Down to the Sea in Ships Read Online Free PDF Page A

the storm. With the wind and the spray the rain was so hard it was also raining upwards, coming up off the sea and bouncing off the ship. The air was all water – I have never seen that again.’
    The ferocity of typhoons in the eastern seas has led some nations to conclude that the Beaufort scale is inadequate to describe them. In China and Taiwan they measure on a scale of fifteen, with three levels more severe than the Beaufort’s hurricane force twelve.
    â€˜The ship was anchored but the strength of the waves was too much. We were very close to the shore and the anchor was dragging. We had to pull up the anchor and ride it out. So the engine had to work perfectly – or . . .’
    I imagine one of the
Gerd
’s gigantic sisters. (If you walk down from the bridge to the main deck and take a turn around the ship by the time you return to the bridge you have pretty well walked a kilometre.) Picture her riding in the typhoon. It is night and she is all but helpless on her anchor chain. Each link of the chain is as thick as your thorax. The bridge is in darkness, the low glow from the computers and radar the only light. It is cool on the bridge, air-conditioned, but the Captain is sweating. Astern of the ship typhoon waves are exploding on rocks, just there in the darkness. You cannot let go of the rails which are screwed to every edge, not for a moment, or you will be thrown. The whole ship is plunging like a thing insane, rearing and plunging, rearing and plunging.
    It is hard to do the simplest thing. Using the stairs takes strength: first they lean under you, and your heavy legs seem stuck to them, though you are trying to descend. Then they topple forward as if trying to hurl you off.
    â€˜How I describe it is – it is not hard to screw a nut on to a bolt. But when you have not slept for three days, and the engine room is flying around in the swells, everything is tilting twenty degrees one way and twenty degrees the other, and you have not eaten properly, and if you don’t hold on you fall, and it is very dangerous in the engine room, and now you must put a nut on to a bolt – this is not so easy.’
    Rohan is a young man with an infectious smile. Most of the work in the engine room is much more difficult than screwing a nut to a bolt.
    â€˜The engine worked,’ he says.
    An extraordinary story of a ship in a storm – so small were the odds of it ever being told – is the tale of the
Indian Empire
, which left Newcastle, New South Wales, on 18 July 1895 under the command of one Captain Johnson, with a cargo of coal for Peru. August the tenth finds them in mid-Pacific with a northerly gale worsening and the
Indian Empire
awash. The sea is huge and terrifying, the tops of the waves a white welter high above the deck. Just after midnight she is struck by a monster sea astern which rolls and pitches her so steeply down the sailors think she has begun her last dive. Her bows surface but the coal has moved, tumbling into a heap; the lee (sheltered) side of the deck is now twelve feet under the water. If the hatch covers fail she must sink in moments, but they hold. The hull, which is iron, is still sound.
    Dawn came up to reveal three of her four lifeboats gone, the fo’c’sle and the deck house smashed, and the galley, lamp locker and paint store washed away. The lee side was badly damaged and all the navigational equipment was gone, along with all the men’s clothes and belongings. By a miracle the carpenter’s tools remained to them.
    Captain George Clark heard this story from a survivor, who later became Captain Simpson, and was at the time third mate on the
Indian Empire
. In his account Captain Clark now writes: ‘Then began a fight which was only won through sheer courage and tenacity.’ Captain Clark published his story in 1975, but he used the understatement of another era.
    First, all twenty-eight hands went below, via a ventilator cowl,