with the ratcheted spine of the island curving around her.
All hands set to their duties with a gleeful eagerness. Battle had disrupted the Morgansers orderly world and they were anxious to set it back to rights. They set to knotting and splicing, conversation requiring a raised voice in order to be heard over the woodpeckerish rap of caulker’s mallets, and Chips and his mates, looking harried but happy. Wood and watering parties were sent ashore, as well hunting parties for fresh meat. Foragers were sent to gather fodder for Hermione and anything else that might be had. In the West Indies, apparently all one need do was put their arm out and food was to hand. After years of eking out an existence on scraps, such a state of plenty seemed edenic to Cate, if only she could see it.
“Let’s give ’ er a new set o’ boots and tops,” declared Nathan, and then jabbed an elbow at Cate’s side. “It’s cleaning. You’ll love it.”
It would seem the sea was of the opinion that the bottom of a ship was solely intended for weed, barnacles, shells, and any number of other things to grow, including the insidious teredo. The shipworm was described to her as nothing more than a mass of sawblade-like jaws set on devouring the ship from under their feet. Able to make holes the size of Cate’s thumb, the creature itself nearly as long as her arm, with such voraciousness that surely, if she bore an ear, she could hear them munching away.
Anything wooden and afloat in seawater required careening, the regularity rising with the temperature of the water in which she plied. It meant literally running the ship on shore and divesting her of everything, including guns and rigging. It was an arduous and monumental undertaking, rendering the ship as vulnerable as a beached whale for the best part of a month.
A good amount of the Morganse’s bottom was copper-sheathed, denying worms and barnacles access. Another portion was studded with copper nails, a massive expense, but one her captain willingly paid to keep her bottom sweet. A space between copper and waterline still existed, and so boot-topping it was, as Nathan had so colorfully ordered. It was an intermediary measure: shifting guns, rigging and cargo to roll the ship on her side—a parliamentary heel—baring the space below her waterline to be breamed.
“Only a strake or two,” Cate was told. The strakes, the planking seams in the ship’s hull, could be seen if she stretched far out over the rail. While out there, in the clear water underneath the ship, she could catch glimpses of the green skirt of weed wisping with the currents.
She was pulled back by her skirt, like a parent jerking a child from a precipice. Turning around, she came directly into Nathan standing there.
“Going somewhere, are we?” he asked in a low voice, with a mixture of suspicion and dare, but daring her to do what?
Startled, she could only sputter. He spun away, apparently losing patience in waiting for her to find an answer.
The workload required all hands. No parties made the pull ashore for the mere sake of fun. And so, once again, Cate was tempted by the nearness of land. She gazed longingly at the long gleam of white sand between the azure and emerald of water and trees, so near and yet so far.
With no skill at carpentry, useless at knotting or splicing, lacking the strength to move guns or do heavy lifting, and Millbridge barring her from helping to stow the cabin, Cate was sat down to make besom brushes: bundling and tying twigs onto the ends of branches. Dipped in tar, the brushes were set afire to heat the graving, the hull’s coating. The heat and fumes poisoning the worms, the fires softened the graving enough for the irons and scrapers to remove the weed, barnacles, and other filth.
Cate moved about, careful not to trip over the tackles rigged for the network of lines over the side from which the men dangled. “One or two strakes” put the decks at an acute angle. In truth, the incline was not much more than when the ship was heeled over sailing, but her motionlessness—baring the cove’s minor swell—made it seem far more precarious. Not unlike when on that same tack, the topsmen scampered about in the rigging with the agility of monkeys and the industriousness of squirrels.
There was a good deal of convivial shouting and swearing. It must possess an