Once Is Enough

by Miles Smeeton

  Wedged down in the bilge of the forecabin was the headless corpse of Blue Bear.

  ‘Here’s that bloody Blue Bear,’ I said. ‘I’m going to throw him overboard.’

  ‘Poor Blue Bear,’ said Beryl, thinking for a moment of Clio, ‘I suppose he’d better go.’

  ‘He hasn’t been much use to us, has he?’

  ‘Well, he must have his head too.’

  We found his head and put him, not ungently, into the sea, and I expect the albatrosses pulled the straw out of his tight blue tummy and picked out his button black eyes before he sank.

  While the ship had been so full of water, she had been acting as a kind of gigantic Mixmaster to all the stores inside her. Most of the lockers could be got at from the top, and during Tzu Hang’s cartwheel, or whatever antics she had gone through, they had emptied their contents into the cabin. All the tins lay piled in the bilges and all their paper covers had come off. There was paper pulp everywhere from labels and books and charts. It looked like the output of a pulp mill. Mixed in with it was broken glass, marmalade, bottled meat no longer in bottles, seventy broken eggs, soggy lumps of twice-baked bread, ashes and coke. The whole was tied together with glutinous tendons from skeins and skeins of coloured wool, which had been going into John’s jersey, and which were destined for several other jerseys that Beryl had hoped to make during the voyage, as a sideline to her many other activities. But not only wool. Marline, fishing line, caulking cotton and fish-hooks all helped to bind it together. This mess was topped off by odd clothing, soaking Dunlopillo cushions and seats, and out-of-place floorboards. Almost everything that could be needed in a yacht equipped for long-distance cruising for a year was there, even if it couldn’t be found.

  We had no particular wish—nor the time so far—to discuss what had happened to Tzu Hang, but as we worked we began to notice all kinds of things that helped us to put together our incoherent impressions. Some of the drawers in the forecabin, which had not fallen out of their places, had nevertheless emptied their contents to mix with the muddle in the bilge. After digging away vigorously for several hours, and emptying bucket after bucket of rubbish over the side, we found the last of the stove lids. We couldn’t find the hatchet, but we set to work splitting wet wood with a knife, until we got sufficient dry shavings. Beryl gave them a liberal douche of kerosene and, after a major explosion, we had a fire. During the afternoon she had been persuaded to lie down, and we doped her with pain-killer and sleeping pills, and she awoke feeling rather better. Now she appointed herself mistress of the stove as well as the galley.

  The chimney had gone with everything else on the deck and, as Tzu Hang rose on a wave, the smoke billowed out of every corner of the stove, and spread throughout the ship. It seemed to hang about from the deckhead down to about knee height. For the next few days, when Beryl was not sitting on the cabin floor sorting out the mess, she sat crouched over the cabin stove, trying to coax the fire into flame. She looked for all the world like an old witch, who had escaped to her cave from the fury of the mob. Her hair, still clotted with dried blood, stuck to her forehead, her face was blackened with soot, and a starved-looking cat trembled on her lap. The smoke eddied round her, and when John and I, her two minions, entered the cabin, we came in crouched in obeisance, in our efforts to keep below smoke level, and coughing apologetically. Beryl, witchlike, remained impervious to the fumes, but here the likeness ended, for her enthusiasm seemed to sparkle through the cabin, bringing light even to its drab darkness.

  We did need some more light in the cabin, because now that the skylights and the main hatch were boarded up, it was very dark below. John decided that he’d put perspex lights in both of them when he had the opportunity.

  That night Beryl and I slept on the floor of the cabin, while John wedged himself in a seat and attempted to keep warm by keeping the stove alight. We drugged Beryl again and she slept fairly well, after wedging herself with wet pillows. As a result of the first day’s work we felt that we were now safe enough so far as keeping afloat was concerned, and we were able to take a look at the balance sheet. We were about 900 miles west of the entrance to the Straits of Magellan. We had plenty of food, and we still had water, with reasonable rationing, for 100 days, and could devise something to catch more if necessary. If we were unable to sail, the drift of the current would take us round the Horn, unless we were first set on shore by westerly or south-westerly winds, and once round the Horn, the Falkland current would take us up towards the Falklands. If we got to the Falklands, Port Stanley was right at the leeward, the eastern end, and it would entail a turn to windward to make it, and if we missed it and were not seen, the next stop would be Africa. Anyway the Falklands were no place to approach under jury-rig if it could be avoided. We decided that we must keep the land to leeward so that in the end we could make land somewhere, but that we must try to get up north to warmer seas and calmer latitudes, out of the Cape Horn current and into the northerly drift, so that we would have a reasonable chance of making a port.

  We had a skilled carpenter on board, we had all the tools and the wood and the screws to build a mast, and we had spare wire and rope and sails. If Beryl got better, and our health stayed all right, there was no reason why we shouldn’t make it. Half the things we wanted were still mixed with the paper pulp in the bilges, but they were there.

  We had other assets too. My radio set had been completely immersed, and we couldn’t get a kick out of it, but John’s, screwed up under the deckhead amidships, had escaped a serious ducking, although stuck to the deckhead only two feet from it was a wad of wet ashes from the stove. Now, when we tested John’s set, warmed by the stove below it, we found that it worked. Our navigational books, wedged tight in their shelves, had survived, and the sextants were all right. The chronometer, with some water showing under its glass, was still running. No single chart had survived, but we had the American Pilot for the west coast of South America, and we had the National Geographic map of the Pacific, printed on some special waterproof fabric, which had survived intact. We also found a small portion of the south-west corner of the chart of the South Atlantic which had the coast of Chile on it, or at least a portion of it, on a very small scale.

  I suppose that night we may have felt rather lonely down there in those wild wastes, but we knew that it was up to us and nobody else to get ourselves out of these difficulties, and there was a feeling of companionship between the three of us in a very real adventure.

  Next morning, Saturday, John decided that he would have no more nights like the last, and he was looking rather the worse for his vigil by the stove. The forecabin seemed to be going to be the first to dry out, so he transferred the canvas from his bunk aft to the starboard berth in the forecabin. The bunkboards of this berth had been used in repairs, and he nailed the canvas across it in a form of hammock. His berth aft was dark and dripping with condensation, and was too far away from the forehatch, which was the only way that we could get on deck. From then on he and I slept in the forecabin and Beryl on the floor of the main cabin. She found this the most comfortable position, between a seat and the brass pipe which held the sliding table. But we were very worried about her. For the time being her ankle was giving her more pain than her shoulder. We had bandaged it up, and now when we removed the bandage, bloodblisters began to break out all round it. Beryl’s great cry with regard to sickness is that ‘the tendency in nature is towards cure’, and everything must be left alone as far as possible, so we were not allowed to do anything very much to help or hinder the process of repair. I gave her some penicillin in case any of these internal injuries should become inflamed, and she submitted to this without protest.

  It was a mild day, and we tried to dry out one or two mattresses on the deck, but they came down wetter than when they went up. John was able to put a perspex light, neatly finished and caulked, in one of the main cabin skylights. While I was on deck, I remembered that I had heard no sound from the rudder, which should have been swinging free
. We had noticed that the tiller had gone, but when I looked aft I saw that the bronze octagonal nut which held the tiller in position on the post was still there. The bronze tiller fitting must have broken wide open, but what really caught my attention was that the top of the rudder-post wasn’t moving. We had fixed up the life-lines after a fashion, and now we were beginning to find our feet again on the deck. Half walking and half crawling, I made my way aft as quickly as I could, got into the cockpit, and peered over the side and under the counter. As Tzu Hang’s stern lifted, I saw quite clearly that the whole of the rudder had gone.

  ‘Don’t look now, but the rudder’s gone,’ I said, when I was down below again.

  ‘What, clean gone?’

  ‘Clean as a whistle. It must have broken off right under the hull.’

  ‘Well,’ said Beryl, ‘she sails with no one at the helm, so I don’t see why she shouldn’t sail just as well without it.’

  ‘We’ll have to fix a steering-oar,’ John said. The matter of a mere rudder, after all that Tzu Hang had been through, and in view of all that we had to do, seemed very small.

  THE FIRST JURY-RIG

  John started work on the new mast that afternoon, while Beryl and I went on with the interminable job of clearing up. We had salvaged only two halves of broken spars from the deck. Half a spinnaker pole, which had remained snapped on to the life-line, where it was stowed, and half a spare staysail boom, which had been lashed down to the deck alongside the dinghies. John started to cut these so that they could be scarfed together. By Monday the mast was finished. It was 15 feet long, scarfed together in a perfect join, riveted through with four copper rivets, and whipped with seizing-wire. On one end was the staysail boom-fitting, to which we could fasten the shrouds and the stays, and on the other was the spinnaker boom snap-hook. We used a spare forestay as the backstay, a spare mizzen-shroud as a forestay, and a jib bridle as the shrouds, which could be adjusted by tackles to the deck.

  In order to set up the mast, we fastened the snap-hook to a deck-ring at the foot of the old mainmast position, with the mast lying aft along the deck. Then we fastened the backstay, the forestay, and the shrouds to the mast-head, making all the lower ends secure at approximately their right length, except the forestay. It seems a very simple thing now, putting up a 15-foot mast, but in the conditions that we were working under it was difficult enough. John took the end of the mast, and standing with his legs wide apart and his knees bent, he raised it until I could hold it on the forestay. We pushed and pulled and directly it was upright, although still rather wobbly, John set up the shrouds with the tackles, and I set up the forestay with a rigging-screw fastened to a grommet round the broken bowsprit. We had a mast again. Now we made fast the sheets of the raffee, a small square sail, 2 feet at the top and 10 feet at the foot, and hoisted it.

  There was a strong wind blowing, and it plunged and struggled as we hoisted, like a wild horse roped, as if to escape from its task. We subdued it and the moment it was up I felt Tzu Hang steady and begin to sail with the wind on her quarter.

  ‘She’s sailing, she’s sailing!’ I shouted in excitement.

  But John said, ‘Look at the bloody mast!’ and I saw that it was bending like a bow. We let the halliard fly, and the sail swooped and cracked, the sheets whipping madly. It had a small 2-foot spar at the head, which used to drive at us when we were setting it up or taking it down, and after one or two vicious assaults we began to regard it with great respect.

  ‘I’ll have to strengthen the mast,’ John said. And we took the whole thing down again.

  On the whole it had been a good day. In the morning, amongst other things, we had actually got the bilges dry, and I had taken the distributor and timing of the motor to pieces and put it in oil, and pumped all the salt water out of the engine sump, and poured oil in the cylinders. John had taken his movie camera to pieces and put it in oil, and Beryl and I wondered how on earth he thought that he could ever assemble it again. We had been sailing for a short time, long enough at any rate to hold out a promise of being able to sail in the near future, and we had found the spare barometer in a locker, in a wet leather case, but otherwise all right. It was reading very low, 28·95. The ship’s barometer and the ship’s clock had both vanished with the doghouse.

  The barometer was reading low for a very good reason. We were in for another gale, and we couldn’t have carried any sail anyway. All through the night it blew, with high breaking seas, giving poor Beryl no rest at all. It was obvious that her shoulder was quite badly injured, though whether it was a cracked shoulder bone, or badly torn muscles, I could not say. She managed by day, but at night she could find no comfort, and all we could do for her was to wedge her with cushions, so that she wasn’t rolled about. She managed to get some rest with the help of sleeping pills, which we had in the medicine chest.

  The wind began to ease before lunch on Tuesday, and I was able to get good sights, although it was quite impossible to stand on the deck to do so. We were in Long. 97° 15´ W. and Lat. 51° 20´ S. Getting a sight was not easy. I stood in the forehatch, with only my head and shoulders out, and took a long series which we averaged out, scrapping any that were obviously wrong. We plotted our position on the National Geographic map, but the bottom of the map was filled with insets of the Pacific Islands, so we found we were fifteen miles west of Nuka Hiva.

  All over the ship below deck there were small pieces of coke. We found them in drawers, in bookshelves, in our sleeping-bags, and there was almost no place that they hadn’t invaded. They had travelled farther and been far more adventurous than the eggs, whose remnants we also found all over the ship. But the eggs had remained on the lower levels. There was even coke on deck, which had been baled out and had stuck in the escape vents. Some of this coke had found its way into the cockpit and into the cockpit drains, and now they were blocked. Looking aft through the window, where we had been wont to see the helmsman’s legs, we now saw something like an electric washing machine, one of those with a window in the front, through which you see swirling water. While John set to work to strengthen the mast, I baled out the cockpit, and endeavoured to clear the drains with an ineffectual piece of bent wire.

  In the evening the wind was down enough for us to set up the mast again. Tzu Hang was on the starboard tack, that is to say she was slowly rolling her way, for she always has some forward movement, down towards the Horn. This time we set the little jib-topsail instead of the raffee, and then we took the dinghy oars, which had been stowed in the stern, and tried to row her round on to the other tack. From the height of Tzu Hang’s freeboard, the dinghy oars, which had been stowed in the counter, were hopelessly ineffectual, but we had nothing else. John rowed one way in the bow and I rowed the other way in the stern, and sometimes John came to the stem and rowed with me, but we had no success, and in the end we took the sail down and decided to try again after tea.

  When we tried again we set the raffee, and I worked the sheets while John struggled with an oar. There was a big following sea, and gradually we got her stern on to it. For a moment it looked as if it was anyone’s bet which way she’d go, but she went on round, and there we were on the port tack, heading north-east. We were sailing. I made a note in the log that night to say that it was our intention to make the rig all secure, to make a steering-oar, and if possible, to build another mast, and to stand on the port tack for Valdivia, Talcahuano, or Valparaiso. That there was beginning to be a change in our feelings is obvious from the log. Bets are recorded for ten shillings on the number of days to land. Beryl said a hundred, John fifty, and I, the lowest and as it turned out the most accurate, said forty. Even Beryl’s bet might be described as cautiously optimistic.

  But in spite of the optimism, our troubles were by no means over. It blew very hard again, Tzu Hang staggered and reeled in the darkness, and even her little bit of rigging blew a thin pipe into the night. In spite of the strengthening to the mast and the middle shrouds that we had put up in addition to the upper shro
uds, we began to think that we might lose it, so we were forced to hand the sail. We set it again after breakfast, and I spent another futile morning trying to clear the cockpit drains. Although the cockpit had never seemed to take much water in when the drains were working, it was surprising how quickly it filled, now that they were plugged. Perhaps it was some indication of the type of weather that we were having, because Tzu Hang was riding lighter than ever before. Meanwhile John was beginning to dismantle a hanging cupboard to get material for the new mast, and Beryl was busy all day, sorting out tins and making a list of the numbers that were stamped on the lids. All the tins that had been bought were stamped, so that it was possible to identify them from their numbers. For instance, beans were stamped HB 2389 and orange juice OR 4386, or something like that. Our own tins, canned on the farm, we identified roughly from their shape, but there was no knowing whether they would be beef or mutton.