Buccaneer (43 page)

‘Maybe an hour,’ Dan answered. ‘There! A reef or a small island. We’re coming too close.’

Hector turned and shouted out the information. Someone down on deck must have heard him for he saw the foreshortened figure of a man running to the helm and relaying the message, then a group of men hastily sheeting in the triangular mizzen sail to assist the action of the rudder in turning the ship.
Trinity
changed direction, clawing up into the wind.

‘More rocks, by that patch of foam,’ announced Dan. This time he was pointing to starboard.

Hector cried out another warning and, standing up on the platform, wrapped one arm around the foretopmast. With the other arm he pointed which way
Trinity
should go. At that instant a cloud passed across the moon, and there was complete darkness. All of a sudden he was completely disoriented, the ship swayed beneath his feet, the motion magnified by his height above the deck, and he felt dizzy. For one heart-stopping moment his grip on the mast slipped, and he tottered, feeling that he was about to fall. He had a sudden, awful vision of smashing down onto the deck or, worse, landing in the sea unnoticed and being left behind in the wake of the vessel. Hurriedly he clamped his other arm around the mast, clutching it to his chest in a fierce grip, and slithered down to a sitting position. Within a minute the cloud had passed, and there was enough moonlight to see his surroundings. Dan seemed not to have noticed his brief horror, but Hector could feel his clothes clammy with cold sweat.

For an hour or more the two of them conned the ship from the foremast as
Trinity
swerved and sidled her way past one danger and then the next. Gradually the sky began to lighten and, very slowly, the extent of their predicament became clear.

Ahead stretched an iron-bound coast, a vista of grey and black cliffs and headlands which extended in both directions far into the distance. Behind the cliffs rose ridges of bare rock which became the slopes and screes of a coastal mountain range whose jagged crest was lightly dusted with snow. Nowhere was there anything to relieve the impression of monotonous desolation except an occasional clump of dark trees growing in sheltered folds of the austere landscape. Closer to hand were the small offshore islands and reefs which had so nearly destroyed the ship in the darkness and still menaced her. Here the surface of the sea sporadically exploded in warning spouts of spray or heaved and sank in sudden upwellings which warned of submerged rocks and shoals. Even the channels between the islands were forbidding. In them the water moved strangely, sometimes streaked with foam, at other times with the deep, blue-black slickness of a powerful current.

‘Hang on!’ said Dan. He had seen the telltale white flurry of a squall which had suddenly ripped up the surface of the sea and was now racing towards them. Hector braced himself.
Trinity
abruptly heeled under the force of the wind. From below them came the creaking sound of the foresail spar as it took the strain and then the sudden crack of something breaking. The squall was strong enough to lift a vaporous whirl of fine spray and send it over the ship, darkening her timbers and leaving a slick on the deck. Hector felt the moisture settle on his face and trickle down inside his collar.

A hail from the deck made him look down. Sharpe was beckoning to him, ordering him to return to near the helm. He made his way carefully down the shrouds, gripping tightly in case another squall struck, and reached the poop deck. Sharpe was no longer in a towering rage but seething with subdued anger. Beside him Sidias looked shamefaced, clearly ill at ease.

‘Lynch, this idiot seems to have lost his command of English,’ snarled Sharpe. ‘Tell him that I want some sensible advice, not pretence and falsehood. Ask him in a language he understands what he recommends, which way we go.’

Speaking in Spanish, Hector repeated the question. But he knew already that the pilot had been feigning incomprehension.

‘I don’t know,’ the Greek confessed, avoiding Hector’s gaze. ‘I have no knowledge of this part of the coast. It is strange to me. I have never been here before.’

‘Is there nothing you recognise?’

‘Nothing,’ Sidias shook his head.

‘What about the tides?’

Sidias nodded towards a nearby island. ‘Judge for yourself. That line of the weeds indicates a rise and fall of at least ten or twelve feet and that would be normal for the parts of the coast I am familiar with.’

Hector relayed the information to Sharpe who glowered at the pilot. ‘What about an anchorage or a harbour? Ask him that.’

Again the pilot could only speculate. He supposed there would be bays or inlets where a ship might find shelter, but anchoring was sure to be difficult. The drop-off from the land was usually so abrupt that an anchor seldom reached to the seabed before its cable ran out.

‘We follow along the coast until we find shelter,’ Sharpe decided. He had to raise his voice above the moan of the wind. ‘God grant that we can scrape through.’

It was a wild, intimidating ride. Every member of
Trinity
’s crew was now up on deck, either spread along the rails or in the shrouds. Even the drunkards had sobered up. They knew the danger, the strain showing on their faces as they watched the reefs slide by. Sometimes their vessel came so close to disaster that her hull brushed fronds of seaweed writhing in the backwash of the swells. Only the skill of the helmsmen, responding to every shift of the current or change in the strength and direction of the wind, kept their ship from being driven into the turmoil of waves which broke and thundered against the cliffs. Finally, after nearly an hour of this unnerving progress, they came level with an entrance to a narrow bay. ‘Turn in! And stand by to lower the pinnace,’ Sharpe ordered. He had noted the area of calm water behind a low promontory. Here a skilfully handled ship might find shelter and lie at rest. More crucially, a great solitary tree stood on the point of land, only a few paces from the water’s edge.
Trinity
sidled in and the crew began to clew up the foresail. As the vessel slowed, the pinnace splashed down in the water, and a dozen men rowed furiously for the land, towing the main cable behind their boat. They scrambled up the beach, made fast the cable around the tree, and
Trinity
gathered sternway. She fell back until the heavy rope came taut, and the ship slowed to a halt, tethered to the land and safe.

A sense of relief spread throughout the ship. Men thumped one another on the back in celebration. Some climbed into the rigging and out along the foremast yard and began to furl the sails. Sharpe was halfway back to his cabin when a last great gust of wind came raging over the promontory and struck the ship. Under the impact
Trinity
reared back like a startled mare against her bridle. The main cable sprang from the surface, water spraying from the strands of rope as they took the strain, and when the full force of the wind drove upon her, there was a loud, rending crack. The great tree holding the ship came toppling down, the ancient roots giving up their hold.
Trinity
, her sails furled, was helpless. The gust drove her backwards across the small bay and, with an impact that shuddered the length of her keel, she struck stern first upon the shingle beach. Above the shriek of the wind, every man aboard heard the sound as her rudder sheered. The vessel was crippled.

F
OR THREE WEEKS
the wounded
Trinity
lay in the bay. A web of ropes fastened to boulders and posts driven into the shingle held her steady against the rise and fall of the tides while the carpenters worked to fashion and fit a new rudder. The great gust had been the gale’s final stroke, and the wind was never again so fierce. Instead the weather was continually cold, damp and oppressive. Thick cloud clamped down, obscuring the mountains, so that the leaden sky blended with the slate-grey landscape. Those men who were not working on the repairs reverted to their endless games of cards and dice or prowled the beach and prised mussels off the rocks. They shot penguins to boil and roast. The flesh was quite palatable, being as dark as venison though oily. Dan volunteered to explore inland and came back to report no sign whatever of human life. The interior was too harsh and craggy to support settlement. He claimed to have come across unknown wild plants which might prove useful additions to the near-empty medicine chest, but this was only an excuse so that he and Hector could go ashore. They took with them the bamboo tube containing their copies of Captain Lopez’s navigation notes.

Safely out of sight of the ship, they tried to make some sense of their notes, smoothing out the pages and putting them in order.

‘I think this sheet shows the coast and the approaches to the Passage,’ said Hector. He placed a page on the flat surface of a boulder and weighed the corners down with pebbles. ‘But it has very little detail. The mountain range is shown as extending all along the coast, and there are at least two dozen islands marked. But they all look much the same. We could be anywhere.’

Dan ran his finger down the page. ‘See here, the entrance to the Passage is clearly shown.’

Hector brightened. ‘If our notes are accurate – and Captain Lopez’s original is right – I’m confident that I could find the Passage. All we need to know is our latitude.’

Dan rubbed his chin. ‘What if there’s an overcast sky like these past few days and you cannot take a backstaff reading? I doubt very much that the crew will want to risk this coast again. They’ve had a bad fright already.’

Hector was about to reassure his friend that even a glimpse of the sun would be enough, when Dan added, ‘And if we suddenly announce to the crew that we have these navigation notes, we’ll bring further trouble on ourselves. They will want to know why we did not say so before.’

‘Then we go around the Cape and not through the Passage, and say not a word to anyone about Captain Lopez’s notes,’ Hector answered. ‘Those more general maps we took out of the
Santo Rosario
are good enough to get us around the Cape if we go to fifty-eight degrees and then turn east. After that, we should come into the Atlantic.’

He rolled up the papers and slid them back into the tube. ‘Come on, Dan. No one wants to stay a moment longer in this dreary place.’

S
O IT TURNED OUT
.
Trinity
, with her rudder repaired and rerigged with the cordage from Paita, took advantage of an offshore breeze and threaded her way through the skerries until she reached the open ocean. Shortly after, she turned south and sailed into waters known to her crew only from hearsay. There they came upon sights that confirmed the stories they had heard – immense blocks of blue-white ice, the size of small islands and drifting on the current, whales of monstrous size, and birds who followed the ship day after day, gliding on wings whose span exceeded the width of even Jezreel’s outstretched arms. All this time the weather remained kind, and
Trinity
entered the Atlantic without enduring a single storm. Northwards next, the sea miles rolling by, the sun higher each day, and the temperature increasing. With no sight of land or other ship,
Trinity
might have been the only vessel on the ocean. To pass the time, the men reverted yet again to their favourite pastime – gambling. It was as if nothing had changed since the South Sea. Those who gambled lost most of their plunder to Captain Sharpe who, fearful of their resentment, took to sleeping with a loaded pistol beside him. Only Sidias was his rival for winnings. The Greek’s cunning at backgammon meant he swept up most of what the captain missed.

Christmas came and Paita’s sow was slaughtered and eaten under a clear blue sky while waiting for the fickle doldrum winds. By that time the men were so anxious for the voyage to end that they clustered around Hector and Ringrose as they took each midday sight, demanding to know how much progress had been made. Ringrose’s health had improved with the warmer weather, and he had regained his usual cheerful manner. It was he who finally declared that they must make their landfall very soon. The following dawn a low, green island on the horizon was recognisable as Barbados, though the unwelcome sight of an English man-of-war in the offing led to a hastily called general council. It was decided to find a more discreet place in which to dispose their booty, and on the last day of January
Trinity
dropped anchor in a deep and deserted inlet on the rocky coast of Antigua. They had completed eighty days at sea.