PAGE 13
P O R T O F CALL
BY BUD HUTTON
The Flying Dutchman came out of dirty weather around
the Hom on the tail of a norther, picked up a good wind from
almost dead astern that filled every sail, and began to reel off
knots in the Pacific's long slow swell. The wnd was brisk and
still held the chill of the Hom's ice floes as the Dutchman moved
on a course almost into the setting sun, but almost overnight the
weather turned tropical, and every man not on watch came on
deck to soak up the sun. They gathered in little knots, forward
and aft, and they should have been happy to bring their unend
ing arguments up from belowlecks and dispute them in the
warm breeze, but they weren't.
For a while, Dewey and Sims tried to keep going their
perennial debate wth Lawence and Jones over the merits of
steam versus sail, and a few of the others paused to see
vtfiether anyone had thought of something new on the subject.
Once they sounded like old times vtfien Dewey made a point
and Lawence hollered, "Don't give up the fight, Paul!"
"Sir, I have not yet begun to argue," Jones answered,
but his heart wasn't in it, and after a rebuttal of sorts, he was
silent.
Across the decks it was the same way. A couple of
Roman admirals were arguing, as they always had, with two or
three Carthaginians as to vtfiether the extra power of a quinque-
reme's fifth bank of oars offset the added bulk and weight of that
many more rowers and benches, but, as von Spee said caustic
ally, those Mediterranean fellows lived so far in the past, nothing
bothered them.
Even on the quarterdeck, where Nelson had the watch,
the feeling of uneasiness communicated itself. Ordinarily, old
Nelson w)uld have all hands holystoning the decks or mending
sail, in weather so fine, but today he turned his blind eye on the
decks as he paced behind the helmsman. Once or twice he
looked over the man's shoulder at the compass, saw they still
held a course just north of due west, and shook his head in
bafflement.
Seated against a hatchway on the afterdeck, Jellicoe
and Beatty tried for awhile to interest some of the others in a
game of crowi- n-anchor, but no one wanted to play. A single
German admiral stood stonily staring at the crown-'n-anchor
board through his monocle. Ordinarily, lacking a game, Jellicoe
and Beatty would have mentioned Jutland, just to hear the Ger
man start spouting the statistics of tonnage lost by the opposing
fleets and trying to prove it was really a victory for the Imperial
Reich, nicht wahr? But today Jellicoe merely looked up and said,
"Afternoon, Graf" because he had found it safe to call all those
German chaps 'Graf' and went back to staring moodily over the
rail.
Inevitably, the glances of the men on the deck turned
toward the admiral's cabin. The door remained shut, as it had
since the voyage began. Sometimes they could hear him pacing
the cabin, back and forth, but he had all his meals brought in by
the steward and he hadn't once been on deck.
Even the usually jaunty Drake was depressed by the
vague uneasiness, the strange feeling of something unknown
and ominous, which hung over the ship. Dewey and deGrasse
watched him turn away from a figure at the taffrail and come
over to them.
"What do you hear, Frank?" Dewey asked.
Drake shook his head. "No one seems to know a thing,"
he replied. "I even tried asking that chap back there. Japanese
fellow who crossed the T on the Russians at Tsushima Strait.
But he just looked politely at me and hissed something or other."
Drake frowned at the figure by the taffrail. "Odd bloke, anyway.
Can't even speak English." He sat dowi by Dewey and the
Frer.ch admiral and watched the blue waters slip past.
'This is the queerest voyage yet," he said after a pause.
"I've made plenty of them with the Old Man, but this one's differ
ent. Spooky, actually."
"Something is~howyou say it?-yes, rotten in Denmark,"
agreed deGrasse, hastily adding, "No offense, monsieur," as an
old seadog from the Skagerrak turned at the words.
"Davy wouldn't even let da Gama navigate, the way he
usually does," Dewey pointed out. "I asked Vasco if he knew
where we were going, but he swore he didn't know a thing."
Drake pulled absently at his ear. 'There was the time he
got us all out of the locker room and aboard the Dutchman to go
watch that affair at Hampton Roads," he recalled. "You know,
that Monitor-and-Merrimac business. Davy said that marked a
turning point and he wanted us all there to wtness it. Of course,
before we got Nelson wth us, we always had to go for a critique
on his shows, and there were a couple more. Finally, there was
that trip we made in peacetime, just after the war in 1914-18,
you remember, to watch some fellow fly an airplane off a ship's
deck. Astounding thing, that; Davy said it was a turning point,
too."
"Seems like every trip he's called us out of the locker
room for was to watch some turning point or other,” Dewey
pointed out. "Maybe this is one."
"But there is no war now, messieurs," deGrasse inter
posed. 'This last war is done, we know, and yet we sail into
the Pacific, all of us with such a feeling on board ship as I never
have known."
"It's funny, all right, and the steward says the Old Man
is acting like he's worried stiff, which just isn't like Davy Jones,"
put in Mahan, who had come up just in time to hear the last
phrase. They all stood up and went about the change of the
watch as eight bells tolled
Never had the weather been so fair for a voyage of The
Flying Dutchman; never had the spirits of the men aboard her
been so low Once EricTheRed swore he had seen a black gull
following them all through the sunrise watch, and every man
aboard knew that was the worst possible luck.
On the next day they caught rainy weather, and that
night the watch reported they had passed a strange craft hove-
to. Finally the weather cleared again, and one morning all hands
came scrambling on deck at sunrise vtfien they heard the rumble
of chains as the forward anchor was let go.
onips! gaspea uavia rarragut as ne emerged into the
sunlight. "Must be hundreds of ’em!"
"Battleships, cruisers, destroyers, some of those new-
fangled aircraft earners, barges, tugs, transports and freighters!"
Jellicoe exclaimed "I say! Where in the world has Davy brought
us this time?"
"Submarines, too," dryly remarked Simon Lake, "and
I can't tell for sure about them, but if you gentlemen w ll look
closely, you'll notice as I have that there isn't a man to be seen
on a single craft."
The others looked. All across the huge fleet, which was
anchored in a wide tropical lagoon, there wasn't a sign of human
life. As they looked, they felt again the apprehension which had
been wth them throughout the voyage. The clear bnght day
seemed falsely bright, and a faint wnd in the ngging made a sad
sound, like a violin playing far away Even Nelson shivered
The old seamen drew together on the midship decking,
as if to find comfort in the presence of one another and present
a solid front to the unnamed and intangible sense of doom which
permeated the whole craft. They were standing like that when
the door of the admiral's cabin opened, and for the first time in
the voyage, Davy Jones stepped on deck.
They were shocked at his appearance. The grizzled,
hearty seadog who had always seemed ageless to them looked
tired, weary, as if he had not slept for nights. There was silence
as old Davy’s glance moved across his men. For a moment his
eyes shone wth pride, then they clouded again and his face set
in the lines of the worry that was in him.
Nelson broke the silence. "Begging the admiral's par
don," he said, "but we'd like to know where we are, and what
we're here for, wherever it is."
There was a murmur of agreement from the admirals
and captains around him. 'This hasn't been a happy ship this
trip, Davy!" someone called from the crowd "Can you tell us
why?"
"As you all know," Davy Jones began, and the men fell
silent under his words. "I've called you together for a voyage
from time to time, one century or another, as the occasion
demanded. This time — well, I've put off telling you as long as I
could and —"
A far-off drone interrupted him. All hands turned toward
the seaward sky. "Airplane," snapped Sims, who knew about
such things.
"I’m not certain yet. I won't be for" -Davy took a quick
squint at the sky— "for a minute or two But this, gentlemen, may
be our last staff meeting."
"What?" The word went up from half a dozen throats.
"I'm not sure yet, mind you," the admiral went on, "but we'll —"
He broke off, staring Everyone followed his gaze. Out
of the hatchway scuttled a ship's rat. While they watched, he
squeaked once, bared his long teeth, and wth a rush was over
the rail and swimming for the shore.
No one said a word. Davy Jones seemed to shrink
inside his uniform. Wearily, almost with an air of resignation,
he opened his mouth to speak again
The sound of the ship's bell cut him short It tolled twice,
and before the third stroke there came to the men on the deck
the sound of a hundred other ships' bells, borne across the water
on the breeze.
One, two. three, four, five, six, seven —
The seamen looked quickly at the sun. It was a scant
four bells, yet the sound tolled on, and it was Farragut who first
noticed and shouted that The Flying Dutchman's bell was tolling
wth the rest, yet there was not a hand near it to strike clapper
against bell.
Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve —
And still they tolled.
"Davy!" Paul Jones shouted. "No ship's bell tolls beyond
eight bells! Davy, where are we? What is this?"
The admiral held up a hand. Overhead, the drone of the
airplane seemed to be swelling, growing louder even above the
sound of the bells.
'We're in mid-Pacific!" Davy called, and he had to shout
because the ringing of the bells seemed louder, and the drone in
the sky had become a thunder, and, though the sails hung
almost limp and the water was still, the breeze in the rigging
seemed to have become a full-blown gale, shrieking through the
stays and whipping his wards from his mouth
'We're in mid-Pacific!" Davy repeated "A place called
Bikini Atoll! We've come — we're here to see if they'll need us
anymore!"
With the last sound of his voice, the roar of the wind
grew to a wild, unending scream. The sound of aircraft engines
beat and throbbed at their eardrums, and all across the lagoon
of Bikini Atoll the bells of the ships went on tolling vtfiile the men
of The Flying Dutchman looked to the high sky where an object
had detached itself from a plane and was falling toward them
Port of Call was originally published in the Saturday
Evening Post in 1947. The first nuclear test at Bikini Atoll took
place the previous year, on June 30, 1946. The fourth atomic
bomb was dropped on a guinea pig fleet of 73 warships in Bikini
lagoon.
Cannon Beach