The Guineaman

  In the next quarter of an hour the wind backed another point. By now the booming roar had dulled their thoughts. Jones put the men onto the pumps to give them something to do, but Kite, as master, could enjoy no such mind-numbing labour. He was left to try and think amid this awesome din. He became slowly aware that a subtle change was occurring. As the violence of the wind rose, the wild motion of the schooner lessened. It took Kite some time to penetrate this mystery until he realised that his vision was almost permanently obscured by the mass of water in the air. It was like a mist that moved with the speed and consistency of bird-shot, a tangible manifestation of the might of the wind. Eventually he realised that the wind in its rising had kicked up a heavy sea, but had now reached such a scale of power, that it no longer did so. Now the wind simply excoriated the sea’s surface, slicing it off it and carrying it to leeward. The air had become half liquid, salty, possessed of mass and density.

  At first Kite thought this would ease the burden on the Spitfire, for her motion was far less violent, but in this he was deceived. It took a moment to register, but now she lay down under a constant pressure, and the forces impinging upon her were no longer air, but air that was sodden with a weight of water. Even as the schooner continued to run off before them, the very forces that impelled her were conniving at her destruction, pushing her myriad component parts, those hundreds of scarphs and rebated joints, those butts, tenons and knees all held together with thousands of trenails, iron bolts and copper rovings, to the limits of their individual strengths.

  On deck the men huddled unhappily and Kite had to lash himself to the weather rail, the thin line of the flag halliard cutting into him as the wind tried to pluck him from his perch. Even breathing became a labour, so choked was the air with salt water, so high the pressure of the wind upon his body. The mind fumbled through this chaos, and Kite found himself a living contradiction, with every instinct in his being telling him to lie down and curl up like a wounded cat, to make himself as small and insignificant as possible, to let the great wind pass over him in the simple hope that he would survive. Against this was an instinctive urge to reason, for survival depended upon the Spitfire remaining undamaged, providing the means of sustaining them upon the surface of this flattened, scoured and tormented sea. To achieve this it was not enough to let her go; she required nursing, helping through her ordeal in order that she could help them.

  But Kite was tired and hungry, battered by the incessant noise, soaked by the wet and driving air, buffeted and bruised by the violent assault of wind and water. As hour succeeded hour he followed the crew, and slowly slipped into a half-conscious acceptance of the inevitable. He lost interest in their compass heading, for the whole world had contracted into this small circle of white and furious water above which the once vast and over-arching sky had contracted into a dull limit of cloud-water, as thick and circumscribing as a fog. His mind seemed capable only of asking a simple and increasingly familiar question: what did it matter? What did it matter?

  Nor was Kite the only man upon the Spitfire’s deck to be so afflicted. Those not hunkered down in the lee of some strong point to which they had lashed themselves, stood at the tiller. The two men who struggled to keep the Spitfire before the wind were tiring rapidly; the compass bowl was difficult to see, so they steered by the tell-tales. But their concentration lapsed, their arms ached and they received no relief. Then, as a sea crashed at the stern and stove in the stern windows, canting the deck violently so that one of them lost his precarious footing. The Spitfire drove off to starboard with a heavy larboard lurch from which, as she broached, she did not recover.

  Puella screamed as tons of water cascaded through the broken stern windows, smashing in the preventive shutters and filling the cabin with a sudden, cold deluge. Perhaps it was Puella’s thin shriek of terror, or perhaps it was the thin halliard cutting into his waist, that stirred Kite. He was vaguely troubled and roused from his catalepsy by the growing conviction that all was far from well. His mind swam, but he realised he had not heard the clunk of the pumps for some time; and then Spitfire protested again. The rigging to which Kite was seized, suddenly jerked and, despite the roar of the wind the crack from aloft was loud enough to wake a dozing man. The main topmast broke, snapping clean off above the doubling. The spar hung down, swaying and tugging at those ropes that still confined it. These jerked and strained under the load while the schooner fell farther over to larboard. From forward there came a report like the discharge of a gun: the shred of reefed canvas set on the forestay blew out.

  Someone sent up a shout as Spitfire lay over on her beam ends and the deck heeled alarmingly. Kite lost his footing and hung from the weather pinrail like a sack of potatoes. The jerk finally alerted him to imminent disaster.

  Kite had neither the experience nor the understanding of the great natural forces unleashed against his small schooner to comprehend that, by running off before the wind, his ignorance had contributed to their plight. Nor had Jones, notwithstanding his competence as the mate of an inter-island schooner, the faintest concept of the true nature of the hurricane. But both men, and several of the hands, knew the remedy for their present plight, and Jones’s large frame was soon crouched over the weather rail, a grey silhouette against the sky forward, clinging for dear life with one hand and sawing at the rigging with the other.

  The knife seemed to take an eternity to sever the first shroud, then the second was attacked. Meanwhile someone had found the axe and had jammed himself inside the main fife-rails from where he began to hack at the foot of the mainmast. Kite lugged out his own knife and turned to the tarred ropes that strained like iron bars under the load aloft, and all the while the delicate fabric of spars and rigging trembled and shook as the loose main topmast swung wildly hither and thither in reaction to the bucking of the schooner.

  But the hull lifted less readily now, sluggish with the amount of water that had been taken aboard, assaulted by the wind and laid over at such an angle that the cunning of her hull lines contributed little to her survival. The beautiful and lively schooner was rapidly disintegrating into a derelict hulk. For several long and tremulous minutes, as the men hacked and sawed, the fate of the Spitfire hung, quite literally, in the balance. Then, with a mighty shudder and a violent windward lurch that nearly flung overboard the energetic seaman forward, the mainmast went by the board, followed by the greater portion of the foremast and the entire jib-boom. The noise of this collapse was snatched away by the wind but the deck was covered by a spider’s web of fallen and tangled rigging, all of it still secured or fouled in the mass of spars and wreckage now alongside. How it failed to entrap anyone was little short of miraculous.

  Slowly the Spitfire adjusted herself to this new situation, seeking the equilibrium between the force of the wind and her own exposed surfaces. The drag of wreckage affected the leeward drift and slowly, as rope after rope was cut through by the labouring crew, the Spitfire spun round so that she stabilised with the wind on her larboard bow and the mass of spars and rigging streamed out to windward, still secured by a pair of unsevered larboard shrouds.

  With this Kite bawled his relief. ‘Avast there! Leave that raffle for the time being.’ It was no longer banging against the hull and its drag helped hold the schooner almost head to wind, keeping her vulnerable, damaged stern to leeward. Within a moment Jones had all hands turned up and the men at the pumps. The carpenter’s sounding revealed four feet of water in the well. Kite swore; it was impossible that such an intake of water had not damaged the greater part of their spoilable cargo.

  As if to reward them for their labour, the wind now began to drop. It died rapidly and the cloud cleared so that the sun shone and speedily dried up the deck. The sudden brightening raised spirits, and grins of relief were visible all round the deck. Kite went below to order the cook to dole out a measure of rum to everyone, then he sought to comfort Puella. He found her crouching sodden in a corner of the cabin, the deck of which was awash. Amid the water slopp
ing up and down were personal effects; a pair of shoes, a fancy hat and a stocking belonging to Puella, some papers, a feathered quill and a shirt belonging to himself. Splintered wood from the window shutters that had been torn out of their frames, added to the mess.

  Despite the water washing about her, Puella was fast asleep. Terror and exhaustion had succeeded with her where they had failed with Kite. Bracing himself against the lurch of the schooner he tenderly lifted her and placed her, wet as she was, in the dry cot swaying above the mess on the cabin deck. Slowly the water was draining away, exposing great shards of the shattered crown glass from the windows which lay shining in the sunlight now flooding through the open frames.

  Planting a kiss upon Puella’s head Kite glanced out of the shattered windows as he withdrew. Conscious that the schooner was now bucking violently again he went back on deck to find the whole surface of the sea boiling. Flapping and exhausted seabirds were falling aboard, adding the quality of a nightmare to the scene. Kite noticed immediately that the wind had fallen almost dead calm and divined the reason for the chaotic state of the sea. It was liberated from the tyrannical driving of the wind and now flew first from one direction and then the other. It struck him that if each incoming wave was the remnant of the wind’s force, if the waves appeared omni-directional it followed that the wind that had generated them must be omni-directional too.

  How could this be? Especially as now there was little wind at all. He went aft, the deck bucking madly so that in a sense this wild and irregular motion was worse than the steady onslaught of the tempest. He managed to work aft and stood at the taffrail, and what he saw seemed like a seething madness as waves slapped into each other, sometimes throwing themselves high into the air and the Spitfire was tossed about betwixt summits and troughs, like a cork in a millstream.

  A hint of a steady gust blew his disordered hair across his face, coinciding with a cloud crossing the sun. The passing shadow raced across the surface of the sea which had, in the sunlight, lost its grey aspect in favour of its customary blue. But he sensed no pleasure from this brief warning; he noticed that the direction of the wind was contrary to what it had been. Half understanding the mighty phenomenon, he felt the prickle of alarm. Stumbling forward he bent over the binnacle, peering at the swinging compass card to confirm his partial grasp of mighty events. Another gust of wind swept the deck and he glanced up quickly, but the tell-tale had gone with the mast. Then as if pressing its insistence upon him, the wind picked up and blew steadily. Spray lifted over the rail and pattered across the deck, laying a feather of wet planking as if to confirm its direction.

  ‘By God,’ Kite muttered to himself, ‘there’s more to come!’

  Within the hour the sky was once more overcast and rain swept down in torrents, driving across the deck with an icy chill which was in sharp and uncomfortable contrast with the previous warm, wet salt-laden air. It was now growing dark as night fell. They had had nothing to eat since the previous day, but the wind was increasing all the time and the daylight had not quite faded behind the lowering scud, before the wind shriek had deepened to the booming roar of the returning hurricane.

  They kept the pumps going all night as the Spitfire wallowed endlessly, her bow held off the wind by the remains of the wreckage, much of which tore free during the hours of darkness. Towards the end of the night the wind dropped, imperceptibly at first, so that it was some time before the exhausted Kite knew their ordeal was approaching its end as the hurricane finally passed them by. Dawn found the Spitfire left to her fate, wallowing, waterlogged in the trough of the sea.

  No semblance of discipline haunted her decks. Men slumped where they fell after the toil at the pumps, or dragged themselves out of the way to lie inert, uncaring, only glad to be allowed to sleep to a gentle rocking. Dawn found them thus, and the forenoon was all but over before some, but not all, were wakened from their slumbers by a piercing shriek.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Refit

  It was already dark by the time they had eaten and turned-to to clear away the decks, recover from overboard what was useful, and contrive a jury rig. The Spitfire had been pumped out and, though she was still making water, it was not an overwhelming amount and Kite felt justified in setting half-watches and allowing the derelict schooner to drift throughout the night while below, her tired company slept.

  They woke much refreshed. Although a fresh northerly wind chilled them and set up a sea that rolled the wallowing hull uncomfortably, they were spurred on by the invigoration of an urgent task. In this work Kite was ably assisted by Christopher Jones, who took upon himself much of the re-rigging. Jones proved a master of improvisation, knotting and splicing, setting up tackles and securely lashing the main boom to the stump of the mainmast. The remains of the fore topsail yard were then rigged as a boom. It was hard and tedious work, both helped and hindered by the roll of the vessel, but by nightfall two small masts were stayed rigidly and a party had begun work on roughly recutting the remaining sails. With these it was hoped that the following morning, they would be under command again and heading for shelter.

  For Kite the dilemma was where they should now make for. He had no idea where they were, and missed a meridian altitude at noon due to the continuing overcast. The only safe option was to return to the west and try and make an identifiable landfall on the coast of North America. In the interim he would probably be able to obtain at least one observation to determine their latitude and there was a strong likelihood that they would encounter other vessels as they drew nearer the land. But the wind was not favourable, shifting slowly in the wake of the hurricane, and having bent on their improvised suit of sails, they spent another night hove-to.

  Dawn the following morning found the wind settled again in its prevailing quarter of south west and they set a course towards the north west. For several days spirits remained optimistic, but then matters began to deteriorate as their progress remained slow and uncertain. They were already on salt provisions, but these were now unalleviated by fresh food of any kind. Their livestock had been lost in the hurricane, their bags of limes swept overboard along with their fresh yams and other vegetables. As the days dragged into weeks it was not long before one or two of the men became resentfully lethargic. This mild insubordination Kite soon realised, came with an inflammation of the gums and, after a further week, a loosening of teeth. The first to be affected were the disreputable beach-combers among the hands, men whose bodies had been subjected to neglect and excess. Rum, that sailors’ soporific, plentiful in Antigua, was a poor diet to prepare men for an ocean voyage. The outbreak of sickness coincided with two cases exhibiting the eruption of the raspberry-like pustules of the secondary stage of what was colloquially known as button-scurvy. This initially masked the outbreak of that quite different, but similarly named disease, the common scurvy.

  Jones recognised the affliction of the two sailors to be yaws, an infection indistinguishable at the time from the pox, and the consequent shunning of these men by their fellows, and the general horror of contagion, made those with sore gums and loosening teeth conceal their own symptoms, ignorant that they were suffering the seamen’s greater curse, the common scurvy. But the reality was unavoidable. Unused to protracted passages, Kite again confronted all the horrors of being overwhelmed by disease, a depressing repetition of the middle-passage of the Enterprize. Neither he nor Jones knew what to do and this lack of leadership told upon the moral state of the schooner. Her sluggish progress seemed an echo of the mood on board, a lethargic indifference to everything and a slow acceptance of the inevitable. Kite abandoned all pretence at command as the first symptoms of the malaise affected him, concentrating all his energies on preserving Puella who had hardly risen from the cot into which he had placed her at the height of the hurricane. She seemed to sink into a morass of apathy, hardly recognising him as she succumbed to the disease, and her listlessness hurt Kite, further reducing his own spirits.

  In this desperate state, th
e Spitfire sailed slowly to the north west, the last shreds of common consent seeing her steered by a tired and half-reluctant remnant of her crew. Kite and Jones clung to their duties, the habits of responsibility dying less quickly than the sense of obligation among the hands, and it was Jones who first saw the blue smudge of land on the horizon ahead of them.

  It was also Jones who recognised their landfall. In later years Kite was apt to descant upon their abrupt change of luck, telling the story with a certain amount of embellishment and reducing its real impact as it assumed, for his listeners at least, the character of a deus ex machina. At the time, however, it moved him to revive his journal entries: It seemed that Providence, having Passed us through the Most Extreme of Trials, had Equally Capriciously changed her Mind and, having Decided to Deliver us from the Evil of our Predicament, now Smoothed our Path. Mr Jones Recognised the Lighthouse at the Entrance to Narragansett Bay and we stood Inwards towards the Port, passing Castle Hill with our Ensign Flying.

  Christopher Jones had visited Newport, Rhode Island, on several occasions when he had served in slavers, loading rum for export to the Guinea coast in exchange for imports of ‘black ivory’. In the euphoria of arrival Jones took credit for having brought them into the shelter of its anchorage, to which a relieved Kite took no exception. The experience of the hurricane had reminded Kite of the severe limitations of his experience. His rise to command of the schooner had been too fast for him to acquire solid experience, and too circumstantial for him to have submitted to the rigour of a real apprenticeship. Indeed so affected was he by their safe deliverance and the relief this would bring to Puella, that he was content to let Jones himself act as pilot, and bring the limping, jury-rigged Spitfire up through the narrows between Dumpling’s Rock and Brenton’s Point, to the anchorage off Goat and Rose Islands. At the schooner brought up to her cable, he publicly thanked the mate and shook his hand. It was a spontaneous but inspired act; witnessed by all hands, it repaired the disintegrating morale of the crew at a stroke, reuniting them for the labour of repairing their battered vessel. In his journal, Kite briefly reflected this turn of events, generously concluding the day’s entry with the remark that, to Mr Jones went not only the Honour of being the First to Sight Land, but of Conning the Vessel to her Anchorage off Newport.