God’s blood! How we toiled!
We had not quite finished lowering the foresail when the sea did strike the Infanta Beatrix athwart. At the same instant three waves broke over her, so huge that the lurches she gave burst the rigging and the mast beams on the larboard side.
“Cut down the mast!” Faleiro cried.
His words were all but lost in the wind, but no matter: we each of knew what had to be done. We found our axes and set to work felling the mainmast, when it broke away above the rings of the fiddle-blocks, as if we had felled it with one stroke, and the wind threw it into the sea to starboard, as if it were something very light, together with the top and the shrouds. Then we cut the rigging and the shrouds on the other side, and everything fell into the sea.
Being now without our mast or our yards, we made a small mast out of the stump which was left us of the old one, by nailing a piece of a spar to it, and made a yard for a mainsail out of another spar, and so on. But all this was so patched up and weak that a very slight wind would have been enough to carry it all away.
All this happened so swiftly, and amidst scenes of such chaos, that I had scarce any time to reflect on the sad mutilation of our lovely little pinnace, nor on the perils that were mounting about us. But we had some respite after a time, the wind relenting a little; and while we worked, we exclaimed on the turns of fate, that had had us so rich with cargo at one moment, and wondering at the next if we would survive at all. But that is the true life of the sea.
They came round with rum for us as we worked. The man who gave me mine was Caldeira de Rodrigues, and I leaned close and looked him eye to eye and said, “What now, duke’s son? Is there not some force striving to repay you for your crime?”
“Keep your voice low.”
“Ah, you still worry about your skin! Well, and I think we may all be swimming, before long. Finish your rounds, and go you and ask Jesus for forgiveness.”
He gave me a cold look and said, “When this is done, I will have your life from you, Englishman.”
“Ah, indeed, I brought the storm to cause you inconvenience, is that it? Go to, scoundreclass="underline" anger me enough and I’ll send you over the side, and then, I think, the storm will abate! But look at the injury we have suffered for you!”
He moved away, fearing I meant my words, which to some degree I did. But worse injury was coming. For now we were helpless in the sea, though we had cobbled together masts and sails of a sort; and we were being driven onward, and night was coming, and who knew what shoals might rise from the sea to harry us? I went to my charts, but they gave me little news. We were still many leagues out to sea, but these were tropic waters, often shallow where one least expected it, and the charts were sketchy, and there was no pilot alive who knew all these waters, least of all me, so hastily impressed into my office.
Darkness fell. The wind seemed more quiet, and the sea a little still. We talked of the repairs we would make in the morning, and the resumption of our voyage. Some men went to their berths. I remained on watch, with Faleiro the master, and Pinto Cabral. Then the wind rose again, and the sea began to foam, and in the very pit of the night we heard suddenly the terrible sound of the waves breaking on nearby rocks. Then, for our sins and by God’s equable and hidden judgment, the Infanta Beatriz that we had no way of controlling did run upon a shoal.
“We are lost!” cried Cabral, and I thought he might well be right.
When the ship struck, it gave three great frightful knocks, and at once the bottom of the vessel was cast up above the water because of the extreme roughness of those submerged rocks. I heard the sound of shattering timbers, an awful grinding and splitting sound, and felt the spume and spray pour over me.
The most evil aspect of this wreck was that it befell by night, in such darkness that we could scarce see one another. Men came rushing from the depths of the pinnace, crying out in fear and confusion, for they faced death in the roaring seas with no knowing where safety might lie. The breaking up of the ship, the cracking of the wood which was all being ground to splinters, the falling of masts and spars, made so hideous a clatter and noise that it fair to burst our brains.
Then came another flaring of that rainless lightning, which gave me a moment’s vision of our surroundings. We were flung up upon rocks that jutted partly from the sea at this tide, though by the sliming and seaweed of them I could see that within some hours they would be wholly submerged. By a second flash of God’s bolt I managed to jump to the nearest of these rocks, and cling to it; and by a third I looked back and saw that though the ship was altogether destroyed, the longboat of her still was intact.
We were thirty or forty men, though, and the longboat would hold perhaps a dozen, and we were some leagues yet from the shore. I turned to gather men to salvage wood for rafts, and stumbled over a figure who lay upon the rocks, groaning: a mariner who had been flung free of the ship in the wreck, doubtless. As I groped for him in the darkness, to which now my eyes were growing a little used, a wave splashed us both, and he began to drift away, and in another moment would have been lost in the night. Though my own life was at risk by so doing, I slipped into the water and, swimming with the greatest difficulty in my heavy boots, did make after him, and catch him by a leg, and draw him in my arms toward the shoal. The lightning came again, and told me that this was Pinto Cabral I had saved, which pleased me, Cabral being a good man. It might just as readily have been Caldeira de Rodrigues for whom I had risked my life, and I was not so fine a Christian that I would have cared to do such a thing.
“The ship is in danger,” Cabral did murmur, coming awake now that he breathed air instead of water.
“The ship is entirely destroyed,” said I. “But the boat survives. Come, put your arm over my shoulder.” And, slipping and sliding upon the sharp rough slimy rocks, we found our way back upon the broken decks. I saw some men striving to lower the boat, and others crowding about it, fighting to get on. There was no sight of Faleiro, which left me in command, as pilot. At once I rushed to the ones who struggled, and cried, “Are you mad? If you all enter the boat, it will go down, and all of you with it! Hold back, let us consider. We are safe here, for the moment.”
Yet did they continue to fight like mad wolves to enter the boat. I seized them one by one, and hurled them back, calling upon them to regain their wisdom, and I took some hard blows as I fought to help them keep their lives. But then Faleiro appeared, with a great bloody bruise on his forehead, and stood beside me, and together we were able to bring order.
Though the wind still howled and the sea raged like a ravenous beast, we kept command and took stock of our situation. It seemed that some eight or nine men were dead: some killed in the breakup of the ship, which lay impaled and sundered upon the shoal in the saddest way, and others thrown free like Cabral, and swept off into the night before they could be aided. The others clung to the sides of the boat and we waited for morning. The waves broke very fierce over the reef and fell off at once with great violence to the south-east, in which direction the sea appeared to be running.