Geoffrey Jenkins - Scend of the Sea

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.