If we did ‘have trouble with the Old Man,’ I did not want Alan chucking his hand in, though he would have to do it before we left the Norwegian coast. Such an eventuality would make my life and Nat’s well-nigh intolerable, and concede some sort of a victory to Hanslip. From what little I had seen of our gallant Commander I did not relish the prospect of that. Anyway, it seemed sensible just to pass on Alan’s warning to Nat, if only to present a united front if it ever came to push of pike, so to speak, but Nat came up with an analysis of his own which was uncomfortably close to mine.
‘This is all a bit of rum do, isn’t it?’ he remarked. ‘I mean Hanslip is odd enough and frankly I don’t think that service as a reserve officer in the Allied Intervention qualifies one for Arctic work, though it might just about provide a few insights. And we three mates, not one of us knows diddly-squat about ice navigation. I applied for the job out of a sense of adventure; this sort of thing won’t come along very often nowadays, but I expected to be shipping out with grizzled old Dundee men who’d served their time in whalers or sealers from the east coast of Scotland. There were at least three of them in that waiting room in Fleet Street…’
‘Were there?’ I interjected, surprised at the depth of Nat’s insight.
He nodded. ‘Yes. I got talking to one of them while you were having your interview; you went in first, if you recall. Anyway, at the very least I thought we would ship an ice-pilot but…’ he shrugged, ‘nothing of the sort. Instead we get a quasi-naval product of the Great War who clearly chose thee and me on the grounds that we were from the Conway and the Worcester and, given what you say, I reckon old Southmoore insisted on Mr Tomkins as Chief Officer so that his ship was in a safe pair of hands.’
I hadn’t thought of that; Gardner was shrewd for his years and I looked at him sharply. ‘You think that?’ I asked. ‘Then why choose Hanslip as Commander in the first place?’
‘Well, either Hanslip has some claim on his Lordship or Southmoore wanted a front man. Hanslip’s naval rank adds a touch of distinction, and he’s got some sort of decoration, that ribbon he wears, I don’t know what it is, but from the point of view of publicity my guess is he’s the gilt on the ginger-bread-work. Don’t forget Southmoore’s a news-paper baron on a mission, not a stingy ship-owner. I don’t know what his outlay is in mounting this expedition as a consequence of some bloody séance in Hampstead or Highgate, but it must be considerable…’
‘I’ve heard one hundred thousand mentioned…’
Nat whistled through his teeth. ‘Christ on a bike! Well, he won’t understand the dynamics that pertain on board and my guess is that he’s tied the Old Man up with so many instructions that Hanslip doesn’t quite know which way to jump.’
‘Well, if you’re right this voyage is likely to be a farce or a disaster and frankly I’d rather it was a farce.’
‘We’ll find out tomorrow morning,’ Nat responded, ‘or at least you and everyone else will, I shall be on watch, but I gather there’s a three-line whip out for the officers, engineers and super-numeraries to assemble in the saloon – er, wardroom – at 10.30 hours.’
‘You’d better turn in,’ I said.
‘You’ve seen the Old Man’s night orders,’ Nat said, straightening up from where he had been leaning companionably on the rail and slapped the teak barrier that ran round the bridge, a dark, circumscribing line against white paintwork.
‘Yup,’ I responded, having read and signed the Order Book before seeking Nat out on the bridge-wing. ‘Call him if the wind changes in velocity or direction.’
‘Well good-night,’ he said and a moment later he had gone below, leaving me looking up at the night sky. The moon was up, a waxing crescent, and a dusting of cloud showed a steady sou’sou’westerly breeze. The engines were shut down and we were steering a course for Bergen under all plain sail. Beyond that, I, as navigator, knew only that we would then head ‘towards’ Spitsbergen; ‘towards’ in the old sailing-ship manner, meaning that was the intention but much lay in the lap of the gods. Quite how much we had yet to find out.
*
Half-past ten the following forenoon found Alan Tomkins and I, with the Chief and Second Engineers, Dr Crichton, Dave Manners, the Sparks from Marconi’s, Geoffrey Hardacre and John Sykes, The Courier’s people and our three so called scientists, Bill Maddox, who was our meteorologist and oceanographer, Derek Cronshaw our geologist and Jim Doughty our naturalist. They were still an unknown quantity, rather like Ahab’s whale-boat crew and thus far had kept themselves to themselves, largely due to feeling queasy, I think.
I was rubbing the sleep out of my eyes when I sat down at precisely 10.30, the five bells from the bridge ringing the half hour. Coffee was on the table and within seconds of my taking my place at the table between Alan Tomkins and Dr Crichton, Hanslip walked in with a chart rolled up under his arm. After some preliminary remarks about getting the ship properly cleaned-up after coaling, all of which were entirely unnecessary since Alan had seen to all that the previous day, he took a cigarette case from his pocket and, while we all waited in dutiful silence, he lit it.
‘Now gentlemen,’ he began, ‘some of you know a little of our mission and while I am fully supportive of any programmes you wish to run,’ here he looked pointedly at the three scientists, ‘yours is not the primary function of this expedition.’
The three young men looked at each other with somewhat perplexed expressions as Hanslip moved on. ‘Our main purpose is to locate the bodies and determine the fate of the Swedish Ørnen expedition, the so-called “flight of the eagle,” which, led by Salomon August Andrée, left Danskøya, or Dane’s Island, which lies here,’ he unrolled the chart, spread it out and pointed to one of a cluster of islands that lay off the north-west corner of West Spitsbergen, ‘on 11 July 1897. The Ørnen was a hydrogen-filled balloon and Andrée and his two companions were attempting to fly to the North Pole. After their departure, nothing was ever heard of them again.’
He paused as we digested this fact, or rather those to whom it was news digested it. I was eagerly awaiting the revelations of the famous Russian medium when Bill Maddox broke in with a question. ‘But how the hell are we going to find this balloon and why, so long after the event…?’
‘I’m coming to that, Mr Maddox…’
‘Doctor Maddox, if it’s all the same to you skipper…’
I sensed Alan Tomkins was enjoying the moment as Hanslip responded. ‘I’m Commander Hanslip,’ he said, hurrying on and stinging the young scientist as he did so. ‘Now, as to the last part of your question, Maddox, Lord Southmoore considers it his duty to relieve the great anxiety and, it has to be said, curiosity that still clings to this tragedy in Sweden. There are those still alive who do not know what happened to their nearest and dearest and his Lordship conceives it an act of great national benevolence worthy of the greatest imperial maritime power the world has ever seen to clear up the mystery. As to where we shall be searching, well his Lordship has received certain intelligence the source of which remains a secret,’ and here he unsubtly shot Alan and me a look which obviously abjured us to silence, ‘that the three men died on an island somewhere to the east of the Svalbard Archipelago. The Norwegians, who administer the territory under a Treaty concluded under the auspices of the League of Nations in nineteen twenty or thereabouts, call it Kvitøya, or in English: White Island.’
‘And there’s only one?’ ventured Maddox with the freedom of the academic in such stuffily pompous surroundings, though one might have expected him to know, given his position on our grand expedition. ‘Strikes me there might be rather a lot of white islands up there,’ he said, gesturing at the Admiralty chart of the Svalbard archipelago.
‘There’s only one that bears the name,’ Hanslip said smoothly, drawing on his cigarette. ‘Any questions?’
There was a babble of queries but I cannot recall what they were. Someone asked when we would be getting home, I seem to remember, I think it was the bird-watcher, Doughty, and someon
e else asked whether we were going to stop anywhere going north, to which Hanslip said yes, to take in victuals and land what he called ‘despatches,’ adding that ‘there would be no shore-leave and if one word of this got out there would be consequences’. I wasn’t taking much notice; I was more interest in skewing the chart from under Hanslip’s nose so that I could have a look at the White Island.
That would be a good place to leave it for tonight, but I’ve a good deal of ground to cover so, if it’s all right with you I’ll press on with the trip from Bergen, northwards.
*
Alas, my memory isn’t perfect and unfortunately I lost my private journal after my wife…well, a lot of things were lost then…other people clearing up and so forth… Anyway, I do remember that whilst I was eager to know where we were bound for, I thought Hanslip a fool for disclosing our destination, then taking the Alert into Bergen but stopping all shore-leave. It was bound to lead to trouble not least because while the wardroom knew our objective and had a partial grasp of the need for secrecy, the crew did not, they simply thought denial of liberty a breach of their rights. It did not help that the officers were confined to the ship too because Hanslip and Geoffrey Hardacre went ashore several times and our stay alongside Bergen’s wonderful old quay became prolonged. Had it been a matter of hours, even a couple of days, we might not have stirred-up ill-feeling among the hands; as it was we lay there for several days, quite idle.
I asked Alan Tomkins why, but he only shrugged, and said all he knew was that we were awaiting ‘further orders,’ though what they constituted I never discovered, though Alan thought further revelations from Madame Blavatskoya were the most likely reason. One was forced to conclude that while Hardacre was filing some copy – though he had as yet little enough to work on – Hanslip was dancing to old Southmoore’s tune.
It didn’t seem important at the time, but we lay ten days in Bergen, eight of which were definitely bad for morale and the consumption of stores, and since we had not been at sea very long before arriving, after our departure we effectively had to go through the whole bloody shake-down procedure again so that when, on the third day out, the weather dusted up, we were not really prepared, though Alan and the Bosun had the ship herself snugged down.
Incidentally, I should say that I had at least spent a good deal of my enforced leisure reading up about navigation in Arctic waters. I won’t bore you but there are a few things you need to understand in view of what happened. As you approach the North Pole the meridians of longitude converge, so that one’s longitude changes rapidly. In addition one’s magnetic compasses become less reliable, being subject to a downward attraction owing to your proximity to the vast mass of iron under the earth’s surface that creates the magnetic field and, so to speak, breaks the surface near the poles. At the time of the year – the Arctic summer – we could expect twenty-four hours of daylight once we passed the Lofoten Islands and there was the unknown ice situation. The charts and Admiralty sailing directions showed the summer ice limit as well to the south of Kvitøya and I wondered, somewhat idly at the time, if our delay in Bergen was not to receive Madame Blavatskoya’s prediction of the season’s ice edge!
Having read a number of other books, all of them borrowed from Alan Tomkins and including Lord Dufferin’s Letters from High Latitudes and James Lamont’s Yachting in the Arctic Seas, I was beginning to convince myself that we stood little chance of reaching the White Island. When, in my capacity as the expedition’s navigator, I broached the subject with Hanslip, he waved my concerns aside, told me to ‘wait and see and simply lay courses off to twenty miles south of Spitsbergen’s South Cape,’ which naturally encouraged me to believe that I had got it right when I guessed old Blavatskoya had revealed something hidden to the rest of us.
We had a rough time in the gale despite being able to run before it for most of the time. It blew hard, more storm than gale, and winds in those seas are cold and unpleasant and exposed us to a discomfort few of us were prepared for, mentally or physically, though old Southmoore had shipped a decent amount of heavy-weather clothing aboard, I will say that for him. Nevertheless, we blew three sails out of their bolt-ropes and I remember after going aloft with my watch late one afternoon while Alan came up and took the deck that he said to me, ‘You know Ned, this lot is letting a fine little barque down.’
‘I’m sorry, Alan,’ I replied, thinking he was admonishing me for my dilatory response in getting sail off her, ‘but that last gust,’ I explained, at which he interrupted. ‘No, no, not you,’ he said, shaking his head and wandering off to the narrow wing of the little bridge to stare up at the fore lower tops’l. He came back to me with a wan smile. ‘She’ll be all right now,’ he assured me, taking his pipe out of his pocket and filling it. ‘You get your head down for an hour before dinner…’
Somehow that enigmatic exchange summed up the feeling he and I, and I think Nat Gardner, had about the way things were going. A sort of inchoate sensation of, if not impending disaster, then something akin to it… An unease… an augury is perhaps a better way of putting it, though it is hard to define so long afterwards because I can’t say it stopped me sleeping, or put me in mind of sailing with Ahab, or any such twaddle. It was just a feeling that things weren’t quite right and we, certainly the three mates, would have to be extra watchful over the ‘fine little barque,’ for she was certainly that. Your father had spared no expense in fitting her out and whatever his faults – though it was probably your dad’s open cheque book that secured it – Commander Hanslip had found him a sturdy vessel.
The gale blew itself out and gave us a couple of days of really fine weather. Naturally averse to using up our stock of coal we rolled along under full sail. the coast of Norway was visible on-and-off in the far distance until we found ourselves west of the Lofotens at which point Hanslip decided another stop was necessary. This was quite irrational and Alan Tomkins advised against it. Moreover, since this exchange took place in the chart-room, just abaft the wheel-house in which I then was, shortly before he relieved me at four o’clock one afternoon, I heard Hanslip’s crisp response.
‘When I require your advice, Mr Tomkins, I shall ask for it.’
I had withdrawn to the bridge-wing by the time Alan came out to relieve me looking like thunder. ‘You heard that, I suppose,’ he growled. I nodded. ‘The man’s a fucking idiot.’ It was not the first time I had heard Alan swear, we all swore pretty freely, but Alan really meant it and I was a bit shaken at this very obvious dislocation between our captain and his executive officer. Such hiccups never bode well.
And in the Lofotens, where we wasted a further five days, we discovered our Commander drank. This came as a shock. You don’t need me to tell you that your father’s paper campaigned on a temperance/Methodist ticket aimed at a virtuous, hard-working, working and lower middle-class, literate and aspirational people who, God help them, will be those who win this bloody war – if we win it. Whatever the reasons for Hanslip’s vice he seems to have had kept it hidden from Lord Southmoore and probably, as is most likely, it only surfaced when he was under stress. I suppose you might dig around the records and unearth his career, after all you’re the journalist, all I can tell you is that he had been decorated for distinguished service in the Great War and while one assumes that comes with some sort of moral superiority over most of his fellows, this often has a darker shadow, a haunting, call it what you will, when events, sights, memories, smells even, can set off moments of black-dog or the blue devils – whatever you want to call them too. Hindsight suggests he may have spent time in Netley, or some other such hospital. I simply don’t know, but if he did, I’m surprised your father, being a thorough-going news-hound, hadn’t checked such a possibility out. Perhaps he hadn’t thought it necessary.
By the time we departed from the Lofotens it was pretty obvious to us that our prolonged stay at Bergen and our unscheduled stop in the Norwegian Islands arose from Hanslip’s sudden procrastination, for neither stop – and certain
ly the second – seemed to have any valid reason. Even the sending of Hardacre’s so-called ‘despatches’ – another of Hasnslip’s little aggrandising nouns – or John Sykes’s photographs amounted to much at either stage of the voyage.
How did we first notice Hanslip’s drinking? Well, looking back both Alan and I had remarked upon the stink of alcohol on his breath in Bergen. He had been ashore on ‘ship’s business,’ with a shipping agent and the British vice-consul and I suppose we just thought he’d been obliged to imbibe some of the local aquavit because once we were back at sea he reverted to his old pompously assertive self, and maybe that was indeed the case. If so, and if he had previously been dried-out, the aquavit, or whatever it was, had triggered a renewal of his desire for alcohol and thinking back to his decision to put in at Reine, at the southern tip of the Lofotens, it was precipitate.
After Alan had relieved me that afternoon and was hauling the barque round onto her new heading I had gone into the chartroom to lay off the new course and initial the log-slate for my watch – Alan, as Chief Officer wrote the fair-copy daily, which was signed by Hanslip and himself, we officers-of-the-watch maintaining a running slate – I went to report to Hanslip.
He had shut his cabin door and I knocked. It took a moment for him to shout ‘come in’ and almost automatically I said: ‘Mr Tomkins tells me we are putting into Reine, sir. I have laid off the courses,’ I think I handed him or told him the ETA – the estimated time of arrival - and asked, ‘would you like me to ask Sparks to signal for a pilot?’
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