Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [29]
It didn’t take long, however, for John Dunbar Moodie to get bored. He was always trying to find something to occupy himself with. Sometimes he trailed a fishing line behind the vessel, hoping to hook a silvery bonito, which might be hauled up onto the deck and eagerly eaten at dinner. Sometimes he amused himself by training his rifle on sea birds that hovered over the ship. He talked to some steerage passengers, swapping war stories with an old Scotch dragoon called Mackenzie. He marvelled at the way the sailors shinnied up and down the rigging. He borrowed the captain’s telescope and spent hours gazing at the horizon, hoping to see land, another vessel, a whale, shark, porpoise or flying fish—anything to break the monotony. On a couple of clear nights, he made Susanna stir from her berth and come and view the brilliant light show in the sky—the Northern Lights, which he hadn’t seen since he’d lived in the Orkneys.
Susanna was amused by her husband’s eager impatience for action, but she secretly rejoiced that there were no other cabin passengers to join John on wild exploits. On the waterfront in Leith, they had heard tales of gentlemen who would take off a in rowboat from the ship in which they were crossing the Atlantic to fish, and were abandoned when the ship’s sails finally caught a wind. Another transatlantic traveller, John Howard, recorded in his diary in 1832 that, when he and some other passengers en route to Quebec on the Emperor Alexander took a little excursion from their vessel in a dinghy, they were “so intent on our sport that we did not observe that a breeze had sprung up.” Howard described how, “looking around for our ship, we found that she had sailed at least five miles from us.…We therefore threw off our coats and [started to row] but all to no purpose as the ship began to disappear from our view.” After the desperate party had nearly given up hope of rescue, and as the rays of the setting sun illuminated the Emperor Alexander’s sails on the distant horizon, the ship finally changed direction and returned to collect them. “The captain was standing on the poop. I took my gun and had a great mind to shoot at him, but at that moment we observed our wives imploring him to take us on board.” If John Dunbar Moodie been a fellow passenger of Howard’s, he would certainly have been amongst those who were nearly lost because they had rowed off to shoot at puffins and other “curious web-footed birds.”
The voyage of the Anne dragged on. The sun rose and set, rose and set, over the empty Atlantic, and progress was agonizingly slow in the baffling winds. After only three weeks, fresh water was rationed. Soon Susanna herself could barely conceal her impatience. She tried to write a story about a woman who emigrated from England to Canada but was unable to finish it. She buried herself in Voltaire’s History of Charles XII. She was forced to wean Katie because of “a severe indisposition,” probably seasickness. The Moodies did not suffer the disasters many transatlantic travellers faced in this period: the Anne did not catch fire, nor was it shipwrecked or driven off course by a raging storm. Susanna did not record any fearful epidemics of measles, typhoid, cholera or fever below decks that might have put little Katie in danger. But she could hardly bear the boredom.
Five weeks into the voyage, the Anne was becalmed on the Grand Banks, off Newfoundland. There she sat, sails flapping empty, for three long