Attacked at Sea

by Michael J. Tougias

  While the adrenaline prompted by thoughts of revenge coursed through Ray’s veins, he also felt rage toward another group. That anger was directed at those in Corpus Christi who wouldn’t let his family leave the Heredia when it anchored outside the bay. He wondered if the captain had really made a strong effort to persuade those authorities to let the family disembark. Now, sitting on this floating sandbox just four feet from the captain, Ray struggled to keep from giving voice to his thoughts.

  He looked down at the top of his son’s head and held him tighter. As much for himself as for Sonny, Ray corralled his emotions and said, “Your mom and Lucille are probably floating with a bunch of the ship’s sailors. They might even have been rescued by now.”

  With the innocence of an eight-year-old, Sonny believed his father. Lucille is probably having breakfast onboard a rescue boat and she’s worried about me. And Mom’s likely right by her side, just the way Dad is with me.

  But a few minutes later, Sonny remembered that his dad had thought he heard his mother shouting when they were still near the sinking ship. Maybe they are not with sailors or rescued. Sonny was about to say something, to remind his father about his mother shouting for help, but he decided it was best to let it go. Don’t upset him.

  Sonny wanted his father to be proud of what he said and did while on the raft.

  Now that the boy could grasp the vast size of the ocean and their own insignificance in it, he felt fear and dread. It was a helpless feeling, similar to what he’d felt when he had been washed from his father’s grip as the ship lurched. Sonny didn’t want his father to know that he felt like crying.

  Captain Colburn admired the way the boy and his father interacted. He wasn’t so sure about how things would go if a major decision needed to be made on the raft. He was still smarting from the exchange with Ray when they were launching the raft, the way Ray had poked him in the chest and shouted that he’d have to learn to swim real fast. Now adrift on the raft, where minutes felt like hours, he wondered if they’d have another disagreement. His ship might be at the bottom of the ocean, but he was still the captain.

  16

  DESPERATION

  (MORNING INTO AFTERNOON)

  When dawn broke at the busy shipping port of New Orleans and the Heredia did not appear at its expected time, there was no sense of alarm. The port officials knew that a vessel could be late for a variety of reasons, and under the restrictions of radio silence, the captain had no way to update them on his progress. While there had been U-boat attacks on ships in the Gulf almost daily, the Heredia had not sent out a mayday and no other vessels nearby had broken the radio silence with a report of either a ship in distress or an explosion.

  * * *

  SONNY AND RAY (SEVENTH, EIGHTH, AND NINTH HOURS IN THE OCEAN)

  The gray life raft and the four survivors rose and fell with the endless swells. Each time it reached the crest, the three adults scanned the ocean in every direction, hoping against all odds that they might spot a ship. The captain had managed to retain his binoculars through the tumultuous night, but they were of limited use, as the horizon remained empty of ships. As the sun’s rays gained strength, Sonny was able to leave his father’s arms and perch on the edge of the raft with his legs dangling underwater in the raft’s middle.

  “The sun feels good,” said Ray. “I don’t care what people say about the warmth of the Gulf Stream: This water is cold.”

  George Conyea agreed. “If and when I warm up, I’m going to slip into the water just so I can stretch my back. Can only sit for so long.”

  Sonny was also stiff and cold, but he did not like the thought of being back in the water.

  Captain Colburn’s voice brought him out of his gloomy thoughts.

  “Way off to the east, I think I see a plane. It’s hard to see with the sun, but I think it’s coming this way.”

  Everyone immediately looked east, squinting into the sun’s glare. “Yes! Yes!” shouted Ray. “I can see it. Quick,” he barked, looking at the captain, “give me your coat! Let’s get it on the board!”

  The captain’s white jacket was draped over the board, and Ray held the makeshift flag as high as he could and then waved it back and forth.

  Sonny thought for sure that the pilot, even though far off in that plane, would easily see it.

  The plane was more than a mile away. Sonny held his hand over his eyes to block the sun. He was literally holding his breath. He stared until he could no longer see the speck in the blue sky.

  Ray slowly lowered the board.

  George Conyea broke the silence. “Maybe there’ll be others. That one was just too far away.”

  Ray and the captain nodded, but neither spoke.

  Conyea continued, “Sure wish we had a flare.”

  Sonny figured that now that it was daylight, another plane would come by in a few minutes. The boy didn’t truly realize the danger he was in. He thought that because his father was with him he would be safe. Yes, he was cold, thirsty, and hungry, but it was nothing that he couldn’t handle for a few more minutes. His father didn’t show a trace of fear, so Sonny assumed he had the situation under control and it would all work out.

  Later in the morning, the group spied a ship in the distance, and the captain took his coat off, placed it on the board, and kept it ready to wave when the ship got closer.

  Sonny got a glimpse of the ship whenever the raft crested a swell, but when the swell passed and the raft descended into the wave’s trough it was blocked from view by the water. Each time the raft rose to the top of the swell, he spotted the ship but couldn’t tell if it was steaming toward them: it was just a little bump on the horizon. Eventually he tired of looking at it.

  A few minutes later, the captain took his jacket off the plank and draped it over his head to protect his fair, freckled face and neck from the sun’s damaging brilliance. No one needed to say the ship was moving in the wrong direction, and the group remained silent.

  The ocean, taking on a gray-green hue under the climbing sun, stretched out as empty as a desert. Their only salvation would be from either a ship or a plane. Ray cursed the designers of the life raft. Why had they not dyed the gray canvas a brighter color so it could more easily be spotted? He imagined himself on a passing ship far off in the distance and knew it would be virtually impossible to see this tiny raft. Half the time it would be hidden from view by the swells. He reckoned a ship would need to be within a quarter mile for any crew member to have a shot at spotting the captain’s white coat on the board. And even if someone did see it, they might think it was flotsam drifting up and over the swells.

  * * *

  INA (SIXTH THROUGH TENTH HOURS IN THE OCEAN)

  Ina was glad she had found the sailors, because they helped take her mind off her family. They shared stories: One sailor had been on watch, the other in the shower when the torpedo hit. Both had been blown free of the ship. They were lucky to have found the big board. Ina and one sailor sat on top of this board with their feet in the water. Sometimes they lay down on it and held on tight so the small waves would not knock them off. The sailor who was naked continued to stay in the water, only gripping this board with his fingers. Ina noticed his hands turning white as he struggled to continue holding on to this board. He was also shivering, but he was unwilling to bare his body in front of a woman.

  “Sailor, get back on this board,” Ina said. “This is no time for modesty.”

  “No, ma’am, I’m fine. I’m just resting my back,” he responded.

  Ina worried that the young man would die from hypothermia. “If you don’t get on this board,” said Ina, “I’m going to go off on my own.”

  The sailor stayed in the water.

  Incredibly, Ina decided to leave the board so the naked sailor would climb on it.

  “Well, I suppose I’ll keep looking for my children. God bless.” Then she slid off the large board and slowly swam away, clutching a small piece of wood.

  At least without me there, In
a thought, the sailor will get back on the planks and have a chance to live.

  The chill of the night had been replaced by the blazing rays of the sun, but Ina decided not to shed her heavy coat, wondering if she could survive another night in water that sucked away her body’s warmth. Being adrift in the ocean was terrifying, but even worse were the thoughts about her family and the very real possibility that they had gone down with the ship. Don’t think that way, she scolded herself; if I escaped, somehow they did, too. She’d go mad with grief if she thought the worst had happened. She knew to put such negative thoughts out of her mind and focus on saving herself so she could search for her family.

  Soon Ina found another pair of survivors: a Filipino sailor who clung to a board, half-conscious, and a ship’s officer who’d stayed with him all night, treading water and holding the sailor’s head up to keep him alive. “Have you seen my family?” she inquired.

  “No, ma’am, I’m sorry,” said the officer. “And, please, beware of the debris. Some of these boards are sharp. If you bump into them and they cut you, the sharks will come and pick your bones.”

  She wondered about the men’s chances for survival as she paddled on in search of her family. Far in the distance Ina thought she could make out the silhouette of a ship, and she began paddling toward it. After ten minutes, she was out of breath and her arms hung like dead weights over the front of the narrow board she clutched to her chest. The life vest and the heavy coat made paddling especially difficult. She contemplated removing her coat and letting it sink to the depths, but her intuition told her to keep it, no matter how bulky and cumbersome. She did, however, stop paddling, realizing that she would never make it to the object on the horizon and was needlessly tiring herself.

  How much longer will it be until help arrives? she wondered. The officer’s warning about sharks was causing havoc with her imagination, and she shuddered at the thought. Then she saw some cork in the water and panicked, thinking her life preserver had ruptured and wouldn’t keep her afloat much longer. Despair clung to the edges of every thought, so Ina tried not to think at all. But it was impossible; her mind went straight back to her family, trying to calculate their odds of survival and the chance for rescue. Surely the authorities knew by now that the ship not only was overdue but also had been sunk. Yet if that was the case, why weren’t there planes overhead or patrol boats in the area? Just thinking about the people “in charge” on land made her furious. Sonny, Lucille, Raymond, and she could have all gotten off at Corpus Christi if the officials had had an ounce of common sense.

  * * *

  LUCILLE (ELEVENTH THROUGH FIFTEENTH HOURS IN THE OCEAN)

  Lucille was growing drowsy. It was now afternoon, and the young girl felt as if she had been in the ocean for days rather than just 12 hours.

  The sailors took turns holding on to Lucille’s little raft, which provided more support than the waterlogged life vests that some of them had had time to grab before the ship went down. She helped them by pointing out jellyfish drifting nearby so they could defend their exposed skin by pushing the creatures away with pieces of wood. She glimpsed a shark below the raft now and then but never realized that was what had been tickling her feet in the darkness. Sorli had seen the predator and a couple of others much earlier, so when Lucille nervously pointed out the shark, he was ready with soothing words. “It’s harmless; just a little curious about what we’re doing out here.”

  That was good enough for Lucille. If Mr. Roy wasn’t concerned, she wouldn’t be, either.

  “Suppose the captain made it out?” Robello asked no one in particular.

  “Don’t know. I was on the bridge with him when we were hit,” said Sorli. “He had about the same chance as I did.”

  “The codes? Papers?”

  “There was no time to take them from the cabinet and put them in the bag,” Sorli said of the procedure of ensuring that the secret naval codes would be destroyed if a ship were abandoned.

  “It only took me thirty seconds to put my shoes on, but the deck was awash the minute I stepped outside. Do you suppose we had time to transmit?” asked Burke. Then he answered his own question. “No, never mind. I know the answer. The first torpedo hit amidships. There was no time; the radioman must have been killed instantly. Poor guy.”

  Silence again descended on the group. They wondered if surviving the attack would turn out to be a blessing or a curse. Like many shipwreck survivors, they might struggle to stay alive only to suffer longer at the merciless whim of the elements. Without food a person could live for days, but without fresh water, that time would be much shorter.

  The effects of hypothermia, even in the Gulf’s mild temperatures, were already being felt, as it takes only a few hours for hands, feet, and other extremities to experience numbness and lack of mobility, the first sign usually being slurred speech. It was one thing for a grown man to accept the dangers as part of his job, but watching a helpless child like Lucille suffer galvanized the group. They would do anything to ease her discomfort.

  As the sun marched toward the western horizon, each of the sailors was summoning his energy for another cold night in the water, trying to assess the odds of lasting without water and with sharks circling beneath.

  17

  RUNNING OUT OF TIME

  (LATE MORNING INTO AFTERNOON)

  SONNY AND RAY (TENTH THROUGH FOURTEENTH HOURS IN THE OCEAN)

  Sonny asked if he could move off his father’s lap and back to his original side of the raft. He needed to stretch and didn’t feel quite so cold anymore.

  A couple of hours passed in silence. Eventually Captain Colburn muttered, “We’d better be rescued before dark, because we’re drifting into the shipping lanes, where there’s a good chance we’ll be run down.”

  Ray shot a piercing glance at Colburn, jerking his head toward his son as a warning. He didn’t want the boy to hear any of this talk about being run over by a ship.

  The sun was blazing hot on Sonny’s bare skin, its rays amplified by bouncing off the water. He no longer felt quite as cold, but his little body had used a considerable amount of energy just to keep warm through the endless night. Simply shivering had consumed much of his limited supply of reserve strength. He felt tired and weak, similar to the way he’d felt while sick with the flu. Sonny didn’t say anything, because he was determined to be as tough as his dad. Instead he simply asked if he could move back to sitting next to his father so he could lean against him.

  “Yes, and lay your head against my side and maybe you can doze.”

  Sonny craved water, just a sip, and earlier had asked his father about taking in a mouthful from the ocean. Ray told him not to, that it would make him sick and that he’d have all the water he wanted when a rescue boat came. But Ray still kept a wary eye on his son, afraid the boy might take a small sip of seawater when he wasn’t looking. It was an overwhelming, constant temptation for all four of the survivors, but drinking seawater would have had the opposite effect of what was needed.

  The high sodium content of seawater would have dehydrated the castaways even quicker than having no water at all. The sodium in seawater needs to be expelled from the body. That means precious fluids from the muscles, other tissues, and organs are drawn off to produce urine. This natural process also takes place in brain tissue, and the resulting loss of hydration often causes delirium and hallucinations within an hour or two of consuming it. This altered mental state has caused more than one shipwrecked person to do the unthinkable—climb out of the life raft and start swimming toward an object they imagined was there.

  In midafternoon, Sonny felt something brush up against his leg, and he looked down to find a green banana floating next to him. He grabbed the banana. “Look what I found,” he exclaimed to his father.

  “Good job. Better hang on to that in case we need it.”

  Sonny smiled. He was contributing.

  The motion of the waves and the lack of conversation lulled the boy to sleep. The slumber didn’t
last long, because even in the sun he was chilled and his muscles cramped. When he awoke a half hour later, he realized he had dropped the banana, and felt devastated.

  “Dad, I dropped the banana.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll find it—or another one.”

  Sonny didn’t think so. He could see absolutely nothing on the ocean’s surface and knew that the only reason he’d found the banana in the first place was because it had bumped into his leg. Under the circumstances, it was more than a piece of fruit; Sonny viewed it as evidence that he was doing his part to keep everyone alive, so losing it was a terrible mistake. He fought to restrain his emotions.

  Ray tried to cheer him up. “A while back when we were on the top of a swell, I thought I saw a couple of little specks on the horizon.”

  The captain joined in. “I’ll bet they were shrimp boats, and one of them is bound to head our way.”

  Sonny wasn’t so sure. Despite the sun burning his skin, he was cold again, and he felt weaker than ever.

  * * *

  By late afternoon, all three adults on the raft were concerned that they wouldn’t be found before sundown. The specks on the horizon were gone, and no more planes came out of the cloudless sky. The landscape of ocean and sky was so bleak and empty that they felt like the only living things on the planet.