daybreak: with both hands on the wheel there was no way he could bolt the dry rations on offer.
Stretching his aching muscles he followed the life-line forward and fell as much as stepped down the hatchway. Tween-decks was a noisy bedlam of swilling sea-water, squealing of guns against their breeching and a pungent gloom. His mess was deserted, the canvas screens not rigged, so he peeled off his wet shirt and helped himself to another from his ditty-bag, which hung and bumped against the ship's side. Condensation and leakage had soaked into the canvas bag and it was a sodden garment that he had to drag over his body. He shivered but gave it no more thought.
In the mess-racks he fumbled around and came up with some sea-biscuits. He pocketed three, then found a hard lump of cheese that he supposed had been left out for him. Munching the hard-tack, he glanced forward to where the patchy light of a clutch of violently swinging lanthorns played on dozens of huddled bodies. He assumed they were marines and landmen, hiding in the depths of the ship in the extremity of fear and exhaustion, racked by panic and sea-sickness.
Kydd felt a warmth of sympathy. They were better off where they were, out of sight of the heart-chilling insanity of the storm. He would go to them and try to say something encouraging, the least he could do. Holding on to anything to hand, Kydd made his way forward in the noisome obscurity.
But then his senses slammed in. The ponderous wrench at the beginning of the scend had disappeared, and a comparatively smooth rise completed the movement. There could only be one interpretation. With a constriction of his stomach Kydd knew that an empty cable was running now from the hawse. As if in confirmation,
Capple stared fiercely ahead to the foredeck where men fought and struggled. At every plunge they disappeared from view under an avalanche of white water. He noticed Kydd. 'Coral bottom!' he shouted. Coral was a deadly menace: it snarled and cut thick cables with razor-sharp edges and normally was never chosen for an anchorage.
A few yards forward Kydd saw Quist. He was yelling something indistinct, but ended by stabbing a finger at Kydd, then pointing forward. Kydd grabbed the wet hairiness of the midships life-line and hauled himself along the bucking deck to the starboard fore-chains, joining the men at the sheet anchor.
There was no immediate need for this last anchor they had, but they could leave nothing to chance. Kydd drew near and was nearly knocked off his feet by the green water sluicing aft. A cable to the sheet anchor had already been bent and seized in storm preparations, but anchoring in coral had not been foreseen.
'Keckling — get goin', Kydd,' the boatswain yelled. A coil of three-inch line was thrown at him; it thumped heavily into his chest. The seas roared against the side, burying the channel, the broad base of the shrouds fitted to the outside of the ship. Kydd caught his breath: he knew they were telling him to climb over the bulwarks and down on to that channel, to work at the stowed black mass of the sheet anchor and its cable.
He looked back resentfully at the row of men, who looked gravely back at him. They were older and more experienced but would be able to remain safely inboard. Then he understood: he had been chosen for this job because he was a better seaman than they.
The realisation warmed him, proofed him against the elements and, with-a jaunty wave, he swung over the bulwarks and dropped to the channel. It had crossed his mind to bend on a life-line around his waist, but if he was swept away then the sudden jerk at the end of the line might cut him in half. In any case the light line would get in the way.
The sea-glistening sides of the ship dipped slowly, and Kydd hung on grimly to the tarry shrouds. The expected seas came, first his feet, thighs, and then above his waist. A rushing torrent bullying and jostling, tearing at his hold on life. It seethed around the lower rigging and fittings with a deep hissing and roaring - then began to recede.
Kydd snatched a glance at the situation. His task was to apply keckling to the last yards of the cable as it came from the sheet anchor, wrapping his lighter line, and stout strips of canvas handed down to him, tightly about the strands of the cable. It was their only chance, the keckling their sole means to protect this last anchor from the deadly sharp coral and keep the ship from driving ashore.
The sheet anchor was lashed outside the shrouds, outside the channel, and Kydd was exposed to the seas. Edging around the aftermost shroud he stood on the iron curve of the flukes of the big anchor, then swung to the channel and shuffled along.
