Hammond Innes - The Black Tide

I was in the starb’d pilot berth, everything very quiet and something about the acoustics of the hull made their voices carry into the saloon. I didn’t mean to listen, but then I heard my name mentioned and

Mark saying, ‘I hope to God he’s right.’ And Pam’s voice answered him. ‘What are you suggesting?’

‘He could be lying,’ the boy said.

‘Trevor isn’t a liar.’

‘Look, suppose he did kill that French engineer …’

‘He didn’t. I know he didn’t.’

‘You don’t know anything of the sort. And keep your voice down.’

‘He can’t hear us, not in the saloon. And even if he did kill the man, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong about the tankers.’

Her brother made an angry snorting sound. ‘You’ve had the flags out for him ever since the old Salt sent him off in search of the Aurora B.’

T think he’s got a lot of guts, that’s all. Getting himself on board that tanker, then getting away on the dhow with the man he was looking for. It’s quite incredible.’

‘Exactly. Salt thinks it’s so incredible it must be true. He says nobody could have made it all up. The next thing is every word he’s uttered is gospel, so that here we are, out in the Atlantic, everything hung on that one word salvage. And I’m not just thinking of the money. I’m thinking of Mum and Dad, and what’s going to happen to them.’

‘We’ve all of us got stop-loss reinsurance,’ she said. ‘Mine is for fifty thousand excess of thirty. Daddy’s is a lot more I know. It probably won’t save us, but it’ll help.’

‘I told you, I’m not thinking of the money.’

‘What then?’

‘If Trevor’s lying… All right, Pam, let’s say he’s told us the truth, say it’s all gospel truth, but we’ve got it wrong about where they’re going to meet up and there’s no tanker waiting at the Selvagens, how do we ever prove that the vessels we insured aren’t lying at the bottom of the sea? We’ve got to show that they’re afloat and in the hands of Gulf terrorists, otherwise that cleverly worded war zone exemption clause doesn’t operate.’

‘The tanker will be there. I’m sure it will’ There was a long pause, then she said, ‘It’s Daddy you’re worried about, isn’t it?’ He didn’t answer and after a while she said, ‘You’re thinking of suicide, is that it? D’you think he might — do you think he really might?’

‘My God!’ His voice sounded shocked. ‘The way you put it into words. You’re thinking of suicide — just like that, and your voice so bloody matter-of-fact.’

‘You’ve been skating around it.’ Her tone was sharp and pitched high. ‘You know you have, ever since you brought up the question of what we’ll find when we get to the island. If Trevor’s wrong and our tanker doesn’t turn up, if nothing happens to prove that the two of them are still afloat, then the money we lose — that’s everything, the house, this boat, all Mother’s jewellery, her clothes even — it will be nothing to the damage Daddy will suffer … all his friends, his whole world. At his age he can’t start again. He’d never be able to at Lloyd’s anyway. You can’t make a come-back when everybody knows you cost your Names just about every penny they possess. Do you think I don’t know this? I’ve been living with it for

the last month or more, knowing that for him it’d be the end of the world. I don’t think he’d want to go on living after that. But whether he’d go as far as to take his own life…’

‘I’m sorry, Pam. I didn’t realize.’

She seemed to ignore that, for she went on almost as though he hadn’t spoken: ‘And don’t start hitting out at Trevor without stopping to think what it’s like to see your wife burn herself up in an attempt to save some seagulls. Or at me either. I may have hung out some flags as you put it, but what have you done, or Salty, any of us? He found the tanker and though he wasn’t doing it for us—’ There was a crash and I heard her say, ‘Bugger! That’s my hat gone overboard.’ There was a stamp of feet on deck, the sound of sails flapping. A few minutes later the girl’s figure slipped past me as she went to her quarters up for’ard.

I woke to the smell of bacon frying, the sun already burning up the dawn clouds. A haze developed as the morning wore on, the sun very hot and Pamela dressed in shorts with a loose-tailed shirt reading a book on the foredeck in the shadow of the spinnaker. It wasn’t until after lunch that we began to detect a smudge like a tiny cloud growing on the horizon. It was straight over the bows and couldn’t be anything else but Selvagem Grande. It grew steadily in size, and though our eyes were constantly searching, there was no satellite smudge that could represent the tanker.

By 15.00 we could see the island quite clearly and had altered course to pass to the north of it. It was a sort of Table Mountain in miniature, the highest point

597 feet according to the Admiralty pilot, and cliffs rising sheer to 400 feet. These cliffs formed an unbroken line, heavily undercut and edged white by the breaking swell, their flat tops arid and desolate with a cap of black basalt sitting on the red sandstone like chocolate on a layer cake. No trees anywhere, no sign of vegetation, just the two layers of rock with a new light structure perched like a white pimple on the summit of one of the basalt picos.

The wind was backing into the north and for a time we were busy handling the spinnaker and setting a working genoa. It was blowing force 3 or 4 by the time we got everything stowed and by then we were close off the northern end of the island with no sign of any other vessel. There was still a chance that the tanker was hidden from us by the southern part of the island, but our hopes faded as we rounded Punto do Risco and began to run down the western side. There were plenty of shearwaters, which is the main reason the Portuguese government declared the island a nature reserve, but otherwise the place looked totally lifeless. There were some shacks by the landing place on the south-western side and a roped pathway climbed steeply to the lighthouse, but apart from that, the only sign of any human presence was the mass of Communist slogans painted on the rocks. This ugly display of giant graffiti had presumably been put there by fishermen who had been ardent supporters of the revolution.

Off the landing place we turned back on to our original course, heading for Selvagem Pequena ten

miles away. This is quite a different sort of island, being little more than an above-water reef, but with the wind increasing we could soon make out the white of waves breaking on the horizon. By sunset the remains of the wrecked tanker were visible and we could see right across the island to where waves were breaking on the smaller reef island of Fora a mile or so to the west. From Fora a chain of above-water rocks six to twelve feet high extended several miles to the north. This was the Restinga do Ilheu de Fora, but there was no tanker waiting there, and with visibility now vastly improved, we could see there wasn’t even a fishing vessel anywhere within a radius of a dozen miles of us. We were the only vessel afloat in the neighbourhood of the Selvagen Archipelago.

Once this had sunk in we felt suddenly very lonely. The islands had an atmosphere of their own. If there was any place at sea that could be described as unfriendly I felt this was it and I found myself remembering that word spooky. It was a strange word to use about a group of islands, but now that I was among them I knew it described their atmosphere exactly. They were spooky and I wondered how long Saltley would be willing to hang around them waiting for a tanker that might never turn up.

I voiced my misgivings that evening, not in front of the others, but to Saltley alone. We had had an excellent meal hove-to on the starb’d tack four miles to the east of Selvagem Pequena, the light on the main island just visible over the bows. I took him up on deck on some pretext or other and told him bluntly