* This story is fiction and resemblance to anyone living or dead is coincidental.

The year was 1748 and although he didn’t know it yet, this was to be his last voyage.

He was homeward bound for England.

Captain James (Damnation) Wallace gazed up at the lowering clouds as they scudded about the heavens and shuddered. There was a time when bad weather was just another heavy weight piled onto his broad shoulders, to be shrugged off as just the luck of the draw. But not anymore, now he was tired, worn out and tired and a perpetual drunkard. He felt like the old man of the sea. He thought back to the halcyon days of his childhood when he would spend most of his free time down at the docks, sitting and watching, gazing in awe-stricken wonder at the great tea clippers, arriving and unloading their assorted cargo’s. His fascination as the town’s Lord Mayor would arrive with his entourage, in full regalia, to greet the slave master’s with a lavish official welcome. This public dignitary would often have “participation shares” in the enterprise (getting rich and fat off the proceeds.)

He would watch fearfully as muscular black slaves were led away in chains, howling and growling in frustration, to be brutally auctioned off to their new owners. The hustle and bustle and noise, as ship workers mingled with foreign merchants and visitors in their colourful costumes. His nose would be filled with the smells of rich spices, coffee, dead fish and salt water. There was the stench of the farmyard, as pigs and sheep and fowl were hoisted aboard in big nets. Then there were the accidents as unskilled dockworkers came to grief and ended up dead or seriously injured by overhead flying gantries. Accidental spillages were a common site as precious medicines were carelessly handled.

Medicines for the treatment and prevention of killer diseases, like scurvy, smallpox, cholera, yellow jack and malaria, powders containing opium and quinine would be spilled onto the rough cobbles, to be licked up by the hordes of rats and stray animals. These were the memories that flooded his brain.

His mother died when he was fourteen, She had been a deeply spiritual woman, clutching his arm and frantically begging him on her deathbed, never ever to go to sea. She’d tried to discourage his interest in foreign travel, having had a premonition that he would drown aboard a ship in a storm. “Deprived of a proper Christian burial his soul wouldn’t rest and would roam, lost on the seas forever.” He had secretly laughed at this as the ramblings of a feeble and superstitious mother’s uneducated mind.