Tim Severin - Sea Robber

‘Can’t bring her up any more into the wind,’ bawled the chief helmsman. ‘The steering doesn’t answer.’

Appalled, the remaining members of the watch could only gaze on as Evans was swept slowly out of view. Another two or three minutes passed and he could no longer be seen among the spume and spray.

‘Even double earrings didn’t save him,’ muttered a grizzled sailor, turning away from the rail, his face hard-set. Evans had worn gold hoops in both ears in the common belief that an earring would save a sailor from drowning.

‘We still have ourselves to worry about,’ barked Dampier. ‘The wind’s picking up. The storm isn’t yet at its worst.’

As he spoke, the mizzensail shredded above his head. The canvas split into a dozen sodden rags, which thrashed back and forth, cracking like whips. Then they ripped loose and whirled away downwind. The bolt rope that had edged the sail lasted only a moment longer, before it too disintegrated and vanished. The gale increased to a hurricane. It raged out of the west, screaming through the rigging, and by mid-afternoon the seas had grown higher than anything even the most experienced sailor on board had witnessed. Solid walls of water reared up and loomed over the labouring ship. The Bachelor’s Delight lay under bare poles, scarcely managing to stay afloat. She rose to each wave, staggered as the crests struck her and skewed sideways. It was suicidal now to try to reach the foredeck. Again and again the sea washed over her, thundering along the deck in a swirling mass and bursting its way under the hatch covers. From there it poured below, adding to the water leaking in through the seams as the Delight ’s hull flexed in the raging sea. Four men at a time, the crew took their turn at the wooden handle of the ship’s pump and desperately tried to stop the level of water rising in the footwell. They knew that if they failed, the Delight would founder.

For the rest of that day and all through the following night, the ordeal continued. The wind veered into the northwest, driving the vessel even farther south. As she wallowed and rolled, her crew had little respite. Those off-duty huddled in the noxious darkness below decks amid the smell of vomit, damp and excrement, for it was no longer safe to go on deck to relieve oneself, and the men used the bilges as their latrine. Hector wedged himself in his cot and took refuge in thoughts of Maria. They helped him blot out the pounding of the waves against the hull, the sudden gushes of water cascading through her deck leaks and the creaking and groaning of the timbers. He conjured up the moment he had first seen her as she stepped from the cabin of a captured Spanish merchantman two years earlier. She had been plainly dressed in a long-sleeved brown gown with a collar of white linen, her nut-brown hair loose. He recalled her small, neat hands clasped in front of her in a gesture of exasperation. She was travelling as companion to the wife of a powerful colonial official, so she had stayed in the background, but his glance had kept returning to her. He found her remarkably attractive with her wide-set, dark eyes, regular features and a lightly freckled complexion the colour of dark honey. She radiated a quiet intelligence, which he found intriguing. Just once their gaze had met, and he’d felt a surge of admiration as he recognized that Maria was unafraid, even when faced with a gang of lawless buccaneers. Now, as the Delight swooped and shuddered in the storm, Hector pictured her courage and defiance and was more certain than ever that he had to find her and tell her that he was in love with her.

By dawn on the second day the storm was easing enough for the exhausted crew to emerge and attend to the needs of their ship. They knotted and sliced damaged ropes, tightened slack shrouds and drove home extra wedges where the masts had begun to work loose. Jacques got a fire going in the galley and had boiled up some hot soup when a maverick swell shook the vessel and capsized the cauldron yet again. This time Jacques slipped on the greasy spillage and, falling heavily, dislocated his shoulder. Hector bound the arm in place with strips of sail canvas. Then Dan and Jezreel carried the Frenchman below. The crew had to make do with plain food and, as the wind rose again, chew on cold biscuit and gulp down brandy to sustain themselves.

Accurate navigation was impossible. Scudding clouds obscured the sky, and when there was a brief glimpse of the sun or the stars, the heaving, rolling deck and a horizon broken with a jumble of swells made it impossible to take an accurate sight. Cook and Dampier could only guess the ship’s position and speculate how much progress had been made.

The ship was being driven farther and farther south – that was evident. One gale succeeded another, with scarcely a lull of a few hours between them. The temperature fell even further. The squalls carried more and more snow. On the seventh day a blizzard reduced visibility to nothing more than a white blur. By then a permanent glaze of ice had formed on masts and rigging. Everything was encased in a thin slick of ice, and it became dangerous to climb the rigging or move about on deck. The men’s hands froze and lost all feeling. Several had fingernails torn away without even noticing as they worked the ship. They counted themselves lucky. One man slipped from an icy yard and fell, smashed like a broken doll, dead.

It seemed like a miracle when, after two weeks of this ordeal, the sky cleared and at dawn they had a gentle breeze in their favour. At last it was possible to set the larger sails and resume their voyage. On the quarterdeck Dampier took a reading with his backstaff, gave a slight grunt of surprise and handed the instrument to Hector.

‘Just to be sure, what do you make of it?’

Hector measured the sun’s angle for himself, and after the two men had consulted the almanac, they agreed that the Delight now lay a full degree farther south than they had thought.

‘Well, there’s no fear of us striking a reef if we head west from here,’ Dampier remarked. Like the others, he looked haggard. His eyes were red-rimmed, his hair dirty and matted with dried salt, and the hand that held the battered chart was little more than a claw, stiff with cold.

‘Just as long as we stay well clear of those monsters,’ said Jezreel. In every direction they could see floating ice islands. Some were huge, white shining blocks, their cores deep aquamarine and vivid blue. Others were low and flat, covered with a mantle of snow and barely showing above the water. After the noise and turmoil of the storms, the ice islands had a strange, alien quality. They were motionless, silent and ghostly.

Dan had said nothing. He was standing at the starboard rail, gazing intently at the largest of the ice islands about half a mile ahead. ‘What are you staring at?’ Hector asked.

‘A ship,’ replied his friend.

Perplexed, Hector looked more closely. The ice island was shaped like an enormous wedge. One end was a blunt cliff, sheer and spectacular, perhaps sixty feet in height. From there the surface of the ice sloped down in a series of irregular ridges and spurs to a low shelf at the opposite end, scarcely above water level. Here a barely perceptible swell could be seen swirling over the submerged ice ledge.

‘At the lower end, do you see it?’ Dan pointed.

Hector put up a hand to shield his eyes. The glare of the sun reflecting from the ice was dazzling.

‘That darker patch,’ said Dan.

Hector turned to Cook. ‘Could we steer towards that ice island over there?’ he asked. ‘Dan thinks there may be something on it.’

As the Delight came closer, the dark object Dan had seen took shape. Stranded on the ice was indeed the wreck of a small ship. She lay at a slight angle, her bow tilted up, as if she had been run on to the ice at speed. Her forward third was buried in what appeared to be a snow bank, and her stern still projected into the sea. A shattered stump was all that remained of her single mast. One side of the hull had burst open. A tangle of damaged rigging hung draped over one side. Rime and ice had coated the entire vessel, so that she seemed like a fly that had been caught and embalmed by a spider.