Frank Delaney - Simple Courage: A True Story of Peril on the Sea

CONTENTS

P R O L O G U E

T HE BEAUFORT SCALE TAKES THE WEATHERS BLOOD PRESSURE. At the bottom of the scale, Beaufort Force 0 indicates a sea as calm as glass; and at the top, Force 12 defines a hurricanewhich takes its name from hurakn, the Caribbean Indians term for an evil spirit of the sea.

Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, an Irish officer in the British Royal Navy, launched his thirteen classifications in 1838 and, in his original construction, the scale estimated the winds speed for ships under sail. Almost as soon as he published it, the meteorological scientists of the day began to debate and refine it; over decades, they made many adjustments, including breaking Force 12 into the five categories by which hurricanes are assessed today.

Eventually, the London Meteorological Office took it further. To give a rounder picture, its officials addressed the scale in joint sea and land terms, and they couched it in accessible images. For example, the Force 0 of Beauforts mirror-calm sea has, on land, an air so still that smoke rises vertically. Next, in a Force 1 at sea, we get ripples but without foam crests, while on land we have light air. Direction of wind shown by smoke drift.

These comparatives rise gently through the levels and grow impressive when the wind strengthens. A long way past the small wavelets and leaves rustle of Force 2, we reach the strong breeze of a Beaufort Force 6, at which point large waves begin to form. On land, this translates to whistling heard in telegraph wires; umbrellas used with difficulty. Force 7 is called Near Gale. Sea heaps up with white foam from breaking waves. Onshore, as the British meteorologists delicately put it, this level of gusting makes inconvenience felt when walking against the wind.

Now begins the true ramping up: Force 8, Gale Force; Force 9, or Severe Gale; and Force 10, Storm Force, which introduces very high waves with long over-hanging crests. The English Meteorological Office observers say that a Force 10 is seldom experienced inland; but if it is, expect to see trees uprooted.

After that, if youre out anywhere under the sky, everything becomes a matter of luck. A Force 11, Violent Storm, brings with it exceptionally high wavessmall and medium-size ships might be for a time lost to view and, on land, widespread damage.

Finally, we have Admiral Beauforts Force 12: Sea completely white with driving spray; visibility very seriously affected. On land: Hurricane.

Mariners, naturally, think of these categories with more feeling. When Force 10 is reached, the waves climb, the crests roll over and hang like ornamental scrolls, and the wind whips the water into foam. This is the moment when the sea seems to turn completely white and the swell seem sluggish, almost torpiduntil it finds something to hit.

And this is when visibility begins to shrink. Culled from the spume that looks like milk spillage on the surface of the ocean, a stinging, obscuring spray begins to fill the air. At Force 12, this thick white curtain blots out what little vision you had until then, and the sea under your hull seems like a heaving carpet of liquid snow. And you gasp in a Force 12, because the wind hits your face at anything between fifty and a hundred miles an hour. Merely to breathe, you have to turn your face away, into the lee of your shoulder, and make a pocket around your mouth with your hands.

If youre on the North Atlantic Ocean in such a gale, and if the temperature is heading below the freezing point, and if, much earlier, as the wind was building, you supposed the flecks of foam and the lengthening spindrift no more than pretty whitecapsthink again.

As the wind climbs, do not stare at the ocean; it has now turned a lethal white that will feel like pins in your eyes. The view that you had gazed on earlier when it was green on gray or blue on blue, and calm or heaving gently or even thumping in a swellthis has become a foaming, pulsating ice field. But the sight is so compelling, so liquid, so fast and savage, and, in the daytime, has a light so beautiful and preternatural, that youd almost risk the stabbing blindness just to glance at it.

In which case you will expose yourself to further danger. The gale can pick up a knob of that white foam, freeze it, and skim it over the waves. It might as well be a steel arrowhead; the salt compressed in that glassy shard of ice will flay your skin to the cheekbone as though a savage had aimed it straight at your face.

Any seafarer out in such conditions knows to wrap up, turn away, andonly if essentialnegotiate the decks of his vessel with the care of a tightrope walker. Otherwise: Stay inside. Those who have a right to be out there, the gulls and the whales and the other marine speciesits their home. Man is the one who is mortally out of his element.

IN LATE DECEMBER 1951, the upper reaches of the Beaufort scale took control of Captain Kurt Carlsen and his ship as though they were the playthings of the winds. He was thirty-seven years old, and his cargo vessel, Flying Enterprise, had fallen foul of a hurricane in the North Atlantic. She listed grievously, far over on her port side. Dense green waves lashed her tilting decks, and a thick veil of that opaque white spray hung in the air, cloaking visibility and deepening the darkness. With her masts bent and her radio antennae in shreds, the black freighter rolled in pain like a dying beast.

Now Carlsen had to deny this biblical tempest any further gainshe had to save the lives of his ten passengers and forty crew. One of his lifeboats had been shatteredit swung loose and useless like a broken limb; the other hung too close under the listing hull to be launched safely. He sent out a Mayday, and a variegated fleet of ships, from all around his part of the ocean, changed course and steamed toward him to help.

When they arrived, Carlsen then gave the order that no master ever wants to give: Abandon ship. The crew led the ten frightened passengers out of the cabin block of Flying Enterprise onto a deck that tilted at an angle of sixty degrees, on a ship dipping so low that her mastswhat remained of themsometimes touched the sea, a broken, out-of-control vessel that might go down in a sucking vortex at any moment.

The passengersfour men, five women, and a boyslipped and slid, here and there; nobody could walk across those slanting decks without tumbling down far and fast. Instead, each movement required a lurch as far as the next handhold: the stays of a hatch cover, the nearest stanchion, a length of pipe. As the passengers grabbed, they held on so fast that they seemed stuck to these metal fitments.