The Strode Venturer (35 page)

Speed had been reduced to six knots again and all through the night the ship wallowed slowly eastward, a lookout in the bows. And at dawn we were in the search area. The sun came up and I went into the wheelhouse in pyjamas to find Deacon there, slumped in his chair, his eyes half closed. He didn’t say anything, but I could see by the position of the
sun that we were steaming north now. We were on the first leg of our search pattern and when I went out to the bridge wing I saw that one of the crew had been hoisted to the foremast on a bos’n’s chair.

Nothing to do now but wait, and hope. There was a swell still running and the wind was back into the south-west where it had been most of the time since we had sailed from Gan. Blue sky, blue sea, the sun blazing down, and the
Strode Venturer
ploughing her way across the endless expanse of ocean. Time passed slowly. There might be days and days of this, but still I was possessed by that same strange feeling of confidence. It was so strong that twice I went out and called to the masthead lookout, but each time he shook his head and shouted that he could see nothing.

The steward brought the mid-morning coffee and we drank it silently. An air of torpor had settled on the bridge, Deacon dozing in his chair, the officer of the watch half asleep, the helmsman’s hands motionless on the wheel, the ship steady as a rock, only the beat of the engines against the soles of my feet and the surge of the water at the bows to indicate that we were moving across the sea.

Weston entered from the chartroom and stood looking at the sea a moment, his watery blue eyes blinking in the glare. “This message just came in.” He thrust a sheet of paper at Deacon, but the big man didn’t stir. “A message for you. From Gan.” And he added, “You might be interested to know I’ve been in contact with an Australian ship bound from Colombo to Perth. She reports steaming through scattered areas of pumice for the past two hours.”

Deacon’s eyes opened slowly and he dragged himself to his feet, fumbling for his glasses in the litter of the chart table. “Bound for Perth, eh? She’s to the east of us, then?” Weston gave him her position and he reached for the parallel rule and marked it on the chart. “Bearing one-o-four degrees from us and almost four hundred miles away.” He swung his head in that slow, bear-like movement, staring at me over his glasses. “The equatorial counter-current is east-going, say just over two knots—fifty miles a day. If that
pumice originated from a disturbance in this area, it happened at least eight days ago.”

“What’s the message from Gan?” I asked.

He read it through and pushed it across to me. It was from Canning. The support Shackleton, the one I had flown in, was being withdrawn from Gan. It was leaving for Changi in the morning and Canning was offering to divert it
en route. Fuel would limit the time it could spend over your area to five hours, but if it would be of help to you the crew are willing to put in the extra flying time.

Five hours wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing, and if we asked them to fly the northern part of the area it would be closer to their direct flight path to Singapore. They might manage more than five hours. But when I suggested this to Deacon he simply said, “Do what you like.” He wasn’t interested. Aircraft meant nothing to him. All he understood was ships and he was poring over the chart again. I drafted a reply and handed it to Weston. Deacon was back in his chair then, his eyes closed. “I’ve only once seen pumice floating on the surface of the sea,” he murmured thickly. “That was off the China coast. I forget the year now—a long time ago.” He shifted slowly in his seat and opened his eyes, staring at me. They were very bloodshot in the sun’s glare. “You said something about pumice—when you came here before, in the
Trader.
That was before you sighted the island, hm?”

“The day before,” I said.

“You were to the west of it, then?”

I nodded. “Eighty miles at least.”

He sighed. “Have to be careful to-night.” He closed his eyes again, relapsing into silence. I think he slept for a while. He looked very tired and later, when Fields took over, he went to his cabin. He didn’t come down to lunch. At two o’clock we altered course to the east again. The haze was thickening, visibility not more than five miles. Two hours and then we’d turn south and when we’d steamed 50 miles we’d turn east for two hours, then north. In this way our search pattern would be a broad fifty-mile band across the
southern half of the probable area, and if the Shackleton could cover the northern half …

I was lying on my bunk then, drowsy with the heat and sweating. Through the porthole I could see the sea ruffled by the breeze, but it was still from the west and we were going with it so that the ship seemed lifeless, without air. Flies moved lazily and where they touched my skin they stayed until I roused myself to brush them off. It was better when we altered course at four. My cabin was on the starboard side and the breeze came gently in through the open porthole. I was thinking of Ali Raza and those five vedis with their masts stepped. Apart from the storm they would have had a steady following wind. Or had Canning stopped them from sailing? The sun was slipping down the sky now, the cabin a blaze of light. I dressed and went up to the bridge where Fields was lolling in Deacon’s chair, the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth stained a damp brown. Nothing had happened, nothing had been sighted, but visibility was improving now, the sea a deeper blue stretching out in a great circle to the hard line of the horizon.

Tea came and Fields stirred from his lethargy. “How long’re we going on like this? It seems bloody years since we saw a real port.” I took my tea out on to the starboard bridge wing. It was cooler there and I stayed watching as the sun sank, flattening its lower rim against the horizon and then dropping quickly. The whole world was suddenly ablaze, the mackerel sky overhead flaming to a surrealist pattern. I went into the wheelhouse to put my cup down and at that moment the masthead lookout called. But all he had seen was a whale. A whale spouting, he said; but he wasn’t very sure. It had been a long way away on the port bow. We searched through the glasses but could see nothing; the sky was fading, the surface of the sea darkening. Night was falling and the echo-sounder showed no trace. The second officer came up to relieve Fields and I left them talking together by the open bridge wing door and went to my cabin.

I had just stretched myself out on my bunk with a paperback
I had borrowed from Weston when the faint sound of the telegraph brought me to my feet. The beat of the engines died away as I slipped into my sandals and hurried back to the wheelhouse. The lights had been switched on and outside the sea was dark. Fields and Taylor were standing staring at the echo-sounder. The trace showed eighty-two fathoms. It had picked up bottom at 200 and had come down with a rush, in a matter of five or ten minutes.

Nobody spoke. The echo-sounder held us riveted. Eighty. Seventy-five. Seventy-three. The ship was losing way, the fall in depth slowing down. There seemed no other sound in the wheelhouse as the three of us stood and stared. And then suddenly the depths were increasing. Seventy-five again. Seventy-seven. Seventy-eight.

A smell of stale sweat and Deacon was there, his cheap, steel-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, his heavy face thrust forward as he stared at the trace. And then his voice, solid, decisive: “Slow ahead. And hold your course—due south.” He stood, his feet slightly apart, his head thrust forward, watching as the beat of the engines responded to the call of the telegraph. The trace changed slowly, the depths gradually increasing. At two hundred fathoms he ordered full starboard wheel. There were stars now and we could see the ship’s bows swinging. He swung her through 180° and at slow ahead took her back over the same track, watching as the trace repeated itself. At 200 fathoms he ordered the engines stopped.

“What’s up? What’re you doing?” Fields’s voice was sharp with an edge of panic to it. “We can’t stop here.”

“We’ll have to.” Deacon let his arm rest for a moment on the thin shoulders. “You’ve found bottom. That’s the main thing. Whatever it is—shoal or island—we’re all right here.” A quick pat and he let his hand drop, turning away to the chart table. Fields followed him, the sweat still shining on his face, but eager to please now. He was telling him about the lookout sighting a whale. Deacon sent for the man, but the Chinese seaman couldn’t tell us any more than he’d called down to us at the time. He hadn’t seen the whale
—just a disturbance in the sea, something that looked like a whale venting. “Off the port bow, eh?” Deacon stared at the trace he’d ripped from the depth indicator. I knew what he was thinking. If it wasn’t a whale, if it was the venting of gases … “Get out!” he bellowed irritably and he shook his head, staring down at the chart. But the chart didn’t help. There wasn’t a single line of soundings within a hundred miles of us. He got his sextant out of its box and for the next half-hour he was engrossed in taking star sights and working out our position. Finally he marked it in on the chart.

“Sights every two hours and maintain depth at two hundred fathoms. What’s the reading now?” he asked Fields. It had fallen to one-nine-three and he ordered slow ahead with the ship’s bows pointing west until we’d made good the drift of the current and the echo-sounder was showing 200 fathoms again. He left the wheelhouse then. When he came back he had a fresh bottle of whisky tucked under his arm and the tooth glass from his cabin. Automatically he took in the details of the bridge the way a man does when he comes on watch. He nodded to himself, his great dome glinting in the light. Then he settled himself in his chair. He had swung it round so that it faced the echo-sounder and now he reached for the bottle which he had placed carefully on the deck, peering up at me at the same time over the rim of his glasses. “Going to be a long night,” he growled and his hands were trembling slightly as he slopped whisky into the glass. They had been perfectly steady when he had been taking his star sights.

I stayed with him most of the night and by dawn he had finished the bottle. But though he cat-napped he never had to be roused to take his sights and always seemed to know when we had drifted out of position and the depth under our keel was decreasing. He didn’t talk much, though in the early hours, when he had drunk most of the whisky, he told me a bit about his early life. He had been to a private school for a time, but then his father, who had been a draper in Camden Town, had gone bankrupt and he had
had to start earning a living. He was older than I had expected, for that had been during the First World War and after his father had been killed at Passchendaele he had enlisted and had been with Ironside’s troops fighting in Russia. And after that he’d bummed his way around the world, finishing up in Karachi where he had signed on as cook on an old tramp steamer. How he’d come to be first officer on the
Lammermuir
when my father died he didn’t say, for by then he had withdrawn again into his shell. Once I woke to hear him gasping, his big hands clutching at his stomach. But whatever it was it seemed to pass for I heard the clink of the bottle as I dozed off again. He took sights again at four and after that he didn’t bother any more, leaving it to Fields, whose watch it was, to keep the ship on the 200-fathom mark. Even when dawn came he didn’t stir.

I was out on the bridge wing then, watching as the light strengthened in the east. But there was nothing there—no island, no sign of a reef, nothing; just the sea with a westerly breeze chasing little waves across the swell. It wasn’t until after breakfast that Deacon took over and we got under way, proceeding south to the point of least depth, and then, with the echo-sounder reading less than eighty fathoms, heading east and feeling our way. Almost immediately the foremast lookout called that there were shoals ahead. The depth was then sixty fathoms, decreasing rapidly. The engines were stopped and before the way was off the ship we could see the changed colour of the sea from the bridge. From blue it changed to green and beyond that to a lighter green that was almost white in the sunlight.

“Full astern!” The screw thrashed and the old ship juddered as Deacon turned her round and headed back to the west, the depth increasing rapidly until it was too deep for us to record. We swung north then on to 012°. The time was ten-seventeen. Reece had steamed south from the island on a course of 192° for just over four hours before his ship had struck the shoals. Assuming that we had been
on the western edge of the same shoals we could expect to sight the island about one o’clock.

But one o’clock came and one-thirty and still nothing ahead of us but the thin line of the horizon blurred with heat haze. A hundred miles to the north of us the Shackleton was flying her own search pattern. Weston had been in wireless contact with Landor since nine-thirty, but Deacon had obstinately refused to let him call the plane south to search our area. He hadn’t come all this way, he said, to have the bloody R.A.F. locate the island. Three years in a Jap prison camp had bitten deep. He couldn’t forgive the Services for letting Singapore be over-run, for the shambles of the evacuation. He hated the lot of them.

At one-forty-five there was still no sign of the island. For the Shackleton time and fuel were both running out, and when I told Deacon I was going to call the plane south he didn’t argue. “Just as you like,” he said, staring at me morosely. I don’t think he understood the limitations of an aircraft any more than he understood the equipment that made the Shackleton such a formidable search weapon.

The aircraft had been working steadily south and it was now less than sixty miles away. I lit a cigarette whilst Weston fiddled with his controls and suddenly Landor’s voice came in very clear. I gave him our position and also the position of the shoal and suggested he fly a pattern to the east and west of both positions. “Roger. But we’ll only be able to stay about half an hour in your area.” There was a short pause and then he added, “We already have you in radar sight. Bearing one-six-three, fifty-five miles. Be with you inside of twenty minutes.”