There was the inevitable temptation to milk the expectant quietness that settled at a moment such as this. She had sent battleships on their way, and bigger cruisers than the one before her now. However, the thrill of setting so many thousands of tons of steel sliding down into the water was the same regardless of the size of the ship.
She was breathless.
Composing herself she gripped the launch lever tightly.
“It is with immense pride and with all my heart that I name His Majesty’s Ship Polyphemus. And in launching her upon her career I wish all who sail in her good luck and cheer!”
She tugged at the launch lever.
It stuck.
In a moment Eleanor’s husband had stepped beside her, waving at the crowds and nonchalantly snapped the ‘sticky’ handle down. To all the world it would have seemed that he had simply moved beside his wife to get the best view and to savour the moment.
The bottle smashed into a thousand pieces against the flank of the cruiser.
Nothing happened.
However, this was not uncommon.
There was over eight thousand tons of deadweight sitting on the slipway and when the last blocks were hammered away inertia was governed not by the will of mere men but by the physical laws of the Universe.
Sometimes it took a second or two, on other occasions several. Ships had been known to ‘stall’ for minutes, or in extremis, hours before, with miniscule, imperceptible momentum beginning to move.
HMS Polyphemus sat in her starting blocks for one, two, three, four, five seconds by which time the launching party was beginning to get nervous.
“Shall we give her a push, my dear!” King George suggested to his Queen.
“Yes, why not!”
Their voices carried over the speakers around the Brooklyn yards and stirred a wave of clapping and cheering.
Together, the King and Queen put their hands to the cold metal of the cruiser’s bow at the very moment she began to slide.
Eleanor felt the ship moving away.
It was all she could do not to give her husband a huge hug in unlikely girlish delight; and from the broad smile on his face and the laughter in his eyes he was similarly moved. Decorum forbade such a ‘scene’ in public, more was the pity!
Slowly, slowly, then with unstoppable inevitability HMS Polyphemus slid stern first towards the waters of Wallabout Bay. It was the cue for clouds of confetti and streamers to be launched into the air. On the quarterdeck of HMS Cassandra, the destroyer’s two-inch saluting ‘pop gun’ began firing into the air. The Admiralty Dockyard Band struck up a raucous march.
‘The other thing about launching a big ship is that once it starts moving the only thing that is going to stop it is the water and hundreds of tons of chains,’ Eleanor’s husband had pronounced all those years ago when he, and she, had been unexpectedly catapulted into Buckingham Palace.
The King had put his arm about his wife’s waist, and she his; everybody was watching HMS Polyphemus so protocol and stupid conventions be damned!
The cruiser was gathering speed.
Rushing to embrace her natural environment.
She had slid at least one hundred and fifty feet by then.
Some witnesses later claimed the explosion had come from within the mid-section of the cruiser; actually, it had occurred on the slipway, beneath the shallow bulge of her starboard flank as her turbine spaces were passing above it.
There was a small bang at first; momentarily followed by a much bigger detonation which showered the workers and their families lining that side of the slipway with a blizzard of red hot shrapnel and debris.
Instantly, there was pandemonium.
The ship kept sliding, faster and faster; nothing could stop her. Not even the wrecked slipway nor the jagged crater edges over which the whole forward hull of the Polyphemus lurched and juddered as she began to topple, inexorably onto her starboard flank as she raced down to the cold waters of the East River.
The dreadful screech of rending metal, of whole compartments within the hull disintegrating, twisting, collapsing would live with those who witnessed the terrible spectacle of the cruiser slowly falling over onto its right side as she went into the water.
The most frightening thing was the speed with which the disaster had happened.
From the ship starting to move to her coming to rest, on her starboard side slowly sinking into the relatively shallow, muddy bay could not have taken more than thirty seconds. In that time over half the men onboard her – Polyphemus’s launching crew – some forty men and as many lining the slipways had been killed and perhaps two hundred others injured, many severely.
In less than a minute the cruiser’s stern had settled on the bottom, her bow and port side proud of the lapping waves.
From her vantage point in the stand behind the launching platform Victoria Watson had watched the tragedy play out with numb horror.
She had seen the King take his wife in his arms; yell at his bodyguards to: “Protect the Queen!”
And then the Royal couple had been hustled away.
Now she stared in stunned disbelief at the sinking wreck little more than four hundred yards away and knew that her life would never be the same again.
She was married to the man they would never forgive for having allowed this to happen.
It was cruel and unjust but it was the way of the World.
Her good life had just come to an end and right then it felt as if the sky was about to fall on her head.
She gasped as a sharp pain doubled her over.
Suddenly, the other wives were all around her.
“Vicky, are you all right?”
Chapter 15
Leppe Island, Montgomery County, New York
The spring floods had piled a stony beach at the northern end of the island and Abe, Kate, Tsiokwaris and his nephews had sat around an open fire eating the fish the boys had caught that afternoon and talking in low tones long into the evening. It was a special night for they all knew that tomorrow their worlds would begin to change forever.
‘Tomorrow is Empire Day. The White Man’s most holy day,’ Kate’s father had prognosticated sagely. ‘When better to begin to be invisible?’
Abe had mulled this over.
“You went very quiet, husband?” Kate asked as they picked their way back through the trees to their tent.
Other than his brother Alex, nobody knew where Abe was. The men with whom he shared lodgings in downtown Albany knew he was away until the middle of next week; they thought he had gone home to Long Island. There was no particular reason to leave for Canada now, or even in a year’s time; except that he had already lived too long in a country in which his soul and his mortal conscience would forever be unquiet.
“We can never have the life we want or deserve in this land,” he murmured, squeezing her hand. “Black Raven is right. We should go now. Not wait for another few days. We’ll only get frightened again and put it off.”
They had talked of leaving many times.
Planned for that day.
Even this time they might have lost their courage.
“Tomorrow we start our new life,” he said.
Once he was formally awarded his Diploma permitting him to practice medicine in the Colony of New York-Long Island he would be indentured to the Colonial Office for five years in payment of his tuition costs. He could be sent anywhere. In the event he obtained a post-graduate position his indentured service would simply be deferred, extended by another two years. Whereas, if he left now the Colony had no legal recourse, other than to add his name to the Colony’s ‘Draft List’ for service in the militia, and he sure as Hades was never going to go fight for the oil men trying to steal the black gold of West Texas from New Spain.