A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (38 page)

Among the personal belongings found in the wreck were two shoes – one of European design and the other a sandal, as would have been worn respectively by a ship's officer and an Indian member of the crew. That mirrors the composition of the crew, which was made up of officers of British background and ratings recruited from coastal communities in India. The officers were divided into deck and engine-room departments, the former responsible for navigating the ship and overseeing the cargo and the latter for maintaining the ship's engine and propulsion machinery. The deck department was under a chief officer or ‘mate' with several officers ranked numerically beneath him, and the engineering department under a chief engineer with junior engineers ranked likewise; many of the engineers were from Scotland – as was the case for three of the five engineers on the
Gairsoppa
– and had served their apprenticeships in heavy engineering before going to sea. The chief engineer held the same rank as the captain, signified by four bands of gold braid on his sleeves, but it was the captain or ‘master' who was in overall charge, the culmination of a career that would have seen him rise through the ranks of the deck department.

The men who went to sea as deck officers on ships of the British India or Clan Lines of the 1930s and 1940s often came from a similar
social background to officers of the East India Company a century or more earlier, and their training gave them a strong sense of that heritage. Many had spent two years on the school-ships HMS
Worcester
or HMS
Conway
, former ships-of-the-line of the early nineteenth century that trained thousands of future officers for the merchant service and Royal Navy; Richard Ayres had been on
Worcester
and my grandfather on
Conway
, where they slept in hammocks, scrubbed the decks and went up the ratlines just as their predecessors had done on ships such as HMS
Victory
. For those looking to careers in the merchant service, the attraction of a company such as British India included pay and prestige, exotic travel and the certainty of being in charge of a ship early on, with even junior officers having a four-hour watch every day. Before that they had to serve an apprenticeship of several years at sea, also in the tradition of the days of sail when the captain had been responsible for training aspiring officers. Cadets such as John Woodcliffe on the
Gairsoppa
, aged only seventeen, would have ‘learnt the ropes' by carrying out tasks alongside the deck ratings, meaning that the officers had begun their careers spending time with the Indians on board and learning about their language, food and religion.

When I went to The National Archives to research the crew list of the
Gairsoppa
I was delighted to discover that it included the ‘Lascar Agreements', rare survivals and never before studied for a wartime ship. Three separate lists, for the deck, engine-room and steward's departments, include the names of each man, his age, his previous ship, details of his pay, and his region and village of origin. The lists were made up in Calcutta on 4 December 1940 two weeks before the ship set off and followed the regulations for the employment of Lascars – the term used for Indian seamen – set out by the Government of India. Among other provisions, the companies employing Indian seamen were expected to pay for the men to have their own cooks, to bring on board the ingredients for the food they preferred, to make extra provision for their comfort in cold weather and to make allowance for daily prayer times, other religious observance and festivals, with all of the Indian deck and engine-room crew on the
Gairsoppa
being of Muslim faith.

These two departments were each headed by a
serang
, the equivalent of a bosun, who was assisted by one or several
tindals
, bosun's mates, and seacunnies, quartermasters. The largest number of men were deckhands and in the engine-room, firemen and coal-trimmers,
the former shovelling coal into the furnaces and the latter bringing it from the bunkers and ensuring that the level across the bunkers remained even, keeping the ship trim – hence their name. These were the most unpleasant and dangerous jobs in the ship, with the coal sometimes spontaneously combusting, coal dust filling the air and the bunkers and engine-room often being the worst place to be when a torpedo struck, with the engine-room crew often having the highest casualty rate when a ship was sunk.

The deck
serang
, Abdul Qudus, came from the village of Mantbhanga on the island of Sandwip, opposite Chittagong; the engine-room
serang
, Khalil Rahman, was from Baktapur in the district of Fatickchhari, on the mainland opposite Sandwip. Those places are today in Bangladesh, but in 1940 they were part of British India close to the border with Burma. Chittagong was the main port between Calcutta and Rangoon and was frequented by ships of the British India and Clan Lines. It was common for
serangs
to recruit from their village and the surrounding area, and this was the case with the
Gairsoppa
; of the twenty-seven deck crew, eighteen came from the island of Sandwip with eight of those from Mantbhanga, and of the twenty-nine engine-room crew, twenty-seven were from Fatickchhari with sixteen of those from Baktapur and the nearby village of Dharmapur. One consequence of this was that the loss of a single ship could be devastating for a small community, in an area where only a meagre living was possible from agriculture and fishing and much depending on the pay brought home by men who had gone to sea. The village of Mantbhanga today only has about ninety inhabitants, some of whom may well be related to the men who went down on the
Gairsoppa
. Life has continued to be hard on Sandwip, with much of the island being only a few metres above sea-level and having been inundated by a cyclone in 1991, destroying 80 per cent of the houses and causing an estimated 40,000 deaths.

The third list, the catering crew, were men of a completely different origin – from the Portuguese enclave of Goa on the west coast of India. The shipping companies recruited kitchen staff from Goa because its population had become Christian under Portuguese rule, meaning that the men did not have the restriction on handling pork that would be the case with Muslims, or beef with Hindus. The butler – the head of the department – was Acacio Rozario Pais, aged sixty-six, from Assolna, a river port of about 3,500 people located downstream from the commercial capital of Margao. Six of the thirteen men in
his department came from Assolna and three from Margao. As Pais's name indicates, many of the inhabitants had Portuguese ancestry or had adopted Portuguese names – four of the men had the surname Rodrigues. It is an extraordinary fact that the British allowed Portugal to retain control of this and several other small pockets in India, known as ‘Estado Português da Índia', throughout the period of East India Company and Crown rule, with Goa only being annexed by India in 1961. It provides a link with the earliest European voyages of discovery, with Portuguese Goa having been founded only a few years after Vasco da Gama became the first European to reach India by sea in 1498.

The average age of the Indian men on the
Gairsoppa
was thirty-six. At least ten of the deck crew had already experienced the Battle of the Atlantic, having been on ships in 1940 that had been subject to U-boat, surface and aerial attack. One of the deck hands, 28-year-old Muhammad Harun from the village of Musapore on the island of Sandwip, had served alongside my grandfather in 1939 on the
Clan Murdoch
. Another man, the engine-room
serang
Khalil Rahman, was seventy-five years old – making him one of the oldest men known to have served at sea during the Battle of the Atlantic. Bringing the names of these men back to light, and setting their stories alongside those of the European crew on the
Gairsoppa
, underlines the contribution of Indian merchant seamen – as well as those of other nationalities, including Chinese – to the war against the Nazis, at a time when the war hung in the balance and the sinking of just a few ships more might have broken the ability of Britain and her empire to continue to stand against the Germans alone.

I found the full recommendation for Richard Ayres' award of the M.B.E., described by the Admiralty as ‘one of the starker episodes of the war', in The National Archives. Once he had recovered from his ordeal and the award had been announced, the newspapers took up the story, interviewing him and publishing his account. On 7 September 1941, the
Sunday Pictorial
– the Sunday edition of the
Daily Mirror
– ran a story entitled ‘29 Sailors were adrift – one lived', with the sub-heading ‘Crouched in an open boat, battered by high seas 300 miles from land, twenty-nine men from a torpedoed ship began a nightmare struggle for existence.' The
News Chronicle
on 19 November published his own words:

I was asleep in my cabin when we were torpedoed, but rushed on deck. There was a huge hole in the ship's side, and we made ready to take to the boats. I was superintending the lowering of No. 1 lifeboat when machine-gun bullets ricocheted off the funnel. We threw ourselves on deck, and the lifeboat dropped into the water. High seas were running, and the wind was howling. There were 30 of us in the boat, including the chief engineer, second and third engineer, a purser, radio operator and a marine gunner and a cadet. Two other boats were also lowered, but what happened to them I cannot say. Our worst moment was when we were swept near the ship's propellor, which was still revolving. We missed it by inches. During the next few days four aeroplanes flew over us. We fired Verey pistols, but could not attract their attention. I sailed by the sun, and by the stars at night. I was determined not to die.

The
Cornishman
on 20 November included another account by him of the machine-gunning:

We never saw the submarine, but that was not the last we heard from her. As we were lowering the boat, a stream of machine gun bullets swept our decks. I dashed for cover, and we all threw ourselves down. The bullets actually cut the falls of the lifeboat, dropping it into the water.

The fresh water supply in the lifeboat was compromised by the ‘violent motion' of the sea at the outset – ‘The bungs had worked out of both the water breakers so that half the water was gone.' Their small sail was split by the gale, but ‘I devised a scheme similar to that of an Indian dhow.' There was no rudder, so they steered by an oar and often had to bale; he divided the men into two watches and taught them how to handle the boat. ‘We started out with 24 tins of condensed milk, six tins of biscuits and two kegs of water. The biscuits were dry, and we could only eat a few, while we rationed ourselves to a quarter of a cup of water per day. On the fourth day the first Lascar died.'

They drove before a westerly gale, with only two rain showers giving brief respite. Their water supply gave out after seven days and from then on they only had a few sips of rainwater collected in cans. ‘Many of my companions were driven crazy by drinking sea water.' As the men died and were put overboard, their clothes were used to
help those who still lived. Eventually just seven men remained, four of them Indians. When land was sighted, they made out a lighthouse – at Lizard Point – and saw that ‘as far as the eye could see there were breakers and a steep surf', so Ayres decided to steer for a cove. After being thrown out of the boat he felt ‘he was tired out and that the fight for life was not worthwhile', but then he ‘heard the voices of children on the shore, shouting encouragement. So he made a last effort, saw a rope, grasped it and made it fast round his waist.' He had done the best he could for his men, and ‘It was only the cruelty of the sea that had cheated him of the fruits of his labours.'

The reports of the escort commander for the remaining ships in convoy SL 64 attest to the severity of the weather; on 17 February, the day that Ayres had set off, the commander reported ‘very rough' seas and ‘frequent squally showers of hail, snow, sleet'. The average sea temperature off western Ireland in February is about 6 to 9 degrees Celsius, meaning an expected survival time in the water of one to three hours and exhaustion or unconsciousness after half an hour. Being in the boat would have given the men little respite from the cold as they would have been drenched at the outset. A similar story of survival only a few weeks later followed the sinking of the SS
Clan Ogilvie
from convoy SL 68 off the Cape Verde Islands, when the second officer brought men to safety after twelve days in a lifeboat; he too was awarded an M.B.E. for his skill and resolve. Many others had extraordinary experiences of survival; a wartime Ministry of Information book on the Merchant Navy described how seamen had shown ‘an almost inconceivable power of endurance'. A photograph in the book shows an upturned lifeboat with four survivors lying together on top with their arms interlinked, where they had been for ten days; another shows a boat with four men who had survived for a month as twenty-four of their companions died. For every story of survival there were many where lifeboats or rafts were seen with only bodies on board. Remarkably, many of the survivors, including Ayres himself, volunteered to return to sea as soon as they were able, men who – as the
Cornishman
put it – ‘have the spectre of death as their constant companion as they bring us the necessities of life'.

The war at sea continued relentlessly after the sinking of the
Gairsoppa
, with merchantmen being sunk every day that Ayres and his companions were in the lifeboat and for many months afterwards.
The
Somali
, the ship that had brought the other part of the silver consignment from Calcutta, did not survive her next voyage – outward-bound from Southend in March she was bombed and exploded off the Northumberland coast, not far from the position where the
Clan Murdoch
had been attacked in the previous month. The wreck of the
Somali
has been discovered by divers, in 28 metres of water with the boilers and the stern gun still in place. Both the Clan Line and British India suffered many further losses that year, in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. One of them – among the most remarkable shipwrecks anywhere – was the SS
Clan Fraser
, which survived only as a piece of hull plating embedded in a tree in Piraeus, blown there when the ship exploded on 6 April 1941; she had been offloading 200 tons of TNT when the Germans invaded Greece and was targeted by Stuka dive-bombers. A week later a few miles to the south the SS
Clan Cumming
was sunk by a mine off the island of Aegina, close to the site of the Battle of Salamis between the Greeks and the Persians in 480
BC
. In 2012, Greek divers discovered her at 94 metres depth, one of the best-preserved merchant ship wrecks from the Second World War. These wrecks are the exception in having been located and explored by divers, with the majority of merchantmen sunk during the Second World War lying in abyssal depth and only accessible with the type of technology that led to the discovery of the
Gairsoppa
.