by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
‘And by drawing attention to the beauty of the dolphins, you naturally drew attention to yourself.’
She remained staring at the horizon. ‘That’s rather a bold speech.’
‘Not intended to offend.’ I straightened up as if to go, uncertain if a note of coldness had entered her voice, but she turned and looked at me.
‘It didn’t,’ she replied reassuringly. ‘You’re just going on watch, are you?’
‘I’ve just come off. It’s past midnight…’
Guffaws of laughter came from behind the jalousies and I recognised her husband’s nasal accent.
‘So you’re off to bed.’ She smiled again and I lingered, finishing my cigarette. ‘Don’t you get fed up with this?’ She motioned her head at the surrounding darkness, and I was leaning beside her again, aware that I was being seduced.
‘No…’
I felt her fingers cool on my arm. ‘Don’t you miss…’ The dark eyebrows arched and the bare shoulders lifted in a gesture of unmistakable suggestion. I had begun to turn when she suddenly pointed: ‘Oh, look!’
Half-relieved, half-regretful, I did as I was bid. It was as though the sea had caught fire. The breaking bubbles of the bow-waves, the hissing rim of foam that tumbled outwards from Antigone’s bow were suddenly luminous. And beyond the disturbance of the ship’s advancing hull it was as if every breaking wave was visible for miles.
‘It’s magical… what is it?’ Mrs Saddler had straightened up, her eyes as wide as a child’s, her lips slightly parted.
‘It’s called a milk-sea, caused by phosphorescence due to the presence of plankton.’ I paused, unwilling to bore.
‘Go on’ she prompted, never taking her eyes from the brilliantly luminous surface of the ocean.
‘Well, it could be a protozoan called Noctiluca, or there’s a luminous shrimp called, I think, something like Meganictyphanes…’
‘But it’s so… so eerie’ she broke in, ‘almost unbelievable.’ She shivered slightly and I could see goose-pimples raised on the bare skin of her shoulders.
‘It could also be sinister.’
‘What do you mean?’ She asked, turning with a look of alarm on her face.
‘There’s a little plant, a dinoflagellate, I can’t remember its name, which contains a terrible poison that makes shell-fish toxic during certain seasons; the stuff reacts on the nervous-system like strychnine.’
‘Oh, how horrible. I really won’t eat lobsters when there’s an R in the month.’
‘Now look!’ I said, pointing. It seemed that among the random glowing of the tumbling water a molten stream was running, undulating through the depths. Following this thick line of luminiscence were faster, thinner trails, darting in and out, harrying the steady flow of the stream into sudden swirls of disturbance; fiery lines that wove a pattern of depredation and then rose upwards, faster and faster until, right beside our rushing hull, the dolphins surfaced for air, gasping as they breached, ignoring us in the wild ecstasy of the hunt as they savaged the shoal of fish. We watched for several minutes, the answer to her question about boredom spectacularly answered for me.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
I turned. Captain Richards stood in the adjacent doorway, flanked by the Chief, the Mate and Mr Saddler. I realised my hand was on Mrs Saddler’s arm, put there in my eagerness to point out the dolphins.
‘He was showing me the phosphorescence, Captain. It’s absolutely beautiful. Look, Darling,’ she stepped forward and drew her husband out from behind China Dick, who grunted and never took his baleful eye from me.
‘Time you were turned in, Mister.’
* * *
The Indian Ocean is dominated by the sub-continent in more than name alone. Although it merges imperceptibly into the Southern Ocean where the westerly winds of the Roaring Forties blow interminably round the globe, and although it possesses the characteristic Trade Wind belt of the southern hemisphere in conformity with the global pattern of oceanic winds, its northern wind system is influenced by the presence of Asia and the salient of India.
During the hot summer months, between May and October, rising air over the land draws in warm damp air from the ocean to cause the South-West Monsoon, the rainy season for India and a period of thick, boisterous weather in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. We, however, were making our passage in the fall of the northern year, when the low pressure over the ocean and the higher pressure over India forced the air south-westwards again. It was a lighter wind, this North-East Monsoon, with fine, clear weather.
The morning following my encounter with Mrs Saddler the summits of the mountains of Socotra were just visible to the far north. Curiosity about this remote island was swiftly quelled by the information in the Admiralty Sailing Directions for the Arabian Sea. The island was inhabited by ‘unfriendly’ persons who had attacked watering parties from naval survey ships. Unlike those of the Pacific, the islands of the Indian Ocean were then largely unexploited. The Maldives, the Laccadives, the Andaman and Nicobar archipelagoes were inaccessible to tourists, only visited by seamen and the occasional intrepid traveller. As we steamed east-south-east, heading for that gap in the island chain west of India known as the Eight Degree Channel, the fresh north-easterly wind was on the port bow, curling the sea into a vista of white-caps beneath a sky of blue dotted with the puff-balls of fair-weather cumulus. Flying fish darted from our passage, sometimes pursued by an albacore or the leaping shapes of long-beaked dolphins. These, of the genus Stenella and notoriously difficult to identify specifically, would rush in from our beam to bow-ride under our forecastle, sensing the point of equilibrium where the forward thrust of Antigone’s hull balanced the drag on their bodies. For this purpose they were able to alter their physical shape, enabling several of these beautiful creatures to bow-ride together. Capable of speeds well in excess of twenty-knots, they could sometimes be seen accelerating alongside in spectacular fashion, but to distinguish a bottle-nose, a bridled, a common or a spotted dolphin from the other members of their genus was almost impossible, for their leaping aerobatics were unpredictable and they always foiled the most dedicated photographers waiting to record their grace and agility.
Occasionally a whale spouted, though too distant to identify, and a few pelagic birds, boobies and the like, wheeled about the ship. After taking my morning sight for longitude seemed an appropriate time to hector my young watch-mate and we settled down on the starboard bridge-wing, eyes mechanically scanning the horizon ahead. Below, Captain Richards, formidable in white shirt and starched white shorts, led the senior officers on their daily rounds.
‘We talked last night about the PZX triangle…’
I led him into the complexities of spherical trigonometry where both sides and angles are expressed in degrees, and Euclidean ideas about plane triangles can be forgotten. We discussed the component parts of the PZX triangle, talked of hour angles, polar and zenith distances, co-latitudes, azimuths and the broad theory of position circles.
As I talked I watched Mrs Saddler on the forward well-deck climb the short ladder and poise herself to dive into the pool. She wore a one-piece bathing suit of black and her figure was stockily handsome. She rolled over at the far end and gave me a playful little wave. Beside me the Midshipman waved back.
‘D’you understand what I’ve been saying?’ I asked sharply.
‘Er, yes. I think so, sir.’
‘Good.’
Below us there was a loud grating noise as of someone clearing his throat. After completing his rounds, China Dick was taking his morning walk across the deck immediately below us. I wondered if he too had waved at that voluptuous figure.
‘Okay, so you know the theory. The problem is how do we turn this into practical use. After all, we’re on the bridge of a ship, not at the centre of the earth. When we use a sextant to observe a heavenly body…’
‘Talking of heavenly bodies…’
Mike joined us, having just completed his morning sight. He star
ed down at Mrs Saddler swimming vigorously up and down the short length of the pool and turning with a swirl of exposed buttocks, then he too spun round and abruptly left us. A few minutes later his lithe form had joined her.
‘But these calculations, sir, how do you do them?’
‘Eh?’ The question brought me back to the present. ‘Oh, they’re based on something called the haversine formula, proof of which is deeply boring and not a patch on watching the buoyancy of Mrs Saddler’s tits. Did you know women stay afloat longer than men? Anyway, you need to understand something called the Reduction of Altitudes first, and we’ll save that for this evening. It’s time you did an hour on the wheel.’
My watch below in the afternoon took in a swim, but there was no sign of Mrs Saddler, though I saw her briefly at boat drill. We were in the throes of this Friday ritual, held at 1615 ship’s time, when Menestheus passed us, homeward bound. The bright spots of orange dotting her boat deck showed she too was performing this rite and we dipped our ensigns in mutual salute before dragging fire hoses along the decks and squirting fire-extinguishers over the side in order, the Senior Midshipman claimed, that he could fill them up again. The Mate joined us briefly during the evening watch. I did not think he enjoyed the hearty drinking in the Chief Engineer’s cabin.
‘Ah, Laddie,’ he said, stretching himself before leaning beside me on the rail while the Midshipman sensibly beat a hasty retreat to the other wing, “there is no entrance fee to the starlit hall of the night.”
It was years later that I discovered the source of that quotation and odd that it stuck. Perhaps it echoed my own pre-Galilean assertions of the previous evening, imposing comprehensible limits on the infinity of the sky. I do not think the Mate saw this in his repetition of Axel Munthe’s words, but his next remark suggested that he might have.
‘I always think the tropical sky offers a paradox.’ He paused and then resumed, ‘you either feel incredibly insignificant when contemplating it, or immensely privileged to be here, aboard this steel speck on the ocean.’ And then, almost without drawing breath, he added, ‘you be careful…’
‘What about?’ But I sensed it coming.
‘China Dick doesna like his officers misbehaving.’
‘Mrs Saddler?’ I was incredulous.
‘Aye.’
‘But…’
‘She was on the bridge at midnight, throwing snowballs at the moon,’ he muttered, ‘She said “I’ve never had it,” but she spoke too bluidy soon…’
I thought better of further reply. The doggerel and the euphemism ‘misbehaving’ belied the seriousness of his warning. Passengers were verboten and the Mate was a bachelor; perhaps he had a better right to contemplate adultery than I.
‘Droit de seigneur,’ I muttered resentfully at his retreating figure. He paused at the top of the ladder.
‘There’s a light coming up astern,’ he said. ‘Probably the Ashcan…’
The Mate proved right. It took her all the next day to overtake, but the Ascanius had the advantage of a fraction of a knot over Antigone. Her proximity provoked messages by aldis lamp, signal flags and radio telephone, mostly of a facetious nature and, as the day wore on, pretty thin on wit. During the afternoon I watched her occasionally from the lifeboats where, with the assistance of two Midshipmen, I was checking the stores, the barley sugar, biscuit, water and condensed milk that would sustain us if disaster struck. Mild fantasies of being alone, adrift with Mrs Saddler, played upon my imagination. As I turned over the watch at midnight, Ascanius could still be seen, a faint glimmer on the horizon ahead.
Although I followed the same itinerary on my rounds and the laughter from the Chief’s cabin betrayed the establishment of a ‘school’, there was no lonely figure on the promenade deck nor, as I half-dared to hope, on the shadowy boat-deck.
‘Looking for somebody?’
Sparks was locking up the radio room, his statutory watch finished.
‘No,’ I lied, adding defensively, ‘fancy a beer before turning in?’
We sat in my cabin and I sensed his loneliness. Younger than the Senior Midshipman, he was denied the rough bear-pit atmosphere of the half-deck, separated by convention, pride and unfamiliarity.
‘How are you liking it so far?’
‘Great,’ he answered insincerely. ‘I’ve been talking to Mauritius tonight, as well as the Ascanius.’
‘I expect you miss your girl-friend, don’t you?’ My mind was running along a predictable track of sexual deprivation.
‘Yes. We’ve been going together for over two years.’
Such fidelity was quite unknown to me and made his presence on board the more inexplicable.
‘What made you come to sea, then?’
It was obvious he had no answer. He was too young to be one of those who had chosen the Merchant Navy in preference to National Service in the armed forces.
‘My uncle was Chief Engineer with Ellerman’s.’
‘Where d’you come from?’
‘The Wirral – Bebington actually.’
With such a background, the Merchant Navy would have seemed so obvious an option, like the mines to a lad in the Rhondda; perhaps the only option.
‘Well, cheer up. You’ll enjoy it when we get to the coast. Sparks is usually the only one of us to get any decent shore-leave. Here, have another beer.’
He seized it with the avidity of an incipient alcoholic and I realised that here was a family man treading the knife edge of self-destruction. He achieved a curious kind of vicarious authority the following forenoon, ringing the bridge and speaking in a tone pregnant with self-importance. I sent the Midshipman down to collect the message and, having read it, despatched him at once to Captain Richards.
Below, in the pool, Mike and Mrs Saddler waved at me. I waved back, beaten.
China Dick puffed up onto the bridge, wearing his hat in readiness for his daily inspection, and disappeared into the chart-room. Five minutes later he emerged, ignored me and went below.
‘What exactly is it, sir?’ asked the Midshipman.
‘There’s a cyclone generating in the Bay of Bengal.’
‘A cyclone?’ The boy frowned.
‘Yes,’ I answered irritably, trying to ignore the salacious horseplay in the pool below, ‘a TRS – Tropical Revolving Storm – known in the Bay of Bengal as a cyclone, and in the West Indies as a hurricane. The Chinese call it the Great Wind: Taifun.’
‘A typhoon!’ the boy exclaimed excitedly. ‘Have you ever been in one?’
‘Yes. Not a really bad one, but bad enough. In the Taiwan Strait. You’ll find Richard Hughes’s book In Hazard in the library. It’s based on fact, about a Blue Flue caught in a West Indian hurricane. She lost her funnel and her boats.’
‘Bloody hell.’ The boy looked aft and upwards at the massive steel column and its wire guys.
We were traversing the Eight Degree Channel by noon. Away to the northwards a smudge of pale golden sand, fringed by white breakers and topped by the waving green fronds of coconut palms, marked the atoll of Minicoy. From the midst of the grove of palms rose the white column of its lighthouse. The dark parallelograms of a dozen sails dotted the ocean, the outrigger hulls of tiny, half-waterlogged fishing boats. We could see the dark skins of the Tamil fishermen and the sudden flash of their catch as they hauled their nets. The gentle timelessness of a subsistence way of life exerted its brief, spurious attraction. Minicoy exported coir in exchange for rice, the cargoes carried still in three-masted dhonis plying to Tuticorin or Cochin; we spotted one later that day, the very last of the true deep-water sailing ships.
My thwarted concupiscence sent me in search of literary consolation, for a long sea-passage was an ideal opportunity to read. One discovered strange companions of like mind in the ship’s library. I found the Cook from Swansea, who proved to be an authority on Guy de Maupassant.
‘Du, no-one writes about women like Maupassant, can’t fault him, like.’
‘I thought Hardy was supposed t
o be pretty good.’
‘Jesus Christ no, Hardy’s crap compared to Maupassant. Got his complete works at home, Maupassant that is… wouldn’t give a toss for Hardy.’
‘Well, there’s no Maupassant here,’ I said looking along the shelves, which contained a comprehensive collection of the newest novels, works of recent biography, history and travel.
‘Try that,’ said the Cook, pulling out The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler. ‘You’ll enjoy that.’
I took it and added The Lotus and the Wind by John Masters, sitting to decide which I should read first. While I sat browsing in companionable silence with the Cook, two figures went past the open door: the Chief Engineer and Mr Saddler.
‘Well, she can’t have gone far.’ I heard the Chief say. The Cook and I exchanged glances.
The following morning the wind had backed a little and freshened to a near-gale. Although the barometer remained steady, there was an oppressiveness in the atmosphere. The sky had become overcast and the sun was surrounded by a halo. We had expected to sight the coast of Ceylon that afternoon, but at noon China Dick decided to avoid the path of the cyclone and our course was altered drastically to the southward. During the day the strong wind continued to back, indicating the centre of the intense low pressure was passing well to the northwards of us, but in response to its disturbance Antigone began to roll and pitch, lifting easily to the swell.
I almost shared the Midshipman’s disappointment, for such a storm was an awesome sight, but I consoled him by taking a lunar sight and showing him the method. It proved to be a mistake. When Captain Richards came onto the bridge to write up his night orders he saw the columns of pencilled figures and summoned me to the chart-room.
‘What’s this?’
‘Observed intercept of the moon, sir. For the benefit of the Midship…’
‘The only thing you’re supposed to teach the Midshipman is how to keep a bloody lookout. What bloody good is this?’ He flicked the page of my sight book contemptuously, forgetful of his injunction to instruct the young apprentice. I held my peace. Initiative was something to be encouraged in aspirants under training, but squashed in junior officers. It was a paradox of the sea-life and I was half-expecting what followed. ‘And keep away from the passengers.’