Once more we all searched our minds for just anything that
could stop our drift if we threw it out on a rope. We had nothing.
We were picking up speed and drifting straight for the unbroken cHflFs and rocks awaiting us, no matter how we turned our rudder oars now. We could clearly see the many dim lights scattered along the invisible coast of Failaka. They soon spanned the entire horizon where the wind was carrying us, and we could not escape on any side, even if we hoisted our sail.
If only it had been daylight we would have seen land. We might have picked our course and steered toward some less rugged part of the shore. Perhaps there was some small opening in the barriers even though the pilot book said there was no landing on this side. But it was now just before midnight. We would strike the rocks before we saw them. We would be shipwrecked in complete darkness.
No reason for panic. A bundle boat like ours was the safest craft we could wish to be on at a moment hke this. Ropes and reed bundles might be torn to bits but would protect us from being beaten to death against the reefs. Thank heavens we were not heading for the surf on the coast in a plank-built boat; then we would all have been in the utmost peril. Now our proud ship was probably doomed, or at least would have to be rebuilt. And this even before it had been put to a fair test. Certainly both we and the ship would have been much safer if we could see something around us. We were Hke eleven bhnd men. How could we swim between reefs or jump on to rocks when we could not even see our own hands or feet without lamps?
There was obviously one thing to try: slow down as much as we could. Then we might delay our crash landing until dawn, and also hit the rocks less violently.
"Throw out the sea anchor 1" It was hanging ready on the bridge floor under my feet.
The sea anchor was nothing but a semifloating canvas bag to be trailed in our wake. It was a simple device used on sailing vessels to keep either the stem or the bow turned into the wind when sails had to be lowered in a storm: a long conical bag without a bottom.
The sea anchor went overboard and acted as a most effective brake. In fact it reduced our speed of drift so effectively that we began to notice that all the hghts from the island remained in the same spot. And so did the blinking from the lighthouse behind us. Never had I seen a sea anchor function so marvelously as this. With
our high stem turned to the wind and waves we just hung as if fixed in the sea. Little did we reahze in the black night that the choppy sea around us was so shallow that the canvas bag had caught the bottom. Instead of floating just below the surface as it should, it had bobbed up and down in the wave troughs digging up mud until it was full and heavy and grabbed a good hold in the bottom mire.
The hghts we saw here and there at long intervals all along the invisible coast were yellowish and feeble. They all seemed to be from kerosene lamps like ours. They certainly came from scattered houses or huts. We were close enough for our own lights to be seen from the shore, so I sent a few SOS signals toward land with a flashlight. But no reply. To the left over Failaka the black night sky reflected the barely noticeable glow of a distant modem city: Kuwait, thirty miles away. We heard the sound of an airplane passing above the clouds.
On behalf of the consortium, the BBC had equipped us with a tiny radio transceiver for the dispatch of expedition news. Norman tried to contact Kuwait coastal station, which had a twenty-four-hour watch just on the other side of this island. There was no answer. Nobody could hear us anywhere.
We shared double watches for the remainder of the night and slept fully dressed with life jackets as pillows. The sea anchor gave us some peace of mind. Some. Norman seemed to be constantly fiddling with another small transceiver which a radio amateur friend had given him because Norman did not trust the one the consortium had insisted on. He had rolled up his mattress and pulled up all his gear from the boxes he slept on. Since Norman and I slept feet to feet I had no room for my legs except on top of his pile. I had scarcely fallen asleep after my midnight-to-2 a.m. watch when I awoke and crawled out on deck again. This was too risky. At intervals we again sent hght signals to the island. Three short flashes, three long, and three short again. SOS. No response. Most of the hghts ashore had been turned off anyhow, and I crawled to bed again and left the watch to Tom and Yuri.
I had been out and in again a couple of times to check the direction of the hghthouse and the wind when Yuri called me and said, "They are answeringl"
It was still pitch-dark: 5 a.m. I crawled out and, yesl I too saw a strong light directed straight toward us in long, well-spaced flashes. It appeared just to the left of one of the few dim house
lights still lit. A very strong electric signal light. From a boat? No, it had to be ashore. It was quite immobile.
For a long while I kept on morsing SOS and each time they answered T, meaning "received." We rejoiced that someone would soon come to guide us through the reefs or tow us around the corner of the island. At last we had contact with other people.
Shortly before 6 a.m. the signals from ashore stopped. Now we began to detect the indistinct contours of Failaka. A long, treeless and very low island with its highest point some forty feet only. I kept on morsing, "SOS no anchor we need tugboat SOS." No further reply. Next we began to see the outlines of three small ships at anchor. Probably dhows. They lay together just where we had seen the signal hght. There seemed to be a reef between them and us. One of the boats began to move, carefully, as if maneuvering out through a diflBcult channel. With binoculars we could see that the men on board were watching us. But they only turned away in the opposite direction once they reached open water. Without sail they disappeared around the island and no other living soul could be seen anywhere.
Norman had gone to sleep at last after sending a bhnd radio message into the night, repeating several times the same few words we had sent with our flashhghts. Detlef refused to sleep, as if it were his fault that we had lost the anchors. He was on the bridge, fiddling with the tiny radio box, when he heard a faint voice calling ^'Tigris, Tigris, Tigris" followed by babbling in an unintelligible language. He called Rashad, who could only confirm that the voice did not speak in Arabic. Then the two plainly heard the word "Slavsk."
"Yuril Yuril"
In two jumps Yuri was on the bridge. Slavsk was gone. Nothing. Norman came and called, "Slavsk, Slavsk, Slavsk." Suddenly a voice was there again: Captain Igorl Clearly now, so that we all heard him. Yuri's face beamed with pride and happiness in the first glow of the rising sun as he translated: Slavsk was already weighing anchor. Igor wanted our position. Yuri also learned that a twenty-knot wind from the same southerly direction was expected in our part of the gulf that day.
As daylight broke we saw a few small huts far apart along the coast. No smoke. No people. The sea around us was not blue and clear as it was yesterday, but grayish-green, filled with sand or mud. Sloppy brown branches of loose seaweed were dancing everywhere
in the choppy sea. We were deep inside the Failaka shallows, with hardly room for a flounder to swim under our ship. As we gathered in high spirits around the plank table to enjoy Carlo's Sunday-morning oatmeal porridge we noted that all the seaweed suddenly began to swim. As new clusters came toward us from the bow, the others went away behind the stern. As we checked the nearest cluster, we found it just circling up and down with the waves in the same grainy water. It was Tigris that had suddenly picked up speed and resumed the drift with the south wind.
The tide had played us another trick. The incoming high tide had pulled in the same direction as the wind and at the same time hfted the sea anchor free from whatever it had caught. FuU of muddy clay and heavy as a sack of cement it now dragged along the bottom and we would hit the reefs before Slavsk had time to reach us. The drift was straight for the island.
We had a choice. If we did nothing we would soon be wrecked against the limestone reefs and cliffs of Failaka. If we hoisted sail and used our rudder oars we could take the wind athwart from starboard and sail parallel to the is
land coast. This would lead us directly into worse shallows, thirty miles wide, dotted with reefs, which separate Failaka from the mainland of Iraq. I favored the second alternative, and everybody agreed. If we managed to sail safely between the reefs and across the shallows in that direction, we would be stranded on "swampy low land" that would not damage our reed ship. All the coastline from Iran to Kuwait would be more or less of the same type we had seen at the mouth of the Shatt-al-Arab. Our only problem there would be the lack of arms on board: we were now heading for the very coast described in the previous year's Persian Gulf Pilot as probably unsafe without armed escort.
The tidal current came in full force and the wind increased in strength. We left the sea anchor out so as not to be too far displaced from our given position before Slavsk found us. With orn* portside turned to the island we began to roll badly. Rashad and Asbjom were seasick. Gherman crawled in and fell asleep. In the wave troughs the sea was so shallow that gray mud was whirled up in thick clouds from the bottom. No sign of any kind of life ashore, but in the binoculars we saw a few round elevations that probably were some of the prehistoric burial mounds. If the ancient navigators had frequented this side of the island they must have been truly expert mariners, unless the reefs and shallows were of more recent date.
It was not yet noon when we sighted Slavsk as a black spot on the eastern horizon. Half an hour later an orange-colored motor launch was lowered and came dancing toward us across the green shallows. The big ship anchored in blue water three miles away, as close to the edge of the shallows as was prudent. We recognized Captain Igor in the bow of the bouncing launch. Water cascaded around him and his crew in orange life jackets. With a broad smile and open arms he jumped on board our reed bundles and embraced us.
"My fatherl"
"My grandfather!"
Our sail was down. AU was joy now. The men with the orange life jackets in the orange lifeboat began pulling up our sea anchor. It was as heavy as lead, fuU to the brim with grayish mud. It had saved us from shipwreck in the dark.
No sooner was the sea anchor up and emptied than we and the lifeboat began to drift oflF together with great speed. The hfeboat crew started their engine and began to tow. But although they had a powerful motor the wind took a strong grip on the high curves of our reed ship, with the result that Tigris began towing the Russians. This was not quite apparent at first, as the tidal current ran our way. Captain Igor and his heavily built second in command had a dinner of salt meat and peas with us around our crowded table, and we all rejoiced and wanted to make beheve that aU went well. But in the afternoon it became clear to all that the lifeboat was only drifting away with us along the coast and toward the much worse shallows east and north of Failaka. The houses moved even more to the left of their earher bearing and the tall lighthouse on the httle island began to sink. Slavsk became more and more indistinct, and in the afternoon it disappeared completely from view. The wind increased in force to twenty-four knots.
At this moment a primitive-looking dhow with a powerful engine and shallow draft suddenly appeared from nowhere. The former mast had been sawn down. It headed for us, but did not come close. It circled around us beyond hailing distance and although several men were on board they were clearly afraid of getting close. No wonder. A great many generations had passed since their ancestors had seen a vessel in these waters as strange as ours.
We inflated our tiny rubber dinghy, brought along for filming and barely big enough for three men. Asbjom, as our dinghy cap-
tain, took Rashad with him and rowed close enough to the frightened fishermen for Rashad to shout to them in their own language. A moment later our two men came back and reported that the crew of the dhow wanted 300 Kuwaiti dinars, worth more than a thousand dollars if converted into American money, to tow us out to Slavsk.
I was ready to start bargaining, but Igor refused to listen and told Rashad to row back again on his behalf and offer six bottles of vodka and two cases of wine. The two boys went over a second time but came back with the message from the men in the dhow that they were Moslems and did not drink alcohol. The seamen in the dhow now reaHzed our condition and ventured to sweep close up past our side before they took off with no further bargaining and seemed to resume fishing, barely visible on the eastern horizon.
The only solution left to us was to hoist sail on Tigris and abandon fmrther attempts at a tow back to the long since invisible Slavsk. If we sailed as we had done before, continuing wiih. our port-side facing the coast, the Russians could try to pull our bow sHghtly into the wind and away from the coast. In this way we could possibly fight ourselves gradually out into deep water before we came into the much worse area awaiting us off the eastern end of Failaka.
Captain Igor had a walkie-talkie and spoke to his officer in charge on Slavsk, who reported that their ship, with a total of six meters draft, had ventured into twelve feet of water, but was now going out to follow us as close as possible along the outer edge of the shallows.
Very soon Slavsk reported on Igor's walkie-talkie that their radar showed us approaching the danger area with great speed. There was a terrible current. The bottom mud whirled up around us from ever-deeper wave troughs.
Now a second dhow appeared from the direction of Kuwait. While the crew of the first had looked like fishermen, this lot looked like real bandits. They, too, kept at a good distance, and when Rashad went over and explained our trouble they doubled the price in Kuwaiti dinars and wanted the equivalent of two thousand dollars. They did not yield a penny and let us know in plain words that if we did not pay what they asked for they would get everything the moment we went on the reefs we were heading for. Again Igor was furious and refused to witness any deal with bandits who wanted ransom. His angry gesticulations left no need for transla-
tion, and uninterested in further bargaining with me the newcomers broke contact. The dhow picked up speed and left. The last Rashad heard was a cynical warning shouted back at us: without their help we would all be doomed.
We were all filled with contempt and anger. If Captain Igor could have waded with his head above water I am sure he would have jumped overboard and started to tow us himself. But for all their strength and willingness the Russians could not make the lifeboat pull more strongly, and we on Tigris had not yet discovered how ancient mariners in these waters had been able to tack into the wind.
Far ahead we saw the two dhows apparently anchored near the dangerous reefs, waiting like jackals for our disaster. We began to realize what awaited us next night if we ran aground. The pilot book was evidently not unjustified in its warning.
We had to take the sail down. The Russian lifeboat anchored in water barely six feet deep and we hung on together hoping for a better wind. No sign of Slavsk.
The sun was slowly on its way down toward the horizon when a third dhow appeared. The mast was cut down as on the other two, and with a minimiun draft and strong engine the crew was clearly at home in the local shallows. Precisely the same process was repeated, for the third time. Even the ransom was the same as the last, as if this were a mere routine. But as the pilot book stressed that the low coast ahead of us was rarely visited by Europeans, I began to suspect that the three dhows probably had contact with each other by radio. By walkie-talkie like Igor's. They were certainly no fishermen.
"Look at that man on the pillows." Detlef was at my side with binoculars. We all took a good look, and the men in the dhow seemed unimpressed by our long-range attention; they seemed to have known before they came what our situation was.
What Detlef had pointed out was a fat, criminal-looking man with big turban and crossed legs who sat on pillows and scrutinized us with contempt and calculation. His fat hands had certainly never touched a fishing hne and he was the archetype of a hardened crook. The others were a mixed lot; none of them to be trusted behind one's back. Some wore turbans and might be Pakistanis, a few less fierce-looking could be Arab seamen of a sort from Kuwait.
That these men asked rans
om money was clear to all, and Cap-
tain Igor again vigorously opposed my entering into any kind of deal with them. It was equally clear that if we did not pay, they would just hang around with the other two gangs and harvest aU we had in the black night if we were forced to jump onto some reef or the swampy land behind. We could not trust the Russians' anchor. In the vast shallows ahead no coast guard or customs officer would ever disturb these people in whatever business they were up to. It was certainly not fishing. Perhaps smugghng of drugs or dutiable goods to Failaka from the other side of the guK. We had heard that even human labor was smuggled to rich Kuwait from Pakistan by organized gangsters. If people or goods could be brought ashore on this deserted side of Failaka Island, then the back door to Kuwait was open. Failaka was Kuwait territory and there was a regular ferry service from the other side of the island direct to the capital on the mainland.
In an hour or so the sun would set. This dhow was clearly the last chance to get out into deep water before the world around us again disappeared from sight. Captain Igor was still furious at the mere idea of deaHng with gangsters. To me this had become a dilemma. I now felt a double responsibihty. My own men had volunteered to confront the hazard of the experiment we were involved in. Our ship was of a type that could bring us safe up on rocks and reefs, so long as there were no vertical cHflFs. But now we were dragging a lifeboat full of Russians with us into the shallows, their big ship circhng aroimd somewhere outside the reefs without a captain.
"Captain Igor," I said, "now I accept that I am your father. Then I am in command. I will consent to pay the dhow.*'
I could see how Igor fought to keep his mouth shut. He had no comment when Rashad passed my acceptance on to the man on the pillows. I crawled into the cabin and rolled up my mattress to look for my dwindling supply of cash. I had no Kuwaiti dinars. But the pirates had agreed to be paid oflF in Iraqi dinars, which was strong cash in these parts. It was lucky that I had enough in reserve for the gulf area.
The Tigris Expedition Page 14
