Into White Silence

by Anthony Eaton

  Polar Exploration Vessel Raven

  Approx. 65°30’S, 138°48’E

  Another day spent dawdling along the edge of the pack ice today. We have made good another forty-two miles, and are hopeful that the winds, which have so far tended more from the WNW, will at some point in the next twenty-four hours swing to the south, and open the pack up somewhat so we might begin to penetrate it.

  With no more time to wait, Doctor Dalby removed Per’s arm this afternoon – a bloody affair, which I was unfortunate enough to witness. Dalby’s skill as a surgeon, though, cannot be questioned, especially given the trying circumstances under which he was forced to work. With Per sunk into a morphine-induced stupor, a surgical table of sorts was set up in the ’tween deck, directly below the main cargo hatch, where the sun could shine through with maximum illumination. The doctor worked surprisingly quickly, his wartime experiences no doubt revealing themselves, and the whole affair took less than seven or eight minutes. Per now lies back in his bunk, one arm fewer, with the doctor in constant attendance. We are told that if he makes it through tonight there is a reasonable chance for his survival.

  This afternoon, I finally managed a decent and quite civil chat with Alex. The taciturn behaviour which had overtaken him since the crossing would appear to have been mollified somewhat by the calm seas and good weather of the last few days. After the bloody messiness of Per’s surgery I, like most of the men, made my way quickly to the main deck to take some fresh air and there, leaning against the port rail, I fell to watching the icepack slipping slowly past, just a scant hundred yards or so away.

  In fact, this has become something of a pastime for all aboard these last four days; moments of inactivity invariably find most of the ship’s company perched upon the kennels or deckhouses, or sprawled upon the foredeck, observing the endless procession of ice as we motor-sail our way west. It is startling the amount of wildlife we have already recorded – several species of seal, including an enormous brute which Greg Shannon-Stacey informed us was a leopard, countless Adelie penguins and occasionally their taller counterparts, the emperors. Storm petrels and various large gulls swoop constantly in the air behind our masts and late this afternoon a group of killer whales breached in the calm water a little out to starboard.

  And the ice itself provides an ever-changing array of vistas: the constant shift and flow of the pack takes the eye in different directions, shadows on distant icebergs throw them into odd relief, and the narrow black leads of water between the floes lend the entire seascape the appearance of an oddly fractured chessboard.

  Lawson is in his element, spending most of his days clambering about in the rigging, lugging his various pieces of photographic equipment aloft with him and shouting orders at those below who have been shanghaied into assisting. For the most part, the men are happy to oblige.

  I was leaning on the rail, watching a small number of Weddell seals basking indolently on pancake ice at the very edge of the pack, when Alex joined me there. We have barely spoken two words to one another since I overheard him and Lawson in the hold and so it came as something of a surprise when, without a word, he offered me a fill from his tobacco pouch, which I took to be a gesture of conciliation. Luckily I had my pipe with me and for some minutes we smoked in amiable companionship, until finally he nodded at the pack, then only thirty or forty yards distant.

  ‘Do you think we’ll be able to get into it tomorrow?’ he asked, to which I could only reply that I certainly hoped so.

  Alex nodded. ‘Me too. For all that I’d rather not be here, I’m glad I saw this.’

  ‘Surely it isn’t that bad?’ I ventured, and Alex cast a quick glance towards the poop, ensuring, I suspect, that our Leader wasn’t nearby.

  ‘Doesn’t Mr Rourke make you at all apprehensive?’ he asked me, his voice barely a whisper.

  ‘Not at all,’ I replied, rather stiffly and very aware that, although it was certainly a pleasure to be on speaking terms again with Alex, at the same time it wouldn’t do to be seen as undermining the leadership of our expedition.

  Alex went quiet again and I worried that my terse response might have discouraged him from further conversation, but this concern proved baseless, because out of the blue he spoke again, his voice a whisper.

  ‘He frightens me to death.’

  This strange confession left me somewhat at a loss, I will admit. I uttered a couple of words of what I imagined would be encouragement, telling him that I have full faith in our crew and that, now we’ve made it this far south, the tasks ahead would prove the worth of Mr Rourke’s vision and goals.

  I can’t say whether or not he was convinced, however he certainly seemed to give it serious consideration before shaking his head in a non-committal fashion.

  ‘I hope you’re right about that, Will.’ And with that he turned and wandered back down the deck towards the chartroom companionway. Soon after, the lookout at the masthead shouted that there was a promising lead into the pack coming up ahead. This caused some excitement but, upon our reaching it, the gap turned out to be narrow and surrounded on both sides by heavily packed ice floes, and so Captain McLaren, much to Mr Rourke’s annoyance, declined to take the ship in.

  12th January, 1922

  Polar Exploration Vessel Raven

  Approx. 65°53’S, 138°30’E

  As I write this, our little ship is finally in the thick of things, nudging her way forward through the pack, and her special design seems to be serving her well for the purpose. We have been in among the ice for a little over six hours now and are making slow but steady progress. After the previous five days of cruising west along the ice-edge, having our bows finally pointed south again is a pleasant sensation and a jolly good end to an otherwise trying day.

  After Captain McLaren’s refusal yesterday evening to take the ship into the lead, this morning Mr Rourke called a long meeting of himself, the two captains and me in the wardroom, which he ordered cleared for the duration. From his cabin he retrieved one of the maps which had until recently adorned the walls of our office in Hobart, and unrolled it upon the wardroom table.

  ‘Our evening shot puts us here …’ he indicated a position perhaps fifty miles directly out to sea from the mainland. ‘Already this puts us somewhere in the order of two hundred and fifty miles north-west of Commonwealth Bay, much further along the coast than we wanted to be at this point and moving further west with every passing day. Gentlemen, from my point of view, this is unacceptable. I’ve led this party down here with two purposes in mind – the mapping of the eastern coastline being the first of them – and we are clearly not accomplishing that from all the way out here.’

  At this point, George Smythe-Davis interrupted.

  ‘The problem is that the pack is much thicker than we’d anticipated. Everything I’ve read suggests that at this time of year, we should have another thirty or forty miles of open water between our current position and the ice-edge …’

  ‘Well, we don’t!’ Rourke snapped back.

  Then Captain McLaren spoke, ‘There’s no point arguing over unchangeable details, gentlemen. The ice is there, and there isn’t a thing we can do to change that. Our only course of action is to continue west until we locate a suitable lead.’

  ‘If we do that, we’ll most likely circle the whole bloody continent,’ Rourke growled. ‘I didn’t spend good money armouring this ship just so we can bob around out here, hovering at the edge of the pack like a frightened wallflower.’

  ‘But to push into the ice without a suitable amount of open water ahead of us …’

  ‘Have some backbone, man, for God’s sake!’ Mr Rourke slammed both his hands against the table with a degree of vehemence that made all three of us jump. ‘What do you expect to find? The bloody Suez Canal? Perhaps I should put the men out onto the ice with picks and shovels and tell them to dig you a passage to the coast? Is that what it’ll take?’

  At that, Captain McLaren also rose to his feet, clearly attempting to salvag
e some dignity in the face of the Leader’s outburst.

  ‘Mr Rourke …’ he began, but was cut off before he could get another word out.

  ‘Be quiet, you spineless coward!’ Rourke held a hand up, as though this might prevent Captain McLaren from uttering another syllable. ‘I have no wish to hear anything else you have to say on the matter.’

  At this, the Captain turned quite red, and retorted that he would ‘not be spoken to in such a manner aboard my own ship!’

  Mr Rourke responded to this with a short, sharp bark of laughter. ‘Your ship? Your ship? I don’t recall seeing your name on the deed of ownership, Captain. This is my vessel and nobody else’s. I paid for her, I crewed her, supplied her, and even designed her …’

  ‘Which explains why she handles the seas like a dying pig!’ Captain McLaren shot back.

  For a moment, I thought that Rourke was about to take further issue with the Captain’s impertinence, but instead he stared the older man square in his eyes for perhaps thirty or forty seconds and, while the Captain refused to drop his own gaze, it was clear from where I stood that he was intimidated. When Mr Rourke spoke next, it was in an entirely different tone of voice, hard to believe that just a few seconds earlier, he and the Captain had been shouting in one another’s faces.

  ‘Captain,’ the Leader’s voice was now calm, measured. ‘I’d be obliged if you’d return to your cabin, and remain there until such time as I summon you with navigational orders.’

  ‘I will do no such thing!’

  ‘You will, or I’ll have Mr Ryan clap you into the brig and you’ll remain there for the duration of the voyage. The choice is yours, Captain.’

  The Captain’s angry expression quickly gave way to incredulity. ‘You wouldn’t dare. This is mutiny.’

  ‘Not at all. I am assuming responsibility for the expeditionary aspects of this voyage at this point. Nothing more. Clearly, Captain, you have a limited understanding of the capabilities of this vessel and are not prepared to exploit them, so as your employer I am withdrawing you from your duties in this area. You will be permitted to continue as ship’s Captain, but only in as much as you will obey my operational directives.’

  At this point, I threw a quick glance at George Smythe-Davis. His face was creased into a small frown, but otherwise his expression told me nothing. At the table, Mr Rourke was still eyeing down Captain McLaren, in much the same way that a cattledog will use its stare to keep control over a bull.

  ‘This is preposterous …’ The Captain muttered, but at the same time began making his way around the table towards his cabin. Mr Rourke’s eyes stayed locked upon him the entire way and the Leader didn’t utter a single word until the Captain was actually entering his cabin.

  ‘Thank you, Captain McLaren. I shall call you when I require you.’

  Captain McLaren’s cabin door slammed shut, and Mr Rourke turned immediately to face George and me and asked us, in the same quiet tone, ‘Do either of you have difficulties with what just occurred?’

  I must confess that I’d found the entire episode deeply disturbing and perhaps at that point I’d have been well served to have voiced my reservations but, given that George Smythe-Davis, whose opinion I have always held in high regard, chose to say nothing, I followed his example and held my tongue. After several seconds, the Leader nodded his head in a satisfied manner.

  ‘Good, then,’ he told us. ‘Perhaps now we can finally get on with achieving what we came here to accomplish.’

  With that, he turned back to his chart and the matter with Captain McLaren was seemingly forgotten.

  ‘As I was saying, our progress these last five days has been unsatisfactory. Clearly the ice is unseasonably thick, and the pack much wider than we’d anticipated, which suggests to me that we could easily spend weeks floating around out here without ever finding any opportunity to make the coast easily. I therefore suggest, gentlemen, that the time has come to take bold action. I intend to have Captain McLaren take the ship back to the lead we noted last night and, with a decent head of steam up, we are going to penetrate the icepack. If either of you have any suggestions or observations, now is the time to make them.’

  Neither George nor myself said a single word and, with a satisfied nod, Mr Rourke dismissed us both, sending George to the poop to assume command of the deck watch, and dispatching me to locate Mr Weymouth and have him stoke the boilers up to their full capacity. I located the engineer below, in the engine room, and he regarded Mr Rourke’s orders with a look of doubt.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ I asked.

  ‘Not as such, but there might be afore a lot longer’ was his answer, which I accepted with due regard. The amount of time that Mr Weymouth must, by necessity, spend below with his machinery means that I have not come to know him nearly as well as I have the others, but I have found him at every turn to be most thoughtful and professional in regard to the mechanics of the Raven and her operations, and so I was predisposed to regard his opinions with seriousness.

  I asked him to explain further and he gestured me forward, along the starboard side of the engine room, past the boiler and drinking water tank to where the coal bunker was built against a bulkhead. Climbing several iron rungs set into the steel wall of the bunker, he slid open an inspection hatch, gesturing me to clamber up beside him and peer in. It was as dark as the ace of spades, the only light in there being the thin beam from Mr Weymouth’s safety lantern, which he’d hung on a nail beside the inspection port. After a moment or two, though, my eyes began to adapt and I could just discern the solid, dark lumps of coal, perhaps halfway down the bunker wall.

  ‘I can’t see any problem,’ I confessed.

  ‘Coal level’s too low, already,’ the engineer replied. ‘Getting through them storms took a lot more power than we’d expected, an’ a fair bit of the lower stuff got wet when the hold flooded. We’re at maybe fifty per cent of our stores already. Mr Rourke wants a good head of steam up, that’s fine, but at the rate we’re burning, he’d better hope we can use them sails up there to get home again.’

  Climbing back down to the deck and following Mr Weymouth aft again to the companionway I asked him, ‘How many days do you think we’ve got left in there?’

  ‘At full speed?’ he replied, and shrugged his shoulders in a non-committal fashion. ‘Hard to say. Perhaps a couple of weeks. More as the wet stuff dries out a bit.’

  With that, I left him to get the boiler stoked and made my way topside, where I found George on the poop deck, staring moodily across at the pack. As per Mr Rourke’s orders, he’d already had the ship brought about and we were now motor-sailing back east with the pack ice off our starboard beam, searching out the lead that Captain McLaren disregarded last night.

  It took me a couple of moments to inform him about our coal situation and when I finished the Captain nodded thoughtfully, but didn’t say anything. ‘Should I let Mr Rourke know?’ I asked.

  ‘Not at the moment.’ George shook his head. ‘Leave it to me. I’ll tell him when the time’s right.’

  ‘Will it make any difference?’ I enquired, and George shrugged.

  ‘Who can say?’ he replied.

  Not convinced that he’d fully grasped the seriousness of the situation, I was about to push him further on the matter when Mr. Rourke himself returned to the deck, Captain McLaren a step or two behind him.

  ‘All in order, gents?’ the Leader enquired, and Captain Smythe-Davis nodded.

  ‘As you asked.’

  ‘Good. I’ll take the watch now, George. You’re relieved. Downes, you too.’

  George made his ponderous way off the poop. Even in these calm waters, his limp leaves him unsteady and hesitant and he moves like a man well advanced in years. Reaching the forward deckhouse, he stopped and leaned against the railing. I joined him there, and together we watched the ice slipping by. Neither of us spoke a word, and the only sounds were the creaking of the rigging, the rush of water past the hull, and the occasional yip from one or o
ther of the dogs. Clearly George was troubled by the events of the morning, as was I, but the problem of how to broach the subject of Mr Rourke’s increasingly obsessive behaviour was beyond me.

  We passed a large floe of pancake ice, upon which a female leopard seal was calmly suckling her pup. The black hull of our ship slid by, only a few feet from where the two animals sprawled, and the mother raised her head, the power of her savage jaws obvious at such a close distance. After sparing us no more than an unworried glance, she returned to her doze.

  ‘Do you remember Dicky Mulligan?’ George asked me, unexpectedly.

  I did, indeed. Mulligan was a member of our company in France. A youngster, no more than fifteen or sixteen, who’d lied his way in and found himself hopelessly out of his depth. The poor blighter wouldn’t have weighed more than seventy or eighty pounds and could barely hold his rifle with both hands. How he got past the recruiters was a mystery to all of us and in a scuffle he was next to useless, scared half out of his mind by the shelling, let alone the prospect of a charge across no-man’s-land. Still, he was harmless enough and we all covered for him and managed to jolly him through the worst of things. I think we all knew he wasn’t going to last the distance, though, and we were right enough in that. We lost track of Dicky somewhere at Bullecourt, right at the start. The Captain told us later that he’d made it through and been invalided out with shell shock, but none of us believed him. We all suspected that he’d been caught in the wire and shot, like so many others. Why George should mention Dicky Mulligan now was a mystery, but I replied that I did, indeed, remember the lad.

  ‘Do you know what happened to him?’ George enquired.

  ‘We were told he was pensioned out, but most of us assumed he never made it back from Bullecourt,’ I replied.

  ‘He never even made it out of the trench.’ Captain Smythe-Davis stared at the passing ice, deliberately not meeting my eye. ‘When the whistle blew and the rest of you leapt over the edge, he wouldn’t go and nothing I said would move the boy. The poor bugger even wet himself. I was yelling at him, trying to drag him back to his feet, but it didn’t make a lick of difference. Then this Pommy officer came along, took one look at the situation, pulled out his pistol and shot Dicky dead, then turned to me and said, “Hadn’t you better catch up with your men, Captain?” Just like that. And do you know what I did?’