Entered in the Ledger at Plymouth, autumn 1621. Told by Mrs. Whiskers III, who had it from her mother, who had it from the one who was on that boat. Written down by a boy named Obedience, who had been told to sit still.
THE RAT
Biscuit.
Tar.
Wet wool, a hundred men’s worth.
Gentlemen.
You can smell a gentleman in the dark. I could, anyway, from the bottom of the Susan Constant in the winter of 1606, with the Thames still sliding past the hull and nobody yet sick over the side. A gentleman smells of rosewater on top and old cheese underneath. He smells like a man who has never carried his own supper.
I was on that boat.
I was born on it, if we’re being exact, in a coil of anchor rope at Blackwall, and I would like that entered first, before any of the men’s names. Every story men tell about this place starts with a ship and a list of the men on it. Nobody lists the rats. We were the only passengers who knew where the food was.
Three ships. The Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, which was so small it could have fit inside the other two’s arguments.
A hundred and five men and boys. No women. The Virginia Company of London had sent them across an ocean to find gold, find a shortcut to the other ocean, and find out what had happened to the last colony anybody had left over here, in that order of importance.
I learned to count them by their crumbs.
A sailor drops crumbs in a line, because he eats walking. A carpenter drops them in a heap beside his tools. A boy drops them everywhere, because a boy eats whatever is near his mouth at the moment it is near his mouth, and a boy on a ship is always hungry and always being sent somewhere else.
There were four boys. I knew all four by their crumbs before I knew a single one by name.
Samuel was the quick one, page to a soldier, and he could find a biscuit end in a dark hold faster than I could, which I took personally. Nathaniel cried the first week and then stopped, all at once, the way a leak stops when somebody finally finds it. James and Richard fought over one blanket from Blackwall to the Canary Islands. By the Canaries they were sleeping under it back to back, and the fight had become a thing they did for warmth.
I crossed to the Godspeed once at the Canaries, along a mooring line, to see whether her biscuit was better. It wasn’t.
The gentlemen dropped nothing.
That puzzled me for a month. Then I worked it out from the bottom of a biscuit barrel. A gentleman does not drop crumbs because a gentleman does not carry food. Someone brings it to him. He eats sitting down, off a plate somebody else will wash, and when he is finished he leaves the plate exactly where it is. Picking it up would be a job.
Jobs were for the rest of the list.
The list was the thing. I heard it read aloud twice on that voyage, once at Blackwall and once in a storm off the Canaries when the captain wanted to know who he was about to lose. Every man on it was one of two kinds. He was a gentleman, or he was something useful.
Carpenter. Bricklayer. Blacksmith. Surgeon. Mason. Laborer. Tailor, which I never understood. Barber. Boy.
The gentlemen were close to a third of the list. The Company had sent them on purpose. They were supposed to lead.
I watched them for four months.
Leading, as near as I could tell, was done lying down.