The Nautical Chart by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Read Free Book Online Page A

or the intermittent light that—once the frequency of flashes or occultations is measured by chronometer—confirms the precision of those calculations. When that moment came, Coy always allowed himself an internal smile, serene and satisfied. Taking pleasure in the confirmation of the certainty achieved through mathematics, the on-board instruments, and his professional competence, he would prop himself in one comer of the bridge, near the mute shadow of the helmsman, and pour himself a lukewarm coffee from a thermos, content that he was on a good ship, rather than in that other, uncomfortable world, the one on dry land, now reduced by good fortune to a feint radiance beyond the horizon.
    But such rigor in plotting a vector on the nautical charts that regulated his life had not shielded him from error or failure. Saying "land ho!" and then physically corroborating the presence of terra firma and its consequences did not always occur in that sequence. The land was there, whether it was on the charts or had popped up unexpectedly, as such things tend to do, piercing the fragile refuge—that little dot of iron floating on an enormous ocean— where Coy felt completely safe. Six hours before the Isla Negra, a container ship of the Minguez Escudero company, split open her hull halfway between Cape Town and the Mozambique Channel, Coy, the first officer, had warned the captain that the British Admiralty chart corresponding to that area called attention, in a special box, to certain imprecisions in the surveys. But the captain was in a hurry, and besides, he'd been sailing those waters for twenty-five years using the same charts, without a problem. He was also two days behind schedule because of bad weather in the Gulf of Guinea, and because he'd had to evacuate by helicopter a crew member who had broken his back when he slipped down a companionway near the Skeleton Coast. English charts, he had said during mess, are so meticulous they handled them with kid gloves. The route is clear: two hundred twenty fathoms at the highest shoal and not a flyspeck on the paper. So we'll pass straight between Terson and Mowett Grave. That was what he'd said: kid gloves, flyspeck, and straight between the islands. The captain, don Gabriel Moa, was a sixty-plus-year-old Galician, small, with a ruddy forehead and gray hair. In addition to his blind trust in the Admiralty charts, he wore four decades at sea in the wrinkles on his face, and in all that time no one had ever seen him lose his composure; not even in the early nineties, it was said, when he'd sailed a day and a half listing twenty degrees after losing eleven containers in an Atlantic storm. He was one of those captains for whom owners and subordinates would put their hands in the fire—curt on the bridge, serious in his cabin, invisible ashore. He was an old-time captain, the kind who addressed officers and trainees formally, and whom no one could imagine making an error. And that was why Coy held to the course on the English chart that pointed out imprecisions in the surveys; and that was also why, twenty minutes into his watch, he had heard the steel hull of the Negra screech on rock, shuddering beneath his feet, before he recovered from his shock and rushed to the engine-order telegraph to call "Stop the engines!" Captain Moa appeared on the bridge in his pajamas, his hair every which way, and stared into the darkness outside with a stupid expression Coy had never seen on his face. He had stammered, "It can't be," three times in succession, and then, as if he wasn't entirely awake, had murmured a weak "Stop the engines," after the engines had been stopped for five minutes and the helmsman was standing motionless with his hands on the wheel, looking first at the captain and then at Coy. And Coy, with the terrible certainty of someone who has to his misfortune received an unexpected revelation, could not take his eyes off the honored superior whose orders he would have followed without