‘Well, you had best hurry up and skin it,’ I told her.
‘We can’t feed all twelve of them on this!’ she cried in a high-pitched tone that was bordering on hysterical. She was right, of course. I turned my attention back to the lump of salted beef, still lying on the floor, swarming with beetles. It looked for all the world like they might at any moment lift it up and carry it out the door.
‘Perhaps if we were to wash it free of beetles?’ I suggested.
‘Have you taken leave of your senses?’ cried Louisa. ‘Have you gone completely insane?’
‘Well, what else are we going to do?’ I was beginning to acquire the same hysterical tone that I had observed in Louisa. There was nothing for it; the men approached in their whale boats even as we stood there. Promptly we filled a large bucket with water and a dash of vinegar, and then I scrubbed away at it furiously while Louisa cowered in the corner, covering her eyes and making sounds as if she were to be violently sick.
‘Do not tell a living soul about this,’ I warned her. I must have made a pretty sight, standing there with my lump of disintegrating beef, surrounded by a colony of drowned and sodden beetles.
We made a kind of hash of boiled bandicoot combined with those portions of salted beef which were not infested with larvae, onions, potatoes, milk, flour and a liberal amount of Worcestershire sauce to improve the flavour.
‘It’s a pity we can’t feed them the larder beetles,’ observed Louisa ruefully, as we slid down the rocks towards the sleeping hut. Suddenly we came to a halt. Over in the try-works, the whale men could be seen taking their baths, no doubt in a bid to thaw themselves out. They had filled the try pots with water and lit fires beneath then, and now they were wallowing contentedly.
‘Quelle horreur,’ hissed Louisa. ‘Naked whalers.’
We stood there for a moment and watched them. It was not a sight we had ever seen before. There amongst them, I glimpsed John Beck, ladling hot water over his shoulders with a skimming spoon. I will not go into further detail on this; suffice to say, it is one of the memories I am trying hardest to preserve. Rousing myself from my reverie, I nudged Louisa and we continued our journey to the sleeping huts.
‘What’s this then?’ asked Robert Heffernan, as we doled out the hash. He was staring at his plate and, to my horror, I saw what appeared to be a larder beetle lying legs up in a murky pool of Worcestershire. Deftly, I flicked it from his plate.
‘Never you mind,’ I replied. ‘Just eat heartily. We need to fatten you up, young man.’
‘Why do we need to fatten him up?’ asked Louisa. ‘Are we going to cook Robert next?’
I was distracted then by the sound of tapping on a tin cup, and turning, I saw John Beck standing amongst the whale men. There was something oddly cherubic about their appearance freshly bathed, reminding one of large ruddy-faced bad-tempered babies. Except for John Beck, of course. He had a blanket wrapped around him, and a light beard growth, and looked for all the world like Jesus of Nazareth amongst his Apostles.
‘Men,’ John Beck was saying. ‘Perhaps after our experience out at sea this morning, you will permit me to offer a small prayer of thanksgiving.’
There was grumbling at this, but most of the men put down their forks and some even lowered their heads solemnly.
‘How typical of the clergy,’ muttered Salty to Bastable. ‘Give him a little encouragement, now we can’t shut him up.’
‘Oh, most great and glorious God,’ intoned John Beck, closing his eyes and holding up his right hand. ‘Who art mighty in thy power and wonderful in thy doings; accept, I beseech thee, our unfeigned thanks and praise for our creation, preservation and all the other blessings which in the riches of thy mercy thou hast from time to time poured down upon us. Amen.’
A mumble of ‘Amen’s issued forth from the whalers but I found, in my astonishment, that my lips could not form the word. A feeling of bewilderment overwhelmed me. What had become of the John Beck of two nights ago, stealing kisses and forcing me to admire his muscles? Here he stood, avoiding my gaze and offering grace in the most doleful and pious tones. Behind me, I heard a mutter of disgruntlement.
‘I’ll not be thanking the Lord for a piece of boiled bandicoot,’ said Bastable.
Some Words About My Father
I am aghast, looking back at these last chapters, at how selfish I appear. Here I am relating the story of the devastating loss of the black whale through the prism of my feelings for John Beck, when in fact my thoughts should have been only of my father. Certainly now, looking back at it from a perspective of thirty years, I wonder that my memories of him at this time are so hazy; the vigilance I have demonstrated in collating and preserving any memory of John Beck has not been exercised to the same degree in the case of my father. The one memory I do have of Father upon their return that afternoon is something of a distressing one. So exhausted was he by the ordeal, both mentally and physically, that he had had to be helped, almost carried, down the jetty. Seeing his bandy legs buckle as the men supported him, I turned and took hold of the little girls and hurried back up to the house so that he would not suffer the embarrassment of knowing we had witnessed him in this condition. I remember also that Louisa picked the very best portions of bandicoot for his plate, and made sure that he did not partake of any of the beetle-infested beef (she could be a loving daughter in her own way). But these are my only memories of him on that occasion, for I was obviously too preoccupied with my own feelings to think about how he must have been suffering.
The black whale we lost that season was not the only whale that had ever been lost in such circumstances. Allowing the Killers to take possession of the carcass always carried with it the risk that the weather might turn before the men were able to recover it. Perhaps the profits incurred by whaling would have been more consistent if the whalers had been able to tow the carcass back to the try-works immediately after the kill; however, the Killers would never have permitted such a thing and I daresay would have torn the whale to pieces had my father attempted it. Not that he would have dared, of course; he had too much respect for their longstanding ‘gentlemen’s agreement’. Besides which, as he readily conceded, without the assistance of the Killer whales, they would likely not have captured the whale in the first place.
The point I was getting to, however, is that although we had lost whales before in similar circumstances, I feel I can trace the beginning of the despondency that characterised his later years to the loss of this black whale in 1908, coming as it did in such a poor season, and after the dreadful season of the year before. And although we went on to have some few reasonably successful seasons after this, there was never a return to the great numbers of whales that were sighted and captured in Twofold Bay in previous generations.
On top of this, whale oil no longer commanded the prices it had in former times; for this, my father would always blame the Great War, although in truth the decline had commenced much earlier, with the ready availability of kerosene. Similarly, as the fashion for corsetry diminished, the demand for whalebone also began to decline. (My father strongly disapproved of these advances in ladies’ fashions, and would cast a baleful eye indeed over Violet and Annie’s short skirts and drop-waists when they were old enough to attend the Kiah dances. Indeed, it was a full year or two after he died before I felt that I could dispense with my own whalebone corset.) Yet although these larger forces of wars and fashion and kerosene were outside my father’s control, I think he felt badly that he was the last of three generations of Davidsons to whale in Twofold Bay. By 1929, he had put the whaling station up for sale, although it took some years to sell.
‘There’s many a time I’ve quivered with fear
As I’ve passed by Twofold Bay
And many a time I’ve shivered to hear
“Fearless Davidson’s on his way!”
“Look smart, boys!” cries Fearless George
; “She’s a humpback fifty feet!”
And he holds aloft the piercing steel
His mission to complete.’
This poem, written from the whale’s point of view and published in the Eden Observer, continued for some ten to twelve verses, and yet I find I can only remember portions of it. (As a child I knew the entire poem by heart and would stand on the back step and declaim it to the chickens, although I was always too shy to recite it to anybody else.) It described my father doing battle with a particularly ferocious humpback into whose gizzards he plunges his lance in the last stanza, crying out, ‘O dark heart, beat no more!’ This caused my father some embarrassment, for of course he knew the humpback to be a mild-mannered creature, nor would he ever cry out such a thing. The only other part of the poem I can recall is:
‘I beg of you, (something something)
Please heed my anguished pleas
But now he deals the fatal blow
Which brings me to my knees.’
Which we found very funny at the time, since obviously whales do not have knees. My point is, however, that while not entirely factually accurate, this poem (and there were others in a similar vein) demonstrates some measure of the esteem in which my father was held by the townsfolk of Eden. I suppose his quiet courage and his cool head when confronted by danger were qualities the civic fathers wished to call their own; certainly they made full use of his reputation to advance the public image of Eden.
Thinking about my father, I feel the urge to recount an event which occurred only a couple of years before he died. By then, it was just him and myself living at Kiah; whaling had been abandoned, much of the equipment already sold, even the Killer whales had stopped returning. I was then employed as a teacher at the Kiah Half-time School; my father spent his days now either sitting on the front verandah or ‘tidying up’ down at the try-works. On this occasion, he had spotted a whale spout from the headland up behind the house. Living where we did, we frequently saw whale spouts during the season; in fact, they seemed especially plentiful now that our livelihood no longer depended upon them. But for some reason, this particular whale captured my father’s attention, and he watched it spout and play for some time from the headland. (It is necessary sometimes to remind oneself that these passing whales are undertaking an epic journey of many thousands of miles, for in fact they seem to dawdle and meander in the manner of recalcitrant schoolboys on their way to school; if there was a bottle, they would kick it. It is truly a wonder that they ever get anywhere.) Returning home from school, I saw my father going down to the jetty and getting into his dinghy; I imagined that he was going to row into town, as he sometimes did on the spur of the moment. But instead, unbeknownst to me, he rowed out some considerable distance to where the whale was still idly cavorting. As he approached, the whale sank below the surface; my father – who clearly still possessed an instinct for such things – then rowed to where he believed it might reappear. Sure enough, some minutes later, the whale rose to the surface directly alongside his boat, whereupon he drove his lance into it.
He lanced it just once; the whale immediately dived, then surfaced again in a distressed state and swam off at great speed. My father attempted to pursue it but, needless to say, an old man in a dinghy was no match for it, so after a while he gave up and returned home.
When he came inside for tea, I noticed what appeared to be blood on his clothing, though it seemed he had attempted to sponge it off. When asked about it, he remarked that he had rowed out and lanced a whale, in as casual a fashion as if he had said that he had walked to the letterbox to pick up the mail. I put down my cup and stared at him. For a moment, I truly believed that he might be in the grip of some kind of senile delusion, but his eyes were clear and lucid and he seemed to be entirely his normal self.
‘Why did you do that?’ I asked, and I realised that my voice was shrill. I did not like whales to be killed for no reason. Besides, it was not as if we had eleven extra men to tow the carcass back and render it into whale oil. Even if we could render it into whale oil, we almost certainly couldn’t sell it.
‘Why did you do that?’ I repeated, and I realised I was angry. I was so angry I felt I could fling something at him, especially since he sat buttering his bread and not responding to my question. He wore a faint, silly smile upon his face, and I noticed his hands were trembling: I suspect he may also have been privately wondering why he had done it, and was unable to provide a satisfactory answer.
Several days later, the dead whale (a young humpback) washed up on the rocks near Green Cape lighthouse, its lance wound plain to see. The story of my father’s deed soon became known, and was widely interpreted as somehow heroic; there was even a small article about in the Sydney Morning Herald, under the headline: ‘Lone Whaler. Veteran’s Feat in Dinghy’. My father’s demeanour was considerably more cheerful for some time after this event; he concocted various excuses to go into Eden that he might sit in the bar at the Great Southern and have drinks bought for him on the strength of it. Looking back on it now, I am still somewhat bewildered as to his motive, yet overall more sympathetic in my attitude. I suppose after a lifetime of chasing whales and ‘staring down the gaping maw of destruction’, it must be difficult to allow them to swim past unmolested. I do not mean to sound glib in saying that; I simply mean that he probably just wished to have one more shot at it.
The postscript to the story is that various attempts were made by my father and his old mates from the Great Southern to somehow float the carcass off the rocks, with the vague idea, I imagine, of rendering the blubber into whale oil. They never succeeded; thus the whale rotted over several months in situ, much to the annoyance of the lighthouse keepers, especially if the wind blew in towards them.
A Missing Clergyman
It was around this period – that is, after the loss of the black whale, the period in which John Beck was apparently overcome by a resurgence in his faith – that we first came across the story of the missing clergyman. An old newspaper article had been discovered pasted over a crack in the wall in one of the sleeping huts; the first I became aware of it was overhearing Salty recounting the contents of the article for the other whalers’ enjoyment one evening at mealtime. John Beck was subsequently on the receiving end of a good deal of speculative commentary on the subject, and I noted at the time that he became quite ‘hot under the collar’.
The next morning, after the whale men had left for the lookout, I entered the sleeping hut, found the article in question (with some difficulty, as there were a great many newspapers plastered over a great many cracks) and copied it out in its entirety.
To summarise the contents of the article: in April of 1906, a Reverend T.A. James, a Methodist minister from Albany, Western Australia, had travelled to Sydney on a visit. Sometime later in the same month, his wife, Mrs James, received a telegram stating that her husband had unfortunately drowned in Sydney and his body had not been recovered. Even amidst her grief, Mrs James considered it odd that the telegram which bore these sad tidings had been posted from Suva, the capital of Fiji, and she at once asked the police if they would commence inquiries. They soon discovered that there had been no drowning accident to speak of in Sydney Harbour at that time. Further, they learned that the Reverend James had last been seen on 15 April, Easter Sunday, at a boarding house in Wynyard Square; he was clean-shaven (up to this point, he had always worn a beard) and, notably, was not dressed in clerical attire. The very next day, a mail steamer, the Maheno, had left Sydney for Vancouver. It stopped at Suva on 23 April, the very day the telegram had been posted.
The article concluded with the following postscript:
‘Important developments have occurred in connection with the missing clergyman. A photograph of the Rev. T.A. James has been identified as Mr Lee, who, with Mrs Lee, stopped at a Sydney boarding house at Easter week. Inquiries show that Mr and Mrs Lee were amongst the passengers by the mail steamer “Maheno�
�, which left Sydney for ’Frisco on 16 April. There is now not the slightest doubt but that Lee and James are one and the same person.’
The whalers derived a good bit of sport from teasing John Beck on the subject, asking him how he liked ’Frisco and what had become of Mrs Lee and whether he shouldn’t let poor Mrs James know his present whereabouts. He had borne all this with good humour initially, but after a while seemed to become irritated by their incessant jibes, and requested somewhat tersely that they desist. (This was not in itself surprising; the whalers would often carry a joke too far, and not infrequently something that had begun as a little light jesting would culminate in fisticuffs.) After a while, the whalers lost interest in the story, and it soon faded from general conversation. As for me, I do not recall thinking there was any great cause for concern; rather, the article simply piqued my curiosity. Yet even as I write these words, it seems to be dawning on me for the first time that given the voyage to ’Frisco occurred fully two years before John Beck came ambling up our front path, then there was a possibility, albeit a slight one, that John Beck and Reverend James were indeed ‘one and the same person’.
I raise the following points for consideration.
On more than one occasion, John Beck had mentioned Western Australian place names in passing, indicating that he had almost certainly been there. For example, I remember overhearing him mention to my father that Busselton, a town in Western Australia, had a jetty that was a mile long. Another time, he said something about there being a large gaol in Fremantle.
Albany (the town in which Reverend James had originally resided) was a whaling port. So it is interesting that there is a whaling connection.
Also, John Beck was clean-shaven (at least he was when we knew him).
Even so, and all things considered, I find I cannot really believe it. It would mean that he had travelled to ’Frisco only to return to Australia again within two years. You would think that he would be reluctant to return to Australia, given the dubious circumstances of his departure, but then again, when I think on it, the police were presumably looking for Rev. James (or, rather, Mr Lee) in ’Frisco, and I imagine that could have made things uncomfortable. (Indeed, the West Australian Methodist Conference recommended his expulsion from the ministry, and sent a statement of his offences to be posted in every Methodist church in the United States.) Then there is the whole question of Mrs Lee. What became of her? I can only assume that the pressure of being ‘wanted’, combined with guilt and shame at his conduct towards his wife – and perhaps even a spiritual turmoil, given that he was a man of the cloth – led to the breakdown of their perhaps somewhat rash and ill-considered liaison.
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