In Hazard (7 page)

Mr. Foster was in there with them.

Captain Edwardes had been on the bridge all day: now the Mate was there to relieve him, he felt it was time to see personally how things were getting on elsewhere. The barometer had fallen to 26.99. So low a reading had never before been recorded for certain at sea. The dynamics of such a depression were beyond computation. Precedents, book-knowledge, experience—they were no longer a guide. The air might now be expected to perform feats no living sailor had had to face before.

Leaving the Mate in charge on deck, he made his way to the engine-room.

It was dark, the engineers doing their work by flash-lamps. The broken skylight had been barricaded, but spray still swept through it. The machinery groaned, all its bearings lying at unaccustomed angles. Chinese greasers, themselves greased, slipped about among it like muddy fish. On a little iron platform beside the telegraph the captain found Mr. MacDonald, his wise old face and grey moustaches dripping with oil and water. He was bitter with complaints: his machinery was not designed to work at an angle like that, and the skylight should have been battened down while it was still possible.

The second engineer, a red-haired Scotsman with a pasty white face, was on an everlasting round, reading steam-pressures and gauges of all kinds.

The third—a perky, opinionated little chap with the fixed expression of a frog, and the fourth (Gaston) were by the chief. They agreed it was doubtful how much longer engines, and men, could work under those conditions. For God's sake, couldn't the Deck do something about it?

“You're the only ones who can do anything about it,” said the captain. “Your first duty is to keep up main steam. Well, keep up main steam and don't worry about the Deck. We must be near the centre now: in a few hours the worst will be over. That's not long to hold out. If you keep up steam we'll be all right—there's no damage done. Keep the pumps going in No. 2 hold and No. 6: then she'll right herself when the lull comes, and we can get her under control again and heave-to comfortable for the next blast. Fill No. 2 port ballast-tank—that'll help to right her. You can't steer and you can't pump without steam—so keep up main steam, whatever happens. It's not long now.”

Well, the Deck knew. If the central lull might really be expected any minute, there was a chance of the engines holding out. Gaston, moving away to get the ballast-tank filled, was heartened. Nothing desperate had happened yet; and they were good engines. They had been working, in spite of the list, for over four hours without anything smashing. He peered into the stokehold: no trouble with the fires. The wind was not interfering with the funnel-draught seriously: at least, not more than the revolving fans, with their forced draught from below, could cope with. The fuel-pumps were working smoothly.

Only Mr. MacDonald was not heartened. He was old—contest had no call for him. Doubt meant foreboding, not excitement. He was old, and he liked certainty, reasonable conditions under which to render reasonable service. Moreover, an engineer comes to feel the stresses in big engines as if those engines were his body. To someone else the grinding of those bearings was a thing outside; but Mr. MacDonald ached with it, as if in his own joints.

Captain Edwardes, in spite of his tubby shape, swerved about these strange places with all a seaman's agility—that a seaman does not lose, at any age, till senility actually cripples him. He did not talk to the Chinese as he had talked to the officers; but they stole glances at him. He looked a very happy man: anyone could see, by looking at him, that everything was going all right. He entered the stokehold, and stood for a minute in the doorway, the light of the fires showing the immense secret pleasure in his face.

Then he left, to return on deck. It was as dark, by now, on deck, as it was below.

Coming out there into the blackness the blast hit him in the mouth, stopping his breath. He tried to gasp, but he could not: something pungent had filled his lungs, so that they retched and shuddered in the attempt to breathe. The wind was wrapping it round him in hot, greasy blasts. His unseeing eyes poured with water, smarted as in mustard-gas. He must be in a cloud of dense smoke: but he could not see it, of course—the night could be no darker than it was anyhow. He had no idea where it came from: possibly the fiddley. The thing to do now was to find his way to the Bridge—if his lungs held out. Keeping his head with an effort of will, he began to feel his way along, holding his breath (what little breath he had), resisting the dangerous temptation to hurry.

Down below, they had no more idea than the captain had, what had happened; though there too it was plain enough something was wrong. Just as he left, they heard a pop from the stokehold. A super-heat element had gone, thought Mr. MacDonald: nothing serious. But the next moment the firemen came out from the stokehold like bolted rabbits. Wisely, too: for steam was escaping, they said (steam at 200 lbs. pressure to the inch, heated to 600° Fahrenheit). No time to see where the leak was—only time to get out: for in thirty seconds the stokehold was uninhabitable.

Meanwhile, in the engine-room, you could see on the gauges the pressure of main steam dropping back, dropping back. What had gone? A mere super-heat element would not give an escape like that. Nor was there any way of finding out. A naked man can move without discomfort in air heated to temperatures above boiling-point, provided the air is perfectly dry, because the rapid evaporation of sweat keeps him cool. But if there is the slightest trace of moisture in the air, retarding that evaporation, it would kill him at once. Any considerable amount of steam would kill him at half the temperature of dry air. So imagine that stokehold, full of steam heated four hundred degrees above boiling-point! If you had ventured in, you would have been scalded to death at once; and then would probably have burst, after a few minutes.

Captain Edwardes found his way to the bridge, the smoke following him in eddies. Mr. Buxton was still there, of course. He had noticed the smoke; but could no more explain it than the captain could. Some trick of the wind, that blew it down on deck and perhaps ... but that could hardly account for so much. They strained their eyes into the darkness till their eyes ached. But their eyes could not help them.

The roar of the storm was now so dense, so uniform, as to be the equivalent of a deep silence, in the way it wiped out all ordinary sound. You could not tell whether it was outside or inside you, like the pain in a deaf man's ears.

A message came up from the engine-room that something had gone: steam-pressure was dropping back.

As the pressure dropped back, of course, all the remaining apparatus that worked by steam began to fail. The pumps grew languid, stopped. The dynamos slowed down. The fans, which supplied the forced draught to the furnaces, stopped. When the fans stopped, the fires began to blow back, with explosions that burst open the furnace doors, and lit the inky engine-room with flashes of flame like lightning. The escaping steam had by this time cooled enough for it to be possible to enter parts at least of the stokehold: but the flames from the furnaces had taken its place as prevention. At each blow-back a tongue of fire thirty feet long would shoot out of the open fire-door.

Captain Edwardes now received a message that main-steam had dropped to a point where the pumps had stopped, the fans had stopped, the dynamo was stopping: and the furnaces blowing back. It was eight o'clock.

But even if the fans had stopped, he considered, the funnel should at least give sufficient draught for the furnaces to function, though not efficiently. They ought not to be blowing back, just because the fans had stopped. Captain Edwardes and Mr. Buxton, through rifts in the spray, played electric torches on the smoke, trying to trace its origin. It must be coming from the
base
of the funnel.

It seemed to come from the base of the funnel, and must hide the whole length of the funnel within its cloud: for no funnel could be seen.

It was with a frightful sinking of the heart that Edwardes and Buxton together compelled themselves to believe what they were without doubt seeing. The smoke was rolling from a great oval hole in the boat-deck. The funnel was gone: must have gone overboard an hour before: yet such was the storm that Mr. Buxton, on the bridge, had neither seen nor heard it go!

Nor had it just crashed over the side: it had been lifted clear: for the life-boat to leeward of it was untouched.

That funnel, guyed to stand a lateral pressure of a hundred tons! A hurricane-wind, at 75 m.p.h., would exert a pressure on it of fifteen tons. But the pressure exerted by air (leaving humidity out of account) increases according to the square of its velocity: the pressure of a wind at 200 m.p.h. therefore, would be roughly seven times as great. And that would mean a total of ... but you can work that out for yourself, as Captain Edwardes did, in his head, while Mr. Buxton ran into the engine room yelling “The funnel's gone! The funnel's gone!” like a maniac.

The steam-whistle-pipe was bracketed to the funnel: so when the funnel went, the whistle-pipe would go with it. Hence the escape of steam—from the broken pipe. That much was clear to every engineer the moment they heard the shocking news.

Now there was an emergency cock, for shutting off steam to the whistle: and there were two ways of getting at it. One was on the boat-deck, just to windward of where the funnel had been. But this one, being out of their province, they hardly gave a thought to; except to presume it was impossible to move on deck at all in these conditions. Looking back, one can at least say this: if they had drawn the captain's attention to it, a deck officer would have found some means of getting there: though he would likely have gone down the funnel-hole into the smoke-box, in the attempt, when another one would have tried his luck.

The other approach to this cock was on top of the boilers, close to the actual break.

This was the only one they thought about. But how to get to it? Being near the break, it would still be defended by hot steam. Nor, with the furnaces blowing back, could you get near the boilers at all.

An engineer's first duty (even without the captain's express orders) is to keep up main steam at all costs. But the furnaces were blowing back; and when they blew back, several of them altogether blew out, leaving hot oil squirting out of their nipples, running out of the fire-doors onto the stokehold floor. Mr. MacDonald's first instinct was that they must be re-lit. He and the Second were standing at the stokehold door, as close as they dared, when the furnace nearest to the door blew out like this.

“Heh, a torch!” yelled Mr. MacDonald: “Relight the aft-centre furnace!”

A Chinese fireman, dripping wet, slipped by them, drew the torch from its container, lit it at the next fire, and thrust it into the oven-like hollow of the extinguished furnace.

There was an explosion, blasting the furnace door clean off. For a moment the air was all flame, in which the only black thing was the Chinaman, in the heart of it, his arms up to guard his face. It licked both engineers, singeing their very skin. They heard the Chinaman screech. Then blackness; so black indeed that MacDonald and Soutar stood dazed, lights still flashing in their strained eyes.

Something was crawling between MacDonald's legs, coming out of that stokehold. He grabbed it, terrified—to find the fireman.

“Are you hurt?” cried Mr. MacDonald.

“My belong velly allight,” said the Chinaman, quietly.

At that moment Mr. MacDonald found it was necessary for him to go to his room, to change his clothes: so he went, leaving Soutar in charge.

As soon as the chief was gone, Soutar called Gaston.

“We got to get at that leak, and turn off the cock,” he said.

“Aye,” said Gaston: “But we can't do it with the fires blowing like this.”

“Then we must put them out,” said Soutar: “put some of them out, so we can get to the boilers.”

Now Gaston had noticed that the flames did not lick the floor: at their ends, they curled up instead. So Soutar and Gaston each took a broom handle, and lying flat on their faces they crawled into the stokehold—
beneath
the flames, like chops under a gas-grill. Then, reaching up with the broom handles, they contrived to turn off the fuel-cock of one furnace after another, their faces in the hot oil, their backs scorched with the flames. Thus they were able to get almost to the boilers. But one furnace defeated them. It was a double arrangement —two furnaces with a single combustion-chamber. The after one they extinguished all right: but the forward one continued to blow back through it, and they could not get round to turn off the cock of that one too.

There was only one thing to be done: they must turn off the fuel-oil at the main supply. That meant extinguishing everything. Nor would it be easy, once the furnaces were cold, to light them again, with no funnel and no forced draught.

Not only would steam be gone—the fires would be out too.

Yet it seemed inevitable. Until the leak was checked, the fires could not raise steam, they were only a danger. The first thing was to check the leak. Once the escaping steam was turned off, the problem of re-lighting the furnaces could be reconsidered.

The chief being away, Mr. Soutar, on his own responsibility, turned off the fuel, extinguishing everything. It was ten o'clock now: less than three hours after the captain's exhortation to keep up steam at all costs: and now the steam was gone, the fires were out.

By ten o'clock, then, the “Archimedes” was totally dead. Everything about her worked by steam or by electricity—so little, on a modern ship, is left to man-power. There being no steam, there was also no electricity. She was dark everywhere, but for the pin-points of a few electric torches and oil-lamps. Water still poured down her gaping fore-hatch—but the pumps were perforce idle. The wireless apparatus, being dependent on main electricity, was dumb. Her propeller was still; her rudder immovable. She was dead, as a log is dead, rolling in the sea; she was not a ship any more. She was full of men, of course; but there was no work for them to do, because ships having once discarded man's strength, cannot fall back on that strength in an emergency.