The Evangeline Read Online Free PDF Page A

trial started, and instructed the prosecution to call its next witness.
    Michael Roberts made a half turn towards the double doors at the back.
    ‘The People call Thomas Balfour.’
    Thomas Balfour had broad, burly shoulders and a face burned red by the sea. He walked with his feet wide apart, a habit become instinct even on dry land.
    ‘You’re the captain of the freighter, the White Rose ?’
    ‘Yes, I am,’ the witness replied in a British accent that had been dulled by thirty years’ contact with other languages and other races around the globe.
    ‘Were you on a voyage last July that took you into the south Atlantic?’
    Balfour’s face was large, with heavy lips and a thick nose, all of it framed by a grey close-clipped beard. His blue eyes, set well back behind heavy lids, had a shrewdness about them that seemed deliberate, as if he had trained himself to judge things by a standard more rigorous than a native tendency to take the world as it came.
    ‘Yes, we had left Punta Arenas on our way back to Bordeaux.’
    ‘Punta Arenas? Could you explain to the jury exactly where that is?’
    Balfour bent forward at the waist, his thick-fingered hands clasped together. When he shifted his weight you could almost hear the leather chair crack. ‘Punta Arenas is in Chile, on the western shore of the Straits of Magellan. It’s the most southerly port in South America. We had brought out a cargo of French manufactured goods; we were taking back a load of copper tubing.’
    Roberts, wearing one of the handful of striped ties he regularly wore to court, walked to an easel that had been set up midway between the bench, where Maitland sat, and the two counsel tables, three feet apart from each other.
    ‘That would be here,’ he said, using a wooden pointer on a map that included South America and the Atlantic.
    ‘Yes, that’s right.’
    ‘On your way back to Bordeaux?’ He drew an imaginary line from the tip of South America to the coast of France. ‘And what happened—after you left Punta Arenas?’
    Balfour craned his neck to get a better view.
    ‘Out there, not quite a thousand miles east of Rio de Janeiro—990 miles, to be exact; our position was 24 degrees, 28 minutes South and 27 degrees, 22 minutes West—that’s where we found them.’
    ‘Found who? Could you be more precise?’ asked Roberts as he stepped away from the map.
    ‘The survivors—what was left of them.’ A look of disgust swept across Balfour’s nearly hidden eyes.
    If Roberts felt any emotion, he did not show it. His face was a blank sheet on which an observer was free to write anything he wished, and no doubt all of it wrong.
    ‘You’re referring to the survivors of the Evangeline ?’
    ‘Yes, that was the name they told me, the name of the boat that went down some forty days before we found them—those that were left—nearly dead.’
    ‘Just stay with the facts, if you would, Mr Balfour,’ said Roberts, suppressing a moment’s irritation. ‘Tell us how you happened to find them.Was there some kind of signal?’
    ‘No, nothing like that,’ replied Balfour, shaking his head.‘How did we happen to find them, you ask? Chance. That was all, chance. If we had passed that spot an hour later, after the sun was down, we would not have seen them; and if we had not seen them, probably no one would have. That part of the ocean isn’t travelled much.’
    Roberts turned towards the jury and was about to ask the next question.
    ‘We saw them; they did not see us. Or perhaps they did, but they made no sign. They were too far gone for that.’
    Roberts wheeled around, but Balfour was not about to be stopped.
    ‘Close to dead, they were; a couple of them out of their heads with hunger and thirst. It made you wonder if they were really human, the way they looked,’ he added with a shudder. ‘Hope to God I never seen anything like that again.’
    ‘Yes, I’m certain they were all in a deplorable state. But tell us this, Captain Balfour,