The Snow Tiger / Night of Error (46 page)

We had decided not to tell the crew too much, and so Geordie gathered them and merely said that I wanted to stooge about looking for a particular sort of water condition, but that everyone was to be on the watch for shoals. Everyone knew there wasn’t much land out here and his request may have sounded strange, but they willingly
organized for extra eyes on each watch, and we had a man up the foremast with binoculars a lot of the time. To my mind that was just a token that a search was in progress as I didn’t think they’d spot anything, but for everyone else it perked up interest. We arranged for some dredging, to give the teams practice as we went along.

I was in the chart room early the next morning with Campbell and Geordie, going over the chart and the
Pilot
.

I said, ‘The
Erato
spotted Minerva here – that was in 1890. In 1920 another ship placed Minerva here, stretching east-north-east for two miles. As Robinson points out, there’s a difference of ten miles.’

Campbell said, ‘It’s strange that there should only have been two sightings in thirty years.’

‘Not so strange,’ said Geordie. ‘These waters are pretty quiet, and they’re quieter now that power has taken over from sail. There’s no need for anyone to come here just for commerce.’ He put his hand on the chart. ‘There are several possibilities. One of these sightings was right and the other wrong – take your pick of which was which. Or they were both wrong. Or they were both right and Minerva is a moving shoal – which happens sometimes.’

‘Or they were both wrong – and Minerva is still a moving shoal,’ I said dubiously.

‘Or there are two shoals,’ offered Campbell.

We all laughed. ‘You’re getting the idea,’ said Geordie. He bent to the chart again. ‘Now, we’ll put each of these sightings into the middle of a rectangle, ten miles by twenty. That’ll give us two hundred square miles to search, but it’ll be sure. We’ll start on the outside and work our way in.’

Campbell said, ‘Let’s get to the heart of the matter. Let’s go right to each of these positions and see what’s there.’

But Geordie decided against that. ‘It depends on the weather. I’m not going anywhere near those two positions unless the sea is pretty near calm. You read what Robinson said about not being able to distinguish breakers from storm
waves. We might find her too quickly and rip the bottom out of
Esmerelda
.’

‘We’ve got the echo sounder,’ I said. ‘They should tell us where the water’s shoaling.’

‘Damn it, you’re the oceanographer,’ said Geordie. ‘You should know that these islands are the tops of undersea mountains. There’ll probably be deep water within a quarter of a mile of Minerva. And we could be sailing in twenty fathoms and a spire of coral could rip our guts out.’

‘You’re right, Geordie. Minerva’s probably a budding atoll. Give her another million years and she’ll be a proper island.’

‘We can’t wait a million years,’ said Campbell acidly. ‘All right, you’re the skipper. We’ll do your square search.’

So we got on with it. Geordie estimated that we’d have to pass within a mile of Minerva in order to see it. That meant we’d have to cover about 100 miles in order to search a 200 square mile area. We used the engine as sparingly as possible, confined our speed to about five knots and less, and that way a daylight search would take about two days.

The first leg of the search gave us nothing and in the evening we hove-to, knowing that it would be the devil of a job to assess our actual position the next morning because of the rate of drift in this area, and an uncertainty factor of at least one knot. Geordie pointed this out to Campbell to make him realize that this wasn’t like searching a given area of land which, at least, stays put. Campbell hated it.

That evening, relaxing on deck, I was bombarded with questions by the crew as we ate our evening meal. They were all curious and I thought that this was not a satisfactory way to deal with them – they’d be more use and have more enthusiasm if they were in the know, of one piece of the story at least. And I was also curious myself as to Kane’s reaction, and he happened to be among the off-watch members.

‘What is all this, Mike?’ Ian Lewis asked.

‘Yes, what are we poking about here for?’

I glanced at Geordie, caught his eye and nodded very slightly. ‘All right, chaps, we’re looking for something a bit offbeat here.’

They were intent, and I knew I was right to share this with them.

‘Ever hear of Minerva?’ I asked.

It brought no reaction but murmurings and headshakes from all but one. Kane raised his head sharply. ‘
Récife de Minerve
!’ he said in a barbarous French accent. Everyone turned to look at him now. ‘Are you looking for that? My word, I wish us all luck then.’ He chuckled, enjoying his moment of superiority.

‘What is it?’

I told them briefly what we were after, and its tantalising history.

‘What’s the idea anyhow?’ Danny Williams wanted to know.

I said, ‘Well, this is an oceanological expedition and chaps like me are always interested in mysteries – that’s how we make our living. The waters round a newly-forming island are fascinating, you know.’

They accepted this, though I did hear Danny saying softly to his nearest companion, ‘I’ve always thought there was something crazy about these scientific types, and this isn’t making me change my mind.’

Presently everyone fell silent, if a little more alert to the night sea around them, and it was then that Kane came over to join me, dropping his voice very slightly to address me alone.

‘Er – this got anything to do with your brother, Mr Trevelyan?’ he asked as though idly.

I was wary. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Well, he was in the same line of business, wasn’t he? And he died not very far from here. Wasn’t he looking for something with another bloke?’

I looked into the darkness towards the north-east where the Tuamotus lay a hundred miles on the other side of the invisible horizon. ‘Yes, he died near here, but I don’t think that he had anything to do with this. I’m not the boss, you know. This is Mr Campbell’s party.’

Kane chuckled derisively. ‘Looking for Minerva! That’s like looking for a nigger in a coal-black cellar – the little man who wasn’t there.’ He stayed on for a bit but, getting nothing more from me, he moved away and I could hear him chuckle again in the darkness. I realized that my fists had been clenched at my sides.

Next day we were up before the sun, waiting to take a sight and hoping there would be no clouds. Taking a dawn sight is tricky and a bit uncertain, but we had to know if possible how far we had drifted during the night, or the search would be futile.

I was with Geordie, holding the stopwatch, as I told him about Kane’s query. ‘Becoming inquisitive, isn’t he?’ he commented.

‘I don’t know, it was a natural question.’

‘I’m not sorry you told the lads, by the way. Otherwise they’d be getting edgy. If you were on board a ship that suddenly started to go in circles in the middle of the Pacific you’d like to know why, wouldn’t you? But I wonder about Kane – he tied it up with Mark pretty fast.’

‘He tied it up in a natural way. Damn him, he makes a good case for himself as an innocent, doesn’t he?’ I heard the bitterness in my voice and was glad to be distracted. ‘Ah, here’s the sun.’

Geordie shot the sun and then said, ‘Well, let’s find out where we are.’ We went into the chart room and he worked out our position which he then transferred to the chart. ’We’ve drifted about seven miles in the night. There’s a set of just over half a knot to the south-east. Right, now that we know where we are we can figure out where we’re going.’

We started on the search. Geordie had the man up the foremast relieved every hour because the glare from the sea could cause eyestrain. He stationed another man in the bows with strict instructions to keep a watch dead ahead – he didn’t want Minerva to find us. That might be catastrophic.

The day was a dead loss. It had its excitements as when Minerva was sighted only to turn out to be dolphins playing over the waves, to the delight of Clare and the other landsmen. Otherwise there was nothing. We hove-to again and waited out another night.

And the next day was largely a repetition. The last leg of the search took us directly over both reported positions, and we were anxious about it because the wind had veered northerly and the waves were confused, showing white caps. In the evening we held a conference in the chart room.

‘What do you think?’ asked Campbell. He was at his most brusque and edgy.

‘We could have missed it in the last three or four hours. Those white horses didn’t make things any easier.’

Campbell thumped the table. ‘Then we do it again. Not all of it – the last bit.’ He was very dogged about it.

Geordie looked at me. ‘Tell me something; when you find Minerva what are you going to do with her?’

‘Damn it, that’s a silly question,’ I said, then immediately had second thoughts as I saw what he was getting at.

‘We’re probably within five miles of Minerva right now. You said that the conditions that created our prize nodules were local, in your estimation. What exactly did you mean by “local”?’

‘I won’t know until I find it. It could be an area of ten square miles – or it could be fifty thousand.’

‘I think you should drop your dredge around here and see what you can find. We could be right on top of your “locality”.’

I felt very foolish. In the mixture of anticipation and boredom that had gone into our two-day search so far I had actually forgotten what we were really here for – and I’d made plans for action earlier in the trip. ‘You’re right, Geordie. We’ve wasted some time and it’s my fault. Of course we can dredge and keep a lookout for Minerva at the same time.’

Campbell and Clare cheered up visibly. The prospect of doing something other than cruise gently back and forwards was enticing, and I wondered how long it would be before their fresh interest waned once again. I didn’t have any hopes of a great find.

So I started to get the winch ready for operations. The seas were choppy and flecked with white and
Esmerelda
was lurching a bit as the dredge went over the side. As we’d done the drills before things went fairly smoothly, though I’d had to take the Campbells aside with a strong suggestion that they should not appear too eager – to the others this was to be a standard research procedure. The recording echometer was registering a little under 15,000 feet.

We dredged two sites that day and five the next. On two occasions operations were interrupted when something was sighted that looked very much like a coral reef, lying some twenty feet under the water, but on both occasions this turned out to be masses of a greenish algae floating on the surface, and we had our share of false alarms when fish shoals were seen. I was kept very busy in the lab analysing the stuff we had brought up, which often included volcanic particles amongst the other material – this pleased me as it bore out some of the theories I was turning over in my mind. We recovered many nodules but test results were poor and disappointing to the others, if not to me. I hadn’t expected anything.

I showed a sheaf of papers to Campbell at breakfast, away from the crew. ‘Just the stuff you might expect from
round here. High manganese, low cobalt. In fact the cobalt is lower than usual – only .2 per cent.’

Geordie said, ‘We’ve only been dredging west of where we think Minerva is – how about a stab at the eastern side?’

I agreed and he said, ‘Right, we’ll go there today.’

There wasn’t much point in pulling the winch down and making sail for such a short trip so we motored across the few miles, starting immediately after breakfast. The sea was calm again with just the trade wind swells and no whitecaps, which would make the search easier.

It was Ian Lewis’s watch and he had given me a spell at the wheel. I wasn’t much of a practical seaman and I wanted to learn while I could, during periods of calm weather, under the watchful eyes of Ian or Geordie.

Clare was sitting talking to me. ‘Isn’t this the life,’ she said. ‘I had flying fish for breakfast this morning. Taffy saved them for me – I think he’s falling for me.’

‘Your dad isn’t enjoying it,’ I observed.

‘Poor Pop, he’s so disappointed. He’s like this on every new project though, Mike. As long as it’s going well he’s on top of the world, and when it isn’t he’s down in the dumps. I keep telling him he’ll get ulcers.’

‘Like gout, it’s supposed to be the rich man’s ailment. That should cheer him up,’ I said. ‘It’s only –‘

Danny Williams’s voice soared up from the bows, cracking with excitement.

‘Go left! Go left! Go to port!’

Someone else started shouting.

I spun the wheel desperately and
Esmerelda
heeled violently as she came round. Hanging on, I had only time to see a jumble of white waters in the sunshine, and then to my intense relief Ian was with me, taking over at the wheel. I fell away from him, cannoning into Clare who was also off balance. Shouts and the thud of bare feet told me that the whole crew was tumbling up on deck to see what was
happening. I noticed the echo sounder and in one incredible second I saw the indicator light spin round the dial. It looked as though the bottom was coming up to hit us.

Ian let
Esmerelda
continue to go about until the foaming area in the sea was well behind us, then straightened her out and the indicator light of the echo sounder spun the other way just as fast. He throttled the engine down and I took a deep breath to steady myself. Geordie came running along the deck.