The Strode Venturer

by Hammond Innes

  My whole mind, my every nerve became instantly concentrated on driving the boat forward, intent on reaching the ship before she got under way. I had the throttle wide open, leaning forward over the engine casing as though I could by sheer will-power drive her faster. The stern sank in a trough and I heard the break of the wave almost at the moment it thumped me in the back, spilling across the stern, flooding over the gunn’ls as it carried the boat forward like a surf-board. And at the same moment lightning forked across the ship, showing it very near now, so that I could see the prop beginning to thresh the water. The thunder crashed. The barge was swinging away from the ship’s side and it was the barge I hit. And as the bows splintered and the boat began to sink under me I jumped, caught the steel edge of the barge’s side and hauled myself aboard. Lying there, panting, on the grit-grimed plating, I could feel the strong pulsing beat of the Strode Trader’s engines transmitted through the barge’s hull every time it rammed its blunt nose against the ship’s side.

  I tried to attract their attention, of course, but no human voice could be heard above the turmoil of the storm. A wave broke and then another. The barge’s flank was like a breakwater, the waves pouring over the side and cascading down into the half-empty hold. I struggled to my feet, balancing myself to the pitch and roll of the ungainly hulk and in the next flash of lightning waved my hands. But there was nobody on deck. There was a shuddering jar, the clank of steel on steel, and beyond the open cavern of the barge’s hold I could see the dark side of the ship towering above me. Food and warmth, the cosy familiarity of my cabin all so near, but nobody to tell Reece to stop his bloody engines and get me off the barge.

  The ship was gathering way fast now. She had turned her fat stern to the island and was running down wind. The barge yawed, grinding its bows. I stood and waved and shouted, and still nobody answered.

  I began working my way for’ard then. I had almost reached the broader platform of the bows when the stern of the barge was lifted and flung sideways. She lay wallowing for an instant, rolling her topsides into the waves, water pouring over me. Then the bow line tautened with a jerk. It steadied her and I started forward again. It was a mistake, for the bows swung in, both vessels rolling towards each other. The crash as they met caught me off balance. I can remember falling, but that’s all.

  I came to, gasping and sobbing for breath, a great roaring in my ears. I knew I was drowning and I fought with all my strength, clawing and kicking, with the water gurgling in my lungs and throat and one little horrified corner of my brain aware that my hands and feet were motionless as in a nightmare where the struggle is in the mind and not transmitted into physical action. My brain, groping towards full consciousness, recorded sluggishly—the feel of grit under the palms of my hands, the hardness of solid steel beneath my body, the slosh of water resounding loud as in a tank.

  I lay still a moment. Then I was gulping air, my mouth filled with grit and the sickening salinity of sea water. Somewhere my head was hurting, a raw burn of pain, and I retched, vomiting nothing but grit and slime. A blinding jar, the crash of steel, a great swooping movement. I was riding a roller-coaster and the water was back. I was afloat in a great sea and being battered to death against a shingle beach. It changed to a sea wall; I could feel its vertical sides as I clawed at it, calling for help, conscious that however hard I called nobody would come to save me since no sound was coming out of my mouth. Another jar and the tide receding—or was I trapped in the engine-room of a sinking ship? Steel under my hands—cold steel, pitted with rust and filmed with grit. A great searing flash and my smarting eyes saw the rusty pit with its vertical steel walls, the pile of ore awash, and the water flooding back at me as the stern lifted, a wall of black filthy water that spilled over me.

  This time my muscles responded to the call of my brain. I struggled to my feet and the water broke, knocking me backwards and forcing me to my knees, and as it receded I was sick again. I felt better then and when the water trapped in the bottom of the barge came back at me I was ready for it, my body braced against the steel side. It broke harmlessly against me, surging round my knees, reaching finally to my waist before it receded, sucking at the heap of unloaded ore. The barge was close against the ship’s side then, grinding at the steel, and the faint throb that was transmitted to my body told me that the Strode Trader was still under way.

  The clouds overhead were low, and in the stabs of lightning I could see dark bellying masses constantly on the move, a pattern of suspended vapour that was never still. I could also see that there was no way out of the hold in which I was trapped. It was like a tank, sheer-sided, and roofed at the edges by the overhang of the side deck, and the water inside it rolled back and forth with the movement of the waves; each time I braced myself to withstand the surge and suck of it and each time the effort sapped a little more of my strength. The ship was steaming broadside to the storm now. Her side was a steel wall, rolling and toppling above me, the seas breaking against it. How long before Reece stopped his engines, or would he steam all night? He couldn’t anchor now. It was too deep. I looked at my wrist-watch, but my eyes were tired and all I could see in the flickering lightning was the pale disk of it spattered red with the blood dripping from my head. There was a gash somewhere in my scalp below the hair. In fact, the glass was broken and the watch had stopped. Dawn was a long way off.

  Ten hours! I wondered whether I could last that long. I felt light-headed and I was shivering, but not with cold for sea and air were both warm; it was exhaustion. The water came and went, rolling nodules of ore. The noise of it sloshing back and forth along the empty barge walls was constant, unending, and behind it were other sounds, the surge of the ship’s bow wave, the growl of thunder, the crackle of lightning. It was a wild night and we seemed to be travelling with the storm for it stayed with us, the clouds hanging in great masses so low they seemed pressing down against the high glimmer of the mast-head lights. And then the rain came as it had before in a solid downpour of water, the roar of it drowning out all other sounds.

  Time passed and the rain stopped. As before it had flattened the sea so that I no longer had to fight the surge of water. The wind had gone, too, and the barge lay snugged against the ship’s side, not bumping now nor even grinding at the plates, but steady, and the water lapped around my knees. My eyelids drooped and closed, the eyeballs strained by the violent contrasts of million-voltage light and pitch darkness, seared with salt. I dozed standing, never quite losing consciousness, but relaxed now that I didn’t have to fight the water. I could survive till dawn. Drowsily I wondered how Peter was faring, what it was like shut up in that small hut with fourteen frightened Pakistanis, and then I was thinking of Reece, wondering what the hell he was playing at. To up anchor and put to sea, that was reasonable enough. He was responsible for the safety of his ship and any captain might reasonably have thought his position insecure. But to go on steaming away from the island …

  I became conscious then of a change in the beat of the engines. The drowsiness vanished and I was suddenly wide awake. The ship’s engines had slowed. The surge of the bow wave died to a murmur. In a brief pause in the thunder I thought I heard the slow threshing of the screw. Then that ceased and I sensed the ship was losing way. I moved out from the side of the barge, climbing the heap of ore so that I could see the ship in the lightning. But of course nothing had changed, it was only that sounds which had become familiar had now ceased. The storm alone remained, thunderous and crackling. It was all forked lightning now. It stabbed and banged around us, the ship’s superstructure lit by flashes so that the effect was of a vessel going in the first wave of a seaborne landing.

  Somebody shouted then. I remember it very clearly because it was the first human voice I had heard for what seemed a very long time. He must have been out on the starboard bridge wing for the sound of his voice was clear and distinct. “Full astern! Full …” The thunder cracked and lightning stabbed, obliterating the rest of it. I think it was Reece and in the
momentary silence that followed the thunder I heard the beat of the engines, the thresh of the screw. There was a visual change, too. The ship slid away from me. For one ghastly moment I thought the bow line had been let go and the barge set adrift, but it wasn’t that; it was just that the barge was swinging as the ship went astern.

  I waited, my head bent back, watching as the side of the ship moved away from me, its position changing. The barge checked at the end of its securing wire. Soon it would swing in again, port side on as the ship gathered stern way. But it didn’t. It stayed like that, bows-on to the Strode Trader. A figure came out on to the bridge wing. A torch glimmered palely in the flash brilliance of a fork of lightning. The man was peering down. His hand waved. Still nothing happened, the barge bows-on and steady at the end of the bow line, which was taut—a single, slender strand of wire.

  It was a strange sight, the ship standing there, the lights bright in the darkness, dim as glow-worms when the lightning banged, and not moving though I could hear the engines and the frenzied turning of the screw. A flash, brighter still and close behind me, and in the succeeding blackness the mast, the bridge, the whole superstructure limned with a blue-green light, the ship’s whole outline traced in a sort of St. Elmo’s fire. And then it happened.

  There was a flash, a great sizzling firework fork of electricity—a thousand million volts stabbing down, striking straight at the foremast. I heard it hit. There was a crack as the full blast of power touched the mast top, a crackling and a sizzling, and then the ear-splitting unbelievable sound of the cloud-clash that had sparked it. And with the sound the mast crumpled, falling slowly to lean in drunken nonchalance against the bridge before the heat of that great charge of electricity burned the metal to a molten white. Flames burst like bright orange flowers as the woodwork caught, and then the whole bridge went up a shower of sparks, a soft whoof of heat rising. It was spectacular, fantastic, beautiful but deadly. Tiger, tiger, burning bright. … My God! I thought. This is it—the ship on fire a thousand miles from any help. And something else—something even more appalling. It had been nagging at my brain, and now suddenly the position of the barge, the man peering down at the water, the call for full astern—it all came together in my mind. The ship was aground.

  Aground and on fire, and myself imprisoned in that barge, a helpless spectator as the flames licked higher and higher and figures lit by the glare and the forked flashes ran shouting about the decks. Lightning stabbed again, struck with a blue flash. A lascar seaman caught on the bridge deck was withered instantly, a blackened rag doll dying with a piercing shriek. Hoses were being run out and a jet of water sprang from a nozzle, insignificant against the flames licking up from the bridge superstructure. And where the jet struck the heat of the fire it sent up a little puff of steam that was instantly burned out in the heat. Two more jets and then another bolt of lightning. The ship, with her steel bottom firmly stranded on the sea bed, was earthed; she was acting as a huge lightning conductor.

  The flames, the lightning, the ship aground where no land should be—my mind reeled before the extent of the disaster, dazed and unable in that moment to comprehend it. The flames licked the humidity out of the night air and a red glow lit the storm clouds overhead. The heat was intense. My clothes dried on me, became stiff with salt and sweat and the darker streaks of my own blood. I watched for a time, held stupefied by the roaring holocaust of fire, by the sheer fascination of it as a spectacle, not conscious then of any fear, only of the childlike need to gape. But the bow line was not more than fifty or sixty feet long and soon the heat forced me to crouch, seeking the protection of the barge’s steel plates. By then my eyeballs were burned dry, my skin parched, my hair like grass. I was glad then of the water in the bottom. I bathed my face and finally lay full-length in it, floating and watching the storm flickering and banging in the red inferno of the clouds.

  It was no longer immediately overhead. In fact, that third lightning stab proved to be the last. But lying there in the bottom of the barge with the water buoying me up I wondered whether perhaps the poor wretch who had been fried by that second bolt of lightning wasn’t the lucky one. I could hear the roar of the flames, could see the leap and glow of them reflected in the sky, but no longer distracted by the visual excitement of them, my mind groped towards an appreciation of my situation, and the result was frightening. I was like a rat trapped in a giant bath, the heat increasing all the time, the water getting warmer, and if I survived till the fire burned itself out—what then? A lingering death, for I’d no fresh water, no food, no prospect of being rescued. I was tied to a ship that would never move again in seas that were unvisited and in an area that was in the process of volcanic change.

  Sparks flew in the night, some burning embers fell with a hiss into the water close by my feet. My left shoulder was beginning to stiffen. My whole body ached from my fall and I wished to God I had never recovered consciousness. I closed my eyes, wearied to death with the glare and the flicker. I pretended then that I was back in London, in the little flat I’d rented, lying in a hot bath. God! I was tired. Would Ida still be in London, or was she back in Dartmouth now, in the room above the antique shop where I had first met her? With my eyes closed, the red glare through my eyelids was like the light of the maroon lamp-shade in the bedroom. I saw her then as I had seen her that last night we had spent together, her slim, warm, golden body emerging and then the closeness and the warmth, the soft yielding, the sense of being one. Would she have a child, or had she taken precautions? I didn’t know. Strangely, I found myself hoping it was the former, hoping that between us we had found new life to replace the old that would die here in this filthy steel tank. The thought of that, of life reproducing itself, switched my mind to John and Mary. All their hopes, and now this. How would they view my death? Would they feel I had let them down? I felt my mind recoil from their contempt, seeking to obliterate the thought of how they’d feel. For their sake, if not for my own, I must struggle for survival. I knew that. But I was drifting now, drifting away from the thought of the effort, the terrible ghastly effort that is involved in dying slowly.

  I slept, pretending to myself as I dozed off that I was lying in my bath, having a little nap, and that soon I’d get up and dry myself and put on my pyjamas and go to a soft, cool bed. And Ida was there, her dark eyes looking straight into mine, her cheek pressed against me, her hair falling about her and her hand was holding me tight, not letting me go, refusing to let me slip away, but keeping me just on the edge of consciousness. Was this the knife-edge between life and death? Somewhere there was a rending crash, the splash and hiss of flaming debris quenched in water. The thunder died, the lightning, too. The world became deathly still, only the roar of the fire in the grate, and then that died down and there were distant shouts from the pavement below and a fire engine playing water on a gutted ship across the street.

  So my mind recorded things, blurring them with the desire for an ordinary setting, an ordinary explanation, whilst I drifted half unconscious. And suddenly the glow was gone and a grey light filtered through my closed eyelids. Dawn was breaking.

  I had floated against the remains of the barge’s load of ore and was reclining against the piled-up heap. My body ached and my skin was crinkled white with long immersion. It was an effort even to shift my position and I lay there with my eyes open, staring at the rusty interior of the barge, at the water, black and filthy and quite inert. Nothing stirred. There was no sound of the sea. I might have been lying in a tank on dry land for all the movement. The sun came up, a rosy glow for a moment, but then a bright, hard light casting dark shadows. When I stirred—when I made the awful effort of struggling to my feet … what should I find? A gutted ship, the crew all gone? Would I be the only living thing? I called out. But my voice was weak. I did not want to call too loudly for then I could continue to lie there, fooling myself that they had not heard. The sun climbed quickly till it touched my body with its warmth, and then the full heat of it was shining dir
ectly on me and I knew I had to move, for the sun’s heat meant thirst.

  I forced myself to my feet and standing on the shingle heap of ore turned and faced the ship. The barge still lay bows-on to it at the full extent of its securing line, held apparently in the grip of some current. The Strode Trader was an appalling sight. All the bridge was gone, the whole superstructure a twisted heap of blackened, tortured metal, with here and there charred fragments of wood still clinging like rags of flesh to a burned carcass. The timbers of the hatch covers were scorched but not consumed. The cargo booms, too, though scorched, were still identifiable in the contorted wreckage of the masts. The only structure to escape the fire was the deck housing on the poop aft and as I stood there the sound of Eastern music came faint on the still morning air.

  At first I refused to believe it. I was afraid it was in my head, for it was a singing sound—a siren song in the midst of desolation. The minutes passed and I stood rooted. But still that music floated in the stillness, something live and real and unbelievable. It was pipes and drums and a girl’s voice singing sweetly, and all so soft, so unsubstantial, so impossible in the midst of chaos and ruin.

  It was a radio, of course. Some poor devil had been listening in as the lightning struck, one of the lascar crew in the quarters aft, and he had run, leaving his little portable radio still switched on. I turned, dejected, but still glad of the sound, and as I turned to find a means of reaching the barge’s deck, I caught a glimpse of something moving, and then a voice called, giving an order. He was on the poop, looking over the stern, a man in a rag of a shirt and clean white trousers neatly creased, all the hair scorched from his head. It was the second officer—Lennie—and before I knew it I was on the deck of the barge, scrambling to the bows and shouting to him. “Lennie! Lennie!”