Two Tides

The first time I went to sea was as a child, when the replica of the Endeavour came to circumnavigate New Zealand and retrace Cook’s voyage from the north. I sailed out to meet the great square-bellied ship in a restored yacht belonging to a friend of my father’s. Lionel was a giant wrathful man who cursed at his children and ridiculed his wife, but from time to time he would lay his hands upon his boat with such a private, secret tenderness it was as if he believed himself to be alone on board.

Lionel kept the Indigo like a thoroughbred mare. A poor knot would turn him purple with fury. He screamed across the water at any vessel that flouted maritime law, and blacklisted any sailor who jammed the radio channels with ordinary talk. He would flare with a scarlet contempt if you said rear instead of aft or back instead of stern. He let nobody in the steering house when the Indigo was at sea, and he called for complete silence whenever he drove her glossy hips in or out of her marina berth, in case his concentration broke. We tucked ourselves against the mast on the aft cabin between his children and his wife and we tried to touch nothing, but he called us lubbers anyway. There was a brass plaque above the freshwater pump that read THE CAPTAIN’S WORD IS LAW.

Craig was generous with the Autumn Mist. He showed me every part of her. He watched while I fumbled with the tiller or dipped my hand down into the streaky black damp of the bilges or traced the fuel line to understand why the ignition wouldn’t catch. He let me make the radio calls to the coastguard watch. He taught me to rope off the mooring line around the forward block and showed me how to cross the rope neatly over the top of the block so the knot could unravel with a single blow of an axe.

He said, ‘Imagine if the boom clocked my temple and I went out cold. You have to know everything.’

When the Endeavour docked at Lyttelton we went aboard and marvelled at the five-foot ceilings and the swarming hammocks clustered tight and the giddy drop of the overboard latrines. They served limes. We touched the flayed catgut fingers of the cat-o’-nine-tails and learned how a single lash could shred a man. The crew were dressed in period costumes, rough linen for the seamen and covered buttons for the captain’s men. Lionel hung back with his hands in his pockets and looked up the length of her mast. He said, ‘Square-bottomed, now, and ship-rigged. Nothing much to look at. But what a life.’

The kauri shelves above the swabs in the Autumn Mist’s saloon were stuffed with faded thriller novels and food for the week ahead. In the morning before we left Mana I went below to stow my duffel bag in the V-shaped cabin underneath the bow and I saw that Craig had stuffed a box of Cadbury’s chocolates into the stow hole beside the anchor chain. The box had been stowed so roughly: it was dented and a corner of the cellophane was pierced.