Their task, their arduous, complex task: very severe and often highly-skilled labour day and night with peaks of intensity at full tide as extreme as anything Jack had known in his long experience.
All day they lightened ship: perpetually rousing out stores and carrying them to the shore in boatloads; lowering all uppermasts and spars over the side, there to be formed into rafts; starting the ship's water, though none had yet been found on the island (an island inhabited only by ring-tailed apes), and pumping it away by the ton together with the sea-water that still came in almost as fast as they could fling it out. And as they worked they saw the ebb, the most surprisingly rapid ebb, bare the reef on either hand, so that there was white water all around: moderate white water, since there was no considerable sea and the breeze was neither here nor there: but as the ebb proceeded so the ship took more and more of her own unsupported weight, and her timbers groaned again. And now from the boats they could see her plain, standing there unnaturally high, showing her copper, supported by three dark weed-grown heads of rock, two under her quarters and one beneath her keel about as far forward as her belfry, where that last surge had set her down, almost upright, before she could grind her way over the rest of the reef and into deep water.
So upright and so solid was she at low water that once Jack had placed some shores by way of precaution all hands had their dinner aboard, by watches, and with extra allowance to recruit them for the heavy work past and to come. The pumping went on all the time of course, and to its steady churning the carpenter and his crew, with lanterns and with all the hatchways wide open for the help of what reflected sun might get down, crept about the encumbered hold and orlop dealing with what damage they could reach and making out the nature of the rest, the Captain being with them most of the time. Meanwhile the bosun and his mates, together with the most experienced forecastle hands and tierers, roused out the best cable the Diane possessed, the most nearly new and unfrayed, a seventeen-inch cable that they turned end for end - no small undertaking in that confined space, since it weighed three and a half tons - and bent it to the best bower anchor by the wholly unworn end that had always been abaft the bitts: the bitter end. There was thought to be good luck attached to the bitter end, as well as greater strength.
The best bower, backed with the smaller stream anchor, they lowered carefully down into the launch, and at last the boat, moving over the longed-for grateful rising tide, dropped the two into what Fielding and the master, after prolonged sounding in the skiff, considered the best and cleanest holding ground in a most indifferent and rock-strewn anchorage.
All this while the other boats had been plying to and fro, shifting great quantities of stores, lightening the ship as fast as ever they could. And much of the time Stephen and Macmillan had been sitting not in their usual action- station far below where they would now have been a great hindrance, but in the after cabin. This was a time of great hurry and even greater effort and they had already treated many falls, sprains and twists and even one most unfortunate hernia - a good man who had undone himself in his zeal. Now their patient was Mr Blyth. A hen-coop flung from the waist had struck him down in the small cutter and he was bleeding profusely from a scalp-wound: they sewed him up, staunched the flow, and asked him how the ship was doing.
'I hope, oh how I do hope, she will be afloat in half an hour,' he said. 'It is very near high-water; the leak is not much worse, though she sat right down; and the Captain believes he may pluck her off. If she leaks extremely when she is in deep water,
then he means to beach and careen her; she will certainly last as far as the island, and there is a good berth there. The breeze is on the land and we shall drop our courses while the boats tow as well. But I do not believe it will come to that: he thinks she will swim. The lower futtocks have suffered, in course; but he thinks she will swim, with the pumps going and maybe a sail fothered over the bottom, until we reach Batavia. But the first thing to do is to pluck her off. Hark!'
'All boats,' came the powerful cry. 'All boats repair aboard.' Their hands came tearing up the side, for they too had been watching the tide rise to its height with infinite attention: a fine height - perhaps not quite so fine a height as could have been hoped for, but at least the barky's copper was well out of sight: she sat there like a Christian ship, and if there had been anything of a sea running she would almost certainly be lifting and bumping. And all the seamen knew that this was their best chance, with a tide not much lower than the last and the ship lighter by God knows how many tons, most of them manhandled over the side.
'Ship the capstan-bars,' said Jack. 'And Mr Crown, pray swift them long.' Then after a pause while the swifting-line joined the outward ends of the bars, leaving a loop at each extremity for extra hands to clap onto, 'Carry on, Mr Fielding.'
More orders, but no running of feet, for the men were already there, and the fife shrilled out loud and clear, cutting high above the tramping feet. Tramping fast as they ran in the first few turns, then slower, slower, much slower.
'I think we may go on deck,' said Stephen. 'We might find a place at the bars. We must go by the waist, or we shall be trodden down and destroyed.'
They skirted the lower capstan, crowded with almost motionless men straining against the bars: half a step and a single click of the pawl at the cost of huge grunting exertion. They ran up to the quarterdeck, to the upper part of the same capstan, equally crowded, equally unmoving, or nearly so. The fife screamed, the little fifer standing on it; the capstanhead blazed in the sun. The men heaved, pale with extreme effort, breathing in quick gasps, their expressions entirely inward and concentrated. 'Heave and rally, heave and she moves,' came Jack's almost unrecognizable voice in the middle of the press. From the starboard hawsehole right forward the cable could be seen squirting water, stretched to half its natural width or less, rigid, almost straight from bow to sea.
'Rally, oh rally,' he called again. Stephen and Macmillan each found a handhold on one of the swifter-ends - there was no room at the bars - and heaved with all their might: thrust on and on and on with no gain.
'Oh sir,' cried the carpenter, running aft, 'the hawse-pieces will never bear it.'
'Vast heaving,' said Jack, after a moment, and he straightened: it was a little while before some of the others did the same, so set were they.
'Surge the messenger,' he said, and the strain came off. He walked stiffly to the rail, then along the gangway to the forecastle and the bows, considering the tide, the ship, the reef, all with the extremity of concentration.
'There is only one thing for it,' he cried. 'Pass the word for Mr White. Mr White: I am sorry, the guns must go overboard. All but the carronades.'
The gunner, pale from his labour, went paler still. 'Aye aye, sir,' he said, however, and he called his mates and quartergunners. This was the cruellest blow of all, a deliberate selfcastration: there was not a man who did not feel it when the cherished guns went out through their ports, splash after deeply-shocking splash, the inversion of all natural order.
'The chasers, sir?'
