The Signals of Distress

November, 1836. A fierce gale beaches an American steamer off the English coast, injuring an African slave below decks and eventually disgorging 300 head of cattle and an innful of rowdy American sailors into a hardscrabble fishing village. The same storm drives into port a ship from London, bearing one Aymer Smith, the foolish well-intentioned prig who will deprive the town of its livelihood, free the American slave, and set into motion a whole series of unforeseeable, tragicomic events. Chosen by Publisher's Weekly as one of the best books of 1995, Signals of Distress, Jim Crace's fourth novel, once again displays the author's gift for inventing richly strange and believable worlds that uncannily foretell our own.

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Both men were en voyage and sleeping in their berths. Hard winds swept in and put their ships ashore.

The coastal steampacket, Ha'porth of Tar, on which Aymer Smith had his cabin, had lifted before the wind that night as if it meant to leave the water and find a firmer passage in the clouds. It arrived at dawn off Wherrytown, hastened by the storm on its short journey along the Channel. Ten in the morning was its scheduled time of arrival. Dawn was too early for the harbour lightermen to be at work. No one with any sense was up and out in such a wind. The night was wild and cold. A few miles down the coast from Wherrytown, the Cradle Rock, which normally would take the efforts of two strong men before it began to seesaw on its pivot stone, teetered, fluctuated, rocked from just the muscle of the gale.

The Tar shipped heavy seas as it came into harbour. There was no choice but for the five-man crew to still its paddles and shut its fires. Its passage in the wind was more temperamental - and less pontificating - than its progress under steam. The Tar was thrown against the harbour boom, and then against the channel buoys which marked the vessel's road. The wind pushed north. The tide tugged south. The Tar was only fifty yards from shore. Two sailors had to land a line by rowboat and secure the ship to capstans on the quay. And then they had to coax the Tar to dock. Aymer lay awake. He wasn't any use on deck. His shoulder hurt from where he'd fallen from his bunk. The muscles in his throat and stomach ached from vomiting. His breath was foul. His temper, too. He should have travelled overland with the company carts, he decided. He should have stayed at home instead of meddling abroad. Yet now his ship had found a haven, he sought a haven, too, in sleep, roped to the granite of the quay. His dream was kelp and some young country wife, ensnared and going down, with Aymer drowning in the girl, the girl sucked under by the weed, the weed pitchforked like hay on tines of sea and wind.

Otto, too, was not much use on deck. His berth, at orlop level on The Belle of Wilmington, was not secured. But Otto was. He was the ship's goat by night, its galley donkey during day. His ankle was held by a light chain, six feet in length and fastened to a timber rib. Shipmaster Comstock considered it a safety chain. Men far from home are boldened by the dark, he said. His African might settle scores at night, if he were left untethered. He might do damage to himself or to the Belle or to the crew or to the galley rations and the grog. He might cause mischief amongst the cargo of four hundred cattle which Shipmaster Comstock had taken aboard in Montreal and whose quarters he meant to fill on the return with emigrants to Canada, if he survived the storm. Wherrytown, the first port of call, could only be a few miles down the coast.

Without a porthole or any light, Otto experienced a partial storm. It wasn't wet for him. He couldn't see the waves slap up against the timber. Or feel the wind. His cabin was a tombola. What wasn't fixed - the stool, the water jug, the palliasse, the black man's boots, the bed - fell across the cabin. Otto fell as well. The chain cut into his ankle. But then he caught hold of the chain and pulled himself tight up against the timbers of the Belle so that, indeed, the chain did become a safety chain. He made a buffer from the palliasse so that the cabin's sliding furniture, the unsecured wooden pallet where he slept, would not cause too much bruising to his legs. The cattle - on the orlop level, too - were not so fortunate. They tumbled without benefit of chains. Some were concussed. Some broke their legs. They were too blind and winded to make much noise, except a tuneless carpentry as hoof and horn hit wood. Three cows at least had heart attacks. Another choked on its swallowed tongue. The bulkhead separating Otto from twenty of the cows could not withstand the buffeting of so much beef. It splintered. Then it fell apart. Two animals broke through the boards into Otto's berth and slid across the planking on their sides. They had no time to find their feet. The Belle made reckless angles in the gale. One cow fell against the palliasse and kicked to right itself. A hoof struck Otto on the ear. His head bounced off the wood. He fell six feet and swung like a carcass on a butcher's chain. The sea returned him to his berth, then dropped him on the chain with every ridge and trough of water. His swollen face and ear took splinters from the deck. The anklet etched new wounds. He was unconscious. He didn't feel the pain.

The Captain did his best, according to the book. The foresail on the Belle was lowered, the mainsail double reefed. But still the wind at its stern hurried the boat bitingly forward towards the darkness of the shore. The fore and mizzen topmasts, with spars and rigging too, fell away into the sea. Part of the bulwarks went. And then the mainsail, taking off into the night like some great canvas albatross. Everything was swept off deck by long black hills of water, thirty, forty feet in height. The hands on board - at least those six of seventeen who weren't sick, and who had managed to hold on by their eyelids to the masts and rigging of the Belle - now waited for the lull following every set of seven waves and sent the anchors down. But the anchors slipped. The Belle heeled landwards. It went in two hundred yards, found some upright purchase on a sandy bar, and stuck. The crew, excepting Otto, took to what rigging had survived.

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Excerpted from Signals Of Distress by Jim Crace Copyright © 2003 by Jim Crace
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.