James Nelson - The Pirate Round

Honeyman and Burgess stood at the rope seized to the spars, like an umbilical cord between the sea anchor and the Elizabeth Galley, ready to slack that away as needed.

There would be no orders shouted. In that howling wind it was not worth trying. Marlowe pointed a finger at Flanders at the stay tackle, pointed toward the sky, and Flanders ordered his men to haul away.

Up off the hatch the bundle of spars rose, swaying wildly with the roll of the ship, while Dinwiddie passed orders to the yard-tackle men to keep it steady.

Carefully, carefully they lifted the ton of tapered and oiled wood, swayed it out over the side. At one point the Galley took a wicked roll, and the spars slammed into her side with an impact that was like hitting the wreck. Then they rolled the other way, and the spars swung outboard, and the yard tackles kept them there.

Out and clear of the ship, they were lowered into the water, and the tackles jerked free, and suddenly the spars were floating, like a great pile of wreckage, tethered to the Elizabeth Galley with the three-inchthick hawser.

Marlowe gave Honeyman a sign to slack away, and Honeyman and Burgess let the rope slip around the fife rail and run out through the empty gunport. Marlowe watched the spars drift farther and farther, and then he made a closed-fist sign, and Honeyman took a turn of the rope around the rail and held it fast.

The Elizabeth Galley gave a light jerk as the sea anchor took hold and checked the ship’s fast drift, holding it more or less in place as the dangerous hulk, beyond any control, drifted down on them.

And then there was nothing to do but wait.

Marlowe sent the men below to have what breakfast they could with the seas too rough to light the galley fires. Happily there was fresh meat aboard, they being only three days out of port, and so the beef that was already cooked was served out cold, along with fresh biscuits and butter. All in all a handsome meal, far better than the salted meat, which even when cooked could be as hard as shoe leather.

The men, like Marlowe, were too eager to see what was happening to remain below. They came back up through the scuttle, meat and biscuits in hand, and lined the rails, watching for signs of the hulk as one or both of the vessels rose on the waves.

They were rewarded with the merest glimpses at first, the low-lying wreck more than a quarter mile away and visible only on those occasions when both ships happened to rise at once. But soon it was evident that the sea anchor was performing famously, that the wreck was now drifting much faster than the Elizabeth Galley.

With every passing wave that held the wreck up like some article for sale in the market, they could see she was getting closer, and with each cable length she closed, Marlowe could feel the tension build like a storm. He could all but hear the questions rolling through the men’s heads: How will we get these poor sods off? How will we keep that wreck from running aboard us and taking us down, too? Is this bloody worth the risk? Those questions rolled through his head as well.

For that last question, at least, Marlowe felt quite sure he had the answer. Quite sure, but not entirely.

An hour and twenty minutes after he had sent his men to their breakfast, Marlowe could see the people on the wreck distinctly through his glass. The battered ship was not more than three cable lengths upwind, visible all the time now, save for those few moments when both ships were deep in the troughs of waves.

She was hard over on her larboard side, her rounded bottom facing into the wind and sea, which broke over her as if she were a spit of land. Her deck was nearly vertical and facing the Elizabeth Galley; Marlowe had an uninterrupted view from the taffrail right up to the shattered end of the bowsprit.

He could see her crew, or what was left of them, up on the high side of the deck. They were arrayed along the combing of the main hatch like figurines on a shelf. One or two of them had been waving arms and that white cloth, but they could see now that the Elizabeth Galley had spotted them, and they had stopped waving, saving what must be the precious little energy that they still had.

Marlowe moved the glass from the deck down toward the sea, training it on the sea anchor, the bundle of masts and yards that floated halfway between the Elizabeth Galley and the drifting hulk. It was all but awash. At times it was lost from sight as the sea rose up between it and the Galley, and the three-inch hawser would seem to disappear right into the side of the wave.

The sea anchor worked because it did not move easily through the water, with the hawser pulling it sideways rather than from the pointed end. For that same reason it was going to be a son of a bitch to haul back aboard. Marlowe wished they had attached another line to one end so they could turn it perpendicular to the Galley and pull it back sharp end first, so it would ride through the sea like a ship’s hull. He wished they had put some sort of a flag on it so the men on the wreck could see it better. But they had not, and it was too late now.

Another ten anxious minutes, and the wreck drifted down on the sea anchor, and every man aboard the Galley hoped the men clinging to her would see the spars, would think to jump for them, would be able to do so. The big seas battered the half-sunk hulk, crashing against her exposed bottom, causing her to roll in such a way that the watching men aboard the Galley clenched their fists and tensed their arms and waited for the whole thing to roll over and finish the poor bastards on her slanted deck.

Then at last the wreck was there. They could see the bundle of spars slamming against the deck of the hulk where it emerged from the sea. There was exactly one hundred yards separating the two ships, the length of cable that Honeyman had veered out. Now the men on the wreck had only to climb down to the spars and grab hold, and the Elizabeth Galleys would haul them over. In theory.

Marlowe climbed halfway up the mizzen shrouds, aimed his telescope at the distant deck. There was no way to communicate to the men there what he wanted them to do, no means of passing orders over the one hundred yards. He could only watch and hope.

He saw one of the men pointing down at the spars that thumped against the nearly vertical deck, right below where they were huddled on the hatch combing. He saw arms waving, pointing at the Elizabeth Galley, pointing down at the spars. They were getting the idea.

There followed what seemed to be half a minute of arguing, and then the men started to move. One of them climbed over the edge of the hatch, half sliding, half crawling down the sloping deck, down into the water that boiled over the low rail, and for a second he was lost to Marlowe’s sight, and Marlowe feared he had been swept away. But he appeared again, his head and shoulders above the white, churning sea, clinging to the bundle of spars.

One after another his mates followed him, down the deck, into the sea, and then onto the sea anchor that ran from their former ship to the Elizabeth Galley. In the Galley’s waist, men shouted words of encouragement, cheers that the men on the wreck would never hear. The Galleys were smiling, pounding one another on the back, relieved and exhilarated.

Don’t bloody celebrate yet, Marlowe thought as he watched the last of the shipwrecked sailors slide down and take his place on the spars. Fifteen men he counted, perhaps half the original complement.

“Mr. Honeyman, heave away at the capstan!” Marlowe shouted. The wind had calmed enough that Honeyman could hear him from the waist. He waved acknowledgment and shouted an order to the men at the capstan bars, and they began to heave around, hauling the hawser in, pulling the sea anchor back to the Elizabeth Galley.