The Strode Venturer (32 page)

“Aye. He was aware of the danger.” He had a slow, north country voice.

“So that you had to keep engine revolutions down to the most economical speed all the way back to Gan.”

“We were doing between seven an’ eight knots most of the time.”

The circle had narrowed to under 800 miles. It narrowed
still farther as I began to question the crew, for Peter hadn’t steered direct for Gan in those first twenty-four hours. I had no hope of reconstructing the ship’s exact course, but at sea most men have some general idea of the direction they are headed—a star seen through a porthole, sunrise, sunset and the heat of the sun during the day, the side of the ship in shade, the dazzle of its reflection in the sea.

Gradually the picture built up—first southerly, then westerly for the first day, the final approach to Addu Atoll from the south, the intermediate variations of course always between 180° and 360°. It was slow work, particularly with the Chinese where I had to depend on an interpreter, mostly the chief steward. But strangely enough it was from the Chinese that I obtained most of my information. They had been scared by the island and not knowing where they were going when they left it, they had been unusually alert to the ship’s general direction. I saw most of them twice, some of them three times, checking and cross-checking each observation. It was a process of elimination and when I finally plotted the result on the chart it all added up to an area of probability centred on 03° South, 84° East.

This position was roughly 600 miles east-south-east of Gan and nearly 250 miles north-east of the line the Shackletons had flown on their way to and from the search area. I marked in the position Reece had given. The distance between the two was just over 500 miles.

It was evening of the second day out and the sun was setting by the time I had worked it all out to my satisfaction. I picked up the chart and went through into the wheelhouse. The second officer, Taylor, was on watch, sprawled drowsily in the chair, his eyes half closed. We had just cleared Socotra and the Chinaman at the wheel was steering 118°. Away on the starboard quarter where the sun had just gone down the sky flamed a searing brilliant orange with isolated patches of cu-nim thrusting up black anvil shapes, sure sign that we were getting near the equator. “What speed are we making?” I asked.

“Eleven knots,” Taylor replied. “Chief’s been on the blower twice.”

I could guess what Brady had said. It wasn’t that he loved his engines. It was just that the mountings were so rotten, the hull so strained, he was scared they would shake themselves out through the bottom of the ship. I went along to Deacon’s cabin, taking the chart and the parallel rule with me. I had had a talk with him that morning. Now he had had a whole day to think it out and note down all the courses he could remember.

I found him propped up in his bunk, a glass of whisky on the locker beside him and the notebook I had left with him scrawled full of courses, dates and times. I spread the chart on the table and whilst he read the courses and distances out to me I plotted them. There were many gaps, for this was one man’s observation covering nearly a fortnight and reproduced from memory nearly three months later when he was ill and suffering from the after-effects of great mental strain.

He gave me the notes on the voyage out from Gan first. The period covered was more than a week, including nearly five days of searching. The search courses could only be guessed at since they had been changed at increasing intervals as the area covered increased. He had, however, been able to reconstruct, with what he thought was a reasonable degree of accuracy, the voyage out to the search area. Plotted on the chart this indicated a position of little over 200 miles north-west of the area of probability I had already arrived at.

I then plotted on a piece of tracing paper the courses he’d noted of the voyage back. The overall course for the first twenty-four hours he reckoned at between SSW and WSW, confirming what I had already learned from the crew. The result of the trace when the final point of it was laid on Gan and the sheet aligned with the chart gave a position south-south-east of his previous position—a difference this time of only 100 miles from my area of probability.

“Well, what’s the answer?” His voice sounded tired,
a low, rumbling whisper, and he fumbled for his glass. “Does it add up to anything?” Whisky ran down the stubble of his chin and he didn’t bother to wipe it away. “It seems a long time ago. Too damned long, and my mind’s not all that clear …” His voice trailed away and his eyes closed.

I gave him the results and he nodded slowly. “A big area to cover.” I could see him working it out, the island little more than sixty feet high, its range of visibility barely fifteen miles and even that reduced by haze. But he was thinking of it as a sea-level search, whereas a Shackleton would probably be able to cover it in a single day. I drew in a square on the chart, noted the latitude and longitude of the four corners and got to my feet. “I’ll wireless Gan.”

It was almost twenty-four hours before I got Canning’s reply:
Regret little likelihood of resumed search being authorized unless you can give me clearer justification. Reece satisfied areas already searched covered island’s last known position. In the circumstances volcanic action still seems most likely explanation of our failure to locate it, but we can discuss it further on your arrival.

When I showed this to Deacon, he read it through slowly, his steel-rimmed spectacles perched on his big nose. “Volcanic action,” he growled. “Submarine pressures, yes. But that island wasn’t a bloody volcano. It was a bit of the sea bed, nothing more.” And he added, “I never did trust Welshmen.” The message-sheet slipped from his fingers and he leaned back with a sigh. “Justification, he says. What’s he mean by that?” His bloodshot eyes stared at me, strangely magnified by the glasses. “The opinion of an Adduan wouldn’t count, I suppose? Not with a man like Canning—a serving officer who’s never had anything to do with them.”

“You’re thinking of Don Mansoor, are you?”

He nodded. “He’s been there twice, once on his own and once with me, and he shared some of Peter Strode’s watches with him.”

“Could he mark the position in on a chart?”

The laugh was thick with phlegm. “ ’Course not. He’d barely seen a chart before he sailed with me. But he knows about the stars, and in his own way he’s a good navigator.”

“Canning has had a great deal to do with the Adduans,” I said. He respected them, even admired them. And remembering how those working on the base came in from the other islands each morning sailing their dhonis, I thought perhaps Gan was the one R.A.F. station where the view of the local inhabitants on a matter of navigation might carry weight. At any rate, it was worth trying.

It was the afternoon of 10th July that we reached Addu Atoll, steaming in by the Kudu Kanda Channel. But instead of continuing south across the lagoon to Gan, I ordered Fields to turn the ship to port and anchor just clear of the reefs off Midu. The breeze was fresh on my face as I rowed in to the beach, the palm fronds rattling with a noise like surf and the hot sun glistening on the broken tops of the waves. Inside the reef five vedis lay afloat with their masts already stepped. The palm-thatched boathouses along the beach all stood empty.

The
Strode Venturer
, anchored so close, seemed to have drawn the whole island from its green jungle shell, a great crowd that hemmed me in as I stepped ashore, a circle of brown faces bright with curiosity. An old man came forward, bade me welcome in halting English. But when I asked him for Don Mansoor he swept his arm towards the open sea and said, “Him leaving on great journey. Looking to island, all men looking to your friend.”

I remembered him then, this old man in the ragged turban, his clothes bunched tight around his thin shanks; he had steered the dhoni that night they brought me secretly to Midu. I asked him when Don Mansoor had left and he said he was leaving now four days. “And these?” I pointed to the vedis lying in the shelter of the reef. He thought they would leave next day or perhaps the day after. “All strong men now leaving Midu.” Without their sails the vedis looked lifeless, their fat hulls listless in the still water, the wood tired after the years ashore in the
hot sun. I asked him whether they were not afraid to make such a voyage in ships that had been laid up so long.

Yes, he said, they were very much afraid. “All women fearing their men drown.” He smiled, adding that the fears of their women-folk wouldn’t stop the men of Midu from following Don Mansoor—the Malimi, he called him. “We Adduans hoping for new life now.” And as we went up to his house he began telling me a rambling story about some monster long ago that used to come in from the sea at night to devour human tribute and how the malimi, the captain of a foreign ship, who believed in a greater god had stood in for the sacrifice and had defeated the monster by his fearless demeanour and by reading the Koran. It was a mythological story, a Maldivian version of St. George and the Dragon that represented the islanders’ conversion to the Muslim faith, and long before he had finished it I was seated in his house with a drink of palm juice in my hand. It made a very strong impression on me sitting there, conscious of the bed at the far end of the room swaying on its cords, dark feminine eyes limpid in the shadows and the old man talking as the sun went down and the dhonis came in with the men from Gan.

The point of the story was to explain to me that men were not afraid to die if they believed in something. “Now Ali Raza is making all Midu vedi ready and we are sailing to find your friend and the new land. If Allah wills it,” he added, and the old eyes stared at me, the whites yellowed with age. One of the vedis now afloat was apparently his. “I am not sailing my vedi for three years now because those Malé men making piracy on the sea. But now I am going for I am—how you saying—
odi vari meeka
, and wishing to see this new land.” The words
odi vari meeka
mean owner rather than captain. There is no word for captain in Adduan, doubtless because they are a seafaring race and any owner would automatically sail his own boat.

A pressure lamp had been lit and the glare of it showed a crowd of men in the open doorway. Others were arriving all the time and soon Eli Raza came in and with him his
son who spoke good English and wore a khaki shirt and an aircraftsman’s beret.

When I left I took them both back to the ship with me. Even if he couldn’t point the island’s position out on the chart, I thought his determination to sail his vedi in support of Don Mansoor’s expedition might spur Canning into flying a new search.

The wind had dropped away and the warm night air was still, not a ripple on the surface of the water as the
Strode Venturer
ploughed south across the black lagoon. The sky was clear, a bright canopy of stars, and standing with Ali Raza on the open wing of the bridge I could see the palm treed fringe of the islands away to port gradually closing in on us. The beauty of the night, the warmth, the absolute tranquillity—it was an island paradise and it seemed tragic to me that these people should have such a desperate longing for something different, all because we had broken in upon their centuries of solitude with our flying machines, our parade of wealth and mechanical power.

We dropped anchor off the Gan jetty and as our engines stopped the scream of a jet tore the stillness of the night apart. The runway lights were on and I could see the
Strode Trader
grounded on the foreshore only a few cables away. Seen like that, black and sharp against the runway glare, she looked a complete wreck, and clear in my mind I saw the island again and the lightning stabbing.

The plane took off, the wink of its navigation lights arcing against the stars as it swung eastward for Singapore. The marine craft officer arrived. I heard his voice immediately below the starboard bridge wing. He was talking to Fields and shortly afterwards the crew began clearing the hatch covers from No. 2 hold. One of the R.A.F. barges was being manoeuvred alongside, the winches were manned and by the time Canning came out in a launch from the jetty the first of the stores was being offloaded. I met him at the head of the gangway. He had Reece with him and the police officer, Goodwin. “I’d have been out before,” he said as he shook my hand, “but I had an Air
Vice-Marshal passing through.” He reached into his pocket and handed me a letter. “This arrived for you two days ago.” It was from Ida and the fact that he had remembered to bring it out with him reminded me how isolated Gan was, how important to them the mail from home.

I took him up to the bridge, and when he saw Ali Raza and his son waiting there he said, “I’ve done my best to stop them sailing their vedis off into the blue.” He knew about my visit to Midu and he added, “I hope you’ve not been encouraging them. I’m very concerned that they’re risking their lives unnecessarily.”

“They don’t need encouragement,” I said. “They’ve made up their minds.” His concern was genuine. I knew that. But I couldn’t help feeling that the organized routine of an R.A.F. station made it difficult for him to understand the urgent emotional forces that were driving them. “You’re faced here with something as inevitable as the suicidal migration of a bunch of lemmings,” I told him. “That island is important to them. And so is Peter Strode.” I spread the Indian Ocean chart out in front of him. I had ringed my area of probability in red and I was watching Reece as I explained how it had been arrived at. His eyes looked tired, the skin below them puffy. Like all Celts he was gifted with imagination, and imagination can play the devil with a man in moments of stress. I wondered how near he was to cracking up. Very near, I thought, for he didn’t let me finish, but he leapt at once to his own defence.

“I kept a note of all courses steered. Compass courses, you understand.” He turned to Canning. “This position is based on nothing more solid than the random observations of a bunch of Chinese seamen.”

“It’s confirmed by Captain Deacon,” I said.

“Deacon!” He put his hand to his head. “My God, man! Are you serious?” He gave a quick little laugh. “Deacon wouldn’t have had a clue where he was. Nor would the crew.” He had become very excited and when I reminded him that what we were discussing might mean the difference between life and death to the men on that island, he stared
at me, the muscles of his jaw bunching. “They’re dead,” he said. “And the island’s gone.” And I knew by the way he said it that he had convinced himself that it was true.