Scend of the Sea

by Geoffery Jenkins

  'I began to turn seawards, towards deeper water. Here, this little arrow shows it, the one I've drawn by the question mark. I thought that with more depth under her, she might ride more easily. She was pitching and rolling, taking a lot of water aboard. Then suddenly there was a great crash, the lights went, the bridge windows were stove in, and we all hit the deck. The ship dived like a mad thing, putting her head down like nothing I've ever known. I thought she would plunge clean to the bottom. I grabbed the wheel so she wouldn't broach to. Then I saw something ... I... I...'

  She was staring at me, startled, penetratingly.

  'Why do you say it like that, Ian?'

  I, in my own way like her, had to control my runaway emotions. I picked my words.

  'The mere fact that a great liner vanished in broad daylight on a short three-day passage, within sight of the coast, on a well-frequented sea route, makes it strange enough. But it becomes stranger still. One man projected the Waratah mystery into the fourth dimension.’

  She glanced at the cracked photograph and shivered. She waited for me to go on.

  I rummaged in the cabinet and found what I wanted.

  'There has never been anything like it in a sea tragedy, before or since,' I said. 'On her last voyage, between Australia and South Africa, the Waratah carried a passenger named Claude Sawyer. Three or four days out from Durban Sawyer dreamed a dream. Here are the exact words in which he described it to the official inquiry in London, which praised his integrity - and his courage.

  ' "I saw a man with a long sword in his left hand, holding a rag or cloth in his right hand, saturated in blood.

  "‘I saw the same dream twice again the same night, and the last time I looked so carefully that I could almost draw the design of the sword." '

  The only sound in the cabin was the distant clatter of loading cranes on the dockside.

  She asked quietly. 'How was Sawyer able to appear at the hearing? Did he disembark in Durban?'

  'Yes. He was so shattered by his dream that he left the ship. But he was to be more shattered still. The day the Waratah disappeared, Sawyer was alone in a Durban hotel.

  ‘ "That night I had another dream. I saw the Waratah in big waves; one big wave went over her bows and pressed her down; she rolled over on her starboard side and disappeared." '

  She glanced uneasily at the Waratah photograph, as if to reassure herself that it was once 10,000 tons of real, tangible, steel.

  Then she asked, 'Did Sawyer say he spoke to the man with the sword and the blood-soaked cloth?'

  'No. Sawyer never at any stage in the future varied his story or elaborated it, but the name which has become attached to the figure he saw is Vanderdecken.'

  'Vanderdecken?'

  'Vanderdecken was a medieval Dutch sailor, the legend goes, who diced with the devil for his soul. He lost, and was condemned to sail perpetually round the Cape of Storms. Like Drake's Drum, in times of danger and calamity men claim to have seen the Flying Dutchman's ship. But no one has ever seen the person of the Flying Dutchman close to, like Sawyer.'

  'Do you believe it, Ian?'

  She was grave, unhappy. I knew, in that moment, that like Vanderdecken I was dicing, but I was dicing for a heart.

  I temporized.

  The star witness of the Waratah inquiry was the first officer of the Clan Macintyre, Phillips. He was specially commended for his evidence. He gave the world the last, most explicit, facts about the Waratah that we have. His bearing at the inquiry made him what is called the perfect witness.

  'But there was something else, something which Phillips did not record until later.'

  I searched in the cabinet again and pulled out a photo-copy document.

  I quoted. ' "During the evening of the second day I was on the bridge of the Clan Macintyre. I saw - or thought I saw - a curious thing.

  ' "Just as the angry light from the storm was fading from the wind-torn sky, to which great waves were leaping, I got a glimpse through the wrack of a small vessel far away to starboard, or landwards.

  ' "I rubbed my eyes and looked again, but the gloom and piling seas had hidden her, and I did not see her any more. Yet I am absolutely positive she was not imaginary.”

  ' "She was a weird, old-fashioned sailing ship, with a tremendous high bow and stern, squat and square, with three masts, the foremast raked forward and the mizzen raked back.

  ' "What made me feel colder than the icy rain and wind was that she was sailing into the teeth of the wind- a thing impossible!

  ' "Was she the Flying Dutchman, going to the Waratah's funeral, or returning from it?

  ' "I did not like the look of that ship in the distance, and had three cups of boiling cocoa to bring me back to the present."'

  She was silent, puzzled.

  There was an imperative knock at the door.

  The moment was past.

  'Dockyard superintendent to see you, sir.' It was Fourie, the bo'sun.

  'On deck, sir.' He grinned. 'Can't believe his bleedin' eyes, begging your pardon, miss.'

  I saw the man examining the hole in the deck. I dodged and took her up to the crushed radio hut. After what I had just said, I owed it to her to show what the storm had done to my ship. Patches of rust had begun to appear on the jagged metal where the radiosonde hut had been, and along the buckled edges of the forward catwalk to the harpoon gun platform. During the first day of the tow we had planked a wooden patch over the gaping socket where the winch had been; now it looked more irregular and untidier in the rain coming in from the grey sea than it did when dry; the rain also emphasized the line of the buckled bow; it drifted in through the broken windows of the bridge.

  She looked round intently, disbelievingly. She did not speak. Her only response was a quick jerky sigh, an intake of breath maybe, a smothered exclamation. Then-our lips were together and our bodies close and warm, as if of their own impulse they sought to burn out the icy desolation and terror of that night whose witness was before us. How long we stood in each other's arms I do not know.

  It was Fourie and his sideburns who brought our surroundings back to us. He came carrying a battered umbrella with an air of diffident, apologetic gallantry. The deck, the docks and the rain came into focus again.

  'Begging your pardon, sir,' he said with a sidelong, half-reproachful glance at her damp hair. He held out the umbrella to her; abstractedly she took it and thanked him. He gave a half-amused salute with his fist and shambled away.

  I groped for something ordinary to say. I nodded towards the dockyard man.

  'When I hand over to him, I hand over my command. That is why I wanted to let you see the ship first.'

  Her eyes never left mine. She, too, was living on two levels.

  'They're not - sacking you!’

  'Not quite. On extended leave, pending repairs to the ship and investigations. It will take at least a month to get her shipshape again. My first run of the gauntlet is my interview tomorrow with the C-in-C ...'

  She laughed softly, and the drops showered through the leaky umbrella.

  'Mr Hoskins! There weren't any doubts before, as far as he was concerned, and there'll be fewer now!'

  I was at a loss to follow, but she raced on. 'Mr Hoskins and I spent a lot of radio time over you, Ian Fairlie! I don't think he'll find it so strange when I ask for my holiday to coincide with your ship being repaired.'

  I held her round her slim waist, pressed hard against mt' and we faced the city and the great mountain. A month! What would we find among those streets and houses, she and I, during those coming weeks which would be ours, inalienably ours, because it was we who would set our hearts' seal upon them?

  I drew her round. Her eyes were alight. I looked into their depths.

  She smiled. Her smiles seemed to start as light far back in her face and be the distillate of her quiet moments, a kind of gathering together of all the joy which had gone before, as if it were awaiting that one moment for expression.

  I held her close.
<
br />   CHAPTER NINE

  'Then give me the position, bearing, and depth of the wreck of the Waratah, and the nature of the phenomenon which sank her.'

  The C-in-C leaned sideways, flipped a switch on his intercom, and said crisply, 'Watch that recorder, Perry. This is important.'

  The sulky hum of the tape-recording machine limped slightly on a warped cassette. There was no other sound in the big room. The officer was monitoring our conversation-from the next room; the two of us were alone. For hours we had sat like that in his office at Simonstown, once the headquarters of the British South Atlantic Command. For over a century Simonstown was an enclave of the Royal Navy at the tip of the African continent, and the room was impregnated with that long occupancy. Under a huge painting of the sinking of the famous Birkenhead troopship off the Cape was a signed letter from the first German Kaiser eulogizing the men in her who had gone steadfastly and unflinchingly to their deaths. A faded print showed a steam-cum-sail warship attacking a land stockade. The title hit me - HMS Hermes!

  Only yesterday, on the deck of my ship, everything had changed. One chapter had closed, another had opened. We should have been free to have taken the Mini and lost ourselves inland - away from the sea - somewhere among the ine-rich earth and purple mountains of the Cape; or gone laughing and skiing in the snow; to have drunk wine; simply to have been with one another. Mr Hoskins had readily agreed to her leave and we found ourselves together, a little uncertain and greatly excited about our weeks ahead together. In that spirit I had brushed aside the significance of my appointment with the C-in-C; I'll be back in an hour, I told her, arranging to meet her nearby at an eccentric aunt's who kept a thirty-acre wild garden under the batteries of the naval base.

  Now almost the whole day had passed. When I had first been shown in, the C-in-C had been curt.

  The Weather Bureau has requested me to conduct a one-man investigation on its behalf into the damage suffered by the Walvis Bay and the causes of it,' he told me. The Bureau itself has no experience of maritime matters.' He stared at me penetratingly. 'As well you know.' He gave a throaty, mirthless chuckle. They nearly lost the one ship they had. Both the Bureau and I felt it was logical for me to act, since the Navy has already been so closely implicated in this . . . uh . . . incident concerning your ship and the storm order. Kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.'

  I had decided the previous day, after Tafline had left me, that my best defence of my actions would be to make a clean breast of the whole Waratah saga and weather enigmas. I could justify my actions to a sailor, I reasoned, and the C-in-C was a sailor. He had boasted publicly of his descent from the Sea Beggars of William the Silent. The emotionless moon face and rather flabby eye-sockets gave no hint of the iron personality in whose hands lay the destiny of Britain's great trade and oil routes round the Cape. In line with my decision, I had brought with me for the interview a mass of Waratah documents, as well as a scale model of the liner I had originally begged from Lloyd's of London.

  It was not, however, an interview but a trial.

  For hours I had expounded, argued, reasoned, explained, sought to justify. I had shown him on the model a hundred technicalities which might have caused the liner's end. I had gone into every facet of the contradictory storm weather which the Waratah and the Walvis Bay had shared.

  The C-in-C had been a good listener. He ordered mid-morning coffee; his only relaxation was to get up and speak to a budgie in a cage which repeated after him, 'Don't talk about ships and shipping.'

  Ten generations in his ancestry since the war,’ he had remarked with a ghost of a smile. 'Still says the same damn thing.'

  It was the only warmth I saw.

  The C-in-C had sent the officer who was in charge of the big tape-recorder into an ante-room, while he himself kept an eye on the revolving cassettes. I appreciated his gesture of privacy between us. Nonetheless, every word, every hesitation of mine, was remorselessly logged. Now my throat constricted. Should I answer, south of the Bashee? I remembered Lee-Aston's reaction.

  I wanted to get up and tear that grinding cassette from its socket. Its rhythm willed me to say, a ship without a soul!

  I looked away, fiddling with my documents.

  The C-in-C said in his deep bass. ‘I have three warships in the area. Lee-Aston's a good man. Has a great interest in these sort of things - weather, currents, seabeds. I sent him to the French inquiry when one of our subs on delivery nearly sank a Frenchman in a collision off Southern Spain. There are all sorts of tricky currents and sets where the Med meets the Atlantic'

  Lee-Aston! I wish I had known. It would have made all the difference to my approach.

  The C-in-C bridled in his chair. 'Well, man?’

  ‘I am uncertain what my position was at the time,' I mumbled.

  'Captain Fairlie, you have based your entire justification for your extraordinary actions on your need to find out where the Waratah sank, and what sank her. I ask you, where did she sink, and you say, I am uncertain of the position.'

  'That is correct.'

  'How far are you uncertain?’

  'I was south of the Bashee. My dead reckoning became suspect once I became aware that although I was actually supposed to be doing thirteen knots, I felt I was in fact losing way over the ground.'

  'Captain Fairlie!' snapped the C-in-C. 'No destroyer ever laid a smokescreen like you are trying to do. You have talked ceaselessly, articulately, for two hours. At one straight question you dodge behind a screen of words and uncertainties.'

  'If I had found the Waratah I would have solved one of the greatest mysteries of the sea ...' I stumbled on.

  The C-in-C threw his big bulk back in the chair with a snort.

  'But you chose to try, nevertheless, using a valuable ship and highly expensive scientific equipment. You defied orders to get out of the storm area. Why?'

  The oil rigs,' I said helplessly. 'I tried to tell you...'

  'Again, nothing but a smokescreen of words!'

  'My actions were inseparably connected with the safety of the oil rigs.'

  'You have spoken about what you call a Waratah storm which you say has special features which no other storm has. What are they?'

  'The counter-current seems to take over .. .’

  'Seems! Are you incapable of giving me a straight, factual reply, Captain Fairlie?'

  I said, 'It's the effect of all this-the build-up. I've never known a wave like that. She didn't rise. Walvis Bay put her head down, not up, as she would do normally ...'

  'Bah!' roared the big man. 'There's not a man of us who has been to sea who hasn't seen a hell of a wave sometime. Now you want me to believe . . . what the devil do you want me to believe?'

  I had come prepared to tell him everything. Now I could not. If what I had explained was so patently unacceptable, how much more would that other be?

  The C-in-C snapped the intercom switch impatiently.

  'Perry! Come and shut this blasted thing off, will you?'

  We waited until he had gone again. We sat and faced one another.

  Then the C-in-C said, 'What I report to the Bureau may well rob you of your command-you know that, don't you?' 'Yes.'

  They tell me you're a damn fine sailor. They've got nothing against you as a captain or a first-class weather-man except...'

  'Waratah,' I said.

  'You've allowed something which hasn't any substance to eat into you, cloud your judgment - even risk your life and your ship.' He stopped and added brutally, 'Kill your own brother.'

  I was alone on that shattered bridge with the water pouring through, trying to swing her head clear of that dark sinister shape among the white waves.

  I said, without heart, There'll be a proper official inquiry into my brother's death.'

  Then I feel sorry for you if you can't do better in public than you have with me in private,' he replied tartly.

  There was a pause. My mind shut fast on the Waratah. I had made up my mind. I wondered what Tafline
had been doing during the hours I had been with the C-in-C.

  'You're holding back on something, Fairlie,' snapped the C-in-C. 'I've a damn good mind to send a frigate or two to have a close look at the area.'

  'South of the Bashee!' I interjected ironically.

  'Listen!' he replied brusquely. 'You can make up your mind which way it's to go. You can tell me confidentially, and then we'll set the recorder going and I'll ask you the right questions and you can give the replies, as if we had never discussed it meanwhile with the machine off. That'll let you out. Otherwise . ..' He shrugged.

  I stood up. 'Thanks for the chance. You're wasting your time if you think your ships will find anything where I failed. I've been there in daylight, too.'

  The C-in-C's rough surgery was gentle compared to the brutal cautery of the Buccaneer inquiry.

  When the massive air-sea search failed to find Alistair or any trace of his plane, the inquiry was announced for ten days later. It seemed to me to be rushing things, but public interest remained at a high pitch and I suspected that the Air Force wanted to put itself in the clear as soon as possible. The hearing was scheduled to be in public, as is customary with all military and civilian crash investigations.

  Smarting from the interview with the C-in-C, I wanted to get away inland with her, find solace, forget about the Waratah. But I had brought my cabinet from the ship and stored the documents in her flat. The model of the Waratah had intrigued her first. She had made me lift off the removable top to explain the interior. She expressed delight at the scale reproduction of the first-class music lounge with its tiny 'minstrels' gallery' of carved wooden pillars in the centre and heavy curtains gathered at each wooden corner supporting post; plush, comfortable settees with backs tuckered like a Tibetan anorak; concealed lighting (the Waratah was the first ship ever to try it); and, inevitably, some potted palms. Starting with the model, she had lost herself in the mass of documents, microfilms, newspapers, weather reports, and the full evidence of the Board of Trade inquiry in London, until the days slipped by and we still had not moved from Cape Town.