The Praying Nun

by Michael Smorenburg

  I picture in my mind a white beach full of black bodies, naked as they were stuffed into the holds. I see stragglers spluttering and crawling from the sea. Among them are the crew, a few white masters reduced by the wild ocean to tattered rags.

  It seems likely to me that some slaves would have helped their jailors ashore, certain that their good deed would bring clemency.

  But any heroic or charitable rescue that may have occurred that day was most likely short lived; charity being in short supply as it was in more fearful times.

  I find myself staring into the rafters. Lost in the nightmare, I bring my eyes back to the screen and my mind is directed back to the beach.

  All those shards of pottery we’ve found over the years, each one now comes alive in my hand—not just as curious fragments, but reassembled by my imagination into pieces of a greater epic tale. An actual bowl once held to a living mouth… perhaps to the mouth of a cruel captain, a kindly mate, a terrified ship’s boy or of a condemned prisoner in the hold. I catch myself with my eyes cast heavenward once more, lost in a waking dream.

  “Gold…” I hear Jacques urge me again, and it pulls me momentarily from my drift.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Underwater in my mind, I see that aged timber that first alerted Jacques to the find.

  It’s locked between the granite boulders, encrusted by sandworm structures, redbait, kelp and other jetsam. Lobsters peer out at me from behind this wooden fortress that serves as a door to their den.

  I wonder if we can somehow core it, if we can then establish its age?

  “Hey, Jacques,” I keep my excited voice hushed in this mausoleum. “That beam in your wreck. Should we hack a piece off and see if they can carbon date it for us?”

  “You think I didn’t come up with that? It’s too expensive. If I get the salvage permit, I’ll try to get the museum interested. I don’t know if carbon dating will work for something that’s been submerged a long time though.”

  “Sure,” I agree, a little crestfallen after my epiphany. “Worth a try.”

  And I’m back to reading and dreaming, knowing I should give this dead end a miss and start researching in a new and more productive direction instead.

  Yep, I say to myself, reading the recorded words of a man who dodged death on my beach two centuries earlier. The Captain, of course, survived. No doubt on a slaver, when it runs aground, it’s every man for himself. If you’re not wearing shackles, your chances are improved dramatically.

  As I read earlier, the Captain’s account suggests that he put a party on a cutter trailing a line through the waves to shore, where they established a beachhead.

  I go back and re-read some of it, looking for clues that I can relate to my own experience with the coast. The Captain set the men and slaves still aboard to work attaching ropes to baskets and pulling his crew and living human cargo ashore until “the sun reached the horizon, after which our ship broke her back”.

  And now in my nightmarish account, the black bodies still clinging to the splintering hull could no longer see their motherland, Africa, as they swirled to their deaths in the wash. They’d be dashed against the reef in the blind terror of the pitch black.

  It all seemed so bleak.

  But, an optimist must find the opportunity in everything, and I muse that under the cover of darkness, a lucky few might have managed to get ashore and slip away to the vast mainland, mostly uninhabited as it was then.

  I ponder on it and decide it must be so. Yet, as I read further, there is no hint or account of escapees. There is only a body count and a salvage count, and a presumption of much death.

  Those captured were marched back to town in chains and duly sold to recover what costs could be recuperated from the mishap to the ship’s owners, the Perreira family.

  End of story.

  Chapter 3

  “A coal barge?” I can’t believe what I’m reading.

  The deed in my hand is a notification from the South African Heritage Resources Agency.

  They’ve identified Jacques’ wreck and he has full salvage rights.

  We’re about to head out there to try our hand once more at salvage, and he just handed me the envelope with the official stamp of approval.

  They know about the wreck, they claim. It’s a coal barge that plied the waters between Table Bay and Simonstown during the late 1800s. It evidently went down on the exact mark indicated. There’s usually nothing on board a coal barge of any value.

  “Except, it’s a coal barge with cannons,” I point out.

  “You’re a regular Sherlock,” he announces. He doesn’t care what the authorities think he’s found. He’s just happy to have the rights and not get hassled over it. “They’re clowns,” he laughs in his characteristic disdain for authority. “Idiots.”

  I can’t disagree. I’ve got three cannon balls from a 19th Century coal barge and a handful of handmade brass nails that says someone’s confused here, and I don’t think it’s us.

  “At least when I come out of the water with a heavy bag now, I’ve got this piece of paper to tell the boere they can fuck off.”

  Boere is the pejorative catchall name we give to various arms of the law, be they police, traffic officers, or inspectors.

  Inspectors are from the Department of Sea Fisheries and charged with bringing petty poachers to book for infringements of size limit, bag count or violating the sanctuary.

  The latter is the only law we contravene, but, as I say, we consider ourselves to be gentlemen poachers. We take out in an entire year what a single commercial trap might haul up in one night.

  We pick and choose what we harvest, only monsters, never in berry and never soft shell. Heck, we’re so green in our withdrawals of small change from the ocean’s massive vault that we even avoid female lobsters, knowing that it’s sustainable if we only target the males.

  “It is what it is…” I add. “We just keep looking.”

  “It’s the bullion ship,” he insists for the umpteenth time. “Nothing to say it isn’t. The copper sheeting, cannons and conglomerate with pottery… the VOC crests. It’s exactly the right timeframe.”

  He has this way of infecting me with his dreams. His dream that this coal barge of his is nothing of the sort. It’s the one, the Dutch bullion ship, the haystack with our needle in it.

  I heft my tank onto my shoulder, “Coming?” And I start down the stairs from home.

  It’s been a bad storm and that’s changed the water.

  Fortunately, it’s a balmy 16°C. That’s centigrade. It’s a leap up the warmth scale from ice-water to tap-water.

  But with the slight warming trend, the cold Benguela current, that fetches its icy ammo from well below the ‘Roaring 40s’ of the South Atlantic, also brings other things.

  On today’s menu is phytoplankton, cloudy green microscopic life that makes a rich feeding ground at the base of the food chain. The result is that our crystal-clear water of last week is gone and is now an ugly pea soup for impenetrable visibility. Sometimes it gets very bad, but today, it’s several stages past merely bad. It’s horrific.

  I used to wear thick white woollen gloves and at least I could see them in front of my face in conditions like this, but these black neoprene gloves will be impossible to see when they’re not pressed against my mask.

  It’ll be a work-by-feel day.

  As I settle my mask into place, I think again that it’s rather stupid bothering to dive today.

  There’s still a bit of surge and we’ll see just less than bugger all, but just maybe I’ll bring home something for the pot.

  There’s a good chance because one rarely sees a lobster before catching it anyway. By the time you’ve seen a crayfish, as we call them, it’s also seen you and has disappeared.

  A little secret I’ll share with you for free: you must feel for them anyway. I could catch a full bag with my mask blacked out, so today’s hideous viz is no real hindrance to that, only to finding our needle.


  And then there’s the matter of my knife and that perlie that’s hopefully keeping it nice and safe, along with my giant yellow hippo tooth implanted into gritty conglomerate.

  We go out through the slushy small surf on snorkel, not wasting valuable scuba air.

  Jacques has with him a huge canvas construction stitched to a webbing harness that he’s had cobbled together, and in it he’s fitted a giant plastic tube, tied off at one end.

  The idea is that we’ll get the webbing sling onto his cannon and then use our demand valves to fill the plastic sleeve with air. In theory, the canvas will provide integrity and the plastic will keep the air within.

  We’ve calculated that it’ll provide three hundred kilos of lift and we’re guessing that the cannon weighs about two hundred kilos—a little more than twice our two weights added together. Except, of course, a cannon is deadweight.

  If our guesses and calculations are right, the bag will lift the cannon free of the bottom and we can swim it to shore.

  But that’s only if it’s free of the kelp and marine growth that’s cementing it to the bedrock. How we’ll even get two hundred kilos up over one hundred steps is a mystery, which I voice aloud.

  “Don’t worry,” he removes the snorkel from his perpetually grinning face and assures me, “I have a plan.”

  Great… he’s got a plan. I mull what it might be as my fins plop like a small motor behind me, thrusting me steadily toward Cherry Rock.

  The strangest thoughts now permeate my mind—that slaver wreck just around the coast… For yet one more time since I read about it, my mind projects into the minds of the victims.

  Drowning, they say, is no longer traumatic once you’ve given up the fight to live. I guess it’s the fight for life that makes it unpleasant.

  I’ve seen someone drown. There’s a definite switch in how hard someone struggles once they get a lung full of water.

  My dad told me many a story about the drowning victims he and my grandfather saved in this bay, and this little pinnacle of rock just triggered one of the stories.

  Back in the 1940s, my grandfather was called to save someone right about where I’m swimming now.

  The guy was repeatedly being hammered by big surf. My granddad took a dreadful beating on the reef during the rescue and wound up hospitalized with stitches and a cast.

  When the attending doctor came to attend to him on the beach, he disclosed that the saved man had said it was a suicide attempt. By all accounts, it took some muscle to keep the old boy from finishing the job for the bloke.

  I look up to take a bearing. We’re almost on point to swap from snorkel to scuba.

  We’re abeam of Cherry Rock, and I marvel once more how these rocks in the sea, so meaningless to the thousands that look out upon them, have been so much a part of my family for three generations.

  I guess that needs a little reminiscence as well.

  Granddad was a colourful character. He was on the lowest rung of the city council staff. As a bottom-feeder, he was forced to take whatever unwanted job others refused.

  The task set for him involved a gun and a spade and a five-mile journey along a dirt road around the mountain from the city. His job was to turn a campsite into a suburb, and then run it somewhat the way a sheriff rules a town.

  The very stairs accessing the beach that I’ve just descended from the roadway, were cut by his hand.

  His council home was set halfway down a ridge of rock that juts into the sea just to the south of where I am now finning. It’s the headland that forms the southern boundary of the bay, and it’s a natural breakwater against storms blowing in from the southwest. From the air, The Ridge, as it’s called, looks like a boxer’s punch jabbed out into the wild ocean and frozen there for all time.

  I have a trove of news cuttings from the 1940s and 50s with headlines screaming versions of “Man-Eater Sharks Shot From the Coast”. They’re emblazoned with photos of my granddad firing his old .303 council-issued rifle from the vantage of the vast granite rock standing as tall as the masts of yachts that lie at anchor, barbequing in this bay when the summer comes.

  I contemplate, as we battle to swim our sodden fabric load out to the mark, how he had to first cut a road out of virgin bush to get his furniture down to his council house.

  In deference, I roll my head and look southward toward the ridge. I easily spot the bungalow I was born to, nestled under a tall California palm just a few doors away from that council abode.

  I fantasize about this place as it must have been when it was wild. Now it’s littered with bungalows and the first towers of concrete supporting mansions for the super rich. Already, it’s the most expensive land in Africa.

  It’s been a slow haul today, the cloying mass of canvas we’ve towed between us has made us work five times as hard for ten times as long, and fit as I am, I’m almost out of steam when we finally arrive on point.

  But Jacques is a street dog and I can see that he’s barely felt the effort.

  “Can’t see a bloody thing,” I remark the obvious, taking a mental bearing on our angle to the familiar rock formations and kelp patterns.

  “We’re here.” He confirms my own conclusion.

  We both look down, and I know he sees what I’m seeing—precisely nothing but green murk.

  In spite of thoughts of the old man shooting at sharks and this relatively warm flush of water, I push the thought of shark! out of my mind. It’s not ten years since a great white chomped a swimmer about this distance from the beach two or three football field lengths just south of where we’re treading water with our heavy load.

  I instinctively lift my head again and look south in that direction. It was just beyond Three Rock, a string of three large rocks in a row out to sea, the most distant one a favourite destination for swimmers to reach and sun themselves a while before swimming home.

  On the day of the attack, I was ever so slightly closer to that spot than we are right now. On that day, we’d just speared a string full of glinting silver sea bream and exited the water when the bloodcurdling screams had begun.

  Is it crazy to continue diving where sharks sometimes visit?

  Well, I remind myself, one must make a decision—worry about the wildlife and stay out of the water, or forget it.

  I choose to forget it and divert my mind.

  “Think it’s loose enough?” I ask for the hundredth time about this cannon that Jacques is so insistent on raising today.

  “Just get the webbing harness equidistant from the ends, we don’t want it unbalanced and falling out.” He won’t dignify my doubt in his hard work last week with an answer.

  He swaps from snorkel to demand valve and slips away into the murk. Huge bubbles that look like jellyfish burst and boil in the spot that he evaporated into. The bubbles from his breath surface in an even and relaxed rhythm.

  I take a last look at the squatting landmass of Africa and follow him into the gloom.

  Chapter 4

  It was hell.

  He’s worked the cannon loose all right, but it’s almost impossible to tell. The bloody thing feels welded to the continental shelf. Even underwater we can barely shift it. That tells me we’ve greatly underestimated its weight.

  With the webbing harness in place and properly adjusted, we’ve taken turns holding our breath and using our demand valve mouthpieces and purge valves to release air from our tanks into the growing sausage of plastic-lined canvas.

  We’ve done our calculations and know that filling the bladder will bleed both of our tanks much more quickly, rapidly depleting our bottom time to just one third of the usual forty-five minutes at these depths.

  Ten minutes into the dive, the thing comes grudgingly loose from the bottom.

  For the first time in who-knows-how-long, it’s out of its rock prison and beginning to hover. Were visibility better today, we’d actually witness what’s happening and this occasion might feel a little more momentous.

  Instead, we gingerly feel along
the length to ensure it was rising evenly so it won’t rise too much on one side and tumble the load from the slings.

  A few more blasts of air into the floatation device and it begins to rise, slowly at first. Then, as the pressure of depth comes off the bag, the bag fills out to offer increasing buoyancy. This in turn creates more lift and our makeshift elevator rises quicker and quicker.

  My head breaks the surface alongside my grinning buddy.

  Not for the first time, the likeness of his ice-blue eyes set in that wide-open face echoes in my mind to another maverick face often seen beaming out of our television screens—Virgin’s founder, Richard Branson. The two could be brothers.

  We’re both elated.

  Our fawn-coloured blimp has worked. Below it is slung a hunk of corroded metal that should finally tell us what we have here.

  Exciting as it is, the whole time during the salvage I’ve wanted to slip away. To pop up and over the rock and down to my own prize, my football-sized conglomerate… if only to feel for my knife under the perlie.

  But my taskmaster will never let me hear the end of my dereliction of duty to help him with this tell-tale piece of whatever-it-is.

  We begin the arduous task of swimming our load on snorkel into the shallows, a torturously slow process. I keep looking up to check our progress, but there seems to be none.

  Kick, kick, kick, kick… Check… we haven’t moved. Kick, kick, kick.

  Eventually our glacial speed wins out over distance and we feel the webbing harness that we’re using to tow our load report that the payload has touched ground.

  I look up and feel for the bottom with my foot. We’re in water I can just about stand in.

  “Yes!” Jacques exclaims in triumph.

  But all of this effort thus far proves to be only a down-payment on the real effort that is to come.