Arthur Upfield - The Mystery of Swordfish Reef

“Who-in-’ell’s B.H.?” demanded Joe. “Them’ssomeone’s initials.

“Yes. B.H. Can’t be Hooper of theLily. His are M.H.”

“No. And B.H. don’t stand for Ericson, or for Spinks, or for Garroway, Spinks’s mate. She couldn’t have come from theDo-me.”

There was vast disappointment in Joe’s voice. He turned back to the wheel, put in the gear, climbed to his petrol drum and resumed his crouching attitude above the shelter roof. It was as though he blamed Wilton.

Wilton placed the “find” in his lunch basket in the cabin, and resumed his place at the mast. Slowly theMarlin was sent on her way parallel with the winding line of suds. When at the end of the suds line, the craft continued her apparently aimless wandering about the sea. During the next hour Wilton retrieved a caseboard, which, however, had small shell fish adhering to it, proving that it had been in the water for some considerable time, and a butter-box with similar evidence.

Nothing was seen or retrieved of vital importance to the fate of theDo-me; and the flask was not likely to have any bearing on it, either.

Time passed quite unnoticed by the searchers until the sun, having travelled down the sky’s flawless bowl, rested for a moment on the horizon and then was swallowed by the sea. Still theMarlin crawled along the invisible road, and still the two men maintained their stations and their attitudes. Only when increasing dusk decreased visibility to a few yards did Jack Wilton come aft, to say:

“We’ll go home and come out again tomorrow.”

“All right! We can start from Swordfish Reef tomorrow,” Joe agreed.“If we don’t find anything tomorrow, then theDo-me ’s still afloat somewhere.”

It was close to midnight when theMarlin approached the now invisible bar, kicked herself over the tumbling water into the channel, and crept along the river to the jetty.

Three men stood on the jetty, evidently waiting for them.

“Any luck, Jack?” inquired Mr Blade.

“No. Don’t think so, anyway.”

“Don’t think so!” echoed a man whose dark shape against the starry sky informed the seaman that he was a stranger.

“What ’ave you got to to with it, any’ow?” demanded Joe, climbing to the jetty with a mooring-rope.

“This is Detective-Sergeant Allen,” said Constable Telfer.

“Coo!” snorted Joe, as though Detective-Sergeant Allen had no moral or legal right to breathe.

Wilton gained the jetty, to say to the waiting three:

“We’ve seen nothing of theDo-me -only that aeroplane. We’ve been looking for wreckage, flotsam, where Joe reckons flotsam from off theDo-me ought to be if she had sunk. We found nothing belonging to her. All we found was a new thermos-flask. Here it is. On the bottom is scratched the initials B.H.”

“Ah!” murmured Allen with immense satisfaction. “B.H. stands for Bermagui Hotel. The morning that theDo-me last went tosea, one of the maids at the pub dropped Mr Ericson’s flask and broke it. She filled and gave him one of three flasks bought a couple of days before by the hotel. The barman scratched the initials on all three of ’em.”

A ClueAmong Fish

BEFORE THE construction of the Prince’s Highway, Bermagui was an isolated hamlet aroused only at Christmas and at Easter by the small influx of visitors from inland farms and the market town of Cobargo. Even after the opening of the Highway it suffered to some extent through the disadvantage of being seven miles from it at Tilba Tilba. It was His Majesty the Swordfish that “made” Bermagui.

The discovery of swordfish in the waters off the southern coast of New South Wales was due to chance, for their swift-moving dorsal fins when seen by the fishermen were thought to be a species of shark. A fisherman when out for salmon, using a hand line with a feathered hook attached, one afternoon was bringing to his boat a fine fighting salmon which was followed by a huge fish. The big fish came to the surface close to the boat-to reveal not only its dorsal fin but its “sword”.

For some time this was thought to be only a fisherman’s yarn, until Mr Roy Smith determined to test the story, and on 2nd February, 1933, proved its authenticity by capturing with rod and reel a black marlin weighing 262 pounds. Still, doubt remained general that swordfish regularly visited the coast of southern New South Wales, although the fishermen declared that the swift-moving fins had been seen every summer. When Mr Roy Machaelis and Mr W. G. Wallis between them captured nine swordfish in the one day, deep sea anglers the world over began to take notice. The subsequent visit of Mr Zane Grey resulted in Bermagui becoming famous as a centre of big game angling.

When Angler Ericson and his launchmen on theDo-me vanished, Bermagui suffered a slight setback, for it naturally followed that when an unexplained catastrophe overwhelmed a small launch the other launches were considered to be too frail for the open sea, or too likely to be the victims of whales or mermen, or too liable to strike an uncharted reef. Proof of this came quickly in the form of cancelled bookings of the launches and hotel accommodation.

The search for theDo-me achieved nothing but the reclamation of one thermos-flask from the sea.

Detective-Sergeant Allen’s reputation was high, but he was unfortunately a poor sailor. Jack Wilton and Joe took him out to show him the position of theGladious when Remmings last sighted theDo-me, and the position of theDo-me when she was last sighted, but poor Allen became frightfully sea-sick and unable to maintain any interest. Thereafter he confined his investigating to the land.

One man in Bermagui came to wonder just who and what Mr Ericson had been-and was, if still alive. The secretary of the club followed the intensive and extensive search with both hope for its success and gratification that officialdom was trying so hard, incidentally, to remove the stigma the mystery put upon Bermagui.

A second plane was sent down from Sydney to assist the first in its thorough examination of the sea and the coast. Allen recommended the employment of theMarlin, and her crew, to continue making a search for flotsam, and for a little more than a fortnight Wilton and his mate enjoyed government pay. On shore, Sergeant Allen organized two search-parties to explore the base of cliffs and those parts of the coast barred to launches, these men primarily concentrating on the discovery of small items of wreckage not likely to be observed by the air pilots. At the end of three weeks the only clue to the fate of theDo-me was the thermos-flask retrieved from the sea by Wilton.

Even the flask was not a clue that proved anything. That it belonged to the licensee of the Bermagui Hotel, and that it had been filled with tea and put into Ericson’s lunch basket, was, of course, established; but, there was no proof how it came to be floating in the sea; whether it had been washed off theDo-me when she sank, or had been lost overboard. General opinion favoured the first theory; for, as Joe Peace maintained, had the angler or one of his launchmen accidentally knocked the flask overboard it would have been retrieved. It appeared unlikely that an article such as a thermos-flask would fall overboard unobserved. The angler would take it from the basket, and pour tea from it, whilst he was in his rightful place-the cockpit.

Joe’s claim to the wide knowledge of the local sea currents, and his ability to follow them, even to “back-track” them, was given little credence by Sergeant Allen, or by Detective-Sergeant Light, who came down to assist him. The small army or reporters were even greater doubters. For a while Bermagui accommodation was taxed to its utmost, and the official search was maintained for three weeks.