Islands of Angry Ghosts by Hugh Edwards

Author:Hugh Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Angus & Robertson
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

15

Whales and Wrecks

Marriage naturally brought with it a change in my way of life. Back in Australia on my first day at the office the editor eyed me triumphantly. ‘You’ll really have to settle down now,’ he said. ‘A married man has responsibilities.’

But my wife, in addition to her other endearing qualities, was understanding, and I still managed to find time for diving. In odd moments I schemed to get back to the Abrolhos. It took time, but in March 1963 — a few weeks after the birth of our son Christopher — I was once again swimming down, skimming over the old familiar staghorn corals and watching the albacore and snapper finning like flocks of wheeling birds down the 45-degree slope of an Abrolhos reef into the blue depths below. The first time or the hundred-and-first, there is always something new and beautiful in coral waters.

I had persuaded West Australian Newspapers to send an expedition to the wreck of the Dutch ship Zeewyk, which was wrecked in 1727, nearly 100 years after the Batavia, on the reef near which the Sardam had drifted one entire night, fearfully within earshot of the breakers. We had got from a Dutch scholar named B. Goppel in Rotterdam, a copy of the log written by the steersman of the Zeewyk, Adriaan de Graaf, telling of the wreck and the nine months spent by the castaway crew on the islands building their sloop of wreck wood to sail to Java with the Zeewyk’s treasure. Secretly I hoped to sneak off for a day or two if the opportunity occurred and have another underwater look in that tantalising area around Beacon Island, fifty miles to the north.

When we arrived in the islands of the southern group aboard George Travia’s crayfish carrier boat Lady Joyous, fisherman Maurie Glazier — an old diving companion from Shark Bay — was there, waving his arms to indicate the enormous size and girth of something. As we got closer we were able to understand what he meant.

‘WHALES …!!!’

Two humpback whales, he said — a cow and her calf — were in a reef-locked lagoon, trapped there by the tides. They were bottled-up in a natural aquarium where we could inspect them at leisure — see how they dived, rolled, surfaced, propelled their vast bulk through the water … a wonderful opportunity!

Would we like to dive in the lagoon with them? Maurie asked.

Would we!

Whales are normally deep-sea creatures and few divers have ever swum with them. The diver who had seen for a few fleeting seconds the great barrel flanks of a passing whale was considered exceptionally fortunate. And now we had the chance to swim, for hours if we liked, with this cow and calf. It was a unique experience, an opportunity perhaps no other divers had ever had. We were a little apprehensive about them at first; after all, the mother was forty feet long and weighed forty tons. In longboat whaling days, whales had shivered longboats and broken

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