The Strode Venturer

by Hammond Innes

  “Yes.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Still at Aden, I imagine.”

  She finished her coffee and stubbed out her cigarette. “It’s late,” she said. “I’m going now. But I think it might be worth having a talk with Deacon. Could we get him to London?”

  “What’s the point?” I said. “Peter was just as secretive about the position of the island when he made the voyage in the Strode Venturer.”

  “But Deacon is an older man than Reece—more experienced.”

  “He’s also an alcoholic.”

  “I know that. But drunk or sober a man who’s been to sea as long as he has ought to have some idea where his ship was.” She got to her feet. “Think about it, will you? I’m not accepting the situation until we have some sort of a check on Reece’s position.” She left it at that and I saw her to her car. And afterwards, when I was in bed, I lay thinking about it. In this she didn’t seem any different from the other women I had known—logic abandoned as soon as the emotions were involved. For the island to be outside the area of search the real position would need to be five or six hundred miles at least from Reece’s DR position. He couldn’t possibly have made an error of such staggering proportions unless he’d done it deliberately. And there was no question of that, for Blake had also kept a note of the courses and his estimate of the position had differed by less than 50 miles.

  But doubt, once planted with sufficient forcefulness, is an insidious thing. It was still with me when I woke in the morning and I knew that for the sake of my own peace of mind I would have to try and see Deacon. And there was Hans Straker, the man who had sat with me all the way from Singapore when I’d flown back to London that first time. It seemed years ago now, but I remembered his interest in the Indian Ocean. He would know who to contact and even at this distance a seismograph would surely record volcanic activity large enough to cause a subsidence in that area?

  But when I arrived at Strode House I was plunged back into a world where catastrophe was seen as something affecting a balance sheet, not in terms of human suffering. “We are naturally very upset at this news, both my brother and I—indeed everyone who knew him here in Strode House.” George Strode had risen on my entrance and the palms of his hands were pressed flat against the top of his desk as he leaned earnestly towards me. “Believe me, Bailey, we shall miss him—his energy, his cheerful optimism. And the men with him. It’s all very tragic.” He stared at me a moment like a frog with his protuberant eyes, as though expecting me to thank him for his little funeral oration. Finally he straightened up. “Well, no good grieving over it. He’s dead and the whole venture with him. It’s for us to pick up the pieces.” He reached for a fat envelope on his desk. “Reece has sent in a full report. I’d like you to read it through and add anything to it you think relevant.” He wanted it back in time for a press hand-out the following day. “It’s come at a bad time, just ahead of the meeting. Henry will have to make a statement to the Strode shareholders and in the circumstances I think it would be as well if you were present.”

  Reece’s report had been sent by telex from Gan and the final paragraph made it clear that it had been written after he knew the search was being abandoned. “The search pattern has been completed and they have not found any trace of the island. There is, therefore, no doubt that the re-submergence of the island …” I put it away in the drawer of my desk. Somehow I couldn’t face going over it all again—not then.

  There was a strange feeling about Strode House that morning, a sort of hush, as though the abandonment of the search touched the members of the staff personally. They stood in little huddles at the end of corridors or in their offices, talking in whispers that ceased abruptly on my approach. The quick, furtive glances, the sudden silences more expressive than words; the ghost of Peter Strode seemed to haunt the building. “They feel his loss very deeply,” Whimbrill said. “It’s as though the spark that might have set this place alight with a new spirit of adventure had suddenly been snuffed out.” I think he was speaking for himself as much as for the staff, for at one stage, when they had received Peter’s message announcing the establishment of the shore base on the island, he said he thought the boards of both companies were beginning to swing towards wholehearted support of the venture. “Not George, perhaps. But le Fleming certainly, and also Crane, possibly Everett. Even Henry was becoming convinced of the need to go along with it. That was when the shares were still going up.” He smiled a little sourly. “The mood has changed now, of course.”

  “You mean they’re going to sell out?”

  He shrugged. “The Lingrose nominations still stand, but I think perhaps they’ll wait until all the publicity has died down.”

  “And then?”

  “Presumably they’ll call an extraordinary general meeting—do it that way.” He sounded depressed, all the fight knocked out of him.

  I left him shortly afterwards, feeling depressed myself. All the plans, all the energy and enthusiasm we had expended—gone, wasted. I went down the main stair, out into Leadenhall Street. I felt I couldn’t stand the atmosphere of Strode House any more. I needed a drink and it was in the pub by Leadenhall Market, standing alone with a large Scotch in my hand, that I remembered how I had seen Phillipson there with Reece. Why had he denied it? And Reece himself, that night we had re-floated the Strode Trader on the tide, so strangely reluctant to return to the island, so insistent that they had stores for a month. Was this a case of “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?”

  I drank the rest of my whisky and walked slowly back to Strode House, and by the time I got there I knew it was no good talking to George Strode or even to Phillipson. Instead, I went straight up to my office and began a close study of Reece’s report. He had obviously given a great deal of thought to it, for it was very carefully phrased to put his own decisions in the best possible light. “Bearing in mind the volcanic nature of this uncharted area and my owner’s instructions—with which I was in entire agreement—to regard the safety of the ship and her crew as of paramount importance, I decided shortly after 1900 hours on 9th June to up-anchor and steam southward to the safety of what had been deep water when we had approached the island only four days before.” This was half-way down the second page and he went on to explain that the wind being off the island strong in the gusts he was of the opinion that it would be a needless risk of life to send boats in to bring off the shore party. “I did not consider them in danger. This was a tropical storm. I could not know that within a few days the island would disintegrate and disappear below the surface of the sea.”

  I sat for a long time staring at that passage—so natural, so convincing. And I kept on hearing Ida’s voice: “I don’t believe it.” And if Peter wasn’t dead, then the island hadn’t disappeared, and from that it followed inevitably that we had been searching in the wrong place. I went all through the report, but in the end it was to those two passages that my mind kept returning. Finally, I phoned the Oriental Club. I wanted an expert’s opinion on whether the island could have disappeared like that, so quietly, so unobtrusively. We had felt no shock, seen no tidal wave.

  But Hans Straker had left. They gave me the address of the farm he had taken in Wiltshire and also his telephone number. After some delay I got his housekeeper. He was out, but would be back for lunch. I left a message that he could expect me some time that afternoon.

  I am not quite certain now of my motive in suddenly deciding to go down to Wiltshire. I think it was partly the need to do something positive, partly a reluctance to face Ida that evening. I marked the report “No comment,” handed it to Elliot and caught the next train to Swindon. The farm was some way beyond Ogbourne St. George, a big, mellow, brick house built on the slope of a chalk down. The wheat was coming up in the bottom fields, a sea of green in the still bright air, and looking at that quiet rural scene as my taxi climbed the hill, the Indian Ocean seemed a million miles away. But a man’s interests are not changed by his immediate surrou
ndings.

  Hans Straker looked even bigger and more florid than when I had last seen him, his fair hair bleached almost white so that the greying of his years barely showed. He gave me a whisky whilst I explained the purpose of my visit. “Strode Orient, eh? So you took my advice.” He was smiling as though it really did give him satisfaction that I had got myself a job that meant something to me. And then he took me through into a room full of seismographical equipment and gave me a short lecture on the general principles of submarine volcanic action.

  His voice was thick and guttural, his English very precise, as he explained to me that an island such as I had described must have originated from the bed of the ocean itself—in this case probably from a depth of around 2000 fathoms. “The wrinkling of the earth’s crust as it gradually shrinks over the millennia produces fissures and lines of weakness much as clay soil does in a drought. This process goes on under the sea exactly as it does on land. The difference is that two thousand fathoms of water acts as a gigantic damper so that unless the eruption is a very major one it has little effect except to produce shock waves in the water. The surface speed of these shock waves is around three hundred miles per hour and in a big volcanic disturbance such as Krakatoa these hills of surface water will travel round the entire globe. However,” he added, “a thing like Krakatoa happens only once in a lifetime—at least one hopes so.”

  He stood with his glass gripped in his big hand, staring at the trace of the recording needle. “You have to remember that the earth’s crust is only about fifty miles thick. It is like a thin skin. The wrinkles and weaknesses in it are formed by the stresses of contraction through cooling. It is only when the tension breaks that you get a major earthquake or an eruption.”

  “And you don’t think that could have happened in this case?”

  “About a fortnight ago? And you say you flew over the area and saw nothing?” He shook his big head. “Definitely not. For an island and adjacent shallows to disappear so completely in a matter of days would constitute a major disturbance. My new instruments are very good. If there had been such a disturbance they would have recorded it.”

  “Even at this distance?”

  “Ja. Even at this distance. That is quite definite.” He downed his drink. “Now, about this island of yours. It interests me very much. That area of the Indian Ocean is known to be weak. But it is not regarded as dangerous. At least, not as far as we know. The trouble is we are very short on information. The seismographic stations are a long way from it and we know almost nothing about the sea bed stratas.” He stood, feet slightly straddled, staring thoughtfully at his instruments. “However, I did record a very considerable number of small tremors during the period I was taking readings at my place in Java.” He took a great sheaf of recordings from a drawer. “I’m afraid these won’t mean anything to you, but I had the very latest equipment—it was probably the most sensitive in the area.” He paused at a sheet. “See that?” He showed it to me, a barely perceptible movement of the inked trace. “This is quite a pronounced tremor in the area of the Chagos Archipelago—south of Addu Atoll.” He pointed to the date. “April last year.” He tossed the sheaf of recordings on to the table. “No point in going through them with you. Simpler for you to take my word for it that it was one of the many indicating a persistent process of adjustment of the earth’s crust in that area.” And he went on to consider the significance of manganese nodules, confirming that this would normally be associated with the sea bed, indicating that the island was the result of a protracted upward movement of the earth’s crust.

  “But all that debris,” I said.

  “Pumice. Aerated laval debris.” He nodded. “It would point to some submarine vent or fissure.”

  “And the water round us boiling like that?”

  “That is, of course, an indication of volcanic action, but not I think severe.” And he explained that eruptions of any magnitude only occurred when the increase in tension of the earth’s crust became insupportable and was suddenly released. “Then you get a really big tremor, an earthquake of shattering proportions.”

  “And you don’t think it possible——”

  “I tell you—I have recorded nothing of any magnitude.” He reached for the file containing his records. “See for yourself. There is the trace covering that week.”

  It showed nothing, absolutely nothing of note. I asked him then what the effect would have been if the movement had been too slight for his seismograph to record it. I was thinking of the island as I had last seen it, the lonely hut lashed by wind and rain, the lightning stabbing. “Would it have been a quick death?” But he couldn’t tell me that. He wasn’t an imaginative man and he only knew the theory of it. He had never seen an eruption, never experienced an earthquake. To him it was a game played on graph paper, an ink trace wavering as the thin skin of the globe on which humanity dwelt made its small local adjustments. He had never been present. He had only read about it. It wasn’t the same thing. “To my knowledge it has been going on for three years and all the tremors have been slight. I see no reason why such a slow, steady movement should suddenly snap and the whole thing explode. Volcanic action of that sort is mercifully rare.”

  He took me back into the other room and re-filled my glass. He was talking about Fayal in the Azores where a new island had been born in 1957, but I was puzzling over the disparity between his categorical assurance that the island could not have disappeared and the evidence of my own eyes. “Do your instruments give you the exact location of tremors?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “For that you need recordings from a number of stations and my inquiries at the time showed only one other seismographer who had recorded it—in India. We had quite a correspondence about it, but failed to develop any definite theory as to what exactly was going on or where precisely the centre of activity was. Then, of course, my work was interrupted so that I never did get to the bottom of it.”

  He insisted that I stayed to dinner, and all the time he talked about eruptions and volcanic islands, his mind roving the vulcanologists’ world in search of parallel cases, constantly referring to the books in his library to check on details that had escaped his memory. The situation fascinated him, and he kept on questioning me—about the analysis of the island’s ore deposits, the sea temperatures at various distances off, the nature of the pumice we had steamed through. He was like a detective of the geophysical searching for clues in a new and absorbing case.

  Afterwards he drove me into Swindon, and as we parted at the railway station he said, “I shall cable my Indian contact and also make some inquiries here in England. Whether your friend Strode is still alive or not, I cannot say, but I think you must proceed on the premise that you have been searching the wrong area.” And when I reminded him that the area already searched was a quarter of a million square miles, he said obstinately, “Then your island must be outside of that area.” And he added, “Have you considered, for instance, that it may have contained other minerals besides manganese, minerals that might affect a ship’s compass? Even aircraft, I believe, can be thrown off course by large iron ore deposits when flying low.”

  How near, how desperately near, he had got to the truth, and I dismissed it without giving it another thought. There was no iron in the ore samples—we knew that. And Shackle tons are fitted with gyro compasses. But his conviction that the island could not have disappeared suddenly without trace, that was a different matter, and it occupied my mind all the way back to London. He had been so certain of it, so categorical that I found myself, against all the evidence, swinging to Ida’s view.

  I rang her as soon as I got back to the flat, but she was out, and in the morning her friend told me that she still hadn’t returned. She had been away all night and I might have worried about it if I hadn’t had something more immediate to occupy my mind. Under the headline STRODE BUBBLE PRICKED the City page of my newspaper carried a long piece on the future of the Strode companies. It described the Indian Ocean v
enture as the brain-child of an inexperienced young man who should never have been elected to the board. “Whilst everybody must regret his death in such circumstances, and the deaths of those with him on the island, it is some consolation to the management and shareholders of Strode Orient that the prompt action of Captain Reece in saving his ship prevented what might have been a much greater loss of life.” It went on to consider plans for the reorganization of the two companies and finished up by advising any members of the public who still held shares in Strode & Company to attend the meeting and support those directors who were in favour of strengthening the board and reorganizing the companies.

  The piece was so obviously inspired that I knew Whimbrill was wrong; the show-down was going to be now, today, at the annual general meeting. I had a quick cup of coffee and left immediately for Strode House. But though I arrived there shortly after nine Whimbrill was already in the boardroom with the rest of the directors. The meeting was a long one and I spent a frustrating morning, not knowing what was going on. I had the papers brought up to me and several other City editors had the same sort of story and took the same line, and when I rang Latham he told me the shares were down to a nominal seven shillings. The outlook was grim. I couldn’t trust Whimbrill any longer and once Slattery and Wolfe were on the board and the reorganization of the companies under way I knew I wouldn’t have a hope of getting the co-operation I needed from Strode Orient. We had come so far—all our hopes so nearly fulfilled—and now to end like this, blocked by men in pursuit of money. And as I sat there in my office, alone and waiting, there was the thought nagging at my mind—that the island might still be there and Peter alive. The minutes ticked slowly by, the time of the meeting steadily approaching, and still I couldn’t get at Whimbrill, find out what he intended to do.