I
The road north from Tulear was even worse than Rebecca remembered. It was just about acceptable for the first twenty kilometres or so, but then it disintegrated into a track of sand, rock and rutted mud that eventually petered out into nothing a little north of Eden. Even making allowances for its wretched state, however, Zanahary drove like a flustered nun, inching across the occasional hazards like they were unexploded ordnance. It grew too much for Rebecca to bear. ‘Let me drive,’ she said.
Zanahary shook his head. ‘Insurance,’ he said.
‘Then let’s at least take a break,’ she said. ‘I need to stretch my legs.’
He pulled over gladly, reaching for his cigarettes even as he threw open his door. She waited till he was out then slid across into his seat, locked the door from the inside, turned on the ignition and pulled away. There were tears in his eyes when she slowed enough for him to catch up and clamber in the passenger side. He stamped on invisible brakes as she sped away along the track, twisting in his seat and muffling shrieks. Perversely, his fear only made Rebecca all the more rash. She came too fast upon an archipelago of rocks, hit one hard with her front right, bounced clear into the air. She cursed out loud; that was an axle gone for sure. It was a nightmare breaking down on these roads; you could wait forever for another vehicle. But somehow they landed between two hummocks and then bounded on to safe, soft sand. It was a dreadful, reckless piece of driving; it braced her and made her careful. But on Zanahary it had the opposite effect. ‘You drive like my brother,’ he said, as though fear was now pointless. ‘He mad too.’
There were cassette tapes on the dashboard. She pushed one into the player. The percussive Malagasy music took her back years. She turned the volume up, nodded to its beat. The wheel felt good in her hand, the driving position gratifyingly high. Navigating these tracks was all about anticipation, about trusting your hands and feet. The forest fell away to their left to reveal the sea, tall wading birds prowling the shallows, sea-grasses painting dark patterns in it, like God’s handwriting. The cassette finished. Silence embraced them. Huge butterflies drifted like perfume across her windscreen. A crested coua fled down the track ahead, swerving aside at the last possible moment. The track bumped and wound through settlement after settlement. Fitsitika. Fiserenamasay. Tsifota. Tsiandamba. The tiny hamlets of her childhood had grown up into villages of thatch huts and tin roofs held down by fifty-kilo sacks of rice refilled with leaking sand.
‘What that song?’
Rebecca glanced sideways at Zanahary. ‘How do you mean?’
‘That song you sing. What song?’
‘I wasn’t singing,’ Rebecca told him, for she couldn’t remember the last time she’d sung in anyone else’s presence. Yet now that he’d mentioned it, she could hear one of her mother’s old lullabies echoing in her mind, and it left her feeling a little uncertain of herself, so she took another cassette from the dashboard, and put it in to play.
II
Knox was beginning to feel blisters on his palms when the first gust of wind shivered the water and then it arrived in force. They all smiled relief at each other as they put down their paddles. The two piroguiers adjusted the rigging and unfurled their sail, and soon they were skimming so fast across the water that Alphonse had to step out on to the outrigger to give them extra stability. His sense of balance was extraordinary, standing on a narrow block of wood as water splashed off his feet like a water-skier, while Thierry clamped a paddle beneath his arm and used it as a rudder, working the rigging with his feet.
Knox opened a bottle of water and a pack of biscuits, offered them around. Lucia arranged her baggage along the bottom of the pirogue to form a makeshift deckchair on which she’d now stretched out and began to snooze, despite the two sides of the hull creaking loudly against each other. Knox devised a similar arrangement for himself, then sat low in the pirogue and watched landmarks grow large and then recede. Ahead were some fishermen, their nets trailing out behind them, sailing in a tightening spiral, like the whorls of a seashell, before beating the water with their paddles to startle fish into their trap. Gulls hung in the air above, and far away to his right, he could just make out the black crescents of a pod of dolphins at play.
Knox took his box-file of Eden project notes from his case, settled it in his lap, began going through them. As long as people had sailed out of sight of land and home, they’d striven for ways to calculate their position. For short distances, a combination of landmarks and directions sufficed: sail one day east to such-and-such an island, then south for a day to your destination. But this was inefficient and of little use to anyone swept off course by storms or unhelpful winds. What was needed was a way to determine position at sea without reference to land.
It was the great Alexandrian Eratosthenes who’d originally devised the concept of latitude and longitude. Latitude drew parallel bands upon the earth, like the equator and the tropics. Longitude, by contrast, divided the globe into segments, like an orange. Latitude was easy enough to calculate, even in open seas, by measuring the sun’s position at its zenith, then checking the result against a table of the sun’s declination for that day. But longitude proved a beast. In theory, it was easy enough: all you needed was to know the time relative to some fixed point, and you could work everything out from there. But keeping sufficiently accurate and reliable time on board ship was an immense challenge. It wasn’t just the rolling motion of the ship that had to be overcome, it was changes in air pressure and the corrosiveness of sea-air too. Most of all, a shipboard clock would somehow have to counter the changes in temperature that shrank or expanded the internal workings of clocks, rendering them inaccurate.
Europe began growing rich on new empires. But as trade boomed, so did shipping losses. A solution was needed urgently. The British instituted a Board of Longitude; the French a Royal Academy. Astronomers looked to the skies for inspiration, trying to use the moons of Jupiter as a universal clock. But in the end it was the obsessive inventor John Harrison who made the breakthrough, designing a bimetallic strip to cope with temperature variations, then crafting timepieces of such precision that one lost a mere five seconds on its maiden test run to Jamaica.
By a cruel irony, however, not every vessel benefited from his breakthrough. The Winterton, a British East Indiaman, had been sailing north up this very channel one night in 1792. Her captain had been justly confident of his position, thanks to his gleaming new Harrison chronometer. Unfortunately for him and his crew, however, the clock-makers had been years ahead of the cartographers, so that his outdated charts placed Madagascar well to the east of its true location. Despite relatively benign conditions, therefore, the Winterton had sailed smack on to the reefs a mile or two south of the Eden Reserve, where she’d lodged upon the coral for three days, despite the crew’s best efforts to refloat her, and had then broken up.
The nose of the pirogue plunged unexpectedly into a wave, splashing Lucia awake, spattering Knox’s pages with translucent tears. Alphonse held up his hand in apology, made some adjustments to the rigging, and they began again to skim over the top. Lucia settled back down and Knox resumed his reading.
The Winterton wreck-site itself was well-enough known, but the fate of its cargo was less certain. This was a question of more than academic interest, because the Winterton had been carrying three hundred thousand pieces-of-eight, pay for the British armies in India. Several chests of silver had been brought ashore; more had been recovered over the years by divers. But half or more of the silver was still unaccounted for. It was this that the Kirkpatricks had found, and that had brought Emilia to England, and which Knox and his MGS colleagues were going to salvage once they were finished with Ricky and the treasure ship.
He closed the box-file. The sun was low in the sky, and their friendly westerly had turned into an unhelpful southerly that was chopping up the water and forcing them into such sharp tacks that they were barely making any forward progress. He glanced around at Thierry. ‘Eden,’ said Thierry, pointing to a distant headland. ‘But not tonight.’
Knox looked regretfully south. The headland looked frustratingly close. ‘Is it walkable?’ he asked.
Thierry leaned out to discuss it briefly with Alphonse, shook his head. ‘Not at night,’ he said. ‘Too dark. But we make camp here, we start before sunrise, you’ll have breakfast at Eden for sure.’
‘Fine,’ said Knox. ‘Let’s do it.’
