A Grue of Ice

1. The Albatross' Foot

" Drake Passage!"

I shook my head. Sailhardy was wrong. The thin, sharp stiletto of wind did not even ruffle the surface of the sea, it was slight. It was there, though. Sailhardy unlashed the mainsail's crude fastening. His hands were as rough as the knotted wood of the whaleboat's ribs. The boom carrying the sail slatted untidily. Way dropped off the deep, thirty-foot craft. She settled into her own reflection, yellow to yellow, blue to blue white to white. The islanders' garish sense of paint did nothing to conceal the sweet lines of the boat.

" South Shetlands," I countered.

Sailhardy didn't seem to hear me. He crooked a knee into the starboard forward rowlock. His action was unstudied, but there was a pointer's tenseness in it. I found another lead sinker for my special net among the long oars on the gratings. I knotted it lazily to a hundred-fathom line coiled on the bottomboards. Sailhardy's taut caution seemed out of place. I suppose fishermen are fishermen the world over, and my enjoyment in sending down my special nylon net to the depths of the ocean here on the fringes of the Southern Ice Continent for tiny plankton sea-creatures was as keen as it would have been in casting a fly six thousand miles away in Scotland. Sailhardy's lean shoulders shrugged under the faded red-orange windbreaker. His was the inborn alertness which made a man survive the sea-enemy, in these Antarctic waters more pitiless than anywhere else in the world. I was fishing, and it lulled me out of feeling that I was a man with a mission, let alone a scientist of the Royal Society of London.

" No, Bruce…" he began.

I grinned at him as I dropped the heavy lead sinker over the side. The use of my Christian name still came a little hard off his tongue. After all, a lower-deck man does not call his captain by his Christian name. Not in the Royal Navy anyway. For two long, bitter years Sailhardy had been my leading torpedoman aboard H.M.S. Scott during the war. My job, as commander of His Majesty's South Shetlands Naval

Force, based on Deception Island, five hundred miles south of the southernmost tip of South America, had been to guard the sea passage between the Pacific Ocean and the South

Atlantic-the Drake Passage. It was the favourite route for German-armed merchant raiders, U-boats and Japanese submarines. They chose it because its fog-bound waters, continually lashed by gales, made it impossible to find a ship, even if you were within five miles of it. I knew the Drake Passage -only too well. The name sang in my mind like a gale through the futtock shrouds of an old clipper. It was maybe fifteen years since I had last seen its wild waters from the bridge of my small destroyer, but its screaming hell-fiends of wind and ice still bit into my memory. Sailhardy's tenseness this quiet, sunny afternoon on the fringes of the wild ocean we had once guarded was a living memory, too, of the inborn sea-vigilance of a Tristan islander. Man against the sea. In these Southern waters we both knew that the cards were stacked against the man.

I assumed my captain's voice. " Leading Torpedoman Sailhardy.. ." I couldn't help myself. I grinned at him again. His eyes were as far away as the horizon. " Relax," I said: " You look as if you were trying to see all the way to the South Pole."

" I wish I could," he said. " Then I'd know what sort of a gale is due to hit us."

I gestured towards the quiet scene. The big island lay some miles astern of the boat, and two smaller ones were visible above the horizon ahead. They made a triangle with unequal sides roughly ten and twenty miles long. The big island was closest to us.

" Nothing is going to hit us," I said lazily. " Nothing at all." Sailhardy glanced back at the big island, his home, as if to take strength from its sombre cliffs.

" The watch never goes below on Tristan da Cunha," he said with a curious intonation. " That is why we islanders have survived. There's a great storm behind this little wind." I, too, turned and looked at the near-by island. A giant flock of Cape pigeons made a white socket of light against its towering throne of darkness; matching their whiteness, a crown of snow rimmed the island's 7,000-foot extinct volcano: Tristan da Cunha, the loneliest inhabited island in the world. It lies, with its two tiny neighbours whose summits I could just see ahead, midway between Africa and South America on a line between Cape Town and

Montevideo, and an almost equal distance of two thousand miles from the nearest tip of the Antarctic ice continent. Before and immediately after Napoleon's time Tristan da Cunha was an important base for British and American sealing ships making for the hunting-grounds of the frozen South. Its first three permanent settlers, half a century before the Civil War, were, in fact, American sailors. During Napoleon's exile on St. Helena, 1,500 miles to the north-east, the British stationed a garrison on Tristan, and the remains of that garrison, plus the Americans, formed the stock from which the island's present inhabitants have sprung. For nearly a century and a half, the island remained cut off from the world, except for a rare visiting ship.

During the war I had brought to Tristan from Cape Town a force of Royal Navy and South African Air Force men to man a radio station. From Tristan I had taken my small task force under H.M.S. Scott two thousand miles to the south and had based in on Deception Island, a flooded volcanic crater on the edge of the ice continent. The two neighbours of Tristan I could see ahead now were Nightingale and Inaccessible Islands. In every direction beyond them, for thousands of square miles, lay completely empty sea.

The Cape pigeons, in splendid white resilience, made for the haven of Tristan da Cunha. Sailhardy unhooked the triangle of foresail forward of the mast, as if to emphasise the danger he feared.

I could not take his forebodings seriously. It was all too peaceful. I was to learn-soon-how much of my ice-lore I had lost.

" I'm a scientist," I replied easily. " I've got a posh title to prove it-holder of the Royal Society's Travelling Studentship in Oceanography and Limnology. You do the sailing."

He caught my mood, and grinned back. " I remember I was nearly sick with fright when you took me aboard H.M.S.

Scott from Tristan during the war. Naval captains were God to me."

" Who ever told you to address me as professor-captain that day?" I laughed.

" One of the midshipmen," he said. " He told me the captain had been a professor of science in peace-time before commanding the ship." He grinned at his own discomfiture. " So you had to be professor-captain."

" I wasn't a professor," I said. " Never have been. I'd merely made special studies in oceanography. I was too young anyway to be a professor."

" You were twenty-seven then," he said, " that makes you fortytwo now."

I remembered his hesitation a few minutes before about my Christian name. " I'll bet that the day you walked on to my bridge you never thought you would be calling me Bruce," I said.

" Bruce." He paused a moment, and then went on: " You would have remained Captain Wetherby to me all my life if it hadn't been for what you said that day you came back to Tristan after the war. That's twelve years ago now. We

Tristan islanders live a hard life. We live off the sea, except for a couple of acres of potato patches and some apple trees, and maybe a hundred cattle and sheep. You had the world at your feet after the war. You'd had a brilliant war-time career, and a brilliant university career before that. I remember how you stepped off the freighter out in the roadstead. Mine was the first boat there. I didn't know you were coming. ' Captain Wetherby!' I said. I'll never forget your reply. ' No, Sailhardy. This is Bruce. Captain Wetherby went down with the raider. I've come back to the things I want Sailhardy, Tristan, the Southern Ocean.' "

I played it lightly. " You forget, I said I wanted your boat, too." I smiled.

He gave a low laugh. Tristan's long isolation from the world has left the islanders a curious heritage-even to-day, their speech is a strange mixture of English West Country speech shot through with the twang of long-dead New England whalermen, drawn out and enduring as the West Wind Drift.

" My boat," he said. " That is to ask everything from a Tristan islander. We are the poorest people in the world. A boat like this makes me one of the richest men on the island. A boat, you said: you would need a boat to try and find one of the greatest sea mysteries."

Sailhardy stowed the mainsail and his eye ran affectionately over the whaleboat, with its six long oars lashed to the bottom gratings. Just as the Viking long-boats gave Greenland the kayak, the New Bedford whalers left the secret of their fast, seaworthy chasers to Tristan. And the islanders, born and bred to the sea, added to that knowledge, until to-day the Tristan whaleboat is as indigenous to the lonely island as a Baldie to Leith or a Sixern to the Shetlands. There is almost no wood on Tristan, so the islanders make them of canvas. The wood for the ribs as precious and as scarce as fine gold-comes from the stunted, wind-lashed apple trees that cling for an existence 12 under walls alongside the stone houses, which are sunk half underground like Hebridean crofters' cottages to escape the gales. I noticed that the forward port-side strake of Sailhardy's boat was splintered; it would remain so, just• because there was no timber to spare for repairs. The boats are daubed-one can hardly call it painted-in bright, garish colours of yellow, blue and white. It is for a purely functional purpose, to waterproof the canvas, and they splash on whatever paint they can find, or beg from the occasional ship. The boats are the finest sea-going craft in the world. I would go anywhere with a crew of ten Tristan boatmen and a Tristan whaleboat. The boatmen have been apprenticed the hard way by the great seas, and they have learned to bring in the whaleboats to Tristan's rough shingle beaches and rockstrewn cliffs in a way which even to my sailor's eye is uncanny.

A hunk of kelp, as thick as a man's body, and perhaps twenty feet long, drifted past. We were about five miles from Tristan, which is ringed by a huge barrier of kelp. Inside that barrier the sea is tamed by the fronded fetters to a grey sullenness. Sea mystery! In that moment I wished that the drifting length of kelp was the pointer to the mystery I had come thousands of miles to try and find, rather than the minute plankton my special net was seeking hundreds of feet below the surface.

Sailhardy seemed to anticipate my thoughts. " Any luck?" he asked.

I shook my head.

The Albatross' Foot! It had a selling title, one of the learned gentlemen of the Royal Society had said, and he was right. That strange, almost mesmeric name was woven into the fabric of my war years, with Sailhardy, with Tristan da Cunha. Little had I thought, the day Sailhardy had come aboard my destroyer in the Tristan anchorage, that he and The Albatross' Foot were to become the star which I had followed actively down-horizon for a dozen years. Before that I had lived with the magic of the name for a further six. Science had never heard of The Albatross' Foot! Nor had I, despite my advanced researches before the war into oceanography. Sailhardy had told me it was the inmost secret of the Tristan islanders. They maintained it was a gigantic warm current which swept down in spring-not every spring, but at irregular intervals-between Africa and South America, bearing countless billions of the microscopic 13 sea creatures called plankton, which are the food of everything in the Southern Ocean, from the smallest fish to the whale. The islanders called it The Albatross' Foot, so Sailhardy had said, because the current resembled, in macrocosm, the warm double vein in an albatross' foot with which the great bird hatches its eggs. The only warm thing in an albatross' nest in sub-zero temperatures is that life-giving warm vein. Life-giving it was, said Sailhardy, in the truest sense, because it brought in early summer the basic plankton-life for all other life to the frozen seas round Tristan, and by its warmth dispersed the ice.

" Drake Passage," repeated Sailhardy. " There's a gale coming, and it's from the Drake Passage. I smell it. It's not coming from the South Shetlands at all." His voice, with its strange fascinating accent, had a curious clarity of modula tion, as if he had learned the trick of talking against a storm without having to raise his voice. The flat calm was broken only by an occasional cat's-paw of wind.

" Does it matter?" I asked.

He looked at me sternly. " Bruce," he said, " you've been away from the Southern Ocean too long. You've forgotten. You came back to Tristan that once after the war-you stayed a whole year until the next ship-but for the rest of the time you've been in Cape Town and London."

I laughed. " A man must live, Sailhardy, even an oceanographer. I came back to Tristan after the war and spent every penny of my war-time gratuity trying to find The Albatross' Foot. You know. How many days of that year did we spend at sea together, you and I, in this very boat?" He came over to the stern and unshipped the high, clumsy tiller, as if to reiterate his warning of an impending storm. " It wasn't long enough," he said. " It took three years before The Albatross' Foot came again. You should have waited."

" I want proof," I said. " I want plankton. I want eightyeight million plankton." He pulled the battered, Navy-style cap back from the red-brown balaclava cap beneath, and looked speculatively at me.

" Eighty-eight million?"

I grinned at him. " My special net will hold exactly one quart of sea-water, and one quart of sea-water, in the concentration I need to prove The Albatross' Foot, will contain eighty-eight million of the little so-and-so's. When-and if we ever do find them, you shall see what a little beauty a plankton really is. Under the microscope. It's octagonal, with a magnificent six-starred centre. The middle is round, and is all fluted and grained like machined silver wire."

" You'd better hurry and get that net up," he said. He reached out and took the hard collar of my buttoned-up anorak jacket and rubbed it against the cloth by my throat.

" Listen!" he said. " Listen. If it were dry, you'd hear it squeak. That would mean your storm is from the South Shetlands. But it doesn't. It's wet. It means it's from the Drake Passage."

I could see it in his face. He was willing the storm-a storm of which I could see not the slightest sign-to come. He wanted to pit the whaleboat against a full gale in the Southern Ocean. He looked to his right, to the south-west first, and then to his left, to the south-east. Then he swung round and gazed at Tristan itself, dominated by the old snowcapped volcano and slightly masked by cloud, like a miniature version of the famous Table Mountain tablecloth at Cape Town.

" Masthead," he said, so softly that I had to strain to hear. " Tristan da Cunha, the masthead of the world!" I ran my eye over the lean figure. I knew he was my own age, but the attrition of wind, sea and ice had weathered his face to an age anywhere between forty and sixty.

" And a masthead must have a lookout," I joked. " That is why I took you with me during the war. What did I know of the Southern Ocean then? I wanted a man with all the sea-lore of this ocean at his fingertips. I was as scared as hell of losing my ships before I even got a sight of a raider. I found my man-Sailhardy."

" I nearly let you down the very first time we entered Deception harbour," he said quietly. " Do you remember Neptune's Bellows?"

" I still get the heebie-jeebies when I think of it," I grinned. " Thank God I brought you on the bridge."

" Neptune's Bellows is just about right," said Sailhardy, " the way the wind rips through the gap."

" It caught old H.M.S. Scott's bows," I filled in. " Dear Heaven! The way her bows whipped in towards those rocks!"

I could still see the way Sailhardy had taken hold of the situation as the flagship teetered on the edge of destruction in the narrow gap which leads into the deeper anchorage-the flooded volcanic crater-beyond.

" It was that afternoon," I said slowly, " that you told me about The Albatross' Foot."

Deception harbour had been full of bergy bits of ice. They had come in crabwise through Neptune's Bellows and started to freeze together in the inner anchorage. It seemed quite clear to me. what would happen: my small force was about to be frozen solid in the harbour. As I had seen it, it would have remained bottled up there for the next six months, unable to move, while the U-boats and raiders sneaked past in the Drake Passage. Destroyers and frigates are not sturdy ships like whale catchers; the ice would have damaged them severely. There were no installations or dockyards to repair them. As the harbour started to freeze, I had climbed the cliff entrance and had been appalled at the gigantic phalanx of solid ice moving through the strait between Deception and the mainland. Some of it was turning aside from the main body into Deception harbour. If enough did-it would have meant death to my whole task force.

Sailhardy had stood with me gazing at the fantastic sight. " The Albatross' Foot!" he had exclaimed softly. " The warm current was sweeping past Tristan as we left the other day. It will be here in a day or two. It will cut that ice up like a hot knife through butter."

It did. I watched in amazement as Sailhardy's strange story of the warm, life-bringing current came true. The great moving battalions of ice, and even the landfast ice on the mainland, wilted before the attack of The Albatross' Foot. In a world where everything was frozen, The Albatross'

Foot was the only warm thing. I blessed the day I had brought the islander with me. My squadron was saved. During the next two years, Sailhardy told me many things about the strange current of Tristan da Cunha-completely fascinating to an oceanographer like myself. But it was war, and we had work-grim work-to do, and there was not time or opportunity to carry out even the preliminaries to the study I wished to make of The Albatross' Foot. After the squadron had been saved Sailhardy had enjoyed a privileged position on the bridge of H.M.S. Scott.

"I don't think Jimmy the One ever got used to my being on the bridge," smiled Sailhardy, as if reading my thoughts.

" Regular Royal Navy," I said. " The form, old boy. Everything according to tradition. Even the admiral at the

Cape never got used to me, a mere volunteer sailor, being given a strategic command. I was in the same category as yourself. Not a hundred per cent. A week-end sailor. An upstart. An islander and a Cambridge scientist-it was just too much for some of the old school of regulars to stomach."

" Yes," exclaimed Sailhardy hotly. " Their goddamned prejudice! Jimmy the One asked me once, what does your captain-you were always my captain-know of running a ship the regular way?"

I hadn't heard this one.

" And what did you say?" I asked.

" I said," replied Sailhardy vehemently, " the Wetherbys have explored and been in these waters for a century or more. He's a Wetherby and a sailor first, and a scientist at Cambridge second. The Wetherbys' goddamned ships were the first to discover the Antarctic mainland, and a Wetherby ship anchored in Deception harbour itself while Napoleon was alive."

I grinned. " What did Jimmy the One say to that?" Sailhardy gave his low laugh. " He said, ' If you ever use the expression " goddamned " on my bridge again, I'll put you on a charge.' "

Sailhardy was sitting on the rough thwart. He seemed to have forgotten his fears about a storm. The whaleboat rolled easily in the slight swell.

" At least the admiral made a hell of a fuss of your being purely a Volunteer Reserve man when he dished out the D.S.O. after you sank the German raider."

Sailhardy's words dissolved my holiday feeling. Maybe it was the memory of the Meteor's deadly 5.9-inch salvos bracketing my small ship as I went in with torpedoes. My guns were useless against the raider's. They had neither the range nor the calibre to match hers.

" Sailhardy," I said incisively, " as you know, I've been back on Tristan for only a couple of days. We've scarcely seen each other until now, what with my having to make social calls to almost every home on the island and the weatherstation men into the bargain Foot." I looked hard at him. " I believe there is another Albatross'

" You believe-what?" he asked incredulously.

" Listen," I said. " During the war you and I went over every shred of evidence, every accompanying phenomenon,. from whales to weather, about The Albatross' Foot. The Tristan one."

" What do you mean-the Tristan one?" he asked. " The Albatross' Foot belongs to Tristan. It is Tristan." 17

" We sank the German raider near Bouvet Island," I replied. " From Tristan that is about two thousand miles." Bouvet! If ever Sailhardy's war-time words to my first lieutenant about the Wetherbys' held true, it was in regard to Bouvet Island. Sixteen hundred miles south of Cape Town towards the South Pole, and slightly to the east of the Greenwich meridian, lies an island. It is about five miles long and slightly over four across. It is the only point of land between Cape Town and the ice continent. There are no other islands, no other land. Bouvet, rivalling Tristan's claim to be the loneliest inhabited island in the world, is the loneliest uninhabited island. Men have not succeeded in landing more than half a dozen times on Bouvet. It lies deeper into the heart of the Roaring Forties than ordinary ships ever go; even the daring clipper captains of the past would seldom venture into such high gale-lashed, ice-strewn latitudes. A Wetherby ship had been there before Napoleon died on St. Helena. I had seen Bouvet once, from the deck of a fighting ship in action; the waters of Bouvet had brought me glory in sinking the Meteor, one of the war's deadliest armed raiders.

" Bouvet," I said slowly to Sailhardy. "We'd • cleared H.M.S. Scott for action. I was on the bridge, of course. You couldn't see what I could. The Meteor was getting our range-quick. She was good, that raider. Kohler's gunnery officer was in a class by himself. From the bridge we could just see Bouvet in sight behind the raider. Every eye was on her. I took one last look round before opening fire. We'd dodged round a big icefield to the south. We all heard Meteor's guns open up. It wasn't guns, Sailhardy. In time, Meteor' s guns were way ahead of the fall of shot."

Sailhardy stared. " What are you saying, Bruce?"

" It was the thunder of ice breaking up," I replied. " Not guns. Everyone aboard H.M.S. Scott was so intent on the raider that they didn't notice the time lag. I did. I also saw."

" You saw what, Bruce?"

" I saw a great spurt of fragments as the ice started to break up. Like the day it broke up in Deception harbour. The day you told me about The Albatross' Foot."

" Then why…"

I shrugged. " Who would believe a story like that? Strain of going into action, they say. Putting my hobby-horse to the front. I couldn't prove it, any more than I can prove the presence of The Albatross' Foot round Tristan. I couldn't even suggest it scientifically. That is, not until a year ago." " What do you mean?" he breathed.

" You know my story," I said briefly. " When the war was done, I brought H.M.S. Scott back to Tristan to take home the radio station men. I was demobbed. I did everything to get back to Tristan. The first freighter back was two years later-1948. I was aboard. You know. I spent that year with you searching for The Albatross' Foot. I spent every penny I had. You know the result-nil. I went back to the

Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge. Three years ago they sent me to South Africa to act as liaison officer to the expeditions going South. A shore job, but at least there was no land between me and the Antarctic."

Sailhardy grinned. " Except Bouvet."

" Except Bouvet. I used to listen endlessly to the radio talk of the whalers down south. Then a year ago a short message from a Norwegian catcher to her factory ship told me what I wanted to hear."

" What did she say?" he asked.

" Her name was Kos 47," I said. " She was about two hundred miles south of Bouvet. She said: I have never seen anything like this. The ice is breaking up as far as the eye can see. It's exploding before our eyes.' I had waited all the years since the Meteor sank, for something like that, Sailhardy."

" Did the factory ship realise its significance?" Sailhardy asked excitedly.

" I thought it wise to suppress her reply to the skipper of Kos 47 when I flew back to London to try and persuade the Royal Society to give me the chance of investigating The

Albatross' Foot," I said wryly.

" What did she say?"

" Finsen,' said the factory ship, if you don't lay off the bloody booze before breakfast, I'll give you a shore job cutting up whale's guts,' " I replied.

He grinned. " The Royal Society wouldn't have cared for that."

" It was difficult enough to persuade them that there was any substance in the story of The Albatross' Foot. It took a hell of a lot of talk. This scholarship runs for one year, and it's not worth much-only a thousand pounds. I' ve already lost two and a half months getting to Tristan.

I was just plain lucky that the South Africans were sending out a relief ship to the radio station."

" But Bouvet…" Sailhardy demanded.

I shrugged. " But Bouvet!" I echoed. " They wouldn't hear of it. No ships go there. It would have meant a special charter, a special expedition. Neither the Royal Society nor myself could raise tens of thousands of pounds for anything on that scale. No, • Sailhardy, even if I prove the Tristan prong of The Albatross' Foot, I can't ever hope to prove the Bouvet one."

" You could try and collect reports from the catchers far south

…" he began rather helplessly.

" You can imagine the reaction of tough catcher captains, can't you?" I said. " It isn't practical. My theory is simple: two great warm currents strike down towards Bouvet, one from the Atlantic side and the other from the Indian Ocean side of Africa, and link up in the neighbourhood of Bouvet. The Atlantic one is ours here at Tristan. That's the theory, anyway. The combined warm currents then break open the pack-ice which forms in winter between Bouvet and the Antarctic mainland. It not only breaks it up-it clears the sea for four hundred and fifty miles. It is, in fact, the whole mechanism which holds the Antarctic ice at bay. It is as important to South America, South Africa and Australia as the Gulf Stream is to the United States. It's the most exciting thing that happens in the world's oceans, the most dramatic. It is completely unknown." I tugged at the line to my net. " A hell of a lot depends on this one little net. Otherwise, it is likely to remain completely unknown."

I started to haul in the deep-level net. It came up. Something kicked feebly. It must have been a fish, because it came out of the sea. It had a peculiar flat head and a protruding beak. The etiolated tail looked as if it had been put through a mangle. The underlying colour was lead, but near the surface the skin was a phosphorescent shocking pink. The eyes. !

My exclamation brought Sailhardy over. The fish's eyes pointed in one direction only-upwards. It was horrible. It gazed as if in supplication. It was about eighteen inches long. I held it at arm's length and I saw that the eyes were fixed to look permanently upwards.

Sailhardy stopped me from throwing it overboard. He took it and held it affectionately. The upturned, dying eyes winced in the sun.

" This is it, Bruce," he said quietly.

The thing writhed in his grip.

" This is an abyssal fish," he went on. " It comes from the deeps. He looks up-to see his food above him. He lives only on plankton."

" Plankton!" I exclaimed. " There wasn't a sign of plankton!" He went as taut as a jib sheet in a blow. His eyes were on something near the kelp barrier of Tristan.

" Longfin!" he said with satisfaction. " Longfin! And bluefin!"

There was nothing in sight except Tristan, which seemed hazier. Clouds were starting to lock round the old volcano. " What is it, man?" I exclaimed.

" Tunny," he replied. " Tunny."

There was a momentary flash from the surface of the sea near the kelp barrier.

" That was the forward fin of a tunny," he said crisply. " His aft dorsal fin stays erect, but the forward one he can fold and unfold at will. He does so when he wants to make a quick turn. He shoots it upright for a moment and swings round hard on it. The tunny wouldn't be doing it unless they were feeding-and feeding hard. That means. .."

" The Albatross' Foot," I said. " My God, Sailhardy!"

" Here it comes," he said excitedly. " Look, Bruce, look at the seals! They're grabbing the tunny!"

It was more dramatic than I had ever imagined it to be. As the warm current swept round the southern point of Tristan, the sea boiled with the commotion as the seals fought the longfin.

Sailhardy looked wistfully at the staccato glints. " If we had some Japanese longlines, we'd be able to bring them up from as deep as seventy fathoms," he said.

" I still want eighty-eight million plankton in my net," I grinned.

" You won't have to wait long," he replied. " Maybe half an hour. There's no hurry. It will go on like this for weeks."

" Weeks?"

" When I was twelve," he said, " we nearly all died of starvation on Tristan. You know how it is-without fish, we couldn't live. The kelp got some sort of disease and the crawfish disappeared."

The islanders rely on the inshore crawfish and deepwater

Blue Fish as a perennial source of food. With seabirds' eggs and mollymawk chicks, it is their main diet. I could imagine the week-by-week cutting of their starvation rations.

" We stuck it for a year," Sailhardy went on. " Then it. came-The Albatross' Foot. I was so weak I could scarcely pull an oar. We hauled in some of the biggest bluefin that day I have ever seen-some of them up to two hundred and fifty pounds."

We were standing with our backs to the west, watching the current and its creatures sweep towards us.

It hit us then. Sailhardy's guard was down. The Southern Ocean waits for that in a man. We had overlooked the unsleeping menace. Thank God Sailhardy had untied the mainsail halliard from the boat's ribs. The force of the wind seemed to pick up the light craft and toss it bodily sideways against the unyielding sea. I started to shout a warning. Sailhardy never heard. I swung to face it-a searing, breath-robbing mask of spindrift, salt and foam choked me. Something scaly hit me. It could have been a dead bird or fish. I spat out its briny clamminess. Tristan vanished. I could not see Sailhardy. The wind reached inside my windbreaker. I fought against being lifted. I tried to fall down, but the wind held me upright, like a man falling free in space. I hooked one foot under the tiller. The boat seemed to lift with me. I was torn loose. As I went over the side a noose and bowline slid over my chest. I found myself dragged against the daubed canvas side of the boat.

I still couldn't see Sailhardy. He was crouched away from the wind under the bulwarks. I grabbed the gunwale. Sailhardy's arm reached over and held me. A jerk, and the bowline was a steel band round my chest. Then I was gasping on the gratings.

Sailhardy knelt beside me. An inch of water sloshed in the bottom of the boat. It was useless trying to speak, even to shout. In the brief time it had taken him to get me aboard, his ocean-bred survival instincts were at work. The same titanic challenge of the storm had been thrown at the men of New England when they had broken open the ice continent in their clumsy, stinking New Bedford sealers a century and a half ago. On their way they had rested at Tristan and sired sea-chasteners like Sailhardy.

He fought the wild object which I identified as the mainsail. I saw the sweat break out on his forehead as he held the bucking thing. He half knelt, his arm about it. The animated fabric jumped and thrust to break his iron hold. I lay and retched salt water. The splintered strake worked along the cracks. I was numb with shock and the tumult. I saw what was frustrating Sailhardy, and tilting our lives in the balance: the mainsail halliards ran through holes bored through the mast. One had snarled up, and the islander could not get at it. I edged along the gratings and got my fingers to it. It whipped free. In a moment Sailhardy had the sail captive and lashed a bight of rope round it. The boat lay over on its port side. The sea poured in.

Sailhardy gestured me to bale. I snatched up a home-made pottery bowl containing our meal-the cooked mollymawk chicks floated pathetically in the rising waters I baled frantically. Then, as if stunned by its own disbursement of force the gale cut off.

" We're right behind the line of Inaccessible Island, and it' s making a kind of huge slipstream," said Sailhardy. The normal modulation of his speech was doubly startling in the quiet. "In a moment we'll catch it again! Get the water out of her, for the sake of all that is holy!"

Although it was still light where we were, it was dark half a mile away. We soared sickeningly and fell into the troughs of the swell.

Sailhardy looked grave. " We must run for Nightingale Island," he said. " Inaccessible is right into the teeth of the storm, and we've been blown too far ever to hope to regain

Tristan again."

" What if we miss Nightingale?" I said. The light was brindled by flowing spume ahead.

"If we keep afloat, we could be blown for a thousand miles before the gale eases," he replied. " There's five gallons of water, and a few mollymawk chicks to eat." He looked sombre. " If I miss the beach at Nightingale, I'm going to spill her over and drown us both. It's better that way."

From my knees as I baled I looked up into the lean face. I knew he meant it.

" Reef that foresail right down," he said tersely. " We may be lucky and get another lull. That's the way they come from the Drake Passage."

The rag of sail slatted in the trough of each wave and parachuted at the crest. The slipstream ended. The gale hit us again like a piston. How Sailhardy steered in that wild vociferation of untrammelled force, I do not know. The boat arced towards the sky in wild genuflexions. I held on to the mast and tried to manage the fragment of sail which kept her upright. I knew then why sailors speak with a special note in their voices about a Tristan whaleboat. She was superb. Even in my fear I felt some of Sailhardy's exhilaration at the storm's challenge. Under his hands, the frightened composition of wood and canvas wheeled up to the top of each comber and then, in the welter at the top, Sailhardy held her as she shied and started to break away. The descent was terrifying.

Sailhardy threw an arm forward, pointing. There, a sinister tower ringing death from the tocsin which clanged round its black cliffs, was Nightingale Island. White gouts burst from its cliffs like signal guns as the water climbed in awe-provoking slow motion up the black granite. Behind a barrier of kelp and sea-bamboo was the beach. The boat swung heavenwards. Sailhardy wrenched one arm from the tiller and threw it across his eyes. Something black hit him. The boat, out of control, started a toboggan run down the wave. Sailhardy regained control. I was crawling to his assistance, but stopped short. The bird was shiny black, with fiery bloodshot eyes. It looked like something conjured up by a sick mind to match the contortion of nature about us. I gazed unbelievingly. There was something wrong. It had no wings.

Sailhardy was shouting and grinning. There was a ragged hole in his mouth where a tooth had been knocked out.

" Island Cock!" he yelled. " Luck! It's as old as the D o d o! T h e w i n d b l e w i t c l e a n o f f t h e i s l a n d! L u c k y !

Lucky!"

Lucky! We would need every bit of luck, I thought grimly, looking around. The bird's over-size talons gripped the gratings. The Flightless Rail, the bird that can't fly and lives in burrows in the ground. It's in the same category as the New Zealand kiwi. I had no interest in ornithological curiosities at that moment.

Sailhardy began his run in for the beach. At the base of a thousand-foot cliff I could see the off-white streak of broken shingle which passes by the name of beach in these waters.

He shouted, and I shifted the rag of sail. The whaleboat slewed to port. There was more drift on her now. Sailhardy fought to keep her head up into the gale. Water poured over the side. I baled. The pitch-black bird moved his grip and glared unwinkingly at me with his drunk's eyes.

Sailhardy shouted something, and indicated the sail. The wind blew his words away, but I knew what he meant. Either he had funked it, or there was some danger I was not aware of. He intended to go about! I flicked the sail free. The whaleboat began her next sickening plunge.

Then it was quiet.

On every hand was the evidence of the gale's dissoluteness. From the low level of the boat the sea was a terrifying sight. Suds and spume lay six inches deep on the jerking surface of the water. Nightingale Island soared, appeared, and disappeared as the waves obstructed our view.

It was quiet.

I heard the aircraft engine overhead.