The Collector of Lost Things

by Jeremy Page

  As if the presence of the ship were a great magnet, repelling the bodies of the whales, their course started to bend away from us. First, the mother began to turn, creating a small distance from her calf which, by instinct, the calf closed. An adjustment was made to our own route, and the Amethyst steered until ship and whales colluded in a curving line in the sea that might be the beginning of a spiral.

  ‘The helmsman must be careful,’ Clara whispered to me, ‘or we will strike them.’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I believe Mr French is giving quite close instruction.’

  Below our bow we followed the choppy trail of white foam the whales left in their wake. Their backs rose, as before, but not as smoothly. The tail flukes lifted erratically, being brought down in a vigorous fashion, slapping the water with the sound of laundry being smacked dry on a washboard. The mother could now be seen almost in her entirety, both above and below the water, occasionally turning on her side, possibly so that she could watch us.

  ‘Do you think they are becoming distressed?’ I asked Clara.

  When I turned to face her, as she had not replied, I found she was looking beyond me, to the men.

  ‘What is the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘Those,’ she said, pointing along the rail. I looked, immediately appalled to see guns being handed out by Mr French.

  ‘No,’ I said, quietly, realising how naive I had been, watching the ship being brought closer to these creatures and yet not expecting it would end like this.

  ‘I cannot watch this, Eliot,’ Clara said, urgently.

  ‘Mr French!’ I shouted. ‘What is going on?’

  ‘A little sport, that is all,’ he replied, directing his men to the task at hand. ‘Do not worry, the bullet is a mere pinprick to them.’

  A rifle was fired. I saw the ball enter the water, below the hump of the whale’s rising back. It had absolutely no effect; as if the bullet had vanished into glass. Other shots were fired in succession, as Clara flinched next to me. The men fired freely and as fast as they could reload, clouding us with a hot stink of gunpowder as bullet after bullet went into the backs of the whales. Someone yelled with disappointment, ‘They can’t feel ’em, sir!’ and I saw French nodding, his gaze intent and bloodthirsty on the sport that was now taking place virtually below us. The whales thrashed clumsily, the mother’s tail crashed down upon the back of her calf, and in the melee I saw French’s long arm raised above his head directing quick adjustments to the course being steered by the helmsman.

  The ship veered across the path of the whales and the bow was brought straight and as heavy as a lock gate right against the animals.

  ‘Stop them! Oh stop them!’ Clara begged me as, below us, with a deep sickening crunch the ship struck one of the whales.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I promised, trying to push the men away as they came down the rail. Right beneath where I stood, a long and impossible flank of pure black skin was rolling to one side, as dark as polished basalt. The animal was stunned, but still pulsing frantically, as if a thrust of its tail might yet lever the ship from its path.

  I noticed French, forcing his way towards us. The calf, you fools!’ he shouted. ‘Aim for the calf, you bastards! Stop the calf and we have the mother.’

  The men raced past, leaning over the rail and shooting wildly beneath the ship or hurling loose weights and spars of wood down at the animals. Despite the scramble there was much laughter and calling out. I was knocked to one side and instantly I felt Clara grasp my hand and pull at my elbow. I turned to see her face, close and wet with tears, as she buried herself in the front of my jacket. I held her, as any man would have done, feeling her sobbing against my chest and, amid the smoke and the rough smell of the men and the blasts of the guns, I smelt the scent of her hair—the scent of hops and attar of roses I had smelt before—and felt the tight-fingered grip of her hands reaching round my middle, beneath my jacket.

  ‘Oh Clara,’ I whispered. ‘Let me save you.’

  She raised her head and looked into my eyes, a few inches away from me. What I saw there was an instant acknowledgement, an understanding that yes, that was what she wanted. I was sure of it.

  I led her towards the saloon, bearing her weight. The saloon would be a sanctuary not touched by the callousness and violence of men. That is what I hoped and what I promised her. Simao joined us, holding Clara’s other arm and sensing that she might be about to faint. A few hundred yards behind us in the ocean, the two whales had come to a halt. A small tail, belonging to the calf, was raised at an unnatural angle, pointing to the sky like a broken weathervane. The mother thrashed alongside it. A couple of shots rang out; each time a gun went off I felt Clara’s body tense, and for the first time I saw the captain, not looking at the whales but ordering the ship’s course to be corrected.

  ‘Don’t waste your shots,’ he ordered.

  At the companionway door, with Clara virtually limp between Simao and myself, I turned, feeling the sensation of someone watching me. A few yards away, French was facing us. He stood, rifle in hand: the rigid stance of a hunter excited with the heat of his blood. But what shocked me was the look in his eyes. With an unguarded expression he glared at me as I led Clara away. It was a look of accusation.

  16

  ROWING ACROSS THE BAY, I noticed clouds of grey effluent suspended beneath us. The water had been dark and crystal clear, but suddenly it had turned murky, and in the gloom I watched nameless sections of carcasses, fluke tips and dorsal fins, jawbones and ragged white-fleshed cartilage, all swaying eerily above the seabed.

  Across the shore this same carnage continued in a filthy tideline. The boulders were slick with grease and had torn strips of dried flesh on them. There was a large congregation of birds: gulls and skuas squabbling and rising, watched judiciously by ravens as black as anthracite. Stinkpot petrels too, sitting happily, at home among offensive odours that only their foul bodies could equal. They scavenged the shore, pulling at the debris and hovering and crying in a frenzy of feeding and appetite.

  The whaling station stretched along the bay for several hundred yards. Huts had been built of ship’s planking, caulked and tarred and smeared with rendered oils to make them weatherproof. In front of them and alongside, large winches stood among the stones and cables snaked across the shore, some of them reaching straight out into the bay.

  Perhaps twenty Danish men lived there, rendering and junking the whales, seals and walruses that were brought throughout the Arctic summer until the weather closed in. They were as dirty as Bray’s crew on the Jester, dressed in flushing jackets on their backs and shoulders, and some with cow-tail wigs upon their heads. I was told they were made from the roughest wool sheared from the sheep’s hind legs, and must have been remarkably itchy upon the scalp. They wore long fishermen’s boots at least a yard in length, that were as wide as tree trunks, giving their legs a curiously elephantine look.

  I was shown around by an enthusiastic boy called Johannes, who spoke some English and made up for the rest of it with intricate hand gestures, explaining the processes of sizing and slicing and boiling the blubber before it was barrelled and stored. He had the blondest hair I have ever seen, almost pure white, somehow untouched by the grime and dust that covered virtually every other surface.

  ‘We boil,’ he said, proudly, at the entrance to the try-works shed. Inside, four men worked in a pall of greyish-black smoke, as if they were stoking hell itself, loading cauldrons with the rendered strips of flensing. The smoke was oily and had a distinctly fishy aroma, and parts of it carried a fine ash that could be tasted on the tongue. I held my sleeve to my nose against the smell. ‘You breathe in the mouth, it is better,’ Johannes advised, leading me away. ‘My pallet,’ he said, pointing into a shed with a curtained door but no window. He made a hand gesture of to the right and high as if explaining exactly where in the shed his bed was. ‘And there is the place we eat,’ he said, showing me a section of the shore where long trestle tables had been set up.

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sp; Overhead, the barbarous skuas intimidated the other birds into dropping their catches. The men had learnt to ignore the birds and the hellish shrieking they made. Occasionally, as a man walked across the shingle, he might try to kick a path between the scavengers, but work was obviously hard and harassing the birds was a job not worth undertaking.

  ‘We see whale, come come,’ Johannes said, eagerly. As I was led I noticed French, a list of stores in his hand, regarding me. He was apparently amused at the tour I was being given, as if I was a visiting dignitary. He smiled, but not for the first time I considered it an expression that he found uncomfortable, as if his face could not quite sustain it. As he looked down at his list of trading goods, the remnant of the smile was closer to a sneer. I recalled the moment when I had fallen against his shoulder, in the anchor locker. The scent of his cologne. The hard fleshless aspect of his chest.

  Johannes pointed out the bundles of rolled-up sealskins, barrels of salted meat, eider down, feathers, seal oil and white whale oil, with an attitude of great satisfaction. But he knew the most impressive sight was further along the shore. He led me to a section of beach that had become a whale graveyard. Three whales, or parts of three whales, had been tethered to the rocks with long cables, from where they stretched half submerged into the water like staved-in boats. They had been stripped of their blubber, leaving a visceral mess of oyster grey and vivid red matter partially spilt, partially held in place by the structures of bone and cartilage that remained intact.

  ‘The whale, you see,’ Johannes explained, ‘is finished.’

  I nodded in grim understanding. As the water lapped around the bodies they rose, eerie and wallowing, and the water that surrounded them was a fetid cloud of foam and grease. The smell was appalling, quite honestly the worst smell I have ever experienced, and it was only being this close to the dead whales that I realised the origin of the curious odour everywhere in the bay. Even the birds were reluctant to gather in this spot, although this had obviously not always been the case, as the bodies had been badly pecked and shredded by tools that were not entirely man made.

  ‘The stench is horrid,’ I told Johannes.

  He held his nose, grinning. ‘I have lost my nose.’

  I laughed, hoping it might prompt us to leave the carcasses, but Johannes was keen for me to study the whales’ anatomy that was revealed here in all its complications. I began to appreciate the sheer size of these creatures, how heavy they must have been, and how strongly muscled and smooth the contours of their bodies still were. They did indeed seem animals of mystery, even in this form. Those bodies had made great journeys, they had known deep oceans and bleak coastlines, star-filled Arctic nights when the aurora borealis had spanned the sky, forming a glittering path they could follow. They had dived beneath the waves and had heard the bellows and moans of other whales, several hundred miles away. They had followed migratory routes passed down from generation to generation. And to finish in this state, chained, then peeled as one might an orange, discarded on this abhorrent shoreline. I realised they had never truly revealed their secrets. Somehow, miraculously, a shred of their dignity remained.

  ‘Let us go,’ I asked Johannes, quietly.

  French had made the men assemble some of the ship’s stores around him so that he could detail their contents for the station’s commander, an elderly man with an odd-shaped leather hat pulled low across his forehead. As the list was read out, the commander kept removing his cap so he could rub his head with his sleeve.

  French read in a monotone, obviously unhappy to perform a shopkeeper’s duty. ‘… lances, towline, toggle irons, gun irons, boat masts and booms …’

  ‘We have no need of the masts.’

  ‘… cask flagging, cask sawdust, a turning lathe …’

  ‘… that is good.’

  ‘… percussion caps, two quarts of flints, fish line, jack-knives, sheath knives. You had those last year. I should strike them off. Let’s see, various manilas, hemp twine, wax, window frames and glass, hacksaws, wire of varying thickness, screws, nails, putty, linseed and turpentine oil, sandpaper, rifles and ammunition, sets of loading tools, cookery ware, pipes, tobacco and playing cards.’ French raised his hand, preventing the commander from interrupting: ‘Also flour, beef, pork, rice, meal, coffee, tea, vinegar, butter, soap, dried apples, sugar, corned beef, pears, potatoes, onions, mustard, spices, beans, peas, raisins, codfish, molasses and pickles.’

  The commander had begun to laugh.

  French straightened. ‘What is so amusing?’ he asked.

  ‘You, sir,’ the commander replied. ‘You do this every year.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘You bore me with your list. Can you not see I have eyes?’

  ‘It is my duty,’ French replied, vexed.

  ‘Ja, ja, your job.’

  ‘Any Esquimaux?’ French asked, impatient to change the subject.

  The commander pointed to a position a few hundred yards away up the slope of a valley, where several huts could be seen, their roofs made of turf.

  ‘They trade?’

  ‘Furs.’

  ‘Good, we have beads and needles and hooks and the like. We’ll visit when we fill with water from the stream. I wish to have a bathe. How’s the water?’

  ‘Straight from heaven.’

  During the afternoon I wandered up the valley, following a brook that bubbled joyously through the rocks. I picked several Arctic buttercups, their yellow petals fresh drips of egg yolk against the darker greens of the sedge and mosses. I identified pink lousewort, dwarf willowherb and Arctic cinquefoil. But there were many grasses and flowers of a kind I had never seen before, nor could identify in my botanical guide. These were not the soft-petalled flowers of East Anglia, but small robust blooms of mauve, white and yellow, as if they had been dipped in ship’s varnish. The air was cool and fresh and a pale sun shone into the bay across the water. I felt a relief to be alone, away from the ship. But the natural subtlety of these flowers made me homesick, for a softness and peace that I associated only with England—and East Anglia in particular. The lavender light of late summer, whose echo I had occasionally seen along the western Arctic horizon, and the dry flaxen colour of the harvest crops. The estuaries in Suffolk and Norfolk, reflecting a morning sky as pure blue as a goshawk’s egg. The hang of the willows over silent river pools. I missed them deeply. No other place than East Anglia—where the land is held in a cradle of tides swinging back and forth—can give such a feeling of balance, such equilibrium.

  Occasionally a breeze descended from the crags, making me turn away from its chill. It was an Arctic breath, sterile and still frozen, without life or scent, reminding me that beyond the valley was a thousand miles of ice desert. It was as if Greenland had been rubbed away in its centre. It made me reluctant to venture far from the whaling station and the view of the Amethyst in the bay beyond. They say that men swimming from a ship in the middle of the ocean will not leave the side, because the thought of the depths beneath and the miles around are too much to comprehend. And I felt a little of this too, that however revolting the whaling station was, it was my only connection to the world that I came from. I recognised it, understood it, and it was where I belonged.

  With my collar turned up against the cold air, I bent down to pick a variety of the flowers and folded them into the leaves of my notebook. I would give them to Clara when I returned to the ship. I would give them to her and I would tell her that she was as rare and as beautiful as anything I’d ever known. That she was as miraculous as these drops of colour that had grown from the Arctic waste. They would look pretty, set in her hair or hanging as a posy from her wrist. Beauty needs to gather in such a place as the Arctic. Among the sedge, I reached to pull some of the stems, and I smelt the damp scent of mud. Mud, and sodden vegetation—the hint of an English woodland. Not just a general smell, but one woodland in particular, I realised with a shudder, where the ground had turned marshy, where rhododendrons grew so densely they blocked
out the light and, among them, the silent dark waters of a lake covered in lily pads.

  I left the flowers where I’d picked them.

  Down the slope, where the stream crossed the shore, I noticed French, standing naked, pouring a bucket of water over his head. His pale skin made him look like a candle set among the dark stones. I watched him slick his hair back with a comb, before he walked to the pile of clothes he had left on a boulder. For a while he stared, naked, towards the ship across the water.

  There were half a dozen houses in the Esquimaux settlement beyond the brook, built with low rock walls and buried, it appeared, in the turf and grasses of their roofs. Thin grey lines of smoke rose from the buildings, and the ground surrounding them was worn away to bare earth. Several of the Esquimaux could be seen, tending to racks along the side of the largest house. From this distance they looked small and wide in body, moving deliberately and without hurry. Children played outside the dark doorway of one of the houses, throwing stones against a small cairn, and I heard the faint sound of the pebbles landing. The sound of each pebble vanished quickly in such a large landscape.

  As I began to walk back to the whaling station, I noticed one of the Esquimaux children, standing in thick sealskin trousers and no jacket, waving at me. I waved back and held my arm in the air for a long time. I saw him point to the sky, then down at the ground. I copied his gesture. As he began to do it again, we did the gesture together—up at the sky, then down at the ground.

  That evening we ate around a large fire that had been set on the shore, while the crew of the Amethyst and the Danish whalers mallymarked with dances and songs. They forgot they could not talk a common language, or had drunk enough Akavit not to notice. French had returned to the ship after his bathing, not wanting to mix further with the men. Unsurprisingly, we were offered whale meat. On a butcher’s table, a piece of flesh had been laid out, as long as a cow’s leg and consisting of the most remarkably dark and smooth meat I had ever seen. There was absolutely no gristle or fat to it, and hardly any grain. In the twilight it was as black and impenetrable as obsidian, yet to the touch it was as soft as butter, leaving an impression of my finger long after I had removed it. One of the Danish men cut it with a cruelly long carving knife into steaks, as wide and as thick as a man’s hand, which he then slapped onto a hot greased skillet. Each steak sizzled quickly, curling up in lifelike contraction, before the cook flipped them to seal on the other side. I watched, fascinated by the darkness of the steak, and struck by a meat that still recoiled from man’s touch.