Read Chapter 13: Planks and Splinters

The galley hatch banged open and shut with each swell, the smell of salt pork and hardtack mixing with the stink of wet wool and unwashed bodies. Men hunched over their tin plates in the gloom below decks, spoons scraping, jaws working, the usual grumble of mealtime talk subdued to something near silence. Hooke sat with his back to a stanchion, three feet from Silas, neither man acknowledging the other.

The ship gave a sudden lurch—not the slow roll of a following sea, but a sideways slap that sent plates sliding and men grabbing for handholds. The hull groaned. Then the wind hit, a howling shriek that came down the hatch like something alive, and the lanterns swung wild, throwing shadows across forty faces.

“Squall!” came the shout from above. Rees’s voice, cracked with alarm. “All hands on deck!”

Hooke was moving before the cry died, shoving through bodies, boots slipping on the slopped grease of the deck planks. The world outside was white—not fog, but driven spray and rain so thick it stung the eyes. The *Leviathan* wallowed, caught broadside, and somewhere forward came the sickening crack of wood giving way.

He saw it through the murk: the longboat, lashed to the starboard davits, swung loose and slammed against the hull. The boat’s gunwale had splintered, one plank stove in, and the fall tackle had parted. The boat hung cockeyed, half its weight on a single davit that creamed and bent.

“Get it secured!” Hooke roared. He grabbed two of the captain’s loyalists—the steward and a cooper’s mate—and threw them at the davit. Rees was already there, knife in hand, cutting the remaining lashings to drop the boat to the deck rather than lose it over the side.

The boat crashed down, and men scattered. Hooke was on it in an instant, running his hands over the damage. One plank, split along the grain, maybe two feet long. Repairable. The davit could be braced. The tackle was a loss, but there was spare line in the bosun’s locker.

“Get me oakum and a caulking iron,” he shouted to no one in particular. “And a plank from the spare stock. Move!”

The squall passed as quickly as it had come, leaving the sea gray and spiteful but no longer murderous. Within the hour, Hooke had the longboat propped on its side on the main deck, the damaged plank pried loose, the new one rough-cut and fitted. He worked alongside the men, hammer in hand, sweat mixing with the salt already crusted on his skin.

That was when he noticed the quiet.

Not the quiet of men working. The quiet of men watching. He looked up from his work and saw them—Silas’s men, the cooper, the carpenter’s mate, the harpooner whose name Hooke had never bothered to learn. They had gathered at the forward rail, six of them, seven, their backs to the work, their heads together. And Silas himself was walking toward the captain’s cabin, not with purpose but with a casual insolence that made Hooke’s stomach turn.

Hooke set down the hammer. “Rees.”

The boatswain appeared at his elbow. “Aye.”

“The captain’s cabin. Now.”

Rees’s eyes followed Hooke’s gaze, and his face tightened. He moved. Hooke moved after him, but he had taken only three steps when the carpenter’s mate stepped into his path.

“Going somewhere, Mr. Hooke?”

“Out of my way.”

“We were just thinking,” the man said, his voice loud enough to carry. “This ship’s had a rough patch. Storm damage. Boats breaking loose. And still no word of where we’re bound or what we’re hunting.”

Hooke could feel it—the deck growing quiet behind him. The scrape of work stopping. The longboat forgotten.

“We got no way home if this ship goes down,” the carpenter’s mate went on. “No way off. So we was thinking it might be time to turn north. Back to the whaling grounds. Back to honest work.”

“That’s the captain’s call.”

“Is it?” Silas’s voice cut through from behind. Hooke turned. Silas walked toward him with a measured stride, the captain’s cabin door standing open beyond him. “Because the captain doesn’t seem to be making any calls at all. Man flogged, course secret, and now we’re sitting in waters where no whale has ever been seen. I’d say the captain’s done making calls. I’d say it’s time for better men to take over.”

The crew was rising now, drifting from their places, drawn toward the confrontation. Hooke counted them—twenty men in Silas’s orbit, maybe more. The rest hung back, uncertain, watching.

“You’re talking mutiny, Silas.”

“I’m talking survival.”

“Two different things where the rope’s concerned.”

“Is that what you tell yourself?” Silas stepped closer, close enough that Hooke could smell the salt pork on his breath. “The captain’s shadow. Hovering at his heel, watching him melt gold while good men bleed. You think that rope won’t fit your neck too?”

Hooke’s hand went to his belt. The pistol was there, oiled and loaded, a habit from years in waters where the wrong word could cost a man his life. He’d kept it through every watch, every storm, every meeting in the blubber room.

He drew it now.

The motion was not fast. Not sudden. He simply lifted it from his belt and raised it to chest height, the barrel pointed at neither Silas nor the carpenter’s mate but at the space between them, where the fight would start.

“The boat is damaged,” Hooke said, his voice flat. “The ship is short a longboat. If any of you have a mind to take the captain’s cabin, you’ll have to do it on a ship that can’t launch a boat in any sea worth the name. You’ll have to do it with a first mate who’s still standing. And you’ll have to do it knowing I’ll shoot the first man who lays a hand on that wheel.”

Silas stared at the pistol. Then at Hooke’s face.

“You drew on your own crew,” he said quietly. “That’s a line you can’t uncross.”

“I know.”

Silas nodded, almost sadly. He turned and walked back toward the forward rail, the carpenter’s mate and the cooper falling in behind him. The rest of the crew slowly returned to their work, casting glances at Hooke that were not fear and were not gratitude, but something closer to counting.

Hooke holstered the pistol. His hand was steady.

“Back to the longboat,” he said to no one. “We finish the repairs before dark.”

But he felt it, in the silence that followed, in the careful distance the men kept from him: he had not ended the mutiny. He had only taken it out of the open and pushed it back into the dark where it could grow.

Somewhere above, a light flickered in the captain’s cabin window.