I felt Etosha's stern cant and sink under the shock of tons of water and the action of the port screw. There was a great rending sound of metal and wood. The transom felt as if it had been mule-kicked. I started to shout to John, but heard no words above the gigantic clangour. I rang the telegraph to "full ahead." Out of the corner of my eye I saw John snatch an axe and dart aft. The sea poured in over the bridge rails. The stern canted over more steeply.
It is in moments like this that the sailor feels his rapprochement with his craft. The mould of iron, the grain of wood, takes on life as the sea seeks to wrest from it the stuff of its being which man has fashioned. The sea,on its remorseless anvil seeks to redesign. The sailor, and the sailor only, is the witness of that elemental forging, the fight for a new pattern. The man of the sea expresses it simply: "She was like a thing alive." The whip of strained steel, the near-breaking strain of rope and recalcitrant wood challenge the sea. It is a titan's battle. In those moments a man's love of his ship is born and he hears with pain the rendings of that dreadful accouchement.
A brief glimpse showed me the aftermast canted over and buckled about five feet above the deck. John, up to the chest in water, was hacking at the wire and rigging screws which, fortunately, were secured on the bridge abaft the funnel. The stern tilted, but it seemed to have more life in it. Above the din I heard the thuds of the axe. If only the stays would part! The mast would then go overboard and she might right herself. From the foredeck came screams and shouts from the crew. The axe thudded. With a twang like a huge banjo-string the last of the stays parted. It was followed by a rending, tearing, sickening noise which seemed as if half her stern had gone with the mast. Through my hands on the spoke I felt the slight lightening of Etosha's burden of death and then a living movement as the powerful screws thrust. The bow was angled high and the list seemed beyond human power to right. A second later, by the great power of the diesels, I felt she might live if she could only shake herself free. I knew then how my great-grandfather had felt — the story had come down to me as a boy — when the fine-lined clipper he was driving round the Cape of Storms under a great press of sail put her yacht-like counter under the wild seas and he alone had saved her as the water towered over her mizzen chains by cutting adrift the halliards and rigging with his own hands.
Like a cork out of a bottle, Elosha leapt free, shedding astern the debris of the mast, stays, boats and stern fittings. Sea and spray cleared. But we had not escaped. Dead ahead, not more than fifty yards, lay a smoking, new-born islet. Beyond was the open sea. The waves out there were white-crested, and, dear God! under them was deep water. A welter of white broke over the shoal — astern. No power could save Etosha now. Her gallant fight for life with the huge wave had not saved her. But as the sickening realisation hit me, I saw in a flash that the smoking islet, steam-crested, was not the one I had originally noted when Etosha made her great bid for safety. It was new, reared in the few minutes of our travail. As far as the eye could see to starboard now Etosha was hemmed in, cut off from the sea by the advancing, inexorable, ever-growing number of islets. The coast had laid a deadly trap.
Etosha checked and I was thrown forward against the wheel and fetid heat rose about me. I waited for the strike which would rip her plating like calico. But it did not come. She lurched slowly ahead, losing speed. Strangely-coloured flames rose and I saw the paint blister. Another lurch — ú she was cutting through the soft, red-hot mud, as yet un-hardened in the sea! Through the steam, a ship's length away, lay open water. She slowed more and struggled tiredly. The heat and the steam nearly suffocated me. I saw a wave sweeping in from seawards. Etosha was almost at a standstill. Then her bows lifted under the sea. The screws screamed as they rose out of the viscous, turgid mud and bit into water — blessed, salt scawater. She surged clear of the nauseating embrace towards the open sea.
Automatically I rang the telegraph — "Half ahead."
Etosha made her way west — to safety.
John joined me at the wheel, grinning, axe in hand.
"Fried fish for dinner," he said laconically.
"We'll have to open up the hatches and see how much is spoiled," I replied. But I intend to get clear of this bloody part of the world first."
"She was magnificent," said John warmly.
"Much damage astern?" I asked.
"A complete shambles. The mast and boats are gone and the davits are as curly as a Hottentot's topknot."
"Where's Jim?" I asked. "Take the wheel a moment while I see how the crew's fared."
John's face clouded. "Crew!" he sniffed. "Bloody lot of frightened savages. Do you think one of them stirred a hand to help me? They hung on to anything they could find and prayed for their souls — if they have such a thing."
I looked over the bridge. Even where the force of the huge wave had been slightest, the damage was frightening. The wheel valves on the two winches under the bridge were awry, gear was swept in a wild tangle to starboard and lay in the scuppers in confusion; the crew, with fear in their faces, still clung to their handholds. Paint had been stripped as if with a blowlamp. Curled fragments clung to the blackened bulwarks.
"Helmsman!" I roared. The Kroo boy detached himself and came slowly along the deck. "God's truth!" I shouted. "This isn't an old men's home! Shake a leg!"
He came on to the bridge, sullen and frightened.
"Course south by west," I snapped.
The wheel swung over and the ragged welt of the coast, steaming, turbulent, half mist-shrouded, came into view.
John looked at it ruminatively.
"First round to us — over the Skeleton Coast!" he muttered.
II
Rays and Beetles
I brought the Etosha into Walvis Bay towards sunset. John was with me on the bridge. As Pelican Point, a narrow peninsula which juts into the sea at the harbour mouth, came, clearly to view about five miles to the southward, the moderate wind to seaward suddenly switched northerly and the uneasy lop of the waves from the south-west indicated that we were in for a couple of days of the great rollers which crash so mercilessly on the coast after a northerly blow, more so at this late autumn season than during the summer.
Etosha eased towards the harbour mouth at seven knots. "If she'd been a sailer, we'd be all aback now," John remarked. His lips were cracked from the wind, and the top of his thick woollen polo-necked jersey was stained with salt and paint. He was tired, too, after the excitement of the dawn. He had been on his feet solidly since.
"I've got some old sailing directions below," I remarked. "It would drive me round the bend bringing a schooner, even under snug sail, up to an anchorage like this."
The wind off the land, blowing powerfully across the direction of the northerly wind outside the harbour, threw up a short, nasty sea.
"Starboard fifteen," I told the Kroo boy at the wheel. "Slow ahead," I rang.
The sun, endowed by the great surge of volcanic dust thrown up by the eruptions, was making a great show of going down. Sunsets are always spectacular on the Skeleton Coast, but this one was out-vying them. Gold spears stabbed heavenwards like molten searchlights, refracted and diffused by the volcanic dust over the sea and the fine particles of sand whipping in from the desert which backs the port.
As Etosha edged in towards her buoy, I laid her length parallel with the sandy peninsula.
John laughed. "Not forgotten the tricks of the trade, eh? Put her against the sunset with a spit of land behind and what do our nosey-parkers see from the shore of damage? Nothing. Only blackness. I suppose it's in the blood, Geoffrey — you might as well ask a wolf not to stalk a caribou as expect a submariner not to hide himself!"