A Burial at Sea

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It was Mitchell, Lenox’s antagonist of that afternoon, who drew their attention to the situation. He had stayed on deck, being the duty officer, while the others ate, and had taken the ship back on course after it had fallen still for Halifax’s burial. Now he came into Martin’s cabin.

“With pardon, sir, there’s weather above,” he said to the captain.

Martin’s brow furrowed. “It was clear not an hour ago.”

“Yes, sir.”

Martin stood. “Only a passing squall, I imagine, but I had better go upstairs. Gentlemen, please finish your port.”

Lenox turned to Carrow after the captain had gone. “What will you do in a squall?” he asked.

“Would you care to see? It shouldn’t be too bad yet. You might come up on deck.”

“With pleasure.”

It looked ominous outside to Lenox’s eyes, but he had learned enough of his own lack of comprehension of naval matters to keep quiet. There were huge clifflike black clouds toward the east, and the air carried a peculiar salt tang.

“More than a squall,” Carrow murmured as they reached the quarterdeck.

“Do you think?”

The captain was on the main deck delivering orders. “Reef the topsails!” his voice boomed out. “Prepare for heavy wind, gentlemen!”

The crew were in action even before he had finished speaking, moving in a kind of symphony of coordination. Soon the masts looked barer than they had when Lenox and Carrow came on deck.

For his part Carrow was watching not the men but the clouds. “This is an overnighter,” he said. To Lenox’s surprise the young man, usually so stern and pinched-looking, was now beaming.

“Might we not outrun it, using coal?”

“We might,” said Carrow, not taking his eyes off of the storm clouds, “but then again we might not. And if we did not, we would have used half our coal and worn our men to the bone just before a storm, just when everyone must be at their sharpest.”

“I see.”

Now he turned to Lenox. “You needn’t worry. A storm is the best fun in the world, I promise you—once you make it out alive, at any rate.”

The other officers evidently agreed, for they were drifting onto deck now, giving orders along with the bosun—lash down this, ship that below deck—and soon the sailors came above too. Those who didn’t work chewed their tobacco and leant on the railings, looking out at the black clouds just as Carrow had.

One man was unhappy, however: the purser, Pettegree, who tailed the captain, occasionally offering a comment when his superior’s attention was less than fully occupied.

“Why does he look so anxious?” Lenox asked Carrow.

“A purser always hates a storm—and since they were never proper sailors, but always purser’s mates, they never shall grow to love them, either.”

“He rose to the position of officer?”

“Oh, yes, he would have started out in hammocks with the rest of them. Now he’s a warrant officer, but still—” Carrow made a gesture that seemed to indicate this wasn’t worth much count.

“And why does he hate a storm?”

“Water is terrible for the purser’s stores, you see. It gets the flour wet, or rolls crates around and destroys them … he’ll be asking Captain Martin for help. To give him his due, he’ll have a difficult night.”

Indeed, Martin finally gave Pettegree his full attention, and once he had heard—with no great measure of patience—the purser’s request, he detached four stout-looking men from their work and sent them below deck.

It was clear now that no amount of coal would have pushed the Lucy, fast as she might be under sail and steam, beyond the reach of the storm. Fat drops of rain started to dot the deck dark.

“Reef the mainsails!” cried Martin.

When this was accomplished the masts looked all but bare—there were a few small, tough-looking sails at the center of the ship, presumably to guide the ship without encouraging her to too great a speed.

“Had I better go below deck?” Lenox asked Carrow.

“If you prefer.”

Martin came charging past them toward aft, stopping long enough to say, “Now you will see my men at their best, Mr. Lenox. Tell the boys in Parliament. Tell Her Majesty, for that matter.”

“I shall.” When he was gone, Lenox went on, “I say, Lieutenant Carrow, why are we running into the wind now?”

“It’s the best way to keep the ship from capsizing,” Carrow answered with a dry smile, “and so I deduce that such is the captain’s desire.”

Lenox went rather pale. “Is there a chance of that—of us capsizing?”

Carrow laughed. “Oh, no. A chance in a thousand, perhaps, but no. This is only a bad storm, from the look of it, not what we call a survival storm. The wind will run us along at eight or nine knots—stiffly enough, mind you!—but not more than that. If it were more we couldn’t sail. In a nine-knot wind you have the great advantage of still being able to use your sails.”

“I see.”

“Even if we couldn’t, however, no, I shouldn’t imagine we’d capsize. And now I really might go below deck, Mr. Lenox,” said Carrow, “or else look sharply about yourself—one hand for you and one for the Lucy, you know!”

Carrow tipped his hat good-bye and went to the aft of the ship, where several men were preparing a line with a drag—or a drogue, as Lenox would learn it was called—to hurl behind the ship, slowing them down, in case they caught the wind fully.

When Carrow had recommended that he go below deck, the weather had been relatively consistent, wetter now, slightly windier, but not bad. Suddenly, though, as if from nothing, the wind went from a heavy breeze to a force so powerful and unrelenting that it nearly lifted Lenox from his feet. As it was he lost his hat, and did well to grab on to a lifeline running down the boat, which he used to retreat below deck.

When he put up his head a few moments later there was a torrential rain; there were great crashes of whitecap onto the deck; brilliant flashes of lightning in a sunless, midnight sky; and that wind, always that wind. Martin’s voice was the only audible one. Everywhere else men worked in grim, silent concentration, always keeping one hand along a lifeline that they might not be swept overboard.

The ship looked in utter disarray. Strips of canvas were streaming out to leeward, sails were running from their boat ropes. He had seen enough, and ducked below the main hatchway and below deck.

“McEwan!” Lenox said when he reached his cabin and found the steward in his tiny hallway outside it, seated on a stool and polishing Lenox’s boots. “Have you ever seen such a storm?”

McEwan considered the question seriously and then responded, “Oh, only seventy or seventy-five times in all, sir.”

“Is it so common? I’ve never seen its like, I swear to you!”

“Here, take a towel, sir, and I’ll find you a fresh shirt. This is a fair storm, I’ll grant you that, but in the Mediterranean we had a twelve-knotter once. That, I can tell you, sir, was fearful. We hove to it and just barely managed to keep our masts upright. This was when I was a younger man, sir. We lost nine.”

“Nine men? How?”

“It was so dark and the rain was so thick that you couldn’t see a foot in front of your face. Men would take their hands off of the lifeline for a fraction of a second and be gone forever. Now then—a towel. And you’ll be wanting something warm to drink.”

McEwan trotted off to start a pot of tea.

If his speech had been designed to reassure Lenox, it failed. With a heavy feeling in the pit of his stomach he patted himself dry, keeping one ear bent toward the deck. Occasional claps of thunder seemed to shiver every board and plank of the ship. Suddenly it seemed the most insane chanciness, a madness, to be afloat on a man-made vessel out here in the middle of nothingness. Why should he have the slightest faith that the mast was well constructed? Or the sails? It was well-on impossible to find a decent carpenter in London, he had learned when he and Jane rebuilt their houses together, and yet here they were in a ship that hundreds of men had worked on, each capable of any of a multitude of small mistakes that might see them all dead.

This panic lasted in Lenox’s breast for some half an hour, and only subsided when he recalled the slapping of the swabs on the deck that morning, and the great cleanliness McEwan kept in his cabin. Perhaps that was the secret to it: in the navy one was always far too careful, to the point of absurdity, because when it mattered lives were staked to that precision and effort. Not in matters of cleanliness, perhaps. But the cleanliness was simply in keeping with the rest of the service’s fastidious care. Thank God.

Glumly he followed his cup of tea with half an orange. He would have traded the storm for scurvy in a heartbeat.