ENDANGERED SPECIES
Mariner’s Library Fiction Classics
STERLING HAYDEN
Voyage: A Novel of 1896
BJORN LARSSON
The Celtic Ring
SAM LLEWELLYN
The Shadow in the Sands
RICHARD WOODMAN
The Darkening Sea
Endangered Species
Wager
The Nathaniel Drinkwater Novels:
The Bomb Vessel
The Corvette
1805
Baltic Mission
In Distant Waters
A Private Revenge
Under False Colours
The Flying Squadron
Beneath the Aurora
The Shadow of the Eagle
Ebb Tide
ENDANGERED
SPECIES
Richard Woodman
First U.S. edition published 2000
by Sheridan House Inc.
145 Palisade Street
Dobbs Ferry, New York 10522
Copyright © 1992 by Richard Woodman
First published in Great Britain 1992
by Little, Brown and Company
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Sheridan House.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Woodman, Richard, 1944-
Endangered species / Richard Woodman.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-57409-076-3 (alk. paper)
1. Great Britain—History, Naval—20th century—
Fiction. I. Title.
PR6073.0618 E54 2000
823’.914—dc21
00-021000
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 1-57409-076-3
For Ned
‘It seems now that the sea has almost retreated from our lives, and that ships are leading a twilight, marginal existence, like senior officials who resist being pensioned off.’
The Bay of Noon
Shirley Hazzard
‘There is no home left for universal souls except perhaps Antarctica or on the high seas.’
The Life and Times of Michael K
J.M. Coetzee
‘All our virtues are forms of fear.’
The Harbour Master
William McFee
Acknowledgement is given to William Orford for his permission to use the poem on pages 283–284.
Contents
1The Middle Watch
2Distant Storm Clouds
3Singapore
4Cargo Work
5The South China Sea
6Encounter
7Refugees
8The Stuff of Heroes
9Master Under God
10A Breaking of Lances
11Oil and Water
12Typhoon David
13Juggernaut
14Vortex
15A Roosting of Pigeons
16Mutiny
17Signs of the Times
18Bloody But Unbowed
19The Blessings of the Land
20Endangered Species
CHAPTER ONE
The Middle Watch
‘One bell, Sec!’
Stevenson rolled over and grunted.
‘One bell!’ The persistent Liverpudlian accent wrenched him from sleep and he sat up with the tired discipline of long practice.
‘Okay, Pritch.’ Stevenson swung his legs over the edge of the bunk. As the door curtain fluttered behind the exit of Able Seaman Pritchard, Stevenson eased his feet to the deck, feeling for his flip-flops.
At the sink he groped for his toothbrush and dashed water into his face. He jerked the sarong off, drew on underpants, shirt and shorts, combed his hair and left the cabin.
The wind of the ship’s passage ruffled his shirt as he climbed the bridge ladder. Above him soared the mute majesty of the tropical night sky, a black, velvet arch pierced with a myriad stars. He marked them with a seaman’s instinct: Canopus blazing low in the southern sky, coruscating with iridescent shots of blue and red as its burning gases were fracted by the earth’s dirt-laden atmosphere; higher up the limbs of Orion dominated the sky, Rigel cold with the blue fire of a super giant, Bellatrix white as ice and Betelgeuse red with blood on the hunter’s spear arm.
‘Morning, Chas,’ Stevenson said curtly as he crossed the bridge-wing to the dimly lit chart-room.
‘Morning, Alex.’ Charles Taylor turned and acknowledged the arrival of his relief, then resumed his review of the horizon ahead of the ship. In the chart-room Stevenson made himself a cup of tea, glanced at the log and read the Master’s night orders written in Captain Mackinnon’s elegantly archaic hand. He scribbled his initials against them, then picked up his mug of tea and re-emerged to lean on the rail alongside the Third Officer.
‘Sleep well?’ Taylor asked as he always asked, as though courtesy demanded it, at the same time drooping languidly over the teak caprail. Such dubious mannerisms tended to set him apart from his shipmates, as though he was unwilling ever to let them forget the social differences that separated them.
Even Captain Mackinnon, Stevenson thought with a mild pucker of irritation, stood slightly in awe of Chas Taylor.
‘Not bad, thanks,’ he replied. ‘All quiet?’
Taylor straightened up, stretched and yawned, as if palpably slipping off the responsibilities of officer of the watch and emphasising his four-hour stint was now over. The product of private education, Taylor had come to sea in a misdirected quest for a genteel way of life. He was some fifty years too late and the result was a rather disdainful young man who nevertheless possessed a certain impervious superiority that neither Captain Mackinnon nor Chief Officer Rawlings could deflate. Indeed, such was the man’s charisma that he was regarded by them with a caution bordering on respect, despite the fact that Taylor was thirty years younger than the Captain and eighteen younger than the Chief Officer.
Stevenson found this conviction of class paradoxical. He in no wise considered himself a man of lesser competence than Taylor, but the Third Officer’s natural assumption of superiority was so easily borne that it was hard to confound. Taylor came from stock which possessed the confidence that money brings, something Stevenson had never experienced. Every fact Stevenson knew about Taylor was quietly notched a little higher than in his own case. The photograph in Taylor’s cabin showed his wife a cool, blonde young woman, with the high cheekbones and square jaw of lasting beauty, and whenever Stevenson saw the picture he felt a slight resentment; the fact Taylor was married seemed somehow to claim a pre-eminence. Inevitably it made Stevenson consider his own love affair with Cathy. Cathy was enviably lovely, but she was not as beautiful as Caroline Taylor. It was as if the Third Mate had some sort of right to these things.
Taylor’s junior status was irrelevant, for Taylor radiated the experience of countless generations in a way that Stevenson found confusing. And, because Stevenson was a straight, almost humourless devotee to his profession, Taylor’s sardonically charming attitude abraded Stevenson’s own self-esteem at times, while at others it attracted him. This vacillation troubled Stevenson’s relationship with his younger colleague, leaving him always the clumsy loser.
‘Only seen two ships,’ Taylor remarked laconically, reporting the significant events of his watch. ‘And the Old Man turned in about an hour ago.’
‘Beautiful night,’ remarked Stevenson between sips of tea. He looked forward. Th
e old-fashioned crutched derricks reflected faint highlights from the stars and the foremast rose like an advancing cross as the ship hissed through the calm, windless sea. Beside him Taylor yawned again.
‘You’re a romantic bastard, Alex.’
‘Thanks.’ Stevenson felt the familiar irritation, then Taylor confounded him by one of those disarming remarks of which he was occasionally capable and which Stevenson felt resentfully flattered to receive.
‘I often stand up here and wonder,’ Taylor said slowly, almost experimentally, ‘whether it is possible to define infinity on a night like this.’ He paused. Beside him Stevenson stirred into full consciousness and looked sharply at the Third Officer, to see if he was being mocked.
‘I keep thinking it should be possible to work it out; after all we’re looking at it, not just contemplating it mathematically, but actually staring at the reality. The trouble is trying to find the words to accompany the thoughts. D’you know, several times this evening I thought I had it, was convinced I was within an ace of the thing, then’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘gone!’ Taylor laughed at himself; a bitter laugh, Stevenson thought suddenly, forgetting his earlier irritation. ‘And then here I am,’ Taylor went on, ‘back on the bridge of the old Matthew Flinders ploughing a furrow across the Indian Ocean.’
He looked at Stevenson and abruptly asked ‘D’you think I’m mad, Alex?’
Taylor had never previously asked him anything, and he thought the question ironic. When put on the spot, Stevenson’s seriousness became his foremost characteristic. Besides, the night was worthy of a few secrets.
‘No, you’re right,’ he said, adding with an awkward diffidence, ‘these nights are bloody romantic. I usually become convinced there is a God. Don’t have the slightest shred of doubt. I just worry for four hours about His exact composition.’
Stevenson was gratified by Taylor’s low chuckle of appreciation. ‘It’s all very poetic,’ Taylor said. ‘The trouble is it’s so bloody beautiful it almost hurts . . .’
The candour of this frank remark disarmed Stevenson for a moment and he lit a cigarette, recoiling from its taste. Then, recalling he was the older of the two, he asked, ‘Have you got something on your mind, Chas?’
Taylor’s silence was that of assent. After a brief pause he inquired, ‘You’re not married, are you, Alex?’
‘No.’
‘Thinking of it, are you? The photos in your cabin, I mean . . .’
‘I finished with Cathy the day I got orders to join this ship,’ Stevenson said with a sudden harsh edge to his voice. ‘I just like to have a bird’s picture to ogle,’ he added tritely, ineptly trying not to break the mood of intimacy that existed between them.
‘Bad for the image, eh?’ Taylor mocked. ‘Don’t want the crew to think you’re fruit?’
Stevenson grunted and drew on the cigarette. A pale orange glow suffused his even features. ‘What’s the problem then? Your marriage?’
‘Caroline,’ Taylor said slowly, as though measuring out the confidence, ‘is a natural blonde with beautiful legs and that indefinable quality of being a prize bitch.’
From forward the single clear note of the ship’s forecastle bell indicated the lookout had spotted a ship to starboard. The two officers raised their eyes, both aware that they should have seen it long before the seaman forward.
‘I’ve got her, two points to starboard.’
‘Right then, she’s all yours. Steering o-eight-nine. Should pick up Pulo Weh sometime during my forenoon watch. Good night.’
‘Good night.’
Stevenson lifted his binoculars and studied the distant, twinkling masthead lights of the approaching ship as Taylor shuffled away, the mood broken by the intrusion of duty. Stevenson thought he had gone when his voice called from the ladder: ‘Ever read Conrad?’
‘A bit,’ Stevenson replied.
‘He knew what it was like to stand a middle watch. D’you know what he said about humanity?’
‘Haven’t a clue,’ admitted Stevenson.
‘He said mankind on this earth was an unforeseen accident which did not bear close examination.’
‘Oh.’ Stevenson tried to find some relevance in the remark.
‘Something for you to chew over, old son; see you in the morning.’
It was only after Taylor had finally departed and left Second Officer Stevenson to the magnificent loneliness of the night that the latter wondered if Taylor had been less than ironic earlier, in doubting his own sanity.
The approaching ship passed two miles to starboard, heading westwards, its phosphorescent wake splashing into the bow wave of the Matthew Flinders.
Stevenson began to pace the bridge, from wing to wing, passing regularly through the wheelhouse where the dull hum of gyro-compass and radar, and the orange flicker of the automatic pilot rendered a helmsman redundant. Only the isolated lookout two hundred feet forward on the old-fashioned forecastle head maintained the vigil above decks. A few other lonely souls stood their watch in the engine-room below.
The London-born child of Scots parents, Alex Stevenson had nursed an ambition to go to sea since childhood. Characteristically he had never wavered from his intention. Up to the beginning of this present voyage he had been quite content, his master mariner’s certificate secured at last, the passport to eventual command.
But the Matthew Flinders was on no ordinary voyage; this was to be her last, for she was already consigned to breakers in the Far East, one of a last pair of cargo-liners which had once formed part of a substantial, privately owned British merchant shipping company. Relegated first to the Isle of Man registry her disinterested owners had recently flagged her out under the ensign of Panama to avoid complying with British government legislation and the supposedly ‘high’ wages demanded by British seafarers. Mercifully, for this final trip, the owners, anxious to rid themselves of their last ships, had not bothered to import a crew from Taiwan or the Philippines, but merely scooped up whatever was available on the international pool. By a perverse coincidence the complement of the Matthew Flinders was largely as it had always been, with British seamen on deck and Chinese greasers below. Her deck officers and engineers were a handful of the company’s remaining long-term employees, hanging on in the forlorn hope of redundancy payments.
This uncertain future had contributed to Stevenson’s rupture with Cathy. Casting about for possible alternative employment he had been forced to face the fact that his country had turned its back on its maritime past; no one gave a tuppenny damn about the so-called Merchant Navy. There were, quite simply, no more ships.
Walking up and down, his bitterness grew. Others were cushioned against the inevitable. Captain Mackinnon was retiring, as was the Chief Engineer. Mr Rawlings, the Chief Officer, had some contingency plan, while Taylor’s family had money. Besides, the lovely Caroline was rumoured to be something smart in her own right in the City of London. But Stevenson, with the indigent respectability of the lower-middle class, needed his job, the only job he had ever wanted to do, the only job he had trained for. In fact it was his very way of life that was to be torn from him by the harsh facts of economic change.
Resolutely, he turned his thoughts away from such embittered contemplation. If this was to be his last voyage, or at least the last voyage before he had to hawk his skills round manning agencies, sell himself to any bidder and sail for his subsistence in ill-founded rust buckets, he wanted to enjoy it.
But he no longer had the consolation of Cathy; he had ended their affair, as he had said, when he received instructions to join the Matthew Flinders. He leaned disconsolately on the rail and reflected on the wisdom of his act, painful though it was. Taylor had spliced his life to that of the beautiful Caroline and it was clear that he was unhappy. Even so, they had been a month at sea and the sensuous warmth of the night was compelling . . .
He gave in to the insistent vision of Cathy in the shower, her dark hair piled on her head and her face held up to the splashing rose. He cou
ld see again her straight nose and the ever-so-slightly receding chin which threw her lower lip into pouting prominence. Hers was not the patrician beauty of Taylor’s Caroline, yet it was the flaw in her looks that gave them their special charm.
‘What are you staring at?’ he could hear her ask from beneath the hissing water, turning those level grey eyes on him lying in bed. ‘Eloquent eyes’ he had privately and poetically named her, for she seemed to say more through them than through her lips, as if the latter were maintained for purely carnal purposes.
‘You,’ he answered, suddenly embarrassed that he had spoken out loud. But it was insufficient to drive Cathy’s image from his mind. She emerged from the shower, pink and brown and deliciously shameless, bending to towel her thighs so that her breasts swung with a detached and lascivious oscillation . . .
Stevenson lit another cigarette and resumed his furious pacing of the bridge, silently cursing the girl.
Cathy had been the first woman with whom he had had more than the briefest of relationships and he had ditched her. She would, he guessed, probably marry a farmer and have dozens of healthy children, farmers being the very antithesis of seafarers. The thought of farming brought him back to Chas. With Cathy and people like her, the presence of mankind on the earth was scarcely ‘an unforseen accident’, but rather a preordained fruition of some cosmic purpose provided with its own internal dynamic.
‘And here I am back to God again,’ he muttered irritably to himself. Dismissing the whole train of thought he made for the compass repeater and occupied himself by taking an azimuth of Jupiter.
In his cabin below the bridge Captain Mackinnon tossed restlessly, unable to sleep. He too wished to savour this last voyage, for though he looked forward to its end, he knew that retirement, no matter how well-deserved, diminished him as a man. At that moment, and for all the succeeding moments until he handed the Matthew Flinders over to her Chinese breakers, he and he alone was responsible for the ship and her company, some thirty-six souls, as tradition had it. And he was master under God, elevated to a most culpable position, not merely responsible but answerable for many of the misdemeanours of his crew. Sometimes the burden of it weighed upon him intolerably, but he was shrewd enough to know that he would miss it.
Endangered Species Page 1