PORTENTOSUM MARE.
Meanwhile a thickening mist had descended on the drifting wretches. They
were ignorant of their whereabouts, they could scarcely see a cable’s
length around. Despite a furious storm of hail which forced them to bend
down their heads, the women had obstinately refused to go below again.
No one, however hopeless, but wishes, if shipwreck be inevitable, to
meet it in the open air. When so near death, a ceiling above one’s head
seems like the first outline of a coffin.
They were now in a short and chopping sea. A turgid sea indicates its
constraint. Even in a fog the entrance into a strait may be known by the
boiling-like appearance of the waves. And thus it was, for they were
unconsciously coasting Aurigny. Between the west of Ortach and the
Caskets and the east of Aurigny the sea is hemmed in and cramped, and
the uneasy position determines locally the condition of storms. The sea
suffers like others, and when it suffers it is irritable. That channel
is a thing to fear.
The _Matutina_ was in it.
Imagine under the sea a tortoise shell as big as Hyde Park or the Champs
Elysées, of which every striature is a shallow, and every embossment a
reef. Such is the western approach of Aurigny. The sea covers and
conceals this ship-wrecking apparatus. On this conglomeration of
submarine breakers the cloven waves leap and foam--in calm weather, a
chopping sea; in storms, a chaos.
The shipwrecked men observed this new complication without endeavouring
to explain it to themselves. Suddenly they understood it. A pale vista
broadened in the zenith; a wan tinge overspread the sea; the livid light
revealed on the port side a long shoal stretching eastward, towards
which the power of the rushing wind was driving the vessel. The shoal
was Aurigny.
What was that shoal? They shuddered. They would have shuddered even more
had a voice answered them--Aurigny.
No isle so well defended against man’s approach as Aurigny. Below and
above water it is protected by a savage guard, of which Ortach is the
outpost. To the west, Burhou, Sauteriaux, Anfroque, Niangle, Fond du
Croc, Les Jumelles, La Grosse, La Clanque, Les Eguillons, Le Vrac, La
Fosse-Malière; to the east, Sauquet, Hommeau Floreau, La Brinebetais, La
Queslingue, Croquelihou, La Fourche, Le Saut, Noire Pute, Coupie, Orbue.
These are hydra-monsters of the species reef.
One of these reefs is called Le But, the goal, as if to imply that every
voyage ends there.
This obstruction of rocks, simplified by night and sea, appeared to the
shipwrecked men in the shape of a single dark band, a sort of black blot
on the horizon.
Shipwreck is the ideal of helplessness; to be near land, and unable to
reach it; to float, yet not to be able to do so in any desired
direction; to rest the foot on what seems firm and is fragile; to be
full of life, when o’ershadowed by death; to be the prisoner of space;
to be walled in between sky and ocean; to have the infinite overhead
like a dungeon; to be encompassed by the eluding elements of wind and
waves; and to be seized, bound, paralyzed--such a load of misfortune
stupefies and crushes us. We imagine that in it we catch a glimpse of
the sneer of the opponent who is beyond our reach. That which holds you
fast is that which releases the birds and sets the fishes free. It
appears nothing, and is everything. We are dependent on the air which is
ruffled by our mouths; we are dependent on the water which we catch in
the hollow of our hands. Draw a glassful from the storm, and it is but a
cup of bitterness--a mouthful is nausea, a waveful is extermination. The
grain of sand in the desert, the foam-flake on the sea, are fearful
symptoms. Omnipotence takes no care to hide its atom, it changes
weakness into strength, fills naught with all; and it is with the
infinitely little that the infinitely great crushes you. It is with its
drops the ocean dissolves you. You feel you are a plaything.
A plaything--ghastly epithet!
The _Matutina_ was a little above Aurigny, which was not an unfavourable
position; but she was drifting towards its northern point, which was
fatal. As a bent bow discharges its arrow, the nor’-wester was shooting
the vessel towards the northern cape. Off that point, a little beyond
the harbour of Corbelets, is that which the seamen of the Norman
archipelago call a “_singe_.”
The “_singe_,” or race, is a furious kind of current. A wreath of
funnels in the shallows produces in the waves a wreath of whirlpools.
You escape one to fall into another. A ship caught hold of by the race,
winds round and round until some sharp rock cleaves her hull; then the
shattered vessel stops, her stern rises from the waves, the stem
completes the revolution in the abyss, the stern sinks in, and all is
sucked down. A circle of foam broadens and floats, and nothing more is
seen on the surface of the waves but a few bubbles here and there rising
from the smothered breathings below.
The three most dangerous races in the whole Channel are one close to the
well-known Girdler Sands, one at Jersey between the Pignonnet and the
Point of Noirmont, and the race of Aurigny.
Had a local pilot been on board the _Matutina_, he could have warned
them of their fresh peril. In place of a pilot, they had their instinct.
In situations of extreme danger men are endowed with second sight. High
contortions of foam were flying along the coast in the frenzied raid of
the wind. It was the spitting of the race. Many a bark has been swamped
in that snare. Without knowing what awaited them, they approached the
spot with horror.
How to double that cape? There were no means of doing it.
Just as they had seen, first the Caskets, then Ortach, rise before them,
they now saw the point of Aurigny, all of steep rock. It was like a
number of giants, rising up one after another--a series of frightful
duels.
Charybdis and Scylla are but two; the Caskets, Ortach, and Aurigny are
three.
The phenomenon of the horizon being invaded by the rocks was thus
repeated with the grand monotony of the abyss. The battles of the ocean
have the same sublime tautology as the combats of Homer.
Each wave, as they neared it, added twenty cubits to the cape, awfully
magnified by the mist; the fast decreasing distance seemed more
inevitable--they were touching the skirts of the race! The first fold
which seized them would drag them in--another wave surmounted, and all
would be over.
Suddenly the hooker was driven back, as by the blow of a Titan’s fist.
The wave reared up under the vessel and fell back, throwing the waif
back in its mane of foam. The _Matutina_, thus impelled, drifted away
from Aurigny.
She was again on the open sea.
Whence had come the succour? From the wind. The breath of the storm had
changed its direction.
The wave had played with them; now it was the wind’s turn. They had
saved themselves from the Caskets. Off Ortach it was the wave which had
been their friend. Now it was the wind. The wind had suddenly veered
from north to south. The sou’-wester had succeeded the nor’-wester.
The current is the wind in the waters; the wind is the current in the
air. These two forces had just counteracted each other, and it had been
the wind’s will to snatch its prey from the current.
The sudden fantasies of ocean are uncertain. They are, perhaps, an
embodiment of the perpetual, when at their mercy man must neither hope
nor despair. They do and they undo. The ocean amuses itself. Every shade
of wild, untamed ferocity is phased in the vastness of that cunning sea,
which Jean Bart used to call the “great brute.” To its claws and their
gashings succeed soft intervals of velvet paws. Sometimes the storm
hurries on a wreck, at others it works out the problem with care; it
might almost be said that it caresses it. The sea can afford to take its
time, as men in their agonies find out.
We must own that occasionally these lulls of the torture announce
deliverance. Such cases are rare. However this may be, men in extreme
peril are quick to believe in rescue; the slightest pause in the storm’s
threats is sufficient; they tell themselves that they are out of danger.
After believing themselves buried, they declare their resurrection; they
feverishly embrace what they do not yet possess; it is clear that the
bad luck has turned; they declare themselves satisfied; they are saved;
they cry quits with God. They should not be in so great a hurry to give
receipts to the Unknown.
The sou’-wester set in with a whirlwind. Shipwrecked men have never any
but rough helpers. The _Matutina_ was dragged rapidly out to sea by the
remnant of her rigging--like a dead woman trailed by the hair. It was
like the enfranchisement granted by Tiberius, at the price of violation.
The wind treated with brutality those whom it saved; it rendered service
with fury; it was help without pity.
The wreck was breaking up under the severity of its deliverers.
Hailstones, big and hard enough to charge a blunderbuss, smote the
vessel; at every rotation of the waves these hailstones rolled about the
deck like marbles. The hooker, whose deck was almost flush with the
water, was being beaten out of shape by the rolling masses of water and
its sheets of spray. On board it each man was for himself.
They clung on as best they could. As each sea swept over them, it was
with a sense of surprise they saw that all were still there. Several had
their faces torn by splinters.
Happily despair has stout hands. In terror a child’s hand has the grasp
of a giant. Agony makes a vice of a woman’s fingers. A girl in her
fright can almost bury her rose-coloured fingers in a piece of iron.
With hooked fingers they hung on somehow, as the waves dashed on and
passed off them; but every wave brought them the fear of being swept
away.
Suddenly they were relieved.