The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  And yes, sure enough, looking over my shoulder, Sheerness is now not a mile away, but two miles away and further west than it had been. The two boys on the beach are mere dots of brightness. Before I was able to see the colour of their hair. I set to the oars with a will, straining and heaving and driving myself mightily through the still-glassy water, but those three gaunt posts, the rotting masts of some sunken ship I guess, saunter up behind and overtake me in an idle but inexorable glide. A pair of green buoys steam upstream, and all my efforts to catch them up are to no avail. Sheerness is fading into a gold blaze of westering light as I drift helplessly out into the North Sea. And still, that overwhelming feeling of calm stillness persists, the impression of being at rest upon a summer lawn awaiting the arrival of strawberries and tea.

  There occur very rarely in the life of Man times and situations where he is utterly powerless to decide his fate. In almost any situation, no matter how desperate, there is something he can do, some last card to play – whether to make that one phone call to his solicitor, or try one last plea to his captors, or make one desperate attempt to trap an animal using a bootlace and an old safety-pin and so survive another day in the wilderness. But when a situation comes along where there is nothing to be done, no final trick, no last resource, no eleventh-hour plea, then a great calm comes over him – in my experience, even a sort of glee. ‘Crikey, I’m in for it now! ’ goes a very tiny way towards expressing that mixture of exhilaration and curiosity and total abdication that I have felt on the three such occasions in my life. It is partly to do with the fact that whatever happens now, it is quite certainly out of our own hands, and this brings with it a weird certainty that therefore the hands in which the matter now resides are there, as they have always been, ready and sure and infinitely more capable than ours. The Mind that keeps the sun spinning and the cells dividing and the green grass growing is ready to take the reins that we have at last been forced to drop. It is a sense of relief, really, like being a child on piggyback again.

  Well, the sun spun in its ordained course, and the land cooled and the seas stayed warm as they were designed to do, and because of that discrepancy in temperatures there sprang up a breeze in the last hour of that long day. It blew straight from the open sea to the little town of Sheerness, and I rode with it on my scarlet wings. Even now, the effect of the tide created a bizarre surrealism, for whereas before I had seemed to sit on a glassy mirror at peace and in reality had hurtled seawards, now with the wind in my sails and the foam curling at my prow and the rip-rip-ripple of water racing beneath the keel, I seemed to be flying across the sea as swiftly as a boy on a bike, and yet the beacon post twenty yards away stayed resolutely in its spot, refusing to draw an inch nearer despite my headlong approach.

  But eventually as the tide slackened, that stand-off -ish beacon post deigned to draw near at last, allowed me to overtake it, and once more Sheerness assembled itself out of the gold and blue of the western horizon. Two hours after my first decision to row the half-mile to shore, I pulled in to that long strand just as the sun dipped below the sea wall. My chart showed a proper harbour another mile back up the coast and round into the mouth of the Medway, but I was deeply weary of all things nautical. I had been aboard for fourteen hours and had had neither a bite to eat nor a drop to drink in that time. I had come sixty miles, and refused to row a stroke further.

  Jutting out from the sea wall was a tall pier of solid concrete, which offered me the only chance to tether my dinghy along the whole length of ochre shingle. The seaward end of this pier was currently ten yards or so from the sea’s edge, so I had to drag or lift Jack de Crow up over the shingle to place it at the pier’s foot. This I did by recruiting the two urchins whom I had spotted earlier. On closer acquaintance these turned out to be two eight-year-old boys called Matt and Luke, tow-haired, ruddy-cheeked and wellie-booted who said things like ‘Coo!’ and ‘Cor!’ and ‘’Ere, Mister, are youse a pirate then?’ and generally seemed straight out of Oliver. They helped me bail the boat out and drag her up beyond what I fondly imagined to be the high-tide limit, and after I had climbed up onto the pier they threw the long painter up to me so that I could tie it onto a ring bolt.

  All the while they asked a million questions and, when they ground to a halt, offered to keep guard on the boat the whole night against ‘feeves ’n’ robbers’ of which, they earnestly assured me, Sheerness was full. ‘And pirates,’ they added solemnly. I declined their kind offer, but playing the amiable Captain Flint to their Death and Glories, tipped them a gold sovereign apiece for their help in stowing Jack so well. (Well, a pound, but you know what I mean.) Seeing me as a possible source of further wealth, they insisted on taking a bag apiece and accompanied me along the promenade to the Seaview Hotel, squabbling cheerfully over who got to wear my pith helmet.

  It was only once I’d checked in at the front bar, and suffered the baleful glare of a few old sea-salts who clearly regarded the front bar as a resolutely child-free domain, that I managed to recover my hat and send them away with another fifty pence each and many earnest promises on their behalf to keep an eye on the boat.

  The Seaview Hotel was a grand edifice built, I suspect, in the port’s palmiest days. One lounge was called the Montgomery Room and had a plaque explaining that the Montgomery was a ship that had run aground and sunk during the Second World War. Its derelict masts protrude from the treacherous waters just off Sheerness (Ah, that’s what they were …) but, as its hold still contains sufficient explosives to take the whole Island of Sheppey with it, all craft are expressly forbidden to go anywhere near it. The only exception to this rule is small Mirror dinghies drifting uncontrollably on the tide, I believe.

  I found a room on the second floor with a view along the beach to where Jack lay in the distance, so that I could keep half an eye out for the ‘feeves ’n’ robbers’ I had been warned of. Much good this did me, because in less than ten minutes I was sprawled on my bed fully dressed and fast asleep. It had been a long day, I had come a long way, and even the promise of a hot bath and a cold beer could not prop my eyes open a moment longer. But I had made a start at last. The long journey had begun.

  Of Shallows and Shipwreck

  They hadna sailed a league, a league,

  A league but barely three,

  When the lift grew dark, and the wind blew loud,

  And gurly grew the sea.

  The ankers brak, and the topmasts lap,

  It was sic a deadly storm;

  And the waves cam o’er the broken ship,

  Till a’ her sides were torn.

  her sides were torn.

  —ANONYMOUS, The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens

  There is a thief in Sheerness Town on Sheppey Isle. He wears a grey cloak sewn with stars, he steals about in the darkness on silent feet and he sighs all night at his work. He shows no respect for the property or life of any man, and the only voice or law he heeds is that of his mistress, the Moon. And when I awoke the next morning, still in my rumpled clothes, and looked down the shingle shore, I saw at once that he had been at work on Jack de Crow.

  This kelp-handed robber had more than burgled her. He had taken her and trounced her and set her on her stern against the pier wall before rifling her pockets and leaving her petticoats and stays all in a dreadful tangle, seemingly broken and bent. To put it plainly, the first thing I saw from my bedroom window when I awoke at five that morning was that the tide had come in during the night and left Jack in a horribly precarious state.

  When I hurried along the promenade to assess the damage, I found that things were not as bad as they had first looked, but it had been a narrow escape. The painter had caught around a protruding iron bolt set in the concrete, probably when the tide was at its fullest, and when the tide had dropped away again it had left the poor dinghy hanging from her bow on the now-shortened tether. Only her stern rested against the shingle. With the angle she lay at and the battering she must have received half the night, one of the mast-stays
had come loose so that her mast now leaned drunkenly to one side, the bundled gaff and sail unravelling in a tangle of ropes and tyers onto the sharp shingle. The front lockers, too, being doorless, had been scoured out by the swill of the sea and their contents stolen away, leaving only a scrape of gritty sand and a few crabs scuttling in their recesses.

  The greatest loss was the jib. This is the smaller triangular sail that runs from the prow up to the masthead, which allows a boat to sail much closer to the wind and assists in bringing it around onto a new course every time you tack. On the narrow rivers I had found that I was usually running downwind, a course where the jib is not useful enough to be worth the bother of setting in place, but here on the open waters I had been planning to use it regularly. To that end I had bought in London a set of brand-new ropes to use with it, and these too were missing.

  There followed an hour or so of re-rigging and scrubbing and emptying while the residents of Sheerness slowly woke to the new day and peered out their windows to see the foreigner at his task. At the end of that time I straightened up, stretched widely and realised that I was ravenous. I had neither eaten nor drunk a thing for thirty-four hours; the last food to pass my lips had been the Thai green curry on my last night in London. I stowed the last of my stuff , marched straight back to the Seaview Hotel and ordered the full cooked breakfast and a gallon of coffee. I wolfed it down, and then ordered exactly the same again.

  I had been studying the chart carefully. Two possible routes lay open to me from Sheerness. I was at the westernmost point of the Isle of Sheppey, which lies like a great green pancake off the north coast of Kent, separated from the mainland only by the thin muddy trickle that is the West Swale and the broader but shallower East Swale. I could either choose to continue along the northern coast of the Isle, remaining in the Thames Estuary proper, or I could duck back round up into the Medway and thread my way through the two Swales to emerge further along the coast at Whitstable. The outer route would be shorter but more exposed to the wind and waves that even now were getting stronger; the inner route would be longer but provide a more sheltered route – and a more interesting one, I anticipated, as I navigated my way through the tidal creeks and secret ways of the Swale. So before the wind grew any stronger, I made my choice. Pushing the dinghy out from the shingle, I hoisted the sail and ran down the strengthening nor’easter to the mouth of the Medway and into the calmer waters behind the Isle.

  Map of the Isle of Sheppey

  It was a pleasant run up the Medway to the narrow entrance of West Swale Creek, with mirror-grey waters and a following wind, and the bliss continued up the Swale as it snaked its way through the low grass pastures and mud-flats of this deserted landscape.

  Herons flapped slowly away across the waters, the odd knot of waders dibbled and pattered on the shore, and the only cause for mild alarm was the sight of the Kingsferry swing bridge ahead, its red warning light telling all ships to stop and wait for the bridge to be lifted. All ships, that is, except the redoubtable Jack de Crow who pleases herself when it comes to these obstacles, who dips her tall gaff in stately salute to the goggle-eyed bridge-keeper and goes on her way unhindered.

  I had been thinking that I would make it at least to Whitstable at the further end of the East Swale by that afternoon, but when I reached the point where the two Swales meet, I found that the incoming tide which had carried me so smoothly up the West Swale would now be against me if I tried to sail down the East Swale. The tidal waters rush up both arms at roughly the same time and meet in the middle, like the meeting of the waters in the Red Sea to drown Pharaoh and all his chariots. But as this fact dawned upon me, I realised that there was a third way to take – the little grey serpent of Milton Creek which runs from this point up to a nearby town, and that even now was filling fast with the combined floodwaters of the two Swales. With a nudge of the tiller, I steered around into the narrow mouth of this baby creek and was carried by my magic carpet of tide and a following wind up to the fair town of Sitting-bourne. I would be there in an hour, and could spend the rest of a leisurely day devouring more full cooked breakfasts.

  Let us be honest. Sittingbourne cannot by any stretch of the imagination be accurately described as fair. Even the approach to it by dinghy along Milton Creek, which Offers the most romantic route in, is dreary. As the creek wound inland, I passed derelict industrial wreckage at every turn, slowly rotting into the salt marsh. Here an abandoned factory, there an old rusting goods depot; now a snarl of cyclone-wire fencing protecting a compound of oil-drums, and then a ruined farmhouse with boarded-up windows and graf-fitied walls. Occasionally my heart would lift at the sight of a fellow vessel ahead, until I drew nearer and found that it was the rotting skeleton of an ancient hulk decaying into the mud. Despite the essentially modern character of this industrial graveyard, there was also something strangely Dickensian about it. I half expected to see Magwitch come stumbling over the salt marshes or Pip escaping from murder in the ruined lime kilns.

  I eventually moored behind a sheet-metal factory, manoeuvred my way past barbed-wire compounds where Alsatian guard dogs snarled frenziedly, and made my way into the town. I suppose the residents of Sittingbourne must feel a loyal fondness for the home of their forefathers, but honesty compels me to admit that I found it a dismal place that afternoon. The B&Bs in town were fully booked (Lord knows why), and I had to search further afield before I obtained accommodation in a large hotel that had prices inversely proportional to its charm.

  I knew that the next morning I would have to time my departure to the minute. I must leave at the very top of the tide; any earlier and I would be fighting the in-sweeping current, any later and I would find that there was not enough water beneath even Jack’s shallow keel to float her. The upper reaches of Milton Creek would reduce to a filmy rivulet within minutes of the tide turning. My tables informed me that high tide was at 4.30 the next morning – another pre-dawn start – so I would have to leave the hotel at 3.30 to walk down to the creek. As I was paying for that night’s accommodation, I was asked if I’d be taking breakfast before I left.

  ‘Breakfast? At that hour?’

  ‘Certainly, sir, and we can bring it up to your room if you wish.’

  Determined to get my money’s worth, I agreed, put in my order for a 3.15 wake-up call and a 3.30 room-service breakfast, and went upstairs for an early night feeling that perhaps I had been too harsh on the good folk of Sittingbourne. Room service? Gosh!

  At precisely 3.30 the next morning I came wide awake in that mysterious instinctive way that humans have despite the absence of alarm clocks, sunrise cues or, indeed, pre-arranged wake-up calls. I rang Reception.

  ‘Hello, Hotel Reception, Jason speaking, can I help you?’

  ‘Yes, I’m in Room 450, my name’s Mackinnon, and I was expecting a wake-up call fifteen minutes ago.’

  ‘Certainly, sir, would you like me to make that call for you, sir?’

  A pause.

  ‘No,’ I said, speaking very slowly, ‘I’m awake now. That is how we are conversing at present.’

  ‘Yes, sir, what is your room number please? I’ll just check that for you, sir, and we’ll soon have the problem sorted.’

  Another longer pause. This boy has clearly been ingesting mercury out of a nearby creek for most of his life.

  ‘Look, don’t worry about that now, my room is 450 and I ordered breakfast to be sent to this room at 3.30. I’m on a bit of a tight schedule, you see, so I was wondering if it’s on its way.’

  ‘Certainly, sir, I have the order written here and it should be on the way up. Room number 330, yes?’

  ‘Four-fifty.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I’ll just change that breakfast to 4.50, sir. You enjoy your lie-in, sir.’

  There followed some very clear, very crisp instructions from my end, and we finally established the correct room number and the fact that I needed the breakfast immediately. The crispness of my tone went no way towards driving out the sing-song chirpiness
of the youthful Jason’s response.

  ‘Yes, sir, enjoy your breakfast, sir.’

  At 3.45, I had washed, shaved and was ready and packed, awaiting my reviving hot brekker.

  At 3.55, I rang downstairs to Reception again.

  ‘Hello, Hotel Reception, Jason speaking, can I hel …?’

  ‘Yes, it is Mackinnon in Room 450, anxious to eat that breakfast that hasn’t yet arrived. Any hope of it arriving soon-ish? I should have left ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Certainly, sir, I’ll just have it sent up, sir. Room number please?’

  (A long sigh through flared nostrils) ‘FOUR-FIFTY. It is on the fourth floor.’

  ‘Certainly, sir. Glad to be of service, sir.’

  At 4.00, the phone rang.

  ‘Wake-up call for Mr Mackinnon, wake-up call. Jason from Reception, sir, just calling to wake you up, sir.’

  ‘I’m awake already, and I am waiting for my breakfast!!

  ’

  ‘Very good, sir, happy to be of service, sir. I’ll send it up. Room number please …’

  At 4.15, breakfast arrived. It consisted of two triangles of leathery toast, a polystyrene cup of tepid coffee and an assortment of those little plastic tubs of apricot jam that are completely impossible to open once your fingers have been made greasy by struggling with the foil-wrapped tiles of frozen butter. Somehow I managed to get a smear of conserve onto each triangle and wolf it down, and then I pelted downstairs to settle the bill, and, if possible, the receptionist.

  While the acned Jason struggled to jam my Visa card into the machine the wrong way round, I realised that it was now too late to walk the distance and get to the boat in time for the tide, so I called an all-night taxi. When it arrived, I bundled into it and gave the order to the driver: ‘The derelict warehouse down on the old industrial estate, please.’ Considering the ungodly hour, I may as well have added ‘just some unfinished business with Vinnie the Grass and a sack of quick-setting concrete.’ At any rate, the driver showed the whites of his eyes, paused on a question, thought better of it and drove straight there, depositing me amid rusting barbed wire and burnt-out cars. Then he drove off rapidly, mentally erasing all memory of the trip.