Iroha nodded.
“Good. Then you can cut yourself free if you must. I must get back to my men.”
The next big wave broke over the Sado Maru’s beam, and tilted the ship to port until its deck was nearly vertical. The men on deck screamed and grabbed for whatever hold they could.
With an awful cracking sound, much of the port bulwark was carried away by the weight of the water. And several sailors, who had grabbed it for safety, were carried away with it, howling in terror as they tumbled into the churning sea.
However, the loss of the bulwark allowed the water on deck to escape, and the ship ever so slowly righted itself. But not back to an upright position; it had a pronounced list to port. The helmsman fought to bring the ship back to a safer heading, without success; the tilt kept the rudder from biting properly, and the loss of forward movement meant that the rudder, even if fully immersed, couldn’t turn the ship.
“Why are we still leaning?” Lord Matsudaira yelled to whoever could and would answer.
“Cargo or ballast shifted,” one of the sailors called out. “Need to throw the deck cargo overboard, or—”
He didn’t get to finish his explanation. Another wave struck the broached ship and hammered it back onto its side. The rest of the port bulwark vanished, along with Lord Matsudaira’s informant. The heel-over was more pronounced, this time. The violent movements had parted some of the standing rigging, and as a result the affected masts were apt to fail if the ship were righted, and its sails exposed to the wind, without first replacing the missing lines.
The men still alive were hanging from the starboard bulwark, or from the base of a mast, or some chance protrusion from the deck. They were in no position to fiddle with the rigging or the cargo at this point.
The Sado Maru was well within the grip of the tidal current, which was still running west south-west, if not as rapidly as before, carrying it away from the Golden Gate and toward the open sea. However, the wind was also pressing on the great exposed part of the hull, pushing the hulk southeast. This first took the Sado Maru out of the strongest part of the tidal current, and then into an eddy that carried it in a counter-clockwise arc until it was heading east. At last, it ran aground on Baker Beach between Mile Rocks and Fort Point, dismasting itself in the process.
Soon thereafter, the moon, a few days past full, rose above the Berkeley Hills and glinted down at the exhausted survivors. They had mustered barely enough energy to crawl above the high-water mark.
* * *
In the morning sun, the Sado Maru lay in uneasy repose between the high and low water marks. It was completely dismasted, and, driven against the rocks at the shoreline, there were great gashes across its bottom, like the claw marks of some prehistoric sea monster. Fortunately, those same rocks pinned it in the shallows, and it couldn’t sink farther than it already had. Until, at least, the waves broke it completely to pieces.
“So how soon will you have her afloat?” Lord Matsudaira asked the captain.
The captain stood gape-jawed. He finally managed to say, “Afloat? Even with a shipyard close at hand, it would be difficult to make her seaworthy again. Here in the wilderness, it’s impossible.”
“I will not accept defeat,” Lord Matsudaira announced flatly. “If you cannot get me to the other shore, I will appoint a captain who will.”
Guard Commander Shigehisa coughed. “Milord, can we not walk around the Bay?”
“Let me see our maps.” The maps, fortunately, had been rolled up inside bamboo tubes, plugged at both ends with tar, and thus were still dry.
Lord Matsudaira laid a string as best he could around the outline of the South Bay, then compared it to the scale. “I make it out to be a hundred miles. We will have only the provisions that we can carry, so we will have to hunt or fish periodically. On foot, we might make five miles a day. Certainly not more than ten. And we will encounter Indians along the way that we would avoid if we went by water.”
Shigehisa was also looking at the map. “It’s a pity; the northern route is shorter. By as much as two-thirds.”
Lord Matsudaira’s laugh was abrupt and bitter, a bark. “But we would have to cross the furious waters of the Golden Gate to get there.”
The captain had also been studying the map. “Lord Matsudaira, two of the ship’s boats survived the shipwreck, so perhaps we can row across. We can look on the bay side of this peninsula for a safe launching spot.” He traced a path with his forefinger. “Here—between the map’s ‘San Francisco’ and its ‘Oakland’—the crossing is less than three miles. Closer to two, in fact. Even rowing we could do it in an hour. And there’s this Yerba Buena Island here, at the halfway point, if we run into trouble.”