But not in Massawa. The only dry dock I had operating was the Persian dock, not a large dry dock. It could lift only 6000 tons, and could not take any vessel coming in drawing more than nineteen feet for strictly routine dock operation, or perhaps twenty feet if I were willing to take a chance with the dock and sink it farther than it was designed to go down safely.
That situation left me with two incompatible conditions to meet with the Liebenfels. To get her on the dry dock, I had to lighten her up to twenty feet draft or less. But with free water in all her holds and one big hold (number two) completely flooded, getting her that high out of water made her excessively top-heavy and unstable, likely to capsize on me. Still both things had to be done, or the Liebenfels could not be saved, even though we had already lifted her. There was nowhere else in the world we could tow her; it was Massawa or nothing.
So I started the third day with that insoluble problem on my hands to solve. There could be no sleep for me till I had the answer.
There was only one hope. I must get the boiler room, the engine room, and the number three hold absolutely dry so as to give the ship sufficient stability to stay right side up at all. To control her listing, I would juggle water in the two after holds, numbers four and five, across the shaft alley.
The shaft alley, a long horizontal tunnel from the engine room to the propeller, passed through those two cargo holds to divide the lower eight feet of each hold, along its fore and aft centerline, into separated starboard and port compartments. Back and forth across the top of that shaft alley, I must pump water as necessary from the low to the high side to balance the ship. It would be a neat trick if I could do it, somewhat akin to keeping a pencil balanced on its point.
All day long, the crew of the Intent struggled to keep enough pumps going together to do what I had to do. It was the story of Tantalus all over again. Occasionally we approached dryness in the midships hold and the machinery spaces, with the water far enough down in the forward hold to approach the light draft we needed. Then most of the pumps would stall, water would begin gaining on us, increasing the draft again, and the ship would begin again to take a bad list, sometimes to starboard, sometimes to port, depending only to which side she happened to be listed when the pumps quit.
Over and over again we fought to restart our pumps, to settle the matter. Each time we gained something permanently in lightening her up, but that resulted only in decreasing her stability as the ship rose higher from the sea. When next several pumps quit and some water returned, all pouring over to the low side, the ship listed even worse than the time before, beginning to assume really dangerous angles to one side or the other.
All day long in the blistering heat and the intolerable humidity far down in the holds of the Liebenfels, we fought that battle, with the Liebenfels mostly heeled so badly as to make climbing up or down the vertical ladders to the pumps an acrobatic feat on top of a fatiguing one. Night came. We had not won. Brown’s knocked-out crew went off, Reed and his men again took up the struggle. I could no longer keep my eyes open or drag myself about. I lay down on the superstructure of the Intent for a little rest. Two hours later I was up again, making the rounds of the holds to encourage the weary salvage men to keep the pumps running till we had her straightened up, now seemingly a hopeless task.
Dawn came again, the fourth day. Still our ship wasn’t light enough. Brown and his tired men took over; all hands were beginning to get discouraged. This was like no salvage task they had ever worked on before; they were nearly dead on their feet on a ship which by all the rules was already successfully salvaged. But even so, if only all those pumps would keep on pumping, as anywhere else on earth they would have, everything would soon be over and they could rest.
The fourth day was worse than all its predecessors. The Liebenfels was higher out of water and lighter than ever (though not yet light enough) and more top-heavy and unstable than at any time before. It took less loose water to give her a bigger list. She was never near erectness any more. When I tried to straighten her up somewhat to make work on the broken-down pumps, walking on deck, and climbing up and down those alarming ladders less arduous, by trimming water in the after holds from the low side to the high side across the top of the shaft alley, it resulted only in heart-breaking failure. The ship would gradually straighten up to within 5° of vertical, then for no cause at all would suddenly flop over to take a big list to the opposite side, in which sudden roll no one could help wondering as she went whether she was ever going to stop. Each time it seemed for certain that she was going to keep on and capsize, to go down on her side like the Colombo lying just ahead of her in that line of wrecks in the south harbor.
I gave up trying to get the Liebenfels erect while we lightened her further; keeping her listed 10° to port, a bad list to work with, satisfied me. Walking the decks under those conditions was difficult. My shoes, waterlogged, soaked in salt, cracked and stiff whenever a few minutes on deck gave the scorching sun and the hot steel a chance to harden up the leather, were killing me, they had shrunk so much. To make matters worse, because of the list, when walking fore and aft along the deck my shoes were at a bad angle to my ankles and the stiff leather rubbing hard against them swiftly wore through the skin and into the raw flesh—between the sweat, the salt water, and the muck I had continually to walk through, those raw spots on both sides of both my ankles made walking a torture.
The day wore on. We gained on lightening up, we lost on stability, for we could never keep the pumps working long enough together to get our midships holds completely dry and hold them that way. Keeping pumps going and restarting them when they stalled, got more and more of a murderous job—apparently the moisture was working deeper into the magneto coils and each time it was harder to remove the grounds by spraying the magneto with carbon tetrachloride, our only cure.
I had cleared the Persian dry dock, ordering no other ships to be docked on it from that morning on, so that the moment we got the Liebenfels both light enough and erect enough, we could tow her directly from where we had raised her around to the naval harbor, seven miles away, and put her on the dry dock immediately, whether by night or day.
By early afternoon, it began to appear as if we were getting through. The Liebenfels was nearly light enough to go on the dock; I felt sure I could juggle trimming water in the after holds fast enough to keep her reasonably erect while we docked her. So I sent word to Lieutenant Fairbairn to get over to the south harbor with his tugs, prepared to pilot us round for docking. By the time Fairbairn and the tugs arrived I felt that we would be in condition to go.
Then disaster struck us. One after another the pumps began to stop and the half-dead seamen were unable to restart a single one. As the pumps quit the ship started to make water slowly, to increase her previously light draft, and worst of all to increase her list to port. Gradually she heeled more and more—from 10° port to 11°; then to 12°. Standing on the sloping decks became difficult. Below, all the men I had, both in Reed’s crew and in Brown’s, were fighting to get the pumps going again, to stop that increasing list. Finally the last pump of all, the one on the engine room floor plates, quit also. Silence fell on the Liebenfels, broken only by the imprecations of agonized sailors far down in the sweating holds, cranking away on moisture-saturated pump engines, cursing the day they ever saw her.
The list of the Liebenfels, bad already, got worse. At that unpropitious moment, Lieutenant Fairbairn and his two tugs entered the south harbor to tow us away. Fairbairn didn’t even come near us. It took no very experienced navigator to see that no ship with that heavy list on her, with her tall masts lying far over to port in evident distress, was going to be towed away, still less to be docked. The pilot took only one look, then turned his tugs about, and steamed back to the commercial harbor.
Down the greasy ladders of the Liebenfels’ engine room I shot, followed by Keith, the Intent’s engineer, when the last pump coughed uncertainly a few seconds and then quit, leaving us helpless to pre
vent the ship’s capsizing. To preserve some remnants of stability, that engine room pump was the most important of any on the ship—it had to be restarted, regardless of the others.
Keith sprayed the magneto. I tried cranking, Keith tried cranking, one of his huskiest machinists tried cranking. We couldn’t get the engine to fire; not even a solitary sputter did we get from its exhaust.
“That magneto’s completely grounded now. She’ll never spark,” Keith finally announced glumly.
“She’s got to start, Chief!” I countered. “If she doesn’t, the ship’s lost after we’ve all but killed ourselves to save her! There must be something you can do to get this engine running again!”
“Nothing’ll do it but taking off that grounded magneto and putting on a new one, Captain. I’ve got a spare magneto in my storeroom. But it’ll take over an hour to make the shift. Will this leaking bucket last that long before she capsizes?” Keith asked me gloomily, looking questioningly up at the huge main engine of the Liebenfels, already leaning crazily to port over our heads.
“I don’t know. We’ll have to gamble on it. You try, Keith.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Keith sent his mechanic up on deck to board the Intent and get the spare magneto, the only spare he had. Then Keith turned to himself with a wrench to remove the grounded magneto from the engine, no very simple job on a badly tilted gasoline engine resting on the greasy, slippery floor plates, with little room to get at the bolts he had to loosen.
“I’ll be back in a minute, Chief,” I told him once he had started. “I want to check on where we stand on the list.”
Whether Keith thought he was being deserted at the bottom of that mantrap of an engine room while I prudently retired to a safer spot on the open deck, I don’t know. But he said nothing while I left, only clenching his teeth involuntarily while he strained to get at those hard to reach bolts.
I climbed the slippery, winding steel ladders up from the floor plates, a tortuous climb under any conditions, a dangerous, terrifying one with every ladder slanted dizzily to port. There was scant room to pass; all about was the crowding machinery of the Liebenfels, so badly tilted now as to look as if any moment the massive main engine and its auxiliaries would tear loose their holding down bolts and go crashing downward into the port bilges, capsizing the ship instantly. It was a climb equal in height to that from the basement to the roof of a four-story building; nobody down on the floor plates could ever possibly make it when the ship started finally to capsize.
Panting for breath, I came out at last in the ship’s superstructure to the only side escape door in the engine room hatch, and cautiously made my way forward. Walking along the frightfully heeled over deck was next to impossible except by grasping one thing after another protruding from near-by bulkheads to avoid sliding headlong into the port scuppers and probably overboard.
Toward the forward end of the superstructure, in what had once been one of the cabins for the ship’s officers, I had several days before rigged up a crude inclinometer against a vertical athwartship wooden bulkhead. It was simply a steel bolt suspended on a string from a nail in the bulkhead; nearly six feet long, that improvised pendulum swept over an arc carefully marked out in degrees with a pencil on the bulkhead. For measuring the ship’s heel, it was accurate enough, even if it had no pretensions to the beauty or to the machined finish of a regular inclinometer.
With great difficulty, I made that cabin. Inside it I found my youthful assistant, Bob Steele, busily engaged with a slide rule and a pencil in figuring out the rate of our heel to port. Already my pendulum had reached 15° port heel; 10° more to port and the pendulum would be off my scale.
Without stopping, Steele glanced up momentarily at me as I came in, then continued on his figuring.
“Don’t bother to figure much beyond 20°, Bob,” I advised him. “After that we probably won’t care.”
“I’ve been watching this pendulum and logging its rate,” he advised me. “She’s heeling down steadily to port; no intermissions, Captain.”
“How fast is she going over?” I asked anxiously, wondering how much time Keith had for shifting the magneto.
Steele looked at his log, did a little mental arithmetic.
“On the average, about a degree every seven or eight minutes, though I’m not sure but that it’s a little faster than that right now. I’ll try to check the next degree,” and he took out his watch, then carefully read both the pendulum scale and the time. “Shall I let you know, Captain?” he added as he saw I was about to leave.
“No, never mind. It won’t help me any.” She ought to stand five degrees more list. That might give us thirty-five or forty minutes yet, I thought, to shift the magneto and get the pump going again before the end. I must get back with Keith; I started out of the cabin into the deck passage to port.
“When will she roll over, Captain?” asked Steele with professional curiosity evident on his face as he followed me out of the tilted cabin. “I figure that when the gunwale goes under, that’s her limit.”
I clung to the rail while I looked down the port side of the Liebenfels at the Red Sea alongside us. Even on the superstructure we weren’t very far from the water, being on the low side of the ship; but the port main deck edge, one deck down from us, was very close to the sea. I estimated roughly the distance from the main deck gunwale to the water. The gunwale was only out of water a few feet now, instead of the twenty feet of freeboard that on the normally erect light ship should have been showing there.
“You’re right, Bob. Keep your eye on that port gunwale,” I indicated, pointing to the listed main deck below us. “As long as that gunwale shows above the sea, she’s safe. But the minute the water rises above that gunwale onto the main deck, she’ll go over on her side and down like a rock. We’ve got maybe two or three feet to go yet before the sea washes over that gunwale and ends it. I’ve got to get back to the engine room. Never mind that pendulum any more. You stay out here and watch that gunwale. When the sea is within two or three inches of it, you sing out down the engine room hatch and down the holds for everybody to get out. That’ll give us maybe a few minutes to get clear. Then you’d better go overboard yourself and start swimming away.”
I started on my return journey to the bottom of the engine room. Clinging tightly to anything I could get my hands on, getting back over the steep deck and down that dizzying maze of insanely tilted ladders, fast as I dared go, took me five minutes.
Keith’s mechanic was already back with the spare magneto, still left wrapped in its waxed paper cover to protect it as long as possible from the surrounding moisture bathing us as in a Turkish bath. Kneeling on the greasy steel plates alongside Keith, he was holding a flashlight to help light the job. Keith himself, the bolts of the old magneto just freed, was cautiously working it off its foundation, careful not to rotate its shaft and so destroy all knowledge of the position of its rotor with respect to the driving shaft on the engine. If he lost that position, the ignition timing would be wrong; even with a good magneto the engine wouldn’t fire. It might take hours to retime the new magneto to the engine. We would never have the hours.
Holding his breath tensely as if his life depended on it (as indeed it did if he stuck with the job), Keith delicately worked the magneto free of its pedestal and out onto the floor plates. Then with a deep sigh of relief, he set it tenderly against the base of the near-by ship’s condenser so it wouldn’t slide away from him, while he wiped his eyes clear of the sweat pouring down his forehead.
“Thirty minutes yet, Keith, I think,” I said to him. “You’re doing fine!”
Keith paused only long enough to look up to note I had rejoined him, then with his eyes dried enough so he could see, he picked up the old magneto again and studied its coupling to note the position of the timing marks punched on it.
I took the flashlight while the mechanic tore away the waxed wrappings of the spare magneto. Keith seized it and hurriedly but carefully set its rotor to match exactly in po
sition the marks on the grounded magneto he had removed.
After that, down on his stomach on the sloping engine room floor, he started to install the replacement magneto while I held the flashlight for him and the mechanic passed him the little open-ended wrenches he required. It was a watchmaker’s job to get the coupling re-engaged correctly under any conditions. In the semi-darkness of that terrifying engine room far below the level of the sea with the minutes ticking away and the ship perceptibly increasing its awesome heel, that Keith’s fingers got the new magneto back in place instead of having it slip from him into the bilge water inexorably rising to port of us over the floor plates, was a miracle.
Steadily, methodically, Keith held the magneto in place with one hand while with the other, he began to set up its holding down bolts. Directing the flashlight a little this way and that, so to light the nut he was attempting to reach with the little S-wrenches, I still could not keep my eyes from wandering a bit to observe what lay about us. Over our heads hung the tilted main engine, dismayingly inclined, apparently defying all the laws of gravitation, for it looked as if long since it should have toppled over to crush us. All about us was other machinery, bulkheads, gratings, all at nightmarish angles, so that one might almost as easily have walked on what had once been a vertical bulkhead as on what was supposedly serving us as a deck.
Would Keith get it done in time, I wondered? It was a fussy job. No use trying to hurry him, that would only ball it up. Keith’s fingers, heartbreakingly slow as they seemed while he nursed his little wrenches round the nuts, were nevertheless going as fast as prudently they could without losing in the bilges the slippery wrenches. If we lost the ship, and with it probably the three of us down there, it wasn’t going to be Keith’s fault.
I watched in agony as endlessly it seemed he tightened nuts and the Liebenfels leaned over more and more till it appeared she couldn’t possibly delay another second the sickening sudden roll that would bring the sea cascading down the open engine room hatch above us, our only escape, and spell the end for us and all our troubles with the salvaged Liebenfels.
Under the Red Sea Sun Page 33