As he had walked down through the village that morning, he had stopped outside the house. The door stood ajar and he peered into the kitchen, seeing the familiar iron range, scrubbed wooden table and worn rag rug on the bare brick floor. There was to be no farewell to his father: he was away on a year-long voyage to the Americas and no longer kept the house.
Tom’s eye lingered on the village a little longer, then he turned his back, setting his gaze out to sea. His wife, Philippa, stood alongside him in the stern, cradling their youngest child against her shoulder. She was several years older than Tom and a couple of inches taller than his stocky, powerful figure. She did not speak, not wishing to wake her sleeping baby, but she studied his face for a moment, then reached out and laid a hand on his arm. As he turned towards her, she gave him a gentle, understanding smile.
His expression softened as he looked at her, then he raised his eyes to the horizon and paused, seeming to scent the wind. He frowned. It was backing north-westerly and freshening all the while. ‘I’m afraid it will not be a pleasure cruise, my dear. There’s another blow coming on.’
William Frost, the younger of the two brothers who formed his crew, stood ready at the warp tethering the Mignonette to her mooring. He had reached his fourteenth birthday only the previous week, but had been at sea since he was twelve. His brother, Jim, was four years older and already an experienced able seaman. They were also natives of Tollesbury and Tom had known them all their lives.
‘Let go,’ he said.
‘Wait!’
Tom stifled a curse as he saw a figure running along the walkway towards them. It had taken all his powers of persuasion to convince the Frost brothers to make the voyage. He did not want their father to talk them out of it now, but he could not prevent Joe Frost from making one last try.
‘You’re not to be dissuaded, then?’
Tom shook his head. ‘I’ve given my word to the owner. I’ll not go back on it.’
Joe paused, choosing his words with care. ‘Tom, there are few braver sailors on this coast, nor fairer men, but you’re sailing across the world in a twenty-year-old yacht. She was built for inshore waters, not great oceans.’
‘You know the yard that built it. Their boats are stout-timbered and solid, and the Mignonette’ — he had given up trying to adapt his broad Essex accent to the French pronunciation and called it ‘Miggonette’ — ‘was built as a cruiser and fishing boat. Only later was she converted to a racing yacht. If she’s properly handled, she’ll do well enough on any ocean.’
‘She’s an old boat and she’s been lying on the Brightlingsea mud all winter.’
Tom nodded. ‘And she’s been fitted out since then by a man we both know and trust.’
‘My boys are on board, Tom.’
He glanced at Philippa. ‘As are my wife and child. Do you think I’d risk them?’
‘But they are sailing only to Southampton, not New South Wales.’
‘And if your boys are not happy with the Mignonette after sailing her that far, they can also leave ship. You have my word on that.’
Joe hesitated, looking from his sons to Tom. ‘Will you not reconsider, before this ends in disaster?’
Embarrassed and uncomfortable, the boys barely met their father’s gaze.
Tom shook his head. ‘I will not. It will be the start of a new life for myself and my family, and I have given my word.’
Joe stood with his hand half extended, then let it fall to his side. He embraced his sons and walked away, unwilling to watch as the yacht slipped from her mooring and began to drift down Tollesbury Fleet.
Tom kept a careful eye on the boys as they went to their work, raising sail. They had said not a word, but their father’s anxiety was now mirrored in their faces.
Still backing into the north-west, the wind drove them down South Channel, past Great Cob Island. Mounds of oyster culch were spread on the shore, left to dry and bleach in the summer sun. Tom raised a hand in farewell to the men mending the sea wall from a barge. They paused to watch the Mignonette slip downstream then resumed their work, driving split elm piles into the riverbed and dumping boulders around them.
As the yacht cleared Shinglehead Point, she lay over to the wind, driven into a swell that was short and steep even in the sheltered waters of the estuary.
Tom’s gaze was never far from the sails and he felt every tremor of the boat through the helm as he steered south-east towards the distant Kent coast. It was the first voyage in the Mignonette for all of them and each boat was an individual. Her ways had to be learned, her strengths utilized, her weaknesses protected.
She was a thirty-tonner, a little over fifty foot long and twelve foot in beam, with a seven-foot draught. She carried sixteen tons of lead ballast and another three tons carried externally on the keel. That made her a stiff boat, slow to roll with the swell but quick to right again as the keel weight hauled her back to the vertical.
For all her weight, she was a fast yacht and had won her share of prize money over the years. She carried a fair spread of canvas on the main mast — with her top mast up, she was rigged to sixty foot above the deck — and had three jibs rigged from the main mast to the bowsprit, and a small mizzen mast, set well aft, almost on the taff rail.
As they cleared the Maplin Sands and began to cross the Thames Estuary, the sea was speckled with sails. Barges laden with stinking nightsoil hugged the Essex shore, bound for the ports where it would be sold as farm manure.
Packet boats, clippers and barques were beating up the channel, racing to make port before the backing wind forced them to heave-to, while smaller craft — coasters, fishing smacks and pleasureboats — scurried for the shelter of shore and harbour. Only the steamers held a straight course, the wind laying the black columns of smoke from their stacks parallel to the water behind them as they ploughed through the waves towards the capital.
The Mignonette pitched and rolled in the swell. The baby awoke, crying, and a stream of milky puke poured on to Philippa’s shoulder. ‘Best take the child below,’ Tom said. ‘We’ll have no shelter from the wind until we round the North Foreland.’
He set the Frosts to reef then double-reef the mainsail, but even with the jib down, the yacht still sped before the wind, its mast bent and its bowsprit plunging through the swell as water cascaded over the bows and foamed out through the scuppers.
The sky was growing still darker and above the howl of the wind, the groan of the timbers and the relentless thud of waves against the bow, Tom heard a distant rumble of thunder. He saw a grey, opaque curtain of rain to the west, binding the black clouds to the sea. It raced towards them on the wind, lit from within by stabs of lightning.
‘Tom?’ Philippa’s pale face appeared at the head of the companion-way. ‘There’s water leaking in.’
‘How much?’
‘An inch or so, but it’s still rising.’
She tried to keep her voice calm but he heard the edge of fear in it, and held his own expression impassive. ‘Don’t be alarmed, it’s normal in a storm.’ He raised his voice. ‘William, Jim, get forward and man the pumps.’
They ran to the head. The leather washers inside the barrels of the pumps wheezed like consumptive lungs as they began working the hand-pumps and the stinking bilge water poured over the side. The Frosts struggled to hold their ground as the wash from the largest waves coursed over the bows, reaching almost to their thighs. Their oilskins gleamed in the spray, showing dull reflections of the lightning strikes piercing the black sky.