Isvik Page 24

  We were still in the narrows, just abreast of Fleuriais Bay, when the wind began to increase very rapidly. We could have put in there. We had the 559 chart and it would have given us a comfortable night at anchor. But at the speed we were going, and with a strong tidal current under us, we were past the entrance to the Bay before I had even thought of it. The wind was ‘right up our jacksie, mate’, as Andy put it, and, with the land close on either side, it was funnelling through the Channel at what seemed almost double its true speed. The square sails were designed to be handled from the deck so that there were a lot of strings, and bellied out as they were, taut as a couple of drums, we had a hell of a job getting them down. It was the first time we had had to lower them running before a strong wind. It must have been force 7 at least, the surface water being lifted and spilled forward in the gusts. We didn’t bother to lower the yards, but got the small jib up and went careering into the night at 4½ knots on that one sail. The wind decreased slightly in the early hours and when Andy relieved me at 04.00 we decided to set the number 2 jib. It needed two of us up for’ard and somebody had to be on the helm, so he called his wife, and after we’d set it I managed to get a good three hours’ sleep.

  It was shortly after I had relieved him at 08.00 that the volatility of Carlos’s Latin temperament suddenly displayed itself. It was a dark morning with a lot of heavy cloud, low and black in the rainstorms. I had climbed the ladder to the top of the wheelhouse and was at the upper steering position when I heard the sound of voices, very faint. For a moment I thought it was the after-effects of tiredness and stress. I had been navigating in the dangerous waters between the Cockburn and the Beagle Channels all the earlier part of the night and thought I must be hearing things. But then I traced it to the voicepipe that connected with the wheelhouse below. I had been testing it out with Andy before he went to his bunk and had left the cap off.

  I started to put the cap back on, but then realised there was an argument going on in the wheelhouse. ‘… spying on me.’ It was Carlos speaking. ‘Why were you phoning him?’

  ‘Ye told Mrs Sunderby yer father had sent ye.’ Iain’s voice was quiet, but with what seemed to me an undercurrent of menace. He had completely ignored the boy’s question. ‘That was a lie.’

  ‘I want to come with you.’

  ‘Ye can’t, an’ tha’s that.’

  ‘But I must.’ The boy’s voice was getting wilder.

  ‘Why?’ And when Carlos did not answer, he asked, ‘How did ye know where we were? Did Connor-Gómez tell ye?’

  ‘Si. I was at the hacienda about a week after you were there. He told me then that he is going to join Iris Sunderby on this ship of hers and navigate for her. I said I was coming with him, but he said, No, he didn’t want me on board with him. His only interest is that woman.’

  ‘What dae ye mean by that? What are ye tryin’ to say?’

  There was a long silence and I thought perhaps Iain had gone back to his bunk. He had hardly left it since his return to Punta Arenas. I was just about to put the cap on when Carlos’s disembodied voice announced on a rising note, ‘I don’t care what he say, I’m coming with you.’

  ‘As far as Ushuaia, that’s all.’

  ‘No. All the way.’ Carlos was almost screaming now.

  ‘Ye leave at Ushuaia.’ Iain’s tone, though still quiet, was very determined. ‘Is that understood?’

  ‘No, no. I must come with you.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked again.

  ‘Why do I want to come?’

  ‘Yes, why? It will probably be a tough, uncomfortable voyage. And a long one if we have to winter over, so why dae ye want to come when ye should be continuin’ yer studies?’

  ‘I have to – please.’ His voice was suddenly pleading. ‘I must know.’

  ‘Know what?’ Iain’s voice had sharpened with sudden curiosity. ‘What dae ye have to know?’

  Another long silence, and then: ‘Nothing, nothing. But I must come.’ And then Carlos added, the words coming in a rush, ‘I can hide on board at Ushuaia. He need not know till after we sail. Or I can stay ashore and jump ship just as –’

  ‘No. Ye are no’ comin’.’

  The argument went on for a moment longer, Carlos first pleading, then insistent, his voice rising uncontrollably, a trembling contralto of urgency. Then suddenly he shouted, ‘All right. If I don’t come with you, then you don’t go. I see to that.’

  ‘Stop being childish.’

  ‘Me? Childish? It is you. Please. One last time. Let me come with you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay.’ There was a sudden rush of movement, impossible to define through the voicepipe. I heard Iain’s voice shouting ‘Carlos’, and a moment later the for’ard hatch banged open and he erupted on to the deck like a man gone berserk, the ice axe he had borrowed gripped in his hand, his eyes wild and a frenzied look on his face.

  For a split second I was rooted to the spot, not realising his intention. Then suddenly I understood. We had tanks below for almost three thousand gallons of diesel. They were right down in the ship’s bilges. But the paraffin for cooking and the petrol for the semi-rigid inflatable and the snomobile was all in drums securely lashed along the bulwarks. He made straight for the petrol drums alongside the foremost ratlines.

  I shouted at him to stop, but he didn’t even glance at me, his eyes glazed now and his face set in an intense grimace. Somebody else yelled at him just as I started down the ladder. I heard the ring of the axe pick biting into the metal of the drum as my feet hit the deck, and then I stopped. Andy, in nothing but his pants, was rushing in on Carlos, barefoot and with only his hands to grapple with him. I saw the ice axe swung high, shouted and stubbed my toe as I flung myself forward. But then Andy had hold of the axe, had wrenched it out of the crazy loon’s hands and tossed it aside.

  I thought that was the end of it and I stood there in some pain as the two of them began to circle each other on the foredeck as in a ritual dance. Carlos reached into the pocket of his anorak, came out with something gripped in his hand, and then there was a flash of steel in the masthead floodlights that Iain must have switched on. The boy was moving forward in a crouch, the six-inch blade of a flick knife pointing at Andy’s stomach.

  I was shouting again and moving at the same time, vaguely conscious of the jib slapping furiously as we came up into the wind. I had almost reached them when a dark whirlwind in red pyjamas flung herself on to the boy’s back, her hands fastening on each side of his neck, thumbs digging in. Carlos gave a wild scream of agony. The knife clattered to the deck and he stood there, totally paralysed and still screaming.

  Andy bent down and picked up the knife. ‘Yours, mate?’ He was smiling, tight-lipped and holding it out to the boy. ‘Do you want it? ’Cos if so, I’m going to plunge it right into your sodding little testicles. Well, do you?’ He looked over Carlos’s shoulder. ‘Okay, let him go now.’

  His wife released her grip on the pressure points either side of his neck and he stood trembling uncontrollably. ‘Well, do you want it?’ And when Carlos dumbly shook his head, he tossed it casually over the side, took his wife by the arm and the two of them disappeared down the for’ard hatch without a word, except that as his head disappeared Andy nodded up at the slapping sail and called to me, ‘Better get her back on course or we’ll be into the kelp.’

  Iain was out on deck now, the smell of petrol strong as he wrestled with the lashings that bound the drum to one of the guardrail stanchions. I got out my own knife, sawing through the wet rope so that we could up-end the container. ‘Now then, laddie, what was all that about?’ Carlos was still standing there, apparently in a daze. ‘Why the hell are ye so urgent to come with us, eh?’

  I don’t know whether Carlos answered him or not. The fores’l was making a hell of a din and I was already on my way back to the wheelhouse. By the time I had got Isvik sailing again the two of them had disappeared below and for a time I had the deck to myself. It was a strange, wild world, the l
ong ribbon of water stretching out ahead, leaden under the louring overcast. The great mass of the Darwin Cordillera was behind us now and though heavy banks of cloud obscured the towering peak of Sarmiento I could feel the menace of it in the sudden wind shifts, the violence of the gusts. It made me very conscious that I was now at the bottom of the world, Cape Horn ahead and the Screaming Fifties; after that the frozen wastes of the pack, the icebergs, the whole mass of Antarctica with its blizzards.

  I suppose I was tired. Certainly I had been under stress with almost two days of very concentrated pilotage. Fear began to build up inside me. I was thinking of Scott and the long trek to the South Pole, of Amundsen, and Shackleton, particularly Shackleton. All that ahead of me. But for the moment I was here, in the comparative safety of the Beagle Channel with Ushuaia the last port of call. One last chance to duck out.

  ‘Are you cold?’ Iris was suddenly beside me. ‘You’re trembling.’

  ‘Am I?’ I had been so engrossed in my thoughts I hadn’t seen her come up, hadn’t realised I was shaking almost uncontrollably.

  ‘I’ll take her now. You go below, get yourself some hot coffee.’

  I nodded. I could smell it now and I stepped back from the wheel, automatically giving her the course. ‘What’s the matter with Carlos?’ I asked. ‘Why is he so set on coming with us?’

  She gave a little shrug.

  ‘Why doesn’t he want Connor-Gómez to know he’s on board?’

  She turned to me then, the knuckles of her hands white with the tightness of her grip on the wheel. ‘You ask him. No, better you ask Ángel when he comes on board at Ushuaia. See what he says.’

  But Ángel Connor-Gómez didn’t come aboard at Ushuaia.

  We snugged into a little gap between a patrol vessel and a stern trawler, and before we had even made fast Iain had jumped ashore and was hurrying along the quay to the port office with the ship’s papers. He was back inside of half an hour, and without consulting Iris, or any of us, ordered Nils to get the engine going. ‘These are the co-ordinates.’ He thrust a piece of paper into my hand. ‘Mark the position on the chart, will you?’ And he told Andy to cast off.

  ‘But what about Ángel?’ Iris asked. ‘It is essential we don’t sail without him, otherwise …’

  ‘He’s joinin’ us further along the coast. On the north side of the Channel, Ah imagine, since that’s still Argentine territory.’

  ‘But why not here? It is arranged that he join us here – tomorrow, Wednesday. That is what you said.’

  I didn’t hear his answer. The engine had come to life, Nils at the helm and Andy tossing the warps on to the deck and leaping for the guard rails as Isvik gathered way.

  The position indicated by the co-ordinates was almost at the mouth of the Beagle Channel, just past the bay called Almirante Brown and almost opposite Puerto Eugenia on the Chilean shore. Iain was peering over my shoulder, and when I had pencilled in a little cross to mark the spot, he nodded. ‘Like I thought.’ He picked up the magnifying glass and began searching the area inland. ‘Have ye got a larger scale chart?’

  I took the South American Pilot Vol. II from the bookcase at the back of the chart table. I had already put a marker in at the Beagle Channel page. It was the next number to the one that was out on the table. ‘Chart 3424.’

  ‘Have we got it?’

  I checked through the chart drawer, found that we had and spread it out on top of the Ushuaia chart. Again he didn’t seem interested in the approaches or the soundings in the little bay indicated by the co-ordinates. His mind was concentrated on the hinterland, the magnifying glass following the contours very slowly as though he were trying to visualise the terrain. But Admiralty Charts are not like geographical maps. They concentrate on the foreshore and seabed. In the end he gave it up, flinging the magnifying glass down and muttering something to himself about waiting till we got there. ‘What’s the state of the moon? Almost at the full, isn’t it?’ And when I told him it would be full in two days’ time, he nodded and said he hoped it would be a fine night.

  ‘We’ll be picking him up during the night, will we?’

  ‘Not this night. Early Thursday mornin’ – 0200.’

  ‘So why the hurry? We could have stayed at Ushuaia, topped up with diesel and had a meal ashore. Got drunk maybe.’ I was thinking of the long weeks, possibly months ahead.

  But all he said was, ‘Give me an ETA at that bay as soon as ye can.’

  ‘I can give you that right now,’ I said, measuring off the distance with the dividers. ‘Sail or motor?’

  ‘Sail. The wind is westerly and we need to conserve fuel now.’

  With the squares’ls reset we found we were logging a comfortable 6 knots. ‘Should be there shortly after midnight,’ I told him.

  He nodded. ‘Have the inflatable ready to launch as soon as we’re anchored. Ye’ll come with me. Okay?’ And he disappeared below.

  The wind force varied considerably during the latter part of the evening, reaching force 5 at times and veering northwesterly. The result was that we arrived well before midnight. There was still just a little light in the sky astern of us, but shoreward visibility was fitful with about seven-tenths cloud. We got the sails down and felt our way in under engine, the moonlight coming and going with the clouds very black in contrast.

  There was a little beach with a stream pouring like a white streak across it, but the kelp forced us to anchor some way off in a depth of over thirty metres. Once the ship was settled, and the engine silenced, a sudden peace descended, only the racing, ink-black clouds to indicate that it was still blowing quite hard. Close in, we were under the lee, and the stillness, and the emptiness of the land, the sense of being at the world’s end – it was almost spooky. And the kelp moving all the time, a slow, voluptuous lifting and falling as the waters of the strait heaved sleepily.

  Iris wanted to come with us. I think she sensed a purpose behind Iain’s haste to get ashore that in some way concerned her. ‘Ye’d only be in the way,’ he said almost brutally. Her reply was drowned in the noise of the engine as he started it up and we headed for what appeared to be a passage through the kelp. It did not reach as far as the beach and just as we entered it a pile of wind-driven cloud swept over the face of the moon so that one minute we could see the kelp moving lazily either side of us, the next all was utter darkness.

  Iain cut the engine and we drifted in an eerie stillness that was punctuated by strange grunts and sucking noises as the sea moved the weed and sloshed among the stones and rocks of the beach. The inflatable was stopped almost immediately, and while Iain tipped the engine up on its bracket, I got hold of one of the oars and began to paddle. In the Stygian darkness we had nothing but the sound of the water streaming down the steep slope of the beach ahead to guide us, and it was hard work, for we were literally sliding the boat over the long streamers of kelp.

  I had just started to pole our way through the shallows when the moon swam out of the blackness overhead, and there was the beach, with the stream gleaming white barely twenty metres away. It seemed afterwards as though the circumstances of our arrival set the scene, preparing us for the shock of what we were about to find. Iain had brought a torch with him, but he hadn’t used it, so that the eeriness of that little beach was exaggerated by what I can only describe as the stage lighting. It conditioned me, instilling a degree of nervous tension, as though at any moment those naked, half-savage Onas of the old land of Tierra del Fuego would come storming out of the darkness, intent on clubbing us to death to provide them with the plumpest, best-fleshed meal they had had in years.

  We stumbled ashore through ankle-twisting boulders, hauling the inflatable up a beach that looked like, and probably was, the moraine of an old glacier. I stopped to wrap the painter round a large stone so that Iain was ahead of me when the lighting suddenly dimmed, the moon sliding behind the ragged edge of a cloud. I could see the vague shape of him picking his way over the black debris of fallen trees that marked the tide line an
d the edge of the stream.

  ‘Beaver,’ he said as I fought my way up to him. The tide line had once been treed, but now they were fallen, rotting sticks, all lying higgledy-piggledy as though destroyed by the whirling vortex of a tornado. We struggled on for almost a hundred yards, picking our way through the mad, ankle-twisting debris of crumbling timber. ‘Some bloody fool of an Argentinian thought it’d be nice to import a few Canadian beaver to Tierra del Fuego.’ He swore as his foot slipped from under him. ‘Ye saw the black debris of the tide line as far back as the Cockburn Channel. Nobody hunts them, so they’ve multiplied like mad.’

  Away from the stream, there must have been a change of soil. Suddenly there were no tree stems lying around and we were wading in among hard, wiry stems of some sort of low-growing vegetation that could stand the cold of the winter at the bottom of the world. Away to the left there was a patch of tussac grass standing like the solid woolly heads of a little army of golliwogs. He found a path of sorts that climbed steadily up the shoulder of a bluff, the top of it just visible, a vague outline humped against the half-lit sky. And then the moon popped out again, the stage lighting switched on and the bluff was smooth as Sussex down-land. We reached the top and looked down on to a rolling plain. ‘Sheep country,’ Iain whispered quite unnecessarily, for there, right in front of us, was a whole flock of them standing bunched and motionless, staring in our direction. ‘The Dark Tower,’ he murmured, nodding away to our left where a huddle of dilapidated huts crouched against the side of a stony hill.

  ‘I don’t see any tower,’ I said. ‘More like the quarters of some military outpost.’

  ‘Childe Roland,’ he murmured, and the way he said it sent a shiver through me, for I too had read my Browning. ‘Ushuaia was an Argentine penal settlement at one time, did ye know that?’

  ‘No.’

  The going was easier now. We were walking on firm, close-cropped grass, the huts getting steadily nearer. ‘Is this an old prison then?’ I asked. ‘Did you know it was here?’