Nation

leave Cape Town today on the schooner Sweet Judy , bound for Port Mercia via Port Advent. The captain is Nathan Roberts. I believe you know him?”
    “What, old ‘Hallelujah’ Roberts? Is he still afloat? Good man, mark you, one of the best, and the Sweet Judy is a very trim vessel. The girl is in safe hands, depend upon it.” The captain smiled. “I hope she likes hymns, though. I wonder if he still makes the crew do all their swearing into a barrel of water in the hold?”
    “Keenly religious, is he?” asked Mr. Black as they headed toward the warmth of the main cabin.
    “Just a tad, sir, just a tad.”
    “In the case of Roberts, Captain, how big is a ‘tad’?”
    Captain Samson grinned. “Oh, something about the size of Jerusalem….”
     
    At the other end of the world the sea burned, the wind howled, and roaring night covered the face of the deep.
    It takes an unusual man to make up a hymn in a hurry, but such a man was Captain Roberts. He knew every hymn in The Antique and Contemporary Hymn Book , and sang his way through them loudly and joyously when he was on watch, which had been one of the reasons for the mutiny.
    And now, with the End of the World at hand, and the skies darkening at dawn, and the fires of Revelation raining down and setting the rigging ablaze, Captain Roberts tied himself to the ship’s wheel as the sea rose below him and felt the Sweet Judy lifted into the sky as if by some almighty hand.
    There was thunder and lightning up there. Hail rattled off his hat. St. Elmo’s fire glowed on the tip of every mast and then crackled on the captain’s beard as he began to sing in a rich dark baritone. Every sailor knew the song: “ Eternal Father, strong to save, Whose arm hath bound the restless wave, ” he bellowed into the storm, as the Judy balanced on the restless wave like a ballerina. “ Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep Its own appointed limits keep …”
    How fast were they moving? he wondered as sails ripped and flapped away. The wave was as high as a church, but surely it was running faster than the wind! He could see small islands below, disappearing as the wave roared over them. This was no time to stop praising the Lord!
    “ Oh hear us when we cry to Thee, For those in peril on the sea, ” he finished, and stopped and stared ahead.
    There was something big and dark out there, coming closer very quickly. It would be impossible to steer around it. It was too big, and in any case the helm didn’t answer. He was holding it as an act of faith, to show God that he would not desert Him and hoped that in return God would not desert Captain Roberts. He swung the wheel as he began the next verse, and lightning illuminated a path across the restless wave—and there, in the light of the burning sky, was a gap, a valley or cleft in the wall of rock, like the miracle of the Red Sea, thought Captain Roberts, only, of course, the other way around.
    The next flash of lightning showed that the gap was full of forest. But the wave would hit it at treetop height. It’d slow down. They might just be saved, even now, in the very jaws of Hell. And here they came….
    And so it was that the schooner Sweet Judy sailed though a rain forest, with Captain Roberts, inspired to instant creativity, making up a new verse explicably missing from the original hymn: “Oh Thou who built’st the mountains high, To be the pillars of the sky—” He wasn’t totally certain about built’st , but bidd’st was apparently acceptable— “Who gave the mighty forests birth” —branches cracked like gunshots under the keel, thick vines snatched at what remained of the masts—
    “And made a Garden of the Earth” —fruit and leaves rained down on the deck, but a shudder meant that a broken tree had ripped away part of the hull, spilling the ballast— “We pray to Thee to stretch Thy hand” —Captain Roberts gripped the useless wheel tighter, and laughed at the roaring dark— “To those in peril on the land.”
    And three great fig trees, whose buttressed roots had withstood centuries of cyclones, raced out of the future and came as a big surprise. His last thought was: Perhaps who raised the mountains high would have been a better line in the circums—
    Captain Roberts went to Heaven, which wasn’t everything that he’d expected, and as the receding water gently marooned the wreck of the Sweet Judy on the forest floor, only one soul was left alive. Or possibly two, if you like