In Hazard (2 page)

As it did Virginia Woolf in her “essay-novel”
The Years
, the hybrid form tempted Hughes to divagate, lecture, ponder, and opine, in passages that are of interest in themselves but don't seem to spring from the fabric of the book in the way that similar passages do in
A High Wind in Jamaica
. The Vestigial Raconteur is the sharp tool that both makes—and (particularly in the latter pages) mars—Hughes's book. In Chapter X, when Hughes allows the Raconteur to analyze the thoughts of Mr. Buxton, the first mate, he produces for us a longish essay on the profession of seaman, from which Hughes then has to recall him: “But this is wandering a little far from Buxton's meditations as he stood holding to the bridge rail ...” Slackness is the risk that Hughes's Raconteur doesn't always avoid.

In Hazard
was well received on publication in 1938; Graham Greene compared it to Joseph Conrad's
Typhoon
. But it was something of a flop, both with readers and critics. Virginia Woolf was interested but felt that between the storm and the people “there's a gap, in which there's some want of strength.” It is the documentary nature of the book that results in the invented characters seeming to us less real, more stock, than the factual details of machinery and weather.

Ford Madox Ford, on the other hand, saw the book as a masterpiece of a peculiar kind, and told Hughes that it was “rather as if the book itself were a ship in a hurricane”:

Hughes rather liked this response, and took it as a compliment. He was essentially a deeply religious man, who became more religious as he grew older, but he never lost his sense that human life on earth was governed by pervasive, unchallengeable, uncaring, but evenhanded Chance. In fact his religious convictions seem to have made this sense more strong in him, and lent his first-person narrators their wise but unjudging omniscience. Nothing in this book reveals it better than the sudden death of Chief Engineer Ramsay MacDonald, after all dangers have passed. It's hard, in reading Hughes's work, which as Ford notes tends toward the inhuman, not to wonder whether Hughes ever quite made clear to himself the distinction between all-knowing divinity and pitiless chance.

Hughes concludes his story with the
Archimedes
, “still tip-tilted over to one side,” towed toward port in Honduras. Thus he ends as he began: with the
Archimedes
and her suffering. The reader may be interested to know that the captain of the
Phemius
was in fact, as the fictional Captain Edwardes fears he may be, held to blame by the Owners for turning his ship into the path of the storm. Laurence Holt—like the unnamed Owners that Hughes describes—was a man of great integrity, who loved his ships and their crews. He was the grandson of the founder of the Blue Funnel Line and descendant of fiercely honest Nonconformists, concerned all his life with social problems, in sympathy with the struggles of ordinary seamen and dockworkers for better pay and conditions, and long remembered with fondness in the world of Liverpool shipping. But he would not forgive Captain Evans. Blue Funnel Line ships were uninsured, and captains had to personally post two hundred pounds surety, just to remind themselves of the loss that any bad judgment or weakness of character on their part would mean. Holt insisted Captain Evans forfeit his bond. After World War II, however, he changed his mind, or heart, and gave it back. By then the rehabilitated
Phemius
had been sunk by a German submarine off the coast of West Africa.
[2]
I don't know if Hughes was ever apprised of these things, but if he could have known of them as he was writing
In Hazard
, I'm sure the combination of righteousness, mercy, probity, misunderstanding, and chance in this outcome would have been irresistible to his ghostly narrator.

—J
OHN
C
ROWLEY

[1]
Except where otherwise noted, all the general facts about Hughes's life and the writing of
In Hazard
come from the biography by Richard Perceval Graves (
Richard Hughes: A Biography
, Andre Deutsch, 1994).

[2]
Information from “The Red Duster,” a Web site operated by the British Merchant Navy Association:
http://www.red-duster.co.uk
.

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Introduction

In Hazard

Note

Part I

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Part II

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Afterword

Copyright and More Information

The events in this story have been kept, to the best of my powers, strictly within the bounds of scientific possibility: the bounds of what has happened, or can happen. Nevertheless it is intended to be a work of fiction, not of history; and no single character in it is intended to be a portrait of any living person
.

R.H.

Amongst the people I have met, one of those who stand out the most vividly in my memory is a certain Mr. Ramsay MacDonald. He was a Chief Engineer: and a distant cousin, he said, of Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald, the Statesman. He resembled his “cousin” very closely indeed, in face and moustaches; and it astonished me at first to see what appeared to be my Prime Minister, in a suit of overalls, crawling out of a piece of dismantled machinery with an air of real authority and knowledge and decision.

For it was in 1924 (during the first Labour Government), that I originally met Mr. MacDonald: in the “Archimedes,” a single-screw turbine steamer of a little over 9,000 tons.

She was a fine ship. Purely a cargo-vessel (unless you refuse to class as cargo the Moslem pilgrims she occasionally carried). Her owners, one of the most famous Houses in Bristol, had a large fleet; but they loved each vessel and got the utmost out of her as if she was their child—a deep, sincere, selfish love like that, not mere sentiment. They built their ships to their own designs. They kept them in perfect repair, never hesitating to scrap anything that was antiquated or insecure. They never insured them. If there was any loss, it should be as much their own as the gains. There was a fanatical determination against any risk of loss, therefore, in everyone from the Chairman of the Company to the Ship's Cat.

No caution could be too great. Look at the funnel-guys of the “Archimedes,” for instance. They were designed to stand a strain of a hundred tons! But how could a strain of a hundred tons ever come upon funnel-guys? A wind of seventy-five miles an hour would blow every shred of canvas out of a sailing ship; yet even such a hurricane, the designers reckoned, would only lean against the funnel of “Archimedes” with a total pressure of ten or fifteen tons. The funnel itself (there was an inner one and an outer one bracketed together) was rigid enough to stand any such ordinary strain alone. When these guys were properly set up, that funnel was as safe as the Bank of England.

Mr. MacDonald, I think I said, was Chief Engineer. He was monarch of the engine-room, the fire-room, and various outlying territories.

An engine-room is unlike anything in land architecture. It is an immensely tall space—reaching from the top of the ship, more or less, to the bottom. Huge. But, unlike most large architectural spaces (except perhaps Hell), you enter it through a small door at the top.

Its emptiness is most ingeniously occupied by carefully placed machines: high and low pressure turbines, reduction gear, condensors, pumps and so on. But the visitor, of course, sees nothing of the nature of these machines, each being securely but-toned up in an iron case, with hundreds of heavy iron bolts for buttons. Large pipes of varying widths, some of them—cold—of shining bedewed copper, and others wrapped in thick white clothing to keep in their heat, connect one with another.

You have seen, in a bush on a foggy day, the spider-runs among the branches? So, too, in an engine-room there are little metal runs at different levels, and gossamer steel stairs, to carry you to whatever part you want of these huge iron lumps: and above you are cranes and overhead railways to convey tools and spare parts for you, since such tools and spare parts often weigh several tons.

The polished steel handrails are slippery with oil and moisture. The air, too, is a contrast to the bright sea-air outside: it is warm, and softened with steam (for a little always manages to escape from somewhere): and the place is moderately loud with the clangour of machinery.

The stokehold (or fire-room), which you enter at the bottom ordinarily, through a low door from the bottom of the engine-room, is a very different place. The air here is hotter still; but quite dry. Here, moreover, is a symmetry more like that of land-architecture: a row of similar furnaces, small at the bottom and growing larger above, so that overhead they tend to come together, like gothic arches in a metal crypt (or the walls of a room in a dream).

Opposite you, as you enter from the engine-room, is a line of oven-like doors, each with a little spyhole bright with the flames within. As you peer in through one of these holes at all that raging fire, it is hard to believe that it comes from the burning of only one little jet of hot oil, squirted through a nipple small enough to carry in a waistcoat pocket! And at the side of each furnace door is a container, such as you might stand an umbrella in. It holds a torch—a long iron rod with a bundle of rags at the end, immersed in oil. To relight a furnace (while it is still warm), all you need to do is to turn very carefully two cocks, one supplying the hot oil and the other a forced draught of air: and then a Chinaman lights the torch and thrusts it through a small hole into the empty, oven-like hollow of the furnace, where the hot oil vapor bursts immediately into a roaring flood of flame.

Here, of course—in the fire-room—you are directly under the roots of the funnel. A steel ladder leads up into the space around its base, which is known as the Fiddley: and a doorway there gives direct access on to the deck for those firemen whose turn it is to enjoy a little fresh air: but the visitor to whom Mr. MacDonald is showing his regions generally passes back into the engine-room again.

And there, beyond all this vastness of furnaces and clanging machinery, you will find at last the quiet, simple thing that all this is about: namely, a smooth column of steel, lying in cool and comfortable bearings and turning round and round with no sound—the propeller-shaft. A passage in which you cannot quite stand upright conveys its great length to the tail of the ship.

Think of a tree. The roots of a tree spread in a most complicated manner through the ground, extracting all kinds of necessary things. This nourishment passes, unified, up the plain column of its trunk, and bursts out in the air into a countless multitude of leaves. So all the varying forces, the stresses and resistances, proceeding from that welter of machinery, are unified into the simple rotation of this horizontal column: are conducted calmly along its length into the sea: and there burgeon suddenly into the white and glass-green foliage of the swirls, the tumbling currents, the enormously powerful jostling of crowded water which is a ship's wake.

All that belonged exclusively to Mr. MacDonald, and so did certain other isolated mechanisms in the ship. The steering-gear, for instance, in its “house” on the after-castle (in the stern). That is a massive engine: yet its powerful forces, shifting with exactitude the heavy rudder, can be switched on or off by the delicate wrist of a Chinese quartermaster on the bridge, lightly twiddling the wheel. And should the wheel on the bridge for any reason be out of action, there is a second, an emergency wheel in the stern which can be connected up. But should the steam steering-engine itself fail, why, then you would be in a hole. For you cannot move so heavy a rudder by hand. Not all the man-power in the ship would suffice to move it one inch.

What else shall I tell you, to describe to you “Archimedes”? I say nothing of her brilliant paint-work, or the beauty of her lines: for I want you to know her, not as a lover knows a woman but rather as a medical student does. (The lover's part can come later.)

Here is some more. The hull of a ship is double, and the space between the two skins is divided into compartments. It is these compartments in the actual walls of the ship which are called the tanks. They serve several purposes. Some contain the fuel oil (“Archimedes” being an oil-burning steamer). Others, if the sea is admitted to them, can be made to act as ballast, to control and adjust the stability of the ship. Others contain the fresh water. Access to these tanks can be had through man-holes, some of which are in the engine-room floor: and they are ventilated (fuel-oil gives off explosive gases) by some of those hook-topped pipes that you may have noticed on the promenade-deck of a liner, near the rails. It is the ship's carpenter's job to sound all these tanks once every watch, and record exactly the depth of whatever is in them.

So much, then, for Mr. MacDonald's region. He had under him seven engineer officers, their tartarean occupation indicated by a shred of purple against the gold on their sleeves: and under them was a sensible and skilful crew of Chinese firemen and greasers. The rest of the ship—the hull, the decks, and chiefest of all the cargo-space—belonged to Mr. Buxton, the Chief Officer,
alias
First Mate.