Your loving son, Perce
Perce could only imagine the surprise when his parents received that letter a month or two from now. What are they doing right now? he wondered. His mother would have already made her Christmas fruitcake. His father would be worrying about paying for the winter's coal. At least they would have Perce's wages from the Golden Gate to help with that. Maybe there would be a little extra for new boots. He pictured his five younger brothers in the annual “try-ons,” when they got out the winter coats and boots to see who fit into what. Even the most careful mending couldn't always make a jacket last through all six boys.
Perce walked up to the bow of the ship and looked all around. They had seen a few icebergs already, but now that they were farther south, they had to be extra alert. The news from the whale-ship captains was not good. They said there was much more ice in the Weddell Sea than anyone could ever remember. Shackleton was worried. The Antarctic summer was short, and his plans were big.
First they had to sail almost two thousand miles across the Weddell Sea, then find a good place to set up the winter camp. Since there were no good charts of the coastline, this would not be easy. Once they found a place, Shackleton would take twelve men ashore for the winter. They would build a hut and spend the winter months getting ready for the crossing. The scientists would do their research, and the dog drivers would train their teams.
Right now, Perce knew, another ship, called Aurora, was sailing from New Zealand to the opposite side of Antarctica. The Aurora would come through the Ross Sea and land another party onshore. Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, and most of the earlier explorers had started from the Ross Sea. The men from the Aurora would go out in dog sleds along Shackleton's old route and lay depots of food and fuel for him.
Next spring, Shackleton would choose a team of six out of the group who had spent the winter onshore. They would make the overland journey. The Endurance would return to pick up the remaining men, then sail back to Buenos Aires.
It all sounded very neat and organized when the men were talking about it, but Perce knew how difficult it really would be. No one had ever gone inland from this side before. Shackleton would have to find a completely new route to the South Pole, then continue across to the Ross Sea. The entire distance was about fifteen hundred miles. He could only carry enough supplies to get a few hundred miles beyond the South Pole. Then he would have to rely on the depots. There were no radios strong enough to cover such a great distance so the two parties couldn't communicate. Shackleton would not know if the supplies had been left until he got past the South Pole. If there were no depots, he and his men would die. At least Frank Wild's brother was aboard the Aurora. Everyone knew he would lay the depots or die trying. If everything worked well, Shackleton and his men would arrive at the Ross Sea in early fall and the Aurora would pick them up.
Perce's thoughts were interrupted by a cold drip on the side of his face. A squashy plop landed on his shoulder. It was a big oily glob of whale blubber. There was a ton of it hanging from the rigging. They had bought it from the whalers on South Georgia for dog food. When the sun warmed it up, it dripped all over the deck. Perce brushed the glob off his jacket. Some of the dogs smelled the fat and started to howl. Perce went over to Sampson's kennel and let him lick the grease off his hand. Sampson was the biggest dog they had, but also the most gentle. Most of the dogs had settled down by now, but some might still bite his whole hand off for a taste of whale blubber.
The bell sounded the end of the watch, but Perce lingered on deck. There was something different about this morning. He wasn't sure yet what it was, just a feeling in the air. The sea felt different too. There was a subtle change in the rhythm of the swells.
Tom Crean, officer of the next watch, came on deck and nodded to Perce.
“You didn't hear the bell?” He spoke with a thick Irish accent.
“I did. It's a fine morning, though.”
“Aye.”
Mrs. Chippy, the ship's cat, strode over to Perce and rubbed against his ankles. Despite its name, the big striped tabby was actually a male. The carpenter, who on a ship was often called “Chippy,” had named him before anyone took the trouble to check. Mrs. Chippy didn't seem to mind. He swaggered around the ship like he was king of the world.
“Come to watch with us, Mrs. Chippy?” Perce scratched the cat behind the ears. “Or is it just a little dog fun you're after?” Mrs. Chippy's favorite game was to run across the kennel roofs to tease the dogs. He seemed to know exactly how long the chains were and always stayed just an inch out of reach.
“Wants his breakfast prompt, he does,” Crean laughed. Perce usually fed Mrs. Chippy scraps when he cleared the table after breakfast. Crean leaned against the rail beside Perce and turned his binoculars out to sea. Crean was not one to fill up the morning with idle chat, though with his Irish wit he could, and often did, outdo any man aboard with tales and song.
“Do you feel the change?” Crean nodded his chin toward the horizon.
“Something's different,” Perce agreed. The temperature hadn't really changed, but the air felt cold in a different way.
“Ice,” Crean said simply. “We're coming to the pack.”
The pack ice was the final barrier. The big icebergs could be dangerous, but they were fairly easy to avoid. In the pack, plates of ice crowded together like water lilies on a pond. There was no way around, only through. The whalers had not been able to get through just a couple of weeks ago.
“Would you fancy hanging off a boom in these seas?” Crean's rough face cracked into a broad smile. “That's how they used to do it down here a hundred years ago. The ships were slow, and some sailed in the winter when it was dark day and night. You couldn't see the ice. So they'd hang a lad out over the side on a boom. He had to listen for the sound of water hitting the iceberg. Feel for a bit of icy air blowing against his face. That'd be your job!” Crean laughed. “Though you'd have been a first-class idiot to have stowed away back then!”
Perce was glad to live in the modern age.
chapter seven
Perce was scrubbing out the porridge pot an hour later when the cry came.
“Ice ho! Pack off the port bow!” The shout sent everyone running. Perce dropped the pot and joined the crowd of men squeezing up the narrow passages to the deck. Shackleton was on the bridge, looking through his binoculars. Perce ran to the rail.
“Wow!” Giant white plates of ice floated across the entire horizon. There was not more than two feet of open water between any of them.
“It's half a mile long, maybe more.” Tom Crean pointed. “But not so wide. There's clear water on the other side.”
“How can you tell?” Perce asked. “All I can see is ice.”
“Look at the clouds.” Crean handed him the binoculars. “Watch the reflection off the bottom of the clouds. It's different over the ice from over open water. You see a touch of blue with open water.” Perce tried to see the difference, but the light was so strange, it was hard to know what he was seeing. Billy appeared beside him, yawning. He had done the midnight-to-four watch and was sleeping when the shout came.
“Dang,” he said. “It's like a jigsaw puzzle! How are we gonna get through that?”
“Very carefully,” Crean said somberly. He went off to talk to Shackleton. Billy rubbed the side of his face that was still creased from his pillow and shivered. He was wearing only a jacket over his undershirt.
“You should have brought your mother along, Billy,” Perce chided. “Someone to tell you to put your sweater on when you're going out in the cold.”
“Yeah. But better to have my grandpa along with his mule whip to knock the living daylights out of that one.” Billy cocked his head in the direction of the ship's bosun, John Vincent.
“What trouble now?”
“He tore his own sweater on a nailhead and offered himself mine till his gets itself mended.”
It wasn't long into the voyage that John Vincent had showed himself a bully. At fir
st it was small things. He took the best of the food at meals. He made everyone move bunks several times until he found the one he liked best. He was the bosun, so he did have some authority over the other sailors, but this usually meant assigning chores, not stealing another man's clothes. Perce looked closer at the red mark on Billy's face and realized it was not from any pillow.
“What—”
“Yeah—” his friend interrupted. “You'd think he'd know how to hit a man without leaving a mark.” Vincent claimed to have been a professional boxer. He certainly looked like one. His shoulders were broad, his neck thick, his arms heavy with muscle. Before signing on with Shackleton, he had worked on fishing trawlers in the North Sea. That was some of the roughest work you could find, and it attracted the roughest men. The six sailors and Charlie the cook all shared the small cabin called the fo'c'sle at the bow of the ship. While it was fairly roomy as far as fo'c'sles went, it was still close quarters, and this would be a long enough voyage without a bully on board.
“He'll settle down when we get busier,” Billy said. He didn't sound very convincing. “His hide's as thick as a mule, so he can't hardly be feeling the cold anyway.”
“Well, take my sweater for your watch,” Perce offered. “I have that extra wool shirt too, if you roll the sleeves up.”
“Thanks.” The two friends fell silent. There wasn't much they could do about Vincent except watch each other's back. He hadn't done anything really bad, and they would look like whiners going to Wild or Shackleton over a “borrowed” sweater. Billy pulled his jacket tight around his neck.
All day, they sailed along the edge of the pack ice, looking for a way through. Frank Worsley, the captain of the ship, had never seen pack ice before. He was from New Zealand and had sailed mostly in the South Pacific. Shackleton and Wild spent the whole day on the bridge, guiding him. The men were kept busy working the sails. Perce had “learned the ropes” from Billy and Tim and now worked almost as well as anyone. There were dozens of lines and cables, halyards and winches, and a sailor had to know exactly which one to grab when the order rang out. A mistake or delay could bring disaster. On the Endurance they were lucky, for they didn't have to rely only on the sails like earlier explorers: they had the coal engines. Perce could not imagine how Captain Cook sailed down here over a hundred years ago entirely at the mercy of wind power. How could you steer through pack ice when it might take fifteen minutes or more to turn your ship about?
“Look there! We got company!” Tim was up in the rigging and pointed down at the ice.
“Penguins!” Billy laughed. “Look at them! All dressed up fancy in their fine tuxedos to greet us.”
“Those are emperor penguins,” Crean explained. “Biggest ones down here. I knew three fellows who sledged through a month of the worst Antarctic winter to collect some of their eggs.”
“Why?” Perce asked.
“I never was too sure about that. But it probably wasn't much crazier than any other reason we come mucking around down here.”
There were ten emperors in this welcoming committee. They stood together solemnly like a bunch of bishops. They looked up at the ship as it passed only inches from their floe, heads tilted up in silent puzzlement.
“They must think we're from another planet,” Perce said. “From Mars or someplace.”
A little while later, they saw a large flock of Adélie penguins. These birds were much smaller and more playful than the emperors. They chattered and squawked and waved their little flipper wings in excitement. They leapt out of the water and slid across the ice on their bellies like kids on toboggans. Sometimes a whole group of them waddled over to the edge of their ice floe and just stood there, looking at the water as if daring someone to be the first to jump in. Finally one would jump, or maybe get pushed, and all the rest would follow.
Perce would like to have stayed and watched the playful birds all afternoon, but he had pots to scrub in the galley. He yawned. It was almost two o'clock, and he was on watch again at six for the second half of the dogwatch. While most watches were four hours long, the dogwatch was broken into two shifts, four to six and six to eight in the evening. This gave all the men a chance to eat supper and shifted the rest of the schedule around a notch so that no one was always on the same watch. Perce squatted down and scraped the last scraps into Mrs. Chippy's bowl. The big cat meowed happily, and Perce scratched his head. When he stood up again and turned to leave the galley, John Vincent was blocking his way.
“What a good little Peggy you are,” the man sneered. “Done all your cooking and washing up; now it's time for mending.” He thrust his torn sweater at Perce. “I'm on again at eight—I'll need it by then.”
“Then you'd better get to work, hadn't you?” Perce said, making no move to take the sweater.
“You'll sew it with broken fingers if you mouth off like that again!” the man snarled.
“Why, I was just offering some advice,” Perce responded calmly, though his heart was beating hard. “You'll want time to do a nice job, seeing as how we all like to keep up appearances down here.”
John Vincent grabbed Perce by the front of his shirt and shoved him back into the galley. He pushed the sweater into his face. Perce knocked Vincent's arm away. This only made him angrier.
“Did you just hit me?”
“If I did, you wouldn't have to ask.” Perce's voice was still calm, but there was force behind it.
“If this sweater isn't mended before I—”
“Hey, Blackborow!” A strong voice interrupted from the companionway. “Blackborow? Are you down there, lad?”
“Aye, sir.” John Vincent glared at Perce and squeezed one hand into a threatening fist, then stepped back as Frank Hurley appeared. Hurley was the expedition's official photographer. He was a big, strapping Australian with thick, curly brown hair and steady, challenging blue eyes.
“Ah, good.” Hurley looked from one man to the other. If he felt the tension in the air, he didn't say anything.
“Blackborow—lad, what you doing now? Not on watch, are you?”
“No, sir.”
“No potatoes to peel?”
“Not for a while.”
“How do you do with heights, lad? Afraid of heights?” Hurley was buckling on a belt of canvas webbing. Beside him were two crates of camera gear.
“No, sir.” Perce looked doubtfully at the equipment and the belt. “Not so far anyway, sir.”
Hurley laughed. “Fancy a climb up the mast, then?” Hurley had already earned a reputation as a daring, some said reckless, man. He would go anywhere, do anything to get a good photograph. On South Georgia, he had lugged his heavy equipment up mountains and glaciers. He also had a brash self-confidence that annoyed some of the men. They thought he was stuck-up. Some called him “The Prince.”
It was true that Hurley could seem a bit full of himself, but it wasn't all hot air. Hurley had traveled all over and really knew how to do a lot of things. He had been to Antarctica before too, with an Australian expedition.
“Come on, then, while the sky's clear. Grab that box, would'ya?”
Perce picked up a crate and followed Hurley up on deck. Hurley clipped a line from his belt to the large box camera. He slung the strap over one shoulder and across his chest.
“I want to take the cine camera too,” Hurley explained. “Got to take advantage of a good clear day like this for moving pictures, so I can't carry the plates as well.” Hurley tossed Perce another safety belt like his own. Perce buckled it on and picked up the case of glass plates.
“Clip the box to your belt so you can't drop it. Don't fall overboard, or it'll drag you to the bottom.” Hurley grinned. “You can clip the safety line on the rigging as you climb if you want to. Boss likes that,” he said, as if he would never consider actually doing such a thing himself. “Once on top, we'll just scoot out the yardarm. You'll hand me a plate when I'm ready. Handle them only by the edges—can't have greasy fingerprints all over the glass.” Hurley turned his ba
ck on Perce and, without any further instruction, began to climb up the rigging.
Perce knew almost nothing about photography. He had seen advertisements in magazines for modern cameras. Some were as small as a packet of cookies, but they were still too expensive for anyone he knew. Most people who wanted a photograph went to a studio, where they sat in front of a painted backdrop and came back a week later for the picture.
Hurley climbed the shrouds as easily as a monkey, despite the heavy camera. Perce followed more slowly. He hadn't done much top work yet. The ropes were frozen with spray from the waves. He knew half the men would now be watching them instead of the penguins, and he didn't want to slip and make a fool of himself. The heavy box banged against his back. When Hurley reached the main yard, he turned and waited for Perce. The strong wind made his eyes water, but he didn't look like the cold bothered him at all. He wore only a sweater and jacket, no gloves.
“Nice view, eh?”
Perce hadn't exactly noticed the view yet. He was just trying to hang on for dear life. Down on the deck, it hardly seemed the ship was moving. Up here, the mast waved back and forth like some crazy carnival ride. Hurley climbed out along the yardarm as if he were strolling down the sidewalk. Perce carefully eased down and sat where he could hold on to the mast. He shifted the box of plates around so he could get to it more easily and waited. And waited.
Hurley looked around in every direction. The wind blew colder. Perce was bareheaded and had only the thin gloves that were in his jacket pocket. At least he wasn't getting beat up by Vincent in the galley, he thought cheerfully. And what nice fresh air there was. You couldn't get much fresher than this! Back home, the coal smoke poured out of chimneys and left fine black grit all over everything. The stink of sulfur sometimes made your eyes water and your lungs burn. Perce shivered and tried to think of the nice fresh air, not how bloody cold it was.
Shackleton's Stowaway Page 4