Atlantic Britain Read Online Free PDF

hangs from the deck-head, its chain not swinging but jerking like a hanged man, a maelstrom of no gravity followed by thumping smacking lurches into new seas. I crawled into my berth, jammed myself against its sides, my body held in place by my hands, the middle of my back and my knees, and hauled the sleeping bag up around my head. The engine groaned away beside me and I slept.
    ‘Can you do it?’ I woke to see George’s maskedface slewing and sliding above me, only his exhausted eyes visible through the slit of his sodden balaclava. ‘I’m too cold to stay up there,’ he said. ‘I’m frozen and I don’t want to start making wrong decisions.’
    In the churning, topsy-turvy world of the cabin, I got up, pushed seasickness away, swathed myself in the weather-armour, went on deck, got the heading for Baltimore from George, 340 magnetic now, took the torch from his hands, and he went below. I was no less exhausted than when I had gone to sleep. I had to shake my head every few seconds to keep myself awake. On and on the engine ground away beneath me. The boat was still smacking into the seas and the drench of the chilling rain was unbroken. It was just a question of staying awake and keeping us on course. No light worked in the compass. I could only find the heading with the torch. But I couldn’t keep that on all the time. An occasional flash on the binnacle and then the hope for a few minutes that I was steering in the right direction. The hours stretched out ahead. The eyelids drooped closed and jerked open, again and again and again. The wool of my balaclava was wet in my mouth. The boat was being hammered by the seas we were driving straight into, coming up whiteon the bow and then breaking over the bowsprit. For a while the stars appeared and I could hold a constellation at least half-fixed in the shrouds, a still point in a traumatic world. But the cloud and rain closed over again. I kept looking at my watch. Ten minutes had passed, sometimes twelve. How was I going to last three hours at this? My back had tensed into steel hawsers. As I turned my head, I felt the sinews in my neck clicking and rolling over each other’s armoured strands. ‘Dig deep,’ George had said to me as he went down.
    It is a mysterious and powerful place to be, on deck alone, while the man you have been relying on sleeps beneath that deck. He has dug deep for you, has stood in his balaclava with the merest of eyeslits open to the world, shielded from it. He has stayed there for hour after hour in the dark while you have slept curled down in the bunk, protected from the rolling and breaking of the sea. How ancient a set of conditions is that? At this level, the sea is historyless: time has not passed here. His standing for me and now my standing for him is there in the Homeric poems and the sagas. It bears a cousin relationship to sharing a rope when climbing, but the tenderness of it and thedemands of it are, if anything, stronger. I sleep while he suffers and I suffer while he sleeps. The only continuities are the sea, the boat, and the seemingly endless stretch of time, of an almost disconnected sense of timelessness, the repeating waves, the light head of exhaustion.
    A strange and distant intimacy. The three hours came and went. I knew I must not wake him but wait until he was rested enough to get up himself. He had done the same for me, and everything here was reciprocity. It was a world governed by a mutuality of duty and care. I was cold but not impossibly cold. I was dog-tired but not beyond all consciousness. He had held the wheel for me often enough already; he had, in many ways, held me; now it was my turn.
    We were in the darkest night I have known. I wonder if anyone who has not been to sea in these conditions, who has not felt himself exposed and exhausted as I was that second night, can know what it means to see the loom of a lighthouse on the shore for which you are making. It is no more than a blur at first, so faint