Eddie worried that being confined to just the lifeboat, without the raft to spread out on, would feel impossibly cramped. He worried that Farmingdale would resist letting Pugh take charge of the sailing. He worried about how far they would have to deviate from their course to stay with the wind; whether they could make four knots using the sail; and he worried, above all, about rations: whether they should continue drinking three six-ounce allotments of water each day or cut one out; whether Sparks’s fishing would ever yield a bite; whether they might somehow navigate toward an island, as the captain and mate of the SS Travessa had done in 1923. Those gentlemen had sailed two lifeboats seventeen hundred miles across the Indian Ocean, but they’d had instruments and charts. Eddie had only a compass.
What he hadn’t considered, as he sat awake the night before they were to sail, craving a cigarette—just one, or better yet, fifty—was that the wind would die out.
On their fourth dawn, the air was hot and still, the sea like a sheen of sweat. The gunners wanted to row for the sake of doing something, and Farmingdale agreed, which forced Eddie to point out, as respectfully as he could, that rowing would waste energy and resources to no purpose. They were at least a thousand miles from the African coast—not a rowable distance. Other men joined Eddie’s plea, and Farmingdale relented with the show of waggish whimsy that Eddie was coming to recognize as his way of confronting defeat.
They let it be a lost day, a day to rest up before sailing the next. Men not on watch avoided the sun by lying under the spray curtain in the lifeboat, or under the boat cover, which they spread out like a tarp on the raft. At night they set off the last of their flares and maintained their watches. The cold kept waking Eddie. He thought he felt a wind, a spray of surf, but it turned out he was dreaming.
The next day was the same, and the next. The only bearable hours were in the early morning, when the sun sucked the dew from their boat and fell deliciously on their chilled bodies; and the evening, when a first intimation of cool salved their scorched limbs like the touch of a nurse, before cold set in and made them cling to each other, shivering under the lifeboat’s six blankets. Eddie distributed rations during these lulls, and all enjoyed a fleeting contentment. Clearly, they had drifted into the equatorial, a zone where the trade winds could not be relied upon to move a boat. These calm spells never lasted long, Pugh assured them, a day or two, rarely more. But each windless day felt like ten. Their discouragement was compounded by occasional zephyrs for which they raised the sail, full of hope, only to have the wind die twenty minutes later. They were consuming rations they would need if they were ever to have a chance of making land. Their best hope was to be picked up by another ship—pinned, as they were, like a specimen to silk. They saw three more ships at a distance. Each time, they screamed and hollered and jumped, then collapsed and lay as if dead. There were no more planes; they were too far from land. The early rescue planes would have come from a ship.
On the third windless day—the sixth since the Elizabeth Seaman went down—they agreed to cut their rations by a third. Eddie’s dungarees were already slipping over his hips. He’d tightened his belt three notches. They talked about food in the florid detail with which protectory boys had talked about sex, and for the same reason: talk was all they had.
Without the midday ration to look forward to, they toppled into lassitude. Ostergaard, an AB, lay asleep in the sun for hours, pushing away whatever cover they tried to force upon him. By evening he was feverish from sunstroke. Roger had taken first aid, and tended to the AB with wet bandages and calamine lotion from the boat’s first aid kit. The AB begged for water so piteously that Roger and Eddie each forfeited half the evening ration to double his. The next morning, Ostergaard had vanished from the lifeboat. Eddie, who’d slept on the raft along with several others, found it difficult to believe that none of the thirteen men aboard the boat had seen or heard the AB go over. He eyed them with suspicion—especially Farmingdale. While he distributed the morning rations, Eddie felt men scrutinizing him, as if they suspected him of playing favorites or taking more than his share. Morale was crucial to lifeboat survival, Eddie knew, and they were lacking the surest morale boosters: booze and cigarettes. But Farmingdale, their leader, was largely to blame. Rather than keep the peace, he was one of the most captious, especially toward the bosun. That same morning, he blocked Eddie from giving the bosun his portion of condensed milk.
“No talkee, no eatee,” Farmingdale decreed, looking around for participants in the hazing. “We’ll see how long he stays mum.”
When Eddie tried again to hand the bosun his share, Farmingdale seized his wrist. “You’re soft, Third. He was never soft with you.”
“We need every man strong,” Eddie said.
“He doesn’t move a muscle. Doesn’t matter if he’s strong or weak. Doesn’t matter if he’s here at all.”
He was offering Eddie a role in a provocation that would satisfy the collective need of a scapegoat. Not a man aboard the Elizabeth Seaman had failed to see the bosun humiliate Eddie. Now the bosun was a broken man, the last vestige of his pride his apparent indifference to their present conversation. Eddie had always wanted to best the bosun, but the prospect of doing so now, in allegiance with Farmingdale, repelled him.
“Leave him alone, Second,” he said severely, and handed the bosun his milk.
Farmingdale looked from Eddie to the bosun and back again. The whimsical smile played at his lips. “I see how it is,” he said.