Towards sundown the next day, the sky began to darken with cloud and the hot, humid air seemed heavy with anticipation. Tom had the jib hauled in and the mainsail reefed ready for the storm, but though the sky continued to blacken, there was not a breath of wind and the sails still hung limp around the mast.
He paced the deck, the slap of his bare feet on the planking echoing in the oppressive silence. An eerie light seemed to glow over the ship. Richard raised his gaze to the masthead and let out a cry. A shimmering halo of light surrounded it.
‘Don’t worry, it’ll do us no harm,’ Tom said. ‘It’s a corposant — St Elmo’s fire.’
It continued to glow for a few minutes, hovering around the top of the mast, sometimes rising or descending a few feet, but then it was extinguished as quickly as a snuffed candle. A moment later there was a savage clap of thunder, and sheet lightning — a wall of white fire — crackled around the horizon.
There was still no breath of wind and the sea was flat calm, but thunder continued to rattle like a naval broadside. Curtains of rain tumbled out of the sky and water poured from the scuppers as if the ship was beating into a heavy sea. The rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun and the storm moved on, but flickers of distant lightning continued to pierce the darkness for several hours.
The next day, a breeze at last got up and they sailed on into the South Atlantic in a freshening south-easterly, the first harbinger of the trade winds. Long thin cirrus cloud streaked the sky, aligned from north-west to south-east, pointing the way to the Cape.
Tom had the top mast taken down, reducing the height and weight of the Mignonette’s rigging and canvas in anticipation of the rougher winter conditions ahead. Tom, Stephens and Richard all worked barefoot. Only Brooks regularly wore his seaboots. Each night, when he was off-watch, he rubbed them with linseed oil to waterproof them.
They sailed on to the south for another week, tacking in long reaches against the wind as the light, high clouds of the trade winds streamed overhead. On 25 June, there was a change in the wind and weather. Tom was below when there was a cry from Stephens: ‘All hands ahoy.’ As Tom ran towards the companionway, not even pausing to put on his oilskins, he heard the crack of the sails as a squall shook them. A fresh north-westerly was upon them. He cast a look to the weather side of the ship and saw a dense bank of cloud and mist, extending from the sky to the ocean, driving over the waves towards them. The surface of the water was darkened by the wind and stippled by rain. A short, ugly swell was beginning to rise, pitching the boat from side to side.
The yacht lay over to the strengthening wind and there was a frantic scramble to reef and furl the sails. Brooks and Richard were already at work on the mainsail. The boy tried to pass the reef earing, but the squall shook the sail with such force that twice it was snatched from his grasp, setting the canvas rattling and banging against the mast. Tom grabbed the boom alongside him. ‘Be sharp, lad, or it’ll have the mast out of her.’
Rain stung their skin like whips as the cloud swallowed them up and they were exposed to the full force of the wind. The ship heeled further over under the spread of canvas still exposed, and every movement of the ship was magnified threefold. Richard’s face was green and he turned his head, groaned and vomited. The wind threw it back in his face.
‘Get below,’ Tom said. ‘You’re no use to us and a danger to yourself here.’
As the boy struggled back along the deck, Tom passed the reef earing himself. He glanced to his left. ‘Haul in, Brooks.’
Rain lashed around the two men, their bodies bent over the boom, as they hauled at the sodden canvas. Tom’s soaking clothes were plastered against his body, but he barely noticed the cold, using all the strength in his stocky frame to hold and lash the sail.
They scrambled forward to take a reef in the foresail, but the wind was still strengthening and they were soon back to double-reef the mainsail, and stuff the jibs as well. The bowsprit had been cut back by six feet before the voyage, but as Tom crawled to the end of it to stuff the number-one jib, with the seas crashing around him and the wind bidding to tear him loose from his precarious perch, he wished he had shortened it a further yard at least.
Even close-hauled, the boat lay hard over, her mast bent like a whip. The bowsprit carved through the waves, the spray flying over the forecastle as the sea broke over it, foaming away down the scuppers. They battened down the forward hatch and lashed the helm, then Tom went below again. Richard was slumped at the bottom of the companion way. ‘I’m sorry, Captain, I—’
Tom held up his hand. ‘My first time on an ocean voyage I was sick as a cur-dog for a week. I’d never met weather like it before — racing yachts run for home when a big blow comes on. You’ll be right enough by and by.’
The boy’s attempted reply ended in another groan. Tom went back to his cabin and stripped off his wet clothes, but he dressed in dry gear before lying down on his berth, certain he would be called again before his watch began.
The ship pitched ever more steeply as the sea got up before the gale. The lantern over Tom’s head swung in a wide arc, casting a ray of light like the intermittent beam of a lighthouse on to the rough wood of the bulkhead against which he lay.
All through that night the wind strengthened and Tom woke to hear rain still hammering on the deck above his head. The pitching of the ship had disturbed the sediment and filthy water in the bilges and a stench as foul as the gas from the bottom mud of a pond corrupted the air.
The waves smashed in endless repetition against the hull, each blow echoing through the ship like the thud of an axe on wood. Every timber in the ship seemed to be creaking and groaning, underscored by the relentless bass battering of the sea against the bow.
Tom clambered out of his berth, pulled on his oilskins and went on deck. Stephens was huddled over the helm, with Brooks forward on look-out. The sails were drum-taut and the shrouds and stays tight as fiddle strings as the wind howled over the rigging, sending the loose ends of ropes snaking through the air.
White spume flew as the bow plunged into the waves and rose again with a groan from the timbers. Each time sea-water coursed over the deck and flooded out through the scuppers, but the calloused soles and splayed toes of Tom’s feet gave him a sure grip on the slippery planking.
The force of the gale was still increasing, and a heavy beam sea was running. Tom took the helm from Stephens. ‘Ship the number-three jib,’ he said. ‘I’ll run her off a couple of points to keep the sea more on our quarter.’
The north-westerly gale kept up for five days. They sailed on under a single-reefed mainsail, making fast time towards the Cape, but the pitching of the ship made it impossible to cook or even boil water to wet the tea. They chewed hard-tack, tinned turnips and lumps of cold, greasy meat, and drank cold water. The tang of the limes Tom had bought in Madeira now barely hid the water’s staleness.
On Monday, 30 June, ‘the wind shifted abruptly to the south-south-west, blowing very hard. I had the mainsail and foresail in and bent the storm trysail, but we could scarcely sail her at times, there being so much sea.’
The trysail was a sheet of canvas secured direct to the mast and bulwarks without a boom or yard; in the storm conditions in which it was used the danger from flying timbers exceeded any advantage they might have conferred.