate; the wild churning of the ocean began to ebb away. But my crew and my captain were so exhausted they hardly noticed; their arms were still wrapped around the ropes, the first mate dizzy from too many bumps on the head, still gripping the helm, steering by instinct. I longed to tell them the fight was over; to thank them for their courage, in seeing out the battle and keeping me and my cargo in one piece. But I could not speak; I could only gradually begin to right myself, little by little, til finally the dawn broke over the horizon.
Captain Lancaster came to his feet; he looked out over the steadily calming sea. Outlined against the gleaming rays of the rising sun was the prow of another ship.
“The Hector,” he said. “The Hector did not leave us after all.”
My friend Hector had not left. Hector, and Hector’s crew, had escaped the worst of the storm; but they had not sailed home. They had waited, in case they might help us; in case the worst came to pass, and I was wrecked, and my brave crew were in need of rescue. They were almost as glad as we, that this was not necessary.
The ship’s carpenter took wood from my mizzenmast to build a new rudder. The best swimmers and divers, from both Hector’s crew and my own, then went beneath the waves with it, and secured it in place. This done, amid other smaller repairs, Hector and I proceeded on our way home.
We had been away for such a long time, my friends, that by the time we reached safe harbour in England on 11 September, 1603, there was a new King on the throne, James I; good Queen Bess, who had given me my first name, had died in March. So by the time Captain Lancaster was securing the friendship of two Kings of the East Indies for Her Majesty, she was in fact no longer able to receive that friendship. I was sad; I had set sail to bring glory to Her Majesty, but she would never witness our triumph.
Captain Lancaster, however, reaped glory of his own; the new King knighted him, pleased with the tremendous success of his mission.
We were, in fact, too successful. Valuable things like pepper and calico, after all, are valuable because of their rarity. With four tremendous shiploads of the stuff all flooding the market at the same time, their value naturally dropped, and nobody made anywhere as much money as they thought they would.
Still, my friends, I had proven my seaworthiness. My second voyage for the East India Company was not with Captain Lancaster (sadly, for I had grown very fond of him and his lemons). Sir Henry Middleton was not as dashing nor as adventurous a man as Lancaster – and he did not believe in the lemon treatment, though Captain Lancaster freely shared that advice with any sea-captain who asked. So in the process of passing through the Cape of Good Hope, we had to stop at Table Bay because my crew was suffering with scurvy.
General Middleton, apropos of nothing, then decided to hunt whales.
All right, I will be fair. This was not such a bad idea, for whales yield oil for lamps and meat for eating; but whale hunting is not for the foolish or faint-hearted. They are large, strong beasts, whose maneuverability and power in the water make a mere mockery of my many guns and sails; they certainly made short work of Middleton’s harpoons. Instead of killing the beast he harpooned, Middleton merely enraged it, and the whale then led us on a merry dance, dragging the boats back and forth across the bay, while the whale’s equally outraged (and equally enormous) companions attacked the rest of us. Such damage this ill thought-out idea caused that it took three days to repair, and the only whale successfully brought in was too small to be of great use.
By then the native residents of Table Bay had had quite enough of Middleton, and chased us off at the business end of their sabres. We sailed on, failing to make much progress until, entirely by accident, we came upon an altercation between the ships of the kingdoms of Tidore and Ternate. The Ternate Sultan being upon one of the galleys, Middleton decided that assisting him would be a better business decision. Accordingly, he turned my guns upon the seven Tidore galleys in pursuit.
This was a terrible idea.
The Tidore galleys entirely brushed off Middleton’s attack, caught up with the Sultan of Ternate, and slaughtered all his men (except for three, who wisely leapt into the sea and swam to me for sanctuary). Even in this moment of extremity the Sultan begged Middleton, “Do not trade with these violent scoundrels – see what they are like! Come to Ternate – you may set up an English factorie, and there trade us English goods.”
Middleton, sensibly enough in that moment, said no.
We arrived in Tidore on 27 March, all hail-fellow-well-met with the same men we had attempted to cannonade out of the water. At Tidore, Middleton finally managed to drum up some decent trade in cloves, the great treasure of both kingdoms.
From here on, friends, things get a little complicated, between the lands held by Ternate and Tidore, and everybody wanting their cloves – “everybody” meaning the Dutch, the Portuguese, and we, the English. Ships passed in the night – not quietly, for we had to sound our horns at each other, to mark that we meant no aggression. This, however, did not stay true for long. By and by, everyone (and I do mean everyone) converged upon the same fort, in a heavily-fought and bloody quarrel over cloves, resulting, eventually, in the fort exploding from the sheet weight of ordnance thrown at it.
The Dutch and Ternate pushed forwards into victory. The Portuguese retreated, spitefully setting fire to a factory in passing. The factory happened to store all the cloves everyone was fighting over.
The end result being, nobody got what they wanted.
Anyway, friends, we eventually made it home, with what I consider to be middling success; between the scurvy, the whales, and the war of the cloves, Middleton did not impress either the King, nor the East India Company.
So my third journey for the Company was with William Keeling. Under his leadership, we had a sensibly managed and monotonous time, with decent results, securing rights in several important ports. Keeling was a comfortable sort of man, likeable, reliable – very dull, I suppose, compared to the men who had taken my helm before him, but that was all right with me.
I was just getting comfortable with Keeling’s general predictability, when he entirely threw me off, before a scheduled voyage in 1615. By then the East India Company was well established, as you can imagine. Keeling was preparing to go on a run-of-the-mill journey to restructure Asian trading links. All the arrangements were efficient, as usual – packing supplies, replacing and checking rigging, all that sort of thing.
I was dozing in the shipwright’s dock one night, the night before we were to set sail, when I was startled awake by hushed voices. Two shadowy figures had come aboard, one of them heavily hooded. It was very late at night; nobody was about, but there was always a big, brawny sort of bastard at the shipyard gates ready for trouble, and I was astonished that someone had managed to get past him.
In a moment I realised how. One of the shadowy figures lit a lamp, to light the way for the other – it was Keeling.
The other figure clambered heavily aboard, with difficulty. “My dear, are you sure this will be all right?” The voice was a lady’s. I had hardly ever heard a woman’s voice, except for the old Queen’s, in the early years of my service – women were not allowed on board ships of my kind, although many of us bore female names. I was amazed, as you can imagine, my friends!
“I will not leave you behind, heavy with child, and alone,” was Keeling’s fervent reply. “I cannot bear it. Who knows how long I must sail? How many months, before I return? And we cannot exchange so much as a letter! No; you must come with us.”
“But you know the sailors do not like women on ships.”
“What can they do, once we are out at sea?”
Well! Dull, staid, reliable old Keeling in love! And how! Love clearly made him a different man. I was curious to see what would happen; I was quite willing to hide the lady in the captain’s cabin, although I had never hosted a lady before, much less one so heavily with child. The ship’s cat, who hunted rats in my hold, had not been more swollen than good Mrs Keeling, when she dropped a litter of seven kittens in my crow’s nest last month.
I was willing, as I said, but the East India Company most assuredly was not. Poor Mrs Keeling! When we set sail, she hid successfully in the captain’s cabin for but two days, before the crew found out. How could they not? Even on a ship of my size, there were no easy hiding places. A lady must eat, piss and shit, like all the rest of humankind, and this one, in particular, would also have to give birth (very shortly, if my experience with our cat was anything to go by).
The crew was very displeased – not with Mrs Keeling, whom they judged to merely be a poor weak woman, after all, obeying her husband, as she was meant to. No, they were annoyed with their unmanly captain. Keeling could not proceed with his plan; the crew preferred to return to port to get rid of Mrs Keeling, than sail on with her aboard, although we would lose precious time.
So we turned back; Mrs Keeling was put ashore, much to Mr Keeling’s very great dismay. But his sense of duty was strong, and he proceeded with his journey, sans pregnant wife. He threw himself into his work, indeed, setting up factories, establishing new trade agreements, and new partnerships. By and by, he worked so hard that he became ill, and I was able to bring him home to his wife and new child in May 1617.
I was glad to see them reunited; and I never saw good Mr Keeling again afterwards. I hope he lived a long and happy life, dull and comfortable and predictable and content.
It has been two years since then; I am almost at the end of my tale, friends. Tomorrow I sail with my new captain, a young fellow named Robert Bonner. I know nothing of him yet worth knowing.
Don’t ask me how I can possibly be sure of this, but friends – I believe this will be my last voyage, either as the Red Dragon, or as the Scourge of Malice. Perhaps that is why I am so garrulous tonight, telling all the stories of my youthful adventures. Ah, you new young vessels, with your fresh paint and clean sails! What a lot you have to look forward to!
Friends, if I do not return, be sure you keep your prow up. Sail strong, sail true, and trust in your captain, even if he be a bit of a fool now and then. Many a storm have I weathered now, but here I still am. Trust in your crew, and take care of your men.
May you find calm waters, swift winds, and in the end, safe harbour, when the time comes.
In October 1619, a Dutch fleet attacked and sank the Red Dragon, commanded by Robert Bonner, who died of his wounds.
Meihan is the author of The Formidable Miss Cassidy (Epigram Books Fiction
Prize co-winner 2021, Singapore Book Awards Best Literary Work 2022), its
upcoming sequel The Enigmatic Madam Ingram (shortlisted for EBFP 2023), and The Messiah Virus (2019). Her short stories have appeared in Fish Eats Lion Redux and Fright. She is Vice President of the Association of Comic Artists of Singapore; projects include The Once & Marvellous DKD and Supacross. She’s still trying to go Super Saiyan.