Brown on Resolution Page 9

  Later he found himself jeering bitterly at himself for his highfalutin determinations. He was a prisoner in the hands of the enemy, and helpless. He could think of no means to hold back Ziethen from her mission of destruction. As soon as her side was repaired she would go off capturing and sinking British ships, just as Emden was doing. Five million pounds was a small estimate of the cost of her probable sinkings. And he would be forced to witness them—or else, with contemptuous carelessness, he might be put on board a neutral vessel to find his way home while Ziethen continued her career. There was nothing he could do. He knew too much about the internal discipline of a ship to hope to disable the engines or bring off any other boy’s adventure book coup, although it must be admitted that he tried to think of some scheme to achieve some such end. Helplessness and despair and loneliness combined to force him into frightful despondency—the utter black misery of the twenty-year-old during the three days that Ziethen was ploughing her crippled way to Resolution.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE GALAPAGOS ARCHIPELAGO is a group of volcanic islands, bisected by the Equator, seven hundred miles from the American coast. They support no inhabitants—mainly because they have little water—and they are sufficiently distant from the ordinary trade routes (at least until the opening of the Panama Canal) to have remained comparatively unvisited. Their flora and fauna have followed their own lines of evolution without interference from the mainland, so that they boast their own special species of insects and reptiles and cacti. The monstrous Galapagos tortoises gave the Archipelago its collective name, but the individual islands were christened by the Englishmen who called there on sundry occasions; Albemarle, Indefatigable, Chatham, Barrington, Resolution and the rest are all reminiscent of ships or admirals or statesmen. Hither came Woodes, Rogers and Dampier, privateering, and Anson with King George’s commission. The Pacific whalers—Herman Melville among them—called to stock their ships with tortoises. HMS Beagle came here a hundred years ago with a young naturalist of an inquiring turn of mind on board, by name Charles Darwin, who was so struck by the evidence of evolution among the living creatures there that his thoughts were directed to the consideration of the Origin of Species by Natural Selection.

  Resolution Island is the loneliest and least visited of them all. Once it was a volcanic crater, but it has been extinct for a thousand years or more, and the Pacific has broken in at one point so that in shape it is an incomplete ring of towering cliffs surrounding a central lagoon half a mile across. The entrance gives twenty fathoms of water; the centre of the lagoon is of unplumbed depth. The cliffs themselves (the ring is nowhere more than a quarter of a mile thick) are of lava in huge tumbled jagged blocks with edges like knives, the lower slopes covered thinly with spiky cactus, the upper slopes a naked tangle of rock. The extreme highest ridge, however, where the wind had full play, has been somewhat weathered down, so that the lava edges have been blunted, and are disguised by a layer of smaller pumice.

  One glimpse of that central lagoon convinced Captain von Lutz that here indeed was the haven he desired. It was a land-locked harbour which would give shelter in any wind that blew, and already in his mind’s eye he could see Ziethen’s side repaired and the ship herself free to traverse the Pacific and wreak confusion and destruction among the helpless British mercantile marine. Cautiously he made his entrance, for the sailing directions are excessively vague regarding Resolution. He sent a picket boat on ahead, and followed her cautiously, sounding as he went. Ziethen breasted gallantly the race of the tide through the gap (for at the ebb the piled-up water in the lagoon comes surging out through the narrow exit like a mill-race), made her way through with the naked cliffs close on either hand and emerged safely into the lagoon. As she entered the stifling heat of the place closed in upon her with crushing force, for the cliffs cut off the wind and the sun beats down all day upon their sloping surfaces and is pitilessly reflected inwards to a central focus. But heat must be endured; cautiously and very, very slowly Ziethen swung sideways. An anchor roared from her hawsehole and took grip of the bottom away from the vast depths of the central throat of the old crater. Tide and propellers and rudder were balanced against each other while another anchor was got away from the stern, and soon Ziethen was riding safely and comfortably in the heart of Resolution. It was a sound piece of seamanship, which Brown thoroughly appreciated, despite the fact that his view of the proceedings was limited to what he could see from portholes.

  And as soon as mooring was completed, Ziethen’s crew sprang into furious action. Alone on a sea where every man’s hand was against them, it was dangerous to linger within sight of land however deserted. The work must be done at once, so that Ziethen could emerge from her concealment with sea room to fight if necessary, and her injured side healed, so that she could fight or run or capture as occasion dictated. The stokers were set to work clearing the starboard bunkers as far as might be and transferring their contents to the port side. The Gunnery Lieutenant supervised the activity of a party which laboured to empty the starboard magazines and fill the port ones. Even the starboard battery twelve-pounders were unshipped, with infinite labour, and taken across, and the central guns were trained out to port. For a modern ship in fighting trim is not so easy to careen as were the tiny wooden ships of the buccaneers. To expose a foot of the ship’s bottom necessitates the transference of hundreds of tons of weight—and even that is a dangerous and chancy matter in a ship whose sides are plastered with armour plate. Small wonder that Ziethen needed the shelter of Resolution for the business.

  All this dawned upon Brown as he looked round him during the dog watches that evening when he was allowed upon deck under the friendly chaperonage of the fat steward. He looked up at the towering cliffs, and felt the increasing heel of the deck. If those cliffs were in the possession of an enemy with a gun—a six-inch—a twelve-pounder even! Ziethen, heavily listed, would be helpless. Her decks could be swept, the repairing party overside could be wiped out, and the mending of the side could be postponed indefinitely, until either the ship was sunk or she remedied her list again and cleared off in disgust to some new refuge; and refuges as good as Resolution were necessarily few. He scanned the desolate cliffs again, warily. They were barely more than a quarter of a mile away at any point, within easy rifle-shot, in fact. Rifle-shot! An idea sprang into pulsing life in Brown’s brain, and the blood surged hot beneath his skin. He turned away from the fat steward lest he should betray his sudden agitation. But again and again he peered up at the cliffs, turning over in his mind the details of his plan, searching for flaws in it and debating consequences. He could find no flaws; he could foresee possibly profound consequences.

  Back in the sick-bay, alone waiting to hear the feeble cry of the Leading Signalman or the renewed sound of Ginger Harris’s agony, he plunged more seriously into his plans. If he could delay Ziethen’s repairs for a time, or if (as he hardly hoped) he could drive her away unrepaired, he would have achieved much. Somewhere, of course, British ships were seeking her out, and the longer she could be kept in one spot the more chance they would have of finding her. The news of the sinking of Charybdis must have brought many ships hot upon the trail. (Brown did not know that Charybdis’ wireless messages never got through and the loss of Charybdis was at long last ascribed to internal causes, the same as accounted for Bulwark and other ships.) To hold Ziethen helpless for a few days might well settle the matter. It might cost him his life, but that was a price he expected to pay. Nelson and Blake and Drake had given their lives in other wars. And although a slight tremor ran through him at the thought of dying—death comes hard at twenty—it did not affect his determination at all, or weigh in the balance of his plans. Agatha Brown’s influence was bearing its fruit, and perhaps his heritage on the male side from a long line of lighting naval ancestors had something to say in the matter too.

  Brown’s escape from Ziethen was absurdly simple. This of course was largely because he was not expected to want to escape—who on eart
h would desire to be marooned on a barren and waterless island?—and partly because at first sight it seemed as if his escape would be a relief for Ziethen. Prisoners of war are out of place on a raiding cruiser; to hold them safely means treating them harshly, and no one on board had the least desire to treat Brown harshly. Yet he was definitely in the way where he was, save for the fact that he was of some slight assistance in the nursing of the two English wounded men. He was a bit of grit in the machinery of Ziethen—slight, but noticeable.

  Now at the foot of the gangway outside the sick-bay stood an arms rack. In the rack stood twelve rifles, and above them hung twelve sets of equipment. For Ziethen was a raiding cruiser, and must be ready at a moment’s notice to send away an armed boarding or landing party. The rifles and equipment stood ready for the use of one of the boats’ crews. Brown had noted them casually more than once, but now he opened the door and stole out gently to examine them more closely. The rifles were heavily greased, as was necessary in the tropics. The equipments were in marching order, ready for instant use. He felt the pouches; they were full—sixty rounds per set. The leather pouches at the back of each belt contained two heavy packages—a day’s emergency ration in each. The water-bottles were empty, however. Brown removed two, tiptoed back and filled them, and drove the corks well home. Inside the door he listened carefully, heard no one coming, and slipped out again. He replaced one water-bottle in its sling and buckled the other to the belt of the same set of equipment. He emptied the pouches of another set and filled his pockets with the ammunition. He put another day’s rations into the pouch of the set he proposed taking with him, and his preparations were complete. If, with two days’ food and water and one hundred and twenty rounds, he could not keep Ziethen thoroughly annoyed for a week he would be very surprised.

  But to be ready to depart was one thing; to transfer himself and his captures to the mainland of Resolution was quite another. Brown realized how easily his plan might fail at this point, and how discovery would mean an ignominious marching off to the punishment cells and the end of all his hopes. That was a risk that had to be faced, however. He had weighed the chances and had decided he might perhaps succeed. All that was necessary, in fact, was a cool head and moderate good fortune. It would be a distortion of English to say that Brown had a cool head; at the moment he was a mere incarnation of duty, selfless and unselfish and impersonal, so that coolness of head had nothing to do with his condition. He was a fighting machine, and as little likely to become flustered as any other machine.

  Outside it was tropically dark; the young moon had not quite cleared the highest ridge of Resolution, to light the lagoon and the ship within. Brown lifted the full set of equipment, put it over his shoulders, and buckled it about him. He took a rifle, slung it on one shoulder, and stole up the gangway. In five seconds he was crouched beneath the port side boat swung in its davits, unobserved by the watch, by the armed sentry, or by any casual wanderers. With noiseless unfumbling rapidity he set about his preparations for the next step.

  With his knife he cut the lashings of the boat cover, reached inside and pulled out, after a small search, two of the lifebelts which were there in readiness. One of them he bound about his rifle as tightly as he could; it would be a sorry fiasco if the weapon were to sink and he were to arrive on Resolution safe but unarmed. The other he bound about him. Then he fished out one of the boat’s lines and dropped the end very, very quietly overside. Slinging his rifle again, he gripped the rope and lowered himself down. He was hampered by the bulkiness of the lifebelt and the mass of his equipment, but patience and brute strength saved him from swinging with a crash against the steel side of the ship; he went down foot by foot, cautiously. At last he felt the sea at his ankles, and by the time he had reached the end of the rope it was at his waist. He let himself fall the rest of the way sinking until the water closed over his head in his effort to avoid a splash before the lifebelt brought him to the surface again. The rest was easy. Lying as much on his back as the lifebelt would allow, and clinging like grim death to his rifle, he struck out gently with his feet along the ship’s side; the water was as warm as milk. Heading steadily and patiently past Ziethen’s stern he moved away by almost imperceptible degrees. It was half an hour before his slow, powerful strokes bore him to the side of the lagoon, and he had to swim along the side for another ten minutes before he could discover, in the faint light of the rising moon, a bit of beach which shelved sufficiently to allow him to clamber up. There he unfastened the lifebelts and dropped them in a cactus clump, and hitching his equipment more firmly round his wet body he set his face in the darkness towards the steep, horribly tangled slope before him.

  Brown knew nothing of the Galapagos Islands; truth to tell, he did not know that he was on one of them—and he was hardly expecting the appalling effort which the climb demanded. The island was only a mass of lava blocks welded together, overgrown with cactus; to make a yard’s progress involved hauling oneself up a six-foot block guarded with razor edges, tearing through spiky cactus at the same time. In a very short time his hands and feet were raw, his clothes were in rags, blood was running from his scratches, and he was streaming with sweat in consequence of his violent exertion in that stifling atmosphere. After fifty yards of progress body and mind were numb with fatigue, but he still toiled on, the perfect fighting machine with duty as its motive power. One stray thought came through his dull mind and cheered him during that desperate struggle; that was that if his progress was so slow that of a landing party would be equally so, and with his rifle in a point of vantage he would be able to hold any number of men back. So, fumbling forward, gasping with fatigue, finding handhold and foothold in the dark, heaving himself up with gigantic efforts, occasionally lowering himself cautiously at breaks in the slope, he forced his way to the top, and there, on a projecting knuckle of rock which his instinct told him would be an advantageous strategic position, he lay down to wait until dawn, his rifle at his side. Instant sleep, the sleep of overstrain, closed over him as he lay, face downwards with his head on his arms.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BUT WHILE BROWN was crawling up the steep side of Resolution, and while he was asleep on the projecting saddle of rock, many things had happened. Tremendous news had reached Ziethen from the wireless stations on the American mainland; the whole ether of the Eastern Pacific had been in a chattering turmoil, for von Spee had struck his first blow upon the ring of enemies which had closed in upon him. Admiral Sir Christopher Craddock had encountered him, with two weak armoured cruisers against two powerful ones. He could have refused battle; he could have fallen back on a slow battleship which was wallowing along after him two hundred miles away, but he had refused to lose touch with an enemy who had already proved so elusive. He had gone boldly into action, hoping to do von Spee enough damage to cripple him, but he had not been so fortunate as had been Charybdis in her battle with Ziethen. Good Hope and Monmouth had sunk with all hands under the guns of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and von Spee was now for a brief space master of all the Southern Pacific coast. The nitrate ships, vital to the manufacture of British explosives, were cowering in Chile ports while von Spee, with all the prestige of victory, was lording it down the coast and an exasperated Admiralty in London was hurriedly searching for the wherewithal to close the gap which von Spee had hewn in the ring they had flung round him. In the last desperate matter of national life or death von Spee’s victory was unimportant—what were two obsolete armoured cruisers to a Navy which could put thirty Dreadnoughts into line?—but to the life of a Cabinet it was supremely important. With Emden still loose in the Indian Ocean sinking ships every day, with Ziethen’s whereabouts unknown, so that at any moment a fresh series of depredations might clamour for public attention, and with von Spee triumphant in the Pacific, the Cabinet’s prestige might well be so shaken as to ensure its fall; and the results of such an overturn were incalculable. Well was it, indeed, that Ziethen in her damaged condition had not dared to let loose her w
ireless and announce the destruction of Charybdis. Once let her repair herself so that she could move about and evade pursuit, and she would be emboldened to proclaim her victory; the streets of London would be full of posters: ‘Another Naval Disaster in the Pacific’, and the Cabinet might come crashing down. That is what Captain von Lutz realized as he read the stream of wireless messages, and it was visualizations of this sort which fired him with impatience as he supervised the healing of the ship and hastened below to inspect the achievements of the ship’s smith and artificers who were preparing the plates which were to close the yawning hole in Ziethen’s side. Not a moment was to be lost, although in all conscience Kapitan zur See von Lutz could see no cause for delay. Twelve hours from dawn would see those plates in position, Ziethen out once more in the Pacific, blazoning the destruction of Charybdis to all the world, and privately informing the German secret agent in Peru of her need for coal and of the rendezvous whither a collier should be sent.

  Even the news that the captured English sailor had escaped and taken a rifle with him did not disturb Captain von Lutz’s state of pleased anticipation; the escape of the sailor could do no harm—von Lutz wondered why the sailor had bothered to arm himself seeing that they would not trouble to pursue him—and the Captain contented himself with putting into prison the kindly sick-bay steward and the marine sentry of the upper deck, for purely disciplinary reasons.