Читать книгу Swallows & Amazons - Boxed Set - Arthur Ransome - Страница 104

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On the fourth day after the Wild Cat had dodged the Viper in the fog and picked up the red-haired Bill, the look out (Peggy, as it happened) got a first sight of Finisterre. There had been a good deal of mist after the storm, and Captain Flint had been looking at the log every half-hour or so and spending a lot of time in the deckhouse doing one sum after another to find out how far they must have sailed. He had been very pleased indeed when Peggy had suddenly called out that she saw land. The mist was lifting to the south-east, and there, below it, was the long, steep-browed cape and the rock of Centolo lying off the point, and two or three tunny-fishers with their tall sails. Captain Flint came out and sat on the roof of the deckhouse staring proudly at Finisterre almost as if he felt it was his own. After all, he had left the Land’s End in a thick fog, and been hove-to for a good many hours in the storm, and found his way here right across the Bay of Biscay. Anyone thinks well of a point or a lighthouse if it turns up just when and where he has been expecting to see it. And all the crew of the Wild Cat crowded along the rail and took turns with glasses and telescopes in looking at the famous cape.

It was a long way off, and there was no point in going nearer to it. At least, so Captain Flint thought, and in the end everybody agreed about it. Some of them had at first been thinking that it would be fun to land in Vigo and Lisbon, and anyhow to sail close along the coasts of Spain and Portugal. But there were good reasons why they should not waste a single moment on mere sightseeing.

“Suppose we go into Vigo,” said Captain Flint, “and spend a couple of days there. Those two days may be just enough to let Black Jake get to Crab Island before us.”

Peter Duck agreed with Captain Flint, and he had other reasons of his own. “Harbours,” he said, “are all one and all dirt. Well enough if we was hard up for grub or run out of water, but a well-found ship’s no need of them. Now the Thermopylae, she’d be as much as a hundred and twenty days out of Shanghai, and did she ever run into a port where she’d no cargo to land? Of course she didn’t. And why should we? I’m not so set on Crab Island, but that’s where we’re bound for, and I’m all for keeping her sailing till she makes it. We owes it to the ship.”

“It ain’t as if Black Jake don’t know how to get there,” said Bill, talking it over with the others. “And if he gets there first we’d best go somewhere else.”

So, though the Wild Cat was no racing clipper like the Thermopylae, but only a little schooner with pole masts and rather small sails for her size, everybody agreed to waste no time that could be saved. Captain Flint took the topsails off her every night, because, he said, in these waters, and with uncertain winds, you never knew when you wouldn’t be jolly glad not to have to take them off in a hurry in the dark. But at earliest dawn he set topsails again. Everybody did the best they could for the little schooner, and the worst that ever John or Nancy or Bill said of each other was to point out that whoever of them was at the wheel had put a waggle in her wake.

South of Finisterre they found the good weather again. They sailed right down the coast, outside the Burlings and the Farilhoes, those two groups of rocks on which so many vessels have been wrecked. They passed them at night, not seeing the wretched little green light of the Farilhoes until they had long been watching the brilliant gleam and flash of the Burlings, although the Burlings were much farther away. Then, the next morning, they took their departure from Cape Roca, outside Lisbon, and their coastwise sailing was over. Captain Flint set a course for Madeira, and, as Cape Roca dropped below the horizon, they knew they would see no other land until they sighted Porto Santo, nearly six hundred miles away.

Already those four days crossing the Bay of Biscay had accustomed them to being out of sight of land. Some people would have thought it dull, but there always seemed to be something to look at. It might be the gulls floating after the ship with hardly a flap of their broad wings, swooping down to pick up a scrap of biscuit that somebody had dropped overboard, or flashing close by the bulwarks and catching scraps flung to them in the air. It might be a steamship, a big liner from South America, or a long, low tanker, carrying oil, with its funnel right aft and no derricks, so that anybody could tell at once what it was. Or it might be a school of porpoises, plunging together through the crests of the waves, as if they were swimming a sort of water hurdle race. In and out, their backs gleaming in the sunshine as they turned over and down again, the porpoises raced together, and everybody used to rush to the side to watch them until their white splashes were too far away to be seen. Or it might be flying-fish, glittering silver things shooting out of the side of a wave, their long fins whirring, looking like little bright white flying pheasants, diving into the top of another wave, coming straight through it and out at the other side, and sometimes skimming the water for a long distance before they disappeared in it again.

There was always something to see. And, besides, there was always something to do. Susan and Peggy were busy from morning to night with their cooking and housekeeping. “Shipkeeping, it ought to be called,” as Roger pointed out one day when Susan said she was too busy housekeeping to knit a stocking cap for Gibber. Gibber, by the way, got his stocking cap all right, but it was knitted by Peter Duck when he had finished darning his socks. He knitted it from blue wool, on the pattern of his own, and Susan, when she saw it, let shipkeeping go hang while she made a red woollen tassel to go on the top of it.

Every day the main water tank had to be filled up from the small screw-top tanks that were stored under the flooring down below. In this way Susan was able to keep count of exactly how much water they were using. She never had been very good at sums, and neither had Peggy, but long before the end of that voyage nobody could have found fault with their additions and subtractions and divisions. They were calculating all the time, and often Susan would wake up in the early morning thinking that one of the sums had gone wrong, and then she would sit up in her bunk and work it out again, and tell Titty about it, and Titty, in the bunk below, would also have a go with pencil and paper, trying to help. Inside the deckhouse door there was a card, and every time one of those tins from down below was emptied into the main tank, Susan used to tick it off on this card, so that Captain Flint, too, was able to keep an eye on the way the water was going. They were very careful about the water, doing most of their washing in salt water, using special salt-water soap. It did not make much of a lather, and it left them feeling rather sticky, but anything was better than running short of drinking water. And in the end, Captain Flint said that it was all due to Susan that things went off so well. If she had not been so careful with the water they could never have done what they did.

They kept watches, too. And in fine weather John, Nancy, and Bill, two at a time, or sometimes all three together, had charge of the ship for four hours in the afternoon. They had a compass course to steer. There was no land for them to run into. And anyhow, in case of meeting other ships, or in case the wind played any tricks, they could always bang on the deckhouse door and bring out Peter Duck or Captain Flint, who tried to get some rest during the day, because at night one or other of them was always on deck. Bill, of course, had been steering small sailing vessels ever since he could remember, and John and Nancy had learnt a lot about it by the time they had come so far. And, of course, all day, no matter what was going on in the way of shipkeeping, it was the duty of everybody who happened to be on deck to keep a good look out.

SUMS

Peter Duck taught them how to make nets, and, taking turns at it themselves, and with a bit of help from him, they made a hammock and slung it between the foremast and the windward shrouds, and collected a good lot of bumps between them, what with trying to get into it or out of it while the Wild Cat went carelessly swinging along, up and down, over the ocean waves. The hammock was a great success, but nobody wanted to stay in it very long. Staying in it meant keeping still, more or less, if you did not want to roll out. They tried playing deck-quoits over the top of it, throwing rope rings (which Peter Duck showed them how to make) to and fro, catching them and throwing them back again. But so many of the rope rings went over the side that they grew tired of making new ones, and Peter Duck said there would be a shortage of spare rope if they went on with that game too long.

Then they took to skipping. Everybody thought this would be rather a childish game when Captain Flint first suggested it, but they very soon found they could collect bumps even better with the skipping-rope than with the hammock. It was no joke at all, skipping on the sloping deck of a little schooner, especially as the slope of the deck was never the same for more than a second or two at a time. Even Bill saw that there must be something in it when he had watched Captain Flint skipping most solemnly, a hundred skips with the right foot first, a hundred with the left, and then fifty with both together, when he sank exhausted on the skylight. Bill tried. He did not sink exhausted on the deck, because he had not time. The deck came up and met him very hard before he had got through his first three skips. In the end they all got pretty good at skipping, and it came a lot cheaper in rope than the deck-tennis over the top of the hammock.

Everything was going like clockwork. Madeira was in sight. They had passed the little island of Porto Santo and were looking forward to anchoring in Funchal and going ashore to do some shopping in this foreign port, besides filling up the tanks with fresh water, when, late one afternoon, Roger, playing with the telescope, caught sight of another schooner a long way astern of them.

Earlier in the day they had sailed through a small fleet of Portuguese fishermen, and now Roger was amusing himself by resting the big ship’s telescope on the stern rail and trying to have a look at them. The whole little fleet of them had hoisted their sails and were coming after the Wild Cat, no doubt bringing their catch to Madeira. Just for a moment they bobbed into sight for Roger as the Wild Cat’s stern dropped low, bringing the telescope down with it. Then the Wild Cat’s bows would go down, her stern would go up, and Roger looking through the telescope could see nothing at all but sky. Still, taking his chance when the Wild Cat gave it him, Roger saw enough of the little fleet of fishermen to notice that away beyond them was another sailing vessel of a different rig.

“There’s another ship coming after the fishermen,” he said.

Nobody took any notice. Everybody knew Roger and the sort of thing he was always seeing when he had the big telescope to himself. Bill and John were at the wheel. All the others, except the skipper and Peter Duck, were up in the bows, looking eagerly at Madeira, which was fast becoming clearer right ahead. Captain Flint was in the deckhouse, busy with the charts, and wondering if he could manage to bring the Wild Cat into Funchal without taking a pilot aboard. Peter Duck was taking his afternoon sleep.

“It’s got two masts,” said Roger, “and big sails on both of them.”

Bill heard that all right.

“Let’s have a look.” He left the wheel to John, squatted down, and steadied the big telescope.

The next moment he dived head first into the deckhouse, startled Captain Flint, and shook Peter Duck by the foot, as he lay there snoring in his happy, contented manner.

“Wake up, Mr. Duck! Cap’n Flint, sir. It’s him! He’s after us again.”

“Less lip,” said Mr. Duck, sitting up. “What’s all the noise about?”

But even he looked grave when, after they had both had a look through the telescope, they agreed that if this was not the Viper it was a vessel very like her.

“Coming on fast, too,” said Captain Flint.

The others had hurried aft when they saw Captain Flint and Peter Duck outside the deckhouse.

“What is it?” said Nancy.

“Black Jake again,” said John.

“Not really,” said Susan.

“Of course, really,” said Roger. “I saw him first.”

“What I would like to know,” said Captain Flint, “is, Has that fellow seen us? And, if so, what we’d better do about it.”

“Well, we’d better have tea anyhow,” said Susan, a little later.

They had tea, but by the time it was ready, it was clear to all of them that this schooner, coming south like themselves, was the Viper. They would have seen her before if it had not been for the Portuguese fishing boats.

“How did he guess what we were going to do?” said Captain Flint rather crossly, when they were all down in the saloon, except Nancy, who was steering.

“No guessing about it,” said Peter Duck. “He’s going the shortest way to Crab Island. That’s one thing. He’d know you’d be doing the same. And he’d know you’d be putting in to Funchal or the Canaries to fill up with fresh water, same’s he will himself.”

Captain Flint got suddenly up out of his chair. There was a new look in his eye.

“Susan,” he said, “let’s have another look at all that water arithmetic of yours.”

Ten minutes later they were back again.

“Thanks to Susan,” said Captain Flint, patting the mate on the back, lifting his mug of tea to her and swallowing all that was left in it. “Thanks to Susan, we’ll do him yet. We’ll carry right on. We’ve more than enough water to last. Funchal’s on the south side of the island. It’ll be getting dark before we turn the corner of the island and then, instead of stopping in Funchal Roads, or going into the harbour, we’ll carry right on for the Caribbees and Mr. Duck’s island.”

Peter Duck looked deep into the bottom of his mug. He was thinking.

“Well, Mr. Duck?”

“I’ll not say but it’s a good plan, if you’re right about the water, sir. He’ll be bound to take in water here himself. It’s not one schooner in a thousand carries all them tons of fresh water ballast. He’ll be taking in water at Funchal, and he’ll be looking for you to be doing the same. Now there’s more places than one where you might likely do it. He’ll be a couple of days before he guesses you ain’t stopped. And then he’s all but bound to think you’re aiming farther south to call for water at Teneriffe or Grand Canary. He’ll never think of a little vessel like yours heading right across and stopping nowheres.”

Not one of the crew could have a word to say against a plan so good, even if it did mean no run ashore to drink iced sherbet in Funchal. They would give Black Jake the slip once more, and if Peter Duck was right, and Black Jake went on to the Canaries, it might very well give them time to get to Crab Island, see what it was that was buried there under Mr. Duck’s tree, and be sailing home again before ever the Viper arrived.

So, as the early dark of the tropical evening rose over the sea, the crew of the Wild Cat looked astern at the black schooner racing after them, but still far away. They hoped, now, that Black Jake and his friends had seen them heading for the island. Close past the eastern end of Madeira they steered in the dusk. By the time the Viper had turned the corner, it had long been pitch dark. It would have been a miracle if anybody aboard the Viper had thought for a moment that the Wild Cat was not putting into Funchal. But the Wild Cat sailed on. She did not head in for Funchal lights that glittered down on the sea front and high on the hill-side. She kept steadily on in the darkness, and at midnight was heading west-south-west into the wide Atlantic.

As the lights of Funchal faded astern, Captain Flint let fall one sentence of regret.

“Blow it,” he said, “and I’d been counting on getting a decent spade in Madeira.”