Читать книгу Atlantic Britain: The Story of the Sea a Man and a Ship - Adam Nicolson - Страница 6

I hauled the warps inboard, and as George took the boat under motor out from the quay, I coiled them and stowed them in the starboard cockpit locker. Fenders in and stowed in the lazarette. Stays’l out of its bag, hanked on to the forestay, its tack fitted with a locking shackle to a strop fixed to the stemhead, the head of the sail itself on to the halyard snap-shackle, the tail of the halyard made up on the pin-rail, and the body of the sail marlin-hitched for the time being to the boat’s safety rail. The two stays’l sheets then tied with bowlines through the cringle at the clew, led back through the sheet-leads on the side-decks, figure-of-eight stop-knots put into their bitter ends, and the full length of the sheets wound around the secondary winches beside the cockpit.

The mains’l next. Ease the leeward running backstay and make it off on the leeward shrouds under the light box. Bring the windward backstay up around the primary winch on that side and winch it iron-tight. Release the sail ties holding the mains’l to the gaff and stow them. Unloop the peak and throat halyards from the pin-rail, loosen the leeward topping lift, bring the head of the boat almost up to the wind, ease the main-sheet and haul on both the halyards. Up the sail goes, filling as she does so, that full belly swollen with wind. Make sure the battens in the leach don’t get caught on the topping lifts and when they are clear tighten up the throat first and then the peak, making up the main halyards on the rail and then, with the jiggers on the port side, put extra tension into both of them, the luff board-hard, the peak just tight enough to put a crease into the sail running diagonally all the way across it down to the tack. The mizzen up in the same way, then the big heads’l, the high-cut yankee, unravelled from its roller-furling gear on the bowsprit forestay, its leeward sheet hauled in tight on the primary winch next to the cockpit. Finally, the stays’l, released from its marlin-hitched tie, sheets eased, hoisted on its own halyard, made up at the pin-rail, jigged with its own jigger and its leeward sheet winched in on the leeward secondary. Ten minutes out of Mylor, the engine off, a full suit of sails driving her, tell-tales aligned on the swell of the yankee, the Auk was now making for Ireland.

In the end, however perfect your boat, you go to sea exhausted, when the weather is least suitable. You just bite off what you can’t do. The Auk was now going to look after us in a way that before we had only been looking after her. It’s the deal you make with your boat. Pour it into her and she will, in time, pour it out for you.

There was a problem. The wind was strong but at least in our favour, just veering that evening from easterly to southerly as we made our way down to the Lizard. If we were lucky it would stay on the beam all the way to Ireland. The boat felt sleek and tight. George and I were tired but keyed up. It then slowly became clear to us that no instruments were working. We turned every switch but nothing came on. The electrician who had arrived to replace two of them two days before did not have a depth gauge in stock. He was going to send it to us in Ireland. But the system on which the instruments worked was an integrated one and no depth gauge in the system meant no readings from anything: no depth of course, no wind speed, no wind direction, no boat speed, no speed over the ground, no course made good, no electronic compass. There was also no light in the magnetic compass and no autohelm. We would have to stand at the wheel, watch and watch about, three or four hours on, three or four hours off, no breaks while you were up there, for the forty hours or so it was going to take us to cross the wide open reach of the Atlantic known as the Celtic Sea.

Driving down south, the sea began to lift under us. We passed the famous Manacles Buoy, marking the killer rocks off the Cornish coast, on which the bell clangs lugubriously day and night, day and night, like a graveyard sexton of the deep. As we passed near enough to read the word ‘MANACLE’ painted on its vast metal body, George said, ‘That bell will still be ringing when we are up in Donegal, or in Orkney, when we are out at sea in the worst storm you have ever known. And it’s been ringing these last ten years, for as long and anywhere you have ever been.’

It felt as if we were pushing our fingers deep into the dark. No instruments, no autohelm, no compass light, both of us tired, the boat on her first day out from a refit. We would have to use a hand-held torch to read the bearing on the compass, to align the boat on her distant destination, one of those blessed harbours in the southwest of Ireland, Baltimore or Schull or Crookhaven, a good 250 miles from here. It was a four-way meeting: ocean, boat, me and George, a test set by the first for the other three.

The Lizard light loomed through the thickening dark. We stayed a mile off the headland but still the sea was roughened by the tide, full of huge barn-door breakers. They were coming at us, the whole of the bow plunging into them, burying the bowsprit up to its socket, and the bulk of water driving back along the deck. The spray was lit in the nav lights on either side in huge green arcs of red and green water. There was no sprayhood and every second or two the water burst and rattled on to our waterproofs as the boat plunged on. ‘Brave’ George called her then. The night was clear and phosphorescence was sprinkled down to leeward like a reflection of the stars. The Auk was passing her exam.

‘Go down,’ George said to me and I slunk down into the safety of the bunk, away from this, sleep instant and deep. No thought for the man on deck and the rattling of the seas as they came over him. Just the warmth and welcome of my own private, down-filled harbour. George was simply going to be there for four hours, as I was to be for another four hours in four hours’ time. In a way, the sea sets too much of a test to reveal the intricacies of character. I, of course, know George ashore, the subtle and layered interactions of his strengths and weaknesses, the certainties and uncertainties, the withdrawals and generosities that make up any man. But at sea, particularly a demanding sea as it was that night, that internal play of the self does not appear. It is a simplified world and the sea only asks the simple question: are you on or are you off? Can you do this or can you not? It doesn’t care why, or even how. It only expects a yes or a no.

At one in the morning, George woke me. I came up, he gave me the bearing, handed me the torch, and I took his place at the wheel. The stars were coming and going through the clouds. Our course was to leave Scilly to port and then bear away for the Irish coast. The Lizard light had sunk below the horizon but the light on the Longships reef at Land’s End was still clear behind me to the east. The lightship on the Seven Stones, the rocks that sank the Torrey Canyon, was winking to the north of me. In the south, the arm of the Wolf ranged across the night. Ahead, Round Island light, to the north of St Martin’s in Scilly, led me onwards. Beyond it, the loom of the Bishop swept out across the open expanses of the Atlantic. These names were like the constellations of the sea.

I was well that night, happy to be out here in the cold. Seasickness, as George had said to me, is a kind of fear, and like any fear can be held at bay and suppressed, can be told to get down like a dog. You can feel seasickness coming on and, as George had taught me, you can deny it. I tried it that night and although from time to time I was still being sick over the side, watching the supper I had eaten spewing out among the phosphorescence below the lee rail, it was not the sort of seasickness I had before. It didn’t make me think I was about to die or my character a waste of shame. I was simply being sick every hour or so, in the way that exhaust comes out of the back of a car. Nelson was seasick until the year he died. The fear it represents doesn’t need to send you to hell. And I wasn’t in hell; I was in a sort of cold windy heaven.

The course for Scilly was 280 magnetic, the wind just behind the beam. One by one the quartering seas kicked under us, picking up the Auk first at the stern, travelling the length of her, and then dropping the bow in the trough behind. As each one came under, I held the helm against it, a door pressed shut, as George had told me, against the beast pressing in from the other side; and then, as the beast relaxed, I relaxed, taking the pressure off the wheel and waiting for the beast to try his luck again. It was a long, twice-a-minute rhythm, on and off, on and off, the wide, strong Auk surging into the dark.

At times like this, alone in a wide dark sea, with your companion asleep below, you can feel the wonder of a boat. Of course a boat is not a natural thing. She is the most cultural of things, the way she works dependent on a line of thought that goes back to the Bronze Age: the form of the hull and the weighted keel; the lift and drive given by a sail; the way four sails like ours can be trimmed to lead each other on; the ingenuity of blocks and tackles, strops, sheets, halyards and warps, the sheer cleverness of knots. The knowledge that is gathered in a boat is a great human inheritance, especially valuable because it is not material but intangible, a legacy made only of understanding.

You can see the boat, in other words, as our great symbol, the embodiment of what we might be. In her fineness, strength, and robustness; in the many intricate, interlocking details of her overall scheme; even in the bowing to nature of her wing-like sails and the auk- or seal-like curves of her body: in all this, she is a great act of civility. The sea is an ‘it’, the boat a ‘she’, and the courage of that confrontation is why people love the boats they know. Boats are us against it, what we can do despite the world. Each sailing hull is a precious thought, buoyant, purposeful, moving on, afloat in the sea that cares nothing for it. From the deck of a boat, out of sight of land, as Auden wrote in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’, his great poem on art and consciousness, ‘All we are not stares back at what we are.’

There is another side to that. It is no coincidence that some of the earliest known depictions of sails, from Bronze Age Crete nearly 4,000 years ago, are exactly contemporary with the story of Icarus and Daedalus. Daedalus is the great designer of intricacies, the father of all boatwrights, the man who ‘fettles’ and fiddles and makes perfect an arrangement of rope and timber, who is entranced with the mimicking of nature by machine. The wings he makes for Icarus are feathered sails. When their wax fixings melt in the sun, it is a step too far, and the boy falls to his death, as the story says, in the sea. This is, at heart, not an air story but a sea story, fuelled by the recognition that the beautiful, made thing, which the winged creature of a boat represents, can fail too and bring sea-disaster on those who have trusted it. Daedalus was still in the yard at Tregatreath; I wondered, in our growing exhaustion, if we were now the Icaruses of this story.

Sometime, in the dark early hours, we came into the shelter of Scilly. I kept the boat a mile or two offshore and although the wind didn’t drop, the sea went still in the islands’ lee. The smell of land came wafting across the night, thick and fleshy; a warm, musty, vegetable fug, like a soup, floated out to us over the Atlantic air. I bore away on to 325 magnetic, eased the sheets, and made for Ireland. Wonderful Auk\ Wonderful sea-surging Auk\

A change of watch then and again in the grey-green dawn, the grey of the sea the colour of battleships, and then again at nine or ten in the morning. On my watches, I was drifting off to sleep. George’s face was creased and worn, but we were making progress. The Auk would look after us. We were at home, however tired we were. All day, we alternated, spending half an hour or so together on deck each time, a little talk, something to eat, a cup of tea. The swells were mountainous out here, mid-passage. The whole extent of this sunlit sea was the deep, royal blue of the ocean.

On the wheel, time slid away. The sky was clear and endless, the rhythm of the boat lullingly repetitive, the sunshine bright in the eyes. Mid-afternoon, a little more than halfway across, a fulmar swung between the shrouds and the mainmast. An hour later, a swallow circled the boat, surveyed it, and without warning flew down through the companionway hatch, circling inside the cabin, cheeping, prospecting for a nest. On the way from Africa, it had found, miraculously, an almost empty, very suitable, if slightly small barn, 125 miles short of where it expected to find land. The swallow flew out again without touching timber, rope or canvas and away, its dipping, curving flight just held above the seas. Ten minutes later it returned, with another. The two of them flew down into the cabin again, not landing, cheeping in excited, quivering calls. They came out and back three more times. Surely a perfect site for a nest? Surely not: no mud or straw with which to build a home. They left again for the fourth and last time, as the Auk plunged on for Ireland.

If the wind had stayed good for us, we could have slid into a harbour that night as sleepily and dreamily as this day had passed. We were lulled. We could have sleepwalked home. Our exhaustion didn’t matter because the Auk would take us on. We were her passengers.

It didn’t happen like that. Late that afternoon, a weather front came through and winds veer on fronts. You could see it ranged above us, a curving wall of cloud, its leading edge quiffed up and back in wisps. The southwesterly wind that had been wafting us to Ireland shifted through thirty, forty, fifty, seventy degrees in the space of an hour. We were headed. Rain hammered down. Night was coming on again, the wind was now in the northwest, which was exactly where we wanted to go.

The bitter tide of exhaustion came flooding in. There was no way we could sail to Baltimore where we were due. The engine was the only option and the prospect of ten hours of that, at something like four or five knots, dead into a rising wind, felt like sacks of grain laid on our shoulders. The wind started to blow. For the first time now it was shrieking in the rigging. We had no instruments to measure it, but George reckoned thirty-five knots, gusting ten knots higher, Force 8 to 9. The beautiful day had given way to a raging night. We hauled the sails down and tied them as best as we could in the climbing wind. The whole of the foredeck was plunging into the breaking seas. Just visible from the cockpit, the white teeth of those breakers appeared grinning around us.

‘Go down,’ George said, a level of intensity in his voice I hadn’t heard before. Freezing rain was driving into our faces. Til get you in three hours’ time.’ Down below, the saloon was jumping, a savage version of itself, thrashing at the lamp that hangs from the deck-head, its chain not swinging but jerking like a hanged man, a maelstrom of no gravity followed by thumping smacking lurches into new seas. I crawled into my berth, jammed myself against its sides, my body held in place by my hands, the middle of my back and my knees, and hauled the sleeping bag up around my head. The engine groaned away beside me and I slept.

‘Can you do it?’ I woke to see George’s masked face slewing and sliding above me, only his exhausted eyes visible through the slit of his sodden balaclava. ‘I’m too cold to stay up there,’ he said. ‘I’m frozen and I don’t want to start making wrong decisions.’

In the churning, topsy-turvy world of the cabin, I got up, pushed seasickness away, swathed myself in the weather-armour, went on deck, got the heading for Baltimore from George, 340 magnetic now, took the torch from his hands, and he went below. I was no less exhausted than when I had gone to sleep. I had to shake my head every few seconds to keep myself awake. On and on the engine ground away beneath me. The boat was still smacking into the seas and the drench of the chilling rain was unbroken. It was just a question of staying awake and keeping us on course. No light worked in the compass. I could only find the heading with the torch. But I couldn’t keep that on all the time. An occasional flash on the binnacle and then the hope for a few minutes that I was steering in the right direction. The hours stretched out ahead. The eyelids drooped closed and jerked open, again and again and again. The wool of my balaclava was wet in my mouth. The boat was being hammered by the seas we were driving straight into, coming up white on the bow and then breaking over the bowsprit. For a while the stars appeared and I could hold a constellation at least half-fixed in the shrouds, a still point in a traumatic world. But the cloud and rain closed over again. I kept looking at my watch. Ten minutes had passed, sometimes twelve. How was I going to last three hours at this? My back had tensed into steel hawsers. As I turned my head, I felt the sinews in my neck clicking and rolling over each other’s armoured strands. ‘Dig deep,’ George had said to me as he went down.

It is a mysterious and powerful place to be, on deck alone, while the man you have been relying on sleeps beneath that deck. He has dug deep for you, has stood in his balaclava with the merest of eyeslits open to the world, shielded from it. He has stayed there for hour after hour in the dark while you have slept curled down in the bunk, protected from the rolling and breaking of the sea. How ancient a set of conditions is that? At this level, the sea is historyless: time has not passed here. His standing for me and now my standing for him is there in the Homeric poems and the sagas. It bears a cousin relationship to sharing a rope when climbing, but the tenderness of it and the demands of it are, if anything, stronger. I sleep while he suffers and I suffer while he sleeps. The only continuities are the sea, the boat, and the seemingly endless stretch of time, of an almost disconnected sense of timelessness, the repeating waves, the light head of exhaustion.

A strange and distant intimacy. The three hours came and went. I knew I must not wake him but wait until he was rested enough to get up himself. He had done the same for me, and everything here was reciprocity. It was a world governed by a mutuality of duty and care. I was cold but not impossibly cold. I was dog-tired but not beyond all consciousness. He had held the wheel for me often enough already; he had, in many ways, held me; now it was my turn.

We were in the darkest night I have known. I wonder if anyone who has not been to sea in these conditions, who has not felt himself exposed and exhausted as I was that second night, can know what it means to see the loom of a lighthouse on the shore for which you are making. It is no more than a blur at first, so faint that you cannot see it with your watching eye, but only if you look away and catch its flickering on a distant screen. Is that something? Is it? Yes, it must be. Fastnet! The Fastnet light! Again and again it smeared its paleness over the northern sky. Then another, over to the northeast, the Old Head of Kinsale. For hours they remained the two sentinels guiding me in. Lights! Land! Shore! Sleep! Home!

On the Auk drove, the Volvo engine beating steadily beneath me, George asleep, clearly very deeply exhausted. In the end, no more than his face appeared at the companionway steps. ‘Cup of tea?’ he said. The dark bulk of the land on either side was drawing us in on 340. The land now had shapes, a blacker outline against the black of the night. Ireland was a place, not a fantasy of arrival. Still an hour from the harbour entrance at Baltimore, I saw the light, marked on the chart, that I had been looking for over the previous hour. ‘I’ve got a flashing green,’ I shouted down to George. ‘Make for that,’ he said. The ocean slowly stilled. We reached the green, then the red beyond it, curving into the harbour calm, the lights of the village, the fishing boats against the quay, the ripple of harbour water against the Auk’s worn sides, the sea, as Auden once wrote, ‘as calm as a clock’. We dropped the anchor at four in the morning, forty-three hours out from England, and the Auk lay to her chain like a stabled mare while George and I drank whisky until the sky began to show the first streaks of a green Irish dawn.