Scend of the Sea

by Geoffery Jenkins

  I took the wheel from Jubela, and signalled him to go below. Tafline was in the cockpit, crouched against the cabin woodwork out of the wind, securely roped to the grab-handles by the door. My eyes were full of blown spray and rain.

  I therefore never saw the thing that hit us.

  I had been guiding the kicking rudder-that violent cross-sea made her wild - to try and keep her head towards the eye of the gale. It must have been about half past eight. Only dim sunlight lit the awesome scene.

  Touleier took a deep lurch and at the same moment she was struck by a heavy weather sea. She seemed to be thrown sideways into another mountain of water. She went over at an impossible angle. The mainsail boom plunged under. Before I had time even to realize what was happening, I was up to my armpits in water. The yacht lay down, completely on her beam ends, with her keel showing between the waves.

  I went cold with fear.

  Touleier dropped like a stone.

  Here was the same sickening drop I had known in Walvis Bay. The whaler's head had been pointing into the storm and she had been under power; now I had under me a yacht without headway, lying on her beam ends with the long mast and submerged storm-jib acting as further makeweight to prevent her ever coming up again.

  I could not see Tafline. All that held me to the yacht was a bight of nylon fixed to the lifeline. My mouth and eyes were full of water and oil from the bags.

  Down the yacht dropped.

  The cabin door flew open as Jubela threw his weight against it from the inside. He was in shirt and trousers only - he must have stripped off the oilskins to dry them - and as he came out, the wind ripped the shirt from his back and whirled it away into the scud-filled sky.

  I spat and retched oil and sea water. 'An axe! Get an axe, man! Cut it away!'

  He seemed stunned, unhealing. Frantically I chopped my right hand into the left palm to show what I meant. He saw, and ducked away.

  I saw Tafline's terrified face. She, like myself, was roped fast to the lifelines. She cowered, half-crouched, half-squatted, on the inner edge of the gunwale planking which now lay parallel to and half under the water, instead of upright.

  Still Touleier lay over. Still she dropped.

  The stern started to slew from the greater weight of water aft in the cockpit. The rudder was beyond human control.

  Her head began to come away from the run of the sea. The next wave would send her stern-first to the bottom.

  Jubela, naked to the waist, broke from the cabin with an axe and raced up the weather rigging, now lying almost flat with the sea. I saw him hack at the tough light-alloy of the mast just above the spreader. It bent, but did not break.

  The bow started to corkscrew and the stern gurgled deeper under me. I yelled frantically to Tafline to get rid of her lifeline. If the yacht went down, she would take Tafline with her to the bottom.

  Jubela doubled back along the rigging and switched his attack to the stays and rigging-screws on deck. I do not know whether it was luck or shrewdness or desperation, but at his second stroke one of the main shrouds parted; a second went and he dodged its backlash; then the rest seemed to part all at once. The mast crumpled, snapped, broke free. A twelve-foot jagged stump was all that was left.

  Relieved of the mast's weight, I felt the first touch of life come back into the hull as the buoyancy tanks fought back. Jubela felt it, too, and hacked again and again.

  Touleier started to rise off her side. But she still continued that awful downward fall, like dropping in a bottomless air pocket.

  Jubela turned to leap forward to cut away some of the trailing wreckage.

  He stopped and froze. He pointed ahead with the axe.

  He turned and screamed at me, his face stunned with shock.

  I could not hear the words, but his meaning was clear from the frame of his lips. ‘A ship!'

  The wind eased momentarily. The air-pocket drop stopped.

  The death-dealing pyramids of water held back from giving their final coup-de-grace to the floundering yacht.

  Touleier pivoted back on to an even keel. Hundreds of tons of water cascaded free. Rigging trailed overboard from the truncated mast.

  Tafline. too. saw Jubela's shock. She scrambled on to the cabin roof towards him. She and Jubela could see. I could not, from the low level of the cockpit and the trough of the sea.

  She turned and called. My astonishment at hearing her vied with my amazement at what she said.

  ‘A sailing ship! Dead ahead!’

  I yelled to Jubela to cut away the overside clutter before it pierced the hull. He paid no attention. He stood transfixed, staring.

  Again I shouted at him. He did not carry out my orders. Instead, he slid aft to me at the wheel. His face was grey with fear.

  ‘I . . . have never . . . seen ... a ship .. . like it! ‘ he jerked out. 'Umdhlebe!' Umdhlebe! - something strange. The smell of death about it!

  I shoved the helm into his shaking hand. I freed my lifeline and jumped up alongside Tafline. She pointed.

  There was no mistaking Phillips' description: there was the high bow, pointing into the eye of the gale, and the squat, square stern. But she had no masts. Water creamed and broke over the bow. Between bow and stern the hull was rounded, disproportionately long, like a whale's back.

  A burst of spray hid the caravel.

  'It's impossible!' I got out. 'I've never seen a ship like that except on a picture . ..'

  She gripped my arm and said unsteadily. There is a ship. A whole ship. A big ship. It's nothing to do with that old-fashioned bow and stern. It's lying caught between them ...'

  'Dear God! What sort of a nightmare is this!'

  'It's not a nightmare, and it's not a caravel,' she jerked out. 'It's an island! It's an island shaped like a caravel, Ian! And it's got a ship on it - upside down1'

  Touleier rose to the next crest. We could hear each other. Here was that merciful, unnatural lull Clan Macintyre had known, the lull which had saved Walvis Bay.

  I made a shambling run to the stump of the mast, grabbed it, and gave her a hand to me.

  Touleier lifted.

  'Look, Ian! The bow and stern don't rise to the sea! They're steady! They're - rocks!'

  Across the welter of sea, a few cables away, I saw what Phillips had seen, what I had seen under Walvis Bay's bows.

  A smooth hill of rock, one end shaped like the bow of a medieval ship and the other in perfect imitation of the stern, reared itself above the confused, grey sea. Between the extremities, it fell almost to water level, and seen from a distance, in the confusion of a gale and impending darkness, it presented the perfect silhouette of a caravel. Phillips had sighted it between himself and the land, against the backdrop of a dim sunset. It must have been a mere silhouette, and distant. What, I asked myself hastily, had caused Phillips to add that he had seen masts? Had it been some trick of the light, or had his overwrought, tired brain simply added them as a natural adjunct to the hull? Or, more simply still, was it that, against the shore skyline, where the great forests hang on cliffs above the sea, the trio of the huge, white, sparlike umzimbeet trees had provided the puzzling addendum?

  In front of my very eyes now was the exposed rock into which Walvis Bay had nearly crashed headlong. In a flash I saw why the sea had not struck down the weather ship after her hideous downward drop, or Touleier a few minutes before: the ship-shaped island provided a perfect lee, a powerful natural bulwark, against the force of the gale and the run of the sea.

  We stared unbelievingly at the rock, an island unmarked on any chart.

  But it was not upon the rock that our eyes were riveted. She gave a half-sob and buried her face against my shoulder. It was the ship.

  The barnacle-fouled hull was mortised so deftly between the 'bow' and 'stern' of the rock that it seemed part of it; indeed, its regular line enhanced the resemblance to a deck between the two projections. Its roundness, curved inward and upward, added to the man-made appearance. At the 'stern' the deception ended
with brutal plainness.

  Two huge screws projected into the air.

  The ship was upside down.

  A steamer, keel and screws in the air, lay sandwiched between the two rock eminences some hundreds of feet apart. The island seemed scarcely wider than the steamer's beam.

  When I spoke, I did not recognize my own voice. 'We'll get a jury stay rigged on to the mast and go closer and look.'

  She bit her lips fearfully and looked at the hulk.

  'How . . . ?'

  I turned to go aft. I stopped dead. There had been nothing for me but that fatal little caravel-shaped island ahead. Until now. Then I saw.

  Behind the yacht towered a grey incline of sea. It was high enough for me to have to look up and see the waves bursting and racing. Touleier, sheltered from gale and sea, was in comparative calm.

  I held her, frozen, round the shoulders.

  'A valley -a valley in the sea! We've toppled down a valley . . .' I pointed to a sort of shallow valley formed in the sea itself.

  The stunning simplicity of it was incredible. The violence of the sea created a sort of hollow in its surface. The gale brought with it a massive run of the sea in the opposite direction to the Agulhas Current, and the two opposing streams banked up and formed a hollow. Something in the undersea topography must have helped, this being over such a limited area. This 'seamount' was a needle-like pinnacle which reared up from the ocean floor, and only an exceptional gale uncovered it, sixty feet deep, not high! Normally it was no danger to ships, but a Waratah gale bared it, and it turned into the Flying Dutchman! Then when the gale eased, the Agulhas Current became master again, the valley and the seamount disappeared, and so did the Flying Dutchman . . .'

  'Quick! We must be quick, Ian, before it disappears! We must see that hulk!'

  Jubela and I hastily lashed up a jury stay from the mast stump to take a rag of canvas. Tafline brought my camera from below.

  Touleier edged closer to the hulk on the seamount. It gave us a lee which became progressively smoother, the closer we approached.

  The high promenade deck which had caused so much controversy lay crushed and concertina-ed under the 10,000 tons deadweight. Somewhere, too, under the telescoped superstructure, on which the whole weight of the ship rested, was the ruin of the single high funnel with its once-proud insignia.

  The camera's electric flash cut across to below the eighteen-foot double screws, sea-fouled and trailing seaweed.

  She called out the name, upside down, emblazoned on the stern.

  'Waratah:

  ‘The gale's holding steady,' I replied. ‘So long as it does, the water should stay where it is. We must be quick. Every minute counts. It's now or never, to see the Waratah. Watch out especially when we get to the keel, the wind could blow us off our feet.'

  Leaving the yacht in Jubela's care -he seemed to want to concentrate on physical tasks to avoid looking at the dead monster towering above us - we made for the stern. It looked easier to climb than any other part of the hull. We had a rope to lash ourselves fast to the decaying screws against the sea.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  That fantastic roll of hers, when she dropped down like we did, must have been the death-stroke. She must have rolled right over, clean on to the seamount, and come to rest lodged as we saw her. No wonder there were neither wreckage nor bodies. The weight of the ship trapped everything underneath. Her upper decks were completely crushed. All the loose gear the world debated about for so long must be lying under all that weight.'

  ‘It must have been all over very quickly,’ Tafline said quietly. 'They had a merciful end, those 211 souls.’

  'Three minutes, some expert worked out. They reckoned at the time that had she capsized, it wouldn't have been longer than that. I expect, too, that in a storm like that everyone was below decks. All the bodies are probably still inside-or what's left of them.'

  The hulk had a complete unreality for me. I could not credit that this was the ship whose every detail I had studied for so long. It reminded me of my first visit to the Cutty Sark at Greenwich dry-dock. As a boy, I had studied her plans, knew every interior lay-out, every deck, as if I had trodden them myself. Then came the day when I went aboard. It was at once familiar and strange. Now I looked with the same new-old eyes at the crushed, corroded hull resurrected from its sea-grave by the extraordinary phenomenon of gale and sea.

  Astern, the power of the gale held back the incline of water, so willing to engulf the Waratah as of old; here, in the shelter of the seamount's lee, we could hear ourselves speak, although the storm thundered by on either flank, giving a curious, disembodied effect to our presence, like being in a capsule - aware, seeing, fearing, but at the same time partially divorced from it.

  Touleier lifted and heaved too much to allow us to bring her safely more than perhaps a quarter of a cable's length from the wreck. Moreover the wind was masked by the immediate lee effect of the seamount, so that the way was almost off her. I was gravely concerned about the mast and the trailing clutter of rigging.

  Yet I was drawn to the thing which I had sought so long.

  The exorcism had begun. It was not over.

  I must know still more about the Waratah.

  She, too, wanted it and said, 'There's the airliner, your father's message. He must have been here too!'

  What awful secrets still lay hidden in that rusted hulk, its propellers so grotesquely turned to the sky? The swell seethed and swished, enveloping the wreck to the first line of cabin ports, tight closed, as they must have been that same day sixty years ago, against the ancestor of the gale which again today had laid its offering on the altar of a sea which could not yet wholly claim its dead.

  Tafline shuddered, a spasm of fear.

  Jubela shuddered, too, and would not reply when I explained rapidly to him in Zulu. I had grabbed his oilskins and sweater for him from the cabin and he pulled the sou'wester hard over his forehead, pretending that handling the yacht needed all his concentration.

  I made up my mind.

  'Bring her round - handsomely now,' I told him. The yacht handled clumsily with the trailing debris alongside; the way the mast stump whipped at the flap of the tiny jib brought my heart into my mouth.

  'Clear away that mess as quick as you can,' I told Jubela further. 'Keep a tight watch. I'm taking the dinghy to have a look . . :

  Tafline helped me inflate the rubber coracle from an air bottle while Jubela got busy on the wreckage with an axe.

  'Her boat deck used to be fifty-five feet above the sea,' I said, 'but it's flat now, so there'll not be as much as that to climb. With all those barnacles and growths on the hull, it should be easy to find footholds.'

  What about . . . ?' She pointed at the hovering incline of sea.

  The gale's holding steady,' I replied. ‘So long as it does, the water should stay where it is. We must be quick. Every minute counts. It's now or never, to see the Waratah. Watch out especially when we get to the keel, the wind could blow us off our feet.'

  Leaving the yacht in Jubela's care-he seemed to want to concentrate on physical tasks to avoid looking at the dead monster towering above us - we made for the stern. It looked easier to climb than any other part of the hull. We had a rope to lash ourselves fast to the decaying screws against the pluck of the wind.

  We paddled to the nearest porthole. My heart raced. I tried to look in. The glass was opaque with green growth. Even my strong flashlight would not penetrate it.

  Disappointed, we dipped and splashed our way to the rudder. Lying inverted, the old-fashioned counter, designed before the cruiser stern became fashionable in passenger liners and showing clearly its affinity with the days of sail, provided us with an easy first step up towards the rudder pintles. Higher still were the propellers.

  I edged in. Tafiine's face was hidden by her sou'wester. The swell receded. Unexpectedly, she stood up and jumped lightly on to the counter. How many years was it since human foot trod that fated hull? She stood poised
for a second, then swung round to face me. She pushed back her sou'wester. I see her still: her face radiant, the short hair light against the old dark hull.

  She tapped each heavy brass letter, green from years of immersion, with her right toe.

  'W-a-r-a-t-a-h' she spelled out, never taking her eyes from my face across the couple of feet of heaving water.

  She held out her arms.

  'Come to me.'

  I jumped. She put her lips close to my ear, and for a moment the caravel-rock, the sea and the wreck ceased to be.

  'I have the Waratah, and now I have my love.'

  Then she eased me a little from her, and the question was in her eyes.

  'Yes,' I said. 'We must look further.’

  Had it been like an ordinary wreck, perhaps we should not have chosen to go on. But, because the hull was completely intact - tribute to those Clydeside builders who had claimed to be among the world's best - it had a shut-off quality, unlike the piteous rends, torn plating, or broken back of a ship aground on a merciless reef. The long, sinister, corroded hull, doubly odd because of its lack of upperworks, lay there, its ports closed, waiting.

  There was nothing to stop us.

  I had brought a boathook and a length of rope, but for our initial progress up the incline of the counter they were unnecessary. The clusters of barnacles gave us adequate foothold. We were able to stand comfortably when we reached the rudder, holding on to the huge slab of rusted metal. This was braced by four massive transverse strips of iron, each about four inches wide and nine feet apart, so that it was a relatively easy matter to use them as footholds to the eighteen-foot screws towering above our heads, their bronze still surprisingly bright against the general shabbiness of the hull.