The Wreck Of The Mary Deare

I glanced out of the chartroom window and my heart sank, for it didn’t seem possible that the sea could be worse than it was now. I watched him work out the dead reckoning and mark in another cross about five miles west and a little south of the other.

‘We can’t have moved that much in an hour,’ I protested.

He flung down the pencil. ‘Work it out for yourself if you don’t believe me,’ he said. ‘The tide’s running south-easterly three knots. Allow two miles for wind and engines, and there you are.’

I stared at the chart. The Minkies were getting very close. ‘And in the next two hours?’ I asked.

‘In the next two hours the tide slacks off considerably. But my reckoning is that we’ll be within a mile or so of the southwest Minkies buoy. And there we’ll stay for the first half of the night. And when the tide turns …’ He shrugged his shoulders and went back again into the wheelhouse. ‘Depends whether we’ve managed to edge south at all.’

With this cheerful prospect I went below again, back to the familiar, aching grind and blazing heat of the stokehold. One hour in the stokehold; one on the bridge. Turn and turn about; it became a routine. Dazed with tiredness we did it automatically, unconsciously adjusting ourselves to the greater movement of the bridge and then readjusting ourselves to the quicker, less predictable and much more dangerous motion of the stokehold.

I remember being at the wheel when darkness fell. It seemed to steal up on us almost imperceptibly. And then suddenly I couldn’t see the bows, couldn’t tell where the wind was because I couldn’t see the spume flying off the wave tops. All I could see was darkness shot with the white-tumbling wave tops. The deck sloped forward under my feet and, with broken water all round the ship, it was as though we were running the rapids of a giant river, slipping downhill at tremendous speed. I steered by the compass and the feel of the ship then, all the time pushing her towards the south with every burst of the engines.

At the helm just after midnight a glimmer of light showed for an instant in the rushing, wind-torn darkness beyond the bows. I hoped to God I had imagined it. I was very tired by then and it had just been a momentary gleam, indistinct and ephemeral. But a little later I saw it again, a flash of light about two points off the starboard bow. It showed intermittently, often obscured by the backs of the waves.

By the end of my watch it was possible to identify it as group-flashing two. The chart showed the southwest Minkies buoy as Gp.fl(2). ‘About what we expected,’ Patch said when he relieved me. His voice showed no lift of interest; it was flat and slurred with weariness, his face gaunt in the light of the binnacle.

And after that the light was always with us, getting a little nearer, a little clearer until it began to fade with the first grey glimmer of dawn as I took over the wheel at five-thirty in the morning. I was almost dead with exhaustion then, hardly able to stand, my knees trembling. The night in the stokehold had been hell, the last hour almost unendurable, shovelling coal with rivulets of water spilling across the floor and spitting steam as they swirled round the hot base of the furnace.

The tide had turned now and the double flash of the Minkies buoy began to come down on us fast, and on the wrong side of us. Soon, as the daylight strengthened, I could see the buoy itself, one of those huge pillar buoys that the French use, and, even above the wind, I thought now and then I could catch the mournful, funeral note of its whistle. We were going to pass at least half a mile inside it. I had a look at the chart and then got Patch on the voice pipe and told him to come up.

It seemed a long time before he appeared on the bridge, and when he came he moved slowly, his feet dragging as though he were just out of a sick bed. Changing watches during the night, he had been just a shadowy shape in the pale, reflected glow of the binnacle light. Now, seeing him suddenly in the cold light of day, I was shocked. He looked ghastly. ‘You’re just about out on your feet,’ I said.

He stared at me as though he hadn’t understood. I suppose I looked pretty bad myself. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

I pointed to the Minkies buoy, now almost four points on the starboard bow. ‘We’re passing too far inside it,’ I said. ‘At any moment we may hit the Brisants du Sud rocks.’

He went into the chartroom and I waited, expecting him to send me running below to get the engines going. He was gone a long time. Once I shouted to him, afraid that he must have gone to sleep. But he answered immediately that he was watching the buoy through the window and working something out. The tide had got a firm hold of us now. I watched the bearing of the buoy altering rapidly. It was almost abeam of us before he emerged from the chartroom. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘There’s water enough at this stage of the tide.’ His voice was quite calm.