Authors: Simon Winchester
But such grand ideas, though necessary meat and drink to the academic world, can be elusive, fugitive concepts to those who merely like to stand on an Atlantic cliff top and contemplate the awful majesty of the sea rolling and unrolling away to the horizon. To them—to us, I would rather say, for this account has been a story told for those who regard the sea less as a concept than as a capricious and wondrous confection of water and waves and wind, of animals and birds, of ships and man—I would offer just a final story. It is a story of a forgotten man, and his small and lonely struggle with this sea, and a struggle in which the sea, as always, won. It involves a shipwreck, and a rescue, and a lonely death.
• • •
Perhaps we all have a secret wreck story to cherish—a saga to think about in the warmth of a much-eiderdowned bed, maybe, while a cold rain is lashing down on the windowpanes, and the trees are thrashing, and one prays silently to oneself for any sailors out on a wild night like this. My own came to me in a book I once read. It was just such a think-of-the-sailors night—cold and exceptionally wild—and I was staying on a lonely
estancia
in southern Patagonia, huddled beside a log fire of baronial dimension, a hot whisky to hand. I was reading by a dim library light the extraordinary story of wreck and ruin that had taken place half a century before on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, five thousand miles away.
It was the story of a heroic rescue that had taken place on a distant Atlantic seashore where legend had long said the rescue of shipwrecked sailors was quite unthinkable: among the rocks, reefs, and utterly waterless sands of that corner of South-West Africa known as the Skeleton Coast.
The first of the ships that had been wrecked, and which was the ultimate cause of the drama that unfolded back in that southern summer of 1942, was the MV
Dunedin Star
—seven years old, a 13,000-ton refrigerated cargo carrier, handsome without being graceful, Liverpool built. She had a crew of sixty-four and twenty-one passengers, most of them Londoners escaping the bombs.
She was on passage southbound. It was a Sunday night, November 29, when she, imprudently hugging the coast to avoid prowling German U-boats, struck the Clan Alpine Shoal (marked on the Admiralty charts of the day with the ominous letters PD,
position doubtful
). The collision ruptured her hull below the waterline, and the captain had little choice but to beach her. He managed to get out an SOS call, and then the power failed. Before the lifeboat motor broke down some forty-two of his passengers and crew made it through the treacherous surf and onto the utterly inhospitable shore. The rest were compelled to stay aboard.
Over the next few days four ships arrived to help with the rescue. One, a Walvis Bay tug named the
Sir Charles Elliott
(named for a colonial grandee), also ran aground. Two of its crew were drowned trying to swim ashore. One was the first mate, a Scotsman named Angus Macintyre; his body was never found. The other was a Namibian, Matthias Koraseb, who is buried ashore: it is his ghost that supposedly haunts this wilderness, his cries said to be the howling winds.
The other three ships tried gamely to help those left onshore, and while the surviving men hunted for driftwood and tried vainly to fish, the women and children huddled out of the sun in a makeshift shelter. The crews offshore tried to float rafts of food and water toward the coast, but most of them were lost, swept northward by the fierce current, or else upended and lost in the raging surf. Then one by one the rescue ships, running out of food and water themselves, left, their distressed captains flashing messages of good luck by heliograph.
Air force planes next tried to help, at first dropping food and water from the air—but all the early packages promptly burst, leaving the survivors aghast as the precious potential water supplies exploded uselessly into the sand. Two of these planes, heavy Ventura bombers loaded with supplies, then landed near the party, both getting bogged down in the dunes. After four days of digging one of them managed to lumber out and get away—only to crash into the sea half an hour later. Its crew survived, managed to swim ashore, and had to be rescued themselves.
Unknown to all, another rescue party of police and soldiers was making its way painfully by land from Windhoek, five hundred miles south. The conditions were appalling: the sand and the salt pans with their fragile crusts meant that on some days the eight-vehicle convoy made only two or three miles. But slowly, carefully, the rescuers crept north—until finally, after twenty-six days of unimaginable suffering in the blistering and waterless heat, the party was reached. All of them, even an infant who had gone temporarily sand blind, were alive; and all of them reached safety, arriving at a military hospital down south, appropriately, on Christmas Eve.
The story was suppressed for the rest of the war: the colonial authorities were keen to keep the German navy ignorant of Allied military dispositions along the West African coastline. The drama was never related in full until 1958, when a South African naval historian named John Marsh found the official papers and wrote
Skeleton Coast,
the book that so captivated me in Patagonia all those years later.
So I decided there and then that one day I would travel to the Skeleton Coast—a place so named because of all the skeletons, of both men and the vessels in which they had wrecked—to see if I could find a trace of the
Dunedin Star.
Some years later I found a commercial ship to take me east from Patagonia, by way of the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, and Tristan da Cunha, and eventually to Cape Town; from there I flew to Windhoek in Namibia, and finally in a two-engined Cessna flew up to a tiny tented camp in the middle of the northern desert, close to the Angolan frontier.
The Skeleton Coast’s waves roared away in the distance. The place was said to be entirely deserted: just a scattering of seal colonies, packs of predatory jackals, endless miles of dunes, morning fogs rolling in from the ocean, the eternal cold surf. Armed with maps and a GPS fix of the wreck site, I set off the next day with two local guides. We traveled in a large and very battered old Land Rover, a car that had twin gearboxes and was equipped with differential locks and the ability to inflate its own tires and all the other necessities of deep desert travel. The night we left was pitch-black, except for a brilliant carpet of stars above us. It was also cold, and until we reached the sea completely silent, except for a faint moaning of the wind and a very distant rumble of the ocean.
After winding and bumping through the sands for hours, hauling ourselves up and over mountain spurs and ridges, sometimes following half-imagined tracks left by earlier wanderers, but usually driving on virgin, sea-washed beach sand or on spurs of blistering granite, we came to a place I recognized. It was a headland named Cape Fria, with an immense colony of fur seals, stinking and noisy, and surrounded by a cordon of yellow-eyed jackals that were busily engaged in carrying away the weaker seal pups. The cape had been a landmark, mentioned in the book, since the
Dunedin Sta
r had stranded no more than fifteen miles from here. But the men and women in their shelter, who had no radio, never knew how close they were to it and thus to a potential source of food, for a seal is an easy thing to hunt and very nutritious when cooked. It was probably a blessing they did not know: in the searing heat, and without water, they never could have walked to the cape. It would have remained tantalizingly out of their reach, doing terrible damage to their ever-flagging morale.
Heat waves were now beginning to rise from the desert. It was over ninety degrees, the summer air harsh and dry. The fog over the cold morning ocean had now vanished, and the fast-climbing sun was a coppery disk against an almost white sky. We passed over thousands of ghost crabs that scuttled in great armadas down to the water’s edge. There were flocks of seabirds, scores of skeletons of stranded whales, occasional wooden cable drums and buried carboys and spars of wood. And then, half an hour north of Cape Fria, a couple of miles after we had passed the northern tip of a long and brilliant white salt pan, I spotted something: two objects that began to loom larger and larger in our field of view.
One turned out to be a half-buried metal cylinder, much corroded, about forty feet long, its upper part eaten away, a metal rod spearing its way up from its midsection toward the sky. To the northeast and southwest of this enormous object were rows of much-decayed wooden boxes, a number of what appeared to be hatch covers, small caches of bayonet-mounted lightbulbs (of a design once peculiar to Britain, I knew), and a scattering of bottles. All told, the site was about three hundred feet long.
The other object, three hundred more yards away, was a small forest of about fifty wooden spars, driven deep and hard into the sand and forming what might seem like a series of crude rooms. If covered with fabric—sailcloth, say, or mariners’ tarpaulins—this could easily be the rudiments of some kind of sanctuary. It was finding this that made me suddenly believe we had probably made it.
I had some map coordinates, given to me by a man in Windhoek who had a lifelong fascination with the story of the
Star.
I held his sheet of notepaper up and switched on the GPS I had brought with me. The device spent a moment or two connecting to its network of satellites above, and then its screen suddenly fixed on a number—18º28′South, 12º0′ East.
It was exactly the same as the number scrawled on my piece of paper. This—the shelter, the cylinder (most probably a boiler, or a fuel tank taken as cargo), the scores of still unbroken lightbulbs—was indeed all that remained of the wreck. It was sited fully two hundred yards in from the surf but where it had originally been beached—a reminder of how the western coast of Africa is slowly moving in toward the sea, just as the sea on the ocean’s other side, in the Carolinas, at Cape Cod, is with equal relentlessness encroaching on the land.
We spent a couple of hours at the site, just sitting, quite mesmerized. The wind picked up steadily during the morning, and though I spoke some thoughts that I imagined were fairly profound into a recorder, when I played them later the howling of the gale and the hissing of the blown sand against the microphone made them almost impossible to hear. But I could hear myself saying what I feel to this day: that it was incredibly moving, being at a place where so many people, after such privation, almost didn’t make it—but did.
One is not supposed to take anything from sites like this. But I did, and for what I thought was good reason. I found among the jetsam a tiny glass bottle, the kind of thing that I imagine one of the elderly lady passengers on the
Dunedin Star
once carried in her handbag, filled with
sal volatile,
in case she ever took a turn. It was quite empty now, of course; but it had a working screw cap and an elegantly frosted surface; and I had a purpose for it, were I to complete the expedition I had come here for, were I to find just one final thing.
We nearly got into big trouble. My guide was so exultant at having discovered the wreck that he drove at a quite madcap speed back along the beach. There is no road; the hard-packed sand of a carefully chosen part of the beach is an ideal substitute. But “carefully chosen” is an important caveat. Too close to land and the sand becomes deep and dry and the wheels will spin uselessly, and you have dig yourself out. Too close to the sea and the sand turns to syrup, and your wheels turn toward the ocean and you can be stranded there, caught perhaps in the onrush of the tide, just like a thousand boats before.
And this is just what happened. The driver was heading fast along the beach, but the oh-so-carefully selected strip of hard-packed roadway became unexpectedly more narrow as a low cliff rose beside us on the left, the landward side. The tide was rushing in from the right, hungrily. We stopped just as the roadway ran out altogether, and spray from the oncoming waves started dashing against the seaward windows.
The driver swore, lustily. We already knew the radio didn’t work, so if we were trapped, we couldn’t get help. He threw the gear into reverse, and shouted to us all to pray. A shower of gray and dirty water suddenly rose in a huge curtain in front of the car as the wheels bit uselessly into the wet porridge below—until suddenly one of the tires, possibly one of the rear tires, bit into a small patch of hard sand—and the car shot backward.
Now he was moving—but he had to keep it moving, keep the car going backward, both straight and very, very fast. The water was coming in swiftly now, covering the packed sand—but seeming for one precious moment not to have mixed in with the grains, not to have broken through the surface tension, not to have begun to change its consistency and its viscosity. And so the car shot backward across the water, as if it were walking on it, almost miraculously—and then after five minutes of steady reversing like this we bumped over the low cliff of sand that had caused the problem, flushed out a small shower of scuttling ghost crabs—and were, quite mercifully, safe.
The driver, his hand shaking, wiped the sweat from his brow. We sat in silence in the heat, the windows open to catch the onshore breeze, gazing out to sea. Beyond the breakers the green Atlantic growled on, restless and eternal. It had a sort of calm smugness to it, someone said. A smugness as if to say that yes, we had escaped its clutches, but it knew it would claim another victim, give it time. And then another, and another. Sufficient numbers of men would always be drawn to occupying their business in its great waters, deep or shallow, for one to be entirely certain of that.
• • •
We made it, eventually, to Rocky Point. It was here, sixty miles south of where the
Dunedin Star
had wrecked, that the
Sir Charles Elliott
had also stranded, and where two of her crew had drowned. I had been told there was a grave, little known and seldom seen.
The remains of the tugboat are still visible, just. The breakers churn the water offshore into a ceaseless maelstrom of white, but at certain moments it is just possible to spy two slender pinnacles of black rising defiantly two or three feet above the sea. That is all: two corroded stanchions, or aerials, or parts of the superstructure, which break clear of the Atlantic for just a second or two between waves. Twenty years ago you could still see the bridge and parts of the funnel; but that is all gone now, and these forlorn relics will probably last for only another year or so.