Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  The radio officer spent less than the others but suffered more, seemingly as dedicated to provoking drunken Brazilian seamen to beat him to a pulp as missionaries are to making converts. He began to look like a walking traffic accident, reappearing on board in the early morning with blood oozing from the corners of his swollen lips, fearful cuts round both his eyes, and his glasses reduced to splinters and tangled wire. The electrician, an Afrikaaner, was found at first light actually lying senseless in the harbour. Popie told me about it in tones of wonder. ‘We came to get the launch back to the ship at seven o’clock. To our horror, there he was floating in the water. Like dead. Toes up – head back – eyes closed. Stiff.’ Was he dead? He could have been. Popie shook his bald head. ‘He began to sink as we watched ’im and I saw his eyes open and staring at us, I tell you, three feet under the water. Gave us all the creeps. It took us twenty bloody minutes to pull him to land.’

  The chief steward had watched the radio officer fumbling his way back on board to lock himself away in his cabin. With his dignified yet gentle, watchful way, he reminded me of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves. He told me later, ‘The radio officer only just made it back at dawn again today.’

  ‘Speechless, I suppose?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I hear he insulted the captain.’

  ‘Luckily the captain is a big enough man to weather that.’

  Lionel nodded. ‘Oh, yes. But it must be a very serious, very personal problem, the radio officer’s. I told the captain that. Mind you – he’s excellent at his job; he never takes a drop at sea.’

  ‘Poor chap, Lionel.’

  ‘Exactly, Gavin.’

  We prepared to sail from Bragança and I breathed a sigh of relief. We took the pilot on board and moved astern into the wide bay. We went astern across the innocent face of that empty bay and within five minutes the Piranha lay motionless, her rudder jammed and her propeller shattered, incapable of going anywhere else at all.

  Thirty-five

  There is something in the sound of the sailors’ word ‘stranding’, meaning a ship touching the ground, that implies a rather slow, drawn-out process. But there was nothing slow about the stranding of the Piranha. Inside two minutes she was as dead as a withered arm. I was in the wheelhouse and it was as if a sea monster had punched her stern with a huge, scaly fist before taking her whole afterpart between finger and thumb and giving it a vicious tweak. The Piranha stopped – bang! – and began to roar and tremble and buck like a pony with a botfly under its tail. And then all at once she died.

  Feeling the tremendous vibrations that shook the bridge and the sudden upward thrust of the stern tilting to port, I instinctively grasped at a nearby ledge. I have sailed in a good many ships but I remain an ignorant landlubber. What had happened? Had we hit the tug astern of us? Perhaps one should simply put it down to a not very friendly Act of God.

  If so, it left Captain Cornie, Ken, Roy, the Brazilian pilot and myself gazing forward into space with a surmise that seemed wilder, if anything, than that of stout Cortez first sighting the Pacific.

  I think it was Ken who first murmured, ‘We’ve hit something.’

  Cornie said in a quiet voice, ‘Half ahead, pilot?’ and the pilot replied, ‘Yeah, half ahead.’

  But half ahead or full ahead, I think everyone on the bridge grasped that the Piranha was not going very far that day.

  Of course, there were theories. Roy said, ‘We hit something that stopped the engine dead. Something like a pillar of rock.’ And Pete, from the engine room’s control panel, said on the intercom, ‘Something big, I reckon. A six-thousand-horsepower engine knocked dead.’ We didn’t know what the hell was happening. The Pope, standing in the stern, had seen ‘a lot of mud flying around in the water’. Eventually the ship’s log simply said: ‘09.47: Ship took bottom.’

  Hours – days – of controlled confusion followed.

  ‘It is necessary for a tug and a diver,’ Captain Brand said in a voice that might have been filtered through all the silt at the bottom of the bay. ‘We have no steerin’ and no engine. A tug will pull us to deep water and dere we anchor.’

  And indeed, eventually a tug came out to us from somewhere near the wharf we had left with such relief a little earlier. Lines went back and forth and were secured. The Piranha’s lifeless hulk was lugged a little further down the middle of the bay, and lay there as inert as the victim of a sudden stroke.

  The diver, arriving after a few more hours, confirmed what by then the ship’s officers had already guessed – that the Piranha’s propeller blades were hopelessly bent. We also learned that her rudder was jammed at an unworkable twenty-degree angle to her hull. ‘It takes a long time to repair a rudder. This one will have to be cut with an oxyacetylene torch,’ Ken said. ‘We shall have to replace the propeller, too. That means dry dock. Rio de Janeiro. And a long tow to get from here to there.’

  I looked round the bay, its surrounding smudge of hills, the white dots of fishermen’s huts along the shore. The low, unappealing port we had so recently been about to leave for ever seemed now to be watching us with a complacent contempt.

  A continuous coming and going by launch to and from the shore began.

  ‘You’ll go with me to de port office?’ Cornie said anxiously to Roy.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll go with you, man,’ Roy rumbled reassuringly. They went off, followed by Ken and one of the cadets. The Brazilian port officer was a careful man who wanted full accounts of what had happened from everyone on the bridge except myself. Furthermore he arranged to question each officer and cadet separately, rather like a police inspector to whom everyone, including the vicar, is suspect. This infuriated Captain Cornie who, I think, regarded his attitude as unnecessarily hostile. None of the Piranha’s officers blamed him, but after giving his own evidence he returned to the ship in a towering rage, muttering, ‘Fokken, stinkin’ business….’ Lunch that day was the first of a series of dire mealtimes at which his heavy silence and furious frown cowed us all.

  That first day’s interviews, even I realized, were to be the beginning of a long process of inquiry that might last months, even years. There would be convocations of surveyors and marine insurance assessors, damage would be inspected, numerous reports scrutinized by expensive lawyers, testimonies studied for telltale inaccuracies, and finally blame would be allotted, punishments doled out and the huge costs paid. It would affect Brazilian pilots, port officials, cartographers – anyone who might in some way be held responsible for the cost of divers, repairs, towage, heaven knows what. That day as we lay there cursing our fate, the messages began to pass between Bragança, Rio, South Africa, and for all I know may be passing to this day. There were more and bigger tugs to be ordered in preparation for the long, tricky, deep-sea tow down the coast to Rio.

  A young English-speaking Brazilian called Osvaldo came on board to relay orders and observations in two languages between the Piranha’s officers and the Brazilian tugmasters. To be handy to the bridge, he took my cabin and I moved down two decks to another one. I don’t think anyone aboard had experienced a long tow before. No one could predict what the weather would be like between Bragança and Rio – no one could even predict when the tow would actually begin. The still waters of the bay seemed to be listening to the echo of our feet in the hollow silences of a motionless mechanical box that had suddenly lost the reason for its existence, like a clock with a broken spring. In a sudden doldrum period of enforced and unexpected inactivity, which contrasted disturbingly with the normal bustle of a working ship at sea, the young officers played darts in the bar and mealtimes came and went in gloom. People mooched listlessly about the deck. The Zulus had gone to ground, invisible below decks. There was ample time to wonder how, in a surveyed and charted harbour, a Brazilian pilot – a local man, I suppose – could permit a ship to run herself astern onto a large rock pinnacle, or even to go anywhere near such a dangerous object. Finding no answer, I slunk away to my cabin and dug about in my metal suitcase for a suitab
le book – a volume of short stories by Saki. I needed something to make me laugh and I would need it even more quite soon. Act of God (Part Two) was only a few hours’ sleep away.

  *

  The moment I opened my eyes I knew that something very odd had happened. It was like half waking from a nightmare. It seemed I was in the wrong bunk in the wrong cabin and someone with a tuba was blasting away on the same note over and over again very close to my ear. I lay hazily collecting my wits, fighting an almost irresistible gravitational force that seemed bent on toppling me out of the bunk onto my head. I twisted about to find a more stable position but it was no good: I kept rolling back with only the raised wooden edge of the bunk to keep me from pitching out. What on earth had happened?

  I sat up and blinked. The room was grey with the dawn light but it was clearly my own cabin. My eyes focused on a pale gleam, reflected through the porthole from the water outside, that flickered on the cabin wall in little moving ripples of gold. The sight of that really woke me up. I knew from other dawns that the ripples should have been waving to me from the ceiling, not from that bulkhead. A second later I noticed that my suitcase, a half empty bottle of gin and most of the books I kept on a shelf by my bunk were now gathered in the corner of the cabin farthest from me, like a huddle of frightened refugees. Barp! Barp! – that was no tuba. It was the ship’s hooter roaring away – one, two, three, four, how many times? The Piranha was bellowing for help.

  With a rapidly heightened pulse I rolled myself out of my bunk, slid down the sloping deck of the cabin and looked out of the porthole. The muddy water of the bay was an abnormally short distance from my nose and beckoning me to dive in. I knew now what was happening. The ship was going over. She gave another tiny lurch to port as I stood there.

  To be trapped in a sinking ship has always been one of my nightmares, and if I have ever dressed more quickly than I did then I can’t remember the occasion. Trousers, sweater, shoes – to hell with socks– were – on me in a flash. I struggled up the slope to the door, yanked it open inwards, grabbed the lintel with both hands, heaved my body into the opening and stuck my head out into the alleyway. To the right, the corridor was tilted like a camera shot from an avant-garde film of the thirties, and it was empty. To the left, there was the same tilt but a good deal more to see. A group of Zulus was clustered round a large door leading onto the deck, looking out, wide-eyed with alarm. They were not there to admire the view. They wore bright orange lifejackets on top of their overalls and each one clutched a small suitcase. Their intention was obvious. The crew of the Piranha was prepared to abandon ship.

  For a moment I had the idea of dashing back to my cabin to rescue my metal case, notes and camera, but then I thought I felt the deck give yet another little jerk, and the sight of experienced Zulu seamen about to take urgent leave of the vessel decided me that the bridge, being high, was the best place to make for. I began to move in the direction, heaving myself up the stairway by the rail. Only one deck up I was delayed by another startling sight: Lionel, the chief steward, and Barry, the youngest and quietest South African cadet, were poised in a doorway on the starboard side. Like the Zulus, they had their lifejackets with them.

  ‘Hey, man.’ Barry greeted me with a nervous smile. ‘No lifejacket? Have you heard? Daisy’s been told to unlock all the emergency doors. Ah don’ like it.’ Daisy was one of the cadets.

  ‘Well, well,’ I said. I had no idea what emergency doors Barry was talking about, but I didn’t like it either.

  We leaned against the tilt, looking like three Towers of Pisa. Overhead, the ship’s hooter continued to roar.

  ‘Strange goings-on, Lionel,’ I said, still panting from my climb.

  ‘You could say that again, Gavin.’ He was calm but his eyes were worried. ‘It’s a puzzle to know what it all means.’

  ‘That it is.’ I was glad to see he was as nervous as me. ‘I think I shall go aloft and try to find out what the matter is.’ It may seem odd that being with Lionel somehow made me talk like a character from Uncle Fred in the Springtime, but my notes tell me that this was so. ‘Excuse me,’ I added. Finding my way to the next stairway, I continued to the bridge.

  There Captain Brand was standing with the pilot, Ken and Roy. ‘What is she now?’ he demanded. He let his hand drop from an overhead valve and the hooter’s mournful blasts died into a reverberating silence. ‘Where’s dat fokken tug?’

  ‘Nine degrees,’ said Roy calmly.

  Ken added, ‘And five metres of water on either side.’

  ‘Den we must be stuck on somedin’ in de middle.’

  ‘That’s what it looks like,’ Ken agreed, adding in low tones, ‘Morning, Gavin.’

  ‘Sittin’ on de bottom on de port side, are we?’ Captain Cornie said to the pilot, in a tight voice.

  ‘Yes, captain. And you know, of course, this is not your original position. The ship has moved.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘You can see by those buoys and beacons.’

  ‘Ja?’ The captain’s face was as expressionless as the bulkhead behind him.

  We had certainly moved. And that meant we had dragged our anchor. Here was another mystery. How had that happened without anyone noticing? At that time no explanation was forthcoming, but from scraps of conversation in the day or two that followed I pieced together an impression of events that began with a sudden forty-mile-an-hour gale charging up the bay before dawn and heaving the sleeping Piranha, anchor and all, onto a bank. Then the tide began to ebb. Heavy rain and the dim light of dawn obsured the all-important landmarks from the presumably unsleeping eyes of the officer of the watch. The slow dragging of an anchor and a stealthy shift in a ship’s position can go unnoticed in the distracting commotion of a sudden blast of wind and rain; or so I have been told. Even dragging an anchor might not have mattered if the tide had not turned at that moment, leaving us high and dry like a toy duck in a plugless bathtub.

  ‘It is low water, captain,’ the pilot said. ‘Better wait for the tide.’ The captain’s reply was a wordless, guttural groan like a wounded lion in the night.

  The officers paced up and down the tilted deck. In an atmosphere so tense with professional drama I tried to make myself invisible. We waited – how long? Time meant nothing – but at last, like a corpse reviving, the Piranha seemed to blink her eyes and breathe. A slight tremble ran through the stricken ship as though she had sighed, and soon there came another, stronger, shudder. In a moment I felt a gentle bumping under my feet and the deck began to heave, rising and falling almost imperceptibly, the slowly rising water restoring, almost tenderly, a buoyancy to her hull, though it still touched the bank beneath as if with soft, rhythmic kisses. After a while the bumping became heavier as the space widened between the ship and the bank – a worrying sensation; but then the tide took up her stern and she rode free. She was upright again, and alive. There was no cause to cheer because we were still immobile, but at least the Zulus could begin unpacking. As for me, I went below, rescued my belongings from the corner of the cabin, and put on my socks.

  Within hours the middle-aged Brazilian diver was back, flopping into the water from his launch and vanishing with a flick of his flippers under the muddy surface. Two or three of the Piranha’s young officers watched him, whistling and hooting when he reappeared and making obscene gestures like urchins at a funfair, and they were watched in turn by some of the Zulu crewmen, who leaned over a rail looking down with blank expressions which, it seemed to me, could only mask contempt. The diver’s verdict was that the ship had sustained more serious damage. He had found a long, deep depression in her plates well below the waterline.

  ‘I’ve never heard of such a big dent,’ Ken said later. ‘It sounded as big as my living room. If the plates weren’t extra thick we’d still be sitting on the bottom.’

  Captain Brand’s heavy expression became heavier and darker. ‘I may be in South Africa before you, Gavin,’ he said glumly, like a defeated general predicting his own recal
l and court martial. In The Mirror of the Sea, Conrad had asked:

  Does a passenger ever feel the life of a ship in which he is being carried like a sort of honoured bale of highly sensitive cargo? For a man who has never been a passenger it is impossible to say. But I know that there is no harder trial for a seaman than to feel a dead ship under his feet…. The grip of the land upon the keel of your ship, even if nothing worse comes of it than the wear and tear of tackle and the loss of time, remains in a seaman’s memory an indelibly fixed taste of disaster…. To be ‘run ashore’ has the littleness, poignancy, and bitterness of human error…. A man may be the better for it but he will not be the same.

  I have never been anything else on a ship but a passenger, and I could have answered Conrad: yes, it is as possible for a passenger to feel life in a ship, as it is for someone on an elephant’s back to feel the life of the elephant; you don’t have to be a mahout for that. Something mournful in the way a captain says ‘Finished with engines’ has always reminded me of a doctor at a deathbed reaching out to close the eyes of a corpse. So, passenger though I was on the Piranha, I could suffer for Captain Cornelius Brand.

  That stranding changed things inside as much as outside the Piranha. First, there was the captain’s brooding; that threw a terrible pall over us all. In contrast, however, Roy, the ship’s baleful Billy Bunter, became genial and talkative; I supposed that his public outburst against me had satisfied his irresistible urge for Pom-baiting: he had made his one-upman’s point and now seemed disposed to behave in a normal, friendly way. For this I felt relief. As for Ken, he took our catastrophes with his usual calm, but I could see that both he and Roy were worried about the effect of the double disaster on Cornie’s nerves.