When it struck, tragedy hit below the belt, the victim of its malice unforeseen. Had I learned, that sad morning two days out of Port Said, that after a lonely watch in his stuffy radio-room Sparks had thrown himself over Antigone’s side, I should not have been surprised. Nor would some extravagant story about Embleton have taken me unawares, for he was said to be suffering some of the milder symptoms of alchoholic withdrawal. Even had the Mate fallen victim to some calenture, I should have felt a certain prescience, for no man could remain immune to the corrosion of the sea-life, no matter how true the steel of his character. But to learn of the death of China Dick seemed somehow monstrously unjust.
He had been within months of retirement and those glimpses of a humanity beneath the tough, uncompromising facade reminded us that he had a wife and daughter at home, that he was a family man like many of the ship’s company. Though he maintained a low profile throughout the voyage, we had never doubted who had been Master of the Antigone or that, whatever dedication the Mate and the Bosun, The Chief Engineer and the Purser and all the rest of us put into the voyage, its success or failure would be judged an achievement of Richard Richards alone. Had Bob and I brought back the motor boat holed on the coral of Bohihan, it would have been China Dick whose name would have been associated with the incident.
‘If you do something brilliant,’ the Mate had said to me one night when in the last hour of the watch we were discussing the bubble reputation, ‘people will talk about it for a week. If you make a monumental cock-up, they will talk about it for years.’
It was a good aphorism for a Master’s responsibilities.
He had died of a heart-attack shortly after dressing that morning, discovered by Mike as he went to make his daily report that the chronometers had been wound. That day the ship was dreary under a mood of gloom; not grief, that was too personal a thing and no one truly mourned him, but a melancholy reflection upon our own transient nature.
The Mate assumed command and we shifted watches, Mike taking the four-to-eight with the Senior Midshipman. I changed, once again, to the eight-to-twelve. Captain Richards stiffened in his bunk, his corpse dressed by the Doctor as telegrams winged back and forth. The Mate was confirmed in temporary command and China Dick’s widow requested that, in accordance with his wishes, he be buried at sea. The Bosun and Lamptrimmer set about sewing him into his shroud while a Midshipman was sent aft to lower the ensign to half-mast.
Shortly after dawn the next morning, irrespective of our watches, the entire ship’s company turned out of their bunks and mustered in silence abreast Number Three hatch. Unbidden, we had all dressed in our best rig; the deck and engineer officers in their dark, gold-braided reefers, the seamen in scrubbed dungarees, the Chinese greasers in immaculate boiler suits, the stewards in their black trousers and white patrol jackets, and the two cooks in their tall hats, white jackets, aprons and checked trousers.
Her engines stopped, Antigone rolled gently in the swell. Disturbed by the strange silence a few passengers appeared above us at the promenade-deck rail. Two women wept discreetly while the daughter of the Foreign Office official cried unashamedly, for China Dick had made a fuss of her, seeing in her, perhaps, something of his own daughter whose childhood he had mostly missed.
We stood round a wooden platform knocked up by Chippy and waited for the burial party, whose appearance startled the passengers. They brought China Dick down from the boat-deck, rigid in his canvas shroud, splinted with steel bars from the engine room. The Bosun and Lamptrimmer struggled with the awkward weight of him and others helped them as they reached the foot of the promenade-deck ladder. The Doctor and the Mate brought up the rear of the cortège, the Mate carrying the Book of Common Prayer, his finger held between the pages as a book-mark. The cover was embossed with the ship’s name and the date 1891, that of the first Antigone belonging to Alfred Holt’s Blue Funnel Line.
They slid China Dick onto the platform and we removed our hats. A low murmur from the Chinese died away as the Mate coughed for silence.
‘I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord…’ We bowed our heads, staring at the red ensign laid over the canvas bundle, its bunting just lifting in the wind that moaned softly in the rigging.
‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out…’
He wasn’t a bad old bastard, you could almost hear men thinking, his very aloofness a sign of the confidence he felt in his officers, for all their ineptitude in grounding a boat on Honeymoon Island. I recalled the anger I had felt when he admonished me for taking a lunar sight – and regretted it, for he had worn the pink and silver ribbon of the MBE, awarded him as a young second mate for bringing in the torpedoed Glencoe after she had been abandoned in convoy during the dark days of 1942. No, he wasn’t a bad old bastard at all.
‘We therefore commit his body to the deep…’
Bosun and Lamptrimmer lifted the platform, their fingers retaining the hoist of the ensign. There was a slither and in the brief hiatus preceding the splash, a sudden crackling sputter of exploding firecrackers filled the air. Driving off malignant devils, the Chinese paid China Dick their own respects.
‘Amen.’
We chorused our amens and they were echoed from the gallery of the promenade deck. Putting on our hats we turned away from the rail. The Mate looked up at Mike, alone on the port bridge-wing. There was a jingle of telegraphs, answered by the duty engineer. Antigone’s engines rumbled into life with a hiss of air and we gathered way again. Already the rings marking the splash of the burial were dispersed by the wind.
‘Away aft and hoist the ensign close-up,’ the Mate ordered the Junior Midshipman.
Somewhere far below and astern of us, China Dick’s body bumped on the sea-bed, disturbing the ooze, then came slowly to rest.
There was a brightening of the weather as we ploughed westward. Suddenly, on the forenoon following, within an hour the ship’s upper-works were dark with the flutter of roosting migrant birds, tired after their long arid transit of the Sahara. There were hundreds of them, swallows, martins and warblers; and with them a sleek pair of raptors, lanner falcons from North Africa living on easy pickings. Each of the two falcons took a mast-table for their killing field and stained the deck below with guano and pellets, staking out a section of the ship for their individual territory.
We carried the birds steadily west during the day, then in the late afternoon they took off, lifting in clouds and circling the ship. By sunset they had all gone, even the lanners, true corsairs returning to the Barbary coast.
The rearrangement of the watches and the assumption of command by the Mate introduced a note of unfamiliarity into our routine. It was typical of him that although he relinquished the formalities of his former rank, he still oversaw the final preparations of the ship for her docking. It was assumed that all Blue Funnel liners berthed in Liverpool in the smartest condition. Open to inspection by the Marine Superintendent or even one of the Company’s Managers, it was a point of honour for Master, Mate, Bosun and all of us, that our appearance should be a credit to Blue Funnel and a reflection on ourselves. Similarly, the Chief Engineer and Willie Buchan and his staff strove to raise the condition of the engine room to the same pitch of efficiency.
With great effort the cattle-dung had been scoured from Antigone’s well-decks; the final touches were being put to her paintwork, limned-in tiddley-work with fine brushes. Brass was burnished to a gleaming finish by the Midshipmen, and the sailors barbarised the decks to a whiteness that would have done credit to a hospital ward. New derrick guys were rove off and new canvas boat covers spread over the lifeboats. Below, the last regular maintenance was completed and boxed up, the casings cleaned and the cream and silver paint touched up. Here and there an instruction plate was high-lit in red gloss, and copper pipes were polished; the final black paint was added to ladders and the bare steel hand-rails given a coat of fine oil so that no trace of rust was visible. Store-rooms were cleaned out, linen prepared for the laundry and the already immaculate galley received a spring-clean in honour of the occasion, so that Antigone rushed homeward like a great yacht.
Every four hours now, at the change of each watch, the Midshipmen raised the thermometers chained in the palm oil tanks and logged their readings as the heat in the steam-coils brought the thick liquid slowly up to discharge temperature. Such were the cosmetic properties of this oil that they had the softest, cleanest hands of anyone on the ship.
‘Hands like poofters,’ remarked the sailors good-naturedly as they walked past the toiling middies.
‘Sod off.’
‘Oooo, don’t talk like officers, do they, Spike?’
‘Nope. Must be too much working wid us, Charlie.’
‘You could tell dey was sailors by the semen on dere boots.’
‘Sod off’
The mood of crude and brittle levity increased as we approached Gibraltar. Passing the Rock we hoisted the four-flag signal that denominated the Antigone of Liverpool, and called up the Lloyd’s Signal Station with the aldis lamp. The news of our transit of the Strait would appear in Lloyd’s List the following morning.
But the fragility of our gaiety was proved next morning, for the Atlantic greeted us with a gale, a west-north-westerly gale that butted us on the nose as we stretched out for Cape St Vincent. Cold, damp weather drove down upon us, sending us to our cabins and interrupting the final flourishes of decoration about the ship. It increased in fury during the grey day so that we laboured, pitching in the sea, our well-decks awash with green water and the tarpaulins shiny under the constant deluge. White specks crept across the burnished brass and a rime of salt encrusted the superstructure.
‘Bloody weather,’ swore the Bosun, shaking his head in disbelief at his ill-fortune.
Off Cape St Vincent we swung north, and the wind veered to head us, keeping us pitching and working as Antigone thrust the great seas aside, seemingly eager to sniff the polluted air of the Mersey. At eight o’clock that night I took over from a morose Mike, for whom every second of delay was a betrayal of fate. Miles to the eastward the lights of Lisbon threw a glow on the scudding clouds and on the radar screen the bearing cursor and range marker intersected over the glowing cluster that marked the Berlings.
‘She’s all yours…’
Out on the bridge-wing the wind screamed and I lifted the glasses to watch a smaller ship than ourselves pitching madly in the darkness. I swept the horizon, then raked it again with my eyes elevated a few degrees above it, a trick for picking up pin-points of light by avoiding focusing on the retina’s over-worked blind-spot. Apart from our bucking neighbour there was nothing else about. Then something caught my eye, something nearer, a flicker of black, like a great bat wing sweeping across the ship. For a second I thought I was imagining things, then I saw an inexplicable movement on the well-deck, a second flutter of something huge, suddenly flung up against the sky and whipped to leeward with an ominous, dull crack. Thoroughly alarmed I dashed into the wheelhouse and lifted the aldis lamp from its cradle. The narrow beam stabbed the darkness and the lookout called down from the monkey island above, ‘Looked like a tarp, Fourth…’
‘Bloody hell!’
Dropping the lamp beam I caught the edge of the hatch coaming with it at Number Two. Bare steel reflected the lamp-light: the hatch tarpaulins had gone. A sea reared up cascaded over the rail, swirling about the hatch and pouring off the after end of the well-deck as Antigone lifted.
I ran back into the wheelhouse and seized the telegraph, rang Stand-by and altered course, slowing the ship and heaving her to, head to sea. Quite suddenly the Mate was beside me, now awesomely transformed to the Old Man.
‘What’s the matter, Laddie?’
‘I’m not sure, sir, but I think the tarps are off Number Two.’
‘Are they, by God…’ he turned as Mike too came back on the bridge. ‘It looks as if the tarps might have come off Number Two,’ he said. ‘Go down and have a look.’
‘How the hell…?’ Mike began, but the Old Man cut him short.
‘Never mind how! Get cracking!’
I told him the course I had steadied on. ‘Three-one-oh, sir, and half speed.’
‘Very well.’ He jangled the telegraphs and reduced to slow ahead. ‘Go and give him a hand. Take the middy with you.’
The Midshipman had completed writing up the engine movements in the record book. We grabbed torches and left the bridge.
‘Get your seaboots and an oily on as quick as you can. I’ll see you by the starboard saloon door in two minutes.’
He ran off and I went and took my own advice. Two minutes later we emerged into the centre-castle. Mike was just in front of us. Round the corner of the superstructure we met the full fury of the wind and bent, crouching forward, loping into the lee of the forward contactor house and edging round it to try and assess the extent of our loss. If the tarpaulin was gone there was nothing to stop the sea from pouring into Number Two hold through the interstices between the hatch boards and the beams. Enough sea could start to flood the ship, even float off the hatchboards. That was an extreme possibility; it would be bad enough if water got down to spoil the cargo.
Forward of the contactor house we were completely exposed, though as the ship rose on the seas we felt the shelter of the distant forecastle. Nevertheless our oil-skin coats tore at us and it was an effort to make forward progress. The after end of the well-deck, at the foot of the ladders, was waist deep in water. Mike hesitated, playing his torch beam on the bare boards of the hatch. Part of the tarpaulin remained, about a third had been lifted and torn off by the strength of the wind, shredded past the locking bars laid over the hatch as an added precautionary measure. Simultaneously, Mike and I sensed there was something wrong, illogically wrong. Between us the Midshipman stared, open-mouthed.
‘Look sir!’ he played his torch beam along the exposed and gleaming edge of the coaming, where the derrick runners of our cargo gear had polished and scored it. The weather edge of the tarpaulin was still secured tightly by the wedges. The canvas showed no signs of strain, no fraying as of natural rupture. Its edge was sharp.
‘It’s been cut!’
The thought and its implications struck us instantly. Mike rounded on the Midshipman. ‘Go and tell the Old Man some bastard’s cut the tarpaulins.’ Then he turned to me. ‘I’m going to get the Bosun and the Crowd…’ he paused a minute and I sensed the conflicting thoughts racing in his brain. ‘I don’t believe this is true,’ he said, and blown to leeward by his billowing oilskin he disappeared round the corner of the contactor house. I stood for a moment, alone. Antigone rose and fell, her flared bow protecting her suddenly vulnerable hold. We would be all right; we would get another set of tarpaulins over in an hour or so. It would be difficult with the wind blowing; perhaps if the Old Man turned the ship down wind it might make things easier…
But the Old Man had different thoughts, thoughts that proved him wiser than I. Coming round the contactor house I heard him bellowing a summons back to the bridge. I scrambled back up there.
‘Is it true?’ he shouted at me.
‘That it’s been cut? Yes, it looks like it.’
He swore, itching to be active and irked by the restrictions of his new rank.
‘The Second Mate’s turning out the Crowd, sir… perhaps if we get the ship before the wind…’
‘Eh? What’s that? Run before it? Not bloody likely. She’ll scend…’ he waved his hand to port where the seas ran huge, ‘lift her stern and bury her bow so that the well-decks fill…’ he left the rest to my imagination and I saw the justice of his assertion. It might be open to debate at the Board of Trade, but not here and not now.
‘They might have trouble with the wind under the tarps,’ he added, ‘but at least the risk of their being washed overboard will be minimal. No, she’s all right as she is…’ And he patted the teak rail, as though Antigone was a favourite horse.
It took an interminable time for Mike to rouse out the hands. Perhaps it was only a few minutes before the dark and shining figures appeared, but it seemed longer. The Midshipman and I had hoisted the two red lights that indicated we were ‘not under command’, warning that other ships could not expect us to take avoiding action. Our neighbour had vanished, but the radar now showed more vessels in the vicinity.
Torchlight flashed momentarily across the wheelhouse windows: Mike was signalling that he was ready.
‘Give ‘em some light down there,’ shouted the Old Man and I flicked the switches. The forepart of the ship was thrown into vivid relief. Figures, leaning against the wind, moved forward. I could see Chippy’s bulk attacking the wedges he had so assiduously driven home, which the unknown saboteur had left in situ. His mate came behind him with a sack, collecting them lest they float away.
‘Shall I go down and lend a hand, sir?’ I too was frustrated by my inaction.
‘No. You take one bridge-wing and the middy the other. Keep an eye on the men. If anyone goes over the side…’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
At either extremity of the ship the Midshipman and I watched the struggle on the forward well-deck. I have no doubt now that the Old Man was right in not turning the ship. The greater buoyancy of the stern, the slow speed of the ship and the period of the waves would probably have inundated the low deck and added the risk of a pooping, but the wind tore at the men below and their exertions were almost proved fruitless. Two new tarpaulins were dragged forward and got down onto the hatch in a bundle. Dragged as far forward as possible they were cautiously unrolled and Chippy, Mike and the Bosun tried to secure the weather edge before exposing the full extent of the canvas rectangles to the grasp of the gale. But the impediment of winch beds, the turbulence created across the irregularities of the deck and the force of the gale which now perversely reached its crescendo, made the task all but impossible. We watched a demonic life of its own seize the heavy canvas, saw it tear itself wilfully from the seamen’s grasp, saw it flog under the lights, dark and shiny from spray, then lift and threaten to blow away.
For a second or two we thought it had gone. But Antigone lifted her bow, throwing the fore-deck into a brief lee. The power of the wind slackened and the canvas flopped, caught by a single corner where Chippy, swearing with the effort, his finger nails torn and bloody, struggled to retain a hold. Men flung themselves bodily onto the thing, as though subduing a monster, and then it was too sodden to lift, and even the gale failed to rend it from them further. Slowly it was dragged once more across the hatch.
But it was too much for the Old Man. He could no longer stand the inactivity; with a shouted ‘The ship’s yours!’ he slid down the starboard bridge ladder and a moment later appeared on the foredeck. Mike was performing prodigies and the intervention of the Old Man, who had again assumed the persona of Antigone’s Mate, would be unwelcome. I could hear him shouting. Snatches of instructions reached me on the bridge.
‘Get some dunnage planks, quick… and some nails… nail the bloody thing down, you’ll never hold it in this wind…’
The glow of the deck lights blinded us on the bridge to events beyond the limits of the deck. A quick look at the radar reassured me that no ships were approaching close, but there was no warning of the height of the sea that now bore down upon us. We dipped into its vanward trough and the sudden drop in the wind roused my instinctive suspicions, taking my attention from the scene below me. The lights on the forecastle samson posts were almost directly into my eyes but then I saw the crest, grey in the gloom, stretching out on either bow, a ninth wave of ninth waves, precipitous and hoary in its advancing slope, up which Antigone began to climb sharply.
‘Hold on!’ I screamed, my voice cracking with alarm. I do not know whether they heard me or whether their own instincts alerted them – the sudden cant of the deck, the variation in the howl of the wind – but there was another danger that transmitted itself to my own brain: Antigone was falling off the wind. The angle of the wave was brushing her aside, her speed, adjusted to a nicety while the wind and sea ran true, was now inadequate to hold her heading before the buffeting she was receiving.
I ran to the telegraph and jangled it to full ahead. Already the auto-pilot, sensing our deviation, was applying helm. Mercifully the engineer below was alert, mercifully Antigone was not sluggish to respond, and she was already turning as the crest burst upon her port bow. But the explosion of white that suddenly flared under the glow of the lights was followed by the boom and shudder of impact and then of solid water, green water, foaming across the rail with a rush that raised my heart-beat in an agony of anxiety. I saw men, black shapes knocked down to heads bobbing with upflung arms, dragged like dolls along the sluiced deck. Antigone rolled, water poured over the side at the break of the centre-castle. I could no longer see anyone, for they were masked by the centre-castle bulwark.
‘Has anyone gone over the side there?’ I shouted to the Midshipman, who was almost overboard himself in his conscientious attempts to keep the party under observation.
‘No… no I don’t think so!’
And then it was over. The passing of the great wave brought us a lull. Men fought their way back onto their feet and then by some corporate effort they were dragging the tarpaulin forward, its mass sagging under the weight of water it contained. A plank or two was swiftly nailed to hold it and then came the regular tonk-tonk of Chippy’s maul as the wedges went home.
I remembered to slow down again, making a mental note to communicate my gratitude to Billy who was on watch below. A figure loomed on the bridge beside me. It was palely pyjamaed and for a split second my over-strained imagination thought it the ghost of China Dick.
‘Everything all right, Fourth Mate?’
‘Oh, hullo Chief. Yes, I think so… a bit of a close shave though…’
‘Is that the Mate down there… I mean the Old Man?’ He nodded through the wheelhouse window to where, in a black huddle, the men were coming up from the well-deck and into the shelter of the centre-castle.
‘Yes.’
‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, can you?’ remarked the Chief Engineer, and I could hear the grin in his voice.
‘Get her back on course, Laddie,’ said the Old Man coming up the bridge ladder. He was soaked from head to foot.
‘You all right?’ asked the Chief.
‘Of course I am,’ replied the Old Man. ‘What are you doing up here?’
‘Keeping an eye on you,’ replied Mr Kennington.
‘I can manage.’ The Old man’s voice came from clenched teeth.
‘You’re bleeding…’
‘It’s nothing…’
The red lights came down and Antigone resumed her passage. We were under command again, heading north with the Berlings dropping astern.
We were conscious of having been lucky. Just how lucky we were not to know until we opened Number Two hatch in Liverpool and broke the bulk of our cargo. Water had got below, finding its way through the cracks between the hatch boards, but it had done no more than wet the outside of sixty or so chests of tea, and the ample dunnage floors we had laid prevented any cargo from spoiling. A prompt pumping of the hold-well had rid the ship of the water as it drained below, and our only casualties were a score of cuts and bruises borne without complaint. A further satisfaction was that the passengers never learned of the incident.
The strip of tarpaulin taken from the coaming showed the sharp edge of a knife slash, and the following forenoon the Old Man tried to establish the identity of the culprit. It was a horrendously serious crime, no less than sabotage, though why it had been committed remained as mysterious as its perpetrator, for no one could be proved to have done it.
Embleton was widely suspected, though he bore cuts and bruises to show he had played his part in redeeming the situation. Popular supposition blamed him and blamed his ignorance, that he did not know the extremity of the danger to which he had exposed us. But nothing was ever proved, for there were no witnesses to an act that spoke of malevolent vandalism rather than conspiracy.
Off Cape Villano the gale blew itself out, leaving a residual swell to harry our crossing of the Bay of Biscay. Before the Spanish coast dropped below the horizon astern we were again invaded by birds. Some fifty Hoopoes came aboard to roost on the derricks, brilliant with chestnut, black and white plumage and Iroquois crests. They vanished as abruptly as they had come and we ploughed doggedly north-north-east towards the chops of the Channel.