DOCTOR AT SEA

by Richard Gordon

  DOCTOR AT SEA

  Richard Gordon

  Richard Gordon

  DOCTOR AT SEA

  First Published in 1953 To THE MERCHANT NAVY They have a lot to put up with

  Note

  The Lotus and her crew are as fictitious as the _Flying Dutchman_ and her insubstantial company.

  Chapter One

  It would be unfair to describe the Lotus as an unlucky ship. It was just that she was accident prone, like a big, awkward schoolgirl.

  Even her period of gestation in the shipyard was full of mishaps. She was laid down in Wallsend in 1929, and had advanced to the shape of a huge picked chicken when the depression blew down bitterly on Tyneside. For the next four years she rusted untouched behind locked gates, and when they started work again her design was changed on the drawing-board from a North Atlantic ship to a Far East trader. Shortly afterwards the company ordering her went bankrupt and she was bought on the stocks by another, who began to turn her into a whaler. They too rapidly slid into insolvency and abandoned her to a fourth, the Fathom Steamship Company of St. Mary Axe. It was this concern that succeeded in launching her, after she had been through as many fruitless changes in construction as a human embryo.

  At her launch she holed and almost sunk a small tug, and on her maiden voyage as a cargo-passenger ship she lost a propeller during a gale in the Australian Bight. At the beginning of the war she came home from New Zealand, painted grey, and was one of the first vessels to reveal to the Admiralty the effectiveness of the magnetic mine. She lost most of her bows in the Thames Estuary, but stayed afloat long enough to be dragged into dock for repairs. After several months she set off again to join a convoy, and had her stern blown away by a bomb twenty-five minutes after leaving port.

  The stern was patched up, and she managed to pass the rest of the hostilities without getting herself involved in any dangerous action, apart from shooting down an American Mustang in error with her Oerlikons in 1945. At the end of the war she refitted and returned to peaceful trading, disturbed only by an explosion in the engine-room in the Caribbean and the cook going abruptly insane one insupportably hot afternoon in the Red Sea and passing among his shipmates with the meat hatchet.

  Much of the damage from both these accidents was repaired, but the repeated structural changes had induced in the Lotus a premature senility, a state of chronic invalidism. She was too cold in the higher latitudes, too hot in the Tropics, and she groaned pitifully in bad weather. But the Fathom Steamship Company unmercifully sent her anywhere in the world where she could find the shareholders a profit. She carried lead and lemons, boiler-tubes and barley, copra and cows. She took steel from Baltimore to Brisbane, wool from Auckland to Archangel, coal from Swansea to Singapore. She was one of the world's shopping baskets.

  There was enough room on board for thirty passengers, though she rarely carried more than a dozen and often none at all. They were people going to unusual places, or too poor to afford a big ship, or experienced travellers who cringed before the bonhomie of the boatdeck and the deadly gin-and-sin routine of a sophisticated liner. The Company was indifferent to them: passengers earned little more than complaints, but freight meant money.

  In the opinion of the crew, one of the severest disasters to overtake the Lotus since the war was her Commander, Captain Vincent Hogg, who was officially required to act at various times once his ship was at sea as the sole representative on board of the Fathom Steamship Company, the King, and God, for all three of whom he substituted himself with impartial grandeur. His officers accepted him as farmers tolerate a prolonged drought, giving daily prayers for Divine removal of the affliction. The weight of his personality fell most heavily on the Mate, Mr. Hornbeam, who had passed his Master's examination twenty years before and was waiting for a command with the pitiful patience of an impoverished expectant relative. Promotion in the Company was simply a matter of dead men's shoes. He had in a drawer in his cabin an alphabetical list of the Fathom Line's Captains, with their exact ages and notes on their partiality for drink, loose women, and other items reputed to shorten life, but all of them retained irritatingly good health. He enjoyed the unstinted sympathy of the Chief Engineer, Mr. McDougall, who hated the Captain like a red-hot bearing; and the Captain disliked the Chief Engineer like fog round the Goodwins. McDougall looked upon the ship as a shell for the transportation of his engines, and complained daily when the navigational position from the bridge was some miles astern of the one he calculated from his revolutions. Indeed, according to the Chief Engineer, the machinery and boilers of the Lotus should have arrived in any port several days in advance of the rest of the vessel.

  There were two other Mates, a gang of engineers, a wireless operator and-as the Lotus carried more than ninety-nine souls when she was full-a doctor.

  The doctor was by order of the Ministry of Transport, the uncompromising power who prescribes on every item of a sailor's life from the number of lifeboats to be available in emergency to the number of times he shall have eggs for his breakfast. Ninety-eight souls can sail the seas until they are carried away with obscure nautical illness, like the shipmates of the Ancient Mariner: their health is preserved with a bottle of black draught, the _Ship Captain's Medical Guide,_ and a scalpel also used for sharpening the chart-room pencil. The Second Mate or the Chief Steward holds the keys of the drug chest and practises daily, after breakfast. All pains below the umbilicus are treated with strong purgative, all disturbances above with Ministry cough mixture, and lesions on the remainder of the body with turpentine liniment. Obviously there occur from time to time more alarming complaints, and these are submitted to surgery under wireless instructions by the Captain on the saloon table, after the patient and the surgeon have taken sufficient brandy to instil in each other confidence that both will survive the operation.

  But one more soul on board brings to all the benefits of medical science-or as much of it as the doctor can remember, because ship surgeons are notoriously forgetful of these things. The sea induces an attitude of pleasant detachment towards problems that strain thought ashore, including those of the diagnosis and prognosis of disease, and the doctor has few professional obligations to distract him from his pastimes or enrich him with experience. For these reasons the companies naturally dislike the expense of carrying him-but then, the Fathom Steamship Company would have objected to the expense of life-boats.

  When I met the Lotus she was lying in Liverpool, due to sail with a cargo of machinery and motor cars to Santos, in Brazil. It had then been raining on Merseyside for four days. The damp November wind channelled itself down the river, broke against the waterfront buildings, and ran up the cold streets behind. The birds on the Liver building, that are unfairly supposed by Liverpool seafarers to flap their wings when passed by a woman of untarnished virtue, wept ceaselessly onto the bleak pierhead. The Birkenhead ferry forced its way miserably across the choppy harbour, the landing-stage looked as forlorn as a bandstand in midwinter, and even the stonework of the St. George's Hall appeared in danger of showing through its crust of soot.

  It was about eight in the evening, the hour when the shipowners are fed in the Adelphi. As they glumly finished their Martinis in the little American bar they calculated among themselves the rain's cost in delayed cargo working. Outside in Lime Street the adolescent tarts already clung hopefully to their damp doorways. The dripping buses took home the last pale shipping clerks, the overhead railway rattled along its grotesque track, and the dock police steamed themselves warm in front of the stoves in their cabins. The Lotus herself lay lifeless at her quay with tarpaulins tented over her hatches, creaking gently at her mooring ropes like an old bed in a bad dream.

  I stood in the rain on the quayside reading a large sheet of printed ins
tructions for resuscitating the apparently drowned. This was the only information of any sort available to passers-by. The wharf was deserted. The cranes huddled together in a row, a few railway trucks crouched between their legs; the warehouses were shut, locked, and abandoned even by the cats; the Lotus, lit with a few dim lights, looked as uninviting as a shut pub.

  I was a young doctor with a bad diploma passing through the difficult stage of professional adolescence when you discover the medical schools teach as little about medicine as the public schools do about life. My knowledge of seafaring was based only on _Treasure Island_ pictures in the windows of Cook's, and a walking-on part I had been allowed to play in a students' production of _The Middle Watch._ I was nevertheless a recognized sailor. I had in my pocket a new seaman's identity card with my fingerprints on it, a document that made me the professional descendant of Drake and Cabot, subject to and protected by a batch of Parliamentary Acts, the target of missionaries' good intentions and girls' bad ones, and entitled, if I felt like it and there was enough room, to doss down in the Sailors' Home.

  The first problem presented by nautical life was how to get aboard the ship. A slippery gangway reached up from the wharf to the Lotus's afterdeck, but there was no one to welcome me at the top. After a few damp minutes I climbed the gangway nervously and looked around me. I was on a dirty iron deck littered with pieces of timber, scraps of rope, and coils of wire, like the junk room in a ship chandler's. A heavy wooden door led into the upper works, and as the rain was coming down my neck persistently I opened it and stepped inside.

  Hostile darkness surrounded me; I smelt the faint bitter-almonds tang of cyanide. Uneasy tales of the sea blew through my mind, like a sudden cold draught in an old house. It occurred to me that the Lotus, like the _Marie Celeste,_ had been freshly abandoned by her terrified crew, or was manned with lost souls from the _Flying Dutchman._ I shivered.

  A light, an oil lantern, sprung into mid air in front of me. A voice behind it snapped:

  ''Op it!'

  I jumped back, hitting the door with my head.

  'Get the 'ell out of it, Charlie,' the voice continued, coming nearer.

  'I-I'm a member of the crew,' I managed to say.

  The light advanced on me. Behind it two eyes stared with concentrated suspicion.

  'The new doctor,' I explained humbly.

  The voice at once took on a friendly inflection.

  'Sorry Doc! I thought you was trying to pinch something.'

  'No…I just came aboard. There didn't seem to be anyone about. I hope it was all right?'

  'Sure, it's all right. Liberty Hall, this hooker. Make yourself at home. Spit on the deck and call the cat a bastard.'

  'Thank you.'

  'Glad you've come, Doc,' he continued affably. 'I've got a bit of a cold like.' He sneezed to add point to the remark. 'Could you give us something for it?'

  'Yes, certainly…But wouldn't a bit later do? I'm extremely wet. I'd like to find my cabin and so forth.'

  'Sure, Doc. Follow me. I'll take you to see the Mate.'

  He walked off, the lamp swinging high in his hand. I stepped timidly behind him, along narrow alleyways, round sharp corners, up unidentifiable ladders.

  'Sorry there ain't many lights,' he apologized over his shoulder. 'But the engineers has got the jennies stripped to-night.'

  'Oh, really?'

  That sounded more alarming than ever.

  He came to a cabin door and opened it.

  'The new Doctor,' he announced, as if he had just materialized me out of a hat.

  There were three men in the cabin-the Mate, Archer the Second, and Trail the Third. Hornbeam was sitting in the only chair with his reefer unbuttoned and his stockinged feet on the washbasin. It was a small cabin, designed like a crossword puzzle, and the visitors had to adapt themselves to the interlocking pieces. Archer, who was a tall, pale man with an expression like a curate just beginning to have doubts, had wedged himself between the bunk and the bookcase above it with his legs dangling on to the deck, like a human question mark. Trail, squatting between the locker and the desk, was a fat youth going through a florid attack of _acne vulgaris._

  'Talk of the devil!' Hornbeam said immediately.

  'We wondered when you were going to turn up,' Archer said. 'Have a bottle of beer.'

  'Move over, Second, and let the Doctor park his fanny,' Hornbeam said. He introduced himself and the others. 'Give us another bottle, Third. Do you mind drinking out of a tooth-glass?'

  'No, not at all.'

  The welcome was cordial enough, but it disturbed me. It is a habit among seafarers to accept every newcomer on terms of intimacy, but I was a fairly new doctor and stood on my professional dignity like a girl with her first pair of high heels.

  'I hope I'm not butting in,' I said stiffly.

  'Not a bit of it! Throw your coat on the hook there. We were only having a quick peg.'

  I climbed up on the bunk next to Archer without enthusiasm. It seemed as comfortable as trying to drink on a bus in the rush hour.

  'You just passed out of medical school?' Archer asked.

  'Certainly not! I've been in practice for…some years.'

  'Oh, sorry. Been to sea before?'

  'I'm afraid not.'

  'You'll soon pick up the routine. I hope you're hot stuff on the diseases sailors get.'

  This brought a roar of laughter from the other two.

  'We doctors have to be "hot stuff" on very many things,' I said.

  I gave a superior smile. Since I qualified I had fed on professional respect and I found the conversation irritating.

  'By George, we find some queer doctors at sea,' Trail said, handing me a glass of beer. 'Don't we, Mr. Hornbeam? Usually they're getting away from their wives or the police, or both sometimes. Or else it's drink. That's the commonest. Sometimes it's drugs, though.'

  'I drink very little.'

  Trail took no notice. 'I remember old Doc Parsons I sailed with when I was doing my time,' he went on cheerfully. 'He was a real scream. As tight as a tick from morning to night. We reckoned he got through a couple of bottles of gin a day, easy. Started before breakfast, every morning. Said the world was so bloody awful he couldn't face it at the best of times, but especially with his last night's hangover. Then one day in the Red Sea the Mate ripped his arm open, and old Parsons said he'd operate. Laugh! The lot of us went down to the hospital to watch. I was doubled up. He'd been at the bottle extra strong and he was as blind as a bat. Kept dropping the knife on the deck and falling over the table. In the end the Mate clocked him one and got the Chief Steward to do it.'

  Archer leant forward.

  'Do you remember old Doc Hamilton in the Mariesta?' he asked.

  The other two began to laugh again.

  'He was a real queer 'un,' he explained to me. 'Started on the grog before we sailed-had to be carried up the gangway. By the time we reached Gib. the Old Man stopped his tap-no more booze, you understand. So he went down to the dispensary and drank all the surgical spirit. When he finished that he scrounged meths from the engineers. They tumbled to it, of course, and wouldn't let him have any more. In the end he drank the acid from the wireless batteries.'

  'The police came for him when we got home,' Hornbeam added. 'I don't know what it was for. Something about abortions, I think.'

  'I remember we buried an old doctor off Teneriffe,' Archer said thoughtfully. 'He hanged himself. He did it with his belt,' he continued in my direction.

  I began to understand that the medical professional was not held in the highest esteem at sea.

  'I assure you I shall not commit any of those things,' I said.

  'The voyage hasn't started yet,' Archer observed. 'Why, look what happened to old Doc Flowerday.'

  'Yes, that was a shame,' Trail said, nodding his head sadly. 'He was as mad as you make 'em. But I was sorry about it, for one.'

  Hornbeam agreed.

  'He was a nice old boy. You heard all about it, I suppose,
Doc?'

  'No, I haven't. Why? Should I?'

  He suddenly looked uncomfortable.

  'I thought they might have told you something about it in the office,' he said vaguely. 'He was the last doctor before you.'

  He sighed gently into his beer.

  'It was a pity,' he continued. 'In a way.'

  I shifted myself nervously on the bunk.

  'What was a pity?'

  Hornbeam drained his glass.

  'His…well, his end, as you might say.'

  They sat in silence for a while. The reference to Dr. Flowerday had saddened them, and no one seemed to wish to reopen the conversation. I sat and anxiously speculated on his possible fate, for which I had now a good number of workable theories.

  Chapter Two

  I went to bed that night feeling like my first day at school when someone pinched my tuck-box. But in the morning the rain had stopped and the sun threw a bloodshot early glance on Merseyside. The ship had come to life overnight. She rattled with the noise of steam winches loading cargo, and the ghosts of the evening were replaced by persons who shouted, coughed, and used bad language on each other with comforting humanity.

  I had breakfast in the saloon with Hornbeam and the Mates. Their conversation was as mysterious to me as the chat at the hospital lunch-table would have been to them: it was about 'tween decks and stowage, dunnage and ullage, tank tops and cofferdams. The only fact I could grasp was that the Lotus's sailing date was as unpredictable as Judgment Day.

  After breakfast I went to my cabin, sat on the narrow strip of settee, and opened the first page of _War and Peace._ This I had bought in three volumes from a bookseller's near Euston Station before catching the train for Liverpool. I thought the voyage would allow me to achieve a ten-years' ambition of finishing the thing; besides, I was determined to make use of the time I was obliged to spend inactively at sea improving my mind. And its long, restful paragraphs might begin to soothe my headaches.