The Nautical Chart

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  "Yes, that's it. That Captain Elezcano would douse the jibs and stow the staysails, if he was tarrying them. He would surely have left the mainmast without canvas, so that the driver didn't force the rudder or mask the wind from the fore-topsail and foresail; or maybe he just struck the driver and left the main topsail. He might also have set his foretopmast or lower studdingsails, although I doubt he would have done that at night. The one sure thing is that, knowing his ship, he got her ready to make the best possible time without putting on canvas that would spring a mast."

  The wind freshened slightly, always astern, kicking up a slight swell. Coy glanced at the anemometer and then studied the enormous shadow of the sail. He put the crank in the slot of the starboard winch, hauled in the sheet a couple of turns, and the Carpanta heeled a few degrees, picking up a half knot

  "According to what you told me," he continued after returning the crank to its place and coiling the tail of the sheet, "the wind must have been a little stronger than what we're experiencing. There's sixteen knots of true wind. Possibly they had twenty or so, which would be force 5 or 6. Enough to move them along, for sure. They'd be traveling faster than we are, heeling slightly to starboard, with a steady wind astern."

  "What were the men doing?"

  "They weren't getting much sleep, especially your two priests. Everyone must have had the pursuing ship on their minds, which they would barely have been able to make out at night. If there was a moon, they may have sighted the shadow of her sail astern from time to time_____ Both of them would have been running without lights, in order not to betray their position. The men on watch would be gathered at the foot of the masts, dozing a little or standing at the gunnels with worried faces, waiting for the order to go aloft again and adjust the canvas. The others would be close to the guns, warned to be at the ready if the corsair suddenly overtook them. The captain would never have left the poop, his attention on the drama behind him and the creaking of the rigging and flapping of sail overhead. A man at the helm, maintaining course...No question that the best of them would have been at the helm that night."

  'And the ship's boy?"

  "Near the captain and the navigating officer, awaiting their orders. Copying down in the logbook the orders, times, maneuvers ... He was young, wasn't he?"

  "Fifteen."

  Coy noted a tone of commiseration in Tanger's voice. Just a boy, it meant. At least, Coy thought, he had lived to tell the tale.

  "In those days they went to sea at ten or twelve to learn the trade— I suppose he would have been excited by the adventure. At that age you're not easily frightened. And that boy was already a veteran. At the very least he had crossed the Atlantic in both directions."

  "His report was very precise. He was a clever boy. We can reconstruct approximately what happened thanks to him. And you." Coy grimaced.

  "I can only imagine how what you tell me happened."

  The reddish light from the companion still glowed on Tanger's face. She was avidly listening to Coy's words, with an attentiveness she had never paid him on land.

  'And the corsair?" she asked.

  Coy tried to evoke the situation on board the xebec. Professional hunters hot on the chase.

  "With that course and that wind," he ventured, "they may have had the advantage of the large lateen sail on the foremast. On a ship designed to sail the Mediterranean, adapting to shifts in the wind or no wind at all... That night, that sail at the bow undoubtedly carried them very fast. Besides, having three masts allowed them to set a main topsail, and maybe the main topgallant staysail. I think she would have set a course that put her between the Dei Gloria and the coast, in order to cut off any possibility of the brigantine's running for Aguilas when the wind veered at dawn."

  "It had to be heart-stopping."

  "You bet it was."

  Coy looked at the slightly darker line of the coast, which by now obscured the beam of the Gata lighthouse. The shadowy shape of a point of land began to announce the luminous bay of San Jose. With those two references Coy made a couple of mental calculations, placing them upon an imaginary chart. He thought about the crew of the brigantine climbing blindly up the masts, making or shortening sail according to the wind and the needs of the maneuver, the rough canvas in their stiff fingers, stomachs pressed against the yards, feet dancing in empty space, their only support the footropes.

  "I think that was more or less what happened," he concluded. 'And Captain Elezcano hoped all through the night that they would leave the xebec behind. Maybe he tried some evasive maneuver, like changing course and trying to lose them in the darkness, but that fellow Misian must have known every trick in the book. As day dawned, the crew of the Dei Gloria must have lost heart when they saw the Chergui still there, between them and land, closing in______ Maybe then, while the navigating officer was calculating their position, the captain of the brigantine made a desperate decision: more sail, set the topgallants. That was when the mast was sprung, and the corsair was upon them."

  And speaking of "upon them," Coy noted, the light off the bow that the Genoa hid from time to time seemed to be closer, in the same position as before. So he picked up the Steiner binoculars and walked along the weather side, holding onto the shrouds, up to the foredeck, next to where the anchor was secured to its sheave. The light was too much for a simple fishing boat, but he couldn't clearly identify its shape. If it was a ship coming toward them, maybe a merchant ship judging by the quantity and size of the lights, he should be able to see the red port or green starboard lights, or both if the other craft's bow was aimed straight for them. But he couldn't see those. And yet, he decided uneasily, it seemed much too close.

  Sailing at night was a goddam crock of shit, he told himself with irritation, returning to the cockpit. Tanger was watching him with curiosity.

  "Put on your life jacket," he told her.

  Something wasn't right, and his sailor's instinct began to click into place. He went below to the midship cabin and flipped on the waiting radar: a black echo appeared on the green screen. Coy took note of distance and bearing, calculating that it was two miles away and headed directly for them. A large, threatening echo.

  "Piloto!" he yelled.

  He didn't know what the hell it was, but very soon it was going to be on top of them. As he ran up the companionway he made rapid calculations. In the immediate area of Cabo de Gata, the pattern for separation of traffic required merchant ships heading south to maintain a course five miles offshore. The Carpanta was sailing close to that limit, so it had to be a ship navigating closer to land than usual. Its speed would be about fifteen knots; added to the Carpanta's five, that meant she would cover twenty nautical miles in sixty minutes. Two miles in six minutes—that was the amount of time one or the other of them had to make some maneuver if a collision was to be averted. Six minutes. Maybe less.

  "What's going on?" Tanger asked.

  "Problems."

  Coy made sure she had put on her self-inflating life jacket, which had a strobe light that was activated on contact with the water. He shrugged into his, picked up the lantern, and went back to the bow, illumined as he went by the red portside light located in the shrouds. The lights of the other vessel, threatening now, were coming closer and closer, with no alteration in course. He turned on the lantern and beamed intermittent signals in their direction, and then aimed the light onto the Carpanta's large unfurled sail. Any sailor on the bridge of a merchant ship should see that. For an instant he turned the light on his watch. Eleven fifty-five. That was the worst possible hour. On board the oncoming ship they would be about to change the watch. The officer, trusting the radar, would be sitting at the chart table, entering the incidents in the logbook before being relieved, and the man scheduled for the next watch would not yet be on the bridge. Maybe there was a drowsy Filipino, Ukrainian, or Indian helmsman lazing about somewhere. Bastards.

  Coy hurried back to the cockpit. El Piloto was already there, asking what was going on. Coy pointed to the lig
hts at their bow.

  "Jesus," El Piloto murmured.

  Alarmed, Tanger watched them, the wide red band of the life jacket fastened tightly over the slicker. "Is it a boat?"

  "It's a sonofabitching boat, and it's coming straight at us."

  She had the carabiner of the safety harness in her hand, and looked from one of them to the other as if she didn't know what to do. To Coy she seemed unbearably vulnerable.

  "Don't hook that onto anything," he counseled. "Just in case."

  It wasn't a good idea to be attached to a boat that might be split in two. He went back down to the cabin and glued himself to the radar screen. They were navigating under sail, and theoretically had right-of-way, but right-of-way was moot at this point. It was already too late to maneuver and get out of the way of the larger ship. There was no doubt that this was a big ship. Much too big. Coy cursed himself for being careless, for not having foreseen the danger sooner. There still were no red or green lights visible, and yet the vessel was there, traveling toward them in a straight line, barely a mile away. He felt the shudder of the Carpanta's engine. El Piloto had started it up. Coy went back on deck. "They don't see us," he said.

  Yet the Carpanta had her running lights on, he had signaled with the lantern, and the sailboat also had a good radar reflector atop the mast. Coy fastened his life jacket. He was furious and confused. Furious with himself for having been distracted by the stars and the conversation and not having foreseen the danger. Confused because he still hadn't sighted the red and green lights of whatever was coming at them.

  "Can't you advise them by radio?" asked Tanger.

  "There isn't time."

  El Piloto had disconnected the automatic pilot and was steering manually, but Coy recognized the problem. The most logical evasive maneuver was to starboard, because if the merchant vessel sighted them at the last moment, it too would change course to starboard. The dilemma was that since the ship was navigating so close to the coast, her starboard might take her too close to land, and it was possible therefore that the officer on the bridge would perform the opposite maneuver, veering to her port and the open sea. LWPC: Law of the Worst Possible Consequence. If that happened, in trying to vacate the merchant's route, the Carpanta would end up directly in the middle of it.

  They had to make themselves seen. Coy grabbed one of the white flares from the cockpit and ran back to the bow. The lights now looked like a carnival, a luminous mass that was less than half a mile away by now. From the water came a dull roar, constant and sinister—the sound of the merchant ship's engines. Coy hung onto the bow rail and took one last look, trying at least to understand what was happening before the oncomer swamped them. And then, only two cables' length away, looming like a dark ghost against the blaze of her own lights, he distinguished a black mass, tall and terrible—the bow of the merchant vessel. Now he could make out several containers stacked on deck, and suddenly, finally, Coy realized what had happened. From a distance, the port and starboard lights had been obscured by other, brighter ones. From the much lower perspective of the sailboat, it was the ship's bow and broad hull themselves that had blocked them out.

  Now there was less than a minute. Clamping his knees onto the rail, thrusting his body in front of the Genoa stay, Coy removed the top of the flare, turned the base, held it away from his body by extending his arm as far leeward as possible, and struck the trigger with the palm of his other hand. Come on, he begged, don't be dead. There was a loud hiss, a cloud of smoke, and a blinding glare illuminated Coy, the sail, and a good portion of the sea around the Carpanta. Clinging to the stay with one hand and blinded by the intense radiance, he watched as the bow of the merchant vessel held course a few instants and then began to veer to starboard, less than a hundred yards away. The agonizing light of the flare revealed the enormous wave cut by the bow, a white crest hurling itself toward the sailboat. Coy threw the flare into the sea and hung on with both hands as El Piloto turned the Carpanta's wheel hard to starboard. The black coast, illuminated from overhead as if during a fiesta, moved past very close amid the roar of the engines, and the sailboat, struck by the wave, bobbed crazily. Then the enormous jib, caught by the wind from the far rail, quartered abruptly and struck Coy, who felt himself swept over the rail and into the sea.

  IT was cold. It was too cold, he thought, stunned, as black water closed over his head. He felt the turbulence of the sailboat's propellers when the hull passed near him, and then a more violent motion that made the dark liquid sphere he was bouncing in boil around him—the great screws of the merchant vessel. The water was filled with the deafening sound of the engines, and in that instant he realized he was going to drown, because the turbulence was pulling his pants and jacket downward and at some moment or other he was going to have to open his mouth to breathe, to fill his lungs with air, and what was going to rush in was not going to be air but murderous gallons of saltwater. It wasn't his life that flashed through his head in quick images, but a blind fury at ending things in this absurd way, along with a desire to stroke upward, to survive at all cost. The problem was that the turbulence had turned him over and over in his accursed black sphere, and up and down were relative concepts—supposing that he was in any condition to swim. Water was beginning to fill his nose with irritating needles of sensation, and he told himself: This is it, I'm drowning. I'm checking out. So he opened his mouth to curse with his last breath, and to his surprise met pure air, and stars in the sky. The strobe light on his self-inflating life jacket flashed beside his ear, blinding his right eye. With the left, less bedazzled, he saw the glare of the retreating merchant ship, and on the other side, a half cable away, its green starboard light appearing and disappearing behind the enormous shadow of the Genoa flapping in the wind, the dark silhouette of the Carpanta.

  He tried to swim toward her, but the life jacket hobbled him. He was painfully aware that at night a boat can pass a man in the water a hundred times and not see him. He felt for the emergency whistle that should have been next to the strobe light. It wasn't there. Shouting from that distance was pointless. The swell was frustrating, with little waves that made him rise and fall, and his view of the Carpanta come and go. And also hiding him from the two on board, he thought despondently. Slowly he began to breast-stroke, trying not to exhaust himself, with the goal of shortening the distance between them. He was wearing his sneakers, but they weren't too great a handicap and he decided to leave them on. He didn't know how long he would be in the water, and they would protect him a little. The Mediterranean's waters weren't frigid, and at that time of year someone who went overboard dressed and in good health could last several hours.

  He kept seeing the lights of the Carpanta, and it seemed to him they were taking in the Genoa. From his position relative to her and to the merchant ship, Coy realized that as soon as El Piloto saw him go overboard, he had dropped the sails, slowing the ship, and now was preparing to backtrack and try to reach the point Coy had gone over. Undoubtedly he was on one rail and Tanger on the other, searching for him in the tossing sea. Maybe they'd launched the emergency life raft with the luminous buoy attached by a short line, and were heading there now to see if Coy had found it. As for his own light, the one on his life jacket, he was sure the swell hid it from them.

  The green starboard light went by close in front of him, and Coy yelled, futilely waving an arm. The movement plunged him beneath a breaking crest, and when he reemerged, snorting the saltwater that smarted in nostrils, eyes, and mouth, the green light had become the white light at the stern. The Carpanta was moving away from him.

  This is really stupid, he thought. He was beginning to feel the cold, and the light sparkling at his shoulder seemed invisible to everyone but him. The jacket inflated around his neck kept his head above water most of the time, but now he couldn't see any of the Carpanta's lights, only the glow of the merchant ship in the distance. There is a good possibility, he told himself, that they won't find me. And that this damned light will wear out the bat
teries and go dead, and I'll be out here in the dark. LLOOOW: Law of Lights Out and On Our Way. Once, playing cards, an old engine man had said, "There's always one fool who loses. And if you look around and don't see him, it's because you're the fool." He looked around him. Dark water splashed against the inflated collar. No one. Sometimes someone dies, he added to himself. And if you don't see another person, the one who may the is you. He looked up at the stars. With their help he could establish the direction of the coast, but it wouldn't do any good, he was too tar to reach it swimming. If El Piloto, who would have pinpointed where he went overboard, radioed a Mayday, man overboard, the search wouldn't get underway before dawn, and by that time he would have been in the drink five or six hours, with serious hypothermia. There was nothing he could do except husband his strength and try to slow the loss of body heat. Position HELP, Heat Escape Lessening Posture, as the manuals called it. Or something like that. So he tried to adopt a fetal position, pressing his bent legs to his belly and folding his arms across his chest. This is ridiculous, he thought. Tucked up like a baby, at my age. But as long as the strobe light kept flashing, there was hope.

  LIGHTS. Drifting, josded by the waves, eyes dosed, and moving as little as possible, to conserve warmth and energy, with the white flashes rhythmically blinding him, Coy kept thinking about lights, to the point of obsession. Friendly lights, enemy lights, stern, anchor, port and starboard, green beacons, blue beacons, white beacons, buoys, stars. The difference between life and death. A new crest whirled him around like a buoy in the water, once again dunking him. He emerged shaking his head, blinking to dear the salt from his burning eyes. Another crest and again he whirled, and then, right before him, at less than forty feet, he saw two lights, one red and one white. The red was the portside of the Carpanta, and the white was the beam from the flashlight Tanger was holding at the bow as El Piloto slowly maneuvered to place Coy to windward.