The Strode Venturer (25 page)

At first I refused to believe it. I was afraid it was in my head, for it was a singing sound—a siren song in the midst of desolation. The minutes passed and I stood rooted. But still that music floated in the stillness, something live and real and unbelievable. It was pipes and drums and a girl’s voice singing sweetly, and all so soft, so unsubstantial, so impossible in the midst of chaos and ruin.

It was a radio, of course. Some poor devil had been listening in as the lightning struck, one of the lascar crew in the quarters aft, and he had run, leaving his little portable radio still switched on. I turned, dejected, but still glad of the sound, and as I turned to find a means of reaching the barge’s deck, I caught a glimpse of something moving, and then a voice called, giving an order. He was on the poop, looking over the stern, a man in a rag of a shirt and clean white trousers neatly creased, all the hair scorched from his head. It was the second officer—Lennie—and before I knew it I was on the deck of the barge, scrambling to the bows and shouting to him. “Lennie! Lennie!”

He turned and I can still see him, standing shocked and
unbelieving as though he thought I were a ghost. And then he called back, dived limping to the deck house, and a moment later half a dozen lascars like demon beggars dressed in rags and black as sweeps came slowly, wearily along the deck to pull on the bow line and bring the barge alongside.

“I didn’t know,” Lennie said as they hauled me up at the end of a rope to what had once been a white scrubbed deck of laid pine and was now black charcoal with the plates all showing, buckled by the heat. “Nobody knew you were there.” And then Reece arrived and Blake, their eyes red-rimmed and sunk deep in their sockets, all moving and speaking slow with the dazed look of men who have gazed into the mouth of hell and do not yet believe that they are still alive.

“What happened?” I asked. “Why is the ship aground?” But it was no good asking questions of men so tired they could hardly stand. In any case, they didn’t know, they barely cared. They’d fought a fire all night and somehow they had won. That was enough—for the moment.

The crew’s galley was still functioning. It produced breakfast and afterwards we cleaned ourselves up, got some sort of an awning rigged and slept, huddled together right at the stern. Three men had died, including the third officer, Cummins, and there were four seriously injured. Most of the rest were suffering from burns and there were few whose hair hadn’t been scorched, some with no eyebrows, no eyelashes even; all were in a state of shock.

There was no breeze that day and by noon the heat was intense. Sleep was no longer possible and Reece called a conference. He had had another bit of awning rigged just for’ard of the deck house. From this position we all had a clear view of the length of the ship. She was in a desperate state. Above decks there was nothing left, just a contorted heap of blackened steel. Below decks the situation was better. The engine-room had suffered some damage due to falling debris, but on a cursory inspection Robbins thought
it largely superficial. “We’re fortunate that this is an old ship. If she’d been a motor vessel the blazing debris from the deck above might have smashed the fuel lines, then the whole ship would have gone up.” He reckoned a day’s work might see the main engines functioning, though it was impossible to say until they were on test whether there had been any heat distortion. The electrical installation, however, was all burned out and beyond repair.

There was no question of taking to the boats. The quartermaster had saved one of the ship’s lifeboats by having it cut from its davits and moored astern just after the bridge caught fire, but the rest were gone. The two landing craft had been swamped and had snapped their mooring lines and sunk. Only the barge would accommodate all the crew and that had no means of propulsion. The question of search and rescue was discussed, but nobody was optimistic. There was no arrangement for regular wireless reports to head office and it might be a week before they tried to contact us. And then there was the question of our position. Reece admitted that his estimate of it might be anything up to 200 miles out. “Navigating blind like that—only one man knowing where we were….” His voice was high-pitched, querulous. “I should never have agreed to it.”

“Well, you did,” Blake snapped. “So it’s no good bellyaching about it.”

But Reece seemed driven now by a compulsion for self-justification. “It’s Strode’s fault. All that secrecy—I knew it was a mistake and now we may have to pay for it with our lives.”

“It’s not only us,” I said. “There’s Strode and the men with him.” My head hurt and I was in no mood to care about his susceptibility to criticism. “You made no attempt to get them off….”

“There wasn’t time, man.” He stared at me, pale and angry. A little frightened, I thought, and his boyish good looks marred now, for his hair was burned short and his eyebrows gone. “You don’t seem to realize … we were dragging.”

“The wind was from the east,” I said. “It was blowing off the island.”

“We were dragging, I tell you. Cummins was on anchor watch and when he called me we were being blown downwind fast. The fact that we were under the lee of the island didn’t mean a bloody thing. Small, intense storms like that—down here on the equator—they’re circular, you see. Once you’re through the eye of it, then the wind comes in from the opposite direction.” There was something more to it than resentment of my criticism. He was trying to convince himself that what he’d done was right. “When that happened we’d have piled up on that damned island.”

“I was out in that sea,” I told him. “You could have sent one of the landing craft in.” I was thinking of what Peter must be feeling now, the ship gone and himself and the sixteen men with him marooned there with supplies for less than a month. “You could have got them off.”

“Why? Why should I risk men’s lives sending in a boat for them? They were perfectly safe where they were. Christ, man! It wasn’t they who were in danger. It was us.”

I thought of the night I had spent in the barge and what had happened to the ship, wondering why the hell he’d found it necessary to keep steaming for four solid hours. He seemed to guess what was in my mind for he said, “There was the current to consider then. If I’d hove-to a few miles off, we might have drifted anywhere. I couldn’t be sure of either its direction or its rate. I still can’t. I thought it better to steam a set course—so many hours out, so many hours back.”

It was reasonable. So reasonable that I thought a Court of Inquiry would accept it. I glanced at Blake. His quiet grey eyes met mine and I knew he was thinking the same thing, that the man had panicked and this was no more than a plausible excuse. But he didn’t say anything and I didn’t pursue the matter. There was no point, for it was the future that mattered.

This it was finally agreed rested on our own efforts. If we could get the ship re-floated and the main engines working,
then with jury-rigged steering from the tiller flat we had a chance. Navigation would have to be by the stars at night and the sun by day, for the compass, all the normal means of steering a course, had been destroyed. However, Evans thought he might be able to produce some sort of a DF set by cannibalizing the radio sets belonging to various members of the crew. If so, we could home on the Gan aircraft beacon. Alternatively, we would have to give the Maldives a wide berth and head north for the coast of India.

The discussion switched to tides then. We had no tide tables now, but Blake reckoned the ship had gone aground about an hour or at the most two hours after low water. With all efforts concentrated on fighting the fire and no anchor put down, the ship would have drifted as the tide lifted her until she finally grounded at high water. Our hope was, therefore, that she was only lightly resting on the bottom. There was the moon, too. When it was at the full in a few days’ time sun and moon would be pulling together to give us spring tides. It would mean an increased lift of a few inches at high water.

Lunch arrived and we ate it sitting cross-legged on the deck. It was a curry and I cannot remember ever having a finer one. It put new heart into all of us. If the cook could produce a meal like that in such difficult circumstances, then surely to God we could get the ship re-floated. Work started on this immediately after we had fed.

But it is one thing to unload a vessel when she is fully equipped with cargo booms and power to the winches; quite another when tons of materials have to be loaded in sacks and each sack hauled up by hand and carried to the ship’s side. At the back of our minds was the nagging thought that when this Herculean task had been completed, it still might not be enough to raise the ship’s bottom off the sea bed Three barge and seven landing craft loads of ore had been delivered into her holds, a total of little more than 400 tons Jettisoning this would gain us less than a foot on the Plimsoll line. The third engineer with three of his men had started clearing the remains of the bridge deck, all the
wreckage of mast, booms and smoke stack. There was probably another 100 tons to be gained by pitching this over the side—three more inches perhaps out of the water.

With Reece’s agreement I took the lifeboat and began sounding round the ship with a lead. There was an easterly current running one and a half to two knots and with only one to help me it was slow, exhausting work for the boat was heavy and the heat intense with the sun’s rays reflected from the sea’s calm surface. The water was very clear and most of the time we could see the bottom. By sunset I had pencilled a rough chart of the sea bed up to a distance of a quarter of a mile from the ship. There were no rocks, no sign of coral. We were on a flat plateau of sand with occasional patches of some darker sediment. There was a slight increase of depth towards the north, a matter of a foot or so, and in one place off the starboard quarter a hole in the sea bed that took all fifty fathoms of the lead line without recording bottom.

When I showed Reece the pattern of the soundings he nodded and said that was what he had expected, the deep water towards the north. “We were steaming south—one nine two degrees to be exact.”

“You mean you were back-tracking the route by which we approached the island?”

He nodded, his mouth set in a tight line. “I thought it safer.”

“How long for?” I asked, hoping to God he’d say he’d changed course.

“Four hours—a little over. We fetched the anchor just after seven—I think it was 1908 we got under way. We grounded about 1120. I remember that because I had just glanced at the chronometer when the lightning struck.”

“What about the echo-sounder? Did you have that on?”

“Of course I did. But I wasn’t paying much attention to it. There didn’t seem any point, you see. It had been recording no bottom ever since we cleared the vicinity of the island.”

Four hours along the same track; and when we had
approached the island it had been all deep water. I stared at him, but he made no comment. There was no need. We both of us know what it meant.

“The sooner we get out of here the better,” I said.

He nodded and his face looked grey.

I left him then and went in search of Blake who was directing work up for’ard in No. 1 hold. He had already arrived at the same conclusion. “Ay, it’s not a very nice thought, is it? The bed of the ocean come up a thousand fathoms and us sitting on the very top of a mountain as you might say.” He smiled. “You must just put your trust in the Lord.” He was from the islands of the Outer Hebrides and he believed in God with the same absolute faith as the men who wrote the Scriptures. The strange thing is that his simple statement seemed to help me to accept the situation. We stood together for a while, not saying anything and watching the sunset flame on the horizon, slowly deepening to purple as night spread like a canopy across the sky, shutting us in with the stars. The work went on without a break for there was a half moon cutting a silver swathe across the flat desert of ocean.

We worked in shifts and when the dawn came men and officers fed in relays. A short rest and then back into the holds, shovelling ore into sacks, hoisting them up to the deck and emptying the contents over the side, and the ship rang to the axe and hammer blows of the demolition gang. By evening the whole appearance of the vessel had changed. I was working the pulley they had rigged over No. 1 hatch then and shortly after the moon rose I was conscious of an anxious twitter of voices. I turned as I swung the next sackload on to the deck. The lascar who was working with me had also turned. Four or five of the crew were clustered by the remains of the port winch, their quick, high voices sounding for all the world like birds in the sudden stillness that had descended upon the ship.

The lascar beside me seized my elbow. “There, sahib. You look, please.”

It was in the moon’s path, a flurry in the water, a disturbance
of the surface and something spouting. A whale? I heard Reece’s voice driving at the crew and then the ship seemed suddenly to come alive so that I thought for a moment she was afloat. But it wasn’t a gentle movement, more of a shiver, and far away a deep growling sound. The gasp that went up from the huddle of the crew was an audible reflection of my own sudden sense of insecurity. It was as though my brain were poised on the edge of some deep unknown. Three of the crew had prostrated themselves, bowing their heads to the buckled deck plates, and far out on the horizon something stirred, shattering the still path of the moon. The crew gasped out an audible expression of their fear. And then silence, an utter stillness, and I knew the danger, whatever it was, had receded. Slowly the men relaxed, the stillness broken by that same bird-like twitter as they found their voices, all speaking at once, and the cook on deck telling us how his pots had gone mad and all the ship full of jinns and devils making them dance on their hooks. And Lennie saying in a carefully casual voice, “Real friendly, ennit? We should come here more often.”

We worked through the night in a frenzied, driven haste till the moon set and we could no longer see. We were dead on our feet then and when the dawn came we found the sea littered with pumice. It lay all round, grey cobbles to the horizon, and when the sun rose the paved surface of the ocean was patched with all the colours of primeval earth. It undulated strangely to the movement of a shallow swell. About midday there was clear water to the west of us. By sunset the pumice had all gone, drifted eastward by the current. But by then we had experienced something much more startling—a boiling of the sea.