Sailing home, p.37
Sailing Home, page 37
A cannonball that had struck a yardarm and fallen to the deck rolled up against Collier’s foot. He held it under his boot and pointed it out to Marin, saying, “Would ya have a look at this pathetic excuse for a cannonball? The Royal Navy hurls no such buckshot.”
Through the fog came an American frigate on the tail of the fleeing mystery ship as the Magister Maris continued to wheel round and round in the stormy sea. Marin ordered the two men manning the lines at the cleats to let loose the ties, and the mizzenmast slipped out into the Atlantic.
Collier grabbed a couple of men and let out the foresail topsail with enough linen to grab some wind. The foresail foiled against the wind and pulled the bow round to a stop facing into the storm. Collier ordered the foresail hauled in, and the Magister bobbed on the choppy waters.
Marin gave the order to drop both bower anchors, realizing that only he, Jude, and Collier had ever performed the task. The other men stood around while the three of them let go the anchor. Not knowing the depth of the water, they let out all the lead cable they had, and when they released the anchors, the massive weight pulled the cables burning past the edges of hawser holes with such force that they screamed out a high-pitched whine such that you would have thought the ship was dying in pain. When the crown caught the seabed and the cable pulled taught, Marin and Collier surveyed the damage topside while Jude and Oscar went below to do the same.
The Mizzenmast was gone, the Mainmast had lost a yardarm and the foremast mainsail was torn through with cannon shot. One of the three jollyboats had been destroyed, and the deck was awash with debris. The crew began to straighten up the deck as best they could.
Phillipe’s voice strained through the wind to ask Marin if they could pause a moment to pray for the Lord’s assistance.
“I wouldn’t think you would have to ask Him,” Marin shouted back.
Jude and Oscar returned topside and took the captain by both arms and led him to his cabin. Once inside, Oscar delivered the bad news.
“She’s taken on too much water, Captain. I wouldn’t give her more than an hour afloat.”
Marin looked to Jude, who added, “The main hold has been ripped open revealin’ nothin’ but stones for cargo. We’ve been duped, Captain.”
“Oscar, assemble the men topside and prepare to abandon ship.”
“Yes sir,” Oscar replied, but remained glued in place.
“GO! NOW!” Marin bellowed, and Oscar scurried out of the cabin. “We’ve only two jollyboats that hold six men apiece, so three of us must remain. I want Phillipe in a boat with you Jude, and—”
“No sir,” Jude demanded. “I’m stayin’ aboard.”
“Jude, you will do as your told,” Marin ordered.
“Beggin’ yer Captain’s pardon, but who do ya mean ta send to the bottom in my stead?”
Marin’s face froze in place. Who indeed?
“Armstrong for one,” he said. “His leg needs to be amputated and he wouldn’t survive the trip. Besides, he would take up too much room in one of the boats.”
“And?” Jude challenged.
Marin’s hand was forced. “And I want Phillipe in a boat with Mister Murel and Oscar. Collier will command the other boat.” There was a funeral like silence for a moment before he added, “Well let’s go. Hoist the jollyboats and get the crew over the side.”
As Jude and Marin were preparing to leave the Captain’s Quarters, Phillipe came bounding through the door. The grave look on Marin’s face gave halt to Phillipe’s step.
“Go Jude,” Marin ordered. “Phillipe, I have something to tell you, and I want you to listen to me as your Captain and forget for the moment that you are my brother. I have given the order to abandon ship. We’ve only two dinghies. Each will hold six men. We’ve fifteen aboard, so that means three men must stay with the Magister Maris.”
“I will gladly stay, Marin ...I mean, Captain.”
“I am not looking for volunteers, Phillipe. You are to get in one of the lifeboats with Misters Murel, Oscar, Sheets, Wayne and O’Brien. That is an order.”
“No, no I will not,” Phillipe threw forth. “I will not abandon the only real family I have left. You have no right to order me to abandon my own brother.”
Marin, straining to remain calm, answered him, saying, “As your Captain, I have every right.”
“I am not afraid of death, Marin,” Phillipe said, and placing his hand on Marin’s shoulder, he added, “In the face of present circumstances, I welcome it.”
Marin swept his brother’s hand off of his shoulder, and in his best captain’s voice he commanded, “I do not give a tinker’s dam whether you fear or welcome death. As Captain of this ship it is my duty to save as many of my men as I can, and you are going in that lifeboat if I have to heave you over board myself.”
Phillipe fell back a step and collapsed into a chair. He bent over placing his face into the Bible that lie in his lap and began to weep. Marin gave the moment it’s due before bending over to address his brother in a more civil tone.
“Phillipe, listen to me. I want you to get into that lifeboat for the same reason you want to stay aboard; because I love you. Someone has to carry on. Someone has to comfort Opaline and Phoebe and Aunt Belle ...explain what happened. You are that person.” He stood up, reached into his vest pocket and pulled out his father’s compass. Handing it to Phillipe, he said, “You’re going to need this more than I.”
Phillipe took the compass and flipped open the lid and silently read the inscription. He closed the lid and held the compass to his breast. Taking the Bible from his lap he held it out to Marin. “Please...” he pleaded, “take this.” Marin reacted with reflexive hesitation. “Please Marin...” Phillipe repeated.
Marin reached out with one hand accepting the Bible, while grabbing his brother with the other and pulling him to his feet. “We need to hurry,” he said, as he accompanied Phillipe out the cabin door and up to the main deck.
Jude and Mister Collier had slung the two boats to the side of the ship and gathered the crew together, and Oscar had loaded the small boats with water and other provisions. Marin gave the orders through the howling wind as to who was to occupy which lifeboat. If any man objected, the wind scattered his words, and the tortured listing of the Magister Maris quickly made him thankful for his seat. As Jude and Marin lowered the boats, neither looked down at the faces of the men looking up. When the lowering ropes gave their slack, Jude yelled over the leeward side,
“We bid you fair wind and following seas, me hearties,” and he turned toward Marin, whose hands were wrapped tightly around the railing as he stared blank faced out into the fog-thickened stormy night air.
Jude grabbed him under one arm and pulled him away, saying, “Come on, Captain, we’ve plenty to do before we surrender to the sea.”
“Has anyone told Armstrong?” Marin asked.
“Couldn’t say, sir,”
“We have to tell him.”
“You go and have your chat with Mister Armstrong, I’m going to galley and grab a couple of barrels of rum,” Jude said.
“That is the ‘plenty’ that we have to do before we surrender?”
“I’m not going to drink a hundred gallons of rum, Captain. It breaks me heart, but I’m going to spill it out. The empty barrels might be our only chance of survivin’.”
When Marin came to Armstrong’s side he found the man in a deep sleep, cradling a Bible to his chest. Marin tried several times to rouse him, to no avail. ‘Should I arouse a man in peaceful slumber to tell him that he is about to die’, Marin wondered. ‘Does it benefit a man to know his time is nigh?’
Marin stood and watched Armstrong’s slow, deep breathing, and began to feel strangely envious; he almost wished he could trade places with the semi-conscious man. ‘Maybe he and Jude should drink as much of the rum as they could,’ he thought to himself. ‘After all, there wasn’t much chance of surviving the stormy North Atlantic in a goddamned barrel. If we are to drown, better to be unconscious than to suffer’.
The longer he looked at Armstrong, the more he was overcome with a sense of what could only be called, ‘morbid mercy’ - the repulsive urge to kill him as he slept rather than risk his waking up to find himself deserted and drowning. Marin sat by the man for several minutes in tortured debate with himself. He recalled the discussion of ethics and morality he had with the Professor in Providence; ‘...a man of character can stand firm against custom, whereas a man of custom is quite often brittle against character.’
“C’mon Captain,” Jude yelled from the deck. “We want to be as far from the ship as possible when she goes to the deep.”
“A Captain cannot leave a ship with a live man aboard,” Marin yelled back. He heard Jude’s footsteps coming down into the sick bay.
Jude peeked his head in and said, “He’s a dead man, Sir; he has only to do the dyin’. Bid yer good-byes, and I’ll see ya topside.”
After Jude left, Marin slipped the pillow out from under Armstrong’s head, held it above the man’s face and said, “I can only hope you would do the same for me.” He placed the pillow over the man’s face and began to apply pressure. As Armstrong’s body began to twist about, Marin increased the pressure. As he pushed down more firmly the man’s body fought harder for life sustaining breath, and Marin felt himself tenuously balanced on the line between mercy and murder. Armstrong’s resistance began to weaken and his body went limber. Marin held the pillow a little longer, as if he didn’t know how to let go. There came a heave of Armstrong’s chest, his arms jerked back sending the Bible sliding off his breast. Marin watched as the Bible flipped open and fell like a bird dying in flight, landing face down at Marin’s feet. Phillipe flew cross his mind for a moment. He looked back at Armstrong and noticed that there was no movement of his stomach. He watched for a moment, as that same familiar stillness that lay itself across Maria and Emma’s departed remains, settled on Armstrong like wet upon a stone. The man was gone.
“What’s keepin’ ya, Captain? Bid yer farewells and let’s be gone.”
Marin picked up the spread open Bible from the floor, giving its pages a quick, curious glance. It was open to Proverbs: Chapter Two. Without pausing to read, he spread it open side down across Armstrong’s lifeless chest, tucked the pillow under the man’s head, and with a slow heavy stride, climbed the steep steps to the top deck.
“The stern is bound to go down first, Captain, so I suggest we get in the barrels to the fore, and as soon as we begin ta float, we paddle like hell away from the ship.”
“I am not going,” Marin said, looking down into his open hands.
“What are you...?” Jude started to ask, but stopped short of finishing the question, and in an attempt to comfort his captain, he said, “Yer thinkin’ ‘bout Armstrong, aren’t ya sir ...and that nonsense about the captain goin’ down with his ship? We both know Mister Armstrong won’t survive, sir. I doubt that we survive, but we’re bound to try.”
“I am not going,” Marin repeated.
Jude gave a surrendering nod, and said, “Then neither am I.”
“Yes you are,” Marin directed.
“I think I’m not.” Jude returned.
“Jude Prince, I am your Captain, and I order you to get into that barrel.”
Jude laughed aloud, and said, “So then take a look ‘round. We’re no longer Captain and First Mate, Mister Carpenter. We’re but a couple of old friend dyin’ together out ta sea.”
Marin gave his old friend a long look. He could feel the tears welling up in his own eyes while hoping that the rain would disguise them, as perhaps they did in Jude’s eyes as well.
“And we’re not going down without a fight,” Jude said, as he sprung to his feet and descended down into the bowels of the ship, leaving Marin in the company of his own thoughts.
Marin became keenly aware of his own breathing and began to feel as if the air in his lungs was borrowed air. It was fair enough for the sea to take the three of them, but he had arrogated unto himself the right to steal Armstrong’s breath, and claim providence over his fate. Emotionally spent and physically exhausted, he was lost to time ...until Jude’s footsteps brought him ‘round.
Jude had returned with two lit lanterns, a large magnifying lens used to read charts, a small wooden box, a long pipe and a few powder horns of gunpowder. He took his knife and cut a hole in the wooden box and wedged the lens into the hole. He then placed the lanterns together in the box and a beam of light shot out into the darkness. Proud of himself, he gave a large smile to Marin, who returned a brief, if noticeably reluctant, amused smile of his own. Jude then huddled under a piece of loose sail and loaded some gunpowder into the open end of the pipe. He took a splinter of dry wood, lit it, and dropped it into the pipe. A bright flare of light shot out of the pipe reaching several feet into the dark air. He followed the flare with a shot from his pistol while waving the light through the dense night air, only stopping occasionally to shoot another flare of gunpowder into the darkness and fire his pistol.
At first, Marin was mildly amused at Jude’s efforts, however as time passed he began to sink into a deep depression. Before him was a man who had not lost all hope, nor faith, nor spirit. Or, it could be Mister Prince was daft, but at least he had not surrendered. Marin wondered if perhaps faith wasn’t so much a matter of surrendering to unknown forces, as it was a matter of not surrendering to unknown forces. Whatever it was, Jude had it, but Marin felt he had lost it the moment he smothered Mister Armstrong. Sinking even deeper into despair, Marin was ready to follow the Magister Maris to her deep-sea grave.
“Ahoy there,” came a voice from deep into the fog.
Jude sprang to his feet and began waving the ‘box full of light’ back and forth.
The call came again. “I say, ‘Ahoy there’ ...you, the keeper of the light.”
“Ahoy.” Jude yelled back. “I’m First Mate, Jude Prince, and I’ve with me, Captain Marin Carpenter of The Magister Maris.”
“How many aboard?” the voice called out.
“Two,” Marin quickly replied. Jude wrenched his head toward Marin, who held his hand up as if to ward off comment from Jude.
“It’s rough goin’ but we’ll heave you a line. You’ll have to secure it and cross over ...and good luck to ya.”
The lightest sketch of an outline of the other ship began to peek through the fog.
“GANGWAY,” came the warning, followed by the sound of a grappling hook grabbing hold of the starboard rail of the Magister Maris.
Jude grabbed the rope, detached it from the hook and secured it to a cleat. The rope between the two ships would, with erratic rhythm, go taught and slack, taught and slack, to the rhythm of the waves between the two vessels.
We need a constant tension on the rope,” Marin said, and he untied the rope from the cleat and ran it through a pulley and wrapped it around a hitch. “You go first,” he said to Jude. “I’ll hold the tension.” Jude gave him a hesitant look, and Marin shouted the order, “GO!”
Jude grabbed the rope straddled between the two ships and slung himself over the side of the boat. Dangling precariously over the cold ocean waves while being tossed and twisted by the rolling and the shifting of the two boats, Jude finally made it to the other side.
“Cleat the rope, Captain,” Jude yelled. “We’ll hold the tension from here. Marin pulled the rope back through the pulley, and for a moment debated whether or not to make the crossing. Jude sensed the delay and yelled, “Now’s not the time for thinkin’, Captain.”
Marin tied the rope securely around the cleat and gave it tug. The rope went taught and Marin gave one last sideways glance at the Magister Maris, and left her for the last time.
Crossing over the divide between the two ships, the anchored Magister Maris held her ground as Marin made the crossing. As several hands reached out to grab him, the rope suddenly slackened, dropping several feet. Jude let loose the rope on his end, and the ship pulled away from the Magister Maris leaving her off into the fog.
“Welcome aboard the U.S.S. Fortune,” someone said, but the words could not pierce the silence the two men shared as they looked out upon the Magister Maris; her skeletal outline etched into a veiling mist, as if posing for a final portrait.
As the fog continued to gather, she ever so gracefully began slipping from her proud perch upon the Atlantic Ocean, and Marin felt as if he himself was losing his equilibrium. He strained to maintain sight of her as she tilted ever more skyward, until her bowsprit reached straight up toward heaven, and surrendering her grasp, she vanished into the deep blue beyond.
A man approached Marin and Jude, but stopped and stood in solemn silence for a few moments, and then in a halting and consoling tone, he asked,
“Begging your pardon, which of you is Captain Carpenter?” Marin turned his head briefly toward the man, but said nothing. “Commander Ernst would like to see you in his quarters,” he said.
“Does he? He’ll see the both of us then,” Marin replied, and they followed the man to the Commander’s Cabin.
“Captain Carpenter?” Ernst probed, glancing back and forth between Jude and Marin.
“I am Captain Carpenter,” Marin said, “and this is my First Mate, Mister Jude Prince.”
“I am Commander Ernst,” the man said, holding out his hand to Marin. “I had hoped to speak with you in private, Captain.”
Jude turned to leave but Marin grabbed him by the arm with one hand and shook the commander’s hand with the other. “Whatever enters my ears will sooner or later arrive in Mister Prince’s, Commander.”
