Homage to Gaia (17 page)

At last February came round, and after breakfast, I said my
goodbyes
to Helen, Christine, and Jane and set off with Tom Thompson and Frank Smith in the Harvard Hospital station wagon. Frank Smith, the retired naval officer, was to be my colleague and guide aboard the ship. Our equipment and luggage completely filled the back of the car. It is only fifty or so miles from Salisbury to Weymouth, which in those days was still a place of naval significance. From the dockside, we could see the huge bulk of the
Vengeance
lying in the middle of the calm water within the breakwaters. We loaded our gear onto a cutter, helped by sailors, one of whom made me immediately feel at ease when he called our helium cylinders boffin bombs. Soon we were at a sea-level platform lowered from the ship’s quarterdeck and they started the boarding ceremonies. The ship’s company piped the naval personnel on board and they saluted the quarterdeck. This caused me concern because my dyslectic tendencies would cause me both to face in the wrong direction and do the salute incorrectly. But
Frank Smith calmed me and said, ‘No need to salute, you’re a civilian and as far as the ship’s concerned, you’re invisible.’ He was a
wonderful
companion, just the guide I needed for such a voyage. It is agonizing to be a virgin in a new ceremonial environment and he saved me an immense amount of embarrassment.

Our cabins for the next six weeks were in the officers’ quarters towards the stern of the ship. They were cramped quarters and in our six-bunk cabin there were only two wash-hand basins. There were more than enough cupboards and drawers to stow our clothing, which included Arctic gear. It was lunchtime before we had settled ourselves and arranged the equipment in our lab—a spacious suite of rooms in the ship’s sickbay. We expected no enemy action on this voyage so these quarters seemed a natural place for us. The officers’ wardroom of the
Vengeance
was forward and was a room of luxurious spaciousness. Tables with white linen and good cutlery were there to welcome us. The food, after the privations of post-war rationed England, seemed almost like a daily banquet.

After lunch, we went on deck to see the ship leave port and go into the Channel to commence sea trials along the Dorset coast before setting sail for the Arctic. It was strange to watch the so familiar Dorset coastline from Lulworth via Brandy Bay to Kimmeridge and on to St Alban’s Head as we travelled past about three miles away. Those high cliffs I had climbed so often seemed no more than the saucer rim of a quiet sea. It was a mild and weakly sunlit February afternoon. Later that same day we began our journey down the Channel towards Land’s End, and then turned north past Wales. It was calm and easy progress at a speed of not more than about 14 knots (16 mph). The weather was unusually quiet as we sailed past the west of Britain and we were able to go on deck to see the snow-covered mountains and islands of Scotland. We sailed on north through the Minches and up past Cape Wrath. The next day the Faroes came in sight as more snow-covered mountains.

We were now well into the routine of our work. We went onto the seamen’s mess decks and negotiated with them for a table on which to set up our gear and start taking measurements. I must admit that this kind of science is not my favourite occupation. Had I not had the joy of being on a ship I would not have been doing it. I always have found tedious the endless repetition of comparatively easy measurements. Nevertheless, I knew that we must do them if our observations were to have significance. It was easy to be distracted by conversation with
the sailors and by watching the hobbies they enjoyed in their off-duty periods. Who would have thought that knitting and embroidery were amongst the pastimes of a warship crew. To me and to Frank Smith, who knew much more about ships than I could ever know, the
Vengeance
was a contented ship. The crew could have seen us as uninvited intruders, like social workers; instead they accepted us kindly and courteously.

Walking through the ship carrying our equipment was our greatest difficulty. The curse of a naval ship is its need for watertight
compartments
to keep it afloat after the enemy has shot it full of holes. The oval doorways with heavy clip fasteners every few yards and the vertical steel ladders between the decks made travel across the
territory
of the
Vengeance
hard and painful. Novices like me always barked shins. However, compared with the naval ships to come, like the aircraft carrier
Victorious
that I went on ten or so years later, the
Vengeance
was spacious and enjoyable. A journey on a present-day large aircraft carrier is like living in a nightmare version of a London Tube station in a permanent state of rush hour.

We spent our evenings in the wardroom playing cards, drinking modestly and telling stories. On British ships liquor is freely available, but something about shipboard life seems to hasten the metabolism of alcohol and lessen its capacity to stupefy. As one sailor said to me, ‘You never need exercise on this ship; even in bed you have to work to stay put.’ Sailors had it easier than the officers did; they slept in hammocks, which insulated them from the ship’s considerable motion. It was winter when we left England and our course was into the Arctic almost directly toward Spitzbergen, which is a mere 800 miles from the Pole. We expected cold but for the first part of the journey, we did not get it. Even at latitude 70° N, close to Bear Island, it was merely damp, wet, and about 40° F, typical of English
December
weather but not what I expected well within the Arctic Circle in February. Not until the eleventh day of our voyage close to latitude 75° N, did we see ice in the sea; even then the wind was still from the south and west and unusually warm for the Arctic. All the time, though, imperceptibly but on a daily basis, the weather had grown stormier.

The
Vengeance
was nearly as long as the
Queen
Mary,
with only about a sixth of the mass of that great liner. It was also a welded ship. This gave her a vicious motion in a rough sea, especially if it was a following sea, with the waves racing to catch up the ship from behind.
As one seaman put it, ‘It was like being dragged down a flight of stairs in a tin bath.’ In the wardroom, the curbs were now around the edges of the dining tables almost all of the time. One of the naval
constructors
travelling with our party was so seasick that the ship’s physician had to ask the engineers to rig a bed for him suspended in gimbals, a clever mechanical contraption that ensures that whatever the ship’s motion the suspended bed remained level. It was a large version of the gimbals used to hold a ship’s compass level. The bed was in the sickbay, which was near the metacentre of the ship, the place where the movement is least. He spent most of the voyage in this bed.

As our course moved west and south towards Jan Mayen Island and Greenland, the wind grew stronger and was often storm force or higher. The naval purpose of the cruise was to see if an aircraft carrier like
Vengeance
could operate and fly its aircraft under winter
conditions
in the Arctic. Flying was, in fact, limited to the few quiet spells, and even then expensive in both lives and aircraft.

In London, before the voyage, I had foolishly volunteered for a dangerous experiment on the ship. I was so keen to go and to make myself acceptable to the Navy that I ignored common sense and my survival instinct. The Navy wanted to know if it would be possible to warm up the piston engine aircraft in the hangars inside the ship. Warming the engines by running them on the icy open decks would waste time and fuel and under battle conditions such a time waste could be fatal, but the hangars were large and full of planes, and to let them start and warm up their engines inside the ship raised the worrying possibility of fire and pollution of the ship with dangerous amounts of exhaust fumes. There was particular concern that carbon monoxide would build up to a toxic level inside the hangar—even to a level where lives were in danger. The Navy needed a volunteer to measure the carbon monoxide in the hangar as the planes warmed up and this is what I volunteered to do.

On a relatively quiet day as we sailed between Spitzbergen and Jan Mayen Island the Captain decided to do the warm-up experiment. It was scheduled for 10.00 am and at 9.45 I went to the stern end of the hangar, just below the great open doors of the ship’s lift that carries planes up to the flight deck. The only protection I had, apart from my Arctic gear, was earmuffs, for the sound level with all of the engines running would be deafening. By 10.00 I had my meter running and checked. I raised my flag as a sign and the first of the engines started up. There were clouds of smoke and a fair amount of fuel from the
priming splashed on to the floor of the hangar. As they started more and more engines, the smoke grew thicker and so did the wind. With all the engines running, I had to kneel down and hold a ringbolt on the deck to keep position. To my relief, the carbon monoxide level barely rose above zero on the meter. There was so much fresh air drawn in by the planes’ propellers, acting like giant fans, that the fumes were swept away almost as fast as they were produced.
Pollution
was no hazard at all. Fire was another thing, and several of the flying crew came to me afterwards and said that the venting of fuel during the start-up made the experiment foolhardy and hazardous. This, coming from men who served in perhaps the most dangerous of peacetime naval tasks, made me feel glad that they spoke after the experiment and not before. As an experiment, it worked well. I did not have to lift my flag the second time to warn that the carbon monoxide had reached danger level. They stopped their engines when they were warm. We had gained some useful information and it helped me personally. Courage is the quality most valued
instinctively
in groups of men and, although to me it had seemed no more than a very uncomfortable and slightly risky experience, to the ship’s crew I had passed some kind of test. From then on, I no longer felt myself an invisible civilian boffin who intruded on their lives at sea.

The most frightening period of the voyage began mildly with some conversation in the wardroom after dinner and while we were playing poker with dice instead of cards. The winner of each game bought the other players a round of drinks, an interesting negative feedback on the rate of play and the amount of drink consumed. Among the players were two naval architects from Bath, who proceeded to tell us about the inevitable fate of welded ships: how once a crack occurs in a welded plate it spreads across the plate and through the weld to the next plate. In this way a crack propagates right around the ship and severs it into two pieces as if sliced by a giant knife. They told us how the welded Liberty ships built in the Second World War often sank suddenly and without warning and the
Vengeance,
they said, was a welded ship built during the war. This good bedtime story stirred us but did not cause any loss of sleep.

A few days later, we at last encountered cold weather and the ice pack. It was also calm, and the low Arctic sun shone brightly. I had expected, wrongly, when we set sail, that at 70 – 80° N there would be no daylight in February. In fact, there was no day even at 75° N without light between 10 and 2 during the day. In the farthest
north, the sun rested level with the sea rim all of the day, a kind of frozen dawn merging into sunset without full daylight in between. Never was it wholly dark.

After the week of storms, the bright sun drew us on to the deck to bask in its apparent warmth, and to enjoy the Arctic scene. Peculiarly, in the wet and mild weather of the previous days we had felt cold enough to need our anoraks and Arctic gear. Today, with the sun shining, many went out with just the clothes they wore in the warmth of the ship. The air temperature was now near 15° F, some 25° F colder than on the previous day, but perversely it felt warmer. The ship then began to move into the pack ice. All went well until there was a sudden noise and a jerk in the ship’s motion. We had hit a larger floe and the bows of the ship were damaged enough to let some sea in. It was nothing serious—not a re-run of the
Titanic
disaster—just a minor mishap like a shunt collision in a car park. It was a result of a scheduled test of the ship’s abilities, not an accident. The ship moved back into open sea and hove to and the engineers repaired the damage by filling the small leaking compartment with concrete. It seemed to us that it was not serious for the ship but we had forgotten our friends, the naval constructors. In the wardroom that evening, the Jeremiah of them told us that the collision with the large ice floe had cracked one side of the flight deck just ahead of the bridge. He seemed to relish telling us that this was the strength deck that held the ship together and that in the cold the steel was much more brittle and liable to further cracking. We went to bed that night less easy in our minds.

A few days later, the storms were back fiercer than ever. We had travelled up and down in a short circular path on the northern and leeward side of the volcano, Jan Mayen Island. This small island, a Norwegian possession, formed a large natural breakwater in the stormy northern seas. We were not alone. Two frigates accompanied the
Vengeance,
the
Loch
Archaig
and the
St
Kitts.
We could see that they were having a much harder time in the rough seas than we were and on the evening of 25 February the Captain announced that we would leave the lee of the island and sail south to give the men on the frigates, as he put it, a good night’s rest. As we left the island shelter and turned into the wind, the ship’s motion became wild enough to be disturbing. The wind must by then have been blowing with hurricane force from the south. We stayed much of the day in our sickbay laboratory near the ship’s metacentre where the movement was mostly a rotation, not up and down. In the wardroom near the
stern, the pitching was so great that it was like being in an express lift forever going up and down at the whim of a hyperactive child in charge of the buttons. A few of us were seasick but eating was in any case an ordeal and our chairs would topple over mid-meal.