Anyway, I went on the bridge to relieve Nat and was in the throes of rendering a quiet and rapid account of the incident when Alan came on the bridge.
‘Get your dinner,’ he said abruptly to Nat before turning to me and indicating we should go out onto the bridge-wing.
‘You know what that was all about, don’t you?’ he said, his face betraying a deep anxiety.
‘Well I suppose…’ I began but Alan’s query was purely rhetorical.
He gestured round him. ‘It’s this ice; it compounds the delay he caused by his adventures in Bergen and Reine. The bloody man’s quite unstable and incapable of command. Now he has no sauce to fall back on, or if he has, he hasn’t taken anything yet.’ Alan let the sentence hang ominously before going on to say: ‘My guess is the next few hours will tell us whether he has a secret store or not. Either way it’s going to be rocky, so don’t you let him catch you gossiping with the Third Mate like that.’
I felt truly chastened. The subject of Hanslip and his erratic behaviour had become such an important feature of our life on board in the last few days, as we laboured painfully north-east through the pack-ice, that I hadn’t regarded my quick briefing to Nat as anything other than a recounting of the ship’s gossip. Alan’s cautionary remark told me that he was trying to manage a seriously deteriorating situation, so I apologised.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I just don’t want you two to be giving him any pretexts for doing something stupid. Actually he thinks the world of you both. Jones didn’t know what he was doing and that was all most unfortunate.’
I remember having a sort of flash of intuition, though I think that I had half-guessed the fact from having seen Alan and Dr Crichton having a chat on deck a few days earlier. The Doc didn’t go on deck much, preferring his cabin and the company of a book, and without really thinking it through, I clocked the fact that the two of them had come on deck to speak privately in what looked like a purely casual chat as they stared out over the ice.
‘You’ve been talking to the Doc,’ I ventured, ‘and he knows something.’
Alan gave me a sharp look. ‘You’re perceptive…’ I explained. ‘Oh, yes, well, you’re quite right,’ Alan went on. ‘Not that he confided much but apparently he’d dried Hanslip out after the war and when Hanslip got the appointment to command the Alert from your father he must have had second thoughts, because he looked Crichton up, told him where he was going and when Crichton asked if a quack had been appointed to the ship and was told no, advised Hanslip to go back to your father and suggest that one was added to the complement, telling your father that he knew someone who would be able to drop his practice and volunteer ‘out of a love of adventure’. This was pure bullshit, of course. Crichton’s retired, and quite well-off. So he’s come along for the benefit of one pathetic alkie, so, now we know…’
A thought struck me and I remarked, ‘he wasn’t at the dinner table.’
‘No, he wasn’t. He was sitting in his cabin and stayed there until the row with Jones had blown over. I popped in to see him after you had come up here to relieve Nat. He said he wanted to hear how Hanslip handled the affair…’
‘Handled it?’ I remember saying. ‘He started it.’
‘Yes, yes, but you know what I mean…’
‘What? Keeping the patient under observation?’
‘Something like that. It’s my guess that Crichton’s presence is what’s keeping our gallant Commander from completely losing control.’ Alan paused a moment, then asked, ‘you haven’t seen them together, hugger-mugger, or anything like that?’
‘No, but they could speak confidentially at any time.’ I recall musing a moment, then adding the comment that Crichton made no effort to stop Hanslip going on the toot in Reine.
Alan shook his head. ‘I mentioned that and Crichton said that he had been reading in his cabin when the Old Man slipped ashore, so had no chance to stop him. Anyway,’ he concluded, ‘I don’t want to be seen talking to you like this, so I’m going to bugger off and catch some shut-eye before eight-bells.’
Tomkins left me to stare out over the ice. We were on half-speed, pushing ourselves through some thin ice and making quite good progress, but in the next hour or so things changed. I had to do some backing-and-filling, going ahead and astern, to get anywhere at all. It all used up coal.
Shall we call it a day? You’re yawning and I am growing boring.
THE THIRD EVENING - THE WHITE ISLAND
Before we go on I want to say something about Hanslip. I really don’t want to give the impression that we were sailing under a latter-day Captain Bligh. You journalists turn easily to commonly comprehended references and clichés, but Hanslip was no William Bligh. Besides being excessively bad-tempered, Bligh was a supremely competent seaman who, even standing amid the wreckage of his career, never took to drink though his bad-language was legendary.
Hanslip, on the other hand, was a grievously wounded man and, God knows, this present war is creating a lot of them, particularly at sea where no-one sees what we endure and we lack the glamour of the Brylcream Boys of the RAF. The Crabs might have saved Britain from a German invasion, though they would have proved totally ineffective if Gerry had actually got afloat and made the effort to cross the Channel, but it’s out there, in the Western Ocean that Britain is being saved – if she is, and I’m by no means convinced of this for all the effort, blood, sweat, tears and treasure that are being expended by our little island…
Sorry, I digress, I merely wish to make the point that I can now better recognise what was happening to Hanslip, a personal insight that was denied me all those years ago aboard the Alert as she struggled through the pack-ice. Alan Tomkins knew, so too did Doc Crichton, for Crichton, perceiving how the land lay, partially broke his Hippocratic oath to the extent of warning Alan that circumstances might arise in which he had to take over the ship. It was a pity your father didn’t know. Somehow Hanslip had wormed his way so far into your dad’s good books that Lord Southmoore saw only what he wanted to see. Perhaps Crichton thought he had cured Hanslip, perhaps your father thought he had, but in retrospect the late appointment of a doctor to the ship was, of course, significant. Anyway…
It took us, oh, I really can’t recall how many days to reach Kvitøya. It’s some miles to the east of North-East Land, the unromantically named large island that lies east of West Spitsbergen. It’s low – Kvitøya I mean - and by the time we got there it was around the end of May, I think. It was a good month before mid-summer and still the weather held, just the occasional drifting fog and sea-smoke, but nothing to worry us beyond the pressures of the pack-ice fields and the steadily diminishing stock of coal. Not then, anyway. I think we were to some extent lulled into a false sense of security, coping well with the ice, while no-one dared mention the coal again, at least not publically. It seemed that if Hanslip was worried about being in the ice, as Alan Tomkins surmised, then most of his anxieties were of his own making.
Still, as I was saying, Kvitøya is low-lying. These islands, being of dark rock heat-up in the sun and you often find there is clear water close to the shore, so that you can anchor safely. At that time of the year there was twenty-four hour daylight and, had we not been keeping watches, one could lose track of the time of day.
I think that we were all pretty excited to have reached our destination. Hanslip certainly was; it was relief, I suppose, but he was like a school-boy let out for the summer holidays. He was all for going ashore directly and starting to search the island, a plan that immediately appealed to Hardacre and Sykes who were, I think, bored out of their skulls and were eager to get their ‘story,’ if there was one to get. Our three scientists were equally keen to set-up a ‘shore observatory,’ though to what end I was never quite sure. It’s all a bit woolly now; they had been collecting data since we left Blyth. I’m afraid I cannot remember all the details, though I think one of them produced a rather well regarded paper after it was all over and it was this that ‘justified’ th
e expedition in the event. I was away to sea almost immediately on my return, glad to have found a berth and rather forgot about things as the Depression caught us all out and I joined the ranks of the unemployed. Thank God for the Royal Naval Reserve; if I hadn’t joined-up I would probably have starved…
I’m sorry, you will not want to hear any of this, it is just that my life and the lives of countless other merchant seafarers were overtaken by a pretty desperate struggle just to survive.
Anyway, to return to our final arrival at the White Island. Alan Tomkins put the mokkers on too precipitate a landing and suggested that, as it was actually near midnight, we should all get some rest and make proper preparations for a landing the following day. I think he mentioned a falling glass, which was the clincher for most of us, but Hanslip kept on a bit longer, wittering about a reconnaissance. We were having a sort of pow-wow in the wardroom and it was only when Dr Crichton rather forcefully endorsed Alan’s advice that Hanslip became compliant.
‘We don’t want anyone eaten by a polar bear do we?’ I remember him remarking laconically by way of conclusion. We had seen one or two of these animals either swimming in the leads, or hauled-out on small bergs with their prey – usually some unfortunate seal.
Apart from the watch, we all turned in. Unfortunately it blew up from the west that night. By about one in the morning we had to get steam up and ease the strain on the anchor cable as the ice blew down towards us and threatened to pin us on a lee shore. It turned into a hell of a night. By two we had to get under-weigh because we risked a wrecking as the gale grew in strength and by morning it was blowing Storm Force Ten. The only thing in our favour was it was relatively warm and the movement of the ice kept breaking it up so we crawled, literally crawled, bashing our way to windward, the whole bloody ship shuddering, the rigging shaking and were about five miles off the island by 08.00 next morning.
Of course this reverse put a different complexion on everything. We three mates and our Commander were all on the bridge and Hanslip was like a petulant kid, blaming Alan for the lost opportunity. The mate quietly pointed out that had we landed a party the night before we would have been in a worse pickle as we might not have been able to recover the men. I remember I happened to be looking at Hanslip when Alan made this perfectly sensible remark and saw that it was as though Alan had struck him. It was odd, and it was some time later that I understood that the thought of actually being separated from the ship and possibly marooned, suddenly terrified our brave skipper. He blenched and I saw him swallow hard. Looking back on it, he must have been going through the agonies of hell after such a night.
As for the rest of us, we simply agreed that Alan’s advice had been timely and saved us a lot of aggravation. The problem was that the storm blew for three days and we were hove-to in the ice. We were in no particular danger, for the Alert was a stout little ship and only occasionally did the ice really threaten us when a berg, larger than most, bore down on us from dead to windward. We actually poled off this, but we all felt its under-water body scrape down our starboard bilge. Fortunately it was rotten ice, old ice, and soft enough not to cause too much damage. Most of the time we just bumped our way through the melting pack with the occasional crash. To be truthful, having been in the Barents Sea in this present shindig, we were pretty lucky and owed a great deal more to the little barque than we knew at the time. As the gale blew the ice east and we struggled slowly west, we eventually broke clear of the pack, whereupon the seas, no longer dampened by the ice, revealed themselves as dangerous. Within hours the wind shifted to the north-west and we found ourselves pretty much on the reciprocal course to that by which we had approached the White Island, losing the very ground we had made a day or so earlier. It was all very frustrating; had any of us a proper inkling of Arctic conditions we would have taken all this in good part, but we didn’t and having a ward-room full of non-seamen – the scientists and, worst of all, your father’s two chaps – only exacerbated the problem. In general seamen accept the delays and vexations imposed upon them by a malign fate. They combat it by black humour and a good deal of foul-mouthed expression – catarolysis it’s called and I have to say it comes in handy, keeping one’s imagination at bay and hence mastering a tendency to insanity. Landsmen are quite unused to such things; everything to them is supposed to be predictable: if the 12.10 from Paddington doesn’t leave until a quarter-past there are letters to The Courier, if you get my point. Even in wartime a degree of ‘normality’ is expected to prevail…
We thought that Maddox, the meteorologist and oceanographer, might have given us some advice but beyond saying that most of his polar experience had been at the other end of the globe, he managed to conclude that what we were experiencing seemed a bit odd for the time of year when high pressure was supposed to prevail in the Arctic, he proved pretty useless. To be fair he suffered another bout of sea-sickness which does nothing for a man’s intellectual powers, but it further revealed the sham of our supposedly ‘well-organised expedition’.
As for Commander Hanslip, he decided that the best thing for him to do was to disappear into his cabin until the gale blew itself out, leaving the ship to Alan, Nat and myself. We were pretty certain he had no source of alcohol and was just funking it all, and nothing subsequently contradicted this. Many of us had become used to our captains withdrawing into their cabins, booze or not, after the last war. A lot of them had had a pretty lousy time and the lack of national appreciation for the contribution to victory made by merchant shipping was never acknowledged. This neglect ate into them and they, and many of us younger men too, took – and continue to take - this badly. It’ll be the same after this business too but, to stick to my tale, Hanslip was bloody lucky in that he had the perfectly splendid Alan Tomkins as his Chief Mate; the man seemed constantly on the move, ever thoughtful, overseeing the gear… He often went aloft himself, taking the Bosun with him, to check-out some gear that was giving us cause for concern…
He was a simply exemplary seaman, the Bosun, I mean… And I do wish I could recall his name…
Anyway, I think it was the afternoon of the day after we broke clear of the pack-ice that the fore-topsail blew out. I had the watch and had gone into the chart-room to work out a Marcq St Hilaire sight of the sun, of which I had caught a brief glimpse through the scud. It would only give me a position-line, but that was better than nothing, though the whole process was complicated by our high latitude. I was consulting the almanac when the sail went with a crack like thunder. You could feel the entire ship shaking as the damned thing, having torn free of the bolt-ropes, flogged itself to ribbons.
I had hardly reached the bridge-wing when Alan’s whistle for all hands pierced the howl of the wind. Chief Mate or not – and he could have taken over from me and sent me aloft instead – Alan was first into the fore-shrouds and I have to say I watched as something of a spectator, easing the helm a bit to help the seamen that followed him onto that bucking yard. Somehow they got the remains of the wrecked sail secured and I can assure you it was no picnic. ‘O’- grade canvas is dreadfully hard on the hands, more like wood than cloth, and it was unusual for it to part company with the bolt-ropes if properly made and looked after, but at least it marked the height of the storm because within an hour the wind began to drop and the glass to rise. It was such an abrupt change that at first I thought it ominous, but no, thereafter it fell away and by midnight, with a new foretopsail bent on we had reversed course and were heading back towards Kvitøya. Things move that fast in the Arctic.
The sense of relief was palpable and when I later took over from Nat under the light of the midnight sun Hanslip himself was on the bridge, writing his night orders as though the previous couple of days hadn’t happened, and with a cordial ‘Good night, Two-Oh,’ marking the end of the episode.
The next thing I recall with any clarity is that after passing again through the pack we found the approach to Kvitøya now blocked by great humps and ridges of ice piled-up by the storm. Maddox
was of the opinion that the prevailing currents would shift this in a day-or-two of fine weather and on this occasion he proved partly right, but only partly. A number of the larger, ‘bergy bits’ had run aground and we could not work our way inshore as closely as we had formerly, but somewhere around the last week in May we found an anchorage and veered down onto the pack so that we could get onto the ice by way of the pilot-ladder. Thereafter we began our preparations to prove whether or not that great clairvoyant, Madame Blavatskoya, was correct in her predictions.
Looking back it seems all rather unreal and bewildering. Rather ridiculous really. I suppose that if, as many wished after the blood-bath of the other sodding war, some means of reaching out beyond the physical world we are all familiar with had proved possible, we would all have thought our expedition highly successful. Now it seems verging on the stupid, even though what happened in the next few days might have persuaded a lot of people otherwise.
Nevertheless, picture us – for it had all sorts of over-laying connotations. There we were, operating in a curious world, isolated in the frozen north, on the one hand as a pseudo-scientific expedition, on the other testing the clairvoyance of an ageing white Russian emigrée in Hampstead. Looking back, the dilettante aspect of it all assumes even more ludicrous proportions when you set them alongside what’s going on in the Western Ocean now – tonight – this very moment. A rich man’s nutty project, if you’ll forgive me saying so. At the time we were still thinking ourselves as cast in the Shackleton mould, brave Britons who were going to rend a pro bono service to the Swedes for the Good of Mankind.
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