by Cormac James
PRAISE FOR
The Surfacing
‘The Surfacing is an extraordinary novel, combining a powerful narrative with a considered and poetic use of language in a way that is not often seen these days. Reading the book, I recalled the dramatic natural landscape of Jack London and the wild untamed seas of William Golding. Cormac James’ writing is ambitious enough to be compared with either.’
JOHN BOYNE
‘The great topic of Cormac James’ The Surfacing is the reach of human possibility. The prose is calm, vivid, hypnotic and acutely piercing. James is attuned to the psychological moment: this is a book about fatherhood and all its attendant terrors. It’s a remarkable achievement…James recognises the surfacing of love in the face of solitude. A stylish novel, full of music and quiet control. This is a writer that I’d like to see hurry— I’m looking forward already to the next book.’
COLUM McCANN
‘Cormac James’ writing is very assured, with a harsh poetic edge. His evocations of barren landscape, sea weather, pack ice and frozen skies are powerful and compelling.’
ROSE TREMAIN
Cormac James was born in Cork, Ireland, and now lives in France. His first novel, Track and Field, was published in 2000. cormacjames.com
The author wishes to thank the Arts Council/an Chomairle Ealaíon for its generous funding during work on this book.
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Copyright © 2014 by Cormac James
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First published in 2014 by Sandstone Press, Dingwall, Scotland
This edition 2014, The Text Publishing Company
Typeset by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore, Scotland
Cover design by W. H. Chong
Cover photo: Arctic landscape with Lars Pettersen in the foreground, 1894.
Fridtjof Nansen, courtesy National Library of Norway
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: James, Cormac
Title: The surfacing / by Cormac James.
ISBN: 9781922182517 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925095470 (ebook)
Subjects: Stowaways—Fiction.
Voyages and travels—Fiction Historical fiction.
Arctic regions—Fiction.
Dewey Number: 823.914
for Cian and Laetitia
Contents
PART I 1850
PART II
PART III
PART IV 1852
PART V
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SOURCES
THANKS
PART I
1850
25th May
They passed through belts the colour of mud, and belts the colour of mustard, that ran directly across the stream. They slid into banks of fog that stood dead on the water, that blanked everything but their voices, and slid back into the daylight as out of a steam room. Exiting one such bank, on the 25th, they met a queer-looking brig. They’d had the sea to themselves since Aberdeen, and hailed heartily, but she made no acknowledgement, slid silently by, into the fog aft, and they never saw her again.
Captain Myer insisted on a strict schedule, to tame the day. By seven o’clock. By eight. By half past. Bunks. Breakfast. Tubs. He wanted all mouths fed at the same time, whether they were hungry or not. At the fixed hour, he wanted them all abed, even if they were not ripe for it. He spoke of the ship as one family, one body, unified. Every noon without fail he could be seen reconciling his several chronometers.
On the 27th, finally, a coastline was cried out. The men all came up and stared at it as a wonder. Greenland, it was called. It looked like burned bog. There was not a single tree, or a single bush. There was no grass. Frayed and shabby at the edges, there was still snow on those hills that faced north.
At Disko there was no other ship. Well above the high water line stood a lone warped wooden house, with a line of huts behind, set directly into the hillside. The huts were roofed with sods level with the land, and from the ship, through the glass, the dirty bundles seemed to crawl out of a hole in the ground.
The whaleboat moved towards the shore with Myer standing at the bow. It was a pose he had admired privately. Already, crowds of women and children were waiting on the rocks. It was an open-air abattoir. Bones, waste, and offal everywhere. And everywhere strips of meat three and four and five feet long laid like frost-charred ferns on the bare ground, to cure. The air was almost sweet. To no one in particular, Myer announced: What a welcome. A carnival of the unclean.
Under the boat, giant grey tentacles, that looked more animal than vegetable, tried a lazy flourish. Lieutenant Morgan, the ship’s second, stared down at them from the stern. The previous summer, he had swum in the liquid jade of Aegean. That seemed another world to him now, another man.
The governor’s house was suspiciously clean, and suspiciously neat, as though something untoward had happened there, of which they hoped to eliminate every trace. It was a blatant rebuttal to everything seen on the shore. The floors were green, and looked freshly painted. The low ceilings were pale blue. The lady of the house was the governor’s sister, Miss Rink. She was pale as an invalid, yet glowed with health. Her skin too seemed strangely clean.
They sat and stared at a grumbling stove and let Rink talk. He was struggling to pull the cork from a bottle. Near the fire stood an empty brass birdcage. The cork came away with a sound, knowing sigh.
You and your officers are all my guests, Rink said. As long as you are here.
We couldn’t think of soiling your sheets for just one night, Myer said.
What does that matter? Rink said. Let her wash some sheets. She complains she is being bored most of the time.
We’re really not so badly off where we are, Morgan said. Quite tightly packed, it’s true, but comfortable nonetheless.
She asked outright how many they were, and Myer told her. They were six officers, ten men, one boy and one Greenlander, to manage the dogs and to translate, if need be. We couldn’t possibly ask you to entertain us all, Myer said.
It’s not often I have the pleasure of proper conversation, she said.
You see, Rink told them.
You must regularly have visits from the whalers, Morgan told her.
The whalers are a very particular, I almost said peculiar, class of man. I admire them greatly, but there are limits, I find, to their charms.
Her hair was blonde, pulled back very tight. There woul
d be a great relief, it looked to Morgan, if all of a sudden the thing were undone.
Myer said they really could not linger, however much the hospitality of Mr Rink and his charming sister might appeal. Already they were behind schedule, he said. They had a rendezvous with other Admiralty ships at Beechey Island, in Lancaster Sound, from where they would disperse to various points in the archipelago, to begin the search, before the winter set in again.
I do not think so, Rink said.
The winter is slow going this year, she said.
We’re hoping to get a good run through The Pack, said Myer.
You will be doing it well, Rink said, if even you get there at all.
That month alone, she said, three whalers had been crushed in Melville Bay. Out of Peterhead. Two more, crippled, had only just gone home.
Myer said he had not seen them, coming up the coast.
Did Myer really think there was still hope of finding them? Rink asked. Franklin and the two missing ships, he meant. Didn’t he think it had been rather long, how many years was it now, with neither sight nor sound of them?
We must try, Myer said. We must make our very best effort, and we must not relinquish hope.
The drawing rooms of London will not tolerate anything less, DeHaven said.
Myer scowled. Pay no attention to Dr DeHaven’s irreverence, he said. At every opportunity he runs down the entire enterprise, but I can assure you there is no more resolute man aboard. His younger brother is on the Terror.
Myer said he had a letter for Rink from the Directors of the Royal Greenland Trading Company. He nodded at Morgan, who tendered the envelope.
What does it say? Rink asked.
Naturally I haven’t opened it, Myer said. And even if I had, I believe it is written in Danish.
Still Rink refused to touch the thing.
His sister took it and broke the seal. She mumbled through the formalities, scanned for the essentials. Where possible, she read, we are to – she checked her translation – generously to supply the bearer’s material needs.
Rink did not answer. He was staring out the window, seemed not to have heard. He had drunk half the bottle himself. The skeleton of a ship lay on the shore. A ship found drifting off the coast, abandoned, the previous summer. A strange story, Rink said.
The officers let the man talk. Every now and then Myer made a civil noise in his throat. Morgan caught the sister looking at him. She raised her eyebrows a fraction, her shoulders, and gave a silent sigh. Every year a package came down from Upernavik with the last of the whalers – however many sentimental novels the priest there had managed to beg from the captains that season. These and her brother’s stories were all she had to shorten the winter nights.
Standing at the window beside him, Myer said he dared not imagine what it was like, inside the natives’ huts. Rink led the way to the nearest one, and Myer followed eagerly. From the porch, they watched him pull aside the flap. They watched Myer lean forward, then jerk his head backward, as though he’d been struck. They live in a ditch, he shouted back to the house, and called his officers to come and see.
The officers all obeyed, but just as Morgan made to follow Miss Rink placed a hand on his arm. She shook her head. She made an ugly face. He did not go. They stood in silence, alone on the porch. Morgan watched her touch the tip of her cigar to the post and put what was left back into the case. Just as gently, she touched her fingertips to the drop of green glass hanging at her neck. This was as though it might not still be there – an elegant pretence. They stood and listened to the ice groan and stutter down at the shore. There was rain on the way. The low sky was a slab of stone.
Are you quite sure you cannot stay for dinner? she asked.
I would very much like to, he said.
They talked carefully. She said she had not so much as set foot on a boat or a sledge for five years.
Morgan made no comment. Rink and the other officers came back and stood up on the porch out of the rain. Myer was hounding him for supplies.
There were no supplies, Rink said. The most he could offer them was a few hares, a young goat. They could have all the codfish they liked, of course.
What about furs? Myer said. There was nothing he would not trade. Books, rum, beer – whatever Rink and his sister wanted most.
It made no difference. There were no furs. The reindeer, Rink said, sprawled his arms in a helpless gesture. The great days were gone. They should have stopped farther south.
But Myer refused even to think of going back. He was afraid of being late, of missing his chance, of not getting through. In the end, the officers all went back into the house and waited with the sister, and drank her coffee, while Rink did the rounds of the huts, confiscating what he could.
Through the window, they watched the rain flailing at the mud. The water ran red in the tracks, as though the whole country had been dyed on the cheap. They watched the mud fuming under the stampede until the hour was rung on the watch bell, out in the bay. Under the roar of the rain, the toll was cheap tin.
Even as they were throwing the furs into the boat, she came after them. She had brought him a bag of coffee, and a little bag of seeds. She had written in English on the folded paper. CARAWAY. The whalers swore by it, she said, for the blood. It needed heat, she said, but could be started off in the dark. Morgan told her to go back, quickly. The rain had eased off, but that would not last.
29th May
On the 29th they pulled out of the bay and swung north. The rigging was strung with salted cod. Water, ice and sky were the colour of ash.
Two days later, at four in the morning, Myer hustled all the officers out of bed and up on deck. Here, at last, forming a lee shore, lay the thing they had heard so much about: The Pack. In the early morning quiet, they listened. It crackled like a burning log.
After the rest had gone down for breakfast, Morgan remained at the bows with MacDonald, the chaplain. They stood side by side, like men hypnotized. Straight ahead, rising up out of the water, stood a block of marble about the size of the Taj Mahal. Each in his own way, the two men admired greatly its utter indifference to the constant fuss and clamour of the sea.
At lunch, MacDonald declared: In my sermon next Sunday, I am tempted to propose the iceberg as a symbol of the Almighty Himself, that is to say, the perfect embodiment of unlimited power held perpetually in reserve. An analogy of which Mr Morgan, I somehow feel, will entirely approve.
Not wishing to contradict you, Mr MacDonald, but I don’t know that I’d see the thing in quite the same terms as yourself, Morgan said.
What terms would you prefer?
I don’t know.
Come come, MacDonald said. We’ve all seen your bookshelf. We’ve all read your reports. You’re an articulate man. Give us at least an idea of what you mean. Look, you have a captive audience.
I’m not being coy, Morgan said. I simply don’t know how I feel about the thing. What we saw this morning. That is the simple truth.
The door burst open. It was Cabot, the cook.
Giorgio! He’s disappeared. Over on the floe.
They rushed up on deck.
Two hundred yards from the ship, some fifty yards into The Pack, a group of men were standing on a giant pan of ice. The officers all rowed over, drove the boat as far in as they could, clambered out.
The boy had gone out with Petersen, to carry his rope and hooks. The Greenlander had spotted a seal, and they had gone to try their luck.
Only for the fun, Petersen said. He looked more annoyed than upset. They had been hopping from pan to pan, he’d been pushing on ahead, and when he turned around the boy was gone. The rope was floating in the water, in one of the cracks. The heavy grappling-hook, perhaps, had caught in his clothes and pulled him down. There was no other trace.
I want only the boy to see, Petersen said. I am telling him the story. He wants to see with his two eyes.
Hand over hand, Petersen drew the rope up out of the water. The gap between the two pans was barely a foot wide. Morgan watched the man coiling the rope nicely onto the ice. Inside him, a stupid hope had already bred, that the boy might still be attached to the end of it. He would come up laughing and spluttering, amused as much as relieved.
Perhaps Mr MacDonald would consider saying a few words, Myer said.
Of course, MacDonald said.
They gathered about the coiled rope. So close to the edge of The Pack, the ice was always alive, and already the crack had completely closed over again.
Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends, MacDonald told them. Such has been our young shipmate’s sacrifice here today. Our every action must henceforth stand in its shadow. His memory must inspire us to equal abnegation. Our brother Giorgio, I say, has shown us the way.
Afterwards, the whaleboat ferried the men back to the ship. As there was not room for them all at a go, Morgan and Cabot and DeHaven remained behind.