The Wreck of the Mary Deare

by Hammond Innes

  He hesitated and then dived into the charthouse. The noise of the engine died, leaving a stillness in which the sound of the sea seemed unnaturally loud. Under sail alone, the boat merged with the elements for which she had been designed, fitting herself to the pattern of wind and wave. The movement was easier. Waves ceased to break over the foredeck.

  But though Patch had been right, Mike came back out of the charthouse in a mood of blazing anger. ‘You seem bloody certain we’re going to try and race that boat for you,’ he said. And then, turning to me, he added, ‘Take my advice, John. Turn down-wind and head for Poole.’

  ‘Down-wind,’ Patch said, ‘the motor boat will be faster than you.’

  ‘Well, head up-wind then and make for Weymouth.’

  ‘It’s a dead beat,’ I said.

  And Patch added, ‘Either way she’ll overhaul you.’

  ‘What’s that matter?’ Mike demanded. ‘They can’t do anything. They’ve got the law on their side. That’s all. They can’t do anything.’

  ‘God Almighty!’ Patch said. ‘Don’t you understand yet?’ He leaned forward, his face thrust close to mine. ‘You tell him, Sands. You’ve met Gundersen. You know the set-up now.’ He stared at me, and then he swung round to face Mike again. ‘Listen!’ he said. ‘Here was a plan to clean up over a quarter of a million pounds. The cargo was switched and sold to the Chinks. That part of it went all right. But all the rest went wrong. The captain refused to play his part. They tried to sink her in a gale and they failed. Higgins was left to do the job on his own and he botched it.’ His voice was pitched high in the urgency of his effort to communicate what he believed. ‘Can’t you see it from their point of view . . . twelve men drowned, an old man dead, possibly murdered, and the ship herself lying out there on the Minkies. They daren’t let me reach the Mary Deare. And they daren’t let you reach her either. They daren’t even let you get into port now—not until they’ve disposed of the Mary Deare.’

  Mike stared at him. ‘But that’s fantastic,’ he breathed.

  ‘Why fantastic? They must know I’m on board. And you wouldn’t have sailed if you hadn’t believed my story. Imagine what they face if the truth comes out.’

  Mike turned to me. ‘Do you believe this, John?’ His face was very pale. He sounded bewildered.

  ‘I think we’d better try and shake them off,’ I said. Patch had his own reasons for driving us on. But I knew I didn’t want that boat to catch up with us in the dark.

  ‘But good God! This is the English Channel. They can’t do anything to us here.’ He stared at Patch and myself, waiting for us to answer him. ‘Well, what the hell can they do?’ And then he looked out at the blackness that surrounded us, realising gradually that it made no difference that we were in the Channel. There were just the three of us alone in a black waste of tumbled water that spilled to white on the crests, and without another word he got the log line out of the locker and went aft to stream it astern.

  ‘We go on then,’ Patch said. The sudden relief from tension made his voice sound tired. It reminded me that he has had no sleep the night before and no food, that for days he’d been under a great strain.

  Mike came back into the cockpit. ‘I think we’re holding them now,’ he said. I glanced back at Griselda. Her navigation lights were masked every now and then by the marching wave-tops. ‘When the tide turns,’ I said, ‘we’ll beat up to windward and see if that will shake them off.’ I got up stiffly from behind the wheel. ‘Will you take the first watch, Mike?’ It would have to be two hours on and four off, with one man alone at the wheel and the other two on call. We were desperately short-handed for a hard sail like this. I gave him the wheel and went through into the charthouse to enter up the log.

  Patch followed me in. ‘Have you thought about who will be on board that motor boat?’ he asked me. I shook my head, wondering what was coming, and he added, ‘It won’t be Gundersen, you know.’

  ‘Who will it be then?’

  ‘Higgins.’

  ‘What’s it matter which of them it is?’ I asked. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

  ‘Just this,’ he said earnestly. ‘Gundersen is a man who would only take calculated risks. But if Higgins is in control of that boat . . .’ He stared at me, watching to see whether I had understood his point.

  ‘You mean he’s desperate?’

  ‘Yes.’ Patch looked at me for a moment. ‘There’s no need to tell young Duncan. If Higgins doesn’t stop us before we get to that salvage tug, he’s done for. When he’s arrested, the others will panic. Burrows, for one, will turn Queen’s evidence. You understand?’ He turned away then. ‘I’ll go and get some food inside me.’ But in the doorway he hesitated. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to land you in a thing like this.’

  I finished entering up the log and turned in, fully-clothed, on the charthouse bunk. But I didn’t sleep much. The movement was uncomfortable, and every time I looked out through the open doorway I could see Griselda’s lights bobbing in the darkness astern of us, and then I would listen to the sound of the wind in the rigging, alert for the slightest indication that it was slackening. Twice Mike had to call me out to help him winch in the sheets, and at two o’clock I took over the helm.

  The tide had turned and the seas were steep and breaking. We altered course to south-west, sheeting in the sails till they were almost flat as we came on to the wind. It was cold then with the wind on our faces and the spray slatting against our oilskins as Sea Witch beat to windward, bucking the seas and busting the wave-tops open, water cascading from her bows.

  Behind us, Griselda’s navigation lights followed our change of course and the white of her masthead light danced crazily in the night as she wallowed and pitched and rolled in our wake. But a power boat doesn’t fit herself to the pattern of the water the way a boat under sail does and gradually the red and green lights dipped more frequently below the level of the waves, until at last all we could see was her steaming light dancing like a will-o’-the-wisp on the wave-tops.

  Mike’s voice reached out to me through the noise of wind and sea: ‘We’ve got them now.’ He was excited. ‘If we go about . . .’ The rest of it was lost to me, whipped away by the wind, drowned in the crash of a wave bursting against the bows. But I knew what was in his mind. If we went on to the other tack, sailing north-west, instead of south-west, there was a good chance that they wouldn’t notice our change of course, even though the night had become brilliant with stars. And once clear of them we could turn downwind, get to the east of them and make for the Alderney Race.

  There is no doubt in my mind now that Mike was right and, had I done as he suggested, the disaster for which we were headed might have been avoided. But the changed motion induced by our heading into the wind had brought Patch on deck. I could see him sitting on the main hatch, staring aft for glimpses of Griselda, and I wondered what his reaction would be if we went over on to the port tack, heading back towards the English coast. Also, we were over-canvassed, and when you go about there are backstays to set up as well as the sheets to handle; one slip and we could lose our mast!

  ‘I don’t like it,’ I told Mike. We were short-handed and it was night. Also, of course, in those conditions, when you are tired and cold and wet, there is a great temptation to sit tight and do nothing. I thought we were drawing ahead of them.

  Apparently Mike had the same thought, for, instead of pressing his point, he shrugged his shoulders and went into the charthouse to turn in. It seems extraordinary to me now that I didn’t appreciate the significance of the fact that Griselda’s light was no longer showing astern of us, but way out on the port quarter. Had I done so, I should have known that we were not gaining on her, merely diverging from her. She was steering a more southerly course, maintaining her speed by avoiding the head-on battering of the seas. And I for my part—as so often happens at night—thought our own speed was greater than it was.

  By the end of my watch it was clouding over and the wind wa
s slackening. I called Patch and when he came up, we eased the sheets and altered course to sou’-sou’-west. We were no longer butting into the seas then, but following the lines of the waves with a wild, swooping movement. The wind was free and Sea Witch was going like a train.

  I heated some soup then and we drank it in the cockpit, watching the dawn break. It came with a cold, bleak light and Patch stood, staring aft. But there was nothing to be seen but a waste of grey, tumbled water. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘We’ve left them way behind.’

  He nodded, not saying anything. His face looked grey. ‘At this rate we’ll raise the Casquets inside of two hours,’ I said, and I left him then and went below to get some sleep.

  An hour later Mike woke me, shouting to me to come up on deck, his voice urgent. ‘Look over there, John,’ he said as I emerged from the hatch. He was pointing away to port and, at first, I could see nothing. My sleep-dimmed eyes absorbed the cold daylight and the drabness of sea and sky, and then on the lift of a wave I thought I saw something, a stick maybe or a spar-buoy raised aloft out there where the march of the waves met the horizon. I screwed up my eyes, focusing them, and the next time I balanced to the upward swoop of the deck, I saw it clearly—the mast of a small ship. It lifted itself up out of the waves and behind it came the hull of the boat itself, drab white in the morning light.

  ‘Griselda?’ I said.

  Mike nodded and passed me the glasses. She was certainly rolling. I could see the water streaming off her and every now and then a wave burst against her bows, throwing up a cloud of spray. ‘If we’d gone about last night . . .’

  ‘Well, we didn’t,’ I said. I glanced aft to where Patch sat hunched over the wheel in borrowed oilskins. ‘Does he know?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. He saw her first.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Nothing. He didn’t seem surprised.’

  I stared at the boat through the glasses again, trying to estimate her speed. ‘What are we doing?’ I asked. ‘Did you get a log reading at six?’

  ‘Yes. We did eight in the last hour.’

  Eight knots! I glanced up at the sails. They were wind-bellied out, tight and hard, solid tons of weight pulling at the mast, hauling the boat through the water. My God! it was hard that we hadn’t shaken them off after a whole night of sailing.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Mike said. ‘If they come up with us . . .’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘There’s not much they can do really, is there? I mean . . .’ He hesitated, glancing at me uncertainly.

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ I said and went into the charthouse. I was tired and I didn’t want to think about it. I worked out our dead reckoning, based on miles logged, courses sailed and tides, and found we were ten miles north-north-west of the Casquests. In two hours’ time the tide would be east-going, setting us in towards Alderney and the Cherbourg Peninsular. But that damned boat lay between us and the coast, and there was no getting away from her, not in daylight.

  I stayed on in the charthouse and got the forecast: wind moderating later, some fog patches locally. A depression centred over the Atlantic was moving slowly east.

  Shortly after breakfast we raised the Casquets—the north-western bastion of the Channel Islands. The tide turned and began to run against us and we had the Casquets with us for a long time, a grey, spiked helmet of a rock against which the seas broke. We thrashed our way through the steamer lane that runs up-Channel from Ushant, seeing only two ships, and those hull-down on the horizon. And then we raised Guernsey Island and the traffic in the steamer lane was just smudges of smoke where sky and sea met.

  All morning Patch remained on deck, taking his trick at the helm, dozing in the cockpit or sitting staring at the grey acres that separated us from Griselda. Sometimes he would dive into the charthouse and work frenziedly with parallel rule and dividers, checking our course and our E.T.A. at the Minkies. Once I suggested that he went below and got some sleep, but all he said was ‘Sleep? I can’t sleep till I see the Mary Deare.’ And he stayed there, grey and exhausted, existing on his nerves, as he had done all through the Enquiry.

  I think he was afraid to go below—afraid that when he couldn’t see her Griselda would somehow creep up on us. He was frighteningly tired. He kept on asking me about the tides. We had no tidal chart and it worried him. Even when the tide turned around midday, pushing us westward again, he kept on checking our bearing on the jagged outline of Guernsey Island.

  I should perhaps explain that the tidal surge of six hours flood and six hours ebb that shifts the whole body of water of the English Channel builds up to an extraordinary peak in the great bight of the French coast that contains the Channel Islands. At ‘springs’, when the tides are greatest, it sluices in and out of the narrow gap between Alderney and the mainland at a rate of up to seven knots. Its direction in the main body of the Channel Islands rotates throughout the twelve hours. Moreover, the rise and fall of tide is as much as from 30 to 40 feet.

  I mention this to explain our preoccupation with the tide and because it has a bearing on what followed. Moreover, the whole area being strewn with submerged reefs, rock outcrops and islands, there is always a sense of tension when navigating in this section of the Channel.

  Holding to our course, we were headed direct for the central mass of Guernsey. I was relying on the westward thrust of the tide to push us clear, and as we closed with the broken water that marked the submerged rocks known as Les Frettes, we were all of us watching to see what Griselda would do. In fact, she had no alternative, and when the rock cliffs of the island were close to port she altered course to come in astern of us.

  The westernmost tip of Guernsey is marked by Les Hanois, a lighthouse set seaward on a group of rocks. We passed so close that we could see every detail of it—the cormorants standing like vultures on the rocks and the swell breaking white all along the edge; and dead astern of us Griselda followed in our wake, pitching and rolling with the spray flying from her bow wave. She was less than a quarter of a mile away and Patch stood with his body braced against the charthouse, staring at her through the glasses.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘is it Higgins?’ I could see a figure moving on the deck.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, it’s Higgins all right. And Yules, too. There’s another of them in the wheelhouse, but I can’t see who it is.’

  He handed me the glasses. I could recognise Higgins all right. He was standing by the rail, staring at us, his big body balanced to the movement of the boat. Higgins and Yules and Patch—three of the men who had sailed the Mary Deare! And here we were, within forty miles of where the ship was stranded.

  Mike was at the wheel and he suddenly called to me. ‘If we turn now, we could make Peter Port ahead of them.’

  It was a straight run before the wind along the southern coast of the island. We could make St Martin’s Point without their gaining on us and then a few miles under engine and we should be in Peter Port. I glanced at Patch. He had stepped down into the cockpit. ‘I’ll relieve you,’ he said. It wasn’t a suggestion. It was an order.

  ‘No,’ Mike was staring at him, anger flaring up into his eyes.

  ‘I said I’ll relieve you.’ Patch reached for the wheel.

  ‘I heard what you said.’ Mike swung the wheel over, shouting to me to ease the sheets. But Patch had his hands on the wheel, too. Standing, he had more purchase and he slowly got it back, holding it there whilst Mike shouted obscenities at him. Their two faces were within a foot of each other—Patch’s hard and tense, Mike’s livid with rage. They were like that for a long two minutes, held immobile by the counteracting force of their muscles like two statues.

  And then the moment when we had any choice of action was past. Griselda, clear of Les Hanois rocks, was altering course to get between us and Peter Port. Patch had seen it and he said, ‘You’ve no choice now.’ He hadn’t relaxed his grip of the wheel, but the tension was out of his voice. Mike stopped cursing at him. He seemed to un
derstand, for he turned his head and stared at the motor boat. Then he let go of the wheel and stood up. ‘Since you appear to be skippering this boat, you’d better bloody well steer her. But by Christ!’ he added, ‘if anything happens to her . . .’ He stared coldly at me, still trembling with anger, and went below.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Patch said. He had seated himself at the wheel and his voice was weary.

  ‘This isn’t your boat,’ I reminded him.

  He shrugged his shoulders, looking round at Griselda. ‘What else did you expect me to do?’

  There was no point in discussing it. We were committed now to go on until we reached the Mary Deare. But if the wind dropped . . . ‘Suppose Higgins catches up with us?’ I said.

  He looked at me quickly. ‘He mustn’t.’ And then he added, ‘We’ve got to get there first.’

  ‘Yes, but suppose he does?’ I was thinking that after all Higgins had got to keep within the law. ‘He can’t do very much.’

  ‘No?’ He laughed a little wildly. ‘How do you know what Higgins can do? He’s frightened.’ He looked at me, sideways out of the corners of his eyes. ‘Wouldn’t you be frightened if you were Higgins?’ And then he glanced up at the sails and his voice was quiet and practical again as he asked me to ease the sheets and he altered course for the north-west Minkies buoy.

  After that we didn’t talk any more and gradually I became conscious of the sound of the motor boat’s engine. It was very faint at first, a gentle undertone to the swish of the sea going past, but it warned me that the wind was easing. The overcast had thinned and a humid glare hung over the water so that the outline of Jersey Island away to port was barely visible. I started the engine and from that moment I knew Griselda would overtake us.

  The forecast announced that the depression over the Atlantic was deepening, moving eastwards faster. But it wouldn’t help us. All the time the wind was dropping now and Griselda was coming up abeam of us, keeping between us and Jersey Island. The glare faded, leaving sea and sky a chill, luminous grey. There was no horizon any more. Patch went below to get some more clothes. It had suddenly become much colder and the wind was fluky, blowing in sudden puffs.