Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [128]
Captain Dean, once more calm and composed, carved our meat and passed around the seaweedand after an eternity the little sloop slipped in to coast back and forth across the southern tip of the island. With each pass she drew closer. We could see she carried no boat; only a bark canoe lashed alongside her cabin.
The behavior of the three men who sailed her filled me with anxiety. They eyed us warily: glanced at each other, as if in doubt. They didn't like what they saw, and I couldn't blame them.
''You've got six feet at flood tide," Captain Dean shouted. "Fifteen feet offshore you've got six feet."
The sloop's master waved his hand, brought the sloop into the wind, dropped his jib and spilled the anchor over
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the bow. The three men ducked under the sloop's boom and studied us again. They looked worried.
"Ship Nottingham," the captain shouted. A wave curled over and fell noisily. He waited for the roaring to subside: then tried again. "Ship Nottingham. London to Portsmouth."
We couldn't tell whether or not the three men could hear.
Captain Dean turned to the rest of us and spoke sharply. "I don't dare tell 'em how much we need food. They might not come ashore."
To the sloop he shouted again, "Fire! We need fire! Cold! Frozen!" He held his ears: bent over, he hugged himself.
The three men conferred.
Captain Dean knelt and went through the motions of using a tinderbox. He pretended to blow on a fire and then to warm his hands before it.
Two of the men unlashed the canoe, lowered it over the side and held it while the third man stepped down into it, knelt in the middle, and took two paddles that were handed to him. One he stowed beneath the thwarts. With the other he pushed off from the sloop and, still kneeling, headed for the cleft in the rock where we were gathered.
"Remember," Captain Dean warned us, "don't say a word about our meat."
The man in the canoe held his paddle steady, looked behind him, waited for a swell to come near his stern: then dug in his paddle and came rushing toward us on the slope of a roller. Captain Dean and George White braced themselves at the head of the cleft, caught the canoe by the
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bow and held it where it was while the wave slipped back. The canoeman, still clutching his paddle, climbed out over the bow and helped White and Captain Dean carry the canoe up higher, out of harm's way.
"We knew somebody had been cast away, and probably here," he said. He spoke slowly, and with assurance, a little like those who came up to Oxford from Warwick or Herefordfrom places like Stratford-on-Avon or Broadway, where people have had the benefit of schooling.
"I'm John Dean," the captain said, "master of the Nottingham Galley. We went ashore"
He broke off, looked from the canoeman to Langman and back again: then asked, "What day is thissir?"
"This is January 2nd, a Tuesday," the man said. "I'm Nason. Richard Nason. Kittery. Part owner of the sloop Head of Tide."
"It can't be Tuesday," Langman said. "It must be Wednesday."
Nason looked at him oddly. "Why must it?"
"Because I kept count," Langman said.
Nason turned back to Captain Dean. "Yesterday was MondayNew Year's Day."
Captain Dean nodded. "We went ashore Monday, December 11th. There was a northeaster blowing."
"You've been on this pile of rocks since the eleventh of December?" Nason asked incredulously. His eyes swept over us, examining us from head to footfrom our oakum hats, with bits of seagull feathers and seagull skin woven into them, the oakum mittens on our hands, the oakum wrappings fastened to our shoulders, chests and legs, the clumsy oakum sheathings of our feet. He shook his head as if he found us incredible.
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"Kittery?" Captain Dean asked. "Isn't