by Tim Severin
‘Couldn’t be worse than what the Spaniards will do to us if we stay around here,’ said Jacques.
Ringrose treated him to a sardonic smile. ‘You forget that we are the rump of an irregular expedition. Captain Sharpe and his friends left Jamaica without so much as by-your-leave to the governor. Not one of our leaders carried a commission to go raiding the Main. That makes us all pirates, if the authorities choose to think so.’
‘But Sir Henry Morgan never obtained prior permission when he attacked Panama, and he finished up with a knighthood,’ Hector objected.
‘He brought back so much plunder that he was too wealthy to be prosecuted. By contrast, what have we got to show for our efforts? A few hundred pieces of eight for every man? That’s not enough to buy our way out of trouble. Besides, we don’t have Morgan’s connections with the rich and powerful.’
There was a short silence, then Ringrose was speaking again. ‘In the time we’ve been gone from Jamaica, anything can have happened. A new king on the throne, a different governor, wars declared and peace treaties signed. We’ve no idea of what might have changed, and how that will affect our return. We’ll not find out until we get there.’ He glanced up at the sky. ‘Sun’s close to its zenith, Hector.’
Hector walked aft with him to where Sidias was sitting cross-legged on the deck, still absorbed in his game of backgammon. He did not even glance up as their shadows passed over him. Ringrose took the noon sight and wrote down the reading. Hector noticed that his hand was shaking.
‘How long do you think it is before we reach the mouth of the Passage?’ Ringrose said, speaking loudly so that Sidias could no longer ignore him.
The Greek looked up grudgingly. He wrinkled his brow as if in deep thought before announcing, ‘Five or six weeks.’ Then he turned his attention back to the tavil board and ostentatiously moved one of the counters, making it clear that he had no interest in further conversation.
SIX WEEKS out from Paita, Sidias declared it was time to steer back towards the land and Sharpe followed his advice. As if to endorse the decision, the wind shifted into the ideal quarter, south-west, and with a fresh gale on the beam Trinity fairly tore along. The mood on the ship quickly became light-hearted and expectant. For some time past there had been a drop in the temperature of the air, and the men guessed that they were now far enough south to be in the region of the Passage. They acted with a careless exuberance as if to celebrate the final leg of their voyage. Hidden stocks of brandy and rum were broached, and several of the crew were fuddled, staggering and tripping as they made their way about the deck. Hector, however, was increasingly uneasy. He and Ringrose had been using dead reckoning to fix the ship’s position. From time to time the two of them had disagreed on progress, the number of miles sailed, and whether or not there had been an ocean current taking them off track. On each occasion Hector had deferred to the more experienced man, partly because Ringrose’s illness had made him argumentative and tetchy. Only the readings from the backstaff could be relied on, and they placed the vessel at 50 degrees south. But that was no indication of how close they were to land, and Hector had long ago decided that Sidias was worse than useless. The Greek was a gambler by nature, and would trust to luck that they would make a safe arrival on the coast. Whenever asked how soon they would raise the land, Sidias was evasive. His job, he always answered, was to identify the landfall, then indicate which way the ship should go. The Greek was so aloof that Hector felt obliged to seek him out that evening and ask if he was not concerned about how he would get back to Paita. In reply the Greek gave a dismissive shrug. ‘What makes you think I want to leave this ship? There’s no reason for me to return to Paita.’
‘But you told me that the Alcalde forced you to become our pilot.’
‘And he will make my life miserable once again if ever I return there. So I prefer to stay with this company.’
Taken aback by the Greek’s self-regard, Hector went to join his friends. It was too chilly at night to sleep on deck, and they had slung hammocks in the aft end of the hold. Groping his way through the semi-darkness, he found Jezreel and Jacques already sound asleep. Only Dan was awake and when Hector told him of his concerns about Sidias’ competence, Dan advised him not to fret. Perhaps in the morning they would have a chance to look through the notes copied from Lopez’s derotero and see if they would be useful when they eventually made a landfall. In the meantime there was nothing to be done, and Hector should get some rest. But Hector was unable to sleep. He lay in his hammock, listening to the swirl of water along the hull and the creaking and working of the ship as Trinity forced her way through the sea.
Hector must have dozed off, for he came sharply awake to the sound of roars of panic. They came from directly above him, from the quarterdeck, and were loud enough to be heard above the sound of the waves crashing against the wooden hull. Trinity was heaving and pitching awkwardly, and water was surging back and forth across the bilge. The wind had increased in strength. In the pitch dark Hector rolled out of his hammock and felt for his sea coat. All around him were the noises of men scrambling out of their hammocks, asking questions, wondering what was happening. The shouts came again, more urgent now. He heard the words ‘Cliffs! Land ahead!’
Clambering up the companion ladder and onto the quarterdeck, he came upon a scene of confusion. A sliver of moon rode a sky streaked with skeins of high, thin cloud. There was just enough light to show men frantically hauling on ropes, scrambling to reduce sail, and when he looked aft, the figure of Bartholomew Sharpe beside the helm.
‘White water close on the port bow!’ came a terror-stricken shout from the bows.
‘Get the topsails off! Quick now!’ bellowed Sharpe. He was half-dressed and must have run out from his cabin. A high-pitched squealing, frenzied and unearthly, set Hector’s teeth on edge. For a moment he froze. Then he remembered that among the stores loaded at Paita had been a half-grown sow. The animal was being kept as a Christmas feast. She had sensed the mood of terror on board and was squealing in fright.
Sharpe caught sight of Hector and beckoned him over with furious gestures. ‘That cursed numbskull of a pilot!’ he shouted above the roar of the wind. ‘We’re entangled among rocks!’
Looking forward over the bowsprit, Hector caught a glimpse of something which showed white for a brief moment. Perhaps a hundred paces ahead, it was low down and above it loomed what seemed to be a darker shape though he could not be sure. Even with his limited experience he half-recognised waves beating against the foot of a cliff. Trinity answered the helm and began to turn away from the danger directly ahead, but almost immediately there was another cry of alarm, this time from his right. A sailor was pointing out into the darkness and there, not more than fifty yards away, was another eruption of white foam. This time he was sure. It was water breaking over a reef.
Sharpe was shouting again, even more angry. ‘We’ve been driven into a skerry. I need sober lookouts, not tosspots. Lynch! Get up there into the foretop and sing out if you see a danger. Take your friend, the striker, with you. He sees things when others can’t.’
Hector ran to find Dan and together they scrambled up the shrouds and onto the small platform of the foretop. The wind was strengthening still further, and on their exposed perch they peered forward, trying to see into the darkness. Below their legs the forecourse still bellied out, providing steerage way for the helmsmen. From farther aft came the shouts of men taking in the mainsail, urgently reducing the speed of the ship.
‘How much longer until first light?’ Hector yelled, trying to keep the alarm out of his voice. He could see almost nothing in the murk, only vague and indistinct shapes, some darker than others. It was impossible to judge how far away they were.
‘Maybe an hour,’ Dan answered. ‘There! A reef or a small island. We’re coming too close.’
Hector turned and shouted out the information. Someone down on deck must have heard him for he saw the foreshortened figure of a man running to the helm and
relaying the message, then a group of men hastily sheeting in the triangular mizzen sail to assist the action of the rudder in turning the ship. Trinity changed direction, clawing up into the wind.
‘More rocks, by that patch of foam,’ announced Dan. This time he was pointing to starboard.
Hector cried out another warning and, standing up on the platform, wrapped one arm around the foretopmast. With the other arm he pointed which way Trinity should go. At that instant a cloud passed across the moon, and there was complete darkness. All of a sudden he was completely disoriented, the ship swayed beneath his feet, the motion magnified by his height above the deck, and he felt dizzy. For one heart-stopping moment his grip on the mast slipped, and he tottered, feeling that he was about to fall. He had a sudden, awful vision of smashing down onto the deck or, worse, landing in the sea unnoticed and being left behind in the wake of the vessel. Hurriedly he clamped his other arm around the mast, clutching it to his chest in a fierce grip, and slithered down to a sitting position. Within a minute the cloud had passed, and there was enough moonlight to see his surroundings. Dan seemed not to have noticed his brief horror, but Hector could feel his clothes clammy with cold sweat.
For an hour or more the two of them conned the ship from the foremast as Trinity swerved and sidled her way past one danger and then the next. Gradually the sky began to lighten and, very slowly, the extent of their predicament became clear.
Ahead stretched an iron-bound coast, a vista of grey and black cliffs and headlands which extended in both directions far into the distance. Behind the cliffs rose ridges of bare rock which became the slopes and screes of a coastal mountain range whose jagged crest was lightly dusted with snow. Nowhere was there anything to relieve the impression of monotonous desolation except an occasional clump of dark trees growing in sheltered folds of the austere landscape. Closer to hand were the small offshore islands and reefs which had so nearly destroyed the ship in the darkness and still menaced her. Here the surface of the sea sporadically exploded in warning spouts of spray or heaved and sank in sudden upwellings which warned of submerged rocks and shoals. Even the channels between the islands were forbidding. In them the water moved strangely, sometimes streaked with foam, at other times with the deep, blue-black slickness of a powerful current.
‘Hang on!’ said Dan. He had seen the telltale white flurry of a squall which had suddenly ripped up the surface of the sea and was now racing towards them. Hector braced himself. Trinity abruptly heeled under the force of the wind. From below them came the creaking sound of the foresail spar as it took the strain and then the sudden crack of something breaking. The squall was strong enough to lift a vaporous whirl of fine spray and send it over the ship, darkening her timbers and leaving a slick on the deck. Hector felt the moisture settle on his face and trickle down inside his collar.
A hail from the deck made him look down. Sharpe was beckoning to him, ordering him to return to near the helm. He made his way carefully down the shrouds, gripping tightly in case another squall struck, and reached the poop deck. Sharpe was no longer in a towering rage but seething with subdued anger. Beside him Sidias looked shamefaced, clearly ill at ease.
‘Lynch, this idiot seems to have lost his command of English,’ snarled Sharpe. ‘Tell him that I want some sensible advice, not pretence and falsehood. Ask him in a language he understands what he recommends, which way we go.’
Speaking in Spanish, Hector repeated the question. But he knew already that the pilot had been feigning incomprehension.
‘I don’t know,’ the Greek confessed, avoiding Hector’s gaze. ‘I have no knowledge of this part of the coast. It is strange to me. I have never been here before.’
‘Is there nothing you recognise?’
‘Nothing,’ Sidias shook his head.
‘What about the tides?’
Sidias nodded towards a nearby island. ‘Judge for yourself. That line of the weeds indicates a rise and fall of at least ten or twelve feet and that would be normal for the parts of the coast I am familiar with.’
Hector relayed the information to Sharpe who glowered at the pilot. ‘What about an anchorage or a harbour? Ask him that.’
Again the pilot could only speculate. He supposed there would be bays or inlets where a ship might find shelter, but anchoring was sure to be difficult. The drop-off from the land was usually so abrupt that an anchor seldom reached to the seabed before its cable ran out.
‘We follow along the coast until we find shelter,’ Sharpe decided. He had to raise his voice above the moan of the wind. ‘God grant that we can scrape through.’
It was a wild, intimidating ride. Every member of Trinity’s crew was now up on deck, either spread along the rails or in the shrouds. Even the drunkards had sobered up. They knew the danger, the strain showing on their faces as they watched the reefs slide by. Sometimes their vessel came so close to disaster that her hull brushed fronds of seaweed writhing in the backwash of the swells. Only the skill of the helmsmen, responding to every shift of the current or change in the strength and direction of the wind, kept their ship from being driven into the turmoil of waves which broke and thundered against the cliffs. Finally, after nearly an hour of this unnerving progress, they came level with an entrance to a narrow bay. ‘Turn in! And stand by to lower the pinnace,’ Sharpe ordered. He had noted the area of calm water behind a low promontory. Here a skilfully handled ship might find shelter and lie at rest. More crucially, a great solitary tree stood on the point of land, only a few paces from the water’s edge. Trinity sidled in and the crew began to clew up the foresail. As the vessel slowed, the pinnace splashed down in the water, and a dozen men rowed furiously for the land, towing the main cable behind their boat. They scrambled up the beach, made fast the cable around the tree, and Trinity gathered sternway. She fell back until the heavy rope came taut, and the ship slowed to a halt, tethered to the land and safe.
A sense of relief spread throughout the ship. Men thumped one another on the back in celebration. Some climbed into the rigging and out along the foremast yard and began to furl the sails. Sharpe was halfway back to his cabin when a last great gust of wind came raging over the promontory and struck the ship. Under the impact Trinity reared back like a startled mare against her bridle. The main cable sprang from the surface, water spraying from the strands of rope as they took the strain, and when the full force of the wind drove upon her, there was a loud, rending crack. The great tree holding the ship came toppling down, the ancient roots giving up their hold. Trinity, her sails furled, was helpless. The gust drove her backwards across the small bay and, with an impact that shuddered the length of her keel, she struck stern first upon the shingle beach. Above the shriek of the wind, every man aboard heard the sound as her rudder sheered. The vessel was crippled.
FOR THREE WEEKS the wounded Trinity lay in the bay. A web of ropes fastened to boulders and posts driven into the shingle held her steady against the rise and fall of the tides while the carpenters worked to fashion and fit a new rudder. The great gust had been the gale’s final stroke, and the wind was never again so fierce. Instead the weather was continually cold, damp and oppressive. Thick cloud clamped down, obscuring the mountains, so that the leaden sky blended with the slate-grey landscape. Those men who were not working on the repairs reverted to their endless games of cards and dice or prowled the beach and prised mussels off the rocks. They shot penguins to boil and roast. The flesh was quite palatable, being as dark as venison though oily. Dan volunteered to explore inland and came back to report no sign whatever of human life. The interior was too harsh and craggy to support settlement. He claimed to have come across unknown wild plants which might prove useful additions to the near-empty medicine chest, but this was only an excuse so that he and Hector could go ashore. They took with them the bamboo tube containing their copies of Captain Lopez’s navigation notes.
Safely out of sight of the ship, they tried to make some sense of their notes, smoothing out the pages and putting them in
order.
‘I think this sheet shows the coast and the approaches to the Passage,’ said Hector. He placed a page on the flat surface of a boulder and weighed the corners down with pebbles. ‘But it has very little detail. The mountain range is shown as extending all along the coast, and there are at least two dozen islands marked. But they all look much the same. We could be anywhere.’
Dan ran his finger down the page. ‘See here, the entrance to the Passage is clearly shown.’
Hector brightened. ‘If our notes are accurate – and Captain Lopez’s original is right – I’m confident that I could find the Passage. All we need to know is our latitude.’
Dan rubbed his chin. ‘What if there’s an overcast sky like these past few days and you cannot take a backstaff reading? I doubt very much that the crew will want to risk this coast again. They’ve had a bad fright already.’
Hector was about to reassure his friend that even a glimpse of the sun would be enough, when Dan added, ‘And if we suddenly announce to the crew that we have these navigation notes, we’ll bring further trouble on ourselves. They will want to know why we did not say so before.’
‘Then we go around the Cape and not through the Passage, and say not a word to anyone about Captain Lopez’s notes,’ Hector answered. ‘Those more general maps we took out of the Santo Rosario are good enough to get us around the Cape if we go to fifty-eight degrees and then turn east. After that, we should come into the Atlantic.’
He rolled up the papers and slid them back into the tube. ‘Come on, Dan. No one wants to stay a moment longer in this dreary place.’
SO IT TURNED OUT. Trinity, with her rudder repaired and rerigged with the cordage from Paita, took advantage of an offshore breeze and threaded her way through the skerries until she reached the open ocean. Shortly after, she turned south and sailed into waters known to her crew only from hearsay. There they came upon sights that confirmed the stories they had heard – immense blocks of blue-white ice, the size of small islands and drifting on the current, whales of monstrous size, and birds who followed the ship day after day, gliding on wings whose span exceeded the width of even Jezreel’s outstretched arms. All this time the weather remained kind, and Trinity entered the Atlantic without enduring a single storm. Northwards next, the sea miles rolling by, the sun higher each day, and the temperature increasing. With no sight of land or other ship, Trinity might have been the only vessel on the ocean. To pass the time, the men reverted yet again to their favourite pastime – gambling. It was as if nothing had changed since the South Sea. Those who gambled lost most of their plunder to Captain Sharpe who, fearful of their resentment, took to sleeping with a loaded pistol beside him. Only Sidias was his rival for winnings. The Greek’s cunning at backgammon meant he swept up most of what the captain missed.
