Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [50]
While she was preparing to leave Fremantle for the East Indies, the Perth had been recalled three times before finally receiving orders to depart at 11:30 on February 13. Confronted with the unlucky date, Captain Waller intentionally delayed standing out till after midnight on the fourteenth. One did not idly tempt the fates. Unease was already rife on that ship. The Perth sailors realized at one point that two chaplains were on the roster, and contemplated the apocalyptic implications. “One was bad enough,” Ronald McKie wrote, “but two—that was lethal.” Another omen: While the Perth was firing on Japanese planes, a portrait of Marina, Duchess of Kent—it was she who had rechristened the ship as the Perth in 1939 after she was acquired from the Royal Navy as the HMS Amphion—fell from the wardroom bulkhead and crashed to the floor. Clearly dark ghosts were at work.
But perhaps the most striking portent involved the feline mascots of the Houston and the Perth. “I don’t know if Captain Rooks had anything to do with this or not, but it seemed very strange,” remembered Seldon Reese, a seaman first class on the Houston. As Rooks walked down the gangplank for a meeting of commanders, the ship’s cat “took off down that pier into Java like some big hound dog. You never saw a cat move so fast in your life.” Apparently the animal had had enough of life on the ship, be it a favorite of the president or not. Crewmen who witnessed the incident were nearly as spooked as their feline ex-shipmate. It gave substance to a fear expressed by Lieutenant Winslow—“that, like a cat, the Houston had expended eight of its nine lives and that this one last request of fate would be too much.”
The Perth’s black cat, Red Lead, had been given to a sailor at a New Year’s Eve party in Sydney in 1941. The feline had lived life as seagoing contraband until one day his owner devised to sneak topside and release the cat when Captain Waller was on duty on the bridge. The affection-starved animal snaked around Waller’s legs. To the delight of the sailor, the captain adopted the cat, removing the risk of its expulsion by officers junior in rank but superior in adherence to the book. In port now, Red Lead tried three times to desert the ship. The master-at-arms finally had to put him in “irons,” sticking his paws in a kerosene can with holes cut in it. The animal seemed to know something.
At dusk on February 28 the two ships got under way from Batavia. The Dutch destroyer Evertsen, also in port, ought to have joined them, but her commander had no orders and her boilers had no steam, and either deficiency was enough to keep her in port no matter how much the cruiser captains may have wanted her as an escort. Without a harbor pilot to guide them, trusting their own charts and the coming full moon—it would be bright enough to allow the antiaircraft rangefinders to take navigational fixes on shore—Rooks and Waller led their ships through the minefield channel without incident, and increased their speed to twenty-two knots. Their bid to reach Australia was all that remained.
Walter Winslow wandered out on the quarterdeck by the port-side catapult tower. Looking astern, he watched Java’s darkening junglescape shrink in the flow of the ship’s trailing white wake. “Many times before I had found solace in its beauty, but this night it seemed only a mass of coconut and banana palms that had lost all meaning. I was too tired and too preoccupied with pondering the question that raced through the mind of every man aboard. ‘Would we get