A Million Tears (68 page)

Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes against the salt water and felt my way into the main cabin. I reached the further cupboard, tore it open and rummaged under the cloth until my hands closed around the object I was seeking. I also picked up a bottle and swam back to the dinghy. Two deep breaths and I was on my way to the surface. A curious thing happened then. My lungs seemed to inflate as I ascended and, before I reached the surface, I was exhaling continually and even on the surface I found I still had a lung full of air. Later I realised it was Boyle’s law working in reverse, with the air doubling in volume as the pressure reduced. It occurred to me there was a possible danger of over-extending our lungs and Jake and I talked about it for some time. We called a halt after that first dive as there was now something I wanted to make. During the weeks we had been diving, Jake and I suffered a lot with salt water in our eyes, and often we carried out the salvaging with our eyes closed. The spare glass port-hole I had recovered was going to prove invaluable and the bottle of rum helped us to celebrate the fact that night.

The next morning, we could not have dived if we had wanted to. After so long without alcohol even the small amount we had imbibed left us with terrible hangovers. The only one not suffering was Estella because she had not drunk anything, and needless to say we got no sympathy from her. In the afternoon I began to fashion a mask. The porthole was six inches in diameter, half an inch thick and weighed about a pound and a half. I used tripled canvas, stiffened with pitch to shape a mask that fitted me snugly from below my nose to the middle of my forehead and reaching almost to my ears. When I tied it in place and put my head under the water of the lagoon, a new world opened out before me. For the first time I could see clearly the myriad of different coloured fish, the shells and rocks on the bottom, the sponges and anemones, the crabs and lobsters hidden under the stones and the pattern of the fine, white sand. I forgot that I was under ten feet of water, seeing the
Lucky Lady
clearly, just a hundred yards away, when I took a breath. I came very close to drowning. If Jake had not been attentive to my jerking on the line attached to my waist and dragged me ashore, I could well have died. As it was, I coughed and spluttered my way back to normal breathing, but the incident had certainly shaken me.

The next day we started to remove the insides of the
Lucky Lady
systematically. It was Jake who had the next frightening experience, after he had been down about twenty minutes. He had been in and out of the dinghy, tying various items to the length of rope we were using, when he could no longer get enough breath into his lungs, no matter how hard he breathed. Alarmed, he swam swiftly to the surface and had to be helped, gasping, onto the raft. When he got his breath back he told me what had happened and complained of having a headache.

‘God, I’m stupid,’ I groaned. ‘Bad air, that’s what the trouble was. What we need to do is bring the boat to the surface, turn the dinghy over and freshen the air. Hell, that’s an elementary problem I should have foreseen. Come on, let’s undo these ropes and bring the boat up.’

So it went on, day after day. We brought up the treasure belonging to the Mendozas, all our clothes, tinned food, the mattresses from the bunks, blankets and our extensive stock of liquor. The work occupied us for two months. The mask fell apart regularly and I was forever repairing it. Amongst the most useful items recovered were the pots, pans, cups and other utensils. To eat off a plate and drink out of a glass was a luxury of unimaginable proportions.

By this time we estimated that we had been on the island six months and two weeks. The weather had been mostly sunny and warm throughout, we were eating off a table and sitting on chairs, our hammocks had been exchanged for bunks and Jake and Estella were closer than most husbands and wives. She was also two months pregnant, much to Jake’s joy. My thoughts turned more and more to Gunhild and I was beginning to despair of ever escaping. We kept a look out for other vessels but saw only one in all that time, and she had passed on the horizon, hull down, with only her masts showing.

I thought often about what was happening back home. Had they given me up for dead? Had they tried searching for me? Even if they discovered I had been to Jamaica there was no way to learn where I had gone from there. What was Gunhild doing? Was she seeing another man? The thought turned me cold. Like most men I operated under double standards. The thought of her being unfaithful to me and sleeping with another man filled me with abhorrence. Yet I considered it quite natural to use other women. No amount of intelligent persuasion could change my mind and Gunhild and I had often argued the point in the past. She maintained it was as natural for a woman to want to make love as a man, which every man knew was rubbish. Men needed to use women. Civilisations over thousands of years had acknowledged the fact, as indeed had the bible, by the admission that female prostitutes were an accepted part of life. Who had ever heard of male prostitutes available for use by women? I hadn’t. Women just did not have the same needs as men, that was all there was to it.

During the months we spent on the island I had lost the small amount of excess weight I had picked up since my university sporting days and had never felt so well and healthy. Both Jake and I had grown beards until we had emptied the insides of the
Lucky Lady
and had both felt a great relief to salvage our razors and shave for the first time in months. Probably the rationing of what we drank also helped. There were even days when not a drop of rum or whisky passed my lips. The cargo of rum we had bought to sell in New Orleans was still in the boat. It was stored in the lower hold, snug amongst the ballast, and to raise it would have been extremely dangerous.

A few times we were lashed by rainstorms and high winds. One night the walls of the hut Dominic and I shared were blown away, but luckily the other hut held tight. On two occasions lightning struck the island, though each time it was on the other side of the hill. We did find one tree that had been split in half, its charred trunk an awesome reminder of the power of Nature.

It was in February that I made up my mind to leave the island.

‘We’re now pretty comfortable. We have nothing to do except eat, sleep and potter around making even more comfortable chairs or something equally inane,’ I began, as we sat at the table, shortly after an evening meal of grilled fish, lobster, mango and coconut flakes seeped in rum. ‘Tomorrow I propose to start building a raft. I don’t intend spending my life rotting on this damned island

– in fact I don’t intend spending one day more than I have to.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jake. ‘It’s not as easy as you may think. How many times did we have to rebuild the raft we use for diving? The rope works itself apart, stretches or breaks. How do we fix that in the middle of the ocean when the nearest land is half a mile away, straight down?’

‘By good husbandry,’ I answered. ‘If every day we examine each section, each knot, each log, then I think we can do it. At least it’s worth a try. If we start now we can have it ready in, I don’t know, two months at the most, I reckon. I’ve made up my mind to try it. We can build a low shelter in the middle, have a single mast not too high but carrying a fairly broad sail, and a long oar for a rudder.’

‘Why not build a proper rudder while you’re at it? It would be easy,’ said Jake. For a second I thought he was being sarcastic. ‘The one thing we have plenty of is time. So we’ll take our time, work carefully and make us something that stands a good chance of getting us somewhere. All we need do then is point west and keep going until we hit America.’

‘Dominic, Estella, what do you think?’ I asked.

Estella put her hand on her thickening belly, now four months pregnant. ‘I think it’s time we got back to civilisation, too. I would like my son to be born in a hospital.’

‘I don’t know if we can manage that,’ I grinned, ‘but we can certainly try. There are a lot of problems we need to think about, the most important being how we’ll carry enough water to last us. We’ve got the pitch, of course, and plenty of canvas, so we ought to manage if we make enough barrels.’

‘That won’t be easy,’ said Dominic. ‘And we’ll need to cook plenty of food too, before we leave. Smoke some pig, maybe smoke some fish as well.’

‘I think we should stop eating any of the tinned stuff we have left,’ I suggested. ‘There’s enough there to last us a month or more, if we’re careful.’

We got out a bottle of rum to celebrate our new venture. We had lived in hope of a ship passing within hailing or signalling distance and nothing had happened. Therefore it meant we had to get ourselves off. That night, as I lay on my bunk, my mind too active to let me sleep, I once more thought of Gunhild. The first thing I was going to do when I arrived home was marry her, of that I had no doubt.

I was up before dawn, impatiently waiting for daylight, ready to go looking for suitable trees to cut down. We had used those in the immediate vicinity for the huts, but there were plenty more on the island. And also it would be an easy matter to float the wood from any part of the island to our camp; all it would take was time and effort.

While Estella prepared a breakfast of mangoes, coconut and dried meat, we discussed how to build the raft in more detail. For maximum buoyancy we intended to make it double thick, like the small raft. We would make two main cross members of trees at least ten inches thick, and lash the first layer of logs to them. A second layer would be secured in the other direction. The whole would be big, heavy and clumsy. We wanted a length of fifteen to twenty feet and a width of at least ten. We would also build two outriggers, at least, as near as we could get to proper outriggers, to help stabilise it, ten feet out on each side, eight feet long, and with two or three logs as floats.

The main trees we found with no trouble, along the beach next to the spit where the coral reached the land. They were side by side, about twenty feet inland from the beach and with little jungle to hamper us. Each had a straight trunk, eighteen feet long and a foot in diameter. We cleared a space and cut a section out of the trees facing the sea. On the opposite side, above the first cut, we started to chop in earnest, the axes sharp and biting deeply. The sweat was soon pouring off me as the sun crept higher in the sky to produce the fierce heat of noon.

I had a great deal of satisfaction cutting down that first tree. We stripped off the branches, cut the top off and dragged it clear. Dominic was well into the second trunk and a few minutes later it, too, came crashing down. We rolled them into the sea and floated them back to camp. We laboured from dawn to dusk.

On the day we assumed was a Sunday, Dominic and Estella would go to their mother’s grave and pray. Dominic had spent some time carving a headboard for the grave, while Estella ensured fresh flowers were always there.

One of us had to spend half a day hunting or fishing, while the other two worked on the raft. Estella was busy cooking, cleaning the camp, washing clothes and generally doing whatever was necessary. She was also swelling at a steady rate and her pregnancy drove us all on. We assumed it would take a month to reach the States or to be picked up by a ship once we got into busier waters. Therefore, we needed to be away at least six weeks before the baby was due. If we did not finish our craft in time, Jake and I thought we would have to wait at least four to six months for the baby to get strong enough to survive the journey. It was going to be no picnic on an open, flat raft, even on the calmest of days. Desperate though I was to get away, I knew I could never live with my conscience if the baby died because I was impatient. The extra months would not make that much difference.

We finished half of the base but we were now floating the logs from half way along the next beach. To save time we tied four logs together and hauled them through the water. We rolled them over the spit one at a time, and then floated them singly the rest of the way. At the end of the day we bathed in the stream, which was cold and refreshing, especially on the days we relaxed with a glass of rum. At such times I often thought how good it would be if Gunhild was with me. There was no doubt I was living in a sort of paradise on earth; a clean, good life. But it did not satisfy me and the main reason was because I had no woman. It’s also true to say I missed the bustle of crowds, restaurants, theatres, all the things that made life enjoyable to civilised man. Soon though, I told myself each evening . . . soon.

Since we had to bring the wood from further and further afield we realised after two months that we would probably not be finished in time. We had enough logs for the bottom layer and a third of the second, but as yet had not tied them together. To save the ropes lying in the sun and rotting we had decided to collect all we needed before making the other items such as the casks and rudder, and then commencing the main construction.

By now Estella was six months and three weeks gone. When I mentioned it to the others Jake gave his lopsided grin. ‘I’m afraid you’re right. Still, we tried. We can take our time and get it built properly now instead.’

‘Yes,’ said Dominic. ‘It would be a bad thing for the little one to go too soon, especially if the journey takes more than a month.’

‘It’s a great pity we can’t raise the
Lady
, then we could go anytime,’ said Jake sadly.

‘Aye, I know,’ I agreed. ‘Don’t talk about it. I’ve thought a million times if . . . if . . . if . . . But I don’t see any way we can do it. She’s fifty-five feet long, is fifteen tons dead weight and is a hundred yards out from land. There is no way, believe me,’ I said.

I suddenly realised that it was April and that I had been away from home for over a year; and it looked like being another six months before I got back. I often wondered what changes might have taken place back home. The thought of Gunhild and whether she still waited for me, or if she had given me up for dead, haunted me all the time and was hardest to bear when I lay on my bunk, trying to get to sleep at night. I thought of Mam, Dad and Sion and what they must have been thinking. Did they also assume that I was dead?