Neil Hanson - The Custom of the Sea

‘I hope we see no more storms like that for a while,’ Richard said, sipping the first mug of tea he had had in days. Tom scanned the lowering sky. ‘The gale is only half over, lad. We’ve entered the eye of the storm.’ He was about to say more, but then fell silent. Why tell the boy that the seas already raised by the days of gales would be whipped into even bigger waves by the further storm to come? He would find out soon enough. Meanwhile, he was better left in ignorance.

All the next day, 2 July, they lay becalmed, but in the evening a light breeze began. As it freshened, it seemed to blow in fitful gusts from every point of the compass, but then settled into the west-south-west, strengthening rapidly.

Just before the rushing clouds blotted out the night sky, Tom looked up at the heavens. Even the stars and constellations, a sailor’s only fixed points far out on the ocean, had shifted almost beyond recognition. The Pole star, the first star any navigator on the northern oceans learns to recognize, had long disappeared below the horizon. The Great Bear had also sunk from sight.

The constellations of the southern skies shone in their place. The Southern Cross was now high overhead and Tom also saw the great galaxies of the southern skies, the Magellan Clouds, for the first time. Two were as bright and dusty as the Milky Way, the other as dark as if a fog bank had rolled over it.

Then the black, lowering clouds of the gathering storm blanked out the heavens and the sails began to crack as the wind ripped and tugged at them. The seas rose to fifteen, then twenty feet as the gale grew ever stronger, and flecks of grey spume like gull feathers flew through the air.

They hung on under a whole mainsail, squaresail and second jib, but by four the next afternoon it was blowing very hard out of the south-south-west, with massive seas. They reefed the mainsail and squaresail, and at eleven that night the mainsail ripped free.

The wind was blowing like knives. Above the shriek of the gale there was a snap like a pistol shot as a rope parted. A corner of the sail flapped loose for a second and then Tom heard a rending tear in the canvas. Deafened by the noise of the storm and blinded by the rain driving into their faces, they groped their way forward and began to furl the torn sail.

The canvas was heavy with water and drum-taut under the force of the wind. Tom took the centre, where the work was hardest, with Brooks on his left and Richard to his right. Inch by inch they dragged in the billowing, snapping canvas. Three times it broke free, with a wild crack, as an even more savage gust shook the mast. The sail bellied out over their heads, then lashed back at them with a force that almost shook them from the deck.

It took almost forty minutes’ punishing work before the sail was in and the storm trysail set. It was brand new, made of the toughest canvas, set close to the deck, but even the little purchase the wind could take on it was enough to all but tear the eyes from it as the ship was driven on.

The ripped mainsail was bundled below and Tom strode aft to take the helm from the exhausted Stephens. Steering the close-hauled ship through such a heavy sea took every ounce of strength and all the skill he had learned in his years at sea.

Every wave battered against the hull and slewed the yacht around, threatening to push it broadsides to the mountainous seas and broach it. The least error could see a wave break over the deck to tear away the superstructure, rip out the mast like matchwood, and sweep them all to their deaths.

Four hours later, when Stephens again took over the watch, Tom remained at his side, scared to trust another man’s seamanship in such conditions; but eventually fatigue drove him below to rest. He took off his clothes, wrung the water from them and draped them on the bulkhead as he collapsed into his berth. They were still dripping when he dragged them on again a bare hour later and went back on deck to answer the inevitable call of ‘Hands ahoy,’ as another rope broke free.

For two days the Mignonette was battered by the storm, labouring in the heavy seas. The gusts were so violent that the yacht was often driven bodily to leeward. Every yard of ground they had made towards the Cape in the previous week was lost again as they fled before the assault of the wind.

The rope lashing the helm snapped under the strain and Tom and Stephens held it by force of will as much as muscle until Brooks could secure it again.

When he went below to snatch a few moments’ rest, the pitching of the ship spilled Tom from his berth so often that he was forced to sling a hammock. The sensation was almost as alarming: the hammock held vertical while the ship swung through a ninety-degree arc around it.

There was also another, more worrying, sign of the force of the storm. The planking repaired at Fay’s Yard — the garboard strakes next to the keel — was seeping water again. As he lay in his hammock, he could see it glistening in the light of the swinging lantern.

By 5 July the weather was even worse. The sky was thick with rain and a ferocious gale was still blowing from the south-south-west. The wind was shrieking through the rigging and the sails cracked as the gusts tore at them. He heard a tortured creaking from the mast as it flexed and bent.

As the Mignonette ploughed on through the swell, the water in the lee scuppers was often waist-deep. The whole surface of the ocean was flecked with foam and great ropes of spume flew through the air. A heavier cross-sea was running than Tom had ever seen, a maelstrom of churning, clashing water. Huge waves seemed to appear from every direction and all the helmsman could do was keep the bow in line with the worst of the wind and seas and pray that a rogue wave would not overwhelm them.

The waves grew ever higher and steeper, reaching to forty feet, their glistening faces almost vertical, capped with curling crests of grey foam. It was an ominous sign, striking a chill in Tom’s guts. Far from any shore, waves broke only for one reason: because the unstable mountains of water were collapsing under their own massive weight. Anything in the path of one of those leviathans as it broke would be crushed.

As he tried to advance along the deck to mend a broken shroud, whipping to and fro across the deck, the wind battered him so hard that he was forced to crawl, clutching at the bulwarks to stop himself being swept overboard.

He crept forward in the brief lull as the Mignonette hit the trough of the swell and the following wave blocked the wind for a moment, then flattened himself to the deck as the yacht was driven upwards to the crest and the gale howled and tore at him again. His hair lashed at his face and as he raised his head, tears streamed from the corners of his eyes and he could feel the force of the gale pushing his eyeballs back into their sockets.

As he reached up to catch the flailing end of the shroud, a gust hit him like a punch. He sprawled helpless, toppling end over end, and a breaking wave swept him bodily along the deck. He hit the edge of the hatch with a force that drove the air from his lungs, then spun away and was left spreadeagled against the bulwarks, within inches of the sea boiling around the ship.

As the wave receded, he dragged himself back from the brink and lay flat on the deck, gasping for breath until he saw the next wave coursing over the planking. He scrambled to his knees, clutching the bulwarks for support, and dragged himself back to safety.

A yacht he was captaining had once been pooped by a following wave on a run across the Irish Sea but even then, in a ship so full of water it was inches from foundering, Tom had never felt the fear that gripped him now. In the heart of the storm, with the shrieking wind gusting to eighty knots and the waves forty and fifty feet high, for the first time in his life he became truly aware that he might die at sea.