Uncharted Seas (6 page)

‘Have you got any grounds for the mutiny bogey you’re trying to scare me with, Hansie? Any of them say anything during the night to make you suspicious? Or were the officers having trouble with the engine-room staff before we left the ship?’

‘You’ve guessed it. Don’t go looking over yer shoulder now; but later on take a squint at the big buck who’s pulling bow. That’s Harlem Joe. Used ter be in the boxing racket they tell me, but got slung out because he did some bigger fellar dirt. Next heard of doing a stretch for homicide in a jail down Missouri way. Broke prison during the 1937 floods and got signed on in the stokehold of a Dutchman outward bound from St. Louis. He—’

‘Half a minute,’ Basil muttered. ‘How d’you know all this?’

‘Picked it up from the other fellars in the fo’c’sle. Harlem’s the boastful kind an’ he knows no one’d do a split.’

‘D’you mean to tell me, that knowing you had an escaped convict on board, none of you had the guts to report it to your officers?’

‘Sure, Mister Sutherland,’ Hansie’s voice was as low and even as ever. It only just reached Basil’s ear, and was drowned for the others by the constant tapping of the oars as they moved in the tholes. ‘Life’s not easy for poor sailormen. Plenty of fellars before
the mast have records that wouldn’t show too good if they was looked into, but they may have been unlucky and be decent scouts all the same.’

‘Yes, I understand that; and naturally you hang together. But in a case like this … well, homicide’s murder, isn’t it?’

‘That’s so. All the same, the unwritten law holds and anyone who goes back on it ‘ud be asking for a knife in ‘is ribs from one of the others the next dark night he went ashore.’

‘D’you think he’s got the others under his thumb?’

‘I certainly do. He’s one of these wise guys—considers himself educated because he’s lived in Noo York. When he hands out the dope about all men being brothers and gives them the Communist angle on equality they just lap it up. Them three buddies of his, Lem Williamson, Isiah Meek, and the one they call Corncob, eat right out of his hand.’

‘That may be, Hansie; but what are you afraid they’ll try anyway?’

‘Why, Mister Sutherland, I can’t rightly say. But some of us may get a knife in our ribs should Harlem get it into his nob that he’ll stand a better chance himself if he can seize control of the boat.’

‘Does Mr Luvia know any of these bedtime stories with which you’ve been trying to cheer me up?’ Basil asked quietly.

‘No, he wouldn’t know anything, ‘cept that Harlem’s been
making trouble in the engine-room, and there’s nothing much unusual in that.’

‘Well, I’ll tip him off to be on the look-out. Don’t worry, Hansie; with the odds so much in our favour we’ll be able to take care of ourselves all right.’

The sun had now risen well over the horizon. Its rays were not yet strong but carried a welcome warmth. Several members of the party took off their sea-soaked jackets and spread them out to dry. The sharp work at the oars was getting the men’s circulation going, and they were already more cheerful than they had been a quarter of an hour before.

In the stern, Juhani Luvia had been making an inspection of the emergency stores, which proved considerably better than Hansie had led Basil to suppose. They consisted of a six-gallon cask of water, a half-gallon jar of rum, a canister of tea, three pounds of sugar, three tins of condensed milk, eight of corned beef, and a large supply of ship’s biscuits. In addition there was a primus stove, methylated spirit, paraffin, a kettle, and a small medicine chest.

Basil was horribly out of condition, and a quarter of an hour’s pulling proved as much as he could manage without suffering acute discomfort. He left Hansie and scrambled back into the stern. Vicente had taken his old place next to Synolda and, puffing like a grampus, he subsided on her other side.

Unity was busy with the primus and her father was helping to measure out the water for the kettle. Synolda was cutting thin slices of corned beef from a square block out of one of the tins.

‘Feeling better now?’ she asked Basil as he sat down.

‘Yes,’ he held his breath; ‘warmer, anyway. You’re looking fine—just as though you enjoyed this sort of thing.’

Actually, she was looking awful. Having made up her face for the day without any of her usual facilities, the cosmetics with which she had daubed it, lacking ground-work, stood out harsh and crude in the strong light of the morning sunshine; but he had lied deliberately, knowing that a compliment on her appearance was the best possible way to cheer her.

Her chin went up a trifle and she smiled. ‘It’s nice to know I look all right, because I’m feeling just like hell.’

Luvia gave the order to cease rowing and ship the oars. He was perfectly well aware that any progress they could make that way was so infinitesimal as to be virtually useless, and had only set them to pulling in the first place to put a little life into his men.

Now he called old Jansen, the carpenter, aft to take the tiller while he went forward himself to superintend the stepping of the short mast through a hole in the central thwart, and the setting of the single sail.

By the time the job was completed, and the boat rippling through the water at a steady pace, Unity had made the tea and all hands were called aft to receive rations.

Synolda had cut the block of bully beef into seventeen slices with scrupulous fairness, and each of them received one of these with a large ship’s biscuit. De Brissac’s was put aside, as he was still sleeping, in the hope that he might be able to manage it later.

Most of the sailors had brought mess tins in their hastily packed bundles, and there were half a dozen tin pannikins in the locker which served for the passengers. Luvia had them all set out in a row, and Unity, measuring the hot tea with one, distributed it equally among the rest.

The last to come up for his tin was Harlem Joe. Basil studied him with special interest now he could see him at close quarters. He was a huge man, weighing at least sixteen stone. He was wearing only a pair of canvas trousers and a dirty cotton singlet. The muscles of his biceps stood out under the black, shiny skin of his bare arms in great knotted cords.

For a moment he paused opposite Luvia, then he pointed with a thick begrimed forefinger; first to his own pannikin, then to Luvia’s, the only two remaining. ‘Fair do’s, Bass.’

Luvia looked down. There was very little in it, but just enough for anyone to have agreed that there was a spoonful or two more tea in his own pannikin. Without a word he changed them over, giving the stoker the larger portion.

It was Monday, January the 10th, and they had been thirteen hours in the boat when, at midday, Luvia shot the sun with the dead Third Officer’s sextant and, after a short calculation, announced that their latitude was in the neighbourhood of 35° South.

‘Clever boy,’ remarked Basil acidly. ‘I didn’t know you were a navigator as well as an engineer.’

‘I’m not,’ replied the Finn with a good-natured smile, ‘but even an apprentice knows how to fix a sextant.’

‘Christoforo Colo discover America before the instrument was invent at all,’ Vicente said hopefully.

Unity nodded. ‘And the Carthaginians circumnavigated Africa in one of their galleys nearly two thousand years before that.’

‘Phoenicians,’ Basil corrected. ‘You’re confusing Hanno’s voyage with the sailors sent by Pharaoh Necho who sailed out of the Mediterranean from Egypt and returned nearly three years later up the Red Sea. They landed each year to sow and harvest a crop of wheat before going on; but where’s all this erudition getting us? What does 35° South mean in terms that the lay mind can understand?’

Luvia spread out a chart he had taken from the locker and placed a square-ended forefinger in the middle of the South Atlantic. ‘We’re somewhere here, ‘bout level with Cape Town in the east and Buenos Aires in the west. Just on the line that shows the limit to which drift ice comes north from the Antarctic.’

Fortunately for them it was early January, high summer in the southern hemisphere, at which season the nearest icebergs were many hundreds of miles to the south, so they had no cause to fear the intense cold they would have suffered had they chanced to drift into an archipelago of bergs at night.

On the contrary, the January temperature in that latitude was much the same as it would have been at sea in July off the coast of Morocco, and they were finding the strong sunshine a mixed blessing. In the mid-morning hours it had dried their clothes and cheered their spirits, but now it was grilling down on their backs and shoulders with uncomfortable persistence.

To protect the two girls from it, and give them a little privacy, a low, tent-like tarpaulin-covered shelter, with a flap that could
be lowered, had been rigged up from spare gear at the extreme stern of the boat.

It was little more than a cubby-hole, dark, uncomfortable and awkward to move in, as the tiller, now artificially lengthened by a boathook lashed to it, ran through the centre of the space and out at the forward end; but it afforded a refuge from the eyes of the men, and in order to tend the unconscious De Brissac better Unity had him carried into it.

The Frenchman had roused just after breakfast. He had lost a great deal of blood and was delirious. After bathing and rebandaging his head, they had forced some condensed milk diluted with water down his throat, and two tablets of medinol from the medicine chest, soon after which he had fallen into another heavy sleep.

At twelve-thirty Luvia issued rations again: half a cup of water all round and two biscuits apiece. He told them they would not feel so thirsty if they had no meat in the middle of the day and promised them a slice of corned beef a head with their evening meal.

Afterwards, the girls retired to try and snatch a nap in their shelter during the heat of the afternoon, and the crew set to work on making another low tent in the bows of the boat. Luvia decided the time had come to hold a conference, so he gathered Jansen, Vicente, Basil, and the Colonel round him in the stern.

‘I think I ought to tell you people just where we stand,’ he opened up at once, in a voice carefully lowered so that the women on the far side of the tarpaulin should not hear him. ‘We’re over a thousand miles from the nearest land, and I’d be a liar if I told you I thought there was the least chance of our making it.’

‘Why not?’ asked the Colonel gruffly. ‘Lieutenant Bligh of the
Bounty
covered a greater distance than that in an open boat.’

‘Did he? Well, maybe he did. I don’t remember hearing about it; unless he’s the guy who crossed the Atlantic in a canoe a year or two back. Anyhow, that’s neither here nor there. The point is that whatever he did he was properly provisioned for the job—whereas we’re not.’

‘ ’Ow many days’ sail you need to arrive South America?’ Vicente inquired.

‘Even with a favourable wind I doubt if we could do it under fourteen days. As it is, the wind’s next to useless. That’s why we’re tacking about so. We’re constantly losing way to the south as it is.’

‘And for ‘ow many days ‘ave we provision?’

‘If we go easy we might make the food hang out a week. Water’s the trouble. That cask holds six gallons, but it’s lost about a gallon by evaporation. Four quarts to a gallon—that’s twenty quarts. Two pints to the quart—forty pints. Say we allow ourselves three rations each per day of one-third of a pint: there are seventeen of us, so that’s seventeen pints a day. We’ll have used the lot by midday the day after tomorrow.’

‘We could distil fresh water by boiling sea-water in the kettle,’ suggested the Colonel.

‘Only as long as our fuel lasts, and our supply of paraffin is pretty meagre.’ Basil shrugged gloomily.

Vicente groaned. His dark eye held the expression of a spaniel that has been unjustly punished. Life was so very good and would be infinitely better once they had mined the gold that lay under his brother’s farm. It was unfair; unreasonable that death should come to claim him out here in the desolate wastes of the ocean when fortune promised him so many favours.

‘How about cutting the ration down a bit?’ asked Basil.

Luvia shook his head. ‘I might a little, but not much. If we were in a cooler climate we could do on less, but we’ll be burnt up on under a pint a day beneath a sun like this. Don’t you agree, Jansen?’

‘
Ja, ja
, Mister Luvia. I was in a boat myself one time off the Canaries. My, it was no joke that, and a pint a day we have to have, else we go mad of the heat. Fortunately, we do not run out and are picked up the third day.’

‘You definitely state that it’s impossible to reach the coast, Mr. Luvia?’ the Colonel asked abruptly.

‘Yes, unless we were blown there by another gale, and in that case it’s a thousand to one only the boat would be swept up. She’d have capsized and we’d be drowned.’

‘Then we must pin our hopes upon being sighted by a passing ship?’

‘That’s about it, but here again I don’t want you to go counting any chickens. We’re three thousand miles south of the great traffic lanes connecting the principal ports of the world across the North Atlantic, and the hurricane swept us five hundred miles south of the lesser routes linking up Africa with Rio and the Indies.’

Basil made a grimace. ‘So the hurricane carried us off the track as far as that?’

‘Yep, and we’re still drifting southward, caught up in the main current that runs parallel with the coast of South America and then swings across to pass south of the African peninsula.’

‘We’re right out in the blue then?’

‘You’ve said it! If we go on this way we’ll be south of southward, if you get what I mean; beyond the waters in which any ships ever sail except for whalers and Antarctic expeditions.’

‘Well!’—the Colonel tapped his sound foot sharply on the bottom boards—‘What d’you propose to do?’

Luvia’s kind blue eyes regarded the old man a little pitifully. ‘I had a hunch I was making things pretty plain, Colonel. There’s nothing I can do—nothing that anyone could do, except hope we’ll sight a ship in the next two days. I thought it right to let you know how we stand though—that’s all.’