“Aye, Sir.” Lathyk nodded. “I’ll see to the anchors now, should I?”
“I think that would be an excellent idea, Master Lathyk,” Yairley replied with a wintry smile.
“I don’t like this one bit, Zhaksyn,” Hektor Aplyn-Ahrmahk admitted quietly several hours later. Or as quietly as he could and still make himself heard at the main topmast crosstrees, at any rate. He was peering ahead through his spyglass as he spoke, and the line of angry white water reaching out from the barely visible gray mass of the mainland stretched squarely across Destiny ’s bowsprit. He had to hold on to his perch rather more firmly than usual. Although the wind had eased still further, Scrabble Sound was a shallow, treacherous body of water. Its wave action could be severe-especially with a southeasterly blowing straight into it-and the masts’ motion was enough to make even Aplyn-Ahrmahk dizzy.
“Not much about it to like, if you’ll pardon my saying so, Sir,” the lookout perched at the crosstrees with him replied.
“No. No, there isn’t.” Aplyn-Ahrmahk lowered the glass with a sigh, then slung it over his shoulder once more. He started to reach for the back stay again, then stopped himself and looked at the lookout. “Best not, I suppose.”
“Better safe nor sorry, Sir,” Zhaksyn agreed with a grin. “Specially seeing as how the First Lieutenant’s on deck.”
“Exactly what I was thinking myself.” Aplyn-Ahrmahk patted the seaman on the shoulder and started down the more sedate path of the shrouds.
“Well, Master Aplyn-Ahrmahk?” Captain Yairley asked calmly when he reached the quarterdeck. The captain’s valet stood at his side, improbably neatly groomed even under these circumstances, and Yairley held a huge mug of tea between his hands. The steam from the hot liquid whipped away on the wind before anyone had a chance to see it, but its warmth felt comforting against his palms, and he raised it to inhale its spicy scent while he waited for Aplyn-Ahrmahk’s report. The steep-sided crest of Ahna’s Point was visible from deck level, however, which meant he already had an unfortunately good notion of what the ensign was about to say.
“White water clear across the bow, Sir,” Aplyn-Ahrmahk confirmed with a salute. “All the way from the coast”-his left arm gestured in a northwesterly direction-“to a good five points off the starboard bow.” His arm swung in an arc from northwest to east-northeast, and Yairley nodded.
“Thank you, Master Aplyn-Ahrmahk,” he said in that same calm tone, and took a reflective sip of tea. Then he turned to Lieutenant Lathyk.
“The depth?”
“The lead shows twenty-four fathoms, Sir. And shoaling.”
Yairley nodded. Twenty-four fathoms-a hundred and forty-four feet-accorded relatively well with the sparse (and unreliable) depths recorded on his less-than-complete charts. But Destiny drew just over twenty feet at normal load, and the leadsman was undoubtedly right about the decreasing depth. By all accounts Scrabble Sound shoaled rapidly, and that meant those hundred and forty-four feet could disappear quickly.
“I think we’ll anchor, Master Lathyk.”
“Aye, Sir.”
“Then call the hands.”
“Aye, Sir! Master Symmyns! Hands to anchor!”
“Hands to anchor, aye, aye, Sir!”
Bosun’s pipes shrilled as the hands raced to their stations. Both of the bower anchors had been made ready hours ago in anticipation of exactly this situation. The canvas hawse-plugs which normally kept water from entering through the hawseholes during violent weather had been removed. The anchor cables, each just over six inches in diameter and nineteen inches in circumference, had been gotten up through the forward hatch, led through the open hawseholes, and bent to the anchors. A turn of each cable had been taken around the riding bitts, the heavy upright timbers just abaft the foremast, before fifty fathoms of cable were flaked down, and the upper end of the turn led down through the hatch to the cable tier where the remainder of the cable was stored. The anchors themselves had been gotten off of the fore-channels and hung from the catheads, and a buoy had been made fast to the ring of each anchor.
Under the current circumstances, there was nothing “routine” about anchoring, and Yairley handed the empty mug to Sylvyst Raigly, then stood with his hands clasped behind him, lips pursed in a merely thoughtful expression while he contemplated the state of the bottom.
His charts for Scrabble Sound were scarcely anything he would have called reliable. The sound wasn’t particularly deep (which helped to account for how violent the seas remained even though the wind had continued to drop), but the chart showed only scattered lines of soundings. He could only guess at the depths between them, and according to his sailing notes, the sound contained quite a few completely uncharted pinnacles of rock. Those same notes indicated a rocky bottom, with unreliable holding qualities, which wasn’t something he wanted to hear about at this particular moment. Almost as bad, a rocky bottom posed a significant threat that his anchor cables would chafe and fray as they dragged on the bottom.
Beggars can’t be choosers, Dunkyn, he reminded himself, glancing as casually as possible at the angry white confusion of surf where the heavy seas pounded the rocky, steeply rising beach below Ahna’s Point or surged angrily above Scrabble Shoal. There was no way Destiny could possibly weather the shoal under these wind conditions. She was firmly embayed, trapped on a lee shore with no option but to anchor until wind and weather moderated enough for her to work her way back out.
Well, at least you managed to stay out of Silkiah Bay, he reminded himself, and snorted in amusement.
“All hands, bring ship to anchor!” Lathyk bellowed the preparatory order as the last of the hands fell in at his station, and Yairley drew a deep breath.
“Hands aloft to shorten sail!” he ordered, and watched the topmen swarm aloft.
“Stand by to take in topsails and courses! Man clewlines and buntlines!”
Clewlines and buntlines were slipped off their belaying pins as the assigned hands tailed onto them.
“Haul taut! In topsails! Up foresail and mainsail!”
The canvas disappeared, drawing up like great curtains for the waiting topmen to fist it in and gasket it to the yards. Yairley felt Destiny ’s motion change as she lost the driving force of the huge square sails and continued ahead under jib and spanker alone. She became heavier, less responsive under the weight of the pounding seas as she lost speed through the water.
“Stand clear of the starboard cable! Cock-bill the starboard anchor!”
The shank painter, which had secured the crown of the anchor to the ship’s side, was cast off, letting the anchor hang vertically from the starboard cathead, its broad flukes dragging the water and threatening to swing back against the hull as the broken waves surged against the ship.
“Let go the starboard anchor!”
A senior petty officer cast off the ring stopper, the line passed through the ring of the anchor to suspend it from the cathead, and threw himself instantly flat on the deck as the anchor plunged and the free end of the stopper came flying back across the bulwark with a fearsome crack. The cable flaked on deck went thundering through the hawsehole, seasoned wood smoking with friction heat despite the all-pervasive spray as the braided hemp ran violently out while Destiny continued ahead, “sailing out” her cable.
“Stream the starboard buoy!”
The anchor buoy-a sealed float attached to the starboard anchor by a hundred-and-fifty-foot line-was released. It plunged into the water, following the anchor. If the cable parted, the buoy would still mark the anchor’s location, and its line was heavy enough that the anchor could be recovered by it.
“Stand clear of the larboard cable! Cock-bill the anchor!”
Yairley watched men with buckets of seawater douse the smoking starboard cable. Another moment or two and Destiny staggered. The galleon lurched, the men at the wheel were hurled violently to the deck, and Yairley’s head came up as a dull, crunching shock ran through the deck underfoot. For a moment, she seemed to hang in place, then there was a second crunch and she staggered onward, across whatever she’d struck.