Geoffrey Jenkins - Southtrap

He aimed the gun at me.

'Get on!' he ordered. 'Get on, Shotton! To Prince Edward Island! No heaving-to!'

'You're out of your mind, Wegger! The ship's sinking under us…'

A crewman, with water and fear all over his face, clawed hand-over-hand along the life-nets and shouted at me.

'Sir! Sir! Come quick! She's making water for'ard! The patch has come adrift from the hole in her bow — it's pouring in…'

He stopped when he became aware of Wegger's gun.

'Get on with it, man!' I said.

He indicated the foremast. I scarcely needed him to tell me, when I saw the way it was tottering.

The bowsprit chain-guy's parted again, sir — like it did after we hit the growler — and the foremast's taking the strain. All the rigging's stretching. It'll go overboard any moment!'

'I'll come.' Before I did so, I addressed the trio of helmsmen. Try and keep her steady — if you want to save your skins!'

Bent nodded but his eyes remained concentrated aloft. He was too good a helmsman to take his eyes off the sails.

I made my way for'ard along the life-nets, clinging like a spider and watching my moment as the seas burst aboard. Botany Bay was sick, lurching now like a drunk across the tops and troughs instead of riding them.

There was a small group of men at the foremast weather rigging. One glance was enough. The topgallant mast was leaning leewards and whipping. Any moment it would go overboard. It must have been a prime spar to have taken all it had.

Trap those backstays together!' I ordered. 'Slap it about, men! We'll take up the slack of the lanyards later, when the weather eases. If that mast goes, cut it adrift.'

These yachtsmen-deepwatermen certainly knew their job. They started in with no-nonsense swiftness and competency. Their lives depended on it.

The motion here in the bows was frightening. The blunt cut-water was never meant to cleave the waves but ride over them. Tumults of seething foam burst from it. Two men were trying to keep their footing in the life-nets rigged below the jib-boom while they did something about the patch in the bow.

One of them called to me, 'It's hopeless, sir! The water drives in every time she plunges. It needs to be stopped with tar…'

Because my mind was anxiously on Linn the answer clicked into my mind.

I'd melt down those waxworks figures in place of tar! 'Do your best — I've got an idea. I'm going below,' I replied. 'It could work.'

The second man had a frost-bitten face and a sense of humour. 'Make it work before we drown, sir!'

I gave him the thumbs-up sign and hurried below-decks via the entrance below the poop.

The scene that greeted me was the way I imagined an old-time warship's deck must have looked after it had been swept by a broadside. It looked like a scene from Dante's Inferno. Light came from a dim smoking oil lamp. Headless wax figures rolled, banged and thumped. The stage-props of the various tableaux swept around in utter disarray. There was water everywhere.

'Linn!' I called. 'Where are you? Are you all right?'

'John!'

I found her crouched in a cubicle. She had barricaded the entrance against debris. She had clipped a couple of pairs of exhibition handcuffs on to a hook on the wall and was using them as grab-handles.

'John! What's happening? Are we sinking…?'

Briefly I explained my plan for the bow leak.

'We've got to find some way of melting the wax and dipping the sail into it,' I added.

'What about the bath — the one they used for the convicts?'

'You're a sailor's daughter, Linn!'

'I could help,' she hurried on. 'We'd have to make a fire under it, though.'

The thought of a naked fire in a wooden ship would have sent any old shipmaster to his grave.

There are as many ways to sink a ship as to hang a cat,' I told her, thinking of the crisis on deck. 'You're wonderful. I'll send down a couple of men as soon as we've worked on the rigging.'

Then I asked, 'Where is the transmitter?'

I saw she'd taken the saddle for a pillow.

'Yes,' she smiled. 'It's not as close to me as my shirt, but it's near enough.'

'Good girl. Keep at it. We'll beat 'em yet.'

I kissed her lightly and hurried back on deck.

I life-lined along the rail to the men in the bows and gave them my orders. Then I returned to the quarterdeck.

Bent called to me from the wheel as soon as I mounted the ladder from the main deck.

'She's wild, sir. She's running away. We can't hold her — riot even three of us.'

Their faces were glistening with sweat; the cords knotted Ullmann's powerful neck every time the wheel bucked.

'I'll try and get a scrap of flying jib on her — if we can fix the foremast,' I told Bent. That will make her more manageable.'

I switched my attention to the men who were making their way cautiously down the ratlines from the upper rigging.

'Goosewing the main tops'l,' I ordered them. 'Let go the fore tops'l halyards — the mast may give at any moment.'

For four days Botany Bay fled before the gale on that goosewing.

Four days.

For four days the hill-like ridges of water chased her stern, each threatening to wipe the ocean clean of the only man-made thing in all its turbulent vastnesses.

For four days the gale held unabated from the west. For four days it raged steadily, relentlessly. My tired mind computed its average speed at 55 knots. It may have been more, — it certainly was not much less. I remembered that the record for the Prince Edward channel was 72 knots in a blow. I didn't want any records for Botany Bay.

For four days the crests of the waves — and often the body of the rollers — threw themselves over the ship's rail.

For four days Linn and her helpers melted down the waxworks, head by head, body by body, exhibit by exhibit, dipping the sails which were the precarious membrane between life and death into the wax until each was smashed into uselessness by the waves. Then a new sail would be impregnated, a new patch rigged, until it, too, went the way of the others. The naked fire was a calculated risk. Time and again the burning planks — they burned the partitions between the exhibits first, then every scrap of loose woodwork they could find — spilled from their makeshift gratings under the bath and had to be soused with fire-buckets before the long process began again from scratch.

But it was no lasting answer. The sea kept streaming in through the leak.

On the first day squads of men pumped the bilges reasonably dry in two hours of back-breaking donkey work. At that stage the crew was still relatively fresh.

On the second day the clanging of the pumps rang through the ship for five hours. Botany Bay lived again.

On the third day it took eight hours.

On the fourth we pumped all day. All the waxworks had been melted down and the sail patch was now all but useless. The men were exhausted, driving themselves to the pump handles like zombies. While they pumped, we floated. But the water was beating them, creeping slowly but inexorably up inside the hull.

Between stints of renewing the sail patch, Linn made food for the tiring crew. At first, while there was still wood for burning, she supplied them with hot coffee to supplement their chunks of bread-and-meat. Now the fuel was gone and sea water was starting to pollute the fresh water tanks. By next day I knew the water would be undrinkable.

For four days Botany Bay staggered goosewinged under a sky as unrelenting as the sea and wind. The overburden of cloud seemed never to rise much above the ship's royal yards. It was impossible to obtain a fix to establish our position. We could have been anywhere. Our only course was the gale's course.

For four nights and four days I had conned the ship from my post at the weather shrouds until my eyes and face were aflame with salt. Wegger, Ullmann and Bravold — one of them had always been on guard. Both Ullmann and Bravold had put their strength to the wheel. Without them, the game but exhausted Bent and the other pump-drunk crewmen would never have held the ship.