‘No wonder she rides so sluggishly,’ Hector exclaimed. ‘There must be at least four feet of water in the bilge.’
They stared in dismay at the gently swirling water.
‘The crew did not have the strength to pump her out,’ said Dan. ‘Let’s hope the leaks are not too bad.’
They hurried back up to question Vlucht, who told them that the vessel hadn’t been pumped for a week. He’d intended to dry her out and recaulk her hull in China, but that was another thing the Chinese had refused to allow. He suspected the Westflinge’s seams were seeping badly.
Hector called a hasty conference with his companions. The five of them were enough to set and manage the sails, handle the ship, keep watch and steer. But whether they could keep the ship afloat long enough to reach Tidore was another matter.
‘We’ll have to take it in turns to man the pump and see if we can lighten the ship. If she continues this waterlogged, she’ll barely crawl.’
‘We can start by dumping her cannon overboard,’ suggested Jezreel. ‘There’re several tons of useless metal there.’
Hector was more cautious. ‘Let’s keep one gun each side. Just in case we have to defend the ship. There are enough of us to make a single gun crew.’
Jezreel went off to find an axe and a maul, and soon he and Dan had hacked a hole in each bulwark wide enough for the guns. They found long hand-spikes and, one by one, levered the cannon into the gaps and shoved them overboard. They made a satisfyingly deep plumping sound as they struck the water and vanished into the opaque depths. Then the team moved to the halyards and sheets and set more sail. There was a steady breeze out of the north-east, and with an adjustment to her mizzen sail, they found they could make a course for the Spice Islands without the help of the rudder, so they left the whipstaff lashed in place.
‘Time to try the pump,’ said Jezreel. He and Stolck went to the aft side of the mainmast, where the T-shaped handle of the pump protruded from the deck. Like her steering gear, the Westflinge’s bilge pump was an old-fashioned affair. A wooden tube made from a hollowed-out tree trunk led to a foot valve in the bilge, and a long shaft worked up and down to provide suction. They gave the pump handle a tentative pull and, after a couple of strokes, the water began to trickle out on to the deck and run to the scuppers.
‘Twenty minutes each,’ grunted Jezreel as he began to send a steady jet of water across the deck.
Hector took an oar from the skiff and went back below to plumb the bilge. As he had feared, there was close on four feet of water. With his knife he scratched a mark on the oar handle as a reference. Turning to leave, his eye fell on a line drawn with chalk on one of the frames. Above it someone had scrawled a crude cross in broad strokes. He guessed it marked the level at which someone had calculated the ship would founder and drown her crew. The line was less than a foot above the water.
Twenty minutes at a time, the men took it in turns to pump. Jacques rummaged through the cook’s stores and found some dried peas, half a cask of rancid butter and a box of biscuit. The last was mostly dust and weevils, so he cooked up a thin gruel, which Maria fed the invalids, though several of them had mouths too damaged to accept the food.
In mid-afternoon, after three hours of continuous pumping, it was time to check the water in the bilge once more. To Hector’s disappointment, the level had dropped barely an inch. Dispirited, he returned to Vlucht’s cabin and asked to borrow the chart and a pair of dividers. The Frisian captain was lying huddled in his bunk, his eyes bright with fever.
‘Will we make it?’ he whispered after watching Hector make his calculations.
Hector put down the compasses. ‘If the wind holds fair, it could take seven or eight days to reach Tidore. I doubt we can last that long. Sooner or later the water will gain on us.’
‘Then we should abandon ship before she sinks. Head for land in the skiff, once we are close enough to the Spice Islands,’ the captain murmured.
‘But there isn’t room for all of us in the skiff,’ Hector objected.
‘Leave the worst of the invalids behind,’ wheezed Vlucht. ‘You and I both know they’ll die anyhow.’
Hector left the cabin without answering and made his way back to the main deck. What Vlucht had said about the invalids was true. With men so far advanced in the grip of scurvy, their chances of survival were slim. Yet Maria would never agree to leave the ship and abandon her patients. For that reason, if no other, Hector had made up his mind that as long as the Westflinge was afloat, he would keep her on course for Tidore.
OVER THE NEXT few days progress was achingly slow. The ship advanced at less than walking pace, heaving and wallowing sluggishly on a sea that seemed determined to hold back their progress. They kept at the pump until muscles and backs were aching, hands blistered. From time to time they formed pairs and hauled buckets up through the hatches and dumped the bilge water overboard. Jezreel spent one entire morning lugging up ballast stones and dropping them into the sea. But it made little difference. On the second day they only managed to hold their own, and during the morning of the third day the water was gaining on them perceptibly. Dan stripped off and pulled up boards at various places up and down the length of the hold and wriggled in through the gaps. He held his breath, ducked down and groped in the noxious water, feeling between the frames and among the remaining ballast, trying to locate the source of the leak. But he found nothing – no eddy or current that indicated an obvious weakness in the hull. The water appeared to be seeping in all along the seams.
It was after the last of these fruitless dives that he reappeared on deck carrying in his arms one of the wooden boxes that had been left in the hold.
‘I could do with some more kindling for the galley,’ Jacques remarked. He was scraping green mould from a piece of salt fish he’d discovered in a locker.
‘First, let’s see what’s inside,’ said Dan. Scratches and gouges showed that the box had been opened and loosely nailed back down. The Miskito took a marlin spike and levered open the lid.
‘This will make you happy, Jacques,’ he said, peering in. ‘There is a fine fat chicken nesting here in straw.’
‘All that pumping has turned your brain to soup, lourdaud,’ retorted the Frenchman.
Dan reached into the box and took out several handfuls of packing straw. He lifted out a large, rusty metal cube. On top of the cube stood an eight-inch-tall model of a hen, with four chicks at her feet. They too were covered in rust.
‘What have you there?’ Jacques demanded.
‘Some sort of clock,’ said Dan. He brushed off stray wisps of the packing material and turned the cube to show Jacques that one side was inscribed with a clock face. He felt again inside the wooden box and found the hour and minute hands, which had become detached.
‘Pity we cannot get that hen to lay. Fresh eggs would be useful,’ Jacques commented, turning back to his work, his nose wrinkled in disgust at the rank smell of the putrid fish.
Dan was examining the hen more closely. ‘The wings are hinged at the base, and the chicks are fixed to some sort of disc,’ he said. He put the clock down on the deck. ‘I wonder what it is supposed to do.’