“A contest worthy of the gods. Brave men matched in conflict with adversity,” Paul said, as he and Jack drifted away from the troubled group.
Jack poked a finger in Paul’s ribs. “You sound as if you’re on a cloud looking down on all of this.”
Paul nodded. “If it were only so, Jackson. If only.”
There was a sense of doom aboard the Star. The meeting with the captain was discussed endlessly. The officers seemed to be, for all practical purposes, useless. First officer Mancy relied almost totally on Quince, even though he was of lower rank. The ship was proceeding south, eventually to O’taheiti, as planned.
Occasionally the captain came on deck, sometimes only partially clothed, taking his constitutional and mumbling to himself. Jack felt a peculiar kinship with this tormented old soul.
The weather became more brisk each day even though it was summer in the Antarctic. They prepared for desperate conditions. Jack did the work assigned to him and helped ready the old ship. They were two hundred miles off the coast of Argentina, passing the 53rd degree latitude, turning west into the Straits of Magellan.
Jack and Paul worked together on the foredeck splicing rope. Paul continued his quest to try to draw Jack out of his periodic moods of sullen silence. “So, my good friend, what do you think of the sailor’s life?” Jack didn’t answer but bore down even harder on the task at hand, viciously driving his marlinspike into a knotted rope. Paul tried again. “You’ll feel better, Jack, if you talk it out.”
He still didn’t answer. Some days he could be almost cheery, others, like today, he was morose and totally into himself. Jack felt as if physical exhaustion were his only salvation.
When the Star was just fifty miles from Espíritu Santo, the weather changed. The winds came around, into their teeth, and the crew were forced to change direction a number of times. They ran as hard as they could hoping to find shelter close to the shore at Tierra del Fuego.
It was not to be. The winds picked up to the point where they had only two choices: turn to the open sea and hope for a wind shift or try to find a cove and wait for better weather. Finally, they found a small bay called Punta de Arenas. The ship stayed anchored for nine days. Bare poles being beaten, the savage wind tried to push them out into the open sea.
Occasionally Jack would pass the captain’s cabin and hear him raving, repeating the same phrase in the high-pitched voice of a much younger man. Jack spent most of his time in his hammock. He was situated in the corner, hard by the forward gun; beside him lay a wooden box piled with iron balls. Tackle to haul the gun to the gunport was neatly laid, but glistened with tar and grease. One of Jack’s duties was to keep the Iron Dog with the Loud Mouth clean and ready for action. A faithful cur, the cannon lay beneath him as he stretched out for the four-hour sleep before the next watch. The four-on-four-off schedule for nearly a fortnight had exhausted him; the sea had become a demanding school.
Jack knew Paul was trying to force him to talk more about what had happened in Cuba, but he found it hard to manage anything other than a halfhearted grunt or nod. During the brief periods of relaxation when the men sat about, retelling sea tales and smoking their pipes, he was silent and reflective.
Always at the center of the group was Quince, who seemed to have second thoughts about the authority tacitly laid upon him.
After confirming with first officer Mancy on the ninth day in the bay, the first mate decided they would weigh anchor at first light and take their chances in the heavy seas.
Jack once again was high in the rigging of the Star as she rounded the long spit of land at Punta de Arenas. The ship’s company were on deck and aloft, trying to drive her into the wind. After several hours the air fell still, followed by a soft rain and fog.
Unable to get his noon fix on the sun, Mancy had to dead reckon the ship’s position, figuring time traveled plus their speed and direction by compass.
Jack pulled on a line; Paul beside him on the foredeck ignored the pain from his chafed, bleeding hands. Jack strained to hear Quince as he spoke with the first officer.
“Mr. Mancy, sir.” Jack could see Quince was debating his next words.
The officer turned and just nodded.
“Sir, by my estimate it be the better part of fifty miles from the point where we left the bay south to the inlet of the Straits.” He glanced down at the compass encased in the wooden binnacle. “I don’t believe, sir, with due respect, that we’ve traveled with the wind in our face more than thirty miles.”
Willing to listen to almost anything, the officer quickly replied, “What’s your suggestion?”
“We bear out to sea until the fog lifts and we have a clearer view, sir.”
“We’ll discuss it,” Mancy answered.
“I may in the very near future be one of only a few true landlubbers who have been shipwrecked twice in a two-month period,” Paul said.
Jack pulled on the line with renewed strength. He glanced at his friend, speaking to him for the first time in days. “I find the closer to the rocks we get, the better I like it. I haven’t had a swim since last summer in the creek in Hamden woods.” Jack quietly asked, “Do you want to live forever, Le Maire?”
Paul looked back, inches from Jack, pale and surprised. “You scare me when you talk like that. I thought we were friends.”
Jack couldn’t bring himself to answer; instead, he threw himself back into his work.
The first officer gathered the other senior ranks to discuss Quince’s proposition that they had not come south far enough to slip into the Straits. None seemed to have an answer. Jack and Paul glanced up as Quince brushed past them, making his way forward to be closer to the starboard watch. Just then the port lookout screamed, “Land-ho!” The port man was stretched out, one leg wrapped around the rail, both hands cupped over his eyes.
“Where away?” Quince yelled.
“Two points off the port bow.”
Quince ran aft to the quarterdeck. The helmsman had already started a turn to starboard. The fog lifted and the rocks on shore loomed huge as barns. They barely cleared them, and Jack was fascinated by the disquiet that ran through him; these rocks would have solved his problems.
As they made their way back out to sea, Jack volunteered for the most dangerous jobs: a line fouled at the top of the mainmast was quickly freed by him, the jib sheet caught in the bowsprit stretching twelve feet over the waves seemed an easy task to untangle. The other crew members just shook their heads in wonder.
When Jack wasn’t on watch he would linger in his hammock or restlessly pace between the bunks. Sometimes he would lever himself to the ceiling by grabbing a cross brace and pulling himself to his chest and then back down, repeating this until he was exhausted.
The ship ran swiftly southwest with the wind at her back, the crew trying desperately to get back to the Straits.
Paul had stopped Quince to ask where they were and what strategy was planned. Quince replied, “We are wandering about in the Southern Ocean. Where’s your friend Jackson?”
Paul pointed to Jack on the foredeck, splicing rope.
“O’Reilly, come down here. And be quick about it, lad.”
Jack dropped the line and joined them.
“I’d like to bring you lads up to date as to our condition.” Quince explained that they discussed several days before whether to run further southwest and bear into the coast or try and hold station where they were. They chose to run, trying once again to get in the lee of the mountains and battled into the protection of the shore. But they had kept slipping further south and the ship was caught between two land masses: Staten Island and the mainland. The wind and current were sending them into Drake Passage and a commitment to the Horn. “You lads keep a weather eye these next days. She’ll go hard, she will.”