Rounding the Horn by Dallas Murphy

Author:Dallas Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780786738731
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2016-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

12

To Cape Horn

Our horizon was limited to a small compass by the spray; the sea looked ominous; there was so much foam. . . that it resembled a dreary plain covered by patches of drifted snow. Whilst we were heavily labouring, it was curious to see how the albatross with its widely expanded wings, glided right up the wind.

—Charles Darwin, Diary

I AWOKE WITH A START FROM A NASTY DREAM, no idea where I was except that it was a cold place. . . . Caleta Martial, the morning after we’d struck in Paso Bravo. That settled with some effort, I pulled on a coat and climbed topside in the cold, pale dawn to have a piss off the stern. During our first night, in Puerto Williams, I’d made the mistake of using the head, instead of the stern, in the middle of the night. Flushing, I heard the captain on the other side of the bulkhead begin to moan and mutter troubled gibberish in his sleep. The sound of gurgling water—the sound of sinking—had loosed a flood of anxiety, attuned as he was to the untoward waking or sleeping. I heard thuds. He was manning the pumps. Kate said, “Shhh, it’s okay, it’s only the head,” in a soothing whisper. I never did that again.

Caleta Martial, a safe, deep semicircular notch in the leeward side of Isla Herschel, was postcard beautiful, like a Caribbean come-on in a snow-belt train station. The water was downright pellucid, the sky dark blue and endless, and against it, the green and brown islands were so distinctly delineated as to seem abstract. I tried to call up the chart. Away to the north was Paso Bravo, the gorge between Wollaston and Freycinet, where we’d touched last night. Isla Deceit, steep and rocky with vertical shores, lay several miles to the east. Up behind Martial Cove’s symmetrical crescent beach, a soft, rolling meadow climbed at a gentle hiking angle to a scattering of greenstone boulders and on to the brown, vertical remnant of a shattered mountain. The buttery light, the glassy blue water, the white beach suggested repose, a softness in the environment. Famous last words. But there actually are these sessions of tranquillity when the sky lifts behind yesterday’s depression. They’re not common, but they’re a real part of the environment, and I wanted to bask in this one alone while that dark dream wilted in new light.

I dreamed I’d seen Jarli die out there in the Drake Passage. I watched from a stable, elevated viewpoint, an albatross eye at masthead height off his starboard quarter. The seas were lethal, seething forty-footers with streaks of crazy spume tearing down their faces. Jarli sat at the tiller of his little boat—it had blue topsides—running under bare poles before the wind and seas without a chance of survival. Jarli knew it, I knew it. A breaking wave higher than the rest soon lifted the stern, pointed the bow at the bottom, and for an instant the boat hung there.

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