Peter Duck

by Arthur Ransome

  *

  Captain Flint and Peter Duck had been on deck for some time smoking their morning pipes in the shelter of the deckhouse and wondering how soon things would have calmed down enough to let the Wild Cat square away once more for Finisterre. Captain Flint tapped his pipe out on the rail and noticed that nobody except himself and the old seaman had come on deck after breakfast.

  “Funny, they’re so quiet down there,” he said. “I suppose they’ve a lot to talk over with young Bill. Hullo! There’s Nancy …”

  Nancy had come up through the forehatch. She moved unsteadily to the side, and looked over the bulwarks at the grey water and at the white-topped waves that came rolling down to the Wild Cat one after another, threatening to come aboard but never doing so.

  “Hullo, Nancy?” called Captain Flint.

  Nancy looked round, but did not answer.

  “What’s the matter with Nancy?” said Captain Flint. “I thought she’d got over it for good, that first day.”

  Just then Titty, very pale and green, came out of the companion, and stood there, holding on to the mast.

  “You too?” said Captain Flint. “What have you been up to below decks? You were all right last night, and it was much worse then.”

  Titty looked at him as if he were three yards farther away than he was. She slid and scrambled, keeping her feet but nearly falling, down to the bulwarks where she clung on by the shrouds.

  “What’s happened?” asked Captain Flint again.

  “It’s … it’s quite all right,” said Titty, and was dreadfully sick over the side.

  “What can they be doing down there?” said Captain Flint, and he walked round the deckhouse and down the companion into the saloon.

  *

  He found no one in the saloon. But there was a noise of talking in the fo’c’sle. Captain Flint started forward. This is what he heard.

  “That’s two.” The voice was the voice of Bill, who was sitting on a coil of rope talking to John, Susan, Peggy, and Roger.

  “Well, I told them not to try it,” said Susan. “And don’t spit on the floor again, please, Bill. Go on using the old paint can.”

  “I think I’ve had enough for now,” said John.

  “Can’t I try just a tiny bit?” said Roger.

  “No,” said Susan.

  “I’m not going to try it,” said Peggy.

  “I can turn you all up without that,” said Bill. “This seasickness, it’s just nothing. Chewing tobacco ain’t got nothing to do with it. Shall I tell you how they cure me? ‘Don’t you never hold in,’ they said. ‘Get it over the side and feel better,’ they said. And the way they cure me was bacon fat. Have you got any bacon fat?”

  “Yes,” said Peggy.

  “Well, you wants a bit of string,” said Bill. “Then you ties the string to the biggest bit of bacon fat you can swallow. Then you swallows it, keeping a hold on the other end of the string. Then you …”

  There was a noise of scuffling up the ladder and out of the forehatch.

  Roger, with a face the colour of old mousetrap cheese, came bolting out of the fo’c’sle, was brought up sharp by a lurch of the vessel, grabbed at a bulkhead, came skidding through the alleyway into the saloon, dodged Captain Flint, struggled round the table, flung himself at the companion steps and climbed desperately.

  The voice of Bill came again from the fo’c’sle, in tones of mild surprise.

  “Well,” he said, “if they won’t wait to be told …”

  Captain Flint smothered his laughter, turned back, and went up again on deck. By now the whole ship’s company was there, except, of course, Bill. Nancy, Susan and Peggy were up in the bows, looking doubtingly at each other. John was holding on to the capstan, swallowing hard and fast. Titty and Roger were leaning over the bulwarks together. Titty was holding Roger’s head. Mr Duck was taking no notice of them at all, looking at clouds racing across the sky.

  Captain Flint said nothing. He walked slowly forward, in time to see a shock of red hair come up out of the forehatch. Bill, the ragged ends of his blue trousers tucked into a spare pair of sea-boots, lent him by Peggy, climbed out.

  “You keeps a hold of the end of the string,” he was saying, “and you jiggles it, just so’s to shift the bacon …”

  Nancy, Susan and Peggy turned hurriedly away. John gulped.

  “Look here, young man,” said Captain Flint to Bill. “We can’t have you aboard here if you begin the day by putting three-quarters of my crew out of action.”

  “I was just telling ’em how to cure seasickness,” said Bill.

  “Well, suppose you don’t,” said Captain Flint. “Those two mates are doing the cooking, and if you go on the way you’ve started there won’t be any dinner. You’d better stop this and give them a hand with the potatoes.”

  “I’m a rare hand with potatoes,” said Bill willingly. “Gutting herrings, too. There ain’t a boy in Lowestoft can gut herrings like what I can …”

  “All right,” said Captain Flint. “Get those mates to give you some potatoes to peel. But don’t talk to them about herrings. Not yet.”

  “Don’t seem as if they likes to learn about them things,” said Bill.

  *

  Nothing more was said about Bill’s cure for seasickness. Nobody bore him any malice for it, but he learnt that day that there were some things allowed in the Viper that were not allowed in the Wild Cat. After the middle-day dinner Captain Flint, impatient to be getting on, decided that under very much shortened sail she could stand what was left of the gale. Bill showed then, while they were setting the reefed foresail, that at some jobs not one of these children could touch him. Then, when the tiny headsail had been let draw, and the Wild Cat had heeled over and picked herself up to run, and was flying away to the south-west across the Bay of Biscay, Bill went aft, dug out once more his plug of black tobacco, cut himself a small scrap, braced himself close by the steering-wheel, and silently chewing, settled down to watch with an expert eye Captain Flint’s performance as a helmsman.

  “How long have you been chewing tobacco?” asked the skipper suddenly.

  “I begin when I were young,” said Bill. “You needn’t be feared sir. I always spits to loo’ard.”

  “All right,” said Captain Flint. “But don’t waste tobacco on the others, and no chewing below decks or in your cabin.”

  All the rest of that day, all that night, and all the next day, no one was allowed to touch the wheel but Captain Flint and Peter Duck, while the Wild Cat raced for the south among rolling seas that seemed like mountains. Whenever he could, Bill was on deck, watching them. It was only on the second day when the wind began to lessen, that he was at all dissatisfied. He admitted to himself that Captain Flint could steer well enough, though not up to Black Jake. With Peter Duck’s steering he had, of course, no fault to find. But he did think, that second day, that they might have shaken out a reef and carried a bit more sail.

  Once, when Peter Duck sent him into the deckhouse with a message, he stopped to look at the sporting guns that Captain Flint had there standing upright in a rack, with a bit of oily rag stuffed into the mouth of the barrel to keep dirt out.

  “What’s this one?” he asked.

  “Rifle,” said Captain Flint, glancing up from the chart.

  “And this?”

  “Shotgun.”

  “Rabbits and such?” said Bill, looking with greater interest at the third.

  “Elephant-gun, that,” said Captain Flint. “I had it in Ceylon.”

  “There ain’t no elephants aboard the Viper,” said Bill, “but I reckon it’s lucky you got them guns.”

  “We’ve lost the Viper all right, after that last blow,” said Captain Flint, “even if he didn’t go right up the Irish Sea looking for us in that fog.”

  “When Black Jake’s got his teeth into something he don’t let go as easy as that,” said Bill.

  “Cheer up,” said Captain Flint. “We won’t hand you over.”

  “I
wasn’t thinking you would,” said Bill.

  Queer ship, the Wild Cat was, and queer folk aboard her, too. They didn’t seem to take things seriously. They didn’t know Black Jake and his friends. Bill said no more, and went out.

  But Nancy, who had been looking at the pencilled spot on the chart, that Captain Flint had just been putting there to mark their position, followed him. She found him in the lee of the deckhouse looking up at the sails.

  “What’s up, Bill?” she said.

  “If this ship was mine,” said Bill, “and I had Mr Duck aboard her, and knowed that Black Jake was after him, I wouldn’t be sailing her easy. I’d crowd on sail, and carry on till her masts went or I sailed her under. That’s how I’d sail, if I knowed that Black Jake was a-sailing after me.”

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE MADEIRAS AT DUSK

  ON THE FOURTH day after the Wild Cat had dodged the Viper in the fog and picked up the red-haired Bill, the look out (Peggy, as it happened) got a first sight of Finisterre. There had been a good deal of mist after the storm, and Captain Flint had been looking at the log every half-hour or so and spending a lot of time in the deckhouse doing one sum after another to find out how far they must have sailed. He had been very pleased indeed when Peggy had suddenly called out that she saw land. The mist was lifting to the south-east, and there, below it, was the long, steep-browed cape and the rock of Centolo lying off the point, and two or three tunny fishers with their tall sails. Captain Flint came out and sat on the roof of the deckhouse staring proudly at Finisterre almost as if he felt it was his own. After all, he had left the Land’s End in a thick fog, and been hove-to for a good many hours in the storm, and found his way here right across the Bay of Biscay. Anyone thinks well of a point or a lighthouse if it turns up just when and where he has been expecting to see it. And all the crew of the Wild Cat crowded along the rail and took turns with glasses and telescopes in looking at the famous cape.

  It was a long way off, and there was no point in going nearer to it. At least, so Captain Flint thought, and in the end everybody agreed about it. Some of them had at first been thinking that it would be fun to land in Vigo and Lisbon, and anyhow to sail close along the coasts of Spain and Portugal. But there were good reasons why they should not waste a single moment on mere sightseeing.

  “Suppose we go into Vigo,” said Captain Flint, “and spend a couple of days there. Those two days may be just enough to let Black Jake get to Crab Island before us.”

  Peter Duck agreed with Captain Flint, and he had other reasons of his own. “Harbours,” he said, “are all one and all dirt. Well enough if we was hard up for grub or run out of water, but a well-found ship’s no need of them. Now the Thermopylae, she’d be as much as a hundred and twenty days out of Shanghai, and did she ever run into a port where she’d no cargo to land? Of course she didn’t. And why should we? I’m not so set on Crab Island, but that’s where we’re bound for, and I’m all for keeping her sailing till she makes it. We owes it to the ship.”

  “It ain’t as if Black Jake don’t know how to get there,” said Bill, talking it over with the others. “And if he gets there first we’d best go somewhere else.”

  So, though the Wild Cat was no racing clipper like the Thermopylae, but only a little schooner with pole masts and rather small sails for her size, everybody agreed to waste no time that could be saved. Captain Flint took the topsails off her every night, because, he said, in these waters, and with uncertain winds, you never knew when you wouldn’t be jolly glad not to have to take them off in a hurry in the dark. But at earliest dawn he set topsails again. Everybody did the best they could for the little schooner, and the worst that ever John or Nancy or Bill said of each other was to point out that whoever of them was at the wheel had put a waggle in her wake.

  South of Finisterre they found the good weather again. They sailed right down the coast, outside the Burlings and the Farilhoes, those two groups of rocks on which so many vessels have been wrecked. They passed them at night, not seeing the wretched little green light of the Farilhoes until they had long been watching the brilliant gleam and flash of the Burlings, although the Burlings were much farther away. Then, the next morning, they took their departure from Cape Roca, outside Lisbon, and their coastwise sailing was over. Captain Flint set a course for Madeira, and, as Cape Roca dropped below the horizon, they knew they would see no other land until they sighted Porto Santo, nearly six hundred miles away.

  Already those four days crossing the Bay of Biscay had accustomed them to being out of sight of land. Some people would have thought it dull, but there always seemed to be something to look at. It might be the gulls floating after the ship with hardly a flap of their broad wings, swooping down to pick up a scrap of biscuit that somebody had dropped overboard, or flashing close by the bulwarks and catching scraps flung to them in the air. It might be a steamship, a big liner from South America, or a long, low tanker, carrying oil, with its funnel right aft and no derricks, so that anybody could tell at once what it was. Or it might be a school of porpoises, plunging together through the crests of the waves, as if they were swimming a sort of water hurdle race. In and out, their backs gleaming in the sunshine as they turned over and down again, the porpoises raced together, and everybody used to rush to the side to watch them until their white splashes were too far away to be seen. Or it might be flying-fish, glittering silver things shooting out of the side of a wave, their long fins whirring, looking like little bright white flying pheasants, diving into the top of another wave, coming straight through it and out at the other side, and sometimes skimming the water for a long distance before they disappeared in it again.

  There was always something to see. And, besides, there was always something to do. Susan and Peggy were busy from morning to night with their cooking and housekeeping. “Shipkeeping, it ought to be called,” as Roger pointed out one day when Susan said she was too busy housekeeping to knit a stocking cap for Gibber. Gibber, by the way, got his stocking cap all right, but it was knitted by Peter Duck when he had finished darning his socks. He knitted it from blue wool, on the pattern of his own, and Susan, when she saw it, let shipkeeping go hang while she made a red woollen tassel to go on the top of it.

  Every day the main water tank had to be filled up from the small screw-top tanks that were stored under the flooring down below. In this way Susan was able to keep count of exactly how much water they were using. She never had been very good at sums, and neither had Peggy, but long before the end of that voyage nobody could have found fault with their additions and subtractions and divisions. They were calculating all the time, and often Susan would wake up in the early morning thinking that one of the sums had gone wrong, and then she would sit up in her bunk and work it out again, and tell Titty about it, and Titty, in the bunk below, would also have a go with pencil and paper, trying to help. Inside the deckhouse door there was a card, and every time one of those tins from down below was emptied into the main tank, Susan used to tick it off on this card, so that Captain Flint, too, was able to keep an eye on the way the water was going. They were very careful about the water, doing most of their washing in salt water, using special salt-water soap. It did not make much of a lather, and it left them feeling rather sticky, but anything was better than running short of drinking water. And in the end, Captain Flint said that it was all due to Susan that things went off so well. If she had not been so careful with the water they could never have done what they did.

  They kept watches, too. And in fine weather John, Nancy, and Bill, two at a time, or sometimes all three together, had charge of the ship for four hours in the afternoon. They had a compass course to steer. There was no land for them to run into. And anyhow, in case of meeting other ships, or in case the wind played any tricks, they could always bang on the deckhouse door and bring out Peter Duck or Captain Flint, who tried to get some rest during the day, because at night one or other of them was always on deck. Bill, of course, had been steering small sailing vessels e
ver since he could remember, and John and Nancy had learnt a lot about it by the time they had come so far. And, of course, all day, no matter what was going on in the way of shipkeeping, it was the duty of everybody who happened to be on deck to keep a good look out.

  SUMS

  Peter Duck taught them how to make nets, and, taking turns at it themselves, and with a bit of help from him, they made a hammock and slung it between the foremast and the windward shrouds, and collected a good lot of bumps between them, what with trying to get into it or out of it while the Wild Cat went carelessly swinging along, up and down, over the ocean waves. The hammock was a great success, but nobody wanted to stay in it very long. Staying in it meant keeping still, more or less, if you did not want to roll out. They tried playing deck-quoits over the top of it, throwing rope rings (which Peter Duck showed them how to make) to and fro, catching them and throwing them back again. But so many of the rope rings went over the side that they grew tired of making new ones, and Peter Duck said there would be a shortage of spare rope if they went on with that game too long.

  Then they took to skipping. Everybody thought this would be rather a childish game when Captain Flint first suggested it, but they very soon found they could collect bumps even better with the skipping-rope than with the hammock. It was no joke at all, skipping on the sloping deck of a little schooner, especially as the slope of the deck was never the same for more than a second or two at a time. Even Bill saw that there must be something in it when he had watched Captain Flint skipping most solemnly, a hundred skips with the right foot first, a hundred with the left, and then fifty both together, when he sank exhausted on the skylight. Bill tried. He did not sink exhausted on the deck, because he had not time. The deck came up and met him very hard before he had got through his first three skips. In the end they all got pretty good at skipping, and it came a lot cheaper in rope than the deck tennis over the top of the hammock.