Uncharted Seas (3 page)

Synolda’s eyelids quivered. For the thousandth time in a hundred and fifty hours she wondered anxiously how much the dark-faced man opposite her really knew. Certain that he knew something had kept her civil to him—but what? Her home was actually in Caracas; not Rio as she had given out, although she meant to leave the ship there. He might perhaps have known her by sight when she was living in the Venezuelan capital, but she could not swear she had not set eyes on him during her recent visit to South Africa so how could he know anything of her recent
past? She had made a bad slip though in giving it out that she was a widow.

He nodded again. ‘You be a good girl and nice to Vicente when the storm is gone—yes—it is better so.’

Suddenly, above the muffled howling of the wind something hit the ship with a boom like thunder; the reverberation of the shock echoed for at least a minute. The timbers groaned, the bolts grated in the girders as though about to be torn out of their sockets; the deck reared up aft to so sharp an angle that the passengers would have been thrown from the settees unless they had clung to the screwed-down tables.

De Brissac knew the ship had taken another giant wave on her for’ard well-deck; that sunken space between the fo’c’sle and the bridge would now be four feet deep in water and she must lift again before it could pour off through the storm ports.

The
Gafelborg
rose once more, yet the deck of the lounge continued to slant steeply up towards the companionway at its after end. De Brissac waited, imagining that the volume of water was too great for the scuppers to carry it off so soon, but the lounge remained tilted permanently. He knew then that she had been seriously damaged.

That knowledge was reflected in the faces of the other passengers; all but a few showed varying degrees of fear from a furtive, hunted look to one of stark terror.

‘Dear God! Dear God we’re going to drown,’ wailed a middle-aged woman, in Spanish; flinging herself on her knees beside the two nuns.

The elderly Greek wrung his hands in an agony of misery. He was not frightened for himself, but he knew that if he was drowned his rascally half-brother would contrive some means to cheat his wife and son out of their share of the family business.

The screws were vibrating like electric drills; at shorter intervals now as the stern was tossed for longer periods from the water. The old cargo carrier began to wallow horribly and it seemed that at any moment she might turn turtle.

Basil Sutherland came scampering up the companionway on all fours; pitched into the lounge, and slithered down the slope towards the bar. De Brissac caught him by an elbow and steadied him. ‘Back already, eh! What happened just now?’

‘A hundred tons of briny smashed in the fore-hatch. No more use to go on pumping than it would be to try and ladle out the contents of a swimming bath with a soup spoon.’

‘The forehold is full up with water then?’

‘Yes.’ Basil was sober enough now. ‘Fortunately her forward bulkhead is holding, but she’s badly down at the head. She’s so sluggish in the troughs that her nose’ll hardly lift before another comber crashes over her fo’c’sle head.’

‘It looks, then, that we are for it.’

A report penetrated the hubbub and Basil nodded. ‘ ’Fraid so. Hear that? They’re beginning to send up their rockets. They’ve been keeping the distress signals for an emergency.’

‘
Mon Dieu
! What is the good of rockets when there is so little shipping here in the South Atlantic?’

Basil grinned mirthlessly. ‘And we’re over a thousand miles from the nearest land.’

‘I shall see you!’ The Frenchman ran up the deck, slipped, caught at the banister-rail of the companionway, and plunged down it.

Bang! Smash! The ship reeled again under another sledgehammer blow. For a moment the dark green sea covered the starboard ports of the lounge, although it was up on the boat-deck. The shock and following dip to port were so acute that a number of bottles were jolted from the racks of the bar. Hansie’s face took on a greenish tinge as they smashed behind him.

Even he was scared now. In a mental flash he saw a young girl nursing a baby. The child was his and he was doing the right thing by the girl, although he could not marry her because he had a wife already. What would happen to both of them if the sea got him and he could never send poor little Hildagrad any more money?

Another of the women suddenly jumped to her feet and screamed. Instantly she was flung full length to the deck and rolled across it until brought up by the legs of a port-side table. Vicente and some others, swaying like a Rugby scrum, managed to get her up between them.

Colonel Carden braced his good leg against a table to prevent himself from slipping off the settee. Beside him, Unity, still outwardly calm, felt as though her heart was rising into her throat to choke her. She feared that at any moment she would give way at last to an unsuppressible fit of terror. Grabbing her father’s hand, she pressed it and he turned to look at her.

‘Cheer up, Daddy,’ she said, striving to reassure herself. ‘We’ll be all right.’

‘Of course we will,’ he replied gruffly. ‘I’d be happier if we were
in a British ship, but these Swedes are first-class sailors. The Viking blood, you know; we’ve got a dash of it ourselves.’

The heaving deck had assumed a new angle. It sloped now towards the port bow. The forehold being full of water weighed them down by the head and something else had given them a permanent list to port.

De Brissac, frantically grabbing the most important items of his kit down below in his cabin, rightly suspected a shifting of the cargo.

Crack! Something snapped on the deck outside. The despairing wail of a human being penetrated to the lounge. Vump—smack—sisss! They were hit again.

Jean De Brissac’s head suddenly shot up from the companion-way. It hovered for a moment. As the ship rode on the crest of the next wave he seemed to bounce up the last few steps. He was wearing his military cloak and had a rubber rainproof over the crook of his arm.

The
Gafelborg
heeled over. The Frenchman lost his grip on the banisters and came crashing into the settee where Unity was crouching. His white teeth, set tight, flashed below his little dark moustache. She managed a feeble smile as he shouted an apology.

The racing screws seemed as if they must be tearing the bowels out of the ship. She staggered, plunged, rolled in the troughs and was cast upward only to bump again on the next wave. The spray scurried past the ports incessantly. The passengers who could still think at all realised that the ship was now out of control; they were at the mercy of a crazy thing.

Juhani Luvia, the blue-eyed Finn, suddenly appeared among them; his face was tense; with him were the Swedish First and Third Officers; the water was pouring from their oilskins. The ship’s siren began to wail piercingly overhead.

‘Get your lifebelts!’ bellowed the First Officer above the din. ‘You know your boat stations—go to them!’

‘To the boats!—to the boats!’ the cry was taken up in half a dozen languages. The passengers snatched their cork life-jackets and hastily set about adjusting them.

In two groups they scrambled towards the entrances of the lounge which gave direct on to the boat-deck. The English-speaking passengers had all been allotted to the port boat aft, which was the Third Officer’s and also Juhani Luvia’s. The Finnish engineer grabbed Unity Carden’s arm with one hand and Synolda Ortello’s with the other. As the port entrance was the more sheltered of the two the little crowd had no difficulty in pressing through it.

De Brissac’s place was in the starboard boat aft with the First Officer. They had to wait for a moment until a lull in the storm gave them a chance to fling open the door without fear of a sea driving them backwards. The Frenchman had hold of the elder of the two nuns, and, supporting her as best he could, he began to stagger up the slanting deck.

Above him, to the right, the insistent buzz of the wireless in the operator’s cabin momentarily caught his ear; SOS—SOS—SOS; as the ether waves stabbed the dark night with their urgent call for help.

The piercing note of the ship’s siren cut through the thunder of the storm; it was sounding an unceasing succession of short blasts. Another rocket was fired with a loud report; it burst in the blackness above and for a second De Brissac glimpsed its coloured stars before they went out.

The
Gafelborg
plunged again; a sea of terrifying height loomed up out of the darkness to starboard. It swept forward, hovered like a towering cliff, then broke and came rushing down to engulf them.

He flung his right arm round a stanchion and clung to it with all his might. With his left, he clutched the frail body of the nun. For a moment they were both entirely submerged by the torrent
of water. The ship lifted again and they gasped for breath while the flood seeped back over the side, sucking and gurgling and almost pulling them over with it.

They caught a glimpse of a figure being whirled away behind them. It was the other nun. She crashed against the rail, doubled up, and fell limply. Someone sprang after her and dragged her to her feet, but she could not stand and was carried along in their rear.

The boat was already swung out on its davits. The First Officer and a number of the crew, all wearing lifebelts, stood by it. Some of them were crouching in the boat ready to help the passengers aboard.

A lesser wave scudded round their ankles and poured away in foaming cascades, the phosphorus in the spume temporarily lighting up the deck. Owing to their list to port and downward tilt for’ard, the starboard boat aft was higher than the others. Swaying drunkenly, half fainting and wholly terrified, the women were passed into it like so many bundles. The screaming of the wind drowned all efforts at speech except the stentorian bellowings of the officer through his megaphone.

Another big wave surged over them and they all clung blindly to the nearest gear that offered. The boat’s complement was nearly completed when the officer made an imperative gesture to Jean De Brissac, but the Frenchman backed away.

Some instinct warned him not to commit himself to this timbered cockleshell, packed with drenched, bemused humanity, which hung at what seemed to him so perilous an angle over the slanting side of the ship.

In a flash of memory he recalled the advice of a man who had survived three shipwrecks. ‘Never try for a place in a boat. They so often prove death-traps when lowered in a storm, and even if a boat’s launched safely there’s danger of its becoming overloaded through picking up people who’re struggling in the water, or capsizing in a heavy sea. Far better avoid the crowd and play a lone hand. Lash yourself to a collapsible raft and wait until you’re floated off as the ship goes down. A raft rides the waves like a great lump of cork, so you can’t possibly drown. It’s only a question of endurance; just sticking the cold and discomfort till daylight comes and you’re spotted from one of the other ships the SOS has brought to the scene of the wreck.’

Three sailors who were standing by to lower the boat flung themselves upon De Brissac and began to drag him towards it.
The arrival of another wave forced them to loose their hold on him and grab at the davits for their own preservation. He was nearly swept overboard, but managed to clutch the rail and clung to it with straining fingers.

The spume-spattered water was still streaming from the deck when the First Officer passed within a foot of him, shrugged angrily, and clambered into the boat. It was not his duty to rescue grown men who were crazy and refused to take such steps for their own salvation; he had the women and the boat’s crew to think of.

The sheaves in the blocks of the boat tackle screamed as the Swede raised his arm. The boat sank from sight, smacked into the water, a tiny toy affair, it seemed now, in the horrid blackness of the gulf below.

Suddenly a huge sea lifted it and cast it up against the steel side of the ship before it could get away. It was smashed like an eggshell—splintered into bits. The men and women in it were flung into the seething waters and its shattered timbers were whipped away up the slopes of those mountains of blackness that rose on every side.

For a second, as the sea receded, De Brissac glimpsed a white face on its surface, and the two arms lifted in mute appeal, then he was blinded by the flying, dust-like froth. When he could look again no trace of the boat or its occupants was there below him in the space to show that he had not dreamed that swift fatality. He staggered back, clutching frantically at the deck-house rail behind him.

Numb, cold, soaked to the skin, he hung there waiting for the sea’s next subsidence; when it came he staggered through a narrow alleyway between two deck houses to the port side of the ship.

Vaguely his mind was still revolving about the project of getting himself a raft. He would have done so without hesitation had he been north of the equator where the most important trade routes in the world are constantly traversed by quantities of shipping, but here, in the great wastes of the South Atlantic, it seemed certain that even if he could survive these tremendous seas he would die of thirst and starvation, alone upon a raft, long before there could be any reasonable hope of his being picked up.

The loss of his machine-gun down in the hold flashed into his mind again. It was complete and fit for action when assembled. He had refrained from dispatching it to the Ministry of War in Paris before leaving Magadascar only because he had not had time to carry out the final tests for heat by prolonged firing. Its
acceptance by his Government would mean promotion, a handsome grant, and, far more important in his eyes, a deadlier weapon for the defence of his beloved France than any of its kind possessed by other nations. He had plans of it, of course, actually on him in an oilskin wallet, so he could get another made—if he survived—if he survived. He began to upbraid himself furiously for his lack of forethought in not having deposited a duplicate set of plans with the authorities before sailing.