Tis a wicked thing, The Sea, for she beckons and she promises more than she delivers.

I sit here on the bluff overlooking the Mersey as it washes its fresh green waters out into the brine and it looks bleak, The Sea. The town of Liverpool, down below, is all but hidden by the low lying fog, though I can see a few ship's masts poking up as they lay anchored in the bay. A lone crow hovers on the up draft near me and he flys on the same cool salt air that once blew me out beyond that fog. But, it was different.

It was different through the eyes of my youth. I've made a good living these many years since the yearning came over us. I've got a good little cottage near Dudgeon and was successful draying salt to Manchester. I even owned my own yoke of oxen and haven't been backbone hungry for three score years. But then, then it was terrible. Terrible and wonderful.

Everett and I had been together forever it seemed. I only knew him by his given name, I guess he didn't have another. That crazy Everett. When we were just kids in Liverpool we had come together of need, on the streets. We had both been orphaned by the pox, it was rampant then and many people in the city had died.

My sister had survived also, and for a while we were a trio, scrapping for ourselves and loving it but it was summer then and easier, then the winter set in. Jool, my sister, didn't make it. It was one of the cruelest winters I had experienced.

At first I missed her so much I thought I too would die. She was only two years older than I was but somehow she had partly taken the place of my mother. When things were exceptionally hard and the three of us were near despair, Jool would caress our brows so gently and lift our spirits up to fight again with quiet words of encouragement. Now, Everett and I had to survive alone with a big empty hole where Jool had been.

There were many other scrappers, but you had to be careful whom you allied with. Many of them were organized into gangs and became slaves of the leader. I had heard some terrible stories of boys that had joined gangs and had suffered merciless tortures from their own gangies. Everett and I had decided not to join even if we were close to dying from starvation, we had a pact always to stick together, no matter what happened.

In those days, Liverpool was a thriving port and the ships that set anchor there were from many places. They were varied in size and class from those like the little two masted brigs all the way up to the twenty gun man-o-wars and with so many sheets that they needed three full-time sail makers aboard.

Just like hungry rats, Everett and I had made our way down to the wharves and for a time made quite a fair living near the foot of Stinton Alley where the fleet three masted Frigates tied in. Those were the golden days for us, we didn't know from the temptations of the flesh yet and each time the sun rose, it signaled a new adventure starting.

Most of the streets were paved with cobbles, and all the surrounding countryside had been scoured for good cobbles when the streets were first laid and there were few good rocks available for repairing streets nearby. Scrappers like us could get a ha'penny per five rocks if we could find decent rocks and deliver them to the pothole site when the repair crew was working. They would use five to twenty rocks per hole. This business was intermittent but made a good supplement to begging and heisty.

The ha'penny price was arrived at by years of competition among the scrappers for it was generally agreed that anything less was not worth carrying a stone for. However, the repair foremen would often pay more if the repair job was far from the wharves. It was Everett that had a natural mathematical head even though he had never been to school, and he had figured it out. If you dealt with the right foreman you could make more money per day hauling rocks to the far out jobs and those jobs tended to need more material. The only problem was the supply, where could you get enough cobbles to keep those blighters happy.

It wasn't our idea, any scrapper knew that many ships carried stones for ballast and in a port of origination such as Liverpool, many ships would dump ballast outside the port in order to be able to take on cargo. But even if you could talk a Captain into unloading ballast on the wharf, those rocks were usually not proper for roads.

One day we saw a brig come in so laden with rocks that it was down in the sea to its gunwales. We had been scrounging the dock for unnoticed bits of cargo that may have fallen astray when the prior ship had unloaded and we were there to watch this little scabby thing tie up. As soon as they were fast, a small lot of molasses was off loaded. Then the crew formed a chain gang and started unloading the ballast rock one stone at a time. The ship did not have the proper rigging to unload these efficiently. The rocks were perfect cobbles. The brig wasn't really a high seas cargo carrier and so we wondered why they were unloading ballast as though it were cargo.

After the unloading was complete we saw the cabin boy cashiered right there on the dock. He had gotten into trouble with the first mate. The boy's homeport was Dublin, but that didn't seem to matter and he was put on the streets with the rest of us. He was a bit of a runt. I forget his real name, we called him Dubby. He wasn't too good a scrapper and was hard to understand at first with his heavy sea tainted Irish brogue. The ship hadn't given him much of a pension. We took Dubby in right away because Everett had sniffed that something important could be learned from him. Ev was still thinking of the cobbles.

It was too late to monopolize the cobbles. The other scrappers were already all over them. With Dubby's help we managed to grab enough to hide for a rainy day. With so many good cobbles available, the market plummeted and for the first time that I could remember, the stones were bringing less than a ha'penny per ten in the outlying jobs. It was hard to stay an honest businessman with prices that low and we did more "heisty" in the market place than usual in order to survive even though there was a great risk in lifting things off folks.

What we found out later, after making friends with the cabin boy, was that most of the ballast was high paying but unrefined gold ore from Mexico which had been covered by cobbles acquired someplace enroute to cover the ore so that any casual inspection wouldn't give light to the true nature of the cargo. The ore was being shipped in surreptitiously and would escape the tax bite because it was classed as ballast. The outgoing cargo was a ruse but good enough to look like a legitimate cargo.

What lit our lights wasn't the gold ore. We didn't know anything about such things since it was unheard of in Liverpool. Of course we had heard of gold, pure gold, but we had no idea how it came about. It was like asking an ant to know about how butter was made. No, it was the adventure. The adventure. Somehow this little brig had acquired a valuable cargo far across the seas and a boy like us had been there to have all that excitement. It was like all the tales we made up in the cold winter nights while trying to keep warm in our little dumpy lair near the cooperage, but this was real. We could taste it.

After a while we got to understand Dubby better and he told us tales about going on the sea that made us drool. He never mentioned much about the bad parts, those we would find out about later.

After a couple of months the little brig left Liverpool, moderately loaded with its ruse cargo of coarse wool blankets and barrels of salt bound for the Bermudas. I think they dumped the bundles of blankets overboard once out of sight of the port. We learned later that the ore was smelted right there in the city and produced a hefty 27% pure.

We had a very hard winter. We used up our catch of rainy day rocks and were lucky to get even a ha'penny for ten. We had an extra tummy now and Dubby's was a big one for such a little clod. After the cobble market fell apart, Everett got very down. His big ideas for cornering the rock market had gone bad and he needed a good escape, we used to say "dream pot". If you had a good dream pot, nothing bad was too bad.

On these severely cold nights we would try to sneak into the cooperage and hide behind the barrels near the big vat of ling tallow. When the barrel wood was poor they used to soak the barrel staves in hot ling tallow to make the barrels hold liquid better. Sometimes at night there was still a little heat left in the vat walls and we could feel it when we crawled close up. Not this night, the current batch of wood must have been too good. We needed a good dream pot. Dubby was the best we had and we called on him to spin a yarn that took us far away to the tropics on the little brig. We knew he embroidered his stories, but we always felt there was a basic underlying truth to them.

And so we spent the winter huddled behind the barrels and listening to Dubby's dream pot and somehow survived again. But despite the coming of good weather and better scrapping we yearned for the ship to return and take us off over the horizon. Dubby had said that they were always needing cabin boys because the first mate was very hard to please and the Captain worse and not many boys lasted beyond the next port.

We were over near Hale Head by the mouth of the Meresy hoping to get hired for the day to beat sheep hides when Everett came running up yelling that the brig was coming in to port. Dubby didn't want to go. He said there was nothing there for him, but Everett promised him his next hot biscuit handout at Penchers bakery. If you knew how much Ev savored those biscuits you would know how much he wanted Dubby to be with us at the wharf. So the three of us went down to the foot of Stinton Alley.

It was true, the little brig, Moon was making fast to the dock as we rounded the corner by the cooperage. Something was odd about her, she was riding too high in the water. It looked like she carried neither cargo nor ballast and was dangerously near to capsizing. Her usual colors, British, were not flying, there were no colors at all. A larger vessel of the man-o-war class was moored at the next dock over and a crowd of sailors was gathering on the starboard side to gaze at the odd condition of the Moon. Soon the gangway was let down and a very haggard looking man limped carefully down to the tarry planks of the wharf. It appeared painful for him to walk, but he made his way slowly to the harbormasters shed near the middle of the dock.

We heard nothing of what had happened to the little ship for some time. But then the story went around that the brig had foundered in foggy seas on rocks near Dursey Head on the south Ireland coast and the first mate had been killed by a flying spar that had broken loose during the accident. The Moon had suffered damage to its hull and the Captain had had to jettison all cargo and ballast to allow the ship to float high enough so as to keep the damage above the water line. The ship had been short handed since Bantry Bay when two of the crew had jumped ship. When we heard the story we all ran down to the wharf to look at the damage.

There was no dry-docking there in those days so the ship had to be repaired while in the water. The carpenters were working alongside the brigs hull on a raft fastened to her side. It was a difficult job. The Moon had been tied from high up on its masts down to the dock in an attempt to keep it from rocking severely as it road high in the water, but the rocking was still excessive. Despite the conditions, the carpenters completed the repair work in about a week's time.

Everett was fascinated with the work, everyday he went down to the docks and watched the men at work and the crew preparing the ship for its next trip. A notice had been posted at the head of the wharf that the ship was hiring to complete the crew roster and would once again be bound for the Bermudas. I couldn't read but the harbormaster's assistant was a friendly younger man who told me of the crew positions to be filled. A new first mate was needed, I guess the second mate had jumped ship at Bantry Bay or wasn't suitable for promotion. Several other seamen and a cabin boy were also being hired.

Dubby had said that the best way to be hired was to tell the Captain you were Welsh. His first wife was from Wales and somehow that was important to him. "But I don't speak Welsh and don't sound it" I told Dubby. He said that didn't matter, you could say that you were brought to Liverpool soon after you were born and were orphaned soon after and learned the ways and language of the street. Dubby said it was important to have a Welsh sounding name, so we all took a vote and I took my new name, Tommy Jones.

Everett was really bothered. He said I was breaking our pact because if I got hired there would be no place for him as there was only one cabin boy position. I told him that if I got hired it would be on condition that he would be hired as cook's boy. "But what if they don't need a cook's boy, what then?" Said Everett. I told him not to worry, that he could apply first, ahead of me, for cabin boy and tell them that I must be hired as cook's boy if they hired him as cabin boy.

We knew that every other scrapper was going to be applying for the job we wanted, so we hid out near Pencher's and while we were munching on our handouts, we made a plan. The next day all three of us started spreading the word among the scrappers that the real reason the ship had arrived with a short crew was that some of the crew had died of the pox at sea.

On the day appointed to start the recruiting for the Moon, Everett and I were the only boys in the hiring line. A man toward the front of the line was applying for first mate and it appeared that the Captain hired him on the spot and turned the hiring job over to him. Everett was ahead of me, and the new mate hired him immediately without asking him a question.

At first Everett turned around to me smiling widely, exulting and then his expression soured when he realized that he hadn't followed our plan. I stood there for a long moment in disbelief at this apparent breakdown in loyalty. Then the first mate grabbed Everett by the collar and shoved him roughly toward the aft deck and told him to report to the cook. He protested but the first mate's menacing look cowered him and he skulked aft looking back at me with a pleading expression. I realized that Everett wasn't breaking our pact but had gotten caught up in the emotion of the thing and didn't know how to react.

The first mate looked at me and said gruffly that they didn't need any more cabin boys and I turned and shrank down the plank to the dock. It seemed that we were half way to doing what we planned but we couldn't get the other half. I looked back at our dream ship as the last of the hiring line was walking up the plank. I couldn't see Everett. The Captain was pacing the deck up towards the forecastle and looked down at me and waved his hand brusquely as if to say "be off with you".

I trudged back to our lair already feeling the loss of Everett and found Dubby preparing to leave. He was going to Dublin where an older sister lived. He had heard that a flat boat was leaving in a week to cross the Irish Sea and had gotten himself hired as the rudderman's mate. Those boats were meant for inland waters, so it was going to be rough going for Dubby, but he was a veteran now and he would stand the high seas well. I told him what happened and he wasn't very surprised. He offered to talk to the flat boat captain for me to see if there was another position. We could go to Ireland together. But, I couldn't think straight and said no. Going without Everett seemed impossible.

The next three days went slowly. I could not get serious about making the usual rounds without Everett. I spent a lot of time down at the wharf watching the crew get the brig ready to sail. I tried to catch sight of Everett but they must have kept him below decks helping with the provisions. The next day I bid goodbye to Dubby, it was hard. We had become good friends in a short while and he had painted a new world for us with his yarns.

The moon was ready to sail and the crew had rigged her with just the two lower yards. Just enough to catch the evenings gentle off-shore breeze and boost her out to a mid harbor anchorage to await the outgoing tide. I sat there on the dock in the dwindling light between two bales of flax watching as my best friend was being taken out to sea. I was desperate.

Not many of us scrappers liked the water, but if you wanted access to all the leavings from a ships loading and unloading you had to learn to swim. There were many items that fell off the ship or docks that floated, such as apples or corks. So we learned first in the shallow waters near the head of the wharf and later out by the pilings at the deep end. We found out later that many seamen didn't know how to swim at all and feared falling into the water. This was an advantage to tyrannical captains as they were less apt to lose crewmembers by them jumping overboard in a port or near shore. Now that grudgingly learned skill would be put to good use.

The Moon lay there in the yellow dappled sunset waters, dark and broody with all her cloth furled, waiting for the tide as I slipped into the water by the outland quay. The wind would favor me there and if my luck held, I could be up next to the ships anchor chain in a short while. If I didn't do it fast enough, I probably would drown because the cold would overtake my body's ability to stay warm and I wouldn't make it back to the quay against the wind.

I had tried to time my departure so that the tide would be moving out as I got to the ship. If I got there too early, I would die of the cold waiting at the side of the ship. If I got there too late the ship would weigh anchor and sail off without me.

I was afraid I had gotten there too early for I had begun to shudder uncontrollably as I clung to the anchor chain. But then I heard the take up reel clank and the chain gave an upward lurch. I let the chain slip upwards until the anchor surfaced and then I clung to its weed laden prongs rising out of the water with it. My shuddering stopped as the fear of getting caught overtook me. While I hung there just over the side I could hear the crew hustling about rigging the sails and the Captain bawling out his orders.

After a time the ship was underway ahead of a stiff breeze and the sounds on deck settled into a routine. After we had cleared the headlands of the harbor and were well out, I ventured a peek over the rail. There was a lone lamp lit near the stairway to the aft deck. No one was in sight except the helmsman. I slipped over the rail with some difficulty, as the anchor chain reel was right there. I managed to slip between it and the rail, cutting my hand on the rusty scale of the chain in the process. I made my way forward off the aft deck. I spotted a place near the aft galleyway where I could hide between some bundles of coarse wool blankets and the aft deck bulkhead.

I stayed in my hiding place for most of the night and slept in short fitful naps, waking when the Captain hollered out a change in course. As the eastern sky began to show the first slight hints of dawn, I heard the cook through the door to the companionway. He was beginning his early routine of stoking his stove. I heard him yell at Everett to go get some coal from the forward bin. Everett came running up the galleyway and I was so glad to see him that I almost gave myself away to the helmsman. Everett could hardly contain himself but managed to calm down enough to tell me to wait while he got finished stoking the stove. He could see that I was cold and wet.

In a while he came back out and motioned me below decks. I took a look towards the helmsman to be sure he wasn't looking my way and then scurried down the stairs on Everett's heels. We stopped at the closed galley door and Everett whispered that the cook had gone back to his berth with orders to wake him when the big pot of water was boiling. He took me into the galley and hid me behind the stove and told me to stay there until we could find a better place. I was content with this because I needed to dry out and what better a place than behind a warm stove. The blood on my cut hand was beginning to scab up. The heat from the stove and my exhaustion combined to send me quickly into a deep sleep.

I awakened with a start as I was being dragged from behind the stove by an angry cook. Everett was shaking in the corner. The cook dragged me down the companionway to the Captain's cabin and called out that he'd found a stowaway. The Captain just having come off his shift and barely asleep when the cook knocked was not at all happy at being awakened. "A stowaway", he bellowed, "throw him in the brig." And soon I was in the darkest, smelliest place I'd ever been in. The brig was down near the bilge line. I could hear the bilge swishing back and forth as the boat rocked. My hand was bleeding again.

The days dragged on in this darkness and occasionally Everett would sneak down with some scraps for me to eat and a tin cup with a bit of water to drink. He told me that there was some talk among the seamen that the Captain was expecting a sighting of another ship and that we were laying to, off of a fairly dangerous cape. Shortly after that, the first mate came down and dragged me out of the brig and up to the Captain's quarters.

I was very weak and my hand still hurt where I'd cut it on the anchor chain. I could barely stand before the Captain when he told me to sit down on a small stool near by. The Captain motioned the first mate to leave and he took a long look at me before speaking. "So, you can swim?" he said not at all unkindly. At first, in my delirium, I hardly noticed what he said. Then he repeated it more loudly. Realizing that this meeting wasn't some sort of dressing down, I became alert and said "Yes sir, I can swim, sir". "Well good." He said. "You must swim pretty damn well to have gotten out to our anchorage from the wharf. We have a position for someone like you. From now on you will be a bonafide member of the crew." He then called out to the first mate and when the mate entered the cabin he said "Give this lad a hammock in the focsle and fix him up with some decent sailor's garb. Oh, and before all that, take him to the galley and have the cook fix him up some rib stickin grub. We need to get this lad in fair shape shortly."

I knew the Captain was up to some larceny but I didn't complain as my treatment aboard had taken a decided turn for the better. In the ensuing days I was shown how the ship's rudder mechanism worked, how the rudder was controlled by the helm assembly, and how to use a serrated blade to cut through the rudder shaft. I was even given a small length of teak shaft timber on which to practice my new trade.

Eventually, I was given a practice exercise. I was dropped over the side into the choppy sea near the bow of the ship and let the ship glide past until the aft end came by. Then I needed to be very quick and careful because I had to grab the rudder shaft and hang on tight. This was only possible if the ship wasn't coursing through the sea too fast. With our real objective of course, I would commence cutting the rudder shaft until it didn't have the strength to hold up under tight maneuvers. My escape was to be the ship's long boat. It was to be lowered before our encounter with the target ship and lay to out of sight until the deed was done, then come up the crippled ship's wake and pick me up.

During my rehabilitation and training period, Everett and I were not allowed too much time together. When we did talk it was to compare notes and catch up on gossip that each of us had heard. We soon learned about some things that Dubby hadn't told us. The Moon was a part-time pirate ship. We would carry small amounts of normal cargo to cover our tracks but when opportunity arose, the Captain would put us into the pirate business. The ship was too small to make profit at normal cross-the-seas hauling, our cargoes had to be valuable beyond the average, or you might as well scuttle the thing. The Moon had been built in Glasgow for coastwise trade such as from England to Ireland, or up to Scotland and back or around the channel to Greenwich, but it had an advantage over larger ships in that it was extremely agile and pretty swift with all its yards and sheets up.

Now the day had come to test my new skill. A ship hove into view on the horizon. It was the Brigantine freighter Orion out of Bristol and returning from the Caribbean with a heavy load. Swiftly we closed on her as we were sailing with the wind and she was tacking against it. The Captain's plan required luck and timing to work.

As we bore down straight at the quarry we fired our bow cannon. The other ship swung around so that we were perpendicular to its keel line and fired a volley of balls at us. But we were still too far and too narrow a target to be hit by their guns. I huddled near the port rail trembling, not from the cold but from the anticipation and fear of the events to come. Before coming about, I was dropped into the foam with my serrated blade hanging from my side in a sheath and my new coat of whale blubber to guard against the chill. Upon hitting, I sank through the dark bubbly water, then bobbed up like a cork gasping from the cold. The Captain then reeled the Moon to port, tacking the ship in the opposite direction from our quarry and the two ships being tail to tail began to separate speedily.

The circumstances of the tacking caused me to wash up to the starboard flank of the Orion and then aft along its side planks. I got bloodied up a bit from the barnacles but managed to grab the rudder shaft. I went right to work.

The Moon soon came about again and was coming up the quarry's wake. The Captain pulled our faster ship up just close enough to draw fire from the Orion's aft cannon but not close enough to get hit. This was to keep the Brigantine's aft crew diverted and to prevent the helmsman from easily feeling the vibration of my sawing action on the tiller. It was a tougher job than I had imagined, since my only practice had not been under the pressure of battle. It seemed like hours before the cut I fashioned in the rudder shaft was deep enough to weaken the timber sufficiently. Then I heard a groan from the wood giving as the helmsman attempted a tight turn. The sudden action caused me to lose hold of the rudder and I was washed immediately abaft of the Orion. The long boat was nowhere in sight.

The Brigantine began to lose control of its direction of tack and started to drift where the wind might take it. But the ship's captain immediately grasped the problem and had his crew drop all the yards so as to minimize the wind's affect.

I whirled in the water trying to catch sight of the Moon or the long boat. They were nowhere in my field of view but the Orion obscured my view to its opposite side. The sea was getting rougher now as the wind began to increase and I seemed to be in an eternal trough between two waves. The foam spewing from the white caps seemed to be flying everywhere and I lost my sense of direction for a moment. Then I heard the crack of the cannon from the starboard side of the Orion, the side I couldn't see. And another, and another, then another. When the volley was done, the ships drift cleared my line of sight to the horribly damaged Moon.

As I rose up on a swell, I could see that it was afire from the aft deck, its forward mast splintered and fallen and it seemed to be listing to port from a shot delivered to the waterline. It was out of control, drifting aimlessly. And, to my astonishment, the long boat, my only escape, was still unlowered on its gimbals on the aft deck, lit up by the spreading flames.

Soon the fate planned by my Captain for the Orion, became the fate, instead, of the Moon. Without her helmsman or captain the little brig was driven windward into the rocks of the outer cape and was battered repeatedly until not a splinter of her Glasgow born hull could be seen. I was now the lone survivor of our little dream ship.