Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  The wind carried us into the chill airs brought north by the Humboldt Current. Ten days out of Panama I put away my shorts and took out long trousers, and three days later I dragged my heavy foul-weather gear out of Stormchild’s wet locker where I also discovered Jackie’s oilskins. I pushed them into a kit bag that I stored under the bunk she had used, and which was now once again given over to ship’s stores. For days I had been finding her belongings scattered about the boat. Her sprouting seeds had gone mad, luxuriating like a tiny forest in their plastic home until I had tossed the whole mess overboard. I had discovered her bikini in a wash bag, and that, like her oilskins, I stored aboard. I found an unused sound tape for her recorder, a pen, her awful felt hat, and a pathetic pair of pink socks. “Chuck ‘em!” David robustly encouraged me when he saw me holding the little socks with the reverence that a Catholic might yield to a scrap of the true cross.

  “They’re not mine to chuck.”

  “You are master under God of this ship, which gives you inalienable rights under international law over all persons and objects and smelly socks found in your domain. Allow me to lighten your ship, Tim, if you lack the resolve.” He plucked the socks from my hand and hurled them far into the wind. I saw the flash of bright pink wool floating briefly amongst a mess of white foam on a wave’s grim face, then the socks were gone forever. The next morning I hurled the silly mug with the loving cats overboard, though I took a perverse comfort from wearing the scarf Jackie had knitted me.

  We thumped on, curving round the bulge of a continent, then steering Stormchild hard to the south. I saw our first albatross, vast, serene, and riding the sky like an angel. There were whales in the gray-green sea and strange stars above us as we left the northern hemisphere behind and slashed on into the southern emptiness. Mile after lonely mile we went, with neither a sail nor a ship in sight, nor even an aircraft above us. This was one of the empty seas, as empty as when Alexander Selkirk, who would be transmuted by genius into Robinson Crusoe, was marooned on an island in the middle of its desolation.

  The further south we sailed, the worse the weather became. We seemed to have entered a region of perpetual cloud that shadowed the sea with a sinister, slaty cast. Squalls hissed across that gray, dark sea. The wind flecked the water white and lifted spindrift that permeated every inch of Stormchild’s cabins. David and I, when on watch, crouched behind the spray hood and tried not to move our heads too much because the skin of our necks, unused to the confining stiffness of the oilskin’s collars, had been chafed to rawness. My mood, already tormented by Jackie’s disappearance, was further soured by the weather. My only escape from doom-laden misery lay in sailing Stormchild as efficiently as possible, taking pleasure in a skill well done. I could lose myself behind the wheel, imagining that my endless path through the heave and pattern of great waves could last forever.

  There was too much cloud for celestial navigation, and I could not be bothered to use the SatNav, yet I knew we were closing on an unseen coast because of the increasing numbers of molly-mawks, gray gulls, terns, and storm petrels that came near Stormchild. One day, miraculously, the sun shone, but the weather stayed cold and when I dipped a thermometer into the sea the temperature measured a mere six degrees centigrade, which meant we had plunged into the very heart of the icy Humboldt Current which drags tons of Antarctic meltwater north into the Pacific. I dug out the red, white, and blue Chilean courtesy ensign I had bought in Colon and stored it in a ready locker of the cockpit.

  That night the phosphorescence made a dazzling path behind Stormchild’s transom. A school of Chilean dolphins embroidered that starry wake by weaving trails of shattered light around it, yet the beauty of the moment was deceptive for the weather was becoming ominous and the seas still heavier. So far, in the nine thousand miles of Stormchild’s voyage, I had escaped all the bad storms, but that night, almost as though the Genesis community was aware of our coming and had summoned the spirits of the deep to stop Stormchild, a black gale came hurtling out of the northeast. The barometer plummeted, and the sea, its current fighting against the wind, became frighteningly steep and confused. The dolphins flicked one last dazzling curve in Stormchild’s wake, then left.

  David, dragged from his bunk, helped me shorten sail. We were both swathed in oilskins and sea boots, and had our lifelines clipped to steel rings bedded in the cockpit’s sole. An hour later we took in all but the storm trysail and jib, yet still the wind rose, and by midnight we had reefed down to just the triple-stitched scrap of storm jib which dragged us scudding through the maelstrom of vicious sea and shrieking wind. Stormchild rode the storm beautifully. She thumped up those bastard seas, slashing through their confused summits before plunging down into the dark troughs. At times a cross sea would jar the boat sideways and the cockpit would fill with a seething swirl of freezing water, but always Stormchild held firm on course to meet the next wind-haunted crest.

  The gale seemed to increase its fury. Once, when a flicker of lightning sliced the sky, I saw that David was praying. A few moments later, when the wind was a deafening and demonic screech, he manfully went below and somehow heated soup which he brought precariously back to the cockpit. Rarely had food tasted better. The boat bucked and shuddered in the worst of the seas, but as dawn approached I sensed that the anger was at last dying from the wind. First light showed us mad waters, blown white by the storm’s anger, but already the madness was settling and slowly, as the gray day lightened and the wind became tired, we could at last stow the storm jib, set headsails, and turn our weary boat toward the hidden shore. “If all I hear about Patagonia is right,” David remarked ominously, “then that little blow is a mere promise of what is to come.”

  “Indeed.”

  “But she’s a well-named boat,” he said with great satisfaction, and indeed she was, for Stormchild had worn the gale’s quick savagery with an easy confidence. I knew there was worse to come, much worse, for we were approaching a coast renowned for killing ships, yet our baptism of tempest augured well. “I fear the galley is painted with spilled tomato soup,” David confessed, but otherwise there was not a great deal of damage. A seam in the storm jib had begun to tear its lockstitches apart, some ill-stowed wineglasses had shattered, and an errant wave crashing on our stern had carried away one of the two life buoys, but otherwise Stormchild had indeed lived up to the promise of her name.

  That evening, as we sipped our whiskey and as Stormchild hissed and bubbled her quick wake across the long, exhausted swell of an ocean after storm, the far peaks of Chile showed like jagged clouds above the eastern horizon. We had come to our landfall, to the high snowcapped Andean mountains that lay behind the Patagonian coast. David stared at the mountains through binoculars, then raised his plastic cup in a heartfelt tribute to my navigation. “Well done, my good and excellent little brother, well done.”

  I said nothing at first. Instead I just stared through red-rimmed eyes at the pink sparks of sun-reflecting snow in that far distance, and I thought with what innocent delight Jackie Potten would have greeted this landfall. “It’s a funny old world,” I said at last, and raised my beaker in response to my brother’s compliment. The sea was darkening into night, mirroring the sky’s gloom to leave those high, brilliant, snow-white peaks suspended like shards of rosy light in the dusky air. I watched till the last light drained away and we could see nothing but the strange southern constellations hanging high between the scudding clouds.

  We hove to, not wanting to make an unfamiliar coast in the darkness. Stormchild, as though impatient with our caution, fretted all night in the short, steep waves until the creeping dawn silhouetted the far peaks black and foreboding, and, at last, under the mountains’ ominous loom, we loosened Stormchild’s sheets, untied her wheel, and plunged toward the land.

  PART

  two

  Water pounded against Stormchild’s steel cutwater, then shredded into a thousand ice-cold missiles that rattled down her decks and shattered loud on her spray hood. For ho
urs we had been enduring such hard, cold, frightening, and wearying work. We were fighting against a head wind and a hostile sea, laboring not merely to make progress, but simply to hold our own against the malevolence of an ocean that assaulted us in close-ranked attacking ridges scummed and ribbed with white water. The crests of the ridges were flying maelstroms of wind-whipped spray that mingled with a pelting rain that slashed diagonally out of low, dark clouds. The wave ridges were coming at an angle so that Stormchild fought her way up their long, cold slopes, only to corkscrew off their peaks before running fast into their deep gray-green troughs. On the ridge tops the foam was sometimes so shattered into spray that I could scarcely see Stormchild’s bows. The wind banged and shrieked and moaned in the rigging, while green water seethed and broke dirty white in the scuppers and cockpit drains. This, as Joanna would have enjoyed telling me, was sailing.

  Jackie Potten had not been waiting for me in Puerto Montt. I had dared to expect her, yet at the same time had known that I would be disappointed. I telephoned her in Kalamazoo, only to have her irritating answering machine wish me a good day. I had also telephoned Molly Tetterman, and had once again reached nothing more than a tape recorder.

  “You’re not pining for the girl, are you?” David had asked me scornfully.

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Oh, pardon me for living,” he said huffily. Our friendship had been strained, both of us knew it, and neither of us really knew how to restore it. David wanted me to forget Jackie, to dismiss her as though she had never existed, while I was missing her. I tried to convince myself that my hopes of any attachment to Jackie had always been as futile as they were unrealistic, but loneliness nevertheless filled me with a corrosive self-pity. The only feeling countering that poison was the growing excitement of sailing ever nearer to Nicole. Each time I woke for another cold spell of watch duty I would feel a small frisson of exhilaration at the realization that every bitter lurch of the hull and hammering blow of the sea marked a moment that took me ever closer to my daughter.

  Or rather each moment should have been taking me closer, had it not been for this damned head wind and its pounding sea. We were one week and four hundred miles south of Puerto Montt as, with two reefs in the main and the number-two jib winched tight as a board, we were trying to weather Cape Raper. I could see the lowering cape, with its lighthouse, way off on Stormchild’s port bow, though our view of the high cliffs was intermittently obscured by the thrashing rain. Once, managing to steady my binoculars on the cliffs, I saw a wave break on the rocks and spume its white water a hundred feet into the air where it was snatched into oblivion by the howling wind.

  Cape Raper was the most westerly point of the Chilean mainland and, because it was the one part of that wild coast where there was no inside channel, we were being forced to pass it at sea. Once past the cape we would still have to cross the infamous Golfo de Penas, the Gulf of Sorrows, before we could once again take advantage of the sheltered channels behind the barrier islands, though “sheltered” was hardly the right word because the waterways between and behind the barrier islands were scoured by vicious tides, prey to violent williwaws, and desperately short of good holding for Stormchild’s triple anchors. We had already sailed the best part of a hundred miles in such channels, protected from the ocean storms by the wooded Chonos Islands, but now, thanks to Cape Raper, we had to face the great gray open ocean that heaved at us like moving mountain ranges. Seaward of us, and having just as uncomfortable a passage as Stormchild, was a big rust-streaked and heavily-laden freighter that must have been carrying limestone north from the Patagonian quarries. Smoke from the freighter’s stack streamed ahead in the spray and rain, then I lost sight of her as Stormchild plunged off a wave crest to plummet down into a dark trough.

  David, sharing the watch with me, gripped a safety bar tight. There was a wariness in his eyes, almost as though, in the great wilderness of wind and water, he was perceiving the wrath of God. We were both dog-tired, both sore, both of us bruised and suffering from the minor injuries of hard sailing: fingers pinched in winches, palms skinned by ropes, and small cuts abraded by salt water. But at least Stormchild was taking the seas well; she sailed sweet and true, despite her crew’s weariness.

  Our last proper rest had been in the fishing town of Puerto Montt, where we had cleared customs and received our ninety-day entrance visas. Then, obedient to Chile’s cruising regulations, we had sought a sailing permit from the Armada, the Chilean Navy. We had been told to expect a stultifying bureaucracy, but the demise of military government had left the whole process perfunctory. “You’re supposed to radio us every day and tell us your position,” a black-uniformed Armada officer, Captain Hernandez, told us in perfect English, “but I wouldn’t bother, because I don’t think anyone really cares where you’re going. Where are you going, by the way?”

  For a heartbeat I had considered lying in case the Genesis community had contacts within the Armada, but Hernandez’s friendly manner made the thought instantly ridiculous, so I had told him of our plans to explore the Archipielago Sangre de Cristo.

  “Good God, why?”

  “Bird-watching,” I lied, for it did not seem entirely sensible to admit that we risked an armed confrontation with a group of survival-minded environmentalists, who, I believed, had murdered my wife and were even now holding my daughter against her will.

  “We’ve come to see the green-backed firecrown hummingbird.” David convincingly embellished my lie.

  “I’m hardly an expert,”—Hernandez seemed to find nothing particularly strange in the idea of men sailing thousands of miles to spot a bird—”but you might have better luck farther south. Still, I’m sure half the joy of bird-watching lies in the search, yes?”

  As Captain Hernandez began to prepare our official papers I wandered to the wall opposite his desk to examine the large scale charts that were pasted together to make a continuous map. I peered very closely at the Archipielago Sangre de Cristo and particularly at the Isla Tormentos, and saw that someone had inked a small square mark on the shore of the island exactly where I had presumed any settlement might have been built. I tried not to betray any particular interest as I turned towards Hernandez. “Are we likely to find any fishing villages in the islands? I’m thinking of places where we can find provisions?”

  Hernandez banged his rubber stamp on our permit, then offered me a dismissive shake of his head. “There’s no fishing village for a hundred miles, only a community of hippies on Tormentos. They’re an odd lot. They sail off and make a damn nuisance of themselves to the Japanese, but they keep well out of our hair. No bird fouls its own nest, eh?”

  “Indeed.”

  Hernandez had crossed to the wall of charts and tapped the inked mark, thus confirming my suspicions of where the Genesis community was hiding. “I doubt if the hippies will be of much use to you if you run short of supplies,” he said scathingly. “They seem to live, how do you say—low on the hog. For all we know they may all be dead by now. The winters there are hard, very hard. Not that you need worry. There’s plenty of fresh water in the islands and as many fish as you can catch.” He ceremoniously presented me with Stormchild’s sailing permit and wished us both luck.

  We went back to Stormchild where I copied onto my own chart the location of the Genesis community’s settlement. At last, after all the supposition and imaginings, we had a destination. I had found Nicole.

  And now, one week later, we were being buffeted by the great seas and drenched by the rain and whip-lashed by the salt spray as we struggled against a pernicious south wind to round Cape Raper and gain the Gulf of Sorrows, beyond which we would discover whether the hippies, low on their hog, still lived. I was nearing Nicole.

  As we crossed the Gulf of Sorrows the wind and seas became atrocious. We had come to Patagonia in its summer season, but the weather was like a bad northern winter, and our journey had deteriorated into a sodden hell. Squall after squall savaged across the water, the
wind rarely dropped below Force Seven and never once veered from due south, and thus it took us three days to claw our way southward across the Gulf. It was three days of hard tacking into a scouring, soaking, dispiriting bitch of a wind, and the misery worsened when I could not find the entrance to the channel that would eventually lead us to the Desolate Straits and to the Isle of Torments. For two whole days we beat up and down that wind-shredded coast till at last a tuna boat radioed us directions.

  We escaped the great ocean waves into a network of channels that were bounded by sheer black cliffs, which, during a rare moment when the clouds lifted, I measured with the sextant and found to be over four hundred feet high. The great rock faces cast the narrow seaways into a perpetual gloom through which waterfalls plumed and fell in white smoking streaks. Sometimes it rained so hard that it was difficult to tell where the waterfalls began and the sky ended, and always there was a pervasive mist that permeated Stormchild’s cabins so that every surface on the boat became damp and slimy with mold. Even the air seemed sodden.

  We motored south in this gloomy, dank world, into which the ocean waves reached to swell and suck green water against the broken black rocks. The tides had a rise and fall as fierce as any in the English channel, yet these tides seemed to follow no set pattern by which we could forecast their surge, for the moon’s metronomic tug on the water was confused into craziness by the complexity of the coast’s labyrinthine channels. In places, where boulders protruded close beneath the water’s surface, the confusion hatched whirlpools and tidal rips that waited in vicious ambush. The whirlpools were glossy, silent, green-black slides inviting a boat to destruction, while the rips looked as though a demented blender was thrashing madly just beneath the waves to explode white spray fifteen or twenty feet into the rain-filled wind. We dared not risk sailing blind into such dangers by traveling at night, so instead we would pick what seemed like a sheltered cove and try to find a lodgement for our heavy anchors which usually just dragged across rock or snagged in the thick floating beds of kelp. One of us would then have to use the dinghy to carry mooring lines ashore, which, because there were rarely shelving beaches, inevitably meant a dangerous scramble across slippery, fissured, weed-slick rocks and an inevitable soaking as a wave surged ice-cold water up the boulders. Whichever of us did that singularly unpleasant mooring duty would then row frantically back to Stormchild to be revived in front of the saloon’s small diesel heater. “Christ, but I’m too old for this sort of caper,” David said one night as he shivered half naked in front of the heater’s feeble warmth.