We put the mast together again on the deck and lashed it down. John went back to gluing the last piece on the spar, so that he had a 12-foot spar. On the next day he shaped it, tapering it at both ends, and put brass sheeting round the centre, so that we could attach the shackle of the halliard. The whole cabin floor was covered with heaps of shavings, which we stuffed into tins to use in lighting the fire. Everything was finished by the end of the fourth week, and we set up the mast.
In order to set up the mast we took the mainsail down, and we used the main halliard to hoist it into position immediately behind the little mainmast that was in use. Otherwise we used the same procedure as before, and with Beryl to help now, everything went smoothly. The mast was stepped on a special step that we had cut out and screwed on to the deck. After it was all set up we took down the original jury-main, stowed it on deck for the time being, and then we adjusted the rigging-screws and set all sail. The mast looked a much better job than the old one, with its neatly finished shrouds and stays, and it gave us more sail. The mainsail set higher, and we could now set the storm-jib upside down as a jib. The new mainsail was ready by the evening and we looked forward to trying it out with some excitement. That evening, when we switched on the radio, the voice of the B.B.C. came clearly over the air. ‘The talk tonight,’ said a smooth and cultured voice, and we imagined the spotted tie and the neatly folded handkerchief, ‘is on modern travel. The emphasis today is on speed, comfort, and security.’
We had our new mast, but we had done wonderfully well on the old one. Since we first set it up we had made good 750 miles, and during the last two days we had made runs on the log of 70 and 75 miles, and 188 miles in the two days by observation. It looked as if we were still getting a good lift from the current. When we put the new sail up next morning it looked enormous, and the moment Tzu Hang felt it, she stopped her cavorting, and steadied down to real sailing, her wake rippling away behind her, but the centre of effort was too far forward, and she began to pay off slowly, coming before the wind. We took a reef in the sail on account of the freshening wind, and hauled the tack down to the foot of the mast. With the storm-jib set she balanced nicely with the wind on her quarter, and when we hauled the sheet in, she brought the wind almost abeam.
That was an improvement, because before she would only sail with the wind on the quarter, but to be sure of getting in to port, she had to go to windward. It was no good sitting back and hoping that a fair wind would blow us there. In order to try her to windward we set up the old foremast as a mizzen with the same rigging that it had had before, and using the old jib that had brought us so far as a sail, with a plank tacked on to it as a boom. As soon as it was up and hauled as close as we could make it, Tzu Hang began to swing to windward. I felt a surge of relief, thinking now that nothing should stop us.
‘She’s going to windward, she’s going to windward,’ I shouted, exulting, to Beryl.
John was bent down low by the mast. He held the mast with both hands, and he looked anxiously up its length to the truck, so that if the mast had not been there, he would have been in an attitude of supplication, like a knight asking for strength for his sword.
‘Here, come quickly,’ he called to me, but it was too late, and as I reached him, there was a crack and the noise of splintering wood. The mast broke in two above the middle shrouds and fell into the sea.
We pulled it back again, and Beryl and I were distressed, not because of the mast being broken, but because of John and all the hours of work that he had put into it in that dark and smoke-filled cabin.
‘Poor John,’ she said, but he was quite unperturbed.
‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘we’ll fix her up tomorrow.’
We lay for the rest of that day and night, and all the following morning, while John worked on the mast. It wasn’t worth moving the mizzen forward again, and anyway it was blowing hard once more; a last flick of those westerly winds which had chased us so far across the ocean, and nearly under the sea. But it was a friendly sort of flick, a kind of ‘Off you go, and don’t come back again when I’m busy.’
It was not a difficult repair job, and the mast was two inches shorter when it was finished. John strengthened it by screwing extra planks into the sides, but we decided that we would not use the big sail except in a light wind.
‘I’ve really enjoyed making it,’ he said, when it was ready again, ‘it’s been a good sort of feeling, knowing that so much depended on my skill. A hell of a lot of good a college education is in a situation like this. I don’t think I’m going to worry about missing that any more.’
We had had a rough and uncomfortable night, and it was rough enough to give us a difficult task in setting the mast up. This time we had no mast to raise it with, but we took the forestay to the winch, and winched it up while John raised it, and Beryl held the foot against the step. There were some exciting moments until the backstay tightened, and the shrouds were set up. As soon as the mast was in position, we set the torn jib on the main, and were off again; a great relief to be sailing, after being stopped for twenty-four hours. We celebrated with plum pudding.
THE FINAL JURY-RIG
On March 10 we were running well with the raffee and the main. Beryl was patching the little storm-jib to make a mizzen sail, and John was making a gooseneck to fit an oar, so that it could be used as a boom for the mizzen. In the afternoon the wind strengthened and came more from the north-west, so that Tzu Hang began to fall off in her course. We set the mizzen and she came back again. Then she began to point a little high, so we reefed it, this tiny little sail; it made just the required difference, and she held to her course once more. For the next two days we made great running, but the wind was hauling round to the south, and we found ourselves sailing west of north, away from the coast of Chile, so we went to the starboard tack. We decided to make Mocha Island our landfall; Mocha Island which Drake had visited on his way up from Magellan and had gained some information about the Spaniards on the mainland. We were into the south winds now, the south winds and the northerly drift of the Humboldt current, and we would have to watch the current, so that we were not carried north of the port that we were aiming for.
The setting up of this mast marked a new phase in our journey since the smash. The first phase had been the struggle for survival, the second one of hope and hard work, and now, and until we closed the Chilean coast, we could imagine almost that we were cruising again. We were much more relaxed and had no serious work to do. It was warmer, and we spent much of our time on deck. Most of the books had been tightly jammed in their shelves, so there was still something to read. The fishing rod was brought out, and John amused himself by making lures from fish-hooks and wool of various colours. He preferred to catch a fish on something that he had made himself, rather than on one of the spoons that we still had on the ship. He spent hours also in re-assembling his camera. When everything was fitted together again, he found that he had a small spacing washer left over. But on the second attempt he succeeded in making it run again. In the evening we used to play a home-made game of scrabble.
We decided to make for Talcahuano, the Chilean Navy Base, for I knew that they had many links with the British Navy and that they would probably be able to give us some assistance. Beryl had been in Chile two years before the war, when she had done a great ride up the Western Cordillera from Magallanes. She had stayed in Talcahuano with a friend, whose name she remembered. The house was on a cliff over the sea, and there was a white rock in the water beneath it, but she had heard that the house had been destroyed in the earthquake.
‘Directly I get in,’ I said, ‘I’m going to get hold of the Consul and get him to take me round to the Admiral. I’m sure that we’ll never be able to get her repaired unless we can get a hand from the Navy.’
‘When you get hold of the Admiral, you might ask him if he’s got a daughter,’ John said. ‘I’d like to meet her.’
‘What’s all this?’ said Beryl. ‘It’s much too early to start talking like that, cer
tainly about daughters. He’ll probably have a dozen, all strictly chaperoned. We made this mistake, talking too much, before. You must not say “when,” only “if.” The Chilean girls were lovely though.’
‘I think that it is very much an “if” as far as Talcahuano is concerned,’ I said, ‘because if the south wind blows as it’s supposed to, all the time in summer, it will be blowing right out of the bay and it has a very narrow entrance. I don’t think that we’d be able to beat it in this rig.’
‘You might do it on the tide,’ John said.
‘But the trouble is this current setting up the coast. We can’t hang about waiting for the tide because we’d be carried past, and if we were past an entrance we’d never get back against the wind and the current. We’ve got to do it first shot.’
‘If you don’t make it and there are lovely Chilean girls waiting, I’m going to swim for it!’
‘Anyway, there won’t be any quarantine for cats, will there, Pwe?’ Pwe was looking much better.
‘If a ship came along and offered us a tow now, would you take it?’ John asked.
‘What, after coming all this way by ourselves …?’
But Beryl answered before I could. She said ‘No’ firmly.
There seemed to be a better alternative than Talcahuano. Ten miles south of it was Arauco Bay. Once inside Arauco Bay we would be in comparatively sheltered waters. It had two entrances, one on each side of Santa Maria Island, and the northern one was wide and easy to get into. Within the bay were the ports of Coronel and Lota, and if we couldn’t make them we could still find an anchorage in shallow water, protected from the south and south-west wind.
The beginning of the fifth week brought a different feel to the ship. We were getting near to land. Three hundred miles seemed nothing after such a long journey, and I was continually looking to the east, hoping to see the Cordillera against the sky, and knowing at the same time that I couldn’t. There were low solid clouds far beyond the horizon, stretching up and down the Chilean coast. With the warmer weather Beryl and John decided to have a wash. I was more energetic and bathed, putting on goggles, and diving down to look at the rudder fittings. The broken rudder-post projected just below the hull, and the fittings on the stern-post were all intact. The water was very cold and I nipped back quickly.
We began to see porpoises again, and supposed that it was a sign of more fish on the continental shelf, for we had seen very few on our way over. Floating patches of seaweed and seabirds with a shorter cruising range than the albatrosses, the petrels and the shearwaters, put in their appearance, and on the 16th I saw a bird flying north with a small landbird’s dipping flight. I did not recognise him then, but next morning there were any number about. They were gay little phalaropes, spinning round and round in the water, and hopping about in and on the patches of seaweed.
The colours also were lovely. In the evening the upper sky was covered with lacy filaments of wind-blown cloud, rose pink in the setting sun, and the whole evening sky was lightly painted in a variety of pastel shades darkening down into the dusk of the eastern horizon, with a white cloud showing low across it, which our imagination could turn easily into the snow peaks of the Andes. Night after night now we had this display of colour, so different from the dark, low, driven clouds of further south. As the colours faded, the moon showed with Jupiter bright and almost in her arms. It was like coming down to a base camp from a high mountain, with water running and some gentians showing in the grass.
Now that we were in the southerly winds and out of the boisterous westerlies, our progress was slower. On March 19, a great skua was round again, with his quick determined wing-beat. A bird of ill-omen, I thought, but he brought some luck, because John caught an albacore on his home-made lure. There was great excitement when it was brought on board and dropped flapping in the cockpit. Pwe was delighted at the prospect of fish for dinner, and walked round purring and rubbing against our legs, until I gave her a fishtail to keep her quiet. On a fish diet she started to swell visibly.
Next morning Beryl was up early when she called down to us from the deck that she could see land. There was cloud all over, low overcast, and after some time I picked out a dim vertical line, showing hazily behind some rain on the horizon to the south. A landfall after so long a journey, and so many hazards, is something to be remembered, but John stayed in his bunk below, and I believe that for a moment he was really quite sorry that the trip was coming to an end. While I had been restless because of our slow advance during the past few days, both he and Beryl had been quite happy, enjoying the rest and the warmer weather, and knowing that in a few days, if we made our port, we would be wrapped up in all kinds of problems again. John, like the cat, had begun to put on weight.
The vertical line was a cliff, the north-east edge of Mocha Island, but it soon vanished in some cloud, and it was impossible to say how far away we were from it. I guessed about twenty to thirty miles. We laid a course now by compass, the little tell-tale compass which we had in the main cabin, for Tulcapel Point. It was not adjusted for the southern hemisphere, and always tried to point through the earth to the north pole, so that it had to be tilted to get a reading, but like so many other things on the boat, it served. The whole of the land seemed to be wrapped in fog. I could make nothing of it, and gradually the fog closed around us, so that it was impossible to get a proper fix. For a moment I saw the outline of a cape ahead of us, but before it could be identified it was gone again.
A shark followed us lazily, keeping station ten yards astern, although locally they are not supposed to come so far south, and eight little petrels in a gossip upon the water raised their wings and danced away on their feet from the slowly questing bow. We passed many patches of weed with their busy little travellers, the phalaropes, skipping about upon them. Towards evening I began to be anxious and to think that we were south of Tulcapel Point, and getting to the wide, shallow, and open bay south of that headland, where the Pilot warned that the sea might break two miles out to sea. But just before dark we saw, close to, a sandy shelving beach with the dark outline of a headland behind, looking as if it was separated from a round mushroom island by a narrow channel. Tulcapel and Morguilla Island perhaps, the best bet anyway, so we put Tzu Hang round on the steering-oar, and out on the starboard tack. The fog still hung round us after supper, but there was a faint light in the sky to starboard, filtering through the murk, which might have been the lights of the coal-mine at Tulcapel, and below it for a moment one light appeared and disappeared. We held away on the port tack and thick fog wrapped us round.
In the morning the sea around us was clear again, but between us and the shore lay a white curtain, so that we might have been sixty miles away at sea. I was able to get a position line, but before I could get a fix, a dark low cloud came rolling up from the south, gathering the fog curtain in to it, and drawing it round us as it spread over the sky, and once more we were surrounded in a dull greyness, with the sea rolling up out of the murk, and rolling on into it again.
As far as I could make out, when I plotted Tzu Hang’s estimated position, we were fifteen miles south-west of Punta Lavapie, the southern entrance to Arauco Bay. When the fog came down we stopped sailing, but I reckoned that we had about twenty miles to sail, if we kept on this course, before we turned to run in. The second leg, to bring us into the bay, should be about eleven miles.
We set sail again on the same course, nearly due north, at four o’clock in the afternoon, with a light breeze from the south-west. At about eleven, when I thought that the mileage we had covered and the current had brought us far enough and that it was nearly time to go on to the other tack, we stopped. We waited until two in the morning, hoping for another mile or so on the current, and not wanting to close the land before daylight.
At two we made sail again, and headed in for the shore. We started in moonlight, but in an hour we were in thick fog again. Daylight came, and we kept a watch at the bow. After eleven miles, when I thought that we should
either be in the bay or close on shore, we were still in thick fog. All kinds of seabirds were in the water and went splattering away from the bows of the ship, as she came upon them in the mist, but I could hear no other sound than the sound of the seabirds and the slap of a wave and the noise of Tzu Hang: no sound of breakers and no sound of a horn. It took nearly a quarter of a mile to wear the ship round, and I didn’t like to think of the difficulties that we might get into if I was wrong.
‘It’s no good,’ I said, ‘I’m not going on until after breakfast. We may just as well give it a little longer.’
I could see that both Beryl and John were disappointed, John particularly so, because I am sure that if he had been alone he would have gone ahead, and now that he was so near he wanted to make a job of it and get in that day.
‘Sorry, John,’ I said, and he was touched because I had understood.
‘Hell, you can’t go in when you can’t see,’ he said.
But after breakfast, when I felt braver, we made sail again. There seemed to be a difference in the sea, as if we were getting into the shelter of a headland, and the waves were certainly altering. And then suddenly there was the faint ball of the sun showing through the fog. I went below to have another look at the makeshift chart I had made, and while I was still below, I heard Beryl call that the fog was clearing, and before I got up to see I heard her shout, ‘Land, I see land.’ Even John found this exciting. To the south of us and a mile away were some rocky islets, and beyond them were the bold cliffs of Santa Maria Island. We were entering Arauco Bay.
The sea fell calm. The sun shone and the sky came blue above us. Behind us the fog lay like a white wall across the entrance to the bay. Fourteen miles away across the bay, on the other side, we could make out a low coastline and some buildings, which we thought must be Coronel, and tree-clad foothills, blue in haze, climbing up to the cloudridden mountains behind. North of us three hills showed their tops close together above the white line of the fog, the Bio Bio Hills. We sat on deck, all anxiety gone, while the rudderless ship sailed herself quietly to her port across the bay.
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