Scend of the Sea

by Geoffery Jenkins

  'Aye, aye, sir. Steady as she goes.'

  Young Smit, who held the imprecise status of second officer of the weather ship, was enjoying the formality. He, like me, was a yachtsman and knew the approaches to Table Bay like the back of his hand. This was a new course to him, for usually on taking Walvis Bay to her Southern Ocean station, I headed westwards into the open sea; now, Durban-bound, the weather ship would first have to make her way round the thirty-mile projection which is the Cape Peninsula and then follow an easterly course past the notorious Cape Agulhas, and then parallel to the country's southern shore. I was keeping a bright watch for fog on this winter's night, as it has an evil trick of hanging over a very limited area of low-lying ground which are Green and Mouille Points and ambushing any unwary shipmaster who sees the bright lights of the port all around him and heads for them. The fine ships whose bones lie on the reefs are proof of the folly of taking that final short-cut into the great port.

  The peaks of the Twelve Apostles were misty to port, and I decided to keep closer inshore than the Shell Mammoth, ahead of me in the night, could do with her deep draught. I went over to the port side of the bridge and took a look at the receding land.

  Chart-bringer!

  Had I thought of that quiet but disquieting presence which still lingered below my Waratah photograph as someone to be sought out again, I should have chafed now at the thought of my long absence from Cape Town during my deep probe southwards beyond Bouvet and past those two seamounts which are more real on a chart than in the actuality of the wild sea-desert of the Southern Ocean and, departing, I would have wondered where she was among the blaze of lights abeam which was Sea Point. I might have even picked out a block of flats as her possible home and told her of it when next I met her. I might have rejected Sea Point and let my mind hover, helicopter-like, over the sprawling welter of suburban lights glistening in the rain under the great mountain and speculated again where she did live. With parents? From whom had she derived that strange withdrawn look, that quiet fervour at the back of those deep eyes, which had touched - me or the Waratah, Or both? I side-stepped that uncomfortable thought. I might have asked too, had the mood of pleasant fantasy been upon me as I watched the lighted land and the darker clefts and kloofs of the mountain slide away, whether she ever watched the ships come and go? Being a weekend, was she partying among the lights, forgetful of her encounter with an odd skipper who was making his way to sea in the darkness, maybe some unaccountable darkness of his own mind?

  I might have had these thoughts, but I did not: it was not of herself, but of me, that she made me think that night. She held up a mirror to me, and it was at my own image, not hers, that I looked as the shoreline became progressively less illuminated until only an occasional light shone out to sea, or a car's headlights searchlighted the magnificent Marine Drive which swings again and again as it follows the shoreline the length of the Peninsula. I was twenty-eight. She was perhaps twenty-five. Command of the Walvis Bay was my first real job. I had been born in Cape Town, educated there, and had graduated from Cape Town University. Before university, as I had told her briefly, I had spent a season in a whaler in Antarctica as a youthful adventure. I think the influence of the head of the university's Oceanographic Department had something to do with my appointment to the command of the weather ship, plus my ocean-racing experience. I had raced Touleier (‘the one who leads the oxen') to South America-and won. That night off the Peninsula I had not yet heard the soft inflexion of her Welsh name, so unusual to South African ears. Tafline! Had I known it, and known something of the ancestry which had shaped that finely-moulded face, it might have given her more substance; there was nothing of her in my cabin but a presence and an oil-skinned chart. There was no lingering perfume, even. She had called the cabin a cell, her curiosity compounded with compassion; I handed over the bridge for a moment to Smit and went below and tried to look at the cabin with her own eyes and project the image of myself which had clearly intrigued her, but I found it uncomfortable, and I went back to the darkness and the disappearing land.

  Mine had begun as a life much the same as thousands of others, but then came the acclaim and publicity over the ocean race. It was true what I had said, that it was boredom which killed on the weather-station islands; at sea, especially in a racing yacht, there is no time for it. Under the self-scrutiny which she had provoked, I realized that subconsciously I had made the weather ship into a substitute for the yacht: for the endless vigilance of sails, helm and wind I had replaced the regular three-hour readings, the barometric pressures, wind velocities, temperature charts and radiosonde balloon ascents, but the essential matrix of aloneness remained unchanged. Walvis Bay and Touleier were different, but the same. This I realized as the cold sea swished by and the land became more ill-defined. The long voyage ahead from Durban, the complex of scientific observations involved which, until she came, had occupied all my thoughts, were, I saw on the silent bridge that night, a further step towards isolating myself from human contacts.

  In themselves they need not have been, but she had gone unerringly to the heart of it all - Waratah.

  My own father had never seen First Officer Fairlie of the Waratah, his father. Dad was born in January 1910, and the Waratah had been lost during the last days of July 1909. By the time I came to discuss the Waratah with Granny Fairlie it was history, and she talked of it impersonally, without sorrow. One thing she asserted, however, and that was that the ship had not been lost the way the ineffectual court of inquiry had found. 'Douglas Fairlie knew ships,' she used to state. 'Captain Ilbery was the same. They knew how to handle them, even if they were-as everyone said after the Waratah vanished - different. Captain Ilbery had graduated in the wool clippers and he used to tell some hair-raising stories of them running the easting down to Australia with decks awash, carrying all sail. Passengers used to queue to sail with Captain Ilbery, whatever ship he captained.'

  And, as if to reaffirm her faith in her sailor-husband, she never applied to the courts to have him presumed dead, as so many others did. 'Douglas Fairlie wasn't dead when the Waratah went down,' she stated flatly. I used to visit her among the noble oaks of Stellenbosch, where she had a small house in classic Old Dutch style. She had settled in South Africa after the Waratah tragedy. In her will she had left me some priceless Waratah documents.

  A few hours before, I had been excited, taut, eager for a voyage which I boasted inwardly to my own scientific ego could be a little Challenger expedition. My route lay first down the coast along the line of the largely unexplored terraces and sea-bed contours of the Agulhas Bank. Then my mission would take on a different form altogether-the study of wind, weather, and the uprising of great bodies of water in the cold seas to the south of Bouvet, towards the ice shelf itself.

  Now, what an unknown girl thought, on seeing my cabin, predominated: to her it was beyond ordinary credence that anyone, isolated as I was in the trackless wastes of the South Atlantic, should for his sole relaxation content himself, as I did, with half a dozen books on Antarctic meteorology and the obscure rewards to be won from a wind gauge. It was not enough, she had reasoned. There must be more to me somewhere: she had gone to the photograph of the Waratah and the airliner to find it.

  'A ship fine on the starboard bow, sir!'

  Smit broke into my thoughts, but the sideburned Fourie, who perhaps sensed my wish to be alone, simply gestured out to starboard and ahead from the dimness of the wheel-house. I saw them too-the lift of the supertanker's masthead lights in the swell. To port, we had picked up Slangkop light - a ship had died here a few days after the Waratah, in the next great gale of the 1909 winter. Perhaps Smit, too, detected my mood, for neither of them spoke. 'Everything well on board' - why did it keep coming back so compulsively since our meeting in the cabin? Those were Waratah's last words to the world!

  She held up a mirror to me: I was nearly thirty, but last year, one whole year, had been lost among the great seas of the Southern Ocean. Was she trying to te
ll me, by calling my cabin a cell, that life was passing me by? Yet life had been good-until the Viscount crash. Now it came to me for the first time that Dad had been barely a year or two older than I when the Second World War had broken out; he had flown with the first war-time squadrons of the South African Air Force against the enemy in Africa. What had he done before that? I simply did not know. Flying had seemed to be his whole life; I had never thought of him as other than a flyer. He had ended the war as a colonel, and it was he who had led the daring bomber raids against the Rumanian oilfields and Warsaw. He was old for a pilot when he died in the Viscount. It was to be one of his last flights before retiring as a civil pilot, which he had become after the war. My mother Anne Fairlie never recovered from the shock of the disaster and died a year later. It meant the end of a gracious home at Rondebosch, not far from the stately Groote Schuur, donated by Cecil Rhodes to be the official residence of prime ministers. My mother was ailing when the inquiry had questioned her about my father's health, and afterwards she never discussed the crash again except, like Granny Fairlie, to assert: 'Bruce Fairlie didn't die at the controls. He was alive after the plane hit the sea.'

  Jubela came through to take the wheel and the midnight watch. The Cape Point light (Drake's 'fairest Cape’) stood out clear, but in the rain I could not distinguish the neighbouring twin peaks, Maclear and Vasco da Gama. I kept well clear of the land with soundings going, for the Cape is the graveyard of careless skippers. Eastward bound as we were, Cape Point is the last of the three great lights of the Peninsula; now, in saying goodbye to it, I realized that I was saying goodbye to the person who had stepped so accidentally, yet so forcefully, into my thoughts. Would we-could we-meet again after that first revealing, penetrating encounter? I did not make up my mind, then: Agulhas, Danger Point, Quoin Point all lay ahead in the darkness and the rain, and she was behind now.

  Jubela did not give me his usual greeting in Zulu, adding his deferential 'Kosaan - little chief. Instead, he said quietly, 'Umdhlebe.' By that single word it was clear that he had read my preoccupation. With her? -1 rationalized it, not her, but myself. Jubela was a witchdoctor's son; I never found out what brought him to sea. His home was somewhere in the hot Tongaland sand forest where the Pongola River finds its normal channel too small to flex its flood muscles in and spills into a series of extensive, shallow flood pans. The Downs of Gold, the earliest Portuguese explorers called Jubela's land, looking optimistically at it with eyes seared by the sun of crossing half the world on their way to reach India. With that sixth sense the witchdoctor or sangoma inherits psychological insight, one could call it - Jubela called me by the strange name he reserved for rare occasions.

  Perhaps seven or eight months before, the weather ship had been taking it green as she plugged her way into the teeth of a gale far to the south of the Cape. The seas had been breaking heavily and lifelines were rigged. Jubela had been at the wheel, but I was anxious for the safety of our precious scientific apparatus, and I sent him aft to check whether our makeshift balloon-filling hut was standing up to the seas breaking aboard. He did not return. It was impossible in the darkness to see what had happened, but he had been washed overboard. Feldman, my No. 1, was regretful but adamant. To turn back to search the sea, he argued, would endanger not only the delicate apparatus, but most likely the safety of the ship herself; the chances of finding Jubela after nearly half an hour were remote. Nonetheless, I went back, taking the wheel myself and picking a way as gently as I could amongst the hammer-blow seas. It was I who had spotted him, too, black like a seal against a breaking line of white. Walvis Bay could not go too close for fear of crushing him to death; we trained the upper deck spotlight on him, hoping not to lose him in the wild welter of water.

  I went over the side with a lifebelt and line attached to drag us back, should I find him. Jubela saw me and swam. He came planing down a roller to the lifebelt, his seaboots tied round his neck. He always looked like a Spaniard, more so that the fine line of his teeth showed in the white spotlight. He made no attempt to grab the lifebelt, but he trod water, as if to get his balance. Then he reached forward with his right hand and took my right hand powerfully round the thumb and shook it once, dropped it, and reached again, his palm across my palm, both our elbows bent. He said nothing during this traditional gesture of comradeship gleaned from the bush and practised upon the great waters: there was no smile, no thank you, only a strange, long, compelling stare.

  They pulled us aboard.

  I found a bottle of rum and two mugs in the wardroom. The cold of the Antarctic sea seemed to paralyse our throats.

  Jubela stopped me as I raised my mug to his. His joking light-heartedness was back. A Tonga loves to make fun of himself, more than of anyone else. His seaboots still hung round his neck.

  'I knew you would come back to find me,' he laughed. 'I knew it would take too much for you to explain to the government why the seaboots were gone. So I just tied them round my neck and swam. I was right. You came, Kosaan.'

  I grasped the mug with both hands to stop the rum slopping. I knew the rules of Jubela's game of banter.

  'There was no other reason,' I grinned back. ‘It would have meant too much paper work for me if you had been lost. The boots are worth far more than the man.'

  ‘I will hang these boots in my hut when I am old, Kosaan.'

  Then what will I say in my report, Jubela? One pair of seaboots lost - as souvenirs?'

  He put his mug down and took my hand and arm again in that strange double handshake. His hands were colder than mine, but still he did not drink the warming rum. The Spanish grin was gone.

  'There is a tree of ours which commands respect,’ he said. 'It commands respect, and this is due to you, Kosaan, the captain. It is different from all other trees, with strange big grey leaves, like the claws of an ostrich. It is a strange tree, because it weeps big drops like a woman's tears; it is lonely, because men avoid it, for they say it has the smell of death about it. The name is Umdhlebe.'

  He picked up his mug of rum and drank it off without stopping.

  ‘I thank you, Umdhlebe.’

  The Cape Point light started to drop astern. Jubela at the wheel balanced himself as Walvis Bay gave a quick little duck-tail shake. At Cape Point the long levels of the Atlantic fall into step with the quick strides of the Indian Ocean, and Walvis Bay fell into step too, like the little thoroughbred she was.

  Strange. Alone. Weeps. The smell of death about it. She had underlined the loneliness of the weatherwatch patrol, but had not derided it, or held out the joys of the land to me. I had replied, 'it suits me,' and she had accepted that, but it still wasn't the answer. I had said I did. not grieve for the Waratah grandfather I had never met; I knew the hazards of a pilot as I knew the hazards of the sea, and my father had survived more than his fair share of flak, bullets and war. Why should I weep inwardly, she had asked herself, why should I grieve? Why should Jubela have said, the smell of death? He could not read and the pictures of the Waratah and Gemsbok meant nothing to him-I doubt whether he had been more than once or twice in my cabin anyway. Was it possible to detect through me on an extra-sensory level the deaths of 211 people in the ship and forty-seven in the airliner? The moment had passed ever to question Jubela; I knew that if I did he would laugh and deny that he had said anything of the kind. Yet tonight, when she had been the agent in provoking this tumult of introspection, he had called me Umdhlebe.

  A gust of wind - they call it a willy-waw - broke from behind Cape Point and slapped Walvis Bay astern; the squall and the rain obscured the last light.

  The darkness of the night was my answer.

  Two days later, I held Walvis Bay twelve miles offshore going north to Durban. It was a beautiful day and the great forests of the Transkei were clear to see on the cliffs and hills rising up from the coastline. A soft north-easterly breeze had no winter chill in it, and a quiet sea made no test of the weather ship's strong flared bow.

  It had come to me, that night
off Cape Point, that it would be a golden opportunity to pass up the coastline to Durban near East London on a course as near as I could steer to Waratah's own, and perhaps form some sort of reconstruction of the disaster. Why? The only answer I could have given then, before the chain of events unfolded itself, was - her. Perhaps on my protracted return to Cape Town I would be able to tell her something first-hand about the area which had swallowed up a ship and an airliner without trace, and take up, so to speak, where we had left off. I had sailed the route before the Gemsbok crash and knew the coast reasonably well. Was I merely building another facade by retracing Waratah's course, like the one she had penetrated in order to see what lay behind? Or was I trying to create an easy excuse for seeing her again?

  I plotted my course on the new chart she had brought me: here, under my keel now, somewhere between East London and the mouth of the Bashee River, more than 250 people had gone to a mysterious death sixty years apart in two vastly different craft. Could the two calamities be equated? More to keep myself occupied with the enigma than hoping for any real clue from it, I checked and rechecked the position of every headland, each river mouth up the coast - Nahoon Point, Gonubie Point, Kwelegha, Cintsa, Kefani, Haga Haga, Great Kei, Qolora, Kobonqaba, Nxaxo, Qora, Shixini - every one to the Bashee Mouth, until I felt repelled by the crop of outlandish names. Every position was right, every description faultless. The area was well frequented - Walvis Bay passed five ships going and three coming, including two big tankers. Through my binoculars I examined the shoreline and investigated every splendid headland. The bland sea smiled back with Oriental impenetrability. At length, off the Bashee Mouth itself where Waratah was last sighted, I could find no excitement. It was a calm, uncomplicated, beautiful day. It held no mysteries, no deaths. It was a passageway of ships on their lawful business, and ashore the holidaymakers and fishermen went about their holiday occasions.