It’s surprising how quickly food is converted into energy and gives a man back that desperate urge to live. ‘What are our chances?’ I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Depends on the wind and the sea and that bulkhead. If the bulkhead holds, then we’ll be driven on to the Minkies sometime during the night.’ The kettle had boiled and he was busy making the coffee. Now that the primus was out, the pantry seemed full of the noise of the gale and the straining of the ship.
‘Suppose we got the pumps working, couldn’t we clear that for’ard hold of water? There was a good deal of pressure in the boiler when I was down there and I stoked before I left.’
‘You know damn’ well we can’t clear that hold with the hatch cover gone.’
‘Not if we ran her off before the wind. If we got the engines going . . .
‘Look,’ he said. ‘This old ship will be weeping water at every plate joint throughout her whole length now. If we ran the pumps flat out, they’d do no more than hold the water that’s seeping into her, let alone clear Number One hold. Anyway, how much steam do you think you need to run the engines and the pumps as well?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Do you?’
‘No. But I’m damn’ sure it would need more than one boiler; two at least. And if you think we could keep two boilers fired . . .’ He poured the coffee into tin mugs and stirred sugar in. ‘With one boiler we could have the engines going intermittently.’ He seemed to consider it, and then shook his head. ‘There wouldn’t be any point in it.’ He passed me one of the mugs. It was scalding hot.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘For one thing the wind’s westerly. Keeping her stern to the wind would mean every turn of the screw would be driving her straight towards the Minkies. Besides . . .’ His voice checked, ceased abruptly. He seemed to lose himself in some dark thought of his own, his black brows furrowed, his mouth a hard, bitter line. ‘Oh, to hell with it,’ he muttered and poured the rest of his rum into his coffee. ‘I know where there’s some more liquor on board. We can get tight, and then who the hell cares?’
I stared at him, my bowels suddenly hot with anger. ‘Is that what happened last time? Did you just give up? Is that what it was?’
‘Last time?’ He was frozen to sudden immobility, the mug of coffee halfway to his lips. ‘What do you mean—last time?’
‘The Belle Isle,’ I said. ‘Did she go down because . . .’ I stopped there, checked by the sudden, blazing fury in his eyes.
‘So you know about the Belle Isle. What else do you know about me?’ His voice was shrill, uncontrolled and violent. ‘Do you know I was on the beach for damn’ near a year? A year in Aden! And this . . . This first ship in a year, and it has to be the Mary Deare, a floating bloody scrap-heap with a drunken skipper who goes and dies on me and an owner . . .’ He pushed his hand up through his hair, staring through me, back into the past. ‘Fate can play dirty tricks, once she’s got her claws into you.’ And then, after a pause: ‘If I could keep this old tramp afloat . . .’ He shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t think it would happen to a man twice, would you,’ he murmured. ‘Twice! I was too young and green to know what they were up to when I got command of the Belle Isle. But I knew the smell of it this time. Well, they got the wrong man.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘A lot of good it did me, being honest. I got her up through the Bay. God knows how I did it, but I did. And round Ushant I headed for Southampton.’ His eyes focused on me again and he said, ‘Well, now I don’t care any more. You can’t go on fighting a thing. This gale has finished me. I know when I’m licked.’
I didn’t say anything, for there wasn’t anything I could say. It had to come from him. I couldn’t drive him. I knew that. I just sat there and waited and the silence tightened between us. He finished his coffee and put the mug down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The silence became unbearable, full of the death-struggle sounds of the ship. ‘Better come and have a drink,’ he said, his voice tense.
I didn’t move. I didn’t say anything either.
‘It’s tough on you, but you didn’t have to come on board, did you?’ He stared at me angrily. ‘What the hell do you think I can do?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You’re the captain. It’s for you to give the orders.’
‘Captain!’ He laughed without mirth. ‘Master of the Mary Deare!’ He rolled it round his tongue, sneeringly. ‘Well, at least I’ll have gone down with the ship this time. They said she was jinxed, some of them.’ He seemed to be speaking to himself. ‘They were convinced she’d never make it. But we’re all jinxed when times get hard; and she’s been kicked around the world for a good many years. She must have been a crack cargo liner in her day, but now she’s just a rusty old hulk making her last voyage. We’d a cargo for Antwerp, and then we were taking her across the North Sea to Newcastle to be broken up.’ He was silent after that his head on one side, listening. He was listening to the sounds of the ship being pounded by the waves. ‘What a thing it would be—to steam into Southampton with no crew and the ship half-full of water.’ He laughed. It was the drink in him talking, and he knew it. ‘Let’s see,’ he said, still speaking to himself. ‘The tide will be turning against us in a few hours. Wind over tide. Still, if we could hold her stern-on to the wind, maybe we could keep her afloat a little longer. Anything could happen. The wind might shift; the gale might blow itself out.’ But there was no conviction in the way he said it. He glanced at his watch. ‘Barely twelve hours from now and the tide will be carrying us down on to the rocks and it’ll still be dark. If visibility is all right, we should be able to see the buoys; at least we’ll know—’ His voice checked abruptly. ‘The buoys! That’s what I was thinking about before I went to sleep. I was looking at the chart . . .’ His voice had become animated, his eyes suddenly bright with excitement. And then his fist crashed against the palm of his hand and he jumped to his feet. ‘That’s it! If we were to hit the tide just right . . .’ He pushed by me and I heard his feet take the steps of the ladder leading to the bridge two at a time.
I followed him up and found him in the chartroom, poring over a big book of Admiralty tide-tables. He looked up and for the first time I saw him as a leader, all the fatigue wiped out, the drink evaporated. ‘There’s just a chance,’ he said. ‘If we can keep her afloat, we might do it. It means working down in that stoke-hold—working like you’ve never worked in your life before; turn-and-turn about—the stoke-hold and the wheelhouse.’ He seized hold of my arm. ‘Come on! Let’s see if we’ve got sufficient head of steam to move the engines.’ A wave hit the side of the ship. Sheets of water fell with a crash, sluicing into the wheel-house through the broken doorway leading to the port wing of the bridge. Out of the tail of my eye I saw water thundering green across the half-submerged bows. And then I was following him down the ladder again into the body of the ship and he was shouting: ‘By God, man, I might cheat them yet.’ And his face, caught in the light of my torch as it was turned momentarily up to me, was filled with a sort of crazy vitality.
3
THE DARKNESS OF the engine-room was warm with the smell of hot oil and there was the hissing sound of steam escaping, so that the place seemed no longer dead. In my haste I let go at the bottom of the last ladder and was pitched a dozen feet across the engine-room deck, fetching up against a steel rail. There was a prolonged hiss of steam as I stood there, gasping for breath, and the pistons moved, thrusting their arms against the gleaming metal of the crankshaft, turning it—slowly at first, and then faster and faster so that all the metal parts gleamed in the light of my torch and the engines took on that steady, reassuring thump-thump of vitality and power. The hum of a dynamo started and the lights began to glow. The humming became louder, the lights brighter, and then abruptly they snapped full on. Brass and steelwork gleamed. The whole lit cavern of the engine-room was alive with sound.
Patch was standing on the engineer officer’s control platform. I staggered down the catwalk between the t
wo big reciprocators. ‘The engines!’ I shouted at him. ‘The engines are going!’ I was beside myself with excitement. For that one moment I thought we could steam straight into a port.
But he was already shutting off the steam, and the beat of the engines slowed and then stopped with a final hiss. ‘Don’t stand there,’ he said to me. ‘Start stoking. We want all the steam we can get.’ For the first time he looked like a man in control of the situation.
But stoking was more difficult now; dangerous, too. The movements of the ship were unpredictable. One moment I would be flinging a shovelful of coal high up against the thrust of gravity, the next I would be pitched towards the flaming mouth of the furnace and the coal would seem to have no weight at all as it left the shovel.
I don’t know how long I was working there alone before he joined me. It seemed a long time. I didn’t see him enter. All my mind was concentrated on the coal and that gaping furnace door, concentrated on gauging the pitch of the ship, avoiding being flung against the red-hot fire. I felt a hand on my arm and I looked up to find him standing over me. I straightened up and faced him, panting, with the sweat pouring off my body. ‘I’ve got the pumps going,’ he said.
I nodded, too short of breath to waste it in speech.
‘I’ve just been up to the bridge,’ he went on. ‘Half the time the bows are right under. Any moment that bulkhead may go. Do you think you could hear the engine-room telegraph from in here?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I expect so.’
He took me through into the engine-room then and showed me the engine controls and the voice pipe that connected with the bridge. ‘I’ll go up to the bridge now,’ he said. ‘You go back to the boiler-room and start stoking. I’ll give you a ring on the engine-room telegraph. If you don’t hear it after two minutes come to the voice pipe. Okay?’
I nodded and he went clambering up the ladder, whilst I returned to the stoke-hold. Even in that short time my arms and back had stiffened. I had to force myself to start shovelling again. I was beginning to get very tired and I wondered how long we could keep this up. Faint above the roar of the furnace and the sounds of the engine-room came the jangling of the bridge telegraph. I flung the furnace door to and went through to the engineers’ control platform. The pointer stood at Full Ahead. I spun the control wheel, opening up the steam valves, and for the first time I understood the thrill and pride an engineer officer must feel; the hiss of steam, the pistons moving and the engines taking up a steady, pulsating beat, vibrant with power. The heart of the ship had come alive, and it was I who had made it alive. It was satisfying.
Back in the stoke-hold the shovel felt strangely light. I barely noticed the aching of my arms. Confidence and the will to fight back had returned. I was suddenly full of energy.
It worked out that about every ten minutes or so the engines had to be run; it took about three minutes to get her stern-on again. Those three minutes produced a big drop in the pressure gauge. Only by keeping the furnace full and roaring could that pressure be built up again in time to meet the next demand from the bridge. At 15.30 he called me up to take over the wheel. ‘Watch the spindrift,’ he said. ‘That will tell you the wind direction. Lay her exactly along the direction of the wind. If you’re a fraction out the stern will swing almost immediately. And have full rudder on from the moment you order me to start the engines—and don’t forget she’ll carry way for a good five minutes after the engines have stopped.’ He left me then and I was alone at the wheel.
It was a welcome relief to be able to stand there with nothing heavier than the wheel to shift. But whereas in the stoke-hold with the roar of the furnace and the periodic sound of the engines, there had been a sense of security and normality, here I was face to face with the reality of the situation. A grim half light showed the bows so badly down in the water that they barely lifted above the marching wave tops even when running dead before the wind, and, as soon as the ship swung and I had to use the engines, the whole deck for’ard of the bridge became a seething welter of water. The sweat cooled on my body, an ice-cold, clammy coating to my skin, and I began to shiver. I found a duffle coat in the chartroom and put it on. A new position had been marked in on the chart. We were lying just about halfway between the Roches Douvres and the Minkies. The congested areas of submerged reefs were looming rapidly nearer.
At 16.30 he relieved me. He stood for a moment looking out across the bows into the faded daylight of that wretched, gale-swept scene. His face and neck glistened with sweat and his eyes were deep-sunk in their sockets, all the bone formation of his face standing out hard and sharp. ‘Come through into the chartroom a minute,’ he said, taking hold of my arm—whether out of a need for the companionship of physical contact or to steady himself against the roll of the ship, I don’t know. ‘The wind is westerly now,’ he said, pointing to our position on the chart. ‘It will probably back farther into the south-west. If we’re not careful we’re going to be driven slap into the middle of the Minkies. What we’ve got to do now is to inch our way to the south’ard. Every time we run the engines we’ve got to make full use of them.’
I nodded. ‘Where are you heading for—St Malo?’
He looked at me. ‘I’m not heading anywhere,’ he said. ‘I’m just trying to keep afloat.’ He hesitated and then added, ‘In four hours the tide will start running against us. It’ll be wind over tide then and throughout most of the night. It’ll kick up a hell of a sea.’
I glanced out of the chartroom window and my heart sank, for it didn’t seem possible that the sea could be worse than it was now. I watched him work out the dead reckoning and mark in another cross about five miles west and a little south of the other. ‘We can’t have moved that much in an hour,’ I protested.
He flung down the pencil. ‘Work it out for yourself if you don’t believe me,’ he said. ‘The tide’s running south-easterly three knots. Allow two miles for wind and engines, and there you are.’
I stared at the chart. The Minkies were getting very close. ‘And in the next two hours?’ I asked.
‘In the next two hours the tide slacks off considerably. But my reckoning is that we’ll be within a mile or so of the south-west Minkies buoy. And there we’ll stay for the first half of the night. And when the tide turns . . .’ He shrugged his shoulders and went back again into the wheelhouse. ‘Depends whether we’ve managed to edge south at all.’
With this cheerful prospect I went below again, back to the familiar, aching grind and blazing heat of the stoke-hold. One hour in the stoke-hold; one on the bridge. Turn and turn about; it became a routine. Dazed with tiredness we did it automatically, unconsciously adjusting ourselves to the greater movement of the bridge and then readjusting ourselves to the quicker, less predictable and much more dangerous motion of the stoke-hold.
I remember being at the wheel when darkness fell. It seemed to steal up on us almost imperceptibly. And then suddenly I couldn’t see the bows, couldn’t tell where the wind was because I couldn’t see the spume flying off the wave tops. All I could see was darkness shot with the white-tumbling wave tops. The deck sloped forward under my feet and, with broken water all round the ship, it was as though we were running the rapids of a giant river, slipping downhill at tremendous speed. I steered by the compass and the feel of the ship then, all the time pushing her towards the south with every burst of the engines.
At the helm just after midnight a glimmer of light showed for an instant in the rushing, wind-torn darkness beyond the bows. I hoped to God I had imagined it. I was very tired by then and it had just been a momentary gleam, indistinct and ephemeral. But a little later I saw it again, a flash of light about two points off the starboard bow. It showed intermittently, often obscured by the backs of the waves.
By the end of my watch it was possible to identify it as group-flashing two. The chart showed the south-west Minkies buoy as Gp.fl.(2). ‘About what we expected,’ Patch said when he relieved me. His voice showed no lift of interest; it was fla
t and slurred with weariness, his face gaunt in the light of the binnacle.
And after that the light was always with us, getting a little nearer, a little clearer until it began to fade with the first grey glimmer of dawn as I took over the wheel at five-thirty in the morning. I was almost dead with exhaustion then, hardly able to stand, my knees trembling. The night in the stoke-hold had been hell, the last hour almost unendurable, shovelling coal with rivulets of water spilling across the floor and spitting steam as they swirled round the hot base of the furnace.
The tide had turned now and the double flash of the Minkies buoy began to come down on us fast, and on the wrong side of us. Soon, as the daylight strengthened, I could see the buoy itself, one of those huge pillar buoys that the French use, and, even above the wind, I thought now and then I could catch the mournful, funeral note of its whistle. We were going to pass at least half a mile inside it. I had a look at the chart and then got Patch on the voice pipe and told him to come up.
It seemed a long time before he appeared on the bridge, and when he came he moved slowly, his feet dragging as though he were just out of a sick bed. Changing watches during the night, he had been just a shadowy shape in the pale, reflected glow of the binnacle light. Now, seeing him suddenly in the cold light of day, I was shocked. He looked ghastly. ‘You’re just about out on your feet,’ I said.
He stared at me as though he hadn’t understood. I suppose I looked pretty bad myself. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
I pointed to the Minkies buoy, now almost four points on the starboard bow. ‘We’re passing too far inside it,’ I said. ‘At any moment we may hit the Brisants du Sud rocks.’
The Wreck of the Mary Deare Page 6