Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “The loggerhead. The line from the large line tub”—I saw the tub lodged between the near seats of the whaleboat—“goes aft to the loggerhead, circles round, and then goes forward toward the harpoons. They connect by their own cords to the line.”

  From nowhere Chester lifted a harpoon. He almost staggered under the weight of it. The implement consists of a very stout wooden holster and an iron. In later years, the irons were developed with a toggle point, but ours were barbed like a simple arrowhead.

  “Pretend we’re at sea,” he said, rocking the boat a bit for realism. “The harpoon should rest here,” and he erected a stick, divided at its top into two compartments, perpendicularly into the starboard gunwale. Through one compartment he rested his harpoon, the barb leaning out beyond the prow, like a projection eager to do its duty. “Usually, there’re two,” he said. And he lifted another harpoon to rest in the second compartment of the upright crotch, for so this harpoon stand was named. “The first iron, and the second iron.”

  The whaleboat was some sixteen feet long, with struts across the width to reinforce the boat and serve as seats for the six oarsmen, two on each.

  “What must I do?” I asked, being a rather ignorant mate.

  “You must sing out, ‘Break your backs! Break your backs, my hearties!’ For that’s what the mate says to the crew.”

  “Break your backs! Break your wrists, and arms!” I improvised, and, like Chester, made the boat rock in the moonlight. Our pretense did not seem to progress much. Maybe Chester envisioned whales ahead, and we were approaching them. He stood crouched and ready. Abruptly I asked, in a normal tone, “What are these other casks and implements?”

  Chester relaxed his posture. “I’ll tell you about it,” he said. And he proceeded to name parts methodically, from bow to stern, in a clear and authoritative manner. He leaned forward and put a finger in a small vertical groove near the chocks; the cut was used for straightening harpoons. Another larger notch, like the half-moon that sailed in the sky above us, cut into the horizontal bracing across the prow, was called the clumsy cleat, and there the harpooner might wedge his thigh as he reared back to heave the iron. Besides the harpoons the whaleboat carried other sharp implements: a boat spade, a boat hook, and lances and knives. “Suppose we were towed away?” Chester asked. “We have our supplies.” Standing on the gunwale, he pointed out the lantern keg, used to carry candles and hardtack, which had its own line to retrieve it, should so precious an item be swept overboard; we also had a water keg and a compass aboard. There was a bucket for bailing.

  Chester showed me a hinge that could be let down to receive a single sail, which lay furled with its mast beside the oars. In some ways, the whaleboat was like a miniature of the ship, though of course it had no layering of decks and was entirely open. “Each oar has its name,” he said earnestly. They were named for the men who wielded them, and those men were so named for their position and function in the whaleboat. The large steering oar was easy to remember. “You would wield that,” he said, since I stood in the stern. And next came the oars known as stroke, tub, midship, bow, and boat steerer.

  “Here is the waif pole,” he said and waved a small flag about. “If we can’t tow in our whale, we tag him with this”—I noted the dart at the end for entering the whale’s flesh—“and then he’s claimed as ours.” I thought how vast must be the bulk of a whale, and how great in value, for him to be claimed exactly the same way Columbus might have claimed America, with a flag.

  Chester stood for a moment, regarding the sixteen feet of boat between us. Finding nothing left to explain, he turned, saying, “Now you say, ‘Give it to him!”’

  “Give it to him,” I whispered, my heart not in the game.

  Chester did not lift either the first or second iron from the crotch, but instead pretended to heave a harpoon. “Now we must change places,” he said, and he began to walk toward me and I toward him. “The mate steers us in and we beach on his back!”

  “Whose?” I whispered as I passed Chester, he taking one direction around the line tub and I the other.

  “The whale’s back! You beach us onto his back. Pretend you hold on to their heads, like knobs. The boat is rocking crazy! crazy!”

  “Whose?”

  “The heads of the crew. Steady yourself, or it will be ‘man overboard’ and no stopping. Here’s a wave!”

  I obediently groped the air for invisible heads. When I reached the bow, Chester urged, “Take up the lance, take up the lance,” and so I pretended to do so. Then Chester added, “I shouldn’t have to tell you what to do.” He sighed.

  A real member of the crew materialized. “Ye’d best go back below, Master Chester,” he said. To me he spoke not at all, as though I didn’t exist. Silent as moonlight in our bare feet, we padded across the deck and down the companionway.

  CHAPTER 29: Captain Morrell’s Story—Thirdhand

  WHEN THE WATER was boiling briskly on the galley stove, Harry told me to set out a smaller pot, for the captain’s soup later. It turned out that Harry was both cook and steward, and that fact probably accounted in part for my getting to come aboard.

  “The captain don’t eat the regular stew, then?” I asked, corrupting my English to better fit in with Harry.

  “The captain requested the egg-drop soup. It’s a Chinese recipe. I’ll show ye how it’s made—just by dropping the raw egg into the boiling water, a pat of butter, the way Captain likes it, and a sprinkle of green onion tops, cut fine. Break the eggs now, ahead of time, into a bowl.”

  I did so and was about to chunk the shells into the garbage when Harry stopped me.

  “What’s the watchword of the galley, lad?”

  “Economy.”

  “And what be ye about to do? Throw out shells? What’s sticking to the inside of the shell, boy?”

  “Well, it’s no more than a wet slime,” I said.

  “There’s nutrition there,” Harry said. “Don’t doubt nature, or nature’s God. Grind up those shells in my mortar. Use the pestle till they’re fine as cracker crumbs. Then we sprinkle ’em in the stew. It makes a nice crunchiness for the crew. But this we do in the pantry, belowdecks. Come along.”

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have washed away the grit and bugs,” I said, following him down the companionway. How many times was I to run up and down those little steps? I had the legs for it!

  “Oh, bugs. If we had to, we could eat ’em. I know an island where the Tasaday people live. It’s a paradise. They eat all morning, turn up leaves and eat whatever’s under till they’re full. Bugs is strong meat, Billy. All afternoon, these Tasaday sit together. They have seats in the side of a rocky cliff. It’s like a theater. Only there ain’t no show except as what’s in their heads. They hold hands and daydream all afternoon. The night’s for fornication. All together, anybody with anybody, I’ve heard.”

  I felt shaken by this. Fornication—yes, I knew the word, for my father’s Bible prescribed against it. But the island peoples, having no Bible, apparently had no prohibition. They had our ways neither in diet nor in married life. I did not comment.

  “The egg-drop soup should be served fresh-made, so we’ll wait for that,” Harry said, “till you’re ready to go in for lunch yourself and you shall serve it.”

  “Will I ever help to serve the crew?” I asked, for there I would certainly see Kit and Giles. But again it seemed I was lucky. I was to serve the captain and the officers, who sometimes ate at the captain’s dining table, sometimes apart, as the captain liked some time with just his boy at meals. Harry fed the crew.

  “Now the elderly Chinese gentlemen that can afford it have a special soup beyond egg-drop,” Harry said.

  “What’s that?”

  Harry commenced to prepare pans to fry freshwater fish that he had bought on shore and that must be cooked right up. We had stores of fish in brine and smoked fish, and as we sailed, we would catch dolphin from time to time, and cod and tuna and other saltwater fish, which we would eat, but tha
t was all haphazard, our main mission being to chase the whale, of course.

  “For rejuvenating, when their old peters hang limp, they eat bêche-de-mer.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sea slugs.”

  My stomach unseated itself and danced a jig.

  “Some white captains make a good profit on sea slugs,” Harry went on. “You gather them among the reefs. You cure and dry them and take them back to China. You sell them high for the soup.”

  “Do only men eat the soup?”

  “There’s no need for rejuvenating old women. Oh, no. They’ve got plenty of young women.”

  “You’ve been to China, Harry?”

  “There’s not much I haven’t been to. The sea goes everywhere. There’s sperm whale in every sea, and where the whale swims, there swims the Sussex, with me cooking on her deck and chopping in her bowels. But I’ll tell you a story of Captain Benjamin Morrell, captain of the ship Antarctic, which sailed out of New Zealand for the Fiji Islands, him intending to harvest sea slugs for bêche-de-mer.

  “Now here again is a true story that happened recently, and it’s all quite true, he having kept a record himself, and his wife, whose name was Abby Jane, she having kept account, too, of the tale he told her.”

  “A tale of sea slugs?”

  “Oh, sea slugs is just the jumping-off point. Sea slugs is not at all the main thing. Sea slugs is but the trigger. Let me send out the bullet for ye.”

  “Harry, are the lunches on schedule?” For I did not want to be thought a corrupting influence and lose my job in the pantry, though it was a close, small place, as all places on ship must be. The sunny, open deck flashed in my mind. There was a world of difference between its open sea and sky, and the cabinets and drawers and work spaces of belowdecks. We did get a trickle of sunlight, for two greenish prisms were set in through the floor of the deck, the work of these prisms being to collect light and funnel it, much weakened, below. The greenish light gave our place a certain eerie, underwater, wavering kind of glow.

  “Carry these up to the galley,” he directed. And when we arrived: “Another stick for the fire, Billy-boy.” He opened the oven door, and heat poured into the galley. “ ’Tis a story of the fires of hell, I’ll tell ye. Certainly it was hell for some. Americans, too, though they set out, Captain Morrell and his crew, from New Zealand.

  “Well, they left Abby Jane off in Manila, and they sailed not to Fiji, but to the Bismarck Archipelago, which lies north of New Guinea. The crew went ashore to build a curing house for the snails. There was natives there, men as black as ebony, but they seemed tame enough. For a time. For a time. Morrell was on board when the savages let out their war whoops and started to massacre the men ashore. For they were black cannibals, every one. The sound of their whoops, Captain Morrell said, was ‘lifeblood-curdling’to his heart. Many a black savage fell, but their numbers was legion compared to the fourteen crew ashore. Morrell and his men aboard were forced to do little but watch. The savages took the crew’s own cutlasses out of their scabbards and used them to cut and carve, to butcher. Yes, it was butchering. And some used their own spears, sticking and tormenting any who still had life. They built fires, and there on the beach with Morrell looking on, grinding his teeth no doubt, they roasted pieces of human flesh and ate it half raw with blood, fresh blood, running over their black chins. So Captain Morrell could only sail away that time, which was in May, back to Manila, where he told Abby Jane the story.

  “But that weren’t the end. No. He told the story, yes, but he also told he would have revenge. I do not know why he would take Abby Jane back with him. I don’t know why he would have taken her whaling in the first place, but he did do both. Well, she wrote about it.

  “September and back to the archipelago. Three hundred cannibals attacked the Antarctic as soon as she appeared. But now Captain Morrell was ready, and he opened fire. But that wasn’t enough. Not enough revenge at all. He put ashore and built a garrison. There was another battle, with war canoes coming in from all the islands in the archipelago. They had the devil in them, but without the guns—well, Captain and his men, with Missus looking on, mowed them right down. The whole village was destroyed under the cannon fire. Then the crew and all struck up ‘Yankee Doodle’ and after that ‘Rule, Britannia’ for the Brits among them.

  “A whaleman can be a fighting soldier, lad. In a whale there’s enough blood and strength for three hundred cannibals. Captain Morrell and his men had whatever courage you’d want to see in the best military man. Now I’ll tell you what Mrs. Morrell had to say. She wrote her feelings out: ‘I saw all this without any sensation of fear, so easy is it for a woman to catch the spirit of those near her.”’

  I was troubled to hear that Abby Jane had been caught up in the spirit of revenge and war. My aunt was right to say that war was the worst of evils, but what of cannibalism? Aunt had called war silly, but it was linked by blood to cannibalism, and I asked myself, Should not civilized folk be able to mourn their dead and not require blood for blood? Did not Jesus himself admonish Christians to “turn the other cheek”?

  “It’s all fresh for me,” Harry went on, “for I bought her book onshore.” Then he opened two of the cabinet doors, and to my surprise, there was a regular library stored there. “It’s the library of the sea,” Harry said. “My second secret.” Again, Harry surprised me, for while I expected my captain to have a little library, he had only Shakespeare. Harry’s books were a library of the sea in two senses, the second being that all the books he owned dealt only with life at sea. I must have looked surprised. “Being so much below,” he said, “I miss a good bit of the action above. Sometimes, I cook and have my muscatel and read a bit. The ship rocks and plows and I’m a part of it all.”

  Suddenly Harry seemed to me about the age of Chester.

  “Here, listen,” and he opened Abby Jane Morrell’s Narrative of a Voyage to a place marked with a scrap of leather and read:

  “ ‘If I had, a few months before this time, read of such a battle”’—Harry pitched his voice high as he read, like a woman’s—“ ‘I should have trembled at the detail of the incidents; but seeing all the animation and courage which were displayed, and noticing, at the same time, how coolly all was done, every particle of fear left me, and I stood collected as any heroine of former days.”’

  Harry softly closed the book, carefully returned it to its upright position among the other books, closed and locked the cabinet. “What do you think of that, Billy?” he asked me. “The language of it? A ‘heroine of former days’? There’s a romance, ain’t it?”

  “Have you yourself ever seen such a carnage?” I asked.

  He shook his head in the negative.

  “I think it might be a quite different thing than the way she writes about it.”

  “Her account,” Harry said, “is the same as her husband’s. His came out the year before. They corroborate each other.”

  “I don’t mean so much in terms of the facts,” I said. “But the feeling. Or the lack of feeling.”

  “Do you think she was afraid after all?”

  “That is not my point,” I said. I felt very impatient with Harry.

  “Do you think, Billy, you understand it better than her or him, you who was never at sea till this voyage?”

  I could tell that Harry, in turn, as is often the response to impatience, was becoming annoyed with me. That I could not afford. “A soft answer turneth away wrath, but grievous words stir up anger.” So my father’s book said, and he had often quoted it, to quench my childish fiery temper. But then, temper had gotten the better of him when I was twelve, no matter what words he knew. I swallowed my desire to argue with Harry and said, “You have a fine collection of books, Harry.”

  “So I do,” he said. He meditatively sipped his wine (I had decided to leave the muscatel for Harry), and his manner proved the truth of my father’s adage, for Harry’s anger was all turned away when my tone was soft. “I’ll read a bit to you from
time to time.”

  He did not offer me the key to his collection. I thought that ungenerous of him, but perhaps he believed me unable to read.

  “It was the reading of sea books that made me want to run away to sea,” he said. His voice took on the naive quality of a young and wondering boy. “I had been a good scholar in my school days. I was apprentice to a glover. I could still make you a pair of gloves fit to wear to a coronation.”

  “How old were you when you went to sea?” I asked.

  “Sixteen.”

  And suddenly I had a fellow feeling with Harry.

  CHAPTER 30: Captain Ahab’s Story—My First Acquaintance with Him

  THE TABLES SET and the cooking ready, except for the egg-drop soup for Captain Fry, which was to be last-minute, Harry and I returned to the steward’s pantry and continued to talk. I soon learned that he was forever between the two places, and that he really did have too much to do. Hence I was not a mere companion to Chester but a sort of apprentice to Harry. As we settled ourselves, he on the high stool, I on a box, he pointed to a small bell, which was wired to be rung by a tug from the captain at his table. He lighted a tiny spirit lamp under an iron plate in the galley to keep the water boiling for the captain’s soup. When we heard the ding, Harry would drop the raw egg into the boiling water, leave the serving, which would be almost immediate, up to me, and himself go up on deck to set out platters for the crew, which numbered about thirty.

  Harry having shared so much with me, I thought I would tell him of some of the landscape of Kentucky. I felt confident that my description of mere landscape would not signal that I might be female. I seemed to owe him something true and real for all the pictures he had made to dance before my eyes. But almost at once the little silver bell dinged, and I postponed a narrative of Kentucky.