Death of a Supertanker (13 page)

By early afternoon the fog had dispersed. A falling barometer and rising wind from the north-west brought scudding clouds and frequent squalls of rain.

As the fog drifted away colour drained back into the landscape and the rocky projection that was Cape Agulhas slowly revealed itself, its tall red-and-white-ringed lighthouse tower standing up boldly against the undulations of the land behind.

With his binoculars the second officer could see a small village from which a scatter of seaside cottages stretched out towards Northumberland Point, a promontory some miles to the northeast. Closer at hand he saw groups of people and parked cars along the high ground beyond the rocks and realized they were sightseers. He took bearings of the lighthouse and Northumberland Point to fix
Ocean
Mammoth
’s position, and found she was aground just on a mile off Cape Agulhas, bows heading to the south-west. The long swells, swollen by the rising tide, were breaking heavily on the foreshore. With the wind increasing in force and backing to the south-west the sea, broken and confused, came rolling in at right angles to the swell.

Earlier the light-keeper had called
Ocean
Mammoth
on VHF to report the gale warning. Captain Crutchley had acknowledged the message with thanks, adding that the ship had already received the meteorological forecast. The light-keeper had then asked if there was anything he could do to assist. Captain Crutchley again thanked him but said he was in direct touch with the authorities concerned. He added that steps were being taken to assess the salvage problem. Once that had been done the necessary assistance would be requested.

At two-thirty the helicopter en route from Cape Town contacted
Ocean
Mammoth
by voice radio. In the ensuing exchange it was agreed that it should land at Bredasdorp until the weather moderated. Its passengers would travel down to Cape Agulhas by road to view the situation from the shore, Captain Crutchley having made it clear that the weather precluded any possibility of their coming off to the ship by boat from St Mungo Bay.

By mid-afternoon the south-westerly wind was gusting at gale force. Rain squalls so reduced visibility at times that the lighthouse became difficult to see. At a conference between Captain Crutchley and Mr McLintoch, with Jarrett and the second engineer present, the situation posed by the weather was discussed. It was agreed there was little that could be done in the ship. The chief engineer reported that boilers and machinery were so far intact. He saw no danger of losing power unless condenser intakes were damaged.

It was decided that there was no point in asking for salvage tugs to stand by during the gale, since they would be unable to do anything until it had blown itself out.

‘If it should be necessary to take off the crew, what then?’ enquired Mr McLintoch whose thoughts, reinforced by unpleasant recollections of an earlier experience, were travelling ahead of the discussion.

Speaking with calm assurance Captain Crutchley said, ‘I trust it will not come to that, Chief. But if it should, the job will probably be done by helicopters.’

The chief engineer agreed and it was decided to ask the Cape Town agents to alert Court Helicopters Ltd. – the company which specialized in supplying the offshore needs of shipping round the South African coast, including the operation of a highly efficient sea rescue service. In talking to Cape Town the Captain stressed that assistance should be available at short notice.

In Zurich, in the old house off the Seefeldstrasse, an urgent meeting was taking place in the managing-director’s office.

‘Raustadt has important news.’ The parchment folds of the chairman’s seamed face were grave. ‘I thought we should lose no time in discussing it.’

‘You’ve certainly chosen an awkward time.’ Neumann, the deputy-chairman, a fussy elderly man with a rasping voice, looked at his watch. ‘I have a luncheon appointment in five minutes.’

‘You’ll be late,’ said the chairman. ‘But you won’t mind. Now, Raustadt, tell us the news.’

‘The Cape Town agents phoned shortly before noon today…’ Raustadt paused, enjoying the drama. ‘Early this morning
Ocean
Mammoth
ran aground in thick fog.’

The deputy-chairman’s hunched shoulders opened and shut
like the wings of a large bird. He leant forward. ‘My God! Where?’

‘On Cape Agulhas.’ Raustadt looked very stern.

‘Good heavens! Well, I never.’ Neumann ran a hand across his bald head. ‘Can they get her off?’

The chairman looked up from the pad on which he was drawing geometrical shapes with a gold pencil. ‘We don’t know.’

‘The agents say she is badly holed,’ continued Raustadt. ‘She was apparently travelling at speed when she ran aground. On a rocky bottom, they say.’

‘Good heavens. But how extraordinary.’ Neumann frowned in bewilderment. ‘That huge ship – all that expensive technology. What on earth can Captain Crutchley have been doing to let such a thing happen? He has an excellent record, has he not?’

‘He has,’ said the chairman. ‘But ships do run aground in fog. Even modern ones.’

‘We have no details yet,’ said Raustadt. ‘No way of knowing how it happened.’

The deputy-chairman blinked through thick lenses. ‘What a disaster. Incredible. Can you imagine it. A three hundred and twenty thousand ton VLCC running on to the rocks at speed.’ He took a cigar from the box on the table with a wrinkled, bony hand.

Raustadt looked at the chairman, who nodded affirmatively. ‘The Cape Town agents say the meteorological broadcast to shipping at noon today warned of a gale in the Agulhas area.’

‘How would they know that if you spoke to them
before
noon?’ challenged Neumann.

‘Cape Town’s time is two hours ahead of ours.’

‘Of course, I’d forgotten that.’ He lit a match and drew on the cigar. ‘But my God! Now a gale. What a disaster. That fine …’ He coughed noisily, took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. ‘Sorry. The cigar. As I was saying … that fine ship. All that money. The insurers won’t like it, will they? Fifty-five million dollars. That should ease our loan problems.’

‘The thought had occurred to me.’ The chairman looked at Raustadt speculatively. ‘Has the ship been posted as a casualty at Lloyds?’

‘Yes, Chairman. I spoke to London – to Kostadis – immediately after the Cape Town call. He is in touch with the brokers. They will be keeping a close watch on things.’

‘Good. There isn’t much else we can do now. Just wait and hope for the best.’

The deputy-chairman stood up. ‘Well, I must be off to lunch. Thank you for bringing me in on this so soon.’ He hesitated, a hand on the door. ‘The crew? I mean, I hope they’re going to be all right. The gale, you know.’

The chairman looked up from under bushy eyebrows. ‘Of course, my dear Neumann. We all hope that.’

Jarrett and Foley had succeeded in avoiding each other most of the morning but soon after eleven o’clock, while the second officer was working at the chart-table, Jarrett came into the chartroom.

The chief officer looked at him with suspicion. ‘What’s that chart you’re working on?’

Foley went on with what he was doing. ‘Two-oh-nine-five,’ he said without turning his head. ‘Durban to Table Bay.’

‘I suppose
you
wouldn’t know where two-oh-eight-three was?’

‘I thought you might know that, Jarrett.
You
used it last.’

The chief officer stiffened and his mouth set in a tight line. It was a double insult. The second officer had never before addressed him as ‘Jarrett’. ‘Better watch it, Foley,’ he warned. ‘I’m not taking any lip from you.’

The second officer pushed the parallel rulers aside, turned slowly and stared at him. ‘Aren’t you really,’ he said. ‘You know what you can do.’

Jarrett moved closer, thought better of it and stopped. ‘If the situation wasn’t so serious I’d knock your bloody teeth down your throat.’

‘Oh, get stuffed,’ said Foley, turning his back on him.

Captain Crutchley finished reading the reports by the chief and second officers, laid them on the desk, took off his glasses and dabbed his eyes with cotton wool. He had demanded that they be written immediately because he wanted Jarrett and Foley to commit themselves while matters were still fresh in their minds. He knew from experience that given time, the benefit of hindsight and the advice of third parties, such accounts could be highly coloured.

His interviews with the two men earlier that morning had led him to expect the reports to be contradictory, but nothing like to the extent they were; each man seemed now to be striving to saddle the other with responsibility for the disaster; each was implying negligence on the part of the other; each was denying responsibility for the missing chart and other records. Captain Crutchley read the reports a second time before locking them in his safe with the logbooks and the course-recorder trace. The reports had sown grave doubts in his mind and he was much disturbed. Though he had heard rumours that these men disliked each other their behaviour was a blow to him for they had always stood high in his estimation. One of them, possibly both, had been negligent, or at least responsible for grave errors of
judgement,
but that charts and logbooks should be removed and that brother officers should turn on each other at such a time was to him indefensible. It was not in accord with the traditions of the sea; traditions which had served generations of British seamen and to which Captain Crutchley attached much importance. In the absence of the chart and other missing documents it was going to be difficult either to reconstruct an accurate picture of what had happened or apportion blame. Not that he had any doubt that as Master he was ultimately responsible in spite of the negligence of others. That, too, was a tradition of the sea.

There was much that needed explanation. The failure of the siren switch and the navigation aids. Electronic devices did fail from time to time, often through improper use, but the failures on this occasion exceeded anything in his experience, and taken
together with the missing records might be thought to suggest something more than coincidence.

His thoughts went on: there would be a preliminary enquiry followed by a court of enquiry. Since the stranding had taken place on the South African coast the proceedings would be under South African jurisdiction.

A question to which the court would certainly address itself was why the Master had not been on the bridge once the ship encountered fog. He would draw attention to his night order book and explain that the chief officer had failed to call him. But Jarrett would deny that and give the court his own account.

The more Crutchley thought about this the more worried he became. The chief officer had said, ‘You told me you had a bad headache. That you’d taken some pain-killers so that you could sleep – that you wouldn’t be coming up.’

Some time after midnight, when the headache had become unbearable and he couldn’t sleep, he had taken two of Grunde-wald’s black and red capsules. But unless the conversation
had
taken place, how did the chief officer know about the sleeping pills? The only man in the ship who might know was Figureido who could have seen the bottle in the bedside cupboard and read the injunction ‘Take two before retiring’. Could the steward have told Jarrett?

Once again the nagging doubt took hold of him. Though he had no recollection of the phone conversation was it not possible that he’d forgotten it, that drug-induced sleep had obliterated the memory? Jarrett had been so positive, insisting that Fernandez must have overheard the conversation. The chief officer would not have done that unless his story could be corroborated. Was he doing the man an injustice in disbelieving him? The more he thought about it the more uncertain and confused he became. Yet, with the ship in fog, Crutchley could not believe that he as Master would have said, ‘I’m not coming up.’

He had never lacked courage and now he faced resolutely the fact that he was in for an extremely difficult time at the enquiry. With his thoughts much on his young wife and family in Farnham he got up from the desk, went to a window and looked out on the grey wind-swept sea. The dayroom, double glazed for air-conditioning, insulated him from sounds of the rising storm but the ship was shuddering as seas broke against the hull, and leaping sheets of spray, blown by the wind, swept across the deck.

To starboard, exposed to wind and sea, Cape Agulhas and the rocky coastline west of it frothed with white water and high-thrown spray. The light was fading and fast-moving clouds chased each other to the north-east, shedding their load as they passed. He could just make out the ringed tower of the lighthouse, a forlorn barber’s pole poking into the darkened sky.

As he watched, a ball of fire flashed from its summit and he realized that the light had just been switched on. Instinctively he counted the seconds: one and – two and – three and – four and – five and – before the light flashed again. Five-second intervals. That was correct.

He looked once more along the immense sweep of the maindeck, thought of a whale stranded and dying, and felt an intolerable burden pressing upon him.

Darkness fell and shut out the land, leaving only a thin scatter of shore lights and the stabbing beam of the lighthouse. Earlier the light-keeper had called the ship by VHF and asked the Captain to speak to the marine surveyor and salvage expert who’d flown from Cape Town and were now in the signal station.

Crutchley got through and discussed with them the situation of
Ocean
Mammoth,
the tank and sea bottom soundings, the
apparent
damage, and the steps already taken to lighten the ship. They talked about the latest weather report with its forecast of gale force winds and high seas on the Agulhas Bank, and agreed that if conditions worsened fuel oil from the ship’s bunkers could be pumped overboard, forward on the windward side, to break the force of the seas.

The men ashore confirmed that nothing could be done by way of assessing the damage and considering the salvage problem until the gale had blown itself out and they were able to come on board. They expressed their sympathy with Captain Crutchley, adding rather forlornly, ‘You may rest assured, Captain, that everything possible will be done for your ship.’ Having explained that they would be back in the morning, they bade him goodnight. Not long afterwards he saw headlights probing the darkness ashore, sweeping round in a wide arc and travelling inland.

The gale mounted as the night wore on and by ten o’clock the ship’s anemometer was recording gusts close on ninety miles an hour. The wind, blowing now from west-south-west, was driving
mountainous seas before it. Little affected by the fuel oil which was swept away by wind and sea as quickly as it was discharged, they broke against the stranded ship with increasing violence. The wind brought with it squalls of rain accompanied by thunder and lightning which revealed momentarily the wildness of the storm. In the intervals of darkness, only its sound and fury remained.

Captain Crutchley stood at the wheelhouse windows staring ahead, hypnotized by the swinging arms of the wipers, the
powerful
flash of the lighthouse, and the thud and drum of seas striking the ship.

It was the after superstructure, the tower of steel rising more than a hundred feet above the water, which took the full force of the gale, the wheelhouse shaking and shuddering to its buffeting.

By midnight the storm appeared to be reaching its zenith. The stern of the ship – still afloat and bearing the burden of the after superstructure and engineroom – strained against the stranded hull and despite the clamour of wind and sea the sound of metal groaning could be heard on deck. Mr McLintoch was soon on the bridge to report to the Captain.

‘The welds on the maindeck above the transverse bulkhead between seven and eight starboard wing tanks are beginning to fracture.’ His voice, hoarse with anxiety, was raised against the noise of the storm.

Captain Crutchley received the news in silence. ‘You heard what I said. Captain?’ prompted the chief engineer.

The Captain nodded. McLintoch must not know his thoughts; that he believed the ship to be dying; that the gale had sealed her fate. Instead he said, ‘That is grave news, Chief. I take it nothing can be done.’

‘Nothing, Captain. The free floating part of the ship is being forced by wind and sea to strain against the stranded hull. The stresses are enormous.’ He stopped to shake the water from his oilskins and wipe his face.

There was no need to say more. Both men knew that VLCCs were designed as floating entities, to flex and whip in a seaway. With the forward two-thirds of the ship flooded and fast aground that was not possible.

‘What can you see on deck, Chief?’

‘It’s no more than a slight buckling on the starboard side with
hairline fractures just now, Captain, but it’s extending all the time. We can see and hear what’s happening on the maindeck, but God knows what’s going on down below. It’s there the real trouble will be brewing.’

The Captain looked at the clock on the console. ‘It’s just gone low water, Chief. A few minutes ago.’

Mr McLintoch made a sucking noise through his teeth. ‘Aye,’ he said and stared through the window. There was a flash of lightning, the sound of thunder, and he saw the seas bearing down on the ship. The lee door of the wheelhouse slid open and they heard in all its rawness the scream of the wind rising and falling as it gusted. The crewman who’d come in slid the door to. Mr McLintoch shivered. ‘If this gale continues the stresses will increase as the tide floods. God help her then,’ he said.

‘If the stern breaks away, Chief. How do you see things then?’ It was a rhetorical question, for Captain Crutchley had only too clear a picture of how he saw things then.

For a while Mr McLintoch was lost in thought. ‘Depends,’ he began cautiously. ‘Depends on the weather and the damage done when the bulkheads collapse …’ He corrected himself.
‘If
they collapse. If the transverse bulkheads between seven and eight wing tanks go, then eight will flood. If it does the bulkheads aft of that will probably go. The fore and aft bulkheads may go. Then the centreline bulkheads. One thing leads to another. One stress compounds another. In this gale …’ he hesitated again. ‘No use bluffing ourselves, Captain. In this gale I don’t see much hope for any part of the ship if she breaks.’

‘We shall see. She may not break. We must help her by assuming she will not break. The weather may moderate. We must believe it will. That, too, can help.’ Captain Crutchley spoke with almost religious fervour. ‘It is possible that we are near the end of the storm.’ He paused but when he went on the fervour had gone. Now he was matter of fact, businesslike. ‘There is one thing, Chief, which we both know. If she shows real signs of breaking we must flood the engineroom. There’s not much water under the ship aft. A fathom or two depending on the tide. We must get the stern settled on the bottom as quickly as possible if it breaks away. If it still has positive buoyance it’ll drift. God knows what would happen to it in this gale.’

Mr McLintoch’s voice took on a deep melancholy. ‘Aye, Captain. But iťs a desperate remedy. I had it in mind but didn’t
care to say so. It’s an awful thing to flood the power out of a ship.’

The Captain’s mouth tightened. ‘I know. It’s as bad as murder, Chief. But it may have to be done. We must be ready to do it at short notice.’

McLintoch sighed noisily. ‘Aye. I’ll tell Benson to prepare for that. We’ll blackout the main boiler right away and switch to the auxiliary. Make ready for getting the inspection covers off the condenser doors … aye, and slacken alternate nuts on the sea-water circulating pump casing. It’s quite a job, it is.’ He shook his head in the darkness, went through the chartroom and down the stairway to the lift.

On the Captain’s orders the signal lamp on the starboard wing was trained on deck to illuminate the area where the fractures were reported. Nothing could be seen from the bridge but the light would help the men keeping watch down there.

The wheelhouse shook, the ship shuddered as if suffering from ague and the wind screamed as Captain Crutchley slid open the port door and went out on to the bridge. It required all his strength to stand against the gale. Driving rain, cutting into his face, obscured the dark glasses so he took them off and faced the storm, waiting for the lightning. When it came he saw as a blurred picture the huge stretch of maindeck, wet and glistening, reaching out ahead of him. Walls of spray leapt into the air to starboard and were driven by the wind across the ship, foaming as they sluiced away under the long lines of piping beside the catwalk. He raised a clenched fist in the darkness. ‘For Christ’s sake stop it,’ he shouted against the storm. ‘You are killing her.’ Then he was silent, suddenly ashamed of the display of emotion, of the futility of the gesture.

‘She is dying,’ he told himself soberly as he struggled towards the wheelhouse. ‘Nothing can save her.’