Ross King - Ex Libris

But from that point in the voyage nothing would go well. Later, taking stock of the disaster, Captain Quilter would blame not only his own avarice-his greed for the two thousand Reichsthalers-but, even more, the ignorance of his crewmen. Not ignorance of their jobs, because he recruited only the most experienced and capable hands, but the pristine ignorance that bred the worst superstitions in men exposed to the cruelty of the elements. Yes, sailors were a superstitious lot, there was no avoiding the fact. Quilter had seen them at their strange rituals in the Golden Grapes, purchasing gruesome good-luck charms-the cauls of newborn children-from the old crones plying the taverns beside the port. The men believed with some bizarrely misplaced faith that one of these shrivelled membranes (or what Quilter's suspicions told him were in fact the bladders of pigs) would save them from death by drowning. And one day when the Bellerophon was becalmed in Dvina Bay he had caught a furtive party muttering a chant and then tossing a broomstick over the poop-rail, as if an action as petty as this, and not (as every educated man knew) the movement of the stars in the heavens, or the rotation of the earth, or the conjunction of planets, or an eclipse, or the rising of Orion or Arcturus, or a half-dozen other celestial rituals that were beyond the feeble arc of human endeavour, might cause a change in a force as powerful and unpredictable as the wind!

Then, of course, there had been the church bells. Their ghostly peals were heard on the upper deck as the Bellerophon slid past Cuxhaven-a sure sign, supposedly, that the ship and her crew would come to grief, for there was no omen so terrifying to a sailor as the sound of church bells at sea. Within a day the ship's surgeon had clambered up from the cockpit to report that three of the crewmen had come down with a fever. Two turns of the sandglass later came the news that another handful of men had fallen ill, but by then Captain Quilter had more serious dangers to worry about.

What, he later wondered, had caused the wind to blow this time, to twitch the dog-vane at the end of its line on the gunwale as the sun climbed overhead at the end of the morning watch? No notice was paid to it, however, for the sky was bright and clear, the wind steady, and most of the crewmen-those who hadn't yet taken ill-squatted on coiled lanyards in the messes below, peering at one another over hands of cards. But slowly a storm front appeared on the eastern horizon, implacable and bruise-black, and began edging its way across the sky like the shadow of an approaching giant. The deck-beams creaked noisily and water poured through the scuttles. Then the first of the spume broke over the bows and across the fo'c'sle deck, followed by stinging pellets of rain. Seconds later the ladders and decks were resounding with the boots of crewmen rushing to their stations. The midshipmen were already on their hands and knees on the waist, prising open the scuppers, while others who stuck their heads through the hatches were sent scrambling up the flapping ratlines. As they hastily struggled to reef the canvas-Pinchbeck was shouting orders at them from below-the first antlers of lightning split the sky.

The luck that saved the crew from the Scylla of the Dvina and the Charybdis of the White Sea had, it seemed, now deserted them. Pinchbeck clung with both hands to the mainmast, bellowing himself hoarse, until a heavy wave broke amidships and sent him staggering sideways like a drunken brawler. He righted himself only to be knocked down a second later as the stern plunged sickeningly downward and frigid water cascaded across the poop deck. Bodies scattered aft from the waist, knocked down like skittles. Then the stem dipped, the bowsprit sliced the water, and the bodies tumbled backwards. The familiar rituals turned to panic as a dozen desperate cries followed them across the decks. 'Helm astarboard!' 'Belay there!' 'Left full rudder!' Three men had lashed themselves to the tiller, which was rearing and tossing them about like an unbroken horse, its rope burning their hands and breaking one of their wrists. 'Hard alee!' 'Steady so!' And then, as one of the topmen sped spreadeagled through the air, his scream lost in the gale: 'Man overboard!'

But there was nothing to be done except to strike the sails, and pray. From the leeward side of the lurching quarterdeck, Captain Quilter watched in helpless anger as the sky rapidly unscrolled itself above the heads of the struggling topmen, above the tops of the masts that, as the sheets of rain thickened, were almost lost to view. He regarded the storm as a personal affront, as impertinent and enraging as the attack of a Spanish picaroon. There had been no warnings beforehand, not the treble ring round the moon at sunrise that morning, nor a halo round Venus at sunset the night before, nor even the flocks of petrels circling the ship a half-hour earlier-none of those things that, in Quilter's long experience, always presaged violent turns of weather. The elements were not playing fair.

Now, with the deck awash, he slipped on a board, fell heavily on to his backside, then was struck on the ankle by a rogue bucket. He pulled himself upright and, cursing again, hurled the bucket overboard. A sodden chart wrapped itself round his head before he could claw it away. It flapped over the gunwale like a mad seagull, and through the rain he suddenly glimpsed the coast looming to leeward-a hazard now more than a refuge. To survive the ice of Archangel and Hammerfest, he thought grimly, only to be dashed to pieces on your own shore!

And it appeared that the Bellerophon and her crew would not be the only ones dashed to bits. Two bowshots astern, on their starboard quarter, another ship was wallowing and plunging in the troughs, showing two distress lights in her main topgallant. A minute later she fired off a piece of ordnance, a brief spark and puff of smoke, barely audible above the rain and wind. Her bowsprit and foremast went soon afterwards, the latter struck, Quilter saw, by a bolt of lightning that knocked two of her hands into the sea. He had steadied himself long enough to raise his glass, and now he could see the Star of Lübeck , another merchantman sailing from Hamburg to London. Her ballast had shifted, or else she was hulled and making water-tons of it-for she was listing badly to port, with her masts bent at a low angle to the heaving water. He only hoped she would keep a decent offing and not drift any closer towards the Bellerophon and take both of them down…

For the next two hours the Star of Lübeck faded rather than loomed, however. Only after the worst of the storm had spent itself-at which point, perversely, the sun lowered pillars of light from between a parting in the clouds-did she reappear. By then the Bellerophon was scudding under bare poles and listing badly to starboard. The damage was much worse, Quilter knew, than in the White Sea. The sails were in rags and the tiller was cracked. The mizzen topgallant lay slantwise across on the poop deck, where it had skewered two deckhands and fractured the skull of a third. Who knew how many men had been lost overboard. Worst of all, the keel had dragged across the edge of a sandbar and then struck a rock with a deafening crack. She was probably bilged and filling with water at this very minute, giving them only minutes to plug the leak with a sail or a hawsebag. Something had to be done, he knew, or the rest of them would be lost too, turned into firewood and fishbait along the shore, which was rearing ever closer.

He made his way through the nearest hatch, beneath which, in the main and then the middle deck, the boards were slippery with provisions spilled from their casks and cupboards. The floors tilted at 45-degree angles; it was like balancing on the slope of a pitched roof. Soon the air thickened with a foul stench, and he realised, too late, how the pisspots had evacuated on to the floor. Then on the gundeck the smell grew even worse.