The Distant Ocean

by Philip K Allan

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ he muttered through his pain. He return to his desk, pulled his chair upright again, sat down and wiped his eyes dry with a handkerchief. Then he picked up Montague’s letter once more, hoping against hope that he might have misread it. But the words were still the same. Think, Alex, think. If the sea chest means he survived the fight, why is he not on the list?

  He returned to Montague’s note, and two words seemed to grow from the page, “who survived”. Preston and Macpherson had said the house they entered had been ransacked. They had spoken of overturned furniture, possessions strewn around and a broken window. In his mind’s eye he saw his friend being hauled from the house by rough hands, the line of homemade signal flags brandished under his nose, and the fury of the French soldiers that had caught him red-handed. They would show little mercy to a spy, caught in time of war in such a way.

  He sat with his head bowed over the note as he thought again of his friend, so full of fun, now gone forever. Had his life really ended in such a way, perhaps blindfolded, against a wall, waiting for a volley of bullets? A few tears splashed down onto the paper, causing individual letters to wave and distort. Clay wiped his eyes again, blew his nose loudly and then paused. A fresh image came to him. It was that of Nicholas Windham, somewhere over the horizon, receiving the same news and exulting in it. His hands began to tremble with rage and he screwed the note from Montague into a tight ball, his knuckles white with the effort.

  ‘I will avenge you, brother,’ he pledged through teeth clenched with anger. ‘If it is my final act on this earth.’

  *****

  Sutton opened his eyes the next day, and wondered what was different. It was morning, and shafts of sunlight penetrated the various gaps and holes in the shelter to dot the three recumbent bodies with points and lines of silver. He could still hear the sea, but it was only faint. The sound of the waves was masked by a much more persistent noise. A shrill wall of sound seemed to come from all around him, a shrieking in the air that went on and on without end. Hunger and thirst had dulled his mind, which was why it took him so long, blinking in the gloom beneath the tent of coats, to realise the main thing that had changed. For the first time in days, the boat was no longer moving.

  He pulled himself out from under the cover, making his two companions groan and shift as he squeezed past them. Outside he looked up in amazement at a sky alive with movement. His first impression was that it was snowing, but then he realised that the air was full of life. There were thousands upon thousands of black and white sea birds. They swirled in the space over his head and filled his world with tumult. All were busy as they streamed in various directions, and every one of them was calling raucously to his neighbours. The boat lay on its side in shallow water, the bow caught in the sand of a gently sloping beach. Already the roof of the shelter was spattered with excrement, and more lay all around him. He leant over the gunwale and roughly shook the others awake, and then staggered inland to explore.

  At the top of the beach the sand gave way to a flat expanse of scrubby grass and little thorn bushes, dotted with patches of bare white rock. From where he stood Sutton could see the whole island. It was roughly circular, perhaps four hundred yards across, with white sand that tapered down into shallow, electric blue water all around the fringe. The interior of the island was a flat bowl of rock and desiccated vegetation. It was covered with thousands of nesting sea birds. Almost all of them seemed to be the same black and white terns that filled the sky, coming and going in an endless cloud of noise. The nearest few nests were at his feet. Their inhabitants looked up at him with unblinking dark eyes set either side of long, dagger-shaped beaks.

  ‘What...?’ croaked Croft, as he and Chapman staggered up the slope to join their captain.

  ‘Gulls,’ Sutton answered. ‘Catch...eat?’

  ‘No!’ whispered Chapman, his eyes alight with greed. ‘Eggs!’

  Desperate with hunger, the three men began to feast like animals. They advanced on all fours into the bird colony, beating off the enraged terns and gorging on the raw eggs. At first they just crammed everything into their mouths: shell, egg, the developing chick within, driven only by the urgent desire to end the pain that gnawed in their bellies. Soon their faces were smeared and filthy with a mess of shell, raw egg and blood. Then Croft yelled out to them, his waving arms sending hundreds of terns up into the sky. The others came over to see what he had found. Before him was a shallow pool of collected rain water. The liquid was full of dissolved excrement, the water acid to the taste, but to the desperate castaways it was just palatable. They sucked their fill, till all that was left was a foul-smelling sludge. Satisfied at last, they picked a path through the bird nests back the way they had come.

  When they returned to the beach, they pulled their abandoned boat a little higher up the sand, so that it was clear of the tide line. Then the three men flopped down with their backs against the shady side of the hull. They each had a distended belly from all their gorging and the strong taste of bird excrement in their mouths. All of them were breathing heavily, and Sutton felt sweat start to bead on his forehead. After a few minutes Croft let out a low groan, and rose to his feet. He tottered down the sand towards the water’s edge, splashed a few steps into the shallows and was violently sick. A geyser of vomit poured from him as he emptied his stomach into the warm sea.

  ‘Oh...God,’ moaned Sutton. He pulled himself upright and his stomach churned alarmingly. He too came staggering down the beach, but Chapman was faster. Soon all three of them were retching and heaving in the shallows. Excited little fish swarmed around their ankles and feasted on the splattering torrent.

  ‘Why...eat...filth?’ groaned the teenager, still doubled over.

  ‘Dying...hunger,’ muttered Chapman. He waged a finger in the air. ‘No more...eggs.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Sutton, leading the way back up the beach. ‘Cook gull...fire?’

  ‘Not now,’ whispered Croft, clutching his stomach as he flopped back down in the shade.

  ‘No...later,’ gasped his captain. He pointed around them. ‘But stay. Food...ship, perhaps.’

  ‘Shellfish,’ added Chapman, with a vague wave towards the shallows. He pulled out his clasp knife and made a prising motion. The others nodded at this.

  ‘W...water?’ asked the midshipman. ‘Not ...puddle, again.’

  ‘Rain,’ said Sutton, retching a little. ‘Clean...puddle...out. Then storm.’ He mimicked rain falling, and scooping up water to drink. The others watched his cupped hands with desperation, as if they really did contained water.

  ‘Now,’ croaked Chapman nudging the others and pointing. Away to the east they could see clouds on the horizon, a hedge of tall thunderheads that stalked along in the keen breeze.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sutton, pulling himself to his feet. He reached into the boat and untied the paddle. Without its support the tent of cloth fragments collapsed. Then he pantomimed digging with it. ‘Come,’ he ordered, and led the way into the bird colony once more.

  The sailors spent most of the morning at work on a large depression. The accumulation of guano was deep, and had baked onto the rock in places. Sutton and Croft dug at the filth with their bare hands, while Chapman scooped it up with the paddle and flung it away. They were very weak from lack of food, and the effort of the work turned their limbs to lead. The sun beat down on them from above, while the acid stench of rotting bird faeces made them choke and retch. After a few hours of toil Croft was completely spent, and the others could barely stand, but at least they had one reasonably clear basin in which to gather rainwater. As they made their way back towards the shelter of the boat they scanned the sky for any promising rain clouds.

  ‘Where...gone?’ croaked Chapman, searching the endless horizon with a hand shading his eyes. The others followed his example, but the clouds they had seen in the early morning had vanished.

  ‘Tonight,’ said Sutton, patting the sailor on the arm. Chapman rolled his eyes at this, then s
taggered onward towards the boat. Sutton followed with Croft trailing behind, leaning for support on the paddle. After a few steps, the youngster was forced to stop and catch his breath. Heat was rising up from the rock of the atoll, bending and twisting the air into a shimmering haze. Around his feet nesting terns squawked and pecked at him. He mopped at his brow with the sleeve of his shirt, and as his head turned he caught sight of something. He shaded his eyes and looked out to sea.

  ‘Sir!’ he croaked. Sutton turned wearily around.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sails!’

  Sutton staggered and reeled back towards him. A wave of alarmed birds took to the air as he came. ‘Glass!’ he gasped in a broken voice, over his shoulder towards Chapman. The midshipman held a trembling arm up and pointed towards the south.

  ‘Sails,’ he repeated. Chapman came lurching over, raising another cloud of terns, and handed across the little telescope. Sutton pulled it open and focussed on the spot.

  At first he could see nothing but blurred sea and sky as his hands trembled uncontrollably. He let his breathing return to normal and clamped his arms against his side. The sea became a solid bar of deep blue in the bottom of the round field of vision, the sky pale in contrast, and then he saw them. Three tiny little squares on the horizon, in a row. They were undoubtedly the topgallants of a ship, but they were beam on to him, which meant that she was sailing past, rather than towards them.

  ‘Ship,’ he croaked, his face in despair. ‘Sailing away.’

  ‘Damn…eyes!’ wheezed Chapman. ‘How...mark...us?’

  ‘Wave?’ suggested Croft.

  ‘No,’ said Sutton. He looked around him as he searched for a solution. By his feet a tern looked up at him from the centre of her scrubby little nest.

  ‘Fire!’ he said. ‘Nests! Now!’

  Frantically the castaways pulled nests together in a heap. Eggs tumbled out to smash on the rock, while birds flew at the sailors, clawing and pecking at them. Then, while the others gathered more nests, Sutton crouched over the pile, holding the telescope towards the sun, and tried to focus the beam onto the dry vegetation. But his arms had grown so weak that the point of light danced and wavered, while he croaked with frustration. Chapman came over and grabbed the telescope from the other side, and between them they forced the little spot of dazzling white to settle on one part of the mass. Nothing happened at first. Then a piece of grass began to char and curl, sending a tiny thread of grey coiling up into the air.

  *****

  ‘There she blows!’ yelled several of the Titan’s hands, unable to restrain themselves. Every one had been pressed from whalers, and the sight of the huge, shiny grey backs as they broke the surface in a welter of white was too much for them. The sperm whales had appeared in a line, a matter of yards from the frigate’s bow, close to where many of the off-duty sailors were taking their ease on the forecastle. Water shot up in tall geysers and a mist of warm breath drifted over the ship. Then there was a series of loud gasps as the whales of the pod sucked in air and dived down out of sight once more.

  ‘There goes a hundred guineas of best grade lamp oil,’ said Trevan. The other sailors gazed at the whales for a moment, before they returned to their various activities.

  ‘How did you hunt such enormous beasts, Adam?’ asked Sedgwick.

  ‘From a boat no bigger than our red cutter, if you will credit it,’ said the Cornishman. ‘First you has to get your ship close to them, and then you launch your whale boats. You has to judge where they will blow next, and wait for them to rise. When they does, you claps yourself on to one with a harpoon and a deal of line. Then they drags you about for a while, or they dive down proper deep, but in time they has to come up for air, see, so you sticks them again each time they do, till they can’t take no more. When their chimney catches fire, you know they be finished.’

  ‘I don’t follow, Adam,’ said Sedgwick. ‘What chimney?’

  ‘Oh, that be whaler talk,’ explained Trevan. ‘A deal of gore comes out of the blowhole, like. It turns the sea all pink and frothy. It ain’t easy work, mind, for they can get right lively before the end. I’ve had a good few boats turned to matchwood under me by one of them buggers.’

  ‘Fecking hell,’ said O’Malley. ‘Who’d be after being a whaler?’

  ‘That be just the start, Sean. Once you gone and killed him, you still have to cut him up and cook the oil out of him.’ The others all thought about this for a moment, with looks of distaste. After a while Evans returned to what they had been discussing before the sperm whales had surfaced.

  ‘So how long we going to spend, driftin’ around these here waters?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s Dismal George’s idea,’ said Sedgwick, with a shrug. ‘I suppose us being out here serves to keep the Frogs in port, but they turn tail and scarper as soon as they clap eyes on us. Cats and mice ain’t in it.’

  ‘Seems clear to me them Frogs ain’t got the pluck for no fight,’ said the Londoner.

  ‘Can you blame them? said Trevan, ‘After what we done to that there Prudence?’

  ‘Talking about them as has no pluck, you boys hear about the crew of the Echo?’ said O’Malley. ‘Word is they are fit to rise any day now.’

  ‘Why would they do that?’ asked Sedgwick.

  ‘From what I heard they are fecking pissed at everyone naming them shy,’ said the Irishman, in a conspiratorial tone. ‘Windy’s barge crew were all given white feathers by the lads on the Prince.’

  ‘That’s fair enough, Sean,’ said Evans. ‘You can’t come back from a scrap where one ship got stuffed and the other barely scratched. What’re folk meant to think?’

  ‘But the lads on the Echo all say as how it was Windy what hung back, and they want him gone,’ said O’Malley. ‘They sent one of them round robins to Dismal. They ain’t angry enough to roll cannon balls at night yet, but it’s only a matter of time.’ The others sat back and digested this for a bit. After a while Trevan spoke up.

  ‘Well, that all seems proper ill,’ he said. ‘Frogs as won’t fight on one side, captains too shy of battle on t’other. Even Pipe’s been proper low since news came that Pretty Boy had perished.’

  ‘It could be fecking worse, lads,’ said O’Malley, pointing at the blue sea that ran away in every direction. ‘Weather’s proper grand, nice bit of prize money due us, back to Cape Town for a run ashore once the vittles gets low. I tell yous, it beats the Channel Fleet and polishing our arses outside of Brest in all weather.’

  ‘Deck ho!’ yelled the lookout. The men all glanced up, some shifting across the deck to get an uninterrupted view of the man who stood high above their heads. Having hailed, he seemed confused as to what to say next.

  ‘What can you see?’ prompted the voice of Armstrong from the quarterdeck. ‘Make your report in proper form now, Hobbs.’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ replied the lookout. ‘Only I ain’t entirely sure. Looks like it might be a trail of smoke, right on the starboard beam.’

  ‘No ship? Or land?’ queried the American.

  ‘Not as I can see, sir, just that there line of brown smoke.’

  *****

  ‘Smoke, Mr Russell?’ queried Clay, looking up from his desk. ‘But surely there is no land hereabout. Are you quite certain?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ replied the midshipman. ‘Mr Butler has been aloft, and he can see it too.’

  ‘How peculiar,’ said his captain. ‘I suppose it might be a ship that has taken fire. Alter course towards the source, if you please, and tell Mr Armstrong that I will be up presently.’

  Clay sat at his desk and stared out of the stern window at the endless vista of blue ocean and wondered what this strange sighting might portend. In truth, it had come as a welcome distraction. In front of him was a blank sheet of paper, which was to be the latest addition to the letter/journal that he kept daily at sea, for his wife. He sent each installment as a bundle of pages whenever he was able. He thought about the last thick package well on its way to the Cape now
, onboard the captured Prudence, and he cursed out loud.

  ‘Oh damn and blast it,’ he exclaimed, towards the portrait of his wife, as he thought about all the ridiculously hopeful things that the letter contained. ‘It’s all the fault of that damned chest!’ He remembered how he had eagerly scribbled away in his spidery hand on the triumphant morning after the defeat of the French frigate. On the strength of that one sighting of John’s possessions, he had created a whole world of hope. He had told Lydia that his friend had survived the battle, was alive and well, and though a prisoner of the French, he would soon be paroled. Beneath his feet he felt the angle of the deck change as the frigate swept around to head towards the mysterious fire.

  ‘Poor Betsey,’ he muttered. ‘If she truly loves John, as he seems to love her, she will had taken such hope from that. But now I must bring her world crashing down, again. What a bloody fool I have been! Still, the letter cannot now be recalled. All I can do is correct it as swiftly as I am able.’ He looked back towards his wife’s picture. The blue eyes seemed to bore into him from out of the painted canvas, the look of accusation unmistakable.

  ‘Yes, my dear, I know,’ he said. ‘I have made a sad hash of things, have I not? I have lurched from despair to hope, and back to despair, and have now dragged my poor sister along the same path.’

  With a sigh he began to write, stutteringly at first, but gradually with more fluency, setting down what he thought to be the facts. When the task was done at last, he looked back at the picture. Lydia continued to stare down at him, but perhaps her eyes were a little more kindly now. Clay glanced back at his letter, and as he did so, he noticed the date. He found it hard to keep track of the seasons here in the tropics, but back home spring would be fast moving into summer now. He thought of life at Rosehill Cottage; the grounds would be at their best, thick with colour. He imagined his mother, in a cavernous straw hat, supervising the gardener in his work. At the end of the lawn, through the old brick arch that led to the orchard, his sister and wife would be busy at their writing, unaware of the dreadful news that was crossing the ocean towards them. Then he looked at the date once more and frowned with concentration as he calculated to himself.