A sou’wester was blowing that day, a freshening breeze coming up Juan de Fuca from who knows where. Perhaps as far as Hawaii, Martin Cuthbert imagined, remembering his first ever sighting of that distant land.
“Cuthbert!” Captain Kennedy hollered from the poop deck. “Stop your lollygagging and get yourself over here.”
“Yes, sir,” he responded sharply, hurrying up the steps to where the captain stood next to the ship’s wheel.
“We need a lookout. Here,” he handed Martin his glass. “Take this up top. Keep an eye out for hazards. No daydreaming, mind.”
Martin froze. The captain’s glass was not an instrument he was often permitted to even touch, let alone take possession of, and never in his young career as a mariner had he been ordered up into the crow’s nest. He knew there was no need for anyone to be up there and that Captain Kennedy was, in his stern way, commending him with a notch of promotion.
“Well? What are you waiting for?”
Martin shoved the captain’s glass under his belt and turned to go.
“Drop that, boy, and I’ll have you keel hauled,” Captain Kennedy shouted after him, then winked when Martin glanced back over his shoulder to acknowledge the warning.
“Oooh! Up top, eh?” Seaman Foster teased as Martin hurried past. “Now aren’t you a real ship’s monkey? Careful you don’t fall off your perch.”
The jest was made in good humour, Foster looking up from a sail he was mending, a hint of smile turning up the corners of his parched lips. Martin nodded and returned the smile. His was a strange situation; he was accepted as part of the crew, liked for the most part by his shipmates, but kept somewhat at a distance because of his allegiance to Captain Kennedy.
Life at sea was taking some getting used to. There was never a moment, not even in your dreams, when you didn’t feel the tension of close quarters and strict discipline. The captain and his officers gave the orders; the men obeyed and jostled amongst each other for position in the ranks. But it wasn’t just the words issuing from Captain Kennedy’s mouth that kept them on high alert; it was a sort of energy that penetrated flesh and bone, making them ever-ready to be jerked into action. “As far as you’re concerned, boy,” Foster once told him, “God dwells in the captain’s cabin, and hell is below, in the brig.”
He liked Foster and the others. On deck, they bustled with purpose, a rolling ship not being a place where a man can saunter as if he was out for a Sunday stroll. Business like, they took their bearings and made straight for you when there was something needed saying or doing. Below or above decks, they were quick to put you in your place and jealous of their own status. But they weren’t bad men, most of them, just rough and stubborn, used to battling the sea, each other, weevils, and the ceaseless commandments of their superiors. Camaraderie was riven by the incessant scrabble to survive.
Taking to the rigging, Martin felt himself rising above all that, if only for a brief, glorious interlude. The ship’s deck and its occupants became smaller and smaller with each rung he climbed up the mast. He was aware of Captain Kennedy, standing on the deck, watching his scurried progress. Glancing down, Martin thought he saw a mote of concern his protector’s pale grey eye, but the captain suddenly turned and walked briskly away, as if distracted by something urgent that needed doing.
Then Martin was alone, the swabs below going about their business, unconcerned and uninterested.
Up here, the breeze becomes… Martin couldn’t think of a word to describe the streaming of air that ruffled his shirt, set his pant legs to flapping, tussled his sandy-blond hair, stroking his scalp with elegant fingers that made him shiver. It was a zephyr that passed through him, its corpuscles transparent even to his skin. Then he suddenly realized it was he who had become a spectral being, a consciousness without substance, with no boundaries, a creature light could pass through without impediment.
And yet, he felt the brass of the captain’s glass prodding his ribs, reminding him that not all the world’s elements could escape the pull of gravity, or the solidity of the earth, or the oak boards of a rolling deck.
From the crow’s nest, Martin could see beyond the horizons of his mates. Not even the captain and his officers could see as far, and he revelled in that future knowledge. Time, for him, had pushed through the limits of their heres and nows—the very fact that those words could have a plural sense seeming odd to Martin. Pleasingly so, but disturbing none-the-less.
The Reindeer tacked to port, turning away from Tricomali Channel onto a lay that would take her past the rocky tip of Bare Point. Martin hung on as she hove to her new course, heard the shouts of the men as they hauled rope and reset the sails. He knew they would be grumbling about the ‘stupidity’ of not going in under steam, complaining that the captain was showing off for his friend Askew and Askew’s daughters. And—in truth—Captain Kennedy did have a penchant for showmanship. Nothing would suit him better than to sail into Horseshoe Bay with sails billowing and pennants fluttering.
“Ships are magical islands, propelled by a clean ocean breeze,” Martin had once heard Captain Kennedy declaim. “They’re plodding barges, making noise, spewing smoke, and sullying their atmosphere when they chuff through the ocean under steam.” And yet, the captain was an ardent admirer of ‘piston power’, as he put it. “There’s nothing like a steaming gunboat to instill law and order when the Queen’s commandments are neither heard nor obeyed.”
As they gained an angle of approach into Horseshoe Bay, Martin scanned the shoreline to the west. There were no signs of human habitation there, at least none he could detect through the captain’s scope. The rocky bluffs and beaches were hemmed in by an impenetrable phalanx of Douglas fir, arbutus, and cedars. Except he could just see far enough down the bay to make out Askew’s sawmill and the isolated scatter of houses and docks that made up the first, tenuous evidence of European settlement in the region.
“Anything to report, Boy?” the captain hollered from the deck.
“No sir.”
“Keep a sharp eye out.”
“Yes, sir.”
Certain there was nothing in their path, or coming out of Horseshoe Bay, Martin swung the glass east, looking across Stuart Channel toward the Indian village on Lamalchi Bay. Dugout canoes were drawn up on the beach, and he could make out the cedar longhouses of the people who lived there. The crew would not have many admiring words to spare for the place or its inhabitants, but Martin had developed a secret admiration for a race of hunter-gatherers who lived off the land and—to his mind—in harmony with it. He wondered what might be learned from them.
“Pah!” his shipmates would have cut short such speculations, and Martin couldn’t repeat the words they used to describe the native peoples of this and other places they had been.
Exploring northward along the strand, his gaze grounded on a point about 800 yards from the village. Atop this rocky outcrop stood a young woman, wearing a cape, which he recognized as being of woven cedar bark, decorated with mountain-goat’s wool. In his travels Martin had learned a few things about the Hul’qumi’num peoples of the region. By her bearing he took this woman to be siem, of noble ancestry. She watched the ponderous progress of the Reindeer suspiciously, deep in thought.
Suddenly—and he knew he would never be able to properly describe the moment—she stared directly at him, right into him, as if Captain Kennedy’s telescope was an optical portal through which she could detect the electricity of his spirit.
You see nothing with this instrument of yours except what you have been told to see, she said. Except what your cursed devises allow.
Martin could not disagree.
And you? he asked.
I see things with the naked eye you can’t begin to imagine. Go places you cannot go. Even if you could step onto sacred ground, you would not know it, and the tracks left by your boots would be a desecration.
If she had spoken in anger or despair, Martin would have felt inclined to argue or apologize. But her voice was even, its tenor calm. What she pronounced was for her indisputable fact.
She laughed. You think you understand, but you can’t possibly know what you do not know. Not until you have unlearned what you do know. Look again at the sea around you and the forest.
Martin raised the glass and put it to his eye…
NEXT: The Captain’s Glass Part 3