The North Water

CHAPTER EIGHT

Three weeks from Jan Mayen Island to Cape Farewell. Clear blue skies above, but the wind is intermittent and changeable, blowing strong and hard from the south on good days, but on others turning blustery and infirm or failing altogether. The crew are kept busy reeving boat falls, splicing whale lines, overhauling the lances and harpoons. After the success of the sealing, morale is high. Brownlee senses a general optimism amongst the men, a belief that luck is with them this year and the season will be a good one. The murmurings of discontent he heard in Hull have quieted: Cavendish, although still an irritating prick, is proving competent at his work, and Black, his understudy, is laudably ambitious and shrewd beyond his years. After his near-fatal dunking, the surgeon has revived remarkably. He is regaining color and energy, and his appetite has returned. Although the blooms of frostbite are raw on his cheeks and the tip of his nose, he can be seen most days pacing the deck for exercise or sketching in his journal. Campbell in the Hastings is waiting up the strait ahead of them, somewhere past Disko Island, but the two ships will not meet or attempt to communicate until the moment is right. The underwriters are alive these days to any sign of conspiracy, and a ship so heavily and disproportionately insured as the Volunteer is suspicious as it is. His final voyage then. It is not the end he would have wished for, but better this way, surely, than another five years on that coal barge chuntering like a pillock from Middlesbrough to Cleethorpes and back again. None of the others that lived went back to sea after the Percival—brains scrambled, limbs missing, twitching and spasming with dread — he was the only one who managed it. The only one sufficiently stubborn or stupid to want to carry on. A man should look forwards and not backwards, that is Baxter’s persistent advice to him. What matters is what happens next. And, although Baxter is without doubt a fucker, a scoundrel, and a deep-dyed charlatan, there’s some small but solid truth to that, he thinks.

The bergs around the cape are dense and dangerous as usual. To avoid collisions it is necessary for the Volunteer to run west another hundred miles or so under topsails before steering north-northeast into the middle portion of the Davis Strait. From the foredeck, where he sits when it is warm enough, Sumner watches out for birds — curlews, ptarmigans, auks, loons, mallies, eider ducks. Whenever he spots one he calls to the steersman for an estimate of the latitude and makes a note in his book. If the bird is close enough and a rifle is at hand, he sometimes takes a shot, but more often than not he misses. His inaccuracy is fast becoming a joke amongst the crew. Sumner has no interest in natural history; when the voyage is over, he will throw the notebook away without looking at it again. He watches for birds like this only to pass the time, to appear busy and to seem normal.

Sometimes, if there are no birds to shoot or write about, he talks with Otto, the German harpooner. Despite his profession, Otto is a deep thinker and has a speculative, mystic bent. He thinks it probable that during the several hours Sumner was missing on the ice, his soul departed his material body and traveled out to the other, higher realms.

“Master Swedenborg describes a spirit place,” he explains, “a broad green valley surrounded by cliffs and mountains, where the dead souls gather before being separated out into the saved and the damned.”

Sumner doesn’t wish to disappoint him, but all he remembers is pain and fear, and then a long, dark, unpleasing kind of nullity.

“If there is such a fancy spot somewhere, I never saw sign of it,” he says.

“You may have gone direct up to heaven instead. That is possible too. Heaven is built entirely of light. The buildings, the parks, the people, everything is made of the divine light. There are rainbows everywhere. Multitudes of rainbows.”

“This is Swedenborg again?”

Otto nods.

“You would have met the dead and spoke to them there. Your parents, perhaps. Do you remember that?”

Sumner shakes his head, but Otto is undeterred.

“In heaven they would appear just the same as they did in this life,” he says, “but their bodies would be made from light instead of flesh.”

“And how can a body be made from light?”

“Because the light is what we truly are, that is our immortal essence. But only when the flesh falls away can the truth shine through.”

“Then what you describe is not a body at all,” he says, “but a soul.”

“Everything must have its form. The bodies of the dead in heaven are the forms that their particular souls have taken.”

Sumner shakes his head again. Otto is a mountainous, broad-chested Teuton with thick, fleshy features and fists like ham hocks. He can toss a harpoon out fifty yards without a grunt. It is strange to hear him expounding such flimsiness.

“Why would you believe such things?” he asks. “What good does it do you?”

“The world we see with our eyes is not the whole truth. Dreams and visions are just as real as matter. What we can imagine or think exists as truly as anything we can touch or smell. Where do our thoughts come from, if not from God?”

“They come from our experience,” Sumner says, “from what we’ve heard and seen and read, and what’s been told to us.”

Otto shakes his head.

“If that were true, then no growth or advancement would be possible. The world would be stagnant and unmoving. We would be doomed to live our lives facing backwards.”

Sumner looks at the distant crenelated line of bergs and land ice, the pale open sky, the dark impatient pitching of the sea. After he came to, he lay in his bunk a full week barely moving or speaking. His body was like a diagram, like a sketch that could be rubbed away and begun again, the pain and emptiness like hands molding and remolding him, knuckling and stretching out his soul.

“I didn’t die in the water,” he says. “If I had died, I would be new somehow, but there’s nothing new about me.”

* * *

Short of Disko Island, the ship becomes lodged fast in a floe. They attach ice anchors to the raft of ice nearest to them and attempt to warp the ship forwards using thick lines reefed to the capstans. The capstan bars are double-manned, but even so it is slow and exhausting work. It takes them the whole morning to move a mere thirty feet, and after dinner Brownlee decides, reluctantly, to give it up and wait for the wind to change and a new lead to open.

Drax and Cavendish take mattocks and descend to retrieve the anchors from the ice. The day is warm and cloudless. The ever-present arctic sun is high and throbbing out a dull, cantankerous kind of furnace heat. The two men, immune to it by now, cast off the warp ropes, hack out the wet ice around the anchors with their mattocks, and kick them free. Cavendish hefts the irons up onto his shoulder and begins to whistle “The Londonderry Air.” Drax, ignoring him, raises his right hand to shield his eyes against the sun and then, after another moment, points off landwards. Cavendish ceases whistling.

“What is it?”

“Bear,” Drax says. “The next floe over.”

Cavendish shields his eyes and squats down to get a better look.

“I’ll get a boat,” he says, “and a rifle.”

They lower one of the whaleboats onto the ice, and Drax and Cavendish and two others drag it across to the open water. The floe is a quarter mile wide and hummocky. The bear is pacing at its northerly edge, snapping at the air and sniffing about for seals.

Cavendish through his spyglass spots a trailing cub.

“Mother and child,” he says. “Look see.”

He hands the glass to Drax.

“That babe’s worth twenty pounds alive,” he says. “We can skin the mother.”

The four men discuss finances for a minute and then, having reached a satisfactory agreement, they pull slowly towards the floe. When they are fifty yards away, they stop rowing and steady the boat. Cavendish, with his knees braced against the bows, lines up his shot.

“I’ve got a guinea in my locker says I’ll put one plumb in her eyeball,” he whispers. “Who’ll match it, now?”

“If you’ve got a guinea in your locker, then my cock’s a cunt,” one of the men retorts.

Cavendish snickers.

“Now, now,” he says. “Now, now.”

“Put it in the heart,” Drax says.

“The heart it is,” Cavendish nods, “and here we go.”

He scowls along the barrel one more time, then shoots. The bullet hits the bear high on the rump. There is a squirt of blood and a roar.

“Fuck,” Cavendish says, looking suspiciously at the rifle. “The sight must be skewed.”

The bear is circling wildly now, shaking its withers, howling and biting at the air as if fending off an imaginary foe.

“Shoot her again,” Drax says, “before she runs.”

Before Cavendish can reload, the bear sees them. Instead of running, she pauses a moment, as if thinking what to do, then drops off the ice edge and disappears into the sea. The cub follows her.

The men row forwards, scanning the surface, waiting for the two bears to rise. Cavendish has his rifle at the ready; Drax is holding a looped rope to snickle the cub.

“She could have gone back under that ice,” Cavendish says. “There are cracks and holes aplenty.”

Drax nods.

“It’s the babe I want,” he says. “That babe’s worth twenty pounds easy. I know a fellow at the zoo.”

They circle slowly. The wind drops off, and the air about them settles. Drax snorts, then spits. Cavendish resists the urge to whistle. Nothing moves, there is silence all around, then, only a yard off the boat’s stern, the she-bear’s head, like the pale prototype of some archaic undersea god, rises up out of the dark waters. There is a moment of wild commotion, scrambling, shouting, cursing, then Cavendish takes aim and shoots again. The bullet hums past the ear of one of the oarsmen and slaps into the bear’s chest. The bear rears up shrieking. Its enormous clawed feet, broad and ragged as tree stumps, crash down on the whaleboat’s gunwales, raking and shredding the planks in a frenzied bid for purchase. The boat pitches wildly downwards and seems set to capsize. Cavendish is thrown forwards, dropping his rifle, and one of the oarsmen is tossed overboard.

Drax pushes Cavendish aside and takes an eight-inch boat spade from the side rack. The bear, giving up on the boat, lunges for the thrashing oarsman. She clamps onto his elbow with her teeth, and then, with one dismissive shake of her enormous neck, rips away most of his right arm. Drax, standing upright in the still-rolling whaleboat, lifts up the boat spade and plunges its chisel edge hard down into the bear’s back. He feels the moment of resistance and then the inevitable and irretrievable give as the bear’s spine is split asunder by the milled steel edge. He pulls the spade out and brings it down again, and then again, stabbing deeper with each thrust. With the third blow, he pierces the bear’s heart and a great purple gout of blood comes steaming to the surface and spreads like India ink across her ragged white coat. The air is filled with a fetid blast of butchery and excrement. Drax feels pleasure at this work, arousal, a craftsman’s sense of pride. Death, he believes, is a kind of making, a kind of building up. What was one thing, he thinks, is become something else.

The mutilated oarsman after some moments of screaming has passed out from his pain and is beginning to sink. The bloody remnants of his lost arm still depend from the dead bear’s tusks. Cavendish gets the boat hook and drags him back on board. They cut off a length of whale line and tourniquet his stump.

“That’s what I call an almighty fuckup,” Cavendish says.

“We still have the babe,” Drax says, pointing. “That’s twenty pounds right there.”

The bear cub is swimming beside his mother’s corpse, mewing and nudging the body with his nose.

“A man’s lost his fucking arm,” Cavendish says.

Drax takes his looped rope and, using the boat hook, slips it over the bear cub’s head and pulls it tight. They bore a hole in the dead she-bear’s jaw, run a cord through the hole, and lash the other end of the cord to the bollard. It is a slow, hard pull back to the ship and before they get there, the oarsman expires from his injuries.

“I’ve heard of such a thing,” Cavendish says. “But never seen it happen ere now.”

“If you could shoot straight, he’d still be living,” Drax says.

“I put two solid bullets into her, and she still had strength enough to take off a man’s arm. What kind of bear is that, I ask you?”

“A bear is a bear,” Drax says.

Cavendish shakes his head and sniffs.

“A bear is a fucking bear,” he echoes, as though the thought had not occurred to him before.

When they get back to the Volunteer they attach the dead bear to a block and tackle and haul her up out of the water until she is suspended over the deck, dangling, shabby and lifeless, from the yardarm drooling blood. Still down in the water, separated from his parent now, the cub becomes enraged, swimming hither and thither in a fierce, wild-eyed frenzy, snapping at the boat hook and pulling back against the rope collar. Drax, on his feet in the whaleboat, calls for an empty blubber cask and, with the help of Cavendish, tugs and prods the bear cub into it. The others toss down a net and haul the cask, filled now with a screaming, flailing bear cub, up onto the deck. Brownlee watches from the afterdeck as the cub tries, repeatedly, to escape out of the upright cask and Drax, armed with a stave, prods him down again.

“Lower the mother’s body,” Brownlee calls out. “That’s the only way to quiet the beast.”

Flat out on the deck, a hillock of bloodied fur, the she-bear steams like the gargantuan centerpiece of some barely imaginable banquet. Brownlee kicks over the cask, and the cub scurries out, his claws scrabbling and scraping on the wooden deck. There is a moment of panicked swiveling and disorientation (men, laughing, scramble up the rigging to escape), but then he sees his mother’s body and rushes to it. He nudges its flank with his nose and starts to helplessly lick the smeared and bloodied fur. Brownlee watches. The cub whimpers, sniffs, then settles itself in the lee of the mother’s corpse, flank to flank.

“That cub’s worth twenty pounds,” Drax says. “I know a man at the zoo.”

Brownlee looks at him.

“The blacksmith will rivet you a grille so you can keep him in the cask,” he says. “More likely than not he will die before we get home, but, if not, every penny he fetches goes to the dead man’s people.”

Drax stares back at Brownlee for a moment as if readying himself to disagree, then nods and turns aside.

Later, after the dead oarsman has been stitched up in sailcloth and slid, with gruff and minimal ceremony, over the side, Cavendish skins the she-bear with a hatchet and a flensing knife. The cub, secured now in its cask, watches on, trembling, as Cavendish hacks, cuts, and tugs away.

“Can a bear be eaten?” Sumner asks him.

Cavendish shakes his head.

“Bear meat is foul-tasting, and the liver is downright poisonous. All that a bear is truly good for is the skin.”

“For ornament then?”

“Some rich man’s drawing room. It would have been better for the price if Drax had been less eager with the boat spade, but I suspect the gash can be repaired.”

“And the cub will be sold to the zoological gardens if it lives?”

Cavendish nods.

“A full-grown bear is a sight of fearsome beauty. People will pay a ha’penny a time to see a full-grown bear and think it cheap at that price.”

Sumner crouches down and peers into the darkness of the cask.

“This one might die of heartbreak before we get him home,” he says.

Cavendish shrugs and pauses from his work. He looks back at Sumner and grins. His arms are dyed bright red up to the elbows and his waistcoat and trousers are stippled with gore.

“He will forget the dead one soon enough,” he says. “Affection is a passing thing. A beast is no different from a person in that regard.”