Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons (Complete Series)

The Amazon unloaded her cargo on the beach and sailed back for more. Susan stayed in the cove this time, and Peggy rejoined her ship and sailed over with the others to the island. Peggy had been a little inclined to forget the fire while watching the patching of Swallow. Besides that, what with all the swimming and diving that had been done that day, Mate Susan was thinking that it would be a good thing if the captain and the rest of the crew had something solid to eat. She opened a pemmican tin, and made pemmican sandwiches, good thick ones, with one of the loaves she had brought across from the island. It was no good thinking of making any use of the loaf that had gone down to the bottom with Swallow, though Roger and Peggy still thought they would be able to do something with the seed-cake.

By the time Amazon returned with her second cargo, and Captain Nancy reported the island all clear, Mate Susan was ready with her sandwiches. Captain Flint had finished putting the patch on, too, and was calling for all hands to help turn Swallow over again. She was turned over, her bottom boards were put in place and then she was run down into the water. The water came in pretty fast from under the patch, but Captain Flint shouted for ballast to put in her stern. John, Peggy, Nancy and Susan ran out along the rocky headland to the place where the pigs of lead had been piled together by Nancy after she had hauled them up from the lake. One at a time they brought them and waded out and put them in Swallow’s stern. Each pig of lead in her stern lifted her nose a little higher out of the water until the whole patch showed above water, and the leak almost stopped. Then Roger was lifted into her to bale her out as well as he could. Then she was anchored by the stern, and after that Captain Flint said they had better knock off and have some grub and see how much she had leaked by the time they had done.

“I haven’t made any tea,” said Susan.

“Tea?” said Captain Flint. “Who wants tea? I was forgetting. That box (he pointed to the box that had seemed promising to Roger when first he saw it in the rowing boat) is full of bottles of ginger beer. I brought them along, thinking they might come in handy. Cook told me she’d had to let the pirates go off without their grog.”

Anybody would have known there had been a shipwreck now if they had seen the beach in Horseshoe Cove with all the stuff from the island camp piled on it in heaps, tin boxes of stores, tents loosely rolled up, rugs, parrot-cage, sleeping-bags, fishing-rods, Susan’s great fire, and the clothes of the shipwrecked hanging to dry and spread about the rocks. The Amazons’ clothes were the only really dry ones, and theirs were in a heap on the beach where they had thrown them out of their ship when she had been pressed into use as a salvage vessel. But no one would have known who had been shipwrecked and who had not. All the Swallows and Amazons had rushed down into the water and out again for a last dip before eating. Captain Flint, sitting among them in his flannel trousers and white shirt, with his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, drinking ginger-beer out of the bottle and taking big bites out of enormous sandwiches, looked like the solitary shipwrecked sailor in the middle of a lot of piebald, pigmy savages.

Bit by bit, listening to the talk round the fire, asking a question now and then, but not very often, Captain Flint came to hear the whole story. He heard how Roger had been hauled ashore through the raging surf. He heard how Nancy and Peggy had watched Swallow come racing down wind from the island. He heard of the rescue of oars and other flotsam. He heard how Titty had made sure of the telescope, and how John had been seen to throw the anchor shorewards at the last moment and had then got clear as the ship sank beneath him. He heard of diving operations, of the salving of kettle and frying-pan and pigs of ballast. He heard how, in the end, they had brought Swallow round into the cove and careened her where she now was. The bits of the story were all in the wrong order, but Captain Flint fitted them together in his own mind and in the end knew pretty well what had happened.

“There’s one thing,” he said at last. “You’ve got the most sensible mate that ever I saw in a ship. There are plenty of mates to go howling round banging poor young chaps on the head with belaying-pins, but there’s not one mate in a thousand who’d have the sense to start a fire and stretch a warp for a clothes-line and set about getting a dry rig-out for the whole crew. How are the skipper’s clothes now, Mister Mate?”

“They’re nothing like as wet as they were,” said Susan. “But they still steam a bit if you hold them to the fire.”

“Well, short of burning them, hurry them up. He and I’ll be off in a few minutes now, and he’ll want a shore-going kit. Now then, Skipper, let’s see how much water there is in the hold.”

John waded out and found there was a good deal, even though the patch had been lifted out of water.

“Bound to be a little,” said Captain Flint, “but there’d be much more than that if she was badly strained. If you want to take her to Rio under her own sail, I don’t see why you shouldn’t. You’ll have the wind with you, now it’s gone round to the south. Bring her nose ashore, and we’ll see what we can do in the way of a jury rig for her.”

John brought Swallow’s nose well up on the beach while Nancy and Peggy hurried off to the point to fetch the mast and the sail, which was still pretty wet, though not quite so soggy as it had been. Captain Flint cut away the worst splinters and stepped the broken mast in its place. John reefed the sail and carried it down to the ship. As soon as they tried to hoist it, they found it was still too big. The broken mast was now so short that even when the gaff was hoisted as far as it would go, the boom still rested on the gunwale.

“We’ll cure that,” said Captain Flint.

The boom had jaws that fitted round the mast. Captain Flint pulled them clear so that he could turn the boom round and round. He turned it again and again, rolling up the sail round it as he turned. As the sail was narrower at the top than at the bottom this meant that there was a long bit of boom with sail rolled round it, sticking out beyond the sail that they were going to use. By the time the boom had been twisted and twisted until so much of the sail had been rolled up that the boom was nearly touching the lower end of the gaff, the little three-cornered sail that was left was a very small sail indeed.

“It’ll take you to Rio,” said Captain Flint. “We’ll take a few turns of rope just here at the foot of the leach, and a few turns at the foot of the luff. The jaws round the mast’ll stop it from untwisting anyhow. It won’t unroll, and you’ve got a sail snug enough for a hurricane.”

They hoisted the sail, and this time the boom cleared the gunwale with a foot to spare.

“What about getting some clothes on?”

Mate Susan had been fairly toasting the skipper’s clothes. He quickly got out of his bathing things and into his shirt and shorts. He took his sand-shoes, but put them on the middle thwart of the Swallow, to go on drying in the sun.

“What about the flag?” said Titty, who had rescued it the moment the broken mast and sail had been brought ashore.

“We’ll jolly well hoist it,” said Captain John.

The sail was lowered once more, for the flag halyard to be reeved through the little ring at the mast-head. As soon as the mast was stepped again, Titty herself hauled up the swallow flag and made it fast. The sail was hoisted, and all was ready for the start.

“Hop in, Skipper,” said Captain Flint. “Now the mast’s in her, it’ll take your weight in the stern beside the ballast to keep her bows well up. No, no. Keep the anchor in the stern, too. You want all the weight there you can get.” He ran Swallow down into the water. “Hi! Nancy. You’re still a South Sea Islander. . . . Take her out to the headland to give her a chance.” He turned to his own boat.