Filligrew’s flota displayed an undue degree of haste to leave. By the time Youssef’s boat had left the strand, the Prometheus — standing not two cables off — had already loosed out topsails to depart into the gathering dusk.
Suddenly I could bear it no longer. Fumbling with my hampered wrists, I fell upon the boxes and tipped them open, one after the other, searching for a knife. Finding one, holding the handle down by my foot, I bent down and drew my hands back and forth across the ropes. Panting from these urgent, clumsy efforts, I looked up to see the Barbar’s cutter no more than a diminishing brown lozenge on the fading blue of the sea as it approached under the Prometheus’s bow. Astern of the flagship lay her faithful escort the Willingminde and some distance off, the Saskia, already under way.
Frantically working at the stubborn lashings, the sweat pouring and my heart banging, I ripped and sliced through those damnable manila strands until they gave up. Throwing the junk-ends away, I pelted down to the water’s edge and plunged in, making fifty, sixty frantic strokes and more before my efforts became laboured.
Already, Youssef’s launch was hoisted in the tackles, the capstan bringing it aboard. Falling away from the yards, one by one the courses billowed out and were sheeted home until a bubbling wake appeared under the barks’ sterns. The far-off wind-borne shouts of sailors working aloft to loose out canvas grew ever more distant. With the Saskia in the van, the flota paid off and scudded along to clear for the sea, picking up a breeze and making four knots or more. Defeated, I stopped swimming and trod water.
As the barks disappeared into the deepening night, hauling offshore to find the full weight of the tradewind, a faint clamour drifted back, something like a fuss raised up, a cry of alarm and a chorus of voices in unison. I pricked my ears but the noise soon faded. The sun dipped beneath the horizon, spreading gloom over the isles, and the barks’ hulls merged indistinctly with the sea leaving nothing but their sails glowing whitely in the last of the light. I turned back to shore and dragged myself dripping from the sea.
Shoulders drooping, arms hanging loosely by my sides, I crossed the strand. It was no more than fifty yards in width, and ten between where the wavelets lapped the sand and the main shore behind. A line of six coco palms bordered the encroaching vegetation. I sat down under the spreading fronds and listened, eyes half closed, to the busy hum of insects and the swishing breeze in the palmtops.
It was long past sunset. I leant back against my palm tree, taking long breaths to rid myself of the suffocation of my recent confinement and the rawness of that unbearable, regretful parting from Abigail.
The love that was between us is dead, she had said.
I tried to reckon whether any real will to live remained within me. To live for what, I heard myself ask aloud in the stillness.
Dumbly, I gazed about. Across a narrow strait lay a second isle, smaller than my own but equally barren and unwelcoming, a rise of scrubby hillside a hundred feet in height, and bereft of life. Perhaps these empty islets set in the desert ocean were all I would ever know now. What a lonely, desolate place to die.
I had to stir myself, to replace despair with action. I got to my feet, thinking to go down to the shoreline and porter my half-emptied boxes a safe way up the strand. In the morning, I would examine their contents and calculate my chances of survival. Just then there came from seaward the dull blast of a distant shot. Another discharge followed, this time quite distinctly the breathy roar of a long-musket, and then together a volley of shots. I ran to the rocks bordering the strand and clambered up a fathom or two to gain height. There was nothing to be seen in the gloom, for the flota had vanished, gone forever from the Witness Isles.
The breeze of day had died and the rustling of leaves at the palms’ tops fell away as absolute night settled on my Tropick prison. Miserably, I gathered palm-fronds for a palliasse and lay down to sleep. Soon, a hundred thousand tree-frogs and a million crawling beasts in the bushes set up such a racket as might never be heard aboard ship.
How many hours passed, as time and again I rolled over to find comfort on the bed of fronds and relief from biting insects inhabiting the sand, I shall never know. In my half-sleep, a persistent, low moan intervened, like a wind wailing in the shrouds of a bark at sea, portending a gale and a rough passage. When at long last it broke through the veil of fatigue, I was brought to full alertness. The night was windless, so what breeze made these groans? Or what animal? Above the incessant trill of insects, there came only the gentle lap and froth of water at the shore. Otherwise, all was still. There was nothing but the black sky above, no Moon, only a starlight from the heavens.
The cries came again, muffled by distance, a mournful sound like the grey seal’s warning if a fishing bark approaches its rocky hideaway. But there were no seals in these latitudes. Was I raving with a fever already? Sitting up like a corpse tightening from the open coffin, I held my breath and listened.
There it was again, a moan just like a human voice.
‘Ho-oo,’ it groaned.
Half thinking there would be nothing more than a brown booby lying on the shore with a broken wing, I scrabbled about for a simple weapon. My hand fell on the knife and I set off towards the source of the sound, padding low across the strand in my bare feet. After two hundred paces, the voice cried out again, distinct enough to send a shiver of fear through me.
‘Ho — Lord help me,’ the voice said.
The cry was surely that of a man. Running onwards, panting, my lungs tight, I crossed the entirety of the strand and gained the flat rockbed on its southern side. My feet skittered on the surfaces, sharp barnacle shells cutting my flesh as I cantered on. Pausing to cock an ear, I caught not a sound except the wavelets lapping the rocks where they fronted the warm sea. Then, peering into the near distance, I made out a pale form lying across the stones, a man’s body — a young fellow, tall and willowy, a mere youth with nothing on but a pair of torn briches. Gasping, I dashed over, all caution gone.
‘How the Devil — ?’ I cried, bending to him. ‘Are you hurt?’
He moved his head, revealing a deep mark across his temple. Feeling into the bloodied gash, I found a path dug into the flesh, but no bone cracked. A musket ball, clearly half spent when it struck, had caught him a glance before arcing clean away. He was barely awake to my ministrations, shivering so his teeth clattered in a constant tattoo, his limbs shaking in a maddened dance. He must have languished, struggling in the water, for hours before gathering the last ounces of strength to drag himself ashore.
‘Up, lad,’ I said, lifting him tenderly. ‘We’ll get you to shelter. Here, on my shoulder.’
Dazed, he leant on me and we stumbled and staggered back across the rocks to my little bower. I at once ran about to open the boxes, hoping to find the essentials for saving life. Filligrew had been as good as his word, the honour by which private seamen gave the marooned a chance to live, for I quickly discovered bundles of seaman’s slops, a flint-box, dry stores of rice and flour, and casks of small beer and sweet-water. I wrapped him in swathes of clothing, then foraged for leaves and wood to get a fire going. Perching him close the flames, I set about to warm some beer in a cook-pot, heaping in a handful of rice to make a filling broth.
In Tropick climes, though the sun is vividly hot and even the night air is warm as an English summer’s day noontime, yet a man cannot endure long in the waters of the Caribbee Sea before his heart and liver chill, and he dies of a lack of warmth. So I vigorously rubbed the lad’s back and chest to stoke up the bodily heat, then stretched out his legs and beat his thighs to make the muscles pump the life back through. Slowly, the fire’s comfort seeped back into his bones and my hopes rose.
‘Take this broth,’ I said when the rice had softened enough, helping him spoon it down.
When he had eaten, he stopped shivering and lay back. I broke open a sweet-water cask and bathed the wound until in the flames I could see it was clean, then tore up a strip of cloth and bound it tight to cover it from the steamy air and the flies. He did not resist or make complaint, but his eyelids drooped towards the extended slumber a body demands when death has been near.
‘Tell me,’ I said softly, ‘why in the Saints’ names did you jump?’
‘You are wronged, sir,’ whispered Adam.
And with that, his lids closed. He let his head fall into my hands and I lowered him on to the pillow of leaves. He slept soundly, his chest rising and falling regularly, and I let him be.
For many hours, I tended the fire, now and then going off to gather dry sticks and twigs. Night long, the smoke rose in a column from the blaze and, as I piled on the fuel, the hot coles of the burning branches issued a reviving heat that bathed my friend in warmth as he slept. And when a breeze ruffled the smoke and curled it towards me, stinging my eyes, I wiped them dry, but still the wetness ran down my cheeks.
Two more nights ensued during which Adam’s life hung in the balance. I drifted from sleep to wakefulness and back again, longing for the first glimmers of dawn. My dreams were peppered with regrets, wheeling through my head in black flocks like birds of carrion, consuming the corpse of my hopes, attacking the marrow of my will. Over and again, I cursed Filligrew and the greed that brought men to the Antilles in search of gold, sugar, tobacco, to plunder or to build fortunes on the bent backs of slaves — enrichments that demeaned their seekers, spoils that ruined lives.
When at last the third morning came and the sun sent shafts of light between the leaves of the shelter, I stirred once more to face the struggle for survival.
‘Lord, the night never ends,’ croaked Adam. My ailing companion lay sprawled across the fouled remains of his sick-bed. His gaze was blank and fixed, the face gaunt and hollow-eyed.
‘It’s dawn now, Adam,’ I sighed.
His youthful features creased with concern. In a voice hardly stronger than a crow’s dry cough, he said, ‘Sir, am I blinded? Has the sickness corrupted my eyes?’
I thought, what can I do? I lifted up a half coco-nut full of precious water.
‘Here, drink.’
He groped clumsily for the shell, his lips touching the woody nutshell rim, and swallowed a mouthful, then another. Exhausted, he lay back, his ragged breaths sounding like a galley-cook raking the morning’s dead fire before six bells rang. He looked near death. There seemed to be a presence crouched over his wasting body, the assayer of men, drawing a life ineluctably towards its reckoning.
Perhaps I had missed something in the boxes of stores. Surely, amongst the paucity of implements and provisions we had been left, there should be a medicine chest? Frantic, I tore at the hampers one by one, emptying their contents on to the sand and rummaging through. There were hooks and knives, fishing nets, small bags containing line, trennels and other assortments. I found hand tools — axes, a hammer, chisels and bradawls, even a sailmaker’s palm and needles. Then I unearthed a cross-staff, a worn and well-used example, its dull brass scale all but unreadable. I threw it down, disgusted. What did he expect, that I should practise the Navigation here? To go where? I muttered rancidly.
At last, I came upon a closed case buried at the bottom of a box where it lay snugly. It was about fifteen inches by twelve, the size of a travelling apotheckary’s chest of wares. In the red-tinted dawn as the sun lifted into the day, a word lettered in gold shone from its front: Physick. The case was locked. Snatching up a bradawl, I fumblingly forced open the lid. Inside, instead of stoppered miniature bottles and blue phials, there was nothing but a single large book with a blank cover, filling the interior, fitting nicely. My fingers slipped at the edges as I grappled angrily to lift out the volume. What use was a damm’ d book of medicines and healing without the substances themselves? I threw down the empty case and flung open the pages.
To my astonishment, here was not a book of Physick but instead only row upon row of numbers, page upon page of nothing but columns of figures, all in manuscript, enscribed in ink with an even, practised hand. Familiar star names headed the pages — Altair, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Sirius and the rest, the mariner’s guides. It was a common almanack of the stars! What twist was this, that we two Navigators should be cast ashore with hardly the means to survive, but only this dull and useless record of the heavens to mock us in our captivity? Sickened, I threw down the volume and resumed my search.
Now I came upon another case, the size of a captain’s armoury box. Once again, I braddled open the lid. Still no medicine but at least there was a more useful contents than the almanack, for inside lay a brace of fine pistols, new flintlocks, along with three dozen of ball, a sealed horn of shot powder and its partner, a littler horn of flash. Well, this is no deception, I said aloud, and wondered who had secreted such a treasure. Then I remembered Youssef’s words, as he left me on the beach, that none knew of the small box.
Carefully, I closed the lid and set off to find a safe, dry hiding place. If any buccaneer or fisherman called at the isles, these beauties would be the means of taking our freedom. As I stepped back up the strand, my foot caught on the old handwritten almanack. Cursing roundly, I kicked out and sent it flying into the scrubby undergrowth, damning the lunatick who had substituted such a dead article for the vital medicines of life.
Adam did not die. With Tropick downpours, I learnt to catch the rainwater running off our knocked-together shelter and, with plenty to drink, his sight returned. Over the next days and weeks, as our provisions dwindled to nothing, in growing desperation I rooted about in the bushes for nuts or berries and tried to boil grass and seaweed to glean nourishment for our bony bodies.
Still Adam endured distressing agonies. Attacks of cramp woke him from a near permanent coma of exhaustion, doubling him over, head into his knees and gasping. Violent voiding made of his palm frond palliasse a stinking bog of wet leaves. He lay back in the mess, distraught and exhausted, while I set about my work, wondering that a man’s body might emit such quantity and remain a substantial thing. After clearing up the soiled fronds, I went outside to gather fresh ones, then gently ease up his body to carpet the sand with new green leaves, letting him sink down with their cool smoothness against his naked back.
Whether he must have taken a spiny urchin’s dart into the sole of his foot and got the rot in his blood, who could tell? But I longed for the sickness to claim me instead.
‘Forgive me, Adam,’ I muttered, ‘for condemning you to this.’
He smiled weakly. ‘I came by my own wish.’
‘Good fellow,’ I murmured, and patted his arm. When the sun broke above the horizon, bathing our island world in golden light, I padded out on to the strand, where the blue-green sea lapped the shore’s edge. Already, so soon after sunrise, the furnace beat fiercely against the whiteness of the beach and the sky was as pale as washed canvas. All around seemed lifeless and desert. Rag-headed and clothed in nothing but torn slops, I loped away to seek the means of our survival.
The lonely Witness Islands were no more than rocky outcrops rising from the wastes of the Caribbee Sea. Of these four isles, shaggy-topped with sparse greenery, the largest was less than three quarters of a land mile long and quite narrow in breadth, while the smallest amounted to nothing more than a sheep-field’s worth of low ground. Yet here was a strand where the ghost crabs ran all about, idiot creatures with a whitened, translucent shell that made them nearly invisible against the glaring sand. They scuttled away faster than a man could run, yet if he came upon them by stealth they did not escape but dug half a hole and sat, claws up, stock still as a squirrel. Then they could be plucked out and carried away in a cloth bag.
To gain the beach on which the crabs clustered I had to swim three cables’ distance to the second islet, a stretch of water I named Crab Strait. Here the swells rolled into the gap and the currents threatened to bear me out to sea. Hours later, fatigued from the effort of the chase but with a bag of half a dozen claw wavers tucked inside my briches, I would plunge into the waters and recross the strait. Crawling, dripping and breathless, up the beach, I would bear the booty at once to Adam and bid him eat his fill. He knew nothing of my endeavours, falling hungrily upon his ghost crabs to devour them. Cracked open, they yielded a portion of raw meat enough for a mouthful or two, and the juice that ran from their shells tasted sweet and reviving. Lord knew, there was little else to sustain us and my reward was to see, by each day, death’s advance thwarted.
One afternoon, some weeks into our marooning and exhausted by these labours, I rested in the sun on the smooth rocks nearby, warming and drying, falling fast asleep. When I next awoke, the sun had dipped stealthily beneath the rising land beyond Crab Strait and darkness was descending. The brief reddish glow of the Tropick dusk infused the day and within a half a glass more the sun was quite gone. The evening sky showed the first brilliant lights of the night to come, and soon the canopy glittered with stars. To keep my mind alive, I picked out the familiar mariner’s guides and named another score of the twinkling signallers. The pale yellow orb of the Earth’s great satellite rose in the north and climbed gracefully higher, her disc curving in a parabola. I soon became absorbed in the Moon’s progress as she rambled amongst the diamonds and sapphires of the night sky, passing before the stars, splitting constellations and outshining the planets.
I sat up with a start, suddenly alert. The Moon, her distance from the other stars, her progress through the universe — why had I not thought of it before? At once, I unfolded my cramped and stiff limbs and set off along the shore.
With careful steps, I searched the ground, zigzagging back and forth, quartering the terrain, until my foot scuffed against something that was not a stone or a root. Bending, groping in the dark, I laid my hands on a soft, rectangular object. The downpours had soaked its leather cover but, wiping the sand off, I opened the volume and found the vellum dry inside. There was a title page. Holding the leaf up to catch the shining moonlight above, I could just distinguish what was written there. My temples pounded in excitement.
A New Catalogue Of The Moon and Three Hundred Stars. The subtitle was wordy but had a ringing clarity to it: With Systems And Tables To Achieve The Necessary Calculations For The Lunar Distance Method Of Navigation. As if confirmation were needed that I had been bequeathed his great treasure towards the Longitude, underneath the title was an inscription. Again, I held the page up to capture the silver light mixed with the fainter beams of the Milky Way, and what they illuminated was this: Author and Deviser, Noah Spatchears, Chief Assistant Observator.
How stupid of me to have thought it an ordinary mariner’s almanack. In the late tremors and uncertainties, I had quite forgotten my encounter in the private cells aboard the Prometheus. Somehow the old man must have secreted his precious works for me to find.
Brushing aside the weariness of near starvation and fatigue, I sat balancing the almanack upon my knee and studied the pages. The volume of tables was a work of the most marvellous character. There was beauty in the simple regularity of the columns of figures, the thousands of recordings of the Moon’s progress around the heavens and of the three hundred observable stars which nightly swing across the canopy as the Earth revolves about its axis. I resolved to observe the diamonds of light until I could name a hundred stars or more, in twenty constellations, simply by means of reckoning their position one against the other. As a Navigator, I was familiar with the twenty or so brightest stars mariners use for their angles, but now I promised to add diligently to my exploration of the star-map. One day, I swore, my skills must again steer a bark’s course by the lights of the night sky. If nothing else, the practice would serve to sustain hope in the face of despair.
Yet there was more. A greater purpose lay in my hands, encoded in the figures and numbers covering those dense pages. That purpose was the finding of the Longitude, the key to Navigation, the unlocking of God’s machinery regulating the Universe. The sinking of the Hannah Rebacka had brought me face to face with the sailor’s nightmare — running hard upon a hidden reef, crashing on to the grinding rocks, his bark breaking in pieces under his feet, hearing the awful cries of drowning men. That great fear, of coming upon the shore after a passage with no fix of the land, would be banished forever once we had the Longitude.
I sighed, aware how valued such an advance would be. Surely all the Sovereigns of nations, all the admirals in all the Navies of the world, all the commodores of privateering flotas, would give a ransom for these tables. They would fight, and make war, and lay waste to men and ships, just to grasp the solution and enrich themselves.
Weary from hunger, I drifted into an exhausted sleep rich with swirling, jumbled scenes. I saw the Merchant Jeffreys in a long-coat and high sea-boots, raising a cross-staff to the twilight sky, now steering at the ship’s wheel, now standing on the quarter-deck like a commodore directing his flota into battle. Then appeared a strutting captain in peacock finery whose officers cravenly bowed, yet it was not Gamble’s face I saw beneath the fancy tricorn but Noah Spatchears’ pallid, shrunken countenance, lips moving in endless incantations. And I dreamed of Abigail, cradling a leather-bound manifest ledger in her arms, but when the covers fell open and nothing was revealed but logarithms in dense rows, she threw down the book m annoyance.
When I awoke, sticky and oppressed, all these remnants faded like a sea mist on a summer’s day. Sitting up, with the heavy volume still in my lap, it came to me with renewed force that if I could only put this treasure of knowledge in the right hands, then here was my chance — of pardon, both for myself and Adam, of a life beyond forever running from the law, of freedom from living in fear of the hangman’s rope. Somehow, we must live, and escape, and prove the tables’ worth.
By degrees, day by day, Adam revived. Soon he rose from his sick-bed, weak but with the will to live unbroken, and at once we set about enlarging our food and water supply.
We fished on the reef, the one driving a school of snapper, mackerels or small barracuda towards a net held out by the other, yet we hardly ever caught more than a single fish. We stalked boobies where they roosted on the low shore, slow-witted birds reckoned an easy catch, yet only once or twice did they tamely walk into my arms as Adam shooed them. He was never strong enough to cross the strait to Crab Beach, where I herded ghost crabs and pounced on them until my legs barely held up. Sometimes, returning at dusk from a sortie alone gathering the scant fruits of the isles, I might find Adam with a fire well-lit and a minute, half-grown reef fish grilling. Then I would lay down my sorely-won handful of nuts and berries and set to pounding them into a paste, stirring in a spoonful of coconut milk to make what passed for a creamy sauce. Feasting, we would bemoan the lot of mere seamen, for we persuaded ourselves that though this starvation fare might be meagre it was tastier than a ship-cook’s mashed down biscuit and salt-beef.
Yet it was a lie, and we were losing the battle for life. A morsel of food once every few days was not enough. Our bodies wasted away with infinite slowness, Adam’s more so than mine. We had shrunk to little more than bones, kindling sticks hung together on strands of twine. If we had the will, we must get free before we starved.
Thus, hardest and longest of all, we worked on our departure. With axe and knife, we cleared the ground for a makeshift shipyard. With a stick in the sand, we carved out the lines of our preferred design. From the windward shores, we brought driftwood, the bounty of breeze and current, dragging great boughs and lesser pieces across the hillock to lay down a keel, if any mere raft can have such. We cut bush and tore up weed, and tramped a little rope-walk up and down, Adam holding one end while I twisted up the creepers and vines towards him, to make the rigging and the stays. With these home-made lashings, we bound tight both the sea-whitened logs and the few boughs of green wood the isles offered, held together by planks broken from our store-boxes. We stepped a dwarf mast to rise from her weather-deck, stayed fore and aft with cap shrouds to the outer logs. Then we stitched spare slops and briches into a single square sail, run along with a line of eyes and pennants for a reef when the wind got up. Piece by piece, she took shape on the shoreside, a rude craft to a shipwright’s eye, but to ours a handsome ocean voyager that was our last hope of salvation.
‘I name this ship Sovereign of the Seas,’ I said, bearing a nutshell aloft with a precious drop of coco milk in it, while Adam held the raft steady in the water, ‘and may the tradewinds fill her sails and send her across the swells and between the reefs safe into her haven.’
‘And how shall we Navigate, sir?’ said Adam.
‘Not by the cross-staff,’ I grimaced, ‘but by the sun, the wind and the current, as men have always done since boats first touched their keels in the sea. And by old Eli Savary’s way, which he calls the first compass of all.’
‘What way is that, sir?’
‘Why, Adam, by the swing of his bollacks.’
We laughed in an over-hearty way, the nervous levity of seamen who fear the voyage ahead, knowing how vast and ominous the ocean is and how frail their vessel.
Her sea trials were a disaster. We attempted the crossing of Crab Strait, where the waves were low and the distance narrow. Not ten fathoms from launching, the rudder paddle slipped adrift of its lashings. Then a breeze swept the strait, filling the sail before we could free it and springing the mast from its step. Struggling to save what we could, we let the rig and rudder go by the board and leapt into the water, swimming and towing the raft behind us. With Adam’s gaunt face growing fearful as his strength ebbed, I ordered him to abandon the exercise and save himself. Soon I too was forced to give up and swim for my life. I followed him on to the strand of our marooning with a heaving chest and seized muscles, all but done in. I lay for minutes on the beach, arms covering my head, my face buried in the hot musty sand, until Adam came and helped me back to the shelter. Too drained to forage for sustenance, we retired to our palliasses of palm fronds where, night long, I tossed on my damp bed, fretting on past mistakes and fitful in my dreams of thwarted departure.
But by morning, quite to the contrary of expectation, our lonely isles had become all too crowded and dangerous a place.