by Nevil Shute
He sent Jo below and stood himself on the companion steps for a while behind the fashionboards, his head out of the hatch, watching the seas. The ship was riding well to her sea anchor, her buoyant stern lifting to the seas so that little came on board. The wind had steadily increased, however, and he judged that now it was blowing at about Force 8. It was so strong that it seemed to be blowing the tops off the seas in the form of flying scud beneath the heavily overcast sky, flattening the very seas; the warp stretched taut behind the vessel to the submerged drogue, hard as a bar. With this increasing wind the speed of the ship through the water did not seem to be very much reduced; she still seemed to be making about three knots towards the north. Visibility was now only a few hundred yards.
He went below and secured the companion hatch behind him. In the cabin it was dark and stuffy, lit only by one small glass port, tight shut, at the galley, and another at the companion. He went forward and lifted the fore hatch a little, letting some air into the ship, and then came back and sat upon his berth, opposite Jo. He pulled the chart over to him from the chart table and sat studying it.
Jo leaned across in the dim light. ‘Where do you think we are?’
He did not know with any certainty. ‘I should say we’re about here.’ He laid his finger on the chart. Actually he was further to the north and not so far to the west, but he did not know that.
‘What happens next?’ she asked.
‘We’ll just have to lie like this now till it moderates,’ he said. ‘I think the centre will pass south of us.’
‘How long before it moderates?’ she asked.
‘Two days, I should think,’ he said. ‘Two days. Maybe, three.’
‘Have we got that much room?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think we have.’
‘Too bad.’ She smiled a little, and then said, ‘Tell me, do you think we’re going to pile her up?’
He glanced up at her. ‘I hope not,’ he replied. He ran his fingers down the line of the Tuamotus. ‘The line of islands isn’t very thick, and there’s deep water all between them. We can steer her a bit downwind, running. If there’s any visibility we should be able to run through them.’ He paused, and then said a little bitterly. ‘Like a drunk crossing the traffic in the Strand.’
‘We aren’t drunk,’ she said gently. ‘A bit out of luck, perhaps, but not drunk.’
He glanced at her. ‘I’m sorry about this, Jo.’
‘We’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘Lie down and get some sleep.’
They lay down and rested, if not slept. The motion of the ship was too violent for any cooking, but in the course of the afternoon Jo managed to light a Primus and to brew some strong, sweet chocolate, and this revived them a little. She still had a few sandwiches left, but neither of them could eat. The bilge water was slopping over the cabin floor; inevitably a wooden ship will leak a little under such strains, and in the last two days a good deal of water had found its way below.
In the middle of the afternoon John Dermott decided to pump the ship out. He pulled up the floor-boards near the engine and left Jo to keep the suction clear of any debris in the bilge, and went out on deck himself by the fore hatch. He was startled and concerned at the strength of the wind now, and the steepness of the seas behind them. As the yacht’s stern rose upon the forward slope of each great wave the warp to the sea anchor stretched out taut behind her, the water pattering off it with the strain; then the crest passed, the surf filling the cockpit, and the rope relaxed.
He crept aft on hands and knees on deck against the wind and the loose surf of each wave crest that slapped at him. With each step he refastened his life-line, for the danger of being swept overboard was now a real one. He gained the cockpit, but he did not immediately begin to pump the ship. The sea anchor warp was more urgent, and he turned his attention to that.
He had wrapped three teacloths around the rope at the stern fairhead, tying them to the warp with marline, to take the chafe. They were just about worn through; he cut the marline, working mostly under water, and remade the packing. The rope below the cloths did not seem to be damaged. He crouched waist-deep in water in the flooded cockpit, watching it for a time. Everything seemed to be holding, but the strain was immense. If the sea anchor went - or when it went - there would then be nothing to be done but to come to the helm and steer the ship, running under bare poles before the storm towards the islands.
He turned and started work upon the pump. There was a little opening glass porthole in the aft side of the cabin top by the companion, and from time to time Jo opened this to tell him how the water level was before shutting it again. It took him about an hour to clear the ship of water, sitting mostly in luke-warm water up to the waist in the force of the gale. By the time he had finished and the pump had sucked he was exhausted, but he did not immediately go forward to the hatch.
He made another inspection of the sea anchor warp; it looked all right. He sat for a time looking round the horizon. An early dusk was creeping down upon the scene. He could see nothing but blown spray and breaking, towering seas; he did not think he could see further than about two hundred yards. There was nothing to indicate the presence of land, but then he knew there wouldn’t be until they saw and heard the breakers.
He glanced around at his ship. She seemed to be in perfect condition, but for the tatters of the sail upon the jibstay. The helm swung quietly and loose. The ends of halliards and sheets were streaming overboard; they did not matter. Seeing the strength and order of his ship, he felt suddenly tired. As usual, he thought, the ship was stronger than the people in her.
He took a final glance at the compass; the wind had gone round further, and was now west of south, blowing harder than ever. The eye of the storm would pass to the south of them now, though pretty close; before the wind eased it would haul round into the west. Before then, he knew, they would be in among the Tuamotus. He left the cockpit and crawled forward to the fore hatch, waited his chance, then opened it and slipped below, pulling it down behind him.
He was shivering a little, more from fatigue and shock than from cold. They heated up the remainder of the cocoa and drank that, and then lay down, fully clothed with lifebelts on, in their sodden clothes upon their sodden berths. There was nothing further to be done on deck; it was more important now to conserve their strength.
Darkness came swiftly, but they did not attempt to light the lamp. The had electric torches, and there were still dry spare batteries in sealed tins. They lay trying to rest, listening to the struggle of the ship, the wash of waves along the deck over their heads, and the insensate screaming of the wind. Presently they may have slept a little.
At about ten o’clock John Dermott went out on deck again to adjust the wrappings round the warp. Conditions were similar but it was dark as pitch and raining hard, or so it seemed to him for it was only possible to distinguish rain from the blown spume by taste. He worked largely by feel, renewed the wrappings, and returned down below.
‘We’ll have to stand a watch as soon as it gets light,’ he said. ‘We may be getting pretty close to something by tomorrow.’
‘Would you like me to go up now?’
He shook his head. ‘We’re all right for tonight. You can’t see anything up there, anyway. Hardly the ship’s length.’
‘What’s the wind doing?’
‘Seems to be a bit more over in the west.’
They lay down on their berths again, but not for the whole night. Soon after midnight the yacht surged forward on the forward slope of a wave, a motion they were well accustomed to, and did not check her run. Instead she went surging forward wildly and then round in a crazy turn to port, throwing John out on to the cabin floor. Then she was thrown on her beam ends and buried in the seas; everything fell down on to the starboard side within the cabin, John on top of Jo in a mass of tins, books, tools, bedding, sextants, and cooking gear. The ship lay on her side for what seemed an age till gradually
she rose again as they struggled free and to their feet in a foot of water over the cabin deck.
They knew what had happened; the vessel had broached to. In fact, the sea anchor warp had chafed and parted at the drogue end, and now the yacht was lying broadside on and at the mercy of the waves. They ripped the companion hatch back and struggled into the cockpit, and as they did so she went over again in a breaking sea.
She came up again more slowly, sluggishly, and they were both still there in the cockpit. The companion hatch had been half open, and she had taken much water in through it; she now lay heavily and sluggishly at least a foot deeper in the water, in the trough of the waves. But Dermott had the helm now and was steering her round down wind, and Jo had slammed the hatch shut and bolted it. When the next wave came they took it stern-on and she rose to it with far less than her normal buoyancy, but rise she did; the top of the crest swept green across them but they did not broach again. There was now a little faint light on the scene, probably due to the moon above the clouds.
John said quietly, ‘Start pumping, Jo. We’ll take it in turns.’
She bent to the pump and began the endless, back-breaking motion on the handle. Presently he gave her the helm and took the pump himself; so they continued alternately pumping and steering for the rest of the night, while the wind screamed around them and the surf beat on them. From time to time the suction blocked with debris in the bilge; then John had to wait his chance to open the companion hatch for a moment to get down into the flooded cabin, shut the hatch above him, and, working with his hands and arms deep in the water in pitch darkness, clear the pump. The night passed like this, but when the grey cold light began to make things visible the ship was buoyant again, almost clear of water.
In the cockpit as they rested, Jo asked, ‘Did you think we’d had it that time, John?’
‘I don’t know that I had time to think of anything, except getting her straight and running,’ he replied, ‘When we got her running I knew that we were going to make it all right.’
She said, ‘I’ve been thinking so much about Janice.’
‘Don’t,’ he said gently. ‘We’ll have her with us in a month or two.’
‘If we get out of this.’
‘We’ll get out of it, all right,’ he said. ‘But if anything should happen, if we buy it, she couldn’t be with anybody better than Katie and Keith.’
‘They’ll look after her,’ she said. ‘But she’s only ten. And, John, they haven’t any money.’
‘She’ll have money,’ he replied. ‘It’s all left in trust to Keith for her, until she’s twenty-five. She’ll get as good an education as anyone can get, and after that she’ll have a good lump sum. Don’t you remember how we made our wills?’
‘But, John, she won’t have anything! We’ve got it all here!’
He stared at her in the half light. ‘I never thought of that.’ This was another disaster that had come upon him, and one that hit him far harder than any that had come so far. The approach of the storm, the parting of the jib, the chafing of the sea anchor warp, the broaching to, the nearness of the Tuamotus - these were challenges to his seamanship. When you went to sea and crossed the world in a small yacht you wagered your courage and your skill against the elements with your life as the stake, and if you were good you usually won. It was what you went to sea for in this game; if you didn’t like the game you needn’t play it. He had wanted to play it because the sea was his whole life, and Jo had wanted to play it with him because she loved him. Now, suddenly and without warning, his small child’s future had been added to the stake.
Inevitably, perhaps, he held strongly right-wing views; he was a conservative in politics. He held that if a man worked hard and well and saved money he had a right to pass some of it on to his children, especially if they were girls, who usually got a raw deal anyway. He approved of moderate death duties because he did not hold that grandchildren should live in idleness because grandfather had worked; all people ought to work, as he had worked for the Navy himself. He held, however, that it was the duty and the right of every decent man to give his children as good a start in life as he had had himself. He had been blessed with money from the start and he had tried to use it wisely and to save it for his child so that she should grow up in the way of life he was accustomed to. That she should go to the council school and be fed and clothed by charity was quite unthinkable.
Joanna did not follow him in all of this. For twenty years she had lived as a naval officer’s wife and she had absorbed a good deal of it, but she had come from a labourer’s home and had gone to the council school herself in Renfrew. She had raised herself when she went on to the stage with a serious, well-managed troupe of girls; she had raised herself again when she had married John Dermott. In many ways she was now more conservative than he. The slum streets and the council school were not terrifying novelties to her for she had come from them, but she had long been determined that Janice was going to have no part of them. She had borne Janice into a different world, a world of naval officers and impoverished noblemen in Northern Ireland, and she was going to stay there.
As the full daylight came they could see the binnacle, and see that the wind was now about west-south-west by their compass. At the same time, it had risen higher than ever, and was now screaming in their ears, deafening them, so that John judged it to be Force 10 or more. The sky cleared with the morning so that they could see much further than before, and away to the south there seemed to be a line of blue sky just above the sea. John pointed it out to Jo, and put his lips to her cold ear. ‘That’ll be the eye of the storm,’ he shouted.
‘Passing south of us?’
He nodded. There were no great waves now, just a smoking, hissing sea flattened by the insensate torrent of the wind. To talk was an effort and a strain; it was better to conserve their strength. They sat in silence each busy with their thoughts turning over slowly in their stunned minds.
John Dermott was thinking always of the ship. She was still sound and practically undamaged. The mainsail and the trysail were still lashed firm upon the boom, ready for use. No sails could stand a minute in such wind; it was no good thinking about them. There was one resource still left to them, however. They still had a little engine.
He had scant faith in it, but it was there. In dead calm weather it would give the ship a speed of about four knots for going in and out of harbour or up windless estuaries, but the wind was now blowing sixty knots or more. This puny little engine, if he could make it work, could not affect the major issues of their course, yet if he could get it going it might serve to pull them out of trouble somehow. It was the last resource still left unused.
He gave the helm to Jo and went below, shutting the companion after him. In the light of his torch he saw that the battery had been thrown from its crate when the ship broached to and was lying on its side; everything was streaming with sea water. He stood the battery upright, checked the leads, and tried a light switch. There was the faintest of red glimmers from the filament, which faded as he watched.
There was no help in the starter. He wiped the magneto and the plug leads with a wet handkerchief, having searched in vain for a dry cloth, and tried her on the handle. For a quarter of an hour he laboured over her, and never got a kick. Finally he gave up the effort and went back on deck. There was no help in the engine.
While he was below, Jo sat at the helm in dull despair. The huge efforts needed to pull the tiller continuously one way or the other to keep the ship stern-on to the seas were draining the last of her strength; she could still make them mechanically but she was now near collapse. There was no ending to this storm and would not be for days and days and days; the ship might see it through if she had fresh hands at the helm, but they would not. She was near failure now, she knew; half an hour longer, or perhaps an hour, and she would be no longer able to swing the tiller. Then the ship would broach to and lie swept by every sea; they would be drowned. Shearwater would fill and sink, and Jani
ce’s future would sink with her. She was too tired now to care about themselves, but Janice was a sharp pain. Keith would look after her and bring her up, and he would do it well. But he would have to bring her up into his own way of life, not theirs; at sixteen she would have to start work in a shop.
John Dermott came back to the cockpit and took the helm from her. ‘No good,’ he shouted in her ear.
She shouted back, ‘Won’t it go?’ He shook his head, and she settled down beside him, listless.
About the middle of the morning something in the water ahead drew John’s attention. He gave the helm to Jo and stood up against the companion, the wind tearing at his clothing, lashed by the spray. Visibility was between one and two miles. There was something different half a mile or so ahead of him; the backs of the seas looked different in some way. Then, over to the left a little, in a quick, passing glimpse, he saw what looked like the tops of palm trees above the waves.
He turned with a heavy heart, and went back to his wife. ‘There seems to be an island dead ahead,’ he shouted. ‘I think we’re driving down on to a reef.’
She nodded. She was now past caring.
He took her hand. ‘I’m sorry about this, Jo.’
She smiled at him. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Can you take her a bit longer?’ he asked. ‘I want to see if we can dodge it.’
She nodded, and he stood up again by the companion. It was clearer now, for they were closer. What he had seen was the backs of great combers breaking on a coral reef; the line of different surf extended both on port and starboard hands as far as he could see. He searched desperately for a break in the surf, something to indicate a passage through the reef into the sheltered lagoon that might lie beyond. If there were any break he would try and steer her off and run in through it, even though they might be overwhelmed in the process. He could see no break at all; it all looked just the same on either hand as far as he could see. There was no escape for them now. Shearwater was driving straight on to a coral reef in the Tuamotus somewhere, and would leave her bones upon the coral as many a tall ship had done before. He had not the remotest idea where they were.
