Isvik Read online

  ‘What did your surveyor think?’ I asked.

  ‘Just that. In theory, that’s what should happen. There the wee man goes and spoils it all by sayin’ he’s not an ice man and if we get ourselves into a really bad pressure ridge he couldn’t say fur sure what would happen. The truth is, Ah suppose, if ye’ve got a berg sailin’ down on ye and ye’re trapped in the ice there’s no thickness of steel that will save ye from gettin’ crushed. That right, Nils?’

  The big Norwegian shook his head, frowning. ‘Jeg forstår ikke.’ I don’t think he found Ward’s accent at all easy, and anyway, like many foreigners, he found it easier to speak English than to understand it. ‘Yu haf finish your café, Iain? Zen ve go look at skrue shaft, eh?’

  There was an old pressure cooker half full of coffee simmering on the stove, a saucepan of milk beside it. I helped myself, and when I had finished, I went up on deck and began sorting out the rigging. Nils had already opened up the engine compartment, which was directly below the deckhouse, and he and Iain were sitting on the floor with their legs dangling over the big diesel, going through a list of requirements he had produced. As I stepped past them Iain had his glasses on and was peering at a diagram the engineer had roughed out in his notepad. ‘Well, that makes sense, but if it means takin’ the engine out and havin’ engineers crawlin’ all over the place so we can’t get on with the job of takin’ on stores and equipment –’

  ‘Nei, nei, nei. We cut the shaft there. I do it myself. No need for Yard engineers. No need for anything, only gears and lever to disengage. And new dynamo – small one so we haf power off the skrue …’

  ‘The propellor?’

  ‘Ja, ja, the propellor.’

  I left them to it. Engines didn’t interest me very much. But rigging and sails did, and once I was on deck, coiling and sorting the ropes and making notes of what I would need, I barely noticed anything else, time slipping by and my mind so concentrated on the job that I barely felt the wind force rising, small frozen particles of snow driving almost horizontally. Periodically I went down into the warmth below, to write up my notes and check them over against the ship’s design plans, which Nils had produced for me before going off with Iain to talk to the Navy Yard people.

  We were almost into November now and I didn’t need to be an expert navigator to work out from the charts, and the Admiralty Pilot lying open on the chart table, that to be into the south of the Weddell Sea in time to take maximum advantage of the summer loosening of the pack we would need to be away not later than end-November. It was a voyage of close on two thousand miles and, allowing for eventualities, it would be a month at least before we were within striking distance of the position where Charles Sunderby had had that brief sighting of the Andros. And Nils was planning a major operation on our engine. Also the snowmobile ordered in England had not yet arrived.

  That evening we learned the name the Argentinians had given their reconstructed East Indiaman – Santa Maria del Sud. And it wasn’t Iris who told us, though she had known for some time that it had come through the Strait shortly after the Belgrano had been sunk. It was the old sea captain, in whose house Nils had billeted us, who told us. Iain had invited him over for a meal. The man lived on his own, except for a half-Indian woman who came in every morning. It was in the nature of a goodwill invitation, nothing more, none of us realising that he was the one man in Punta Arenas who had some idea of why an old wooden-walled East Indiaman, built like a frigate, should have been reconditioned and brought south by the Argentine Navy during the war.

  Iris came aboard with him, wearing a long dress and in full warpaint. The Contraalmirante had invited her to dine at the C-in-C’s residence. He was a Rear-Admiral, and as Commander-in-Chief of the Third Naval Zone, he was the most important man in Punta Arenas. The Gobernador Marítimo would be there, also the officer in charge of the Navy Yard. How she had managed it, God knows, except perhaps that beautiful and exciting women dropping in out of the blue at the bottom of the world were not very plentiful. ‘It’s important we get the co-operation we need.’ She smiled and waved the formidable list of requirements I had helped her prepare.

  The C-in-C was sending his car for her, and when it arrived, I saw her to the quay. By then it was blowing a full gale from the west, the wind slamming down off the mountains with katabatic blasts that hammered the luminous white of the water with such fury that it splayed out like shot, a reminder that the heights west of the port were almost six hundred metres high, the first ski-run only eight kilometres away by car. She looked like a Cossack in jackboot-black sea boots, the skirt of her long dress looped up and tucked into the strap of a gold lamé handbag, the top half of her padded out by a fur-hooded anorak. It was sleeting, the ice-cold droplets driving past the light on the quay in a white mist, the freighter’s stern glistening as though with salt spray. I was slit-eyed and shivering by the time she was driven off.

  Our seafaring landlord was Finnish – Captain F. F. Kramsu. ‘Like the poet. Ve haf a poet, same name, but different view of life, very full of miseries. The F is for Frederik, so you call me Freddie.’ He was a little gnome of a man with intense blue eyes. ‘F for Freddie. I am from Lapland. They don’t speak my language here. It is English or nodding but their own sort of Spanish. So we speak English mostly and everybody call me Freddie – or something vorse in Spanish when they don’t think I understand.’ He grinned, baring rabbit teeth stained brown, his eyes crinkling with laughter as he reached for the drink Nils had just poured him. ‘Then I get big laff with them because I am by then very fluent in Chilean Spanish.’ He raised his glass, first to Nils, then to Iain, finally to me. ‘Skool!’ He knocked it back in one gulp.

  ‘It is pisco, I am afraid,’ Nils said apologetically. ‘Chilean brandy, not vodka. Vodka is difficult. So many foreign ships come through the Strait. The factory and freeze ships, they stay at sea, gobbling up krill and all the fish their boats bring them, and when they are full, they go straight back to Russia, Poland, wherever they come from, or if they haf trouble, they go to the Atlantic ports further north, in Argentine or Brazil. They are for them nearer to home.’

  Captain Freddie’s position in Punta Arenas was an unusual one and largely a result of the Falklands war. Being Nordic, and regarded as a neutral, he had come to be looked on as port representative for foreign ships passing through the Magellan Strait, a sort of consul. It was not official, of course. Nobody had appointed him. It was just that, since he had sold his coaster and settled in Punta Arenas, he had kept a log of all ships passing through. He had brought his telescope ashore with him and mounted it in the little dormer window high up under the eaves of the steep-pitched east-facing gable of his house.

  In that log book, which he showed me later, was the name, port and country of origin, of every ship that had passed through during the last eight and a half years, together with her age and condition, her destination, and of course the name of the captain and details of the cargo. As he pointed out to me, the port and other government officials, also the navy and military personnel, came and went, generally posted south for only a short period, whereas he was a permanent fixture. We learned later that he was paid an honorarium by the government in far-off Santiago, so that he was also in a sense their man in Punta Arenas, and it was, therefore, quite natural for him to cultivate us and be as helpful as possible.

  He had a second book, started at the outset of the Falklands War, which though still in the form of a diary, was more of a journal. It not only covered ships passing to and fro through the Strait, but also included reports of Argentine air strikes, naval activity, including the sinking of the Belgrano, and even references to the British helicopter that had landed on the coast of the Magellan Strait almost opposite Punta Arenas, and had been destroyed by its pilot. He was full of all the gossip and rumours, most of it picked up from the ships he visited and seamen he talked to.

  It was in this book that he was able to show me the first reference to the Santa Maria. The entry read:


  On board the MV Thorhavn the first officer was from Helsinki. He told me they had put into Puerto Gallegos to land seven Swedish engineers with spares for Volvo and Saab equipment and had seen an old wooden square-rigger lying at the Navy Yard quay. She is the Santa Maria del Sud and had recently been brought down under tow from the Argentine naval base near Buenos Aires where she has been undergoing a complete refit. Captain of the Thorhavn, Olaf Peterson, tells me there were men aloft fitting aerials up the sides of two of the three masts and there was talk that the gun deck of this maritime relic, renovated just before the war as a museum ship, was now equipped with the very latest in electronics.

  This is a translation, of course, the original being in Finnish. Then, shortly after the British Task Force arrived off the Falkland Islands, there was another reference to the Santa Maria del Sud:

  There is talk of the British landing on the coast of Patagonia north of Puerto Gallegos. But it is just rumour. I do not think it probable they will land. It would not make sense. At sea they have mobility. This, and the carrier-borne Harrier aircraft, are their great advantage. The only vessels in today are an Argentine tug towing what I presume to be the Santa Maria del Sud. She is a wooden ship, not unlike the old clippers we used to run for the grain trade before World War I, but she is at least a century older. She has been excavated out of the mud that preserved her in La Plata, they say, and virtually rebuilt. Now they have aerial wires attached to the masts and this made me think they must intend to use her for some sort of electronic surveillance.

  It was about a fortnight after I arrived in Punta Arenas that he showed me his journal and I was able to take a translation of those entries. But that first evening on Isvik we had it from him direct. Iain asked him what he thought the electronics were for. He smiled and shook his head. ‘I don’t make any speculation. Not at that time. It is not wise because there are quite certainly agents of the Argentine Junta in Punta Arenas. I am well known here for the checkings I make of the movement of ships.’ He pulled a battered pipe from his pocket and began to fill it. ‘One time,’ he continued slowly, ‘I come back to my house to find it is rummaged, and they have taken out everything, all the drawers bottoms-up on the floor, also boards ripped up. I am telling the police, of course, but nothing happen, they don’t arrest nobody. But they know. I am very sure they know who do it.’

  He lit his pipe, drawing on it slowly, a Puckish smile lifting the corners of his mouth. ‘Chile and Argentina …’ He gave an expressive little shrug. ‘You can see from the map how the frontiers between them here in the south are not made very good. So it is like a game of chess between them, eh? This country vile haf its own people in sensitive posts in the Argentine. They don’t want them arrested for doing what they are trained for, so they don’t arrest agents of Argentina. They live and let live. That is right, ja? You operate same vay, I guess. Anyway –’ He laughed and slapped the table – ‘they don’t get what they come for. I start a new book just before they land on Malvinas, when those demolition men start work on South Georgia, remember? It was the begin of the war. I think what I say in that book may be sensitive, so I keep it always on my body, and in Finnish. The other books, of course, they leave. They are of no interest. That is what make me certain who they are.’

  ‘They could have taken that book from you by force,’ Iain suggested.

  Captain Freddie shook his head. ‘That is mugging, no? Ve don’t haf too much mugging in Punta Arenas.’ His smile was so elfin I was reminded of a troll and a performance of Peer Gynt I had seen at the Maddermarket in Norwich. ‘If they are mugging me, then it is too much obvious. The police do not hesitate then, and it is more important at that time for the Argentine to have their observers here in freedom.’

  ‘I understand.’ Iain nodded.

  ‘And even if they do take my book, they don’t find nothing.’ A crafty look had come over his face. ‘After I go on board I don’t write anything about my visit. Is too dangerous.’

  Iain was leaning forward then. ‘Ye went on board?’

  ‘Kyllä, they invite me on board. That is when I begin to realise what the Santa Maria del Sud is about.’

  Silence then, the sounds of the port coming to us softly through the night, partially overlaid by the persistent hum of machinery from the freighter moored ahead of us. Ward waited, but in the end it was only by persistent questioning that the details gradually emerged.

  It must have been a very strange sight. Captain Freddie said he could hardly believe his eyes when he looked out of his bedroom window. It was like a ‘ghost ship’ – he used those words – the three masts standing black against the white of the low, snow-mantled line of the shore opposite and that enormously long bowsprit jutting out from the wooden hull of the ship ‘like a lance’. He hadn’t seen the tug at first because it was alongside on the far side.

  The two vessels had laid there off the Navy Yard all that morning. Finally, in the early afternoon, he had been summoned on board the tug to try and resolve the ‘liddle difficulty’ that had arisen. The tow was on passage from Puerto Gallegos to the Argentine port of Ushuaia in the Beagle Channel. Just short of the entrance to the Estrecho de Magellanes they had encountered gale-force winds and off Cabo Virgenes the tow had begun to sheer violently and range up on the tug.

  The tug-master had never, of course, towed a large sailing vessel before and had no experience of the windward effect of three tall masts in a gale. Periodically the ship had literally sailed up on to the tug, ramming her bows against the stern, and finally the towing hawser had ripped out the capstan to which it was fastened. All the tug could do then was to stand by the tow until the gale abated.

  The towing hawser was finally reattached with rope strops round the bowsprit fastenings, and with this makeshift arrangement they had towed into Punta Arenas. What they were requesting was the co-operation of the Chilean Navy Yard in installing steel bits strong enough to ensure that the hawser did not again tear itself free. Also materials were required to effect temporary repairs to the starb’d bow where several timbers had been started by the ship riding up against the tug’s stern. And they needed the loan of extra pumps because she was making water. The difficulty was that there was a naval lieutenant in charge of the tow and he refused absolutely to let any officer of the Chilean Navy on to the Santa Maria del Sud to assess the damage.

  That was when they had sent for Captain Freddie, and after what he described as a long, sometimes ‘vair ackermonious diskussion’, and after a good deal of long distance telephoning, fax instructions had finally come through that allowed the Chileans to accept his decision as to what was required. That was how he had come to go on board the Santa Maria del Sud.

  ‘It is a political decision, you see. On poliittinen pääatös, ymmärrättekö. Everything politics. There is a war, but they still want friendly relations.’ The fastenings for the steel bits would need to be on the gun deck, and it was on the gun deck they had some of the electronic equipment they did not want the Chilean officers to see. ‘They don’t want the purpose of the ship understood. I know nothing about electronics. Olen vain vanha lastilaivan kapteeni, siksi olen turvassa. Me know nothing, eh? Only old cargo boat captain.’ He smiled, his eyes twinkling as he told Iain how he had had a glimpse of the lower decks, which had all been cut away in the centre and some sort of plastic covering installed.

  He had been on board the Santa Maria some two hours or more working out with the Argentine naval lieutenant and the tug’s engineers just what was required to get the tow safely down the short cut into the Beagle Channel and thence to Ushuaia. The pumps were sent out from the Navy Yard immediately. All the rest of the equipment, together with additional tools and a power generator, were sent out the following morning. Because they were effecting the repair work themselves it had taken longer to complete than if they had let the Yard do it, but even so the tow had been under way again shortly after noon on the third day.

  That’s all he could tell us. What the precise p
urpose was of installing complex electronics in an old sailing vessel he did not know for sure, and Iain did not press him. However, he did ask him about the crew, particularly those on the Santa Maria. ‘Was there a man named Gómez among them?’

  The old man shook his head. ‘Ei.’ There had been two Argentine naval officers, one on the tug and the other on the Santa Maria, and he had seen at least six crew, but he did not know the names of any of them. Iain dipped into his briefcase and pulled out a photograph. It was a picture full-face of Mario Ángel Gómez in Navy uniform. ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked him.

  His eyes flicked in my direction, but he didn’t answer. ‘D’ye recognise him?’ he asked Captain Freddie. ‘Was he one of the officers?’

  The Captain stared at it briefly, then shook his head. ‘Ei. That man is not aboard the Santa Maria del Sud, nor the tug neither. Vy do you ask?’

  Iain slid away from that, cross-examining him about the details of the electronic equipment. But all he could do was describe the look of the equipment on the gun deck. The rest was under wraps.

  Iris returned, her eyes bright and her cheeks a-glow with the sudden transition from the cold outside to the warmth of the saloon. Everything was fixed, the Yard would do all they could to help. She had a private word with Iain in the after cabin, then put her anorak on over her dress and went off to bed, escorted by Captain Freddie. We had a final drink with Nils while he checked the list of his requirements for the prop-shaft alterations, then we went out into the night, walking quickly through the bitter blustering of the wind back to our billet.