Dead and Alive

CHAPTER THREE

Sarah understood our mood as soon as she saw us, wet and angry, at her door. She piled the fire high, gave us a huge breakfast, and left us alone with a chess set that had belonged to her husband.

Neither of us had played chess for a long time. We played all day, while the rain lashed at the windows and the gale shook the house. We spent the night there for we knew there would be no sleep for us on board.

Next day the wind had dropped and the sun shone on a drenched world. We went back along the cliffs and saw the sea thundering at the cliffs with blows that looked like depth charges. The tide was falling. When we reached the cove it was just as I’d first seen it. Of our three days’ work there was not a trace. ‘But what about the boulders?’ Stuart said. ‘Surely they haven’t been sucked out to sea?’

‘Buried under the sand,’ I told him. ‘It’s lucky we hadn’t started shifting her.’

‘There is that,’ he agreed. ‘Once we do start moving here we’ll have to work fast.’

Two plates had been buckled and looked as though they might have sprung a leak. Otherwise she seemed none the worse. Obviously she’d weathered bigger storms during the winter.

Bill and Anne came down to commiserate with us and we drove over to Boscastle for lunch. Stuart was in a sombre mood. He seemed dispirited about the whole thing. And his mood flared dangerously at an innocent remark of Bill’s, who was trying to cheer him up. ‘You think I’m a child to be patted on the hand and given crumbs of comfort like a bag of sticky sweets,’ Stuart cried, banging down his knife and fork. His voice was tense and strained and his eyes strangely narrowed. ‘When things go wrong with you, you can go crying to Anne for comfort. But I’ve got no one. Nobody in the world. All I’ve got to show for my life is an old landing craft. And that’s on the rocks. I’m no good. I’m finished. And bloody little fools like you come with words of comfort. I don’t want your comfort. I don’t want it — do you understand?’ And he flung out of the room.

It was a side of him that I hadn’t known about until then.

There was a stunned silence. And then Bill said, ‘What an extraordinary fellow!’

I said, ‘Not so extraordinary.’ Then I asked him if he’d been overseas.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I was in a reserved occupation — they lowered the age just in time.’

I said, ‘Well Stuart was nearly four years overseas. He was wounded twice. And I rather fancy — he hasn’t told me, but I think I’m right — that his wife and child were killed by a flying bomb.’

Anne nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I understand now. Those photographs — and that charred furniture. What hell for him! Find him a girl, David, before it drives him crazy.’

‘He’s trying to marry a landing craft at the moment,’ I told her. ‘That’s why he’s so upset.’

After lunch I sought out old Garth and asked him about the weather. He told me there should be at least two weeks of fine weather now.

I made no attempt to find out where Stuart had gone. I’d known men in his mood in the Med. He’d walk it off. The three of us drove into Tintagel and saw a frightful film which was made pleasant because Anne held my hand. She was a very sweet and understanding girl. She insisted on coming back and cooking dinner for us.

Down in the cove Stuart had already started rebuilding the ramp.

We were up next morning at dawn and were at work whilst the cove was still dark and sunless though the sky was blue. We decided to build the ramp of sand this time for it was difficult to find rocks. But the curve along which the stern would be shifted had to be of rocks in order to support the girders.

Stuart was in terrific form. He nicknamed the half-wit Boo, because of his goggle eyes. And for some reason the queer boy was pleased at that. Stuart drove him unmercifully. He drove the trippers too. A man had only to pause a second gazing upon our labours and Stuart, who had suddenly cultivated a broad Cornish accent, suggested that a little physical exercise would do him a power of good. They fell for it practically every time. And as soon as they’d a shovel in their hands, he’d got them. ‘Man, thee’ll never stand it for as much as a quarter of an hour.’ And then when they did stand it for quarter of an hour, he’d be so full of compliments that blisters or no they just had to go on. He paced them himself or set off one against the other. And all the time he sang old sea shanties and snatches of Negro spirituals. And periodically he directed a stream of curses at Boo’s rhythmically swinging back. And Boo would give him a loose grin and the sand would fly from his shovel.

It was a great day and by sundown sand and boulders were piled amongst the rocks.

The next day Bill and Anne came down and Stuart even bullied Anne into taking a shovel. And for the next hour there wasn’t a man in that cove who dared refuse the proffered tool. We ran short of sand as well as rocks by midday and after lunch we rigged one of the winches and, using an old piece of corrugated iron as a bulldozing blade, ploughed fresh sand up to the edge of the ramp. Then I borrowed Bill’s car and ran down into Boscastle. I was worried about the engines. I was afraid sand might have got into them and I was taking no chances of engine failure once we’d floated here. We had to get her out of that cove and into a harbour where we could tie up, for she’d no anchors and if the sea rose before we got her out of the cove she would be wrecked.

Garth told me that the nearest marine engineers would be over at Newport. He saw my disappointment and said, ‘Remember I told thee about a boy from the Navy who was looking round for work? I mind now that he was an engineer.’

And that was another stroke of luck, for Jack Dugan had served a year in landing craft. He’d been with a rocket ship in the Normandy and Southern France landings. ‘I’ll walk over in the morning, sir,’ he said.

I really felt we were getting somewhere at last.

Next morning the cove was deserted save for a few children and two girls who giggled at us from a nearby rock. All male holiday-makers decided to boycott the place. I wasn’t surprised. Their women folk were proba bly putting in overtime massaging their aching backs. One lone sucker appeared in the afternoon and was persuaded to hold a shovel in white hands. He leaned on it most of the time and insisted on telling Stuart all about the essay he was writing on — Life. At length, exasperated, Stuart tore the shovel from his nerveless fingers, thrust his bearded face into the face of the would-be essayist and said, ‘You’re useless. Do you hear? — useless. Get out.’

The young man was rather surprised and slightly scared. He got out.

Dugan had arrived shortly after breakfast and he was so thrilled at the sight of the familiar old Paxmans that by nightfall he had both engines stripped. He had dinner with us that night. ‘They’re all right,’ he reported. ‘But there’s a lot of sand needs clearing out of them. And the cylinder walls are slightly scored as though they’d been run recently.’ He said this accusingly and Stuart admitted his guilt.

‘I was so keen to see if they’d work,’ he explained.

‘No harm done, sir,’ Dugan told him. ‘But they need a right good clean out.’

‘How long will that take?’ I asked.

‘Two days,’ was his reply. ‘Oh, and the auxiliary for the dynamo is okay. Strange thing, sir,’ he added, ‘the batteries look as though they’re all right, too. They’re not good, of course. But no sand and sea water has got into them and I reckon I might be able to give you some light tomorrow night in place of these oil lamps you’re using. I took the liberty of breaking open a locker and I’ve found a lot more tools, some spares, including bulbs, and several rifles and revolvers and ammunition — German, I think they are. There’s grenades, too. But they’re pretty rusty. The water has been at them.’

Before he left he gave me a long list of things that would be required.

‘Good find of yours,’ said Stuart as we watched his flashlight moving like a will-o’-the-wisp up the path out of the cove.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘our luck’s in, I think.’

By lunch-time the next day the ramp was complete again. The weather was set fair. In the afternoon we began running hawsers out. I had decided not to use the winches, but to work with pulleys. Bill and Anne came down and I persuaded them to go up to the farm, borrow Mervin’s trailer and drive over to Camelford to get things Dugan urgently needed like distilled water, petrol, cleansing oil, gear and lubricating oils, cotton waste and a firkin of beer.

By sundown we had two hawsers out, firmly fixed round great rocks on each side of the cove near the entrance. I attached a snaffle and pulley to the hawser fixed to the side of the cove opposite the stern of the ship and slipped the chain over one of the after deck bollards. Then we went to work on the pulley chains until it was taut.

Shortly after Bill’s return Jack Dugan had the auxiliary going and the lights on.

We were pretty excited that night for tomorrow was the great day — we should know whether we were going to be able to shift the deadweight of the stern with the tackle we had. I was frankly worried. The girders were strong, but the stern, which carried the two 500 h.p. engines, was a hell of a weight. Stuart and I sat smoking on the deck and talking over all the possibilities long after Bill and Anne had driven off with Dugan.

They returned with him early next morning. Working with pulleys, we had already got two of the girders in position and chains slipped underneath the hull. They were as excited as we were. ‘If you want any help, sir,’ Dugan said, ‘give me a shout.’ And he disappeared down the engine-room hatch.

The method by which I had planned to move the ship was primitive and laborious, but at the same time simple. On the landward side of the stern I rigged two girders like legs astride and bolted together at the top, to which I affixed a pulley bearing a triple chain which ran beneath the hull. To the top of the girders I also fixed a rope, ran it round one of the bollards and then pushed the girders out till they slanted away from the side of the ship at an angle of about twenty degrees out of the perpendicular. On the seaward side I did the same, but the girders were planted well away from the ship’s side and slanted at the same angle towards the ship. The triple chain was brought up from beneath the hull and fixed to the pulley. To the apex I fixed a second pulley and attached it to a short hawser which I ran around a big outcrop of rock on the far side of the cove. Hauling on the pulley, we made this taut. And then we did the same to the other pair of girders.

By midday everything was set for the first move.

With Stuart and Boo on the landward girders’ pulley and Bill and myself on the seaward we began to put the weight of the ship on to the girders. They bedded down, grating on the rock base of this section of our ramp. Then inch by inch the stem began to lift clear of the rock on which it rested.

When the hull was six inches clear, I ordered a halt and we manned the pulleys that bore on the hawser attached to the girders on my side and also the one that bore on the long hawser that ran direct to the ship. I called Dugan up and set him to slacken off on the pulley on the landward side.

Slowly, as we hauled on the pulleys, the girders swung into the perpendicular. The stern was then two feet clear of the rock. I was scared that the tackle would break then. It wouldn’t matter so much when she was fully on our sand ramp. But if she dropped two feet on to rock she’d be holed for certain.

But the tackle held. The girders gradually slanted over in our direction until at length the hull was resting on the ground again. But now she was no longer lodged on the flat rock she had rested on for nearly a year. She was on the ramp we had built. We had swung the stern just over six feet.

In a long and pompous after-lunch speech Stuart publicly presented me with a tin of bully beef in token of the company’s ‘gratitude for my astonishing engineering feat,’ regretting at the same time that at such short notice they had been unable to obtain the packet of ‘V cigarettes that should have accompanied the gift.

We achieved another move during the afternoon. And after tea, as we prepared for the third, the cove echoed to the stuttering roar of the starboard engine. We all gathered round the stern as Dugan set to slow ahead. The propellers turned and we knew we would be able to get out of the cove under our own steam.

We did a third move before the sun set. The stern was by then well on to our ramp and the whole hull was slanting diagonally across the end of the cove. After dinner, working by flashlight, Stuart and I rigged rope ties for’ard and the second long hawser taut to the ship. I was taking no chances with a change in the weather.

By the following evening she was off the ramp on flat sand, pointing stern first straight towards the entrance of the cove. At high tide that evening the waves were breaking against her propellers.

A day of disappointment followed. We ran the long hawsers to the capstan and short hawsers with pulleys to the bollards on either side of the stern. With two of us manning each pulley and the engines working the capstan, she refused to slide on the sand. She wouldn’t even budge with rollers under the stern. She just ground them into the sand, and that with the tide lapping all round her. All we succeeded in doing was breaking one of the long hawsers.

We patched it and settled down to the laborious task of frog-marching her into the water by cradling her on the girders as we had done when shifting the stern across the ramp. The one bright spot in the whole day was that Dugan got the port engine going.

The next morning it began to blow. Dugan confirmed my view that it was blowing up dirty and we spent a back-breaking morning running out all the hawsers and rope we had to lash her into position. By midday it was blowing half a gale and the wind was roaring up the cove from the open sea. The low tide barely cleared the rocks at the entrance and the waves were breaking in a smother of spray against the Elephant Rock. As the tide thun dered in, the cove was filled with a mist of driven spume — the wind whipped it off the creamy breakers and flung it in a stinging rain against out faces as we stood watching the advancing tide.

Stuart’s lips mouthed curses at the elements, but the sound of his words was whipped away by the wind and given to the cliffs behind us.

High tide was shortly after five and by that time great shaggy combers, blurred in spray, were thundering on to the beach and breaking in a cascade of foam against the stern. Every time a wave broke the ship lifted, suddenly buoyant, and as the water sucked back she settled with a thud that jarred her whole frame. The long hawsers slackened and tautened with monotonous regularity as though some great giant were plucking at them as part of the orchestra of the storm. Between the breakers they whipped and thumped at the water like galvanized eels. Every now and then there was a sickening crash against the stern plates as a rock from the demolished ramp was flung against the ship.

Suddenly Stuart pointed. A great wave was piling into the entrance, gathering height as it was contained by the narrowing cliffs. We clung to the deck stanchions and watched it swirl in, its angry, wind-whipped crest jostling in a pyramid of surf. It broke, a mountain of green and white, slap against the stern. A cataract of water swept green over the ship. It hit me in the chest, winding me and wrenching at my arms. The ship bucked like a live thing. I felt one of the starboard hawsers snap and through the flurry and foam of the spent wave I caught a glimpse of the broken end of the long hawser coiling over the stack like a great snake. It hit the deck with a thud as the water began to seethe from under us. Then the ship thudded down with a hard grinding sound.

‘Rock,’ yelled Stuart. He had a slight gash on his forehead where his head had been flung against the sides of the stanchion to which he was clinging.

No doubt about it. The sand had been sucked back from beneath the ship and we were on the rocks. The hull was grating horribly as the ship yawed to port, straining at the short hawser that was now the only hold on the starboard side.

‘We must tighten that hawser,’ I yelled in Stuart’s ear.

He nodded and we went right aft to the bollard that held the hawser. But the chain of the pulley had been ripped from the stanchion to which it had been attached. The double loop hung trailing in the surf. The next wave seemed insignificant after its predecessor, but the grating of the bottom on the rocks was a wicked grinding sound even in that pandemonium of wind and water.

I watched the surf seethe back, judged the depth to break my fall, and jumped. I caught the chain as the backwash whipped my legs from under me. Stuart landed beside me a second later and we strained like madmen at the pulley chains. The next wave swept us up the beach, wrenching at our arms. We worked frantically in the second of slack water at the height of the wave and then hung on as it surged back. Each time the ship lifted we gained a bit until at length the hawser was taut.

Battered and breathless, we made a dash through the surf and gained the rocks. We were bruised, but that was all. We climbed up by the broken chain of the bow door. The worst was over now. The wave that had parted the long hawser was the top of the tide. The ship held steady.

She no longer yawed. There was only the metallic crash as she hit the rocks in the backwash of each wave and soon that was muffled as sand shifted and held beneath her flat bottom.

As the tide receded we set to work to re-rig the hawser that had parted. Dugan, who insisted upon staying, fixed up a big spotlight and got the auxiliary going. By midnight the ship was firmly held again and we settled down to cold meat washed down with hot coffee laced with rum.

‘Is she going to hold, do you think?’ Stuart asked. His face was tired and strained and his beard caked with salt. I suppose I looked as tired, but I was more accustomed to this sort of thing.

I said, ‘If the wind doesn’t drop she won’t.’

‘I see.’

He said nothing after that and the three of us ate in silence. I was thinking of the way the ship had lifted to each wave.

By the end of the meal my mind was made up. ‘If the wind does drop,’ I said, ‘we could work her quite twenty yards down the cove on the pulleys.’

He glared at me. ‘Aren’t the elements bad” enough without you trying to make it worse?’ His voice was almost a snarl.

I said, ‘Listen. She’s holed just below the stern. You know that. After the pasting she’s just taken, she’s probably holed in other places as well. She’ll float on her double bottom, but the space between is probably full of sand just now and I doubt whether we’ll be able to lift the extra weight on those girders.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘You go ahead. Do what you like.

I don’t care any more. Throw the lines off and let her smash herself to bits on the rocks.’

Dugan and I went up into the gale again and set to work rigging pulleys to the ties that held the bows to the beach. Stuart joined us shortly afterwards, working like a man possessed, but saying nothing. The turn of the tide came shortly after midnight. Dugan straightened up and sniffed the air. ‘Wind’s going to drop,’ he shouted.

I gazed down the cove, darkly mysterious in the light of the spotlight which was flung back by the cliffs. Out by the entrance the seas thundered in a vague blur of white surf. But there was a new softness in the air. ‘Rain,’ I said.

He nodded.

Within an hour the wind had died completely and it was raining, a steady drenching rain. By then we had rigged pulleys to all hawsers so that they could be operated from the deck. We had barely fixed the last pulley when lights showed like dancing glow-worms on the cliff-top above the cove. We watched them as they descended towards us.

It was Garth and Bill and about half-a-dozen Boscastle fishermen.

‘We heard thee were off the rocks,’ said Garth. ‘An’ we thought maybe you’d be in difficulties.’

‘We’ve got a lorry up on the cliff-top loaded with ropes,’ Bill added.

I looked out towards the incoming tide. ‘I think she’ll hold,’ I said.

‘Aye,’ Garth nodded. ‘At the high there’ll be a big swell running — no more. You’ll hold all right. We just thought maybe — ‘ He nodded his head again. ‘A right seamanlike job ye’ve done, Mr Cunningham.’

L

I thanked him for coming. ‘It was touch and go at one time,’ I said. ‘And I’d still be glad of your help when the tide is in.’ And I told him how I planned to use the tide to ease the ship down the cove.

We broached the firkin of beer that Bill had brought back from Camelford. And we crowded the little wheel-house, drinking till the crash of the waves and the lift of the stern told us the tide was in again.

Outside it was daylight, grey and wet. The seas were still big and they thundered in, to roll crashing in great roars of surf on either side of the ship. But they had lost their power and no longer broke right over the stern.

With two of us to each pulley we began to work the ship out at the flood of each wave. Those on the two long hawsers’ pulleys reeled the chains in, bit by bit, whilst those on the bow and short hawser pulleys eased off as required.

An hour’s work and the ship was nearly twenty yards down the cove, the limit of the pulley chains, and still held fast on all sides.

Stuart cooked us a terrific breakfast. The strained lines had disappeared from his face. He was in great spirits. Only his bloodshot eyes told the story of the night. He wouldn’t allow them to leave until the firkin was empty and then played them up the cliff-path, singing until they were all singing. Their voices died away in the murmur of the receding surf. Dugan had gone with them. And we were alone. I felt very elated and very tired. We went to bed.

I woke in the sweat of a nightmare. I had dreamed that we were afloat in the cove without ties and the ship was slowly being broken up. I opened my eyes to find the sun streaming in through the open port and Stuart shaking my shoulder and offering me a cup of tea. The noise of the sea filled the stuffiness of the cabin and now and then the ship lifted and then settled gently back on to the sand of the cove.

‘Afloat?’ I asked.

He nodded.

I put a pair of slacks on and went up on deck. The sea — a quiet, complacent, gentle sea — was reaching up the cove beyond the bows. There was still a swell running, but in that warm dancing sunlit scene it was difficult to recollect the wicked thundering breakers of the night.

Tomorrow,’ he said, and there was relief in his voice. And I agreed.

Right away we begun to re-rig the pulleys so that we could ease her farther out. The long hawsers we ran direct to the capstan. We rigged ropes to the short hawsers to give them extra length. And we fixed a temporary wheel. At low tide we went round the ship to see what damage had been done. A blade of the port screw was broken and the other blades bent. That was all.

Bill and Anne came over with Dugan very early the following morning. The sea was almost flat calm. ‘Mr Garth says, sir, if we’re in difficulties you’re to send to Boscastle,’ Dugan told me. ‘He says there’ll be four boats at call if you need ‘em around midday.’

The tide was full at a little before nine. And just after eight-thirty we felt the first jar as the stern lifted and settled back on the sand. Dugan got the engines going. I cast off the bow lines. Bill and Boo manned the short hawsers which we had lengthened by adding ropes.

It was with a feeling of some pride that I ordered, ‘let go, for’ard,’ and started the capstan. Stuart operated the port hawser and I handled the starboard and so we guided the ship stern first out to the entrance of the cove. It was as easy as that. In fact the whole operation took no more than ten minutes.

I dashed up to the bridge. ‘Let go for’ard, I called. Then ‘Let go, aft.’ The splash of the long hawsers going overboard told me that we were on our own. Stuart went to the wheel-house as arranged. ‘Slow astern both,’ I called down the voice-pipe that connected direct to the engine-room. I felt the bite of the screws as they began to turn. ‘Port ten,’ I ordered Stuart.

The Elephant Rock slid by, peering down at us over the starboard rail. ‘Half-astern both.’ Then to Stuart, ‘Steady as you go.’

She came out as sweet as if she’d been coming off a beach. ‘Half-ahead starboard.’ The bows came slowly round as though the coastline were marching by. ‘Half-ahead both.’ We steamed slowly past the Rocky Valley about two cables’-length off shore, past the village of Trafalgar with its squat-towered church, past the light on the cliff-top and in to Boscastle inlet.

Word of our coming had gone before us. “Half the village was out to greet us, cheering and waving as the rusty hulk slid between the two arms of the old stone breakwater. We tied up alongside the hard. Old Garth was the first aboard. And there was a burly man with a cheery grin and mud-caked gaiters with him. ‘This is my friend Ezra Hislop, Mr Cunningham,’ Garth said. ‘He’s going to present me with five pound in the bar and you and Mr McCrae must come along and help drink it.’

As we went down to the pub I caught snatches of conversation — ‘I mind the first time I saw ‘un. I thought I was dreaming’ and ‘I saw ‘un come in. I reckoned she’d break up in that cove’ — and so on. Some had helped the crew off. Some had put them up for the night. Several had helped the captain to salvage things. The pub didn’t close its doors until near four o’clock that afternoon and there can have been few sober fishermen in Boscastle by the time it did.

We spent all next day recovering our borrowed gear in Bossiney Cove and loading it into the barge which Garth towed round for us. The cove looked strange without the rusty hulk of the landing craft lodged precariously under the cliffs.

When we got back, Dugan approached us, cap in hand and smothered in oil. He had with him a short, powerfully built young fellow with a mop of unruly yellow hair. He was dressed in what had once been khaki overalls and he too looked as though he’d bathed in the sump of a diesel engine.

‘I was thinking that now she’s off the rocks you’d be needing a crew like, sir,’ Dugan said.

‘Wait a minute,’ put in Stuart. ‘We’re not staying in home waters. We’re going to the Mediterranean.’

‘That’s okay with me, sir.’ He grinned cheerfully through the mask of oil that smeared his face. ‘I ain’t got no ties as you might say. An’ there don’t seem no job for us around these parts. My mate here feels the same way.’

‘What’s your name?’ Stuart asked Dugan’s pal.

‘Eric Boyd, sir.’

‘You’re the boy that was in the R.A.S.C., aren’t you?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, sir. But I were in a Water Transport Company. I had charge of a schooner running cargoes between Corsica and Naples and up to Livorno for more than a year. And I was out with the boats when I was a boy.’

‘Speak Italian?’ Stuart asked.

‘Pretty fair, sir. You had to on them schooners. There weren’t nobody but yourself and a bunch of Ityes.’

Stuart glanced at me. I gave a slight nod. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Come and see me in the morning and we’ll fix up details.’

After supper that night Stuart brought out the armoury that Dugan had found. There were three Mauser rifles with a box of a thousand rounds, all tracer, two boxes of grenades and four of those little Italian Berettas complete with holsters and a hundred rounds of ammunition apiece. The rust was only surface rust. He started on the pistols. ‘Mighty useful find of Dugan’s,’ he said, and you could almost hear him purr.

Two months later I was to remember his words. At the time, however, I said, ‘There’s not a war on in the Med now.’

He looked at me with that slightly humorous lift of the eyebrows. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘Remember the arms that were filched from us in Egypt, North” Africa and Italy. There are caches of weapons of every kind in practically every country in the Med. And we’re not all that popular in some areas where there wasn’t enough food. I won’t be going ashore without one of these little toys tucked away in my pocket.’ And he tapped the pistol he was cleaning.

Whilst he worked at the weapons, we held a brief board meeting. Our salvage worries were over. We had a ship now that could move under her own steam — not a problematical hulk lying on the rocks. And our thoughts were concentrated on how to make the best use of her.

It was agreed there and then that I should run the ship. In matters of seamanship he would come under me as my Number One. But that he should fix cargoes. He’d been in a solicitor’s office before the war and he was confident that he could avoid the normal pitfalls into which a one-ship concern might fall. We agreed to do the trip out with the skeleton crew of four we already possessed — Dugan and Boyd to come in on a profit-sharing basis. The rest of the crew were to be recruited in Italy where labour would go where there was food. We would sail for Plymouth as soon as I was confident the craft could make it and whilst I supervised refitting he was to go to London and get in touch with some Italian contacts he had with a view to our investing in a suitable cargo.

Two days later we said good-bye to our friends in Boscastle. We made Plymouth in just over twenty-four hours. The sea was calm and the engines ran without a hitch. Behind us we trailed our borrowed barge with the tackle that had enabled us to become a going concern.

It was the end of the first phase.