By Fickle Winds Blown

by Maryk Lewis

his visitors forward to his cabin, where they would sign the papers that had to be dealt with before the ship could sail.

  “We’ll do the palliasses then,” Mr Milburn said to the other two mates. “We’ll have the main hold people up first.”

  Before long the foredeck was smothered in loose hay, while passengers filed along the port side of the ship with empty palliasses, and returned along the starboard side with them full. Each had to fill their own, but there were many willing hands available to help those who could not manage. At the accommodation ladders the filled bags were simply allowed to drop, and soon the dust fibres floating in the air had one and all sneezing violently.

  The single women followed the family groups, and then the single men took their turn. Last of all came the new crew members who had boarded that day. The ship was a seething mass of active humanity. It reminded Jess of bees in a hive, and she wondered if it was going to be like this all the way to New Zealand.

  In the midst of it all Mr Smithers and the owners’ agent left them, going down the gangplank to a chorus of farewell calls. They stood on the leading barge, and waved. The tug gave a long mournful toot, and then two short ones. Their last contact with the shore, at least in the Thames, was broken when the string of barges slid away.

  Jess looked around for Andy, wondering what he was doing in all the rush of activity. One of the ship’s boats was still in the water, and she saw that Andy was one of those manning it. They were towing a hawser across to a pile, which stood up from the water on the south side of the river. With great spirals of tightly twisted cords, the huge thick rope floated on the surface of the water, catching and tugging in the current, making their job difficult. The near end was attached to the stern of the ship. With Samantha, she went up onto the poop deck, and found a place out of the way, so that she could watch what they were doing.

  “We’ll have the Peter down, Mr Milburn, if you please,” she heard the captain say.

  The mate passed on the order to a sailor, who hurried down into the press of people milling around at the foot of the main mast. Shortly the halyard began to slap against the mast, and the blue and white flag near the masthead started downward.

  “Why are they taking down the New Zealand flag?” Jess asked Midshipman Smettley who was standing nearby, supervising the sailors handling the stern hawser.

  “The New Zealand flag?” Smettley queried. “What New Zealand flag?”

  “The blue flag with the white oblong in the centre,” Jess pointed. “The one that’s been at the masthead all day.”

  “That’s not the New Zealand flag,” Smettley shook his head in disbelief. “Has somebody persuaded you that it was? Is that what you were saluting?”

  Jess turned scarlet. The midshipman gave her another of his peculiar looks, and her stomach sank. She fled.

  The galley seemed a haven of order and sense, and she dodged in there, Samantha at her heels.

  “Hullo,” said Angus MacGillivray. “Have you been in the wars again?”

  “Is the Peter a flag?” Jess asked, gulping, and close to tears.

  “Yes, the Blue Peter,” Mr MacGillivray nodded. “It should be coming down any time now.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “We put it up on the day we sail, and that warns everybody who can see it to come out and finish their business with us before we go.”

  “Oh dear!” said Jess.

  “And they’ve had you saluting it?” Mr MacGillivray asked. “I did mean to ask you what all the saluting was about, but there hasn’t been time today.”

  “You noticed then?”

  “I think we all have, love. We knew you were saluting something.”

  “Oh, I feel a fool,” Jess wailed. “That Andrew; he’s caught me again...and Midshipman Smettley knows too. He laughed at me.”

  Ten

  “I shouldn’t worry about the midshipmite,” the cook laughed. “At the beginning of our last trip, when he first came to us, Mr MacGovern told him that it was the midshipman’s flag, put up there to warn other ships that we had a midshipman on board, so that they could look out for all the mistakes he might make. When he noticed that it wasn’t flying on the second day, he was told that it was taken down because he was too seasick to do any work. He was too.”

  “What happened when he got better?” Jess asked, brightening up.

  “The first time he went on watch, he put the Blue Peter up again, and without orders too. Captain Hedley wasn’t very amused.”

  “Oh, you sailors are awful,” Jess said, but felt recovered enough to go out on deck again.

  This time, though, she and Samantha went up on the forecastle, well away from Midshipman Smettley. There they wedged themselves into a pen with some sheep, where they wouldn’t be under the feet of the boatswain who had several sailors manning the capstan. Mr Milburn was up in the bows, looking back down the length of the ship.

  At the other end, on the poop deck, Ken MacGovern was peering through a small telescope which was part of a large brass instrument, all curved scales, screws, and lenses of smoked glass.

  “It’s a sextant,” he was explaining to an admiring Sarah. “With it, I can measure how far apart things are, or how high they are. With the measures I get, I can figure out whereabouts we are on a chart.”

  “How does it work?” Sarah asked.

  Showing her involved Sarah holding the telescope part up to her eye, while the young, ship’s officer stood behind her, and helped her to manipulate the semi-transparent images she was seeing. She could see two different views at the same time, one showing right through the other, and by turning a screw which changed the angle of a small mirror, she could make things in the different views appear to come together. How much the mirror had to be turned was a measure of the angle between the two things. Helping Sarah make the adjustments was a grand excuse for Ken to get his arms around her.

  Gil Inkster saw them there. In seconds he was up on the poop deck, with his two little ones in tow, and all three of them were looking on Ken MacGovern with louring brows.

  “I can’t see,” Phyllis piped. “Can you hold me up, Sarah?”

  “Why certainly,” Sarah smiled down at her, handing the sextant back to Ken MacGovern, who didn’t look very pleased to receive it. On the other hand, Gil Inkster and his children looked much happier with the world.

  Captain Hedley, for his part, was pleased with none of them, and shortly suggested something for Sarah to do down below. He wanted his officers attending to the ship, and not to any pretty girls.

  The ship’s boat had been around the pile in the meantime, and was then back at the stern of the ship, where Andy threw up a light line to Midshipman Smettley, who had a group of sailors use it to haul the end of the hawser on board again. Both ends of the hawser were then on board, with the bight in the middle passed around the pile.

  “What are they doing with that rope?” Jess asked the boatswain.

  “We’re about to give it a good tug to take all the stretch out of it,” he told her. “You can’t tie proper knots with it, if you don’t get all the stretch out at the beginning of the voyage.”

  It looked a frightfully big rope to tie knots in. It was thicker than Jess’s leg.

  Captain Hedley was looking over the side at it. Perhaps the boatswain was telling the truth. On the other hand, the captain also seemed to be studying the mud at the edge of the river. The tide was almost at its lowest point, and Jess knew that it was due to start coming in again at any moment. The captain could just as well be watching for the turn of the tide.

  Three coal barges were passing to starboard. Everybody stood and looked at them, waiting for them to sail clear, and leave that stretch of the river to the ‘Haldia’.

  To port a ripple passed up the shallows on the extreme edge of the water. Captain Hedley raised one hand and pointed a finger at the sky.

  “We’ll have the anchor up, if you please Bo’s’n,” Mr Milburn called.

  The boatswain spoke to his
men, and they leaned into the spokes of the capstan, forcing it around, and winding in the anchor chain link by link.

  Under her feet Jess felt the ship move. The chatter of the passengers died away. Water lapped under the bows as the ship breasted the current, being hauled bodily up the river by the shortening chain.

  “Up and down!” Mr Milburn yelled.

  There came a shudder, felt right through the ship.

  “Anchor’s aweigh!”

  The ‘Haldia’ sagged away with the current, which was still flowing down river, not yet affected by the change of the tide. She felt dead in the water, nothing stopping her being washed away downstream, dreadfully unsafe, out of control.

  Quickly Jess and Samantha looked back along the port side of the ship. The ship’s boat was in the falls, being hauled bodily on board, Andy riding up with it, and fending it off from the ship’s side. The hawser, both ends of it, curved one way down into the water, and then curved again sideways where the current pushed it downstream.

  Pushed by the river, the ship slid past the pile with the bight of the hawser around it. The ends of the hawser had to go with the ship. The bight stayed with the pile. The curves in the hawser straightened out rapidly, whipped across the water, sending up a shower of spray, and then jerked tight, held above the water by the tension, twin lines dead straight from the ship to the pile. Water in the coils squirted out, squeezed as the pressure went on. The rope twanged like a violin string as it stretched.

  The jerk from the