Uncharted Seas

by Dennis Wheatley

  Much better take on Vicente. It might not be so bad perhaps if she could stop him talking and try to think of him as someone else when they were in the dark together. Better put a cheerful face on it too. That paid. It would make him more considerate and she’d be able to get rid of him sooner.

  At last she stood up and went over to the upright piano which occupied a corner of the small lounge. Idly she began to strum upon it.

  ‘What is that you play?’ asked Vincente.

  ‘Oh, just a little ditty that tells the oldest story in the world.’ In a husky contralto Synolda began to sing:

  ‘She was poor but she was honest

  Victim of a village crime

  For the Squire’s cruel passion

  Robbed her of her honest name.

  ‘Then she came right up to London

  There to hide her grief and shame

  But she met another Squire

  And she lost her name again.’

  Synolda stopped playing and gently shut down the lid of the piano. ‘That second verse is rather appropriate, don’t you think? Fix me a double brandy and bring down the champagne.’

  7

  The Weed

  That night the ship drifted on through the mist, and when morning came she was still shrouded in its grey, ghost-like wisps.

  It muffled the footsteps of those walking on the decks, made wood and metal fitments damp to the touch, covering them with fine beads of moisture like sweat, and gave the passengers an eerie feeling.

  Luvia took scant notice of it. He knew that in these desolate seas there was little likelihood of another ship being within a hundred miles of them, so the risk of a collision was entirely negligible.

  Taking the bulk of the crew with him he went down to the engine-room; he was overjoyed to have the chance of working again in his own special domain. To rake out the fires and get them going up to the point where sufficient pressure of steam had been generated for the propellers to turn over at a normal speed would require many hours of heavy labour, but the men set to with a will.

  Vicente was among them; stripped to the waist and ready to take his turn at the shovels with the others. Basil, who was also there, looked at him curiously. The Venezuelan was broad and squat, but in spite of his little paunch he looked vigorous and muscular; for some inexplicable reason, too, he appeared to be half a dozen years younger this morning.

  Between-decks in the galley Unity was peeling potatoes while Synolda was making pastry for a pie. She showed no trace of the night’s events except that she was a little more silent than usual.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Unity asked with no object but to make conversation.

  ‘I was thinking,’ said Synolda slowly, ‘how strange it is that things you dread are never quite so bad, when you really come to them, as you imagine beforehand.’

  Unity laughed. ‘There’s a pavement artist at Hyde Park Corner who does a scrawl which says, “Today is the tomorrow you were worrying about yesterday”, and it’s quite true. Even when the future appears incredibly grim we get through it somehow. In fact, people often derive a certain amount of enjoyment from periods in which they had visualised themselves committing suicide through bitterness and disillusion. But what makes you think about that?’

  ‘Oh, nothing particular,’ Synolda hedged. ‘Just being here a thousand miles from anywhere cooking for sailors in a derelict ship, yet not feeling particularly unhappy all the same—if you know what I mean. Just think how worried we’d have been if we’d been told the sort of voyage we’d have to face before we left Cape Town.’

  ‘Yes, we’d have been horrified and refused to sail, of course, although now we’re more or less out of danger I wouldn’t have missed the experience for anything.’

  There was a pause in the conversation before Unity went on: ‘D’you know what I’d have said you were thinking about, if you’d given me the usual three guesses?’

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘Oh, Juhani.’

  Synolda turned to stare and opened wide her heavily lidded blue eyes in genuine surprise. ‘Juhani Luvia—but, good God, why?’

  ‘Well, you’ve made a pretty sweeping conquest there, haven’t you?’

  ‘What, I? Gracious, what nonsense!’

  Unity stiffened slightly. ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t the least desire to pry into your personal affairs. Of course, I should never have mentioned it.’

  ‘Oh, please!’ Synolda dusted the flour quickly from her plump white arms and abandoned her pastry-making. ‘I’m not offended. Not a bit. You’ve been so sweet to me, how could I be? But, honestly, I haven’t even looked at Juhani. I thought you were just pulling my leg.’

  Unity smiled. ‘I wasn’t, and if you haven’t looked at him he certainly spends most of his time, when he’s taking a spell from work, looking at you.’

  ‘Really! How queer. I’ve never noticed it.’

  ‘Then it’s quite time you did—that is unless you dislike him.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t dislike him in the least. In fact, I admire him a lot and think him rather a hero. He’s behaved splendidly all through, but he’s so off-hand. I had no idea he was interested in anything except his job of salvaging the ship and getting us safely back to land again.’

  ‘Well, you can take it from me, he’s just crazy about you. Like the great big baby he is, he tries to conceal it, but I know from the way he follows you about with his eyes whenever you move out of his vicinity; and he’s jealous as hell of Vicente.’

  ‘Is he?—but he has no cause to be,’ Synolda replied innocently.

  ‘No, none,’ Unity agreed, ‘since for some obscure reason he conceals his interest in you. All the same I should probably be jealous, too, if I were in his shoes. Ever since we sailed from Cape Town you’ve shown pretty plainly that you prefer Vicente’s company to anybody else’s.’

  ‘Oh, well, he lays himself out to be pleasant,’ Synolda hurriedly turned back to her pastry-making. ‘You see, he knew my late husband years ago in Caracas.’

  ‘Caracas!’ echoed Unity a trifle puzzled. ‘I’m afraid I’m frightfully ignorant, but where exactly is that?’

  ‘It’s the capital of Venezuela. I lived there for nearly seven years.’

  ‘How interesting. You’ve only been on a visit to South Africa, then?’

  ‘That’s all. I was born and brought up there, but my first husband—I’ve been married twice, you know—was an engineer named Piet Brendon. He had a job in Venezuela so he took me out there, but he died after we’d been married only a year and left me more or less high and dry. I could have gone back to my people in Johannesburg, of course, but I didn’t want to—then.’

  ‘So you married again.’

  ‘Yes. I was still under twenty. My second husband, Henriques Ortello, was pretty well off and very persistent. I knew the language enough to talk it fairly fluently by then, and as I’m the lazy kind I preferred an easy life to going home where I should have had to do some sort of job.’

  ‘What is Caracas like to live in?’

  ‘Not bad, provided you steer clear of politics. Of course, no girl can go about the streets alone there, even after she’s married. Upper-class women are treated in the old Spanish fashion and almost as carefully guarded as if they were in a harem. They have their affairs just the same, though, because the men come in over their garden walls at night.’

  ‘It sounds most romantic.’

  ‘I thought that too at first, but Venezuela has its drawbacks. All the men are absolutely crazy about politics, and it’s not much fun never knowing when your boy friend’s going to be bumped off as a Liberal or something. Everyone lived in terror of that until the old Catfish died.’

  ‘The Catfish?’ Unity murmured. ‘Who was he?’

  ‘That was their nickname for the Dictator Gomez. He was an incredible old man who ran the country as though it was his own private boozing-den and brothel from 1890 right up to 1935. No woman was safe from him however highly placed, and he had
over a hundred illegitimate children; but his power was so great that nobody could break it. He made the cattle-market his own personal monopoly and millions out of the oilfields, so he was able to keep an army strong enough to terrorise the whole country. They just imprisoned anyone they suspected was anti-Gomez, without trial; men and women alike; and nine-tenths of the prisoners died in their cells from disease or torture.’

  Unity stared at her in amazement. ‘D’you mean to tell me that sort of thing was still going on in 1935—the year of King George’s Jubilee?’

  ‘Yes. It may sound a bit far-fetched, but it’s perfectly true. All news that reached the outside world was frightfully strictly censored, and although most of the European Governments must have known what was happening they were much too busy with their own affairs to interfere.’

  ‘But torture—in these days?’

  ‘They used to put leg-irons weighing seventy pounds on all the prisoners and hang them up to the ceiling with ropes by their tenderest parts. If the women were attractive they were raped first by the officers and then by the soldiery.’

  ‘It sounds simply too frightful.’

  ‘Things weren’t so bad if you could keep out of prison and out of the way of the old man’s innumerable hangers-on. They were naturally all tarred with the same brush as their lord and master. If one of them took a fancy to a girl she had to make up her mind to a party, or risk herself and her whole family suffering God-knows-what awful fate through being slung into prison on a false accusation of conspiracy.’

  ‘My dear, you have seen life with a vengeance.’

  ‘I didn’t have.…’

  Synolda stopped short. De Brissac had suddenly flung open the door and thrust his head into the galley.

  ‘Land—land!’ he shouted. ‘Get out on deck—we may run ashore any moment.’

  He dashed away and began to bellow down through the fiddley of the engine-room hatch amidships.

  Both girls abandoned their preparations for the midday meal and ran after him. Young Largertöf, who was greasing some gear half-way down the shaft, heard his shouts and attracted Luvia’s attention. The whole party came clattering up the iron ladders on to the deck.

  ‘Land!’ panted Luvia. ‘Where—where?’

  De Brissac led them to the side of the ship and pointed downwards. The mist still shut them in, but it was not too thick for them to see a great patch of seaweed floating alongside.

  ‘You see it,’ exclaimed De Brissac. ‘Algue—seaweed—washed from the rocks by a storm. Where there is weed there must be a coast not far distant.’

  Luvia shook his head dubiously. ‘That doesn’t follow. I’m afraid I’ll have to have a look—see what sort of weed it is before we know for certain. Anyway this stuff might have been washed scores of miles from the rocks on which it grew.’

  He ordered the men below again, with the exception of Basil, and together they hauled the boat up alongside by the rope which kept it trailing in the ship’s wake whichever way she drifted. The two of them went over the side into it and rowed the few strokes necessary to bring them within reach of the patch of weed.

  Leaning over the bow, Luvia thrust his hand into the weed and pulled up a great bunch of it. Basil saw that it was a bright grass-green and grew in long, spiky trails inextricably interwoven. The Finn threw it back into the water and made a grimace.

  ‘De Brissac’s barked up the wrong tree,’ he grunted. ‘This stuff’s called algae, I think. Anyhow, it’s the sort of weed that’s often seen right out in the middle of the ocean.’

  ‘Well?’ Unity called down impatiently as they clambered up the rope ladder again.

  ‘No luck,’ Luvia told her. ‘It’s just ocean weed and we’re probably drifting through a big belt of it.’

  ‘But from where does it come?’ inquired De Brissac.

  ‘That sure is a mystery; nobody seems to know. There’s masses of it in the North Atlantic, about five hundred miles off the coast of Florida, and it’s met with right down to the south-west of Australia, too. They even mark these areas on the map. Come up to the chart-room and I’ll show you.’

  They followed him up the bridge ladder, and, in the deck-house he produced a big map of the world, showing the principal prevailing winds, ocean currents, and seasonal limits of drift ice. Weed seas were clearly marked upon it by hundreds of tiny horizontal black strokes forming irregular patches on the blue grounds of the oceans, with the word ‘weed’ printed across them. North of the equator lay one between the Azores and the West Indies, another to the south-east of Greenland, and a third in the Pacific, north of Hawaii. In the southern hemisphere the weed seemed to be even more prolific. A big patch of it lay to the east of New Zealand, and about a thousand miles south-west of Australia a vast weed continent as large as Germany, France and Italy put together occupied a huge area of those rarely travelled seas. From it, a belt several hundred miles in depth spread out westward, across the great waste of waters girdling the earth for over seven thousand miles, in a wavy streak roughly following the forty-fifth parallel of latitude and passing south of Africa to end off the eastern coast of South America.

  Luvia placed a large finger on the spot. ‘See the weed here; a thousand miles from Patagonia. That’s our position—roughly. I can only guess our longitude as somewhere between thirty degrees and fifty degrees west, but our latitude must be about forty-five degrees south as we’re just entering the weed belt.’

  ‘Does it get thicker as we go further in?’ Unity asked.

  ‘Not a lot if it’s anything like the patch up here,’ he pointed to the seaward area, as big as Spain, which lay north-east of the West Indies. ‘I’ve sailed those waters plenty and for a couple of days or more you see great banks of it drifting with the wind if you’re running down from Europe to Havana.’

  De Brissac peered over his shoulder. ‘That is the Sargasso Sea. I have heard of it, but did not realise that there were others like it elsewhere. Columbus was delayed by it on his voyage to discover America—was he not?’

  ‘I couldn’t say,’ Luvia shrugged. ‘Though I’ve heard tell lots of those old navigators had trouble with the weed. You meet up with it in banks a mile long at times, and that’s not so funny if you’re a sailing ship with only light winds to help you. Steamers can avoid the big patches and cut through the little ones, so it presents no problem at the present day.’

  ‘De Brissac’s right,’ Basil cut in. ‘Columbus did get stuck there for some time on one of his voyages, so did lots of the other early adventurers. There grew up to be quite a legend about it. For centuries people believed that there was a great, central mass of weed and that many ships which were reported lost had got caught in it for good and all.’

  ‘I’ve heard that too,’ Unity agreed. ‘It was thought that the hulks remained there derelict for years and years after their crews had died from lack of food and water, until the timbers rotted and they sank. There were supposed to be Spanish galleons with cargoes of golden doubloons and pieces of eight trapped in the Sargasso Sea.’

  Luvia laughed. ‘That’s all boloney. A Danish research ship chartered the whole area in the ’80s and they would sure have found any place such as you speak of if it existed. The weed in the Sargasso just drifts around in chunks as the wind blows it, and there’s no central mass anywhere. By all the rules it’ll be just the same here. Come on, Sutherland, let’s get back to the engine-room.’

  ‘Right-oh,’ replied Basil cheerfully, and, leaving the girls with De Brissac, they went below.

  By midday Luvia had the boiler-fires raked out and re-lighted. It was now only a question of steady stoking until a sufficient head of steam could be maintained to get the ship under way.

  After the meal he assembled the passengers and crew, told them that hitherto they’d all had to work as many hours as they were able and get what sleep they could between times; but that now he proposed to divide them into watches; upon which he set about the business.

  The watches consisted of
six men apiece. Vicente Vedras, Largertöf, Hansie, Harlem Joe and Isiah Meek forming the starboard watch under Jansen; and Basil, Bremer, Li Foo, Gietto Nudäa and Corncob being drafted to port under Jean De Brissac.

  Luvia gave a watch to the Frenchman in preference to any of the others because his army experience had accustomed him to the command of men, and the rest, knowing that, were unlikely to resent it; but he placed with him Bremer, who was the most experienced of the two seamen. The arrangement also separated the two most likely elements of trouble, Harlem and Nudäa. All the ex-mutineers had become models of good behaviour since they had reboarded the ship, but Luvia was perfectly well aware that appearances were deceptive in such a case and it was all the more likely that they would try and stage something before he could hand them over to the authorities on land.

  He did not propose to take a watch himself as he would have all his work cut out to both navigate the ship and superintend the shifts in the engine-room, so he would have to snatch an hour’s sleep when he could. Synolda and Unity were also excluded from the watches; it being understood that they would continue to work in the galley during the daytime and get a clear rest at nights.

  Jansen’s party went on duty while De Brissac slept, until, at eight bells, he took over for the first dog-watch. When he arrived on deck he saw that the mist had lightened during the afternoon. From the bridge a considerable area of the surrounding sea was now visible. Upon it on every side, like islands in an archipelago, floated large patches of the weed. Many of them were several hundred yards in length and all tailed out like long streamers parallel with the direction of the wind. The ship was drifting nearly broadside-on between two big banks, but a little faster owing to the greater area her hull and tophamper offered to the pressure of the light breeze. There were no wavelets as the weed checked any free movement of the waters and it heaved upon them in a slow, oily swell.

  A great silence brooded over the strange seascape. It seemed incredibly desolate in the evening light and there was something sinister about it. Although all was well on board and there was the cheering prospect that the ship would soon be under way again, heading for a port, De Brissac felt unaccountably depressed and was troubled by the queer imaginative notion that he was no longer living in the twentieth century, but had passed out of time into a dateless period when there was neither land nor sea, only weed and water, so that he gazed on no normal phenomenon, but Earth as it was at the beginning, or might be at the end of the world.