XI 



The Eastern Fleet 



THE railway carriage was old, the upholstery worn and 

 threadbare, the pictures of spas and resorts had long since 

 disappeared from their frames above the seats; a dubious 

 drawing and a bawdy suggestion scrawled with untutored hand 

 replaced them upon the exposed cardboard backing. Three Royal 

 Marines — a sergeant and two corporals — sat in the compartment 

 gazing out across the flat, featureless marshlands of the Isle of 

 Sheppey, their kit in bags and suitcases stowed upon the racks 

 and the empty seats before them. The train crawled across the 

 forbidding landscape as dusk fell and the last light in the western 

 sky turned the mudflats of the Medway to sheets of lead. 



The Marines had had a busy day for they had been turned from 

 civilians to members of this fine corps in eight hours, a process 

 which normally takes as many months. They were the chart 

 production staff of Challenger travelling to join her at Sheerness 

 on her commissioning day, the i st of May, 1 942 . 



The ship was preparing to sail to join the Flag of the Com- 

 mander-in-Chief, Eastern Fleet. She was to be employed in making 

 surveys and charts of the bases and anchorages that the Fleet 

 would occupy during the course of the fluctuating battle being 

 fought in the Indian Ocean. To eliminate the delays that would 

 be occasioned by sending each survey back to England for re- 

 production as charts, the ship had now been fitted with a flat-bed 

 printing press. This same press had been used onboard the old 

 surveying ship Endeavour for reproducing her surveys during the 

 Dardanelles campaign in World War 1. 



Challencjer was to produce her charts by a process of lithography 

 adapted to the equipment which it had been found possible to fit 

 into this already overcrowded ship. It was planned to draw each 

 chart upon tracing paper, and then, by placing this against a 

 specially coated zinc plate in a glass fronted vacuum frame exposed 

 to an arc-light or the tropical sun, to transfer the image to the zinc. 



125 



