Read Online A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby by Eric Newby - Free Book Online Page B

which I could so easily have been speared, over the fife rails of the mizzen mast, right over the top of No. 3 hatch and into the scuppers by the main braces outside the Captain’s quarters.
    ‘Where you bin?’ demanded Tria accusingly, when I managed to join the little knot of survivors who were forcing their way waist deep across the deck, spluttering, cursing, and spitting sea-water as they came.
    ‘Paddling,’ I said, relieved to find that there were still six of us.
    ‘Orlright, don’ be all bloody day,’ he added unsympathetically.
    ‘Tag i gigtåget. One more now. Ooh – ah, oh, bräck dem.’
    ‘What happened?’ I asked Jansson.
    ‘That goddam Valker let her come up too mooch,’ said Jansson. ‘I bin all over the bloddy deck in that sea.’
    The fore upper topsail was the most difficult. All the buntlines jammed and more than half the robands securing the topsail to the jackstay had gone. The outer buntline block had broken loose and was flailing in the air, so that when we reached the lowered yard eighty feet above the sea, we hesitated a moment before the ‘Horry ops’ of the Mates behind us drove us out on to the footropes, hesitated because the bunt of the sail was beating back over the yard. The wind was immense. It no longer blew in the accepted sense of the word at all; instead it seemed to be tearing apart the very substance of the atmosphere. Nor was the sound of it any longer definable in ordinary terms. It no longer roared, screamed, sobbed, or sang according to the various levels on which it was encountered. The power and noise of this wind was now more vast and all-comprehending, in its way as big as the sky, bigger than the sea itself, making something that the mind balked at, so that it took refuge in blankness.
    It was in this negative state of mind that could accept anything without qualm, even the possibility of death, that I fell off the yard backwards. I was the last man out on the weather side and was engaged in casting loose a gasket before we started to work on the sail, when without warning it flicked up, half the foot of a topsail, 40 feet of canvas as hard as corrugated iron, and knocked me clean off the footrope.
    There was no interval for reflection, no sudden upsurge of remorse for past sins, nor did my life pass in rapid review before my eyes. Instead there was a delightful jerk and I found myself entangled in the weather rigging some five feet below the yard, and as soon as I could I climbed back to the yard and carried on with my job. I felt no fear at all until much later on.
    It needed three-quarters of an hour to make fast the weather side. Time and time again we nearly had the sail to the yard when the wind tore it from our fingers.
    My companion aloft was Alvar.
    ‘What happened?’ he said when we reached the deck.
    ‘I fell.’
    ‘I din’ see,’ he said in a disappointed way. ‘I don’ believe.’
    ‘I’m damned if I’m going to do it again just because you didn’t see it.’
    ‘I don’ believe.’
    ‘Orlright,’ I said. ‘The next time I’ll tell you when I’m going to fall off’
    ‘Dot’s bettair,’ said Alvar.
    At noon on Saturday, the 25th, our position was 50° 7’ S, 164° 21’ W. In the 23½ hours from noon on the 24th
Moshulu
had sailed 241 miles and made 228 between observed positions. Her previous day’s runs were 296 and 282, but the violence of the sea and the necessary reduction in canvas were slowing her increasingly.
    The barometer fell and fell, 746, 742, 737 millimetres. The sun went down astern, shedding a pale watery yellow light on the undersides of the deep black clouds hurrying above the ship. It was extremely cold, colder than it had ever been, blowing a strong gale, force 9. Big seas were coming aboard. I felt very lonely. The ship that had seemed huge and powerful was nothing now, a speck in the Great Southern Ocean, two thousand miles eastwards of New Zealand, three thousand from the coast of South America,