Neil Hanson - The Custom of the Sea

The big sailing barques could handle the enormous seas and heavy gales of the roaring forties. Small yachts were different, but before setting out Tom had scoured the back numbers of yachting magazines for the logs of other yachts making the passage to Australia, and he had chosen a route used by many past captains.

As he was later to say, ‘I felt it safer to set a course closer to land than the Great Circle which the barques follow into the southern latitudes in pursuit of the roaring forties that carry them across the southern oceans. I felt we would have less wild weather if we followed a course to the east and north of theirs.’

He planned to sail to Madeira, where he would stop to reprovision the ship, and to the Cape Verde Islands, before making for Cape Town. After a further stop for reprovisioning, he would set a course almost due west to Australia, keeping above latitude forty, in less reliable, but lighter winds. He hoped to reach Sydney in a maximum of 120 days, an average daily distance of 120 miles. It was an optimistic target for a yacht of the Mignonette’s size, but not impossible.

For a man with his limited deep-sea experience, in a small, frail and elderly boat, his choice of route was entirely understandable. If anything happened to the ship, however, he was putting himself in dangerous waters, well to the north and east of the usual sailing route but a long way to the west of the steamer route to the Cape.

The first Sunday out dawned fine and fair. As Stephens held the helm, Tom took Sunday service on the after deck. He read from the Bible and led them in a hymn, and they said prayers in turn for themselves and their loved ones at home.

For the remainder of the day those off-watch took their ease about the deck. Stephens and Brooks darned their clothes and rubbed linseed oil into their worn oilskin coats, or chatted and smoked their pipes.

Tom began teaching Richard his letters. He prided himself on never sitting down on deck, lest it set a bad example and encouraged idleness in his crew, and he remained standing as the boy squatted cross-legged at his feet. Under his tutelage, Richard laboriously spelled out a letter to the Matthews’ in his uncertain, childlike hand. It read only, ‘I am happy and comfortable, all on board are well. We have had a fine and pleasant passage all the way,’ but his face was flushed with pride when he had finished. It was the first letter he had ever written in his life. They would post it on reaching Madeira.

As Richard continued to practise his writing, Tom talked to Stephens. ‘Will you stay in Sydney?’ he said. ‘Mr Want seems a good man, if not to some English tastes. There would be many worse owners.’ He laughed. ‘I’ve sailed yachts for some of them.’

‘I plan to stay there,’ Stephens said. ‘If my Ann will join me.’

‘You haven’t told her?’

‘I mean to. I — I didn’t know how to broach it with her. I’ll send her a letter from Madeira.’ He seemed to flinch at the thought and hurriedly changed the subject. ‘But what of you, Captain? Will you not take up Mr Want’s offer for yourself?’

He shook his head. ‘If Mrs Pettigrew and her business are as she says, I intend to join her in it.’ His face darkened. ‘But I mean to be more careful in my choice of business partner than I have been in the past.’ He intercepted Stephens’s questioning look and told him of his ill-fated venture.

A school of dolphins showed on the surface nearby, breaking his black mood. They tracked the yacht for several miles, swimming just under the water, the sunlight dancing on their skins as they alternately surfed the pressure wave at the bow and broke surface on either side of the boat in arcing loops that left rainbow-sprays of water hanging in the air. The Mignonette sailed on with every inch of canvas set under the hard light of the sun, a pyramid of blinding white sail reflecting in the green water rippling past the ship.

Brooks had no eye for the beauty of the scene. He had grumbled of toothache for two days and rose to the morning watch the next day with his face so swollen that his eyes were mere slits.

‘Something will have to be done,’ Tom said.

Brooks shook his head, making inarticulate protests through a mouth that would barely open.

‘We’ve a little laudanum,’ Tom said, ‘but that is for something more serious than a toothache. You can wait until we make port in Madeira and take your chances with a local sawbones there, but we’ve three days’ sailing before us, even if the wind holds. Better, surely, for me do it for you. It’s not the first tooth I’ve had to pull.’

Brooks hesitated a while, then gave a reluctant nod. His eyes widened in fear as Tom pulled his knife from his pocket.

‘You’re never going to cut it out of him?’ Stephens said.

‘No. I’m going to make certain of the right tooth.’ He held Brooks’s mouth open as far as it would go, and tapped each of his teeth in turn with the back of the knife blade until Brooks roared with pain. Tom sent Richard below for the rope-yarn and pulled a long strand from it. He looped it over the tooth and knotted it, then took a couple of turns around his fist and gripped it taut. ‘Hold his head still,’ he said.

Stephens and the boy clamped Brooks’s head between them. Tom let the cord fall slack, then jerked it taut again with a sudden snap. There was a rising howl of pain from Brooks that ended in a yelp as the tooth was ripped out and dropped on to the deck.

He pulled himself free of the other two and stumped around the deck cursing and kicking at the bulwarks, and spitting blood and fluid over the rail into the sea. By the time he had completed his circuit of the deck, the swelling was already beginning to subside and he paused to shake Tom’s hand and thank him.

Tom laughed. ‘You’ll do well enough now, but I doubt the ladies will fall for that smile of yours so readily in the future.’

Land clouds rising in the distance ahead of the Mignonette told of Madeira while the island still lay invisible in the vastness of the ocean. They began to take soundings at each change of the watch and before long, Tom caught the dull, distant rumble of breakers.

They reached the island on the evening of 2 June. They sailed down its eastern coast, smelling the sunbaked earth and the resin from the pine forests, and hearing the roar of the Atlantic rollers breaking against the rocks.

They entered Madeira Roads at midnight. The hills rose steeply behind the harbour, towards the mountains at the island’s heart. The port of Funchal was in near darkness, with only a few torches flickering along the quayside, but ships showing the flags of a dozen different nations rode at anchor in the Roads or were tied up at the quay.

After so long on the open sea, the heat from the sheltered land was oppressive. The others sprawled out to sleep on the deck as soon as they had dropped anchor, but Tom and Richard stayed at the rail for some time, immersing themselves in the sights, scents and sounds of a strange land, carried to them on the breeze.

Before the sun was barely above the horizon the next morning, the Mignonette was besieged by bumboats. There were men with scrawny chickens and squealing piglets trussed like turkeys, fishermen offering the pick of their catch, water-sellers and a host of other waterborne hawkers with ropes of onions and garlic, flasks of wine and rum, flowers, pineapples, melons, limes, oranges, peaches, figs and olives.

‘Keep close watch on them and let no man on deck,’ Tom said. ‘They’re as likely to thieve as trade with us.’

Brightly painted whores were also rowed out by their pimps, and the pleasures they could give were extolled to Tom and his crew. Brooks was leaning over the rail talking to one when Tom ordered him away. ‘We’re sailing on the next tide. There’s work to be done and no time for whoring.’