A Million Tears (67 page)

‘I hope he’s as good as he says he is,’ said Jake. While waiting for Dominic to return we lit a fire and spread the canvas out to dry. It would be enough to make a couple of tents.

Dominic arrived a short while later with the carcass of a half-grown wild pig slung over his shoulder.

By no stretch of the imagination could we be called a happy group as we ate our half burnt, half raw, smoked meat, but at least we were no longer hungry.

The next morning at dawn, after a breakfast of cold pig and coconut, Jake and I went back out to the
Lucky Lady
. We took it in turns throughout the morning to empty the locker. We removed pieces of tackle, some rigging and some of the tools. By noon we were exhausted, and shivering in spite of the sunshine. If we could possibly empty the boat then life would be more than bearable until help came along.

The next day neither of us felt like diving again, so we spent the time looking for a place to set up a camp. Alongside the stream, about ten yards from the water’s edge, there was a flat grassy section surrounded by palm trees. There was some shade and an evening breeze cut through the grass just after sunset. We cut some poles and made two rough tents using the canvas. The grass was coarse, the ground hard and that night I slept worse than I had on the beach. From the looks on the faces of the others the next morning I guessed they hadn’t done much better.

‘Easy. We’ll get up the jibs and mizzen sail and make hammocks. It’s been some time since I slept in one but once you’re used to it they’re very comfortable. Heck, it’d be the easiest thing in the world to make.’

‘But it’s not easy to get the canvas Jake. That stuff is all in the forward locker. There are eight or ten butterfly screws holding the hatch down and each one takes a minute or more to undo. We’ll be up and down all day just opening the bloody thing.’

‘We haven’t much else to do, have we?’ he asked dryly.

So we went back on the lagoon. We had an estimated forty five seconds on the bottom, not long but long enough. I did the first dive, reached the cockpit, cut the rope and swam to the bow. I managed to tie it to a deck cleat before returning to the surface, my lungs bursting and stars exploding in my head.

We alternated, slowly undoing each nut. It was long and arduous work, the temptation to stay down too long almost overwhelming but finally we were finished. We started to remove each item and take it ashore. We recovered two coils of one inch manila, each four hundred feet long as well as half a dozen blocks, other lengths of rope and finally the canvas sails. It took us three days but, eventually, the locker was empty.

We resited the tents so that they covered the hammocks when we slung them between palm trees. From the tools we had salvaged Jake took his sailmaker’s kit and showed us how to use the palm, a device that fitted into the hand to push against the needle, and taught us the stitches we needed to use to prevent the canvas from tearing. Jake was adept with the thick needle but the rest of us managed only with loud groans and muttered curses, as the needle slipped off the palm and into our hands. The edges of my hammock promised to be a lovely shade of blood red, in irregular blotches, by the time I had finished.

Jake graciously gave his completed hammock to Estella and elected to spend another miserable night on the ground.

46

The time seemed to fly by. It was more than a week before we started counting the days, and from then on the number increased with frightening speed. We dived often and removed all the loose gear from the
Lucky Lady
. We had plenty of rope, canvas and tackle. Our tools consisted of two axes, a chisel, two hammers, a bucket full of nails, two more buckets, two brooms, the needles, palms and thread of the sailmaker’s kit, a fid – used to worm a way through rope and then thread more rope into the hole created – for splicing, and a dozen hard eyes for certain types of eye splices. We also had a block of pitch used for re-corking the decks and hull. There was nothing else we could salvage without going inside the hull and neither Jake nor I were capable of doing so.

We had now been on the island for ten weeks and had seen no sign of another ship or boat. Dominic had turned out to be a happy, friendly person once we got to know him, though he was still capable of extremely childish moods. Estella was lovely; she never complained and was always willing to work hard. She was friendly to both Jake and me and would often sit and talk to us for hours about religion and politics.

The island, apart from the coast, was covered with jungle. The only way up the hill was to follow the stream which bubbled mysteriously out of the ground about twenty feet short of the summit. Sitting at the fire in the evenings we often discussed such subjects as where did the stream come from? Was there a subterranean, artesian well buried in the coral of the island, or did it come all the way up from the sea bed? How deep was the sea bed away from the coral reef ? What plants could we eat? Coconuts and mangoes we knew. But what about the green fruit in the middle of the jungle that Dominic had brought back from a hunting expedition? It looked tempting but none of us dared risk sampling it. We had seen at least half a dozen different types of snakes but which were poisonous and which weren’t? Living so close to nature showed us how appallingly ignorant we were and how we took so much for granted.

There was plenty of food to be had from wild pigs, of which there were three or four families scattered across the island, to the fish in the lagoon. There were hundreds of birds which screeched and cackled whenever we passed close, from parrots to whippoorwills. As our hope of rescue faded, our desire for creature comforts increased and we started building a wooden shack to live in.

We built a platform, fifteen feet by ten, four feet above the ground, supported by twelve uprights buried deep in the earth. We left a narrow veranda, two feet wide in front of the door, built walls six feet high of thin bamboo interlaced with palm leaves and left a canvas covered window in the back. We covered the roof with a double thickness of canvas for added protection and covered a frame with another sheet for the door. It took three weeks to complete – in between hunting, fishing and, on some days when the despair got worse, lazing.

We had half completed the first hut when we started on a second for the Mendozas, planning a canvas partition to give Estella some privacy. By this time I realised that Jake and Estella were particularly friendly, often going for walks together, often looking at each other in a private and special way. Dominic too had noticed and began to act petulantly, especially when Estella did any small kindness for Jake, like handing him his food or mending his clothes. Once, when they were away for over three hours Dominic worked himself into a paroxysm of rage, threatening all sorts of consequences to Jake. Nothing came of it of course, except that Dominic and Estella had a blazing argument.

I was shocked when Estella and Jake announced one day that they would take one of the huts together and Dominic and I could have the other. For a week Dominic sulked, stormed and argued with his sister. He did no work and went for long walks across the island alone. No arguments of religion, marriage, age difference or the lack of noble ancestry could change her mind. She loved him and that was all there was to it.

‘What would Mamma say?’ wailed Dominic. ‘You need to go to a Church, you need to be married properly . . . Estella, it is unthinkable.’

‘No it’s not,’ she replied sweetly. ‘Jake was captain of the boat and captains have the right to perform wedding ceremonies.’

‘Is that true?’ Dominic asked, but before anyone answered he continued, ‘But that does not matter. It is a sin to live together without a proper blessing from a priest.’

‘We have been here for nearly four months,’ Estella said patiently, ‘and in that time we have seen no sign of a rescue ship. How long must we be together before we are able to live like husband and wife? Years? And for what? A so-called blessing by a man who has studied the bible and another man has said to him, you are now a priest.’

‘Estella,’ Dominic was scandalised, ‘how can you talk so? I shall pray to Our Lady and ask her forgiveness.’

‘Yes, do that. And while you’re at it ask for her blessing too. Dominic I want you to know something I’ve never told anybody. I have followed the church for our parents’ sake. I have gone to mass three times a week and spent hours on my knees. I have met many senior men within our church, almost all of whom I have despised. I have seen the suffering in villages, I have seen the starving children and I have seen men and women go hungry to place their money into the hands of the church. The church grows fat and rich on the exploitation of the people it’s meant to help. The priests grow fat and rich, they never go hungry, they never suffer. Remember Archbishop Francisco who visited us two years ago; the man you said was so wonderful? I had to threaten to scream one night when he was staying with us, to get him to leave my bedroom. Don’t look so shocked, Dominic. He was not the first to have tried. I hated them all and their rotten church, and when we leave here, if ever, I shall become a Protestant. In the meantime Jake is delegating his authority as captain to David who will marry us.’

‘Hang on,’ I protested. ‘Surely that’s not possible?’

Jake shrugged. ‘Estella wants it that way, so that’s the way it’ll be.’ And that’s the way it was.

Curiously enough Dominic began to accept the situation and instead of questioning the right or wrong of their action, began questioning his religion. I was more or less a confirmed atheist and we had many interesting discussions on the subject.

One evening after we had completed the huts and were sitting near the fire enjoying a baked fish, I said, ‘I’d give anything for a cup of coffee laced with rum,’ I poked a stick into the flames, causing a shower of sparks. ‘Or even a tin of beans. Anything to remind me there’s civilisation out there.’

‘It would be easy if we could breathe under water,’ Jake joked, and the others laughed.

‘And we could raise our treasure too,’ said Dominic, and they laughed again at the preposterousness of the idea. Except I didn’t.

I was silent for some minutes as the idea took root and grew. I smiled and then chuckled. ‘Sometimes I wonder if my parents wasted their money giving me an education. Do you three want to know something? The Greeks were diving and staying under water for long periods as much as two thousand years ago.’ I wrinkled my brow in thought. ‘I believe it was Herodotus who wrote about a diver named Scyllis who worked for the Persian King Xerxes, recovering sunken treasure in the fifth century before Christ. I think that’s right. Hell, history is full of examples of divers being used for warfare. There’s been salvage going on in the Mediterranean for over two thousand years. I know that the ancient Greeks trained from childhood to hold their breath for long periods,’ the others groaned at this, ‘but in the sixteenth century in Massachusetts, or,’ I added as an afterthought, ‘more precisely, that’s where the inventor came from, they were using diving bells.’ I was becoming excited now, my mind racing ahead of my thoughts. ‘You know there’s plenty of air pumps on the market nowadays, Jake. I’ve even seen one working in New York harbour.’

‘I hate to point out the obvious, Dave lad, but we don’t have an air pump.’

‘Of course not,’ I said impatiently, ‘but there’s another way. Have any of you heard of Boyle’s law?’ They shook their heads. ‘What it comes down to is that air taken to thirty feet under the sea occupies half its volume it did originally. That’s not what the law states but that’s what it means to us.’

‘So how does that help?’ Estella asked.

‘We take the dinghy, turn it upside down and haul it to the yacht. We’ll use blocks and rope, or even just weight it with stones. We dive down, get under and breathe. From there, with only a few feet to travel we ought to be able to get into the cabins and get some, if not all, the gear out. We don’t need to come to the surface but go back into the boat for the next breath. See what I mean?’

The next day we started making a raft. If the boat was to be used, as I suggested, then we would need a platform over the
Lucky Lady
. We made our raft six feet square, with a double layer of logs, each six inches thick. We added a piece of stave to the
Lucky Lady
’s mizzen mast so it projected out of the water, and then ran a length of rope to the shore. We could now pull ourselves quickly back and forth.

Along the gunwale of the dinghy we fixed two lengths of wood and then surrounded it with a shelf which helped to stabilise it. We tied stones as evenly matched as we could find onto the platform. When in the water it floated and left six inches of keel showing. Underneath, a volume of air was trapped in a space five feet from bow to stern, three feet at the widest part and two feet deep. The preparations took a week, but finally we were ready.

The raft was buoyant enough to take the four of us, so with our home made diving bell towed behind us, we pulled ourselves across the lagoon. Once it was in position we rigged blocks and tackle and Jake and I took it in turns to swim down to the cockpit of the
Lucky Lady
and to fit the blocks each side of the gunwale. With those in place, we hauled on the ropes roved through the blocks and watched with satisfaction as the boat slowly vanished under the water in a horizontal position. I dived to check its position after which we lowered it another few feet until we declared ourselves satisfied. The dinghy was now over the centre of the cockpit, directly above the door to the forward cabin.

This time when I went down, pulling myself along the rope, I ducked under the boat and lifted my head into the air space. I wanted to jump and shout, I felt so exultant. All that the
Lucky Lady
held was now available to us and, most importantly, the one item I wanted above all others.