The Unknown Shore (16 page)

‘It is only the
Tryall
saying that she is in soundings,’ said Jack, detaching himself from the rail and steering Tobias pleasantly along to a neutral space out of the way.

‘The soundings of Brazil?’ cried Tobias, taking him by the arm.

‘Well, it is the Abrolhos Shoal, as I take it; but it is much the same thing.’

‘How can you be so provokingly calm, Jack?’ cried Tobias, in strong agitation. ‘The New World, Brazil, another continent! The home of the jaguar, the tapir, the capybara, the vampire – the true,
the genuine vampire, Jack  …’ – gazing earnestly at the western horizon as he spoke.

‘I don’t care what you say, Toby,’ said Jack, steadily insisting upon the point although Tobias flowed on, ‘but I will not have vampires in the cabin.’

‘… the boa-constrictor, to say nothing of the three-toed sloth.’

‘Nor a flaming boa-constrictor either.’

‘I cannot wait to tread the Amazonian field,’ exclaimed Tobias.

‘Well, you will have to,’ said Jack, leading him reluctantly away, ‘for there are sixty leagues of water between us and Brazil.’

F
AR, FAR TO THE SOUTH
of the River Plate, a thousand miles and more, the desolate coast of Patagonia stretches down towards the bottom of the world. It is a land of cold plains, rising one behind the other to the cold interior; and sometimes there are rounded hills, or downs; but everywhere the land is made of shingle, unimaginable stretches of cold dry stones, with a little whitish naked earth among them. Here and there wisps of wiry brown grass bend and whistle under the dry cold wind, and sometimes a few low thorny shrubs are to be found in the most favoured places; but this is not enough to take away from the impression of desolate sterility – a vast, unending, silent emptiness. In places the naked ground shows snowy white with the efflorescence of saltpetre; and where the rocks stand bare, in inland cliffs or by the sea, they too show the harsh colours of chemical deposits, almost the only vivid colour in a sad, bleached, sterile world. Even the few rivers that flow over the empty pampas from the west are sterile too, clear and lifeless.

Far down this coast, in almost fifty degrees of southern latitude, and far from any summer, there is a folding-in of the shore which makes a natural harbour: it is called St Julian’s. The first man ever to come there by sea, Magellan, built a gibbet on the shore and there hanged his mutineers; and Drake, coming there nearly sixty years after, did the same. So the creatures of this lost, ill-omened shore were used to strange things, whenever ships came in: the occasions were rare enough, for in the two centuries that separated Magellan from Mr Anson only a score of ships had touched there; but now St Julian’s had no less than six at one time. The whole squadron was there, with the exception of the
Pearl,
which had parted company a month ago in a howling tempest, a full gale mixed with an inexplicable fog.

In this same storm the
Tryall
had lost her mainmast, and now she
was alongside the
Wager,
receiving out of her a spare main-topmast: the refitting of the
Tryall
had already taken a week, and all the carpenters and the carpenters’ crews of the squadron were there, hammering and sawing and banging day and night. The inhabitants of St Julian’s had not been so thoroughly disturbed since Sir John Narborough spent the winter among them, seventy years before. For animals there were, although the country seemed not only devoid of life but also of anything that could ever support life: there were the guanacoes, the wild llamas, and each herd (there were several in the neighbourhood) had its sentinel on a height, watching the motions of the people by the sea; there were rheas, called ostriches by some, and they, like the guanacoes, had the long necks of creatures that must for ever be on the watch; there were pumas, tawny lion-like beasts almost invisible against the dun terrain, the destroyers, the cause of the hereditary anxiety and the long necks of the guanacoes; there were agoutis, rather like hares; and there were armadilloes. All these, except the placid armadilloes, were in a perpetual state of extreme watchfulness: there were not a great many of them – there could not be, in such a country – but they watched with the keenest attention, and they rarely missed anything at all. And when the creatures of the land did miss anything, it was certainly observed by one or another of the rapacious birds that sparsely lined the pallid sky – huge condors, hideous vulturine carranchas and chimangoes. They missed nothing, ever.

The sum of what they saw was little less than the entire refitting of the squadron, as far as it could be done without actually heaving down the ships. All the standing rigging was re-rove, all the chafing-gear renewed, preventers were sent up and storm canvas was bent against the rounding of the Horn; the holds were rummaged and restowed, and everything that was susceptible of it was oiled, greased, painted or tarred. All this was done at the greatest possible speed, for every day brought the southern winter on; and every captain did his best to see that nobody, anywhere, had the briefest moment for ease, reflection or the contemplation of the landscape; but even so there were some tasks that were less arduous than others, and one of these was the collection of salt.

Nearly all the running water in those parts is brackish, and nearly all the pools are salt – that is to say, when there is any water in
them at all it is brine (guanacoes drink it, nevertheless; which is very strange). But the pools are nearly always waterless, and in the place of brine there is salt, shining and perfect, in immense crystals. This was the case when Sir John Narborough was there, but it so happened that when Jack and Tobias were riding through the rain from Bedford to London, rain also fell in south-western Patagonia, so that now, when they were sent with casks from the
Wager
to gather salt, they found a deliquescent black ooze surrounding an unlovely saline sludge, and instead of being able to cut it out as neatly as an Eskimo cuts snow blocks for his igloo they were obliged to spade up unsatisfactory dollops and set them aside to drain.

At this particular time there were several midshipmen squatting in the fetid mud, taking their ease about a handful of smoky fire (all Patagonia would not yield a blaze of honest wood – no trees at all) and waiting for their salt to drain: they spent their leisure in complaining of their lot, as seafarers so often do.

‘Oh,’ cried Tobias, in a great heat of reminiscent indignation, ‘you may talk about your hard duty, your disagreeable quarters, your rude commanders. You may say what you please, but how would you like to be a surgeon’s mate? Brazil, another universe, and I saw nothing of it – within a stone’s throw of the largest rodent in creation, to say nothing of the epiphytes, and I am penned up in a hospital tent in order to tend a series of commonplace diseases – not so much as an amputation among them – mostly caused by voluptuous over-eating. People belonging to other ships, the greater part of them,’ he added, glaring in what could only be considered a personal manner at P. Palafox, of the
Centurion.

Mr Palafox was an Irish gentleman, and as such impatient of any disobliging remark; he had battered his shipmates for much less, but he was a grateful, affectionate soul, and now he only replied, ‘Why, your soul to the devil, old Barrow, my dear, and did we not regale you with the great bat of the world?’

‘Yes,’ said Tobias, mollified, and bowing towards him, ‘and I am infinitely obliged to you. But what base and lumpish mind induced the vampire, nay,
compelled
the vampire to leave the cabin? For I am persuaded that the vampire would never have left of its own accord, being a prodigious affectionate bat.’

Jack affected a high degree of unconsciousness and lack of concern,
but he was not very convincing, and the arrival of a boy from the
Centurion
with loving messages from the first lieutenant and his assurance that if the salt were not aboard in exactly three minutes there would be the very deuce to pay, was quite welcome as a diversion.

‘Has she come in yet?’ he asked the boy. He was speaking of the
Pearl,
which had been seen in the offing the day before; the
Gloucester
had been sent for her, but with the light and contrary wind she had not yet made the harbour.

‘No, sir, she’s still working round the point,’ said the boy, ‘but her cutter has pulled round aboard of us.’ The boy hesitated, but he was too big with his news to contain it, and speaking behind his hand he said, ‘She’s lost her captain, and she has seen the Spaniards – two seventies, two fifties and a forty.’

This news instantly swept the fate of the vampire into total insignificance, and with unbelievable rapidity the salt trundled down to the shore and the boats as all hands hurried to learn more if more was to be learnt, and to confirm what they had already heard.

It was true enough: the
Pearl
could not have miscounted, for, deceived by the Spanish admiral’s signals, she had let them come within gunshot, and she had had plenty of time to number the ports of the enemy during the long chase that followed. It was clear that Admiral Pizarro had had exact information about Commodore Anson’s squadron, for not only did his force outnumber it in guns and weight of metal, but he had even been able to fabricate a commodore’s pendant so exactly like Mr Anson’s that it foxed the officers of the
Pearl,
although they had seen the real one hundreds of times. It was clear, too, that the Spaniards were ahead of them, ready and prepared, with a superior force, on a coast familiar to their pilots for more than a hundred years, but untouched by the English since the high buccaneering days of Dampier and his disreputable friends – untouched, and unknown except for the certain knowledge that no coast, no storms and no seas were worse than those which lay before them.

And Captain Kidd was dead: that was also true. All those who had known him were heartily sorry for it, he having been a good man, cheerful, capable and very much esteemed in the squadron; but death was so usual in the Navy and at sea that it was much less
noticed than it would have been by land. They had left rows and rows of graves behind them in Brazil, and they had expected to do so, for they were used to seeing scurvy, fevers and the ordinary perils of the sea carry off at least a tenth of their shipmates in a reasonably long commission, to say nothing of those killed in fighting with the enemy; and therefore without being particularly hard-hearted or callous they turned their attention more to the living than to the dead.

The Wagers had particular reason to pay attention, for they were to change captains again. By the unbreakable laws of seniority Captain Murray would succeed to the
Pearl,
and in his place the
Wager
would receive Mr Cheap, an exchange that made every man aboard very thoughtful. But however thoughtful they might be they had little time for gossip, and little for bemoaning their fate, for now the guns that had been struck down into the hold earlier in the voyage, partly to make room for more provisions between decks and partly to ease the ship in heavy weather, were laboriously roused up again into their proper places, against a meeting with the Spaniards. The guns were heavy, awkward brutes, and they had to be brought up with very great precaution; if a gun should slip it would plunge through the bottom of the ship, to the destruction of one and all, so it was understandable that the work of getting them up should call for something extra in the way of roaring, oaths and blasphemy. There was a steady bellowing throughout the squadron, for nothing can ever be done at sea without it, but aboard the
Wager
the noise was greater by far: the
Wager’s
crew was still far less of a united, skilled body than the crews of the other ships; her officers were fewer, and, in the case of the gunner and the bo’sun, far less efficient.

All this work was done in their last days at St Julian’s; it was continuous, backbreaking toil, and they had no leisure for making up their minds about their new commander. He threw himself into the work; it was obvious that he was a hard driver and that he would spare nobody; and it was clear that he could talk in a very rough and savage fashion. But at this juncture any captain would drive his crew, without the ship’s people holding it against him, for it was all part of getting his ship ready for sea in time.

‘He means no harm,’ they said, and they hoped it was true, because the captain of a man-of-war is a man with extraordinary
powers; if he cannot make life at sea a perpetual picnic (the elements stand rather in the way) he can at least make it into a lively imitation of hell – he can flog, starve and hang at his own sweet will.

‘He probably does not mean it,’ said Morris nervously, picking at his biscuit.

‘He had better not,’ cried Cozens, with a devil-may-care expression. They were standing out of the bay – a light wind, though fair, and a cold grey forenoon – and the remembered heights behind the harbour were sinking into their accustomed solitude. Captain Cheap had signalised their departure by a harangue in which he had compared the Wagers unfavourably with the men of the
Tryall,
and had assured them that he would improve their speed in setting the topsails even if he had to rip out the living heart of every man aboard. He had also rebuked Mr Bean in public; he had ordered three hands for punishment for a fault in catting the anchor; and he had sworn that Morris would be disrated before he got round the Horn.

A midshipman is an officer only by courtesy; he has no commission until he is made a lieutenant. His legal status is that of a man appointed, or rated, by the captain – he is rated a midshipman on the ship’s books, just as he might be rated a sailmaker or a butcher, and he is in fact no more than a petty officer. He is below the warrant officers such as the gunner, the carpenter or the bo’sun, who were at that time appointed by the Navy Office, and he can be disrated, or transformed into an ordinary seaman, at the captain’s pleasure. And once he has been turned before the mast he can be flogged or punished in the same way as the rest of the lower-deck – a terrifying threat in a captain’s mouth at any time, and even more so when there is the prospect of a very long voyage still to come. Morris was an inadequate midshipman, a lazy and ignorant fellow who was too stupid to try to improve himself, but on this occasion he had not really been at fault. He had been sent aloft to improve the appearance of a piece of chafing-gear – a piece of seal’s skin wrapped round a rope that was likely to be frayed by another – and by the time he came down the seal’s skin was hanging in disgraceful ribbons. A chimango, a bird something between a kite and a vulture but more passionately disagreeable than either, had ripped off the strong leather and had flown away with the greater
part of it. This is the sort of unfortunate thing that can happen to anyone in the high southern latitudes, and in some circumstances it is best borne with a sigh and no more. But Morris was no judge of time and place, and he answered in a pertinacious, foolish manner. Nothing could have been more unwise, unless perhaps it was Toby’s gratuitous intervention: hearing Morris’s stuttering explanation about a bird, a sort of large yellow bird, and seeing that it gained no credit, he had stepped forward, and laying his hand on the captain’s sleeve at once to calm him and to attract his attention, had assured him that there were indeed such fowls – had often watched them – probably of the polyborus family and not connected at all with the kites, though deceptively like them – destructive birds. Mr Eliot had walked him off before the end of his remarks, but not before Captain Cheap had recognised him and had said, with an ugly, sinister look, ‘I shall look after you, my friend.’