He had sworn viciously as he had been bruised but, taking the wheel, fear and the enduring instinct to survive kept him company again, compelling him to do his duty and keep the ship on the course Mackinnon desired. But Macgregor was no true seaman and lacked the instinctive response that makes a good helmsman. He was unable to anticipate the movement of the ship and was, at best, merely a reactive operator. For a while he kept a tolerable hold on the ship, but then, from time to time, he lost her and she threatened to skid round towards the dreaded position of broaching.
On each occasion Mackinnon stirred from his post to stand like Nemesis at Macgregor’s elbow, silent, forbidding and all-powerful. Unperceiving of much existing outside his immediate self, Macgregor feared Captain Mackinnon more than the typhoon and fought, in self-justification, for control of the ship again.
Taylor was there too, threatening Macgregor in a more physical way, and by his very presence as the Captain’s satrap triggered off Macgregor’s smouldering resentment against all whom providence had elevated above and thus against him. Macgregor had not forgotten the threats made by the Third Mate. The insensate hatred that ran bilious in his personality poured itself into his ego.
In the radio-room Sparks finished writing to the dictates of the dots and dashes crackling through on the airwaves. Bracing himself he tapped out his acknowledgement of the signals then made his way to the bridge. Halfway along the boat-deck, fifteen minutes after Macgregor had traversed it, he paused and took stock of their situation.
‘Christ,’ he muttered, unaware the wind had actually dropped a little, even though the effort of moving forward made him gasp, ‘if the wife could see me now . . .’
He found the Captain and stirred him from his trance. On Mackinnon’s instruction, he read out the contents of the messages by torchlight.
‘Both from Hong Kong Radio, sir, for the Master, Matthew Flinders. The first one’s an acknowledgement of our typhoon information and then a request for clarification of our flag state, sir.’
‘What the hell do they want that for? They can find it out by ringing the agent.’ Mackinnon’s voice was genuinely puzzled.
‘I, er, think it may have something to do with the refugees, sir. It’s my guess they want you to admit you’re not British.’
‘What d’you mean I’m not British?’ Fatigue made Mackinnon testy.
‘Well, the ship’s no longer British, sir.’ Sparks’s voice bore traces of the patience of the experienced. He had never aspired to command, settling early in his career for a specialisation that made him forever subordinate. It was, he was fond of saying in his cups, why he made such an excellent husband.
‘You think we may have a problem with the immigration people?’
‘It’s very likely, sir. I read something in the Straits Times about the camps in Hong Kong being overcrowded.’
‘Were we supposed to leave those people to drown?’
Sparks was wisely silent at Mackinnon’s outraged rhetorical question.
‘It’s just a guess, sir.’
‘Yes, yes, I know. And you’re probably correct. What’s the other message?’
‘It’s from Dentco, sir and personal. D’you want—’
‘No, no, read it out.’
‘It’s confirming your wife’s time of arrival, sir, tomorrow evening.’
Tomorrow evening. Mackinnon turned once more to the wheelhouse window. Tomorrow evening. Where would he and his ship be tomorrow evening? It seemed an eternity distant.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Oil and Water
On the bridge Mackinnon considered what to do next. With the wind on the starboard quarter the Matthew Flinders would slowly move out of the path of the advancing typhoon on a curving course. This was a result of the indraught of the air as it circulated and was drawn towards the eye of the storm. The wind-generated waves did not alter their angle with the same speed, they lagged slightly, so the nearer the eye an observer was, the more the angle increased until at the centre all was confusion as waves rushed in from every point of the compass.
As the actual wind constantly created new waves, the ‘old’ waves, the cumulative residue of air that had now moved on, were left behind as swell waves. Dispensing with the landsman’s notion of ‘waves’, the seaman refers to the inequities in the sea’s surface as ‘seas’ and ‘swells’, a precise rather than a pedantic differentiation. A swell, though it might be monstrous in size, is a decreasing force; losing its angular shape it becomes rounded, like an ancient mountain. It possesses no breaking crest, but if unimpeded it will travel thousands of miles across an ocean as it gradually decays, long-distance evidence of a gale or storm, an observable early warning. In this decaying state it will do no more than cause a ship to roll if she is beam on to it or pitch if she heads into it, with a consequent corkscrew motion at other angles. With sea and swell astern the motion is called scending, for it contains a precipitate forward motion not unlike a sleigh-ride.
The swells then assaulting the Matthew Flinders were still relatively young. They possessed enormous kinetic energy and it would be a long time before they became mere benign ground swells, low and slow. Their rolling and pitching motion was a danger because they were still steep and the period between the passing of their crests remained short. More important, their angle was not yet significantly different from the wind-made waves that were constantly being produced by the screaming air as it rushed towards the vortex. The combined effect was to produce a very steep, comparatively short sea that flung the ship wildly about and in which the danger of being pooped remained.
Captain Mackinnon was well aware of this and it presented him with a dilemma. In theory there was a classic remedy: oil. The less easily answerable part of his problem was how to deliver the oil and who was to do it. There were notable examples quoted in the seamanship books of, as it was quaintly put, ‘the efficacy of oil in quelling the sea’.
Oil, and only a little of it, was necessary, spread in a thin film which damped down the breaking seas, robbed them of their crests and therefore rendered them much less dangerous.
Captain Mackinnon had seen plenty of oil slicks during the war and could vouch for their practical value; moreover, Mackinnon knew that God helped those who helped themselves.
There were drums of lubricating oil stored in the steering gear. They could be reached by going aft from the engine-room through the shaft tunnel and up the escape, the route by which he had earlier ordered the greasers, accommodated aft under the poop, to use. From the after end of the shaft tunnel, access to the poop was achieved by ascending the vertical ladder of the tunnel escape shaft. The steering flat was conveniently close to the greasers’ lavatory. Half a bale of waste dropped into one of the pans there and kept sodden with viscous lube oil would, with an occasional flushing, spread astern of them, damping down the seas and rendering them, at least on a comparative scale as things now stood, relatively harmless. Resolved on this course of action, Mackinnon turned from the window.
In the wheelhouse Taylor stood keeping a watchful eye on the useless runt Macgregor. Taylor would organise the matter, Mackinnon concluded. Judging by his recent performance he was at his best with a task to attend to. After amputating legs this would be simple.
Holding on to the engine telegraph, then edging round Macgregor, Mackinnon began to shout an explanation of what he wanted done.
Taylor bent to hear what the Captain was saying, taking his attention from the helmsman. For some time Macgregor’s steering had been steady; he seemed to be getting the hang of the thing and, in any case, had only about another fifteen minutes before he was relieved. Standing over Magregor, glad of something to do, Taylor’s mood had swung back again to one of groundless optimism. He was actually amused by the grunting effort Macgregor put into his exertions, writing off fifty per cent as being for his benefit. Had he been less introverted, Taylor might have smelt the musk of the man, the exudations of fear and anxiety. For a man unused to any form of real responsibil
ity, this supervised torture was a hell to Macgregor from which there was no escape.
By now he understood the danger to which his neglect might expose the ship, and it overawed him, chiefly because his own life, rather than the lives of others, was at stake. Experience had early marked out the priorities for Macgregor; the fact that he came low on the list of others made him aware that to survive he must look after himself. In his own way he too understood that God helped those who helped themselves. He had observed its truth since his boyhood.
However, his character lacked staying power and the whisky he had drunk nurtured his grievances. Supervening his fear at losing control of the ship again, resentment grew at having such a responsibility thrust upon him. Paradoxically he equally resented the supervision. He knew his job. He did not need Third Officers and Masters to stand over him as though he was a child. He had an AB’s ticket just like Braddock and Williams and Pritchard. Fear, incompetence and pride spawned this complex, deadly peevishness, and it welled up within him, submerging the fear and breeding carelessness.
But Taylor and Mackinnon were impervious to his spite. Instead he had begun to hate the wheel. It had knocked his knuckles twice as he released it to spin back admiships under the equilibrifying forces of the hydraulic fluid in the telemotor. It had humiliated him, just as the corner of the winch on the boat-deck had caught his ribs fifty minutes earlier. He had begun to resent steering the ship and the typhoon had become a thing to be hated, defied and spat upon.
Then, out of the night, came a periodic series of those coincident crests which Mackinnon had studied before turning. Distracted, Macgregor did not notice the ship’s head begin to pay off and the swing had accelerated beyond redemption when he did. He lost control of the ship on the advancing face of the first of the cumulative waves.
As the stern lifted it was thrust to starboard, almost cartwheeling in an attempt to overtake the accelerating bow. Driven deep, the ship’s head slewed rapidly to port, increasing the swinging moment as the angle of the supporting ocean abruptly inclined towards the vertical. The Matthew Flinders rolled to starboard as her head flew to port. And she failed to swing back as the rudder bit, for Macgregor had quite forgotten the ship was inanimate and needed sympathetic human intelligence to nurse her through her ordeal.
Perhaps Macgregor should never have taken the wheel as custom ordained and Mackinnon ordered; perhaps Macgregor should never have been isued with a certificate of competency as an able seaman which allowed him the privilege. Whatever misjudgements had been made where Macgregor was concerned, and they had doubtless been made (whatever he thought of them) by giving him the benefit of the doubt, they were now proved wrong. His application of counter-helm was too late for, lifted high, nine tenths of the Matthew Flinders’s rudder turned uselessly in the spray-sodden air.
The Matthew Flinders broached at the first of the oncoming quartet of heavy seas. It burst against her port quarter with an impact that could be felt throughout her fabric, further pushing the ship’s stern to starboard and lifting her as she continued slewing to port. The flung spray arched over her in a pale, wind-riven cloud and the wave passed under her. The Matthew Flinders rolled back to port as the second huge sea heaped up alongside her, rearing over her entire length as the decks, even the exhaust tubes poking up through her buff funnel, pointed invitingly towards it. The crest came roaring down upon her as she lay like a drunk in the gutter.
As hundreds of tonnes of water cascaded from the summit of the wave, the inherent stability of the Matthew Flinders asserted itself. A reaction between the downward thrust of her weight and the upward thrust of her buoyant self reacted with a levering effect. Whilst each might be considered to act at a single point, the first at her centre of gravity, the second at her centre of buoyancy, the first remained constant whatever the ship’s attitude in the water. The other moved according to the body of the hull actually in the water. As the centre of gravity acted downwards through the ship’s centre, a roll to port moved the upward thrust of her centre of buoyancy dramatically to the left. This was increased by the rising of the port waterline for the ship now felt the upward buoyancy of the next wave. These two forces, gravity and buoyancy, acted in opposition, and since they were not in the same vertical line they formed a moment known as a righting lever, throwing the Matthew Flinders back to starboard away from the breaking torrent that swept down upon her.
Although it was not the decks upon which this vast volume of water struck, it hammered with tremendous force upon the whole exposed length of the port side, inducing a fast roll the other way. At the same time it swept the ship, like a woodchip in a mill race, bodily sideways.
Mackinnon turned in those few fateful seconds to correct Macgregor’s steering. He knew instantly he was too late. He was level with the open wheelhouse door as the ship went over to starboard, with Taylor somewhere above him on the canting deck and Macgregor scrabbling at the telemotor for support. Mackinnon was flung into a half-run, half-stumble out on to the bridge-wing. The outboard rail dipped down, down to the seething blackness that was the sea on their lee side. For an instant he thought he was to be flung from his own bridge, then he made gasping, winded contact with the starboard gyro-bearing repeater pedestal and collapsed, clinging to it as the water came over him, roaring in his ears, deceptively warm.
In the wheelhouse Macgregor was flung from his handhold on the wheel, hitting the engine-room telegraph with a yelp of pain and falling to the deck as one of the port wheelhouse windows was stove in. The armoured glass shattered into long slivers and one slashed across Taylor’s forearm as he reached out to seize the abandoned wheel, bracing himself against the steep angle of the deck. Anxiously he scanned the starboard bridge-wing for a sign of the Captain.
Yet none of the water that poured aboard the old cargo-liner at that moment was solid, or constituted what sailors call a ‘green’ sea, for the bulk of the wave had gone under the ship; it was merely the mass of water flung upwards from the impact of the colliding breaker which was then shredded to leeward, smashing the wheelhouse window, deluging Captain Mackinnon and pressing him to the deck at the foot of the repeater pedestal.
A deck below the bridge Rawlings found himself lying on his cabin bulkhead. Once relieved by Taylor he had crawled to his bunk in search of an hour or two’s rest and had actually fallen asleep. When the Matthew Flinders rolled to leeward he was jerked from his fitful slumber. As the ship lolled on her side, Rawlings was pierced by anxiety for her stability. It was his particular responsibility and he was aware of the potential variables that such a roll might cast loose in the ship’s cargo spaces. He lay still, his whole, frightened being concentrating on listening for distant rumblings from the holds.
Stevenson had been unable to sleep. He was keyed up, excited as much by the presence of the Vietnamese girl as the typhoon. Who was she? What was she?
She seemed to be alone and he nurtured ridiculous ideas about her vulnerability. A ship was a libidinous hothouse. He thought of Macgregor and Rawlings as threats to her. Then, being a sensible man, he dismissed the whole thing as stupid fantasy and tried to sleep, only to find he could not drop off. He got up and realised he felt hungry. He recollected he had eaten no dinner that night; his hunger gave him the excuse he subconsciously sought to make his way back down below.
He went first to the galley. Fred Thorpe was still about. The Chief Steward never turned in early but normally led a small school of the ship’s hardened drinkers who, off watch or on day work, congregated nightly in his cabin. He was a sociable host and, being Chief Steward, had the keys that circumvented Captain Mackinnon’s bar-opening hours. Tonight, however, Thorpe was occupied on more humane matters. Being a pragmatist he felt no humiliation from passing out over the amputations. Mackinnon had himself quailed, handing the job over to Taylor. Taylor always was a superior, heartless sort of bastard, and if his detachment only confirmed this in Thorpe’s eyes, he had been too long subservient to worry about social pecking orders. Basic
ally, as exemplified by his discreet drinking school, at the end of the day, Freddie Thorpe did just what he wanted.
He was not a voluptuary, however. No seaman can ever be that entirely. Bred to the service of others, it was Thorpe who, with one of his Chinese assistant stewards, cleared up the swilling muck in the officers’s duty mess. After that he had made it his business to supervise the feeding and bedding down of the refugees. The women and children had settled first in the smoke-room, then the men had been attended to in the saloon.
He was in the galley discussing the arrangements for feeding the increased numbers the following day when Stevenson found him. The galley was at main-deck level in the approximate centre of the ship, directly above the forward end of the engine-room, the nearest habitable space to the ship’s centre of gravity. More than anywhere else, the motion of the ship was least here.
Thorpe and Wang Lee, the cook, stood, braced easily, their hands clutching the guard-rail that ran round the Carron electric range.
‘Hullo, Freddie, any chow left?’
‘You no come dinner, Mr Steven-song. Your favourite – Nasi Goreng.’
‘Got any left, Wang Lee?’ Stevenson grinned.
Wang Lee shook his head. ‘Mos’ go boat people.’
‘Oh.’ Stevenson’s regret was tempered by the thought of Tam. ‘Never mind.’
Thorpe was looking amused. ‘We’ve got a drop of soup, Alex, and some bread rolls.’
‘They’ll do.’
‘You’d better have the soup in a mug,’ Thorpe said, taking a ladle from the jingling row that swung from a hook above the range. He lifted the lid from a huge pot held on the warm hotplates by horizontal bars. Wang Lee handed the Chief Steward a mug from the half-dozen hung from hooks in the deckhead above, then turned and produced a basket of crisp brown rolls. Stevenson could smell the freshness of them and his mouth watered.
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