by A. N. Wilson
—I can remember finishing the book in my little bedroom in Percy Street. It is such a pretty street – it looks out over rolling fields, and in the distance you see the hills and woods of Hampstead. And for about half an hour, although I had never been in love in my life, I felt I knew what it was to love, to feel this . . . this really rather absurd emotion.
Her silence told him he had said quite the wrong thing.
—I mean, it was absurd to kill himself. That, surely, anyone acknowledges.
His nervous laugh, which, he supposed, came as an attempt to placate her, to subdue her anger, always had the opposite effect.
—That is how you see it? Absurd?
—Yes.
—Love is absurd?
—No. No . . .
Allowing his voice to trail away, refusing to say anything which could rescue the situation, he allowed her to think – or as he furiously said in his silent hate – to ‘think’ – he’d said love, rather than Werther’s extravagant self-regarding suicide, was absurd. But damn it – it was absurd, this talk of love when all it was, was Nature, forcing human beings to continue the species. And in that cold week, Rose was conceived. Their first born child. Neither of them knew how to leave a dispute, or an unpleasantness, behind. It was several days after their Werther squabble that she said to him, as he came into the room hoping for peace, even daring to hope for an evening of pleasure, perhaps a game of cards,
—It wasn’t your saying love was absurd that made me so angry. It was your refusal to discuss it – you thought I’d been stupid, you thought I’d failed to distinguish between Werther’s selfishness and—
—but you had—
—What did you say?
—You had failed to distinguish—
—So the little woman can’t think. She can read novels but she does not even understand them. That is why we do not even bother to tell her about our real interests – our scientific papers we do not even show to her.
—I’m sorry – what is this about?
—Surely you are not so stupid that you need me to spell it out.
And thus was their sad setting forth.
PART TWO
New and Awful Scenes
With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, land roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.
I
1772
THEY WEIGHED ON 23RD NOVEMBER AND FOUR DAYS LATER, in a high sea and brisk wind, George celebrated his eighteenth birthday: a fine dinner of roast albatross and Saur Kraut at the Captain’s table, after which they all toasted him in the excellent brandy which had been brought aboard at the Cape. Returning to their cabins they reeled – unsure how much this was owing to the swell, and how much to the Captain’s good Cognac.
A kind of dew settled on everything and it was impossible to be dry. At five in the morning, waves lashed the side of the ship and through the seams of George’s cabin a flood of sea water squished over his bedclothes. He was in time to rescue the portfolio of sketches which he kept, wrapped in oilskin, on a shelf above his door. He was especially pleased with his bird paintings – a water-colour of a petrel and a pintada had both been accomplished since he left the Cape.
—It’s as if you could touch their feathers, Nally had said. Jesus, what I’d give to have that gift – to be able to draw.
—You have other gifts.
—I’d be pleased if it was true, George, and that’s a fact.
Nally was there next morning when he came out of the cabin, drenched, in the dark, holding the portfolio. Nally, even in pitched darkness, was an immediately recognizable figure. George could sense his presence even when he couldn’t see it.
—Sure have you been sick?
—Nally, where are you?
—With a swell like this it can do you good to vomit.
The words were yelled at the wind.
As light returned they were aware of Dr Sparrman, the young Swede whom Reinhold had met in Cape Town, and persuaded to come aboard.
—The wages they offered your man – Nally was scandalized – £500! It would take me a lifetime to save a sum like that and they give him £500 – not that I grudge him. He’s a nice quiet lad. There’ll be some persuading the Admiralty to pay up, I’d say.
—The Captain says my father will have to bear the cost himself.
For the last week Reinhold and the Swede had been inseparable: whenever time allowed arranging plant samples collected in South Africa. George had had the runs ever since his birthday dinner, and took no part in the scientific work – dividing time between the privy and the sketch-book – and the everlasting conversation of Nally.
—Talking the old Latin the pair of them like a couple of priests. As the glimmer of dawn brought Nally, soaked rigging, mainmast, the sea itself into clearer light, they heard Reinhold’s voice,
—Incubuere mari, totumque a sedibus imis –
and the Swede’s response,
—Sehr gut! Ponto nox incubat atra. praesentemque vivis intentant omnia mortem . . .
How little, when they had studied the Aeneid at Pastor Büsching’s school in Petersburg, had George imagined he would ever, like the ancestor of Rome and his companions, be cast forth onto the brine, and feel the journey as an emblem of some greater destiny.
—My dad would say, the priests could get away with gabbling Double Dutch for all we’d notice it – et in saecula saeculorum – that’s one of the phrases—
—Indeed it is.
—George—
—Good morning, Vati.
—I heard you in the night. I heard you get up twice, thrice, to squitter. You should not let this looseness, those gripes, so to say, continue. Dr Sparrman will help you.
—Sure and I’ve told him he ought to try and vomit, said Nally.
Later that morning all hands were summoned on deck. The sea was lashing them and the roar of the wind made it difficult to hear the Captain’s words. Cook, upright and unbudgeable as a mast, in his tricorn hat and his thick cloak from which the rain splashed in thick drops, bellowed,
—and I want every man of you at once – to put them on – We are going – very likely – [lahkla] – where no man has ever been – we are going to a land of ice and snow – and every man of us will come back alive. That is my duty to you – to the Royal Navy – and to God. And by God you must obey me. You must wear—
The words were lost in a tempest’s howl.
Meanwhile, the quartermaster distributed the thick Magellanic jackets, the woollen Fearnought trousers and the thick red woollen hats. You could remove the Fearnoughts to shit and for no other purpose. This order created splutters of merriment among the midshipmen.
—Hear that, Forster?
At first George thought Midshipman Burney was making a jest about his weak bowels: but there are no secrets on board ship.
When the Lieutenant tried to check their impish cruelty, Burney unconvincingly said,
—It was the tossing of the waves, Mr Clerke, we referred to the tossing of the waves – not Mr Forster’s—
—That’s enough, Burney!
How did they know? When had he been seen?
Certainly, once everyone on board was swathed in the thick woollen garments there would be small temptation to remove them. Not only would the process be unwieldy, but the thermometers were falling rapidly. Even at dinner, though the woollen hats were laid aside, the cabin was so cold they were glad to be wearing their protective layers of warmth. The Captain was in expansive mood.
—I’ve studied Bouvet’s journey till I could tell it by rote, chart his passage with my eyes blindfolded. Course, he was travelling from the coast of Brazil, but we’re soon going to meet up wi’ his course. The ice were unusually far north in ’38 when he did the journey – he reached his icy cape on 1st January—
—which, being the Feast of the Circumcision he called it Cape Circumcision, said Reinhold. But before you tell us any more, Kapitän, I am sorry. Sorry. But I must. I must revert to the condition of my cabin . . .
Wales, the astronomer, cut across Reinhold, with
—and I imagine our difficulty will be to see how far south we may reach before we are wedged in—
—Ay sir, by field ice. That will be our challenge. The floating iceberg we may by God’s grace avoid, but – the field ice. I heard tell of a Greenland ship frozen solid in the water a whole nine week. We’d scarce survive that. We must – must – go as far south as God permits. That is the object of our voyage – to find the Southern Continent. But I shall risk not one man’s life for it.
—We all have colds already, sir. My son has a disturbed gut – for some days diarrhoea – and the state of our cabins is a desolation – I could say without hyperbole, a disgrace.
—We’ll go down as far as we can, Mr Wales. And if we fail to make it this time we’ll retreat for New Holland or New Zealand for a while, and then return.
—Are you saying to me that the state of our cabins—
—The Captain was not saying anything, said Mr Wales. I take it upon myself to speak for the rest of us that if you have complaints about the accommodation they could be made to the master – and if your son is ill he could be referred to the surgeon. What he does in the privy and how comfortable you are in bed – these are not subjects for the table.
There was an awkward silence.
—Kapitän, does Mr Wales speak for the company? I have never before considered my conversation needed correction.
—We’ll see tomorrow. They’ve been devilish days but we’ve made good progress – sixty sea miles yesterday, I reckon – so we’ll see tomorrow. It’s the fog that’s worst. The Adventure were out of sight altogether today.
For two weeks they plunged south, the two ships sometimes losing sight of one another. Every man aboard the Resolution had a cold. The oakum had worked out of the seams of the ship, which was leaking. It was near impossible in their lumpy winter clothes to keep clean but each man, despite the cascading temperatures, was obliged to display his bare hands for inspection at six bells each day. Any with dirty hands had their allowance of grog stopped. So too those with frayed cuffs or torn.
—This is a Royal Navy vessel, said Cook. I’ll have a healthy ship, a clean ship, a safe ship.
Two men were flogged for pilfering – two lashes only, but as Nally said,
—You could almost see the blood freeze on their backs by Jesus as the cat hit them, poor bastards.
Cook distributed needle and cotton to the men to make them ‘shipshape’.
On some days the rigging hung so thick with icicles that it was impossible to manipulate the sails. They did no more than tack this way and that, trying to keep moving without collision with an iceberg.
—Mr Wales, Dr Forster, would you be prepared to reconnoitre our position – make an expedition in the jolly boat?
This on a day when the fog was so thick you could not see from one end of the deck to the other. George went with his father, the astronomer and the master. Nally volunteered to be one of the able seamen who rowed the craft. There was an eerie quietness as they rowed into whiteness. They tested the temperature of the water – 32˚ – and tried to gauge the currents. If the whole experience of being at sea transformed George’s concept of time, this expedition in the jolly boat intensified the sense of temporality suspended. He would think of it in later years on the many occasions when he lay on a bed of sickness. As he lay dying in that cold truckle bed in the rue des Moulins in ’94 this universal whiteness, this blanket of cold oblivion, this sense of being, yet not being, of bobbing and gliding into the unknown, with Nally’s knees pressing his own, returned.
The jolly boat was out two hours. For those who had gone on the expedition it could have been two years.
—We nearly thought we’d lost you, Mr Gilbert, Mr Wales.
Vati found it in himself to mock himself.
—I was so frightened it silenced me, Kapitän Cook. Even I was lost for words.
The master said,
—We couldn’t see a bloody thing. We could have been anywhere.
—I know how you feel, Mr Gilbert.
The expedition happened in the week before Christmas. There was no possibility in these circumstances of finding the Southern Continent. Conscious of the hell through which he had put his men, Cook was determined to let them enjoy Christmas Day. He began the day with church – the Lord’s Prayer and the Collect. In his Journal he wrote:
At Noon seeing that the People were inclinable to celebrate Christmas Day in their own way, I brought the Sloops under a very snug sail least I should be surprised with a gale of wind with a drunken crew.
There was plenty of rum for all of them. One of the hogs which he had been taking to breed in New Zealand was roasted. His own cabin was crammed with the gentlemen, and as many officers and petty officers as could be squeezed in, the others eating as usual in the gun-room. They drank Madeira, claret, brandy and rum. From below decks where the men were enjoying rum came the roar of song. Although there was the slightest of swells, everyone to be seen on deck swayed from side to side as if in a typhoon. In the afternoon there was a boxing contest, which the Captain and his officers appeared to enjoy as much as the men – only Dr Sparrman and Reinhold protesting at its barbarity as inebriates lashed out uncertainly at their opponents’ faces, as teeth were knocked out and blood spurted, to the baying satisfaction of the audience. So much had been drunk that the pugilists felt brave enough to strip off and fight bare-chested.
—That’s a grand lad, that one – Nally had somehow found George – just look at the sinews on the boy. The sinews.
—This is worse than the barbarities of Rome in its decline.
—But the men are enjoying it, Vati.
—That is what makes it so . . . so . . . nauseating.
Nothing distinguished the men of the Resolution so impressively perhaps as their ability to live with a hangover. Those who on Christmas Day had been scarcely able to stand upright could be seen early on the Feast of St Stephen clambering up the rigging with the confident handgrip of gibbons, heaving ropes, swabbing, scrubbing, patching the leaking seams with fresh oakum, regardless of throbbing heads and queasy stomachs. In spite of the cold and in spite of their frail bodily condition, there was constant reefing of sails and striking of top gallant yards as the proud sloops ran to the east at a rate of about twenty miles per day. Two weeks into the New Year – ’73 – the Captain, with his impeccable navigational instinct and skill, steered sharply southward and on 17th January, just before noon, those aboard the Resolution became the first human beings in history to cross the Antarctic Circle – latitude 66˚36½'S – four and a half miles south of the Circle – and longitude 39˚35'E.
The air had cleared, and they could see – the limitless miles of field ice, and the bergs, green in that midday light. Did any of them but know it, they were within seventy-five miles of the Southern Continent they sought.
For a week or two they cruised, gingerly fearful of being trapped in field ice, searching in vain for land. By the beginning of February, the appearance of penguins and petrels made them suppose land must be near.
—Where birds are, land is – this is Law.
—I would have agreed with you, Dr Forster, said the Captain, peering at the strange birds that swooped and swam, half waddling nuns, half graceful divers – but where is the land? We must discard the dogma. I wish I knew where the buggers found fish to eat. Mr Gilbert’s been trawling wi’ ’is net day after day and not a dab, not a tiddler has he caught. We could all do wi’ a fish dinner.
The number of penguins following the ship was immense. Some of them outstripped the Resolution and swam ahead in the water. Others strained out of the sea and stood in formation on floating ice-sheets: small penguins, black above, white beneath, identified b
y George as Aptenodytes papua. Nally netted one for him and he painted its portrait before lowering it again into the water. From the beadiness of its eye and the semblance of a grin in its half-opened red bill, it seemed to take a satirical view of humanity.
Such cynicism as the bird appeared to express would surely, George thought, have evaporated, could it have looked with emotionally intelligent eyes on the fixed, fine-boned face of the Captain. Having tacked east and south for a week, Cook now resolved upon one last attempt to sail due south. Like a fencer who with coulé and glissade revolves his epée waiting for a chink to appear in his opponent’s guard before cutting to the triumphant patinando, Cook was determined upon one further lunge upon the mysterious south. George would never forget the concentration upon that honest face, the set of the very straight lips, the frost on his brows and on the rim of his tricorn hat as he stared resolutely at his aim. While other naval heroes had sought ships to fight, wars to win, Frenchies or Spaniards to cannonade into dark water, Cook was in pursuit of knowledge, his conquest would be a conquest of the future. Already, for the rest of the human race, the world was larger because of James Cook.
Further, further, further south to what George in his book of the voyage called new and awful scenes. Seals played on the larboard bow. Common and sooty albatrosses wheeled over the masts, with common and black-banded petrels and black shearwaters. Whales surfaced and spewed, huge islands of flesh, and a gigantic iceberg, a vast island of ice, loomed to leeward. As night-time approached on 18th February, the word got out that the sky was full of portents. Even those mariners who would have needed sleep, in readiness for an early watch, left their hammocks and came on board to witness the wonder of the Southern Lights, immense curtains of colour shimmering across the frozen skies.
—Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes, said George’s father spontaneously and no man aboard would have contradicted him. While Mr Wales with his telescope and instruments made scientific notes – it was the first anyone ever knew about this Australian counterpart to the Arctic phenomenon of the Northern Lights – most of the men stared upward, awestruck by the colours – streaks of green, purple, orange – the wide extent, the sheer majesty of what they beheld – and beyond the skeins of coloured light they saw the bright stars and were speechless with what they felt.