Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [74]
The rumbling, roaring thunder of which we seemed to be the center was the sound of breakers pounding at the unseen rocks on which the Nottingham shuddered and grated; and even in my despairing panic I had quick thoughtsif the disjointed fragments that flutter in a man's mind in an emergency can be called thoughts:
... that Langman's repeated insistence that Captain Dean had all along intended to run the Nottingham ashore now seemed to be true, but was in truth more untrue than ever:
... that never, in all our weeks of sailing against adverse winds, had we ever heard anything approaching the deafening tumult that now surrounded us:
... that nothing made by man could withstand the hammer blows that beat upon the Nottingham's weather side to pour torrents of icy water and slashing spray across her canted deckand yet that this shore upon which we had struck had been here, unharmed, since the world began,
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in spite of innumerable stormsthat among the crevices of those rocks were living things that would survive these pounding waves ... and that perhaps we ourselves would similarly survive.
The Nottingham's stern was higher than the bow, as if bent on thrusting her stern more solidly against the shore, and the waist of the ship seemed filled with struggling figures, striving to reach the after cabin.
I found Neal pushing at Swede's buttocks: found a rope-end to which to cling: ran into Chips Bullock, with an axe and a hammer in one hand and his workbag in the other, making his way along the weather rail.
A breaker curled over the bulwarks, hit him squarely, and sent him sliding down the steep deck and into a gun carriage. My rope-end let me reach him, take his axe and hammer and pull him to his feet.
"My workbag!" he shouted. "Spikes! Nails!" He fell to his knees, scrabbling in the scuppers for his workbag. Another wash of icy foam struck us. By the grace of my rope-end we clawed free of the scuppers and pushed and pulled each other to the cabin companion.
The cabin was like a room insecurely poised on one of its corners, and something about a structure so tilted throws a man off balance, both physically and mentally. Every person in it is dizzy and, unless he holds to something, falls down: his mind, too, is so addled that he thinks he can stand, and so gets to his feet only to fall immediately, like a wounded pigeon.
The dark deck had been bad enough, what with waves, the icy torrents that drenched us, the crunching of the ship as she thumped upon the rocks; but the inside of the
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cabin was worse, and for the first time in my life I knew terror, as I think each of the fourteen of us knew it, even though some concealed it.
A single lamp still burned dimly, shuddering in its gimbals. Only Captain Dean was on his feet, supporting himself by the rudder case. The others were on the floor, some trying to rise, only to reel down again: the others just lying there. Cooky Sipper was moaning.
I found that if I closed my eyes the strange tilt of the room had next to no effect upon me. I could crawl to the cabin wall and pull myself erect by clinging to it. I made my discovery known to Neal and Swede and Chips.
Langman, when we crawled in, was striving to make himself heard by Captain Dean. "You were bound to do it from the very first!" he was shouting. "You've been looking for a chance to run her ashore since the day we left the convoy! You planned it!"
"Don't be a damn fool!" Captain Dean shouted back. "This is no time for such stuff as that! I want every man in this cabin to pray."
"Pray?" Langman demanded, and his voice was a squeal. "You think God's going to come down here and pull us off these rocks after you've put us on them?"
Captain Dean smashed his fist against the rudder case. "All right! All right! I put you here! All I know is there was no land on the course I plotted from Cape Porpoise, and there was no lookout forward when you had the deck. Now pray!"
"Pray?" Langman shouted again. "How's that going