Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Dep. St Cadix Hr. 0615. Log 0037.3. Course set: 093°. Bar 1002, rising (?). Calm. Vis—

He stopped here, for the vis. was definitely rum. It looked alright — it seemed as if you could see for miles and miles under this bland and steadily brightening sky. The trouble was that half the local headlands had gone absent without leave. The day mark on St Cadix Head was clear enough: he could even see the paint moulting on its red stripes. But where were Nare Head, the Dodman, Greeb Point? They’d vanished clean off the face of Cornwall — and where they should have been there was just sea, innocently shining, placid as a carp pool in the grounds of a ruinous abbey.

He held the little handbearing compass to his eye and squinted through it at the daymark, watching the numbers spin in their dish of damping fluid. They settled, wobbling a little, at 282°, then climbed to 285° and past 290°. At 294°, St Cadix Head faded out into a clear horizon. George read the log: Calliope had travelled just over a mile between the first bearing and the moment when the headland had dissolved into the sky.

He sat at the chart table, ruling off the bearings from the daymark together with his course and distance travelled. The elementary, elemental triangle gave George a deep twinge of reminiscent childish pleasure. There wasn’t really much, he supposed, that he was awfully good at; but he was good at this — this magical monkey business with protractors, soft pencils and heavy old boxwood parallel rules. The only nickname he’d ever had was on Hecla , when they’d called him Oz (after “The Wizard of Oz” with Judy Garland had been screened on the flight deck one balmy Saturday night off Cape St Vincent). Oz might have got a little rusty since, but he still remembered most of his old tricks.

“That’s our position, sir,” he said aloud in the empty wheelhouse, drawing a neat circle round the cross at the bottom of the triangle and labelling it with the time and log reading. His Known Point of Departure. From now on, unless the vis. cleared, he’d have to go by Dead Reckoning.

“Dead Reckoning, gentlemen, was good enough for Columbus, so don’t despise it. You won’t be called on to discover America with it, but — ah, good morning , Mr Grey!”

“Morning, sir. I’m sorry, sir.” Commander Prynne watched him in silence as George shuffled in to the empty chair beside Cadet Carver.

“Mr Grey, we were just discussing that primitive old seaman’s solace, next in importance only to his rum ration, Dead Reckoning.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Indeed …” Prynne whiffled happily at his class; “we might do a little experiment in Dead Reckoning with the, ah, unfortunate case of Mr Grey.”

The classroom was still called The Little Folks Den, a survival from 1939 when Pwllheli had been a Butlin’s Camp. All four walls were decorated with a waist-high frieze of grinning gollywogs. Above the gollywogs were pinned sheaves of Admiralty orders. The furled blackout curtains in the windows were pale with chalk dust. George stared at the blank page of his Nav. Notebook, fearing to catch old Prynne’s housemasterly eye.

“To start our DR track, we have to know one thing only. Our Known Point of Departure. Where, in other words, did we start from? ”

George, obedient to a fault, wrote: “1. Known Point of Departure.” For a hopeful moment, he thought Prynne had forgotten him.

“Mr Grey?”

“Sir?”

“Your place of birth, please, Mr Grey.”

“Sorry, sir?”

“You must have started out from somewhere. Where were you born?”

It was too awful. Feeling perfectly idiotic, George said, “Er … sort of … a bit outside … Winchester, sir. In a village, sir.”

The class laughed. Oh, the shame of it, when you were a brand-new officer cadet, destined to command!

Prynne seemed to soften slightly. “It’s not a very precise position, is it, Mr Grey? But the good navigator has to make the most of whatever gen he has to hand, and if you think that ‘er sort of a bit outside Winchester sir’ sounds pretty ropey, I think I can promise you that you’ll meet worse at sea. So, for Mr Grey’s known point of departure, we’re stuck with sort of a bit outside Winchester. Mr Ives, I wonder if you’d care to do a spot of inspired guesswork, if it’s not too early in the morning for you?”

“No, sir. Yes, sir.”

“The co-ordinates of Winchester, if you please. Do you know it? Very imposing cathedral there. A little north and west of Portsmouth.”

“Yes, sir. I’m not sure, sir. About, oh, 51 north and 1 degree west, sir?”

“Yes, that’ll do. Though I rather think you’ve managed to put poor old Winchester somewhere in Sussex, which it wouldn’t like at all. Never mind.” He chalked up the letters KPD on the blackboard and wrote 51.00°N 1.00° W beside them. “Now we have the vexed question of Mr Grey’s intended destination. He has, we must assume, been sailing from Winchester in a brave if, as we now know, forlorn attempt to be punctual for his Navigation class here in Pwllheli. Can anyone give me the co-ordinates, in exact figures this time, of Pwllheli? Yes, Mr Owen.”

“52 degrees, 54 minutes north, 4 degrees 25 minutes west, sir.”

“Good. I do wish you wouldn’t look so confounded with wonder at Mr Owen’s genius, Mr Usherwood. We did go through all this last Tuesday.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now all we need is the course steered. Erratic, one might say. But let’s give Mr Grey the benefit of the doubt and take it that he consulted his charts and plotted a direct line from the original seat of King Arthur’s Round Table to Gimlet Rock. Any volunteers? Mr Farmer has the look of a man born with a compass rose in his head. Yes.”

“Three one five, sir.”

“Winchester to Pwllheli … three … one … five.” The chalk squealed on the board. “Now we have to face up to the matter of Mr Grey’s speed . We’re clearly not dealing with one of the fastest ships of the line.” He was whiffling again. George, looking up cautiously, saw that the curious noise made by the Commander to show he was happy was actually produced by loosening his false teeth and blowing through them. Prynne was now jigging his snappers up and down with the point of his tongue. The sight made George feel fractionally better about being ragged by the old man.

“Known point of departure. Course steered. Speed. Mmm. I don’t like the look of that speed at all. The duration of passage so far, from a bit outside Winchester to a bit outside Pwllheli, seems to have been somewhere in the region of eighteen years. Yes, Mr Grey?”

“And seven months, sir,” George said, determined to poker-face it out.

“And seven months.” Commander Prynne addressed himself in marvelling silence to the gollywogs on the walls, the squad of drilling cadets beyond the window, the flies that were buzzing against the ceiling and, finally, the navigation class. He whiffled contentedly for several seconds and said, “What, ah — kept you, Mr Grey?”

“I slept through the—”

But Prynne wasn’t going to be cheated of his endgame. “Ah. Foul tidal streams all the way, no doubt. Years spent becalmed in fog, hundreds of miles lost in leeway. How long, Mr Grey, I wonder, did you have to stand hove-to in storm conditions? Eighteen years and seven months. Hmm. Gentlemen, this is an occasion worth hoisting all our flags for. Here at last is Mr Grey, one of His Majesty’s bravest and most battered little corvettes, struggling into safe harbour under jury rig. (I rather think, Mr Grey, that if you try reaching up behind your starboard ear, you’ll find some spindrift there. Is it spindrift? Or just shaving soap?)”

George wasn’t late for Nav. class again. At the end of the course he passed out top in Navigation; streets ahead of Carver, who came second.