A Twist Of Sand

I looked at the litter on the chart. By themselves, the inaccurate old logs were enough of a riddle, but the blasted German log threw the whole picture haywire. I wished now I had never dug around in the German archives in Winkhoek and never clapped eyes on or heard the name of the German warship Hyane. But I had, and here lay the salt-marked log just to prove that all my theories about the location of the shoal were wrong. I didn't have to consult it as it, too, lay on the chart…" Breakers during a moderate SSW gale and a high sea, in a position 282 degrees, distant 2 miles from high pointed hill." Two miles! I couldn't credit it. At that distance from the shore the Kaiser's old battle-wagon would have been a dead duck on the iron-hard sand of the shoal. And probably a rock or two through her armour-plating as well. The bearing, 282 degrees, was just about the craziest I had ever encountered.

I straightened up from the chart table. I was being mocked by the ghosts of ships which had long since gone to their graves. Their tall old-fashioned stacks and yardarmed masts seemed to cluster out of the fog round the modern, sharp lines of Etosha like a cerement ushering her to doom. All dead ships — and a shoal of death right under me now.

I shivered again. The dawn made it more morbid still. I looked down at the untidy chart table and cursed them all heartily. I needed fresh air. I cursed the bright light over the chart also: if it had been my old submarine, it would have been red, and I could have gone up on to the bridge without being blind for ten minutes before my eyes accustomed themselves to the blackness aloft.

It was just beginning to get light. The blackness was turning only slightly grey, but it was sufficient to catch a faint glimpse of sea. Jim, the Kroo boy, was at the wheel. The fog was so thick I could not see the top of the signal halliards, and the great beads of moisture, like sweat urged from a man in a fever, dripped thickly from the lower spokes of the wheel. It fretted in runnels uneasily down the canvas dodger. I glanced at the compass.

"Steer five-oh," I ordered, making a minute correction to the north-east.

Etosha was doing perhaps three knots: I must solve the riddle of the shoal this dawn, or I might not ever get the chance again. John Garland wouldn't always be asleep below as he was now and, as one of the finest navigators in the Royal Navy once, he'd smell a rat before long.

With that extra sense that comes when danger is near, I felt rather than heard the man in the chartroom.

I clattered down the companionway.

John stood examining the photostats and my own chart, with its countless annotations and figures.

We stood looking at one another across the baleful light of the angled lamp. He ran his eyes slowly over the photostats. His voice was hard, but laced with professional admiration when he spoke after a long scrutiny.

"That's a very fine chart, Geoffrey," he said. "For a coast which has never been mapped, or never been surveyed, I'd say, in fact, it was a masterpiece." He leaned over my soundings to the south-west of the Clan Alpine shoal. "A masterpiece," he repeated slowly, staring hard at me.

"Where are we now?" he went on in the same voice.

I jabbed a pencil at the five and three-quarter fathom mark. "About there. For what it is worth. It could be nine, or three fathoms."

He blenched. Off the Skeleton Coast a ship's position is every skipper's nightmare. It haunts his mind, waking and sleeping; drunk in a ditch ashore, it is his first waking question.

I had known in my heart of hearts that the showdown with John must come. I would have preferred to have chosen the moment. An icy dawn is not the best time for presenting a case, a shaky case at that, to someone who believes in you.

I made up my mind suddenly.

"John," I said briefly. I drew a line on the chart with the ruler. "I intend to go inside this line. Two things may happen. You may find yourself drowning in the next ten minutes. Or you may find yourself facing a fine of Ј1,000 or five years in gaol."

"Go on," he said tersely.

"What I'm trying to say is simply this, that this ship is now off the diamond area of the Skeleton Coast. For months I have mapped and charted this coast coming home from the fishing grounds, in your watch below. I bought her for that. Trawling is purely a secondary consideration. It also is good cover. Remember how I insisted that I should take the midnight-dawn trick? " He nodded. " Well, I've faked the ordinary chart, but plotted everything in minute detail on my own special chart, the first accurate one ever of the Skeleton Coast.

John looked puzzled. " You may have hoodwinked me, but what of it? That's not a crime. It's no crime to chart a coast."