The Black Tide

The wind was backing into the north and for a time we were busy handling the spinnaker and setting a working genoa. It was blowing force 3 or 4 by the time we got everything stowed and by then we were close off the northern end of the island with no sign of any other vessel. There was still a chance that the tanker was hidden from us by the southern part of the island, but our hopes faded as we rounded Punto do Risco and began to run down the western side. There were plenty of shearwaters, which is the main reason the Portuguese government declared the island a nature reserve, but otherwise the place looked totally lifeless. There were some shacks by the landing place on the south-western side and a roped pathway climbed steeply to the lighthouse, but apart from that, the only sign of any human presence was the mass of Communist slogans painted on the rocks. This ugly display of giant graffiti had presumably been put there by fishermen who had been ardent supporters of the revolution.

Off the landing place we turned back on to our original course, heading for Selvagem Pequena ten

miles away. This is quite a different sort of island, being little more than an above-water reef, but with the wind increasing we could soon make out the white of waves breaking on the horizon. By sunset the remains of the wrecked tanker were visible and we could see right across the island to where waves were breaking on the smaller reef island of Fora a mile or so to the west. From Fora a chain of above-water rocks six to twelve feet high extended several miles to the north. This was the Restinga do Ilheu de Fora, but there was no tanker waiting there, and with visibility now vastly improved, we could see there wasn’t even a fishing vessel anywhere within a radius of a dozen miles of us. We were the only vessel afloat in the neighbourhood of the Selvagen Archipelago.

Once this had sunk in we felt suddenly very lonely. The islands had an atmosphere of their own. If there was any place at sea that could be described as unfriendly I felt this was it and I found myself remembering that word spooky. It was a strange word to use about a group of islands, but now that I was among them I knew it described their atmosphere exactly. They were spooky and I wondered how long Saltley would be willing to hang around them waiting for a tanker that might never turn up.

I voiced my misgivings that evening, not in front of the others, but to Saltley alone. We had had an excellent meal hove-to on the starb’d tack four miles to the east of Selvagem Pequena, the light on the main island just visible over the bows. I took him up on deck on some pretext or other and told him bluntly

that I’d no real confidence in the conclusion we had reached. ‘I’m not even sure Choffel used the word salvage. It sounded like it, that’s all. If you remember, I made that quite clear.’

He nodded. ‘Understood. But Mike and I didn’t come to the same conclusion solely on the basis of what you had told me. We worked it out for ourselves. Unless they were going to operate independently, they’d want to rendezvous as near the target as possible.’

‘It doesn’t have to be an island,’ I said. ‘There’s all the mainland coast, or better still a fixed position out at sea.’

He shook his head. ‘The mainland would be too risky, but we did give a lot of thought to a sight-fixed rendezvous. It’s what you or I would choose. But we’re navigators. Terrorists tend to be urban creatures. They wouldn’t trust a rendezvous that was arrived at by using a sextant and tables stuffed with figures. They’d want a fixed point they could see.’ We were in the bows then and he had his hands in his pockets, balancing himself easily to the plunging movement of the ship. ‘You picked on the Selvagens, so did we, and the more we thought about it, the more ideal they appeared. And now I’ve seen them—’ He turned his head to port, staring westward to where the sound of the seas pounding Selvagem Pequena came to us as a continuous deep murmur. ‘No ship’s captain wants to tangle with that lot. They give this group a wide berth, and the silly idiot who ran his vessel on to the rocks there only goes to make the point that it’s a bloody

dangerous place.’ He turned then, walking slowly back towards the empty cockpit lit by the faint glow of the lights below. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘Our friend will turn up. I’m sure of it.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But probably not tomorrow or the next day or the next — just how long are you prepared to hang around here?’

‘For three weeks if necessary,’ he said. And when I asked him if we’d got enough food on board, he answered curtly, ‘If we have to stay that long, it’s water, not food, will be the problem.’

I thought it might be the humans, too, for the prospect of hanging around these godforsaken islands for three weeks appalled me. But, as his words indicated, we were committed now and no point in leaving until we were absolutely sure this wasn’t the meeting place.