by Wilbur Smith
We were some distance off coast, with our nets already winching up, when our sister boat, owned by the same Cape Town brothers as the Kingfisher, drew near. Across the waters, we watched as they cast their nets, the line streaming off the back of the trawler. I saw one of their crewmen stumble, his ankle caught in the running line. For a terrible second, he stood tall, then the sea was dragging the line away, his body snapped taut—and he was gone cartwheeling over the side. As he hit the water, still entangled in the netting, his crew rushed to snatch him from the depths but it was too late. The line was already thirty feet under water. By the time he surfaced, he would be dead.
An hour passed. Maybe more. When it came time to draw in the nets, filled with pilchards, plankton—and the occasional shark or barracuda, to be cut free and tossed back into the water—there lay the man’s body, already beginning to bloat.
After four weeks working the Kingfisher, we had gained the grudging respect of Boots Botha and his crew. Both Hillary and I were hard-working boys, and one night we all went out on the town. The hotel in Walvis Bay was heaving with trawler men, and the crew of the Kingfisher were already deep into their cups. At the bar, Hillary and the chief engineer were rounding up more drinks while I propped up a table with Boots Botha and the rest. It had been a good day. One of our sister ships had been trapped at sea, their net filled with so many pilchards from such an unexpectedly vast shoal that they were laden down, unable to move. The Kingfisher came to the rescue and we spent the day ferrying parts of their catch back to port and, in doing so, had the most profitable day in the crew’s memory. Most of it was being spent in the hotel that night.
Boots was smashed out of his skull and he pulled me over for a heartfelt chat: “Spook-gat,” he said, struggling to remember my real name. “Wilbur isn’t it? You’re a good man, I like you, so let me tell you. Every time you stick your bleddy arm through those rings, I get such a fright . . .”
Boots’ eyes were bloodshot with beer, and he seemed to be laughing at some joke only he knew the punch line to, his spittle flecking my ear.
“Why?” I asked.
“Spook-gat, if the line breaks when your arm’s in the rings, all those rings are going to separate—and they’re going to have a pressure of about three hundred tons on them and your arm will look like a sliced loaf of bread.”
Now I understood the looks of consternation whenever I put my arm through the rings. I gazed around the room, at Hillary drinking, at the other members of the crew who all knew this simple truth that I did not. I had been risking my arm, perhaps my life, and not one of them had breathed a word. It was the law of the jungle and I was the little baby antelope squinting in the sun wondering why all the other animals had run away when a predator emerged. I smiled at my naivety. At least I was still alive to tell the tale.
The next day, as we rode the waves beyond Walvis Bay, casting our nets and preparing to draw them in, the cry went out—“Spook-gat! Put your hand through these rings!” I took one look at the grinning crew and told them in trawler man’s language that I was never going to put my hand in there again. “Go get your stick,” I shouted. They’d been rumbled.
•••
The time we spent aboard the Kingfisher had been as grueling as I could remember. Hillary and I set off eastward, along the railway that would take us back across the desert, to Windhoek and, from there, to South Africa and Rhodes University; our pockets were flush, our bodies were strong, and my mind was filled with a new understanding of the sea. It was unforgiving and cruel, it took life with impunity, but it was also magnificent, wild and beautiful and rewarded those who understood her with the riches of comradeship and stirring narratives of life on the waves. In the years to come, I would return to those stories, to men like Boots Botha and the crew of the Kingfisher. Looking back, the seeds of future novels like The Diamond Hunters and The Eye of the Tiger, and even the character Lothar de la Rey from The Sound of Thunder, were all being sown in those experiences at sea.
Those novels were still more than a decade away—and, before then, the sea would come calling again.
•••
The next Christmas vacation, I thought that, having survived working on a pilchards’ trawler, I was tough enough to do a season with the whaling fleets which left from Cape Town in November and sailed down almost to the South Atlantic. I had heard from a friend that a Japanese whaling fleet was looking for labor.
The docks in Cape Town were vast, heaving with freighters, liners and pleasure boats. Before I was born, whaling in this part of the world was centered a couple of hundred miles up the coast at Durban, where the blue whales ran into the warmer northern waters, but this Christmas it was colder waters to which I was bound. Once signed up by a representative of the Whaling Company, I boarded a resupply boat, along with dozens of others like me, and we began the long voyage. Our destination was as far south as I had ever been in my life, and as far south as I was ever likely to go. We were bound for Antarctica, the cold majesty of empty ocean and icebergs. Down in those waters, the humpback, sperm, and southern right whales were to be our prey.
The whaling company had been in Antarctic waters since November, when the whaling season began, and the boat I was traveling on was one of many resupply vessels that regularly plied this route, delivering new men, goods and specialist supplies to the fleet. For five nights and four days we plowed south, a journey of stultifying boredom, across boundless oceans, where there was nothing to see but the curve of the horizon, growing more pronounced the further we went. The crew on board, a mixture of South Africans and Japanese, were hard, taciturn men—and before we were one night out of port, I knew that this was no Kingfisher.
At dusk on the fourth night, we saw the blue expanse of the ocean broken, for the first time, by jagged peaks of white. Icebergs pocked the horizon and, as we entered the ice field, I realized we were close.
On the fifth day, we reached the site where the whaling fleet was working. It was the stench that hit us first. I had not encountered the foul smells of whale blubber and meat before, nor do I want to again. The odor was thick and loathsome, and seemed to taint everything in the atmosphere. The closer we came, the more the oily fug wrapped around us, suffocating us with its miasma of putrefaction and death.
In an expanse of open water, shimmering with the run-off from the butchery on board, lay the factory ship of the fleet.
Antarctic whaling was built around processing stations on the ice shelf itself, but the need for more efficient butchery—and to avoid regulation by any government in the world—had led to the first factory ships being built so that whaling could take place entirely at sea. When we boarded her, the factory ship seemed like a world in itself. I imagined the Antarctic as the place of beauty and grandeur I had conjured up by reading classic tales of exploration and heroism—of Robert Falcon Scott and his doomed mission to reach the South Pole, of Ernest Shackleton and the crew of the Endurance, abandoning their ship to the pack ice and yet somehow returning home without losing a single man—but there was little triumph or adventure in what the next month had in store. The factory ship was an open-air abattoir, her every surface slick with whale oil and blood. For the rest of the season, she was to be my home.
•••
If my first days aboard the Kingfisher had shown me how unprepared I was compared to the trawler men who worked those waters every day, my first days aboard the factory ship revealed how naive I had been to think of the trawler as any kind of preparation for a life like this.
Days were spent in long shifts on the factory deck. There were eight harpooning boats in the fleet. At first light, they would set out to hunt their prey, returning at intervals with rivers of blood trailing behind them. The carcasses of the whales were towed in by the catchers, and winched up the slide in the stern of the mothership by great mechanical claws. Then our work would begin. Armed with flensing knives, the crewmen sliced open the layers of blubber, systematically taking the great animals apart. The t
eam of which I was a junior member hooked on cables that peeled the blubber off. It was hard, unrelenting work on a slippery, rolling deck, in gale-force winds which whipped across us, carrying with them all the freezing bitterness of the Antarctic. We were surrounded by heavy, moving machinery, while the knives swung with wild abandon by the Japanese could decapitate or disembowel a man. By comparison the pilchard trawler was a luxury pleasure cruise.
Once flensed—stripped of every scrap of fat, flesh and bone that could be processed, used or sold—the carcasses of the whales were pushed back out to sea. Somewhere, further south, they would wash up on the shores of the Antarctic ice shelf where vast bone yards would collect—a veritable skeleton coast.
I spent my nights in quiet solitude, too exhausted to do anything but sleep. I had no companions here—and no chance of making them. The men of the Kingfisher had become friends, but these whaling men were a different breed. Even those who spoke English had a glazed, faraway glint in their eyes. There was no camaraderie between them, only work, blood, blubber and bone.
By the end of the fourth week I felt as if I had been here a lifetime. The place was less a factory ship than a mobile slaughterhouse. The visceral mess of death was all around. I spent another long day toiling on the cadaverous deck, and, when I retired that night, every inch of me glistening with whale oil, I knew what I was going to do.
The next day, I made my way across the slippery decks to find the ship’s doctor. I told him I had a pain in my abdomen that wouldn’t go away. He laid me down, felt my gut but found nothing. He told me to go back to work. “Surely,” I said, “you don’t want somebody to die on this ship? That’s how bad it feels.”
He picked up a pen and began to fill out a form. He’d heard this story before and knew it wasn’t worth questioning. That day, when the resupply ship came down from the Cape, there was one extra passenger on its manifest for the return route north. Two months earlier than I’d thought, I was saying goodbye to that floating hell upon the water. It would take me days to feel civilized again, weeks until I could no longer feel the residue of whale oil between my fingers, or smell the noxious vapor of the factory ship in my hair. The return journey was long and unsettled, the seas squalling under tempestuous skies—and Cape Town couldn’t come quickly enough.
One day, I would write a novel called Hungry as the Sea and draw on my experiences in the Antarctic. Hungry as the Sea would be my twelfth book and the first I had ever written partially set in the US. It was a story about Nicholas Berg, the golden prince of Christy Marine, who had got to the top of the shipping world through hard work and ability, only to lose his position to a glib London city boy, who stole his wife for good measure. Now, with only a tugboat to his name, Berg had to brave the chilly wastes of the Antarctic, rescue one of his former company’s luxury cruise liners and then prevent his cuckolder from killing his estranged wife and son.
I had no knowledge whatsoever of the big ships and the arcane world of high sea salvage. Safmarine, South Africa’s merchant navy, was particularly helpful, being one of the big world players in maritime freight and shipping, but the greatest lure for me was Safmarine’s ownership of two of the biggest and most powerful sea tugs in the world, the John Ross and the Wolraad Woltemade, known as the greyhounds or the vultures of the Cape, depending on your viewpoint. They both regularly docked in Cape Town. I spent hours aboard with the captains and crews who, very generously, shared their knowledge and stories of high drama on the worst seas of the world.
As for whaling and the Antarctic, if I never saw those icy wastes again, it would be too soon.
9
THIS HIGH-FLYING LIFE
The summer of 1947 was long and dry, and the further north we went the more blistering the heat. I had already been on this train for nearly three days, grinding our way from Johannesburg to Bulawayo, changing trains there for the final leg, and now, as we neared Lusaka, I was ready to believe that the vacation had truly begun. This was always a golden moment, a time when I could forget the strictures of boarding school and live as I wanted, running free on the ranch. My father’s driver was waiting to meet me at the station and the delirious excitement of the vacation from school stretched before me.
There was always work to do at home. My father, as a staunch Victorian, had little tolerance for idleness, and I could not get away with weeks of untethered abandon. But there was still time for hunting and shooting, reading and exploring—all the things that made me remember the ranch so vividly and with such fondness. On the third day of vacation, I woke early, took to my bike, and set out for the Kafue River.
I was born between two world wars and growing up in the aftermath of the Second World War, I couldn’t escape the consequences of war. I grew up around veterans, many of whom had been invited to the Rhodesias to settle as farmers or work as artisans. Our ranch had been built up from several smaller farms allocated to ex-servicemen who had then decided Africa was too hostile and harsh a place and had returned to England to build their futures in that green and pleasant land. But, of all our neighbors, there was one who had resolved to stay, and who was stoically making this corner of Africa his own. He lived two farms away and, as I cycled along winding dirt tracks and familiar scrub, I wondered what kind of reception he would give me.
I had first set out to befriend this man when I’d overheard my father talking about him with our laborers. Apparently, he was a recluse and rarely seen in the social circles of the ranching world. He was also a former Royal Air Force pilot, a hero of the Battle of Britain who had come here to recover from his injuries.
The Battle of Britain was fought between July and October 1940 when the RAF defended Great Britain from the onslaught of the German Luftwaffe. As a boy, weaned on stories of the pilot Biggles and his escapades in the air, the idea of brave British pilots dog-fighting with the relentless Luftwaffe as London burned below was thrilling stuff. It was a story of valor, romance, heroism and sacrifice that fired my imagination. Even now, as I remember attending air shows and hearing the gut-thumping roar of a Supermarine Spitfire’s Rolls-Royce Merlin engine as the aircraft soared into the heavens, or the sky sounding like it was being torn in two by giant hands as the plane swooped in a never-ending dive, I have shivers down my spine. I once saw fourteen Spitfires and Hurricanes from the Second World War take off en masse, the ground shuddering with the combined raucous horsepower, the air riven with the staccato pulse beat of their engines, and I shall never forget the grace with which they cleaved the sky. Later I would read that classic of Second World War literature, The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary, a Battle of Britain pilot who suffered terrible burns when he was shot down by a Messerschmitt Bf 109. As a teenager, war gripped me in its glamorous fist—it was a chance to test your mettle, answer the call of duty, to become a man. The price of military conflict was never in my reckoning. That is until I met our neighbor for the first time.
His face had been burned beyond the talents of any surgeon to repair. His eyes seemed like black holes set in a mask of contorted scar tissue, his nose pinched and out of shape. It was as if his face had frozen into an expression of shock, as if set permanently in the moment of agony as the flames tried to consume him. He had fought over the skies of London during the Battle of Britain and was shot down when pursuing a group of German Dornier 215 bombers above the coast of Kent. He was reluctant to talk about the details but with time he gradually opened up to me. He said that Geoffrey Page, a fellow RAF fighter pilot, had described his early experience of flying Spitfires as “the sweet red wine of youth,” and perhaps he saw some of that in me, in my callow enthusiasms, my endless curiosity. He had opened fire on one of the leading Dorniers when suddenly the air was crisscrossed with a hail of flashing white tracer cannon shells. The escorting Messerschmitt 109s had attacked his squadron in defense of their bombers. A thunder burst of an explosion deafened his eardrums and he knew he had been hit. An ugly wheal of a hole gaped open in his port wing and flames started belching from the bo
ttom of his cockpit. His engine vibrated violently and he thought he’d better get out of there fast. The fuel tank on a Spitfire is between the instrument panel and the engine, so right in front of the pilot was 90 gallons of volatile fuel, and suddenly it went up like a bomb, flames shooting over his face and hands. Instinctively remembering his bailout procedure, he jettisoned his canopy, grabbed at his Sutton harness to loosen it while his skin shriveled like roasting meat in the searing blast furnace of his cabin. Somehow, he managed to jam his control column forward, pitching him out of the cockpit as the aircraft dropped away. He tried in vain to pull the parachute rip cord with his red raw fingers, over and over he grabbed at it, his hands slippery with sloughing flesh, until finally he gained purchase and his parachute opened with a sickening jolt. It was only when, off the coast of Margate, he hit the sea hard, feet first, and surfaced, gasping for air, his parachute luckily collapsing to one side of him, that he realized how badly burned he was as the salt water pressed against his wounds like sandpaper. Months of pain and many operations later he was invalided out of the RAF and given a desk job for which he was grateful, although he also felt disappointed and guilty. He was ashamed of being wounded, felt somewhere deep inside of him that, by surviving, he had failed some ultimate test, and I realized that perhaps it was not just his facial disfigurement that made him shun company.
Just as the visible scars of that defining episode in his life never disappeared, the inner wounds never seemed to heal either, and I think he found my presence some sort of comfort. He was not much older than me—a man in his midtwenties, perhaps, though it was hard to tell; he had the demeanor of a man much older.