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Six hours, six pints of ale, and six shots of whiskey later, Claud Sawyer was seeing stars. The Royal Hotel was plush by frontier standards. Electric lights and ceiling fans, indoor plumbing on each floor. As soon as Sawyer had checked in, he’d made his way to his room. A large wooden, four-poster bed draped in mosquito netting. Cotton sheets and hand towels for the bathroom down the hall. Sawyer had washed up, changed into clean clothes, and lain on the bed, but sleep would not come. After a few hours, he had given up and walked downstairs to the bar. He’d been there ever since.
The ornate bar was nearly twenty feet long and carved from zebra wood. To the rear, the back bar had several panes of stained glass lit from behind by lightbulbs. The floors were made of a sandstone-colored tile. Carved chairs sat in front, and Sawyer had parked there for the first few hours. Once the night had cooled some, he had made his way outside.
“Sir,” the bartender said, walking out to the patio, “we’ll be closing soon.”
Sawyer was staring skyward at the Milky Way. He looked down and smiled at the man. “Nothing else, thank you,” he said.
The bartender walked back inside.
Sawyer had failed to eat since lunch, and he had vomited his lunch into the toilet in the lobby bathroom upon arriving. His head was not swimming, but it was far from placid. The alcohol had failed to have the desired effect. Waratah was never far from his mind. Rising unsteadily to his feet, he made his way to the stairs in the lobby and climbed them to his floor. After several tries, he managed to unlock his door and enter his room. He prayed he would pass out soon.
Captain Ilbery stood on the foredeck of Waratah. He was smoking a pipe and staring at the sea. Even over the smell of his cherry-tinted tobacco, he could smell the ocean. A bitter, acrid odor like that of a copper coin cooked in a cast-iron skillet. Knocking the dottle from the pipe, he made his way to his cabin.
The sheets were bathed in sweat, and Sawyer’s feet were entangled in the mosquito netting. He had passed into a stupor, a feather pillow pressed against his mouth making breathing difficult. Sawyer shook his head from side to side for air.
Waratah was steaming into a storm. Sawyer could see it as clear as if he were standing only a short distance away. Then, in Sawyer’s mind, the ship became small, as if he were watching it from the heavens. He watched as a rogue wave far out to sea made its way toward the vessel, then slammed into the side. Then the image faded, and a knight in medieval armor appeared. “Stay clear of Waratah,” the knight said ominously.
Sawyer bolted upright, the pillow flying to the side.
The rest of the night he tried to sleep, but sleep never came.
Captain Deroot maneuvered Transkei alongside Waratah and began the push away from the dock. The Lund Blue Anchor Line ship was responding differently than he remembered. If possible, the ship seemed stiffer and more ungainly than before.
Captain Ilbery stood alongside the chief pilot, Hugh Lindsay, as he guided Waratah out of the harbor and past the outer bar. After a celebratory drink with Lindsay, then his transfer off, Ilbery assumed control of Waratah. Ordering a course along the coast, he tried to shake his feelings of impending doom.
Corporal Edward “Joe” Conquer stepped from his tent along the Xora River mouth. His unit, the Cape Mounted Rifles, was on field maneuvers. For the last hour, a warm rain had been falling. It leaked through the crude canvas and soaked the crude wood-planked floor. Conquer had waited for the storm to abate before venturing outside. Staring over the cliff to the ocean, he could see that the skies were temporarily clear. Farther out, Conquer could see another storm building. A black wall of clouds had formed. At that instant, gusts of wind raked the camp. The temperature, which had been hovering around ninety degrees, dropped into the seventies as if by magic.
Conquer reached up and smashed his hat down on his head before it blew away.
Then he reentered his tent to strap on his side arm.
“Merciful Allah,” the African said, “protect me.”
She came with a fury on a wind of destruction, with no name or number to mark her passage. Formed of hot wet winds far in the Indian Ocean, she moved on a westward course like a relentless marching army. The leading edge of the hurricane packed winds of nearly a hundred miles an hour. Lightning streaked from water to heavens, and booms of thunder racked across the tossing seas. Waterspouts fa
Urbuki Mali was in the wrong spot at the wrong time.
His cargo dhow Khalia was carrying a load of ci
Twelve miles from land, Mali might have seen the shoreline had the weather been better; as it was, he was surrounded by a tempest that refused to release him. A strong gust carried his foremast away.
“My fortune for fair winds,” Mali shouted.
And then the sky rained fish, and Khalia turned turtle.
On Waratah, Captain Ilbery was fighting a losing battle. The leading edge of the storm was still miles offshore, but the effects were being felt in the pilothouse. Choppy waves raked against the hull, and twice already his vessel had dropped into troughs, as if the seawater had been sucked out to sea. All at once, Waratah listed hard to starboard and hung suspended at a forty-five-degree angle. Fully three minutes passed before she righted herself.
“Mother of God,” Ilbery said.
Second Officer Charles Cheatum could no longer contain his anxiety. His face was ashen white, and moments earlier he had nearly vomited onto the floor.
“Captain, this is bad,” Cheatum said loudly.
“Hell, I know,” Ilbery said. “Go below and check the cargo hold. I feel it’s shifted.”
Cheatum tried to move, but the muscles in his legs were knotted with tension. Pounding his upper legs with his fist, he made a few steps toward the door before he had a stomach spasm and vomited onto the pilothouse floor.
“Swab that down,” Ilbery shouted to a deckhand.
Cheatum wiped his mouth with his handkerchief and walked woodenly out the door.
Fully half of the passengers were clustered in the dining room. Each time the ship listed, they were tossed from one side of the great room to the other. Most were bruised and bloodied from slamming into tables and flipping from their chairs. Fear was palatable — chaos was reigning. Carl Childers, a robust Australian cattle baron on his first trip to London, did his best to quell the increasing pandemonium.
“I peered out the port,” he shouted. “I can see land.”
Sydney diamond merchant Magness Abernathy found no solace in Childers’s words.
“Well, it best be close enough to swim to,” Abernathy yelled, “because that’s what we’ll soon be doing.”
A deckhand made his way into the dining room with an armful of cork life vests. The children were outfitted first, the women and elderly second.
“She’s pitching and wallowing,” Ilbery shouted, as he spun the wheel in an attempt to bring Waratah back on a solid heading.
Deep in the engine room, Chief Engineer Hampton Brody could sense things were not right. Every time Waratah heeled over, one of the two propellers was wrenched from the water into the air. Without the drag of water, the shaft would spin rapidly, taxing the steam boiler providing power. At just that instant, a pressure valve on the starboard boiler exploded, and the engine room was filled with clouds of scalding steam.