When God Laughs: And Other Stories by Jack London

Author:Jack London
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Short stories, American fiction -- 20th century
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2018-04-19T20:16:36+00:00

Make Westing

What­ev­er you do, make west­ing! make west­ing!

Sail­ing di­rec­tions for Cape Horn

For sev­en weeks the Mary Rogers had been be­tween 50 de­grees south in the At­lantic and 50 de­grees south in the Pa­cif­ic, which meant that for sev­en weeks she had been strug­gling to round Cape Horn. For sev­en weeks she had been ei­ther in dirt, or close to dirt, save once, and then, fol­low­ing up­on six days of ex­ces­sive dirt, which she had rid­den out un­der the shel­ter of the re­doubtable Ter­ra del Fuego coast, she had al­most gone ashore dur­ing a heavy swell in the dead calm that had sud­den­ly fall­en. For sev­en weeks she had wres­tled with the Cape Horn gray­beards, and in re­turn been buf­fet­ed and smashed by them. She was a wood­en ship, and her cease­less strain­ing had opened her seams, so that twice a day the watch took its turn at the pumps.

The Mary Rogers was strained, the crew was strained, and big Dan Cullen, mas­ter, was like­wise strained. Per­haps he was strained most of all, for up­on him rest­ed the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of that ti­tan­ic strug­gle. He slept most of the time in his clothes, though he rarely slept. He haunt­ed the deck at night, a great, burly, ro­bust ghost, black with the sun­burn of thir­ty years of sea and hairy as an orang­utan. He, in turn, was haunt­ed by one thought of ac­tion, a sail­ing di­rec­tion for the Horn: What­ev­er you do, make west­ing! make west­ing! It was an ob­ses­sion. He thought of noth­ing else, ex­cept, at times, to blas­pheme God for send­ing such bit­ter weath­er.

Make west­ing! He hugged the Horn, and a dozen times lay hove to with the iron Cape bear­ing east-by-north, or north-north-east, a score of miles away. And each time the eter­nal west wind smote him back and he made east­ing. He fought gale af­ter gale, south to 64 de­grees, in­side the antarc­tic drift-ice, and pledged his im­mor­tal soul to the Pow­ers of Dark­ness for a bit of west­ing, for a slant to take him around. And he made east­ing. In de­spair, he had tried to make the pas­sage through the Straits of Le Maire. Half­way through, the wind hauled to the north’ard of north­west, the glass dropped to 28.88, and he turned and ran be­fore a gale of cy­clonic fury, miss­ing, by a hair’s-breadth, pil­ing up the Mary Rogers on the black-toothed rocks. Twice he had made west to the Diego Ramirez Rocks, one of the times saved be­tween two snow-squalls by sight­ing the grave­stones of ships a quar­ter of a mile dead ahead.

Blow! Cap­tain Dan Cullen in­stanced all his thir­ty years at sea to prove that nev­er had it blown so be­fore. The Mary Rogers was hove to at the time he gave the ev­i­dence, and, to clinch it, in­side half an hour the Mary Rogers was hove down to the hatch­es. Her new main­top­sail and brand new spencer were blown away like tis­sue pa­per; and five sails, furled and fast un­der dou­ble gas­kets, were blown loose and stripped from the yards.

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