BIGGLES AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA

by Captain W. E. Johns

7. WORRY FOR ALGY (Pages 77 – 86)

“Algy had watched Biggles until he was out of sight”. The lagoon is quiet. “No stretch of water ever looked more peaceful. Except for a slight ruffle inside the break in the reef, it might have been a sheet of blue ice, pale turquoise in the shallow parts and shading to ultramarine and purple where the water ran deeper”. “As a boy, as a result of reading romantic and mostly imaginative stories of desert islands and coral atolls, uninhabited of course, he would have asked nothing more than to find himself on one. Now, perhaps unfortunately, he reflected, he knew better”. “How many unfortunate mariners, victims of shipwreck, had perished miserably, he wondered. Hundreds. Possibly thousands. Their numbers would never be known”. Algy thinks of Richard Falconer and Philip Aston, two people who was stranded separately as castaways and rescued. (Richard Falconer, born 1680, date of death unknown. In 1699, he fell into the sea in a storm and was washed up on one of four or five low sandy islands, where he lived on bird eggs and rainwater. On 8.11.1699 another small ship was washed up onto his island, which he was told was the Alacran, or Scorpion Islands lying eighty miles north of the coast of Yucatan in Mexico. Refloating the ship, Falconer was washed away with it. He reached land and was able to get help and return to rescue the other crew members. Philip Aston, 1702 – 1746, escaped from pirates on the island of Roatan in the Bay Islands of Honduras and survived for 16 months before finally being rescued by a ship called Diamond. He wrote a book about his experiences in 1725 called “Memorial”). Algy also thinks of Alexander Selkirk who was willingly marooned on the island of Juan Fernandez in the Pacific for four years and four months and whose story was the inspiration for the book, ‘Robinson Crusoe’. “From these sober deliberations he was jolted into the world of reality, literally jolted, by a bump from below, not severe but sufficient to cause mild alarm. On looking, Algy sees a shark, about ten or twelve feet long in the lagoon. The shark bumps the aircraft again. Algy worries the hull might spring a leak and so he decides to pull up the anchor and move to a different position. “The anchor refused to budge an inch. Algy swore softly”. The anchor is caught on coral and he can’t pull it in. He ties his end of the anchor rope to a lifebelt in order to mark the position where it is and moves the aircraft to a new position on the lagoon. The shark follows and so Algy decides to move the aircraft up onto the coral sand. Algy now starts to worry about Biggles, who has been absent longer than had been expected. Algy goes up to the top of the rise. “It must have been while he was there, surveying the huts, that Biggles came into view, for when he returned to the aircraft and looked along the shore he saw him coming. He saw him break into a run and could guess the reason. He would be alarmed to see the machine ashore and was in a hurry to know why it had been taken off the water”. Biggles arrives and Algy explains what happened with the shark. Biggles stared incredulously. “A shark! Sharks don’t do that sort of thing”. “This one did. Kept bumping itself against the keel. Don’t ask me why. I can’t think like a shark. Maybe it was only trying to scrape some barnacles off its back”. Biggles says to Algy, “Be a pal and fetch me a drink. I’ve put in some hard work and I’m as dry as a chip”. Algy brings Biggles a mug of orange juice. Algy asks Biggles if he found anything. “Plenty” is the response. “I fancy this is going to shake you”. “Listen, I’ll tell you”. “He lit a cigarette”.