The Wreck Of The Mary Deare

The wind had dropped. The swell was big, but gentle-sloped with no broken water. The sea slept, heaving as it slumbered. Yet I was sure Patch was right. Though the wind was light, the clouds were hurried and torn to shreds and the pounding of that surf was ominous, like gunfire to the west. A wave suddenly reared up out of nowhere and broke, pouring surf over us, spilling us away from it. My feet touched rock for an instant. And then everything was quiet as before and we rose and fell, rose and fell to the swell. We had crossed one of those sentinel-like pillars of rock that we had seen at low water.

The rock on which we had spent half the night was disappearing now — disappearing astern of us so that I knew we were all right. We hadn’t missed the tide. Patch stopped swimming, treading water. ‘I can’t see Grune a Croc,’ he said, and his teeth chattered. ‘I think we should strike more to the west.’

So we swam on with the Pole Star and the Plough to our left and I wondered how long we could last. My teeth were chattering, too, and the sea, which had felt so warm at first, was now a cold compress chilling all my stomach. We had no food inside us to generate warmth. Soon one of us would get cramp, and that would be the end.

Our sodden clothing weighed us down. The inflated life-jackets made us clumsy. Each stroke had to be powerful to drive our bodies through the water; and power meant energy — our vital, last reserves of energy. God knows how long we swam that night. We seemed to go on and on for ever. And each stroke was imperceptibly weaker than the last. And all the time I was thinking if only I were wearing a foam rubber suit or at least had my fins on my feet. It was years since I had swum in this clumsy fashion. My mind sank into a coma, a slough of pain and deep exhaustion, in which I saw myself again ploughing down to the old tanker through clear bright Mediterranean waters that glimmered with colour — the white of the sand and the silver gleam of fish; and myself, buoyant and carefree, exactly balanced, warm and breathing comfortably through my mouthpiece.

‘John! John!’ I opened my eyes. Black night surrounded me. I thought for an instant I was deep down, on the verge of going into a rapture of the depths. And then I saw a star and heard the surge of a wave breaking. ‘John!’ The voice called again out of the darkness.

‘Yes. What is it?’

‘There’s a rock. I can just see it.’ It was Patch’s voice. Funny, I thought. He’d never called me John before. And then he said, ‘You gave me a scare just now. I couldn’t make you hear. I thought I’d lost you.’

The concern in his voice filled me with a sudden warmth for the man. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Just dreaming. That’s all. Where’s this rock of yours?’ I turned, treading water, and there, not more than a hundred yards to my right, the dark shape of a rock stood out for an instant against the white gleam of a breaking wave. I searched the blackness beyond it. More waves were breaking out there and I thought I saw the solid mass of something.

And then it came to me that there would be lights on the Mary Deare. With a salvage company working on her there would have to be lights. I searched the blackness all round, each time I was lifted to the top of a swell, but there was nothing, not the faintest flicker of a light. Perhaps they were being so secret about their salvage operation that they didn’t show lights. And then the thought came to me that perhaps they had lifted her already and towed her away. The cold came back into my body, more intense now, more destructive, and I felt the muscles of my left leg begin to screw themselves together in a knot.

‘There’s something beyond this rock,’ Patch croaked. ‘Shall we make for that?’

‘All right,’ I said. It didn’t seem to matter. To die in the water was better than to die of exposure on one of those God-forsaken rocks. I lay back, kicking out feebly with my legs, thrusting at water that was no longer warm, but icy cold, swimming automatically whilst my mind tangled itself up with the matter of those lights. There should have been lights. Unless we’d been swept back into the central mass of the reefs we should have seen lights right from the start. ‘There should be lights,’ I mumbled.

‘Lights. That’s it. There should be lights.’ His voice sounded weak, a little scared. And then, after a bit — ‘Tell them to put the lights on.’ He was back on a ship, his mind wandering. ‘Put those lights on, do you hear?’ And then he suddenly called ‘John!’ His voice was very faint.

‘Yes?’