The Wreckers

THE SMUGGLERS,
Iain Lawrence
THE BUCCANEERS,
Iain Lawrence
THE CONVICTS,
Iain Lawrence
JUNGLE DOGS,
Graham Salisbury
UNDER THE BLOOD-RED SUN,
Graham Salisbury
BLUE SKIN OF THE SEA,
Graham Salisbury
THE GHOST IN THE NOONDAY SUN,
Sid Fleischman
MR. TUCKET,
Gary Paulsen
WHITEWATER,
P. J. Petersen
THE ISLANDER,
Cynthia Rylant

F
or seven days we ran before the storm. We raced through waves that seemed enormous, chased by a shrieking wind. We ran toward England under topsails and jib, in a brig called the
Isle of Skye
. She leaked from every seam, from every hatch and skylight. But she went like a witch mile after mile, wrapped in a shroud of spray.

I was wet and cold, and sometimes frightened. But I loved it all, my first time at sea.

Skye
was my father’s ship, though he was never a sailor. To him, the sea was a nuisance, and the ship was a thing to be owned, like his carriage and his office desk. “Only owners and admirals,” he liked to boast, “can order a captain about.” And this rare voyage—Father had called it a ride—was meant to teach me that a scribbling of ledgers was better than a life at sea. “You want to be a sailor?” he’d said. “Why, you’d be driven mad by the boredom.”
And he’d laughed. “Or scared out of your wits. So it’s one and the same.”

But I was never at loose ends, and not once so scared as that. We’d fìlled the ship with Italian linen and Turkish raisins, and with Spanish wine that we’d loaded on a strange and mysterious night. We’d covered the deck with chicken coops, and then sailed for home. And on the seventh night of our return trip, the barometer was rising.

The cautious little crosses on Captain Stafford’s chart showed us seven leagues southwest of Plymouth. But even that was too close to land, and Stafford begged my father to let him heave to until daybreak. “I’m not at all sure where we are,” he said.

Father would have none of it. “Raisins,” he said, shaking a finger. “Raisins don’t keep well in salt air.”

So on we went. And an hour before dawn, the
Isle of Skye
hurtled down a wave. She hit the trough in a burst of spray, and water filled the deck. A thousand times we’d done that, and might a thousand more, but now the chickens rose from their perches and hurled themselves, shrieking, against the cages. An old sailor named Finnigan Quick stared at them with horror.

“Land,” he said. “They smell the land!”

My father was beside me, his hand clutching a backstay, his scarlet cape flapping in the wind. He lowered his head against the spindrift, then grabbed my collar. His golden ring was cold as ice, and it pressed against my neck as he pulled me right against him.

“Go below,” he said. His beard was like hoarfrost on my cheek. “Go, John. You’ll not be scared down there.”

“But I’m not scared up here,” I said. “We’re fetching the shore, and—”

He gave me a push, to send me on my way. But I didn’t go below; for the first time in all my fourteen years, I disobeyed my father. I climbed to the weather shrouds and hooked myself to them like a spider. And the next wave rolled us over so far that I was lying flat above the sea.

It seemed forever until the ship found her feet again. And then the lookout cried down from the maintop, his voice made ghostly by his speaking trumpet. “Land ho! Land ho!”

He was invisible up there, where the storm clouds tangled in the rigging. It might have been God Himself who hailed us from the heavens.

“Breakers ahead!”

I saw my father stiffen. He looked frightened and lost, like a deer about to flee. At the wheel, the helmsman wrestled with the ship. But Father didn’t move, and others came running past him. There was Cridge, the mate, his white hair blowing like a horse’s mane. Danny Riggins was beside him, the foretopman from Plymouth. They threw their weight on the wheel and brought the brig to her course. And up from the ship’s waist in his dark tarry-breeks came the master.

“Captain Stafford!” cried my father. He clutched at the man’s arm.

Stafford shook him off. “Up helm,” he shouted. “Up helm and wear ship!”

It might have torn the masts out of her. But the
Isle of Skye
was a good strong ship, and she flung herself round
on a crest. The yards went over with a squeal of blocks. From stem to stern she shivered. Then the wind slammed against her, and she heeled so far that the mainsail yard tore a furrow from the water. Down below, something snapped with a gunshot sound, and I heard the rumble of barrels as the cargo came loose.

A wave as high as the maintop shattered on the weather side and pushed the brig down in the trough. I was under water one moment, then gasping for air, then under again. I heard a man scream, high and shrill.

And after it came the sound of the breakers. It was a thrumming, throbbing noise. It was a low pulse, like a heartbeat. My father’s head came up, turning like a hawk’s. And suddenly, like a thunderclap, the mizzen topsail shredded into rags and rope.

The
Isle of Skye
came upright, then settled again with the scuppers in the sea, water tumbling over the rail.

“As you bear,” yelled Captain Stafford. He raised his head, his hands cupped round his mouth. “Masthead there,” he screamed.

But the lookout had disappeared.

A man came aft with a dripping wet rag in his hands. “The pumps,” he said. “They’re clogged with something.”

“With what?” said Stafford.

“Sawdust, I think.” He shook out his rag, and a flurry of red-colored shavings scattered to the deck.

Father gazed at them with something like horror. Only later would I learn what he saw in those shavings, what terrible message was written in the sawdust. At the time, I thought only of the pumps.

“Can you clear them?” asked Stafford.

“We’ll try.” The rag was the man’s cap. He wrung it out and put it on as he staggered forward again.

The ship hurtled on. Spray swept over the deck like a series of rainstorms, blinding the men at the helm. But above them, in the shrouds, I could see the shoreline and the glimmer of breaking waves.

And then the lights.

There were two of them, one above the other, like golden eyes shining in the darkness. I sprang from the shrouds and raced down the deck. “Lights,” I cried, and tugged my father’s billowing cape. “Lights.”

He was angry at first, furious to see me. Then he understood, and he grabbed my arm. “Where?” he said.

“There!”

He sighted along my arm, and Stafford did the same. The brig rose from a trough, and the lights were nearly dead ahead. Then a third appeared, tossed by the wind, as though from the mast of a ship.

The captain frowned. “Now what the devil is all this?”

“A beacon,” said Father. He laughed. “A harbor.”

“Maybe,” said Stafford. “But which one?”

“Plymouth!” Father cried.

Riggins stomped up the slope of the deck. He winked at me, then put a huge hand on his beard and squeezed out half a pint of water. “T’aint Plymouth,” he said. “I was born and raised thereabouts, and I’ll tell you that much. T’aint Portloe neither, nor Salcombe nor Fowey.”

“Damn your eyes!” my father roared. “What does it matter where it isn’t?”

Poor Riggins reared back as though Father had hit him. “It’s nowhere, is what I mean,” he mumbled. “Nowheres I know.”

My father gave him an awful stare, full of fear and anger. In London he would never have raised his voice like that, not to the lowest of clerks. The wind swirled his cape around him.