The Main Cages Page 10

  They were, he estimated, some two miles west of Kidda Head. He could hear the foghorn astern, off the starboard quarter. He ordered a man to the bows to sound their own horn at intervals. When the helmsman brought the ship round, the sails started to lift at once.

  ‘Close as she’ll go, sir!’

  He took her off a few points and for twenty minutes they sailed in silence. Mist half hid the mast-tops. Around the ship they could see no further than a couple of swell lengths before the sea disappeared into the whiteness. When they heard the Cages bell, not to leeward where it should have been but off the port bow, the helmsman panicked. He backed up into the wind and the ship stalled.

  ‘Back to your course,’ said the Captain calmly. When they had enough way, he would go about.

  Just then, from far below them, came a deep groan and the ship juddered as something passed along the hull. It lasted no more than a few seconds and then they were free and sailing again.

  ‘Phew!’ said the First Officer.

  But in the helmsman’s hands the wheel spun idly. ‘Lost the rudder, sir!’

  Henriksen ordered all hands on deck, and told his Bosun to make a jury. But already he sensed that his ship was lost. They were only minutes from a lee shore, and the wind was still fresh. He went down to his own quarters. Mrs Henriksen asked, ‘What did we hit?’

  ‘The Main Cages.’

  He looked at the chessboard; she had placed her king out of danger. ‘We may have to finish some other time. You must come up on deck.’

  ‘Listen to me, Peter.’ Mrs Henriksen had thought often about this moment. ‘You must understand that I will not leave the ship while you remain on board.’

  ‘Don’t worry, my dear.’

  On deck, Captain Henriksen made his way aft. There was a great deal of shouting and in it for the first time he detected traces of an echo. The light became suddenly brighter. The fog thinned and they saw where they were. On three sides were cliffs.

  As soon as he saw the Constantine, Captain Williams tensed, waiting for the impact. When it came it was not a single crash but a sickening sound of timbers, scraping and buckling against the rock. The spars shuddered; several men ran to the side. Then the fog came in again and Williams was on his way, running and wheezing back up the hill to call the lifeboat.

  The moment he heard the maroons, Tick-Tock Harris set his watch. The conversation around him in the Fountain Inn had ceased to make much sense. Many were singing. But with the double boom of the maroons, the bar emptied in seconds. By the time the first men had reached the lifeboat station the others were spread out along the road in a line of sprinters, joggers, trotters and walkers. Coxswain Tyler had some difficulty picking a crew.

  ‘Bloody favours!’ shouted Joe Stephens as Tyler bypassed him and his brothers and picked his own nephew, Dougie.

  ‘You’re drunk.’

  Jack had left the Fountain early with Croyden and Charlie to be with Mrs Cuffe. They were given lifejackets, as was Double Walsh who never drank. The others picked had not been in the Fountain. They all took their places in the Kenneth Lee and Tyler gave the order and they started down the slip.

  ‘Thirteen minutes’ – Tick-Tock was standing with the crowd outside the station and he stopped his watch the moment the boat struck the water – ‘and twenty-three seconds.’

  They passed Pendhu Point without even seeing it. Coxswain Tyler brought the Kenneth Lee round until the seas were meeting them beam-on. Jack stood with Croyden in the bows. They had prepared the anchor and Jack was holding its shank on the foredeck to stop it shifting. Down to leeward he watched the wave-backs as they came out under the boat and rolled towards the shore. Somewhere in there was Hemlock Cove and the cliffs but all he could see with the fog was a darting spot before his eyes.

  It lifted suddenly. There were the rocks and the seas sliding white up against them and the spray rising and falling back. And there was the Constantine with her sails flapping like the wings of a wounded butterfly. She was now listing some way to port.

  Tyler brought the Kenneth Lee up into the wind. ‘Let go!’ he shouted. Jack pitched the anchor over the side.

  The warp raced out through the fairlead and the lifeboat dropped back. Jack waited for the anchor to strike bottom and the warp to slacken – but it kept on running out. There was a great depth of water between the Balk and the Main Cages.

  ‘Bring her in!’ shouted Tyler. ‘We’ll go in on the engines.’

  He edged the lifeboat in towards the Constantine. The seas were steepening, breaking high against her stern. She was now not rising with the tide but rocking from side to side as each wave washed through. Her forward holds were filling.

  Jack and Croyden prepared to jump aboard. The Kenneth Lee caught the top of a wave and Jack looked across the deck. Then they dropped into a trough and he could see only the line of faces at the gunwale and above them the spars and the useless sails. Croyden stood on the gunwale. As they rose he grabbed the Constantine’s shrouds and leapt onto the ship. Tyler pulled the lifeboat back and they came in again. Jack waited for the boat to stop rising and in the second before it dropped and Tyler thrust backwards, he stepped across.

  Captain Henriksen faced them. On one side was his First Officer, on the other his wife. He himself dwarfed them both. He wore a white-topped cap and a reefer jacket and tie.

  ‘We have now nine crew,’ he told them, ‘two officers, myself also and my wife. My rudder has gone. Holds one and two of my ship are flooded and water is passing into hold three. You have capacity for all hands?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Croyden.

  ‘How much tide remains?’

  ‘A few feet, perhaps more with this wind. An hour or two.’

  The Captain looked aft. Tongues of water were already sliding up across the deck.

  ‘In that case, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘we should hurry.’

  Time and again the lifeboat came in, picked up a man, then dropped back. As the tide approached its peak, so the motion of the seas became more haphazard. They had risen high up the ship’s sides and were coming green over the stern. Jack and Croyden stood at the starboard rail, some way aft, where the freeboard was lowest. They held each crew member as he stood on the rail, gripped the stay and waited for the lifeboat to come in. ‘Now!’ shouted Croyden as he released them.

  All the while, as his men queued up at the rail, Captain Henriksen stood to one side. Beside him Mrs Henriksen had her arm looped through his; in her other hand she held a leather case with the initials ‘PH’ embossed on it. The First Officer jumped aboard the lifeboat and Croyden motioned to Mrs Henriksen to come forward.

  Captain Henriksen placed his hand at his wife’s back.

  ‘Quick, Missus!’ Croyden shouted.

  But again she said, ‘I will not leave before you.’

  Henriksen took his leather case and stepped up to the gunwale and Tyler brought the lifeboat in.

  ‘Now!’ shouted Croyden.

  The Captain glanced back.

  ‘Go on!’ urged his wife.

  But the moment had passed and as he leaned forward the lifeboat was already dropping away from the ship. Jack leaned over and grabbed him – but Captain Henriksen was too heavy.

  Jack did not remember falling. He remembered suddenly being in the water and thinking how very large the Constantine looked and how very steep the seas. When the line fell across his head he caught it and looped it around the Captain’s waist and, without looking, tied a Spanish bowline. Six hands reached down from the lifeboat and pulled the Captain aboard. Jack already felt the next wave washing him away from the ship. It was breaking as it reached him and it drove him down and slammed him against the side. The water cleared above him and those were the bows of the lifeboat and the line that looped out from them and he was thinking again how very large the Constantine looked from down there and he was rising from the water and on the lifeboat they were pulling up his trouser leg and how strange that he felt nothing because there was his shin wi
th a gash down but it was as if it was someone else’s leg and not his at all.

  CHAPTER 15

  Before the Kenneth Lee had even returned to the lifeboat station, where Dr White put more than a dozen stitches into Jack Sweeney’s shin, the committee of Polmayne’s Shipwrecked Mariners’ Association were already busy. Between them Mr Francis Evans, Parson Hooper and Mrs Hooper and Clifford Thomas contacted the Finnish Consul by telephone, collected more than a dozen blankets and commandeered the United Methodists’ tea-urn.

  Later, when the Freeman Reading Rooms was a mass of milling bodies, steaming cups and assorted languages, Parson Hooper arrived and asked for silence. The Constantine’s crew bowed their heads. Captain Henriksen tucked his cap under his arm.

  ‘Eternal Father, who divided the Red Sea with His power and brought his people to dry land, we thank Thee for bringing these Thy servants from the perils of the deep. Protect them this night and always, so that Thou might lead them peacefully into that final place which is called Fair Havens, nigh whereunto is the city of the Lord …’

  Parson Hooper then offered to accommodate Captain and Mrs Henriksen at the rectory.

  Even though Polmayne’s summer visitors already occupied every spare room, and many that were not spare, more than half the ship’s company had found billets by the end of that evening. Joan Kliskey put up three at Dormullion. Eliza Tucker erected a camp bed in her store room. Major Franks and Mrs Franks had their guest room occupied by a friend from Bombay but they laid out bedding for one in their dining room. Mrs Cuffe offered Whaler’s shed and Mrs Hooper wondered whether it was seemly with him only just buried.

  ‘Take it or leave it,’ shrugged Mrs Cuffe.

  At the rectory the next morning, Captain Henriksen woke early. He dressed in the same shirt as the day before, the same black tie. He then placed himself in a chair in the corner of the room. He was still sitting there when his wife woke.

  ‘No moping!’ she said and after breakfast took him for a walk. The fog had cleared and it was a beautiful morning. In the churchyard they stopped to admire an azalea and some gentians and to read Parson Hooper’s Tablets.

  How beautiful it is to be alive,

  to live – to love – to work for God! …

  ‘You see, dear – we should be grateful we survived.’

  Captain Henriksen said nothing. He was looking at the latest Tablet. ‘… Not this man but Barabbas.’

  That day the first reporters began to arrive in Polmayne. The Garrett brothers charged them extra to go to the wreck in the Polmayne Queen. ‘Dangerous waters,’ explained Jimmy.

  By the weekend a total of fifteen thousand people had made their way out to Pendhu to see for themselves the FAMOUS BARQUE MAROONED ON CORNWALL’S TREACHEROUS COAST. The lanes from Porth became clogged with buses and cars. Ivor Dawkins had his labourers place hand-painted signs in the gateways of his mown fields – ‘TO THE WRECK!’ – then charged sixpence a car for access.

  Many of the visitors beat a path to the watch hut where Captain Williams recounted his own part in the events of that afternoon: ‘Blind as a mole I was, fog ’s thick as paint.’

  The Constantine’s crew remained in the town. Four were sleeping in the Reading Rooms. In Dalvin’s field the number of visitors’ tents was still growing and the committee of the SMA wrote an open letter to the Parish Council saying it was ‘an iniquity’ that the town should fall over itself to charge for tents and put up paying visitors while no space could be found for a few poor shipwrecked sailors. Moreover, the brand new villas along Church Road lay empty. Why should the men not be permitted to stay there?

  Parliament Bench responded to the ship’s loss as they responded to all loss.

  ‘They won’t ever get her off now.’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘We’ll not see another barque like her.’

  ‘Not if we live a thousand years.’

  But Toper had been thinking. ‘They might get her off yet.’

  And although the Constantine remained fast on the Balk, exposed to the swell, the weather settled and the tides eased and for the time being she was safe. Salvors came in a launch and made their calculations and went away again. They came back and patched up her bows and told Captain Henriksen that if the weather held, they could have a go at refloating at the next spring tides.

  For Parson Hooper, the Constantine proved a blessing. He busied himself with the crew’s welfare, found them all billets, liaised with the Finnish Honorary Consul. The crew’s presence in church more than doubled his congregation. He even put a few to work in the churchyard.

  And each evening after supper he retired to his study with Captain Henriksen. They played chess and discovered a common interest in the Old Testament. Captain Henriksen said he had found a certain reassuring truth in his misfortune. ‘Sorrow is better than laughter,’ he quoted from Ecclesiastes, ‘for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better …’

  Hooper reached for his Bible. ‘Beware, Captain! Beware the worm of self-pity! It can sap your spirit without you even knowing. Here – I thought so. Only two chapters later we have, “Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy and drink thy wine with a merry heart.”’

  Parson Hooper had found purpose again. His faith in Polmayne began to be restored. He resumed his work in the churchyard and one evening read to Captain Henriksen a stanza that the fate of the Constantine had moved him to write:

  Ye who seek out landfall on this earth of ours,

  shall surely strike the shoals

  and tear the belly of your ship asunder!

  For there is no safe haven save in Your kingdom

  Where we shall unburden the cargo of our hopes!

  Henriksen went rather quiet. But later that week Parson Hooper proudly took the stanza to Pascoe & Sons and commissioned a new Tablet.

  Jack Sweeney sat in his room. With the stitches in his leg and his ankle badly bruised he was unable to walk.

  On that first day after the wreck, a number of people made their way up the bare-boarded stairs to his room. Major Franks came and squeezed his shoulder: ‘Well done, old man. A splendid rescue.’ He handed Jack an envelope in which was his ten-shilling call-out fee.

  The Henriksens came. Captain Henriksen stood before him and said: ‘I thank you! Thank you …’ He then turned and climbed back down the stairs. Mrs Henriksen apologised. ‘I’m so sorry, dear. He’s finding it all rather trying.’

  Mrs Cuffe, whose daily rota had altered little since her husband’s death, came up with Jack’s food. On the second evening she appeared with a fruit cake.

  ‘Not me that made it,’ she explained. ‘It was that foreign woman. She left it on the step, with a note.’

  I have heard about your adventure and your famous underwater knot and what could I do? I made this cake. It is a very clever cake and will make you better very quick.

  Anna Abraham

  Croyden appeared and he alone did not express his concern. When he asked about the leg, Jack knew he was really asking how long before they could leave for Newlyn. The pilchard shoals had already arrived. But one day Croyden came and sat down and lit a cigarette. He had smoked half of it before he said, ‘I won’t be coming to Newlyn.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s Hammels. He’s a bloody Jonah. We have no luck while he’s on board.’

  A few weeks earlier, Jack would have given in – but now he called Croyden’s bluff. ‘We’ll miss you.’

  The next morning, using a stick, Jack managed to walk out to the front for the first time. Several people he didn’t know asked him how he was.

  It was a week of very hot weather. As the days passed and he recovered and made his way further around the harbour, so he found himself filled with a restless enthusiasm. He leaned on the harbour wall and thought: I will leave this town, find a trading ship, work passage to America, or Africa or the Indies. Then he hatched a plan to buy a bigger boat, fish the Western Approaches, put into Irish ports. He would go to London. H
e even considered going back to Dorset and farming. Each of his whims lasted a few hours.

  When the stitches came out, he went to the East Quay and took out his punt. He found if he lodged his bad leg against a stern-frame he could row. He headed out of the bay. What wind there was came from the north and there was no swell. Beyond Hemlock Cove he saw the Constantine and its stranded bulk. The sun had not yet risen above the hill and the ship was in shadow. Short little seas rolled along her sides; a line of shags stood drying their wings on her rail.

  He rowed on, out into the sun. He heard the first clangs of the Cages bell and at Maenmor came round and looked at the gap between its two peaks. The tide was higher than when he had first done it, two years earlier, and the gap was even narrower. He swung the bows round, brought in the paddles and the rock closed in over him. He ducked, and his ankle twisted against the bottom boards and he cried out. The boat began to spin. He grabbed one of the paddles and jabbed it against the rock. Then he was out again in the sunlight and he caught his breath and looked back at the gap and wondered what on earth was making him so reckless.

  Back in the inner harbour, Jack sculled in and anchored his punt. The quays were crowded and he hopped up the steps and there at the top was Anna Abraham. On the cobbles beside her were two baskets. ‘So – you can row, but still you can’t walk!’

  She was on her way back to Ferryman’s and he offered to take her there.

  Up the river, the heat bounced off the water. The wind had dropped away to almost nothing. The oak trees were thick-leafed, at their greenest, in that brief half-season between fullness and the long drying slide towards autumn. Sitting in the stern, Anna said: ‘You know, Mr Sweeney, you look different.’