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heavy leather jacket. John Davis said, almost timidly, "Sir, there is a little wine."
"We might need it, Davis," was the answer. It was said gently, but the gentleness did not conceal the determination not to let any guard down yet; not to give one bit of the battle yet to this enemy, this cold mighty southern sea and the mountains that guarded it. Davis knew that the man, who was his Captain, was hungry. He knew that the magnificent six feet of bone and flesh and blood and muscle must cry for food.
"I'm smaller than you, Captain," he said.
But he saw Cavendish had hardly heard him. The Desire was sailing through the outer narrows, closehauled against the wind.
"You're thinking of those charts," Davis accused.
The word charts made an impression. Only the words, the sentences, the thoughts that had to do with this fight to enter the Pacific, were the words that mattered to Cavendish. All his will was straining toward one object, and only that object had his attention.
"The wind is stronger," he said.
The sprit sail strained under full canvas. All other sails were sheeted. The ropes and braces creaked. The wind blew steadily. The inner narrows were upon them.
"In with the main sheet!" Cavendish called out.
Ice crackled as the crew furled the mainsail. The sun came out and glistened on the ice-coated ship. The water turned blue, and the sun winked evilly on the floating icecakes. Ahead was Cape Froward.
"It is unearthly. Beautiful," Davis said, under his breath.
Seven thousand feet up into the sky, Mount Sarmiento towered whitely. Cape Froward, black rock that it was, was sprinkled with snows.
"Famine Reach," Cavendish said, indicating the narrowing channel toward which the Desire tacked on the starboard tack.
"You named it," said Davis. Again they spoke of nothing but charts and channels, seas and currents. Only the sea mattered. Davis thought Cavendish's eyes as blue as the sea water itself.
A great chunk of ice slipped off the nearest glacier and splashed into the water, settling itself lazily to float. Long trails of seaweed drifted past the ship.
"At least the cold keeps her bottom clean," Cavendish said. "And there's no water in the well."
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"She's dry. We just sounded the well," said Davis.
"We shall double the Cape before noon," Cavendish went on.
They did. At eleven they doubled Cape Froward. They were in the narrowest stretch of the straits. Then the day turned hell dark, and fury came out of the skies.
The Desire heeled over; the wind screamed over the sound of the tortured wood and canvas. Davis and Cavendish clung in the shrouds as they furled the mizzen. The Desire clawed to windward; the shore of Famine Reach came closer. Cavendish's voice pierced through the wind.
"Helm to starboard!"
The Desire steadied her course.
"Sheet anchor to seaward!"
Cavendish slid down onto the deck, with Davis after him. There was no need for further orders. Cavendish was already unlashing the heaviest boat. Davis was beside him. Tyler was there.
The boat swung over the side. Cavendish scrambled down into her, seizing an oar. A great breaker took the boat, stood her on her stern, and crashed it down again. They pulled frantically.
The shore was close. Cavendish jumped out into the icy water, carrying rope. His hands fumbled with the knots. They moored the Desire to the heaviest trees, for there was no real anchorage there. Then they pulled for the Desire.
No man was lost. Cavendish ordered a fire lighted to dry the men. They were anchored in the Straits, and until the weather lifted, they would have to stay.
"Famine Reach," he whispered. "You named it yourself."
The fourth day they buried the first man to die of starvation. The Desire was moored on a narrow shelf of rock, very near shore. Beyond, the water was unfathomable; the current itself so swift that it ran free always although ice floated in it, dotting its blackened surface, running along merrily, bobbing with the water.
The sound of the wind was high and strident. It blew from the north northeast, prisoning the Desire. The great ropes, the heaviest the Desire had, moored the ship to shore; the cables were soon crusted with ice, and when the snows began to fall, ridges of snow lay along the ropes and over the forms of the trees so near.
Seaweed floated near the ship, long and trailing. They ate it. The leather on the yards was frozen solid. They could not strip
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it off and boil and powder it for food. They ate mussels, raw, for Cavendish thought there was more nourishment in them raw.
On the eighth day two men died. After the prayer had been said, and the bodies, sewed into the hammocks, had slid into the black sea, Cavendish took the men ashore to cut more wood, and to find the precious mussels. A blizzard blew down on them that day, and continued in intensity for five more days.
Incredibly, it was almost May. In England the blossoms would be burgeoning; in California the skies would be drenched with south winds and lazy mists that the sun pierced at morning. But in the Straits of Magellan it was winter. The world turned white; only the black water swirled along past the ship, and there was no sound in this world but the sound of the wind.
Twenty men died. Twenty men were buried in the frozen seas, and the gale winds blew steadily. The wind made its long familiar sounds, the waves slapped at the sides of the ship; the wind wakened Cavendish early on the morning of the tenth of May. More than a month had passed since he had entered the Straits.
Hunger and the wind wakened him. It was not yet dawn. He sat up wearily; he was fully dressed. He wriggled his toes; they felt frozen, as always. Yet they could not be, because he could move them a little.
He tried again to sleep. He must sleep. But he was conscious of only one desire, and that was food. For days now he had been aware only of hunger—everything else was gone and only hunger was left, and he knew it was the same for every man aboard the Desire. He got up and stumbled in the darkness. He found the lamp and lighted it.
Last night he had put away the chart that had lain on the table for days, and which Davis had been studying. Wearily Cavendish extracted paper and ink. He began to write to David.
He wrote long. In his own cabin, here aboard the Desire, the only sound was the scratching of his pen. Sometimes long after he needed ink he would keep on with the words, and then he would have to retrace the lines where they were too faint. He had told David about the first part of the voyage; now he went on:
"Such was the fury of the west-southwest wind and southwest winds that we were driven from shore four hundred leagues, and constrained to beat from fifty degrees to the southward into forty
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to the northward, before we could recover near the shore. In which time we had a new shift of sails clean blown away.
"Thus we had been almost four months between the coast of Brazil and the Straits, being in distance not more above six hundred leagues, which is commonly run in twenty or thirty days."
He dipped his pen.
"Now, being anchored here in the Straits, some days the snows fall so thick we cannot see but for two and a half hours, in the middle of the day."
He looked back over what he had written.
"Bear with this scribbling," he ended, "for my fingers are cold to hold a pen in my hand."
He frowned, looking down at the words. He looked at his thin brown hands; he clenched them slowly, watching the fingers, the short clipped nails.
He laid down the pen, and blew out the lamp; it was getting light, and he really shouldn't have used the lamp. Everything aboard should be conserved, for the hours and days ahead. It must never be lost sight of—his objective. It was all that was left, except hunger.