The Dead Men Stood Together (6 page)

And here it was I saw my first Africans. I had never seen a black face in all my life, but here they were common. Slave ships crowded the harbour and some of the slaves were sold here. We saw them shuffle by: men and women, children too – their ankles and wrists chained in irons. Some had been bought by islanders and they alone toiled in the full searing heat of the sun.

The people here spoke a language I did not understand and which I soon learned was Portuguese. My uncle surprised me by showing himself to be fluent. He said it paid to know the language of your would-be enemies and he knew a fair amount of Spanish, French, Dutch and Turkish too.

I marvelled to hear him talk to the traders in this strange tongue. I stood there, grinning like a fool, looking from face to face, as he bargained over a stall filled with what I later learned were watermelons. The melon seller used a huge knife to cut us slices and handed them over with a grin filled with gold teeth.

I took a little persuasion to try this strange fruit, but it turned out to be delicious and we sat in the shade spitting pips on the cobbles whilst the captain haggled over our supplies.

The Portuguese soldiers eyed my uncle with suspicion. As always, he had the crossbow on his back, and one of the crew had told me that the soldiers were always on guard against the pirates who regularly attacked the islands. My uncle cared little about this attention or showed no sign of caring if he did. He ignored them. Very soon, he found some shade, settled down and ignored us all.

I joined the others of a younger age from the crew and we explored the area whilst we waited for the captain to call us back to the ship. We looked for lizards on the hot stone walls and stared at the pretty girls who stood in a chattering group in the shade of the church.

We stayed three days at Mindelo, making good the damage the ship had suffered during our voyage there and stocking up on provisions. Mainly though, we were waiting for the other ships – the ships with the sponsors of the expedition. We were to meet here and sail the rest of the journey together.

But by the third day, their ships had still to appear. And my uncle had been right when he told me and my mother about the dangers of leaving a crew idle ashore. The captain had already had to buy the freedom of four men who got into a brawl and rescue another who was in danger of being killed by an angry husband.

At sundown on that third day, the captain gathered the crew on the quayside.

‘We have waited long enough for our comrades to arrive,’ he said. ‘We cannot wait any longer. The food we have on board will perish and we will quickly exhaust what moneys we have buying more from these thieves.’

Here he looked away towards the flock of hawkers and merchants who crowded on the quayside.

‘The leader of the expedition ordered me to return home if they have not made contact in three days and, as they have not, back we go,’ he said.

‘I was told of no such plan,’ said my uncle.

‘Well, then,’ said the captain, ‘perhaps they did not feel it of vital importance to tell you.’

There was a ripple of laughter at my uncle’s expense.

‘Are we simply to abandon the expedition then?’ he said. ‘I thought you were made of stronger stuff.’

‘It would be insanity to continue,’ said the captain. ‘What purpose would be served? We are one ship, a supply ship. Without the others we are nothing. I am not taking these men to the Pacific for sport. I have a letter from my employers. Here.’

The captain handed my uncle a letter. He read it quickly and handed it back.

‘I say again,’ he said. ‘I was not informed of –’

‘You’ve been informed now!’ said the captain angrily.

The sailors nearby smiled and chuckled and muttered as they moved away to row back to the ship. I turned to look at my uncle. He stood alone, holding the cross around his neck, his face a picture of rage.

We stayed at anchor that last night. There was a strange atmosphere. We had gone very quickly from the fearful excitement of heading into the unknown, to the knowledge that we were now to sail home, back to our loved ones. I thought of my mother and wished that I could wake up back in my own bed. If we were not to sail on, I wanted to be home right away.

I was not alone in this, I soon discovered, once the men were below and talking. If there was no adventure ahead, then we were all for a fair wind to take us home as speedily as possible.

I think I was the only one who voiced any disappointment at having the voyage cut short. An old sailor slapped his big hand on my back and said there’d be plenty more voyages ahead.

I smiled and hoped he was right and looked to my uncle. But he was off in the shadows alone, polishing the wood of his crossbow and greasing the metalwork. We all flinched at the click of the trigger as he tested it and I saw his white smile glowing in the darkness.

XI

The storm, when it came, flew like a banshee out of the west and struck us full in the face. We were not more than a couple of hours out of port.

I thought the storm we had sailed through in the Bay of Biscay was bad, but it was a gentle breeze compared to this tempest. And it hit with such speed. We saw it on the horizon, and then it was upon us.

I had been sent aloft to trim the sails and I was forced to cling to the spar with all my might. The rain greased the wood and the wind seemed to pull purposefully, spitefully, at my fingers, trying to prise them free.

Two men were plucked from the topsails: one thrown into the crashing waves to drown, the other hurled headlong to the deck, dashing out his brains. The ship swung this way and that. One moment the spar tips would be skimming the wave crests as we leaned so far that I felt most surely we were bound to capsize and all of us drown; then the ship would take the waves head on, climbing with the prow skyward, the deck tipped back, throwing all towards the stern. Then there would be a heart-stopping moment of stillness as the ship crested the wave and crashed down over the other side, the prow ramming the next wave with such force that it lifted the stern clear of the water, hurling us all towards the prow.

The noise was deafening. The roar of the wind and the sea and the constant attack of the rain on our heads engulfed the voices of the men, who I could see were shouting out. Each of us, old and young, looked to our allotted tasks and did them the best we could. Our lives depended on it.

But more lives were lost all the same. I was working in the topsails when three men were washed overboard to be swallowed up by the ravenous waters. I saw them rise up atop a giant wave and then sink into its hungry darkness.

I thought about what the hermit had once told me. He said the sea was one huge living creature. If that was true, we had encountered the ravening mouth and teeth. Three more men were swept overboard and devoured, one of them the old mariner who had told me I had many more voyages ahead. It didn’t feel that way.

The sea was by turns black and dark green and slate grey, and it rose up like a range of mountains stretching into the distance. I had never seen the like of it. After a while, I had to stop looking into those waves, for it was as though I looked into the doom of the world.

The sky closed in around us: if I’d reached out my hand I could almost have touched the soot-black clouds that swirled about the topsails. Sea and sky, sky and sea – it all melded into one.

The storm flew past us and then turned about, chasing us from behind. It threw us forward and, though the helmsman did his best to steer, the storm was our pilot now. We went wherever the winds decided and we were spun about so many times none of us knew whether we were heading north or south, east or west.

I saw the look of panic and despair written on the faces of older sailors who had seen storms before. They too had seen nothing like this. Any little pause in the storm’s roaring and all I could hear was the mumbled prayers of every man around me.

I heard one man pray that the ship go down quick if it was going. My father had told me never to learn to swim. ‘If your ship goes down,’ he had said, ‘better to go down quick with it than to float about on the surface, waiting to die of thirst or be taken bit by bit by hungry sharks.’

So I’d never learned. Nor had most of the men on the ship, I’d have wagered. Most thought it was bad luck. Learning to swim was like saying you thought the ship was going to sink. But that is what everyone now thought, regardless.

The storm punched us and punched us until we were drunk with it, and then it punched some more. The whole ship reeled and everyone aboard staggered dizzily about, exhausted and battered.

I began to imagine what it would be like, slipping beneath the waves, sucking water into my lungs instead of air – down, down into the blackness until there was nothing. I was so tired that such a prospect didn’t strike me as so very bad. In any case, I think we all felt it was only a matter of time.

I remember a wave rising up so high it seemed to be higher than the top of the mainmast and it was as black as ink. It was like a great shadow. It rose up like a giant and towered over the ship before crashing down, swamping the deck and flinging the crew this way and that as though we were cod hauled up and let loose on a wet deck.

I heard men talking and saying that we must be being driven west and that we would end up in the Americas, like it or not, for that was where these storms were determined to drive you when they hit.

‘We’ll end up in the Bermudas, mark my words,’ shouted one, over the raging wind.

‘Well, there’s worse places to be forced ashore!’ bellowed another. ‘Plenty of beautiful women there, and plenty of rum too!’

The captain ordered half the crew to rest and they went below to try to sleep. By the time our shift was relieved, I was almost asleep myself, holding on to a thick hemp rope for dear life, so I wouldn’t get washed overboard.

We staggered below deck and collapsed into our hammocks as best we could. Despite the noise and bucking of the ship, exhaustion overtook me and I slept, awakened every few minutes by the din and the wild motion.

The storm continued in my sleep. The waves of my dreams were even larger, our ship even smaller. And stranger still, my uncle stood at the storm’s eye, whether directing it or whether the sole target of its venom, it was hard to tell.

XII

Day after day, night after night, the storm raged. Then one morning I woke unsure of where I was. I leapt to my feet in alarm, not knowing why I was so unnerved, and then realised that the ship no longer lurched and rolled. So strange was this calmness that I rushed on deck to see what was happening.

At first I was overjoyed. I grinned as I leapt each rung of the ladder and bounced on deck. We’d survived the tempest! It should have been a cause for celebration. But I found a sombre gathering of the crew.

The men stood in silent stillness, so removed from the frantic activity I’d known in the previous days. It was an eerie sight – and a strange glimpse of the horror to come.

The sea was now calm, as was the air above and around us. A thick mist wrapped itself about us, and it was fiercely cold.

There should have been thanks given for being saved from the storm, but we were all too perplexed by our new situation to give any thought to anything but the fogbound present.

Had we been driven north? Were we now back in the cold climes of our own country? But, no, the captain informed us that, as much as he could be sure of anything, he was certain that somehow we had been driven south, and at such an unnatural speed that we had crossed the equator without knowing it. We had arrived in the chill waters that lie at the far end of the Atlantic near the very straits we’d been originally bound for: the straits that would see us sail into the Pacific Ocean.

But how, in the space of one night, could we have drifted into waters so cold? How could the climate change so swiftly? I looked to older faces for the answer but there was none. It was a wonder to them all.

My uncle stood apart as usual, a scowl on his face as though the storm lingered on in his person. He leaned on his crossbow and stared malevolently at the deck.

The damp air soaked our clothes and all the crew were soon chilled to the bone. I began to shiver and found that I couldn’t stop. My teeth rattled in my head and the joints of my arms and legs knocked one against the other until they ached.

It took an effort of will to persuade my legs to take me back below deck so that I could grab my father’s winter coat. I hugged myself and stamped away the cold as he had taught me to. Then I put on his old mittens and came back on deck to hear the captain’s orders.

They gave no comfort. He told us that whatever fog we were in seemed to have some hold over the compass because the needle spun and spun and would not tell us which way to go. We could see neither sun nor stars through the mist. We were lost and had no notion of which way we were headed.

The captain ordered some of us – and I was one – to go up into the topsails and act as lookouts. We were to watch for land or for other ships – anything that might help us get a bearing on where we were.

I climbed the wet rigging of the main channels, high, high up into the airy top of the mainmast and clambered into the crow’s-nest.

I leaned over and looked down. The mist was so thick all about that I could scarcely see the deck, as when on deck, the top of the mast seemed to be disappearing into the cloud.