I awoke then to full realisation of what was going to happen. “All hands on deck,” I shouted. I rang for the engine to be stopped and seized hold of the engine-room communication pipe and ordered McPhee to get his men up as fast as he could. As I dropped the tube I saw Howe down on the gun platform, swinging the harpoon gun towards the oncoming ship.
One man stood alone on the corvette’s bridge. Against the grey back-cloth of cloud he stood out clear like an etching. His oilskins were a dark gleam in the hissing sleet, his black Norwegian sou’wester framed his white face. His hands were braced on the wheel, his whole body hunched over it like a rider driving his horse at a jump. It was Erik Bland.
Then everything seemed to happen at once. There was the violent crack of an explosion from our bows as Howe fired. The harpoon rose in a wide arc, passing over Bland’s shoulder and crashing down behind the bridge, the thin forerunner snaking after it. And in the same instant a man flung himself on to the bridge, swept Bland aside and swung the wheel over. The bows began to turn. The ship heeled. The engine-room telegraph clanged, loud and clear above the wind. But it was too late.
I can see it now as vividly as when it happened. It’s like a strip of film running through my mind. Yet it all happened in a second or so. The bows were no longer driving straight at me. They were swinging away towards our stern. But they were right on top of us now. And as they drove through the last few yards of the gap, they seemed to grow bigger and sharper. I remember a patch of flaking paint just below the hawse-hole and a streak of rust that had almost obliterated the letter E of the name. I remember the way our bulwarks buckled in like tin sheet under the impact—the shriek of tortured metal.
She struck us just aft of the engine-room, smashing the port boat and ploughing up the deck plates. Men were coming out on to our after-deck as the bows broke into our thin sides. There was the heavy shock of impact and an awful grinding, tearing sound as metal was ripped and torn open. Men fell sprawling on the deck. And in the same instant I was flung sideways and fetched up against the wooden side of the bridge with a jolt that drove all the breath out of me. The grinding and ripping of the metal seemed to go on unendingly.
Then suddenly all was still. Nothing seemed to move. The wind howled and beyond its howl was the rumbling gunfire of the ice. I gulped air and caught my breath at the pain in my side. Slowly the scene round me came to life. Gerda picked herself up from the corner of the bridge where she’d been flung. Men were staggering to their feet on the after-deck. The bows of the corvette stood like a huge wedge in the twisted steel of the afterdeck. Our funnel was bent over with the impact. A plume of steam was escaping from the engine-room.
Somebody moved on the bridge of Tauer III. It was the man who’d tried to take the wheel. Bland was cursing him, ordering him for’ard. His voice came to me on the wind as an angry scream. As the man left the bridge, Bland turned. His teeth were bared and he had a wild look about him. His hand reached out towards the engine-room telegraph. I yelled at him not to go astern My wits were so dulled by the disaster that I don’t think I’d really grasped that it had been intentional. I know he heard me yelling, for he raised his hand. It was a gesture of farewell. And then the engine-room telegraph rang.
I understood then and I gripped the canvas of the windbreaker in a sort of dazed fascination. I’d never seen a man coolly murdering a ship’s crew. I’d heard of U-boat commanders doing it during the war. But I’d never seen it happen.
The engine of the corvette began to hum. The black water at her stern was churned to an icy green and she began to back away from us. Our stern swung slowly with her. Then with a horrible tearing sound the bows wrenched free of us and she began to pull clear of the wreckage of our stern. Howe was screaming from the gun platform—screaming for them to stop. The forerunner of the harpoon lifted from the water in a slack loop, unwound slowly and as slowly tightened. And as it became taut there was a dull, muffled explosion from somewhere deep inside the corvette.
It’s queer, but whilst I have that vivid mental picture of the actual ramming, I have only a confused recollection of what followed immediately after. I remember standing there for a second, watching the corvette draw away and stop, seeing Bland turn at the sound of the explosion, rage darkening his face, and hearing a confused medley of shouts and orders and the ugly roar of escaping steam from somewhere in the bowels of the ship. Then I was down from the bridge, running aft, shouting orders.
A quick examination of the damage made it clear we couldn’t stay afloat for long. The after-bulkhead doors were damaged and water was pouring into the engine-room. The crew’s quarters aft had borne the brunt of the collision. Raadal was dead—crushed beyond recognition. Another man had been pinned against his bunk by a jagged strip of metal. It had gone through his stomach. He was unconscious and there was nothing we could do for him. Two other men were injured—one with a broken arm, another with broken ribs. The radio had been completely wrecked. As for the gap in the little vessel’s side, there was no question of patching it up. It was a great, ragged hole about eight feet wide and as many deep. It ran from deck to keel.
I sent McPhee down to the engine-room to see if he could get way on the ship and I ordered one of the men to the bridge with instructions that if the engine could be got going he was to steer the ship into the ice. Gerda I ordered to get the remaining boat swung out and to collect all the stores she could, in case we had to camp on the ice. Then I ran up to the bridge and hailed Tauer III through a megaphone. The ship was lying-to about twenty yards from us, her bows slightly crumpled and steam and smoke pouring out of her engine-room hatches. A man came running down to the bows. He looked scared. “Can you come alongside and take us off?” I shouted to him.
But he shook his head. “Nei, nei. We have damage in the engine-room and fire.”
My stomach seemed suddenly empty. I looked back along the length of the catcher. Her stern was already badly down. “You must take us off,” I shouted. “We will help you fight the fire.”
The man hesitated uncertainly. He glanced behind him as though trying to decide whether his ship was in better case than ours. And as he did so a great tongue of flame leapt out from amidships. Almost instantly there was a heavy roar of steam and the whole ship was enveloped in a white cloud against which her battered bows stood out black and sharp. Then the white of the steam darkened, became black and turned to great billowing clouds of smoke. I knew what that meant. The oil was alight inside her. I turned on Howe, who was standing there beside me, staring with open mouth at the belching column of smoke. “You bloody fool! You bloody, silly fool!” It wasn’t any good cursing him. I knew that. His damned harpoon was fired now. But I went on cursing him. I went on cursing him because I was scared. Tauer III had been our one chance. I felt sure the men wouldn’t have abandoned us even if that was what Bland had intended.
It was Gerda who pulled me out of my senseless mouthings. “We must begin landing stores,” she called up. McPhee was standing beside her and the expression on his face told me that he’d failed to do anything with the engine. Fortunately the starboard boat was intact. “Clear the boat and start loading,” I ordered.
I sent Gerda with the first boatload to choose a good stretch of ice. I remained on board, working to bring up the sort of stores we would need—food, clothing, canvas, petrol, oil, matches, instruments, charts, rifles and ammunition. My mind went back to that Greenland expedition, visualising the things we’d needed then and on the basis of that trying to imagine our requirements now. Tobacco. I remembered that, and lighters. I could recall how short we had got of matches. The food stores I packed in wooden boxes. I got up every packing case we could lay our hands on. Wood was always useful. Two drums of oil. Blankets to make into sleeping-bags. Needles and thread. Cooking utensils. Nails. Tools. It was the little things that could so easily be overlooked. The after-deck was almost awash now. We hadn’t much time. And once she went there would be no going back for anything that had been forgotten.
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The boat returned, was loaded with stores and men, and was sent back to the ice, McPhee in charge. Gerda remained on board, her woman’s mind quick to think of things I had forgotten: mending things, medical supplies, tins of fat, some personal stores of her father’s, including some brandy, leather ripped from chairs and seats, spare bootlaces. The boat came back again and this time we loaded the heavy stuff—frozen whale-meat, the two oil drums, coils of wire, steel stanchions cut from the ship for tent supports, a roll of canvas, packing cases filled with flour, axes, saws, guns, a block and tackle with four 60-fathom lengths of forerunner (my idea for hauling the boat if necessary) and a whole pile of junk that had been flung down by men acting on their own initiative as to what would be necessary. We piled it all in and sent the boat back.
It was a risk. There were still seven of us on the ship and she was very low. But I was determined that if we were to be forced to live on the ice then we should have everything that was necessary. To occupy the men I sent them to comb the ship—or what was left above water—for anything else of use. Then I went over to the port side and looked at Tauer III. I suppose in all about half an hour had passed since I had last looked at her. My whole effort had been concentrated in getting the stores together and ferrying them to the ice. Now I was amazed at the sight that met my eyes. The corvette was enveloped in a cloud of black smoke. Her bows were still clear of it. But aft of the bridge she was a roaring inferno with flames licking up to funnel height. A group of men were dragging stores up on to a floe beyond the ship. They were just black figures against the white of the ice that disappeared into the grey curtain of the sleet. The boat was being pulled back to the ship. I watched it come alongside. More stores were being lowered. And then my eyes went back to the corvette’s bridge where something had moved and I realised with a shock that Bland was still standing there. I picked up my glasses, which were lying on a pile of my own personal things, and focused them on him. He was no longer grinning. He seemed dazed, his face white and his lips moving as though he were muttering to himself.
And then Gerda tugged at my arm. “I brought this down, Duncan,” she said. It was the radio from my cabin. “It is a portable in case of emergencies. My father always say it is good to hear even if you cannot send.”
I cursed myself for having forgotten it and started to rack my brains again in case there was anything else I had overlooked. “I wonder if Tauer III managed to send a message?” I said.
She shrugged her shoulders. “We shall know when we join up on the ice. I think they will have radioed the Southern Cross. You see their R/T is below the bridge and that is still clear of the fire.”
The catcher gave an ugly little wriggle then. I glanced quickly aft. We were very low now. The bows seemed higher. I dived for the rail. The boat was on its way back. “Quick!” I shouted. The men bent to their oars. “Just drop everything in,” I ordered the others. “Then follow quickly. We haven’t much time.”
The boat slid alongside. I felt another tremble run through the ship. I had a horrible feeling that the bows were rising higher and higher. The deck seemed to be slanting away to the stern like a water chute. And as the men tumbled over the side the water slid quietly over my ankles. The catcher was beginning to sink stern first. Gerda heaved herself over the rail. I dropped the radio into someone’s lap and flung myself in after her. “Row like the devil.” I shouted.
But they didn’t need any urging. The oars bent under the thrust of the rowers. The heavily laden boat thrust away from the catcher. And as we pulled away Hval 4 gave a violent shudder. Her tottering stack shook free of its mountings and fell with a crash. And as though that were the last straw, the little vessel slid quietly stem first into the sea, the sharp bows pointing higher and higher as she went and the harpoon gun swinging aimlessly. She disappeared with barely a ripple, mast tip and gun the last to go. And where she had been the icy water swirled in black whorls for a moment and then settled as though there had never been a vessel there.
It was the first time I’d lost a ship. I had no sense of personal loss. She hadn’t been my ship in the way my corvette had been. But I felt an awful sense of emptiness, as though I had been suddenly disarmed in mortal combat. It took all the courage out of me. I glanced at Gerda and saw she was crying. Her brown eyes were staring almost unbelievingly at the spot where Hval 4 had been and big tears rolled down her cheeks. For her it was different. The catcher had been her home. I lent forward to pat her hand. Then I saw that Howe was gripping her arm, staring into her face, his eyes looking hurt as though he felt the loss through her.
I looked about me, taking stock of my surroundings. From the deck of Hval 4, even though she had been sinking, I’d felt a sense of security as though the storm and the ice and the black, heaving sea were all slightly unreal—something apart. Now the ship had gone and from the slender freeboard of an overloaded boat the scene looked frighteningly real. I think in all that followed I never felt lower in spirits than at that moment. There was just the group of men huddled round the stores on the ice, another group farther away and the burning hulk of the corvette. And the icy sleet swept over everything—cold and wet and dismal. Behind it was the wind and beyond that still the staccato cracking of the ice.
The boat touched the ice, crunching into the thin edge of it, and we climbed out on to the floe. We were up to our ankles in a soft slush of half-melted ice. My first thought was for the stores, particularly the flour. Everything was just heaped there in the rotten ice with the sleet streaming off it. The floe was a big one, jammed in against other floes. It rocked gently to the swell that ran under it and its edges ground against the others. A little to the north of us one floe had layered on another so that the ice was higher and slightly sloping. I floundered through the slush towards it. Once I slipped and found myself up to my knees in water. For a moment I thought I was falling between two floes. But it was only a weak patch that had filled with a morass of half-melted ice. I reached the floe that had layered and climbed up on to it. The ice was hard here and clear of slush. I found a way back that avoided the hole I had stumbled into and ordered all the stores to be moved up to the new site. Tarpaulins were laid on the ice, and when all the stores were piled on to them, others were placed over the top. Then we set to work to construct tents and I ordered the steward to try and produce some sort of a stew.
There were fourteen of us on the ice and two of those were injured. As soon as there was any sort of shelter, Gerda and I went to work, first on Jacobsen’s broken arm and then on Grieg’s ribs. The arm we set in splints and we must have done a pretty fair job on it, for it mended fine. But though we didn’t know it then, Grieg’s ribs were not a simple fracture. Only an X-ray could have shown us the extent of the damage and it was to be a constant source of worry to us. It was whilst we were strapping him up that I became conscious again of the pain in my chest that I’d felt when I lay against the side of the bridge gasping for breath. Association of ideas, I suppose. Maybe I’d strained a muscle. Possibly I did have a slight fracture of one of the ribs. It went off in the end, but it gave me a lot of pain during the next few days, particularly when I was lifting anything.
We had just finished strapping Grieg up when McPhee called to me that a boat was coming alongside. We ducked out of the canvas shelter to find the sleet easing off and Tauer III’s boat running in towards our floe. Four men were rowing it and in the stern sat a big, bearded man with a flattened nose and sharp, close-set little eyes. “Who’s that?” I asked Gerda.
“It is Vaksdal,” she said. “He is made first mate on Tauer III. He is a Sandefjord man. He is a good whaler, but I hear he have a bad temper.”
The man certainly looked an ugly customer. Howe came up beside me as I watched the boat pull in to our floe. “I wonder what sort of a story Bland has thought up,” he said, and his voice trembled slightly.
That was the first time any of us had commented on the cause of our predicament. We’d been too busy to think about it. We’d accep
ted the situation and concentrated wholly on endeavouring to cope with it. But seeing Vaksdal’s set face and the purposeful way he came towards us, I knew why he’d come. I think Howe knew, too.
“You Kaptein Craig?” he asked. The gentle lilt of Eastern Norway was entirely swallowed by the violence of his tone. The man was tense with anger.
“Yes,” I said. “What do you want?”
“Did you order that harpoon to be fired?”
“No,” I said.
But he didn’t wait for my reply. He went straight on: “That harpoon explode in our engine-room. That is what cause the fire. That is what put us in this damn mess.” His little eyes fastened on Howe. “You fire that harpoon.” He hunched forward slightly, his hands clenching as he moved in purposely on Howe.
“Just a moment,” I said.
But Gerda brushed past me and faced the man. “What do you expect us to do, you fool?” she said, her eyes blazing. “You wish us to sit still and be murdered? You go back to your Erik Bland and ask him why he ram us?”
The man had stopped. “It was an accident,” he said. And his hand stretched out to push her aside.
“Don’t you dare put your hands on me, Vaksdal,” she said angrily. “And you listen to what I tell you. That was no accident. Bland meant to ram us. There are people on this ship that he must kill if he is not to hang for the murder of Bemt Nordahl. Why do you think he bring Tauer III here when he is ordered to stand by at his earlier position?”
“Who say we are to remain in our old position?” Vaksdal demanded. “And what is all this about murder? It is suicide.”
“It was murder,” Gerda snapped back at him. “And it is Kaptein Eide who ordered you to stand by. Don’t you listen to your radio?” The man hesitated and she added, “Ask your radio operator.”
“He is injured by the fire when he send the SOS.”
“Well, somebody must have listen to the radio.”
The White South Page 17