The Elspeth, by Iain Corrigan

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

The Elspeth was a puffer, seventy feet of rust and black paint, and she carried coal to the islands and brought back whatever the islands could spare. Captain Macrae had owned her for twenty-six years. He was a short, broad man with a beard like a burnt hedge, and he spoke so seldom that during my first week aboard I wondered whether he had taken a dislike to me personally.

He had not. He had taken a dislike, as far as I could tell, to talking. He gave orders by pointing. He ate his porridge standing at the wheel. When the cook, an old Islay man called Lachie, told a story at supper, the captain would listen to the end, nod once and go out on deck, which Lachie told me was the highest praise he had ever known him give.

On my ninth day the fog came down off Ardnamurchan. It came quickly, like a curtain dropped from above, and within ten minutes I could not see the bow from the wheelhouse door. The engine slowed to a mutter. Lachie stopped whistling.

Captain Macrae did a thing I had not seen him do before. He took off his cap. He put his head out of the wheelhouse window into the grey, and stood like that, perfectly still, with his eyes shut.

‘What’s he doing?’ I whispered.

‘Listening,’ said Lachie.

I listened too. I heard the water slapping at the hull, and a gull somewhere, and nothing else. But after a minute the captain put a hand on the wheel and eased it, the smallest touch, and then again, and the Elspeth crept on into nothing. Once he said, very quietly, ‘Rocks,’ as another man might say ‘Good morning’, and a long time afterwards I heard it too, the hollow suck and boom of the sea in a gully somewhere off to port.

We were in the fog for three hours. He did not speak again, and he did not once sit down.

When it lifted, as suddenly as it had come, the pier at Kilchoan was two hundred yards ahead of us, exactly where it should have been. The captain put his cap back on. Then he turned, looked at me properly for the first time since I had come aboard, and jerked his head towards the wheel.

‘Take her in,’ he said. ‘Slow.’

I took her in. My hands were wet on the spokes. He stood behind me the whole way, saying nothing, and when the fenders bumped the pier he went below for his porridge as if nothing had happened at all.

What impressions does the writer create of Captain Macrae? How does the writer create these impressions?

You must refer to the language and structure used in the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.