Scend of the Sea

by Geoffery Jenkins

  'This isn't the Southern Ocean,' he replied with a laugh. 'I'm still thinking of those bikinis on the beach yesterday.'

  'You'll want more than a bikini before tonight's out,' I retorted. 'It's coming up rough. Real . . .' I choked back the word Waratah '. . . Cape of Storms stuff. From the southwest.’

  'Will do,' replied the engineer cheerfully. 'But the big problem remains - battery acid, if she starts to buck about.'

  I stopped Smit leaving the bridge. 'Take a special look at the Van Veen grab,' I told him. 'It's awkward to secure, hanging outboard like that. I don't want the chains flailing around in the darkness.'

  'Aye, aye, sir. I'll get the bo'sun on to it first before the sea comes up.'

  Mine was a tough, well-tried Southern Ocean crew. But the stay in Cape Town, and the soft-weather delights of Durban at the height of the winter season, had taken the edge off them. I always had a sneaking sympathy with Odysseus trying to drive his languor-laden crew. Waratah weather wouldn't be the rearing, mile-long swells of the Southern Ocean they were used to; it would be a brutal tossing of short, quick blows and forty-foot waves, a savage, give-no-quarter in fight. It had driven back the search tugs which had gone to look for the lost liner; it had hammered one of the 2200-ton cruisers for nine days until her hull was so strained that they had had to drydock her. Naval divers had had to work on the second cruiser for eight days before she dared put to sea again.

  The string of orders and need for action to snug down the ship had taken my mind from the problem which now loomed. Smit brought it home like a dollop coming over the side.

  ‘Feldman will be coming on duty soon, sir. You'll be able to give him your signals for the Weather Bureau.'

  Feldman telescoped the duties of radio operator with first officer. Smit could help out with incoming signals, but was incapable of transmitting.

  My preoccupation with the Waratah had driven momentarily from my mind that other track which ended where hers did in a circled question-mark south of the Bashee-Gemsbok.

  Gemsbok had flown on a Waratah night; tonight a Waratah night was lying in wait for the Buccaneer!

  My next order froze. How could I stop Alistair flying tonight? Even the most guarded message would somehow betray that we had some sort of tryst-the pilot of a crack squadron using a crack plane for some private arrangement with the trusted skipper of an experimental weather ship whose success depended largely on his judgment and seamanship? Beating up shipping in Buccaneers is a court-martial offence: when I had reminded Alistair of it, he had laughed and said: ‘I don't see brother Ian peaching on me, do you? Who's to know anyway in the dark?' We had left it at that.

  Send a slightly overstated on-the-spot weather report to the Bureau hoping that they would supply it to the Air Force who in turn would call off the manoeuvre? My mind jeered at me even as I composed it - how would you get away with that one? 'On the basis of my observations of a storm sixty years ago . . . !' What else was I basing my assumptions on? Not the tight interwoven system of highly scientific observations from a score of professional stations in this year of grace, transmitted at the speed of light to the central Bureau in Pretoria, digested by computer, and fed by skilled professional weathermen every few hours to hundreds of ships round the coast, scores of jetliners over the land, and squadrons of faster-than-sound military aircraft at a dozen bases. I felt the first tingle of doubt when I turned the spotlight on myself. If I dressed up the message in professional code, someone might see through it and say, Fairlie's been too long in the Southern Ocean, he's losing his nerve. He's lived with these gales so long they're starting to get under his skin.

  Signal the Air Force? Even if I knew their wavelength, such a by-passing my own people would invite a rocket which might mean my getting no nearer Antarctica than the next port...

  Say even the Weather Bureau were to accept my assessment of the impending gale-against all the skill and advice of their other weather stations - what would their reaction be? Walvis Bay carried a load of scientific equipment whose delicacy had caused a hundred headaches ashore and afloat. The Weather Bureau would play it safe. Get out of the storm area, it would say with complete justification. If there's any risk to the equipment in making the nearest port, turn back to Durban. You can still be there, safe in port, ahead of the storm. If you can't risk that gear in a winter's gale off the Cape, then there's no point in trying it in the Roaring Forties. They would appreciate the finer points of difference between the ocean swells of deep waters and the sort of seas I knew spelled Waratah weather.

  My glance at my watch was more instinctive than anything else. It may have even been subconscious, the rendezvous time.

  It gave me reason to beg Smit's question. I needed time. I must not miss the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity which offered to try and solve the Waratah mystery.

  'The shipping forecast is due in ten minutes,' I said. 'Bring me up one of the transistor portables from the ward-room. Come and hear yourself what the Weather Bureau thinks of it.'

  'Good -1 mean, very well, sir.' I liked Smit's unquestioning enthusiasm which burst through his veneer of formality as soon as he came under pressure.

  I took another long look at the south-west. That curious sky and blanched sea still told me - Waratah. If it was, or if it wasn't-like a martyr on a gridiron, whichever way I turned I would get myself burned.

  The Weather Bureau turned the spit again with its lunch-time forecast.

  Siriit came racing up the companionway just as the bland tones of the woman announcer, sitting in her soundproof box 600 miles away inland, said, 'There is a gale warning. We repeat, there is a gale warning.'

  Smit grimaced derisively as she shifted the emphasis from one word to another with professional satisfaction.

  ‘A strong south-westerly wind between East London and Durban will reach thirty to forty knots in the south of the area.'

  Forty knots! Smit glanced sideways at me. I could sense his let-down. Here I had been virtually ordering the crew to panic stations with threats of a Force 10/65 m.p.h. gale while the Weather Bureau - the people who had access to all the information and mutations from their weather stations-came up with a piddling little thirty-forty-knot blow which would do little more than wet the weather-ship's decks. My let-down was the kicker to years of patient, often heartbreaking, research and compilation into which I had thrown all my spare time in the Southern Ocean. Had I, as Alistair had said and she made implicit merely by her lovely presence, been simply wasting my time in a self-made statistical funkhole while life rushed by a thousand miles across an ocean waste?

  My bitterness rounded on young Smit. 'Switch off that damn thing,' I said harshly.

  'Aye, aye, sir,' he said, scared. 'Orders for the ship, sir . .. ?'

  'My orders stand,' I snapped. 'Look at that sea, you fool. And that sky. Can't you .. .see!’

  'No, I mean, yes, sir. Snug the ship down, sir. Grabs to be secured. Emergency ..." he forced himself to say the word '. . . gale rations from the galley. Galley fire to be doused by 1800 hours. Crew to stand by ...'

  'Don't go on like a bloody parrot,' I snarled.

  He stopped at the bridge ladder. 'In case ... in case . . . you have to leave the bridge, sir, what course, speed?'

  The way he was repeating everything made it all sound doubly ludicrous; now he was trying to use a euphemism to try and say that if my non-existent gale washed me from the bridge . . .

  ‘You heard-as before,' I retorted. 'Course, south-west, true, speed thirteen knots. No reduction or change of course without my express permission.'.

  'Aye, aye, sir.' Smit fled down the ladder.

  By mid-afternoon the old shipmaster's words had begun not to sound but to thunder in my mind-’a ship - without-a soul'. They took on the rhythmic thump, rip and rend of the seas which now smashed against the bow of the Walvis Bay, throwing themselves in spouting cascades of broken water and tails of spray high over the platform where the harpoon gun had stood, and then spreading themsel
ves feet deep across the decks like ragged, too-eager fingers searching again and again for a weak winch, a fatigued hatchcover, or a loosened stanchion to pluck away over the side. Walvis Bay knew how to toss them clear, and she was still fighting well within herself; nonetheless, I could hear her strain in the shuddering vibration of the hull and propellers. I had stood and watched with a kind of morose satisfaction at the rapid build-up of the sea and the gale until young Smit, oilskins streaming, reported to me before going off duty.

  'Handing over, sir.'

  I nodded.

  'Shouldn't . . . er . . . it's getting a bit wet up here, sir. Can't I bring you your oilskins ... ?'

  I regretted my curtness earlier. 'Yes, thank you.'

  He grinned and said boyishly, 'Looks as if you're right and they're wrong, sir.'

  There were too many things on my mind to accept the compliment. I was far too unsure, too. I checked my briefness and said:

  'See what the wind gauge says when you go to my cabin.'

  He returned and helped me into my waterproofing. 'Only thirty-eight knots, sir.' He sounded disappointed.

  I grinned at him now. 'So who's right is anyone's guess.'

  'When it gets worse-I mean, if it gets worse, sir, don't hesitate ...' He stopped at the presumption.

  ‘I’ll call you all right if it really blows.'

  'Thanks awfully -1 mean, very good, sir.'

  In his haste, he nearly bumped into Feldman. Feldman was slightly older than I, an unemotional, rather wooden first officer with a shock of black hair and a full face. He had none of Smit's volatile enthusiasm - the enthusiasm of a man of sail, I told myself. Feldman was reliable, providing the decisions were made for him. He spoke slowly, deliberately, and was, on occasion, almost pernickety.

  He greeted me briefly. He held on against the bucking of the ship and took a long look to the south-west, and then westwards towards the hazed shoreline. Jubela had been at the wheel for a few minutes before Feldman's arrival -morose, silent, withdrawn. There had been no conversation between us before Feldman came, except helm orders.

  Feldman finished his long scrutiny and then said slowly, as if afraid almost to voice his thoughts, 'Shouldn't we reduce speed a little, sir? She seems to be taking a lot of water. There's the gyro gear ...'

  My surprise at Feldman's querying a decision of mine shook me for a moment out of my Waratah train of thought. Never in a year at sea had he done anything but follow my orders. He did not look at me but, as if to reinforce his views, he seemed intent on examining the wind-torn sky south-westwards.

  Feldman was right: the hull of the weather ship was straining and thumping in the mounting seas. It was not the elated drum of the waves one hears when a racing yacht is running at her maximum speed, or the exhilarating crunch as she planes down one roller and up the hill of the next, but the head-on slug of evenly-matched boxes, the savage soften-ing-up in-fighting to produce the final knockdown. During the past hour I had watched critically the build-up of the sea. No need now to refer to those innumerable painstaking computations. The reality before my eyes brought every fact to mind with startling clarity. My guess was that it had not reached its maximum yet, whatever the Weather Bureau might say. Nor had the wind. Where Walvis Bay was now, the Waratah had been forging ahead at thirteen knots. So, whatever Walvis Bay suffered, she must hold Waratah's speed.

  Walvis Bay's course- Waratah's course-was about twelve miles offshire, and this corresponds roughly with the maximum southward flow of the Agulhas Current. This is a river of warm tropical seawater (known as the Mozambique Current north of Lourenco Marques) which touches a surface speed of five knots hereabouts, although divers have reported much higher underwater speeds. What drew my attention now-I could see by the jerky boil of the water between the ship and the land-was that a powerful counter-current was in the preliminary stages of building up, the sure herald (in my view) of a severe south-westerly buster. Despite what the official forecast said, I felt sure that this counter-current, hammering against the mighty Agulhas Current striking south, would create a maelstrom of a sea before the night was out. This was the way it had been with the Waratah. I had the Clan Macintyre's own log to back me, and this is the way it had been with her. She had been only a little way behind the Waratah, and had barely escaped disaster herself. The main instrument in the provocation of these great natural forces was the south-westerly gale, which would move up its own massed battalions of sea to reinforce the counter-current against the dominant Agulhas flow. What would transpire, only the night would show. And I intended to be in a ring-side seat with Walvis Bay to see.

  I knew Feldman's devotion to officialdom.

  ‘It looks worse than it really is,' I jollied him. The wind hasn't reached forty knots yet. The Weather Bureau says there's nothing more than an ordinary blow to it.'

  He looked relieved, although still dubious at what lay before his own eyes.

  'I've just checked the wind,' I went on. 'A mere thirty-eight knots.'

  What I did not say, was that I considered Smit's reading of a little while back already out of date. I guessed it at forty-five knots now - and increasing.

  Alistair! My foreboding at the thought of the Viscount's course running dead as it did on my chart jerked me back to an objective assessment of the whole situation. Say the wind way gusting forty-five knots now-what was that, in Alistair's own words, to a machine capable of the speed of sound? Was I not projecting all my Waratah fears and shadows and my own experience as a sailor into a quite different medium without due justification? The night the Viscount had vanished, land stations noted a speed of fifty knots. That was enough to inconvenience, but not threaten, a machine backed by thousands of horsepower. Was I not thinking in sea, rather than air, terms? At the moment there was no way I could see of warning off Alistair, anyway.

  Feldman said, after another long look at the south-west, 'I've never seen a sky quite like that. But the weather people must know. They've got all the information which we haven't. . .’

  By late afternoon, even Feldman's faith had evaporated. He answered in monosyllables only as the weather became wilder, until I could stand his moroseness no longer.

  'I'm going up aloft to take a look round,' I said.

  It was simply to get away from him; the bridge of the converted whaler was, in fact, the highest point of the ship after we had dismantled the special whaling lookout on the crow's nest at the time of her original conversion.

  I made my way to the scrap of deck high up aft near the radio hut

  The bridge, which was enclosed, gave only a forward sight of the sea; hanging on to a funnel stay-wire, I had an all-round view. I was taken aback at the wildness of the scene. I was aware that this type of storm developed rapidly, and that its storm centre moved equally quickly, but it was nevertheless startling to see it happening before my very eyes. To the south-west, towards East London, the sky was a curious purple-black over the land, and night-black out to sea. It was like looking from a spaceship at the dividing line between night and day on earth. The dying sun was able to create a lightness over the land, but the sea-black was relentless, ominous. Between Walvis Bay and the great blackness was a kind of no-man's-land of wind-torn sky and cloud flying at impossible speeds; these were the outriders of the main army of the storm, the light armour probing with quick thrusts the WarataWs battlefield of death. All round Walvis Bay the seas leaned to a plume of spindrift; they were not so high as steep, a sure sign that the general engagement with the Agulhas Current still lay ahead; the counter-current was still testing the enemy's defences.

  Involuntarily, I looked astern. I found myself reading the situation by hindsight. Sailors of the calibre of Douglas Fairlie and Captain Ilbery were not afraid of a storm, and the Waratah was a new ship, stout, fast, well-found. In the immediate uproar after her disappearance, sailors had no difficulty in believing that Captain Ilbery would have pushed her through the storm. Both men had served in clippers whose captains rejoiced in nothing l
ess than a full gale, men who knew how to pile on canvas to the royals and to use to the full the great westerly winds of the Roaring Forties. They were iron men who battened down their hatches because their decks would run awash for days under the press of sail; they were cruel, proud time-makers who armed their officers with pistols with orders to shoot down any terrified seaman who tried to let fly a halliard.

  There was not the least anxiety in the Waratah's last messages to the Clan Macintyre. She had not even reduced speed. This evening's sea would have looked just as wild from the bridge of the Waratah, and she had been nearly twenty times the size of my game little whaler.

  A short while before arriving at her present position, the Walvis Bay had passed a curious natural arch of rock known as The Hole-in-the-Wall which rises sheer out of the coast. The massive, soaring slab is pierced by an archway: the low sun broke through the gloom of the land and backdrop of great forests and for a moment the arch appeared like a bright nature-made headlight shining from the black land. One of the stories scouted after the Waratah had disappeared was that she had been sucked into a blowhole similar to The Hole-in-the-Wall and drawn down, by the strong inshore counter-current, into a vast undersea (or underland) cavern. A companion theory was that, under the extremes of gale and sea, a natural vortex had formed in the sea, and into this the liner had been sucked.

  How much, I asked myself hanging there and seeing the storm forces unleashing themselves - the same question I had asked Alistair-did we really know about the ocean's secrets? I ran my mind now over my own scanty knowledge of the ocean floor beneath Walvis Bay's keel. Round the coastline of South Africa runs a narrow continental shelf known as the Agulhas Bank, oil-bearing, elusive. It drops away in successive shallow terraces into very deep water. With something of a shock, I realized that the course I was holding was roughly the line of the-final terrace of the Agulhas Bank before it fell away into abysmal depths. Meaningful? Meaningless?