Pathfinders by Cecil Lewis

Author:Cecil Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History / Military/ World War II
Publisher: Imperial War Museums
Published: 2022-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

TOM COOKSON

‘WHERE ARE WE now?’

Tom Cookson smiled to himself, as he bent over the chart table again. It reminded him of young Dick. Young Dick sitting there, stripped to the waist, laughing in the warm sun, sitting on the cabin top of the Dolphin, after they had weathered their first storm, laughing at him, as he tried to take a sight from the plunging deck. ‘Where are we, Tom?’ he laughed. ‘Where are we now?’

Tom didn’t know. That was the truth. The mystery of navigation, which still fascinated him was a far greater puzzle to him then. In theory he knew more or less what to do. But it is one thing to have the whole thing buttoned up in a solid room ashore, and another to concentrate on figures in a reeling cabin, and still another to bring the sun down on to the horizon of a sextant mirror from a small yacht’s deck when the seas are running high. It was like snipe shooting, one instruction book had said. Tom had never done any snipe shooting; but he gathered that meant you had to be pretty quick on the trigger and pretty sharp in the eye. The book didn’t exaggerate. Tom had been trying for half an hour to get a sight, and he’d failed miserably. Neither the sun nor the horizon would stay in the field of his sextant long enough. Dick had been watching his efforts sceptically, listening to Tom swearing under his breath and when at last he’d lowered the sextant – for it got pretty heavy to hold up after a bit – he’d laughed and jeered, ‘Where are we, Tom? Where are we now?’

It was their first cruise; the first time they had ever been out of sight of land, the first time they had undertaken a deep-sea voyage in their own little ship, the ship they had planned and built together. They were three days out from Auckland. The gale had hit them the first evening and hadn’t let up for two days and three nights. Now the wind had moderated and the sun had come out, though big seas were still running. They were alone in the magnificent desolation of the ocean. The long rollers towered up behind them, lifting the little Dolphin’s counter, then, as the crest hissed under them in a smother of foam, she seemed to pause there on the summit of the world. They could see far out over the angry emptiness to the four horizons. Then, as the wave rushed off to leeward, the Dolphin would slide down into the trough and lie becalmed in a deep valley of water, till slowly she climbed the far slope, her sails filled and she poised herself again on the next wave-top. The rhythm repeated itself everlastingly.

Tom had been trying to use the sextant, wrapping a leg round the mainmast to steady himself; but it was no good. He couldn’t catch that fleeting second on the crest when the horizon was visible.

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