Collision Course Read online

  If he had thought of fog, he could have called the captain up to the bridge instantly. A speaking tube directly to the captain’s cabin was not more than 18 inches away from the radar set, on the starboard wall of the wheelhouse.

  For a fleeting moment Carstens thought of summoning the captain, but he dismissed that idea. He was sure he would see the other ship in a moment. Still the thought of fog or of a fog patch blacking out the lights of the oncoming ship did not occur to Carstens. Nor was he worried. He was not the worrying type of man or officer. He was aware of the easy maneuverability of the Stockholm. She handled well, responded instantly to the wheel and had tremendous stopping power. The great advantage of diesel motors which ran the Stockholm was that, like the motor of an automobile or truck, they had 100 per cent backing power. Steam turbines, more efficient than diesels in running larger ships, were rated with only 30 to 60 per cent backing power.

  The bridge clock showed 11:06 P.M. The Stockholm was plowing full speed ahead at more than 18 knots when Carstens went once again to look at the radar scope. The radar pip was still there, off to port, closing in on the Stockholm when Bjorkman sang out, “Lights to port.”

  Carstens, standing at the corner of the radar set, looked through the square window to the left of the radar set and there, where he had expected them to be, he saw the two white dots of the ship’s lights. He could make out also a weak red light, the portside light of the other ship.

  He looked down into the radar scope. The pip showed the ship to be about 1.8 or 1.9 miles away. It was just inside the two-mile ring of the radar scope.

  Picking up binoculars from a ledge on the aft wall some ten feet away, Carstens strode to the port wing of the bridge for a better look at the lights. The forward light was a bit to the left of the aft light as he saw them, indicating the ship was heading still farther away from the Stockholm.

  Now, certain in his mind of the position and course of the other ship, he decided he would increase the safety margin for the passing. “Starboard,” he called out. Larsen turned the wheel steadily two complete turns to the right.

  Carstens watched the Stockholm bow swing away from the approaching vessel and called out, “Amidships.” Larsen turned the wheel back to its center position. Meanwhile, the bridge telephone rang.

  Carstens watched the Stockholm straighten out on her new course. She had swung some 20 degrees to the right. Then he ordered “Steady so,” and Larsen steadied the ship on her new course.

  The orders had been given calmly in a voice hardly raised from a normal speaking tone. To Carstens, again, this was a routine maneuver. He no more suspected disaster within three minutes than does a sleeping man fear being struck by lightning.

  He took one more look at the masthead lights of the unknown ship to the left, satisfied himself the ships would pass safely port-to-port, and then went to answer the telephone. He walked at a normal gait across the darkened wheelhouse to the telephone mounted on the rear wall on the starboard side of the wheelhouse. So sure was he of a safe passing, the young officer did not bother to look again at the other ship.

  Turning his back on the approaching ship, he picked up the telephone. “The bridge,” he said.

  “Lights 20 degrees to port,” reported Johansson from the crow’s-nest.

  “All right,” said Carstens, and hung up. He stood with his left shoulder toward the wall as he spoke, facing the helmsman.

  Johansson, replacing the phone in the crow’s-nest, looked out at the lights of the other ship. In that instant the eighteen-year-old youth saw the position of the lights begin to change. He stared in disbelief as the forward light crossed under the aft light. The lights now, as he saw them, were in a switched position, the forward light to the right of the rear light. The other ship was going to cross the bow of the Stockholm. The seaman reached for the telephone and then stopped the motion. He didn’t call the bridge again. His duty as lookout was to report the sighting of other vessels to the bridge. Now it was up to the bridge.

  Lookout Bjorkman on the starboard wing of the bridge also saw the lights change. He started across the wheel-house to tell the mate. But then he saw the officer also had seen the lights.

  Carstens, having walked back to the port wing, stood with his binoculars focused on the lights. He had stopped for a glance at the radar before returning to the port wing. While on the telephone, he had not seen the other ship start her swing across the Stockholm bow. The changed position of the radar pip had not registered in his mind. His glance at the ship through the windows of the Stockholm as he walked to the bridge wing also failed to alert him.

  But when he reached the bridge wing, the situation roared up at him. No longer was this the safe passing situation he had assumed. He saw the enormous broadside of a giant black ship, sparkling with lights like Copenhagen’s Tivoli. The ship was heading across his bow. Amidst this phantasmagoria, he saw the glow of the ship’s green running light. It was the starboard side of the other vessel!

  Carstens lunged at the engine telegraph in front of him. Heaving his body over the telegraph stanchion, he gripped a handle in each of his huge hands and pulled the twin levers together to the upright STOP position and an instant later plunged them down to FULL SPEED ASTERN.

  “Hard a-starboard,” he cried out to Larsen, as he cursed the unknown ship ahead of him. The engine telegraph clappers clanged out their harsh brassy cry as Carstens moved the handles. At the same time, he thought he heard a whistle signal from the other ship, but because of the bells of his own engine telegraph, he could not be sure.

  Larsen reacted immediately. As fast as he could reverse one hand over the other he swung the power-driven wheel to the right. It spun around once, twice, three, four and five full turns and then it would go no farther.

  Captain Nordenson below reacted immediately. Upon hearing the telegraph cables to the Engine Room moving inside his wall, he pushed his chair back from his desk, grabbed for his cap and started off for the bridge. Fog, he thought. The ship had come upon sudden fog and Carstens topside had reversed the engines, the captain thought as he left his cabin.

  Next door, Acting Chief Engineer Gustav Assargren also reacted immediately. He had just finished reading a book and had turned off his light when he heard the bells of the engine telegraph on the bridge. He hopped out of bed and began shedding his pajamas. Any engine maneuver at sea was unusual and, he decided, his place was in the Engine Room.

  In the Engine Room the telegraph repeaters clanged out the startling order for full speed astern, and two officers and three motormen reacted immediately. While the men in the Auxiliary Engine Room came running into the Main Engine Room, Second Engineer Justra Svensson, posted on the maneuvering platform between the controls for the two giant diesel motors, turned the wheel of the starboard motor to STOP. Motorman Alexander Hallik at the same time turned a smaller wheel to open an air valve necessary to reverse the engine. Then Svensson lunged across the 10-foot platform separating the two motors, and stopped the port engine. The forty-seven-year-old officer raced back to the starboard engine and turned the wheel to FULL SPEED ASTERN. It was like bringing an automobile to a full stop before going into reverse.

  On the bridge, Carstens and the two seamen felt the ship shudder as the braking action began to take hold. But a ship does not screech to a stop like a car. They felt the braking, but they saw the Stockholm plunging ahead on her starboard turn still heading for the unknown ship ahead.

  Terror welled up inside Peter Larsen, making his first voyage on the Stockholm, as he saw the enormous black hull of the unknown ship fill the square windows before his eyes. One sharp thought cut through his mind. A shiny brass alarm button was not more than five feet away. He could, he thought wildly, dash from the wheel in an instant, push that button and alarm the entire ship of the catastrophe which was seconds away. He might save hundreds of lives. The passengers should have the chance of at least this warning. The thoughts raced through Larsen’s head, but he remained at the wheel, obeying
his orders, holding the rudder at hard right, watching disaster happen, and muttering to himself, “I’m a goner … this is the end for me.”

  One passenger at least, Dr. Horace Pettit, a devoted amateur yachtsman who never failed to carry a compass in his pocket, had been alerted by the distant sound of a whistle signal from another ship. Without a moment’s hesitation, he dropped the book he was reading, thrust his head through the open porthole of his cabin and saw a ship, her lights aglow, speeding across the Stockholm’s bow. “Brace yourself,” he yelled to his wife, “we’re going to crash!”

  Up until the very last instant, Carstens just did not believe the ships would collide. Somehow they would miss one another, his mind insisted. He gripped the engine telegraph on the port wing of the bridge and watched with horror the sight which afterwards he would discover he could never drive from his mind for very long.

  “The watertight doors!” The thought screamed through Carsten’s mind at the last moment. The watertight doors, which would protect the Stockholm from possible sinking, were still open. And the two ships drew closer and closer together.

  Chapter Three

  “I CAN SEE A SHIP”

  On the bridge of the Andrea Doria, the watch changed at 8 P.M. The ship was surrounded by a thick, opaque fog which cut visibility to about one-half mile. At times the wet mist even cut off the bow of the ship from the view of the men on the bridge. The wheelhouse was turning dark as the two officers of the eight-to-midnight watch came up to the bridge together. They were unalike in appearance and personality. Senior Second Officer Franchini was a tall, thin, dark-complexioned man of serious mien, thirty-seven years old, while his colleague, Junior Third Officer Eugenio Giannini, was blond, light-skinned, short and stocky, a cheerful, eager officer of twenty-eight.

  First Officer Luigi Oneto, the senior watch officer, passed the watch to Franchini while Giannini, the youngest officer on the ship, relieved Second Officer Junior Guido Badano at the radar. “Come, I’ll show you the position on the chart,” Oneto said to Franchini. The two men went into the chartroom where the first officer pointed out the approximate position of the ship. Franchini glanced at the rough log as Oneto, who was leaving the watch, spelled out the various fog precautions which had been taken. The course of the ship was 267° true. The numerals were written on a small blackboard over the chart table and on a blackboard in front of the helmsman.

  Giannini performed the usual functions which began each watch by checking the three compasses on the bridge to see that they were properly adjusted to one another. He then checked the panel controlling the watertight doors. He saw the twelve small red lights gleaming in the wheelhouse.

  At the radar to the right of the helm, Badano pointed out in the scope the pips of three ships which showed in the 20-mile range of the Raytheon radar set. “They are all going with us,” Badano said. Giannini saw that two ships were about nine miles ahead of the Doria, one bearing some 40 degrees to the left and the other about 40 degrees to the right. The third ship was about six or seven miles behind the Doria and to her left.

  Franchini stopped to glance into the radar scope long enough to fix in his mind the positions of the two ships ahead and then went out on the wing of the bridge. There he chatted casually with Captain Calamai as the two men peered into the thick, impenetrable fog.

  Giannini, who could hear the subdued voices of the two older men through the open wheelhouse door, silently watched the radar scope. He could see that the fast Andrea Doria was steadily gaining on the two ships ahead. He was not concerned with the ship behind, which the Doria was rapidly outpacing. From time to time the captain asked for the bearings and distances of the two ships ahead and Giannini called out the figures. He read the distance from the ships by the concentric rings on the scope which represented miles. He determined the angle bearings by adjusting the cursor on each of the pips and reading off the degree of bearing on the outer rim of the scope. The radar set was of a later model than that of the Stockholm. It had a built-in compass synchronized with gyrocompass by which the helmsman was steering. Thus at any one given moment he could read off the relative bearing of other ships.

  But unlike the Stockholm, the Andrea Doria radar set had no plotting device nearby which the radar man could use. In order to plot the precise position, course and speed of an observed ship it would be necessary for the second officer of the watch to plot on a maneuvering board in the chartroom where there was light. The plotting device was in the top drawer of the chart table, unused. Unlike the Stockholm regimen, it was not the practice on the Andrea Doria to plot radar observations of other ships. The officers merely approximated the course and speed of other ships by what they could see and remember of the changing positions of pips on the radar scope.

  The rule of thumb followed by many ship officers is that if the angle of the pip changes appreciably, you will pass the other ship safely. If the angle does not change substantially, the two ships are on a collision course and one or both must change course depending upon the circumstances.

  As the Andrea Doria plowed on through the misty wet fog and calm black sea, overtaking and passing the two slower ships that had been ahead, there was no sense of foreboding on the bridge of the modern luxury liner. Captain Calamai had navigated his ship through fog many times during his forty-one round-trip crossings of the North Atlantic on the Andrea Doria. He had missed only ten voyages of the Doria during her three-and-a-half-year life because of vacations. He himself, while master of the Italian liner Saturnia and other ships, had crossed the North Atlantic more than one hundred times and the South Atlantic even more often while voyaging from the Mediterranean to South America.

  Second Officer Franchini, in his eighteen years at sea, half his lifetime, also was familiar with fog and the vicissitudes of ocean travel. He had served as an ensign on two Italian submarines during World War II until he was captured escaping from a torpedoed submarine in 1943. He spent the next three and a half years as a prisoner of war in England. After the war he had served on five other Italian Line ships before being assigned as second officer on the Andrea Doria in October, 1955.

  For Giannini however, making his fifth voyage, this was the first time he had been on watch in fog since he had come aboard the Doria three months ago. The Doria was his first ship since being hired by the Italian Line, although he had served on six other vessels since going to sea as a junior deck boy in 1949 at nineteen years of age. But he had the same schooling as his senior officer and captain. All three officers on the bridge held captain’s papers. Gianinni had earned his that January when he graduated from the Italian Naval Academy in Leghorn.

  Several minutes after nine o’clock the staff captain, Osvaldo Magagnini appeared on the bridge. It was his second visit to the bridge since the onset of the fog. “Would you like to go below for some rest?” Captain Magagnini asked his superior officer. The second-in-command knew the answer before Captain Calamai replied, “No, thank you.” His query was more a gesture of courtesy than anything else for in the years Captain Magagnini had known Captain Calamai, he never knew the commander to trust the bridge of his ship to anyone but himself in fog.

  Captain Magagnini, who stood no regular deck watches since his promotion to staff captain the previous February, remained on the bridge, chatting with Captain Calamai for a while and then walking about the wheelhouse, checking the radar, the helmsman, the charts and getting the feel of the bridge.

  Captain Calamai, as was his practice, paced the bridge incessantly. He walked from the outer end of the bridge wing, extending beyond the side of the ship, to the inner end of the bridge wing, a distance of some 20 feet. He walked through the wheelhouse, glancing at the radar from time to time, and he stopped at the chartroom to estimate the position of his ship at fairly frequent intervals. Then back into the wheelhouse and out again to the wing of the bridge, where he could feel the wet sea air in his face and sense the movement of his ship. The wing of the bridge is the best vantage point to see or hear t
he approach of another ship, and old seafarers like Captain Calamai trusted to his senses more than he did to radar.

  Somewhat after 9:20 a pip appeared in the radar scope seventeen miles almost dead ahead of the ship’s course. Giannini called out his observation as he watched the yellow pip appear closer and closer to the center of the radar scope. The center of the scope, stationary, represented the moving Andrea Doria, and the moving pip turned out to be the stationary Nantucket Lightship. The lightship was expected at about that time. The officers on the bridge gathered at the radar set and, observing the positions as the flasher swept around the scope, concluded that it must be the lightship at last.

  Franchini went to the chartroom and took a position fix of the ship by loran, a long-distance radar-type instrument, and then checked it by turning his radio directional finder on the lightship. There was no doubt left that directly ahead lay the Nantucket Lightship, the first checkpoint for the Doria since the Azore Islands. In fact, it appeared that if the Andrea Doria continued on course she would split in half the small anchored ship.

  At fourteen miles distance from the lightship, Captain Calamai ordered a change of course six degrees to the left. Carlo Domenchini, the fifty-nine-year-old seaman at the wheel, swung the helm to port as the compass needle clicked off the degrees to 261. Second Officer Franchini took over at the radar for the important approach to the lightship. Staff Captain Magagnini, who had instructed most of the officers aboard in the use of the Doria’s radar equipment, looked over the second officer’s shoulder, watching the pip that was the Nantucket Lightship draw closer and closer. Third Officer Giannini went about the more menial chores of changing the course numbers on the two blackboards, laying off the new course on the chart, and recording the changes in the rough log.

  On the wing of the bridge, Captain Calamai peered out into the fog which enveloped the bulbous bow of his ship. If he were to obey the Rule of the Road which called for ships to be able to stop in half the distance of visibility, the Italian superliner should have been stopped dead in the water. But the Andrea Doria also had an obligation to dock her 1,134 passengers in New York early the following morning. About 250 longshoremen had been hired to be on the dock ready for work at 8 A.M., and they would be paid some $2.50 an hour from 8 A.M. on whether or not the ship arrived on time. And so the Andrea Doria sped on, as undoubtedly did virtually every other vessel traveling in the fog-shrouded waters.