Chapter Eight
WOULD THIS NIGHTMARE NEVER END? PETER SAT ON A LOCKER in the berth instinctively braced against the prodigious roll: he held his aching head in the crook of his arm, his forehead against the dripping oilskin. The icy water that washed about the deck came almost to his knees on the starboard roll, and surged across to the other side as the Centurion rose again, but Peter did not notice it—it was so usual now, and he had not been dry these three weeks past. He slid his free hand down to ease the familiar pain of his broken ribs, and again he asked himself, ‘Will this nightmare never end?’
It had begun so long ago, within one hour of their clearing the Straits Le Maire, full of hope and delighted to see the Southern Ocean. He remembered the beginning so well—Ransome’s voice saying ‘Look out for squalls’—the hurried orders, the onset of the storm from the dark north-west, and the turning of the monstrous tide, which, dammed up by the whole continent, had rushed them back so furiously that before it let them go they were more than twenty miles south and east of Staten Island, far into the Atlantic once more.
He remembered the beginning: but after that it was a succession of storms, blackness, white water and snow from the black sky, blackness and such winds that a man must crawl, clinging to the handlines, hardly able to breathe, to fight his way along the sheltered waist of the ship. Wind and the perpetual cold, cold so intense that the rigging froze, so bitter that the flying spray froze on the shrouds, and the ratlines were round bars of ice; so fierce that every rope and line was rigid, brittle and never to be trusted: it was a stout rope that had sent him hurtling from just below the foretop, a rope that broke because its frozen length acted as a lever to shear it in the block. But he had been lucky: his fall had been broken on a man’s shoulders before he hit the deck, and it was only the mainstay that had caught him under the heart, staving in a couple of ribs. It was nothing to what some had received: there was Davis, for example, an excellent seaman; he had gone overboard that dreadful time when they had had to wear ship without a sail set, by manning the foreshrouds so that the clinging men formed a resistance to bring her before the wind: and in the insane rolling and the tearing gale Davis had lost his hold. They had seen him swimming strongly for an endless minute, without the faintest chance of launching a boat or bearing up; and they had heard him call to them for life. Then there was Matthews, who was plucked from the ice-sheathed fore-topmast yard in the black night, when the clewlines parted and the sail was lashed to ribbons—he was just a white blur falling and a lost cry swallowed in the wind, barely audible although Peter could almost have touched him. Sommerton, Green, Aiken: so many others. And so many storms. They followed one another, with rare intervals of foggy calm, just long enough for new rigging to be sent up, new sails to be bent, enough for the ship to survive the next somehow—they followed one another so that now it was impossible to sort them out, for they had a nightmarish continuity: it was an unceasing struggle in which time itself had stopped as it stops in the worst of dreams.
‘I shall try to write it down,’ said Peter, dully. But somewhere in the wash and bilge his journal rocked to and fro, its pages spread and pale. Yet he had done his best to keep it up: for Elliot, only a little while before the end, had begged him to persevere. Elliot had been light-headed then, and going fast; but there had been something cruelly moving about his care for Peter’s book.
It was the scurvy, of course, that had broke him down; but it was Cape Noir that killed him. It was on the thirteenth of April. ‘I will write it down,’ said Peter, again. The thirteenth of April, three days after they had lost the Pearl and the Severn: thirty-eight days of beating round the Horn, with rarely a sight of the sun or the moon, with a current of enormous but incalculable strength setting eastward and driving them back: yet every officer aboard reckoned their position a good ten degrees west of Tierra del Fuego, and the course was set for the north at last—north, to bring them up the Chilean coast with sea-room and to spare. Edging up to the north with reborn hope the Centurion, the Gloucester, the Tryal, the Wager and the little Anna pink, shattered, pumping day and night, but still capable of high ambition, sailed day after day. Elliot was already very ill by the first week of April, the teeth loosening in his jaw; he was too weak to get in or out of his hammock, but they brought him the noon-readings whenever they had them, and the dead-reckoning and the rare shots of the moon: he worked their position with Halley’s compass deviations pinned up overhead and Frezier’s chart beside it. He was quite certain that they were running far clear of the land, running up their northing out of the zone of perpetual storm and into the warmth: it kept him alive.
And on the thirteenth of April, one degree south of the mouth of the Strait of Magellan, and by their reckoning at least two hundred miles to the west, they were steering north-north-west with their larboard tacks aboard and a stiff gale that tore ragged cloud across the racing moon, when at two bells of the middle watch the pink’s guns blazed out and right under the lee bow they saw the tremendous surf towering on Cape Noir.
The wind turned and saved them at the last minute, when they were almost in the breakers: they clawed off the shore and stood again for the south and west. But you could feel the courage leak out of the ship: the men felt dumbly that they had done all that men could do, but that it was not enough, and that the ship was accursed. For some days together the winds were fair: the crew could get some rest and even dry their quarters and eat cooked food: but it counted for nothing. The disappointment stunned them; and it killed Elliot.
They were terribly accustomed to death. Peter had seen men drop and die on the deck and had hauled them aside so that they should not impede the work; he had seen so many die: he was hardened to death. But when Elliot went over the side he stood there openly crying: he cried like a child and the tears ran down his face with the rain. It had been so important for Elliot to live; he had not wanted to die, as some of the old men did, and the very sick; and almost the last thing that ever he said was that he must cling on—‘for there are special reasons, Peter, you know.’
But that was long ago. Since then they had buried one hundred and seven, for the hopelessness reinforced the scurvy, whatever the surgeon and his mate could do.
After that, what was the main happening? The turning up northwards again; then that appalling sudden storm that caught them with their topsails unhanded and ripped them to thread: no, that storm was after the one when the rest of the ships disappeared. ‘I must write it down in succession,’ said Peter again.
There had once been a time when it was almost impossible to write in the midshipmen’s berth, when you had to take your journal into the top, either because there was physically too little space or because someone would inevitably pour the sand into the ink in a spirit of fun. But now Elliot was gone: and Hope was gone too, vanished at some moment in a furious storm when the ice blew from the sea and drew blood where it touched—no one knew exactly when or how. Keppel was lashed into his hammock, and nobody thought he would leave it. There was room enough now: and now when a midshipman came below he ate silently and fast, devouring what meagre rations and green scum was left, and flung himself into his hammock, dead until the next pipe. There was not much boyishness left in the midshipmen’s berth.
‘All hands on deck,’ came the cry, as familiar as the unceasing clank of the pumps, and Peter lurched off his seat. From the shadows on the other side Ransome and Bailey rose like automata and they went silently on deck. It was the main-course to be reefed and the yards braced round—a few minutes’ work for a single watch in ordinary times, but now a long and painful toil for the whole ship’s company. There were no idle hands any more, and Peter found himself tailing on to a brace immediately behind the Commodore’s French cook. On the yard the lieutenants reefed next to the seamen, and Mr Walter held the wheel with the schoolmaster: but for all this reinforcement there were now no more than a dozen upper-yardmen in a watch—a force with which no sixty-gun ship, no twenty-gun ship, would ever have
dreamed of setting sail in a calm at home—and the simplest working of the ship was a dangerously slow manoeuvre, which told very heavily on the few skilled and able-bodied men.
‘Listen, cully,’ said Ransome quietly, drawing Peter aside when the work was done and they were dismissed below. ‘Listen, cock.’ He seemed embarrassed, and Peter looked at him stupidly. ‘It’s young Preston,’ he said. ‘I am not saying he is frightened—not the wrong colour, you know, eh? But he is getting low in his spirits, you understand what I mean? Needs to be give a hand now and then, you smoke it? A cove like you, with plenty of bottom, could bear up to him: he would mind your signals more than mine.’
Peter nodded. He knew very well what Ransome meant. Preston had not yet cracked under the strain, but he was frightened through and through. They all were: men who understand the sea, who know that their ship is slowly disintegrating, that she is short of food and water, that she is fantastically undermanned, burying six or seven hands a day, and that she is in the worst seas and the most terrifying storms in the world, are either frightened or born fools. Peter knew the danger they were in; he knew that every time he went aloft his life depended not only upon his own skill and diminishing strength, but also upon the chance of a rope or a sail carrying away, and he dreaded it. He was frightened nearly all the time; he was frightened in his sleep, and had been for weeks and weeks. It had never occurred to him not to perform his duty, but he understood how it could come into one’s mind to lurk below, particularly if one’s courage were undermined by the scurvy that had by now attacked almost everyone aboard in a greater or a less degree. He understood what Ransome meant.
There was only one man in the Centurion who seemed really unmoved. Peter had seen the Commodore anxious, very grave, perturbed; but he had never seen him afraid. He had seen a great deal of Mr Anson, too: the Commodore was rarely from the quarter-deck: whenever Peter’s watch was called he found the Commodore there, usually in streaming oilskins, standing somewhat abaft the wheel. He appeared to be made of iron and oak, quite unchanging, except that he grew a little more affable as things grew even worse.
Peter had an immense respect for him, and although they did not often speak, a real affection: the Commodore held the ship together, and the officers drew strength from him. In the very worst of times there was no hint of anarchy: the routine of the ship went on in the most orderly manner that circumstances would allow. Everything that could be done was done, in a seamanlike fashion, quickly, with no thought of argument.
How long anything more could be done was another matter. This was a question that Peter asked himself several times as they cruised off the island of Socorro in the vain hope of finding some other ship of the squadron—for this was their rendezvous in case of separation. They had been cruising, if that is the right term for the staggering progress of a terribly battered vessel with barely enough hands to trim her sails, for a fortnight, and the coast off which they cruised was as inhospitable as all the rest: no hope of any landing or refreshment there. Worse, it was a rendezvous and a station that had been calculated at a time when the squadron was complete and at least adequately manned: it had not been meant for a single ship with a dying crew; but the Commodore would not be found wanting at his appointment or in his duty, and he kept his appointment by cruising there, and he thereby did his duty by taking all possible measures to reassemble his forces in order to attack the Spaniards. So without a moment’s peace they cruised, with no sea-room and a terrible shore to the east in a region of westerly gales, in continual anxiety and a painfully dying expectation of their friends.
How long can it go on? thought Peter to himself, as they hurried northwards and south again between the limiting latitudes of their rendezvous, north and south again under topsails and courses—far too much sail, but being unable to lie-to with so little sea-room they were forced to carry it all, though it might very well carry away. Only a few days before the Centurion had been struck by lightning: it had injured five fit men who could not be spared, and Mr Brett: it had knocked Peter flat, and when Sean picked him up there was a queer long brown scar on his cheekbone. But what would once have been a nine days’ wonder passed with little remark: they were surprised at nothing now, and they carried the stunned sailors below with as much phlegm as the next morning they carried eight of their comrades up from the sombre gun-deck, once so crowded, now so filled with empty bays—carried them up for the usual morning burial service.
How long could it go on? Not much longer, perhaps. But while the ship floated it would float in a naval fashion, with the log heaved regularly, the watches piped up and down, the due observations made and recorded, respect paid to the quarter-deck and the dead buried in decency.
Peter was pleased with three things. The first was that they were now in latitude 45° S., be their longitude what it might, so that even if they went down that day, still they would have rounded the Horn, which was a high point of ambition: the second was that Sean should have done so very well. He had long ago been freed from the butcher’s realm—there were no beasts left to tend and the butcher was dead these many leagues to the south—and now Sean was no less a figure than the captain of the foretop. He had greatly distinguished himself by going aloft to cut away a sail that was about to destroy the yard—almost certain death—and in the uncountable subsequent storms he had played a noble part, sure-footed, very strong, skilled, and as brave as ever he was. ‘Sure, admiral dear,’ he said to the Commodore, on receiving a kind word in the face of the ship’s company, ‘I have always been quite as brave as a parish of lions—it’s no virtue at all, but the blood of my people.’
The third was that Keppel was still alive. He was low, very low, and he appeared to have shrunk to the size of a child; but he kept up his spirits amazingly, and Peter hoped that if only they could make Juan Fernandez within the week—for bitterly against their heart, though forced by sickness and by dwindling stores, they were to make for the next rendezvous in the morning—then they would save him, for everybody knew that Juan Fernandez abounded with scurvy-grass and a hundred such remedies. A week was a fair allowance for the distance between Socorro and the supposed position of Juan Fernandez: but then again there was that infernal question of longitude; their charts all differed, and the island was no more than a speck in the vast Pacific.
‘Look out for squalls,’ said Ransome, breaking in upon his meditation. Peter looked up. ‘Well, that’s the queer sky of the world,’ he said, looking at the strange massing of violet light in the west. ‘I thought we had seen everything; but we have not, I find.’ He looked quickly over his shoulder in the direction of the land, and there surely enough rose the infinitely remote white peaks of the Cordillera, far within the continent. The cruel black precipices of the coast were too far beneath the horizon to be seen, but they were there, and a great deal nearer than the mountains.
The crew were already at their stations: the order to hand the topsails came at the same time as a distant growl of thunder. Peter had time to notice a sinister trembling of the sea as he swung up the starboard foreshrouds, on the weather side: it was a trembling ripple of the surface over and above the heavy swell from the west and it travelled with an extraordinary rapidity, jarring the heavy vessel for a second as it passed.
The fore-topsail was half clewed-up. Peter was working between Sean and Sergeant Burroughs of the Marines: leaning over to re-tie the soldier’s gasket he heard the flat air suck and sigh. He braced himself for the expected blow, but it came from the wrong direction. The false wind plucked him backwards like a straw; then in an instant the true wind smashed him against the yard with a greater force than he had ever known. The sail flew from its gaskets: momentarily he saw the half-flowed sheet like a bar below him and then it parted silently, the great crack lost in the all-pervading shriek of wind. The sail was a streaming mass, split in every seam, threshing with diabolical strength as it fouled the stays. Sean already had his knife at work, slicing through the earrings. Peter whipped out his own,
and the canvas shot away, straight on the wind. He leant inwards to try to make the soldier understand what to do: but there was no soldier there.
In a breathing-space before the wind redoubled they reached the deck. It was a scene of shocking disorder: the gig was sprawled across the waist and the studdingsail booms lay in a criss-cross, brought somehow from the chains, while posed madly upon them all stood the top-lantern. But there was no second of time for gaping: they ran along the hand-line to the mainmast lifts, where a spray-drenched party was striking the yard to save the main-course, the only sail spread that was yet unsplit. Colonel Cracherode was on the rope in front of Peter, and his mouth opened and closed without a sound.
Mr Stapleton was by his side, pulling at his sleeve and pointing forward. Peter understood him to shout something about the bowsprit gammoning, but before the lieutenant could repeat it a green sea hurled him across the deck. Peter passed him a moment later; he was crawling on his hands and knees, reaching to lash himself to the bitts—he was very weak with scurvy, blotched and swollen. There was nothing to be done about the gammoning, nothing but the roughest makeshift: Peter took three men, cut a writhing length of stay and took what turns he could about the bowsprit and the figure-head, making all tight with capstan bars as tourniquets, lashed along the head rails. It took a long time, though it was little enough to stand the enormous strain that the bowsprit must take from the forestays: yet the Centurion’s head, still with a lick of gold leaf on his helmet, was unusually solid—it might do something for the moment.
They had been somewhat under the fo’c’sle’s lee, and now when they came back to the full force of the storm it seemed to be less: Peter heard the surgeon shout as he passed, ‘There’s life in us yet.’