The Wreck Of The Mary Deare

‘Captain!’ He laughed without mirth. ‘Master of the Mary Deare!’ He rolled it round his tongue, sneeringly. ‘Well, at least I’ll have gone down with the ship this time. They said she was jinxed, some of them.’ He seemed to be speaking to himself. ‘They were convinced she’d never make it. But we’re all jinxed when times get hard; and she’s been kicked around the world for a good many years. She must have been a crack cargo liner in her day, but now she’s just a rusty old hulk making, her last voyage. We’d a cargo for Antwerp, and then we were taking her across the North Sea to Newcastle to be broken up.’ He was silent after that, his head on one side, listening. He was listening to the sounds of the ship being pounded by the waves. ‘What a thing it would be — to steam into Southampton with no crew and the ship half-full of water.’ He laughed. It was the drink in him talking, and he knew it. ‘Let’s see,’ he said, still speaking to himself. ‘The tide will be turning against us in a few hours. Wind over tide. Still, if we could hold her stern-on to the wind, maybe we could keep her afloat a little longer. Anything could happen. The wind might shift; the gale might blow itself out.’ But there was no conviction in the way he said it. He glanced at his watch. ‘Barely twelve hours from now and the tide will be carrying us down on to the rocks and it’ll still be dark. If visibility is all right, we should be able to see the buoys; at least we’ll know-’ His voice checked abruptly. ‘The buoys! That’s what I was thinking about before I went to sleep. I was looking at the chart…’ His voice had become animated, his eyes suddenly bright with excitement. And then his fist crashed against the palm of his hand and he jumped to his feet. That’s it! If we were to hit the tide just right…’ He pushed by me and I heard his feet take the steps of the ladder leading to the bridge two at a time.

I followed him up and found him in the chartroom, poring over a big book of Admiralty tide-tables. He looked up and for the first time I saw him as a leader, all the fatigue wiped out, the drink evaporated. ‘There’s just a chance,’ he said. ‘If we can keep her afloat, we might do it. It means working down in that stokehold — working like you’ve never worked in your life before; turn-and-turn about — the stokehold and the wheelhouse.’ He seized hold of my arm. ‘Come on! Let’s see if we’ve got sufficient head of steam to move the engines.’ A wave hit the side of the ship. Sheets of water fell with a crash, sluicing into the wheelhouse through the broken doorway leading to the port wing of the bridge. Out of the tail of my eye I saw water thundering green across the half-submerged bows. And then I was following him down the ladder again into the body of the ship and he was shouting: ‘By God, man, I might cheat them yet.’ And his face, caught in the light of my torch as it was turned momentarily up to me, was filled with a sort of crazy vitality.

CHAPTER THREE

The darkness of the engine-room was warm with the smell of hot oil and there was the hissing sound of steam escaping, so that the place seemed no longer dead. In my haste I let go at the bottom of the last ladder and was pitched a dozen feet across the engine-room deck, fetching up against a steel rail. There was a prolonged hiss of steam as I stood there, gasping for breath, and the pistons moved, thrusting their arms against the gleaming metal of the crankshaft, turning it — slowly at first, and then faster and faster so that all the metal parts gleamed in the light of my torch and the engines took on that steady, reassuring thump-thump of vitality and power. The hum of a dynamo started and the lights began to glow. The humming became louder, the lights brighter, and then abruptly they snapped full on. Brass and steelwork gleamed. The whole lit cavern of the engine-room was alive with sound.

Patch was standing on the engineer officer’s control platform. I staggered down the catwalk between the two big reciprocators. ‘The engines!’ I shouted at him. ‘The engines are going!’ I was beside myself with excitement. For that one moment I thought we could steam straight into a port.

But he was already shutting off the steam, and the beat of the engines slowed and then stopped with a final hiss. ‘Don’t stand there,’ he said to me. ‘Start stoking. We want all the steam we can get.’ For the first time he looked like a man in control of the situation.

But stoking was more difficult now; dangerous, too. The movements of the ship were unpredictable. One moment I would be flinging a shovelful of coal high up against the thrust of gravity, the next I would be pitched towards the flaming mouth of the furnace and the coal would seem to have no weight at all as it left the shovel.