Witness account · 3 min read · Set in The Kessin Crossing ·
The Crew of the Last Trip
On the night the crossing closed for the season the crew signed off at the pierhead and heard the boat go out once without them.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Aubrey Lane, deckhand"
I have worked the Kessin crossing eight seasons, deckhand on the Ostrey, forty feet and change, licensed for twelve passengers and a master. I give it plain, hour by hour, and the pier book is at the harbour office to set against me.
The last Friday of September the crossing closes for the winter, and the Ostrey works to the last light and then ties up for the season. We ran the final trip at evening, ordinary in every way: the four of us aboard, six passengers over and six back, the engine as she always is. At the harbour side I coiled down and hosed the deck. Coming in we landed at 22:04. The master, Peter Redding, signed the log at the pier step, passengers entered nil on the landing, and the book went up the pierhead ladder into the keeping of the pier man. Once the book is up, the trip is over for the record and for everything else.
We went up the ladder at 22:12, the four of us, and there was talk of supper, and the pier man had the football pages under the lamp. I was last off the ladder, as I am last down it in the mornings, and I was not off it before I heard the engine.
She went out on the last Friday without us. That is the whole of it and there is no way of making it less. The lamps were burning masthead and sidelight, both sides, as for a working trip. She stood out on the ebb, riding light, and turned down channel at the buoy. I watched the stern light go small past the middle beacon, and I did not call out: calling out to a boat that is not yours to call is not deckhand conduct. Tull heard the engine too, from the penthouse by the steps. Sellars was at the ice house and says he heard nothing. She was gone thirty-one minutes by my watch, out and in, and she came alongside the way she comes alongside, and there was nobody to take the head rope. I took it, hauled her in, made fast. The deck was wet as at the end of a working, with the marks of boots on it, small, going to the rope side and coming back.
In the morning the log was read out to the season's ending, as it is read every closing, and it showed the last trip worked in full. Crew of four, the same four names in the same hand as every other Friday, Redding's initials taking each signing. Times out 22:29 and in 22:58 — one minute either side of what my watch and my ears had. Passengers over, nil; passengers back, nil. No entry made after the book went up the ladder, and the pier man has sworn to that — not a man who takes an oath lightly — so the book stands.
I have not asked Redding or Tull to sign anything against the pier book, and they have not offered, and I understand them. Redding, asked once on the Monday at the net shed, looked at me the way you look at a knot you think you did not tie, and said the word no, once, on his own time. I have asked Sellars twice to come to the harbour office with me, and Sellars answers carefully, the way a man answers when he is reading his answer off something.
So the confirming stands at nothing that would serve a court: Tull hears the engine and shrugs at it, Redding says no, Sellars has stopped meeting the question at all, the pier book is contradicted by nobody but me, and the boat is on the mud with the log read and filed. What nobody will put beside the book is the arithmetic of the last Friday: if she in truth worked that trip with her full crew aboard, after her crew had gone up the ladder — then who, at five and twenty to eleven, took her head rope when she came in?