The North Water

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

About midday, the wind veers suddenly from south to north and the loose pack of drift ice which clogs the middle of the sound, and which previously posed no danger begins to move gradually towards them. Cavendish moors the ship to the edge of the southerly land floe and orders the men to cut out an ice dock for protection and be quick about it. Equipment is brought up from the hold — ice saws, gunpowder, ropes, and poles — and the men leap over the gunwales and down onto the ice. Their dark silhouettes move urgently across the unmarked surface of the floe. Black paces off the dock’s required length and breadth, then drives boarding pikes into the ice to mark the angles and midpoints of each side. The men are divided into two teams to make the first long cuts. They erect wooden tripods with pulleys at the apex. They reeve ropes through each of the pulleys and attach a fourteen-foot steel ice saw to each end. Eight men are attached to each rope to deliver the upward cutting stroke and another four take hold of wooden handles on the saw end to drive it down again. The ice is six feet thick and the dock’s sides are two hundred feet in length. Once the two sides are cut, they cut across the end, and then cut again from one corner to the midpoint of the right-hand side. From there, they cut another diagonal line in the opposite direction from the midpoint to the ice’s edge. After two hours’ labor, a final horizontal cut across the middle of the dock leaves the floe divided into four separate triangles, each one several tons in weight. The men are sweating and gasping from their work. Their heads steam like puddings on a plate.

From the quarterdeck, Cavendish watches the pack advance towards him. As it continues to approach, blown on by the wind, the breaches in it heal and what was previously a loose agglomeration of separate floes and fragments becomes a seamless field of solid-seeming ice moving imperceptibly but unstoppably down upon them. In the middle distance, enormous blue-white icebergs loom like broken and carious monuments. The thinner ice around their bases rumples and tears like paper. He checks the Hastings’s position with Brownlee’s brass telescope, sniffs, then lights his pipe and spits across the rail.

Out on the ice, Black pushes charges of gunpowder down into the nearest diagonal cut and lights the fuse. After a few seconds’ pause, there is a dull thud, a high plume of water, and then a broader cascade of shattered ice. The large triangular blocks divide and break apart, and the men in teams drag the several fragments out of the dock with grappling hooks. When the dock is entirely cleared of ice, they warp the ship into it — tugging the bows in first, then swinging the stern round to straighten. They moor her to the floe with ice anchors, then climb back on board wet and exhausted. Handfuls of coal are thrown into the cabin stoves and a round of grog is served. Sumner, who has assisted with the cutting, and feels weak and wretched from the effort, eats his tea in the mess, then takes a dose of laudanum and settles in his cabin to rest. Although he drops into sleep easily enough, he is woken intermittently by the great percussions of the ice field, the thunderous explosion of one floe meeting another one. He thinks of artillery, of the fifteen-pounders thumping on the ridge, the sickening overhead roar of shell and cannonball, then stuffs his ears with cotton wool and reminds himself that their ship is safe enough and that the dock they have made for it is strong and secure.

In the early hours of the morning, with the wind still gusting hard from the north and the sky a luminant, unstarred smear of mauve and purple, one large corner of the ice dock fractures under the pressure of the pack and the broken-off segment is driven hard onto the Volunteer’s sternpost, propelling the ship forwards and sideways. The bows are driven into the other end of the ice dock, and, with an enormous wail of strained and splitting wood, the ship is viciously squeezed between the land ice and the moving pack. The timbers screech, the vessel spasms upwards. Sumner, torn from his tranquil dreams, hears Cavendish and Otto hollering down the hatchway. As he scrambles to get into his sea boots, he feels the ship shudder and dislocate, the boards beneath his feet begin to tremble and separate, his books and medicines cascade down from the shelves, the door lintel shatters. On deck there is uproar. Cavendish is loudly ordering the evacuation of the ship. The whaleboats are being lowered onto the ice, men are frantically gathering their possessions and hauling provisions and equipment up from the holds. Chests, bags, and mattresses are pitched over the bulwarks; provision casks are rolled down the gangway onto the floe, seized upon, and rolled away. A sail is spread on the ice, and the bedding and mattresses are thrown onto it. The whaleboats are filled with food, fuel, rifles, ammunition, then covered with tarpaulins and dragged a safe distance from the groaning ship. Cavendish bellows commands and imprecations, and every now and then joins in — kicking a cask across the deck or tossing a sack of coal out onto the ice. Sumner runs back and forth from the ship to the floe, then back again, hauling and carrying, taking what is given to him and leaving it wherever he is told. His head is in a ferment. He understands from snatched conversations with Black and Otto that their situation is perilous: when the ice dock fractured the ship was most likely stoved in fore or aft, and it is only the upward pressure of the ice that is presently stopping her from sinking completely.

Cavendish raises the inverted ensign as a signal of distress, then orders the blacksmith down into the forehold to release Drax from his chains. They strip the captain’s cabin, the bread locker, the line room, and the galley and make ready to cut the rigging when necessary. Drax emerges from belowdecks bare-headed, shirtless, wearing a filthy peacoat, ruined brogans, and smelling strongly of piss. His ankles are free, but his wrists are still crudely manacled. He looks scornfully about him and smiles.

“I’d say there’s no need for such girlish fucking panicking,” he says to Cavendish. “There int but two foot of water down in that hold.”

Cavendish tells him curtly to go fuck himself, then turns away to continue supervising the unloading.

“I was down there when she was nipped,” Drax continues undeterred. “I saw it with my own eyes. She bent a good deal all right, but she didn’t break. This ice’ll ease off in a little while and you can send McKendrick down there with his caulking iron; he’ll fix her up nicely.”

Cavendish, after pausing for thought, sends the blacksmith back onto the ice, leaving Drax and himself alone on the half deck.

“You’ll keep your fucking mouth shut now,” Cavendish tells him, “or I’ll put you back where you were and let you take your chances.”

“She int sinking, Michael,” Drax tells him calmly. “You may dearly wish she was, but she int. I can promise you that.”

Three weeks in the chill and darkness of the forehold have had no noticeable effect. Back on deck, Drax looks intact, unweakened, as if the imprisonment was merely a necessary interlude and now the story proper has resumed. Below their feet, the deck shakes and the ship groans and crackles under the rasping pressure of the ice.

“Listen to her squeal now,” Cavendish says, “creaking and wailing like a sixpunny whore. You honestly think she can stand much more of that if she int stoved in already?”

“She’s a good strong ship, doubled and fortified: ice knees, ice plates, stanchions, and the rest. She’s old but she int weak. I’d say she could stand a good deal of squeezing still.”

The sun, which never fully set, is beginning to rise again. The ship’s distended shadow spills across the larboard ice. To north and south, the purple tips of distant mountains gleam. Cavendish takes his hat off, scratches his head, and looks over at the men still working on the floe. They are building tents from spars, poles, and stun-sail booms. They are kindling fires on iron cressets.

“If she don’t sink now, I can always sink her later.”

Drax nods.

“True,” he says. “But that won’t look half so good. You built a fucking ice dock.”

Cavendish smiles.

“It was a rare stroke of luck the way it broke like that. Don’t happen too often, does it?”

“No, it don’t. And it appears you’re good and safe here on the fast ice too. Campbell can warp back easy if a lead opens up. With a bit of luck, you won’t need to walk more than a mile or two to get to him. And the rest of them think she’s stoved in already, I expect. They won’t be making any trouble.”

Cavendish nods.

“She won’t survive this one,” he says. “She can’t.”

“She will if you let her, but if you knocked a plank or two out of her arse, she surely wouldn’t. Give me ten minutes down there with an ax, that’s all. Why fuck about?”

Cavendish sneers.

“You kill Brownlee with a walking stick, and you honestly think I’m going to gift you a fucking ax?”

“If you don’t believe me, go look down there for yourself,” he says. “See if I’m lying.”

Cavendish licks his lips and paces round the deck awhile. The wind has slackened off but the dawn air is stiff and cold around them. Out on the floe men are shouting, and the ship beneath is keeping up its ghoulish groans.

“Why kill the boy?” Cavendish says to him. “Why kill Joseph Hannah? What’s the benefit in that?”

“A man don’t always think on the benefits.”

“So what does he think on?”

Drax shrugs.

“I do as I must. Int a great deal of cogitation involved.”

Cavendish shakes his head, curses abominably, and peers up at the paling sky above. After some moments of silence he walks to the gunwale and calls down to a cabin boy to bring him a lantern and an ax. The two men descend to the tween decks and then, with Drax leading the way, down into the forehold. The air is dank and frigid; the lantern’s yellow light illuminates a stanchion, the hold beams, the ribbed surface of the stacked casks.

“Dry as a fucking bone,” Drax says.

“Raise some of them casks up over there,” Cavendish tells him. “I can hear water leaking in, I swear it.”

“Nowt but a dribble,” Drax says. He squats and heaves up a cask and then another one. The two men lean in and peer downwards at the dark curving of the hull. Water is spraying through a breach where the timbers have separated and the caulking has dropped away, but there is no sign of serious damage.

“Fuck,” Cavendish whispers. “Fuck. How can that be?”

“Like I told it,” Drax says. “She bent a good deal, but she didn’t ever break.”

Cavendish puts down the lantern and the ax, and the two of them together begin moving away more casks until they are standing on the bottommost tier and most of the timbers on the starboard bow are exposed.

“She won’t sink unless you make her do it, Michael,” Drax says. “That’s how it is.”

Cavendish shakes his head and reaches for the ax.

“Nothing’s fucking simple in this world,” he says.

Drax steps back to give him room to swing. Cavendish pauses and turns to look at him.

“This don’t put me under any obligation,” he says. “I can’t free you now. Not after Brownlee. A cabin boy is one thing, a cabin boy is plenty bad enough, but not the fucking captain.”

“And I int asking for it,” Drax says. “I wouldn’t presume.”

“Then what?”

Drax shrugs, sniffs, and gathers himself.

“If the time ever comes,” he says slowly, “all I ask is you don’t hinder me, don’t stand athwart. Allow events to take their natural course.”

Cavendish nods.

“I turn the blind eye,” he says. “That’s what you’re asking.”

“The time may never come. I may hang in England for what I done and rightly so.”

“But if it ever does come.”

“Aye, if it ever does.”

“And what about my fucking nose?” Cavendish says, pointing.

Drax smiles.

“You were never no Adonis, Michael,” he says. “I ’spect some would call that an improvement.”

“You have some fair-sized fucking balls, to say that to a man hefting an ax.”

“Like a fine big pair of tatties,” Drax confirms lightly, “and I’ll even let you stroke ’em if you like.”

For a moment, they hold each other’s gaze, and then Cavendish turns away in disgust, swings the ax, and lets its ground steel edge bite down hard into the ship’s already dampened timbers eight, nine, ten times, until the doubled planking creaks, swells, and begins to splinter inwards.