The Wreck Of The Mary Deare

I wasn’t following his trend of thought. I was thinking that there was all this work completed and no salvage ship. ‘Why do you think they left?’ I asked him.

He glanced at the sky, sniffing the breeze from the west, which was coming now in irregular puffs. ‘The forecast was probably bad,’ he said. ‘Maybe they had a gale warning.’

I stared at the jagged reefs, remembering what it had been like before. Surely to God …

‘What’s that?’ His voice came sharp and clear, and through it, beyond the barrier of the bridge-deck, the cough of a diesel engine settled to a steady roar. I could feel the deck vibrating under my feet, and for a moment we stood, quite still, listening to the music of it. Then we were running for the bridge-deck alleyway. We came out at the head of the ladder that led down to the for’ard well-deck and there, just aft of Number Two hatch, stood a big suction pump, lashed to the deck. The engine was going full bat and the thick suction pipe was pulsating with the flow of water where it disappeared through a hole cut in an inspection hatch. Water was sluicing out of the far side of the pump, flooding across the deck and disappearing through the scuppers. And yet there was nobody there. The well-deck was empty and in all the fore part of the ship there wasn’t a living soul.

It was uncanny.

‘Try the bridge,’ Patch said. ‘Somebody started that pump.’

We dived back into the alleyway and up the ladder to the bridge. It was all so familiar, but horribly changed. The glass was gone, the doors smashed and the wind was whistling through it, pushing little rivulets of water across the sand-smeared platform. There was nobody there — nobody in the chartroom. And then, out on the bridge again, Patch gripped my arm and pointed. Beyond the bows a pillar-like rock stood like a bollard with the bite of a thick steel hawser round it. The hawser ran taut from rock to ship, an anchor against the pull of the tides. It was the hawser that had fouled me during the night as I swam in over the bows.

But Patch was pointing to something else — a small blue dinghy pulling out from under the Mary Deare’s bows. It was Higgins, and he was rowing out to the rock. The peaked cap on the bull head, the massive shoulders and the blue seaman’s jersey — it was all so clear in the cold grey light. It was clear, too, what he intended to do. I shouted to him, but he couldn’t hear me from the bridge. I dived back down the ladder, down to the well-deck and up on to the fo’c’s’le. ‘Higgins!’ I screamed at him. ‘Higgins!’

But it was blowing quite strong in the gusts now and Higgins didn’t hear me. He had reached the rock and was tying the dinghy to a snag, and then he began to climb. He reached the bight of the hawser and, with an iron bar he had brought with him for the purpose, began to lever it up the rock, whilst I shouted to him, standing up in the wind, balanced right on the slippery point of the Mary Deare’s bows.

He had his back to me all the time and when he’d freed the loop, he pushed it up over the jagged point of the rock, and the whole line of the wire that anchored the ship, right from where it ran out through the hawse-hole, went slack as it fell with a splash into the sea. Then he clambered back down the rock and got into his dinghy.

He saw me just as he’d unhitched the painter and he sat looking at me for a moment. His face was without expression and his big shoulders sagged with the effort he had made. And all the time I was shouting to him, telling him to fix the hawser back on to the rock. ‘There’s a gale coming,’ I shouted. ‘A gale!’ I kept on repeating that one word, trying to din it into his thick head.

Maybe I succeeded, for Higgins suddenly let go of the rock, pivoted the dinghy on one oar and began to row back towards the Mary Deare. Whether he panicked and was making a desperate attempt to get back on board, or whether he was moved to unexpected pity by the desolate character of the place and was trying to take us off, I shall never know, for the tide was north-going, about three knots, and though he worked like a man possessed to drag that heavy dinghy through the water faster than the tide ran, he made not more than twenty yards headway. He tired quickly and, after the first burst of energy, he made no further progress; and then, gradually, the tide took control and he drifted farther and farther away from the ship, still desperately rowing.

In the end he gave it up and steered the dinghy across the tide into the lee of Grune a Croc, and there he sat, clutching the rock, staring at the ship, his head bowed to his knees, his whole body slack with exhaustion.

The noise of the suction pump died and ceased abruptly so that I was suddenly conscious of the wind whining through the broken superstructure. Patch had switched the engine off and as I climbed down off the fore-peak he came to meet me. ‘We’ve got to flood the ship,’ he called out, his voice loud and clear. ‘It’s our only hope.’