Harold Bindloss - The Secret of the Reef

The Cetacea plunged into the seas, burying him to the waist, but he made his way out-board with the canvas buffeting his head until he seized an iron ring. It cost him a determined effort to wrench it loose so it could run in, and when, at last, the sail swept behind him he felt the blood warm on his lacerated hand. Then he crawled on board, and when he and Moran had set a smaller jib it was high time to reef the mainsail; but they spent a few moments in gathering strength for the task.

She was down on her beam-ends, with the sea breaking over her. Jimmy could not imagine what Bethune was doing at the wheel. The foam that swirled past close under the boom on her depressed side lapped to the cabin top; it looked as if she were rolling over. They felt helpless and shaken, impotent to master the canvas that was drowning her. But the fight must be made; and, rousing themselves for the effort, they groped for the halyards. The head of the sail sank lower; gasping, and straining every muscle, they hauled its foot down, and then Jimmy, leaning out, buried to the knees in rushing foam, with his breast on the boom, knotted the reef-points in. It was done at last. Rising more upright, she shook off some of the water.

Moran turned to Bethune, who was leaning as if exhausted on his helm, and demanded why he had not luffed the craft, which would have eased their work. Then the dripping man showed them that the boat they carried on deck had been washed against the wheel so that he could not pull the spokes round. They moved her, and when Bethune regained control of the sloop, he told them what had happened, in disjointed gasps.

“Wind freshened – but I – held her at it. Then there was a – burst of rain and I – let the topsail go – thinking the breeze would lighten again. Instead of that – it whipped round ahead – screaming – and I called for you.”

Conversation was difficult amid the roar of the sea, with the spray lashing them and their words blowing away, but Jimmy made himself heard.

“Where’s the compass?”

“In the cockpit, or overboard – the dory broke it off.”

Moran felt in the water that washed about their feet and, picking something up, crept into the cabin, where a pale glow broke out. It disappeared in a minute or two and he came back.

“Binnacle lamp’s busted,” he reported. “She’s pointing about east.”

“Inshore,” said Jimmy. “When you’re ready, we’ll have her round.”

She would not come. Overpowered by wind and sea, she hung up for a few moments, and then fell off on her previous course. They tried it twice, not daring to wear her round the opposite way; and afterward they sat in the slight shelter of the coaming, conscious that there was nothing more they could do.

“She may keep off the beach until daylight,” Jimmy observed hopefully; “then we’ll see where we are.”

The glance he cast forward did not show him much. The long swell had rapidly changed into tumbling combers that rolled down upon the laboring sloop out of the dark. As she lurched over them, the small patch of storm-jib swept up, showing the sharply slanted strip of mainsail; but the rest of her was hidden by spray and rushing foam. She was sailing very fast, close-hauled, and was rushing toward the beach. Jimmy could feel her tremble as she pitched into the seas.

Morning seemed a very long time in coming; but at last the darkness grew less thick. The foam got whiter and the gray bulk of the rollers more solid and black, as they leaped, huge and threatening, out of the obscurity. Then the sky began to whiten in the east, and the weary men anxiously turned their eyes shoreward as they shivered in the biting cold of dawn. After a time, during which the horizon steadily receded, a gray and misty blur appeared on the starboard hand, and, now that they could see the combers, they got the Cetacea round. As she headed offshore a red flush spread across the sky, and rocks and pines grew into shape to the east. Then a break in the coastline where they could see shining water instead of foam indicated an island; and, getting her round again, they stood in cautiously, because she could make nothing to windward through the steep, white seas outshore. Reeling before them, with lee deck in the water as she bore away, she opened up the sound, and presently her crew watched the rollers crumble on a boulder-sprinkled point. Moving shoreward majestically in ordered ranks, the waves hove themselves up when they met the shoal and dissolved into frothy cataracts. It was an impressive spectacle, and the sloop looked by contrast extremely small. Still, she drove on, and Jimmy, standing at the wheel, gazed steadily ahead.

“We’ll have to chance finding water, because the lead’s no guide,” he said. “If there’s anything in the sound, it will be a steep-to rock.”

She lurched in past the point, rolling, spray-swept, with two rags of drenched canvas set. As Jimmy luffed her into the lee of the island there was a sudden change. The water, smoothing to a measured heave, glittered with tiny ripples; the slanted mast rose upright; and the sloop forged on toward a shelving beach, through variable flaws. Then, as she slowed and the canvas flapped, the anchor was flung over, and the rattle of running chain sent a cloud of birds circling above the rocks.

Half an hour later the men were busy cooking breakfast, and soon afterward they were fast asleep; but the night’s breeze had made a change in their relations. Their mettle had been rudely tested and had not failed. Henceforward it was not to be mere mutual interest that held them together, but a stronger though more elusive bond. They were comrades by virtue of a mutual respect and trust.

On a gray afternoon, with a fog hovering over the leaden water, they sighted the island where the wreck lay. What wind there was blew astern, but it had scarcely strength enough to wrinkle the long heave that followed the sloop; the tide, Jimmy computed, was at half flood. This was borne out by the way a blur on their port hand grew into a tongue of reef on which the sea broke in snowy turmoil, and by the quickness with which the long, gray ridge behind it emerged from the fog. Sweeping it with the glasses, Jimmy could distinguish a few dark patches that looked like scrub-pines or willows. Then, as she opened up the coastline, he noticed the strip of sloppy beach sprinkled with weedy boulders, and the bare slopes of sand and stones beyond. The spot was unlike the islands at which they had called on their way up; for they were thickly covered with ragged firs and an undergrowth of brush and wild-fruit vines; this had a desolate, forbidding look, as if only the hardiest vegetation could withstand the chill and savage winds that swept it.

The men were all somewhat worn by the voyage, which had been long and difficult. Their clothes were stiff with salt from many soakings, and two of them suffered from raw sores on wrists and elbows caused by the rasp of the hard garments. Their food had been neither plentiful nor varied, and all had grown to loathe the sight of fish.

“I’ve seen more cheerful places,” Bethune declared, when Jimmy had handed him the glasses. “I suppose we bring up under its eastern end?”

Moran nodded.

“Pretty good shelter in the bight in about two fathoms. Watch out to starboard and the reef will show you where she is.”

Jimmy turned his eyes in that direction, but saw nothing for a minute. Then the swell, which ran after them in long undulations nearly as smooth as oil, suddenly boiled in a white upheaval, and a cloud of fine spray was thrown up as by a geyser.

“One can understand the old steamboat’s breaking her back,” he said. “Where’s she lying?”

“Not far ahead; but by the height of the water on the beach, there’ll be nothing to be seen of her for the next nine hours.”