Scend of the Sea Read online

  Mine had begun as a life much the same as thousands of others, but then came the acclaim and publicity over the ocean race. It was true what I had said, that it was boredom which killed on the weather-station islands; at sea, especially in a racing yacht, there is no time for it. Under the self-scrutiny which she had provoked, I realized that subconsciously I had made the weather ship into a substitute for the yacht: for the endless vigilance of sails, helm and wind I had replaced the regular three-hour readings, the barometric pressures, wind velocities, temperature charts and radiosonde balloon ascents, but the essential matrix of aloneness remained unchanged. Walvis Bay and Touleier were different, but the same. This I realized as the cold sea swished by and the land became more ill-defined. The long voyage ahead from Durban, the complex of scientific observations involved which, until she came, had occupied all my thoughts, were, I saw on the silent bridge that night, a further step towards isolating myself from human contacts.

  In themselves they need not have been, but she had gone unerringly to the heart of it all — Waratah.

  My own father had never seen First Officer Fairlie of the Waratah, his father. Dad was born in January 1910, and the Waratah had been lost during the last days of July 1909. By the time I came to discuss the Waratah with Granny Fairlie it was history, and she talked of it impersonally, without sorrow. One thing she asserted, however, and that was that the ship had not been lost the way the ineffectual court of inquiry had found. 'Douglas Fairlie knew ships,' she used to state. 'Captain Ilbery was the same. They knew how to handle them, even if they were-as everyone said after the Waratah vanished — different. Captain Ilbery had graduated in the wool clippers and he used to tell some hair-raising stories of them running the easting down to Australia with decks awash, carrying all sail. Passengers used to queue to sail with Captain Ilbery, whatever ship he captained.'

  And, as if to reaffirm her faith in her sailor-husband, she never applied to the courts to have him presumed dead, as so many others did. 'Douglas Fairlie wasn't dead when the Waratah went down,' she stated flatly. I used to visit her among the noble oaks of Stellenbosch, where she had a small house in classic Old Dutch style. She had settled in South Africa after the Waratah tragedy. In her will she had left me some priceless Waratah documents.

  A few hours before, I had been excited, taut, eager for a voyage which I boasted inwardly to my own scientific ego could be a little Challenger expedition. My route lay first down the coast along the line of the largely unexplored terraces and sea-bed contours of the Agulhas Bank. Then my mission would take on a different form altogether-the study of wind, weather, and the uprising of great bodies of water in the cold seas to the south of Bouvet, towards the ice shelf itself.

  Now, what an unknown girl thought, on seeing my cabin, predominated: to her it was beyond ordinary credence that anyone, isolated as I was in the trackless wastes of the South Atlantic, should for his sole relaxation content himself, as I did, with half a dozen books on Antarctic meteorology and the obscure rewards to be won from a wind gauge. It was not enough, she had reasoned. There must be more to me somewhere: she had gone to the photograph of the Waratah and the airliner to find it.

  'A ship fine on the starboard bow, sir!'

  Smit broke into my thoughts, but the sideburned Fourie, who perhaps sensed my wish to be alone, simply gestured out to starboard and ahead from the dimness of the wheel-house. I saw them too-the lift of the supertanker's masthead lights in the swell. To port, we had picked up Slangkop light — a ship had died here a few days after the Waratah, in the next great gale of the 1909 winter. Perhaps Smit, too, detected my mood, for neither of them spoke. 'Everything well on board' — why did it keep coming back so compulsively since our meeting in the cabin? Those were Waratah's last words to the world!

  She held up a mirror to me: I was nearly thirty, but last year, one whole year, had been lost among the great seas of the Southern Ocean. Was she trying to tell me, by calling my cabin a cell, that life was passing me by? Yet life had been good-until the Viscount crash. Now it came to me for the first time that Dad had been barely a year or two older than I when the Second World War had broken out; he had flown with the first war-time squadrons of the South African Air Force against the enemy in Africa. What had he done before that? I simply did not know. Flying had seemed to be his whole life; I had never thought of him as other than a flyer. He had ended the war as a colonel, and it was he who had led the daring bomber raids against the Rumanian oilfields and Warsaw. He was old for a pilot when he died in the Viscount. It was to be one of his last flights before retiring as a civil pilot, which he had become after the war. My mother Anne Fairlie never recovered from the shock of the disaster and died a year later. It meant the end of a gracious home at Rondebosch, not far from the stately Groote Schuur, donated by Cecil Rhodes to be the official residence of prime ministers. My mother was ailing when the inquiry had questioned her about my father's health, and afterwards she never discussed the crash again except, like Granny Fairlie, to assert: 'Bruce Fairlie didn't die at the controls. He was alive after the plane hit the sea.'

  Jubela came through to take the wheel and the midnight watch. The Cape Point light (Drake's 'fairest Cape’) stood out clear, but in the rain I could not distinguish the neighbouring twin peaks, Maclear and Vasco da Gama. I kept well clear of the land with soundings going, for the Cape is the graveyard of careless skippers. Eastward bound as we were, Cape Point is the last of the three great lights of the Peninsula; now, in saying goodbye to it, I realized that I was saying goodbye to the person who had stepped so accidentally, yet so forcefully, into my thoughts. Would we-could we-meet again after that first revealing, penetrating encounter? I did not make up my mind, then: Agulhas, Danger Point, Quoin Point all lay ahead in the darkness and the rain, and she was behind now.

  Jubela did not give me his usual greeting in Zulu, adding his deferential 'Kosaan — little chief. Instead, he said quietly, 'Umdhlebe.' By that single word it was clear that he had read my preoccupation. With her? — 1 rationalized it, not her, but myself. Jubela was a witchdoctor's son; I never found out what brought him to sea. His home was somewhere in the hot Tongaland sand forest where the Pongola River finds its normal channel too small to flex its flood muscles in and spills into a series of extensive, shallow flood pans. The Downs of Gold, the earliest Portuguese explorers called Jubela's land, looking optimistically at it with eyes seared by the sun of crossing half the world on their way to reach India. With that sixth sense the witchdoctor or sangoma inherits psychological insight, one could call it — Jubela called me by the strange name he reserved for rare occasions.

  Perhaps seven or eight months before, the weather ship had been taking it green as she plugged her way into the teeth of a gale far to the south of the Cape. The seas had been breaking heavily and lifelines were rigged. Jubela had been at the wheel, but I was anxious for the safety of our precious scientific apparatus, and I sent him aft to check whether our makeshift balloon-filling hut was standing up to the seas breaking aboard. He did not return. It was impossible in the darkness to see what had happened, but he had been washed overboard. Feldman, my No. 1, was regretful but adamant. To turn back to search the sea, he argued, would endanger not only the delicate apparatus, but most likely the safety of the ship herself; the chances of finding Jubela after nearly half an hour were remote. Nonetheless, I went back, taking the wheel myself and picking a way as gently as I could amongst the hammer-blow seas. It was I who had spotted him, too, black like a seal against a breaking line of white. Walvis Bay could not go too close for fear of crushing him to death; we trained the upper deck spotlight on him, hoping not to lose him in the wild welter of water.

  I went over the side with a lifebelt and line attached to drag us back, should I find him. Jubela saw me and swam. He came planing down a roller to the lifebelt, his seaboots tied round his neck. He always looked like a Spaniard, more so that the fine line of his teeth showed in the white spotlight. He made no attempt to grab the
lifebelt, but he trod water, as if to get his balance. Then he reached forward with his right hand and took my right hand powerfully round the thumb and shook it once, dropped it, and reached again, his palm across my palm, both our elbows bent. He said nothing during this traditional gesture of comradeship gleaned from the bush and practised upon the great waters: there was no smile, no thank you, only a strange, long, compelling stare.

  They pulled us aboard.

  I found a bottle of rum and two mugs in the wardroom. The cold of the Antarctic sea seemed to paralyse our throats.

  Jubela stopped me as I raised my mug to his. His joking light-heartedness was back. A Tonga loves to make fun of himself, more than of anyone else. His seaboots still hung round his neck.

  'I knew you would come back to find me,' he laughed. 'I knew it would take too much for you to explain to the government why the seaboots were gone. So I just tied them round my neck and swam. I was right. You came, Kosaan.'

  I grasped the mug with both hands to stop the rum slopping. I knew the rules of Jubela's game of banter.

  'There was no other reason,' I grinned back. ‘It would have meant too much paper work for me if you had been lost. The boots are worth far more than the man.'

  ‘I will hang these boots in my hut when I am old, Kosaan.'

  Then what will I say in my report, Jubela? One pair of seaboots lost — as souvenirs?'

  He put his mug down and took my hand and arm again in that strange double handshake. His hands were colder than mine, but still he did not drink the warming rum. The Spanish grin was gone.

  'There is a tree of ours which commands respect,’ he said. 'It commands respect, and this is due to you, Kosaan, the captain. It is different from all other trees, with strange big grey leaves, like the claws of an ostrich. It is a strange tree, because it weeps big drops like a woman's tears; it is lonely, because men avoid it, for they say it has the smell of death about it. The name is Umdhlebe.'

  He picked up his mug of rum and drank it off without stopping.

  ‘I thank you, Umdhlebe.’

  The Cape Point light started to drop astern. Jubela at the wheel balanced himself as Walvis Bay gave a quick little duck-tail shake. At Cape Point the long levels of the Atlantic fall into step with the quick strides of the Indian Ocean, and Walvis Bay fell into step too, like the little thoroughbred she was.

  Strange. Alone. Weeps. The smell of death about it. She had underlined the loneliness of the weatherwatch patrol, but had not derided it, or held out the joys of the land to me. I had replied, 'it suits me,' and she had accepted that, but it still wasn't the answer. I had said I did. not grieve for the Waratah grandfather I had never met; I knew the hazards of a pilot as I knew the hazards of the sea, and my father had survived more than his fair share of flak, bullets and war. Why should I weep inwardly, she had asked herself, why should I grieve? Why should Jubela have said, the smell of death? He could not read and the pictures of the Waratah and Gemsbok meant nothing to him-I doubt whether he had been more than once or twice in my cabin anyway. Was it possible to detect through me on an extra-sensory level the deaths of 211 people in the ship and forty-seven in the airliner? The moment had passed ever to question Jubela; I knew that if I did he would laugh and deny that he had said anything of the kind. Yet tonight, when she had been the agent in provoking this tumult of introspection, he had called me Umdhlebe.

  A gust of wind — they call it a willy-waw — broke from behind Cape Point and slapped Walvis Bay astern; the squall and the rain obscured the last light.

  The darkness of the night was my answer.

  Two days later, I held Walvis Bay twelve miles offshore going north to Durban. It was a beautiful day and the great forests of the Transkei were clear to see on the cliffs and hills rising up from the coastline. A soft north-easterly breeze had no winter chill in it, and a quiet sea made no test of the weather ship's strong flared bow.

  It had come to me, that night off Cape Point, that it would be a golden opportunity to pass up the coastline to Durban near East London on a course as near as I could steer to Waratah's own, and perhaps form some sort of reconstruction of the disaster. Why? The only answer I could have given then, before the chain of events unfolded itself, was — her. Perhaps on my protracted return to Cape Town I would be able to tell her something first-hand about the area which had swallowed up a ship and an airliner without trace, and take up, so to speak, where we had left off. I had sailed the route before the Gemsbok crash and knew the coast reasonably well. Was I merely building another facade by retracing Waratah's course, like the one she had penetrated in order to see what lay behind? Or was I trying to create an easy excuse for seeing her again?

  I plotted my course on the new chart she had brought me: here, under my keel now, somewhere between East London and the mouth of the Bashee River, more than 250 people had gone to a mysterious death sixty years apart in two vastly different craft. Could the two calamities be equated? More to keep myself occupied with the enigma than hoping for any real clue from it, I checked and rechecked the position of every headland, each river mouth up the coast — Nahoon Point, Gonubie Point, Kwelegha, Cintsa, Kefani, Haga Haga, Great Kei, Qolora, Kobonqaba, Nxaxo, Qora, Shixini — every one to the Bashee Mouth, until I felt repelled by the crop of outlandish names. Every position was right, every description faultless. The area was well frequented — Walvis Bay passed five ships going and three coming, including two big tankers. Through my binoculars I examined the shoreline and investigated every splendid headland. The bland sea smiled back with Oriental impenetrability. At length, off the Bashee Mouth itself where Waratah was last sighted, I could find no excitement. It was a calm, uncomplicated, beautiful day. It held no mysteries, no deaths. It was a passageway of ships on their lawful business, and ashore the holidaymakers and fishermen went about their holiday occasions.

  Off Port St John's, where Waratah exchanged her last signals with Clan Macintyre, the ship which will always be associated with her name, it was the same. It was warmer there under the faint north-easter, and a friendly ski-boat from the shore circled Walvis Bay. I closed to the exact position where the ships had been off the magnificent Gates of Port St John's, but it was so prosaic that I found my attention wandering from what I had set out to do at the sight of the splendid 1200-foot cliffs topped by forests.

  It was a day to offset the wild nights of the Southern Ocean.

  Or did the very loneliness of the day, in its beguilement, shut fast the tragedy which lurked beneath its.easy waters? Accused, or witness, the sea? It smiled back now, bland and beautiful.

  CHAPTER THREE

  'Waratah!’

  Alistair shied his empty beer can in a shallow trajectory towards the bulkhead. It made an adroit cannon off the steel beam immediately below the photograph and clattered unerringly into my wastepaper-basket to the one side. He must have seen my face darken at his clowning — he was not to know that she had stood just there, treading gently and wonderingly into a mystery which had been woven into the fabric of a man she had just met-for he leapt off his chair with schoolboyish zest, made an aeroplane shape of his hands, and zoomed them over the receptacle where the can still vibrated.

  His light-heartedness was irresistible. That's where the Buck boys' training begins-in the stern classroom of the mess,' he went on. 'If you can hit a thing with a beer can, you can hit it with a bomb, says teacher. So..'

  I grinned. 'Have another can … a full one.'

  He nodded, and I slipped down to the tiny 'ward-room' for a fresh supply.

  Alistair was standing with arms akimbo surveying my cabin when I returned.

  'For crying out loud!' he said. 'This cabin of yours smells like … like. ‘

  'Formalin,' I supplied, handing him a beer to open. 'Used to preserve fish and marine organisms. Plankton and suchlike.'

  He grimaced. 'It's almost enough to put a man off his beer. Mortuary. Dead bodies. That's what it reminds me of. How you can live your life in this boat beats me,
but when you add what you've taken aboard now. .' He jerked off the lid of his beer, but this time he did not make an Aunt Sally of my photograph. He placed the empty carefully on the steel floor among the clutter of things in the cabin. He studiously avoided any mention of the Waratah, and I was grateful for it. He began to talk quickly, as if he feared I might bring it up.

  'What the hell's all this stuff for anyway, Ian?' he demanded. ‘I thought you were coming to Durban to have some special met gear installed? These aren't weather instruments.'

  He took off his Air Force tunic, threw it across the table which had held the second chart (the one I could not explain to her that night of sailing) and sprawled with a sigh again in my armchair.

  'Unfriendly, inhospitable,' he grinned. 'Only one chair. No creature comforts. In fact, what joy you extract from this sort of game is beyond my guess.'

  'It has its rewards.'