Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [205]
‘No man is perfect, sir,’ the captain said, shaking his head, ‘and seamen less so perhaps than others, being confined together for long periods. They contrived to draw off some rum from the ship’s stores and carry it to shore with them. It was not enough to take their legs away, but it was enough to make them wild and heedless. They sighted a party of Indians and gave chase, hoping to catch the women among them. At least, that is how I understood the matter – they tried to pretend otherwise later, to lighten their punishment. There are Indian bands along that coast, sir, so much is true. They are hostile to white men and their arrows can give a death-wound if they strike in the right place. What these men did was folly, to rate it no worse. They were led on further than they intended, especially the two foremost, and found themselves in a swampy wooded ground where the only way forward was by following the course of a dry creek bed. This took them round in a blind curve and so they came upon her quite sudden, they said, tilted over in the bed of the creek, one side of her jammed against the bank, with creepers trailing over her and her decks half rotted away and both her masts down. That is how they told it to the mate and that is how the mate told it to me.’ The captain shook his head again. ‘Out of sight of the shore, she was,’ he said, ‘in the middle of swamps and trees, sir, where no ship has any business to be. She was an uncanny sight even for me, who was prepared for it by their account. Her name was there, on the scroll below the quarter figure. Faded, but you could still make it out.’
He had gone himself, led by the men who had found her. He had clambered over the sloping, gaping planks of her deck and found his way below, to the captain’s cabin. ‘Nothing much there but rubbish,’ he said. ‘She had been well picked over. By those who left her there, I suppose, and by the rats that were aboard with them and maybe the Indians after. But I found this behind a rotted bulkhead.’ He put a hand into the pocket of his coat and drew out a square-shaped book bound in black buckram, shredded and ragged now. ‘ ’Twas in a wood box,’ he said. ‘The damp has done for most of it, but some pages can still be read. It is the ship’s log.’
Erasmus reached out his hand for it with the sense of slow, protracted motion sometimes felt in dreams. His thoughts too had slowed; there was nothing in his mind but the strangeness of what the captain had told him. ‘But is it sure?’ he said, with some instinct of gaining time. ‘Can you be sure it is the same ship?’
‘She is a snow, sir, a two-master, Liverpool made. And there is the name on her, and the figurehead.’
‘But how could she have got up so far, away from the water?’ He felt again the need to compose himself, the need for time. He was aware of the captain’s eyes resting steadily on him. ‘Perhaps you will tell me she crawled,’ he said.
‘The land keeps low on that piece of coast, it does not rise more than a few feet, and it is soft, sir, sand and shingle and mud. The Atlantic tides come in very strong. But perhaps you know those parts?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘The sea makes roads into the land and they run deep sometimes, I have known of four- and five-fathom depth. Behind the shore it is a maze of mud flats and streams and lagoons and they are changing all the time, silting up into swamp, changing their courses, running into creeks that go for miles. That coast never looks the same from one year to the next, and I know it better than most. Your father’s ship lies in a channel that is narrowed now and half choked up, but it could have held deep water twelve years ago, deep enough to tow a ship, taking her at full tide and hauling from the banks.’
‘But the men who did that, who laboured to do it, must have been desperate