Hammond Innes - Solomons Seal

The bos’n was waiting outside the door, and I made him show me all the likely places. In the end we found it tucked away in a locker behind the life-jackets, half a dozen bottles of whisky and two of vodka. We carried them through the wheelhouse and out to the bridge wing, where I jettisoned the lot. We were out through the Heads now, and the ship was rolling.

Holland came into the wheelhouse just as I was getting rid of the last bottle. ‘What’s that you’re throwing overboard?’ he asked me. And when I told him, he said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ He didn’t wait for me to explain, but added as though to justify his forbearance, ‘He suffers from melancholy. He’s a manic-depressive. I think that’s the medical term. Without a drink inside of him he’s no good at all.’

‘Well, he’s no good with it, so it makes no difference.’ And I told him about the bow doors. ‘If you’d had that southerly buster when you were coming down the coast … ’

‘Well, we didn’t,’ he said sharply. ‘Anyway, they’d have held. We never use those cross-members. Takes too much time. And Mac,’ he added, ‘he needs his liquor. Without it he goes crazy. He’s afraid.’

‘Of what?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Death. Devils. All the dark imaginings that inhabit men’s minds. He’s quarter French and quarter Mortlocks.’ He didn’t tell me what the other half was. He didn’t have to. It was Glasgow Irish, the accent unmistakeable. ‘He was with my grandfather through the war, and afterwards. Fought with him, ran the schooners, taught me most of what I know about the sea. Never mind,’ he added. ‘I’ll see he gets enough.’

I was about to argue with him, but then I thought better of it, knowing that men who have been together a long time develop ties that are sometimes closer than blood relations. Shelvankar would fill me in on the details. It was Shelvankar who had shown me to my cabin, a talkative little Indian Fiji who acted as radio operator when he wasn’t dealing with stores, fuel, cargo inventories and bills of lading. He came in shortly afterwards with the latest weather forecast. It was good; easterly Force 3 decreasing, sea calm with a slight swell, some rain showers, visibility moderate. The general situation indicated that conditions would further improve as we headed north to the Queensland coast.

Holland spiked it and turned to me. ‘Care to take over, Mr Slingsby?’ I nodded, the formality not lost on me. ‘Course 010°. Keep her about five miles offshore.’ He stayed there for a while, watching as I entered up the log, checked the chart and the Pilot. Apparently satisfied, he said, ‘Luke will relieve you at four. I’ll take the last Dog.’ And he left me to it.

There was only one ship in sight, a coaster heading north up the coast and about two miles ahead of us. A shower of rain was drifting across the sea to the north-east. I stood for a while by the portholes, watching it as it swept across the coaster, enjoying the movement of the ship under me, the lift and roll as the blunt bows breasted the swell, the steady throb of the engines under my feet. The tank deck below me, made strange by the ungainly bulk of the Haulpaks, rose and fell, the heavy vehicles straining at the chains as she rolled. Once, trying to make the lee of Barra, we had been caught out in Force 10. If we’d had this sort of a load, I thought, we’d have gone to the bottom.

I was alone except for the helmsman, everything so familiar, yet because of him it was different, the skin of his face a glossy black below the woolly halo of his hair and no means of communicating with him except in Pidgin. He was from Shortland Island. I checked it out on the Solomon Island Chart 214; it was a small island just south of Bougainville. ‘Are all the crew from the Solomons?’ I asked him.

He shook his head. ‘Sampela long Bougainville en Buka. Buka bilong Solomons wantaim. Nau Papua Niugini.’

I went back to the charts, found the one that gave the planned details of the Buka Passage, and with this and the Admiralty Pilot I began to familiarise myself with the approach. It was something I always did. I have an orderly mind, and I like to know what lies ahead of me before I make any sort of a passage. When I had finished with that, I turned back to the chart we were currently using, the Pacific Ocean 780, South West Sheet. It was old and faded, much used, with many pencil marks only half rubbed out in the area of the Solomons. Looking at it, I wasn’t surprised that Holland was worried about navigation. Sometime in the second night out we would be off Sandy Cape. We would have to leave the Australian coast there, just short of the Great Barrier Reef, and head north through the hazards that littered the chart between Queensland and New Caledonia. Variation between true and magnetic at that point was given as 10°E.

‘You know where Captain Holland is, please?’

I turned to find Shelvankar behind me, a message pad in his hand. ‘Isn’t he in his cabin?’

‘No, not in his cabin or the saloon. Maybe in the engine-room.’ He smiled. ‘It’s about the two extra vehicles we take on tomorrow night. It can wait.’ He put his thick-lensed glasses firmly into place, peering at the charts. ‘I have entered you as acting first officer now. On Captain Holland’s instructions. You are a good navigator?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘He is damn nearly asleep on his feet when we come south to Sydney.’ His English was very precise, spoken with a high-pitched lilt that reminded me of a Welsh friend of mine who lived on an old Thames sailing barge up the Blackwater. ‘The sea is not my natural home, and when the Captain is tired and his mind is on other things-’ He gave a little shrug expressive of an unwilling fatalism. ‘I am relieved to see you checking the charts so conscientiously.’ He said it on a note of uncertainty, and I realised that he knew nothing about navigation and was afraid I might be trying to pretend I knew more than I did.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I can navigate all right. It’s just that I don’t know these waters.’

‘So you find out from the chart and the Pilot. ’ He nodded, smiling his relief. ‘That’s fine. That’s very fine, very sensible.’

‘What’s this about loading two extra vehicles?’ I asked, glancing down at the tank deck, where the four Haulpaks had been loaded aft in a tight huddle that left a clear space between the lead vehicle and the storm door.

He didn’t reply, and when I asked him what the message was, he said, ‘It’s nothing important. Just a change in the time the vehicles will be at the beach.’

‘At the beach? Are we loading direct off an open beach?’

He nodded, a shade reluctantly.

‘What about Customs?’

‘No Customs.’

I stared at him, conscious of his reluctance to talk, remembering Holland’s strange behaviour two nights back when I had walked unexpectedly into his wardroom. ‘Where is this beach?’ I pushed the chart towards him. ‘Show me.’

But he shook his head. ‘You ask Captain Holland. I do not know where it is.’ And he scurried out like a small spider that has weaved a bit of a web and then been frightened off it. He could have kept his mouth shut. But I realised that wasn’t in his nature. As a source of information he would always be unreliable, but at least he was a source, somebody I could talk to, and I guessed he had been with Holland quite a time, knew the family’s history.

Luke arrived in the wheelhouse a little before four, which was a good sign. He seemed to know nothing about the beach. And when I raised it with Holland in the saloon over tea, he refused to discuss it, his face blank. ‘Two trucks, that’s all. Nothing to do with you.’ And he began discussing navigation, confirming that we’d leave the Queensland coast at Sandy Cape, steering 05° Magnetic to pass between Saumarez Reef and Frederick Reef, both lit. I had already pencilled this probable course on the chart. ‘Where’s the beach?’ I asked him.