Geoffrey Jenkins: A Twist Of Sand

"The Swallow Breakers," he exclaimed hoarsely.

"You saw the photostat," I said briefly. "H.M.S. Swallow in '79."

"But," said John incredulously staring out to starboard, " that means we've been carried miles to the nor'ard…"

"There's no damned time to worry about that now," I snapped. MacFadden, the engineer, joined us on the bridge. He looked without a great deal of interest at the shore, the burning islets and the sea.

"What's this all about?" he asked in his broad Scots accent.

"Mac," I said, "for once your bloody double-action diesels are going to get the chance of their lives. Do you see that dark thing sticking out "- I gestured towards the bows — "about a mile and a half ahead? That's what I've named Diaz's Thumb. You won't find it on the chart either. Nor did Diaz, despite having been here four hundred years before us. Take a look almost due north — there, where the fog has just lifted. You see…"

"There's a gap," exclaimed John excitedly.

"Aye, about as wide as a schoolboy's arse," said Mac. "How'll ye ever get her round that rock into a damn near ninety-degree turn, I ask? Fah! Ye're asking me for eighteen knots. This isn't a speedboat."

"Take a look at the alternatives," I said quietly.

"B …. the alternatives," replied Mac. "All I want is to get those diesels at full pelt once before I die. Eighteen knots at three-eighty revolutions." He smiled a thin, cold smile. "Double-action diesels. Fastest things afloat."

He turned and went below to his beloved engines, ignoring the desperateness of the situation.

John and I clattered down to the bridge. I took the wheel from the Kroo boy.

"Full ahead," I snapped. John rang down. "Any moment that surf may break," I said. "We want every knot we can get out of her. If the wind comes up — and you know how it does out of a dead clear sky here — we're finished. Once the surf breaks under her, you can say your prayers."

"Geoffrey," said John, "there have been times when I started to say my prayers before with you in command, and I feel damn like it now. You know this coast better than any skipper living…"

"Cut out the pretty speeches," I said briefly, spinning the spokes. "I'm taking her on a line with that striped hillock." Etosha began to tremble like a horse as Mac opened up the great engines.

John laughed suddenly, as he always did in the face of danger. "Mac's whipping 'em up. Inyala Hill bearing green one-oh, speed fifteen," he mimicked a destroyer man, "Enemy in close range. Bearing all round the bloody compass. Director-layer sees the target — and how!"

Etosha was picking up speed rapidly. As her head steadied on the bearing it seemed sheer suicide to be taking her in at speed. Suicide anyway, with a few feet of water under her keel, water which might start breaking at any moment.

"Get the crew on deck," I told the Kroo boy. "Get their lifejackets on, and your own too. If she strikes, it's every man for himself. Make it snappy!"

"John," I said as Jim made his way aft, never taking his eyes from the deadly shore. "You and I are the only two who know our position. For all the crew knows, we're anywhere at all." I took my eyes from the shore and gazed at him levelly. "No one is ever to know about this little picnic. We've never been away from the fishing grounds, do you understand? I want your word on that."

"You have it," he replied. "But the crew will talk."

"What they saw was a submarine eruption which they imagined was the shore — that's the explanation you'll give. Your charts, not those you saw of mine, will show our position at sea — and nowhere near this coast. Is that clear?"

"No need to come the heavy skipper with me," he grinned. "Just as you say."

I knew that Etosha was fast, but I did not realise that her slim lines underwater and the fine engines would give her such pace. The coast was tearing towards her bows. Diaz's Thumb looked a biscuit toss away. Beyond, the sea smoked evilly and the angle of the turn looked impossibly acute. I began to have grave doubts whether we would make it.

The air was humid and the islets in their birth-throes gave off a peculiar smell, for all the world like newly-sawn stink-wood — a fetid, half sickly-sweet, semi-acrid pungency, combined with the warm odours of superheated steam.

John stood impassive.

"The scientists say this is the oldest coast in the world," I said slowly. "They say it was here that earth first emerged from chaos. Maybe life also emerged first, here, too. We're probably seeing the same thing before our eyes now as happened on the first day of Creation…"

He took up the speaking-tube. There was a curious exaltation about his voice.

"What is she doing, Mac?" he asked.

The voice came indistinctly back, but John gave a low whistle. "Nearly nineteen," he said. "She's splendid. But if she so much as touches anything now-"

"Get a lifebelt on," I said tersely.

"No time now," he said. "I want to watch the last act."

The water creamed under Etosha's forefoot. Diaz's Thumb was now so close that one could see its smooth, wicked fang sticking up a hundred yards away on the port bow. If I could feel any kind of relief, it was that Etosha was now — by no doing of mine — north of the dreaded shoal, although still on the shoreward side of it. She'd run through the vital gateway by the grace of God. I gave the wheel a spoke or two and she leaned over slightly towards the rock. Fifty yards now. The crew stood below me on the deck, some cowering beneath the bridge overhang. The ship roared on like an express train. Then suddenly one of them gave a wild shout — it might have been the leadsman — clambered over the bulwarks and jumped into the sea, swimming strongly towards the jagged pinnacle.

John snatched at a lifebelt.

"No," I snapped. "Don't throw it. Let him go. He's finished anyway. You'll only prolong his agony with that. The first surf will smash him to pieces."

John obeyed, but his hand was shaking. One of the crew shouted something obscene at the bridge, but it was drowned in the crash of the bows through the water.

Twenty yards now.

"Take a grip of something," I said quietly. "Here we go."

I spun the wheel hard to port. At the same time I ordered the port screw to "full astern."

At that moment the wave hit us.

Generated by the great south-west winds which strike at gale force out of a sky so clear it might be yachting weather, the sea in these parts works itself up to a demoniacal fury within a space of minutes. This was the wind and the sea which I had dreaded as I put Etosha at full speed across the open stretch of water in the hope that she might get clear before anything struck. The giant wave carried with it not only the elemental force of the sudden gale, but also the punch of the submarine eruptions. No one had seen it towering up astern as we raced towards the Thumb. I caught sight of the massive chocolate-coloured wall, freckled here and there with the white belly of a dolphin or shark killed in the eruptions, and towering above it all a cream-and-dun crest of breaking water. The port screw had begun to bite and the rudder too as the great mountain of sea struck aft the bridge structure.

I felt Etosha's stern cant and sink under the shock of tons of water and the action of the port screw. There was a great rending sound of metal and wood. The transom felt as if it had been mule-kicked. I started to shout to John, but heard no words above the gigantic clangour. I rang the telegraph to "full ahead." Out of the corner of my eye I saw John snatch an axe and dart aft. The sea poured in over the bridge rails. The stern canted over more steeply.

It is in moments like this that the sailor feels his rapprochement with his craft. The mould of iron, the grain of wood, takes on life as the sea seeks to wrest from it the stuff of its being which man has fashioned. The sea,on its remorseless anvil seeks to redesign. The sailor, and the sailor only, is the witness of that elemental forging, the fight for a new pattern. The man of the sea expresses it simply: "She was like a thing alive." The whip of strained steel, the near-breaking strain of rope and recalcitrant wood challenge the sea. It is a titan's battle. In those moments a man's love of his ship is born and he hears with pain the rendings of that dreadful accouchement.