Текст книги "The Bedlam Detective"

Автор книги: Stephen Gallagher

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

WHEN EVANGELINE WENT LOOKING FOR SEBASTIAN BECKER at his home, she got no farther than the funeral wreath on the door. She knocked and waited, then knocked again, but no one answered. The wreath was a striking weave of laurel, lilies, and black feathers, but in the week since the funeral the petals had fallen and the leaves were beginning to curl. This was her third attempt to reach him. Perhaps Sebastian had taken his son and sister-in-law and gone away? She made inquiries at the wardrobe maker’s, but no one there could help.

Then, in a moment of inspiration, she made her way through the borough’s streets to the pie stand under the railway bridge and there he was, at the stand’s folding side counter. He was a figure apart from the cabbies, looking through his work messages while taking sips of hot tea from a tin mug.

He was unaware of her approach. She was almost at his shoulder when she spoke.

“Sebastian,” she said, and he looked around in surprise.

Her heart lurched at the sight of him. He bore all the signs of the blow that he’d sustained. The sleep-deprived pallor of his face, the dazed look in his eyes. As if they gazed on a reality other than this one, seeing a fading version of the world that he was reluctant to leave.

He started to speak, hesitated, turned and set down his tin mug, and then said, “Miss Bancroft.”

“Sebastian—” She had been pursuing him. With reluctance, but knowing that she must. But speaking to him now for the first time since the day of their return from Greenwich to find tragedy in his home, all that she could say was, “I am so sorry.”

“Please,” he said, raising a hand before she could go on. “I never had a chance to thank you.”

“Thank me? What is there to thank me for?”

“The care you took of Robert that afternoon. He speaks of you often.”

“How is he?”

“Confused. I know the loss has touched him. And before too long I’m sure it will show. Until then … he goes on exactly as before. Are you well? I’d have been in touch to ask, but I didn’t know where to find you.”

“I came to the funeral,” she said.

“I didn’t see you there.”

“I stayed back. I wasn’t properly dressed. But so many people!”

Elisabeth Becker’s funeral service had been conducted by the hospital’s chaplain in the Evelina’s own small chapel. Evangeline had hurried over in the middle of the day and slipped into the nave behind some nurses standing at the back. Even greater in number than those crowded into the chapel had been the families and children that filled the passageway outside it, joining in with the hymns, bowing their heads in silence for the prayers.

Sebastian said, “Elisabeth was a good friend to many. Had it been my funeral and not hers … I think it would have been a much quieter affair.”

“I do wish I could have spoken to you on the day. How are you, Sebastian?”

He gathered and placed the half-dozen message slips—hers among them, she noticed—inside his notebook, closed it, and put it away inside his jacket. “I get along,” he said. “I follow Sir James’s advice. He has the same answer to all of life’s ills. ‘Work, and plenty of it.’ Of course, for him it’s a choice. For the rest of us, a necessity.”

She said, “I hesitate to raise this. But I can see no other way. Have you had any news from Arnmouth?”

“Arnmouth has not been very close to my thoughts, I’m sorry to say.”

“So you don’t know that Grace is dead.”

“Grace Eccles?”

“You didn’t know.”

He shook his head. Evangeline went on, “Cruelly murdered. Close to her cottage. How much more there is to it, I don’t know yet. Mother put it in a letter, but she spared me the details.”

“Does it relate to the other murders?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

She’d hoped to ignite him with this news, and he tried to respond; but it was like an invalid’s brief effort to rise, quickly abandoned.

He said, “I can’t pursue this with you, Evangeline. Look at me. I don’t sleep. I drag myself through the days. And if that weren’t enough, I have to support three of us on half the income.”

“I know,” she said. “And believe me, I am ashamed to be intruding on your grief. But I’ve located the other survivor of the expedition. He’s close to London.”

“And?”

“I can get no further.”

“If you can do such detective work, you clearly don’t need me.”

“But I do,” she persisted. “He’s in the Broadmoor Asylum. They’ve refused me a visit. That’s why I’ve had to seek you out. I don’t imagine they can turn away a Lord Chancellor’s man.”

“What’s the patient’s name?”

“Somerville. Doctor Bernard Somerville. Not Summerfield. Our master’s mate had it close, but not quite right.”

“I’ll give you a letter.”

“A letter’s no use. He won’t correspond and he won’t agree to a visit. But he’s the only man who knows what really happened in the jungle. He’s our only chance of a window into Lancaster’s madness. Aren’t you even curious to know why the man’s in a hospital for the criminally insane?”

“In all honesty? I feel very little of anything. And you’re proposing that we use one madman to explain another? That’ll wash, I’m sure.”

But he was interested despite himself. She could see it.

“They say his behavior is unpredictable but his thinking is lucid,” she said.

“Much like Sir Owain’s.”

“Can I walk with you? I’ll tell you as we go.”

Sebastian could offer no objection. They started toward the river, through the wide iron passage under the railway lines. The racket of trams and carriage wheels and overhead trains forced her to raise her voice.

She said, “After his return to England, Somerville set up house with his sister. At some point—and from what I read in the newspaper, he swears to this day that he doesn’t know why—he beat her almost senseless against his bedroom wall and then chased her naked down a public street to finish her off. He claims that his violent acts and his inability to remember them are a product of his experience on the Lancaster expedition. He is judged to be dangerous to others. And that’s why he’s where he is now.”

SO WHEN BEDLAM WAS FULL, THEY BUILT BROADMOOR.

Sebastian telephoned to make the appointment, and on Friday morning he and Evangeline traveled out into Berkshire on the train together. At a little station built to serve nearby Wellington College they disembarked, and from there took the carriage that was waiting to convey them to the world’s first purpose-built asylum for the criminally insane.

During the ride, which took them past the village of Crowthorne and on a steady climb up the wooded hill that overlooked it, Sebastian said, “Here’s an irony for you. You remember Joseph Hewlett? The man who slashed Elisabeth and then cut his own throat? He survives. The knife he used on her was filthy, and poisoned her blood. The one he turned on himself was the hospital’s own, and clean. The attention he received saved his life. And on the advice I gave him, he now pleads an unsound mind. So he won’t even hang.”

“Surely they won’t let him go free.”

He looked out into the autumn woodland, where the passing trees stood like lonely soldiers. “We’ll see how far he makes it if they do,” he said.

She seemed startled by his tone. “Would you hunt him down?”

“I don’t know. I know it would be wrong. But would it be unjust? Because hunting down men for justice used to be my living.”

“You won’t do it, Sebastian,” she said, as their landau swung into the approach to the asylum’s main gate.

“You don’t know me that well.”

But it was empty talk, and Sebastian knew it. His thoughts of revenge were a consolation, but nothing more than that. Most likely Joseph Hewlett would be committed to some institution very like this one, if his plea of insanity were to be accepted. Those who killed, and were judged mad, might be spared a hanging; but they were neither forgiven nor set free.

Broadmoor Asylum’s main entrance had the look of some grim railway terminus, with brick towers and a big clock above the gateway arch between them. The gates opened at their approach, and the carriage passed inside and stopped. Thirty feet beyond this entrance was a second gate; the inner gate would not open until the outer had been secured. The asylum had been designed by a military architect, and built like a fortress.

For an hour the previous evening Sebastian had studied the case notes of Bernard Somerville, Ph.D. After his return from the expedition, unable to work and with his health broken, Somerville had been obliged to lodge with his sister. He slept badly, and as a consequence was hard to rouse in the mornings.

One day, following a particularly bad night, his sister had entered his bedroom with his morning tea, to find him hidden in a swirl of blankets and covers with only his big toe sticking out and visible. His sister, who sounded like a jolly sort, had taken hold of the toe and tugged on it to wake him. Whereupon he’d flown out of bed in an instant and pinned her to the wall, fixing her there with a forearm and seizing her head with the other hand to smash it into the plaster.

She managed to escape and ran from the house. Somerville pursued her, caught her in the street, and tried to finish her off with a rock. He would have killed her for certain, had he not been restrained by passersby. He’d raged in the Black Maria, and only achieved calm in his police cell some hours later.

His explanation to the custody sergeant had been that in the state between sleep and waking, he had not recognized his sister. He had mistaken her for something inhuman and malevolent. He had acted violently out of fear, and to protect himself.

“I am not,” he had pleaded, “and have never been, a knowingly dangerous man.”

SOMERVILLE WAS confined on the second floor, in a single room on an L-shaped corridor. Somerville had offered no threat to anyone since his arrival, saying that for the first time since the voyage home, he’d felt safe. The superintendent’s deputy was to remain with them throughout the interview.

Though unmistakably a cell, with bars at the windows and an inspection slit in the door, the room was not without its comforts. It had an armchair, a writing table, and a bookcase filled with botanical and other learned texts. In the armchair sat Somerville, enormous, a walrus of a man. He did not rise as they entered, but he did close the book that he’d been reading.

In the doctored photograph at the front of Sir Owain Lancaster’s book he’d been represented as a tall, spare member of the party with white hair and a long goatee. In life, his beard was a dirty gray. Combed out, it reached to his chest. He wore a smoking jacket, a waistcoat that was almost bursting its buttons across his girth, and checked trousers. One leg was extended and supported by a padded stool, recalling the infection for which he’d been treated on the voyage home. He wore a carpet slipper on the elevated foot, slashed open to relieve any pressure.

Sebastian introduced himself and Evangeline and said, “Thank you for consenting to see us.”

“I don’t recall consenting,” Somerville said. “What I recall is the suggestion that I might be returned to the disturbed ward if I refused.”

“Who suggested that?”

“Who indeed.”

“If this goes well, then perhaps I can intercede for you. See if I can’t persuade the superintendent to let you hold on to your privileges.”

“Can we drop the charade?” Somerville said. “It’s been made very plain to me. I tell you my tale or they take my books away.”

“As you wish,” Sebastian said, and there was a pause in proceedings as extra chairs were brought in.

When all were seated, Sebastian said, “You were in the jungle with Sir Owain Lancaster.”

“I was.”

“And apart from him, you were the only survivor of the party.”

“Not exactly. A number of the men turned back early and missed the worst of it.”

“All right, then,” Sebastian said patiently. “You’re the only other man who completed the journey and survived.”

“I told the story for the inquest in Brazil. I was too ill to attend the court, but my account was translated and read into the record.” At this point, he looked toward Evangeline. He said, “It has elements that are not pleasant for me to recall, or for anyone else to hear.”

Evangeline said, “Don’t be too concerned on my account.”

“Very well, then,” Somerville said. “Just bear in mind that these are the words of a madman. Even I can’t trust everything that I say.”

IBELIEVE THAT SIR OWAIN HAD ALREADY SPENT TWO YEARS PREPARING the expedition before I joined it [Somerville began]. The design of those great steam cars was his own. I traveled up to his estate and saw the plans there, and he took a party of us to his engineering works to see them being built. His original idea had been for the Europeans to traverse the jungle in airships while the Portuguese-speaking camaradas and their mules kept pace with us on the ground, but he’d been persuaded to abandon that. Not for any technical reason, I don’t think, but because his wife refused to fly.

You’re aware that he took his wife and child on the expedition and they didn’t survive it? They appear nowhere in any of his retellings, but I don’t believe there was ever any doubt that they’d accompany us. Mrs. Lancaster brought outfits for almost every occasion, but nothing for the conditions that we actually encountered. I can’t imagine that he’d given her any true idea of what might lie in store.

For a man who prided himself on his thoroughness and rigor, Sir Owain came badly unstuck. He planned around his vision meticulously. But try suggesting any possibilities that were not part of his vision, and he’d give you very short shrift. I had been to the Amazon before and knew what to expect. Sir Owain had read up on the Amazon and was sure he knew better.

Take me, for example. I was engaged as the expedition’s botanist. Only once we were under way did I learn that I was to perform as the expedition’s doctor as well. He’d planned this to keep the numbers down. He called it good business sense.

I said to him, “But I have no more than one year of medicine. What if illness should strike?”

He said, “Then I shall expect you to go out and find suitable remedies in the local vegetation.”

I argued that I had only basic first-aid skills—I could set a leg or drain a wound, but nothing much beyond that. He assured me that nothing more complicated would ever be called for. “An accident,” he would quote in response to any disagreement, “is an inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.”

Well, as you know, two of those mighty land craft broke down and never made it to our assembly point. So even before we set off inland from the coast, we were abandoning supplies. Another of them burst its boiler three days inland. That meant another two tons of goods to leave by the wayside. He wouldn’t dump his family’s luggage—not even that infernal rocking horse—but instead he recalculated everyone’s rations with the aim of supplementing them with game from the jungle.

The plan was to travel overland to the lake headwaters of a particular uncharted river, where we’d unload our boats. The steam cars and the mules would make their way back, and the main party would navigate the river all the way down to the sea. Along the way we were to stop at predetermined points, to take measurements and make celestial observations for Sir Owain’s global ordnance system.

I was traveling some way behind the engines, in the mule train. Some days I could be as much as a mile back from the leaders. As we went along I’d see sacks and boxes by the trail, opened and rifled by those ahead of me. Sir Owain continued to ride in luxury at the head of the parade, unaware of the vital supplies hemorrhaging away in his wake. When I raised it in camp the camaradas blamed the Indians, while the Indians either failed to understand, or pretended so.

We were a week behind schedule when we reached the lake that was the birthplace of our unpronounceable river, although Sir Owain declared his confidence that we’d make up time once we were on the water. It took us two days to prepare the boats and load our goods onto them. This involved some inevitable stock-taking, and for the first time I saw Sir Owain show concern. The boxes of staples—by which I mean salt beef, tinned hams, biscuits—were by now far outnumbered by those packed with fine wines, champagne, olives, and foie gras.

The lamp burned in his work tent for most of that night, and some harsh words were spoken. By morning he and his quartermasters had radically revised the expedition plan to suit our remaining supplies and manpower. One-third of the camaradas were paid off. They were sent back with the mules and oxen, which I gather they promptly stole.

Everything and everyone else was loaded onto the boats and launched across the lake. This lake stood on a level plain, with mountains behind it and the jungle sloping away below. Without wind or tide to disturb us, that first day’s crossing was like a lazy afternoon on the Thames.

The river itself was another matter. It began quietly enough at the point where the lake emptied, but within the first mile it began to narrow and speed up, and then its course very soon took some rapid turns. Rocks and islands set up eddies that made the boats sometimes hard to control. Nevertheless, after two days we reached a point close to our first measuring station with some excitements but without any real mishap.

While the astronomer and the survey party hacked a trail to the spot from which they needed to make their observations, the rest of us set up camp. I took the opportunity to gather some botanical specimens, while others hunted for meat. Alas, they shot only monkeys, which most of us refused even to consider.

When our surveyors returned we celebrated with some of the champagne and tinned truffles. The next morning we broke camp and returned to the water.

On leaving the lake we’d kept the boats close together, in a kind of flotilla. But this approach had its disadvantages. In rougher waters the boats could be driven together, risking upset. Instead of using their paddles to steer, the Indians and camaradas had to employ them to shove the boats apart, and so for miles at a stretch all proceeded in chaos, with everyone crashing and turning and spinning midstream.

So for this next part of the journey we launched one after another, with gaps in between. Sir Owain’s pilot boat would precede us all. He carried a fearsome-looking Indian whose task it was to read the river’s signs and warn of any dangers ahead, while Sir Owain sat with a gun on his knees ready to shoot the Indian if he got out of hand. Where a hazard presented itself, they’d make a landing and place a signaler with a flag to warn the rest of us to paddle for the bank.

When we met a waterfall or any other obstacle, we’d have to lift our boats from the river and carry everything around to the other side of it. Around midafternoon I noticed that our boat was moving faster, the waters were boiling and heaving, and our crew was paddling harder to keep control. There was one major disadvantage in using the river’s own energy to power our journey. Whatever might happen, there would be no going back.

At that point, we seemed to be moving from rough water into actual rapids. At the same time we were descending into a gorge, so there was no riverbank to head for. The gorge snaked and turned, giving us no chance to warn those who followed, any more than we could have received warning from those ahead.

The change in the water was sudden and brutal. One moment a fast, rough ride; the next, a merciless battering. Within seconds we’d lost our paddles and unsecured cargo and were clinging on for our lives, as our boat tossed and skipped down a thunderous chicane of white water and spray. Swept around the next bend, we came upon the first wreckage; one of our steel-hulled boats had lifted right up out of the water like a leaping fish, turned onto its side, and jammed itself between rocks, and now there was no sign of the men who’d been emptied from it. As we sped by I saw a wooden chest from its load caught in a whirlpool, spinning in place. I’d barely had a chance to take that in when our own boat grounded hard and bounced on a great shelf of stone, and only my grip on the side kept me from being flipped overboard.

We lost a man from our boat. I was too busy clinging on, and never saw him go. After a while, we reached quieter waters and were carried along, out of danger but with no control. We bailed out the boat with our hands and prayed that those from the wreck had survived, and that the others had fared better than we. A few hundred yards farther on, our prayers received their grim answer.

Boats, bodies, debris … I can hardly exaggerate the horror. We coasted through them in appalled silence. For all who’d fetched up here, more must have been swept on downstream.

Farther on, the river widened and slowed. To our left rose the sheer curving side of the gorge; it held the river in a wide loop, with a low-lying beach contained within the loop like a tranquil island. On this sandbank I saw our astronomer, waving a flag made from a shirt, and with nothing but our hands for oars we dug into the water and propelled ourselves toward him.

FIVE OUT OF our twenty boats had survived intact. Forty souls, including all in the lightly laden pilot boat, remained alive. The rest—gone. It was a true disaster. Over the next day or so we saw many of our fellows being carried by, bloated and floating high in the tepid waters and with a cloud of flies over each. Some of the cargo drifted by as well, and we rescued whatever we were able to catch. I found the medical kit, and in my capacity as “expedition doctor” did what I could to treat the minor injuries of the survivors.

Any drowned Europeans that we saw, we dragged in for burial. I regret to say that the Indians and camaradas were pushed out into the middle of the river and sent on their way. The surviving camaradas were grimly accepting of this practice, as they were the ones assigned to the digging. While searching for a suitable graveyard site within reach of the river bend, our burial party found a row of overgrown mounds with wooden grave markers. The wood was rotten, the markings illegible. Those graves could have been made ten years before, or a hundred.

I found this deeply disturbing. It meant that others had been this way before us, and had suffered a similar trial. But no record of any prior exploration of the river had been found. Which suggested to me that those who’d survived this hazard, and made these graves for their comrades, must ultimately have fallen to some other hazard yet to come.

I suggested as much to Sir Owain.

“Good God, man,” was his response. “Don’t breathe a word of that to the others. As if this weren’t trial enough. I can’t believe you’re out to make it worse.”

His wife and son were in a tent some way from the beach, where they would not be forced to witness the sad spectacle of the passing dead. But I saw the boy standing by the tent and staring at the waters anyway, while his mother lay prostrate inside. All the symbols of civilization—a picnic hamper, wine bottles, cruet sets, parasols, trunks with changes of clothes—passed before his gaze and were carried away, as if offered in sacrifice for the use of the drowned in the afterlife.

That evening, I overheard Sir Owain speaking to his wife and son. I did not deliberately eavesdrop. Voices carry through canvas, and it was impossible not to hear.

I heard him say, “We’ve suffered a setback, I won’t deny it. I cannot promise you all of the comforts I’d intended to provide. But I swear to you. Our safety is not compromised and our purpose has not changed.”

Mrs. Lancaster said something in return, and I could not hear what.

The next morning I looked out across the river and saw the head of that rocking horse floating by, upright and bobbing like a seahorse, badly battered and with its body mostly submerged in the water. In the same moment I saw that Lancaster’s boy was in the river up to his knees, trying to reach it.

I called out, “Are you mad, boy? What do you think you’re doing?” and I waded into the water and dragged him back to the shore. Though the river was slower here, it was far from safe. There were undercurrents, and there were parasites. The rocking horse was already gone.

Later that day, Sir Owain sought me out.

He said, “Simon has demanded that I dismiss you.”

I thought at first that he was making some wry comment and that thanks would follow. But then I saw that he was serious.

I said, “I beg your pardon?”

“Please,” he said. “If my son is ever to be disciplined, I’d prefer you don’t interfere.”

“I didn’t discipline him,” I said. “I pulled him from the water before he took the step that would see him drowned or carried away. If you want him to learn anything from this misconceived adventure, show him how to look after himself or teach him some gratitude.”

I cannot tell you Sir Owain’s reaction, as at that point I turned my back on him and walked away.

WITH OUR five boats, our mixed party of survivors, and our salvaged equipment, we continued down the river. In shallow water near the next night’s camp, Sir Owain spied one of his instrument cases and, seeming to forget all tragedy, exulted in the possibility that he might still achieve something of the scientific purpose of the expedition.

But when the case was recovered, everything inside proved to be smashed or damaged in some way.

“Ruined,” I heard him say. “All ruined.”

That night some animal moved through the jungle close to our camp, smashing and breaking trees. We reached for our remaining guns and leapt to our feet. But as much as we did not want to leave the light of our campfire, the intruder did not wish to approach it and we were spared a confrontation.

The next morning we contemplated its wide trail, and two of the camaradas set out to follow it. Sir Owain called me over and asked for my thoughts.

I said, “There’s no single animal of such a size. Not in this jungle. Unless the rumors are true and the Megatherium survives.”

“Megatherium?” he said. “Never heard of it. Is it a dinosaur?”

“No,” I said. “It’s one of the largest mammals ever known. Believed to have been extinct for over five thousand years, but some say that the Amazon basin is vast enough and wild enough for some areas of its ancient habitat to survive unchanged.”

“Herbivore or carnivore?”

“Herbivore,” I said. “The Megatherium’s stance was like a bear’s, but it was the size and weight of a bull elephant.”

He nodded, and kicked thoughtfully at the trampled ground, and then looked at all the stalks and branches that the creature had broken in passing.

“That could have done it, all right,” he said.

“Could have,” I said. “If one even exists.”

“What do you think, Somerville? What if a man could bag such a beast and drag it home?”

He was serious. I thought for a moment that he was speaking hypothetically, but he was not.

I said, “Owain. Look at what’s been lost. Forget about your standing and your reputation for once. We’ll be lucky if we all survive.”

He narrowed his eyes and looked at me. With the manner of a man who is judging what he’s looking at, and thinking little of what he sees.

He said, “Don’t make me regret bringing you along, Doctor Somerville. You can be such an old woman sometimes.”

THE TWO camaradas did not return. I have no idea why, and nor did anyone else. I don’t believe that they ran away. It made no sense for them to leave the boats. Without the river there was little chance of crossing this jungle and surviving the journey.

Sir Owain talked about going after them, not for the sake of the men but for the beast they’d followed. If he could not bag it alive, he’d have a trophy. I could see that he’d begun to look for some outcome, any outcome, that might save his face and justify his losses on our return to civilization. He was probably writing the Royal Society speech in his head. My dear lost colleagues and loyal servants, I mourn them all; and I dedicate this triumph to their memory.

Meanwhile, his son had begun to suffer painful eruptions on his bare legs. Though he’d dubbed me the party’s physician, Sir Owain had now started to behave to me as he behaved to all critics, by sending the odd sarcastic shot in my direction (“We might have some tea, if Doctor Somerville doesn’t think it too dangerous,”) but otherwise choosing largely to ignore my existence. He said to his son, “It’s just bug bites, boy. Get some lotion on them and stop your complaining,” and so the boy came to me on his own.

He stood by me and said, “Excuse me, sir,” and I hadn’t the heart to let the rocking horse incident color my response.

I’d heard the conversation with his father and so I said, “Hello, Simon. Need something for those bites?”

“Father’s told me to get some lotion.”

I looked at his legs. I saw no bug bites. Just infected scratches. In these conditions he should have been in long trousers from the beginning, regardless of youth and social convention.

“Let’s see what there is for you,” I said.

There was nothing. Someone had been at my kit, and anything that might have been useful was gone. The boy was watching me now, and I didn’t want to turn him away without at least making some effort to help him.

Then I had an inspiration and took out my hip flask. I soaked a pad in neat navy rum, and said, “Some of those wounds are quite raw, so I can tell you this will sting. But in a good way. Have you been scratching them?”

“A little,” he admitted.

“I know,” I said, “it’s hard not to. We’ll bind them up to stop them itching and give them a chance to heal.”

I swabbed his wounds with the rum, which I know must have hurt, but he remained stoical and barely made a sound. Then I tore up some linen and bound his legs in makeshift puttees. They probably wouldn’t help with the itching, but they would protect his legs and prevent him from making the scratches worse.

For the rest of the day he followed me around, offering to help with whatever job I was doing.

DISASTER STRUCK again the next morning, within an hour of continuing our journey. Our river merged with a second, faster torrent, and our pilot boat was capsized in the crosscurrent. Sir Owain, his wife, his son, the Indian, the astronomer, and two of our surveyors were dumped into the foam, along with the paddle crew. The boat was lost, but all swam to safety, or were rescued.