Before us lay a nine-day ocean passage of some three-and-a-half thousand miles between Aden and Pulo Penang. Initially we shaped our course obliquely across the Gulf of Aden, raising the grey bluff of Cape Elefante the following day. The Somali coast to the eastwards of this mighty rock hummock was high, a vast upland plateau extending to Cape Guardafui, beyond which lay the Indian Ocean. Refreshingly strong katabatic winds streamed down from the Horn of Africa, relatively cooler air drawn off the land to replace the rising updraughts of the sun-warmed air at sea level.
Cape Guardafui, the Cape of Spices of the ancients, was marked by a lighthouse, extinguished on that first night-watch as I stood the eight-to-twelve with the young Midshipman.
‘I wonder if they’ve been eaten,’ I remarked, giving up the search and putting my binoculars into the bridge box.
‘What?’ asked the Midshipman incredulously.
‘Eaten,’ I repeated. ‘Soon after the Italians built the thing, native tribesmen attacked it and were supposed to have eaten the keepers.’
‘Bloody hell.’
I went into the chart-room, where the high cliffs of the Cape glowed hard-edged on the radar-screen, and fixed our position, recording the fact on the slate and adding the symbol <R> alongside to indicate a radar-derived position. After checking the positions of three other ships within ten miles I returned to the Midshipman and began my lectures.
‘Astronomical navigation,’ I began bravely, ‘is based on the pre-Galilean misconception that the earth is the centre of the universe.’ I could almost hear his brain coping with the acceptance of this great lie as we leaned on the rail and stared at the horizon. Above our heads the vault of the sky was a mass of stars, a perfect night for the elucidation of the great nautical mysteries.
‘As you can see, all the heavenly bodies – sun, moon and stars – can easily be imagined as moving relatively on the inside of a vast sphere, which we call the celestial sphere. Okay?’
‘So far, sir.’ I sensed a wariness that it was not all going to be so easy.
‘Good. Now just as our position on the surface of the earth is located by latitude and longitude, so it may be on the celestial sphere. Up there!’ I pointed dramatically overhead. ‘It’s called our Zenith, and is point Z of the PZX triangle.’ I could see the starlit frown smooth with the realisation that the thing had no visible existence.
‘And if we extend the earth’s axis through the poles to a point above them, then we have the P of our triangle. Point X is the sun or star which we observe with sextant and chronometer, and the solution of one or more of the component parts of the PZX triangle helps us to determine our position.’
My arm swept across the great blackboard of the sky from our zenith to a point close to Polaris and out towards the great coruscating glow of Canopus low on the southern horizon, where the refraction of low altitude was producing spectacular flashes of blue and red from its ice-water centre.
‘But, just as a single line of bearing, such as that radar bearing I took off Cape Guardafui, will not give you an exact position unless crossed with another piece of information such as a second bearing or, in the case we have just taken, the distance off the Cape by radar, so a single observation of a star will not give you a position.’
‘Then how do we…? I mean you get one at noon, don’t you?’
‘Ah. Good question. That is a piece of legerdemain, a nautical conceit which we can look at later, but it is conditional upon a good observation of our longitude early in the morning. We make an allowance for the run between the morning longitude and the noon latitude and, hey presto! A noon position to use for calculating the day’s run to keep the passengers happy. It’s not perfect, but substantially accurate. The best fix is obtained by stellar observations at twilight…’
‘When you shoot more than one star at the same time?’ He was a quick-witted lad; I would have to watch myself.
‘Except that we “observe”; “shooting” things is strictly for Hollywood.’
‘Oh.’
‘Well, that’s enough for tonight. It’s nearly one-bell. Nip down and call the next watch.’
He left me alone for a few minutes. Ahead the pale half-moon of the forecastle bulwarks showed the dark shape of the lookout pacing his lonely grating in the very eyes of the ship. Beyond, the horizon stretched away dark and empty now. I went into that chart-room to complete writing up the log-slate.
‘Okay dere, Fourth, I got de tea.’ Wakelin, the second man in my watch, brought the pot of tea onto the bridge. He had stood the first two hours of the eight-to-twelve as look-out, the second two hours in the seamen’s mess on stand-by.
‘Thanks. Nip down and see if the Middy’s put the Third Mate on the shake.’
‘Okey-doke.’
After the change of watch I came off the bridge to make my round, a quick, torch-lit tour of the upper decks to see that all was well, reporting the fact from the gyro-room where our Sperry master gyrocompass hummed and from which we regularly verified the readings of the bridge repeaters. I made my way back to the boat-deck, exchanging a few words with a passing engineer and avoiding the passengers, still revelling at the bar. I was pleasantly sleepy and almost bumped into Mrs Saddler leaning alone on the promenade-deck rail.
‘Hullo,’ she said coolly, turning and leaning back, her elbows on the rail. She wore a thin white crepe dress with a stole of the same material, caught on her shoulder with a brooch. The noise of male laughter came through the jalousies of the adjacent Chief Engineer’s cabin.
‘Oh, hullo.’ I paused briefly as she smiled.
‘They’re all drinking,’ she said in answer to my unasked question. ‘D’you have a cigarette? I don’t like to go back and disturb them.’
I fished the packet from my breast pocket and a lock of her hair brushed my hand as she bent over the lighter flame. She caught my eyes on her cleavage as she smiled her thanks and her perfume completed my confusion. She turned back to the rail and stared out over the sea while, I, hesitating, lit a cigarette and leaned beside her. Beneath us the wake rushed, hissing past.
‘I’m sorry if I embarrassed you all the other day, when we saw those dolphins.’
‘Oh.’ I recalled the incident. ‘Were we embarrassed?’
‘Well, I said they were beautiful. I suppose it was a silly thing to say to a lot of men.’
‘Why? We’re not all boors.’ I thought of the Mate and the sensitive person beneath the professional carapace. ‘Just a bit different, I suppose.’
‘I suppose so.’
I could not tell her that her physical presence aroused us; that every day the voyage lasted she became increasingly desirable. I felt her elbow brush mine. Or could I?
‘And by drawing attention to the beauty of the dolphins, you naturally drew attention to yourself.’
She remained staring at the horizon. ‘That’s rather a bold speech.’
‘Not intended to offend.’ I straightened up as if to go, uncertain if a note of coldness had entered her voice, but she turned and looked at me.
‘It didn’t,’ she replied reassuringly. ‘You’re just going on watch, are you?’
‘I’ve just come off. It’s past midnight…’
Guffaws of laughter came from behind the jalousies and I recognised her husband’s nasal accent.
‘So you’re off to bed.’ She smiled again and I lingered, finishing my cigarette. ‘Don’t you get fed up with this?’ She motioned her head at the surrounding darkness, and I was leaning beside her again, aware that I was being seduced.
‘No…’
I felt her fingers cool on my arm. ‘Don’t you miss…’ The dark eyebrows arched and the bare shoulders lifted in a gesture of unmistakable suggestion. I had begun to turn when she suddenly pointed: ‘Oh, look!’
Half-relieved, half-regretful, I did as I was bid. It was as though the sea had caught fire. The breaking bubbles of the bow-waves, the hissing rim of foam that tumbled outwards from Antigone’s bow were suddenly luminous. And beyond the disturbance of the ship’s advancing hull it was as if every breaking wave was visible for miles.
‘It’s magical… what is it?’ Mrs Saddler had straightened up, her eyes as wide as a child’s, her lips slightly parted.
‘It’s called a milk-sea, caused by phosphorescence due to the presence of plankton.’ I paused, unwilling to bore.
‘Go on’ she prompted, never taking her eyes from the brilliantly luminous surface of the ocean.
‘Well, it could be a protozoan called Noctiluca, or there’s a luminous shrimp called, I think, something like Meganictyphanes…’
‘But it’s so… so eerie’ she broke in, ‘almost unbelievable.’ She shivered slightly and I could see goose-pimples raised on the bare skin of her shoulders.
‘It could also be sinister.’
‘What do you mean?’ She asked, turning with a look of alarm on her face.
‘There’s a little plant, a dinoflagellate, I can’t remember its name, which contains a terrible poison that makes shell-fish toxic during certain seasons; the stuff reacts on the nervous-system like strychnine.’
‘Oh, how horrible. I really won’t eat lobsters when there’s an R in the month.’
‘Now look!’ I said, pointing. It seemed that among the random glowing of the tumbling water a molten stream was running, undulating through the depths. Following this thick line of luminiscence were faster, thinner trails, darting in and out, harrying the steady flow of the stream into sudden swirls of disturbance; fiery lines that wove a pattern of depredation and then rose upwards, faster and faster until, right beside our rushing hull, the dolphins surfaced for air, gasping as they breached, ignoring us in the wild ecstasy of the hunt as they savaged the shoal of fish. We watched for several minutes, the answer to her question about boredom spectacularly answered for me.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
I turned. Captain Richards stood in the adjacent doorway, flanked by the Chief, the Mate and Mr Saddler. I realised my hand was on Mrs Saddler’s arm, put there in my eagerness to point out the dolphins.
‘He was showing me the phosphorescence, Captain. It’s absolutely beautiful. Look, Darling,’ she stepped forward and drew her husband out from behind China Dick, who grunted and never took his baleful eye from me.
‘Time you were turned in, Mister.’
The Indian Ocean is dominated by the sub-continent in more than name alone. Although it merges imperceptibly into the Southern Ocean where the westerly winds of the Roaring Forties blow interminably round the globe, and although it possesses the characteristic Trade Wind belt of the southern hemisphere in conformity with the global pattern of oceanic winds, its northern wind system is influenced by the presence of Asia and the salient of India.
During the hot summer months, between May and October, rising air over the land draws in warm damp air from the ocean to cause the South-West Monsoon, the rainy season for India and a period of thick, boisterous weather in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. We, however, were making our passage in the fall of the northern year, when the low pressure over the ocean and the higher pressure over India forced the air south-westwards again. It was a lighter wind, this North-East Monsoon, with fine, clear weather.
The morning following my encounter with Mrs Saddler the summits of the mountains of Socotra were just visible to the far north. Curiosity about this remote island was swiftly quelled by the information in the Admiralty Sailing Directions for the Arabian Sea. The island was inhabited by ‘unfriendly’ persons who had attacked watering parties from naval survey ships. Unlike those of the Pacific, the islands of the Indian Ocean were then largely unexploited. The Maldives, the Laccadives, the Andaman and Nicobar archipelagoes were inaccessible to tourists, only visited by seamen and the occasional intrepid traveller. As we steamed east-south-east, heading for that gap in the island chain west of India known as the Eight Degree Channel, the fresh north-easterly wind was on the port bow, curling the sea into a vista of white-caps beneath a sky of blue dotted with the puff-balls of fair-weather cumulus. Flying fish darted from our passage, sometimes pursued by an albacore or the leaping shapes of long-beaked dolphins. These, of the genus Stenella and notoriously difficult to identify specifically, would rush in from our beam to bow-ride under our forecastle, sensing the point of equilibrium where the forward thrust of Antigone’s hull balanced the drag on their bodies. For this purpose they were able to alter their physical shape, enabling several of these beautiful creatures to bow-ride together. Capable of speeds well in excess of twenty-knots, they could sometimes be seen accelerating alongside in spectacular fashion, but to distinguish a bottle-nose, a bridled, a common or a spotted dolphin from the other members of their genus was almost impossible, for their leaping aerobatics were unpredictable and they always foiled the most dedicated photographers waiting to record their grace and agility.
Occasionally a whale spouted, though too distant to identify, and a few pelagic birds, boobies and the like, wheeled about the ship. After taking my morning sight for longitude seemed an appropriate time to hector my young watch-mate and we settled down on the starboard bridge-wing, eyes mechanically scanning the horizon ahead. Below, Captain Richards, formidable in white shirt and starched white shorts, led the senior officers on their daily rounds.
‘We talked last night about the PZX triangle…’
I led him into the complexities of spherical trigonometry where both sides and angles are expressed in degrees, and Euclidean ideas about plane triangles can be forgotten. We discussed the component parts of the PZX triangle, talked of hour angles, polar and zenith distances, co-latitudes, azimuths and the broad theory of position circles.
As I talked I watched Mrs Saddler on the forward well-deck climb the short ladder and poise herself to dive into the pool. She wore a one-piece bathing suit of black and her figure was stockily handsome. She rolled over at the far end and gave me a playful little wave. Beside me the Midshipman waved back.
‘D’you understand what I’ve been saying?’ I asked sharply.
‘Er, yes. I think so, sir.’
‘Good.’
Below us there was a loud grating noise as of someone clearing his throat. After completing his rounds, China Dick was taking his morning walk across the deck immediately below us. I wondered if he too had waved at that voluptuous figure.
‘Okay, so you know the theory. The problem is how do we turn this into practical use. After all, we’re on the bridge of a ship, not at the centre of the earth. When we use a sextant to observe a heavenly body…’
‘Talking of heavenly bodies…’
Mike joined us, having just completed his morning sight. He stared down at Mrs Saddler swimming vigorously up and down the short length of the pool and turning with a swirl of exposed buttocks, then he too spun round and abruptly left us. A few minutes later his lithe form had joined her.
‘But these calculations, sir, how do you do them?’
‘Eh?’ The question brought me back to the present. ‘Oh, they’re based on something called the haversine formula, proof of which is deeply boring and not a patch on watching the buoyancy of Mrs Saddler’s tits. Did you know women stay afloat longer than men? Anyway, you need to understand something called the Reduction of Altitudes first, and we’ll save that for this evening. It’s time you did an hour on the wheel.’
My watch below in the afternoon took in a swim, but there was no sign of Mrs Saddler, though I saw her briefly at boat drill. We were in the throes of this Friday ritual, held at 1615 ship’s time, when Menestheus passed us, homeward bound. The bright spots of orange dotting her boat deck showed she too was performing this rite and we dipped our ensigns in mutual salute before dragging fire hoses along the decks and squirting fire-extinguishers over the side in order, the Senior Midshipman claimed, that he could fill them up again. The Mate joined us briefly during the evening watch. I did not think he enjoyed the hearty drinking in the Chief Engineer’s cabin.
‘Ah, Laddie,’ he said, stretching himself before leaning beside me on the rail while the Midshipman sensibly beat a hasty retreat to the other wing, “there is no entrance fee to the starlit hall of the night.”
It was years later that I discovered the source of that quotation and odd that it stuck. Perhaps it echoed my own pre-Galilean assertions of the previous evening, imposing comprehensible limits on the infinity of the sky. I do not think the Mate saw this in his repetition of Axel Munthe’s words, but his next remark suggested that he might have.
‘I always think the tropical sky offers a paradox.’ He paused and then resumed, ‘you either feel incredibly insignificant when contemplating it, or immensely privileged to be here, aboard this steel speck on the ocean.’ And then, almost without drawing breath, he added, ‘you be careful…’
‘What about?’ But I sensed it coming.
‘China Dick doesna like his officers misbehaving.’
‘Mrs Saddler?’ I was incredulous.
‘Aye.’
‘But…’
‘She was on the bridge at midnight, throwing snowballs at the moon,’ he muttered, ‘She said “I’ve never had it,” but she spoke too bluidy soon…’
I thought better of further reply. The doggerel and the euphemism ‘misbehaving’ belied the seriousness of his warning. Passengers were verboten and the Mate was a bachelor; perhaps he had a better right to contemplate adultery than I.
‘Droit de seigneur,’ I muttered resentfully at his retreating figure. He paused at the top of the ladder.
‘There’s a light coming up astern,’ he said. ‘Probably the Ashcan…’
The Mate proved right. It took her all the next day to overtake, but the Ascanius had the advantage of a fraction of a knot over Antigone. Her proximity provoked messages by aldis lamp, signal flags and radio telephone, mostly of a facetious nature and, as the day wore on, pretty thin on wit. During the afternoon I watched her occasionally from the lifeboats where, with the assistance of two Midshipmen, I was checking the stores, the barley sugar, biscuit, water and condensed milk that would sustain us if disaster struck. Mild fantasies of being alone, adrift with Mrs Saddler, played upon my imagination. As I turned over the watch at midnight, Ascanius could still be seen, a faint glimmer on the horizon ahead.
Although I followed the same itinerary on my rounds and the laughter from the Chief’s cabin betrayed the establishment of a ‘school’, there was no lonely figure on the promenade deck nor, as I half-dared to hope, on the shadowy boat-deck.
‘Looking for somebody?’
Sparks was locking up the radio room, his statutory watch finished.
‘No,’ I lied, adding defensively, ‘fancy a beer before turning in?’
We sat in my cabin and I sensed his loneliness. Younger than the Senior Midshipman, he was denied the rough bear-pit atmosphere of the half-deck, separated by convention, pride and unfamiliarity.
‘How are you liking it so far?’
‘Great,’ he answered insincerely. ‘I’ve been talking to Mauritius tonight, as well as the Ascanius.’
‘I expect you miss your girl-friend, don’t you?’ My mind was running along a predictable track of sexual deprivation.
‘Yes. We’ve been going together for over two years.’
Such fidelity was quite unknown to me and made his presence on board the more inexplicable.
‘What made you come to sea, then?’
It was obvious he had no answer. He was too young to be one of those who had chosen the Merchant Navy in preference to National Service in the armed forces.
‘My uncle was Chief Engineer with Ellerman’s.’
‘Where d’you come from?’
‘The Wirral – Bebington actually.’
With such a background, the Merchant Navy would have seemed so obvious an option, like the mines to a lad in the Rhondda; perhaps the only option.
‘Well, cheer up. You’ll enjoy it when we get to the coast. Sparks is usually the only one of us to get any decent shore-leave. Here, have another beer.’
He seized it with the avidity of an incipient alcoholic and I realised that here was a family man treading the knife edge of self-destruction. He achieved a curious kind of vicarious authority the following forenoon, ringing the bridge and speaking in a tone pregnant with self-importance. I sent the Midshipman down to collect the message and, having read it, despatched him at once to Captain Richards.
Below, in the pool, Mike and Mrs Saddler waved at me. I waved back, beaten.
China Dick puffed up onto the bridge, wearing his hat in readiness for his daily inspection, and disappeared into the chart-room. Five minutes later he emerged, ignored me and went below.
‘What exactly is it, sir?’ asked the Midshipman.
‘There’s a cyclone generating in the Bay of Bengal.’
‘A cyclone?’ The boy frowned.
‘Yes,’ I answered irritably, trying to ignore the salacious horseplay in the pool below, ‘a TRS – Tropical Revolving Storm – known in the Bay of Bengal as a cyclone, and in the West Indies as a hurricane. The Chinese call it the Great Wind: Taifun.’
‘A typhoon!’ the boy exclaimed excitedly. ‘Have you ever been in one?’
‘Yes. Not a really bad one, but bad enough. In the Taiwan Strait. You’ll find Richard Hughes’s book In Hazard in the library. It’s based on fact, about a Blue Flue caught in a West Indian hurricane. She lost her funnel and her boats.’
‘Bloody hell.’ The boy looked aft and upwards at the massive steel column and its wire guys.
We were traversing the Eight Degree Channel by noon. Away to the northwards a smudge of pale golden sand, fringed by white breakers and topped by the waving green fronds of coconut palms, marked the atoll of Minicoy. From the midst of the grove of palms rose the white column of its lighthouse. The dark parallelograms of a dozen sails dotted the ocean, the outrigger hulls of tiny, half-waterlogged fishing boats. We could see the dark skins of the Tamil fishermen and the sudden flash of their catch as they hauled their nets. The gentle timelessness of a subsistence way of life exerted its brief, spurious attraction. Minicoy exported coir in exchange for rice, the cargoes carried still in three-masted dhonis plying to Tuticorin or Cochin; we spotted one later that day, the very last of the true deep-water sailing ships.
My thwarted concupiscence sent me in search of literary consolation, for a long sea-passage was an ideal opportunity to read. One discovered strange companions of like mind in the ship’s library. I found the Cook from Swansea, who proved to be an authority on Guy de Maupassant.
‘Du, no-one writes about women like Maupassant, can’t fault him, like.’
‘I thought Hardy was supposed to be pretty good.’
‘Jesus Christ no, Hardy’s crap compared to Maupassant. Got his complete works at home, Maupassant that is… wouldn’t give a toss for Hardy.’
‘Well, there’s no Maupassant here,’ I said looking along the shelves, which contained a comprehensive collection of the newest novels, works of recent biography, history and travel.
‘Try that,’ said the Cook, pulling out The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler. ‘You’ll enjoy that.’
I took it and added The Lotus and the Wind by John Masters, sitting to decide which I should read first. While I sat browsing in companionable silence with the Cook, two figures went past the open door: the Chief Engineer and Mr Saddler.
‘Well, she can’t have gone far.’ I heard the Chief say. The Cook and I exchanged glances.
The following morning the wind had backed a little and freshened to a near-gale. Although the barometer remained steady, there was an oppressiveness in the atmosphere. The sky had become overcast and the sun was surrounded by a halo. We had expected to sight the coast of Ceylon that afternoon, but at noon China Dick decided to avoid the path of the cyclone and our course was altered drastically to the southward. During the day the strong wind continued to back, indicating the centre of the intense low pressure was passing well to the northwards of us, but in response to its disturbance Antigone began to roll and pitch, lifting easily to the swell.
I almost shared the Midshipman’s disappointment, for such a storm was an awesome sight, but I consoled him by taking a lunar sight and showing him the method. It proved to be a mistake. When Captain Richards came onto the bridge to write up his night orders he saw the columns of pencilled figures and summoned me to the chart-room.
‘What’s this?’
‘Observed intercept of the moon, sir. For the benefit of the Midship…’
‘The only thing you’re supposed to teach the Midshipman is how to keep a bloody lookout. What bloody good is this?’ He flicked the page of my sight book contemptuously, forgetful of his injunction to instruct the young apprentice. I held my peace. Initiative was something to be encouraged in aspirants under training, but squashed in junior officers. It was a paradox of the sea-life and I was half-expecting what followed. ‘And keep away from the passengers.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
I took myself back to the bridge-wing, exiled the Midshipman to the other side and sulked. China Dick had no time for the unorthodoxy of others.
‘That cyclone,’ said Sparks as we enjoyed a beer in my cabin after midnight, ‘passed over Trincomalee.’
‘Is that fucking so,’ I said unkindly.
When I relieved Mike at 0800 the following morning he was singing, a trifle obviously, I thought.
‘I’ve got a ticket to ride – I’ve got a ticket to ride – and I’m okaaay…’
The misquotation and the coarse pun advertised his triumph.
‘You bastard,’ I said. ‘The Old Man thinks it’s me.’
He handed over the watch and went laughing to his breakfast. It was a glorious day, the breeze light and only a low swell rolling ominously out of the north-west where the cyclone had beaten upon the beautiful coast of Ceylon. The sea’s population seemed to revel in the passing of the great storm, for myriads of flying fish rose around us, extending their gliding flight by beating the elongated lower halves of their fail-fins against the surface of the ocean. The action left expanding chains of concentric rings on the smooth water.
On deck the splashes of red-lead had disappeared under successive layers of under-coat and gloss, while a second task supervised by the Mate, had resulted in the after deck being covered with loose coils of derrick wires, drawn off the winch barrels for greasing. From the heads and heels of the steel derricks the blocks had been unshackled, the pins knocked out and their sheaves removed for greasing and an inspection of the bushes. Much sloshing of grease had been evident and each block on reassembly, had the date of the examination stamped into its steel cheek, the numerals picked out in white lead. Such were the preparations that occupied the Crowd, hatch by hatch, in preparation for the ports we were about to visit. Most were without cranes and many were devoid of wharves. We would work our cargo in and out of our holds by means of these derricks and their complex rigging.
That evening I showed the Midshipman a simpler mystery of navigation, the taking of an azimuth. It was a much easier procedure than a sight, merely a compass bearing of a prominent star taken through a prismatic instrument mounted on the compasses. This azimuth was compared to the calculated bearing of the star worked from our dead-reckoning position. The infinite distances of the stars and the comparatively crude calibration of a compass made the accuracy of our position less critical than might be supposed, and our dead-reckoning was rarely far out. The result showed the small instrumental error in the gyro-compass, but it was the comparison with the standard magnetic compass that was important, for one never knew when a power failure would throw one back on this primitive instrument. The total error of a magnetic compass was compounded by the earth’s ‘variation’, that is the influence of the planet’s magnetic field (which varied from place to place), and the ship’s local influence, known as ‘deviation’. Deviation was complicated by being almost infinitely variable, depending upon the ship’s heading, upon her cargo and the amount of soft iron or steel therein, even on whether the derricks were topped up or stowed for an ocean passage. A close record of all its values was therefore desirable and at least one of these ‘compass errors’ was expected for every course steered and during every watch, unless other demands (such as fog or dense traffic) prevented the officer-of-the-watch from attending to the matter.
Next morning was Christmas Eve and as I sipped my coffee at four-bells, China Dick arrived with a surprise.
‘Emergency boat-drill, Mister. Sound the alarms and stop engines. I’m going to lower the motor boat.’
I did as I was bid, mustering on the boat-deck as Antigone slowed in the pellucid blue water. The Mate told me off to command the boat and I sensed victimisation, scowling at Mike who grinned infuriatingly back. Scrambling into the boat as it was swung out on the tall arms of the luffing davits, I shipped the rudder, aware of the ocean fifty feet below. Others were joining the boat as it lay griped in, level with the boat deck: a pair of Midshipmen, three seamen and the Lamptrimmer, the Fourth Engineer, two Chinese greasers and three Chinese stewards. Sparks came too, crouching proprietorially over the emergency radio.
I checked the plug was in the boat’s bottom as the Mate ordered the gripes slipped and the winch-brake lifted. The boat began its long descent, swinging with increasing oscillations on the ever-lengthening span of the wire falls and bumping Antigone’s side as the ship rolled with an easy motion, striking sparks from the metal skids that wrapped the bilge in an effort to protect the boat’s planking and facilitate a launch against an adverse list. We struck the water with a thumping splash. The boat rose, the suddenly slack falls looping dangerously inboard then jerking tight again, snapping together as Antigone rolled away from us.
‘Unhook! Ship crutches and toss oars!’
Mindful of their fingers, two seamen cast off the heavy blocks and pushed them over the boat’s gunwhale. I put the tiller over, allowing the residual way of the ship to ease us off Antigone’s unforgiving plating as we towed alongside.
‘Leggo the painter… Down oars!’
We were on our own, crabbing awkwardly off the black cliff in a shambles of missed strokes, of curses as oar-looms struck the back of the next man, a tangle of blades and knocking of crutches. High above us the passengers stared down from the promenade-deck and I saw Mrs Saddler laughing beside her husband. Above them, hands on hips in disbelief, the Mate shook his head over us, while from the bridge a stream of advice, or perhaps it was abuse, came from China Dick.
Clear of the ship we got our oars inboard, the men gasping as they watched the Fourth Engineer bend over the engine. At the tenth despairing swing of the handle it fired amid a cloud of black smoke and we chugged shamefacedly away from the ship.
‘Right fucking game this is,’ muttered the Lamptrimmer, while the Chinese chatted amongst themselves, unconcerned by western preoccupations with smartness and efficiency. The intimacy with the surface of the sea was pleasant, the true magnitude and power of the swells that rolled the diminishing ship now obvious to us as our grab-lines trailed in the white foam that rolled back from our bluff wooden hull. A dozen flying fish lifted from the sea and we saw them clearly, the sunlight glancing from their armoured sides, their eyes wide with the terror of our strange intrusion. Borne on the huge undulating surface of the sea we opened our distance from the ship to a mile, so that only her upper-works, masts and funnel were visible in the troughs, then eased to a stop.
In the stern Sparks had been preparing the emergency radio, a hand-cranked apparatus with a small aerial. He bent over his key and, after some experimental twiddling, announced he had contacted the Purser on the ship. After a little he raised his head smiling.
‘Message reads: “Come back to mother”.’
‘Okay. Acknowledge it.’ I nodded to the Fourth. ‘Give her full ahead, Billy.’
Half a mile from the ship the engine faded and died. Eighteen swings of the handle and Billy collapsed, swearing it was moribund: ‘The fucking fucker’s fucked.’
‘Shit…’
The groan went up and down the boat. Leung Yat, the Number Two Greaser swore a rich, descriptive Cantonese oath.
‘Out oars.’
I determined to make a better show of our return. ‘Come on. When I say “Pull!” put your backs into it.’
I stood in the stern and urged them on. To their everlasting credit, we made a show of it, backwatering neatly in under the falls and hooking on without mishap. A little flutter of applause came from above and I saw Mrs Saddler clapping. We rose dripping past the row of curious faces on the promenade deck.
‘Not bad – for beginners,’ I heard one of the men remark facetiously.
‘Bollocks,’ came the reply from one of the seamen bent over the plug, and then we were drawing level with the boat-deck and scrambling out of the boat.
‘Practice makes perfect,’ Mike said, grinning as he supervised the swing inboard and onto the chocks.
‘Bastard,’ I replied, grinning back.
‘Two of your men had their fingers on the gun whale as you came alongside,’ admonished China Dick when I reported to the bridge, pricking my bubble of pride.
‘Bastard,’ I mouthed at his stocky back as he left me to my watch. Antigone gathered speed and along the boat-deck a group of engineers gathered round the recalcitrant boat-engine.
‘Hit the fucking thing with a hammer,’ advised the Bosun as he saw the last of the seamen below.
It was not much of a Christmas. The cyclone thrashed itself to death on the Coromandel coast and night fell in a downpour of torrential rain. After the days of clear weather and empty sea, we ran into traffic and, blinded by the rain, were driven to the tedious expedient of avoiding collisions by radar plotting. In such conditions we passed the northern tip of Sumatra. The rain continued intermittently all day and we passed the lonely, bird-limed islet of Pulo Rondo as we assembled for pre-lunch drinks. It proved a mirthless occasion, as was the more-than-ample Christmas dinner in the saloon, eaten with the passengers under a cloud of forced bonhomie from China Dick, causing brittle laughter from the ladies and insincere guffaws from his officers. To be absent from home at Christmas was bad enough, but to be at sea, under way, was terrible. At least in port the yoke of duty could be eased, but at sea the ship’s routine went remorselessly on, though those on day-work knocked-off. The ship’s company fragmented, drinking schools assembled in hidden places, dominated by maudlin sentiment and occasionally deteriorating into a scrap. On the whole it was better to be on watch and pretend the whole thing was a normal day. Perhaps Sparks was the most fortunate, kept busy with a stream of incoming and outgoing telegrams. I wondered if Mike had either sent or received one. He did not say, merely wore the stupid grin of gluttony and lust.
By 2000 the ship had sunk into inertia, only the watch-keepers awake. For us on the eight-to-twelve there was a spectacular consolation; a massive, soundless electric storm illuminating huge cumulo-nimbus clouds that rose over the distant mountains of Sumatra.
Dawn showed the dark, jungle-clad shoulders of Pulo Penang ahead. Before breakfast the Crowd were out, topping the derricks, while Chippy and his mate worked along the hatch-coamings, knocking loose the wedges in preparation for opening up. As we rounded Muka Head and picked up our Chinese-Malay pilot, the pool was coming down; half an hour later we were edging alongside the wharf, under the ramparts of Fort Cornwallis. The halcyon, flying fish days were over; it was this for which Antigone was called into being.