Jenkins - Scend of the Sea

SCEND OF THE SEA

There was a tremendous crash, and the bridge windows splintered in, as if by bomb-blast. The lights went. I heard a heavy thud inside the bridge itself, and Feldman screamed as if in pain. Water hundreds of tons of seacame pouring into the shattered bridge.

Still the ship nose-dived at that impossible angle.

Waratah!

I was picked up by the wall of water and carried headlong aft as it swept through the open door at the rear of the bridge, down the companionway into my cabin. I clutched at something metal and hung against the rush of water. As the rudder lost its power to control her, so the seas took command...

Available in Fontana by the same author

A Twist of Sand

Hunter-Killer

GEOFFREY JENKINS

Scend of the Sea

FONTANA Collins

First published by Wm. Collins 1971 First issued in Fontana Books 1973 Second Impression March 1973 Third Impression June 1973 Fourth Impression September 1973

1971 Geoffrey Jenkins

Printed in Great Britain

Collins Clear-Type Press London and Glasgow

CONDITIONS OF SALE!

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

The disappearance without trace of the crack liner Waratah off he Pondoland coast of South Africa remains one of the great nysteries of the sea.

I have built my novel into the facts of this mystery and have lot bent history to suit my fiction. Several years of intensive esearch have brought to light a number of fascinating new facts.

I believe that in the remarkable sea phenomenon experienced by the British cruiser HMS Birmingham during the Second Vorld War off the Pondoland coast, and subsequently by several irge British and Dutch liners, lies the true solution of the Waratah enigma.

Pretoria, 1971

All the characters in this book are imaginary and have no reference to any person, living or dead

PROLOGUE

Last entries from log of missing yacht Touleier: July 28th, 1971

p.m. Ship out of control

Latitude, unknown; longitude, unknown. Course, unknown. Visibility, nil.Position (dead reckoning)-400/500 miles north-north-east Waratah hulk.Furious gale unabated (6th day). 65 m.p.h. estimated, anemometer blown away. Beaufort scale, southwest/10. Run of sea - mountainous southwest, high and short, waves approx. 35/40 ft.Barometer at lowest, 985 millibars. 530 p.m. Gale eased slightly, wind approx. 55 m.p.h. Overcast lifted temporarily westwards. Tremendous heavy cross-sea. Ship still burying herself, lee deck completely under water. Attempted to cut away mainboom wreckage which fouled self-steering gear at onset of gale. Unsuccessful. Rudder useless. Stump of mainmast started to thrash. Feared heel would knock a hole in hull. Managed to secure it. Left hand out of action, flesh stripped from thumb, third and fourth fingers, severe pain from spilt acid of dead radio batteries. p.m. Gale resumed its fury, southwest/10, gusting 70 m.p.h. Dumped last polluted food overboard. Sampled remaining fresh water tank. Undrinkable. Heavily contaminated with salt. Ship taking large quantities of water aboard. Doubtful whether she will survive tonight.

July 29th, 1971

a.m. Course, position, drift, unknown. Woken dawn by crash of mainmast stump previously damaged at deck level, mainboom and self-steering wreckage also carried away.

Starboard cabin ports blown in, destroying everything in cabin. Waratah records in top galley locker still safe. Ship covered in spray and lying on her side. Scores of dead and dying mollyhawks and albatrosses caught in rigging tangle. No craft can take such punishment. End very close.

7.20 a,m. Ship's motion wilder. Waratah .

CHAPTER ONE

What made her come aboard that first evening?

There was no compelling reason for it that I could discover later. There was no suggestion, as far as she knew, that I was in urgent need of the chart. I was sailing that night for Durban and I had told Mr Hoskins that I required a chart, but she was not in the chandler's at the time. Mr Hoskins had always been obliging and somehow - because of the three-barrelled name of the firm, perhaps - Merry, Baggs and Hoskins-I had thought of him more in the light of a benevolent lawyer from Lincoln's Inn than a ship's chandler. The name reeked of old briefs and faded documents, not of charts, rope, ships' stores and sailmaking, nor of Dock Road, Cape Town, within biscuit toss of the great array of ships which have made the port, since the closing of Suez, again worthy of the name Tavern of the Seas. Since I had taken command of Walvis Bay, I had fought a running battle with officialdom about stores and equipment for her: the Weather Bureau preferred its 'official channels' and I Mr Hoskins, who seemed to sense the wants of a ship as unique as Walvis Bay on her strange occasions among the great hectic wastes of the Southern Ocean.

I wonder now whether she came less because of Mr Hoskins' benevolent wish to cater for an unusual client of a skipper than under compulsion to what she was to call those strange forces which have surrounded the Waratah and her fate? Now that the whole long history of the ship has been laid bare, I have been able to trace a step-by-step inevitability which doomed her, and doomed those who sailed in her, and doomed those who came near her. The fates of men and of ships come down to these forces, they say, and the Waratah was fated. She was the first ship ever to be claimed as unsinkable - before the Titanic even - and I know now that even after the ship was dead, those vaunted watertight compartments of hers still carried the power to strike. I am prepared to believe, after all that has happened since, that it was indeed the forces of the Waratah which brought the girl to the docks that evening as I got Walvis Bay ready for sea.

I was aft watching the two Weather Bureau technicians unhouse some of the radiosonde equipment we used for balloon ascents at sea, which we would not want on the coast-wise passage from Cape Town to Durban since there are plenty of shore stations and our route would be close inshore. It was almost dark and we were working by floodlight. There was a thin speckle of rain from the northwest, but the Port Met. Officer and I had decided that there was not much to it and Walvis Bay would not have to put up with a winter's gale round the Cape of Storms. Nonetheless, I did not wish to risk the radiosonde gear when the ship was not on station: it had taken us, when Walvis Bay had been converted from a whaler to South Africa's first weather ship, too much ingenuity to install. The radiosonde gear had not been specifically designed to operate at sea from a ship, but we had got round that by shifting the mast forward and constructing a makeshift balloon-filling hut abaft the funnel-and it worked. Walvis Bay was, in fact, a compound of ingenuity, improvisation and enthusiasm by a small working group from a number of formidably-named state and semi-state organizations. Now we were bound for Durban to try and increase her weather watchdog usefulness by equipping her with special radar and other apparatus for observing the new American Itos weather satellites. From Durban I had been ordered to make a series of special observations along the line of the Agulhas Bank deep down south towards Bouvet Island and the Antarctic ice shelf, and then swing back towards my station between Gough Island and the Cape via the Discovery and Meteor Sea-mounts, where further scientific investigations were scheduled. Durban was where the whaler had been converted and, since it might be necessary to alter the ship still further, I wanted the shipbuilders there who had worked on her previously with such success. Cape Town, moreover, was so jammed with shipping, including the massive supertankers, that to enlist a shipbuilder for a relatively small but tricky job was virtually impossible.

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