Neil Hanson - The Custom of the Sea

By nightfall Tom was shivering with a fever and his cuts rapidly became infected. Each morning and evening, Mrs Simonsen dressed his wounds and bathed his sores, and every afternoon he, Brooks and Stephens were helped on deck to breathe the fresh air and take a few hesitant steps. None of them could yet stand upright or even lie flat, their limbs still contorted by the weeks on the cramped dinghy.

For days they did little but eat and sleep. The food was spartan but sufficient, and they began to regain a little strength. Brooks and Stephens remained forward in the crew’s quarters of the 140-foot, 440-ton barque, but mindful of Tom’s status as captain of the Mignonette , Simonsen invited him to use his day-cabin at the stern.

On the Sunday after their rescue, Mrs Simonsen judged the three men well enough to attend the divine service conducted by her husband. They stood bare-headed as the captain led his men in prayers and sang a Lutheran hymn.

Tom then touched the captain’s arm and asked permission to say a prayer on behalf of himself and his men. ‘Almighty Father, bless those who have rescued us from our peril and grant them Godspeed and a fair wind to bring them safe to home. We commend to you the soul of our shipmate Richard Parker, who did not live to be restored to his loved ones.’ He broke off as tears tracked down his cheeks. ‘God grant us forgiveness for our sins. Amen.’

The captain left him alone for a few minutes to compose himself, then invited him to share their meal. After they had eaten, they leaned against the stern rail on the upper deck, taking the sun as the ship cleaved through the waves, driven on by the wind on its quarter.

Tom stared at the line of the wake across the waves behind them. ‘Where were we when you rescued us?’ he said.

Simonsen went below for his log. ‘You were twenty-four degrees twenty-eight minutes south, and twenty-seven degrees twenty-two minutes west, about a thousand miles east of Rio. You’re lucky we spotted you at all. I was the first one to sight your dinghy. I thought I saw a small speck on the horizon and looked at it through my glasses. I saw something floating on the waters but at that distance I could not at first distinguish it as a boat; I thought it a piece of wreckage. As we neared it, I was astonished to find it was a dinghy with human beings in it. It was a frightful spectacle. You looked like living skeletons. I never saw men in such a state in my life.’

He suppressed a shudder at the memory. ‘If your mate’s dead reckoning of the position of the wreck was accurate, you had drifted over a thousand miles. At that rate of progress it would have taken you at least another twenty-five days to reach land. By that time, I think none of you would have been alive.’

Tom glanced at him, searching the words for malice, but there was only sympathy in Simonsen’s face. ‘You have examined the dinghy?’

He nodded.

‘And you know to what straits we were driven?’

‘I know. Desperate straits require desperate measures.’

He watched Tom for a moment. ‘You’re already a little stronger, I think, and we have five or six weeks yet before we make port, time for your body to heal and your memories to fade a little.’ He paused. ‘But if it is not too distressing for you, I would like to hear the story of your voyage. It is none of my concern, of course, and if you wish to remain silent I shall respect that, but I would be most interested to hear it. The cause of a sinking is always of interest to another ship’s captain.’

Tom glanced towards Mrs Simonsen, standing close by. ‘I think there are parts of my story that would not be suitable for the ears of a lady.’

She smiled. ‘There is little enough that these ears have not heard during five years’ voyaging with my husband, Captain Dudley, but in any event I have work to do below deck.’ She walked towards the companionway and disappeared.

Tom still hesitated, reluctant to put himself back into that dark place again. He stood in silence, staring down at his calloused hands grasping the stern rail as if it was the dock of a court. At last, he began to speak. Slow and hesitant at first, words started to pour from him as he unburdened himself. Several times he stopped, racked by sobs at the memories he had unlocked. Simonsen stood silent at his side, neither judging nor condemning, and Tom resumed his narrative, watching the wake unfurling behind them, a signpost to the past.

By Tom’s schedule, the Mignonette should have arrived in Cape Town on 15 July, and as the weeks went by without a cable, Philippa had been growing increasingly desperate for news of her husband.

She waited another fortnight, hurrying to answer each knock at the door in case it was a messenger boy with a telegram, but on 29 July, the day the Moctezuma rescued them from the dinghy, she could contain her impatience no longer. She went to the telegraph office and asked them to check their files, but there was no record of any cable for her from the Cape. Then she caught the train into London and walked to the Strand to see Andrew Thompson at the Thames Yacht Agency.

He did his best to allay her fears, stressing how often adverse weather could delay a sailing ship for days or even weeks, but he could not completely mask his own anxieties from her. He had already cabled an agency at the Cape, asking if any other ships had news of the Mignonette , but there had been no reports of any sightings in the six weeks since Tom had handed letters for home to the captain of the Bride of Larne .

As the weeks dragged by, Philippa’s concern deepened. When Lloyds posted the ship missing, Andrew Thompson travelled out to Sutton to tell her in person, confirming her worst fears.

Philippa had been paying the crew’s wages during the voyage, sending Brooks’s to his lodgings and Stephens’s and Parker’s to their families, but Thompson now advised her to suspend their payments at once. It was a standard, if harsh, practice once a ship was lost, and it was worse for many seamen, who fell foul of the hoary old saying, ‘Cargo is the mother of wages.’ If a merchant ship and its cargo were lost, the crew were not paid for any part of the voyage.

Philippa hesitated, knowing how hard things would now be for Stephens’s family, but then she acceded. Even if she had wanted to keep paying them, she had no money to do so other than her own wages from the school. If the Mignonette was lost, there would be no payment for her safe delivery to Sydney.

Philippa clung to the belief, fading to a hope, that her husband was still alive, but every day that passed without word made it harder to sustain. She was also beset with worry about their younger daughter, Winifred. She was a frail child and constantly ill, with wheezing breath and a cough that, even at the height of summer, rattled in her lungs like a consumptive’s. As Philippa’s anxieties ate into her and disturbed her sleep, she became ill herself.

Ann Stephens, too, was in torment. She had received her husband’s letter from Madeira asking her to emigrate with him, and had sent a reply to the Cape saying that she and the children would follow him as soon as he sent word of his arrival in New South Wales. Since then she had heard nothing.

The letter from Philippa, telling her that the ship was missing and that Stephens’s wages would now be stopped, offered reassurances that neither woman believed. It concluded, ‘All we can do now is wait and pray.’

Tom awoke one morning to a flurry of activity from the ship’s crew and knew that they were not many days’ sailing from home. Captain Simonsen had as much pride in his ship as any sea-captain and he had set his men to work to restore his ship to prime condition before it made port.