Read Online Centuries of June by Keith Donohue - Free Book Online Page A

bound for the settlement at Jamestown in Virginia, the good ship Sea Venture , under the hand of Sir Thomas Gates, Admiral Somers, and Cap’n Newport and bearing the souls of fifty and one hundred men, women, and children, storm-wracked and separated from the other ships of the fleet, found itself in a watery hell. The houricane blew for four days, the clouds spit and lashed and covered both sun and moon in turn. Lightning crackled over the top of the mainmast and raced down the spars, the admiral’s flag on the mizzen stiffened in the constant wind, and the wild and wasteful ocean swelled and made to swallow them. Every jack pumped belowdecks, the oakum seals peppered with holes large and small, till the leaks threatened to let in the whole Atlantic. It were Mr. Frobisher, the ship’s carpenter, who suggested that the seams might be plugged with beef and biscuit, ten thousand weight in all, from the ship’s stores. The common mariners and servants stripped naked in the water so as not to shrink theirblouses from the salt, and only one, Long John Long, the cabin boy to the ship’s pilot, refused to part with a single thread on his back. He was a beautiful lad, fair of face, and all of fourteen years, and not a hair on his cheek.
    Master Ravens, the pilot, himself stripped of waistcoat and blouse, called out to his boatswain over the thunder. “Speak to th’ men. Full to’t lest we turtle or split.”
    The swain, bald as a coot and red with exhaustion, turned to the crew and gentlemen united in the cause of life. He roared over the tempest. “Yare, ye salty dogs, make haste and heave to.”
    No sooner had the command left his lips, all was forgot. The engorged sea spat up a wall of water that like to fall upon their heads, and so it did, washing o’er the starboard rail, and swept the decks bow to aft, filling the Sea Venture from the hatches to the spardeck and knocking the helmsman from the wheel. The whipstaff swung like the tail of a dog and when he tried to grab and still it, the helmsman was batted nearly into the pitching waves and by the mercy of Jesu was not rent asunder. The cabin boy upon the deck bent like a crab and scuttled to grab the helm, holding on for dear life, and were it not for that quick action, the ship and all would have sunk to the bottom of the sea.
    S he dipped a finger into the sink and twirled the water, making a whirlpool, and the tiny ship caught in the vortex spun like a top. I began to feel dizzy and wished she would stop.
    T he admiral hisself, she went on, came dripping from the hold, drown’d as a cat and to his knees in the saltwater. Those who had gained their feet gathered round. “We are quenched but not besotted, and if I am to die, I shall not perish below as in a box but under God’s wide skies, inthe company of these valiant mariners and my good friends.” He raised his fist to the thunderclouds. “Blow ye winds and crack, give us your best, and shew ye can best these fine Englishmen.”
    Straining against the wheel, Long John Long listened with wonder, thinking the man a bloody fool with his false pride spewing from his mouth like the black blood of a dragon. “Men,” she said under her breath, for the cabin boy was a girl, as surely you have guessed by now. She was on the cusp of the change and bound her wee breasts with a linen strap, but for ere else could easily be mistaken for a boy. “Men and their vanity, as if every jack was a stalwart son of the King. And where was he now? Could James himself still the heavens and escape such a storm?”
    That night, the fire came and danced across the waves, leapt upon the deck, and tarried upon the spars, slipping up the rigging not yet torn to shreds. What the Greeks called Castor and Pollux and the French name Saint Elmo’s, and every sailor knows the light foretells the changing of a storm and a shift in fortune. Friday, the sixth day of the storm, the morning revealed their fortunes had turned indeed, and for the