Neil Hanson - The Custom of the Sea

Tom felt his heart pounding as he scanned the waves, but the seconds passed without any sign of its return. Then Brooks gave a cry. It had broken surface on the other side of the boat. Tom saw the glistening hide knifing through the water towards them, and scrambled across the dinghy, sending the gunwale dipping level with the water.

He stood half upright, swaying with the rhythm of the boat, and held the oar high above his head. As the shark closed on the dinghy, Tom brought the oar down on its head with all the strength he could muster. He was forced to his knees as the boat rocked wildly. There was a splash of white water and the shark dived beneath the boat and disappeared.

It returned several more times over the next hour, but each time Tom drove it away by battering it with the oar. At last they settled into an uneasy rest, praying for the dawn.

By first light, the worst of the storm had passed, though the towering seas were still heavier than Tom had ever known. He told Stephens, the tallest member of the crew, to haul himself upright to look for a sail and scan the sea for a sight of the missing water-breaker. It was a thin hope: the sea and wind could have driven it miles from them during the night, and after searching the ocean all around them he shook his head in despair.

Tom looked along the length of the dinghy. It was barely thirteen feet long, four feet wide and just twenty inches deep. Richard’s pale, frightened face stared back at him, searching his expression for some glimmer of hope. There was little that Tom could offer. Stephens looked outwardly calm but Tom could see a muscle in his cheek tugging in an insistent nervous tic. Only Brooks’s lined face remained stolid and expressionless, staring back at his captain, awaiting his orders.

‘We can decide nothing until we know our position,’ Tom said. ‘Stephens, set to with the sextant. Brooks and Parker, bale while I plug this hole a little better.’

He took out his clasp knife and cut a few inches from the bottom of the legs of his trousers. As he pulled the sodden oakum out of the hole, water once more began to gush into the boat. It slowed to a trickle as he began to pack the hole with the black cloth. It took him almost an hour to secure it to his satisfaction, then he sat back on his haunches and motioned Stephens to join him in the bow, away from the others.

‘Where are we?’ He kept his voice low, not wishing to further alarm the boy, who had no real sense of how far from land they were and how desperate was their plight.

Ordinary seamen like Parker and Brooks had no knowledge whatsoever of navigation, particularly the complex process of establishing longitude. Few seamen had the education or interest in it and fewer still had the necessary funds, for ships’ officers had to purchase their own navigation equipment. The expense of sextants and chronometers meant that sometimes even officers responsible for the navigation of their ships didn’t carry them, and one expert witness to the 1836 Select Committee investigating the causes of shipwrecks admitted ‘very many’ instances of ships being three or four hundred miles from their estimated position.

It was also the deliberate policy of ship-owners and officers to keep their crews in ignorance. The one means by which a ship’s captain ensured that his men could not rise up in mutiny against an often tyrannical rule was that only he and his senior officers had the necessary skill to navigate the ship safely back to port. The mysteries of navigation were therefore strictly controlled; it was an offence punishable by flogging for an ordinary seaman to attempt to keep his own log or take his own sightings.

Once they were out of sight of land, neither Brooks nor Richard had the slightest idea of where they were or which way to steer. Without Tom and Stephens to navigate, they would find land only by accident, not design.

‘By dead reckoning we were twenty-seven degrees, ten minutes south and nine degrees, fifty minutes west when the ship sank,’ Stephens said.

‘Where is our nearest land?’

The mate shrugged. ‘We could not be much worse placed. We are almost midway between St Helena seven hundred miles to the north and Tristan da Cunha perhaps seven hundred and fifty miles to the south-west, and even further from the coast of Africa.’

‘The Cape?’

‘South-east perhaps fifteen hundred miles, but we are still in the south-east trades at these latitudes. Whatever sail we manage to rig, we will not make ground to windward.’

‘South America, then?’

‘But that is more than two thousand miles.’

Tom thought for a moment, then turned to face the others. ‘We are already well to the west of the steamship route to the Cape. We’ll sail before the wind and make what speed we can towards the route of the barques and clippers. God willing, a ship will find us soon.’

‘Or we may strike land,’ Richard said, with a nervous, hopeful look.

Tom merely nodded.

Brooks remained silent. Although he knew nothing of latitude and longitude, he had been at sea long enough to realize the vastness of the ocean on which they were adrift.

Tom thought carefully before he spoke again. Ordinary seamen may have been ignorant of navigation, but they knew enough of maritime law to be aware that, when a ship sank, the captain’s authority went down with it. From now on he could lead only by example. If they chose to disobey or unite against him, there was nothing he could do.

He cleared his throat. ‘Our situation is poor. We have no water and little food, and we must conserve what we have.’ He glanced at Brooks. ‘What is in those tins?’

‘Turnips.’

It was not the answer he had hoped for, but he held his expression unchanged. ‘We shall not open them yet.’ He paused, but no one argued with him. ‘We will divide the day into four watches and take turns baling and steering.’

Brooks shook his head. ‘The boy can bale but he does not have the skill to steer the boat. He is too young.’

Tom nodded. ‘He will take his turn only when sea conditions allow. I’ll take the first watch, Brooks the second, Stephens the third. We must also keep the boat trimmed. The boy and I will take berths in the stern, the other two forward. We will have to keep her head-to-wind, but if we rig a sail, we can make some progress sternways.’

Brooks interrupted him again. ‘We have no sail.’

‘Then we must fashion one out of our shirts.’

Brooks glanced at Stephens, and after a moment’s hesitation, he shook his head. Richard gazed uncertainly from one to other.

‘You would defy me?’ Tom said.

‘Are we to risk our death of cold or sunstroke to move a little faster before the wind, when we have not the least idea where we are heading?’ Stephens said.

Tom checked, surprised at opposition from that quarter. ‘We have our oilskins.’

‘And we will suffer heatstroke if we wear them and, without our shirts, sunstroke if we do not.’

‘But we must make for South America.’

‘We will all be dead long before we reach it.’

‘But it is the only way. A ship may cross our path.’

Stephens nodded. ‘It may, but we are far from the shipping lanes and it is no more and no less likely to do so here than at any other place on this ocean.’

Tom ignored him for the moment and looked towards the others. ‘Will you not do as I ask?’

Neither of them replied.

Tom turned away to hide the anger on his face. He began pulling at the bottom boards of the dinghy. ‘Then we must at least raise these.’

Brooks hesitated, then helped him to free the boards. They wedged them upright in the stern.

As Tom looked round he saw Richard kneeling against the side of the dinghy, urinating into the sea. ‘Stop!’