"Nordhoff, Charles & Hall, James Norman - Bounty 02 - Men Against the Sea 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hall James)

That night was the only one we had passed in any measure of comfort since leaving Tofoa. Our cramped positions were no pleasanter than they had been, but the boat, as well as our cloathing, was dry, and we were able to have some hours of refreshing sleep.

The ninth of May was just such a day as the eighth had been, with a calm sea and a light breeze from the east-southeast. Bligh had everyone roused at dawn, and as soon as we had worked a little of the stiffness out of our limbs, he set Cole to work, with some of us for helpers, in fitting a pair of shrouds for each mast. Others assisted the carpenter, who was employed in putting a weather cloth, made of some of our spare canvas, around the boat. The quarters were raised nine inches by means of the stern seats which were nailed to cleats along them, and the weather cloth was of the same width, so that, when the task was finished, the boat was as well prepared for rough weather as we could make her. This was the carpenter's day, and he made the most of it; and I will do him the justice to say that he did a thoroughly workmanlike job.

I was glad to hear Mr. Bligh remark: "That will do very well, carpenter."

It was high praise, coming from him; but Purcell would not have been Purcell had he not replied: "Begging your pardon, sir, it won't do well, but I can make no better with what we've got here."

At noon, on the ninth, we were sixty-four miles farther on our way. All of this day we saw neither fish nor bird.

Toward the middle of the afternoon, Nelson broke a silence that seemed to have lasted for hours. "I am constrained to speak, Mr. Bligh," he said, with a faint smile. "This sea is so vast and so quiet that I am inclined to doubt its reality and our own as well."

"That's a strange fancy, sir," Bligh replied; "but the sea is real enough; I can promise you that."

CHAPTER VII

I REMEMBER Captain Bligh saying to Fryer, about noon on May the twelfth: "I think we've seen the worst of it."

"I am sure of it, sir," Fryer replied, but he believed no more than Bligh in the truth of the statement. It had fallen calm about half an hour before, but the sea, as viewed from the launch, was an awe-inspiring sight. Fryer had just relieved Bligh at the tiller, which he had held continuously for eighteen hours.

Our shrouds for the masts and the canvas weather cloth had been fitted none too soon; on the evening of that same day, -- May the ninth, -- at about nine o'clock, wind and rain had struck us together, and all through the night four men were continuously bailing, and there were times when every man of us save Bligh was so employed. The sky was concealed by low gray clouds scudding before the wind. So it remained all day and all night of the tenth, the eleventh, and till near midday of the twelfth; and now, although the wind had fallen, the sky was an ominous sight.

There was no break in the clouds, no signs of a lightening at any point in the heavy canopy that overhung us, so low that it seemed almost within reach. Nevertheless, it was calm, for the moment, at least, and the sky withheld its rain. Our sail was dropped into the boat.

"I want two men at the oars," Bligh said.

"I'll make one, sir," Lenkletter called out, and a dozen others at the same time. All were eager for a chance to warm their benumbed bodies. Lenkletter and Lebogue were first chosen, but there were reliefs every quarter of an hour so that the rest of us might enjoy the benefit of the exercise.

"Don't exert yourselves, men," said Bligh; "merely keep her stern to the swell."

The boat had never seemed so small to me as she did then, and I could imagine what a speck she would have appeared in that vast ocean could one have observed her with a sea bird's eye. The long swell, coming from the southeast, was of a prodigious height, but without the wind there was no menace in it. The seas moved toward us, rank after rank, with a solemnity, a majesty, that filled the heart with awe; cold and wretched though we were, we had a kind of solemn pleasure in watching them: seeing our little boat lifted high on their broad backs, to find ourselves immediately after in a great valley between them.

As a recompense for our sufferings, Captain Bligh issued an allowance of rum, two teaspoonfuls for each man; and for our dinner that day we had half an ounce of pork each, in addition to the bread. This made our midday meal seem a veritable feast, and the rum gave us a little warmth. It was the cold that we dreaded at this time, fully as much as the sea: the wind, penetrating cloathing perpetually drenched with rain, felt bitterly chill, as though it were blowing from fields of ice. Thanks to Captain Bligh, we now adopted a means of combating it that proved of inestimable service. He advised us to wring out our cloathing in sea water. It is strange that none of us had thought of this simple expedient before, but the fact remains that we had not. The moment we tried it we found ourselves wonderfully comfortable in comparison with our miserable plight before, the reason being that salt water does not evaporate in the wind so fast as fresh.

We passed the next two or three hours tolerably well; what between taking our turns at the oars and wringing out our cloathes from time to time, we broke the back of the afternoon, each man secretly watching all the while for any change that would give us reason to hope that better weather was in store; but the only change was that the dull light became duller yet, as the day wore on toward evening. And still there was no wind.

The silence made us uneasy. Our ears had been accustomed to the deep roar of the wind and the seething hiss of breaking seas. God knows, we wanted no more of such weather, but we did crave wind enough to carry us on our way. The great swells went under us noiselessly; the only sounds to be heard were the small human sounds within the boat -- a spoken word, a cough, a weary sigh as someone shifted his position. It must have been toward four o'clock in the afternoon that there was mingled with the vast quiet what was, at first, the very ghost of sound -- and yet every man of us heard it. Elphinstone, who was lying in the bottom of the boat just before me, raised his head to look round.

"What is that?" he said. There was no need to reply. As we rose to the swell, every head was turned to the eastward; and there, not half a mile distant, we again saw approaching our remorseless enemy -- rain.

It came on in what appeared to be a solid wall of blackness, faintly lighted by a dull grayish glow from the sky before it. There was no wind immediately behind; the slowness of its approach assured us of that; therefore, we waited in silence, while the-sound increased and spread, now deadened as we fell into the trough, more loud as we rose to the crest of the next wave. Then, as though at the last moment it had leaped to make sure of us, we were in the midst of it -- drenched, half drowned, gasping for breath, in a deluge such as we had never before experienced.

In an instant I lost sight of the men in the forward part of the boat. This, I know, will scarcely be believed by those whose experience of rain has been only in the northern latitudes, who know nothing of the enormous weight of water released in a tropical cloudburst. The fact remains that the launch vanished from my sight save for the after part of it where I sat, and the men immediately before my eyes were but shadows blurred by sheets of almost solid water. I heard Captain Bligh's voice, faintly, above the hiss and thunder of the deluge. The words were indistinguishable, but we well knew what we had to do. We bailed with the desperation of men who feel the water gaining upon them even as they bail; who feel it cover their feet and rise slowly toward their knees. And it was not sea water that we threw over the side. It was the pure sweet water of clouds, which men, adrift in a small boat in mid-ocean, so often pray for in vain, with blackening lips and swelling tongues; and we hurled it away from us with bailing scoops, coconut shells, the copper pot, with our hats, with our cupped hands, lest this precious fluid, which Captain Bligh had, rightly, doled out to us a quarter of a pint at a time, should be our death. There was irony in the situation, though we had no time to think of it then.

The darkness in the midst of the storm was almost that of night, but presently I could once more see the outlines of the boat and the forms of the men, and knew that the worst was over. We were a forlorn-looking crew: the water streamed from our cloathing, which was plastered against our bodies; from our hair and beards; and we were again chilled to the bone.

Mr. Bligh's voice sounded unusually loud against the ensuing silence. "Look alive, lads! Mr. Cole, close-reef the foresail, and get it on her. There'll be wind behind this."

"Aye, aye, sir," the boatswain called back. The rest of us, with the exception of the men at the oars, continued bailing, for there was a deal of water yet to be got rid of.