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  Scend of the Sea

  Geoffrey Jenkins

  Geoffrey Jenkins

  Scend of the Sea

  PROLOGUE

  Last entries from log of missing yacht Touleier: July 28th, 1971

  5p.m. Ship out of control

  Latitude, unknown; longitude, unknown. Course, unknown. Visibility, nil.

  Position (dead reckoning)-400/500 miles north-north-east Waratah hulk.

  Furious gale unabated (6th day). 65 m.p.h. estimated, anemometer blown away. Beaufort scale, southwest/10. Run of sea — mountainous southwest, high and short, waves approx. 35/40 ft.

  Barometer at lowest, 985 millibars.

  530 p.m. Gale eased slightly, wind approx. 55 m.p.h. Overcast lifted temporarily westwards. Tremendous heavy cross-sea. Ship still burying herself, lee deck completely under water. Attempted to cut away mainboom wreckage which fouled self-steering gear at onset of gale. Unsuccessful. Rudder useless. Stump of mainmast started to thrash. Feared heel would knock a hole in hull. Managed to secure it. Left hand out of action, flesh stripped from thumb, third and fourth fingers, severe pain from spilt acid of dead radio batteries.

  6p.m. Gale resumed its fury, southwest/10, gusting 70 m.p.h. Dumped last polluted food overboard. Sampled remaining fresh water tank. Undrinkable. Heavily contaminated with salt. Ship taking large quantities of water aboard. Doubtful whether she will survive tonight.

  July 29th, 1971

  7a.m. Course, position, drift, unknown. Woken dawn by crash of mainmast stump previously damaged at deck level, mainboom and self-steering wreckage also carried away.

  Starboard cabin ports blown in, destroying everything in cabin. Waratah records in top galley locker still safe. Ship covered in spray and lying on her side. Scores of dead and dying mollyhawks and albatrosses caught in rigging tangle. No craft can take such punishment. End very close.

  7.20 a,m. Ship's motion wilder. Waratah ….

  CHAPTER ONE

  What made her come aboard that first evening?

  There was no compelling reason for it that I could discover later. There was no suggestion, as far as she knew, that I was in urgent need of the chart. I was sailing that night for Durban and I had told Mr Hoskins that I required a chart, but she was not in the chandler's at the time. Mr Hoskins had always been obliging and somehow — because of the three-barrelled name of the firm, perhaps — Merry, Baggs and Hoskins-I had thought of him more in the light of a benevolent lawyer from Lincoln's Inn than a ship's chandler. The name reeked of old briefs and faded documents, not of charts, rope, ships' stores and sailmaking, nor of Dock Road, Cape Town, within biscuit toss of the great array of ships which have made the port, since the closing of Suez, again worthy of the name Tavern of the Seas. Since I had taken command of Walvis Bay, I had fought a running battle with officialdom about stores and equipment for her: the Weather Bureau preferred its 'official channels' and I Mr Hoskins, who seemed to sense the wants of a ship as unique as Walvis Bay on her strange occasions among the great hectic wastes of the Southern Ocean.

  I wonder now whether she came less because of Mr Hoskins' benevolent wish to cater for an unusual client of a skipper than under compulsion to what she was to call those strange forces which have surrounded the Waratah and her fate? Now that the whole long history of the ship has been laid bare, I have been able to trace a step-by-step inevitability which doomed her, and doomed those who sailed in her, and doomed those who came near her. The fates of men and of ships come down to these forces, they say, and the Waratah was fated. She was the first ship ever to be claimed as unsinkable — before the Titanic even — and I know now that even after the ship was dead, those vaunted watertight compartments of hers still carried the power to strike. I am prepared to believe, after all that has happened since, that it was indeed the forces of the Waratah which brought the girl to the docks that evening as I got Walvis Bay ready for sea.

  I was aft watching the two Weather Bureau technicians unhouse some of the radiosonde equipment we used for balloon ascents at sea, which we would not want on the coast-wise passage from Cape Town to Durban since there are plenty of shore stations and our route would be close inshore. It was almost dark and we were working by floodlight. There was a thin speckle of rain from the northwest, but the Port Met. Officer and I had decided that there was not much to it and Walvis Bay would not have to put up with a winter's gale round the Cape of Storms. Nonetheless, I did not wish to risk the radiosonde gear when the ship was not on station: it had taken us, when Walvis Bay had been converted from a whaler to South Africa's first weather ship, too much ingenuity to install. The radiosonde gear had not been specifically designed to operate at sea from a ship, but we had got round that by shifting the mast forward and constructing a makeshift balloon-filling hut abaft the funnel-and it worked. Walvis Bay was, in fact, a compound of ingenuity, improvisation and enthusiasm by a small working group from a number of formidably-named state and semi-state organizations. Now we were bound for Durban to try and increase her weather watchdog usefulness by equipping her with special radar and other apparatus for observing the new American Itos weather satellites. From Durban I had been ordered to make a series of special observations along the line of the Agulhas Bank deep down south towards Bouvet Island and the Antarctic ice shelf, and then swing back towards my station between Gough Island and the Cape via the Discovery and Meteor Sea-mounts, where further scientific investigations were scheduled. Durban was where the whaler had been converted and, since it might be necessary to alter the ship still further, I wanted the shipbuilders there who had worked on her previously with such success. Cape Town, moreover, was so jammed with shipping, including the massive supertankers, that to enlist a shipbuilder for a relatively small but tricky job was virtually impossible.

  I did not hear the Mini pull up on the dockside because of the noise of the electric drill we were using; the driver was invisible anyway to eyes blinded by the floodlight. The first I knew of her was when the bo'sun Fourie thrust his long sideburns into our circle of light and said, 'Lady to see the skipper, sir.'

  Now, thinking of it, I see one of those tiny, inevitable, fateful steps, the first on the dark road to our venture. Why did she simply not hand over the oilskin-wrapped chart to the bo'sun with the request to pass it on to me? I would have thanked Mr Hoskins, who knew of the ship's projected sweep into waters hardly ever frequented by any but an occasional whaler, next time I saw him; he might have, if the interval had not been too long, passed on my appreciation to her. Perhaps I should have met her then, perhaps not. But she had asked to see me, and I walked for'ard to the starboard side where the gangplank to the shore was still in place. We were not due to sail until the Shell Mammoth was well clear of the Robben Island channel; I had no wish to tangle with a 200,000-ton supertanker on a murky night.

  Outside the strong floodlight, I could not see her face clearly, and I asked her to my cabin under the bridge. The cabin also served, as a chartroom to the little ship (only 600 tons). She was wearing slacks and a thick grey yachting sweater with loose raglan sleeves and a complex pattern knitted into the wool. Strange, that it was to have such a place in our lives.

  My attention when I came to the ship's side was certainly not on her or else I would have realized that she had made a special effort to get me the chart I had asked Mr Hoskins for. And I certainly had no idea, as she told me afterwards, that she had gone home, changed, and then motored seventeen miles to Kalk Bay, near Simonstown, to collect a chart from a friend of Mr Hoskins who had a yacht there, and then motored back again to the docks. It was so trivial a thing to involve so much coming and going — and yet she did it for a skipper who was a complete stranger. All I recall is my surprise and pleasure at this new evidence of Mr Hoskins
' helpfulness, and the rain-dappled pattern from shoulder to neck of her sweater. 1 have no recollection of what she said and what I replied, nor of the first picture of her face.

  The dockside was alive with all the movements of sailors going ashore; behind lay the murky bulk of Table Mountain, hazed out of its habitual dominance by the screen of rain, except for a house light here and there or a string of sodium-yellow street lights up its slopes; the broad waterfront driveway of the Heerengracht was flanked by the pallid wateriness of skyscraper lights, while a blue neon restaurant sign atop one concrete minaret called the faithful to eat.

  She ducked under the steel-lintelled doorway of the cabin. I was behind and could not see what impact the starkness of my steel box had made upon her. I might have guessed, though, from the reserve in her voice.

  'She's a very tiny ship.'

  I took off my cap but not my oilskins. I scarcely expected her to stay. 'It's a very big ocean.'

  Her eyes went to the wind-gauge repeater, then to me, and back again to the instrument. It was that scrutiny which, I think, first brought her face into sharp focus for me. Her cheekbones were quite high and exquisitely moulded, and the slightly thin nose and fine line of her lips contributed to an ascetic quality of loveliness which became more exciting when I came to know that it reflected an inward counterpart; my first comparison of the sea-green-blue eyes was an instinctive one: with the Minch off Skye, clear now that the sky was clear, but thoughtful always of the great Atlantic storms at its back which come to trouble its pellucid depths. The people of those coasts are an admixture of Celt and Viking; she was of the same fine-boned breed, and I was to discover that my instinct had not been amiss in placing her among those who sometimes seem to have less than one foot in this world. Her hair was short and light, emphasizing the lovely contour of her face. For a moment she had an abstracted, concentrated expression which I later came to know meant that something had moved her, and at the same time puzzled her. She started to say something, half to herself, but cut it short. She did not let me see her thoughts, then.

  Instead, she said, 'Mr Hoskins thinks you must have about the loneliest job in the world.’

  I avoided the clear eyes. 'He's very kind to me. Gets me all sorts of things you can't hope for from officialdom.' I gestured to the wrapped chart which she held close to her left breast and the strange pattern of her sweater.

  Why do you say officialdom?'

  I had been fretted by a host of small details in preparing the ship for the trip to Durban and the long voyage south, and my reply was sharper than intended.

  'So many committees have had a hand in this ship that it's a wonder she got beyond the planning stage,' I retorted, but I pulled myself up. 'No, I'm being unfair. Anything like a first-ever weather ship in a small country like South Africa, and a great ocean like the Southern Ocean, requires a lot of things which don't strike the eye, especially the layman's eye. True, many organizations are involved, but there's been plenty of clear thinking too.'

  'I thought you were a sort of floating weather station?'

  'Correct. But the problem was to get that weather station floating-and to keep it floating.'

  I wished she would hand over the chart. I hadn't a drink to offer her, and I had scheduled only an hour and a half for dismantling the radiosonde gear before sailing.

  'Mr Hoskins says you are mainly responsible for that.’

  I should have thanked her and let her go. Instead, I went on to explain.

  'A couple of years ago, SANCOR — that's the South Africa National Committee for Oceanographic Research-got together with the Weather Bureau and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. .'

  'Officialdom!'

  I thought for a moment the interjection was mere frivolity, but she seemed too serious for that. She was staring at two big photographs screwed on to the steel bulkhead.

  I went on, a little uncertainly. 'There are more: Fisheries Division, Oceanographic Department of the University of Cape Town. I don't know if you want to hear about. .'

  She said, irrelevantly, still looking at the photographs, 'It takes courage.'

  I didn't know her context then, so I said, 'And money. We — that is, the various bodies concerned who wanted a weather ship or some sort of automatic weather device stationed in the Southern Ocean. .'

  She placed the chart on the glass face of the wind repeater, balancing it neatly.

  ‘I can't make out why you weather people must have your own special ship when there are plenty of other ordinary ships which can send you weather reports.'

  I thought of my meetings in hot Pretoria committee-rooms. I had learned to fence, to explain, to argue, that same question while the fans hummed and a torpor of heat seemed to hang over my listeners, jacketless at the chairman's permission, or wearing cool 'safari suits' which are the civil service fashion in the capital.

  'Surface and upper air observations from a weather ship stationed slightly south of the Gough Island meridian and between Gough and the Cape itself are especially valuable. This is a part of the South Atlantic bordering on Antarctica where even surface observations of current weather conditions are extremely rare. .'

  She looked at me puzzled, disappointed even. Was I talking by rote, I asked myself, a bore addressing a group of unresponsive civil servants? Her glance went quickly to the two photographs and then to the wind repeater. I could see that in her mind something somewhere didn't tally.

  She did not reply, but waited. She had a strange power of waiting, a way of building up forces to make things go her own way when they seemed to be taking a wrong channel. In the silence I heard the heavy boom of the Shell Mammoth's siren and the adolescent shrill of the tugs' sirens as they started to move her out of her berth.

  For the first time, I responded to her quiet guide-lines.

  'What I mean is, most ships stick pretty close to the South African coastline, and for our professional purposes they don't tell us much we don't know about the weather. They can give us only symptoms; we need a basic diagnosis, and that comes from regular, quick and reliable news of weather from deep down in the Southern Ocean. That is where the South African weather is really bora. The occasional ships which cross to South America don't go as far south as the areas from which we want reports. Understandably. The Roaring Forties aren't the place for pleasure cruises.'

  She seemed easier, more relaxed at my colloquial explanation than my earlier jargon. I could see the rain droplets in her fine hair under the electric light and was about to say some politeness about them, but the clear, searching scrutiny of her eyes stopped me.

  'How long have you been-out there?'

  'Nearly a year. We radio back observations every three hours.'

  'You haven't been out there a year! At sea!’

  The puzzlement, the slight disappointment, were gone. She seemed satisfied at our rapport, and it brought the beginnings of a luminosity to her lovely face, like the first nimbus of light round a lighthouse seen in fog.

  'No. I meant, I first took up station a year ago. I bring the Walvis Bay back to Cape Town once a month for bunkers and stores. It means being off station for a week at a time, but I'm afraid that can't be helped.'

  'Afraid it can't be helped!"

  I went on, warmed by her challenge, and too absorbed to realize how odd it must sound to her shore ears, to describe the need to keep up the continuity of the weather watch.

  "Coming back to port really means that we lose one week's weather out of every four-on the spot, that is. We naturally take readings and observations on the way back to port and out again, but it's not quite the same.'

  'I read somewhere that during the Napoleonic wars Admiral Collingwood blockaded the French port of Brest for twenty-two months without ever once stepping on to dry land,' she said. 'You're not doing too badly for yourself — once a month!'

  She turned to the two photographs and stared hard at them, as if she had come to some decision. Her voice was subdued, warm in its
sincerity.

  'Now it's my turn to be unfair. I said just now, it takes courage. A year-that's what I really meant.'

  I might have dodged into some conventional repartee, but her sincerity forbade it.

  'No one has ever described it as courage before,' I replied a little wryly, wondering what had made her choose to work for a ship's chandler. 'Screaming boredom, insufferable separation from the bright city lights, wayout type of living, hermit existence-it's been called all that, and more. But courage — no.'

  She waited. The electric drill was still and I guessed the crew was busy with the crating. Since she had begun to talk, perhaps I felt a little differently. It was their job. They could do it well enough by themselves. They didn't need the skipper to nursemaid them on every minor function connected with the ship.

  Her eyes dropped to the wind repeater, as if silently urging me to go on.

  ‘In many ways it's better to be in a ship than be stuck on one of the weather observation islands down in Antarctica,' I said. The sea is always alive, and you have something to occupy yourself with all the time. They tell me that one of the biggest problems for men on Gough is boredom off watch, during leisure time.'

  'I don't understand why there has to be a ship to observe the weather as well as the island stations.'

  The trouble is that Gough is 1400 miles from the Cape; Tristan da Cunha, still nearer South America, is 2000,' I replied. 'On the east, the opposite side of Africa, we have a weather station on Marion Island, but it's 1200 miles from land. To the south, in Antarctica itself, there's the South African base-2300 miles from home. It's no good reporting a storm front passing over Gough and expecting as a matter of course that it will strike the Cape. Between cup and lip, so to speak, a lot can happen in 1400 miles. A storm front can sheer off to the north or the south of the main land mass, or change its whole character and form what we call a secondary low. . anyway, most of the storm systems which give the Cape its bad name start east of Gough towards the Cape — in other words, after they have passed over the island.'