The Main Cages (13 page)

The last time Jack saw Whaler was one Saturday in mid-July. The blinds were down and the light was on. Its glow made him feel warm, he said – although the heat of the day
itself hung heavy as a shroud in the room. Whaler was weak and pale. He told Jack about the
Belfast.

‘She was a barque we’d sailed to Australia. Failed to find a return cargo so headed east out into the Pacific. Eighth day out we hit a gale … struck by a wave and knocked down –’

Whaler started coughing. Jack poured him a cup of his lukewarm water. He sipped at it, then lay back against the pillow and closed his eyes. He lay like that for a long time, and Jack stood to leave.

‘Wait, I haven’t finished.’ Whaler strained to take a couple of deep breaths. ‘… We was drifting for three days, set up a jury rig and sailed to an island …’

He took another sip of water. ‘We was two months on that island … no one there but trees and a lot of turtles. I don’t think I ever been happier than on that island.’

Whaler drank some more water. ‘Open the window will you, Jack.’

Jack stood and pulled up the blind. He released the casement and felt the breeze on his face. The Petrels were racing in the bay. On the road below the window, the sand that Toper had spread was cut by wheel tracks.

‘They don’t believe me, do they?’ said Whaler.

‘Who?’

‘They say I make it all up.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘I know what they say. They say Whaler tells fairy tales. But I saw it all, Jack. I saw every last bit.’

Whaler died three days later. They buried him that Saturday. The weather had closed in and thick fog covered the town. Mrs Cuffe had had her best coat dyed black and sat all morning in the parlour with the coffin beside her. Various women came to be with her.

‘Cold as ’ell out there,’ said Brenda Walsh.

‘Damper ’n a sponge,’ said Agnes Thomas.

‘More like March than July,’ said Eliza Tucker.

Mrs Cuffe ignored them. She sat straight-backed before the
coffin. When Jack and Croyden and the other pall-bearers arrived, she watched in silence as they carried Whaler out and down the steps to Bethesda. She did not follow.

At the graveside the men sang ‘Rock of Ages’; it had been Whaler’s favourite hymn. They sang it again in the Fountain Inn. Everyone agreed that ‘a good man had gone’, that Whaler had been as much a part of Polmayne as ‘the harbour isself’, and although they had all spent years deriding his stories, using his very name as a measure of exaggeration, they now competed to show their respect.

‘What places he saw!’

‘And the rest of his life blind.’

‘No one’ll ever see the half of what Whaler seen.’

‘And he only saw half of what he bloody said he saw –’

‘Who was that?’ demanded Toper Walsh.

Silence.

‘Come on, who said it?’

But the murmur of conversation had resumed, and soon everyone was recalling their best ‘Whaler stories’.

Outside the fog had thickened. The southerly wind was driving it on in damp and smoky billows. It cut off one end of the town from the other. It blew over the bay and the deserted quays, up through the hillside alleys, over the roof of the chapel, into the empty space that had once been Cooper’s Yard. It rolled in across the damp brown mound of Whaler’s grave and in the pine trees above it the wind made a lonely, distant sound. No one was outside. Every two minutes, from the south-east, came the very faint moan of Kidda Head’s foghorn.

O
n Pendhu Point, Captain Williams was singing. On days like this he liked to sing because here on his own with the fog blowing in over the cliffs and nothing in front but milky-white and nothing above but milky-white and nothing all around him but milky-white, he sometimes found it difficult to remember he was alive.

Brown cow in the middle of a field,

Brown cow dreaming of home …

He scratched his beard and stared ahead. The window of the watch hut, which on good days looked south over the Main Cages to a horizon that was as sharp and distant as the stars, was now all that existed in this wide, white world. From Kidda Head lighthouse came the moaning of the foghorn, and he hated that foghorn with its intermittent, bovine groan because it reminded him of all the other foggy days that he had sat there, singing into the whiteness.

Brown cow in the sun,

Brown cow lowing for her love,

Poor little brown cow left alone …

In his naval days, Captain Williams did not mind the fog as there were always ratings to talk to. His days on watch here were usually broken by a visitor or two leaning in through the door for a yarn, but not in fog. No one wanted to come out to Pendhu if they could not see.

Poor little
–
poor little
–
poor little brown cow

All alone …

At 3.30 Williams heard the third ship’s horn of the day. It was far-off and muted and he thought nothing more of it until it sounded again, much closer. When it sounded a third time, to the east, he pulled on his coat. He took his klaxon and stepped out into the fog.

For a few minutes he stood on the edge of the cliff. The damp wind left drops of moisture in his beard. He struggled to hear anything but there was only the wind at the flaps of his sou’wester and the waves breaking some eighty feet below. He could see nothing. They had probably heard the bell and readjusted their course. That was the thing about the Cages bell – it might mean you were close to danger but it also told you exactly where you were. Keep in the lower half of the quadrant and all you had to worry about was other ships.

Then it came again. Something was moving closer, heading towards the cliffs, but he could neither see it nor hear it. He sounded his klaxon –
Pah – pah – paa-ah!
The letter U:
You’re standing in to danger.
There was no reply.

To the east of Williams’s hut, the land dropped away to a stream before rising steeply up the far side. He began the climb down and then he heard the horn again. It boomed off the cliffs around him.

Pah
–
pah – paa-aah!
he replied.

He could now see the valley bottom where the waterfall tumbled over a short cliff and the wind was catching its strands as they fell and blowing them back up.

Pah
–
pah
–
paa-aah!

This time a deep double sound rang around the cliffs – still to the south-east. He began to run. He reached the valley bottom. As he was climbing the other side, zig-zagging up the path, leaning on the boulders to catch his breath, he heard voices through the fog.

He knew exactly where they were. They were off the Balk – the reef that at low water ran covered in oar wrack out towards the Cages. But he could still see nothing. He stood, breathing heavily. The mist mirrored his own breaths – exhaling great billows of cloud, then thinning. Water was dripping from his sou’wester. The fog came and went, allowing glimpses of the black cliffs, of the grey shifting sea, then smothering them again in cloud. As it thinned so he saw for the first time a darker shade of grey. The fog came in again and all was white and then when it cleared, she was there, where no ship should be. He knew her at once: three-masted barque, high bowsprit – the
Constantine.

Captain Henriksen and his English wife had been in their cabin, playing a game of chess. They had left Plymouth soon after dawn and made good progress; they would be in Dublin in a couple of days.

‘Sir! Sir!’ There was a knock on the door. ‘Come quick!’

The Captain pushed his rook into an attacking position, then raised his heavy frame from the chair and pulled on his reefer jacket. ‘Check, my dear.’

At the door was his First Mate. ‘The compass, sir, it’s gone strange!’

On deck, Captain Henriksen pulled the collar up to his ears and made his way aft. Fog surrounded his ship and there was a damp southerly wind. At the wheel he tapped the
binnacle and the needle flickered and spun. He called for another compass. When that showed the same random spinning, he looked up at the sails and ordered the sheets to be tightened.

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.