The Sot-Weed Factor (71 page)

The Captain bade the crew resume their pumping, without musical accompaniment, and thrust his dripping head into the cabin.

"There's land not far to leeward," he announced. "Ye can hear the surf astern." And upon repeating his cheerless prophecy of some hours before, that one way or another their ordeal would soon be over, he disappeared into the darkness forward.

Then, despite Bertrand's protests that he would rather drown where he sat than outside in the cold and wet, Ebenezer insisted that they too leave the cabin, the better to swim for their lives when the boat went down or broke up in the surf. The rainfall, they found, had considerably diminished, so that the entire length of the boat was visible; but the wind howled as fiercely as ever, blowing the tops from the huge black seas that crashed and shuddered about the hull. And now their new peril was identified, Ebenezer could hear it too -- the more profound and rhythmical thundering of invisible breakers to leeward.

Up forward the Captain cut loose the sea anchor, whose efficacy had waned with the run of the tide, and cast the grapple in its place -- not with any serious hope of its holding fast on the reckless bottom of the marsh country, but merely to hold his vessel's bow into the wind and delay as long as possible her reaching the breakers. Then he joined his passengers aft and, stroking his beard afresh, listened with them to the ominous rumble astern.

"Why can't we let go the anchor and ride the waves ashore?" the poet inquired. "It seems to me I've read of such a practice."

The Captain shook his head. "Your square stern yaws in a following sea, don't ye know, and wants the proper lift as well: the first good sea would either broach ye to or poop ye." He did not trouble himself to define the latter catastrophe, but advised all hands to divest themselves of boots, coats, wigs, and waistcoats, and to take positions more or less amidships.

"Not I," the valet objected. " 'Tis ten yards the less to swim if I jump here astern."

The Captain shrugged his shoulders and replied, "Stay there, then, and be damned t'ye: we can use your weight to keep her trim. But I'll not answer for't if the whole ship breaks on your idle skull!"

Seeing the flaw in his reasoning, Bertrand grew so ready in the Captain's service that, not content to stop amidships, he moved on the extreme bow of the sloop and might even have attempted the sprit had not one of the Negroes added the complementary caution, perhaps as a tease, that too much weight forward would put the vessel down at the head, already hampered by the drag of the grapple and pendant, and jeopardize her rising to the sea.

"Stay, listen!" the Captain interrupted. "D'ye hear?"

Again they strained their ears. "Naught but the storm and yonder surf, as before," Ebenezer said.

"Aye, but not astern now; 'tis off the larboard quarter!"

Facing aft, he pointed about forty-five degrees to the right, to which invisible location, sure enough, the sound of breakers had moved, although they were apparently much nearer than before.

"What doth it mean?" Ebenezer demanded. "Hath the wind shifted?"

"Not a point," said the Captain. " 'Tis sou'-sou'west, and should have brought us to Hooper's Island square astern. Haply 'tis just some cove or bend o' the shoreline --" He broke off his musing to send one of the Negroes aft, to listen for surf to starboard or astern. But only to eastwards could they hear it, and then east-southeastwards, and then dead southeastwards, as it moved from the quarter to the larboard beam; and though at first its apparent proximity had increased at a fearful rate, now that the sound was abreast of them it grew no louder, while astern the storm raged on as it had in the middle of the Bay. Clearly, whatever land that surf broke on they were leaving to larboard.

" 'Twas the run o' the tide in the sea anchor," Captain Cairn declared thoughtfully. "It hath dragged us something eastwards of our sternway -- which is to say, something south of Hooper's Island. My guess is, 'tis Limbo Straits we're in, and yonder surf is a marsh called Bloodsworth Island. If it is in sooth -- I'Christ now, let me think!" He tugged ferociously at his beard, while Ebenezer and Bertrand watched with awe. "No surf astern yet, or to starboard?" he demanded again of the Negroes, and was answered in the negative. The breakers to larboard were still moving slowly forward; now the sound reached them from due south -- about four points off the larboard bow -- and had diminished somewhat in volume, as had the seas in height.

"Is't our ruin or our salvation?" asked the poet, at the same time endeavoring to remember where it was that he had previously encountered the name of the straits.

"It could be either," said the Captain. "If that be Bloodsworth Island yonder, why, there is a cove in the top of't called Okahanikan, just abeam, where we might run for shelter; or we can drift through Limbo Straits and take our chances with the surf on the Dorset mainland. Ye can see the waves are something smaller now we're past that point o' land; if yonder's Okahanikan and we leave't to windward, ye'll soon see 'em large again as e'er they were before. . ."

"Then prithee let us run for't!" Bertrand begged.

"On the other hand," the Captain concluded, with a great tug of the whiskers, "if we run for't and it
isn't
Okahanikan, or we miss the deepest part of't, we're as good as run aground and swamped."

"I say let's try it," Ebenezer urged. "As well risk drowning as freeze for certain." Indeed, stripped of his boots and outer garments, he had never been so cold. His great jaw chattered; he hugged himself and pumped his legs on the pitching deck. He recalled an observation made winters before by Burlingame: once when the twins had marveled at a tale of the tropical heat endured by Magellan or some other voyager of the horse latitudes, their tutor had observed that, given a covering of clothes and ample water, the severest heat is simply more or less uncomfortable and can be dealt with, but cold is in its essence inimical to life. The image of equatorial climate has at its center those swarming beds of procreation, the great rain forests; but to think of what lies above the Arctic Circle is to think of Chaos, oblivion, the antithesis of life. Even thus (so Burlingame had declared to his charges) do men speak of the heat of passions, and refer to various sentiments and social relationships approvingly as
warm,
forasmuch as the metabolism of life itself is warm; but fear, contempt, despair, and deepest hatred -- not to mention facts, logic, analysis, and formality of dress or manner -- however involved they may be in the human experience of living, have forever in the nostrils of the race some effluvium of the grave and are described in mankind's languages by adjectives of cold. In sum (Ebenezer remembered Henry concluding with a smile and raking up the fire in his converted summerhouse with the ramrod of a Spanish musket on the wall), hot days may well elicit sweat and curses, but chill winds cut through the greatcoats and farthingales of time, knife to the primal memory of the species, shiver that slumbering beast in the caves of our soul, and whisper "Danger!" in his hairy ear. The surf now was a muffled thunder well forward. The Captain ordered the triple-reefed jib and mainsail up and took the helm himself. The Negroes having their hands full with sheets and gaff-halyards, he stationed both passengers forward, Bertrand to take soundings with a pole (the sloop itself, chine-bottomed, drew less than three feet of water, and the keel only two or three more) and Ebenezer to watch and listen for trouble ahead. The luff of the sails cracked like pistol-fire in the wind, and the heavy boom whipped back and forth over the deck. When the anchor pendant had been shortened until the grapple barely held the bow to windward, the Captain put the helm up hard and close-hauled the jib: the bow fell off at once to larboard, both sails filled with a snap that heeled the sloop far over and bid fair to take out her mast, and the anchor was desperately weighed. For a moment the fearful forces hung in balance: surely, Ebenezer thought, the ship must capsize or broach to, or the mast let go, or the shrouds, or the chain plates, or the sails. But as the next great wave rolled under, the Captain eased the helm; the bow pointed just a shade nearer the wind's eye, and to the accompaniment of cheers from the crew, the sloop righted herself to a reasonable angle of heel, took the next crest fairly at forty-five degrees, and gained steerageway due southwards on a sluggish starboard tack.

Almost at once they found themselves in comparatively calm water, though the wind howled as furiously as ever; clearly they were in the lee of whatever land they'd raised, and while their troubles were by no means over, they were temporarily relieved of the danger of losing their ship from under them. Moreover, with the island, or whatever, to break the wind, they were able to proceed with greater caution and control: almost at once, on their southerly bearing, Bertrand touched bottom with his pole and bawled the news aft -- indeed, the sound of the wind in reeds and trees could be plainly heard in the darkness ahead. The Negroes at once slacked off the sheets, and the sloop was brought over on a broad reach paralleling the apparent shoreline, with just enough way to steer by. For ten minutes the soundings remained constant, at between nine and ten feet of water, and the trees howled steadily off the starboard beam. Then this land-sound became more general -- seemed, in fact, almost to enclose them everywhere but astern -- and at the first brush of the keel against the bottom, heard and felt by none besides Captain Cairn, he ordered the anchor dropped and came up into the wind.

"Dear Heav'n!" Ebenezer cried. "Can it be we're safe?"

"Only the wittol can know he is no cuckold,"
said the Captain, repeating a proverb Ebenezer had heard before, "and only a dead man is safe from death." Nevertheless he stroked his beard with obvious relief and admitted that, barring a shift in the direction of the wind, there seemed to be no reason why they could not ride out the night at anchor.

" 'Tis some manner of cove, right enough," he declared when the vessel was properly secured, "else we'd hear more sea astern, instead of trees. Whether Okahanikan or some other we'll learn anon."

There being, incredibly to Ebenezer, nothing further to do until daybreak, all hands put on the clothes they had discarded some time before and made shift to warm and rest themselves. The chore of standing watch for changes in the weather or other perils was assigned to the exhausted crew until Ebenezer protested that the Negroes had already labored valiantly and prodigiously the whole night through, and volunteered to give up his place in the cabin to them and stand watch with Bertrand in their stead.

"Ye may do as ye please," the Captain replied. "Keep a lookout lest we drag anchor, and take soundings astern if we swing with the tide. For the rest, don't wake me unless the wind comes round and blows into the cove."

Having made these injunctions, he retired, but the Negroes, despite Ebenezer's invitation, made no move to follow after. They had followed the conversation as impassively as if they understood not a word of it, and indeed, judging from their reticence, their difficulties with the English language, and the bashfulness -- manifested by averted smiles, great rolls of the eyes, and much shifting of their feet -- with which they declined his offer of shelter, the poet concluded that despite their seamanship they were not long out of the jungles. This impression was strengthened not long after, when he commenced his watch with Bertrand: the Negroes spread on the deck between them a spare jibsail, folded once leech to luff, and commencing one at the head and one at the foot rolled themselves up in it against the weather. The adroitness with which they performed this feat gave it an air of outlandish ritual, and when it was done and they lay face to face as snug and immobile as scroll-pins, they entertained themselves for a time with a chuckling, husky-whispered colloquy in some exotic tongue -- unintelligible to the Englishmen save for the often-repeated name of their supposed anchorage,
Okahanikan,
and another recurrent word which (though Ebenezer was not so certain on this head) Bertrand declared with much emotion to be
Drakepecker.
So moved was he by this conviction, in fact, that he expressed his determination to inquire at once of the Negroes whether they knew any more than he of Drakepecker's welfare and whereabouts and was restrained only by Ebenezer's reminder that their fellow castaway had been clearly a fugitive of some sort, the less said about whom, the better for his safety. The valet was obliged to grant the prudence of this counsel; reluctantly he took up his watch in the vessel's stern, alee of the cabin, where Ebenezer, on his first circuit of the deck a quarter hour later, found him wrapped in a bit of canvas himself, and already asleep.

" 'Sheart, what a hawk-eyed sentry!" He moved to rouse the man, but checked himself and decided to stand the watch alone so long as all went well. He had, at the hour of their departure from St. Mary's, little but contempt and mild disgust for Bertrand, nor had he now, assuredly, any new cause for affection. That he felt it -- or at least the absence of its contraries -- not only for the valet but also for Henry Burlingame, he could attribute only to the violence of the storm, and more especially to the purgative ordeal of three hours' dancing on the doormat of extinction.

He strolled forward again. The rain had stopped entirely, and though the wind held strong it came now in quick gusts, the intervals between which were mild. But the best sign of all that the storm had blown its worst was the break-up of the lowering blanket of cloud into a heavy black scud that first opened holes for the gibbous moon to breach, then gave way, broke ranks, and fled across its face before the whips of wind like the ragtag of an army in retreat. For the first time since nightfall, Ebenezer could see beyond the white sprit of the sloop: the inconsistent moon disclosed that they were indeed in a cove, a marshy one of ample dimension. The island into which it made was ample too (so much so, that for all the poet could tell it might as reasonably have been the mainland), entirely flat, and, as best one could discern in that light, entirely marshy, its landscape relieved only by the loblolly pine trees, alive and black or dead and silver, that rose in lean clumps here and there from the marsh grass. It was a prospect by no means picturesque, but under the pale illumination stark and beautiful. Ebenezer even thought it serene, for all its bending to the wild wind, just as he felt the Island of his spirit, though by no means tranquil, to be peculiarly serene despite the buffet of past fortune and the sea of difficulties with which it was beset.