James Nelson - The Pirate Round

They moved fast at first, pulling in the slack. The hawser rose up out of the sea, streaming water, growing straighter with the pull of the capstan. More and more rope came inboard, and as it did, the men at the capstan moved more and more slowly. And then they stopped.

“Heave! Heave a pawl!” Honeyman shouted, as if his voice could push them around, but it was no use. The hawser would not come in.

“You there, you lazy bastards, lay onto that capstan!” Dinwiddie shouted, indicating every man who was not at that moment pushing a capstan bar. They ran to the capstan, jostled in to find a place, every possible inch taken up by men ready to push the big winch around.

“Good!” Honeyman shouted. “Now, heave!”

From the quarterdeck Marlowe could hear the combined groaning of the men, the rope, the capstan as they exerted tremendous pressure on the bars. The capstan came around, slowly, and one more pawl clicked into place, and then it stopped.

Marlowe climbed down from the mizzen shrouds as Dinwiddie came rushing aft. “No bloody good, Captain!” he said between heaving for breath. “We can’t pull the damned thing in!”

“Son of a bitch!” Marlowe shouted out loud. The wreck was drifting down on the sea anchor. If he did not pull the men in, it could roll right over them. If he did not get the sea anchor free, the wreck would run right into the Elizabeth Galley and sink her as well.

The only reasonable thing to do was to cut away the damned sea anchor and the shipwrecked sailors with it. He thought of those men clinging to the spars. They had been sure of their pending death, and then like an angel from God the Elizabeth Galley had appeared. The sea anchor had been their path to salvation. He could not cut it away.

“Come with me,” he said, and ran forward and down the ladder to the waist, grabbing the main topsail halyard for balance as the ship rolled under him, an awkward, jerky motion thanks to the restraining effect of the bar-taut hawser.

Honeyman saw him coming, came staggering aft. “We’ll never haul it in!” he shouted. “Not in this sea! I-”

“If we attach a line to one end of the sea anchor, we can pull it so it is at a right angle to the ship!” Marlowe shouted, gesturing with his hands to imitate the motion of the sea anchor. “Then we will not be trying to pull it sideways but point first, like a boat going bow first through the water! It should come right in!”

“Yes,” Honeyman agreed.

“Aye, but there’s no line, sir. We can’t float one upwind,” Dinwiddie pointed out correctly.

“Right,” Marlowe agreed. He turned to Burgess. “Have you a snatch block that can go over that hawser?”

Burgess paused. A snatch block was a specialized piece of equipment, a block-what a landsman might call a pulley-like any other, save that it was opened on one side so that it could be put around a line rather than having to thread the end of the line through it.

“Aye…” Burgess said at last. “But what… you ain’t…”

“Get the snatch block over the hawser. I’ll use a strop for a sort of harness, carry a line out along the hawser.”

“Captain!” Honeyman and Dinwiddie protested, almost at once.

“Don’t argue with me, just do it, goddamn your eyes!” Marlowe shouted.

“Let me take the line out to them!” Honeyman countered.

“No! Get the block!” Marlowe shouted, and Honeyman and Burgess raced off, and Marlowe shed his oilskins, coat, and shoes and climbed up on the bulwark, above the taut hawser, above the roiling sea.

Don’t think, don’t think… The words raced through his mind. This was one of those moments, all too frequent at sea, when one could not think about the action he was resolved to take, or he would never have the courage to do it.

It was his idea to save the shipwrecked men, his mistake not to order a line tied to the end of the sea anchor in the first place. Ultimately, it was all his responsibility.

Sending men aloft to stow sail in a howling wind was one thing- that was as much a part of the sailor’s life as scrubbing the decks-but he could not expect anyone else to undertake this extraordinary danger. Not when it was his idea, and his oversight, that made it necessary.

These thoughts floated around in his head, amorphous and unformed, as Honeyman and Burgess rushed up with the snatch block and strop, a loop of rope that Marlowe would pass under his arms. He leaned out of the gunport, clapped the snatch block over the bar-taut hawser, tied it shut with spunyarn so it would not open accidentally. He hitched the strop over the hook in the block while Burgess arranged the rope that Marlowe would carry out to the sea anchor. He passed the bitter end to Honeyman, and Honeyman made it fast to the snatch block.

A swell rose up beyond the bulwark, slapped in through the gun-port, hit Honeyman square in the chest and face, but he did not pause any longer than it took to spit out the water he caught in his mouth and blink it out of his eyes.

“Ready, Marlowe,” he said at last.

Marlowe nodded, looked fore and aft. Nothing holding him back now, save for his powerful reluctance to plunge into that frigid water.

“All right, goddamn my eyes…” He reached down and grabbed the strop and slipped it over his head and shoulders and arranged it under his arms. The hawser was going slack. “Honeyman, I believe the wreck is shoving the sea anchor along. Keep tension on the hawser, take up with the capstan as you can.”

“Aye,” Honeyman said, and Marlowe was surprised to see the concern in his face and the faces of the others in the waist, but he had no time to ponder it. He slipped over the side.

Marlowe grabbed for the hawser as he went down but missed it, plunging into the sea, over his head, brought up short by the strop. He thrashed with arms and legs and finally got a hand on the rope overhead and pulled himself up, spluttering, gasping with big, open-mouthed, wide-eyed gasps at the profound cold of the water. It was like a great weight pressing him all around, then a thousand wicked teeth biting into his flesh.

“Ahh! Ahh!” he heard himself shout, could not help it. He could hear the capstan going around, felt the slack coming out of the hawser. He clenched his teeth, reached out, and, half floating and half hanging from the snatch block, he pulled himself along.

Sometimes the sea rose up under him and floated him as high as the hawser, sometimes it dropped away below him and he found himself hanging, sliding down the angled rope at the end of the block. Yard by yard he made his way along, seemed to get nowhere, but every time he had the chance to see forward, the spars were closer, the men clinging to them more distinct, the wreck towering over them bigger, more threatening.

There was little feeling left in his hands. They seemed to cling to the hawser by their own will, or they were frozen in the gripping position, Marlowe could not tell. He wondered if he would be able to tie the rope he carried with him to the ends of the spars. If not, his effort was wasted, and he might die along with those he had hoped to rescue.

Then suddenly he was there. The spars, which he had thought were still a hundred feet away, were now just beyond his reach, fifteen wet, pale, drawn, exhausted men clinging to them. And behind them, just behind them, rising up and up from the sea, the wrecked ship from which they had come, a great edifice of dark, wet wood and broken gear, like some hideous monster rising up just to crush them beneath its mass.

Marlowe slipped out of the strop and climbed onto the spars, struggling over the slick, wet wood, straddled them, got himself as securely in place as he could. The sea anchor was rising and falling fast in the big seas, the water washing over it, a wild and precarious ride.