II
Knox sailed out to a cluster of symbols marked at between thirty and forty metres on Adam’s chart, then dropped anchor, checked his equipment and suited up. Diving solo on a re-breather was a bad habit to get into, but he’d be fine as long as he stuck to his disciplines, kept checking his equipment and took breaks. He tipped himself backward over the edge, exploded into the sea. The water was cold but visibility was excellent, though it grew darker as he descended. The sea-floor here was rich with brain and stag-horn corals, but there was no way to tell which in particular Adam had been interested in, or why he’d marked his map as he had. He swam in a widening spiral around the Yvette before deciding he’d seen enough and beginning his ascent.
The sun was high and warm. He unzipped his wetsuit, the better to enjoy it, opened a bottle of drinking water and sat on deck watching the waves breaking gently yet relentlessly upon the reefs, just as they’d done day after day for centuries now; for millennia.
The Winterton had spent three days upon these reefs before it had broken up. Three days. What a bizarre time that must have been for crew and passengers alike, praying for a berth on one of the few lifeboats that had plied back and forth to the shore, or with the native fishermen who’d come out to help, as their ship slowly fell apart beneath them. They’d tried to save it, of course; their immediate response to collision, indeed, had been to throw everything overboard to lighten it and so float it off the reef.
He sat forward a little. It was a sailor’s first instinct, when they’d run their ship aground, to try to refloat it. Was that what had happened to the Chinese? He closed his eyes, the better to picture that leviathan on a shortcut from the Cape crunching its keel upon this reef. He could only imagine the chaos and terror. Giving orders on a ship that big was hard at the best of times, but infinitely harder in the aftermath of a reef-strike, particularly if it had happened—as they mostly had—at night or during a storm. But deckhands knew the drill even in the absence of command: toss overboard anything and everything you can to lighten the ship and make it easier to refloat. The most obvious things to jettison would have been its anchors and cannons, the very things they’d found at Cheung’s site. And if a cargo hold had been torn open, it would explain the pottery and other artefacts too.
Chinese ships had been fitted with watertight bulkheads to survive moderate hull damage. But even once they’d refloated themselves, they’d still have been stuck outside the reef, badly damaged and shipping water fast, shrouded in darkness or buffeted by a storm, facing a desperate race to find a pass before they sank.
A pass just like the one right here.