Inspired by a new blog called ‘Old Steam Ships’
by our friend, Max, this is a fictionalized account
in the voice of Tom Dartford, Quartermaster
of the New Zealand ferry, TEV Wahine.
Please show support for Max’s new endeavor
by checking out his blog. Thank you!
They will tell you I was brave. I wasn’t. I was simply the man at the oar.
By the time she listed past saving, the Wahine was already half- swallowed by the sea. The cyclone had been at her all morning …. Gisele, they named it …. as if something that cruel deserved a woman’s name. We’d struck Barrett Reef in darkness, and after that it was only a matter of when.
I had my orders. I had a lifeboat.
The swells were twenty feet if they were an inch. You don’t reason with water like that …. you read it, the way you’d read a man who means to hit you. There’s a moment before each wave crests where it shows you its intention. I learned that in the first ten minutes or I’d have learned nothing ever again.
People were in the water; some had jumped, some had been thrown. I couldn’t think of them as people then, God forgive me, only as positions. Twelve o’clock. Nine o’clock. Pull.
One woman wouldn’t let go of her handbag; I didn’t argue. A man came up over the gunwale, blue as winter, and said thank you before he’d even drawn a breath.
I made the run again. And again.
I don’t know exactly how many we brought in. They tell me it was over a hundred. What I remember is the weight of the Wahine sitting lower with each pass, and thinking: she’ll hold, she’ll hold, she’ll hold.
Fifty-three people didn’t make it home that day.
I think about them whenever the sea is calm and everyone assumes it always will be.
NAR©2026
This is “The Wreck of the Wahine” by Mice On Stilts
The union boats are leaving town
Giselle went south for the spring
An antique haul, Tapuhi’s fall
Hector, my captain, take the reins away
We’ve lost control……
Go quietly by the rooms, there’s a child on board
Dragging anchor, looming founder
Ngake strikes his tail
Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea
Abyssal plains ahead
The drowning dogs in smokeroom lounges
Such an ugly day
We’ve lost control……
(Lyrics provided via Musixmatch)
Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.
The Elephant's Trunk 