1

Captain William Ebbs, MBE, Master of the Pole Star Line freighter Martin Luther, looked gloomily through the rain into the lower windows of his Company’s office in Leadenhall Street. They were bright with shiny models of liners, sliced miniature cabins, coloured photographs of bronzing girls leaping for deck quoits, and sunny posters beckoning bronchitic Englishmen Come to Australia! – a cheerful picture of ship-board life which always upset him. So did the office itself, where every Captain was summoned in the fresh insignificance of his shore-going clothes, to be bullied by pale clerks or girlish secretaries and asked fogging questions about storm damage, sick seamen, and condemned stores reported and forgotten long ago in the voyage. These official visits had for many years seemed to Ebbs the severest penalties of command; but his present arrival was more heavily overshadowed by the certainty that he had come ashore to be sacked.

Ebbs was a tall, bony, mild-eyed man with fussy hands and awkward feet, a distortion of the conventional image of a ship’s Captain, who now bore his authority with the weary air of an underpaid schoolmaster on the last day of term. As he entered the building he respectfully removed his weeping trilby, misshapen through long stowage in sea air and nibbled by a hundred insects unknown in English wardrobes, and revealed under his mackintosh a brown tweed suit that had apparently been used for storing potatoes.

‘But Sir Angus was expecting you all the afternoon, Captain!’ said the girl inside, as he announced himself.

‘I’m afraid I was delayed at the dock. How is he?’ he added as though asking if the blade were sharp.

‘He seems rather out of sorts today, sir.’

Speculating briskly on the possibilities of shore employment, Ebbs followed her to the room where the Chairman of the Line sat among the teak and traditions of his former ships.

The Pole Star Company was founded in the 1850s by a red-bearded Orkney sea-captain called Andrew McWhirrey, who had roared his way around the China coast for forty years and by not troubling overmuch about working men and ships to death sailed into a fortune. He was a pious sailor, who screwed his personal indulgence down to a pipeful of tobacco at sunset and carried a Bible under his arm like a telescope. ‘The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few!’ he would shout at an idle deckhand, kicking him headlong into the scuppers; ‘Abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul!’ he could roar at a drunken bos’n, knocking him over the poop rail. Drinking and gambling were forbidden in his ship, and every Sunday all hands were ordered aft for Church; he had a fine voice for reading prayers, and it was said that no one could take a better burial at sea.

The present head of the Line was an attenuated form of old Andrew, whose portrait stared down with a salty eye from the wall. The fiery hair was reduced to a pair of fuzzy hedges on a pink scalp, the eyes that once split horizons were diluted with spectacles, and the voice that roared bloody threats into the fo’c’sle modulated politely for the telephone. But Angus McWhirrey was as tough a shipowner as his great-grandfather. As he could no longer use a belaying-pin or his boots he subjected his subordinates with daily lashes of confidential memoranda, which vetoed promotion and kept men he disliked in the Company’s outdated tramps until they were overtaken by retirement or heat-stroke.

For some seconds McWhirrey looked at Ebbs in the way his ancestor used to inspect errant members of the crew while deciding whether to flog them at the main-mast or blacken their faces with boiling pitch.

‘Sit down, Captain,’ he said quietly.

Ebbs obediently took the edge of a chair.

‘Your report from Aden,’ McWhirrey went on, ‘contains many interesting passages. I am particularly struck by your remark…’ He found his place on the flimsy. ‘“The Martin Luther is no longer fit for the conveyance of freight, animals, or sailors, and I recommend that she be scrapped, scuttled, or when next in Australia presented to the Government for the detonation of atomic bombs.”’ He looked up. ‘Would you care to expand that, Captain? Just take your time. I have the whole afternoon to listen to anyone who knows more about the shipping business than myself.’

Ebbs felt the rain on his collar begin to soak down his neck, and said nothing.

For five years he had held impatient command of the Martin Luther, a long, low, hag of a ship creaking herself to a standstill across the oceans of the world. He had dutifully suffered her uncertain refrigeration that left the food suddenly rotten and rancid a week out of port; the electric light that dimmed and faltered nightly; the condensation that streamed down the cabin bulkheads and the cockroaches which paraded up them; the bewildering steering engine that set the ship cutting perilous circles in Sydney harbour; and the crew of malcontents, refused by a dozen masters of better vessels, who came every morning truculently to the bridge and generally ended their shore-leave in handcuffs. But the complaints that came hotly from his pen, kennelled in his cabin in the detachment of another hemisphere, froze and perished in the London air: he knew that the Pole Star Line expected its captains to fret in honourable silence.

‘I was perhaps a little overwrought,’ he murmured hopefully. ‘The heat, Sir Angus… ’

‘We do not expect our masters, who are in charge of lives and ships in tropical waters, to be affected by the heat like girl guides on a picnic.’

Ebbs rose. He could at least take his dismissal like a master mariner of the British Merchant Marine.

‘Sir Angus,’ he said with dignity. ‘I have given twenty-five years of my life to this Company – since I was a cadet of sixteen, and in a far better ship than the Martin Luther I may say. I have always done my duty strictly in the Company’s interests, as my father and my grandfather did before me. I had hoped that in time virtue would not have to be its own reward, but I see that I was mistaken. As you no longer require my services, I will say good day to you, sir.’ He replaced his hat with modest defiance. ‘I am now going out to find myself a job. What or where, I have not the slightest idea, but at least it will be a change from the Pole Star Company. Who, I might tell you, Sir Angus,’ he continued, feeling a little alarmed at himself, ‘are the biggest bunch of robbers afloat since Captain Kidd. Good afternoon!’

‘Captain Ebbs,’ McWhirrey said patiently. ‘You sometimes appear to be a bloody fool.’

Ebbs paused.

‘It’s not a question of dismissing you. I asked you here to promote you.’ He pointed with his pencil to a rack on the wall like a train indicator, which reproduced the daily position of the Pole Star fleet. In one column were the fast white liners, which inherited their titles like aristocrats, enjoyed launchings like fashionable weddings, and had their movements recorded below the stock market in The Times; in the other, the fifty hardworked unknown cargo boats, that crept from British ports with ensigns humbled to their big sisters to lose themselves for months at a time among the sweaty harbours of the Java Sea, the Persian Gulf, or the Queensland coast. ‘You knew Captain Buckle was taken ill?’

Ebbs stared at him.

‘Collapsed on the bus yesterday. A great pity, of course. Nevertheless, his ship still has to sail for Sydney on Monday. And we haven’t a relief. We are therefore appointing you to the Charlemagne, Captain.’

‘But she’s a passenger ship!’

‘So I was aware when my wife launched her.’

Ebbs struggled for coherence, swallowed, and stopped. Instead he blew his nose. He often did so to make a point, seize time to think, or relieve emotion.

‘When can you go aboard?’ Sir Angus asked.

‘Tonight – any time – this minute, if necessary.’

‘Tomorrow morning will be soon enough.’ McWhirrey got up and paced thoughtfully across floorboards once trodden by a generation of angry shipmasters. ‘Captain Ebbs, what makes you think we people in the office know nothing at all that goes on at sea? Of course the Luther’s a bad ship. That’s precisely why we kept you there. I’m not in the habit of handing out bouquets, but you made a good job of her – in your own way. At least you kept the vessel going and the crew alive, which is something of an achievement in the Luther. You must have more confidence in yourself, man! You’re not a fourth mate any more. And try not to be so infernally fussy. It’ll only upset your new officers.’

‘Fussy? Me fussy, sir?’

‘I must make it quite clear that this new appointment is probationary. I gather Buckle’s unlikely to return to sea. If you’re a success we may therefore consider a permanency, despite your views on the company that pays you – ’

‘I meant it only…only as a joke.’ Ebbs tried to smile.

‘No doubt. Most amusing. With ordinary luck, and if you find your feet early enough, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make a perfectly good Captain in the Charlemagne. But if you’re not a success – back to the Martin Luther. You understand?’

Ebbs nodded.

‘Very well. Then there seems nothing more for me to do except congratulate you on behalf of the directors. And of course wish you a most pleasant voyage.’

2

In the Royal Navy a new Captain enjoys a stimulating welcome to his ship in a ceremony shrill with bo’s’n’s pipes and aflutter with salutes; but in the Merchant Service – even in such a courtly section of it as the Pole Star Line – his arrival is as unexciting as the appearance of a new stationmaster.

Early the next morning Ebbs arrived at Tilbury and stood on the quay, anonymous in his mackintosh, looking at the chilly white sides of the Charlemagne with the excitement of a cadet spotting his first ship. It had been his ambition to command a passenger liner since he had curled in his hammock as an unpleasantly spotty adolescent in the training vessel Worcester. Even his first sickly voyage and his first seagoing Captain – a booming six-footer who made his crew feel that the arrival of the Day of Judgement would now be something of an anticlimax – had not quenched his confidence of ascending with maturity to the bridge of a mail steamer. At twenty he had excitedly found himself appointed Third Mate of a Pole Star Liner, and as he was a thoughtful young man who smuggled aboard books on training the mind instead of pornography he drew up a secret scheme to lead him to the comfort of a captain’s cabin. He would do all the unsavoury tasks like checking the lifeboats and inspecting the bilge pumps, and report them to the Chief Officer as completed; he would ballast his slight sea-going experience with heavy reading from the Manual of Seamanship; and he would watch constantly for irregularities in the ship’s structure and routine, informing the Captain while he took his daily walk alone before breakfast. This system led to Ebbs being thrown out of the ship at the end of the voyage, but discouragement settled on him only as he began to see the years repel his goal: from Third Mate in a ship carrying a dozen passengers he was promoted to Second Officer in another with only three, to Chief Officer in a meat ship with no passengers at all, and lastly to be Captain of the Martin Luther, where his ambitions rapidly withered in her hot hull to aspiring command of any vessel with predictable steering.

Ebbs rapidly climbed the long gangway to the Charlemagne’s after-deck.

‘Good morning,’ he said to the fat Quartermaster at the top. ‘I’m the Captain.’

‘No you ain’t,’ he said guardedly. ‘The Captain’s sick.’

‘The new Captain,’ Ebbs explained.

The man awarded him a sluggish salute.

‘Is the Chief Officer aboard?’

The Quartermaster screwed up his eyes. ‘Chief Officer, sir? No, sir. Not on board, sir. On leave.’

‘Well, how about the Second Officer?’

‘Ah, I know where he is. Ashore at the dentist’s. The Purser’s with the Customs, the Chief Steward’s down at the catering department, the Doctor don’t generally show up till sailing day, and the Chief Engineer’s turned in with a bad cold. Orders not to be disturbed, sir.’

‘Who’s keeping ship?’ Ebbs said sharply.

‘The Fourth, sir. Down the bottom of Number One Hold.’

‘Oh, very well, very well! You stay here and see my gear aboard. As I’m obliged to conduct myself to my quarters, I shall do so.’

‘Sure you can find the way, sir?’

‘To the sailor all ships are the same, Quartermaster,’ Ebbs told him solemnly. ‘They float on the water, they contain machinery, they feed you and sleep you. It is only the people inside them who differ. Kindly remember that.’

He strode off forward, gripping his trilby, his mackintosh flapping violently round his legs in the cold wind lightly loaded with snow that was blowing off the Estuary.

The Charlemagne, which was known to all British seafarers as the Charley Mange, was one of the smaller Pole Star Liners. She was designed for six hundred passengers in the modern tradition of painstakingly flouting as many of the conventions of naval architecture as possible. Nothing could be done to the shape of her hull, for the Cutty Sark’s has yet to be bettered; but the funnels that in the ’thirties numerically indicated a ship’s vigour were swept into one truncated stack, the weary ventilators were cleared from her decks, and the masts reduced to a single spike above the bridge. Her first-class saloons repeated the modern idiom by assuming the ocean to be something shameful, to be hidden away from the passengers as much as possible, and had been decorated by an amiable young man who was hairy with tweed and rough with corduroy and had been no further to sea than the balcony of The Prospect of Whitby. She also offered tourist-class accommodation, found at the bottom of a narrow companionway leading towards the stern. The descent of these stairs had the same discouraging effect on a passenger seeking his cabin as a climb to the gallery in a London theatre: the pastel shades gradually hardened, the springy decking underfoot turned into ringing linoleum, the lights stared disagreeably through thick plain glass, and the sea breezes carefully directed by the designers into the first class staterooms were replaced by the alternate smells of hot oil from the engine-room and hot fat from the galley.

Ebbs distributed glares at the cigarette packets, scraps of newspaper, spent matches, and empty beer bottles scattered everywhere by the dockers, giving the decks the look of a football stand on a Saturday night. He had a sharp eye for untidiness beyond the blind spot of himself, and was already composing orders for cleaning up his ship when he reached the door labelled with brass dignity CAPTAIN.

He crossed the storm-step, and looked round his new apartments. In the Martin Luther he had occupied a green-painted steel nook between the gyro compass and the officers’ oilskin locker, but command of the Charlemagne awarded him a day-cabin that was agreeably lined with polished wood and deep carpet, and would have comfortably accommodated the whole of his former crew. Remembering he was stepping into a sick man’s home he abruptly took on an expression of reverence; but this dissolved as he stepped through to his night-cabin and found himself provided with a double bed under a pink silk counterpane. He bounced on this several times with satisfaction, then went into the bathroom and playfully tried all the taps. Returning to the day-cabin, he stood in the middle of the deck with his hands clasped behind him and jauntily inspected the furniture. The Company had designed the cabin firstly for the entertainment of passengers, making it resemble the tea lounge of a residential hotel. Apart from a desk the size of McWhirrey’s, there were two pink sofas, several pink-and-gold easy chairs and matching tables, some pink-shaded lamps, three clocks with pink faces, pink-flowered curtains on the scuttles, pink-framed pictures on the bulkheads, and an open hearth in which a pair of incombustible logs smouldered in a permanent pink electric glow. In one corner was a pink-and-gold cabinet Ebbs took for a wardrobe, which he opened and found full of glasses, bottles, and cocktail shakers. He suddenly began to laugh: after his daily wrestle for comfort with the Martin Luther this crowning luxury glittered with ridicule.

He heard a cough behind him.

‘Ah, Purser!’ Ebbs recognised the white bands on his visitor’s cuff.

‘Good morning, sir. My name is Prittlewell. Herbert Prittlewell. I hope the cabin is satisfactory?’

‘Perfectly, thank you.’

‘I had your predecessor’s gear removed as soon as I heard of his indisposition, sir.’

‘Very sad, very sad,’ Ebbs said, becoming solemn again. ‘I have – ah, of course, sent some flowers and grapes and so forth.’

‘I’m sure you have, sir.’

Prittlewell looked at Ebbs shrewdly. As the Charlemagne’s hotel manager he spent his life assessing people, separating the ones who were genuinely important, wealthy, honest, or married from those taking advantage of the isolation of the sea to pretend they were. He was a tall grey handsome man with a monocle, like a cartoon Admiral, and he had a graceful manner that might have flowered first in Dartmouth, an older public school, or at least South Kensington. But Prittlewell had been to none of these places. He had begun as a fourteen-year-old bell-boy aboard a Pole Star liner, where he found that packages of soap, butter, tea, and cutlery could be safely smuggled ashore in a gutted copy of a Mission Bible and sold handsomely to the neighbours in his native Stepney. This spirit had quickly projected him through the lower ranks of stewards, but he soon became dissatisfied with such trivial scrounging and set himself to acquire book-keeping, good manners, and a wardroom accent, in order to achieve control of the dozen silent percentages and score of unmentioned favours that bring power and profit to the purser of a large liner.

‘I’ve brought your own gear up, sir,’ he said, as two stewards struggled in with the loaf-shaped leather trunk and dozen paper parcels in which Ebbs moved his possessions.

‘Thank you, Purser.’

‘This is your first command of a passenger ship, I believe, sir?’ Prittlewell had speculated more sharply than anyone on board about Ebbs’ accession to the Charlemagne, as his income depended largely on keeping the Captain’s eyes from his account books.

‘I really can’t see why that is of any importance,’ Ebbs told him. ‘To the sailor all ships are the same. They float on the water, they contain machinery, they feed you and sleep you. It is only the people inside them who matter. I should like you to remember that, please.’

‘Certainly, sir.’

Ebbs sat down in his pink desk chair. ‘I gather we have a full ship for the voyage?’

‘Yes, sir. Not a spare shed.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘No unoccupied cabins, sir. Perhaps you would like to see the passenger list?’

‘Ah, thank you!’ Ebbs eagerly took a bundle of typewritten flimsy. ‘Nothing like starting work at once, eh? Well, well!’ he murmured, flicking over the smudgy sheets. ‘Remarkable, isn’t it? Here are these people, whom I couldn’t tell from Adam and Eve, and by the end of the voyage we’ll all be firm friends and know each other inside out.’

‘Most remarkable, sir.’

‘If you will kindly give me half an hour,’ Ebbs went on, ‘I shall prepare a list of people I wish to sit at my table. A somewhat chancy selection, I think? Like picking horses. However, from the ages and occupations so thoughtfully provided by the head office, I should be able to gather some congenial company. I don’t want any young women – ’

‘The Company have already sent me a list of passengers who will be sitting at your table, sir.’

‘You mean I have no say in the matter at all?’

‘None whatever, sir.’

He handed Ebbs another flimsy.

‘But – but supposing I don’t like these persons?’

‘I’m sorry, but there’s nothing you can do about it. You could take your meals in your cabin, I suppose, sir. But that would hardly recommend itself to the Company.’

‘No, of course not.’ Ebbs frowned. ‘It’s very inconsiderate.’

‘You appreciate, sir, a seat at your table is an honour which carries a substantial social position on board?’

‘Anyway, I shall have my breakfast in my cabin at sea,’ Ebbs said decisively, tossing the papers on his desk. ‘Breakfast is not a sociable meal. What’s that?’

‘The list of guests who will be attending your cocktail party, sir.’

‘I appear to be in the position, Purser, of a child having its first birthday treat?’

Prittlewell’s shoulders hesitated on a shrug. ‘It’s the custom of the Line, sir.’

Ebbs was beginning to feel uneasy. The Martin Luther’s catering had been managed by a beery Irishman with dirty finger-nails who obediently shuffled the few dishes on the menu at his command, but Prittlewell affected him like an undertipped head waiter.

‘I don’t suppose there’s anyone in particular travelling with us, is there?’ he asked, his good spirits evaporated. ‘No – ah, celebrities?’

‘There are six parsons, sir.’

‘Six!’ Ebbs was shocked. ‘I’m not a superstitious man, Purser, but that augurs badly.’

‘I agree, sir. One dog-collar is usually considered sufficient to blight a voyage. I was with Captain Graham in the Hannibal when he dropped dead in the middle of the fancy-dress dance. A party of missionaries we were bringing back from Singapore was generally held responsible. And there were only four of them.’

‘Let us sincerely hope these will prove less murderous,’ Ebbs said sombrely. Prittlewell gathered the interview was at an end. ‘I will hold a conference of officers tomorrow,’ Ebbs added. ‘Is there any sign of the Chief Officer?’

‘Not on board yet, sir.’

‘Not yet? But I sent the fellow an extremely urgent telegram. I’ll have to wire again, that’s all. What do you suppose could have happened to him?’

Prittlewell looked thoughtful. ‘He may have been detained, sir,’ he suggested.

‘Detained? But how? Where?’

‘The Chief Officer has many friends who press their hospitality in London,’ Prittlewell told him. He thought that a reasonably honest reply.