Mutiny!

By J.E. Macdonnell

The captain was furious. “I warn you, if you want to name this ship the Bounty, I shall be Captain Bligh!” His right hand punched forward in vehement emphasis. The crew stared at him in deep and attentive silence. The voice then came from the middle of the pack – high, thin, disguised, rendered more effective in the tense quiet by the tone of laughter. “Yeah, and we’ll cut you adrift!”
The tension among the crew was hard, menacing. Wind Rode was perilously close to mutiny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Apr 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215204450

J.E. Macdonnell

JAMES EDMOND MACDONNELL was born in 1917 in Mackay, Queensland and became one of Australia’s most prolific writers. As a boy, he became determined to go to sea and read every seafaring book he could find. At age 13, while his family was still asleep, he took his brother’s bike and rode eighty miles from his home town to Brisbane in an attempt to see ships and the sea. Fortunately, he was found and returned to his family. He attended the Toowoomba Grammar School from 1931 to 1932. He served in the Royal Australian Navy for fourteen years, joining at age 17, advancing through all lower deck ranks and reaching the rank of commissioned gunnery officer. He began writing books while still in active service.Macdonnell wrote stories for The Bulletin under the pseudonym “Macnell” and from 1948 to 1956 he was a member of The Bulletin staff. His first book, Fleet Destroyer – a collection of stories about life on the small ships – was published by The Book Depot, Melbourne, in 1945. Macdonnell began writing full-time for Horwitz in 1956, writing an average of a dozen books a year.After leaving the navy, Macdonnell lived in St. Ives, Sydney and pursued his writing career. In 1988, he retired to Buderim on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. He died peacefully in his sleep at a Buderim hospital in 2002. He is survived by his children Beth, Jane and Peter.Macdonnell’s naval stories feature several recurring characters – Captain “Dutchy” Holland, D.S.O., Captain Peter Bentley, V.C., Captain Bruce Sainsbury, V.C., Jim Brady, and Lieutenant Commander Robert Randall.

Book preview

Chapter One

CHIEF PETTY-OFFICER Hooky Walker opened his eyes at six o’clock in the morning, was awake instantly from long practice, and lay in bed listening for it. He was not disappointed—the sound came in through the tightly-closed windows with a dull beat like the roar of soft surf. His brow-hung eyes narrowed as he picked out another, strange sound—something like an oversize frog belching.

A sleepy voice came from the opposite bed.

What’s the weather? Still raining?

Hooky swung his feet out of bed and answered with several succinct, descriptive, emphatic and unprintable comments on the weather. Then he added, as he dragged his shoes towards him with one foot, the cheerful information:

Hear that gurgling noise? The blasted drains are overflowin’. Come on you bludgers, show a leg! Hands to balin’ stations.

While his two friends stirred in the preliminary struggle to leave their warm blankets, Hooky dressed in shorts and shirt and lumbered to the window. He pulled the curtains aside and stared out at the weeping scene with morose hatred.

Rain! It had rained like this for the past three days. No wind, nothing to divert the fat, flooding shafts in their vertical plunge from the smothering clouds. With the coxswain and Gellatly, newly-promoted to petty-officer after destroyer Wind Rode’s final action, he had taken this house at Avalon on the renowned sunshine and beachy coast thirty miles from Sydney, in preference to living in barracks while their new ship drew gradually towards its commissioning date.

He curled his sinewy lips in distaste and stared at the waterlogged backyard. In a ship in sea—rain or a storm you got ten times this volume of water—but it didn’t bank up like this muck was doing at the back there, flowing over from the easement drain in a muddy yellow surge and rippling down to meet the low back porch. Half of it was swilling over the porch while the rest ran down the side of the house in a gouging stream that seemed to have an endless reservoir behind it.

From the kitchen and the lounge-room came the persistent plopping of water dropping into buckets and basins. Even in old Wind Rode, worn out as she had been, you could be washing-down with solid waves from stem to stern and not a drop would get in between decks through the squeezed rubber on port-holes and hatches.

Strike me purple! invited the coxswain beside him. He stared out at the watery depression, scratching his belly ruminatively. What’s on today? Golf, tennis, or maybe we could duco the car?

Very funny! Hooky remarked, his face distinguished by a total absence of humour. I can tell you what you’ll be doin’ for the next hour or so—moppin’ up the kitchen.

Okay, okay, growled the coxswain, trying hard not to show his pleasure at this allotment of duties. Then you’ll get the breakfast? he added tentatively.

Hooky nodded his tough old head. After yesterday’s effort you’re permanently excused, he growled.

And then we whip out and see the skipper? the coxswain suggested brightly, relieved at his abstention from culinary duties.

Then we see the skipper, Hooky agreed.

Which, said a cheerful voice behind them, proves my point that everything is relative.

Eh?

Everything’s relative.

We heard that, snarled the coxswain, his destroyer man’s soul abused by this early morning cheerfulness. It was worth a seaboot in the face to laugh in a destroyer before eleven a.m. What the hell you talking about?

Everything’s relative, said Gellatly again, to make sure they got his point. Here we are whingeing about a spot of rain and there’s the skipper lying with a couple of bullet holes in him. I know where he’d sooner be—here or in hospital. See what I mean? Everything’s ...

Yeah, yeah, we get it, the coxswain grimaced. Now how about droppin’ philosophy and grabbin’ a few spuds. I want chips with me eggs this mornin’.

They dressed quickly—sandals added to shorts completed their early-morning working rig—and got down to their tasks with seamanlike efficiency.

There can be few bodies of men who work with such interlocking smoothness as a destroyer’s crew. The coxswain swiftly set-to on his floor-mopping chore, a job which would shock him into a horrified stupor if it were suggested aboard ship; Gellatly peeled and sliced potatoes with an economical efficiency a housewife might have envied—he had been doing it for years, there being no servants provided on mess-decks; and Hooky busied himself about the gas stove, excused the finer details of food-preparation because of his steel hand, but nevertheless dexterously handling pots and pans with it.

A man ought to get himself a steel mitt, said the coxswain darkly, then he’d be on a beautiful bludge for the rest of his life.

Yeah, said the big man, you do all right as it is. Get off your spine and lay the table. The car might be hard to start in this rain and I want plenty of time up me sleeve.

You leave the engine alone, Gellatly warned him. You can handle rope all right but a car certainly knots you up. Come on, this is breakfast, not dinner.

They talked amicably with insulting words, and ate quickly and cleared up with the same dispatch—underlying their banter and snarls at the rain was the thought that this morning was the first day on which they would be allowed to visit their captain. It couldn’t have come at a better time. They had this Saturday and Sunday left of their leave, then they would report to the new ship; seeing Lieutenant-Commander Bentley would provide that spark which should light them into an alcoholic final forty-eight hours—not that they really needed an inducement.

Hooky and Gellatly were dressed first, the Buffer in sports coat and flannel trousers and white shirt, and Gellatly, the candidate for a commission, in a smartly-cut grey flannel suit. Hooky brought the car round to the front gate—he knew more than he was given credit for and had covered the engine with a corn bag—and then, when the coxswain had still not appeared on the veranda, he came stamping up the path in the rain, calling all the curses of heaven, and a few of his own, down upon the little man’s head.

What the hell’s he up to? he asked Gellatly. We only got an hour with the old man. He ain’t goin’ to no ...

He stopped, and stared at the door. Gellatly saw the look on his weathered face, and turned his own head to follow Hooky’s stare, without surprise. Then he took the cigarette out of his mouth.

Well I’ll be ... he said in wonderment.

The coxswain stood in the door, trying hard to keep a look of self-consciousness from his leathery face, and nonchalantly lighting a cigarette. He was adorned in a bright brown suit, and his green shirt and staggering tie would have made Joseph’s coat look like a suit of deep mourning. Defiant under their incredulous stares, he reached back into the hall and took up a hat. It was green, and a kaleidoscopic feather sprouted in contrasting yellow and red from the band. The coxswain placed this unaccustomed covering on his sparsely-haired head and was ready to meet the civilian world on its own terms.

Hooky swore softly and continuously for half a minute, the shakes of his head punctuating his incredulous blasphemy. Gellatly was making a superb effort to sustain his gravity in the face of the coxswain’s hurt and belligerent gaze—the effort threatened to sprain every muscle within six inches of his mouth.

The little man’s head hooked forward on his neck, and his eyes slitted.

What the hell are you two mongrels lookin’ at? he demanded. Before Hooky could give the rude and obvious answer, Gellatly said with defensive snappiness:

For Pete’s sake let’s get under way! We’ll have to average ninety as it is.

As their vehicle was an old utility loaned them by the coxswain’s carpenter brother, Gellatly’s statement will indicate that they were late already for their visiting hour, and that he was complimenting Betsy, as they had named their transport. The coxswain pulling savagely at his cigarettes, they moved down the wet path and crowded into the front seat.

They took off, Gellatly driving, and as he looked into the rear-vision mirror and was affronted again by his friend’s sartorial get-up, he turned his head quickly away and looked out the window. The uncontrollable expression on his burned, good-looking face would have made the traditional Cheshire cat look like a mask of melancholy.

The utility turned left into Barrenjoey-road and carved a watery bow-wave towards the Avalon shopping-centre. Here, because each man preferred different cigarettes, they all piled out and filed into the newsagent’s. Though these three in their three week’s leave had not depleted Mr. Hennessy’s stocks of literature by as much as one page, his smoking requisites had not suffered a similar unprofitable fate, and as he saw them enter he moved toward the cigarette shelves, one hand already up caressing the coloured packets.

Good-day, fine weather for ducks, said Mr. Hennessy originally, to which assessment they nodded, and answered with seamanlike economy of speech, Craven A, Capstan and Garrick: three twenties each. Then, re-victualled, and stoking-up before venturing out into the rain, they piled in and took-off on their brightening-up mission to the skipper.

Lieutenant-Commander Bentley had already, that morning, been visited by the admiral and his flag-lieutenant. It meant one visitor in reality, for the gold-bedecked lieutenant hung back, apparently awed into silence by the rank of his chief. It did not occur to Bentley that his young visitor might be awed by him—he did not know that his name was now a by-word in the Fleet, as the captain who had nursed from Darwin a destroyer crippled in its fight against a Japanese cruiser squadron, and had then rammed her into an attacking enemy submarine and subsequently escaped from a Jap prison on a secret base in the Coral Sea, taking two bullets in his body in the process. ¹

Awed or not, the flag-lieutenant would have had little chance for conversation. The admiral was ponderous, but prolific, in his praise of the destroyer commander: jolly stout work, sort of thing that bucks up the war effort, shows those Nip fellows we might be small but we’ve got the men and the ships, let ’em see that we’ll take the war right into their own backyards, damn ’em! It was the worst kind of jingoism, and it came oddly from a man who hadn’t been to sea for the past ten years.

Bentley looked surreptitiously at his watch, for he was hoping for more welcome visitors. The admiral saw the gesture, and interpreted it wrongly, but advantageously.

Well, my boy, rising, I know you must still be worn out. Come on Templeton, we mustn’t excite him further. The aide got up from his distant chair obediently. Now don’t you worry about your new command, Bentley, the admiral told him pontifically, I’ve organised all that. Take it easy and get back on your feet, what! You’ll find the new ship will tie you down once you join her. So make the most of your spell here. Come on, Templeton. Goodbye Bentley—happy recovery.

Goodbye, sir, Bentley had murmured, and had closed his eyes in shameless pretence of tiredness In case the old windbag thought of anything more to say. When he opened them the ward was clear.

He smoked two cigarettes, looking at his watch with growing impatience. The beginning of the visiting hour was ten minutes past. He didn’t expect the whole ship’s company to turn up ... but maybe there were one or two of them who might have thought of him. Perhaps they were too busy with their new ship. There would be a hell of a lot to do. But this was Saturday. Maybe most of them were still on leave, and Concord was a fair way out. But buses ran to the door.

He leaned back in the bed, squirming his sound hip into a comfortable position. His lips twitched as he recognised his petulance: maybe he wasn’t the popular captain after all: maybe he had no damned right at all to expect them to give up a Saturday of their leave. God knows they had seen enough of him, and would see more in the future. He was their shipmate, not their messmate. He had no claim on their leisure time whatsoever. Wake up to yourself, chum!

He leaned over to the little cabinet beside the bed and his hand touched the cigarette packet; his eyes, automatically following the line of his hand, travelled down the ward. He saw them standing in the doorway, and an abrupt surge of warmth flooded through him. He felt his whole face cracking in the grin of pleasure and relief and welcome: he tried to tighten the ridiculous grin, he was weaker than he had thought, he cursed his weakness in showing his feelings.

He lay back, watching them walk down the ward, and he was helped in his