Hammond Innes - The Wreck Of The Mary Deare

There was no litter of matchwood. The deck was swept clear of all trace of the hatch covers. They had been gone some time. I watched the water spilling out of the hold as the ship rolled. But as fast as it spilled, the angry seas filled it up again. The bows were practically under water. The ship felt heavy and sluggish under my feet. She didn’t feel as though she could last much longer.

I glanced round the bridge, rooted to the spot by the strange emptiness of it and the sudden certainty that the ship was going to go down. The spokes of the wheel were flung out in a forlorn circle. The brass of the binnacle gleamed. The telegraph pointers still stood at Full Ahead. The emptiness of it all… I turned and went down to the captain’s cabin. He was there, lying back in the arm-chair, his body relaxed, his eyes closed. A half-empty bottle of rum stood on the desk at his elbow. The glass was on the floor, spilling a brown wet stain across the carpet. Sleep had smoothed out the lines of his face. Like that he seemed younger, less tough; but he still looked haggard and his right hand twitched nervously where it lay against the dark leather arm of the chair. The two blue raincoats still hung incongruously side-by-side on the back of the door. The girl still smiled at me sunnily from her silver frame.

A big sea broke against the ship’s side, darkening the portholes with upflung water. His eyelids flicked back. ‘What is it?’ He seemed instantly wide awake, though his face was still puffed with sleep, flushed with the liquor he’d drunk.

‘The for’ard hatch covers have gone,’ I said. I felt a strange sense of relief. He was real and it was his responsibility, not mine. I wasn’t alone after all.

‘I know that.’ He sat up, pushing his hand across his face and up through his black hair. ‘What do you expect me to do about it — go out and rig new ones?’

His voice was a little slurred. ‘We did that once.’ He pulled himself up out of the chair and went over to the porthole and stood there, looking at the sea. His back was towards me, his shoulders slightly hunched, hands thrust into his pockets. ‘It was like this all the way up through the Bay — heavy seas and the ship making water all the time.’ The daylight filtering through the porthole shone cold and hard on his exhausted features. ‘And then that storm! God! What a night!’ He stared out through the porthole.

‘You’d better get some more sleep,’ I said.

‘Sleep?’ His hand went to his eyes, rubbing them, and then pushing up through his hair again. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ His forehead wrinkled in a frown and he smiled so that his face had a surprised look. ‘You know, I can’t remember when I last slept.’ And then he added: ‘There was something…’ He was frowning. ‘God! I can’t remember. Something I was going to look up.’ He stared down at the chart and books that lay on the floor beside the arm-chair. The chart was Number 2100, the large-scale chart of the Minkies. And then he was looking at me again and in an odd voice he said, ‘Who exactly are you?’ He was a little drunk.

‘I told you that earlier,’ I replied. ‘My name is-’

To hell with your name,’ he shouted impatiently. ‘What were you doing out there in that yacht? What made you board the ship?’ And then, before I had time to say anything, he added, ‘Are you something to do with the Company?’

‘What company?’

‘The Dellimare Trading and Shipping Company — the people who own the Mary Deare.’ He hesitated. ‘Were you out there, waiting to see if-’ But then he shook his head. ‘No, it couldn’t have been that. We weren’t steaming to schedule.’

‘I’d never heard of the Mary Deare until last night,’ I told him. And I explained how we’d almost been run down. ‘What happened?’ I asked him. ‘How was it that the crew abandoned her with the engines still running and you on board? Was it the fire?’

He stared at me, swaying a little on his feet. And then he said, ‘She was never meant to make the Channel.’ He said it with a sort of smile, and when I asked him what he meant, he shrugged his shoulders and turned back to the porthole, staring out at the sea. ‘I thought we were in the clear when I’d got her round Ushant,’ he murmured. ‘God damn it! I thought I’d taken all the knocks a man could in the course of a single voyage. And then that fire.’ He turned and faced me again then. He seemed suddenly to want to talk. ‘It was the fire that beat me. It happened about nine-thirty last night. Rice rushed in here to say that Number Three hold was ablaze and the crew were panicking. I got the hoses run out and part of Number Four hatch cleared so that we could play water on the bulkhead. And then I went down the inspection ladder into Number Four to check. That’s how they got me.’ He pointed to the bloodied gash on his jaw.

‘You mean somebody hit you — one of the crew?’ I asked in astonishment.

He nodded, smiling. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. ‘They battened the inspection hatch down on top of me when I was unconscious and then they drove the crew in panic to the boats.’

‘And left you there?’

‘Yes. The only thing that saved me was that they forgot we’d cleared part of the hatch cover. By piling bales of cotton up-’

‘But that’s mutiny — murder. Are you suggesting Higgins…’

He lurched towards me then, sudden violence in his face. ‘Higgins! How did you know it was Higgins?’

I started to explain about the letter Rice had written, but he interrupted me. ‘What else did he say?’ he demanded. ‘Anything about Dellimare?’

‘The owner? No. Only that he’d been lost overboard.’ And I added, ‘The Captain died, too, I gather.’

‘Yes, damn his eyes!’ He turned away from me and his foot struck the overturned glass. He picked it up and poured himself a drink, his hands shaking slightly. ‘You having one?’ He didn’t wait for me to reply, but pulled open a drawer of the desk and produced a glass, filling it almost to the brim. ‘I buried him at sea on the first Tuesday in March,’ he said, handing the drink to me. ‘And glad I was to see the last of him.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I was glad at the time, anyway.’

‘What did he die of?’ I asked.

‘Die of?’ He looked up at me quickly from under his dark brows, suddenly suspicious again. ‘Who the hell cares what he died of?’ he said with sudden truculence. ‘He died and left me to face the whole …’ He made a vague gesture with the hand that held his glass. And then he seemed suddenly to notice me again, for he said abruptly: ‘What the hell were you doing out there in that yacht of yours last night?’

I started to tell him how we’d bought Sea Witch in Morlaix and were sailing her back to England for conversion into a diving tender, but he didn’t seem to be listening. His mind was away on some thought of his own and all at once he said: ‘And I thought it was decent of the old bastard to get out and make room for a younger man.’ He was laughing again as though at some joke. ‘Well, it’s all the same now. That bulkhead will go soon.’ And he looked at me and added, ‘Do you know how old this ship is? Over forty years old! She’s been torpedoed three times, wrecked twice. She’s been rotting in Far Eastern ports for twenty years. Christ! She might have been waiting for me.’ And he grinned, not pleasantly, but with his lips drawn back from his teeth, A sea crashed against the ship’s side and the shudder of the impact seemed to bring him back to the present. ‘Do you know the Minkies?’ He lunged forward and came up with a book which he tossed across to me. ‘Page three hundred and eight, if you’re interested in reading the details of your own graveyard.’ It was the Channel Pilot, Part II.