The Midnight Watch (2 page)

A couple of hours later, as streaks of pale grey began to lie along the horizon and a feeble crescent moon showed itself in the eastern sky, I boarded the train out of Boston for New York. Something told me that Krupp was right: there was a good body story for me here. I felt a tingling energy in my fingers, as though they were already beginning to write it.

CHAPTER 2

Herbert Stone tapped his teeth with his fingers as if playing a small piano. He had come from his cabin to the port side of the promenade deck to take his afternoon sun sights, and been surprised to see three large, flat-topped icebergs a mile or so away across the still ocean. They were magnificent things, with lofty cliffs catching the yellows and pinks of early sunset, but Stone was worried. Only last year the
Columbia
had struck ice off Cape Race and smashed up her hull plates, and this year even more bergs had come sweeping south into the shipping lanes. There would be many more up ahead.

He lifted his sextant, put in place its shades and took two altitudes of the low sun. He then stepped into the chartroom, a small space squeezed between the captain’s cabin on one side and a bare steel bulkhead on the other, and began to work up his sights. Someone had marked on the chart the ice reported by wireless over past days, and most of it lay to the west, directly across their track. When he plotted the ship’s position he saw that the ice was only about seven hours’ steaming away. They would likely meet it during his watch later that night.

Stone walked back to the ship’s rail and looked again towards the south. The three icebergs had drifted astern but he could still see them, stately and tall and brilliantly lit. But he knew not all icebergs were like this. Some were low and grey, and tonight there would be no moon. He wondered how, during the dark hours of the midnight watch, he would able to see them.

*   *   *

The SS
Californian
was an ordinary ship, but that’s what Herbert Stone liked most about her. The glamorous new liners of White Star or Cunard were not for him; this modest vessel was good enough. She was middle-aged, middle-sized, and carried commonplace cargoes. Sometimes she also carried passengers – in nineteen old-style, oak-panelled state-rooms – but there had been no bookings for this trip. Instead she had loaded in London textiles, chemicals, machine parts, clothing and general goods, and waiting for her in Boston were a hundred thousand bushels of wheat and corn, a thousand bales of cotton, fifteen hundred tons of Santo Domingo sugar, and other assorted cargoes.

Stone had learned during his training that ships could be spiteful, dangerous things. They could part a mooring rope so that its broken end whoop-whooped through the air like a giant scythe, or take a man’s arm off by dragging him into a winch drum, or break his back by sending him sprawling down a cargo hold. But the
Californian
had done none of these. She was gentle and benign. She had four strong steel masts, and a single slender funnel that glowed salmon-pink and glossy black when the sun shone on it. She rode easy in the Atlantic swells, found her way through the thickest fogs, and her derricks never dropped their cargo. She was a vessel at ease with herself – unpretentious, steady and solid.

Stone was proud to be her second officer and each day he tried to serve his ship as best he could. He was responsible for the navigation charts, making sure they were correct and up to date, and had charge of the twelve-till-four watch. From midday until four o’clock in the afternoon, and from midnight until four o’clock in the morning, he stood watch on the bridge and had command of the ship. The twelve-till-four shift at night was properly called the middle watch, but most sailors knew it as the midnight watch and Stone liked the name: it gave a touch of magic to those four dark hours when the captain and crew slept below and he alone kept them safe.

The midnight watch required vigilance, so he tried always to get some good sleep beforehand. While other officers might visit the saloon after dinner to play cards with the off-duty engineers, or even have a shot of whisky, Stone would retire to his cabin. By eight o’clock he’d be in bed reading, and by nine he would be asleep. That gave him almost three hours’ sleep before his watch began.

But on this cold Sunday night, halfway between London and Boston, he found himself still awake at nine-thirty. He was thinking about the icebergs he’d seen. The lively bounce and throb of his bunk told him that the ship was still steaming at full speed. He thought the captain might have slowed down as darkness fell, given there was ice about, and he was worried they might keep up full speed for the whole night. Stone pictured the men crowded into cramped living quarters low in the ship’s bow – the bosun, the carpenter, the able-bodied seamen, the greasers, trimmers, firemen and donkeymen – lying in their bunks with less than half an inch of steel between their sleeping heads and the black Atlantic hissing past outside.

He flicked on his reading light and took up his book again –
Moby-Dick
, a gift from his mother. The novel soothed him. He thought no more about icebergs but instead imagined Starbuck aloft, scanning the horizon, handsome in his excellent-fitting skin, radiant with courage and much loved by a noble captain.

*   *   *

In the wireless room Cyril Evans, a bespectacled twenty-year-old with black hair pasted flat to his head with machine oil, was at work at his equipment. He loved the new technology. He’d been a star pupil at the Marconi school in London, mastering quickly the dash-dot sequences of Morse code, learning the rhythm first of each letter and then of complete words and sentences. Nowadays he even dreamt in the code.

Evans had been happy to be appointed to the
Californian
when her wireless set was installed on the previous voyage, but life on board soon became difficult. Captain Lord, on their first meeting, looked at him as if he were part of the machinery, a box with wires and dials, and had referred to the equipment as ‘an instrument for tittle-tattle and gossip’. The wireless room doubled as Cyril’s sleeping quarters, and within this confined space he worked from seven o’clock in the morning until eleven o’clock at night, seven days a week. Whenever he walked on the open deck, sailors laughed at his thin arms and thick glasses. During a lifeboat drill he had been assigned the role of panicking passenger, and when the seamen asked him to sit in the stern and look pretty, and then to put on a lady’s hat and cry for help, he tried to join in the fun, but at the end of it all he was humiliated.

He learned quickly that he was just the Marconi man and had to look after himself, but he was not entirely alone. Charlie Groves, the third officer, loved the wireless equipment too, and spoke kindly to him, and Evans made friends with Jimmy Gibson, the apprentice officer, who was the same age he was and had also once been the panicking passenger. ‘Don’t worry, Sparks,’ Gibson told him. ‘We all have our turn.’

Evans was grateful for this encouragement, but he hoped for more than graduation from his role in lifeboat drills. He had grander ambitions. He hoped he might one day be a hero, like Jack Binns, the wireless man on the White Star’s
Republic
, who only three years earlier had brought ships racing to the rescue when his own vessel had been rammed in thick fog off New York. It was Jack and his Morse key, not the sailors, who had saved all the passengers.

And this quiet Sunday night, he thought, might just be his opportunity, because a little before half past ten the deck beneath his feet became suddenly still and the usual rattle of his cabin door stopped. Something odd was happening with the ship. Evans took off his headphones and waited. Seconds later the deck began to come to life again, slowly at first, but then building up to a pounding, spasmodic thumping. It was not the usual rhythm: it was more irregular and violent. The ship’s engine, he realised, was going astern. He ran from his cabin to the deck outside and leaned over the port rail. The cold shocked him but he stayed where he was, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Sounds drifted to him from the bridge above – the bell of the engine telegraph, the captain’s voice calling, ‘Hard a-port,’ a seaman calling back the orders. Evans looked forward along the ship’s side, but could see nothing. Then he heard a low, crunching, grinding sound from below and saw large chunks of ice sliding beside the hull, riding up in high arcs, snagging rivet heads and leaving neat white scars on the black steel. He gripped the rail tighter.

Now the ship was turning sharply and slowing. As the ice moved astern it was sucked into the thrashing turbulence beneath the stern overhang. One large chunk, Evans thought, would be enough to wreck the propeller or the rudder and leave them all stranded. But moments later he heard the order ‘Stop engine’ from the bridge. The deck became still again, the sucking turbulence ceased and the
Californian
drifted onwards in silence. Soon she was back in clear water and the ice passing below slowed and thinned until one small, flat piece, winking in the reflected light of a porthole, nudged against the hull and stayed there.

The ship had stopped. Evans wondered whether she was damaged. There might be water rushing in below, and there was only one place to be if there was: at his key. He walked back to his cabin, rubbed his hands to warm them and sat at his desk. If the captain came, Evans would be ready to send out a CQD.

But nobody came. The ship did not begin to list; he heard no sounds of sailors preparing the lifeboats on the deck outside. Everything was silent and still. He sat at his equipment listening to messages until just before eleven o’clock, then he put down his headphones, took off his shoes and picked up his magazine. He was standing at his bunk when the door opened and the captain himself stepped in.

Captain Lord was a tall man and he was forced to stoop a little in the cabin. Evans waited as he surveyed the wireless set, reaching out to touch each component in turn – the Morse key, the headphones, the transformer, the magnetic detector.

‘We have run into some field ice,’ the captain said at last. ‘We turned around and got out of it, but now we have stopped for the night. You might want to use your instrument to let nearby ships know – in case one of them comes crunching up into it.’ He placed on the desk a piece of paper. ‘Our position,’ he said, and walked out.

Evans sat back down at his desk, switched on the transmitter, put on his headphones and began tapping at his key. ‘
CQ all ships CQ all ships this is MWH we are stopped and surrounded by ice —’
But he did not finish. A reply came instantly and with such power that he winced with pain and lifted his phones from his ears. Even then he could still hear the code sputtering through loud and fast: ‘
This is MGY shut up shut up shut up keep out I am busy I am working Cape Race you are jamming me
.’

Very well. Enough was enough. He had earned his pay for the day. He hung up his headphones, turned off the transmitter and lay on his bunk with his magazine. At midnight, third officer Charlie Groves would come in after his watch to get the day’s news and practise his Morse. Evans looked forward to his friend’s visits, but in less than five minutes the magazine fell to his chest and he was asleep.

*   *   *

In the final half-hour of the evening watch, standing on the
Californian
’s cold, open bridge, Charlie Groves was watching the lights of a ship that had appeared about ten miles away, coming up from the southeast. He had reported her to the captain below – a passenger steamer, he’d said, heading west – and the captain told him to keep an eye on her.

As he watched, the ship’s lights grew steadily brighter until, at twenty to midnight, most of them seemed suddenly to go out, and the ship appeared to stop. ‘Now, that is strange,’ Groves said to himself, bringing his binoculars to his eyes. When he worked for P&O he had known ships to turn off deck lights late in the evening to send passengers to bed, but it was never as dramatic and abrupt as what he’d just seen. He studied the ship carefully through his lenses but all he could see were her faint steaming lights – white lights, and perhaps a hint of red.

He was about to walk down to the chartroom to report again to the captain, but as he turned towards the stairs he saw there was no need: Captain Lord had come up to the bridge and was standing quietly at the starboard rail.

‘Is that the ship you reported to me?’ the captain asked, looking south.

‘Yes, Captain,’ Groves said, ‘although she’s stopped now.’

‘She doesn’t look like a passenger steamer. She’s not carrying enough light.’

‘She
was
carrying a lot of light,’ Groves replied, ‘but she’s put them out.’

‘She’s probably a tramp steamer,’ the captain said. ‘Stopped for the ice, just like us.’

Groves agreed: the lights did now look like those of a small steamer. But he knew what he had seen. A blaze of light. A passenger ship steaming at full speed. In any event, it didn’t much matter – passenger ship, tramp steamer or Mississippi showboat, in a few minutes his watch would be over and he would be in a warm cabin below.

*   *   *

In the
Californian
’s engine room, Ernie Gill, the newly promoted assistant donkeyman, neared the end of his own watch. He was working on a pump with the fourth engineer – there was something wrong with a valve, and the pump kicked and jumped like a rabid dog. Gill grunted and cursed, his thin flannel overalls damp with sweat. He dropped his spanner. The fourth engineer called him a fool.

Gill was pleased that in his new role he no longer had to shovel and rake coal, but the fourth engineer was taking advantage of him by giving him these extra jobs. So when his watch was at last over he walked aft along the main deck sullen and sulking. The fourth engineer had no right to talk to him in that manner. No right at all. And he shouldn’t be working so hard on a Sunday night anyway. He thought about making a complaint to the chief engineer.

It was painfully cold. In the distance he saw the lights of a ship, but lights in the dark were no concern of his. He hurried to the washroom and then to his cabin, where he undressed and lay in his bunk. But he could not sleep. The ice was grinding away at the hull right next to his head and it sounded like a barrel bumping along a road. He got up, threw a thick coat over his pyjamas and went on deck to smoke a cigarette. The captain had told him many times not to smoke on the open deck, but tonight he didn’t care.