Four hours later and the sea itself was settling; the wind moderated and veered a little, so we shook out a reef and bounded again toward the west. There was a tangible sense of relief to be sailing again: everybody laughed easily and the old refrains and jokes were taken out again and dusted off. Patrick and Tom sat down and thrashed out their differences in the matter of boat handling and came to a perfectly sensible agreement. Meanwhile the rest of us had returned to the Jumblies:
And every one said, “If we only live,
We too will go to sea in a Sieve,—
To the hills of the Chankly Bore!”
AS OUR COURSE TOOK us northwest toward the southern tip of Greenland, the ice cap, the greatest repository of frozen freshwater on the planet, the very air began to freeze. We had thought it was cold before, but this was different, and we felt it. And we already had all our cold-weather gear on, so there was nothing left to add.
Day after day we scudded on toward the west, sometimes chugging along with the engine, sometimes driven like a leaf before a gale, and at others, more rarely, gliding across the shining swell with the wind behind us. This was a lovely motion that tended, with its feeling of being lifted and gently hurled forward to where we wanted to go, to induce in us all a mild euphoria. Sometimes the clouds lifted a little and then there was an intense, crystalline brightness to the air and the sea. The sea would turn glassy all around, not a ship, not a boat; nobody else was crazy enough to be out and up at these sort of latitudes. All the more sensible sailors were cruising across the milder bluer seas of the world: the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, and it made us feel just the tiniest bit sanctimonious.
On one of those glassy days, I was leaning on the shrouds, staring idly around, when I noticed the slightest puckering of the surface away in the distance … then nothing. I must have imagined it … but then again, a little more and closer. Patrick noticed it too. Soon it was unmistakable. Dolphins. There were scores of them, and they came racing playfully from the distant horizon toward our boat, leaping like puppies and dancing and diving as they came. I had never seen dolphins before and I was unprepared, so far out in the loveless wastes of the northern ocean, for such a dazzling display of physical exuberance.
They gathered round the boat and rolled and dived beneath the hull; they weaved joyously among one another as they hurtled along riding the bow wave, now diving deep, now leaping full clear of the water. A little ahead and to one side a dolphin leaped right out of the water and with muscular thrusts of its tail, performed two or three skips across the surface before falling with a great splosh back beneath the waves. They didn’t tire of their games; they played and played, on and on … and we too were almost leaping with excitement on the deck. Hannah squealed with utter delight; we were all swept up in the same astonished thrill. I climbed the mast and from high above the deck watched their glorious antics. The water was clear and I could see their great dark glistening bodies way below us, spiraling up and twisting over to show their pale undersides.
You couldn’t help but be foolish and imagine that those tiny eyes of theirs, deep in their protective hoods of blubber, were smiling and laughing at the sheer fun of it. I had seen a similar phenomenon with a flock of crag martins, forty or so of them horsing around in the sunshine and shade of the rocks by the shore in Greece. The only explanation I could possibly think of for this behavior was that it was a manifestation of sheer animal joy. Me, I found myself whooping with pleasure. All the cold and the boredom and the misery and the fear of the journey were amply repaid by such a sight.
The others were a little dewy-eyed about the dolphins, too, for although every long-distance sailor has often seen them, it’s a sight you don’t tire of. And from here on, as we crossed the Greenland Sea, there were dolphins with us almost all the time, and we felt comforted by the presence of such benignity. Until now we had had the birds: fulmars and skuas and cormorants and gannets; creatures that had both moved and fascinated us, and kept us company in times and places of loneliness and fear. For this I’d felt a certain gratitude and respect. But the dolphins … well, the dolphins are mammals; they are “one of us.”
WE HAD BEEN HOPING to make a landfall on the coast of Greenland, but the ice reports had not painted a rosy picture of the seaways up to those ports: there was pack ice and drifting ice, and the westerlies had blown all the ice from the west side of the Sea of Labrador over to the east, where it was blocking access to the coast. This, of course, was back in the 1980s; if you’d a mind to today, you could sail round the Greenland coast in your little Cornish Crabber. There’s almost no sea ice left anymore.
“Trouble is,” said Tom, “that you can be sailing in the evening through waters lightly packed with thin sheets of ice that just tickle the sides of the boat as she passes, and then you wake up in the morning and it’s turned to slabs of pack ice six feet thick. That’s the way it is up in these beastly latitudes. Give me the Torrible Zone any day … and the hills of the Chankly Bore.”
So we didn’t make Greenland—it was just too damn dangerous in a wooden boat—although that evening we passed close enough to the southern tip to be able to make out, in the faintest of pastel blues, Cape Farewell. We watched it wistfully for an hour or two as we passed and warmed our bellies with whisky.
The next day there was mist in the morning, and something new to talk about: John had spotted a growler.
“So tell me about your growler,” I suggested as I emerged on deck.
“You can see for yourself,” said John. “There it is, right behind us.”
I looked back to where he was pointing. There it was, a rather unexciting block of white ice bobbing about on the sea.
“It doesn’t look much to me,” I said, a little disparagingly.
“It may not look much to you, Chris,” said Tom. “But if we’d hit it at the speed we were going, it would have stoved in the front of the boat, and we wouldn’t have been here now, nicely up on the surface of the sea; we’d have been well on our way down below it. From now on, this being growler country—and maybe there’ll even be icebergs, too—we’re having a man on the bow on lookout day and night. So off you go and wipe the breakfast out of your beard and then get shackled on to the forestay; it’s your turn first.”
Keeping watch on the forestay was different from being in the cockpit. There was no shelter for a start; you were right out there on the front of the boat, peering keenly into the mist. You had to see the growlers and bergs; it was simply a question of life and death. This made me feel very important, and feeling important kept me good and alert for at least fifteen minutes. But then the intense cold and the tedium of the thing began to kick in. There didn’t seem to be any more growlers in this particular patch of sea. I turned round and grinned at Patrick, who was at the helm. He waved back. Then I jumped up and down a bit, to see if I couldn’t get some circulation going again. Next I leaned my back against the forestay and recited the whole of “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” then I did “The Jumblies.” And then I saw the growler.
It was a hundred yards away off the port bow, so it didn’t pose any threat to us. “Growler off the port bow, Pat,” I said in a seamanlike way, mainly in order to give the impression that I was alert and doing my job. We watched it as it bobbed away into the mist. That’s what growlers do: they move with the waves, in contrast to an iceberg, which sits foursquare and serene. Growlers are chips off icebergs or broken bits of pack ice that have fled south on the winds and tides. They tend to be somewhere between the size of a small room and a big house, and they get scattered all over the northern oceans. Of course, to a great ship of iron and steel they barely represent a hazard, but to a small wooden boat like ours a collision with a growler would mean the end of the line for us all.
I resumed my watch; there was nothing to see as we butted on through the mist. I stared and stared as hard as I could, and soon there seemed to be wraiths and plumes of swirling cloud in the enfolding whiteness, and then shadows of gray that m
ight be the walls of soaring icebergs just ahead, or more likely just the play of the breeze in the mist. I looked down into the bow wave to reset my vision. I looked up and there was a growler dead ahead.
“GROWLERDEADAHEADPAT!!” I yelled. “HARD A STARBOARD NOW!”
Patrick swung the wheel hard over, and the growler slipped along the port side. It glowed and gleamed in purest white and turquoise and froze the very air around it. Patrick spun the helm back and the sails took up the wind once more.
“Blimey, that was a close one,” I said, as I wiped the mist from my glasses. “I think it’s your turn up on the front now, Pat. I’m about frozen solid.”
“You’ve another fifteen minutes, by my reckoning.”
I grumbled quietly and wrapped myself tightly around the forestay, peering still into the mist. There was something out there, something enormous.
“WHAT IN THE NAME OF HEAVEN IS THAT, PAT?” I shouted.
“What, where?”
“That bloody great thing lying on the water over there, look at it!”
“Holy mother of God, it’s a whale. It’s a bloody great whale!”
Patrick stood up and looked openmouthed at the apparition, then shouted down the companionway: “Whale ahoy!” Then he felt a little self-conscious about what he’d just shouted and said, “There’s a whale up here, lads, come and have a look,” but this time more quietly.
Now, the whale was not like the dolphins; it wasn’t horsing about, it was much quieter, more dignified. Then it blew, a great wet whoomph from its blowhole, and over all the Labrador Sea there spread a great miasma of marine flatulence, a thing with overtones of krill and plankton and seaweed and whole hosts of the fishy animalcules of the northern oceans.
By now everybody was sitting on deck in awed silence. It was as if we had just seen God.
“Pooh,” said Hannah, pinching her nose, then thought better of it and joined in the awe.
The great creature swished its flukes idly and drifted through the water, easily keeping pace with us. It was bigger even than the boat, probably sixty feet or more. It was a finback, one of the most enormous creatures on the planet. There we were drifting in perfect silence alongside one of the few remaining survivors of the great whales, for man has pursued and hunted these peaceful creatures to the very verge of extinction. I had seen film of the appalling things we do to whales, of the pilot whale cull in the Faroe Islands, where they corral hundreds of these small whales into a shallow bay, using motorboats and nets. Then, when the poor confused creatures find themselves in water too shallow to maneuver, they are set upon and butchered by scores of men wielding axes and flensing hooks. The sea runs literally red with their blood. And this is done not as a matter of survival, nor of necessity, but as a ritual for men to prove their manhood.
Two hundred years of whaling doesn’t seem to have convinced whales of the evil intentions of men, and they have retained their peacefulness and their curiosity. For a long time our finback kept station with the boat, as if it were interested in us. Then eventually it sounded again and dived, leaving us with a flourish of its colossal flukes, shiny, barnacled, and running with seawater.
NIGHT BEGAN TO FALL as we ran toward the coast of Newfoundland, a deeper, darker night than we had been used to, for the summer was drawing on, and by this time we were a lot farther south. Once again the port and starboard lamps glowed red and green against the mainsail. The wind had come round behind us at last, and we were loping along in great bounds across a long lazy swell. There was a mood of high anticipation onboard, as after nineteen days at sea it looked like we might at last see land.
Tom was on deck, staring ahead into the falling darkness; I was at the helm with Patrick perched out on the bow. There was still a risk of the occasional growler, and we had recently picked up a signal on our radio direction finder, a series of four beeps followed by a silence, like the flashes and occlusions of a lighthouse. The pattern told us that the beacon was on the coast of northern Newfoundland. Unfortunately, because we couldn’t get another signal, we had no way of establishing exactly how far we were from the coast. We knew the line down which we were sailing to reach the coast, but had no idea of where we were on it. We hadn’t had a reliable sun sight for several days because we had been sailing through mists, probably caused by warm air currents colliding with cold air currents or some such thing.
Anyway, Tom didn’t like it.
“We’re running down onto a lee shore with a big wind up our arse, night falling fast, and no way of knowing how far off we are. It’s a classic recipe for disaster. No one’s going to like this, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to turn around and head back the way we’ve come.”
We looked gloomily into the rushing dark. So near and yet so far. We had all been looking forward so much to the land. On land there were women and there was beer and bars, and flowers and trees and a certain undeniable solidity to things, which was conspicuously lacking at sea. We all wanted it … and we wanted it tonight.
“Pat,” called Tom to the shadowy figure hanging from the forestay. “I think we’re going to have to beat back out to sea. What do you reckon?”
“Well, I tell you what, skipper: I think you’d be crazy to keep running in toward this coast in the dark. I may be hallucinating out here on the bow, but I keep thinking I can hear the sound of waves crashing onto rocks. We could be fifty miles off … but we could be no more than half a mile away.”
“OK, Chris,” ordered Tom. “Bring her about. Pat, you come back here and haul in the foresail sheets.”
I swung the wheel and the boat described a great curve away from the longed-for land. Tom hauled in the yards and yards of mainsheet, and we resumed our more usual motion of beating hard into an oncoming sea.
And so all the long dark hours of that night we fled from the land, for if there’s anything more terrifying than the fathomless depths of the ocean—and, let’s face it, they’re pretty terrifying—then it’s the hungry rocks of the land. If worldwide there is a big ship lost at sea once a week (for that is the figure), then the figure for ships wrecked on the rocks must be many times that.
At dawn, however, we turned again and ran toward the south. I was asleep when the lookout spied the land, at first the faintest of blue lines on the southern horizon, and by the time I came on deck there was a distinct line of low, green hills. It was still a long way off but we could already smell it. I had thought this was the most fanciful of notions—the belief that sailors can smell the land long before they see it—but take it from me, you can. We were all on deck in the early morning, bundled up against the cold and sniffing the air like a pack of dogs. I could smell flowers (which is what you’re supposed to be able to smell), and I could also smell bread and women, and cakes and hay. It seemed extraordinary, and I wondered about it for a bit, and came to the conclusion that we were closing with an entire continent, and that from Halifax to Vancouver there were countless bakers baking bread and cakes, and millions of women scented and powdered, and prairies of new-mown hay drying in the August sunshine. All these scents were rising on the cushion of warm air above the land and falling to earth over the cooler sea, where they drove mariners insane with longing for the loveliness of the land.
The New World
NOW, THE IMPORTANT THING when you make a landfall, as I well knew from my experience in Greece, is that your boat looks good. The wind and the tides were on our side and we were able to make our approach into the bay of Quirpon all standing, which means with all the sails up and looking pretty damn good for the benefit of any nautical-minded folk who might be watching. At the last minute we rounded up, dropped the bags, and, with the skipper standing proud at the wheel, edged in to the long wooden jetty. Mike sprang across the narrowing gap with the head rope; I took the stern line and we made fast to a couple of bollards.
Then we climbed back onboard and joined in the general preparations for going ashore. This meant folding the sails tight and neat in a “harbor stow,” fla
king down all the ropes and lines, and generally tidying up the boat. Then we washed and shaved in salt water from buckets on the deck, and finally dressed ourselves in clean, dry finery for that great moment when we would march along the dock and greet the natives. It was pretty exciting for Mike and me, as neither of us had set foot on the soil of the New World before, and we were unsure what to expect.
On the jetty were a number of men all dressed more or less alike in dungarees, thick checked shirts, and baseball caps. They were bent intently over what they were doing … mending nets, I shouldn’t wonder, as it’s fishing that makes things tick around these parts. Not one of them so much as raised his head at our arrival; to our surprise, and indeed chagrin, they took not the slightest bit of notice. It was hard to believe: you’d have thought that the arrival out of the northeast of a boat that looked like something out of a romantic historical drama, with all her sails set and flags flying, would have excited a certain interest. But no—these were the most phlegmatic of men.
“Right,” said Tom. “I guess we’d better go and make ourselves known to these good people.”
We all climbed over the rail and onto the dock. Together we took two swaggering strides and promptly keeled right over … all of us in a chaotic and undignified heap. At this, one or two of the fishermen almost imperceptibly raised their heads and mumbled something with the faintest play of a smile. We picked ourselves up and, with circumspection and intense concentration, stumbled on. You get your sea legs, but when you’ve been at sea for days on end you lose your land legs, and so our first longed-for taste of terra firma was letting us down; the land was rolling and lurching, so it seemed, all over the place.
Three Ways to Capsize a Boat Page 12
