Evans was frowning through the pilot book again, which suited me perfectly. That chair was lovely and comfy and I didn’t want to go back on the bridge. Come to that, it was still my watch below, but… the Old Man looked up from his reading. ‘It’s interesting that you should have compared the two, John.’
I blinked, ‘Sir?’
‘Tristan da Cunha with this… ah, Quintanilha Island. Tristan was actually discovered by the same Portuguese Admiral in 1506; a voyager called Tristao da Cunha. There are four islands, or groups of islands actually — Tristan itself, Nightingale, Gough and a cheery-sounding place called Inaccessible. Or did you know already?’
I didn’t as it so happened, and now I did I still wasn’t much better off as far as I could see. I’d heard that people lived on Tristan, but anyone with an inclination to maroon themselves on a rock in the middle of the South Atlantic came well outside my sphere of understanding.
But then again, perhaps to the Tristan Islanders the idea of steaming around the ocean aimlessly butting at invisible barriers and going nowhere fast, would have had its bizarre side. Hell — not only to the bloody islanders! Presumably the black teeth which marked Tristan remained as the only legacies of an earlier submarine cataclysm. Suggesting we had more in common than I'd first imagined.
The Old Man seemed to have relaxed considerably now that the responsibility for our next move was lifted from his shoulders, so I just poured myself another coffee, searched forgetfully for the non-existent sugar, then sat back and left him to ramble on.
‘Yes, well, apparently, when Almirante da Cunha finished discovering the Tristan Group which, incidentally, we British annexed in 1816…’
‘A good sovereign tradition,’ I murmured, not really listening too hard.
‘…the admiral continued south, presumably to give the Cape a wide berth. In doing so he came across another island. He described it in his log as a “Bleak, inhospitable hoof of stone at first sight, and extending to some two and one half thousand hectares, but of value to the mariner by reason of its central lake, affording as it does a protection from the tempests met in the great sea around”.’
He looked up and I jumped self-consciously. The comfort of the chair had finally overwhelmed me and I could feel great waves of lassitude blurring my mind. After no sleep for three days other than a few hastily stolen catnaps, I could well have spent this time more profitably in my bunk.
‘Yeah? But does it say if that… that Quintel place affords protection from the U-boats met in the great seas around?’ I inquired guiltily.
The grey eyes stared at me reproachfully from under the bushy brows. ‘Quintanilha de Almeida,’ he grunted finally. ‘Having used up his own name by that time, the Admiral called it after his sailing master and dear friend, Almeida.’
‘A nice, easy-to-remember tally,’ I ventured, trying to appear interested.
‘And nice, easy-to-remember pilotage instructions too, seeing there aren’t more than a couple of sentences of them.’
I sat up as he carried on. This was important. If we could find a way into that central lake of the old admiral’s, then we’d be a damn sight safer than steaming around in a repetitive orbit of the island like some giant Kriegsmarine torpedo range target. I leaned over the chart again but it wasn’t of much help: all it showed was an irregular blob shaped rather like a lower-case letter ‘d’ with a tiny gap where the top of the circle didn’t quite return to the vertical stem. This, presumably, was the entrance.
‘Quintanilha has never been inhabited since its discovery,’ Evans frowned, ‘and apart from occasional visits from British and America sealers during the latter part of the eighteenth century, has very seldom been landed on, or examined. It was surveyed by a Royal Navy ship, H.M.S. Cilicia, in 1868…’
‘Good God. That was the year before the Suez Canal opened,’ I murmured, snatching at a long-forgotten splinter of school memory.
‘…which was, however, wrecked off Madagascar before she could despatch the results of her survey to the Admiralty.’ He glared up at me in angry frustration. ‘Typical Royals. Incompetent clowns.’
‘So we’re not much the wiser now than we were before, Sir?’
He looked doubtful. ‘It says that, while none of the Cilicia’s officers were saved from the wreck, some of her ratings survived and, according to statements from them, “It appears that a passage into the central anchorage is clear to ships with a draught of at least some twelve feet — this being the survey vessel’s draught at the time of her entering — and navigators so doing are advised to keep well to the larboard side of the rocky fault forming the opening. They are further warned that an almost vertical submerged shelf, or reef, prevents direct access to the enclosed waters and necessitates a right-angle turn to starboard just after the vessel’s counter clears the inner periphery of the natural breakwater thus formed”.’
‘And that’s all we have to go on?’
He nodded. ‘Unless you’re interested in the fact that the last recorded persons to land on Quintanilha de Almeida were the survivors of the German Keil-Sud Afrika Linie steamer Darmstadt in 1903? And they got fed up with waiting for no one to call so, after four months of living on seabirds’ eggs and rainwater, seven men left again in a fifteen-foot boat. Two of them were still alive when they reached Africa.’
‘Sounds like a bustling, hospitable little stop-over,’ I muttered gloomily.
He closed the book with a snap. ‘Let’s hope like hell it’s not. Bustling stop-overs might be bustling with the wrong kind of people.’
‘Implying you intend to try for the anchorage, Sir?’
The Old Man levered himself out of his chair and paced slowly back and forward, hands clasped behind his back. ‘I don’t know. We don’t have much practical information, just a lot of damn sketchy history. And what we do have doesn’t make me any keener to try.’
‘At least we know the Royal Navy man went in.’
‘Aye, with a twelve-foot draught. What was our mark when we sailed, John?’
‘Twenty-eight, Sir.’
He turned the corners of his mouth down sourly. ‘So where’s the reassurance in that? And another thing… they apparently made a sharp turn to starboard just as their stern cleared the inner rocks of the entrance. In those days she’d have been a big ship if she was three hundred feet long… we’re what? Four eighty overall?’
I nodded and got stiffly to my feet. I needed a shower and shave myself before I went on watch. ‘So we’ll be feeling our way in completely blind, Sir?’
He smiled fractionally and, for a fleeting moment, I got the impression he was actually looking forward to it. ‘If I decide to go in at all, Mister Kent, we’ll feel our way in as tentatively as a virgin with his first lay.’
We sighted the island as I’d predicted — at 8.40 in the morning watch. The low cloud had dissipated under the onslaught of the sun’s return, and already it was getting hot. To be on the safe side I’d posted a masthead lookout an hour before our E.T.A. as well as a man up in the eyes of the ship. The Captain was already on the bridge, standing in the chartroom wading through a mound of bacon sandwiches, when the call floated down from aloft, ‘Laaaand fine on the starb’d BOW!’