The Strode Venturer

by Hammond Innes

  Five hours wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing, and if we asked them to fly the northern part of the area it would be closer to their direct flight path to Singapore. They might manage more than five hours. But when I suggested this to Deacon he simply said, “Do what you like.” He wasn’t interested. Aircraft meant nothing to him. All he understood was ships and he was poring over the chart again. I drafted a reply and handed it to Weston. Deacon was back in his chair then, his eyes closed. “I’ve only once seen pumice floating on the surface of the sea,” he murmured thickly. “That was off the China coast. I forget the year now—a long time ago.” He shifted slowly in his seat and opened his eyes, staring at me. They were very bloodshot in the sun’s glare. “You said something about pumice—when you came here before, in the Trader. That was before you sighted the island, hm?”

  “The day before,” I said.

  “You were to the west of it, then?”

  I nodded. “Eighty miles at least.”

  He sighed. “Have to be careful to-night.” He closed his eyes again, relapsing into silence. I think he slept for a while. He looked very tired and later, when Fields took over, he went to his cabin. He didn’t come down to lunch. At two o’clock we altered course to the east again. The haze was thickening, visibility not more than five miles. Two hours and then we’d turn south and when we’d steamed 50 miles we’d turn east for two hours, then north. In this way our search pattern would be a broad fifty-mile band across the southern half of the probable area, and if the Shackleton could cover the northern half …

  I was lying on my bunk then, drowsy with the heat and sweating. Through the porthole I could see the sea ruffled by the breeze, but it was still from the west and we were going with it so that the ship seemed lifeless, without air. Flies moved lazily and where they touched my skin they stayed until I roused myself to brush them off. It was better when we altered course at four. My cabin was on the starboard side and the breeze came gently in through the open porthole. I was thinking of Ali Raza and those five vedis with their masts stepped. Apart from the storm they would have had a steady following wind. Or had Canning stopped them from sailing? The sun was slipping down the sky now, the cabin a blaze of light. I dressed and went up to the bridge where Fields was lolling in Deacon’s chair, the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth stained a damp brown. Nothing had happened, nothing had been sighted, but visibility was improving now, the sea a deeper blue stretching out in a great circle to the hard line of the horizon.

  Tea came and Fields stirred from his lethargy. “How long’re we going on like this? It seems bloody years since we saw a real port.” I took my tea out on to the starboard bridge wing. It was cooler there and I stayed watching as the sun sank, flattening its lower rim against the horizon and then dropping quickly. The whole world was suddenly ablaze, the mackerel sky overhead flaming to a surrealist pattern. I went into the wheelhouse to put my cup down and at that moment the masthead lookout called. But all he had seen was a whale. A whale spouting, he said; but he wasn’t very sure. It had been a long way away on the port bow. We searched through the glasses but could see nothing; the sky was fading, the surface of the sea darkening. Night was falling and the echo-sounder showed no trace. The second officer came up to relieve Fields and I left them talking together by the open bridge wing door and went to my cabin.

  I had just stretched myself out on my bunk with a paperback I had borrowed from Weston when the faint sound of the telegraph brought me to my feet. The beat of the engines died away as I slipped into my sandals and hurried back to the wheelhouse. The lights had been switched on and outside the sea was dark. Fields and Taylor were standing staring at the echo-sounder. The trace showed eighty-two fathoms. It had picked up bottom at 200 and had come down with a rush, in a matter of five or ten minutes.

  Nobody spoke. The echo-sounder held us riveted. Eighty. Seventy-five. Seventy-three. The ship was losing way, the fall in depth slowing down. There seemed no other sound in the wheelhouse as the three of us stood and stared. And then suddenly the depths were increasing. Seventy-five again. Seventy-seven. Seventy-eight.

  A smell of stale sweat and Deacon was there, his cheap, steel-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, his heavy face thrust forward as he stared at the trace. And then his voice, solid, decisive: “Slow ahead. And hold your course—due south.” He stood, his feet slightly apart, his head thrust forward, watching as the beat of the engines responded to the call of the telegraph. The trace changed slowly, the depths gradually increasing. At two hundred fathoms he ordered full starboard wheel. There were stars now and we could see the ship’s bows swinging. He swung her through 180° and at slow ahead took her back over the same track, watching as the trace repeated itself. At 200 fathoms he ordered the engines stopped.

  “What’s up? What’re you doing?” Fields’s voice was sharp with an edge of panic to it. “We can’t stop here.”

  “We’ll have to.” Deacon let his arm rest for a moment on the thin shoulders. “You’ve found bottom. That’s the main thing. Whatever it is—shoal or island—we’re all right here.” A quick pat and he let his hand drop, turning away to the chart table. Fields followed him, the sweat still shining on his face, but eager to please now. He was telling him about the lookout sighting a whale. Deacon sent for the man, but the Chinese seaman couldn’t tell us any more than he’d called down to us at the time. He hadn’t seen the whale —just a disturbance in the sea, something that looked like a whale venting. “Off the port bow, eh?” Deacon stared at the trace he’d ripped from the depth indicator. I knew what he was thinking. If it wasn’t a whale, if it was the venting of gases … “Get out!” he bellowed irritably and he shook his head, staring down at the chart. But the chart didn’t help. There wasn’t a single line of soundings within a hundred miles of us. He got his sextant out of its box and for the next half-hour he was engrossed in taking star sights and working out our position. Finally he marked it in on the chart.

  “Sights every two hours and maintain depth at two hundred fathoms. What’s the reading now?” he asked Fields. It had fallen to one-nine-three and he ordered slow ahead with the ship’s bows pointing west until we’d made good the drift of the current and the echo-sounder was showing 200 fathoms again. He left the wheelhouse then. When he came back he had a fresh bottle of whisky tucked under his arm and the tooth glass from his cabin. Automatically he took in the details of the bridge the way a man does when he comes on watch. He nodded to himself, his great dome glinting in the light. Then he settled himself in his chair. He had swung it round so that it faced the echo-sounder and now he reached for the bottle which he had placed carefully on the deck, peering up at me at the same time over the rim of his glasses. “Going to be a long night,” he growled and his hands were trembling slightly as he slopped whisky into the glass. They had been perfectly steady when he had been taking his star sights.

  I stayed with him most of the night and by dawn he had finished the bottle. But though he cat-napped he never had to be roused to take his sights and always seemed to know when we had drifted out of position and the depth under our keel was decreasing. He didn’t talk much, though in the early hours, when he had drunk most of the whisky, he told me a bit about his early life. He had been to a private school for a time, but then his father, who had been a draper in Camden Town, had gone bankrupt and he had had to start earning a living. He was older than I had expected, for that had been during the First World War and after his father had been killed at Passchendaele he had enlisted and had been with Ironside’s troops fighting in Russia. And after that he’d bummed his way around the world, finishing up in Karachi where he had signed on as cook on an old tramp steamer. How he’d come to be first officer on the Lammermuir when my father died he didn’t say, for by then he had withdrawn again into his shell. Once I woke to hear him gasping, his big hands clutching at his stomach. But whatever it was it seemed to pass for I heard the clink of the bottle as I dozed off again. He took sights again at
four and after that he didn’t bother any more, leaving it to Fields, whose watch it was, to keep the ship on the 200-fathom mark. Even when dawn came he didn’t stir.

  I was out on the bridge wing then, watching as the light strengthened in the east. But there was nothing there—no island, no sign of a reef, nothing; just the sea with a westerly breeze chasing little waves across the swell. It wasn’t until after breakfast that Deacon took over and we got under way, proceeding south to the point of least depth, and then, with the echo-sounder reading less than eighty fathoms, heading east and feeling our way. Almost immediately the foremast lookout called that there were shoals ahead. The depth was then sixty fathoms, decreasing rapidly. The engines were stopped and before the way was off the ship we could see the changed colour of the sea from the bridge. From blue it changed to green and beyond that to a lighter green that was almost white in the sunlight.

  “Full astern!” The screw thrashed and the old ship juddered as Deacon turned her round and headed back to the west, the depth increasing rapidly until it was too deep for us to record. We swung north then on to 012°. The time was ten-seventeen. Reece had steamed south from the island on a course of 192° for just over four hours before his ship had struck the shoals. Assuming that we had been on the western edge of the same shoals we could expect to sight the island about one o’clock.

  But one o’clock came and one-thirty and still nothing ahead of us but the thin line of the horizon blurred with heat haze. A hundred miles to the north of us the Shackleton was flying her own search pattern. Weston had been in wireless contact with Landor since nine-thirty, but Deacon had obstinately refused to let him call the plane south to search our area. He hadn’t come all this way, he said, to have the bloody R.A.F. locate the island. Three years in a Jap prison camp had bitten deep. He couldn’t forgive the Services for letting Singapore be over-run, for the shambles of the evacuation. He hated the lot of them.

  At one-forty-five there was still no sign of the island. For the Shackleton time and fuel were both running out, and when I told Deacon I was going to call the plane south he didn’t argue. “Just as you like,” he said, staring at me morosely. I don’t think he understood the limitations of an aircraft any more than he understood the equipment that made the Shackleton such a formidable search weapon.

  The aircraft had been working steadily south and it was now less than sixty miles away. I lit a cigarette whilst Weston fiddled with his controls and suddenly Landor’s voice came in very clear. I gave him our position and also the position of the shoal and suggested he fly a pattern to the east and west of both positions. “Roger. But we’ll only be able to stay about half an hour in your area.” There was a short pause and then he added, “We already have you in radar sight. Bearing one-six-three, fifty-five miles. Be with you inside of twenty minutes.”

  I had some lunch brought up to the radio shack and just after two Landor was back on the air again. “There’s a blip on my screen—quite a big one—almost due east of you. Hold on while I work it out. From you it bears about one-one-o degrees, thirty miles. Can you see it from where you are? Over.” But of course I couldn’t. Our radar was out of action and visibility, even from the lookout’s position at the foremast, was little more than five miles. There was a good deal of cloud about. I passed the information on to Deacon and he immediately altered course to the east. “If that’s the island,” he growled, “then the shoal bears about two-thirty degrees, not one-nine-two, which was the course Reece said he steered.”

  The truth was staring us in the face then. “And when we steamed north again after the fire it was a true course. We’d nothing to steer by—only the stars.”

  “That’s what I mean. His compass must have been out—badly out.” He was staring at me and the same thought was in both our minds. “Christ!” he said. “What a thing to have done to you. And I accused him of lying.”

  “You weren’t to know,” I said. “And anyway, if he wasn’t lying, he was certainly holding something back.” I was thinking of the report he had written on the stranding. “I’m quite sure he had his instructions—to use a storm, something—any excuse to get clear of the island and leave us there, isolated for a few weeks. George Strode needed time.”

  “I see.” And he sat there with troubled eyes, his head hunched into his shoulders, thinking about it. He didn’t say anything for some time and I knew he was seeing it from Reece’s point of view, knowing what it was like to be under pressure from owners who were prepared to sacrifice their captains. At length I heard him mutter to himself, “Poor sod!” And then he leaned back and closed his eyes, his face grey and drawn under the stubble.

  We heard the plane pass to the north of us, but it was hidden by a rain-storm. Landor came on the air to say it was definitely an island. He began to describe its appearance on the radar screen—about six miles by three, a bay on the western side. And then he was shouting that the pilot could see it, a bare island with nothing growing. “We’re over it now—flying very low—two-three hundred feet. There’s a hut—some sort of road—yes, and equipment. It’s your island all right. And we can see men—about half a dozen—waving to us.”

  I sat down then, suddenly tired as the tension drained out of me. I was trembling slightly, my body damp with sweat. Rain beat against the deck outside and it was suddenly much darker. To the east of us the Shackleton was clear of the rain and climbing to 4,000 feet heading south-west. Soon they could see the area of shallows where the Strode Trader had grounded. “A big oval patch about fifteen miles by ten.”

  “What’s it bear from the island?” I asked.

  “Bearing two-two-seven degrees.”

  I told Deacon and he nodded his big head, slowly, almost sadly. “A compass error as big as that doesn’t happen by chance.” It was what he had expected—what we had both expected. “He’s like his father. No consideration for anybody once he’s made up his mind to a thing. And he’ll get more and more like him as time goes on,” he added in a grim, tired voice.

  Forty miles to the south of us the Shackleton plotted the shallows and then made a wide sweep searching for others. But Landor reported nothing—all deep water and the sea empty except for a couple of native boats some twenty miles west-south-west of the shoal, both under sail. “Vedis?” I asked, and he said he thought so. He had taken the Shackleton in low, trying to head them off from the danger area and direct them towards the island. Now he was coming back. He couldn’t stay any longer because of his fuel situation. A few minutes later the big, clumsy-looking aircraft bumbled over us at masthead height. A great roar of engines, an old-maidish waggle of the wings and it was gone, lost in a rain cloud and heading for Singapore over a thousand miles away.

  Three hours later we found bottom in just over 290 fathoms. The island was hidden by rain and we stopped engines and lay to. Shortly after six we had a brief glimpse of it, a blurred line seen through a mist of rain at a distance of about three miles. It looked like a great sandbank, bare and glistening wetly. Deacon roused himself from his chair and came out on to the bridge wing to look at it. And as the rain closed in again and the dim outline of it faded he said, “Well, he’s got what he wanted; an island, a people of his own. He’ll get Strode Orient, too. Or he’ll build another company. He’ll finish up with more power than his father had.” His eyes were staring blankly into the rain. “New men, new ships …” His voice died, his big head sagging between the massive shoulders. He was an old man, lonely now and filled with misgivings about the future. “There was a time,” he murmured, “when I’d have enjoyed a fight.” He shook his head. “Not now, not any …” A fresh downpour drowned his voice and we ducked inside the wheelhouse.

  The sun set, but we saw it only as a darkening of the rain clouds. Night closed quickly in on us. Another twelve hours to spend keeping the ship to a depth position. Deacon had drinks served in the saloon. He had shaved and put on a clean khaki shirt and trousers. Like the rest of his clothes they had been run up for him by one of the Chin
ese seamen. He even stayed for the evening meal, a massive, almost paternal, figure at the head of the small table. And afterwards he insisted on standing a watch, sitting alone in the wheelhouse watching the echo-sounder, giving the necessary orders. I went up there just after eleven and stayed with him until the second officer took over. He didn’t talk much, just sat looking about him, his eyes surprisingly alert as though every detail of the bridge was new to him. I put it down to the fact that he was sober. I don’t think I had seen him properly sober before.

  As soon as he was relieved he got to his feet. “Just hold her here on the three-hundred-fathom mark,” he told Taylor. He stood there a moment, looking uncertainly round the wheelhouse as though reluctant to leave it. “Who’s relieving you?” he asked.

  “Fields.”

  He nodded. “Good. Tell him to get under way as soon as there’s light enough. He’s to make straight for the anchorage. He’s not to delay—not under any circumstances.” He nodded good night to us and then he turned very slowly and walked out of the wheelhouse, his head high, his shoulders no longer stooped—walking with a steady, purposeful gait.

  Shortly afterwards I went to my cabin. The rain had stopped, but it was still overcast, the air very oppressive, and I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking of Deacon, wishing there was something I could have said, something I could do to relieve his desperate sense of hopelessness. It wasn’t just the despair of the alcoholic. It was much deeper than that. All those years, all the post-war years nursing an old tramp whilst younger men driving bigger and faster ships passed him on the sea lanes of the world. The bottle helps, but it isn’t the answer, not when you’re a born seaman and living in a world that has no use for you. There comes a time when you don’t fight any more. You give up then.