Mingming II & the Impossible Voyage by Roger D. Taylor

Author:Roger D. Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The FitzRoy Press
Published: 2019-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

27

Just after midnight on the morning of Saturday the twenty-eight of July, after twenty-five and a half days at sea, we crossed 37°East longitude and so entered, unequivocally, the Queen Victoria Sea. Externally, of course, nothing changed: water and waves were just as before, the wind was as fickle and gutless, a brief spell of clear sky had ceded to thick low cloud and light rain, I was still hard at work adjusting our course and rig to keep slatting to a minimum and squeeze the best out of the light airs. Internally, I felt the elation that comes with entering new and almost forbidden territory. After four years of thought and planning, we were actually there. Once again, my relationship with the planet shifted. It was the same old ocean, doing the same old things, but my internal spacial orientations had reinvented themselves. I was seeing and feeling the world from a totally altered perspective. It seemed to me that the fact of having been nearly a month at sea, alone, and in a tiny vessel, was fundamental to the strength of this perception. The speed and unnaturalness of air travel, as a contrary example, anaesthetises us to any real sense of displacement; the globe is stripped of its scale; advanced technology makes us superhuman, but at the same time robs us of some primal elements of our humanity; our sense of the geography of where we are is somehow scrambled and enfeebled.

About a hundred and twenty miles to our east lay Ostrov Artura – Arthur Island. Halfway across that distance just one line of soundings, on a north-south axis, each sounding ten miles apart, sullied the otherwise pure white of the chart. The sea hereabouts was as virgin as it is possible to find.

An hour after entering the Queen Victoria Sea the wind swung round to the south-east. As I settled us down again under five panels of the sail I discovered that the forward end of one of the battens had chewed its way out of its restraining pocket, a result, no doubt, of the heavy slatting of the last few days. Standing in the open forehatch I made a provisional repair. I ought not to have not needed to do this. Over the winter I had strengthened all the upper batten pockets, but neglected the lower ones, on the basis that they were less prone to wear and tear, and had been fine throughout our previous voyage. My laziness was now catching up with me.

It was the middle of the night, but for once the sky had cleared completely. I could feel a tinge of warmth from the brilliant sunshine. Despite that, I was starting to feel more hungry than usual; no doubt I was burning more calories to keep warm. Later on I relented on my eating discipline and added a tin of fish to my breakfast.

Lieutenant Ross made an unexpected reappearance just before that breakfast. Having weathered his island I thought that we were

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