What would the weather do?
I handed the bridge over to young Smit and went to my cabin, which was also the chart-room. Pinned to my table was not the chart she had been at such pains to bring me, but my own, with its complex lines and figures. For a moment I stood looking at them; within hours, would that ominous sea and sky in the south-west put them to a fiery test?
During the long watches when the weather ship had been on station in the Southern Ocean, I had plotted, on the basis of all the information I could gather, the exact course of the Waratah after she left Durban on that winter's evening of late July 1909. Side by side with her course, I had traced the nearly coincidental course of the Clan Macintyre, the last ship to speak to the Waratah a few hours before she vanished. Gridded above the two main courses I had added the tracks of the three British cruisers which had searched for her in the days immediately after her disappearance, and had struck far south-eastwards of the Cape in a competent square search on the assumption that she had broken down and been carried away towards Antarctica by the great Agulhas Current. Naval ratings had manned special crow's nests by day, and by night searchlights had swept the seas for the missing liner. I had also added the position of a liner called the Guelph off East London. On the night of the Waratah's disappearance this ship had received a garbled Morse lamp message which ended with the letters 't-a-h'. The identity of the ship which sent the message — known to be a big, fully-lighted liner on correct course for Cape Town-was never established. I had filled in, too, the track of the special search ship Sabine, a merchantman captained by a Royal Navy officer, which, after the fruitless search by the three cruisers, made a 14,000-mile, 88-day voyage through the seas and islands of Antarctica. She found — nothing. Fifteen steamers and two windjammers had been at sea between Durban and Cape Town when the Waratah vanished; their contribution to the mystery I had added in graphic form — courses, wind, storm. My father's projected track as he had flown southwards from Durban over the sea towards East London, ending at the approaches to the port, was precisely drawn in.
It was not so much upon the ships that I concentrated now. I had taken to the Southern Ocean with me in Walvis Bay volume after volume of weather statistics dating back to the beginning of the records, which was after the Waratah had vanished. I resuscitated from oblivion every winter storm of consequence for half a century. They, too, were set off in graphic form 'on my chart, and each had its own separate colour.
Of the storms in which the Waratah had disappeared there were only limited meteorological records. Yet I had painstakingly gathered information from the logs of as many ships in Cape waters at the time of the disaster as I could still obtain. I had also unearthed a copy of the official Board of Trade inquiry into the loss of the Waratah, and from micro-film records I had the day-to-day newspaper reports of witnesses at the hearing.
The inquiry itself had been singularly barren of specific information on the storm; it had concluded vaguely that it had been one ‘of exceptional violence’.
It was small wonder when Tafline came to my cabin that she should marvel that a man could spend months at sea with his only apparent companions some sterile books on meteorology; in actuality, the sifting and correlating of this huge burden of obscure, forgotten, time-sunk data had passed away my months on the weather station only too quickly. How could I explain this when she saw my Waratah chart with its 'lines and figures'; how could I explain it all to a girl whose name I then did not even know?
Dominating all the other storms was the one in which the Waratah had vanished; I outlined it in black.
Now, because of what was happening up on deck, that black-circled storm was being wrenched out of the sphere of academic doldrum to find expression in the wild waters and insane wind which would surely come. How much could I deduce from it? The official forecast I had heard earlier had spoken of a south-westerly gale off the southern Cape coast, but in winter one can count on four or five of them a month. There was no hint of anything exceptional in this one-yet.
I held myself back deliberately for a moment on the threshold of plunging into deductions from that funeral-lettered Waratah storm. She had known none of this when she had stood by the cabinet where I had carefully stowed away all my facts about the Waratah — statistics, photostats, microfilms, comments, legend, a model of the ship even. Yet with some curious perception she had gone to my photograph of the Waratah. Why? Forces? Ultra-sensitivity to the pent-up transmissions of my own mind? She had called it grief, mistakenly, but still she had been aware of something pressing. .
About a year before, when searching ashore for Waratah information, I had come across a folded sheet of notepaper in an archive. It was a lover's note, written that last sailing day from the Waratah. The very sheet of notepaper came from the ornate lounge of the Waratah itself. As I opened the note, my awareness of what I have come to call 'forces' was overwhelming. I knew what that workaday shipmaster meant when he said the Waratah had no soul. The note was signed with endearments, 'for ever and ever'. There were no proper names. What pair of lovers, I asked myself, had the Waratah separated, 'for ever and ever'? That old captain had seen the Waratah herself, not merely a sheet of notepaper, to reinforce the sort of imponderable emotions I felt at the sight and touch of the note. So strange had been his feelings that he had called his quartermaster and asked him what he thought of the Waratah. Quartermasters, especially those of half a century ago, were a breed of men not given greatly to flights of fancy. They had come up in the hard school of sail; they were tough; the sea was their life.
Looking at the pride of the Blue Anchor Line, the quartermaster replied quickly and simply, ‘I wouldn't sail in her for ten times my pay.'
Smit knocked at the door with three radio signals. He came in, glancing inquisitively at my chart. As a yachtsman, he had that indefinable feeling for sea and weather which the plain man of steam lacks.
'In for a blow, sir?'
My assessment would depend on the signals he brought. If they fitted the template of Waratah weather which lay plotted in front of me…
I shrugged before I read them.
Smit said, 'I was round this way once in early winter, and it was bad enough then, especially in a small boat. I thought my last moment had come at the sight of some of those seas.'
'It's a question of what happens to an ordinary-looking gale once it rounds the ankle of the coast,' I said. I grinned as he peeped shyly at the lines and whorls of my old storm fronts.
'Doesn't seem to be any very unusual yet,’ he replied. 'Gale warning, Force 8-40 knots.'
I knew exactly what it all looked like-on paper. I had been through it all a hundred times. But it was the clincher, those unread, apocalyptic messages Smit had brought and which I played with, which would provide the key, the dovetailing pattern, if it existed: I had sailed from Durban on what was a typical, mild winter's evening (warm enough to swim in the afternoon), no threat on the barometer, and scarcely a wind or sea worth speaking about So had Waratah. I had resurrected from oblivion the port captain's weather report of July 26th, 1909.