Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  “I’d rather like to see that hummingbird,” David said wistfully.

  “Patagonia can’t be a very comfortable place for a hummingbird,” I suggested. “I thought they sipped nectar in warm climes?”

  “It can’t be a very comfortable place for von Rellsteb and his Genesis community either”—David was peering at the map—”if indeed they’re there?”

  “Where else?” I asked.

  “But Patagonia means rather a drastic change in your plans, Tim, does it not?” David inquired.

  “Not really.” I spoke with an insouciance I did not entirely feel. “It just means that I turn left when I reach the Pacific, instead of turning right.”

  “You mean.” Jackie Potten frowned at me.

  I glanced across the table at her. “Oh, I’m sorry, I never told you where I was going, did I? When you arrived I was just leaving to find the Genesis community.”

  “In this?” She gestured round Stormchild’s spacious saloon.

  “It’s a great deal more suitable than a Ford Escort,” I said very seriously.

  “You were just leaving?” She ignored my feeble jest. “But you didn’t know where to look!”

  “I had a mind to try Alaska,” I explained, “but I would probably have tried to telephone you as soon as I reached the far side of the Atlantic, and I guess you’d have told me to try Patagonia instead.”

  “So now you’ll just go to Chile?” Jackie seemed astonished that such a decision could be made so lightly. “How do you get there?”

  “Sail south till the butter melts, then turn right.” David offered the ancient joke.

  “I’ll sail south to the Canary Islands,” I offered more sensibly, “and wait there till the trade winds establish themselves, then I’ll run across to the West Indies. After that it’ll be a brisk sail to Panama, and I’m guessing now, because I’m not familiar with the waters, but I imagine it will be easier to go west into the Pacific, then dogleg back to South America rather than fight the Humboldt Current all the way down the coast. And with any luck I should be in Chile by March next year, which will be toward the end of their summer and, if there’s ever a good time to sail in Patagonian waters, late summer is probably that time.”

  “Wow!” Jackie Potten said in what I took to be admiration, but then it was her turn to astound me. “Can I come?”

  Stormchild sailed on the next tide, just after midnight. She slipped unseen down the river with her navigation lights softly blurred by the light rain. Instead of the champagne parting and the paper streamers there had only been David and Betty calling their farewells from the pontoons, and once their voices had been lost in the night there were only the sounds of the big motor in Stormchild’s belly, the splash of the water at her stem, and the hiss of the wet wind. That wind was southerly, but the forecast promised it would back easterly by dawn, and, if the forecast held good, I could not hope for a better departure wind. It was blowing hard, but the big, heavily laden and steel-hulled Stormchild needed a good wind to shift her ponderous weight.

  I raised sail at the river’s mouth, killed the engine, and hardened onto a broad reach. The wake foamed white into the blackness astern as the coastal lights winked and faded in the rain that still pattered on the deck and dripped from the rigging. The green and red lights of the river’s buoys vanished astern, and soon the only mark to guide Stormchild was the flickering loom of the far Portland light. I had lost count of how many times I had begun voyages in just this manner; slipping on a fast tide down-channel, making my way southerly to avoid the tidal rips that churn off the great headlands of southern England, then letting my boat tear her way westward toward the open Atlantic, yet however many times I had done it there was always the same excitement.

  “Gee, but it’s cold,” Jackie Potten said suddenly.

  “If you’re going to moan all the way across the Atlantic,” I snapped, “then I’ll turn round now and drop you off.”

  There was a stunned silence. I had surprised myself by the anger in my voice, which had clearly made Jackie intensely miserable. I felt sorry that I had snapped at her, but I also felt justified, for I was not at all sure that I wanted her on board Stormchild, but the notion of Jackie accompanying me had energized David and Betty with a vast amusement, and they had overriden my objections with their joint enthusiasm. Betty had taken Jackie shopping, returning with a carload of vegetarian supplies and armfuls of expensive foul-weather gear that I had been forced to pay for. I had ventured to ask the American girl whether she had any sailing experience at all, only to be told that she and her mother had once spent a week on a Miami-based cruise ship.

  “But you can cook, can’t you?” David had demanded.

  “A bit.” Jackie had been confused by the question.

  “Then you won’t be entirely useless.” David’s characteristic bluntness had left Jackie rather dazed.

  Dazed or not, Jackie was now my sole companion on Stormchild, which meant I had the inconvenience of sharing a boat with a complete novice. I could not let her take a watch or even helm the ship until I had trained her in basic seamanship, and that training was going to slow me down. Worse, she might prove to be seasick or utterly incompetent. All in all, I was sourly thinking, it had been bloody inconsiderate of David and Betty to have encouraged her to join the ship.

  There was also another and murkier reason for my unhappiness. I had felt an inexplicable tug of attraction toward this odd little stray girl, and I did not want that irrational feeling to be nurtured by the forced intimacy of a small boat. I told myself I did not need the complication, and that this girl was too young, too naive, too idealistic, too noisy, and too pathetic. “I thought you had a job to go home to,” I said nastily, as though, being reminded of her employment, Jackie might suddenly demand to be put ashore. “Aren’t you the Kalamazoo Gazette’s star reporter?”

  “I was fired,” she said miserably.

  “What for? Talking too much?” I immediately regretted the jibe, and apologized.

  “I do talk too much,” she said, “I know I do. But that wasn’t why I was fired. I was fired because I insisted on going to Hamburg. I was supposed to be writing some articles on date rape in junior high schools, but I thought the Genesis community was a better story, so I left the paper. And now I’ve got a chance to sail the Atlantic, so you see I was quite right. Molly says that we should always take our chances in life, or else we’ll miss out on everything.”

  “It’s a pity to miss out on roast beef,” I said nastily. “What is all that sprouting shit you brought on board?”

  “It isn’t shit,” she said in a hurt voice. “You put seeds in the trays, water them twice a day, and harvest the sprouts. It’s a really good, fresh source of protein.”

  I glanced up at the pale mass of the mainsail. “Did you know that Hitler and Mussolini were both vegetarians? And so was the guy who founded the KGB?”

  There was a pause, then Miss Jackie Potten showed me another side of her character. “I know you’re captain of this ship,” she said, “but I think it’s important that we respect each other’s beliefs, and that we don’t mock each other’s private convictions. I kind of think that’s really crucial.”

  I had just been told off by a floozy young enough to be my daughter. I was so mortified that I said nothing, but just clung to the big wheel and glanced down at the binnacle to make certain we were still on a course of 240 degrees.

  “Because we all need our private space,” Jackie went doggedly on, evidently translating my silence as incomprehension, “and if we don’t recognize each other’s unique human qualities, Mr. Blackburn, then we won’t respect each other, and I really believe that we need to share mutual respect if we’re to spend so much time together.”

  “You’re right,” I said briskly, “and I’m sorry.” I meant the apology, too, though my voice probably sounded too robust to convey the contrition I genuinely felt, but I had been boorish and Jackie had been right to protest. She had also been very brave, b
ut it was evident, from the embarrassed silence that followed, that the display of defiance had exhausted her courage. “Is there anything I can do to help, then?” she finally asked me in a very small and very timid voice.

  “You can call me Tim,” I said, “and then you can go below and make me a mug of coffee, with caffeine and milk, but no sugar, and you can get me a corned beef sandwich with butter and mustard, but nothing else, and certainly with nothing green in it.”

  “Right, Tim,” she said, and went to do it.

  By the time we docked in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, I had developed a healthy respect for the frail-looking Jackie Potten. Not that she looked so frail anymore, for fifteen hundred sea miles had put some healthy color into her cheeks and bleached her mousy hair into pale gold. After her complaint about feeling cold on our first night out she had uttered not a single grievance. In fact she had proved to possess a patient tenacity that was well suited to sailing and, despite her fondness for a diet that might have starved an anorexic stick-insect, she had a stomach that could take the roughest motion of the waves. In the beginning, as Stormchild had thrashed into the great gray channel rollers with their hissing and bubbling white tops, Jackie had been nervous, especially when the first sullen dawn showed that we were out of sight of land. That, to me, is always a special moment; when at last you can look around the horizon and see nothing but God’s good ocean. For Jackie, when all she saw was the cold crinkling heave of the careless waves, her overwhelming sensation was the terror of insignificance.

  The terror did not last. Instead she began to enjoy the challenge, and learned to have confidence in the boat and in her own ability to control Stormchild. Within two days she was watch-keeping alone, at first only by daylight, but within a week she was standing the night watches and all traces of her initial nervousness had disappeared. She was a natural sailor, and, as her competence grew, her character hardened out of timidity into confidence. She even talked less, and I realized her previous volubility had been merely a symptom of shyness.

  We marked off our private territories within the boat. Jackie had excavated a sleeping space among the heaped stores in the starboard forward cabin where she settled like some small cozy animal. Once in a while I would hear her speaking aloud in that cabin. At first I thought she was just chattering to herself, but later I learned she was dictating into a small tape recorder. She was making a record of the journey, but would not let me listen to the tape. “I’m just making notes,” she said disparagingly, “only rough notes.”

  We raced across Biscay where Jackie, equipped with Stormchild’s copy of The Birds of Britain and Europe learned to identify the various seabirds that kept us company. There were fulmars on either beam, storm petrels flickering above our wake, and handsome, slim-winged shearwaters effortlessly skimming all about us. As Jackie learned to identify the birds, I taught myself more about Stormchild’s character. She was a stubborn boat, good in heavy seas, but sluggish and sullen when, ten days into our voyage, we encountered light winds north and east of Madeira. The winds eventually died to a flat calm and the sails slatted uselessly to the boat’s motion on the long swell. I was tempted to turn on the powerful engine, but there was no point in wasting fuel, for nothing would hurry the establishment of the trade winds and I reasoned that we might just as well wait it out at sea than pay daily harbor fees of seventy pesetas per foot of boat length in a Canary Islands port.

  After three days the winds came again and Stormchild dipped her bows to the long ocean swell. The weather had turned fiercely warm. I changed into shorts, but Jackie had no summer clothes so stayed in her usual baggy attire. I stored our foul-weather gear in a hanging locker and suspected that, storms apart, we would not need the heavy warm clothes again until we had long cleared the Panama Canal, for now we were entering the latitudes of the perpetual lotus-eaters and would stay in these warm latitudes for weeks.

  We raised the Canary Islands on a Sunday morning and by mid-afternoon we had cleared the Spanish immigration procedures in Las Palmas. Jackie was wide-eyed with the realization that it was in this ancient harbor that Columbus himself had waited for the trade winds to take him into the unknown west.

  Next day, for lack of space in Las Palmas, we moved to the harbor at Mogan, on the island’s south coast. Mogan, like all the other island harbors, was crammed with cruising yachts waiting to make the Atlantic crossing. There had been a time when barely a dozen small yachts a year made this passage, but now the Canary Island ports could scarcely keep up with the demand for berth space. Hundreds of boats would cross with us, making a great flock of sails that would speed across the blue heart of the Atlantic.

  “So how long do we wait for the trade winds?” Jackie asked.

  “A month? Maybe longer.”

  We collected our mail from the English pub where David, God bless him, had sent every available chart of the Patagonian coast. He had also sent me the details of the Chilean government’s regulations for visiting boats, which were complex, together with his advice to see a Chilean consul somewhere in Central America. “I’m going to talk to Peter Carter-Pirie,” he wrote to me, “for his advice on sailing the Patagonian channels. I’ll have his words of wisdom waiting for you Poste Restante in Antigua, with copies to Panama. Betty and I send best wishes to the lady from Kalama-zoo, that is if you’re still talking to each other!” I could almost hear David’s evil chortling as he wrote that sentence.

  I took the charts back to Stormchild where I planned to spend the afternoon studying the awful coast where the Genesis community had apparently taken shelter. I had Stormchild to myself, for Jackie had taken the boat’s folding bicycle to explore the nearby countryside and to look for shops where she could buy galley supplies. I had also instructed her to buy herself some summer clothes, for the weather was stifling and she could not go on wearing her shapeless sweaters and capacious trousers. I spread the Patagonian charts in Stormchild’s cockpit, over which I had rigged a white cotton awning, then settled down with a tall jug of Bloody Marys.

  I discovered the Archipelago of Christ’s Blood to be a tortured group of islands some two hundred miles north of Puerto Natales, which was where the settlements of Tierra del Fuego began. I traced my finger northward from Puerto Natales, across a tangle of islands, fjords, channels, and glaciers, and noted the odd mixture of place names. Some were English, legacies of the great naval explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; thus there was an Isla Darwin, a Nelson Straits, an Isla Duque de York, and an Isla Victoria. The majority of the names, naturally enough, were Spanish; some pious, like the Isla Madre de Dios, and some ominous, like the Isla Desolacion, but a good number of German names were also salted among the Anglo-Spanish mix; I found a Puerto Weber, the Canal Erhardt, the Isla Stubbenkammer and the Monte Siegfried; just enough Teutonic names to record how many hopeful people had emigrated from Germany to Chile’s bleak and inhospitable coast.

  None of the charts marked von Rellsteb’s finca, but of the score of islands which made up the Archipielago Sangre de Cristo only one seemed large enough to sustain a ranch. That island bore the ominous name of Isla Tormentos, the Isle of Torments, and I wondered if it had been so named by shipwrecked sailors who had suffered on its inhospitable coasts. The long Pacific shore of the Isle of Torments was shown as a stretch of gigantic cliffs, pierced by a single fjord that reached so deep into the island it almost slashed Isla Tormentos in half. The opposite shore of the island was far more ragged than the ocean-facing cliffs; the eastern coast was a cartographer’s nightmare, for it looked as though the island had been raggedly ripped from the rest of the archipelago to leave a tattered, scattered, and shattered litter of rocks and islands and shoals, which, in turn, were all navigational hazards within the forbiddingly named Estrecho Desolado, the Desolate Straits. The Patagonian coast was thickly printed with such depressing names, but the Archipielago Sangre de Cristo seemed to have more than its fair share of forbidding nomenclature, suggesting that sailing its labyrinthi
ne channels would be hard and dangerous work. I traced the difficult course of the Desolate Straits to find they were not true straits at all, but rather a blind sea loch that ran uselessly into the heartland of the Isle of Torments.

  I was distracted from these dispiriting researches by Jackie’s noisy return. She came laden with string bags that were crammed with papayas, avocados, tomatoes, leeks, pineapples, cabbages, bunches of radishes, and the island’s small, good-tasting potatoes. She was clearly delighted with the Canary Islands. “I got talking to this Dutch lady, who’s on one of the boats moored by the wall over there, and she speaks Spanish and she talked to the lady in the shop, and she told us that everything in the shop was grown organically. Everything! Isn’t that just great, Tim?”

  “It’s absolutely astonishingly terrifically wonderful,” I said with an utter lack of enthusiasm. “Did you buy some organic meat for your organic skipper?”

  “Yeah, sure. Of course I did.” She produced a cellophane pack, which held a very scrawny portion of tired-looking chicken, then dived enthusiastically down the main companionway with her purchases. “Chicken’s OK, isn’t it? They had rabbits, too, but I really couldn’t bring myself to buy a dead bunny rabbit, Tim. I’m sorry.” She shouted the apology up from the galley where she was evidently storing the food into lockers.

  “Did the dead bunnies have their paws on?”

  There was a pause, then her small, wedge-shaped face frowned at me from the foot of the companionway. “I didn’t look. Why? Is it important?”

  “If the paws are still on the carcass, then it probably is rabbit,” I said, “but if the paws are missing, then it’s a pretty sure bet you’re looking at a dead pussycat.”

  A heartbeat of silence. Then, “No!”

  “Cat doesn’t taste bad,” I said with feigned insouciance. “It depends on how well the family fed the pussy, really. The ones fed on that dry cat food taste like shit, but the others are OK.”