As I entered the galley, John’s head and shoulders broke water by the galley stove. They may have broken water already, but that was my impression anyway. John himself doesn’t know how he got there, but he remembers being thrown forward from where he was sitting and to port, against the engine exhaust and the petrol tank. He remembers struggling against the tremendous force of water in the darkness, and wondering how far Tzu Hang had gone down and whether she could ever get up again. As I passed him he got to his feet. He looked sullen and obstinate, as he might look if someone had offended him, but he said nothing. There was no doghouse left. The corner posts had been torn from the bolts in the carlins, and the whole doghouse sheared off flush with the deck. Only a great gaping square hole in the deck remained.
As I reached the deck, I saw Beryl. She was thirty yards away on the port quarter on the back of a wave, and for the moment above us, and she was swimming with her head well out of the water. She looked unafraid, and I believe that she was smiling.
‘I’m all right, I’m all right,’ she shouted.
I understood her although I could not hear the words, which were taken by the wind.
The mizzenmast was in several pieces, and was floating between her and the ship, still attached to its rigging, and I saw that she would soon have hold of it. When she got there, she pulled herself in on the shrouds, and I got hold of her hand. I saw that her head was bleeding, and I was able to see that the cut was not too serious but when I tried to pull her on board, although we had little freeboard left, I couldn’t do it because of the weight of her sodden clothes and because she seemed to be unable to help with her other arm. I saw John standing amidships. Incredibly he was standing, because, as I could see now, both masts had gone, and the motion was now so quick that I could not keep my feet on the deck. He was standing with his legs wide apart, his knees bent and his hands on his thighs. I called to him to give me a hand. He came up and knelt down beside me, and said, ‘This is it, you know, Miles.’
But before he could get hold of Beryl, he saw another wave coming up, and said, ‘Look out, this really is it!’
Beryl called, ‘Let go, let go!’
But I wasn’t going to let go of that hand, now that I had got it, and miraculously Tzu Hang, although she seemed to tremble with the effort, rode another big wave. She was dispirited and listless, but she still floated. Next moment John caught Beryl by the arm, and we hauled her on board. She lay on the deck for a moment, and then said, ‘Get off my arm John, I can’t get up.’
‘But I’m not on your arm,’ he replied.
‘You’re kneeling on my arm, John.’
‘Here,’ he said, and gave her a lift up. Then we all turned on our hands and knees, and held on to the edge of the big hole in the deck.
Up to now my one idea had been to get Beryl back on board, with what intent I do not really know, because there was so much water below that I was sure Tzu Hang could not float much longer. I had no idea that we could save her, nor, John told me afterwards, had he. In fact, he said, the reason why he had not come at once to get Beryl on board again, was that he thought Tzu Hang would go before we did so. After this first action, I went through a blank patch, thinking that it was only a few moments, a few minutes of waiting, thinking despondently that I had let Clio down. Beryl’s bright, unquenchable spirit thought of no such thing. ‘I know where the buckets are,’ she said. ‘I’ll get them!’
This set us working to save Tzu Hang.
Beryl slipped below, followed by John, but for the time being I stayed on deck and turned to look at the ruins that had been Tzu Hang. The tiller, the cockpit coaming, and every scrap of the doghouse had gone, leaving a 6 foot by 6 foot gap in the deck. Both masts had been taken off level with the deck, the dinghies had gone, and the cabin skylights were sheared off a few inches above the deck. The bowsprit had been broken in two. The rail stanchions were bent all over the place, and the wire was broken. A tangle of wire shrouds lay across the deck, and in the water to leeward floated the broken masts and booms—the masts broken in several places. The compass had gone, and so had the anchor which had been lashed to the foredeck.
There could be no more desolate picture. The low-lying, waterlogged, helpless hull, the broken spars and wreckage, that greyish-white sea; no bird, no ship, nothing to help, except that which we had within ourselves. Now the sun was gone again, the spindrift still blew chill across the deck, and the water lipped on to it, and poured into the open hull.
I think both John and I had been numbed with shock, but he recovered first and was working in a fury now, and a hanging cupboard door, some floorboards, and the Genoa erupted on to the deck. I hung on to them, so that they would not be blown or washed off, while he went down again for his tools. He found his tool-box jammed in the sink, and when he groped under water for the tin of galvanized nails in the paint locker, he found them on his second dip. I had intended to help John, as the first essential seemed to be to get the hole covered up, but he was working so fast, so sure now of what he was going to do, his mouth set in a grim determination, oblivious of anything but the work in hand, that I saw he would do as well without me, and now Beryl, who was trying to bale, found that she could not raise the bucket to empty it. I climbed down to where Beryl was standing on the engine, the water washing about her knees. We had to feel for some foothold on the floor-bearers because the engine cover had gone. A 70-lb. keg of waterlogged flour floated up to us.
‘Overboard with it,’ I said.
‘Mind your back,’ said Beryl, as if we were working on the farm.
I picked it up, and heaved it on deck, Beryl helping with her good arm, but it seemed light enough, and John toppled it over into the sea, out of his way. Anything to lighten the ship, for she was desperately heavy and low in the water.
‘We’d better bale through the skylight,’ Beryl said, ‘I’ll fill the bucket, and you haul it up. We’ll need a line. Here, take my life-line.’ She undid her line from her waist and handed it to me, and I noticed that the snap-hook was broken. I tied it on to the handle of the plastic bucket.
We waded into the cabin feeling with our feet, because there were no floorboards to walk on. I climbed on to the bunk and put my head and shoulders through the skylight. Beryl was on the seat below with the water still round her knees. She filled the bucket and I pulled it up and emptied it, and dropped it down through the skylight again. It would have floated if she had not been there to fill it. It was the best that we could do, and although we worked fast, to begin with, we could just keep pace with the water coming in. No heavy seas broke over the ship, and when a top splashed over, I tried to fill the aperture with my body as best I could.
John was doing splendidly. He had made a skeleton roof over the hatch with the door and floorboards, and nailed it down, and he had made it higher in the middle, so that it would spill the water when the sail was nailed over. He was nailing the folded sail over it now, using pieces of wood as battens to hold it down. It was a rush job, but it had to be strong enough to hold out until the sea went down. As soon as he had finished he went to the other skylight and nailed the storm-jib over it. Beryl and I baled and baled. As the bucket filled she called ‘Right!’ and I hauled it up again. Her voice rang out cheerfully from below, ‘Right … Right … Right!’ and John’s hammer beat a steady accompaniment. Tzu Hang began to rise slowly, and at first imperceptibly, in the water.
When John had finished with the skylight, he called to me to ask if he should let the rigging-screws go, so that the broken spars would act as a sea-anchor. I told him to do so, and he then went round the deck and loosened all the rigging-screws, leaving only one of the twin forestays attached to the deck. He had not much to work with, as the topmast forestay and the jibstay had gone with the mast, the forestay had smashed the deck fitting, and the other twin forestay had pulled its ring-bolt through the deck, stripping the thread on the ring-bolt. All the rigging was connected in some way or other, so now Tzu Hang drifted clear of her spars an
d then swung round, riding head to wind, on her single forestay. This forestay was attached to a mast fitting, on the broken mast, and the fitting was not equal to the strain now put on it, and it carried away. Tzu Hang swung away and drifted downwind, sideways to the sea, and that was the last that we saw of our tall masts, and the rigging, and the sails on the booms.
We baled and baled. We had two pumps on board, but the water that we were baling was filled with paper pulp from books and charts and labels. They would have clogged up with two strokes, and to begin with the pump handles themselves had been under water. John was now in the forecabin, standing on the bunks and baling through the skylight. Both he and Beryl were wearing the oilskins that they had been wearing when we upset, but I was still only in a jersey, and was beginning to feel very cold. I was continually wet with spray and salt water and lashed by the bitter wind, and my eyes were so encrusted and raw with salt, that I was finding it difficult to see. A broken spinnaker pole rolled off the deck, showing that Tzu Hang was coming out of the water again, and was getting more lively. I saw a big bird alight by it and start pecking at it, and I supposed that this was also a sign that the wind was beginning to abate. I peered through rimy eyes to try and identify it, and saw that it was a giant fulmar. It was the first and only one that we saw.
After a time I became so cold that I could no longer pull up the bucket, in spite of Beryl’s encouragement from below.
‘This is survival training, you know,’ she said.
It was the first joke. Survival training or no, I had to go below for a rest and we called a halt, and John came back from the main cabin and we sat on the bunk for a short time. Beryl found a tin of Horlicks tablets in a locker that had not been burst open, and she pulled off one of her oilskins and gave it to me.
‘Where is Pwe?’ I asked. ‘Anyone seen her?’
‘No, but I can hear her from time to time. She’s alive. We can’t do anything about her now.’
We were making progress, for the top of the engine was showing above the water. There was over a foot less in the ship already, and we were getting down to the narrower parts of her hull. We went back to work, and I found that now I had some protection from the wind the strength came back to my arms and I had no further difficulty. All through the day and on into the evening we baled, with occasional breaks for rest and more Horlicks tablets. Before dark, almost twelve hours after the smash, we were down below the floor-bearers again. After some difficulty we managed to get the primus stove, recovered from the bilge, to burn with a feeble impeded flame, and we heated some soup, but Beryl wouldn’t have any. Now that the struggle was over for the time being, she was in great pain from her shoulder, and she found that she couldn’t put her foot to the ground into the bargain. She had injured it stumbling about in the cabin, with no floorboards. Some blood-clotted hair was stuck to her forehead. Like a wounded animal, she wanted to creep into some dark place and to sleep until she felt better.
We found a bedraggled rag of a cat, shivering and cold, in the shelf in the bow, and with her, the three of us climbed into John’s bunk to try and get some warmth from each other.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘if it hadn’t been for John, I think that we wouldn’t have been here now.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘If there hadn’t been three of us, we wouldn’t be here now.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Beryl. ‘I think you were the man, the way you got those holes covered.’
‘I think my tool-box having jammed in the sink, and finding those nails is what saved us, at least so far.’
Beryl said, ‘If we get out of this, everyone will say that we broached, but we didn’t. They’ll say that there was a woman at the helm.’
‘If they know you they’ll say that’s how they know we didn’t broach, and anyway, we didn’t: we just went wham. Let’s leave it.’
‘How far are we off shore, Miles?’ John asked.
‘About 900 miles from the entrance to Magellan I should say.’
‘If we get out of this, it will be some journey. If there is a lull tomorrow, I’ll fix these covers properly.’
‘Get her seaworthy again, and get her cleaned up inside. I think that’s the first thing to do.’
Beryl was restless with pain and couldn’t sleep. In the end we went back to our own soggy bunks. As we lay, sodden and shivering, and awoke from fitful slumber to hear the thud of a wave against the side of the ship and the patter and splash of the spray on the deck, we could hear the main-sheet traveller sliding up and down on its horse. The sheet had gone with the boom, but the traveller was still there, and this annoying but familiar noise seemed to accentuate the feeling that the wreck was just a dream in spite of the water which cascaded from time to time through the makeshift covers. The old familiar noises were still there, and it was hard to believe that Tzu Hang was not a live ship, still running bravely down for the Horn.
For several days to come, although all our energies were spent in overcoming the difficulties of the changed situation, it seemed impossible to accept its reality.
CHAPTER EIGHT
RECOVERY
WHEN daylight came to the forecabin, and percolated dimly through the sails covering the holes in the deck on to the dank jumble that lay higgledy-piggledy throughout the ship, we set about breakfast.
Beryl, as indomitable as ever, was not prepared to let either of us usurp her position in the galley. She was the first up and set to work on the primus stove. The matches we had recovered from a large watertight tin that we had kept stowed in the stern. We found spare primus prickers in a locker in the forepeak, which had also remained inviolate, and the stove was soon going again in its familiar robust manner. Tea and sugar she found somewhere in the galley shelves, or about the galley, still in their plastic containers, and we rescued a 2-gallon glass bottle of egg powder from under John’s bunk. We had a dozen tins of lifeboat ration biscuits in the shelf in the forepeak, still more or less undisturbed. What a breakfast that was! As if there had been some benevolent genie in the bottle of egg powder, whom we had released to serve up life and hope and enthusiasm with the breakfast.
As we ate we planned our day. First we had to bale out the ship again, but it did begin to look now as if there was no damage to the hull. In spite of the water that had come into the ship from the deck during the night—and to our anxious imagination it seemed that tons had poured in—it was still below the floor-bearers. Next we had to make the coverings on the deck really strong and seaworthy.
‘What’s it like outside?’ Beryl asked.
‘Like the picture of “A Hopeless Dawn”,’ I replied.
‘Do you think that you can manage?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said John. ‘Anyway we’ve got to. I don’t want any more nights like that with the water coming in, and wondering whether you’ve got to get up and bale again all the time. If I can fix the coverings properly she ought to float all right anyway.’
‘I think that we must try and get the cabin stove going after that, otherwise I’m afraid that Pwe is going to pack up.’
Pwe was in very bad shape. Although Beryl had cuddled her all night, she still looked as if she had only just been pulled out of the water. She wouldn’t eat and was listless and miserable. Everything that she had trusted in had gone. The security of the ship, the warmth and the comfort had vanished in a single cataclysmic moment, and it looked as if she thought that life was no longer worth the struggle.
We uncovered one of the skylights, and baled again until we had most of the water out of the fore part of the ship. Then John and I went on deck to fix the cover over the doghouse opening. It was no longer a doghouse now, and we referred to it as the main hatch. The wind was down, but there was a wild looking sea, and the motion on deck was violent. John at times ventured on to his feet, but I moved about on my hands and knees or in a sitting position.
After taking off the Genoa, John set about improving the frame over which it was nailed. First he fastened two-by-twos, the poles fr
om the two canvas bunks in the main cabin, round the edges of the whole opening, so that the frame would be slightly higher than the deck. Then he laid three or four floorboards, or two-by-fours, fore-and-aft across the opening, the centre ones being slightly thicker than the outside ones. Next he covered these from side to side with plywood sheeting, and nailed it down to the side pieces. The result was a slightly curved roof, just above the deck level, but our plywood was limited and there were one or two gaps in it. Over this framework we stretched the Genoa, folded three times, and we nailed it down all round with wooden battens, which we got by knocking the frames from wooden lattice window covers, which were supposed to screw into the old doghouse windows for their protection, but which we never used.
By the time we had finished, the cover to this 6 by 6 feet hole was strong enough to stand on and was absolutely waterproof. John then turned his attention to the skylights, squaring up the broken sides, building them up with plywood and nailing plywood over the top, and finally covering them with canvas. Fortunately Beryl had always been a determined hoarder, and John and I had rarely been allowed to throw away unwanted pieces of wood. Since John had joined the ship, I had been able to get rid of one or two awkward pieces, by passing them to him, and when the expert advised that they should be got rid of, she had sometimes consented. On the whole her store remained undiminished in Tzu Hang’s canoe stem, where all unwanted things went. Now all kinds of old favourites, condemned and reprieved, were brought to light and made use of.
I left John with the skylights and went below again to dig in the mass of tins and paper pulp for the stove tops; the cabin stove had four tops and all were missing. They had left some marks on the deckhead above to show that they had been about during the smash. Amongst the debris we found a complete, heavy, bronze porthole, knocked out of the front of the doghouse, lying in the bilge by the galley. Its partner, also complete, we found in John’s cabin. The starboard doorpost of this after-cabin had been smashed by John’s tool-box, in its flight to the sink, after breaking away from its lashings, and it now seemed that while John and his tool-box were on their way out, the heavy porthole had been on its way in. As the other port was lying where I had first seen John as he emerged from the water, he must have been just missed by both barrels. Lying on its side in the rubbish in the main cabin was the sewing machine. We threw it and the ports overboard. We tended to throw all kinds of things over the side in a kind of desperation induced by the devastation below. Many things we might have made use of or restored later on, but we were still none too sure that we had a future.
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