Uncharted Seas (17 page)

Unity stared at her in amazement. ‘D’you mean to tell me that sort of thing was still going on in 1935—the year of King George’s Jubilee?’

‘Yes. It may sound a bit far-fetched, but it’s perfectly true. All news that reached the outside world was frightfully strictly censored, and although most of the European Governments must have known what was happening they were much too busy with their own affairs to interfere.’

‘But torture—in these days?’

‘They used to put leg-irons weighing seventy pounds on all the prisoners and hang them up to the ceiling with ropes by their tenderest parts. If the women were attractive they were raped first by the officers and then by the soldiery.’

‘It sounds simply too frightful.’

‘Things weren’t so bad if you could keep out of prison and out of the way of the old man’s innumerable hangers-on. They were naturally all tarred with the same brush as their lord and master. If one of them took a fancy to a girl she had to make up her mind to a party, or risk herself and her whole family suffering God-knows-what awful fate through being slung into prison on a false accusation of conspiracy.’

‘My dear, you
have
seen life with a vengeance.’

‘I didn’t have.…’

Synolda stopped short. De Brissac had suddenly flung open the door and thrust his head into the galley.

‘Land—land!’ he shouted. ‘Get out on deck—we may run ashore any moment.’

He dashed away and began to bellow down through the fiddley of the engine-room hatch amidships.

Both girls abandoned their preparations for the midday meal and ran after him. Young Largertöf, who was greasing some gear half-way down the shaft, heard his shouts and attracted Luvia’s attention. The whole party came clattering up the iron ladders on to the deck.

‘Land!’ panted Luvia. ‘Where—where?’

De Brissac led them to the side of the ship and pointed downwards. The mist still shut them in, but it was not too thick for them to see a great patch of seaweed floating alongside.

‘You see it,’ exclaimed De Brissac. ‘
Algue
—seaweed—washed from the rocks by a storm. Where there is weed there must be a coast not far distant.’

Luvia shook his head dubiously. ‘That doesn’t follow. I’m afraid I’ll have to have a look—see what sort of weed it is before we know for certain. Anyway this stuff might have been washed scores of miles from the rocks on which it grew.’

He ordered the men below again, with the exception of Basil, and together they hauled the boat up alongside by the rope which kept it trailing in the ship’s wake whichever way she drifted. The two of them went over the side into it and rowed the few strokes necessary to bring them within reach of the patch of weed.

Leaning over the bow, Luvia thrust his hand into the weed and pulled up a great bunch of it. Basil saw that it was a bright grass-green and grew in long, spiky trails inextricably interwoven. The Finn threw it back into the water and made a grimace.

‘De Brissac’s barked up the wrong tree,’ he grunted. ‘This stuff’s called algae, I think. Anyhow, it’s the sort of weed that’s often seen right out in the middle of the ocean.’

‘Well?’ Unity called down impatiently as they clambered up the rope ladder again.

‘No luck,’ Luvia told her. ‘It’s just ocean weed and we’re probably drifting through a big belt of it.’

‘But from where does it come?’ inquired De Brissac.

‘That sure is a mystery; nobody seems to know. There’s masses of it in the North Atlantic, about five hundred miles off the coast of Florida, and it’s met with right down to the south-west of Australia, too. They even mark these areas on the map. Come up to the chart-room and I’ll show you.’

They followed him up the bridge ladder, and, in the deck-house he produced a big map of the world, showing the principal prevailing winds, ocean currents, and seasonal limits of drift ice. Weed seas were clearly marked upon it by hundreds of tiny horizontal black strokes forming irregular patches on the blue grounds of the oceans, with the word ‘weed’ printed across them. North of the equator lay one between the Azores and the West Indies, another to the south-east of Greenland, and a third in the Pacific, north of Hawaii. In the southern hemisphere the weed seemed to be even more prolific. A big patch of it lay to the east of New Zealand, and about a thousand miles south-west of Australia a vast weed continent as large as Germany, France and Italy put together occupied a huge area of those rarely travelled seas. From it, a belt several hundred miles in depth spread out westward, across the great waste of waters girdling the earth for over seven thousand miles, in a wavy streak roughly following the forty-fifth parallel of latitude and passing south of Africa to end off the eastern coast of South America.

Luvia placed a large finger on the spot. ‘See the weed here; a thousand miles from Patagonia. That’s our position—roughly. I can only guess our longitude as somewhere between thirty degrees and fifty degrees west, but our latitude must be about forty-five degrees south as we’re just entering the weed belt.’

‘Does it get thicker as we go further in?’ Unity asked.

‘Not a lot if it’s anything like the patch up here,’ he pointed to the seaward area, as big as Spain, which lay north-east of the West Indies. ‘I’ve sailed those waters plenty and for a couple of days or more you see great banks of it drifting with the wind if you’re running down from Europe to Havana.’

De Brissac peered over his shoulder. ‘That is the Sargasso Sea. I have heard of it, but did not realise that there were others like it elsewhere. Columbus was delayed by it on his voyage to discover America—was he not?’

‘I couldn’t say,’ Luvia shrugged. ‘Though I’ve heard tell lots of those old navigators had trouble with the weed. You meet up with it in banks a mile long at times, and that’s not so funny if you’re a sailing ship with only light winds to help you. Steamers can avoid the big patches and cut through the little ones, so it presents no problem at the present day.’

‘De Brissac’s right,’ Basil cut in. ‘Columbus did get stuck there for some time on one of his voyages, so did lots of the other early adventurers. There grew up to be quite a legend about it.
For centuries people believed that there was a great, central mass of weed and that many ships which were reported lost had got caught in it for good and all.’

‘I’ve heard that too,’ Unity agreed. ‘It was thought that the hulks remained there derelict for years and years after their crews had died from lack of food and water, until the timbers rotted and they sank. There were supposed to be Spanish galleons with cargoes of golden doubloons and pieces of eight trapped in the Sargasso Sea.’

Luvia laughed. ‘That’s all boloney. A Danish research ship chartered the whole area in the ’80s and they would sure have found any place such as you speak of if it existed. The weed in the Sargasso just drifts around in chunks as the wind blows it, and there’s no central mass anywhere. By all the rules it’ll be just the same here. Come on, Sutherland, let’s get back to the engine-room.’

‘Right-oh,’ replied Basil cheerfully, and, leaving the girls with De Brissac, they went below.

By midday Luvia had the boiler-fires raked out and re-lighted. It was now only a question of steady stoking until a sufficient head of steam could be maintained to get the ship under way.

After the meal he assembled the passengers and crew, told them that hitherto they’d all had to work as many hours as they were able and get what sleep they could between times; but that now he proposed to divide them into watches; upon which he set about the business.

The watches consisted of six men apiece. Vicente Vedras, Largertöf, Hansie, Harlem Joe and Isiah Meek forming the starboard watch under Jansen; and Basil, Bremer, Li Foo, Gietto Nudäa and Corncob being drafted to port under Jean De Brissac.

Luvia gave a watch to the Frenchman in preference to any of the others because his army experience had accustomed him to the command of men, and the rest, knowing that, were unlikely to resent it; but he placed with him Bremer, who was the most experienced of the two seamen. The arrangement also separated the two most likely elements of trouble, Harlem and Nudäa. All the ex-mutineers had become models of good behaviour since they had reboarded the ship, but Luvia was perfectly well aware that appearances were deceptive in such a case and it was all the more likely that they would try and stage something before he could hand them over to the authorities on land.

He did not propose to take a watch himself as he would have all his work cut out to both navigate the ship and superintend the shifts in the engine-room, so he would have to snatch an hour’s sleep when he could. Synolda and Unity were also excluded from the watches; it being understood that they would continue to work in the galley during the daytime and get a clear rest at nights.

Jansen’s party went on duty while De Brissac slept, until, at eight bells, he took over for the first dog-watch. When he arrived on deck he saw that the mist had lightened during the afternoon. From the bridge a considerable area of the surrounding sea was now visible. Upon it on every side, like islands in an archipelago, floated large patches of the weed. Many of them were several hundred yards in length and all tailed out like long streamers parallel with the direction of the wind. The ship was drifting nearly broadside-on between two big banks, but a little faster owing to the greater area her hull and tophamper offered to the pressure of the light breeze. There were no wavelets as the weed checked any free movement of the waters and it heaved upon them in a slow, oily swell.

A great silence brooded over the strange seascape. It seemed incredibly desolate in the evening light and there was something sinister about it. Although all was well on board and there was the cheering prospect that the ship would soon be under way again, heading for a port, De Brissac felt unaccountably depressed and was troubled by the queer imaginative notion that he was no longer living in the twentieth century, but had passed out of time into a dateless period when there was neither land nor sea, only weed and water, so that he gazed on no normal phenomenon, but Earth as it was at the beginning, or might be at the end of the world.

When De Brissac’s short watch came to an end at six o’clock he was glad to be relieved by Jansen, and went at once to the lounge in search of Basil who had been working below decks.

They fed at seven, the passengers’ mess being as usual except for the absence of Vicente, who was a member of the duty watch. Luvia told them that he hoped to have steam up before midnight, but would not set a course before the following morning as the weed here was thicker than he had ever seen it in the Sargasso Sea, and he did not want to pile great heaps of it up against the bow. By waiting till morning he would be able to steer her through the wide channels of clear water which lay between the banks and avoid running into the densest of them.

When dinner was over Synolda asked him if he hadn’t earned a rest from his labours in the engine-room.

‘I certainly have,’ he replied promptly, ‘and I mean to take it. This is the last good night’s sleep I’ll be getting for some time.’

‘Come out and get some fresh air before you turn in then,’ she suggested. ‘You’ve had little enough all day.’ The devil inside her prompted the invitation. Unity’s remarks that morning had stirred her curiosity about the big Finn and she could not resist the itch to see how he would behave if she gave him the chance to be alone with her.

He stood up at once. ‘Sure, that’d be grand. Let’s go to it right away.’

Side by side they walked along to the deserted fo’c’sle. The ladder leading up to it had been ripped away when the whole forepart of the ship was dismantled, but he put his foot on a projecting bolt, grabbed the edge of the deck above, and in one spring had landed sitting on it.

‘Give me your hands,’ he laughed, leaning down, ‘now, one foot on the bolt and up you come.’

It hardly looked possible, but she obediently lifted her arms
towards him. He could only just touch her fingertips, but gripped her wrists as she jumped and drew her up towards him. Next second he had released one wrist to catch her round the waist and she found herself pressed against him, her face on a level with his, her legs dangling between his as he sat perched on the fo’c’sle break. She was quite helpless even if she had wanted to resist and instinctively flung her free arm round his neck to save herself from falling. Suddenly she felt a terrific thrill as his golden beard came in contact with her skin, and, finding her lips, he kissed her.

‘Oh!’ she gasped when at last he drew back. ‘Oh, you shouldn’t do that.’

He laughed again. ‘Why not? You didn’t ask me out here to talk engineering, did you?’

‘I didn’t ask you out here. But pull me up—pull me up—I’m falling.’

‘You did,’ he declared, taking not the least notice of her plea. ‘If you want to be pulled up you’d best confess it.’

‘I won’t. I didn’t. All right, I did if you insist—but only to talk to.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I like you.’

‘Good girl,’ he grinned. ‘That’s better,’ and he drew her up sideways across his knee so that she could sit beside him.

They continued to sit there with their arms round each other’s waists and their legs dangling for a long time. She told him a lot about her girlhood in South Africa, a little of her two husbands, and practically nothing of her life in Caracas. Somehow she did not want to talk to him about that black chapter in her history. It was not a pleasant story and she wanted him to think well of her, although she knew that she was living in a fool’s paradise. If nothing worse came out he would be sure to learn sooner or later about Vicente Vedras.

He scarcely noticed the omissions in her disconnected story for he was busy talking about himself. She encouraged him, and finding her such a sympathetic listener he spoke of things he rarely mentioned. Finland in the springtime after the great thaw had come; green and beautiful with a million lakes and wooded islands bursting into leaf and blossoms almost overnight; the old town of Viipuri and his mother who still lived there. He did not attempt to kiss her again, but talked on as though that single contact had sealed their friendship and made them intimates;
telling her of his ambitions as an engineer, and his hopes of reward and promotion if he could bring the salvaged
Gafelborg
safely into port.