‘It was that poor devil Steffens,’ Basil said as he rejoined Unity. ‘The fellow who was cut about the face so badly in the scrap last night.’
‘Oh, dear! He’s been feverish all day and he was feeling the lack of water more than any of us. I was going along in a few minutes’ time to re-do his bandages. What happened?’
‘He couldn’t stand the strain any longer, I suppose. His friend Largertöf says they’ve twice had to prevent him by force from drinking sea-water, but the first time he swallowed quite a lot before they could stop him.’
‘Drinking sea-water sends people mad doesn’t it?’
‘So they say. He suddenly jumped up and chucked himself overboard.’
‘Oh, how horrible!’ Unity covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.
‘Steady—steady on.’ Basil put his arm round her. ‘You’ve been so splendid all this time. Don’t give way now.’
After a moment she checked her sobbing and he helped her back to the stern. The others there had noticed them during their long talk together, so Basil’s presence was accepted without comment.
For a short spell the new tragedy had roused the whole boat’s company to frantic activity, but now they subsided in their places again, a hapless prey to the gnawing misery of their thoughts.
Largertöf wept for his friend Steffens and would not be comforted. He was a young fellow, little more than a muscular, well-grown boy, and the older man, a seaman of twenty years’ standing, had become his hero through having protected him in the rough life of the fo’c’sle. The others sat glum and silent; some of them wondering with good reason if Steffens had not taken the wiser course in making a sudden end of himself.
The sun, now a red-gold disc, touched the horizon. The long, low layers of cloud gathered about it were lit for a few moments into a glory of crimson, orange, and rose. With lack-lustre eyes they watched it sink into that underworld which the ancients believed to contain only death and eternal night. Another day was gone, and the passing of the supreme symbol of all life and virility left them doubly conscious of their ever-increasing weakness.
When the hurricane lantern was lit, Luvia issued rations. The cask was now empty as a hollow drum, and owing to the loss of the kettle and stove in the mutiny no sea-water could now be boiled to distil fresh with the limited amount of paraffin still at their disposal, but the fat of the corned beef contained a small amount of moisture and the condensed milk, of which he allowed them two spoonfuls apiece, was a semi-liquid.
After the long day of sunshine their throats were so dry and parched that it was a struggle to get down the sticky mess, but they masticated the ration doggedly; conscious that it would give them a little strength—a few hours more of the life for which they were so greedy now that its sands were running out with such terrifying speed.
Before they settled down to the long hours of darkness Juhani Luvia joined them all in prayer as he had done each morning and evening since they had been in the open boat. None of the company had a prayer-book with them, but Juhani’s mother had brought him up in the faith she held very dear, and on his leave he still accompanied her to an old church in Viipuri, so he experienced little difficulty in leading a simple appeal for help, guidance and fortitude to the Maker of them all.
The night proved calm, and had they been in comfortable berths after an ample meal they would normally have enjoyed a dreamless slumber, but their seats on the hard boards and lack of nourishment kept them wakeful. The gentle rocking of the boat and the monotonous lapping of the water against the sides became a torture to their frayed nerves. Towards midnight one of the Negroes began to pray aloud, a semi-incoherent rambling argument with God, it seemed, in which the man alternately reasoned and pleaded that he had done nothing to deserve such chastisement. Luvia was in two minds whether to stop it with an abrupt order, but, knowing that none of the others were really sleeping, could not bring himself to do so.
The coloured man was not the only one to become light-headed. Suddenly, without warning, Synolda began to scream and bang her head against the woodwork in the stern. It took twenty minutes’ patient handling on the part of Unity, Luvia, Vicente and Basil to restore her to sanity, and when the hard tears came at last to her dry eyes they thought her rasping sobs would never cease.
Starlight of a brightness unbelievable to those who have always lived in cities lit the scene. The Southern Cross gleamed high in the heavens to the south, yet moved in its orbit as the night crawled on with what seemed to them incredible slowness. Like points of light in a high canopy of dark purple, the countless stars winked and twinkled above them, so that each shape in the boat could be recognised as an individual by their gentle radiance. When the Negro had fallen into an uneasy slumber and Synolda had been quieted, a great silence was all about them. In the mysterious twilight of the stars they crouched, suffering there until the sky paled and out of its greyness came another dawn.
The night had not been cold, but their lowered resistance had made them more susceptible to the chill of a light breeze that had sprung up in the early hours. Their muscles ached almost unendurably from the strain of trying to keep in one position for any length of time: their heads were heavy from fatigue and sleeplessness, yet curiously clear in the matter of awareness concerning their surroundings.
Water, condensed milk and rum were now all exhausted, so the only issue for the morning meal was the last tin of corned beef. Slowly they chewed it, but Unity found hers impossible to swallow and had to dispose of it over the side of the boat. Hardly a word was spoken; it was an effort for them to croak out more than a sentence from their leather-dry throats.
Anyone who had seen them go on board at Cape Town would hardly have recognised them on this, the fourth morning of their ordeal. Their eyes were sunken in their sockets; their cheeks leaden, where they were not covered with a coarse stubble.
Synolda’s vanity case had been sent spinning overboard during the upset of the mutiny. At the time her fury at its loss had caused her to become almost blasphemous, but now she no longer cared. Curiously enough, without her make-up she seemed years younger, but she had the pale-faced, hectic-eyed look of a consumptive rather than the robust freshness of a healthy girl.
After the ration of bully had been dispensed it was found that one portion remained over. At first Luvia feared that their depleted company of fifteen had been further reduced by yet another fatality unwitnessed by them during the night, but Hansie was discovered curled up sound asleep in the bow.
All efforts to arouse him proved fruitless and his big flask lay beside him quite empty. It was obvious that he had sought temporary oblivion in his supply of Bourbon and, on a practically empty stomach, the strong spirit had overcome him to an extreme degree. He was dead drunk, and, having rolled up his eyelids, Basil came to the conclusion that the ex-bartender would not regain consciousness before midday.
Four hours of the morning drifted by and for all of them each hour seemed like a month in hell. At a little before eleven o’clock the woolly-pated Lem, who had rambled so wildly in the night, went insane. Cursing, screaming, blaspheming, he suddenly dived at his feet and attempted to tear away the ropes that held them. The sailors tried to restrain him, but, wild-eyed and foaming at the mouth, he fought them off with superhuman strength. Luvia went forward and, thinking it the most humane thing to do, hit him a smashing blow under the jaw that knocked him out.
Just as Lem sagged and slid down in a heap, Vicente, who was doing look-out, gave a croaking yell.
‘A ship! I see her! Blessed Madonna! A ship to left there! A ship, Luvia—a ship!’
Instantly every neck was craned in the direction he had pointed. A groan of disappointment went up—the horizon was blank and empty.
‘Oh, how could you!’ Synolda’s cry of protest came huskily from between her cracked lips.
‘He wasn’t trying to be funny,’ said Basil bitterly. ‘The poor chap’s gone off his rocker.’
Vicente’s expressio
n suddenly changed from delirious joy to utter despair. He ceased waving his arms and stood staring, mouth agape, at the unbroken seascape with its monotonous expanse of bobbing wavelets. ‘She is gone!’ he wailed. ‘She is gone. Yet I swear I see her this moment back.’
‘What was it you thought you saw?’ Luvia asked soberly.
‘Two masts—their top staffs—also, between, for a second, a black patch I think is a funnel tip.’
‘He’s higher than we are and can see further,’ Unity muttered just as Luvia pushed past her, and, jumping up on to the thwart beside Vicente, cried, ‘Hi you, give me those glasses.’
With a dazed look on his face the Venezuelan handed over the binoculars which Luvia lent to each look-out for his turn of duty.
For two breathless moments the whole company remained absolutely motionless, their hearts gripped by the most appalling suspense. Not a murmur escaped them while they awaited the verdict which meant for them life or death.
Luvia held the glasses firmly to his eyes, yet he could not keep his hands from trembling. Slowly he lowered them and turned to look at the group who stood in the well of the boat, their anxious faces all strained up towards him.
His mouth twitched spasmodically before he spoke. ‘We win. Vedras is right. There’s a steamer to sou’-west of us. I can see her topmasts and the tip of her funnel when we rise on the swell.’
It was Thursday, 13th January, and they had been eighty-four hours in the boat. The tension snapped. Some portion of their inexpressible relief was manifest in a sudden outpouring of emotion. Synolda flung her arms round Vicente’s neck and kissed him. Basil led a husky cheer. Unity fainted. Jansen slipped to his knees and began to render thanks to God aloud. Luvia sat down on the thwart, put his head between his hands and burst into tears.
Within five minutes Unity had come round and Luvia was back in the stern rapping out orders. The rest, having regained control of themselves, were springing to obey him; their languor gone; galvanised into a fierce activity by the miraculous promise of succour which had come to them when hope seemed past even praying for.
The mutineers were released; the sail was set. Jansen was sent forward with the glasses to keep watch upon the ship. Basil shinned up the mast and tied a long streamer of white material, which Synolda had ripped from her underskirt, to the spar.
‘How far off is she?’ he asked Luvia when he had finished fixing the pennant which he hoped might attract the attention of the look-out on the ship to them.
‘Difficult to say,’ the Finn replied. ‘Her funnel tip, which I could just make out, must be fifty feet above the water; a man sitting on it could see our sail each time she rises if he had glasses. At that height his horizon would be close on ten miles away. Maybe the funnel’s higher though. If so, we’re farther off.’
‘How long d’you reckon it’ll take us to come up with her?’
‘God knows! It’s a bad break her being almost dead to windward. Can’t sail within seven points of the wind, you see, so we’ll have to tack first one way then another to get nearer.’
‘With any luck she’ll spot us and turn out of her course to pick us up.’
Luvia shook his head. ‘I doubt that; anyway till we’re much closer. They’d never sight a small boat like this such a distance away. There’s so little shipping in these waters, too, the look-out knows it’s a cinch there’ll be nothing to report so the odds are he’s some lazy bum who’s sitting up in the crow’s-nest half asleep.’
A hoarse voice behind them asked anxiously: ‘In which direction is she going?’ It was De Brissac; his head still swathed in bandages, but well enough to lie propped up now.
‘I don’t know,’ Luvia grunted. ‘I couldn’t see the slant of her masts sufficiently to judge; but she’s practically broadside-on to us.’
Synolda grabbed his arm. ‘But if she’s ten miles away and not coming towards us she may disappear again before we get near enough to signal her.’
‘Yes,’ Luvia agreed soberly. ‘I’m afraid that is so. We’re not out of the wood yet.’ He had already visualised such a possibility, but forborne to mention it.
At the awful thought that they might not be rescued after all a quick reaction set in. They fell silent, strained their eyes in the direction of the ship they could not see, and watched the maddeningly slow progress of the boat through the water with the acutest anxiety.
The life-boat was a heavy, broad-waisted vessel, built to survive in rough seas and not for speed. With a good wind she could not have done much more than six knots an hour and the light breeze which played about it at the moment was carrying it along at less than three. The necessity for tacking further reduced their actual progress towards the ship and when midday came Jansen reported that while the steamer did not appear to be any farther away he did not think they were much nearer to her.
As they were tacking all the time at an angle to their true course, it was difficult to observe in which direction the vessel was moving. A second and longer study of her through the glasses had convinced Luvia that she was not broadside, but three-quarters on, with her stern towards them. He could see no smoke rising from the funnel tip and concluded that she was cruising very slowly away to the southward. Jansen and the oldest sailor, Bremer, agreed with him.
Speculation was rife among them as to what the ship could be doing in such a lonely area of the ocean. From the little they could judge, without seeing her hull and at such a distance, she seemed too big for a whaler, while a tramp or passenger ship would hardly have been likely to be cruising at a few knots an hour in the empty spaces of the South Atlantic.
They were in no state to talk much, however, as, after the first excitement of sighting their possible rescuer had subsided, they suffered a relapse to their previous state of weakness. Even a few words meant an effort, and now the sun was over the meridian the real torture of thirst had them all firmly in its grip.
Since there were no liquid rations left to issue, old Jansen had the idea of breaking up the cask. Its wood retained a little moisture and when he had knocked off the iron hoops they eagerly shared out the curved staves. By hacking off small pieces of the wood with their knives they were able to chew it for the pitifully small amount of water it still held before spitting out the evil-tasting residue. Though it did not even serve, to wet their throats it occupied them for a while and gave them the illusion that they had had a meagre ration.
By one o’clock they still seemed to have made little progress and the light wind was dying fast. Luvia judged that they could not have made more than a mile in the direction of the ship in the past hour, and, whatever might be her mysterious mission, cruising so slowly in these waters, he feared every moment that she would put on steam and sail away. In a cracked voice he ordered the sail to be lowered and the men to get out their oars.
They obeyed willingly enough, only too glad, in spite of their physical distress, to be able to lend a hand towards their own salvation, rather than remain idle in such frightful suspense.
Luvia took the stroke oar himself; Basil, Bremer, Largertöf, Harlem, and Corncob made up the rest of the crew. Jansen, at the tiller, turned the boat’s bow dead towards their goal and Unity relieved him of his job of look-out with the glasses.
An hour’s rowing brought them perceptibly nearer to the steamer. Occasional glimpses of her mast and funnel tops could now be caught when standing up in the boat, and from Unity’s perch on the bow thwarts she could keep them under constant observation, even when the ship sank a little in the gentle swell. But that hour had taken the go out of the best men in the boat.
It was over twenty-four hours since any of them had tasted water and for nearly four days they had subsisted on the barest minimum of food.
As in a nightmare, Synolda watched them from the stern; their faces grimed and furrowed, or red and puffy where the sun had caught them; their breath coming in painful gasps at each tug on the heavy oars; their eyes protruding unnaturally from blackringed sockets. Nearest her,
Luvia was sticking it manfully; the muscles in his cheeks tightening under his four-days’ growth of golden stubble every time he threw his weight into a long, steady stroke. His fine head and splendid physique had attracted her from the beginning, and in these days of stress she had come to admire his courage and fortitude as well. Now, her heart bled for him as she realised that the rest of the oarsmen were quite incapable of adequately supporting his splendid effort.
Bitterly he realised that too. Their strokes were becoming ragged and uneven; their oars dipped into the water but there was little power behind the blades. Now and again one of them caught a crab, impeded the others, and checked the way of the boat. It was not that they were slacking, but too weary and feeble to row better even though their lives depended on it.
At half past two he replaced Bremer, Largertöf, Corncob and Basil with Isiah, Nudäa, Vicente and Jansen.
Another hour of dogged rowing and Unity reported that she could see most of the funnel and the upper bridge-works of the ship. It had turned a little and was now heading dead away from them, but must be proceeding very slowly as they were certainly decreasing their distance from it.
At four o’clock Basil went up into the bow and found Hansie, about whom they’d all forgotten, lying there wide awake staring up at the sky. The ex-barman had come out of his drunken stupor some time earlier, but was suffering from such an appalling hangover as well as ravaging thirst that he had no idea a ship had been sighted and the fact that the others were rowing had not even impinged on his consciousness.
Basil dipped a canvas bucket over the side, and, filling it with sea-water, flung its contents over Hansie to rouse him fully. It then occurred to him to take a look at Lem. After Luvia had knocked the Negro out in the morning they had tied him up and gagged him to prevent his screaming tearing all that remained of their nerves to pieces when he came to again. Basil found him still and stiff, with his eyeballs staring; he was quite dead. His body meant so many stone of weight in the boat; so much extra to pull when every ounce mattered to the aching muscles of the rowers. Without the least compunction Basil heaved up the dead Negro’s body and, with an effort, pushed it overboard.
Uncharted Seas Page 9