The Black Tide (2 page)

The tug left immediately, steaming out past Pendennis Point at 03.27 with an ETA at the probable position of the drifting tanker of about 06.30. By then Falmouth coastguards had alerted the Naval Flag Officer, the Sennen lifeboat had been put on stand-by and the duty officer at the Department of Trade’s Marine Division, Sunley House, High Holborn, had been informed and had immediately called the retired admiral who headed the Marine Pollution Control Unit.

As anticipated by the forecast, the weather was now worsening rapidly so that by 04.00 the wind was force 8, gusting 9, and the tug, out from under the lee of the Lizard and punching westward into heavily breaking seas, was forced to reduce speed. Shortly before 05.00 the tug master contacted the
Petros Jupiter
and informed her master that owing to heavy seas his ETA would now be 07.30 or even later.

By then the tide had turned, wind and tide pushing the ship in a north-easterly direction. Falmouth coastguards, plotting the shifting direction of the tidal stream between Land’s End and the Scillies, calculated that with a wind drift of approximately one knot the ship would go aground in the vicinity of the Longships about an hour before the tug could reach her. This warning was passed to the master and the advice repeated to let go his anchors when he was in a depth that would give him sufficient scope of chain. In the weight of wind and, with the seas now big, the chain would almost certainly snap, but there was just a chance that the anchors might hold long enough for the north-going tide to take the tanker clear of the Longships and, with the extra fetch provided by Whitesand Bay, the tug might still get a line on board before she struck.

Meanwhile, the secretary of the Sennen lifeboat, in consultation with his cox’n, had decided to launch. The time of launch was 04.48 and the lifeboat reached the casualty at 06.07. By then the
Petros Jupiter
, with two anchors down and her bows pointed in the general direction of the Wolf Rock, was barely a mile from the Longships. An hour later, as dawn began to break, first one anchor chain, then the other parted, and the lifeboat, which was lying in the lee of the tanker’s stern reported the grey granite tower of the lighthouse just visible through mists of wind-blown spray and driving snow. It was very close, the cox’n radio-ed.

It was a dark, cold dawn, full of scudding clouds. A Sea King helicopter from RNAS Culdrose, hovering overhead, taking photographs and checking for pollution, gave the distance between the tanker’s stern and the lighthouse as barely 500 metres. The pilot also reported that he could see no sign of the tug. This information was passed to the
MPCU at Sunley House, which was now fully manned and already operating on the assumption of a major disaster, alerting tugs and aircraft fitted with spraying equipment and arranging for the transportation of stock-piled dispersants to Land’s End.

The
Petros Jupiter
struck at 07.23, but not on the Long-ships. By then she had drifted clear of the lighthouse and the sunken ledges on which it was built, and with the wind veering, and the direction of the tidal stream already changing, she went on to the shallow reef south-west of the Shark’s Fin, swung round and finished up with her stern almost touching the flat of the rock known as Kettle’s Bottom.

The tug did not reach the casualty until almost an hour later, and though the wind had eased by then, the seas were still very confused and it was another hour and a half before a line was got across to the tanker’s bows. The first attempt to tow her off was made shortly after 10.00.

Meantime, on the other side of England, at Colchester, where the Casualty Room at Lloyd’s Intelligence Services kept a 24-hour watch, the Casualty Reporting officer, informed by Land’s End coastguards that the
Petros Jupiter
was on the rocks with two ruptured tanks spilling oil, began notifying all those organizations which took the service. This included, of course, the media, so that it was on the BBC 8 o’clock news and all subsequent broadcasts. Information about the casualty was also transmitted by telex from the Communications Room on the same floor direct to the Lloyd’s of London building in the City for posting on the Board, so that underwriters entering the Room for the start of business after the New Year’s Day holiday would see it there.

The lead underwriter for the
Petros Jupiter
cover was Michael Stewart. He headed three of the top marine insurance syndicates, a position he had inherited on the death of his father just over a year ago. He was still relatively young, only just turned fifty, but he had a good track record and was generally regarded as having his father’s underwriting flair. He heard the news on the radio and immediately phoned his Claims Manager. Holiday or no holiday, he was
urgent to get things moving – the Salvage Association in particular.

Michael Stewart’s syndicates were not deeply involved in the
Petros Jupiter
, for though he had agreed to continue the cover following the change of ownership in 1975, he had increased the extent of the re-insurance. But it was still his responsibility as the lead underwriter and it looked as though this was going to be the second casualty in two months with which his name would be associated.

The first had been the
Aurora B
, a 120,000-ton tanker belonging to GODCO. She had simply disappeared somewhere off Ceylon. Gulf Oil Development Company vessels had always been operated at such a high standard, and had always had such an outstanding record, that his father had allocated to his most favoured syndicate a greater proportion of the total premium, and consequently a greater proportion of the liability, than was normal. His son had seen no reason to change the practice. The GODCO policies had an excess of £500,000 to be met by the Company and, as a result, Syndicate OX71 had done very well out of this line of underwriting over the years.

In the case of the
Aurora B
, it wasn’t just one syndicate that was heavily involved. In dealing with the re-insurance that spread OX71’s liability round the market, he had allocated a larger than normal percentage to his two other syndicates. The
Petros Jupiter
, on the other hand, was no longer a GODCO vessel. But though he could comfort himself that at least he had had the sense to reduce his syndicates’ involvement, it was still basically a GODCO policy and he was still the lead underwriter.

The loss was thus a blow to his pride, as well as to his pocket, for there was nothing to indicate on that bank holiday morning that the stranding was anything other than an accident. It was just another disastrous tanker casualty that Lloyd’s, and his own syndicates in particular, could have done without.

Twelfth Night and it was after lunch, after the fog had lifted, that the first oil-sodden bodies began to come ashore. I had just left the rough board table where I did my writing and was out with spade and pick breaking up a little patch of new ground above the cottage. The air was cold and very still, a high hanging over us with the pressure close on 1040 and the sea lying like pewter against a white, opaque sky, no horizon and the remains of a westerly swell barely creaming the base of the Brisons.

From the new ground, where I was planning to grow sorrel and lamb’s lettuce, possibly some bush tomatoes close under the rocks that sheltered it, I looked straight down on to the sloping roof of our cottage, and beyond it, beyond the rock outcrop that looked like the head of an elephant, the grey granite tower of the Longships lighthouse was just beginning to emerge, a dim, blurred finger still wreathed in mist. And almost alongside it, that bloody tanker looking like a ghost ship, the fog still swirling about it.

I stopped digging and lit my pipe, thinking once again about how it must have been up on the tanker’s bridge that night almost a week ago when the gale had stranded her on Kettle’s Bottom. A faint breeze stirred the peat smoke of our cottage chimney and the fog rolled back from the Longships so that the wreck, the rocks that held her pinned at the stern and all the attendant ships were suddenly revealed in startling clarity against the white miasma glimmering now in pale sunlight. The
Petros Jupiter
was all of three miles away, but in that strange watery brightness every detail of her seemed
magnified, so that even at that distance I could identify the salvage equipment littering her deck, the pumps, compressors, hose and coils of rope and wire.

Incredibly, because of the unseasonable quietness of the weather during the days following the gale, she was still intact and, except that she was down by the stern and her after deck almost awash, she might have been anchored there. All this side of the wreck the sea was a flat oily brown. I left my spade and went up to the knoll above the elephant head rock. When I had been out to the wreck on the Friday the spillage had all been to seaward and I was hoping it would prove to be some trick of the iridescent light. But it wasn’t. It was oil all right. Two anti-pollution vessels were spraying close inshore along Whitesand Bay and the slick ran in a long dirty line from the tanker right across the bay until it disappeared from sight below the cliffs on which I was standing.

Karen must have been looking at it, too. From the door of the cottage you could see straight down the rocky pathway to the little patch of sand wedged into the rocks of the gully where we kept our inflatable. The anguish of her cry cut the stillness. She was out of the door, searching wildly and calling to me: ‘Trevor! Trevor!’ She looked up to where I stood. ‘D’you see it?’

‘See what?’ I called down to her, though I knew damn well what she’d seen.

She turned. ‘There! On the sand.’ Her voice was high like the screech of a gull. We had been expecting this for almost a week now. ‘By that rock.’ She was standing in the cold, watery sunlight, her left hand shading her eyes, her right stretched out, pointing down into the cove.

From where I stood I couldn’t see it, the little cove blocked from my view by the top of the elephant rock.

‘I can see it moving.’ She had turned, looking up at me again, the smooth rounded beauty of her face shattered by the violence of her emotions — a fishergirl’s face, I had described it in a magazine piece, with the high-necked fisherman’s jersey she wore in winter and the blue scarf tied in a bandeau round her head. And then she was running, her feet flying on the grass slope to the path.

‘Careful!’ I shouted. She was a big girl and running like that, at such a crazy pace, I was afraid she’d go flying head first down among the rocks.

But it was no good. She took no notice. She never did. Once her emotions took charge, nothing stopped her. The cottage, the birds, everything – our whole way of life, it was all hers. She was so impossibly lovable, so damnably difficult, and now I was running after her, and it seemed to me, in exasperation, I’d always been adapting myself, excusing myself, ever since she’d faced me, holding on to the handlebars of her bike, eyes wide and spitting like a cat. That had been at the back end of Swansea docks, our first meeting, and a gang of teenagers using a puppy for a football. They’d broken its back and instead of going after them, I’d got hold of the jerking little rag of a body and put it out of its misery with a hand chop to the back of its neck. The teenagers were Arab, and she had thought I was one of them.

Now, as I joined her on the little V-shaped patch of sand, she was in the same sort of mood. ‘Look at it!’ She thrust the feebly flapping bird at me. Her hands were wet and covered with oil, her dark brown eyes gone almost black with anger.

The bird lifted its head, squirming and opening its beak. It was a razorbill, but only recognizable by the strangely bulbous shape of its beak. The beautiful black and white plumage was coated with a thick film of heavy, black oil. No sound came and its movements were so feeble that it was almost certainly near the point of death.

‘How many more?’ Her voice trembled on the edge of hysteria. ‘Last time – remember? November it was. The night we had that bonfire on the beach. Mrs Treherne’s little boy found it flapping in the shallows, and the very next day they began coming ashore.’ Her breath smoked in the cold air, her eyes wide and very bright. ‘Dead birds, dead fish – I can’t take it.’ Her lips were trembling, tears of anger and frustration starting. ‘Spilling their filthy oil, ruining our lives, everything … I can’t take it. I won’t take it.’ And then, gripping hold of me, holding my arm so tight I could feel her fingernails through the thick sweater, ‘We’ve got to do something, fight back …’

‘I’m doing what I can, Karen.’ I said it gently, keeping a
tight hold on myself, but she thought I was on the defensive.

‘Talk, talk, talk, nothing but talk. That silly little committee of yours—’

‘There’s an Under-Secretary coming with our MP this evening. I told you, be patient. It’s a big meeting. The press and the media, too. We’re trying for the same rules and sea routes that the French established after the
Amoco Cadiz
, and tonight …’

‘Tonight he’ll say yes; tomorrow, at Westminster, he’ll have forgotten all about it.’ She said it bitingly, her eyes contemptuous. She looked down at the razorbill. ‘Remember that first time? And last March, how many was it we took into the cleansing station—twenty-seven? All those people working for hours. Three hours to clean each bird. And they all died, every one of them.’ The bird lay passive now, no longer struggling. ‘We’ve got to stop them – do something – make them realize.’