‘Tag that information on the end of the signal then, Sparks.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
Mackinnon lingered a moment in the chart-room, bending to stare again at the barograph. It still plummeted: it was time to turn round. But a hundred and forty-six souls! A hundred and forty-six lives which fate had already decreed should not dwell in their native land and had then abandoned upon the indifferent surface of the South China Sea . . .
Did his intervention constitute some mild relenting on the part of fate? Or was it a fragment of the arrogance that gave John Mackinnon his identity as a ship-master? And if it was the latter, had fate regarded it as a challenge and hence sent the typhoon as chastisement . . . ?
He dismissed the preposterous thought with a mental shrug. What purblind bloody foolishness! He had no time for such introverted nonsense. True, the operation on the woman had unnerved him; true, he had taken too much whisky for prudence, and, true, he was tired; but he had been scared before and he had been drunk before, really drunk, so drunk that he had damn near lost everything. And, come to that, he had been so dog-tired before that he had not cared whether or not death crept upon him, and yet he had survived.
He drew in a deep breath and braced himself. For Shelagh’s sake, he thought, Shelagh who was even then preparing to fly out to meet him, he could not weaken now. He was Captain John Mackinnon, Master under God of the motor vessel Matthew Flinders.
‘Come to take the wheel, Cap’n,’ Able Seaman Williams said as both men met at the wheelhouse door. ‘Sorry I’m late. Took a bit of time getting along the boat-deck.’
‘That’s all right, Williams,’ Mackinnon said, glad to be dragged from his morbid introspection, bending to the auto-pilot controls and resetting them to manual.
‘She’s doing a dido and the wind—’
‘Yes, it’s bad,’ Mackinnon cut in, in no mood for idle chatter. ‘We’re going to turn round in a minute, so get the feel of her. Steer three-three-five.’
‘Three-three-five it is, sir.’
They were going to turn round, he had said so matter-of-factly, as if the manoeuvre he was about to carry out was nothing more than a simple alteration of course. In fact, to remove the ship from her situation of potential trouble, he would have to risk everything on a most dangerous evolution, for to turn meant swinging her broadside on to the seas, if only for a few moments . . .
It called for the finest judgement and to make it Mackinnon would have to call upon more than mere experience. To gamble on such a single throw would need instinct, and without instinct he knew he was unfit to occupy his lonely post. Struggling against the wind, which in theory was diverted from the exposed bridge-wings by the upward curve of steel dodgers, he went out to get the feel of the run of the seas and the weatherliness of his ship as she rode them.
Immediately he realised he should have put about hours earlier. Prudence dictated he left the ship as she was, hove-to and riding the waves in reasonable comfort. She could take the punishment to which she was currently subject for as long as necessary. But more cogent reasons nagged at the Captain’s brain, reasons concerned with meteorology. The proximity of the typhoon’s core demanded action with a more peremptory insistence than mere cavilling safety. Once turned away with the wind astern, the ship would be heading south as the typhoon moved west and north. It was impossible for a tropical revolving storm to turn towards the equator, for it was generated by forces inimical to existence at very low latitudes. Formed some three to six hundred miles north or south of the earth’s midriff as a mass of warm air that rose, slowly at first, drawing in cooler air to replace it, it became a self-generating vortex of increasing violence, spun off towards the nearer pole by the rotation of the earth.
The whole system moved on two axes. Spinning about the funnel of rising air, a vacuous column of low pressure formed, the dead centre wherein extraordinary conditions existed, conditions of wholly vertical air movement that left the surface of the water a confusion of tossing seas and swells that rushed spiralling inwards to collide with dangerous and destructive force. No ship-master deliberately exposed his ship to this windless but chaotic area within which the very surface of the sea could be lifted by the lack of atmospheric pressure. But on its rim the wind circled with predatory force, roaring in horizontally before rising into the upper atmosphere, generating the furious waves it then relinquished to send against those tearing in from the opposite direction.
This indraught of air resulted in acute changes of the angle the wind made with the seawaves so that a vessel head to the heaviest swell might be struck by cross seas differing in direction by as much as forty degrees.
Not content with spiralling, the vast disturbance moved bodily westwards as the earth rotated towards the east, casting it off with a twist of geostrophic force which, in addition to initiating the spin, inclined its track towards the elevated pole. As this polar component increased as a function of time and latitude, the typhoon accelerated, perhaps doubling its speed of advance. As time passed and latitude increased, somewhere near the appropriate tropic, the storm reached its vertex and began to recurve. Sometimes it headed north and west to enter temperate latitudes as a depression. Alternatively it struck the coast of Indo-China and lost its driving force overland, starved of the warm, moist air necessary to its existence, so that continental landsmen never knew its awesome violence, only its pale and localised relation, the tornado.
This, then, was the text-book theory, known by every navigating officer worth his salt. A local mass of humid air, generally produced by a tropical island, which coincided with a northerly, or southerly, movement of the dead air of the doldrums which in turn conferred the revolving spin of a latitude greater than five degrees. It was this slower, earlier stage that the mariner feared, for within it unimaginable winds, winds in excess of a hundred and fifty knots might be encountered. On these facts he based his decisions, knew not to get caught in the so-called ‘dangerous semicircle’, that area to the right of the storm’s line of advance in the northern hemisphere, and vice-versa in the southern. More hazardous still was the dangerous quadrant, that quarter in which the winds tended to drive a vessel in towards the centre and where the fiercest winds would be encountered, for their velocity was reinforced by the forward motion of the typhoon itself.
As a black overcast covered the Matthew Flinders, it appeared to Captain Mackinnon that his ship lay in the path of this dangerous sector. His intention to turn, to take his ship south clear of the storm’s eye, would have the opposite effect, where the wind speed was diminished by the forward component of the typhoon as it moved away.
There was a rule of thumb by which he could gauge the peril in which his ship lay. Named for the Dutchman who had first made the simple discovery, it was called Buys Ballot’s law and it decreed that if an observer in the northern hemisphere faced the wind, the centre of the nearest low pressure was ninety degrees to the right.
So much for the theoretical considerations. There were now the variables to consider. With the Matthew Flinders hove-to and making no headway, her present position was extremely vulnerable in terms of the approach of the storm. As the disturbance approached, the wind would gradually increase and back round anti-clockwise, throwing up an ever-worsening sea. Though he had no doubt as to her ability to stand up to such punishment he had to think of the ship’s burden: not merely her professional crew, nor the added one hundred and forty-six boat people, but her lashed and tommed break-bulk general cargo, of the three bulldozers and Ford cars in the ’tween decks, of the twelve cement mixers any one of which, breaking adrift in the vacant spaces left by the cargo discharged in Singapore, might alter her trim, leave her with a list and affect her stability.
Then there was one last twist in the tail of this train of thought: occasionally typhoons behaved quite otherwise than predictably. Occasionally they looped in their paths; occasionally they turned back on themselves, increased in violence as though they knew the land killed them.
/> The legacy of Captain Mackinnon’s almost superstitious apprehensions was an unshakable conviction that this was one such monster. So he stood on his bridge and studied the beast with which he was about to do battle.
Above Mackinnon’s head the scud raced downwind, oppressing the surface of the sea. This sensation was augmented by the warmth of the great wind. Here was no forbidding chill, but the almost luxurious enervation of tropical destruction. A typhoon had the seductive breath of a whore, warm, overwhelming, and potentially lethal.
Mackinnon turned his attention to the sea. The wind speed was well over fifty knots now, force ten to eleven. Grey-white spume streaked the surface of the sea, almost entirely covering it. The waves were huge, well-defined ridges, the spume angled slightly across their direction of advance, their crests curled over, roaring in gigantic avalanches that flung themselves upon the ship with a roar that added to the shriek of the wind. This now produced a hostile diapason in the derrick topping lifts, the halliards and stays about the upper deck and a deeper and more significant booming heard intermittently from the heavy funnel guys. To communicate, all conversation had now to be shouted above the pervasive and deafening noise of the wind.
The Matthew Flinders staggered into each ridge of water, her bow rising before plunging downwards, the flare of her bows driving the sea clear until the wave stopped her dead, tossed her propeller into aerated water where it raced ineffectually. Forward, water cascaded aboard and sluiced aft as she fought back, crashing against the winches and the hatch-coamings, running this way and that, grey torrents that picked out her deck fittings as dark spots of resistance.
Then, by some magnificent combination of design, trim, buoyancy and the speed and course set earlier by her Master, the ship rose again. The water poured off the foredeck as the bow climbed towards the unseen sky and the cycle repeated itself, over and over, seemingly interminably.
Mackinnon found his hand caressing the teak rail, watching the ship gallantly defy the wind and sea. It made him feel better and threw off the sense of gloom that had clouded his mind. He had an odd sense of kinship with the Matthew Flinders and found himself grinning into the howling blackness.
Supposing he lost in the coming hours? Supposing in the next fifteen minutes he misjudged things and the Mattheew Flinders broached and rolled on her beam ends. No cargo lashings would restrain those bulldozers . . .
He thought of Shelagh with a brief regret, but everyone had to die and it was better to go confronting a challenge than to fade, incontinent and helplessly broken down. He thought of the western luxury of contemplating tomorrow, of working towards those pensioned years as though some guarantee, some convenant existed between a soul and its fate.
Good God, what folly! Life was a series of linked moments, that was all. The poor devils they had picked up that afternoon understood this: luck had given them another moment or two and perhaps, if Captain Mackinnon misjudged his moment, this would be their last too. Either way they had extended their existence by a few hours, for the junk would have sunk in this sea long since.
‘We build such temples to the permanence of our lives,’ he muttered, ‘yet what are they? What do they amount to?’ And he laughed to himself in the surrounding wildness, a laugh of mild wonder. ‘We are no more than dogs pissing upon lamp posts to mark our passing . . .’
He did not hear the ring of the telephone above the roar of the wind, but Rawlings, still in the wheelhouse, answered it and bawled its news at the immobile figure on the bridge-wing.
‘Engine-room are ready, sir. Ship’s ready to put about when you like.’
Mackinnon found the Mate’s use of the ancient sailing ship term appropriate, suiting his sudden access of energy.
‘Aye, aye,’ he replied, exhilarated, ‘let’s see what we can do.’
CHAPTER TEN
A Breaking of Lances
Taylor had not rested. The effort of the operation coming, as it did, after days of strain and worry, had simply served to string his nerves to a greater pitch. Finally, the achievement of the operation under the stimulus of the alcohol, had left him high as a kite. He sat in his cabin swaying automatically with the motion of the ship, staring unseeing in front of him. He felt like a spider at the centre of its web; as though the essence of his life was concentrated at some central point within him and the threads of his being, tired and only half-acknowledged, extended from this core outwards to the extremities of eyes and hands and feet. Periodically he moved to sip from the tooth glass, for he had persuaded Freddie Thorpe to part with another bottle of whisky, ‘on Company Service’, after the operation. He drank it without apparent effect.
He was unaware of being tired, even of being strained, tuned to the very pitch of nervous collapse. Indeed, if he was aware of anything beyond this centrical intensity it was a small, deep-seated glow of contentment. He had never known the sensation before, but it did not bewilder him, for he had known it must exist somewhere. His contentment compounded itself from the knowledge he had discovered it at last.
His life was circumscribed now, he knew that, knew it with the terrible conviction his body harboured its own destruction. Somehow the fact fired him with a spirit transcending both fear and fatigue. He had slipped on to a plane of self-knowledge beyond reason and remorse, so he sat still, while the ship gyrated round him, quietly drinking the whisky, waiting.
Stevenson did not turn in immediately. Knowing the Matthew Flinders was soon to go about and she would roll abominably in doing so, he was concerned for the passengers, fearing the motion might excite them to a panic. He went below to the officers’ smoke-room where the movement of the ship was much less pronounced than on the bridge above. Under the single bulb the women and children slept in conditions far better than the overcrowded junk they had existed on for the previous week.
Only an old woman was awake, a balding crone who bobbed and grinned and showed a row of gold-capped teeth. Stevenson smiled in response, wondering what exactly had driven these unfortunate people from their homes.
He stepped gently over the bodies on their makeshift beds of spare mattresses and blankets. The sleeping faces of the women were calm, passive with the patience of Asia; the children slept with the innocent charm of babies and tiny people the world over, unmarked as yet by the experience of flight. For a moment Stevenson remembered Cathy and her part in all this, her fertile enthusiasm, her delight in things maternal.
He found Tam before he realised he had been looking for her. She lay on her side, her legs drawn up, one cheek resting on a hand. Her face too, had the calm of exhausted sleep upon it. The closed, long-lashed eyelids were almond-shaped, and if her full lips robbed her of the rose-bud beauty her race idealised, she was infinitely desirable to Stevenson. He bent over her for a moment and heard the old woman wheeze and gurgle. She rocked back and forth, smiling and nodding even more vigorously, sucking approval through her expensively ugly teeth.
Stevenson was embarrassed the crone had discovered his interest in the girl. He retreated towards the door. Outside he sensed the ship heel as they began the vital alteration of course.
Mackinnon had been watching the pattern of the waves as they came at his ship, judging their height and power, counting the sequence as they worked their way to a culmination of large waves, after which they could be predicted to subside slightly before building to the next sequence. At such an interval he sought to turn the Matthew Flinders.
‘Ready, mister?’ He checked the Mate was at the wheelhouse door ready to relay the order. He could see the pale shape of the officer and behind him the helmsman in the dull glow of the binnacle lights.
‘All ready, sir.’
Rain began to fall, driving downwind in torrents, abrupt and drenching so that Mackinnon was instantly deluged and soaked through. The sudden onslaught of the rain would moderate the breaking power of the wave crests. Not much, but a little, perhaps enough to offer him a chance . . .
He watched and waited.
The Mat
thew Flinders lifted her streaming bow and the rivets, stringers, panting beams and shell plating creaked as the whole length of her forepeak and Number One hold rose unsupported from the sea. Then she crashed downwards, her flared bow shooting the water clear yet again in a white flash, snorting two grey columns up her hawse pipes. The rising water was torn in a great curve. A billion droplets of spray struck Mackinnon’s face like needles. This was the moment.
‘Full ahead!’ roared Mackinnon. ‘Hard a-port!’
‘Full ahead and hard a-port!’ repeated Rawlings leaping for the telegraph and wrenching the handle back before slamming it down against the stop. The jangling answer from the engine-room was gratifyingly instantaneous.
‘Hard a-port!’ grunted Able Seaman Williams as he strained with the effort of responding rapidly to the Master’s orders. The telemotor pressure gauges registered his effort in the two narrow-bore pipes operating the four-ram steering gear two hundred and ninety feet abaft the bridge, under the greasers’ poop accommodation. The rudder, a hydro-dynamically streamlined plate as high as three men standing upon each other’s shoulders, turned through its regulation thirty-five degrees. Slowly at first, but then with mounting speed as the propeller responded and thrust its wash against the rudder, the Matthew Flinders fell off the wind and into the trough of the sea. She rolled heavily to port and from below came the crash and tinkle of lose gear going over to leeward, a chair, crockery, personal effects left inadequately secured, but trivial noises to Mackinnon for whom came the satisfaction of knowing he had judged the matter to a nicety.
On the main-deck seawater poured aboard, building up against the weather hatch-coamings before lipping over the Macgregor hatches and cascading to leeward. She rolled back to starboard but the wind held her from even reaching the vertical as she was lifted high on the crest of a sea and exposed to its full force. Then she dropped, still rolling with a violent twisting as the lesser crest passed obliquely under her, and fell forty feet into its following trough.
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