'If necessary.'
'Hmmm, this is not less'n five hundred miles, but with the nor'east trades a-beam . .. about three, four days.'
Stanhope was thoughtful. Renzi looked up with an apologetic smile. 'I will earn Cecilia's eternal loathing, but duty obliges me to point out that we are perhaps six days from Barbados if we continue, but if we return to Port Royal the vessel we take there must necessarily retrace our course, meaning a total time of around twelve days, even a fortnight. This—'
'We press on, I believe.'
'Yes, my lord. Might I suggest her brother be the one to inform Cecilia ... ?'
A jabbering from the little boy to his warily curious father brought attention back to the man. 'If we have coins, perhaps we can persuade him of some fruits,' Renzi suggested.
Cecilia was delighted with what was brought - not only fruits but corn bread, dried strips of meat and four eggs. 'We shall dine right royally before we face that odious sea again,' she vowed, and set Renzi to building a fire, claiming the boat baler as her cooking pot.
Kydd saw braiding in the sand along the beach and knew at that spot there would be water — the two barricoes would be full when they left, more than enough for a six-day voyage. As Cecilia's soup laid its irresistible fragrance on the air, he bent his mind to the job in hand. 'Nicholas, we need t' clear the Dutch islands, an' as well keep away fr'm the coast shipping. Do ye think we should run down the 14-degrees line o' latitude to the Wind'ard Islands?'
'I do, dear fellow, but I worry that we are sadly at risk if we cannot fix our longitude for the Barbadoes after passing through the islands. Should we ignorantly sail past, into the empty Atlantic .. .'
'Aye, you're in the right of it, m' friend, but I have an idea.' Kydd assembled his thoughts carefully. 'Do we not now have, at this moment, complete and certain knowledge of our position — our longitude, in fine?'
'Yes?'
'And when we sail, this is lost. But what if we conjure our own chronometer? Do y’ ask Lord Stanhope if we c'n borrow his fine watch. I take m' noon sighting right here in th' usual way, when the sun tells us it's exactly midday.' Kydd paused significantly. 'This is then our noon at this longitude, which we do know. An' if I am not mistaken in m' reasoning - I pray humbly I am not — then we know fr'm this the exac' time we are here ahead o' Greenwich noon.'
'At the rate of one hour for every fifteen degrees — you are, of course, completely right’
'So we subtract this time an' set th' watch to our Greenwich noon, and by this we have a chronometer — an' fr'm now on, the difference between our local noon and this watch gives out y'r exac' longitude.'
Renzi, who had seen it coming, nevertheless joined in the general applause. 'You are indeed in the character of a magician, right enough.' No matter that the watch was a poor substitute for the precision of a real chronometer, it would nevertheless put them well within sighting distance of their goal — and if it did that, then it was all they could desire.
Apart from some far-distant flecks of white there was no indication that they were crossing a major sea highway. In a world with privateers and pirates no ship would be inclined to indulge their curiosity and they sailed on unmolested into the empty seas of the central Caribbean.
Routine set in — the scrupulously doled-out rations, the morning square-away that Kydd insisted on, Doud's never-failing evening songs. And, most crucial, the noon sight. It seemed a fragile thing indeed to entrust their lives to a ticking watch. A frail artefact of man in the midst of effortless domination by nature, yet in itself a token of the precious intelligence that could make man the master of nature. It was the first thing to be stowed safely beneath the thwarts when the rain came down.
Thick, hammering, tropical rain. Tied to the tiller for hours at a time, unable to go to shelter, Kydd endured. The rain teemed down on his bowed head, his body, his entire being. The incessant heavy drops became a bruising torture after a while, and it took real courage to keep to his post. The others crouched together under the slacked-off awning, just the regular appearance of a hand sending a bright sheet of water from the baler over the side from under the lumpy canvas.
It was trying afterwards as welclass="underline" from being comprehensively soaked to a brazen sun warming rapidly. The result was a clammy stickiness that had clothing tugging at the skin in a maddening clinging heaviness. Cecilia's appearance from under the old sail showed that she had not escaped. Patches of damp had her distracted, plucking at her sun-faded dress and trying to smooth her draggled hair; she was in no mood for conversation with the men.
Mile succeeded mile in a near-invisible wake that was a perfect straight line astern. The dying swell of the storm petered out into a flat royal-blue immensity of water, prettily textured by myriad dark ripples from the warm and pleasant breeze. Then the sun asserted itself — there was real bite in the endless sunshine now, a heat that was impossible to escape.
But on the fourth day a milestone was reached: the meridian of 65 west. It was time to leave their eternal easterly progression and shape their course to pass through the Windward Islands chain and direct to Barbados. The empty sea looked exactly the same, but the filigreed hands of the watch mysteriously said that not only had they passed the Dutch islands safely astern but that the several island passages that were the entrance to the Caribbean Sea were now only a couple of hundred miles ahead, say no more than a day of sailing.
'Huzzah!' cried Cecilia, and Doud stood tall on a thwart and sang of England and sweethearts to the uncaring sea and sky. They had adequate water; the food was now a monotonous hard tack soaked in water tinged with wine, cheese of an heroic hardness and a precious hoard of treats — dried meat strips cut into infinitely small pieces to suck for minutes a time, dainty cubes of seed-cake and, for really special occasions, one preserved fig between two, with a whole one for the helmsman of the watch.
The boat lapsed into a silence; rapt expressions betrayed minds leaping ahead to another, more congenial plane of existence. The clean fragrance of fresh linen in a real bed. Surcease for body and spirit. What would be the first thing to do after stepping ashore?
And then the wind fell. From a breeze to a zephyr, from that to a playful soft wafting around the compass, and then nothing. The longboat ceased any kind of motion. The sails hung lifeless with only an occasional dying twitch, and the heat closed in, blasting up from the limitless watery plain, a hard, blinding force that could be felt behind closed eyes. The awning seemed to trap a suffocating humidity beneath it, but the alternative was to suffer both the unremitting glare reflected from the pond-like sea, and the ferocious heat from a near-vertical sun.
Time slowed to an insupportable tedium. Rooted to their places on hard wood for an infinity of time, the slap and trickle of water the only sound, the choking heat their only reality, it was a trial of sanity. Doud lay in the V of the bow, staring fixedly ahead. Stanhope sat under the awning against the mast, with Renzi opposite. Cecilia lay in the curve of the lower part of the boat, and Kydd still sat at the motionless tiller, his mind replaying a quite different nightmare — the shrieking darkness of Cape Horn.
The baler was passed from hand to hand, a scoop of seawater poured over the head gave momentary relief, but the sticky salt remaining only added to the misery. Water, precious water, it was no longer a given thing. Life — or death - was in the two hot wooden casks in the bottom of the boat, and when they were broached, eyes followed every move of the person drinking their tiny ration of tepid, rank fluid.
'I fear we have a contrary current,' Kydd croaked, after the painful duty of the noon sight. 'Only a half-knot or one, but...' Nobody spoke, the idea of being carried back into the Caribbean a thought too cruel to face.