In the Eye of the Storm

Anyone who has read – or started to read – The Human Predicament by Richard Hughes probably shares my frustration that it remained unfinished on his death in 1976. Hughes had planned a trilogy, tracing the origins of the Second World War through a clever amalgam of fact and fiction. Hitler’s rise to power, including his early failures, is faithfully documented, and interwoven with this impressively researched truth is the fictitious story of a family with both German and English branches. The first in the trilogy, The Fox in the Attic, was published in 1961 to resounding acclaim – an Italian critic declared, ‘England has found her Tolstoy’ – and the second, The Wooden Shepherdess, followed in 1973. Sadly, Hughes only completed twelve chapters of the third and final volume and twentieth-century literature is the poorer for it.

Consolingly, I recently discovered Hughes’s In Hazard, published in 1938. (A High Wind in Jamaica, his best-known novel, appeared even earlier, in 1929.) The dust jacket didn’t immediately appeal, promising ‘high suspense on the high seas . . . [an] unremitting struggle for survival . . . [an] eerie fascination with the hurricane . . . [a] wrenching tale of humanity at its limits’. To a non-sailor it sounded both exhausting and forbiddingly nautical. However, recalling how much I’d enjoyed his other books I decided to try it (thinking, shamefully, that at 160 pages it wouldn’t be too arduous). I loved it. In Hazard is an extraordinary read. It resembles The Human Predicament in mixing fiction with fact, but here the ‘fact’ is not a devastating political movement which took years to grow, but a devastating meteorological event which took place within a week. In November 1932 the steamship Phemius was sucked into a Caribbean hurricane and tested to the limits, yet somehow she and all her crew survived. The owner of the shipping line to which Phemius belonged approached Hughes and suggested he record the dramatic story. Hughes agreed to describe the storm and its effects on the ship as accurately as he could, with the proviso that he would invent a fictitious captain and crew. He researched the project rigorously, interviewed the crew, sailed with the Phemius’s captain and became familiar with every inch of a ‘single-screw turbine steamer of a little over 9,000 tons’. From the outset Hughes takes the reader by the hand, explaining with sparkling clarity how a steamship – his is the Archimedes – works. He escorts us both above and below decks, detailing every-thing in a conversational, matter-of-fact way. Then, having guided us around the Archimedes’ engine-room and fire-room, he shows us, almost reverently, the propeller-shaft – ‘the quiet, simple thing that all this is about’.

Think of a tree. The roots of a tree spread in a most complicated manner through the ground, extracting all kind of necessary things. This nourishment passes, unified, up the plain column of its trunk, and bursts out in the air into a countless multitude of leaves. So all the varying forces, the stresses and resistances, proceeding from that welter of machinery, are unified into the simple rotation of this horizontal column: are conducted calmly along its length into the sea: and there burgeon suddenly into the white and glass-green foliage of the swirls, the tumbling currents, the enormously powerful jostling of crowded water which is a ship’s wake.

And now we realize we are in the hands of a novelist – or perhaps (‘glass-green foliage’ is inspired) a poet. Yes, he is an experienced sailor who knows this steamship inside out, but he is imaginative too and understands precisely how to impart his knowledge. We are shown how a propeller works; and I defy anyone to describe better a ship’s wake. Hughes also moves comfortably between fact and invention. The ship’s officers, being fictitious, allow him to examine different facets of human nature. He conjures some of the men’s backgrounds, engaging our sympathies for their coming ordeal. Subtly, he instils tension from the start. Anyone picking up the book will know what they are in for – my copy has a queasy cover photograph of, simply, a heaving sea beneath a filthy orange sky – and his reassurance at the outset that the Archimedes is a ‘fine ship’ is small comfort. The more he reassures, the more anxious we become. Somehow it’s no help to hear about the strength of the funnel guys. (‘When these guys were properly set up, that funnel was as safe as the Bank of England.’) Later, he says the wheel on the bridge effortlessly operates the steering-gear, ‘and should the wheel . . . for any reason be out of action, there is a second, emergency wheel in the stern. But should the steam steering-engine itself fail, why, then you would be in a hole.’ He exudes breezy confidence. But that ‘you’ has press-ganged us, embroiled us in whatever is to come. If there is to be a ‘hole’ then we will be in it. He declares that modern meteorology protects shipping. ‘The days of Conrad’s Typhoon are passed . . . when hurricanes pounced on shipping as unexpectedly as a cat on mice.’ He is playing with us, of course; every confident assertion only unnerves us further. Then we learn that the storm ‘was not at all where it was thought by the pundits to be’ and somehow the Archimedes has been caught. A junior officer, whose first hurricane this is, hopes for drama, ‘something spectacular . . . for letters home’. But Hughes instead emphasizes the unremarkable:

No . . . nor was it a Viking figure that stood at the wheel: it was a little old Chinese quartermaster, with a face like a wrinkled yellow apple, standing on a little old mat.

That inspired novelistic touch of the ‘little old Chinese quarter-master’ on his ‘little old mat’ achieves two things superbly. First it underlines the ship’s fragility as the storm gathers power. And second it makes us believe utterly in the truth of the story. Why else mention a ‘little old mat’ if it were not there, before our eyes? Hughes’s descriptive powers are unleashed with the storm. ‘The ship might just as well have been standing up on its stern when you tried to go forward: and coming aft was like falling downstairs.’ The imagery is commonplace, almost prosaic. He adds: ‘And over the side one saw, not the familiar sea, but rather whole countrysides of water.’ It gets steadily worse. Hatches are whipped off and somehow, in a terrifying wind, repaired. Men find courage to do extraordinary things. The Chinaman is indeed blown off the bridge on his ‘inadequate toboggan: then fetched up against the rails . . . with such a terrific impact as to bend them’ but he is dragged back. The wheel stops steering, the double-skinned funnel is torn clean away, steam escapes – eventually everything fails. A ship dependent on steam has no other resources: ‘she was dead, as a log is dead, rolling in the sea; she was not a ship any more’. He describes heroism, raw fear, human frailty. A few men waver, one cracks altogether, but most find astonishing reserves of bravery and endurance. The Captain, fortunately, has ‘enough courage to serve out round the ship in ladles’. Eventually, in the eye of the storm, the men can at last see clearly, but the nightmare only intensifies:

Now you could see the horizon tilted sideways, the whole ocean tipped up at a steep slope as if about to pour over the edge of the world: so steep that it seemed to tower over the lee bulwarks. It was full of sharks, too, which looked at you on your own level . . .

In the lull, birds alight on the ship. ‘Some herons even tried to settle on the lee bulwarks, that were mostly awash; and were picked like fruit by the sharks.’ The decks are now oily and birds stick ‘like flies on a flypaper. The officers kept stepping on live birds – they could not help it . . . I must tell you what things were like . . . you would feel the delicate skeleton scrunch under your feet; the gummed feathers hardly even fluttered.’ Then, with the storm renewing, the battle begins again. For six days, despite exhaustion and hunger, the crew struggle to handle the failing ship in ferocious weather. Finally, however, the Archimedes is rescued and the Captain rejoices, ‘We haven’t lost a man!’ Then Hughes – ever the novelist – delivers one heartbreaking death almost as an afterthought. In a fascinating Afterword, he suggested – with hindsight – that he’d been eager to write this book because, subconsciously, the struggle of the steamship and her crew had symbolized the coming war. ‘In our bones we had foreseen from the very beginning this hurricane of preternatural power which no manoeuvring could dodge.’ It evidently struck a chord with readers, because by 1945 sales of In Hazard had outstripped those of A High Wind in Jamaica; but whether you read it as symbol or documentary, as fiction or fact, I guarantee you will not forget it.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 61 © Posy Fallowfield 2019