Scend of the Sea

by Geoffery Jenkins

  Each recalcitrant stay, each intractable sail gasket, each impossible sheet, I fought with a frenzy which ignored the pain of my blood-raw hands as the nails were torn from the sockets of three of my fingers and a thumb. In the end the gale won-that awful, thundering attrition from the south-west which resumed in full blast after the lull. What chance had I, one man, when a crew of race-proven, storm-toughened seamen were needed, against the fury of the gale when trying to break out a bolt of canvas which seemed to have all the devils of the deep lodged in its folds?

  I failed.

  I wept when the sail blew away into the white, driving gloom of salt and spray. I could not see a boat's-length ahead. I fought for hours after that to try and rig the jib as an emergency, but it, too, was ripped away into the sea-murk. Every time I managed to bring her head round, the yacht would start off in an eccentric circle because of the jammed rudder, until the gale and sea would catch her and throw her bodily to the north-east - away, away, each desperate mile, from the Waratah's grave.

  When I realized I could do nothing to handle the yacht, I set about trying to get the radio to work. The rawness of my wounded hands was made worse by spilt acid from the cells, which I refilled and changed, at first with hope, then with despair. The set remained as mute as the hour she had reported it dead.

  On the third day, when I ate the last of the emergency sandwiches she had made, and drank the last unpolluted water from the tanks, my frenzy turned to exhaustion, and then to calm-a kind of numb, uncaring calm. My reason told me I was in as almost severe straits as she the moment that steel lid shut on her upturned face; my heart told me it did not matter, and that soon we would be together again.

  So I read the pitiful little log between black covers which she took from Douglas Fairlie's pocket and caused her own doom.

  I read of the Waratah's doom.

  SS. Waratah. 9 p.m.

  July 27, 1909

  I write this in the presence of Almighty God, to whose protection and mercy I shall go when it is finished, in the certain knowledge that I have only a little time to live. That I am alive, is a miracle, for around me tonight are the bodies of over 200 of my fellow-beings - passengers, captain and officers-in this ill-starred ship. I interpret this small reprieve from death as His grace to enable me, in my extremity, to record how the Waratah met her end.

  We sailed from Durban at approx 8 p.m. yesterday. I had the first watch today. I was surprised, before it was fight, to have Captain Ilbery join me on the bridge. He wished me a formal good morning and then stood looking out ahead.

  'As an old sailing shipmaster I must sniff the first wind of the day,' he said with an attempt at a smile, but it was clear to me he was very uneasy about something. I had

  never known him be like that before.

  'What do you make of it?' he asked me.

  I was surprised that he did not address me by my rank. He was always meticulous about this, especially in front of the crew.

  'Coming up for a south-westerly blow, sir,’ I replied.

  Captain Ilbery kept on looking to the south-west, as if he expected to see something there. The sea was rising, and once or twice the ship put her head down. We had had trouble loading 250 tons of coal into the well deck bunker at Durban and we could not get the ship upright. Now I resolved to get the well deck coal below as soon as the day watches came on duty.

  Captain Ilbery went to the extreme forward section of the bridge. He seemed to be studying the well deck.

  To lighten his unease, I used a windjammer expression as a joke.

  'No need to whistle for a wind, is there, sir?'

  The Captain did not reply, but started towards the chart-room companionway. Then he said, 'Come below a moment, will you, Douglas?'

  I was so startled by his use of my Christian name that I left the bridge and followed him without giving orders.

  Again, in the chart-room, he used my Christian name. Even when he had officiated at my wedding aboard Waratah, he had only half-managed to get it out.

  'Douglas, what do you make of it?'

  The thought crossed my mind, how many great storms has he ridden out, and what is so special about this capful of wind from the south-west?

  'It seems to be working up a bit from the south-west, sir,' I replied. There's not much to it at the moment. We had a bit of a blow from the same quarter outward bound round the Cape, you remember ...'

  ‘I don't mean the storm, man—I mean the ship,' he retorted with a vehemence which was so strange from him. The ship and the storm together, if you like.’

  'It's not a storm yet, sir,' I pointed out.

  'It will come,' asserted Captain Ilbery. 'One develops an instinct, a sixth sense, about these things. It's coming-a big one. This ship has never been in a Cape buster before, Douglas.'

  'I'd feel happier if that well deck coal were below for the sake of her stability,' I answered. 'The sea is working up, and she has an odd sort of dead feel to me.'

  Captain Ilbery seemed relieved that I shared with him the unspoken fears we both felt about the ship, her stability, and her incredible roll and lurch.

  4Do that then,' he said. 'Get it stowed below as soon as you can after daylight.'

  'Can I compensate the ballast tanks as well?' I asked. ‘I would like all the weight I can find as deep below her centre of gravity as I can put it.'

  Captain Ilbery eyed me gravely, and was about to say something when a messenger came from the bridge. 'Steamer fine on the port bow, sir. Overhauling her.' I went to the bridge, but Captain Dbery stayed. A ship called the Clan Macintyre, bound for London, signalled us. We exchanged formalities. It was off Port St John's.

  Shortly after Waratah had passed Clan Macintyre, Captain Ilbery returned to the bridge. He was formal, which showed he had reached a decision in a difficult situation. There are not many captains who would have the courage to risk censure by running from a storm which had not yet developed into anything special in a crack, well-engined 10,000-tonner.

  'I am going to do what my sailing-ship instincts tell me,' he informed me. 'Haul out, Mr Fairlie.'

  I set course as he directed, and Waratah headed seawards across Clan Macintyre's bows and across the scend of the sea - its run was now strongly from the south-west - while the wind rose to a full gale. The new course, taking the sea on her starboard bow, brought several heavy seas aboard, and drenched the coaling gangs I had set to work.

  Shortly after 10 o'clock-it seems scarcely credible that it happened a brief twelve hours ago - Waratah was struck by a heavy beam sea. She hung at the end of her roll in her characteristic way until I was convinced she would never come back. She lay in that position for perhaps five or six seconds, and then yawed off course landwards. Her recovery from the roll had been so sluggish that I feared that the worst had happened below.

  Within seconds, I had an emergency call from the chief engineer. Hundreds of tons of coal had shifted in that awful roll and were lying against the ship's steering rods, jamming the rudder. I sent to Captain Ilbery to come to the bridge while I ran to the engine-room. That is the reason why I am alive tonight. With the rudder jammed, the ship's head swung round, away from the safety Captain Ilbery had so wisely sought. The ship listed badly to starboard. It was now blowing a full gale from the south-west. The sea had worked up with alarming rapidity. The speed was still on her when I rushed from the bridge to the engine-room.

  It is hard to write of a man one has seen burned to death before one's very eyes. Vinney, the engineer, was waiting for me. The engine-room was a holocaust. Vast quantities of coal were lying across the steering rods and this would have to be cleared before the ship could be brought under control. Already two coal trimmers were not accounted for. The roar of steam being blown off drowned the senses. Vinney had also emptied the main furnace ash chute as a precaution.

  It is impossible for me now to estimate times, or say how long I had been in the engine-room, but the engineer and I were on the catwalk by No. 2 boiler furnace
making hurried plans to clear the coal when the disaster happened. I am still too dazed to give a coherent account of it, but do this I must, for this is my final task.

  One moment Vinney was beside me; the next, the entire furnace seemed to tip forward as the ship's bows dropped at an angle so unlikely that it seemed to deny she was a craft on the surface of the sea. White-hot coal spewed from the furnace over the engineer and two stokers. I did not even hear them scream, it was so sudden. In a moment, it seemed, the whole engine-room - furnaces, engines, bunkers, boilers - turned upside down. At the same instant there was a tremendous crash and a rending noise whose like I have never heard before. Even now, nearly twelve hours afterwards, I have difficulty in crediting that this 10,000-ton ship capsized, turned completely turtle.

  I found myself hanging on to the catwalk railing staring upwards through the metal tunnel of the ash chute which had been emptied. Had the engineer not dumped its contents at the first emergency, a cascade of white-hot ash would have written the same fate for me as for him. Scalding steam and smoke made it impossible to see across the inferno of the engine-room; the roar of escaping steam boomed and reverberated between the metal walls of the compartment like non-stop thunder.

  As I groped to haul myself on to the inverted catwalk, I was confronted with another impossibility - I was looking at driving storm clouds across the sky through the chute opening! The cable to the ash chute hatch had been left unsecured in the haste to empty its contents and the watertight bulkhead intersecting the tunnel about fifteen feet from the bottom had swung wide of its own accord.

  My movements were instinctive. My sole thought was to escape from the roaring, thundering, scaring engine-room before the boilers exploded. Everything was lit by the red glow of the flaming coal which had been ejected from the furnaces, and I coughed and gasped for breath in the swirling smoke. I had no conscious appreciation in those desperate first minutes of the nature of the disaster which had overtaken the ship - all I knew was that she had capsized completely. In the baleful light I saw a trimmer's lamp attached to the catwalk rail. I took it and climbed up into the ash chute. I closed the bulkhead behind me so that when the boilers exploded, I would be shielded against the concussion.

  At that stage I considered that the ship, after turning over, was floating upside down with her keel in the air. I think I first intended to swim clear of her, but when I put my head outside the open hatch for a moment, the sight of the boiling sea and insane wind drove me back, terrified. I tugged the hatch cover closed by means of the cable and lit the trimmer's lamp. Better to have at least a floating wreck under one than be cast adrift on that awe-inspiring sea. I tried to pull myself together.

  The catastrophe overtook the ship at between 10 and 11 this morning, but it was not for fully an hour afterwards-, sitting here in the ash chute in a state of numbed shock, that I came to realize that my first reconstruction of it, namely, that the vessel was floating upside down, was wrong. Shortly after I entered the chute there was a violent, grinding movement like an earthquake which brought terror to my already overwrought nerves: I thought the ship was settling and that the boilers would explode when the sea reached them. This cataclysmic noise drowned even the racket and vibration of the screws turning in empty air above my head. The grinding and rending threw me from side to side in the chute. I was too terrified to try and open the hatch again. When the violence and movement stopped, I came to the conclusion that the ship must have been settling down on some solid object, crushing the superstructure as she did so, with that nightmare of noise.

  The boilers did not explode, as I feared. I felt the screws start to slow, and then stop, as the steam pressure fell away.

  I blessed Vinney's foresight for throwing open the steam safety valves.

  I am not sure now whether the noise, or the silence which followed, were more terrifying. I found courage at last to try the hatch again. I thought it had jammed, but the significance of it did not come home to me until I cautiously screwed open the bulkhead door through which I had come from the engine-room. A jet of compressed air and stale smoke whistled in, but before hastily screwing it shut, I caught a glimpse below.

  The ship was full of water!

  In this moment of my extremity - the light is beginning to flicker for want of air and my breathing becomes more difficult as the tunnel's oxygen is spent-I know that I am sealed alive in a ship which, for some reason which I cannot explain, is neither afloat nor ashore.

  Later: Breathing very difficult. No point in prolonging my life further. Ship rocked and heaved. No. 1 hatch burst, I think. I will douse the light now to have use of the last of air for what I must do, namely, open the lower bulkhead to the flooded engine-room, and go through. I will then seal the chute behind me with this account to tell how the Waratah met her end, so that the sea will not be able to reach it.

  Under my grandfather's signature was scrawled, 'Read this. Will scratch message for Ian on panel cut from Gemsbok - Bruce Fairlie, captain, SAA Viscount Gemsbok, July 19, 1967.'

  I took the black-covered notebook, embossed with two blue anchors of the famous line, wrapped it in oilskin, and buried it deep among the other Waratah things which Tafline had so carefully stowed in the waterproof galley locker.

  The frenzy of the gale made it almost impossible to write Touleier's log. I resorted to a kind of cryptic telegraphese to try and rush down on paper, amid the violent kicking and jerking of the hull, something of what was happening. Often I had to wait five minutes or more between individual words because of the bucking. To try and fix the yacht's position was out of the question.

  A flicker of hope came to me on the afternoon of the fourth day.

  I saw my chance. There was a lull in the gale in the late afternoon. If I could get rid of the mainboom wreckage locked in the self-steering gear, I might still save the yacht.

  Not until I chopped at the gear with an axe did I realize how weak I was. I had had no food since the last sandwiches nearly two days before. The salt-contaminated fresh water had made me vomit. My feeble strokes simply bounced off. I switched my attention to the stump of the mainmast, whose heel was starting to thrash. Somehow I managed to fix it, but it cost me a left hand stripped of flesh to the bone of the thumb and two fingers.

  Before I could attempt more, the gale resumed in full fury.

  That night I gave up hope.

  In the morning, Touleier was still afloat.

  I did not think it possible for her to take any more punishment, or that there was anything left to carry away. But at dawn I was jerked from my semi-coma by a crash and a gust which even in my sinking brain stood out as more violent than anything I had yet encountered. It took away the stump of mainmast and mainboom wreckage. The starboard cabin ports were blown in and water cascaded into the shambles of a cabin.

  I did not want to die down there, cowed, beaten, alone. I wanted to die with a curse on my lips at the south-west wind, facing it, feeling its plucking challenge on my face at the end.

  I tried to say goodbye to her at the bunk where we had had the magic of that other dawn off Pondoland, looking down on her lovelines, but a lurch crashed me to my knees, and as I sprawled I prayed, oh Christ put an end to my thoughts like the south-west wind, will the agony never end? She said, while the Waratah mystery is unsolved, I cannot be yours. Now it is resolved, and very soon she shall have me.

  I dragged myself on deck to die.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The persistent slatting, rattling of the sail reached down into my coma.

  My last spark of consciousness cursed the south-west wind. Could it not leave me to die even in peace? The roaring in my ears told me that the end could not be far off. My fading sea-instincts told me it was not the wind which was roaring - maybe I noted subconsciously that it had fallen. Perhaps that is what caused me to force open my eyes and wonder why, then, a sail should slat, when there was no wind?

  The downrush of air forced oxygen into my unwilling lungs and I tried to g
et to my feet to cut loose that maddening slatting sail. As I grabbed one of the cockpit handles, the roaring increased, the wind increased.

  A man hung in space over the socket of the mast.

  The big Super Frelon helicopter hovered over Touleier, its rotors slatting and banging. All round the yacht the sea boiled in minor imitation of the gale. I tried to focus on the helicopter-one of the big long-range French-built craft the South African Air Force uses for troop-carrying-but all I could distinguish before a fit of giddiness swept me off my feet was the five-pointed roundel representing the Castle of Good Hope.

  When I drifted back to half-consciousness, I was aware that an airman was fixing a 'horse-collar’ device under my arms preparatory to signalling the helicopter to winch me up. It was the thought of her, those priceless Waratah documents which were now all the living things I had left of her, that made me seize the grab-handle and hang on fast.

  Take it easy, chum!' exclaimed the airman. 'We're here to help you. You'll be all right once we get you aboard.'

  I heard a megaphone shouting above the racket of the rotors, but I was too far gone to know what was being said.