The covenant - James A. Michener [258]
She remained in her cabin even when the ship resumed its journey, as did everyone else who had one, for a wintry gale blew up, driving the vessel far south, reminding the sailors of Adamastor, the tempestuous giant who guarded the Cape in the time of Vasco da Gama, and of whom Luis de Camoens had written with such brilliance.
Day after day the winds raged, forcing waves so high across the bow of the ship that they flooded cabins. At times the vessel plunged downward in such steep and sickening falls that everyone belowdecks was sent flying in one direction and then another as shrieks and wails competed with the howling winds. Sleep was impossible and food unthinkable; at numerous times, when her wet and lonely cabin shivered as if its bulkhead might splinter, Vera huddled in a corner, fearful of the moment when the voyage would end, terrified of its continuance, but never did she give way to superstition and castigate herself or her actions with Thomas as being in any way the cause of this violent storm. She was glad she had known him, even for just their brief passage through the tropics, and she prayed that in some mysterious way she might meet him again.
Alone, at the heart of a shattering tempest, she changed from being a meek English spinster and became a mature woman with a surprisingly independent mind. She had enjoyed being loved by a strong man and realized that she could never return to the dreamy afternoons of a cathedral town. As for marrying a missionary, that was quite impossible, but what she would do she did not know. Once, as the ship fell sideways in a plunge that could have torn it apart, she clung to her bed to prevent being swept away and cried, 'If we make land, I'm an African.' And she shook her fist in some wild direction, supposing the storm-girt continent to lie in that quarter.
On the seventh day of the storm, when the little barque was well down toward polar waters, passengers began reciting old tales of ships, rudderless and sails gone, being driven relentlessly southward till ice entrapped them, holding them forever in its embrace: 'A graveyard of ships down there, masts erect. Everyone aboard frozen stiff and standing erect till judgment day.' They told also of the Flying Dutchman: 'Captain van der Decken, out of Rotterdam. One of his great-grandsons settled at the Cape years ago. Swore he could round the Cape in a storm like this, swore an oath to do so. He's out there somewhere, still trying to breast the Cape, and will be till the people frozen down there are called to judgment.'
The poor ship was so knocked about that when the storm finally abated and the sun allowed the captain to calculate his position, all were shocked to learn how far south they had been driven; they were indeed on their way to the ice, and now, as they turned north toward Algoa Bay, they were humbled and chastened in spirit, so that even the young captain felt remorse at the way he had wanted to treat the awakened young woman in the cabin next to him, and he knocked on her door to apologize.
'I'm sorry,' he said.
'I'm not,' she replied.
'In the storm,' the captain confided, 'I thought once or twice we must surely sink. And do you know what I thought next?' He smiled at her engagingly, a man much younger than herself, endeavoring to reach understanding. 'I thought how utterly insane I'd been to interfere in your affairs. I wanted to shoot you, you know.'
'I was told.'
'Madam, would you allow me to make amends? I was such an ass. Whom you love makes no difference to others.' And to her astonishment, he fell to one knee, took her handand kissed it.
The scene at Algoa Bay in the winter of 1820 was one of historic confusion, confusion because five ships like the Alice Grace were trying to unload passengers in the open roadstead without a wharf to aid them, historic because a whole new type of person was coming ashore