The Pirate Submarine

"THAT'S done it! Scrap brass has fallen another thirty shillings a ton, Pengelly. The slump has knocked the bottom out of the market. We're in the soup."

Thus spoke Tom Trevorrick, senior partner of the firm of Trevorrick, Pengelly & Co., shipbreakers, of Polkyll, near Falmouth. He was a tall, powerfully-built man, standing six feet two and a half inches in his socks, red-haired, florid featured, with a high though receding forehead and a heavy protruding jaw. His rich deep voice had a plausible ring about it--a compelling, masterful yet persuasive tone, that had largely influenced the shareholders of Trevorrick, Pengelly & Co. to part with their money with the absolute certainty of a pre-war ten per cent. return.

Paul Pengelly, aged thirty-three, or three years older than the senior partner, was of different build and temperament. Trevorrick represented the Celtic strain of Cornishmen; Pengelly had dark curly hair and sallow features--legacies of an Iberian ancestor, one of a handful of survivors from a vessel of the Spanish Armada that had been cast ashore on the rock-bound Lizard. History does not relate why the Cornish wreckers spared the lives of the olive-featured mariners, but it does record that the shipwrecked Spaniards took wives of the Cornish maids, and lived and died in the country of their adoption.

Pengelly was slow of speech, stolid in action save when roused to anger. Of an argumentative nature, he acted as a foil to his partner's exuberance. If Trevorrick suggested a certain course, Pengelly almost invariably went dead against it, not that he disapproved of the scheme, but simply as a matter of habit. He was secretive and cautious; but he never hesitated to do an underhand action if he felt reasonably secure from detection.

He was a man of many parts--a jack-of-all-trades and master of a few. Given to building castles in the air, he would soar to dizzy heights in planning fantastic schemes. Some of them might take definite shape; then, almost without warning, he would "chuck his hand in" and cast about for something else.

Eighteen months previously, Trevorrick and Pengelly had met for the first time. Trevorrick had just left the Royal Navy. He had been a lieutenant-commander attached to the Portsmouth submarine flotilla. He had not resigned under the favourable terms offered by My Lords to redundant officers; he had not been "axed" under the Geddes Scheme. He had been courtmartialled and dismissed from the Service under circumstances that could not be termed extenuating.

Trevorrick was at a loose end when he encountered Pengelly. He had a limited amount of capital. So had Pengelly. The latter's latest scheme appealed to the ex-lieutenant-commander. Just then, hundreds of ships of all sizes were being sold out of the Service for breaking-up purposes. There was money to be made out of the business, with very little capital required for plant, while surplus destroyers and submarines could be bought at a flat rate of one pound per ton, subject to the condition that they had to be broken up.

Of the hundreds, nay, thousands of people who patronise the little steamers plying between Falmouth and Truro--or Malpas, according to the state of the tide few are likely to notice a small creek on the starboard hand of the picturesque river Fal. Fewer still know it by name.

Its entrance is narrow, between steeply rising, heavily wooded ground. Although barely twenty-five yards in width across its mouth, it carries nearly thirty feet of water at Springs. Two hundred yards up, the creek widens out. One bank retains its precipitous, tree-clad nature. The other dips, forming a wide bay, with a flat belt of ground between the shore and the high ground beyond.

On this site, hidden from the Fal by a bend in the channel, stood a derelict shipyard. A century ago, when Falmouth was at the height of its prosperity as a packet-station, the shipyard teemed with activity. It enjoyed a brief and illusory spell of life during the Great War, when it again sank into obscurity and neglect. The two slipways were left to rot, two tidal docks were allowed to silt up. The buildings were ruinous and leaky. The whole concern was in the hands of the Official Receiver.

To the delectable spot came Trevorrick and Pengelly. They looked at it. Trevorrick lost no time in declaring that it was "the" place; Pengelly asserted that it was not. The big man had his way, and thus the Polkyll Creek Shipbreaking Company came into being.

They started modestly upon their enterprise. The heaviest item for plant was the purchase of an oxygen-acetylene apparatus. At first, ten hands were engaged. Pengelly wanted to obtain them locally. Trevorrick, as usual, overruled him, and as a result inserted in a Plymouth paper an advertisement for ex-Naval and Mercantile Marine men. They received shoals of replies and could pick and choose, without having to pay Trade Union rates.

"We'll have unmarried men," declared the senior partner. "They won't be wanting to run away home every five minutes."

"Married men are more likely to stick to their jobs," objected Pengelly.

"No one but a born fool would chuck up a job nowadays," retorted Trevorrick. "They are none too plentiful."

In due course, the shipbreaking yard began to function. A destroyer and a submarine were purchased at Devonport and towed round to Falmouth and up the Fal to Polkyll. The scrap metal was sent up to Truro in barges and thence transferred to goods train for the Welsh smelting works. So profitable was the venture that three more vessels were bought for demolition, twenty additional hands taken on, and the firm of Trevorrick and Pengelly became a limited liability company.

So far, things were going smoothly. The two principals got on amicably, which was rather to be wondered at, since Trevorrick was apt to boast that he had had heaps of friends and had never been able to keep one of them. No doubt, the totally dissimilar physical and mental characteristics of each kept them in a state of mutual docility; but already Pengelly was tiring of the monotonous work, and Trevorrick was scheming to get away to a livelier spot than the dead-and-alive Polkyll Creek.

Then, slowly but surely, came the slump. The shareholders had their first dividends--ten per cent.--paid out of the capital. Another dividend was shortly due and there was no possible chance of it being forthcoming, unless Trevorrick and Pengelly drew upon their capital--a step that each was firmly determined not to take.

"Are we in the soup?" asked Pengelly, in reply to his partner's pessimistic declaration. "What do you suggest?"

"Pack up and clear off," replied the senior partner. "Lay hands on all the ready money we can possibly get hold of, and make ourselves scarce."

"How about the shareholders?" asked Pengelly. Trevorrick shrugged his shoulders.

"Shareholders have lost money before to-day," he remarked. "That's their affair."

"That's all right as far as we are concerned, if they take it lying down," objected the other. "S'posing they don't? What then? We wouldn't be safe for twenty-four hours in this country. We might try our luck abroad."

It was Trevorrick's turn to offer objections.

"Don't fancy the idea, especially with a warrant hanging over my head. Fellows who issue fraudulent balance sheets (Pengelly winced) get it in the neck pretty badly when they're caught. I've no fancy for seven years behind prison bars. And there's another thing. How long could either of us hang out abroad with what money we can lay our hands on? Six months. After that--_phut_!"

"Then what do you suggest?"

"Depends," replied Trevorrick. "Fifty thousand apiece and a snug hiding-place in one of the South American republics."

"Takes some doing."

"It can be done."

"How?"

The two men looked at each other, trying to fathom the depths to which either would be prepared to go.

"How?" asked Pengelly again. "Holding up a bank, for example.

"Try again."

"Highway robbery, perhaps."

"Sort of," admitted Trevorrick. "For 'highway' substitute 'high seas,' and you've got it."

"Piracy, by Jove!" ejaculated Pengelly, with a gleam in his eyes. It was a case of blood will tell, and Pengellys had in bygone days sailed under the Jolly Roger; more than one had made a public spectacle at Execution Dock. "'That's funny, deuced funny," he added after a pause.

"I've been thinking of that myself."

"It'll require a jolly sight more than thinking," remarked Trevorrick grimly.

"It's risky."

"Course it is. So's everything, if you go the wrong way about it. Take shipbreaking: you might get cut in two by a chunk of steel plate, or you might try the business end of an oxygen-acetylene flame. That's happened before to-day."