The Highwayman

by F. M. Parker

“The wind has been blowing from the west ever since we raised the sail and that means we’ve been offset quite a bit to the east,” Swallow said as he relinquished the tiller to Patrick.

  “That’s no problem for that’s the direction we’ll soon take.”

  “Right you are. Wake me when it’s my turn again.” Wearing his foul-weather clothing, Swallow crawled forward and under the blankets.

  *

  Patrick sailed to the south, making the adjustments to keep the mainsail and jib working together and drawing strongly. In the late evening, he spotted a ship on the southwestern horizon. It carried three masts, for and aft rigged and driving under full sail. Probably heading for Sydney, he thought. If it held its course, it would pass some two miles west of him. That would put his boat within sight of the ship’s lookout. He dropped the main and jib to lessen the boats visibility.

  He watched as the sails of the ship turned red in the rays of the evening sun. By the time the ship was off the beam of Patrick’s boat, the sun had dropped below the horizon and the sky was gray. The ship drove silently on and vanished into the deepening gloom of night like a ghost ship.

  Patrick raised the sails and swung to an east heading. This brought the wind dead astern. He loosened the sheet to allow the mainsail to extend out at right angles to the wind. Running before the wind, the speed of the boat increased a couple of knots.

  With darkness, the wind grew stronger and the waves larger and frothed with white. The boat struggled up the moving hills of water and plunged down into the foamy valleys. The violent motion of the boat woke Swallow. He sat up and looked at Patrick.

  “Anything I can do?” Swallow called out above the hiss of the wind and rumble and splash of the sea.

  “Yes, reef the sail about half way.”

  “Right.” Swallow crawled to the mast, released the halyard to lower the sail part way, and reefed its foot.

  “Take the tiller for a while,” Patrick said. “I’m going to tie the canvas across the bow to keep out as much water as possible. Then we’ll bail some.”

  “Good idea,” Swallow called back. He moved to the stern and took the tiller from Patrick.

  The strong wind fought Patrick for the canvas. He finally secured it over the bow of the boat and brought it back to the mast. Then after another battle with the wind, he brought the corners of the canvas back over the boat and lashed them to the gunwales near the stern. The boat was now covered except for a V area with its apex at the mast and its base at the stern. Patrick turned to with the bucket and bailed the boat dry.

  “She looks shipshape,” Swallow called out above the whistling wind. “Okay if I rest a little more.”

  Patrick nodded his approval. “You do that.”

  Swallow released the tiller to Patrick, and crept forward and ducked under the canvas and out of sight.

  Patrick checked the sky. A high, thin haze blurred the stars. Still the Southern Cross lying off on his right was visible to steer by. He hoped the night didn’t become cloudy and hide that valuable guidepost.

  He was ravenously hungry and thirsty for he had taken nourishment only one time during the day. He roped the tiller left and right to the gunwales to hold it in position to temporarily maintain course. Working swiftly, he removed the bung from the water cask and drank his ration of water. After replugging the water cask, he dug out a handful of dried apples and a piece of dried fish.

  The boat was falling off to leeward and bringing the wind around toward the beam, a dangerous position. He went swiftly to the tiller and brought the boat back on course, with the wind and waves dead astern. He ate as he steered. The quantity of food was meager; still it took the edge off his hunger.

  The boat rose and fell as the waves raced past beneath it. Though Patrick couldn’t see their true dimensions in the frail moonshine, he sensed their huge size, now towering over him, now beneath and hoisting him skywards. A mixture of exhilaration and worry held him as he was hurled ahead by the wind into the darkness and the hidden giant waves.

  The boat raced on with the wind howling past. Now and again the bow caught a wave wrong and the cold sea came hurtling out of the blackness and back over the boat to hit Patrick. How large a wave, how strong a wind could the small chip of a boat withstand without sinking? He may soon find out.

  Midnight came, as Patrick estimated by the stars. He called Swallow to relieve him. Without a word the crippled man crawled out of the blankets and came to the stern.

  “It’s a mean sea,” Swallow said and staring into the night.

  “Don’t let the boat get broadside to the waves,” Patrick warned.

  “I’ll do my damn best,” Swallow said peevishly.

  “I know you will.”

  Swallow seated himself, braced his good leg against one of the boat’s ribs, and took the tiller. Patrick went forward slid under the canvas and wrapped himself in the cold, damp blankets. He worried whether or not Swallow was strong enough to control the boat in the rough sea. He went to sleep with that worrisome thought on his mind.

  CHAPTER 28

  Patrick jerked awake with a gasp as he was rolled against the side of the boat and frigid water cascaded over him. The boat lay nearly on its beam end. He came to his knees with his head jammed against the canvas, just as the boat flopped back onto its keel. On hands and knees he scrambled from under the canvas to the weak light of dawn illuminating the sea.

  Swallow was overboard, immersed in the water to his chest, and hanging onto the tiller that was swung far outboard. His panic stricken eyes caught Patrick’s.

  “Help me, Patrick!” he cried. “For God’s sake, help me fast.”

  Patrick lunged to the stern and grabbed Swallow by the arm and yanked powerfully. Swallow came in over the gunwale with his clothing pouring water and tumbled into the bottom of the boat. Immediately Patrick caught hold of the tiller and swung it hard and brought the boat on a heading to put the wind square on the stern.

  “A giant wave like you’ve never seen hit us,” Swallow cried. “It rolled us so far that I thought we were going to be capsized and drown for sure.” His body shivered and shook. He hugged himself around his chest. “I’m freezing to death.”

  “Damn shame we don’t have dry clothes for you,” Patrick said and feeling sorry for the poor fellow.

  Patrick looked down into the bottom of the boat where water swept back and forth from stem to stern. “She’s taken on at least a foot of water. We’ve got to do some fast bailing for she can’t take the sea with this load.”

  He motioned at Swallow. “Take the tiller and hold the boat steady as you can while I bail.”

  Swallow took up a length of rope from the bottom of the boat and held it out to Patrick with a shivering hand. “Tie me to the boat. From now on any time the sea is rough, I want to be tied on for I can’t swim.”

  “Wouldn’t do you any good if you could swim. There’s no way I could turn the boat around to pick you up if you went overboard.”

  Patrick fastened one end of the rope to Swallow’s waist and the other to the center seat. He quickly snatched up the bucket and began to scoop up the water and fling it back into the sea.

  Propping himself as best he could in the pitching and rolling vessel, Patrick worked speedily with the bailing. When down to the dredges of water, he tied the bucket to the boat with a line to insure that important piece of equipment wasn’t lost overboard.

  He went forward and checked the bedding. “Everything is soaked,” he called out to Swallow.

  Patrick’s worry mounted as he twisted the water out of the blankets as best he could. He was wet to his waist, half wet above that, and shivering with the cold. Swallow was totally wet and must be suffering terribly. They needed dry clothing and a dry place to rest. They had neither.

  He spread the bedding back under the canvas and then went and sat down on the stern seat beside Swallow. “Go cover up and try to get warm,” he said and taking the tiller from the shivering man.

  Moving stiff as
a wooden puppet, Swallow made his way forward and under the canvas to the blankets.

  Patrick watched the small figure disappear. He was helpless to aid his comrade. They were at the mercy of the sea. The sea had no mercy.

  *

  Waves twelve feet, fifteen feet tall chased Patrick through the morning, overtaking the boat, raising it high on their crests and then dropping it with a crash and a spray of water into the chasms that followed. The sails stretched taut and hard on the climb up the wave to its crown. In the forward plunge into the hollow, the sails were back-winded and emptied and flapped and popped. He worried that the sails would rip and leave the boat unable to catch and ride the wind.

  He kept a careful watch to the rear to be prepared for the arrival of one of the extra large gray-black hills of water that now and again overtook them. Should one of those towering waves break and fall upon them, the tons of water would drive the boat to the bottom of the sea.

  Patrick sailed the boat onward through the turbulent sea to the end of the day and did not call Swallow for a turn at the tiller. As the evening grew old, thick dark clouds appeared on the western horizon, and moving fast, drove in under the sun and killed its weak flame. The wind crept around to blow half a gale from the south. The wind was frigid, coming straight from the Antarctic the birthplace of blizzards. It brought hard, flinty snow and flung it to sting like fire against Patrick’s face. He squinted into the wind and whispered to it. “You seem to be trying to kill Swallow and me. Now I’d like it if you’d ease up and didn’t try so damn hard.”

  The south winds fought with the waves that had been created by the west winds and the struggle created a tortured sea with currents driving different directions and fighting for the right of way. The boat yawed, and rolled, and pitched crazily, sometimes riding the westerly waves and then a moment later riding the growing waves created by the south wind. Patrick dropped the mainsail and lashed it down, and ran with only the jib. He could not hold a steady course. For now he would be satisfied to just stay afloat. He hunkered down to endure the flogging from the glacial wind.

  The snow fell upon Patrick all night and piled up four inches on the boat. By the time the first pale glimmer of day arrived, his face was frozen into a stiff mask and his fingers rigid talons locked around the tiller bar. He needed relief.

  “Swallow,” he called. “It’s your turn to steer.”

  Swallow crawled from under the snow-covered canvass. He began to shake in every limb as the swift Antarctic wind whipped away the little body heat he had built up wrapped in the damp blankets. Still he stoically reached out to take the tiller from Patrick.

  “Go back under the canvas,” Patrick said upon seeing Swallow’s weakened condition. He feared Swallow might lose control of the boat and allow it to be breached by one of the huge waves. “I’ll steer for a couple more hours. Maybe the sun can find a hole in the clouds and give us a little warmth.”

  Swallow looked into Patrick’s face. He said not a word, but his eyes were full of gratitude. He nodded and crawled back under the canvas and wrapped himself in the damp blankets.

  When full daylight arrived, the snow ceased. Patrick searched the seas, waiting until the boat topped a wave and from that perch flinging a quick look around. Nothing was in sight, not even a bird braved the wind-harassed sky. The frigid sea was theirs alone and its emptiness inspired in him a feeling of man’s insignificance; that he did not matter at all.

  Patrick hoisted the mainsail to work with the jib and guided the frail craft eastward through the huge waves that rolled under him, thousands upon thousands, never ending. In the evening the wind veered back to blow from the west. For six days the wind held steady, keeping the sails full and hurrying them to the east. Patrick shot the sun with the sextant, checked his readings in the navigator tables and found they were at latitude 45 degrees and 30 minutes south. That put them on course for the desired landfall of New Zealand.

  The eighth day dawned extremely cold with the pale winter sun giving no warmth. In early morning the wind went off to some unknown place and left them becalmed. The sea was still restless with memories of the past winds and rollers of indigo and malachite water rose and fell and tossed the boat about.

  Patrick and Swallow rigged fishing lines, fashioned bait from pieces of dried fish, and dropped the lines into the water from the gunwales. They waited anticipating a fish to strike and ready to haul it in. They waited hour after hour but the lines hung limp.

  A flock of a score or so petrels with lead gray under-body and dusky black upper-body and pale legs folded tightly to their bodies came skimming in close above the water. They halted some thirty yards from the boat and rose to about the height of the peak of the mast and began to circle. With an occasional flap of the wings to maintain altitude, they studied the water below them. This went on for nearly a minute. Then as if the birds had called fish to them by some form of magic, a school of fish began to stir and roil the water beneath them. Now and again the sleek body of a fish some six to eight inches long shot out of the water and for an instant became airborne to sparkle like silver in the winter sun.

  The birds began to feed, with two or three of them at a time folding their wings and plunging head first into the sea. More often than not, each skilled aerial hunter lifted aloft with a flopping fish in its beak. Patrick envied the birds their skill at fishing and the fine feast they were enjoying. After a couple of minutes the fish vanished from the surface and the birds went off on their hunt.

  The men fished on through the day and the night and the next day without one fish taking their bait. The wind stayed lost in some remote place and the ocean quieted and the boat lay dead in the water.

  On the fourth day near noon, a dark gray body of huge size breached and blew a jet of moist air from the vent in the top of its head. In the frosty air, the whale’s breath turned instantly into a jet of fine ice crystals that glowed like a million tiny white diamonds in the sun. The whale, more than three times the length of the boat, swung its broad tail and came gliding to inspect the strange object in its domain. It halted with its head at a distance from the boat that a tall man could span with his arms. The beast lay quietly and stared with its huge brown eyes at the boat and the man. The whale’s sides carried patches of barnacles, and there were scars resulting from wounds now healed. One scar was a foot wide and stretched along the animal’s side for eight or so feet. Others were circular and the size of a dinner plate. Even a beast as large and powerful as this one had enemies in the depths of the sea.

  A slightly younger whale surfaced close beside the first. It too expelled its silver jet of breath and came drifting close to examine the boat. And a third and a fourth whale appeared. These last two had calves, tiny miniatures of their elders. The calves, their skins smooth and unblemished, held close station on their mothers’ sides. From the mixed sizes of the group, Patrick thought they might be a family unit, perhaps a large female and her daughters and their offspring.

  The last arrivals also found interest in the boat and glided up to investigate. With their heads almost touching the boat, they lay encircling it, their tapering bodies radiating outward like the petals of a flower around its center. So close were the whales that Patrick caught the musty smell of their breath. He was surprised by their action for he had heard they were difficult to approach. He was extremely hungry, but had no harpoon, no way to kill one of the calves for food. What would the adults have done should he have been equipped to hunt and had slain one of the calves? Would they attack the boat, or would they flee?

  The whale that had arrived first now moved forward and nudged the boat with its head. A gentle touch as if meaning no harm but just making an examination to determine what kind of a creature the boat was. Still the boat was jarred and Patrick held to the gunwale to keep from being unseated. He was glad for the gentle attitude of the animals. One butt of a head or slap of a tail could crush and sink the thin shell of wood within which Swallow and he survived.

  �
�Swallow, come take a look at our visitors,” Patrick called.

  “What is it,” Swallow asked as he crawled out from under the canvas.

  “Well I’ll be, whales,” Swallow said upon seeing the gargantuan animals.

  The two men sat silently and with little movement for half an hour as the whales lay benignly loafing near the boat and now and again venting their breath with hissing sounds into the air. Patrick saw what he thought was an intelligent curiosity in the eyes of the sea animals. This was their world. What were they thinking as they intently studied this odd thing they had come upon?

  One of the calves flipped its twin flukes and came closer to the boat. Patrick reached out slowly and gently rubbed the calf’s forehead. The skin was leathery, but soft and smooth as an old glove, and cold. Patrick knew that with its layer of blubber the baby did not feel the chill of the far south sea as he did. It endured the human touch with its eyes turned up at the man. Patrick saw an expression come into the calf’s eyes. Was the expression one of pleasure? Could this youngster be enjoying the caressing?

  After half a minute, and with the slightest movement of its tail, the calf backed away just beyond Patrick’s reach. Immediately and for no reason Patrick could determine, the grandmother whale gave a splash with her broad set of flukes and sank back into the depths of the sea. A spray of sea fell upon the boat, and it was rocked by the wave generated by the large body submerging. The other whales followed one by one, with the calf that had been petted being the last, and all disappearing within a handful of seconds, to continue their endless wandering of the great deep.

  On the tenth day just after noon with Patrick on watch, the wind came alive, roaring out of the north and bringing large white-capped waves with it. Within minutes, the heavens filled with ice mist and the sun became but a ghost disk barely visible. Patrick called for Swallow, who came from under the canvas as fast as his lame body could move.

  “We can’t fight it,” Patrick shouted above the tumult of the wind and sea. “Take the tiller while I get the main down. Let her go with the wind.”