Scend of the Sea

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

That fantastic roll of hers, when she dropped down like we did, must have been the death-stroke. She must have rolled right over, clean on to the seamount, and come to rest lodged as we saw her. No wonder there were neither wreckage nor bodies. The weight of the ship trapped everything underneath. Her upper decks were completely crushed. All the loose gear the world debated about for so long must be lying under all that weight.'

‘It must have been all over very quickly,’ Tafline said quietly. 'They had a merciful end, those 211 souls.’

'Three minutes, some expert worked out. They reckoned at the time that had she capsized, it wouldn't have been longer than that. I expect, too, that in a storm like that everyone was below decks. All the bodies are probably still inside-or what's left of them.'

The hulk had a complete unreality for me. I could not credit that this was the ship whose every detail I had studied for so long. It reminded me of my first visit to the Cutty Sark at Greenwich dry-dock. As a boy, I had studied her plans, knew every interior lay-out, every deck, as if I had trodden them myself. Then came the day when I went aboard. It was at once familiar and strange. Now I looked with the same new-old eyes at the crushed, corroded hull resurrected from its sea-grave by the extraordinary phenomenon of gale and sea.

Astern, the power of the gale held back the incline of water, so willing to engulf the Waratah as of old; here, in the shelter of the seamount's lee, we could hear ourselves speak, although the storm thundered by on either flank, giving a curious, disembodied effect to our presence, like being in a capsule — aware, seeing, fearing, but at the same time partially divorced from it.

Touleier lifted and heaved too much to allow us to bring her safely more than perhaps a quarter of a cable's length from the wreck. Moreover the wind was masked by the immediate lee effect of the seamount, so that the way was almost off her. I was gravely concerned about the mast and the trailing clutter of rigging.

Yet I was drawn to the thing which I had sought so long.

The exorcism had begun. It was not over.

I must know still more about the Waratah.

She, too, wanted it and said, 'There's the airliner, your father's message. He must have been here too!'

What awful secrets still lay hidden in that rusted hulk, its propellers so grotesquely turned to the sky? The swell seethed and swished, enveloping the wreck to the first line of cabin ports, tight closed, as they must have been that same day sixty years ago, against the ancestor of the gale which again today had laid its offering on the altar of a sea which could not yet wholly claim its dead.

Tafline shuddered, a spasm of fear.

Jubela shuddered, too, and would not reply when I explained rapidly to him in Zulu. I had grabbed his oilskins and sweater for him from the cabin and he pulled the sou'wester hard over his forehead, pretending that handling the yacht needed all his concentration.

I made up my mind.

'Bring her round — handsomely now,' I told him. The yacht handled clumsily with the trailing debris alongside; the way the mast stump whipped at the flap of the tiny jib brought my heart into my mouth.

'Clear away that mess as quick as you can,' I told Jubela further. 'Keep a tight watch. I'm taking the dinghy to have a look. :

Tafline helped me inflate the rubber coracle from an air bottle while Jubela got busy on the wreckage with an axe.

'Her boat deck used to be fifty-five feet above the sea,' I said, 'but it's flat now, so there'll not be as much as that to climb. With all those barnacles and growths on the hull, it should be easy to find footholds.'

What about. .?' She pointed at the hovering incline of sea.

The gale's holding steady,' I replied. ‘So long as it does, the water should stay where it is. We must be quick. Every minute counts. It's now or never, to see the Waratah. Watch out especially when we get to the keel, the wind could blow us off our feet.'

Leaving the yacht in Jubela's care-he seemed to want to concentrate on physical tasks to avoid looking at the dead monster towering above us — we made for the stern. It looked easier to climb than any other part of the hull. We had a rope to lash ourselves fast to the decaying screws against the pluck of the wind.

We paddled to the nearest porthole. My heart raced. I tried to look in. The glass was opaque with green growth. Even my strong flashlight would not penetrate it.

Disappointed, we dipped and splashed our way to the rudder. Lying inverted, the old-fashioned counter, designed before the cruiser stern became fashionable in passenger liners and showing clearly its affinity with the days of sail, provided us with an easy first step up towards the rudder pintles. Higher still were the propellers.

I edged in. Tafiine's face was hidden by her sou'wester. The swell receded. Unexpectedly, she stood up and jumped lightly on to the counter. How many years was it since human foot trod that fated hull? She stood poised for a second, then swung round to face me. She pushed back her sou'wester. I see her still: her face radiant, the short hair light against the old dark hull.

She tapped each heavy brass letter, green from years of immersion, with her right toe.

'W-a-r-a-t-a-h' she spelled out, never taking her eyes from my face across the couple of feet of heaving water.

She held out her arms.

'Come to me.'

I jumped. She put her lips close to my ear, and for a moment the caravel-rock, the sea and the wreck ceased to be.

'I have the Waratah, and now I have my love.'

Then she eased me a little from her, and the question was in her eyes.

'Yes,' I said. 'We must look further.’

Had it been like an ordinary wreck, perhaps we should not have chosen to go on. But, because the hull was completely intact — tribute to those Clydeside builders who had claimed to be among the world's best — it had a shut-off quality, unlike the piteous rends, torn plating, or broken back of a ship aground on a merciless reef. The long, sinister, corroded hull, doubly odd because of its lack of upperworks, lay there, its ports closed, waiting.

There was nothing to stop us.

I had brought a boathook and a length of rope, but for our initial progress up the incline of the counter they were unnecessary. The clusters of barnacles gave us adequate foothold. We were able to stand comfortably when we reached the rudder, holding on to the huge slab of rusted metal. This was braced by four massive transverse strips of iron, each about four inches wide and nine feet apart, so that it was a relatively easy matter to use them as footholds to the eighteen-foot screws towering above our heads, their bronze still surprisingly bright against the general shabbiness of the hull.

I used the boathook to haul myself up on to the first pintle, reaching down and helping her up beside me on to the narrow iron shelf. From this higher position we were able to see for the first time something of the seamount behind the ship. The rock was covered in thick marine growths; she started momentarily at a movement, but it was only one of a colony of outside rock lobsters. How long would the seamount stay above water? — long enough to make it part of the air-element which was so alien to it and so kill off the teeming life of lobsters, mussels, barnacles and other rock-and-sea creatures?

She gave a gasp at a movement above us. I whipped round, my nerves strung to breaking-point. A magnificent albatross, holding himself skilfully against the wind, came to rest above one of the propeller shafts and then plucked eagerly among the sea-creatures.

We breathed again. We pushed on.

I secured the boathook over the next pintle, and we climbed yet higher.

My eyes went automatically to Touleier, so safe-for the moment-in the lee of this rock-and-metal hill of death and enigma. My sailor's heart skipped a beat at the sight of the seas which boiled behind her, and on either side of the seamount. We were held in a tight, ephemeral cell of safety. We could not see a defined line where the sea-valley began or ended. We were protected, where we stood, from the blowing spray and lash of wind, but I feared that when we got higher further exploration might be impossible because of it.

How long could, or would, the phenomenon last? Precious minutes were racing by. We had to see the top of the hull!

I bent to help Tafline. In doing so, my line of vision was through the gap between rudder and hull. ‘What is it, Ian?'

I stopped transfixed. She could not see from where she was.

A fuselage, one wing attached and the other piled upright against the side of the hull, lay in a crumpled, untidy heap on the far side of the wreck. The tail-section had snapped half off and the airliner lay broken-backed across a rock, as if a giant had begun to break it across his knee and then grown tired of the game and cast it from him.

My hands were shaking as I hauled her up. I pointed.

'Four engines!' she exclaimed.

I found my voice. 'Airscrews! Alistair's was a jet!'

Some of the propeller blades were broken off and others were wrapped round each other and the turbine casings.

'Gemsbok’ she exclaimed. 'Gemsbok and the Waratah — crashed together!'

I craned forward to try and see more. 'Those experts were right about her going in at' full power-look! They said she first touched something and then slewed round. Dad must have been sitting on this side, nearest to us, and the wing on his side came off in the final moments of the crash and landed up against the hull of the ship.'

'How could he have come alive out of that?' she exclaimed. 'Ian, he must have had some time to have cut loose that panel!'

'He crashed at night, remember. Maybe that would account for the peculiar writing.'

'Do you see anyone, in the immediate shock of a crash, calmly setting about chopping off a piece of the aircraft? And then, of all things, deciding to make a testament out of it? He must have seen the name Waratah, and that would need daylight. That means the seamount must stay above water for a good few hours..

I agreed. We felt safer to go on.

She took a firm grip of my hand and leant out to see as far beyond the hull as she could.

‘Ian! Ian-there are two tails! There's another against the side of the ship!'

Cautiously, fearfully, I eased her back to safety on the slippery shelf to enable me to see. One slip would have been fatal; our precarious perch was twenty-five feet above the rocks.

I extended my range of vision by using the boathook. I, too, peered out round the bulge of the stern. That high tail was unmistakable. The Buccaneer!

It projected from the hull slightly forwards of where I judged the bridge must be and almost on a level with where we were standing. Only the tail was visible. There was no sign of the rest of the machine.

I edged myself back on to our narrow place of safety.

'It's Alistair's plane,' I said numbly. The tail sticks out of the hull up for'ard. The jet must have gone right through this rotten old hull like a bullet. Only twenty feet higher, and he'd have missed it!'

We stood silent, shaken. The gale roared past and the sea probed at the base of the hulk. The earlier radiance in her face was gone. I was filled with a sick hatred for the wreck.

'Let's go back, Ian! Haven't we come far enough to know all we want to know? Remember what Alistair himself said — what if you do find the Waratah! All there'll be is a lot of skeletons! Among those skeletons are your father and your brother. .'

I poised myself uncertainly on the slippery foothold. At that moment I held her life in my hand. I did not know it

What made me go on?

I could not answer that any more than what brought her that day to the dockside and Walvis Bay. In retrospect, however, I think it was that the blank, rotting hull provided no way into the Waratah mystery, not so much even as an open port. It was a shape, a thing, a hulk, and even in the moment of discovery, it shut itself fast.

To the top-only,' I replied. 'From there we can see along the whole length of the keel. It won't take a couple of minutes.'

The massive struts from the stern to the propeller shaft tunnels, which bulged unnaturally big once one was against them (normally they would be deep under water and not seen) gave us an easy passage to the keel. We were careful when we lifted our heads above the level of the hull and exposed ourselves to the gale. Another albatross appeared magically out of the spindrift and coasted down to settle near the remnants of the Viscount. This time she did not admire but shuddered — had the birds once feasted on human flesh as well as on the delicacies the seamount brought from the deeps?

The long level of the keel stretched away; the salt and wind stung our eyes. Tafline pointed at what appeared to be a larger accretion of deep-sea things round a rusted stump of metal. It was the only projection along the ship's bottom.

I pulled her down close to speak into her ears.

'Engine-room ash chute. Burnt coal from her furnaces was dumped through it into the sea. It goes right through the ship, clean through the watertight compartments and into the engine-room itself.'

‘What is that supposed to be, then?' She indicated the metal stump.

'It's a loosely-hinged metal cover to the chute. The mechanism is simple. When the weight of the ash discharged from her furnaces was greater than the sea pressure thirty feet below the waterline, the chute opened automatically. Experts thought it might have stuck open and allowed the sea to flood the ship from the engine-room.'

She screwed up her eyes and looked along the spume-swept hull. 'Then why don't we open the hatch and look inside?'

We had found entry to Waratah. It was as simple as the device itself.

We inched along the keel at a crawl to the outlet, which faced sternwards to form a final outcurve of the interior passageway. This 'lip' of metal, now heavily encrusted and black with rust and immersion, was about two-and-a-half feet high, roughly curved with a kind of primitive streamline like a ship's ventilator. Where it met the hull there was a metal hatch cover, about three feet wide and four feet long, hinged at the forward end. The small half-cupola of the lip also acted as a brake to prevent the hatch cover from swinging open too wide. It would come to rest at an angle of about sixty degrees when fully extended, the speed of the ship providing a natural motion to sweep the spent ash clear. It was simple and ingenious.

I reached with the boathook and got a grip on the 'lip'. The crawl along the flat broad bottom had been more difficult than dangerous; I remembered how the wind had plucked away Jubela's shirt.

We crouched behind the little cupola.

The hatch rectangle and surrounding jamb appeared much more rusted than the metal of the hull itself, caused no doubt by white-hot coals and cold water. There was a continuous discharge down the chute.

Also heavily rusted was a big eye-bolt set into the hatch cover, to which was attached a broken length of cable. I could not locate the aperture where this cable entered the hull because of the growths and corrosion, but it was clear that the trap could be pulled open at will from the inside, if there was need to get rid of the ash quicker than by the automatic way.

She crouched, simply looking at the hatchway. Her eyes met mine, and they were full of unspoken questions.

‘I’ll try,' I said, going to the eye-bolt. The odds are that the hatch is rusted solid with the hull by now. The metal round here in continual contact with the white-hot ash would deteriorate far quicker than the rest of the hull.’

I gripped the eye-bolt.

She stopped me. 'Open that, and perhaps you open a Pandora's Box. Remember Alistair's words: maybe a lot of skeletons only!'

It was so tantalizingly near.

'If it's no go, it's back to the yacht,' I replied.

I tugged. The hatch cover moved.

'It's quite loose! Give me a hand!'

She hung back, tense, uneasy.

'We needn't go in. We can shine the torch and see if we can spot anything.'

Together we lifted the metal cover about eighteen inches, but there was no way of keeping it open. I unscrewed the metal top of the boathook. We tugged the hatch open again. I jammed it with the boathook top.

The gale, ventilating the passageway, swept up to us a deep-sea smell of water and decay, a curious musty odour of rotting metal. The chute, we saw, widened slightly a little further in. It ended about fifteen feet down against a round watertight bulkhead door, clamped shut.

The torch beam also showed a narrow metal ladder, red-brown with rust, clamped against the side of the chute.

I played the beam to the bottom.

At the end of the ladder, against the floor formed by the bulkhead, hung two uniform jackets. One was white, the other blue.

She gripped my arm, and gave a sharp intake of breath, half-sigh, half-exclamation.

One of the jackets, on whose shoulders the green mould showed against the white material, was an old-fashioned naval uniform with a high upright collar. The once-gold epaulettes were also green with mould, and the brass buttons were as dim as the ship's name on the stern.

The other jacket was fresh blue. Its goldwork on the shoulders and sleeves was dimmed, but not completely tarnished.

I flicked the beam on to the insignia on the sleeve. It was a captain's jacket of the South African Airways.

My hand was shaking so much I could not direct the light. I gave it to her. She brought it back to the white jacket.

The collar was embossed with two blue anchors. The sleeves had the insignia of a merchant marine first officer.

She played the light over it inch by inch. I don't think either of us breathed.

She held it steady.

'There's something sticking out of the top pocket!' I craned forward as far as I dared. It was a black-covered notebook with a pencil in the spine. I found my voice.

'My father and my grandfather's jackets! ‘

'Your father must have scratched the panel down here! He wasn't blind or hurt — he was down there in darkness, next to his own father's jacket!'

'It must have got stuck on something — it only floated free when Walvis Bay's storm finally loosened it!'

The question seared both our minds. Would the probing flashlight next reveal two ragged heaps of bones which were my kith and kin?

It would be my duty to see them first. I took the torch from her.

Holding it at arm's-length down the shaft, I explored the corners below the jackets.

An old-fashioned miner's safety lamp with a gauze screen was in one corner. There was a scatter of matches round it.

'They used that sort of lamp in the old coal-burners' bunkers,' I said in a whisper, as if in the presence of the dead. 'Same as in the coal mines. It's a Davy lamp-couldn't cause a coal-gas explosion …'

'Ian! We must have those two jackets! Try and reach them with the boathook! ‘

I snatched up the long pole. Without its metal claw on top I could not unhook the jackets.

'I'll go down.'

'No! No!’ She held me tight. 'No! Don't! Let me! That rusted ladder won't take your weight…'

We argued; we lost life-ebbing minutes; she won.

I ran a bight of rope under her arms and eased her down. The first step held, but the second gave even under her slight weight. My heart was in my mouth. Step by step she edged her way to the jackets.

Then she was there.

She looked up and called. This old one is so fragile, I'm almost frightened to lift it.'

Before I could stop her, she unhitched the rope from under ' her arms and tied the notebook securely with it. I yanked it up. I pocketed it without looking.

My anxiety to get her out of that fate-filled tunnel and my haste made me fluff the rope on its return. The loop which I had hastily remade for her shoulders caught on the rusted rung which had snapped under her weight.

I jerked the rope.

The noose narrowed. It stuck tighter.

My hands started to sweat. I redirected the flashlight beam. I saw her upturned face above the polo collar of her sweater. For a moment, her eyes looked into mine.

I gave the rope a savage jerk.

It gave.

My arm shot wildly sideways, free of tension. It swept away the boathook prop. The hatch cover crashed shut.

All I knew was a stunning blow on the head, a crash, and a clatter.

How long did I lie there sprawled among the barnacles-five, ten minutes?

My first consciousness was of that inescapable deep-sea smell-my face was among the sea-things; second, of blood streaming into my eyes and salt on my lips; third, the stunning, overwhelming agony of mind which drove away the mists from my brain-she was trapped in the Waratah tunnel where the other Fairlies had died!

I grabbed the eye-bolt and yanked with all my strength.

It did not move.

I looked round for a lever. The boathook top and torch were missing-that had been the clatter into the chute I had heard as the hatch cover knocked me senseless.

The long wooden shaft of the boathook was there, however, and I thrust it through the eye-bolt to lift it. The effort brought a wave of nausea and a blinding stream of blood into my eyes.

I pried it. The shaft opened.

In frantic desperation I knelt down and shouted her name. There was no answer. I cupped my hands and shouted again, trying to penetrate the slab of rusty metal.

Then I saw. The jamb which had been weakened by white-hot ash in Waratah's lifetime and by over a half century of corrosion after her death had given way under the slamming weight of the hatch cover. The slab had sunk an inch or two into the rotten metal, jamming it tight.

A cold horror which had nothing to do with my stunned state came over me. I grabbed and tore at the eye-bolt until the ragged metal ripped my hands.

Still the hatch stuck fast.

I knew what I had to do. But first she must know that I had not forsaken her. I beat a rat-tat with the broken boathook shaft on the hatch cover. Had I not been so engrossed, I would have noticed that the wind had eased-that is why I heard.

Her signal came back faintly-a muted rat-tat.

I gave one final despairing tug at the unyielding eye-bolt.

Jubela! I must have his strength, an axe, some sort of lever to prise open that hatch.

I turned and got down on all fours, crawling back along the keel towards the stern. Now I realized the wind no longer plucked the way it had done. I got half to my feet and made a shambling run towards the rudder. The dinghy bobbed at its foot.

I hung back.

I hadn't the rope or the boathook now. How was I to bridge the nine-foot gaps between the giant rudder pintles? I climbed clear of the hull proper along one propeller-shaft tunnel. I let go, holding on by my hands alone. My feet groped for a foothold on the lower pintle. It was out of reach.

I glanced down in desperation. Forty or fifty feet below was the dinghy and the sea. Three or four feet from me was the slime-covered pintle.

I let go. I came down half-sideways. I fought for balance. I snatched at the thick blade of the end-on rudder, and held on. I steadied myself. I was safe.

I wiped the blood out of my eyes and swallowed my nausea.

Frantic, I dropped again, slipped, grabbed, from pintle to pintle. Four times more my life hung on a thread above the kicking sea. Then I was in the dinghy, paddling for Touleier.

Jubela stood hanging on to the makeshift stay he had rigged, astonished.

Before I was half-way to him, I shouted, 'An axe! Get me an axe, a crowbar, a boom — anything! Quick! Quick!'

I knelt to the paddle, glancing up only to see my direction.

Jubela clutched the dinghy's grab-lines. He, too did not see it coming. The sea burst over us.

The gale had eased! The sea was rushing back! The 'valley' was filling! The seamount was submerging!

I had a glimpse of Jubela tottering on the deck. Then he was thrown into the welter of foaming water. My back fetched up against something hard. I clutched it fast as the sea fought to tear loose my grip.

Touleier was borne away, half-submerged, in a foam of sea, like a paper boat on a pond.

Five days. Five dawns.

Five days of undetermined merging of day and night.

Five days of gale.

Five crucifying days of agony.

How far I was blown that first day, I have no idea. In the first desperate hours after Touleier was blown away from Waratah's grave — the wild despair burned acceptance into my mind: her grave, too-I fought to get the yacht's head round to go back to her by bringing up the big mainsail from the locker and bending it to assist the rag I had managed to set in place of the jib. The rudder was jammed because the mainboom had crashed on to the self-steering gear, and the — first wild wave fused the two as if they had been welded. I saw the rudder was hopeless. I decided to steer her by sails. The fact that every moment I was being blown further away from her goaded me to a strength I did not know I possessed. There was no sign of Jubela. I presumed he must have been swept away and drowned in that first onrush of returning sea.

Each recalcitrant stay, each intractable sail gasket, each impossible sheet, I fought with a frenzy which ignored the pain of my blood-raw hands as the nails were torn from the sockets of three of my fingers and a thumb. In the end the gale won-that awful, thundering attrition from the south-west which resumed in full blast after the lull. What chance had I, one man, when a crew of race-proven, storm-toughened seamen were needed, against the fury of the gale when trying to break out a bolt of canvas which seemed to have all the devils of the deep lodged in its folds?

I failed.

I wept when the sail blew away into the white, driving gloom of salt and spray. I could not see a boat's-length ahead. I fought for hours after that to try and rig the jib as an emergency, but it, too, was ripped away into the sea-murk. Every time I managed to bring her head round, the yacht would start off in an eccentric circle because of the jammed rudder, until the gale and sea would catch her and throw her bodily to the north-east — away, away, each desperate mile, from the Waratah's grave.

When I realized I could do nothing to handle the yacht, I set about trying to get the radio to work. The rawness of my wounded hands was made worse by spilt acid from the cells, which I refilled and changed, at first with hope, then with despair. The set remained as mute as the hour she had reported it dead.

On the third day, when I ate the last of the emergency sandwiches she had made, and drank the last unpolluted water from the tanks, my frenzy turned to exhaustion, and then to calm-a kind of numb, uncaring calm. My reason told me I was in as almost severe straits as she the moment that steel lid shut on her upturned face; my heart told me it did not matter, and that soon we would be together again.

So I read the pitiful little log between black covers which she took from Douglas Fairlie's pocket and caused her own doom.

I read of the Waratah's doom.

SS. Waratah. 9 p.m.

July 27, 1909

I write this in the presence of Almighty God, to whose protection and mercy I shall go when it is finished, in the certain knowledge that I have only a little time to live. That I am alive, is a miracle, for around me tonight are the bodies of over 200 of my fellow-beings — passengers, captain and officers-in this ill-starred ship. I interpret this small reprieve from death as His grace to enable me, in my extremity, to record how the Waratah met her end.

We sailed from Durban at approx 8 p.m. yesterday. I had the first watch today. I was surprised, before it was fight, to have Captain Ilbery join me on the bridge. He wished me a formal good morning and then stood looking out ahead.

'As an old sailing shipmaster I must sniff the first wind of the day,' he said with an attempt at a smile, but it was clear to me he was very uneasy about something. I had

never known him be like that before.

'What do you make of it?' he asked me.

I was surprised that he did not address me by my rank. He was always meticulous about this, especially in front of the crew.

'Coming up for a south-westerly blow, sir,’ I replied.

Captain Ilbery kept on looking to the south-west, as if he expected to see something there. The sea was rising, and once or twice the ship put her head down. We had had trouble loading 250 tons of coal into the well deck bunker at Durban and we could not get the ship upright. Now I resolved to get the well deck coal below as soon as the day watches came on duty.

Captain Ilbery went to the extreme forward section of the bridge. He seemed to be studying the well deck.

To lighten his unease, I used a windjammer expression as a joke.

'No need to whistle for a wind, is there, sir?'

The Captain did not reply, but started towards the chart-room companionway. Then he said, 'Come below a moment, will you, Douglas?'

I was so startled by his use of my Christian name that I left the bridge and followed him without giving orders.

Again, in the chart-room, he used my Christian name. Even when he had officiated at my wedding aboard Waratah, he had only half-managed to get it out.

'Douglas, what do you make of it?'

The thought crossed my mind, how many great storms has he ridden out, and what is so special about this capful of wind from the south-west?

'It seems to be working up a bit from the south-west, sir,' I replied. There's not much to it at the moment. We had a bit of a blow from the same quarter outward bound round the Cape, you remember …'

‘I don't mean the storm, man-I mean the ship,' he retorted with a vehemence which was so strange from him. The ship and the storm together, if you like.’

'It's not a storm yet, sir,' I pointed out.

'It will come,' asserted Captain Ilbery. 'One develops an instinct, a sixth sense, about these things. It's coming-a big one. This ship has never been in a Cape buster before, Douglas.'

'I'd feel happier if that well deck coal were below for the sake of her stability,' I answered. 'The sea is working up, and she has an odd sort of dead feel to me.'

Captain Ilbery seemed relieved that I shared with him the unspoken fears we both felt about the ship, her stability, and her incredible roll and lurch.

⁴Do that then,' he said. 'Get it stowed below as soon as you can after daylight.'

'Can I compensate the ballast tanks as well?' I asked. ‘I would like all the weight I can find as deep below her centre of gravity as I can put it.'

Captain Ilbery eyed me gravely, and was about to say something when a messenger came from the bridge. 'Steamer fine on the port bow, sir. Overhauling her.' I went to the bridge, but Captain Dbery stayed. A ship called the Clan Macintyre, bound for London, signalled us. We exchanged formalities. It was off Port St John's.

Shortly after Waratah had passed Clan Macintyre, Captain Ilbery returned to the bridge. He was formal, which showed he had reached a decision in a difficult situation. There are not many captains who would have the courage to risk censure by running from a storm which had not yet developed into anything special in a crack, well-engined 10,000-tonner.

'I am going to do what my sailing-ship instincts tell me,' he informed me. 'Haul out, Mr Fairlie.'

I set course as he directed, and Waratah headed seawards across Clan Macintyre's bows and across the scend of the sea — its run was now strongly from the south-west — while the wind rose to a full gale. The new course, taking the sea on her starboard bow, brought several heavy seas aboard, and drenched the coaling gangs I had set to work.

Shortly after 10 o'clock-it seems scarcely credible that it happened a brief twelve hours ago — Waratah was struck by a heavy beam sea. She hung at the end of her roll in her characteristic way until I was convinced she would never come back. She lay in that position for perhaps five or six seconds, and then yawed off course landwards. Her recovery from the roll had been so sluggish that I feared that the worst had happened below.

Within seconds, I had an emergency call from the chief engineer. Hundreds of tons of coal had shifted in that awful roll and were lying against the ship's steering rods, jamming the rudder. I sent to Captain Ilbery to come to the bridge while I ran to the engine-room. That is the reason why I am alive tonight. With the rudder jammed, the ship's head swung round, away from the safety Captain Ilbery had so wisely sought. The ship listed badly to starboard. It was now blowing a full gale from the south-west. The sea had worked up with alarming rapidity. The speed was still on her when I rushed from the bridge to the engine-room.

It is hard to write of a man one has seen burned to death before one's very eyes. Vinney, the engineer, was waiting for me. The engine-room was a holocaust. Vast quantities of coal were lying across the steering rods and this would have to be cleared before the ship could be brought under control. Already two coal trimmers were not accounted for. The roar of steam being blown off drowned the senses. Vinney had also emptied the main furnace ash chute as a precaution.

It is impossible for me now to estimate times, or say how long I had been in the engine-room, but the engineer and I were on the catwalk by No. 2 boiler furnace making hurried plans to clear the coal when the disaster happened. I am still too dazed to give a coherent account of it, but do this I must, for this is my final task.

One moment Vinney was beside me; the next, the entire furnace seemed to tip forward as the ship's bows dropped at an angle so unlikely that it seemed to deny she was a craft on the surface of the sea. White-hot coal spewed from the furnace over the engineer and two stokers. I did not even hear them scream, it was so sudden. In a moment, it seemed, the whole engine-room — furnaces, engines, bunkers, boilers — turned upside down. At the same instant there was a tremendous crash and a rending noise whose like I have never heard before. Even now, nearly twelve hours afterwards, I have difficulty in crediting that this 10,000-ton ship capsized, turned completely turtle.

I found myself hanging on to the catwalk railing staring upwards through the metal tunnel of the ash chute which had been emptied. Had the engineer not dumped its contents at the first emergency, a cascade of white-hot ash would have written the same fate for me as for him. Scalding steam and smoke made it impossible to see across the inferno of the engine-room; the roar of escaping steam boomed and reverberated between the metal walls of the compartment like non-stop thunder.

As I groped to haul myself on to the inverted catwalk, I was confronted with another impossibility — I was looking at driving storm clouds across the sky through the chute opening! The cable to the ash chute hatch had been left unsecured in the haste to empty its contents and the watertight bulkhead intersecting the tunnel about fifteen feet from the bottom had swung wide of its own accord.

My movements were instinctive. My sole thought was to escape from the roaring, thundering, scaring engine-room before the boilers exploded. Everything was lit by the red glow of the flaming coal which had been ejected from the furnaces, and I coughed and gasped for breath in the swirling smoke. I had no conscious appreciation in those desperate first minutes of the nature of the disaster which had overtaken the ship — all I knew was that she had capsized completely. In the baleful light I saw a trimmer's lamp attached to the catwalk rail. I took it and climbed up into the ash chute. I closed the bulkhead behind me so that when the boilers exploded, I would be shielded against the concussion.

At that stage I considered that the ship, after turning over, was floating upside down with her keel in the air. I think I first intended to swim clear of her, but when I put my head outside the open hatch for a moment, the sight of the boiling sea and insane wind drove me back, terrified. I tugged the hatch cover closed by means of the cable and lit the trimmer's lamp. Better to have at least a floating wreck under one than be cast adrift on that awe-inspiring sea. I tried to pull myself together.

The catastrophe overtook the ship at between 10 and 11 this morning, but it was not for fully an hour afterwards-, sitting here in the ash chute in a state of numbed shock, that I came to realize that my first reconstruction of it, namely, that the vessel was floating upside down, was wrong. Shortly after I entered the chute there was a violent, grinding movement like an earthquake which brought terror to my already overwrought nerves: I thought the ship was settling and that the boilers would explode when the sea reached them. This cataclysmic noise drowned even the racket and vibration of the screws turning in empty air above my head. The grinding and rending threw me from side to side in the chute. I was too terrified to try and open the hatch again. When the violence and movement stopped, I came to the conclusion that the ship must have been settling down on some solid object, crushing the superstructure as she did so, with that nightmare of noise.

The boilers did not explode, as I feared. I felt the screws start to slow, and then stop, as the steam pressure fell away.

I blessed Vinney's foresight for throwing open the steam safety valves.

I am not sure now whether the noise, or the silence which followed, were more terrifying. I found courage at last to try the hatch again. I thought it had jammed, but the significance of it did not come home to me until I cautiously screwed open the bulkhead door through which I had come from the engine-room. A jet of compressed air and stale smoke whistled in, but before hastily screwing it shut, I caught a glimpse below.

The ship was full of water!

In this moment of my extremity — the light is beginning to flicker for want of air and my breathing becomes more difficult as the tunnel's oxygen is spent-I know that I am sealed alive in a ship which, for some reason which I cannot explain, is neither afloat nor ashore.

Later: Breathing very difficult. No point in prolonging my life further. Ship rocked and heaved. No. 1 hatch burst, I think. I will douse the light now to have use of the last of air for what I must do, namely, open the lower bulkhead to the flooded engine-room, and go through. I will then seal the chute behind me with this account to tell how the Waratah met her end, so that the sea will not be able to reach it.

Under my grandfather's signature was scrawled, 'Read this. Will scratch message for Ian on panel cut from Gemsbok — Bruce Fairlie, captain, SAA Viscount Gemsbok, July 19, 1967.'

I took the black-covered notebook, embossed with two blue anchors of the famous line, wrapped it in oilskin, and buried it deep among the other Waratah things which Tafline had so carefully stowed in the waterproof galley locker.

The frenzy of the gale made it almost impossible to write Touleier's log. I resorted to a kind of cryptic telegraphese to try and rush down on paper, amid the violent kicking and jerking of the hull, something of what was happening. Often I had to wait five minutes or more between individual words because of the bucking. To try and fix the yacht's position was out of the question.

A flicker of hope came to me on the afternoon of the fourth day.

I saw my chance. There was a lull in the gale in the late afternoon. If I could get rid of the mainboom wreckage locked in the self-steering gear, I might still save the yacht.

Not until I chopped at the gear with an axe did I realize how weak I was. I had had no food since the last sandwiches nearly two days before. The salt-contaminated fresh water had made me vomit. My feeble strokes simply bounced off. I switched my attention to the stump of the mainmast, whose heel was starting to thrash. Somehow I managed to fix it, but it cost me a left hand stripped of flesh to the bone of the thumb and two fingers.

Before I could attempt more, the gale resumed in full fury.

That night I gave up hope.

In the morning, Touleier was still afloat.

I did not think it possible for her to take any more punishment, or that there was anything left to carry away. But at dawn I was jerked from my semi-coma by a crash and a gust which even in my sinking brain stood out as more violent than anything I had yet encountered. It took away the stump of mainmast and mainboom wreckage. The starboard cabin ports were blown in and water cascaded into the shambles of a cabin.

I did not want to die down there, cowed, beaten, alone. I wanted to die with a curse on my lips at the south-west wind, facing it, feeling its plucking challenge on my face at the end.

I tried to say goodbye to her at the bunk where we had had the magic of that other dawn off Pondoland, looking down on her lovelines, but a lurch crashed me to my knees, and as I sprawled I prayed, oh Christ put an end to my thoughts like the south-west wind, will the agony never end? She said, while the Waratah mystery is unsolved, I cannot be yours. Now it is resolved, and very soon she shall have me.

I dragged myself on deck to die.