“Sailor!” the Bosun yelled at a deck hand. “Bind that man and woman fast. That devil can swim and we will not have him taking his leave of us.”
The sailor, fearful for his life yet more terrified of the authority the Bosun would wield when this was over, pressed four of his fellows into the task of chaining Christian and Faith together to the rail amidships, ahead of the mast, passing the key to the Bosun who pocketed it.
Even through the windblown spray of the ferment, a calm area of the bay ahead lay off the starboard bow, protected from the swell and gale coming out of the southwest by a long ridge that stood out to sea.
There lay a fine white beach with moderately sized surf in the lee of that hospitable ridge of land.
If they could make that landfall, the ship could run herself aground and later be careened for repair when the storm had blown itself out.
The Captain, fighting for his ship, vast sheets of water still cascading over them as she went, failed to notice his Christian couple lashed in the lee of the ship’s headlong plunge.
And suddenly, as they came into the protection of the bay, there came a jarring crash to the hull as the vessel ran into some submerged obstacle, heeling her over to almost capsize.
When she righted, her wheel spun freely with no more connection to the rudder.
More evidence that the rudder had been ripped out from beneath them came in the screams of those chained below decks as the ship began taking on water.
The Captain ordered stern anchors dropped, but they dragged ahead of the wind in the sandy bottom.
To the north corner of the bay, the storm surf still wrapped around the headland and hurled itself at an unyielding granite cliff face.
With the ship taking on water fast, the skipper launched the cutter and, trailing a line, it ran in to the beach through a protracted lull between the waves. It made landfall in the bay midway between the southern corner of calm and the boiling northern granite cliffs.
Slowly, the stricken vessel was blowing ahead of the tempest toward a long finger of reef that ran a league out to sea from where the cutter had made landfall.
Above the tiny figures of men trying to secure the line that they had drawn to shore, soared the slopes of a two-thousand-foot mountain capped by a rocky outcrop that wore a mane of cloud. The cutter lay on a snow-white beach where the land behind it reared up into a tangle of knotted flora glistening in the late-afternoon sun.
A bucket crew was fighting against the water coming in through the damaged hull.
Another phalanx of ocean swells arose again on the horizon and began to march in file toward the shore.
The Captain squinted and saw that good fortune was smiling on them. The ridge of headland now to their south cast a sickle of offshore reefs that would take the brunt of the oncoming assault.
He watched as white water exploded and creamed up and over the distant rocks, and he breathed a sigh of relief.
But battalions of the deflected swell still swooped into the bay and gathered themselves on that long pinnacle of reef now seaward of them. White water as tall as the rail came bearing down on the stricken vessel, adrift, beam-on to the assault.
Each man aboard gave prayer to the heavens, calling out to God for deliverance.
And a miracle happened.
The peculiarity of the bay’s geometry sent that wave thundering past the ship by no more than three fathoms.
The schooner bucked and rolled violently in its passing. The man still clinging in the rigging, sent aloft to spot a best course ahead, was flung as if by catapult from the exaggeration of the mast thrashing against the sky. He hit the water and was the first to die, his death throes unseen so horrified as each of them were with the terror of their own fate.
From below decks, came the roar of naked panic.
The next wave ran past in similar fashion, slapping the ship as it thundered by so that the bow came about and pointed back out to the horizon.
Through the confusion of it, Christian was trying to track the Bosun. That man had the key to the shackle that held them and he knew that if the Bosun came within range, he must take his chance and get a portion of the chain that bound him to Faith about the man’s bull-neck to finish him and their predicament.
The third wave was the biggest by far. The white water followed the same path as the wave before, but now the shoulder of that wave stood higher and higher, threatening to break where the previous had not. The top of it curled over the ship’s prow and came barrelling down the deck at knee height, sweeping with it all hands who had not taken a firm grip.
But fate had again shifted to deliver a cruel justice and the Bosun was nowhere to be seen. He was gone with that wave.
Christian searched for him—for the last chance he had at life and liberty—but he was nowhere on board to be seen, and nowhere in the ocean of thrashing swimmers could he see the ugly bald head.
He clung to Faith with the last of his strength, whispering his love to her. “My dove,” he kept cooing in her ear, fighting to keep the quaver from his voice and its baritone certainty. “You will fly again, my dove,” softly in her ear.
The chains that looped between them ran through a hawsehole, an aperture in the teak structure of the ship’s hull designed to allow mooring lines to pass through. Had he lost his grip on either the ship or his wife, the pair would be held aboard by their common tether, but the rough shackles would likely pare their flesh to the bone.
“We will make it, my dove,” he assured her calmly. “I have a plan.”
The whole ship’s company was so engaged in saving themselves that nobody saw how he had already begun to use the chain that held him to saw and saw at the wood.
Chapter 11
When night came, the line taken ashore by the first party out in the cutter was still doing duty. The swell had abated and no more sets of waves had borne down on them.
The Captain had gone to shore, hitched to the line in a makeshift basket.
An hour before sunset, the cupboard-shaped demon that was the Bosun somehow appeared as if delivered by the devil himself onto the shore. Recovered from his ordeal through the waves, he was now clubbing into a semblance of order the slaves being spirited by the line and basket, one at a time to shore.
The growing group of blackness, hauled from the ship’s hold, was being corralled near the top of the beach where two flat rocks with the likeness to whales at the surface, gave armed sentries a commanding view from which no slave could escape.
The vessel had come to rest on the inside of that terrible reef, bumping and grinding its hull as the tide steadily fell away and the height of the swell with it.
The São José de Afrika lay stricken just behind the wave line, hard against a small rock that stood like a cherry, as tall as a man, proud of the water.
Under her keel, lay a reef on which she had come to rest. As the tide drained the bay, she began to list.
The Mate who was organizing the evacuation of human cargo from the holds tried to free Christian and Faith, but with no key to the shackle he quickly gave up. It was now a race to recover whatever small profit they still could from this doomed venture.
All the while, Christian worked the chain like a saw, making little progress through the iron-hard wood.
In the pitch of the moonless night, he stopped to feel how close they were coming to their freedom, but his heart sank as he realized that the wood was unyielding and he would not beat the dawn light. The Bosun would come back for them, and that would be their end.
The swell was all but gone now and the ship had fallen into a bump-bump pattern of sway, creaking and grinding with new sounds as it listed more and more to port, the side to which they were chained.
In the dead of night, the ship sighed and succumbed to her death, the icy water getting closer to the chained couple’s naked feet.
All the while, Faith remained in prayer and Christian became Chikunda once more, slipping into the rhythmic tribal chant from his youth
, sawing and sawing in time to the memory of it, calling to his ancestors in this moment of crisis.
And as the slack of the tide reached its ebb, his efforts and their appeals to the higher powers were rewarded. The ship broke her back, the two halves parting and going either side of the submerged reef on which she had come to rest.
In those moments after the thunderous crash and splinter of timbers, Chikunda fell backward, the chain released from the wooden hawsehole. His sawing efforts had weakened the structure at that point so that the pressure on the hull fractured along that line.
Faith fell in the other direction, bewildered and confused in the dark.
The screams of those slaves still locked in the hold were a nightmare to endure in the claustrophobic dark.
The chain between the couple ran up and over the torn hull, with each of them fallen and trapped between freshly released bodies, many minced and broken by the violence of the staved-in and splintered lumber, some still clawing for life.
The chains on these men, women and children unskilled in swimming as they were, took them swiftly to the bottom. Very shortly, there were only the noises of the ocean and shouts from the land calling for news.
By now, Chikunda had crawled his way over the wreckage, taking minor gashes as he went. He reached his wife.
The chain connecting them was light and no impediment to swimming, but she could not swim, and he could not risk the length of chain hanging between them snagging on anything underwater.
Already, the stars had begun poking through the clouds, revealing the bright rash of the Milky Way overhead.
But new danger was afoot. Approaching torch flames lit a line of men picking their way down the mountainside off to the south.
Chikunda’s urge was to flee away from the moving torches, toward the north. But even in the bedlam of the ship’s violent entry into the bay, he had spotted the calmer waters in the southerly direction where the torches were moving, and only impenetrable towering cliffs to the north.
He faced the gamble of a lifetime and guessed that their salvation lay in the direction of the greatest danger.
“I have a plan, my dove,” he told his wife. “All you need to do is be silent. Remove your clothing, the white will show. Hold it so that watchers from the shore cannot see it. We need to move now, before the sky begins to dawn.”
And he held her from behind, his right forearm beneath her breast, her back to his chest, and he struck out with a kick like a frog.
He needed them in waist-deep water. Their black skin would give them cover against the dark of the ocean, but already the line of torches were down to beach level and moving fast, passing them as they went in the opposite direction.
“Our statue!” Faith suddenly cried under her breath, and her body went rigid, as if to stroke back toward the wreck.
“Leave it!” Chikunda ordered sternly. “I will carve another.”
And she was sobbing in his arms.
For all the great misery they had witnessed and pain they had endured, it was the loss of this trinket that she held onto.
“Leave it, my dove…” Chikunda said again, gently this time.
The worst of the danger had passed, the line of rescuers with their flaming torches were a receding chain of fairy lights dimmer than the stars above, and the couple could risk coming to shore in knee-high water.
“Don’t go ashore, we will leave tracks,” he cautioned. “We must stick to the water.”
They followed the coast a few hundred more paces and passed three handsome rocks standing in a line out to sea. The clarity with which they could see them made Chikunda realize that dawn was nearly upon them.
“We must hurry.”
In the growing light of the dawn, the magnificence of the bay in which the ship had wrecked slowly emerged over a tragedy.
The couple picked their way out to the end of a long ridge that ran out to sea, forming the southern boundary and headland to the bay.
It ended in a vast granite rock that stood taller than a ship’s mast, a natural breakwater that gave the stricken ship a fighting chance. It looked like a fighter’s punch thrown out into the frenzied sea, frozen there for all time.
From this deserted vantage point, careful to keep low and not present a profile on the skyline to watchers on the beach, Chikunda and Faith saw the slaves being taken away in columns.
Soldiers had come through the pass in the mountains, over from the fort at Cape Town.
The dead littered the sugar-white sands and the two halves of the shipwreck were steadily being cut down to the waterline by wave action that was increasing. Another storm was blowing in.
The dead were left to the gulls, scavengers and tide.
“There is only danger for us here, Mkiwa,” he said, using Faith’s Swahili name because they were still in Africa and had a sliver of hope for remaining African.
He led her away, down the leeward side where the rock formed a natural gangway taking them back to the shore.
They were terrified, starving and parched, but the Lord answered Faith, and frogs soon led them to a seep where fresh, sweet water ran clear and soft, downy grasses gave shelter under a thicket of natural scrub.
They’d found for themselves a headland. A secluded little rock-strewn beach surrounded by pools where bounteous delicacies from the ocean could be harvested.
The location divided the bay just north of them where they were wrecked ashore, and they could now look in to the larger bay.
It felt like a place where they could hide and live forever.
By the second day of their isolation and rest, Chikunda had worked away at their chains, freeing them from one another and binding them more toward one another by that freedom than ever before.
Within another day, he had worked the shackles off their bodies altogether, and he had found new ways to prepare the edible foods from the sea; lobster similar to those native to his stretch of coast, and a tough snail-like shellfish they could pluck from the shallows. Set in a mother-of-pearl shell, it yielded a translucent white plug of flesh that was tough but curiously delicious.
It sustained them and allowed their strength to flow back.
In the large bay that their small encampment overlooked to the south, he identified the only signs of human encroachment, a gun battery facing out to sea.
For days he kept a vigilant eye on the clutch of soldiers who manned it. But very soon he realized by their swigging and staggering, that they seemed to have more interest in the bottle than in diligent observation of their surroundings.
Most days the small band in this backwater base were absent from duty, drifting away to smoke and sleep off hangovers in the mountains.
Every few days he chanced to creep back and see if there was any change at the site of the wreck.
Within ten days, the corpses were all gone from the beach, the flocks of excited gulls, rats and perhaps wild dogs and other scavengers finishing off what the tide had not reclaimed.
Little of the vessel remained still showing above the sea’s surface.
The slaves were all gone and the search parties as well. Just a virgin mountain soaring up toward a lion’s-head profile.
They seemed alone, isolated and almost dared to believe themselves safe.
Storms came rolling in every other day and their scouting soon found a cave with an entrance turned aside from the driving onshore gales. A large bush obscured the interior from casual passers-by, of which none seemed imminently likely.
But it dawned on them that the time would soon come when they must begin to move on, or risk being captured once more.
Chikunda began to scout and prepare their escape route, watching the moon each night as it came to full and then began to wane.
When the dark of the new moon arrived, that would be the time to take their leave and hike out along the shore, again relying on the dark of their skin and the pitch of the ocean to conspire to give them cover.
Each evening, he moved after du
sk, tracing the track of the night before, then learning new territory before retreating.
And it was from one of these sorties that he returned excitedly with news for Mkiwa.
“Come with me,” he urged her, suddenly filled again with vigour.
“What is it?” She became infected by his elation. But terrified too. Terrified to let her mind continue down the path of pessimism that recent life had imposed on her. Imaging the worst.
He led her along a labyrinth of tracks over ancient seashells. Between granite outcrops they walked carefully, out onto an exposed wave-cut platform of land.
There, flirting with the risk of being spied by a distant observer from across the bay at the soldier’s outpost, they reached a massive boulder.
Mkiwa looked on in awe. Before her was The Praying Nun—a formation that precisely echoed her wedding gift now lost to its watery grave with so many others.
And she began to cry, because the man she loved was not kneeling there before her likeness.
And he knew her mind well enough to understand.
“There is no need for tears, my dove,” he held her fast to his breast. “I am not gone, we have become one.”
> THE END <
Part 3
Epilogue
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Autumn, 2016
Thank you for sharing this true story, embellished though it is for your drama’s sake.
All of Part 1 during the early and mid-1980s really did happen. Of course, Part 2 and the details from 1794 are necessarily a fiction.
The Praying Nun is, indeed, a rock feature located on the beach down at Maiden’s Cove, between Clifton and Camps Bay.
Captain Antonio Perreira was indeed the Captain of this ship, the São José de Afrika. And the São José really did founder on the reef of Clifton 2nd Beach—where I was the second person ever to dive on her. There was truly not much left, only beams wedged in the boulder field and conglomerate containing cannon-balls, parts of what we now know were shackles, copper sheathing for the hull and handmade nails.
The Praying Nun Page 8