Endangered Species

By Richard Woodman

Captain John Mackinnon and his ship, the Matthew Flinders, are embarking on their last voyage. Both endangered species, they symbolize the irreversible, quiet decline of the British merchant fleet.
But this journey to Hong Kong will prove to be anything but quiet. Internal tensions among the crew provoke unrest and lead to a navigation error, steering them right into the violent, destructive path of Typhoon David. Suddenly the crew of the Matthew Flinders are no longer fighting for their livelihood, but for their very lives.
Yet on the same seas, other lives are at stake as well. When Mackinnon feels compelled to rescue a boatload of Vietnamese refugees fleeing to Hong Kong, he sets off an explosive chain of events that will lead to mutiny, confrontation with Hong Kong authorities, and the greatest challenge of his career.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Apr 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781493081073

Richard Woodman

Richard Woodman has previously worked for The Trinity House Service. He is also the author of the Nathanial Drinkwater stories and other maritime works.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The Middle Watch

‘One bell, Sec!’

Stevenson rolled over and grunted.

‘One bell!’ The persistent Liverpudlian accent wrenched him from sleep and he sat up with the tired discipline of long practice.

‘Okay, Pritch.’ Stevenson swung his legs over the edge of the bunk. As the door curtain fluttered behind the exit of Able Seaman Pritchard, Stevenson eased his feet to the deck, feeling for his flip-flops.

At the sink he groped for his toothbrush and dashed water into his face. He jerked the sarong off, drew on underpants, shirt and shorts, combed his hair and left the cabin.

The wind of the ship’s passage ruffled his shirt as he climbed the bridge ladder. Above him soared the mute majesty of the tropical night sky, a black, velvet arch pierced with a myriad stars. He marked them with a seaman’s instinct: Canopus blazing low in the southern sky, coruscating with iridescent shots of blue and red as its burning gases were fracted by the earth’s dirt-laden atmosphere; higher up the limbs of Orion dominated the sky, Rigel cold with the blue fire of a super giant, Bellatrix white as ice and Betelgeuse red with blood on the hunter’s spear arm.

‘Morning, Chas,’ Stevenson said curtly as he crossed the bridge-wing to the dimly lit chart-room.

‘Morning, Alex.’ Charles Taylor turned and acknowledged the arrival of his relief, then resumed his review of the horizon ahead of the ship. In the chart-room Stevenson made himself a cup of tea, glanced at the log and read the Master’s night orders written in Captain Mackinnon’s elegantly archaic hand. He scribbled his initials against them, then picked up his mug of tea and re-emerged to lean on the rail alongside the Third Officer.

‘Sleep well?’ Taylor asked as he always asked, as though courtesy demanded it, at the same time drooping languidly over the teak caprail. Such dubious mannerisms tended to set him apart from his shipmates, as though he was unwilling ever to let them forget the social differences that separated them.

Even: Captain Mackinnon, Stevenson thought with a mild pucker of irritation, stood slightly in awe of Chas Taylor.

‘Not bad, thanks,’ he replied. ‘All quiet?’

Taylor straightened up, stretched and yawned, as if palpably slipping off the responsibilities of officer of the watch and emphasising his four-hour stint was now over. The product of private education, Taylor had come to sea in a misdirected quest for a genteel way of life. He was some fifty years too late and the result was a rather disdainful young man who nevertheless possessed a certain impervious superiority that neither Captain Mackinnon nor Chief Offrcer Rawlings could deflate. Indeed, such was the man’s charisma that he was regarded by them with a caution bordering on respect, despite the fact that Taylor was thirty years younger than the Captain and eighteen younger than the Chief Officer.

Stevenson found this conviction of class paradoxical. He in no wise considered himself a man of lesser competence than Taylor, but the Third Officer’s natural assumption of superiority was so easily borne that it was hard to confound. Taylor came from stock which possessed the confidence that money brings, something Stevenson had never experienced. Every fact Stevenson knew about Taylor was quietly notched a little higher than in his own case. The photograph in Taylor’s cabin showed his wife a cool, blonde young woman, with the high cheekbones and square jaw of lasting beauty, and whenever Stevenson saw the picture he felt a slight resentment; the fact Taylor was married seemed somehow to claim a pre-eminence. Inevitably it made Stevenson consider his own love affair with Cathy. Cathy was enviably lovely, but she was. not as beautiful as Caroline Taylor. It was as if the Third Mate had some sort of right to these things.

Taylor’s junior status was irrelevant, for Taylor radiated the experience of countless generations in a way that Stevenson found confusing. And, because Stevenson was a straight, almost humourless devotee to his profession, Taylor’s sardonically charming attitude abraded Stevenson’s own self-esteem at times, while at others it attracted him. This vacillation troubled Stevenson’s relationship with his younger colleague, leaving him always the clumsy loser.

‘Only seen two ships,’ Taylor remarked laconically, reporting the significant events of his watch. ‘And the Old Man turned in about an hour ago.’

‘Beautiful night,’ remarked Stevenson between sips of tea. He looked forward. The old-fashioned crutched derricks reflected faint highlights from the stars and the foremast rose like an advancing cross as the ship hissed through the calm, windless sea. Beside him Taylor yawned again.

‘You’re a romantic bastard, Alex.’

‘Thanks.’ Stevenson felt the familiar irritation, then Taylor confounded him by one of those disarming remarks of which he was occasionally capable and which Stevenson felt resentfully flattered to receive.

‘I often stand up here and wonder,’ Taylor said slowly, almost experimentally, ‘whether it is possible to define infinity on a night like this.’ He paused. Beside him Stevenson stirred into full consciousness and looked sharply at the Third Officer, to see if he was being mocked.

‘I keep thinking it should be possible to work it out; after all we’re looking at it, not just contemplating it mathematically, but actually staring at the reality. The trouble is trying to find the words to accompany the thoughts. D’you know, several times this evening I thought I had it, was convinced I was within an ace of the thing, then’ - he snapped his fingers -‘gone!’ Taylor laughed at himself; a bitter laugh, Stevenson thought suddenly, forgetting his earlier irritation. ‘And then here I am,’ Taylor went on, ‘back on the bridge of the old Matthew Flinders ploughing a furrow across the Indian Ocean.’

He looked at Stevenson and abruptly asked ‘D’you think I’m mad, Alex?’

Taylor had never previously asked him anything, and he thought the question ironic. When put on the spot, Stevenson’s seriousness became his foremost characteristic. Besides, the night was worthy of a few secrets.

‘No, you’re right,’ he said, adding with an awkward diffidence, ‘these nights are bloody romantic. I usually become convinced there is a God. Don’t have the slightest shred of doubt. I just worry for four hours about His exact composition.’

Stevenson was gratified by Taylor’s low chuckle of appreciation. ‘It’s all very poetic,’ Taylor said. ‘The trouble is it’s so bloody beautiful it almost hurts…’

The candour of this frank remark disarmed Stevenson for a moment and he lit a cigarette, recoiling from its taste. Then, recalling he was the older of the two, he asked, ‘Have you got something on your mind, Chas?’

Taylor’s silence was that of assent. After a brief pause he inquired, ‘You’re not married, are you, Alex?’

‘No.’

‘Thinking of it, are you? The photos in your cabin, I mean …’

‘I finished with Cathy the day I got orders to join this ship,’ Stevenson said with a sudden harsh edge to his voice. ‘I just like to have a bird’s picture to ogle,’ he added tritely, ineptly trying not to break the mood of intimacy that existed between them.

‘Bad for the image, eh?’ Taylor mocked. ‘Don’t want the crew to think you’re fruit?’

Stevenson grunted and drew on the cigarette. A pale orange glow suffused his even features. ‘What’s the problem then? Your marriage?’

‘Caroline,’ Taylor said slowly, as though measuring out the confidence, ‘is a natural blonde with beautiful legs and that indefinable quality of being a prize bitch.’

From forward the single clear note of the ship’s forecastle bell indicated the lookout had spotted a ship to starboard. The two officers raised their eyes, both aware that they should have seen it long before the seaman forward.

‘I’ve got her, two points to starboard.’

‘Right then, she’s all yours. Steering O-eight-nine. Should pick up Pulo Weh sometime during my forenoon watch. Good night.’

‘Good night.’

Stevenson lifted his binoculars and studied the distant, twinkling masthead lights of the approaching ship as Taylor shuffled away, the mood broken by the intrusion of duty. Stevenson thought he had gone when his voice called from the ladder: ‘Ever read Conrad?’

‘A bit;’ Stevenson replied.

‘He knew what it was like to stand a middle watch. D’you know what he said about humanity?’

‘Haven’t a clue,’ admitted Stevenson.

‘He said mankind on this earth was an unforeseen accident which did not bear close examination.’

‘Oh.’ Stevenson tried to find some relevance in the remark. ‘Something for you to chew over, old son; see you in the morning.’

It was only after Taylor had finally departed and left Second Officer Stevenson to the magnificent loneliness of the night that the latter wondered if Taylor had been less than ironic earlier, in doubting his own sanity.

The approaching ship passed two miles to starboard, heading westwards, its phosphorescent wake splashing into the bow wave of the Matthew Flinders.

Stevenson began to pace the bridge, from wing to wing, passing regularly through the wheelhouse where the dull hum of gyro-compass and radar, and the orange flicker of the automatic pilot rendered a helmsman redundant. Only the isolated lookout two hundred feet forward on the old-fashioned forecastle head maintained the vigil above decks. A few other lonely souls stood their watch in the engine-room below.

The London-born child of Scots parents, Alex Stevenson had nursed an ambition to go to sea since childhood. Characteristically he had never wavered from his intention. Up to the beginning of this present voyage he had been quite content, his master mariner’s certificate secured at last, the passport to eventual command.

But the Matthew Flinders was on no ordinary voyage; this was to be her last, for she was already consigned to breakers in the Far East, one of a last pair of cargo-liners which had once formed part of a substantial, privately owned British merchant shipping company. Relegated first to the Isle of Man registry her disinterested owners had recently flagged her out under the ensign of Panama to avoid complying with British government legislation and the supposedly ‘high’ wages demanded by British seafarers. Mercifully, for this final trip, the owners, anxious to rid themselves of their last ships, had not bothered to import a crew from Taiwan or the Philippines, but merely scooped up whatever was available on the international pool. By a perverse coincidence the complement of the Matthew Flinders was largely as it had always been, with· British seamen on deck and Chinese greasers below. Her deck officers and engineers were a handful of the company’s remaining long-term employees, hanging on in the forlorn hope of redundancy payments.

This uncertain future had contributed to Stevenson’s rupture with Cathy. Casting about for possible alternative employment he had been forced to face the fact that his country had turned its back on its maritime past; no one gave a tuppenny damn about the so-called Merchant Navy, There were, quite simply, no more ships.

Walking up and down, his bitterness grew. Others were cushioned against the inevitable. Captain Mackinnon was retiring, as was the Chief Engineer. Mr Rawlings, the Chief Officer, had some contingency plan, while Taylor’s family had money. Besides, the lovely Caroline was rumoured to be something smart in her own right in the City of London. But Stevenson, with the indigent respectability of the lower-middle class, needed his job, the only job he had ever wanted to do, the only job he had trained for. In fact it was his very way of life that was to be tom from him by the harsh facts of economic change.

Resolutely, he turned his thoughts away from such embittered contemplation. If this was to be his last voyage, or at least the last voyage before he had to hawk his skills round manning agencies, sell himself to any bidder and sail for his subsistence in ill-founded rust buckets, he wanted to enjoy it.

But he no longer had the consolation of Cathy; he had ended their affair, as he had said, when he received instructions to join the Matthew Flinders. He leaned disconsolately on the rail and reflected on the wisdom of his act, painful though it was. Taylor had spliced his life to that of the beautiful Caroline and it was clear that he was unhappy. Even so, they had been a month at sea and the sensuous warmth of the night was compelling …

He gave in to the insistent vision of Cathy in the shower, her dark hair piled on her head and her face held up to the splashing rose. He could see again her straight nose and the ever-so-slightly receding chin which threw her lower lip into pouting prominence. Hers was not the patrician beauty of Taylor’s Caroline, yet it was the flaw in her looks that gave them their special charm.

‘What are you staring at?’ he could hear her ask from beneath the hissing water, turning those level grey eyes on him lying in bed. ‘Eloquent eyes’ he had privately and poetically named her, for she seemed to say more through them than through her lips, as if the latter were maintained for purely carnal purposes.

‘You,’ he answered, suddenly embarrassed that he had spoken out loud. But it was insufficient to drive Cathy’s image from his mind. She emerged from the shower, pink and brown and deliciously shameless, bending to towel her thighs so that her breasts swung with a detached and lascivious oscillation …

Stevenson lit another cigarette and resumed his furious pacing of the bridge, silently cursing the girl.

Cathy had been the first woman with whom he had had more than the briefest of relationships and he had ditched her. She would, he guessed, probably marry a farmer and have dozens of healthy children, farmers being the very antithesis of seafarers. The thought of farming brought him back to Chas. With Cathy and people like her, the presence of mankind on the earth was scarcely ‘an unforseen accident’, but rather a preordained fruition of some cosmic purpose provided with its own internal dynamic.

‘And here I am back to God again,’ he muttered irritably to himself. Dismissing the whole train of thought he made for the compass repeater and occupied himself by taking an azimuth of Jupiter.

In his cabin below the bridge Captain Mackinnon tossed restlessly, unable to sleep. He too wished to savour this last voyage, for though he looked forward to its end, he knew that retirement, no matter how well-deserved, diminished him as a man. At that moment, and for all the succeeding moments until he handed the Matthew Flinders over to her Chinese breakers, he and he alone was responsible for the ship and her company, some thirty-six souls, as tradition had it. And he was master under God, elevated to a most culpable position, not merely responsible but answerable for many of the misdemeanours of his crew. Sometimes the burden of it weighed upon him intolerably, but he was shrewd enough to know that he would miss it.

Besides, he had a most unsailorlike affection for the ship herself, having been her very first Third Officer, sent to Belfast to join her at the builders because Mrs Dent had specifically ordered it.

‘You’ve impressed the Old Woman,’ the Marine Superintendent, Captain Shaw, had said to him, referring familiarly to the widow of the company’s founding chairman, a woman whose influence in the Eastern Steam Navigation Company remained pre-eminent. ‘She insists on you occupying the Third Mate’s berth.’

Shaw had regarded him through his rheumy eyes, his yellow face already betraying the cancer that, with the overwork of six years of war, would lay him in his grave before the maiden voyage of the new Matthew Flinders was over.

‘Don’t let the Old Woman down, laddie,’ Shaw added, repeating the nickname by which Mrs Dent was known throughout Eastern Steam.

‘I’ll do my best, sir.’

‘Aye, see that you do or I’ll have your hide.’

He had stepped happily out into Water Street, disregarding the sleeting rain driving up from the Pier Head and the restless chop of the grey Mersey beyond. He and Shelagh had high hopes now the war was over, and the approbation of the Old Woman and a berth on a brand new ship meant that they would be able to marry soon, their future secure. Britain, he had thought with the experience of war behind him, would always need her Merchant Navy.

It was odd, Mackinnon thought, how easy it was to remember these things: the elation, the rain, and Shelagh’s pleasure when he had phoned and told her he would be crossing to Belfast that night. And all because the ‘Old Woman’ approved of him.

Mackinnon’s memory flashed back to the events that had earned him the Old Woman’s good opinion.

It had been raining that black night, a stinging rain coming up astern of the convoy with a following sea that made the old Matthew Flinders roll and scend in a twisting that racked the creaking hull. The first of her name, she grossed eight thousand tons, a coal-fired steamer capable of no more than nine knots, built for profit out of the reparations greedily scooped up by Dent and his partners after the First World War. She had been obsolete when she had slid down the ways and into the grubby Tees and was over twenty years old that foul and bloody night the U-boats found her off Rockall.

‘Almost home and dry,’ Taffy Davies had said as Apprentice Mackinnon relieved him on the starboard Lewis gun at midnight and about five seconds before the first explosion. Mackinnon had still been shaking the sleep out of his weary young frame after what seemed like weeks of endless, mind-numbing watch-and-watch, four hours on and four off, with sleep in short snatches of three hours if undisturbed by the ship’s motion or the enemy. When the night split apart and the gouts of orange and yellow flame shot skywards to die to a flickering before the concussion rolled over the water towards them, he was conscious of shock, and then the t:elief of knowing it was not them.

‘Jesus!’ blasphemed Taffy as he made way for Mackinnon in the sand-bagged gun pit, ‘that’s the Patagonia.’

Mackinnon needed no further enlightenment. After days of weary plodding across the Atlantic, they knew the relative position of every ship in those four, strung-out and irregular columns; knew the dawn reshuffling that took place after the destruction of the nights as the Commodore of Convoy HX 987 rearranged his battered charges. They knew the Patagonia well, having laid ahead of her in Newport News and become friendly with her apprentices, penniless like themselves.

‘The poor bastards,’ whispered Davies as the flames were extinguished by the sea and the night was lit by the cold glare of the starshells thrown up by the questing escorts. The SS Patagonia had ceased to exist, for she had been laden with high-explosive ammunition.

‘Can you see anything?’ a voice asked, as behind the two boys the Second and Third Mates stared through their binoculars.

The adjacent ships were thrown into monochrome relief by the flares. Only a gap in the extreme starboard column attested to the missing Patagonia, a gap into which, her Aldis light flickering, the corvette Aubretia was moving. Of the U-boat which launched the attack there was no sign.

‘They won’t have known anything,’ observed the Third Mate with an exhaused sigh, and then the night blew apart again, blew up around them with a fiery savagery that seared them as a torpedo struck the Matthew Flinders. Momentarily blinded by the ‘flash of the impacting warhead, Mackinnon felt the deck beneath him rear up, throwing him against the gunshield. Its steel angle caught his shoulder with a sickening pain which brought the taste of bile into his throat as he fell to the deck.

Shakily he got to his feet. He was suddenly, inexplicably, alone.

He felt sick from the effect of the blast, but conscious that he was less frightened and more aware of his surroundings. Above the increasing roar of escaping steam he could hear the klaxon alarm, and someone shouting an unintelligible order. The angle of the deck increased sharply, then seemed to stop, and this sudden change enabled him to recover his wits. He scrambled out of the gun pit and up the tilting deck, like an animal in a flood, instinctively seeking high ground. Oddly, there was no one in the wheelhouse and he continued upwards until he came to the opposite side of the bridge where his watch mate, Apprentice Dave Kingsley, should have been.

‘Dave?’ he shouted, casting about with a sudden panic as the starshells were extinguished by the sea. The utter darkness filled him with a rank, sweating fear. Then above the venting steam he could hear orchestrated shouting.

‘The boats!’ lie cried in sudden comprehension, and half-slid, half-skidded back down the sloping bridge through the deserted wheelhouse, making a grab for the ladder rail that wrenched his shoulder again. Then he stumbled down on to the boat-deck where, in the gloom, he could see the white flash of men in singlets, the dull gleam of oilskins and the grey outline of the starboard lifeboat.

‘Is that you, Mackinnon?’ Captain Robson’s harsh voice cut through the wet night air above him. Mackinnon turned. At the head of the ladder the Master stood, the pale stripes of his pyjamas showing beneath his bridge coat. A pale square of paper fluttered from his right fist.

‘Sparks is waiting for this in the radio shack …’

Reassured that some discipline prevailed and aware that the Captain must have been in the chart-room while he scuttered foolishly about the bridge, Mackinnon ran back up the ladder and took the message form. The radio shack was abaft the tall funnel and inside, under the battery-powered emergency light, the Radio Officer was dragging on a cigarette, his headphones clamped round his balding skull and a nervous hand poised over the morse key. Without a word he tore the chit out of Mackinnon’s hand and began transmitting the fate of the SS Matthew Flinders to the outside world. Mackinnon stood for an uncertain moment, then the sparks flung off his headphones, pulled a duffle coat from a hook on the bulkhead and shoved past the apprentice.

‘Come on, she’s going!’

The ship gave another lurch. More starshell burst overhead and the crump of exploding depth charges could be heard in the distance above the shouts and the roar of the steam.

‘Come on.’

Mackinnon followed the Radio Officer. Back on the boat-deck the struggling figures were thrown into stark relief by the flares. Above their heads a white plume vented from the funnel and then a series of tremors rumbled beneath their feet and the ship suddenly fell back on an even keel.

The surface of the sea, tossing up towards them with the curl and hiss of breaking crests, was much nearer as the Matthew Flinders began to settle in the water.

The Bosun had the after end of the boat swung out and was exhorting the men to heave on the forward guy of the old-fashioned radial davits to carry the bow out over the ship’s side. The boat swung clear, hanging over the black Atlantic twenty feet below, and they began to clamber into it.

There was a terrific noise, so unfamiliar they stopped and looked at one another for a petrified instant. Then more depth charges exploded on the far side of the convoy and the black hull of a following ship steamed silently past them, her wash spreading out from her bow and striking the sides of the Matthew Flinders. Plumes of water shot vertically and were torn across the boat-deck, dousing the already rain-soaked men who swore with true, seamanlike ferocity and began again to scramble into the lifeboat.

At the same instant a starshell went out and the unexplained noise grew louder, shaking the ship.

‘Lower away there!’ yelled Captain Robson, motioning Mackinnon into the boat. A moment later the lifeboat began her jerky descent. A rising sea struck her and she was lifted bodily and swung outwards, away from the ship’s side which rose now like a black wall beside them. Then the sea fell away with a suddenness that brought Mackinnon’s stomach into his throat, the falls snapped tight and the boat whipped the length of her keel and swung inboard, striking the rusty steel topsides, her frames cracking as she bounced off with a flexing of her gunwale.

‘Lower, lower!’ Captain Robson was shouting and the boat resumed its progress until another wave caught her and, ready for it, Captain Robson roared, ‘Come up!’, and the men on the falls threw the turns off the staghorns.

The boat wallowed into the sea and the falls were unhooked. The side of the Matthew Flinders seemed immensely high, looming up into the night sky like a great cliff.

‘Christ, she’s breaking up …’

‘She’s rolling over!’

Split in two as her exploding boilers tore her apart, some quirk of the destruction wrought to her ancient fabric caused her to roll away from the boat. The men who had lowered it and should have followed down the rope ladder went with her. It was over in a matter of less than a minute.

The lifeboat was alone on the empty, heaving ocean, the centre of a small circle of black sea circumscribed by a pall of rain and spray. The crumps of the depth charges of the counter-attacking escorts seemed much farther away and the starshells finally went out.

All that remained of the ship’s company of the SS Matthew Flinders were two able seaman, the Chief Steward, three greasers, a fireman and Apprentice Mackinnon. He was sixteen years old.

He remembered few details after that nightmare evacuation of the old ship. Memory told him his exemplary conduct during those next few days had recommended him to the ‘Old Woman’ and she, after the war, had insisted he became the Third Officer of the brand new Matthew Flinders.

Now, as his thoughts came full circle and he drifted off to sleep, he felt the prickle of disappointment that his ship no longer carried apprentices. The lack of them had been the surest indication that the owners no longer considered there was a future for their ships, or cared very much. This was now proved by their voyage to the scrapyard. This, Mackinnon considered as he rolled over, was a tragic shame; true, the system had been abused to provide cheap labour and not even a war had prevented sixteen-year-old boys being exposed to its merciless rigours, but it had provided thousands of young men a chance in life …

It was history now and he was an old man approaching retirement. Slowly his brain relinquished its hold on consciousness and he drifted to sleep.

Dawn had found them quite alone on the heaving sea. The Chief Steward took nominal charge and the older of the able seamen sat aft at the helm. The rest of them huddled disconsolately on the thwarts shivering in the damp chill, for it still rained, a cold drizzle that obscured everything.

Once, and then so briefly that afterwards they could not be certain, they thought they heard the hiss of a bow wave and the grey loom of a ship, perhaps the Aubretia, sent back to quarter the wake of the convoy in search of survivors; but although they raised a shout, it ended in a senseless stream of blasphemy as the insubstantial apparition vanished.

‘It might have been a U-boat,’ said Mackinnon, asserting himself for the first time and voicing a fear which, for him, was greater than that of impending death. He was too young to imagine death might be about to claim him; the fear of imprisonment in German hands was far stronger.

But as the day wore on he learned how very easy it is to die. The fireman, shuddering uncontrollably in his singlet, was dead by noon; a greaser passed silently from them an hour later. The very ordinariness of it filled Mackinnon with dread.

It began to dawn on him that the others in the boat did not expect to survive and were incapable of exerting themselves to no purpose. After three years of war they had seen others die and there was a strange kind of comfort in numbers. The Chief Steward dished out water and biscuit, though for the most part they slumped helpless and hopeless in the wallowing boat, silently awaiting their fate.

Mackinnon had no idea how long they remained like this, for the rain swept over them for hour after dismal hour, until, as dusk overtook them, the sky began to clear. A blood-red sun sank towards the horizon.

The sunset reminded him sharply of yesterday, of the Matthew Flinders and his chums in the half-deck, of Taffy Davies and Dave Kingsley …

‘Almost home and dry,’ Taffy had said.

‘We’ve got a compass, haven’t we?’ he asked Able-Seaman Bird whose crouched figure