The Strode Venturer
Read The Strode Venturer Online
Authors: Hammond Innes
Contents
What could link the slick world of London boardrooms, an isolated island race in the Maldives and the mysterious voyages of a battered ship skippered by a brooding alcoholic? It falls to Geoffrey Bailey to unlock the mystery, but first he must overcome both family tragedy and the unpredictable treacheries of land, sea and big business.
Ralph Hammond Innes was born in Horsham, Sussex, on 15 July 1913 and educated at Cranbrook School, Kent. He left school aged eighteen, and worked successively in publishing, teaching and journalism. In 1936, in need of money in order to marry, he wrote a supernatural thriller,
The Doppelganger
, which was published in 1937 as part of a two-year, four book deal. In 1939 Innes moved to a different publisher, and began to write compulsively, continuing to publish throughout his service in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War.
Innes travelled widely to research his novels and always wrote from personal experience – his 1940s novels
The Blue Ice
and
The White South
were informed by time spent working on a whaling ship in the Antarctic, while
The Lonely Skier
came out of a post-war skiing course in the Dolomites. He was a keen and accomplished sailor, which passion inspired his 1956 bestseller
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
. The equally successful 1959 film adaptation of this novel enabled Innes to buy a large yacht, the
Mary Deare
, in which he sailed around the world for the next fifteen years, accompanied by his wife and fellow author Dorothy Lang.
Innes wrote over thirty novels, as well as several works of non-fiction and travel journalism. His thrilling stories of spies, counterfeiters, black markets and shipwreck earned him both literary acclaim and an international following, and in 1978 he was awarded a CBE. Hammond Innes died at his home in Suffolk on 10th June 1998.
Air Bridge
Attack Alarm
Atlantic Fury
Campbell’s Kingdom
Dead and Alive
Delta Connection
Golden Soak
High Stand
Isvik
Killer Mine
Levkas Man
Maddon’s Rock
Medusa
North Star
Solomons Seal
Target Antarctica
The Angry Mountain
The Big Footprints
The Black Tide
The Blue Ice
The Doomed Oasis
The Land God Gave to Cain
The Last Voyage
The Lonely Skier
The Strange Land
The Trojan Horse
The White South
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
Wreckers Must Breathe
To
Jeppy and Erd
for all their kindness and encouragement over the years
The Strode Venturer
I will nowe referre the reader to the following discourse with the hope that the perilous and chargeable labors and indevours of such as thereby seeke the profit and honor of her Majesty, and the English nation, shall by men of quality and vertue receive such construction, and good acceptance, as them selves would looke to be rewarded withall in the like.
Sir Walter Raleigh
1. STRODE ORIENT
M
ARCH
, 1963. Looking back through my diary, as I begin this account of the strange means by which the prosperity of the company I now serve was founded, I find it difficult to realize that there was a time when I had never been to the Maldives, had scarcely ever heard of Addu Atoll. The island we now call Ran-a-Maari had only recently been born the night I flew into London from Singapore. The stewardess had woken me shortly after four with a cup of coffee and through my window I could see the moon falling towards the west and a great bank of black cloud. The plane whispered softly as it lost height. The first lights showed below us, long ribbons of amber, orange, white and blue. And then the great sprawling mass of the city seen only as slashes of arterial brilliance, the blank spaces in between dotted with the pinpoints of individual street lights like thousands upon thousands of tiny perforations in a black sheet of paper. It was breathtaking, beautiful—immensely impressive; and it went on and on until the pattern of lights was spread from horizon to horizon.
By the time we landed the moon was gone and the sky was clouded over. A chill north-westerly wind blew a light drizzle across the apron and London Airport glimmered damply as we made our way into the terminal building. At that dead hour before the dawn the Customs and Immigration officers, all the night staff, moved with careful deliberation. But though they were slow, they still possessed that quiet air of politeness, even kindness, that always surprises one when coming home after a long sojourn abroad. I hadn’t been back for over three years and the consideration with which they treated the passengers erased some of the weariness of the flight. “Any watches or cameras?”
“No, only what’s on the list.”
It was quite a long list for I thought I was returning to England for good, but he chalked my bags and let me through without charging me anything. He had a cold and perhaps he didn’t want to be bothered. “If you’d declared some sunshine I might have charged you,” he said with a tired smile. His face looked white under the lights, even the dark tan of the passengers was sallowed by the glare.
I went down the escalator and out through Channel Nine with the man who had been my companion throughout the flight, but we didn’t talk. We had said all there was to say in the long hours we had been cooped up in the plane together and now we were going through the process of readjustment that is common to all travellers at the moment of separation into individual existence. Dawn was only just beginning to break as the coach took us into London—a slow, reluctant dawn coming grey out of a grey sky. The wet road surface reflected the pallid gleam of the street lighting. There wasn’t much traffic, heavy lorries mainly and the first milk roundsmen, and in the thickening lines of semi-detached and terraced houses a scattering of lights as London began to stir from its sleep.
We crossed the Chiswick and Hammersmith fly-overs and were into the area where the dual carriageway had slashed like a sword through residential suburbs, the scars showing in the blank ends of houses, in the dead ends of streets abruptly severed. “I’d forgotten how bloody big this city was,” my companion said. His name was Hans Straker; he was half Dutch, a big florid man with close-cropped hair bleached the colour of pale straw by the Indonesian sun. He’d been in rubber most of his life and now, in his late forties, he’d been forced to sell his estates and get out. His love of Java, where he’d lived and worked in recent years, had been soured by the difficulties of operating under the Sukarno Government and the shifts he’d been put to to get his money out. Between Singapore and London I’d been given his whole life story including accounts of his early travels in the Melanesian Islands and as far afield as Polynesia. His hobby was seismography and he had talked a lot about the records he’d kept of submarine disturbances, his theory that the bed of the Indian Ocean was in process of change—a theory he expected to be confirmed by the international hydrographic survey due to commence shortly. He was almost as bitter about the loss of his seismometer as he was about his estates.
But now that we had reached London he was strangely silent, as though he, too, was over-awed by the sprawl of the great city. Which was perhaps as well since I was no longer in a mood to listen. A dawn arrival after a long flight is not the best moment to face up to one’s prospects. I’d very little money and no job to come back to. On my own for the first time since I’d joined the Service at the start of the war, I was conscious of a sense of uneasiness, a lack of confidence in myself that I’d never experienced before.
My decision to leave the Navy had been based on an assessment of my prospects following Britain’s application for membership of the Common Market. I spoke French and German and the way the newspapers talked at that time of the economic future of the country I thought I’d have no difficulty in finding a job. Even so, with two children at school in England, I’d never have left the Service on the strength of the gratuity alone. What finally decided me was a letter from a London firm of solicitors offering to purchase on behalf of a client the Strode Orient shares my mother had left me. It was so unexpected, so opportune that it seemed like the hand of providence. And the price they offered was well above the market value of the shares. I had accepted at once and at the same time had applied for my discharge. And then everything had gone wrong; France had blocked Britain’s entry into Europe and the London solicitors had written to say that the Company’s Registrar had refused transfer of the shares under the terms of an agreement signed by my mother in 1940. They had added that they had seen the letter of agreement and were satisfied that it was binding on her heirs and assigns.
I could understand my mother’s acceptance of the terms for I knew her circumstances at the time, but that did not soften the blow. Indeed, it revived all the anger and bitterness I had felt as a kid when she had tried to explain to me what had happened to my father and the great shipping line we had owned. The shock of the solicitor’s letter was aggravated by the fact that I had been relying on the money to start me in civilian life, for by then I knew the form. Not one of the firms I had written to had held out any prospect of employment. They wanted technicians, specialists, men with experience in their own particular field, and all I knew about was ships and how to run them. Shipping was in a hell of a mess and here I was in London, unemployed and damn’ near unemployable, the only capital I possessed unsaleable, and nothing to show for my twenty-odd years in the Navy but the gratuity and a small pension.
Something of this my companion must have gathered in the long hours we’d spent together for he suddenly said, “All this new building. I haven’t been here for years, but it’s still the most exciting city in the world. The sheer ramifications …” His small china-blue eyes stared at me. “I envy you. You’re young enough to get a kick out of starting all over again.”
It was all very well for him to talk; his wife was dead and he hadn’t any children. “School bills have to be paid,” I said.
That seemed to touch a loss he felt deeply for he snapped back, “Christ, man! You talk as though it were a millstone. You don’t know how lucky you are.” And he added, “If I were your age and a family behind me, by God I’d rip this city apart to get myself the niche I wanted.” He didn’t know about Barbara. I hadn’t told him our marriage was just about on the rocks. He shifted angrily in his seat, his quick little eyes looking me over as though I were a stranger whose worth he was trying to assess. “But maybe you don’t want anything, just security—the same sort of security you’ve had in the Navy.” He hesitated as though searching for the right words, and then he said, “All your working life you’ve been sheltered from the raw rough world outside, and now you’re scared. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re scared and beginning to feel you’d like nothing better than to get into some big outfit that’ll recreate for you the sheltered world you’ve just left.” He gripped my arm, a gesture of friendliness that was meant to ease the probing bite of what he’d just said. “Take my advice, Bailey. Find out what you want, find something you really care about. When you know what you want the rest follows. But don’t just drift into something because it offers security. Security is never worth a damn. We’re meant to live, and to live means living dangerously, half on the edge of trouble, half on the edge of achievement. Myself, I’ve never felt really alive unless I was fighting something, and here I am, more than ten years older than you and starting all over again. And I’m excited. Yes, dammit, I’m thrilled by the prospect.”