We had made to land at Dubris, originally, that being the easiest access point in the long line of high, white chalk cliffs that formed much of the southernmost coast of the island. An entire stretch of coast there, several miles in length, offered long, shallow beaches and safe havens set into vales and niches along the great white cliffs and had provided the landing place for Caesar’s legions on his earliest exploratory expedition to Britain. But even before we had begun to sail in toward the land we had been aware of large numbers of armed warriors lining the clifftops and watching us with intense, unmoving hostility, evincing absolutely no signs of welcoming activity. Joachim, our ship’s captain, held back, eyeing the spectacle warily and looking distinctly unhappy, and I moved to stand beside him.
“You look displeased, my friend. What’s wrong?”
He shook his head without looking at me, his gaze fixed on the distant clifftops. “I don’t know,” he growled, “but something’s far from right.”
“How so?”
Now he glanced at me, sharply. “I told you, I don’t know. All I know is something’s wrong. If I knew what it was I wouldn’t have to say I don’t know, would I? But that’s new.” He waved a pointing finger toward the men lining the cliffs. “I never seen that before, and I’ve landed here a hundred times and more. This is a port, a trading town, and I’ve always been welcomed here no matter who was in command of the place … and it’s changed hands more times than a copper coin. But I’m not welcome here this time … a blind man could see that. I’m going to stand away and change course for a safer berth.”
He swung around and started shouting orders, all of which were unintelligible to me, and within moments his men were swarming up ropes and doing things with the enormous sail.
“Where are you going to go? We have to land there, don’t we?”
He looked at me with a grimace, baring his teeth. “You might have to,” he growled. “I don’t. This is the only ship I own, and I owe it to my crew to keep it afloat. They rely on me to keep them alive and safe from getting drowned or murdered by pirates, and that’s what I intend to do. If you’re determined to be foolish I’ll drop you ashore farther along the coast, if that’s what you really want, but I’m not going any closer to land right now, not until I’ve made sure they’ve got no swift battle boats lying in wait behind some headland, waiting for me to sail into a trap.”
The words had barely left his mouth when two swift-moving vessels came into view upwind to the right of us, the spray from their sweeps catching the rays of the midday sun and sending up rainbow showers of drops as the ships drove straight toward us, plainly intent on overhauling us. Fortunately for us, however, they had made their opening move too soon. Joachim wasted no time in congratulating himself on his caution. He simply rapped out more orders to his crew and we swung away westward, our ship lying over on her left side with the steepness of the turn. We had the advantage of a fair wind at our back and soon left our pursuers behind.
From then on, the weather began to deteriorate, and so did Joachim’s good humor. He had been fretting for hours before that, eyeing the gathering cloud masses to the north and west and anticipating the onset of the winds as he muttered to himself, invoking the ancient gods of the sea to hold back their displeasure and not to send the winter storms too soon. But they were either deaf or angry with him, because all his pleading was in vain. The wind came fitfully at the outset, blowing in short-lived, uneven gusts for the first hour or so, with long gaps of stillness between gusts, but as the day wore on the gaps grew shorter and the gusts more violent, whipping streamers of stinging spray from the curling tops of the waves that had suddenly taken on an appearance more coldly hostile than any we had seen before.
Long before sunset we had lost all sense of sunlight. The wrack of clouds overhead was low and roiling, the masses of vapor churning upon themselves as the air grew darker. And then the first rain squall struck us and abruptly we were all blind, in a world of utter blackness filled with howling winds, hissing sheets of rain, and terrifying, chaotic motion that annihilated all the rules by which we had been taught to live and move on land. Above and beyond all of those things, however, were the appalling noises made by the ship itself under the stresses of the storm, when the threat-filled, menacing creaks and groans and screams of tortured ropes and planks made it sound as though the vessel were about to rip itself asunder and disintegrate under the hammering of wind and water.
All four of us passengers, who had believed ourselves to be ill until then, immediately plunged to the bottom of an abyss of despair and abject, inhuman sickness. I know not how the sailors fared during all that transpired that first night—I have to presume that they continued doing what they were employed to do, since we survived the tempest—but we four, embarked upon an adventure, suffered beyond description. For several days one hammering storm rolled over us and passed by only to be replaced by another, even more violent upheaval. None of us could recall having been that sick, or that helpless, or that frightened at any time in our lives.
I often talked to people about that voyage in the years that followed, and I was always amazed at the unworldliness and the indescribably profound ignorance of people who have never been aboard a ship in foul weather. They simply cannot conceive of the difference between a storm on land and a storm at sea, and the most common question I encountered whenever I told the tale was, “Why didn’t you go ashore and get out of it?”
Why indeed? It was a question I might have asked myself, the day before we set sail upon that voyage. But experience taught me very quickly that it was a question with no simple, clear-cut answer. In the first place, and most particularly at night, we could not even see the shore, and all we knew was the terrifying truth told to us by our captain and his crew—that we had to hold the ship in safety far away from the land in order to prevent its being hurled against the rocks and crushed like an egg. So great was the power of the breaking waves, we were told, that our bodies would be destroyed by its savagery, pounded into unrecognizable, bloodless meat against the rocks along the shoreline. That was a comforting vision to sustain us in our terror. Then, too, we were prohibited from any simple act of “going ashore” by the size and shape of our vessel. It was a trading craft, broad and deep-keeled, designed to carry large volumes of cargo, which meant that it could not simply be rowed up into the shallows fronting a beach and grounded there.
In order to bring our large ship to land and unload his goods in safety, Joachim required the presence of a pier at which he could moor the vessel, or, failing that—a situation the captain described with no great enthusiasm—he needed to find a straight-edged shoreline or a riverbank along which the water was deep and calm and its surface no more than half the height of a man below the land’s. Neither one of these could be achieved with anything resembling safety in stormy conditions, and one or the other of them was necessary for us to unload our eight horses and all the goods we carried with us. We ourselves might leap over the side in relatively calm waters and swim to safety, but we would do so at great cost, since we would have to leave everything, including our armor and weapons, behind us aboard ship and would thus be stranded in a strange land without any means of surviving or even defending ourselves.
Shortly before dawn on the morning of our second day at sea, we felt the wind abating and the motion of the ship became less violent, sufficiently so for me to bestir myself to find the captain and ask him what was happening. He told me we were in the lee of Wight, which left me squinting painfully, wondering if I had lost the proper use of my ears. Wight, he told me then, is an island off the south coast of Britain, and we were now sheltered between it and the mainland, enjoying the respite that its bulk provided from the winds. We would stay there, he told me, in the hope of riding out the remainder of the storm.