At last the yard was down and the sheets were cast off and the sail was hauled up. It filled with wind and bucked and fought like a wild animal, but finally it was subdued through strength of arm and the mechanical advantage of block and tackle.
Then, one by one, the men climbed into the weather shrouds and worked their way aloft, moving slowly, a single careful step at a time, as the rolling ship tried to fling them into the sea. Up, up the main shrouds, over the main top, and up the topmast shrouds. From there it was step onto the foot ropes strung under the yards and shuffle out to where they could claw the canvas into submission.
Marlowe watched them go aloft. He had no business joining them. As captain, his place was on the quarterdeck, where he could see the entire situation, fore and aft. Indeed, it would have been a dereliction of duty for him to abandon that place and lay aloft with his men. But still, even after all the years he had had command of ships at sea, he could hardly bear to send men aloft into such peril while he remained behind.
Bickerstaff, he saw, was with them. He had been on deck through most of the day, bearing a hand, ignoring Marlowe. He worked by choice. He had no official duties on board. In fact, he was something of a nonentity, having refused to sign the ship’s articles, leaving him with no vote and no right to any prize taken.
But for all that, Bickerstaff was not a man to shrink from labor, not the kind to use his status as a gentleman to avoid hauling side by side with the men, especially in a crisis such as the building storm. And so he hung from the clewlines like the others, heave and belay, and made his careful way aloft to save their precious topsail from the wind’s terrible grip.
And Marlowe wished fervently that Bickerstaff would not die before he had a chance to redeem himself in his friend’s eyes.
For over an hour the men fought with the main topsail. At last it was stowed and what was left of the fore topsail lashed in place and all the men back in the relative safety of the deck.
Full night was on them, complete blackness, which meant that every big sea that rolled up from the dark took them by surprise, sometimes breaking over the stern, sometimes seeming to pause in front of them so that the bow pounded into the wall of water again and again.
A wild, hellish night of mounting wind and bitter-cold spray, a night where men and gear were tossed around the deck by the capricious seas, and water coming over the bow and through the gunports in the open waist would run two and three feet high over the deck.
But still Marlowe was sanguine about it all. Years of experience told him that they were at the height of the storm, that dawn would bring a slacking of the wind, a diminishing of the seas. And they were secure now, the sails stowed away, everything on deck lashed down, the pumps working well. It was all hands on deck, too rough for anyone to get a watch below, but the men were not exhausted or starved, and they were showing what a solid and coordinated crew they had become.
The Elizabeth Galley was moving fast under just bare poles. The sail area that her masts and yards alone presented was enough to drive her at six and seven knots before the gale. Under their bow, over three thousand miles of open ocean. And best of all, and most unusual given the seemingly malicious nature of storms at sea, they were being driven in just the direction they wished to go.
Cold, wet to the skin, tired, throat burning from swallowing salt spray, Marlowe was still feeling largely optimistic as he struggled down the ladder to the waist and, bouncing off the doors in the alleyway, stumbled aft to the great cabin to check on Elizabeth.
He found her in her bunk-their bunk, their former bunk-flat on her back, moaning with each wild swing of the hanging bed. It took quite a bit to make Elizabeth seasick, but the storm was giving quite a bit that night.
“How are you, my dear?” he asked, trying to sound tender and sensitive, which was hard, as he had practically to yell over the cacophony of creaking timbers and the waves and the howl of the wind.
She looked up at him, her face waxy in the light of the lantern, which also swung in wild arcs, throwing crazy shadows around the small sleeping compartment. Her long hair was tangled and matted, and it looked as if she had not been entirely successful in keeping it clear while she vomited.
For a moment her expression was pleading, vulnerable, and Marlowe thought she was going to express her unfailing love for him, there on what she might believe to be her deathbed. But she did not. Instead she flopped onto her back and closed her eyes as the ship rolled and the bunk swung so hard that it thumped on the overhead.
When the Galley had come upright again, she said simply “Go to hell, Thomas,” so soft Marlowe could scarcely hear.
Well, damn you, then. You shall be sorry, you ungrateful wench, if we all die this night, Marlowe thought, and without another word he turned and left her there.
Back down the alleyway and into the waist, past groups of men huddled in what shelter they could find. Nothing to do at the moment, no sail to trim, and the ship seemed to be standing up to the storm’s onslaught. Only the helm to man and the pumps to work, and beyond that there was only to stay awake and alert, because their happy stasis could be torn away by a single rogue wave or gust of wind.
For all that black night Marlowe prowled the quarterdeck, standing sometimes in the lee of the cloth lashed up in the mizzen shrouds, sometimes talking with the helmsmen or with Dinwiddie or Honey-man to see how the vessel fared, sometimes making his way down into the waist to give the men some encouragement and to see that nothing had been overlooked. But the Galley was strong and well set up, and the crew he had managed to piece together was competent and able, if not so numerous as he might have wished, and all was well.
Two bells in the morning watch, five A.M., and Marlowe realized that the pumps were sounding louder. It took his fatigue-shrouded brain a moment to realize that this was due to a lessening in the wind, a diminishing in the omnipresent howl that had tormented them all the dark hours.
With that realization came the awareness that the sea was settling down a bit. It was still a mad, pitching, rolling, yawing ride through the big swells, but Marlowe realized it was not as bad as it had been an hour before, and an hour hence, he had reason to hope, it would be better yet.
Dawn came around four bells, no more than a gray version of the night, with the sun entirely hidden behind the impenetrable cloud. The sea was the color of lead, rising up all around, row after row of watery hillocks that obscured everything beyond as the Elizabeth Galley sank down in the space between them and then gave a brief glimpse of the horizon as she rose up again. But the menace of the night was gone, the tension that came with not knowing when the next wave would be on them or how big it might be.
Dinwiddie sent lookouts forward and to either beam, there now being some hope that they might see something, if there was anything to see. Marlowe doubted there would be. They had been running fast away from the English coast all night. Nothing was under their bow now but open water, clear to the Americas.
He sat wearily down on a quarter bitt. His legs ached, and his skin was chafed raw in several places from his salt-water-soaked clothing. He was thinking about breakfast.
Then the forward lookout shouted, “Son of a bitch!” his voice edged in panic.
Marlowe shot to his feet, leaped up on the bitt, hand on the mizzen shrouds, looking forward. Water, nothing but water.
“What is it, you poxed whoreson?” Dinwiddie shouted.
“Ship! Damn me! A wreck!” was all the lookout could splutter. The Elizabeth Galley came up again as the sea passed under. There, below her now, unseen in the trough of the waves until that moment, was a ship, or what was left of one.
Dismasted, half sunk, lying almost on her beam ends, her bottom toward the Galley, her deck on the far side. Glistening in the dull light, water breaking over her. A ship, lying at a right angle to the Galley, like something that had risen up from the grave, her stern under the Galley’s bow, directly in their path.
“Starboard your helm! Starboard!” Marl
owe shouted. The helmsmen shoved the tiller over. The Galley began to turn as the wave passed under and the wreck rose up above them. And then the next roller had the Galley, driving her forward, and the two ships struck.
Chapter 11
THE GALLEY ’S spritsail yard hit first, dragging across the quarterdeck of the drifting hulk, then catching in the shattered taffrail, tangling inextricably in the jagged wood, as if the dying ship were reaching out, one last desperate grasp for help.
Honeyman was at the bow, casting off the spritsail lifts and braces, but Marlowe could already feel the Elizabeth Galley pause as the wreck held her in its grip.
“Shift your helm!” The tiller went over again, and the Galley turned, just a bit. The wind and sea were driving the Galley fast, and now the waterlogged wreck was trying to hold her back.
He could see the bowsprit flexing under the enormous pressure, could see the spritsail yard bending, wondered what would give first.
And then the spritsail yard was torn clean away, pulling free from the bowsprit with a cracking of wood and snapping of lines. Bits of rigging whipped through the air as the big yard was wrenched off. The Elizabeth Galley leaped forward, out of the wreck’s grip.
“Midships!” Marlowe shouted, and then the Elizabeth Galley’s starboard bow slammed into the wreck’s transom. The ship shuddered, the waterlogged hulk as unyielding as solid rock. The cathead crumpled under the impact, and the bulwark stove in. Men ran aft as the ship dragged along the wreck, tearing itself up.
Marlowe stared, transfixed by the sight of the great round white bottom of the ship. The deck was still lost to his view, the ship listing away from the Elizabeth Galley.
The starboard fore channel hit next, tangled up in the battered stern section of the hulk. Marlowe could see the three forward shrouds grow taut and tauter under the strain, and then something snapped, and the shrouds went slack again, ripped apart like old twine. If even one more shroud was torn free, they would loose the mast.
The next sea lifted the Galley’s stern and began to shove it around. She turned sideways to the sea, pivoting on the forward section that was locked to the wreck. Broadside to the waves, a bigger sea might have rolled them over, but the waves were smaller now, choppier, and Marlowe did not see a watery end coming.
The channel wrenched free from the hulk, and the sea drove the Galley past, and they were downwind of the drifting menace, safe, beyond the threat.
The deck of the dead ship came into view, and Marlowe was able to see something of her in the imperfect light of that early morning. A big vessel, an Indiaman perhaps. The lee bulwarks were underwater-her hull must have been half filled. She had an hour to live, perhaps a bit more, and then she would be gone.
On the stump of her mainmast, rising fifteen feet above the deck, a British merchantman’s ensign, torn to rags, set upside down. A pathetic signal of distress, as if anyone would see it or would have been able to render any help if they had.
Marlowe did not like to think of the horrible death that had attended the crew, thrashing in the bitter-cold water at night, the nightmare of every sailor.
Then, just as the big ship was disappearing from sight behind the next steep wave, one that would leave her farther beyond the Galley’s reach, he saw motion, color, something moving along the deck. He leaped into the main shrouds, raced aloft, eyes locked on the wreck, trying to gain some height, to see before she was lost behind the wall of water.
There were men still alive on her. He could see them, now one hundred yards away, but he could see them, crawling along the high side, waving frantically. Something white-a shirt, a fragment of sail- someone was desperately signaling.
The Elizabeth Galley was still nearly beam on to the waves, but the helmsmen had the tiller over, and she was turning again, so that in a moment she would once again be running away downwind.
“Helmsmen! Hold as you are!” Marlowe shouted. “Mr. Dinwiddie! The mizzen sail! Let us set it, quickly, quickly!”
Dinwiddie came running aft, a lumbering, awkward sort of run, with the more athletic Honeyman on his heels and a gang of men behind. They did not ask questions, they just obeyed, casting off gaskets and laying out the halyard, clapping on and hauling away with speed and care.
“Reef’s tucked!” Honeyman shouted over the wind.
“Good! We are going to bring to!”
That order received a frown and a knitting of brows, but no more, as the men struggled with setting the sail in the howling gale. When they were running before it, the wind had not seemed so bad, but now, with the ship virtually stopped, it blew over them with all its force, pulling at hair and clothes, making the rigging hum and sing.
“Midships!” Marlowe called to the helmsmen. The mizzen yard inched up the mast, the bit of canvas that was exposed pulling hard, bellied out taut in the wind.
“Dinwiddie! Send some men forward! Set that fore staysail!”
The Elizabeth Galley turned until she was taking the sea and the wind on her damaged starboard bow.
“Now, helm a’larboard! There, hold her there!” Marlowe paused, gauging the feel of the ship, trying to get a sense of whether or not she was in balance, if she would stay as she was with the contending forces of helm and sail, and he saw that she would.
Honeyman and Dinwiddie were there, at his side, waiting for orders, wondering no doubt what he was thinking. The safest thing for them would have been to keep running before the storm. Instead they were stopped, hove to, with the wreck to windward and drifting down on them. Now and then it was visible from the deck, rising up on the swell, and then down again. The next wave, or the next, and she might go down and keep going, until she came to a stop in the sands’ unknown fathoms below.
“There are men alive on that ship!” Marlowe pointed to windward. He thought that would explain everything, but Honeyman and Dinwiddie continued to stare.
“We are going to get them off!” Marlowe shouted again. Behind him the man coiling down the mizzen halyard shouted, “What? In this bloody sea?” as if he were part of the conversation, which he was not.
In fact, there was no conversation. Marlowe glared at Dinwiddie, challenging him to argue. He glared at Honeyman, daring him to make some noise about what the crew wished to do. He was ready to break them both at that point if they gave him a breath of grief, and the Red Sea be damned. But Dinwiddie just nodded, and Honeyman said, “How do you reckon to do it?”
That was the question. If they had been to windward of the wreck, they might have drifted a boat down to them. But they were downwind now, and all the tacking in the world would not get them back up to windward again.
Marlowe turned from the two men, ran his eyes along the deck and then out to windward, where he was able to catch a glimpse of the wreck before it was lost again between waves. The Elizabeth Galley, with her masts in place, was drifting much faster than the waterlogged hulk. If they could slow their drift, let the wreck drift down on them, pass a line somehow…
God, this is a stupid thing I am doing! Marlowe thought. The idea of letting an unpredictable hulk drift down on them, with that sea running and the wind howling around their ears, was insane. But he could not let those men die without trying. They were sailors. British sailors, to boot. He did not examine his motives; he knew only that he had to try.
“We must slow our drift!” he shouted, and the two men nodded. “Let us lash some of them spare spars together, put ’em over the side with a light hawser, a sort of sea anchor! That might do!”
“Aye, sir!” Honeyman shouted. “Mayhaps the wreck’ll drift down on the spars. If those poor bastards yonder can reach them, they can grab on to the spars and we’ll pull ’em aboard!”
Marlowe nodded as if that had been his thought all along, but actually it had not occurred to him. Still, it was perfect. Set a sea anchor in the form of the spare masts and yards, let the hulk drift down on that, let the men climb aboard the spars, and pull them over to the Galley. Simple.
But Marlowe
was seaman enough to know that it was never that simple.
The first task was to lash the spare spars together and get them over the side. Honeyman and Dinwiddie and Burgess worked the gangs of men in the waist, lashing together the long, rounded timbers, Elizabeth Galley’s inventory of spare topmasts and yards and topgallant masts. They lashed them lengthwise, like a giant bundle of twigs, and rigged stops and yard tackle and stay tackle to lift the whole mess.
Halfway down the length of the spars they attached the hawser, the three-inch-thick rope that would hold the Elizabeth Galley tethered to the drifting mass.
The Elizabeth Galley would drift faster through the water than the half-submerged sea anchor made up of spare spars. If the hawser were attached to the sharp end of the spars, the ship would just pull the sea anchor through the water like a boat. But with the hawser attached to the midpoint of the spars’ length, the Galley would be pulling the long timbers sideways, like trying to drag a ship broadside through the water, rather than bow first. The spars would thus act as a brake to slow the Galley’s fast downwind drift.
Simple.
The men staggered through the task, tired, battered from their long night, their footing unsure on the slick and rolling deck.
Will this be worth it, if any of my men are killed in the trying? Marlowe wondered.
Bickerstaff made his way aft. He looked drawn, pale with fatigue. “You are setting a sea anchor, or so the rumor goes, forward.”
“Yes, we are. Let that hulk drift down on us.”
“Do you mean to take possession of her?”
“Possession? Dear God, she will not live till the first dog watch. I have no hope beyond getting her men off!” Their conversation, like every such conversation for the past twenty hours, was carried out at shouting volume. Marlowe could feel his throat ache with the effort.
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