Limekiller!

Limekiller was certainly not afraid of any Flying Dutchman or Jack O’Lantern, no. But he had his own fears. He did not advertise them, but he knew what he had. Limekiller was an acrophobe. He was, in common speech, afraid of heights. He would not, he could not, have climbed to the top of his own mast to save himself from being hanged from it. So he could, now, well understand how men who were afraid of neither gunfire nor hurricane could all but (in old John Aubrey’s blunt phrase) beshit their breeches at the thought of facing this spectre of the sea.

“Me go near he?" the last one asked had said. - And no need, anymore, to say how „he’ was. “ Whattt? ME go near HE? No, mon, no. No bloody fear me go near he. What me fear, mon, me bloody fear he go near me!"

Limekiller understood.

And, also, he understood that, somehow, somehow, he was going to have to undertake the task of bringing his cargo down and, somehow, getting it ashore, all by his lone.

All that he knew about Curasow Cove, really, was that the curasow was a large bird which roosted in trees and was regarded as good hunting. The shore showed on the map as dry, and not “drowned,” land; and the water was free from coral-heads. The map did not show how deep the Cove was; of course, the deeper it was near shore, the easier his task would be. The map was fairly new, it was far from perfect, but it was the only completely new map of the colony and its waters that there was. Witness that it was new: no seemingly solid mass was shown off the north-east shore and labelled Anne of Denmark Island. What showed there instead was the mass of shoals and shallows and mangrove “bluffs” (i.e. bogs) and here and there an islet: which was what really was there: as Limekiller well knew, having been there himself. But every other map, without one single exception which he knew of, showed the same fictitious and seemingly-solid Anne of Denmark Island. Perhaps there had really at one time been such an island of that size and shape, it might have been broken up. half-drowned. eaten away… by hurricanes. This had happened to more than one cove.

As to when the original map, or chart, from which all the others (except this newest one) had copied… or been copied from copies of copies. as to when that one had been made, or made by whom: Limekiller had no idea. Captain Cook, maybe.

He had a good enough wind to take him out. Port Caroline was soon enough merely a white blur with red spots marking its roofs. He passed Bamboo Creek and The Nose and Warree Bight; past Warree Bight he had to put in closer to shore to avoid coral-heads. The beach was the highway down around here, with paths — not visible from his distance — leading back to the numerous “plantations” in the bush. Anyone expecting anything resembling anything from Gone with the Wind — white columns and all that — in the way of a plantation, well. Hereabouts the word retained its simple and original meaning: it was a place where things were planted.

In other words, a farm.

Almost without exception the farms were small, from an acre to three. None of them would have ever been plowed. It was the hut and hoe culture, as it had obtained among the American Indians, as it had obtained among the West Africans. Moving down the coast by wind and current, Limekiller could see the ever-present procession along the beach: mostly women in bright dresses, walking stately and proud: a stance which may have had something to do with social personality, but which certainly had much to do with their carrying almost everything balanced upon their heads. Babies, no: babies were carried on the hip. Everything else went by head: bundles of yams, sticks of firewood, a basket of fruit — even an axe.

All this was as expected, what was not as expected was the incoming mist. Mists were not unknown but mists were not common. The last one Jack had seen had been, exactly, on the Night before Christmas. It was not night now and it was nowhere near Christmas. Be all of which as it may, love laughs at locksmiths and the weather often laughs at the weatherman, and there was a mist on the waters and coming towards him from the south; that is, just then, against both the wind and the current — of course, there could be a different wind and current down there. however far awav “down there” was… in which case he wanted to know about it. Being a one-man crew, he had no log to toss astern for reckoning his speed, he did that by guess and by God.