John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

"Would Heav'n it were, sir!" cried the valet. "Hear that wind, i'Christ, and the sky already dark!"

"I have had dreams that seemed more real," Ebenezer said, "and so hath Anna, many's the time. There was a trick we knew as children: when the lions of Numidia were upon us or we'd fallen from some Carpathian cliff, we'd say, 'Tis but a dream, and now I'll wake: 'tis but a dream, and now I'll wake — and sure enough, we'd wake in our beds in St. Giles in the Fields! Why, we were even wont to wonder, when we talked at night betwixt our two bedchambers, whether all of life and the world were not just such a dream; many and many's the time we came nigh to trying our magical chant upon't, and thought we'd wake to a world where no people were, nor Earth and Sun, but only disembodied spirits in the void." He sighed. "But we ne'er durst try — "

"Try't now, sir," Bertrand pleaded, "ere we're drowned past saying charms! I'God, sir, try't now!"

The poet laughed, no longer feverishly. " 'Twould do you no good in any case, Bertrand. The reason we never tried it was that we knew only one of us could be The Dreamer of the World — that was our name for't — and we feared that if it worked, and one of us awoke to a strange new cosmos, he'd discover he had no twin save in his dream. . What would it profit you if I saved myself and left you here to drown?"

But Bertrand fell to pinching himself ferociously and bawling " 'Tis but a dream, and now I'll wake! 'Tis but a dream, and now I'll wake!"

His concern for the safety of the boat was justified. The sudden half-gale that had blown up from the southwest was piling seas in the open water of the Chesapeake as formidable as any the poet had seen, except during the storm off Corvo in the Azores, and instead of the Poseidon's two hundred tons and two dozen crewmen, his life was riding this time in a gaff-rigged sloop not forty feet long, manned by one white man and a pair of husky Negroes. Already the light was failing, though it could be no later than five in the afternoon; the prospect of sailing through some fifty miles of those seas in total darkness seemed truly suicidal, and at length, despite the urgency of his desire to find Anna, he asked the Captain — a grizzled gentleman by the name of Cairn — whether they had not better return to St. Mary's.

" 'Tis what I've been trying to do this past half hour," the Captain replied sourly, and explained that even with his jib and topsail struck and his mainsail triple-reefed, he had been unable to sail close-hauled back into the Potomac, which lay to windward; so strong were the frequent gusts that the minimum sail required for tacking was enough to dismast or capsize the sloop. The only alternative had been to drop anchor, and even this, according to the Captain, was but a temporary expedient: had the bottom been good holding ground, the anchor pendant would have parted at the first gust; as it was they were dragging to leeward at a great rate and would soon be beyond the depth of the pendant entirely.

"Yonder's Point Lookout," he said, indicating an obscure and retreating point of land in the very eye of the wind. " 'Tis the last land ye'll see this day, if not forever."

Ebenezer felt cold fear. " 'Sbody! D'you mean 'tis over and done with us?"

Captain Cairn cocked his head. "We'll heave to and rig a sea anchor: after that 'tis God's affair."

Thus delivered of his sentiments, he and the Negroes bent a little trysail onto the mainmast to keep the bow to windward and replaced the useless iron grapple with a canvas sea anchor, which, so long as the tide was ebbing towards the ocean, would retard the vessel's northeastern leeway. There was nothing else to be done: when the work was finished the Captain lashed the tiller and took shelter with his passengers in the cabin, which, unfortunately for the crew, had room enough for just three people. Point Lookout very soon vanished, and as if its disappearance had been a signal, darkness closed in immediately, and the wind and rain seemed to increase. The sloop was flung high by each black sea and fell with a slap into the trough behind; the sea anchor, though of value in preventing the boat from broaching to, caused her to nose rather deeply and ship a quantity of water at the bow, which the Negroes were obliged to bail out with a crude wooden bilge pump.

"Poor devils!" Ebenezer sympathized. "Should we not spell them at the pumps and give them some respite in the cabin?"

"No need," the Captain replied. "Three hours shall see the end of't, one way or another, and 'twill keep 'em from freezing in the meantime." What he meant, the poet learned on further interrogating him, was that if the storm did not blow itself out, change direction, or sink them, the present rate and course of their leeway would carry them across the Bay in three hours or so and bring them stern-foremost to the Eastern Shore.

"Then marry come up, we've hope after all, have we not?" Even Bertrand, who had been chattering with cold and fright, displayed some cheer at this announcement.

"Ye've hope o' drowning near shore, at least," the Captain said. "The surf will swamp her in a trice and haply break her up as well."

The valet moaned afresh, and Ebenezer's cheeks and forehead tingled. Yet though the prospect of drowning horrified him no less now than it had when he walked the pirates' plank off Cedar Point, about a dozen miles northwest of their present position, the prospect of death itself, he noted with some awe, held no more terrors. On the contrary: while he would not have chosen to die, especially when Anna's welfare was so uncertain, the thought of no longer having to deal with the lost estate, his father's wrath, and the sundry revelations and characters of Henry Burlingame, for example, was sweet. Delicious Death! Not in broodiest night hours of his growth, when in anguish or fascination he would cease to breathe, hold still his brain, and hear the blood rumble in his ears while he strove dizzily and in vain to suspend the beating of his heart — not even then had cool Oblivion seemed more balmy.

Except to grunt at occasional extraordinary crashes of water or lurches of the boat, no one was much inclined during the period that followed to speak aloud to anyone else. The storm, though uneven in its violence, showed no signs of abating, and could at any moment have swamped or capsized them without warning in a sea too cold and rough for the ablest swimmer to survive more than twenty minutes. Yet thanks to the sea anchor, the indefatigable Negroes at the pump, and an apparent general seaworthiness about the hull, not to mention blind Providence, the vessel remained hove to and afloat through gust after gust, sea after sea — and slipped steadily, if not apparently, to leeward all the while. After a time — which to Ebenezer could as reasonably have been twenty as two hours — the Captain left off stroking his beard and raised his head attentively.

"Hark!" He raised a hand for silence. "D'ye hear that, now?" He threw open the door, stepped onto the deck, and, at the risk of swamping, ordered the Negroes to suspend for a moment both their pumping and the rhythmical chantey with which they paced and lightened their labor. Ebenezer strained his ears, but though the open door amplified the noises of the storm and admitted no small quantity of rain and cold air into the bargain, he could detect no novel sound, nor could he see anything at all.

The Captain bade the crew resume their pumping, without musical accompaniment, and thrust his dripping head into the cabin.

"There's land not far to leeward," he announced. "Ye can hear the surf astern." And upon repeating his cheerless prophecy of some hours before, that one way or another their ordeal would soon be over, he disappeared into the darkness forward.

Then, despite Bertrand's protests that he would rather drown where he sat than outside in the cold and wet, Ebenezer insisted that they too leave the cabin, the better to swim for their lives when the boat went down or broke up in the surf. The rainfall, they found, had considerably diminished, so that the entire length of the boat was visible; but the wind howled as fiercely as ever, blowing the tops from the huge black seas that crashed and shuddered about the hull. And now their new peril was identified, Ebenezer could hear it too — the more profound and rhythmical thundering of invisible breakers to leeward.