“I am dreaming, I think. There cannot be such—and even reckless men such as sailors are commonly supposed to be—they would not set your life at a higher rate than their own!”
“My boat is up there on the boom, Mr Talbot.”
“But Captain Anderson—”
Mr Jones appeared to stifle a yawn, then once more he shook his head, and smiled as if at some remembered pleasure—his own oddness, perhaps.
“I will hold the canvas aside for a while after you have gone down. That should give you enough light until you see theirs.”
This congé left me surprisingly without speech. I tried to infuse a degree of contempt into a slight bow as I edged past him, but cannot feel that he took any notice. He was right in one thing. Before I had passed into complete darkness again—and it was strange how the light seemed to diminish the pouring sounds of our internal wave, our tiny internal wave!—I caught the glimmer of another light beyond what might be the sacking-wrapped body of a coach.
“I say! I say! Hullo! Is anybody there?”
There was a pause and no sound but the glutinous cluckings of appetite from the water within us. Then through the intestinal wash of our wave I heard a familiar voice.
“Who’s there?”
“Charles? It is I, Edmund.”
There was a brief pause, then the glimmer brightened and became a lantern held aloft by young Mr Taylor. Its light fell on coach wheels, harness, a shaft, all packed round with full sacks, against which the ship deposited me as water poured from one side of the ship to the other. I was by what looked like a hut.
“Mr Talbot, this passes everything! You must leave at once!”
“With respect, Mr Summers, is that wise? Mr Talbot is an emissary—”
“If you please, Mr Benét. I am still first lieutenant of this ship and shall remain so until their lordships see fit to declare otherwise!”
“With respect again, sir, since he bears a message from the committee—”
There was a pause while the two pale faces peered at each other. It was Charles Summers who moved first, lifting his hand in what looked like a gesture of defeat.
“Roberts, Jessop, report back to your stations for duty. Mr Taylor, leave the lantern here and report back to Mr Cumbershum. Don’t forget to thank him. Now, sir; oh, for heaven’s sake, Edmund, sit down! On that bale. You have been sick and are in no case to stand about when she is moving.”
“I will lean against this cabin—”
“Against the magazine, you mean. Now do not, I beg of you, continue to use that box as a rest for your feet. It is the bed in which our three chronometers are kept.”
“With respect, sir, kept for the time being.”
“How did you know about the committee and my message—my alleged message?”
“Do you suppose such affairs can be kept secret? As it happens, you have come upon the best place in the ship for a private conversation! Your precious committee should have foregathered down here.”
“With respect, sir, I will walk a step to make sure that Roberts and Jessop are not hanging about.”
“Do so, Mr Benét. Well, Edmund, shall I take your message as spoken?”
“They—‘we’, I suppose I should say, wish to make known their opinion that for the sake of the women and children the ship’s course should be redirected to South America.”
“Have you ever heard of a null point?”
“Not as far as I can remember.”
Mr Benét’s face reappeared, pale in the light of the lantern.
“All clear, sir.”
Charles Summers nodded.
“The sea, Edmund, which earlier peoples, savage peoples and poets such as Mr Benét, have credited with thoughts and feelings does sometimes exhibit characteristics which would still make the mistake understandable. Those who go down to the sea in ships can sometimes find themselves in a combination of circumstances which produce an appearance of malevolence! I do not refer to storms and flat calms, dangerous as they can be, but to small events and minor characteristics, to odd exceptions and unstatistical behaviours—you are listening, Mr Benét?”
“Devoutly, sir.”
“—which soulless and material as they are can none the less produce a position in which men are conscious, strong, adept—and forced helplessly to watch a quiet destruction moving inexorably upon them.”
We were all three silent for a while as the hold dripped and trickled around us. Below me, it seemed, the wave passed once more.
“I was not prepared for this. What are these circumstances? Is this what I am to take back to the committee?”
“Understand the circumstances first.”
“I will try. But you have set my head spinning.”
“The null point. The term is sometimes used of a line where two tides meet and so produce motionless water where a current might be expected. I can find no better words for our situation. Point non plus, perhaps? You see it’s not a question of whether we will or will not stand towards South America. I suppose you mean the river Plate. We cannot proceed in that direction. What is more, we are satisfied that we cannot touch anywhere at the Cape of Good Hope. We have got ourselves too far south—”
“He, confound him, has got us too far south!”
Charles turned to Mr Benét.
“Observe, Mr Benét, that I express total disagreement with Mr Talbot’s remark about our captain.”
“Observed, sir.”
“But ships go further south than this! Good God, how do they—why, whalers spend years in the Southern Ocean!”
“You do not understand. Are you willing to—I will not say ‘to lie’—but to play down the seriousness of our situation as far as the passengers and indeed the rest of the people are concerned?”
“You had better explain.”
Charles Summers sat on a bale, Mr Benét sat on what looked like a bench end, I lay against my bale and the lantern stood on the bed of chronometers and lit us all three palely.
“It goes back to—oh, as far as the ship is concerned, as far as when she was built!”
“They say of these ships, Mr Talbot, that they were built by the mile and sawn off as required!”
“Defective building is only too common in warships, Mr Talbot. Copper through-bolts are sometimes no more than a dummy head outside and a pin on the inside. It saves all the copper in between, you see, and lines someone’s pocket. Commonly, of course, these things are not discovered until the ship is broken up.”
Mr Benét laughed sunnily.
“Or at sea, of course, sir, when the holes begin to squirt, but this is not often reported!”
“Can men do such things? Why—it is our—”
“We do not know if this ship has such defects. They have not revealed themselves in detail. But we feel she moves too much, has spewed too much oakum to be sound in her main frame; and she is old. Now add to that, Edmund, that the wind elected to change by no less than a dozen points at the very moment when an unworthy officer, your friend Deverel, had sneaked below for strong drink and left the con to a poor creature—a midshipman—”
“Willis.”
“—who will never make a seaman if he lives to be a hundred.”
“Would you care to continue, Mr Benét, or shall I—? That is not the half of it, Edmund. She was taken aback, when any competent officer could have prevented it. She was wrung and might have gone over if we had not lost our topmasts. Even so the foremast moved in the step and broke it. Watch the foremast, Edmund, and you will see the hounds—the top bit of what is left—describing a small circle. We cannot use the foremast and by reason of a balance of forces which will be immediately apparent to you, we cannot as a consequence use the mizzenmast either. Now observe. The same wind which lamed us drove us back, helpless as we were, into warmer water. We idled and weed grew. That makes us even more helpless. The upshot of all is that we have no choice, you see. We can only go more or less where we are driven.”
“What is goi
ng to happen? All is lost then!”
“By no means. By submission, by obedience to the forces of nature we may just outwit them.”
“Moreover as you know, sir, I propose we should take steps over the weed—”
“Shall I finish what I have to say, Mr Benét?”
“I beg pardon, sir.”
“Very well. Now, Edmund. Have you ever seen an atlas inscribed with lines showing the advised course for a ship between one point and another?”
“No.”
“You will find it curious, I think. For example a ship bound for India would not take the direct route from the Cape across the Indian Ocean but would make a great curve taking her nearly to Australia—”
“We might come across Alcyone again!”
Charles smiled but shook his head.
“I am sorry, Edmund, believe me! But we shall not. They will use the wind and bend with it as we must. The course we must take from our null point takes us south again in the great Southern Ocean. There the prevailing winds will alter and blow from the west. It will blow us to Australia. So you see, by consenting to what must be we may reach our destination.”
“It will be like going downhill, Mr Talbot, when you cannot go up but in any case wish to go down. We shall go downhill all the way to the Antipodes!”
“I see. No, gentlemen, I believe I really do see.”
“It will be a long voyage, Edmund.”
“And we may sink?”
The two officers looked at each other. Then Charles turned to me.
“I can trust you? Then yes. We may sink.”
I said nothing but tried to digest this naked information into a feeling and succeeded more quickly than I had anticipated. I froze as I had done when Jack Deverel had furnished me with a cutlass. But Summers laughed a little.
“Come, Edmund! It is not today or tomorrow and may be never—with God’s help!”
“And the chronometers, sir. Do not forget the chronometers!”
Charles Summers ignored the young man in a way that persons unaccustomed to the sea service would have found offensive.
“We do not think that this information should be made widely known among the passengers and emigrants.”
“But we behaved well enough when we set up a defence against what proved to be Alcyone!”
“That was sudden, desperate and soon over. This is a danger of a different degree. It will wear down all but the strongest spirits—as if the effect of this motion was not trial enough!”
“I agree, Charles. But this puts me in a fix. I am to report back to that idiotic committee, cannot ignore them—but now I know too much!”
“Perhaps, sir, Mr Talbot might adopt my metaphor and tell them we propose to go downhill all the way?”
Charles smiled at him pallidly in the light of the lantern.
“A degree of ignorance among the gentlemen is certainly desirable at the moment and Mr Talbot adequate to the task, I believe.”
“But devil take it, what am I to say?”
“Why that we shall alter course to the south and they will feel easier—”
“I submit, sir, that Mr Talbot should mention the dragrope.”
“If I say that we cannot reach either Africa or South America they will rightly fear the worst. If I say that Captain Anderson simply will not, they might well believe me and blame him for arbitrarily submitting them to this trial and real danger!”
“It is a difficulty. Perhaps the task is beyond you—oh, do not lift your chin at me in that Roman way, Edmund! I trust you to do your best but believe me that best would be a description of your own ignorance—”
“What the first lieutenant means, Mr Talbot, is that you should darken counsel a little and rely only on assuring them that all will be well and that we do the best in the circumstances. I must own the prospect of the Southern Ocean daunts me! There we shall get on with a vengeance. The reports make awesome reading. They write of seas the like of which are known nowhere else in the world. Even in a well-found ship—”
“We are rendering like an old boot.”
Charles actually laughed but it was not a merry sound.
“Their lordships made do with what they could find. By the inattention of your friend Mr Deverel, we have no tops’ls, a sprung foremast and a ship that has been badly wrung.”
He held out his two hands and demonstrated a wringing movement.
“Captain Anderson should have refused to command her!”
Mr Benét shook his head.
“A captain who refuses a ship will not get another.”
Charles turned to him.
“Observe, Mr Benét, that I have no criticism to make of Captain Anderson. He is a fine seaman. You are fortunate, Mr Talbot, to find yourself in the hands of such an officer. If you wish to apportion blame, aim it rather at the clerks of the Admiralty who indifferently thrust you into this, this—”
“I heard Mr Talbot use the word ‘hulk’, sir.”
“Just so, Mr Benét. Mr Talbot used the word.”
“What must I do?”
“Explain that we shall turn away a little from the wind and make what speed we may to the south where we may get a steady wind on one quarter or the other.”
“And the movement will be easier?”
Again the officers exchanged glances.
“The first lieutenant would agree that it will be different, Mr Talbot. He would agree you should use the word ‘different’.”
“Well, I am willing to do anything in this emergency. Do you wish me to keep the tone of the passenger saloon amiable and pleasant? Cheerful?”
“For heaven’s sake, Mr Talbot, I can see you going round the ship with such an air of demented cheerfulness you would dreadfully disconcert the whole company!”
“What can I do? I cannot do nothing!”
“Let there be no alteration seen. Be as you were before your—injuries. The only result will be congratulations on your recovery.”
“Be as I was? How was I?”
There was a pause and then suddenly Charles and Mr Benét were laughing, Charles, it seemed, with a touch of hysteria. I had never seen him so before. Tears flashed on his cheeks in the light of the lantern. Head on his knees, he reached out a hand and laid it on mine. I flinched at the unaccustomed contact so that he snatched his hand away again and smeared the water from his face with the back of it.
“I beg your pardon, sir. Your present mood of cooperation, or perhaps I should say complicity, had made me forget how prickly you can be. Mr Benét, how would you suggest that Mr Talbot should conduct himself in order that our other passengers should detect no change in his demeanour?”
Mr Benét’s grin broadened. He pushed back his yellow hair with both hands.
“My acquaintance with the gentleman has been short, sir, but I have heard of ‘Lord Talbot’. A lofty, not to say toplofty demeanour—”
“Well, gentlemen, I see you are determined to roast me. Indeed it is not easy for a man of my inches to hit off the right bearing in this world of deck beams and squabby tars. If he goes about concealing his height he is bent down like an ancient cripple whereas if he stands up straight as God meant him to and lives with his own eye level he is always cracking his skull and stumbling over—you damned squat creatures, confound you!”
“This voyage will be the making of you, Mr Talbot. At moments I even detect a strong streak of humanity in you as if you was a common fellow like the rest of us!”
“Since we are all common fellows, allow me to share more information. There was mention made of chronometers.”
“Yes indeed. You know that the chronometers enable us to measure our movement east and west? Our longitude? With the ship in such a state we are discussing the advisability of bringing them up one deck. But—”
“The wave!”
“What wave?”
“Why the one we—she—has in her. The one I heard as I scrambled towards you!”
“There is no wave inside her, Edmund
. Before we allowed her to reach such a state we should have the whole crew pumping—”
“And the passengers, sir, watch and watch—”
“We should have had sails fothered over her bottom and be busy throwing the guns overboard! That was no wave. We have been heavily rained on. Our decks spew oakum. Some of the rain has found its way through the deck—for all rainwater and spray does not run straight into the well. It will puddle at one level or another and wash about, making for discomfort but nothing more. It is a small matter compared with the real danger that faces us.”
“There was the corn, sir.”
“We ditched a few tons of it, Mr Talbot. It was wet and swelling. We have trouble enough without that.”
“Mr Talbot could also mention the dragrope, sir. The prospect of an increase in speed will go some way towards making their discomfort tolerable.”
I looked at Charles levelly.
“I was deceived in thinking she makes so much water that between pumpings a wave washes to and fro in her bilges?”
There was a long pause. Charles Summers put his hand to his mouth, then took it away again.
“There was no wave. Your ears deceived you.”
Now it was my turn to pause. Then—
“And the dragrope?”
“Mr Benét has persuaded Captain Anderson that we may use the dragrope here in the open sea to get weed off her. In that respect I do as I am ordered. After that we shall see about my own proposal to frap her hull with what cables we can spare for it. Frapping, carefully adjusted, will diminish her rendering to the seas.”
“I see. An interminable period of nagging danger—the prospect of a catastrophe, perhaps. Well, so much for a career! And heigh-ho, so much for—but is there really no more to be done?”
“You could pray.”
“As Colley did! I will not be bullied to my knees!”
I got to my feet. Light appeared beyond the mainmast like a dawn.
“What is that light?”
“It is the change of watch. Men under punishment are come down to pump for fifteen minutes at the beginning of it.”