The Wreck of the Mary Deare by Hammond Innes (1956)

After that I was conscious all the time of the dinghy behind us. I can see it still, like a deadly water-beetle crawling after us across the sea, everlastingly following us through an unreal miasma of fog; and I can hear the creak of the rowlocks, the dip and splash of the oars. And I can see Patch, too, his set face leaning towards me and then pulling back, endlessly moving back and forth as he tugged at the oars, tugged till his teeth were clenched with the pain of his blistered hands, until the blisters broke and the blood dripped on the oars – hour after wretched hour. (p.216)

This is a really gripping and exciting adventure story. If I were to recommend one Hammond Innes novel to anyone who hadn’t read him, this would be the one.

The plot

It’s a first-person narrative told by John Sands. He is skippering a yacht, the Sea Witch, across the Channel with three friends, when they are nearly run down by a vast cargo ship, the Mary Deare. A few hours later, in daylight, they spot it becalmed west of the Channel Islands. Coming closer they see the lifeboats have all been launched, their ropes trailing down the sides into the sea. In a reckless moment Sands gets his friends to sail right up to the side of the steamer, manages to grab a rope and haul himself aboard. The mystery begins.

Part one – the wreck

He goes from one end to the other of the ship finding everything eerily quiet and abandoned. He reads the ship’s log in the empty bridge, the letters in the captain’s cabin and so on. All very well done and spooky. Suddenly he hears footsteps, faint and faraway, and tracks down the haggard, exhausted master of the ship, Patch.

Through Patch’s rambling narrative and from the log, Sands pieces together the story: the Mary Deare, a decrepit wreck of a cargo ship, is shipping cotton and old aero engines from the Andeman Islands to Antwerp, then was going on to Newcastle to be broken up. But the voyage has been dogged by disaster. Successive storms kept flooding the holds. Then the original captain, Taggart, died and was replaced by Patch. More storms and Patch slowly realised the mate Higgins was in a conspiracy to sink the ship. The owner of the shipping line, Dellimare, was lost overboard. The radio was put out of action in a fire. Then Patch was lured down into a hold and knocked unconscious, while the conspirators among the crew persuaded all the others to abandon ship. By the time Patch escaped he found himself the only man aboard.

Sands decides it’s time to leave but he has left it too late. A gale has whipped up and, try as they might, his friends can’t get the Sea Witch into position without risking smashing her against the huge ship. They say they’ll rendezvous at St Peter Port and  sail off, and Patch hauls Sands back aboard. He is trapped on a massive ship which is slowly sinking. He and Patch try to get the engines working again and there are terrific scenes of them taking it in turns to stoke the furnaces with coal.

In fact, the opening hundred pages of the novel are wonderfully atmospheric and gripping, with keen descriptions of the sea, the gale and storm, the huge ship foundering, the terrifying sense of abandonment, the claustrophobic scenes stoking the furnaces down in the engine room. All the time Sands finds it almost impossible to get a straight answer out of Patch, who is shattered, distracted, elusive. And it is his bad-tempered refusal to talk plainly which dictates much of what happens next.

Without telling Sands his plans Patch uses the ship’s remaining power to navigate deliberately into the heart of the Minkies, the treacherous reefs off the French coast. He runs the ship aground among the reefs, then they take to an inflatable dinghy, float for a while and are picked up some hours later by coastguards on the lookout for survivors. The ship’s crew has already been rescued, the newspapers have the story, the authorities interview Patch and Sands who, for the first time, meets the hulking aggressive mate, Higgins, who Patch blames for everything.

Part two – the enquiry

The middle section of the novel is devoted to a long, realistic and thorough account of the official enquiry which is held into the fate of the Mary Deare at the request of the insurance company. The court, its procedures and its officials, especially the barristers, are described in minute and convincing detail, emerging as characters in their own right.

Innes uses this setting to skilfully reveal aspects of the events which occurred before Sands stumbled across the ship, going back to the formation of the company which had bought the Mary Deare for its ill-fated last voyage. Because the narrator is biased in favour of Patch, having seen the character of the man under stress as they spent those last 12 or so hours trying to keep the ship afloat, he is inclined to favour Patch’s evidence and discount the evidence of the ship’s crew and owners. However, Innes gives Sands a friend – Hal – accompanying him throughout the enquiry and, through his eyes, we can see how Patch fails to make key points which Sands and we, the reader know about. Through Hal’s eyes we see the evidence slowly mount up against Patch, creating the strong impression that it was he who wrecked the ship.

This is crystallised when the court hears the account of how Patch lost another ship, ten years earlier in his career. Rumours at the time suggest he wrecked it for money, rumours which ruined his career and made it impossible for him to get another captaincy. This blot on his career, combined with all the testimony against him, begins to make Patch look like the guilty man. That night he is seen drinking heavily in pubs of Southampton (where the enquiry is taking place) and doesn’t show up in court next day.

In any case, the enquiry is called off with the dramatic news that French coastguards have sighted the Mary Deare still afloat. Sands returns to the yacht he and his friend Mike are refitting in a dock at Lymington determined to get on with his life when he and Mike are astonished to see Patch swimming out to them and clambering on board.

The conspiracy

By now, and despite Patch’s obstinacy and obfuscation, Sands has pieced together the master narrative behind the plot: Patch is convinced the owners of the Mary Deare are crooks; the small company which owned it had recently been taken over by a big-time operator in the Far East; the ship’s manifold said it was carrying a cargo of hundreds of unwanted fighter plane engines back to England; but for four crucial days the ship was moored alongside the company’s only other ship in Rangoon river; Patch thinks the engines were switched to the other ship which then sailed behind the ‘Bamboo Curtain’ ie the engines were sold to the communist Chinese. The Mary Deare was supposed to sail west and be sunk somewhere convenient; hence the presence of the company owner on board to make sure the plan was carried out; but they reckoned without the alcoholic captain Taggart who, for sentimental reasons, was determined to make it home to his dear sweet daughter in England; they reckoned without the first mate going sick and being replaced by Patch; and they reckoned without Patch’s almost unhinged determination not to let a second ship of his be wrecked. The conspirators thought Patch would be a drunken pushover; in the event he turned out to be an immoveable stumbling block. Eventually, the conspirators among the crew, led by Higgins, set fire to the ship, sabotaged the radio, knocked Patch out in the hold and abandoned ship trusting it would sink.

But it didn’t. And that was where Sands entered the picture, all innocent of this complicated situation and the history of everybody’s motives, especially the haunted determination of captain Patch not to lose another command. Now Patch is driven by one obsessive desire – to get back out to the Mary Deare, caught on the treacherous reefs of the Minkies, and to prove that what happened to her was no accident.

Part three – the Minkies

Against the advice of his partner Mike, Sands agrees to take Patch out on their yacht to the wreck of the Mary Deare. But even as they weigh anchor and begin to motor out of the harbour (late at night), they become aware of a powerful motorboat entering. Suddenly suspicious, they turn off their motor and glide out under sail but not before they’ve glimpsed that the motorboat is captained by the brutal First Mate Higgins and two of the surviving crew. Mike and Sands debate outsailing them down the coast and putting into the next available harbour – but the presence of Patch would go against them – they might be charged with harbouring a fugitive. This, along with the close emotional bond Sands has formed with the obsessive captain, makes them decide to go out to the Deare – and so into the violent and tense climax of this thrilling book.

The final 40 or so pages are a gripping and gruelling description of Higgins’s motorboat chasing Sands’s yacht across a stormy Channel. It covers days of accidents and adventures during which the human protagonists are stripped of all resources and reduced to the level of animals barely clinging to life. For dawn brings a thick fog and in it the yacht and motorboat collide, sinking both. Both crews get into rowing boats and there follows a numbingly detailed and drawn-out test of endurance as they chase each other into the treacherous white water among the reefs of the Minkies. Here, at low tide, they moor to reefs and hide shivering on seaswept rocks, before their boats are eventually staved in by the seas and they walk and swim and then, with no food and no strength, supported only by their life jackets, feebly paddle south to where they think the Mary Deare must be.

Even when Sands and Patch reach the derelict hulk, Innes still has a few plot twists up his sleeve. But the real point is that by this stage the reader has accompanied the characters into a no-man’s-land of hunger and fever and freezing cold sea water and weakness and lack of sleep. In this extremity of human endurance, the broken beached ship assumes a horrifying and allegorical power. Nothing that dramatic actually happens aboard the ship but the writing makes these final scenes, as the Mary Deare founders deeper and deeper in the stormy seas and the characters reach the ends of their tether, incredibly powerful and moving.


In many of his other novels the quality of obsessiveness is structurally required to make the plot happen and, although you go along with it for the sake of the story, deep down it feels contrived and implausible: for example, The Killer Mine wouldn’t have been a killer mine at all if it hadn’t been for the quite mad behaviour of old man Mannock; or in Air Bridge, there would be no plot if it weren’t for the obsessive behaviour of Saeton who ends up stealing and murdering and lying to achieve his dream of building the new-design aero engines.

Here in Mary Deare there is the same structural feature, ie there wouldn’t be much plot if captain Patch just told the enquiry the truth and argued it out the legal way: but he is a man driven, haunted by the great failure which ruined his life, and determined to prove himself justified, whatever the cost. And somehow, in this novel, this plot device – the man obsessed whose obstinacy creates and prolongs perilous situations – transcends itself: it becomes a truly magnificent obession and combines with Innes’ fast accurate style and his profound knowledge of the sea and sailcraft, to give the novel a real depth and imaginative power.

The movie

The critics recognised Wreck as marking a new peak in Innes’ writing and so did Hollywood, who snapped it up. In 1959 they released a movie version starring an ageing Gary Cooper as the haunted, obsessed captain, and a fresh-faced Charlton Heston as the salvage man who gets caught up in the conspiracy. Interestingly, the script was adapted from the novel by English thriller writer, Eric Ambler.

Related links

1968 Fontana paperback edition of The Wreck of The Mary Deare

1968 Fontana paperback edition of The Wreck of The Mary Deare

Hammond Innes’ novels

1937 The Doppelganger
1937 Air Disaster
1938 Sabotage Broadcast
1939 All Roads Lead to Friday


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  1. The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959) | Tim Neath - Visual Artist

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