The Black Tide

The air was heavy and very still, only occasional cat’s-paws ruffling the oily calm that stretched away on all sides until lost in the white glare of the heat haze. A sudden whisper of spray to starb’d and the whole surface of the sea took off, a thousand little skittering slivers of silver breaking the surface, and behind the shoal a dozen king mackerel arched their leaping bodies in pursuit, scattering prisms of rainbow colours in the splash of a myriad droplets. Again and again they leaped, the shoals skittering ahead of them in a panic of sparkling silver; then suddenly it was over, the oily surface of the sea undisturbed again, so undisturbed that the voracious demonstration of the hard piscatorial world below might never have been.

It was very humid, unseasonally so, since it was still the period of the north-east monsoon, and now that we were into the Arabian Sea we should have had the benefit of at least a breeze from that direction. The current, which was anticlockwise for another month, would have a westerly set and would thus be against

us. I spent over an hour and all my energy unfurling and setting the heavy lateen sail. To do this I had to shin up the spar with a butcher’s knife from the store and cut the rope tie-ers. The rest was relatively simple, just a matter of hard work, using the block and tackle already attached to the spar and another that acted as a sheet for the sail. With so little wind it hung over me in folds, flapping to the slow motion of the ship. But it did provide some shade on deck and in an instant I was wedged into the scuppers fast asleep.

I woke to the sound of water rushing past, opening my eyes to see the great curved sail bellied out and full of wind. Even as I watched, it began to shiver. I leaped to my feet, wide awake and diving up the steps to the tiller, hauling it over just in time to avoid being taken aback. The wind was north-west about force 3, still in the shamal quarter, so that I could only just lay my course. The coast was clearly visible now. The haze had gone, the day bright and clear, the sea sparkling, and the sun was almost overhead. I glanced at my watch. It was 13.05. I couldn’t believe it. I had been asleep for something like four hours.

We were making, I suppose, about three knots and as the afternoon wore on the Iranian coast vanished from my sight. And since yisibility was still good I thought it probable I was opposite Gwadar Bay which is on the frontier between Pakistan and Iran. It is a deep bay with salt flats and the bed of a river coming in from Baluchistan. Visualizing the chart I had so often had spread out before me on the chart table, I reckoned we were less than forty miles from Gwadar.

No shipping now to point the way, the sea empty to the horizon, except once when a sperm whale blew about half a mile away and shortly afterwards shot vertically out of the water like some huge submarine missile, leaping so high I could just see the flukes of its tail before it toppled with a gigantic splash back into the sea. At sunset I thought I could make out a line of cliffs low on the port bow. They were of a brilliant whiteness, wind-carved into fantastic towers and minarets so that it was like a mirage-distorted view of some incredible crystal city. Was that the Makran coast of Baluchistan?

Night came and I was still at the helm, the wind backing and getting stronger, the dhow thundering along at six knots or more. Suddenly it was dark. I had to start thinking then, about what I was going to do, how I was going to make it from dhow to shore. I had only a rough idea how far I had come, but at this rate, with the wind still backing and freshening, and the dhow empty of cargo, it looked as though I could be off Gwadar about one or two in the morning — presuming, of course, that the disappearance of the coast in the late afternoon really had been the bay and river flats that marked the frontier. I wondered how far off I would be able to see Gwadar at night. In daylight it was visible for miles, a great 500-ft high mass of hard rock sticking up out of the sea like an island. It was, in fact, a peninsula, shaped like a hammer-headed shark with its nose pointing south, the body of it a narrow sandspit with the port of Gwadar facing both ways, east and west, so that there

was safe anchorage in either monsoon — always provided a vessel could weather the rock and cliffs of the peninsula’s broad head.

My years at sea told me that the prudent thing to do would be to lower the great lateen sail and let the dhow drift through the night, hoisting again at dawn when I could see where I was. But what if the wind went on increasing? What if I couldn’t hoist the bloody thing? Seeing it there, bellied against the stars, I knew it needed several men on the tackle to be sure of taming the power of that sail. And I was tired. God! I was tired.