The North Water

CHAPTER TEN

They cross into the North Water by the last week of June, and near dawn the following day Black strikes their first whale. Sumner, woken from his slumbers by the sounds of shouting and boot heels pounding the deck, follows the progress of the hunt from high up in the crow’s nest. He sees the first iron go in and the wounded whale descend. Twenty minutes later, he sees it rise again, closer to the ship but nearly a mile from where it first went down. Black’s harpoon, he can see through the spyglass, is still dangling from its broad flank, and blood is sluicing brightly from its leadish skin.

Otto’s boat is closest to it now. The oarsmen ship their oars and the steersman sculls them steadily forwards. Otto crouches in the bows with the harpoon’s wooden shaft gripped tightly in his fists. With a giant horselike snort, audible from Sumner’s perch in the crow’s nest, the whale exhales a V-shaped flume of grayish vapor. The boat and crew are temporarily obscured, but when they reappear, Otto is up on his feet and the harpoon is poised above his head — its barb pointing downwards and the shaft forming a black hypotenuse against the sullen sky. The whale’s back looks from Sumner’s aerie like a sunken island, a grainy volcanic hump of rock peeping from the waves. Otto hurls the iron with all his strength, it sinks in deep, up to the foreganger, and the whale instantly convulses. Its body bends and spasms; the eight-foot flukes of its enormous tail break from the water, then crash back down. Otto’s boat is tossed wildly about and the oarsmen are thrown from their seats. The whale descends again but only for a minute. When it rises, the other boats are gathered round ready: Cavendish is there, Black, Drax. Two more harpoons are sunk deep into the whale’s black flank, and then they begin with the lances. The whale is still alive, but Sumner can see that it is damaged now beyond repair. The four harpooners pierce and probe. The whale, still hopelessly resisting, blows out a plume of hot vapor mixed with blood and mucus. All around it, the smashed and bloodstained waters boil and foam.

Drax, far below in the hectic midst of the killing, bears down hard on the butt of his lance and whispers out a string of gross endearments.

“Give me one last groan,” he says. “That’s it, my darling. One last shudder to help me find the true place. That’s it, my sweetheart. One more inch and then we’re done.”

He leans in harder, presses, seeking out the vital organs. The lance slides in another foot. A moment later, with a final roar, the whale shoots out a plume of pure heart’s blood high into the air and then tilts over lifeless onto its side with its great fin raised like a flag of surrender. The men, empurpled, reeking, drenched in the fish’s steaming, expectorated gore, stand up in their flimsy boats and cheer their triumph. Brownlee on the quarterdeck wafts his billycock hat in circles above his head. The men on the deck roar and caper. Sumner, watching it all from above, feels a brief thrill of victory also, a sense of sudden, shared advantage, of obstacles overcome and progress made.

They bore two holes in the tail and secure the dead whale to the bow of Cavendish’s boat. They lash the fins together, retrieve and coil the whale lines, and then begin to tow the corpse back to the ship. As they row, they sing. Sumner, descended to the deck, hears their voices coming across the water, tuneful, gruff, carried by the cool damp wind. “Randy Dandy-O” and “Leave Her Johnny.” Three dozen men in unison. He feels again, and almost against his will this time, that he is part of something larger and more powerful than himself, a joint endeavor. Turning away, he notices Joseph Hannah standing by the fore hatch talking happily with the other cabin boys. They are reenacting the recent kill; they are throwing imaginary harpoons, plying imaginary lances. One is Drax, one is Otto, one is Cavendish.

“How are you, Joseph?” he asks him.

The boy looks back at him blankly, as if they have not met before.

“I’m well, sir,” he answers. “Thankee.”

“You must come to my cabin again tonight for your pill,” he reminds him.

The boy nods glumly.

What has the boy told his friends about his injuries? Sumner wonders. Has he made up some story, or do they know the truth? It strikes him that he should question the other boys also. He should examine them too. What if they have suffered in the same way? What if the secret is not Joseph’s alone but is something they share amongst them?

“You two,” he says, pointing to the other boys. “After supper you come to my cabin with Joseph. I want to ask you some questions.”

“I am on the watch, sir,” one of them says.

“Then tell the watch commander that the surgeon, Mr. Sumner, has asked to speak to you. He will understand.”

The boy nods. All three of them, he can see, wish he would now leave them alone. The game is still vivid in their minds, and his is the voice of dullness and authority.

“Go back to your pleasures now,” he tells them. “I will see the three of you after supper.”

The whale’s right fin is lashed onto the larboard gunwale with its head facing sternwards. Its dead eye, not much larger than a cow’s, peers blindly upwards at the shuffling clouds. Strong lines are secured to the nose end and rump, and its belly is heaved a foot or so out of the water by means of a block attached to the mainmast and a rope hooked onto the whale’s neck area and brought to tension through the windlass. Brownlee, after measuring the corpse’s length with a knotted line, estimates it will yield up ten tons of oil and half a ton or more of whalebone — a value of close to nine hundred pounds at market, if prices hold firm.

“We may yet be rich, Mr. Sumner,” he says with a wink.

After resting and taking a drink, Otto and Black strap iron crampons to their sea boots for grip and climb down onto the whale’s belly. They carve out strips of blubber with long-handled knives and chisel off the baleen and the jaws. They cut off the tail and the fins, and then remove the nose and rump tackles and allow the dilapidated purple carcass that remains to sink under its own weight or be eaten by sharks. The flensing takes four hours in all and is accompanied throughout by the stench of grease and blood, and the endless cawing of fulmars and other carrion birds. When it is over — when the blocks of blubber are stowed in the flens-gut, the deck is scoured a dull white, and the knives and spades are rinsed clean and put away — Brownlee orders an extra ration of rum for each sailor. There are cheers from the forecastle at the news, and, only a little later, the sound of a Scottish fiddle and the thump and cry of men dancing jigs.

Neither Joseph Hannah nor his friends appear, as they were bidden, at Sumner’s cabin after supper. Sumner wonders whether to search them out in the forecastle, but then decides against it. There is nothing that can’t wait until the morning and, in truth, Joseph’s simpleton wretchedness is beginning to gall him. The boy is a hopeless case, he thinks: feebleminded, a congenital liar according to Drax, prone no doubt to hereditary disease (both mental and corporeal) of every kind. Evidence suggests he is the victim of a crime, but he will not name his abuser, will not even admit that he has been abused — perhaps he has forgotten who it was, perhaps it was too dark to see, or perhaps he does not think of it as a crime at all but as something else instead? Sumner tries to imagine inhabiting the mind of a boy like that, tries to grasp what it would feel like to see the world through Joseph Hannah’s sunken, shifting, squirrel eyes, but the effort seems both absurd and faintly terrifying — like a nightmare of being transformed into a cloud or a tree. He shudders briefly at the thought of such Ovidian transformations, then, with relief, reopens The Iliad and reaches into his coat pocket for the small brass key that commands the medicine chest.

The next day, two more whales are killed and flensed. Sumner, since he is otherwise unoccupied, is given a pick haak and a long leather apron. Once the strips of blubber have been hauled on board ship and cut up into foot-square blocks, it is the surgeon’s newly appointed task to take the blocks from the foredeck to the hold and pitch them down to the men working below, who will store them in the flens-gut until the time comes for making off. It is dirty and exhausting work. Each block of blubber weighs twenty pounds or more and the ship’s deck is soon slick with blood and grease. He slips several times, almost topples into the hold on one occasion but is saved by Otto, and ends the day bruised and aching but with a sense nonetheless of rare satisfaction: the crude, physical pleasure of a task accomplished, of the body tested and proved. He sleeps for once without the aid of laudanum, and in the morning, despite the ungodly stiffness in his shoulders, neck, and arms, breakfasts well on barley porridge and salt fish.

“We will make a whale man of you yet, Mr. Sumner,” Cavendish jokes, as they sit in the mess cabin smoking their pipes and warming their feet by the stove. “Some surgeons would be too dainty for the pick haak, but you took to it nicely, I’d say.”

“Flensing is a good deal like cutting turf,” Sumner says, “and I did plenty of that when I was a boy.”

“That’s it then,” Cavendish says. “It’s in your blood.”

“The whaling is in my blood, you think?”

“The working,” Cavendish says with a smile. “The Irishman is a laborer at heart; that’s his true calling.”

Sumner spits into the stove and listens to it fizzle. He knows enough of Cavendish by now not to take his taunts to heart, and his mood is too light this morning to be seriously baited.

“And what is the Englishman’s true calling, I wonder, Mr. Cavendish?” he answers. “To grow fat off the labors of others, perhaps?”

“There are them that are born to toil, and them that are born to grow rich,” Cavendish says.

“I see. And which one are you?”

The mate leans back complacently in his chair and flares his pinkish lower lip.

“Oh, I’d say my time is coming, Mr. Sumner,” he says. “I’d say it’s coming pretty soon.”

* * *

It is a quiet morning. No more whales are sighted and the hours before noon are spent cleaning the decks, reeving lines, and restocking the whaleboats. Sumner, who has not seen or spoken to Joseph Hannah since the time he saw him horsing with his friends near the fore hatch, decides to seek the boy out. He notices one of the other cabin boys on deck and asks for Joseph’s whereabouts.

“We were told he was to bed down in the tween decks from now on,” the boy says. “I have not seen him since yesterday.”

Sumner ventures into the fore-tween decks, where he finds a grubby wool blanket nestled between a sail chest and a pile of bundled staves but no other sign of the boy. He climbs back up and looks about. After checking that Joseph is not hidden from sight behind the spare boats, the windlass, or the deckhouse, he peers down into the forecastle. Some of the men are on their bunks asleep, others are seated on sea chests smoking, reading, or carving wood.

“I am looking for Joseph Hannah,” he calls. “Is the boy down there?”

The seated men turn to look at him. They shake their heads.

“No we hant seen him,” one answers. “We thought he were staying aft with you, Mr. Sumner.”

“With me?”

“In officers’ quarters. On account of his illness.”

“And who told you that?”

The man shrugs.

“That’s all what I heard,” he says.

Sumner, touched now with the beginnings of impatience, returns to his cabin and retrieves a candle with the intention of exploring the holds (although why the boy would be concealing himself anywhere in the holds is beyond him). He sees Black emerging from the captain’s cabin carrying the brass sextant.

“I’m looking for Joseph Hannah,” Sumner says to him. “Have you seen the boy about?”

“The one with the sore arse?” Black says. “No, I can’t say I have.”

Sumner shakes his head and sighs.

“The Volunteer is not such a large vessel. I’m surprised a boy can so easily go missing.”

“There are a thousand nooks and crannies on a ship like this one,” Black says. “He’s probably off pulling his pizzle somewhere. Why do you need him?”

Sumner hesitates, aware that his concern with the health of Hannah’s fundament has already become something of a joke amongst the officers.

“I have a task for him,” Sumner says.

Black nods.

“Well, he’ll emerge by and by, you can be sure of that. The boy is an awful malingerer, but he’ll not miss his rations when they’re served.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Sumner says, looking at the candle for a moment, then dropping it into his jacket pocket. “Why should I trouble to search for someone who doesn’t want to be found?”

“There are other cabin boys,” Black agrees. “Ask one of those.”

Later that afternoon, since there are still no signs of whales and the weather is calm enough, Brownlee orders the men to commence the making off. They reduce the sails and begin to break out the main hold. Eight or ten casks, previously filled with water for ballast, are brought up onto the deck, thereby exposing the lowest stratum of casks, the ground tier, which will be first to be filled with the minced-up blubber. The men on deck make ready the equipment (speck trough, lull, chopping blocks, and knives) needed to separate blubber from muscle and skin, and to cut it into pieces small enough to be squeezed through the bunghole of a cask. Sumner keeps an eye out for Joseph Hannah, assuming he will appear soon enough, roused by all this commotion from whatever hiding place he has found.

“Where’s that little shit Hannah disappeared to?” Cavendish shouts out. “I need some knives taken down for sharpening.”

“He’s missing,” Sumner says. “I was looking about for him this morning.”

“He’s a shiftless little cunt, that one,” Cavendish says. “I’ll show him the true meaning of a sore arse when I discover him.”

The casks on deck are emptied of water one by one, by means of an iron hand pump. Otto takes charge of this operation, inserting the pump’s end into the bunghole, draining off each cask, and then mopping it dry. The ballast water, which sloshes across the deck and out through the fore-channels, gives off a noxious, sulfurated reek caused by long contact with the rotting residues of blubber left in the casks from previous voyages. Other men climb the rigging to escape this eye-watering miasma, or tie scarves across their noses as they work, but Otto, putty-faced, thick-shouldered, slow and deliberate in all his actions, seems immune to the repellent stench. After emptying four casks, he discovers the fifth one has been damaged. The head has been partly stoved in and most of the water appears to have leaked out already. He calls over the cooper and asks if it can be repaired. The cooper leans down, pulls out a piece of the broken cask head, and examines it.

“It ain’t rotted away,” he says (he has his hand against his nostrils as he speaks). “No reason for this to crack on its own.”

“But it’s cracked all right,” Otto says.

The cooper nods.

“Best break it up and start again,” he says.

He tosses the splintered wood aside, then peers indifferently and without expectation back into the half-empty barrel. He sees curled up inside it, part submerged in the remnants of the ballast water, like some monstrous fungal knottage, bred and nurtured in the fetid petri of the hold, the torn, dead, and naked body of Joseph Hannah, cabin boy.