by Bodie Thoene
An overturned lifeboat swept alongside the raft. What had happened to the occupants? There was no one clinging to the sharp keel or to the safety ropes floating from the sides. Whatever oars it had possessed must have disappeared when it capsized. Useless. Useless.
Then, as if drawn by invisible cords, the derelict craft pivoted toward the cavern of steel, making a precise turn. Angling directly into Newcastle’s side, the empty lifeboat passed the raft and plunged like an arrow into the opening…and jammed there on some jagged metal.
“Now! Now’s our chance,” Browne bellowed. “Give it all you’ve got!”
With the renewed effort Number 7 shot across the intervening space. Once more Raquel jumped upright, and this time we did nothing to prevent her. Her body extended far over the sides toward her children and she called to them. Yael spotted Raquel and leapt to her feet. The bobbing and surging threw the child off balance…right into Raquel’s outstretched arms. Mariah and Raquel dragged Yael aboard.
Our boat collided with the raft. Now I finally recognized the rescuer. It was Cedric Barrett, the British playwright. “Take the girl,” he said, choking on a mouthful of seawater. He lifted Simcha to her knees and held her steady until a pair of sailors plucked her to safety.
“Look out! She’s going,” Browne cried.
I glanced up at Newcastle, expecting to see the great hulk crash down on us, but he meant the cork in the bottle. The capsized boat that had given the raft a brief respite snapped in two, and the pieces were sucked out of sight.
Immediately the raft was yanked away from us toward its own destruction.
“Jump, man,” Browne urged Barrett. “Jump for your life!”
Barrett needed no further urging. Flinging himself upright, he leapt forward just as the raft smashed against Newcastle’s hull, but his jump was not far enough to reach Number 7. He fell in the water. Two oars reached out toward him. He grasped them both and pulled himself toward us as if they were the handrails of a bridge.
Moments later he was dragged out of the waves and Number 7 was rowed powerfully away from jeopardy, in search of others to rescue. Behind us the raft flipped up on end against Newcastle’s shattered side, waved a forlorn farewell, and disappeared into oblivion.
When Number 7 escaped the current jetting into Newcastle’s side, we were in an eddy of debris. Lounge chairs, bits of wooden slats from the decking, empty life rings and…dead bodies.
It was a grim task: checking each and every floating corpse we located for the remote possibility of life. Each encounter was made even more grim because of the momentary hope of another rescue. Officer Browne made it extremely clear: we were not taking any of the dead aboard. The lifeboat was already near capacity.
When I saw those who had been alive only moments—at most minutes—before, bobbing away in the wake, I shuddered. I was grateful I recognized none of them.
Browne directed our course to anything resembling a survivor. We searched each scrap big enough for someone to be clinging to.
Where were all the other lifeboats? Newcastle had still been moving forward while boats were being launched. Were they scattered over miles of ocean?
Where was the rest of the convoy? How far away was rescue?
I hugged Robert close to me. Raquel was closely hemmed in by her girls. Mariah continued to scan the horizon. Above the creaks and groans of the sinking ship she called out the names of her sister and her niece and nephew.
Almost without warning we encountered another lifeboat. We rowed over the crest of a swell and nearly collided with it. It was barely afloat. Surrounded by frigid water up to their waists, there were four occupants. Two were elderly passengers. Both were dead.
With a cry of excitement Mariah recognized her sister, Patsy, and her niece, Moira. Both were alive…but barely. Patsy was in shock. Moira was icy cold and unresponsive.
We took them aboard. Mariah and I stripped them out of their soaked garments, shedding our own coats to wrap them in.
“Michael,” Patsy murmured, when she could make herself understood past her chattering teeth. “Must find Michael.”
Mariah rubbed her sister’s feet and hands and fiercely promised to find the missing boy.
Sailor Matt Wilson commented, “She’s going.” My head snapped around. I was certain he knew Patsy was dying.
It was Newcastle’s final departure he meant.
Lights blazing, the ship’s stern rose higher and higher into the air until her decks were almost perpendicular to the sea. Waves lapped against the first of the two funnels; the forward third of the ship was already underwater.
New sounds of destruction were blown to us on the wind. Bubbles of air and steam hissed and screamed from trapped cavities inside the ship. Raquel bundled the girls close against the nightmarish sound of souls in torment. The floundering wreck gulped great gouts of sea.
Mariah rubbed her sister’s cheeks and patted her niece’s hands. She worked feverishly, as if afraid Newcastle’s sinking might still somehow carry Patsy and Moira into a watery grave.
The ship heeled farther to starboard as she sank. The second smokestack aimed itself at us. The radio masts reached out toward us as if even now Newcastle would claim us to accompany her into the depths. Involuntarily I drew back, though I knew we were a safe distance away.
The lights blinked once…twice…a third time…and then the blaze winked out, leaving only a blacker silhouette against the impenetrable night. At the last Newcastle was no more than a blank expanse of canvas in the center of a portrait of white-capped waves. Then she slipped silently away and was gone.
Raquel gasped and pointed. Pablo’s guitar drifted past.
I breathed a prayer for all those who had been lost in Newcastle…and for us.
As far as I could tell, we were alone on the vast, empty sea.
16
LIFEBOAT NUMBER 7
NORTH ATLANTIC
AUTUMN 1940
I felt the most intense silence. I do not know how else to describe it. There were still the rush of the wind and the patter of flying spray. I felt the thud when Number 7 crested a wave and her bow fell into the succeeding trough.
No more shrieks of alarm.
No more rending steel and tortured machinery.
The world was now cloaked in stillness and in night.
I think we were all stunned. I know I was. There had been no time to sort out terror from relief, grief from shock. I looked around the boat again. There were perhaps twenty-five with me. Were we the only survivors? Had hundreds perished?
My mind refused to accept this conclusion. I had seen other boats being launched. There had to be more still living than this handful.
The reality of loss was brought home to me by Mariah’s expression of sheer desperation. She could not believe that Michael was missing. Perhaps she was afraid his death would kill her sister, who remained barely conscious. While the others looked numb, Mariah still exhibited frantic anxiety.
“We must keep looking,” she demanded. “There must be others. We can’t be the only ones left alive.”
“We won’t give up yet,” Harold Browne agreed.
“Won’t the other ships in the convoy be coming soon to pick us up and to help search?” Raquel asked.
There was no immediate reply and the omission was ominous. “No,” the officer said at last. “Convoy procedure requires that if one ship is attacked, all the others scatter. Lingering to search for survivors would be to invite more U-boat attacks. No, none of the other ships will be coming back for us.”
“So we’re all alone?” Cedric Barrett, the playwright, queried.
“Not for long,” Browne corrected, adding a brighter note to his earlier words. “I was near the radio room when the torpedo struck. I heard Sparks get off a message to Western Approaches Command. He gave our position exact to the last minute. Why, right now destroyers are steaming toward us. You can be certain they’re coming at flank speed.”
“How fast is that?” Ro
bert inquired, lifting his green-hooded head.
“Thirty knots,” the Apostle named James said with authority. “Thirty-five, the newer class.”
“Right you are, mate,” Matt Wilson confirmed. “And how long will it take ’em to get here if they start from three hundred miles away? A bit of figurin’, eh?”
“Ten hours or less,” John, James’s older brother, calculated.
“By breakfast time tomorrow,” Connor said cheerfully.
“So we’ll keep searching,” Browne said again. “Those of you who can, get some sleep.”
There was much less debris around us now. On the featureless ocean, hemmed in by cloud and fog, I could not even point to where Newcastle had sunk, though I had witnessed it.
“How do we know where to search?” I quietly asked Wilson.
“That’s all right, miss,” he said, running his hand through his mop of shaggy blond hair. “Mister Browne there knows what he’s about. Wind was out of the west when we was struck. It hasn’t changed direction, so we just keep rowin’ with the breeze to our faces. That’ll help us stay near anyone who might have gone in the water, don’tcha see? It’ll also keep us close to where the destroyers will come lookin’ for us.”
Wilson located a pack of blankets from a watertight container and passed them out. They were some shelter from the wind, but were soon soaked with spindrift.
The sailors plied the oars with long, even, unhurried strokes. They pulled for several minutes; then Browne ordered them to stop while he called out in the darkness, “Is anyone there?” and listened for any reply.
After each pause, they resumed rowing.
I dozed a little amid that fruitless survey. I awoke when the weather turned still dirtier. Rain squalls added to our misery but flattened the waves some.
Mariah’s gaze roamed over the blankness as if by intensity alone she could locate her beloved little nephew.
It felt tragically bleak.
Just as the rain storm moved off to the east she said, “There! I see something there!”
The direction toward which Mariah waved was at right angles to our course. I could not make out anything on the bearing she indicated. Her hopeful imagination was getting the better of her, I thought.
Third Officer Browne, who had been huddled in the stern trying to keep warm, stood upright and stared where Mariah pointed. “I don’t…,” he began, then, “Wait! There is something there. Hullo! Is anyone there? Can you hear me? Hullo!”
Every ear in Number 7 strained for the response.
“Hullo? Is anyone…?”
“Yes!” came the emphatic reply. “Help! Help!”
“Pull, boys,” the officer commanded. “Stretch out and pull!”
I shook off my drowsiness. Looking around me, I saw the lethargy that had engulfed everyone aboard Number 7 roll back. If we could save just one more life, it would be a triumph.
“Over…here,” a male voice sputtered and coughed. “Hurry!”
As we drew near, a vague, bread-loaf shape on the waves resolved itself into an overturned lifeboat. Lying across its keel was a figure I recognized as Podlaski, the Polish diplomat…and he had one arm wrapped tightly around Mariah’s nephew, Michael.
Patsy and her children were alive, but barely so. Raquel chafed Michael’s feet and hands while I rubbed Moira’s. Mariah concentrated on her sister. Mariah crooned to Patsy in Gaelic—lullabies of Connemara, tunes of comfort and hope.
Then the rains arrived in earnest. A solid-seeming deluge blotted the scene. The cold drenching from the skies piled misery upon misery. The lascars lay on their oars. The officer made no move to order them into renewed action.
“We must keep searching,” Mariah insisted. “What if I had given up before we found Patsy?”
Browne shrugged. “If there are any survivors alive out there still, they will have to wait ’til daylight. I can’t keep on any kind of bearing. Anyway, tomorrow we may need our strength for a real purpose.”
His phrasing emphasized the finality of the loss of so many people we had known.
The officer’s words were the curtain speech. The rainfall was the final curtain, ending Act One, during which we had rescued others.
The second act of the play brought the growing realization of our own great peril.
The first night after Newcastle’s sinking was, as Saint John of the Cross says, “the dark night of the soul” for many on board Lifeboat Number 7. Our prayers seemed to bounce off the drape of gloom and despair. They rose no higher than the height of the waves.
Harold Browne attempted to instill hope by making us believe some things were still in our power. “Women and children into the bow,” he said. “You men rig the tarpaulin.” His instructions caused a triangular canvas shelter to be raised as some protection against the spray and the cold. With four women and eleven children on board, it was not possible for the bit of canvas to shield all of us. “You’ll have to take turns,” the officer said. “And I insist that you do so. The risk from exposure is great. Even a few minutes’ warmth may save your life.”
Browne and Wilson gathered in the stern, together with Cedric Barrett and Podlaski. The nine lascar sailors occupied the seats between them and us.
The jostling required to maneuver in the confined space caused some irritation. The effort to get us organized allowed some sense of control.
It did not last.
Around midnight, one of the lascar sailors died. He had come aboard with a head injury and never fully regained consciousness. When his mate shook his elbow and slapped his cheek, there was no response.
What followed would have been unthinkable in the ease and civilized comfort of SS Newcastle.
What a difference two hours makes to basic human decency.
After determining the man was in fact truly dead, Browne ordered, “We are cramped for space. I’m sorry, but there it is. Put him over the rail.”
“With no ceremony? No words spoken over him?” Raquel murmured.
“He is…was…a Mohammedan,” Wilson noted. “Doubt if Anglican prayers’d suit ’im. If any of his friends wish to speak, they may.”
No one did.
Since the dead body lay between his mate and the Apostle named John, the thirteen-year-old boy was called on to lift the corpse under the arms and help slip it over the side.
At this Raquel protested: “Why make the boy do it? Can’t someone else?”
To which John replied, “It’s all right, ma’am. I don’t mind.”
John was strong and sturdily built. The body was hoisted over the gunnels and deposited in the sea without a splash.
The silent farewell was not the end of the horror. The body floated alongside the boat, drifting with us in silent reproach.
Eventually a current eddied between us and the dead man, and he fell away astern. This experience was only one among the nightmares of that night. Worse was yet to come.
Would dawn never arrive? The sense of being abandoned, swallowed by inescapable gloom, permeated the boat. I prayed the coming of the sun would raise our spirits.
“Three in the morning,” I heard James murmur to his brother. “Sunrise isn’t until six thirty at this latitude.”
More than three hours to wait. I continued massaging Moira’s little hands and arms, trying to get some warmth and circulation back into the five-year-old’s listless body. Beside me Raquel did the same with three-year-old Michael.
Patsy and Mariah were at the center of the canvas shelter. Behind the sisters, forming a living cocoon, were Angelique, Simcha, and Yael. Raquel and I were next, but facing Patsy so she could see her children.
The boys made an outer ring around us, but they were outside the lip of the tarpaulin. Despite what the officer had said, we did not change places. John insisted, and the other boys agreed, that we females remain beneath or at least closest to the makeshift awning.
It worried me that Patsy and her children were so lethargic. All three had been immersed in the sea and had
come aboard Number 7 soaked through. We dried them as best we could but had no way of restoring heat to their bodies.
“Look here, Aunt Elisa,” Tomas said, touching my elbow to get my attention. He extended a glass jug. “The officer gave it to me. A bottle of tea. One of the men brought it but thought he’d lost it overboard. Just now found it. For the little guys and Mizz Patsy.”
“Thank you, Tomas. But shouldn’t everyone have a share?”
John said firmly, “Wouldn’t even be a mouthful each.”
Connor: “That’s the right of it, Elisa.”
The fragrant brew was barely warmer than our surroundings, but it was thickly sweetened.
I pressed the rim of the flask to Moira’s mouth. She swallowed and licked her lips. It seemed to ease her. Some of the rock-hard tension left her body. I handed the container to Raquel, who tipped it into Michael’s mouth. Mariah did the same for Patsy. We passed the bottle back and forth until, all too soon, the contents were gone.
I scrubbed little Moira’s hands, then rubbed the calves of her legs. Pressing her close to me, I tucked her cheek against mine and tried by force of will to send life back into her barely responsive form. I knew no Gaelic, but what I had I offered to her:
“Golden slumber kiss your eyes,
Smiles await you when you rise.
Sleep, pretty baby, do not cry,
And I will sing you a lullaby.”
“I know that song,” Tomas said, rousing himself. Though his voice quaked with cold, he sang the lyrics to the chorus:
“Care you know not, therefore sleep.
While I, over you, watch do keep.
Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry,
And I will sing you a lullaby.”13
The waves smacked against the boat in a twelve-count beat, such as I had learned from Raquel. THUMP, slap, slap; THUMP, slap, slap; THUMP, slap, THUMP, slap, THUMP, slap.
The rhythm sounded familiar. What was it called? I could not make my foggy brain unravel the mystery.
