Endangered Species

by Richard Woodman

  Besides, he had a most unsailorlike affection for the ship herself, having been her very first Third Officer, sent to Belfast to join her at the builders because Mrs Dent had specifically ordered it.

  ‘You’ve impressed the Old Woman,’ the Marine Superintendent, Captain Shaw, had said to him, referring familiarly to the widow of the company’s founding chairman, a woman whose influence in the Eastern Steam Navigation Company remained pre-eminent. ‘She insists on you occupying the Third Mate’s berth.’

  Shaw had regarded him through his rheumy eyes, his yellow face already betraying the cancer that, with the overwork of six years of war, would lay him in his grave before the maiden voyage of the new Matthew Flinders was over.

  ‘Don’t let the Old Woman down, laddie,’ Shaw added, repeating the nickname by which Mrs Dent was known throughout Eastern Steam.

  ‘I’ll do my best, sir.’

  ‘Aye, see that you do or I’ll have your hide.’

  He had stepped happily out into Water Street, disregarding the sleeting rain driving up from the Pier Head and the restless chop of the grey Mersey beyond. He and Shelagh had high hopes now the war was over, and the approbation of the Old Woman and a berth on a brand new ship meant that they would be able to marry soon, their future secure. Britain, he had thought with the experience of war behind him, would always need her Merchant Navy.

  It was odd, Mackinnon thought, how easy it was to remember these things: the elation, the rain, and Shelagh’s pleasure when he had phoned and told her he would be crossing to Belfast that night. And all because the ‘Old Woman’ approved of him.

  Mackinnon’s memory flashed back to the events that had earned him the Old Woman’s good opinion.

  It had been raining that black night, a stinging rain coming up astern of the convoy with a following sea that made the old Matthew Flinders roll and scend in a twisting that racked the creaking hull. The first of her name, she grossed eight thousand tons, a coal-fired steamer capable of no more than nine knots, built for profit out of the reparations greedily scooped up by Dent and his partners after the First World War. She had been obsolete when she had slid down the ways and into the grubby Tees and was over twenty years old that foul and bloody night the U-boats found her off Rockall.

  ‘Almost home and dry,’ Taffy Davies had said as Apprentice Mackinnon relieved him on the starboard Lewis gun at midnight and about five seconds before the first explosion. Mackinnon had still been shaking the sleep out of his weary young frame after what seemed like weeks of endless, mind-numbing watch-and-watch, four hours on and four off, with sleep in short snatches of three hours if undisturbed by the ship’s motion or the enemy. When the night split apart and the gouts of orange and yellow flame shot skywards to die to a flickering before the concussion rolled over the water towards them, he was conscious of shock, and then the relief of knowing it was not them.

  ‘Jesus!’ blasphemed Taffy as he made way for Mackinnon in the sand-bagged gun pit, ‘that’s the Patagonia.’

  Mackinnon needed no further enlightenment. After days of weary plodding across the Atlantic, they knew the relative position of every ship in those four, strung-out and irregular columns; knew the dawn reshuffling that took place after the destruction of the nights as the Commodore of Convoy HX 987 rearranged his battered charges. They knew the Patagonia well, having laid ahead of her in Newport News and become friendly with her apprentices, penniless like themselves.

  ‘The poor bastards,’ whispered Davies as the flames were extinguished by the sea and the night was lit by the cold glare of the starshells thrown up by the questing escorts. The SS Patagonia had ceased to exist, for she had been laden with high-explosive ammunition.

  ‘Can you see anything?’ a voice asked, as behind the two boys the Second and Third Mates stared through their binoculars.

  The adjacent ships were thrown into monochrome relief by the flares. Only a gap in the extreme starboard column attested to the missing Patagonia, a gap into which, her Aldis light flickering, the corvette Aubretia was moving. Of the U-boat which launched the attack there was no sign.

  ‘They won’t have known anything,’ observed the Third Mate with an exhaused sigh, and then the night blew apart again, blew up around them with a fiery savagery that seared them as a torpedo struck the Matthew Flinders. Momentarily blinded by the flash of the impacting warhead, Mackinnon felt the deck beneath him rear up, throwing him against the gunshield. Its steel angle caught his shoulder with a sickening pain which brought the taste of bile into his throat as he fell to the deck.

  Shakily he got to his feet. He was suddenly, inexplicably, alone.

  He felt sick from the effect of the blast, but conscious that he was less frightened and more aware of his surroundings. Above the increasing roar of escaping steam he could hear the klaxon alarm, and someone shouting an unintelligible order. The angle of the deck increased sharply, then seemed to stop, and this sudden change enabled him to recover his wits. He scrambled out of the gun pit and up the tilting deck, like an animal in a flood, instinctively seeking high ground. Oddly, there was no one in the wheelhouse and he continued upwards until he came to the opposite side of the bridge where his watch mate, Apprentice Dave Kingsley, should have been.

  ‘Dave?’ he shouted, casting about with a sudden panic as the starshells were extinguished by the sea. The utter darkness filled him with a rank, sweating fear. Then above the venting steam he could hear orchestrated shouting.

  ‘The boats!’ he cried in sudden comprehension, and halfslid, half-skidded back down the sloping bridge through the deserted wheelhouse, making a grab for the ladder rail that wrenched his shoulder again. Then he stumbled down on to the boat-deck where, in the gloom, he could see the white flash of men in singlets, the dull gleam of oilskins and the grey outline of the starboard lifeboat.

  ‘Is that you, Mackinnon?’ Captain Robson’s harsh voice cut through the wet night air above him. Mackinnon turned. At the head of the ladder the Master stood, the pale stripes of his pyjamas showing beneath his bridge coat. A pale square of paper fluttered from his right fist.

  ‘Sparks is waiting for this in the radio shack . . .’

  Reassured that some discipline prevailed and aware that the Captain must have been in the chart-room while he scuttered foolishly about the bridge, Mackinnon ran back up the ladder and took the message form. The radio shack was abaft the tall funnel and inside, under the battery-powered emergency light, the Radio Officer was dragging on a cigarette, his headphones clamped round his balding skull and a nervous hand poised over the morse key. Without a word he tore the chit out of Mackinnon’s hand and began transmitting the fate of the SS Matthew Flinders to the outside world. Mackinnon stood for an uncertain moment, then the sparks flung off his headphones, pulled a duffle coat from a hook on the bulkhead and shoved past the apprentice.

  ‘Come on, she’s going!’

  The ship gave another lurch. More starshell burst overhead and the crump of exploding depth charges could be heard in the distance above the shouts and the roar of the steam.

  ‘Come on.’

  Mackinnon followed the Radio Officer. Back on the boat-deck the struggling figures were thrown into stark relief by the flares. Above their heads a white plume vented from the funnel and then a series of tremors rumbled beneath their feet and the ship suddenly fell back on an even keel.

  The surface of the sea, tossing up towards them with the curl and hiss of breaking crests, was much nearer as the Matthew Flinders began to settle in the water.

  The Bosun had the after end of the boat swung out and was exhorting the men to heave on the forward guy of the old-fashioned radial davits to carry the bow out over the ship’s side. The boat swung clear, hanging over the black Atlantic twenty feet below, and they began to clamber into it.

  There was a terrific noise, so unfamiliar they stopped and looked at one another for a petrified instant. Then more depth charges exploded on the far side of the convoy and the black hull of a following shi
p steamed silently past them, her wash spreading out from her bow and striking the sides of the Matthew Flinders. Plumes of water shot vertically and were torn across the boat-deck, dousing the already rain-soaked men who swore with true, seamanlike ferocity and began again to scramble into the lifeboat.

  At the same instant a starshell went out and the unexplained noise grew louder, shaking the ship.

  ‘Lower away there!’ yelled Captain Robson, motioning Mackinnon into the boat. A moment later the lifeboat began her jerky descent. A rising sea struck her and she was lifted bodily and swung outwards, away from the ship’s side which rose now like a black wall beside them. Then the sea fell away with a suddenness that brought Mackinnon’s stomach into his throat, the falls snapped tight and the boat whipped the length of her keel and swung inboard, striking the rusty steel topsides, her frames cracking as she bounced off with a flexing of her gunwale.

  ‘Lower, lower!’ Captain Robson was shouting and the boat resumed its progress until another wave caught her and, ready for it, Captain Robson roared, ‘Come up!’, and the men on the falls threw the turns off the staghorns.

  The boat wallowed into the sea and the falls were unhooked. The side of the Matthew Flinders seemed immensely high, looming up into the night sky like a great cliff.

  ‘Christ, she’s breaking up . . .’

  ‘She’s rolling over!’

  Split in two as her exploding boilers tore her apart, some quirk of the destruction wrought to her ancient fabric caused her to roll away from the boat. The men who had lowered it and should have followed down the rope ladder went with her. It was over in a matter of less than a minute.

  The lifeboat was alone on the empty, heaving ocean, the centre of a small circle of black sea circumscribed by a pall of rain and spray. The crumps of the depth charges of the counter-attacking escorts seemed much farther away and the starshells finally went out.

  All that remained of the ship’s company of the SS Matthew Flinders were two able seaman, the Chief Steward, three greasers, a fireman and Apprentice Mackinnon. He was sixteen years old.

  He remembered few details after that nightmare evacuation of the old ship. Memory told him his exemplary conduct during those next few days had recommended him to the ‘Old Woman’ and she, after the war, had insisted he became the Third Officer of the brand new Matthew Flinders.

  Now, as his thoughts came full circle and he drifted off to sleep, he felt the prickle of disappointment that his ship no longer carried apprentices. The lack of them had been the surest indication that the owners no longer considered there was a future for their ships, or cared very much. This was now proved by their voyage to the scrapyard. This, Mackinnon considered as he rolled over, was a tragic shame; true, the system had been abused to provide cheap labour and not even a war had prevented sixteen-year-old boys being exposed to its merciless rigours, but it had provided thousands of young men a chance in life . . .

  It was history now and he was an old man approaching retirement. Slowly his brain relinquished its hold on consciousness and he drifted to sleep.

  Dawn had found them quite alone on the heaving sea. The Chief Steward took nominal charge and the older of the able seamen sat aft at the helm. The rest of them huddled disconsolately on the thwarts shivering in the damp chill, for it still rained, a cold drizzle that obscured everything.

  Once, and then so briefly that afterwards they could not be certain, they thought they heard the hiss of a bow wave and the grey loom of a ship, perhaps the Aubretia, sent back to quarter the wake of the convoy in search of survivors; but although they raised a shout, it ended in a senseless stream of blasphemy as the insubstantial apparition vanished.

  ‘It might have been a U-boat,’ said Mackinnon, asserting himself for the first time and voicing a fear which, for him, was greater than that of impending death. He was too young to imagine death might be about to claim him; the fear of imprisonment in German hands was far stronger.

  But as the day wore on he learned how very easy it is to die. The fireman, shuddering uncontrollably in his singlet, was dead by noon; a greaser passed silently from them an hour later. The very ordinariness of it filled Mackinnon with dread.

  It began to dawn on him that the others in the boat did not expect to survive and were incapable of exerting themselves to no purpose. After three years of war they had seen others die and there was a strange kind of comfort in numbers. The Chief Steward dished out water and biscuit, though for the most part they slumped helpless and hopeless in the wallowing boat, silently awaiting their fate.

  Mackinnon had no idea how long they remained like this, for the rain swept over them for hour after dismal hour, until, as dusk overtook them, the sky began to clear. A blood-red sun sank towards the horizon.

  The sunset reminded him sharply of yesterday, of the Matthew Flinders and his chums in the half-deck, of Taffy Davies and Dave Kingsley . . .

  ‘Almost home and dry,’ Taffy had said.

  ‘We’ve got a compass, haven’t we?’ he asked Able-Seaman Bird whose crouched figure huddled over the kicking tiller gave a specious appearance of order in the boat.

  Bird looked up at the first-trip apprentice and nodded.

  ‘Why don’t we sail the boat then?’

  Bird stirred, frowning, and shook his head.

  ‘We could get the mast stepped by dark.’ Mackinnon saw intelligence kindled in the eyes of the men around him. It dawned on him how far inside their instinctive selves they had retreated. They had become feral creatures, each facing the inevitable end with a silent resignation.

  ‘Which direction do we steer then, son?’ asked the Chief Steward quietly, his tone that of exhaustion. ‘D’you know?’

  Mackinnon did not know; not exactly. His duties had been confined to cleaning his quarters and the bridge, doing odd jobs and mounting lookout duty in the bridge gun pits, to be ammunition server if needed. It had seemed a glamorous enough task, sitting by the Lewis gun as the old Matthew Flinders struggled along, belching black smoke in an attempt to keep up the speed ordered by the Commodore. Now it struck him that it might have been of more value to have known roughly where they were. He supposed he had actually possessed the information on the chit Captain Robson had sent him to Sparks with, but the Master had been a man of old-fashioned prejudices. Apprentices were the lowest form of animal life and the chart-room was a hallowed sanctum . . .

  Nevertheless, Taffy Davies was an apprentice of two years’ experience and Taffy seemed, at least to young Mackinnon, to know everything. Taffy had said with his usual confidence, ‘Almost home and dry . . .’

  ‘If we steered east . . .’

  ‘We usually get sent up towards Iceland, son,’ said the Chief Steward. You did not need a master’s certificate to know that east of Iceland lay a lot of ocean before one hit German-occupied Norway. Mackinnon felt the older man’s patronising rejection as a spur to anger. He was incapable of comprehending the Chief Steward’s quiet courage in waiting for the end. He was an elderly, unfit man. War had called many back to the colours, and the red ensign of the Merchant Navy was the least glamorous, least regarded of them. The Chief Steward felt overwhelmed with pity for Mackinnon; the boy’s youthful spirit would not allow him to die quietly.

  ‘Steer south-east, then,’ Mackinnon persisted, a complex feeling of anger and adolescent petulance seizing him. He struggled forward and began unlashing the mast and the lugsail rolled round its yard.

  ‘South-east . . .’ Bird looked up from the compass. ‘Maybe the kid’s right.’

  By nightfall the starboard lifeboat of the SS Matthew Flinders scudded south-east, the tiny glim of her binnacle light radiating hope on the face of Apprentice Mackinnon at the helm.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Distant Storm Clouds

  Taylor sighted Pulo Weh at 1030 ship’s time the following morning and the lush green hummock lay on the starboard beam of the Matthew Flinders by noon. This proximity of the land released Stevenson from the necessity of attendi
ng the bridge for the ritual of taking noon sights. Instead he enjoyed a quick beer in the bar before having lunch and relieving Taylor in the endless round of the ship’s routine.

  There were several other officers already sipping their pre-lunch drinks. The Radio Officer was picking up a gin and tonic when he caught sight of the Second Mate.

  ‘Hullo, stranger.’ He turned to the Chinese steward behind the bar. ‘Here, Woo, give Second Office’ a nice cool beer.’ The Radio Officer signed the chit and Stevenson gratefully accepted the dripping glass, grinning like a boy let out of school early.

  ‘Cheers, Sparks.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Any news from the big outside world?’

  Sparks shrugged. ‘Rioting in Ulster, fuel shortages in Eastern Europe which are imposing great hardships on British tourists, and another load of Vietnamese boat people picked up in the South China Sea. SNAFU . . . situation normal all—’

  ‘All fucked up,’ Stevenson completed the acronym. ‘I know the graveyard watch go out of circulation but I’m not a complete zombie.’

  ‘Oh, scoff not, it’s the best thing to be,’ grinned Sparks, eyeing Stevenson over his glass. ‘I’ve ceased to react to news from Ulster and being stuck here scarcely gives me cause for concern for British tourists in Yugoslavia or wherever. Strikes me the bastards have too much money and too much time off.’

  ‘Who? The Yugoslavs?’ asked Stevenson.

  ‘You are bombed out, old lad. No, the bloody British tourists.’

  ‘What about the Vietnamese, then?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Alex, do me a favour; you’re bombed out on night air. The world’s full of poor suffering bastards, isn’t it? At the moment I feel one myself.’ Sparks swallowed the gin and tonic and held his glass between thumb and forefinger, making it oscillate conspicuously. Stevenson took it and passed it across the bar.