Rich Man's Coffin

by K Martin Gardner

"Bearing ought-four-ought." Arthur yelled after a half hour of silence. The Captain ordered steady course again. He knew that prevailing currents around The Horn would sweep the ship in an arc, helping him steer the true, desired course. A bearing of forty degrees meant that the island around which he wanted to turn was out to the right at a modest angle. When the call came that the horn was directly off the ship's starboard, then he would take the helm himself and turn the ship hard to the right, north.

  "Eight O'clock and all is well!" came the cry from the roving watch on the forecastle.

  Another half hour passed before Arthur exclaimed, "Bearing ought-five-ought!" He thought he saw land approaching on the dark horizon, but he knew that the plan was to turn when the ship had sailed far south of the mark. He yelled out in a concerned voice, "Captain, the Horn is getting closer!"

  The Captain looked up, and then exchanged a confused glance with the Helmsman. They both smiled and shrugged, as if to discount the opinion of their junior seaman. The Captain chuckled and mumbled something about seeing flashes of white in the sky whenever Arthur spoke.

  At roughly nine o’clock, Arthur called out, "Bearing ought-seven-ought!" Having been ignored earlier, he remained silent about the immense dark mass looming dead ahead in the distance. He heard the Captain and Helmsman laughing below, making small talk. He heard the low voices of the relaxed crew. He heard the gentle wind rustling in sails. He heard the bow slicing through the calm water. And as he ever so gently began to doze off in the darkness of the warm, night breeze, he heard the firing of a distant cannon. He awoke with a start. Something struck his face. It was a single drop of rain.

  Ten o’clock arrived, and Arthur shouted, "Bearing ought-eight-ought!" He saw the Helmsman preparing to step aside as the Captain put on his rawhide gloves. The two shrugged again, this time looking around the sky. The rain began as a sprinkle. A few sailors kicked at their weather gear, like children poking peas on a plate. Instead they focused on readying the sails for the turn.

  The Captain cried out across the deck to the First Mate, "Prepare to mark the turn!"

  The First Mate yelled back, "Prepare to mark the turn, aye."

  Jubilantly, Arthur exclaimed, "Bearing ought-nine-ought!" The boat was now near the bottom of the Earth, at a ninety-degree angle to the tip of The Horn. A fitting place it was for the hellish events about to unfold.

  The Captain stepped in to take the helm. He cried out, "Mark!"

  The First Mate yelled out, "Mark!"

  The starboard crew laid hard into the lines and the sails roared in protest as the masts groaned. The Captain arrested the wheel and wrestled it to leeward. He leaned into the helm, calves straining, as the ship lurched and crackled loudly. The ropes sang and the hull hummed, while the keel drummed on the choppy swells. The rain joined the wind as they played the sails and pummeled the deck.

  Suddenly, the wind shifted violently. It seemed to blow straight down out of the sky, cascading heavily like a waterfall; and along with it came a torrent of water. The term rain would not apply, as there was an absence of any space between the droplets. What fell that night onto the deck of The Elizabeth could only be described as solid streams, like gutter spill, of cold stinging water. Before the sailors could set the lines, the weather followed its dramatic entrance onto the stage by performing a devastating duet with the wind that had suddenly decided to dance sideways to the frantic concerto. The ropes were ripped from the raw hands of the riggers, the sail sheets were rented, and the boom slammed into the stay. The shudder of the impact threw the Captain from his precarious stance. The wheel spun from his hands, causing the ship to pitch and tilt over in the opposite direction, all in one heaving sway. Many of the crew were thrown to the deck, and the rest were blown and scattered about. The sails flailed and flapped untied, tearing to tatters, as the lines whipped about in the wicked wind.

  The lightning began, giving the ghastly-lit ship the look of an eerie, angry Medusa. The Captain righted the ship as the sailors scrambled to secure the sails. He struggled to steer without the sheets. The swells rose higher. With the ship turned away from the current, the large waves hit the bow at odd angles and bad times. The mountains of water were enormous, and swift enough to lift the ship high. They came one after the other, before the boat could settle again. The crew felt the awesome sensation of the ship climbing high into the air, followed by the sickening plunge and jarring hit as the bottom of the boat slammed into the valley floor of hard seawater below. The crew rode the rolling humps of the rampaging sea serpent, while walls of water walked across the deck, marching to the thunder as troops to war. The phantom forces brutishly tipped the ship to one side as they clamored aboard, exiting rudely as they leapt over the opposite rail like liquid lemmings.

  The battle raged on for nearly two hours around the drenched and defeated sailors. The squall’s last assault came shortly after Midnight. As the wind and rain slowly ceased, the seas stilled and the ship once again slipped smoothly through the water. The Captain assessed the damage. The crew began unfurling and fitting new sheets. The situation returned to normal. The ship had successfully made the turn and survived its worst! The crew began to let out bouts of cheers as they slapped one another on the back. The Captain ordered a head count. No one was visible in the side nets; and the word of all accounted for came back to the Captain. He looked skyward.

  There was Arthur in the crow's nest against the backdrop of a clearing night sky. As he hung the net straps to one side and stretched his arms, he heard a fluttering sound in the rigging above him. He looked around in the darkness for a shred of tattered sail, but saw nothing. Exhausted from the ordeal, he decided that all inspection work could wait for the morrow and daylight. He was happy simply to have lived through such a turbulent and terrifying display of nature. He started to exit the crow's nest and climb down. Suddenly, he was startled by another rustling sound near his right shoulder. He felt something brushing his face, and he turned his head just as the bird clenched his drenched shirt.

  The parrot said, "Por Favor Señor Arthur."

  VII

  Two months is a long time to go without seeing land or women. Men in these conditions commit unspeakable acts against one another, and so the account of these acts will remain unspoken. One time, Arthur thought he saw a man in the distance walking on the water, but he couldn't be sure.

  He named the Captain’s bird Mary.

  Chapter 6

  The view lying before the advancing dinghy that morning was foretelling of the coming night’s events and the fate of those souls rowing toward the shore. A dark and foreboding scene waited before them. Some described the forsaken inlet as the Golgotha of the Whale because it had become the ungodly resting place for the strewn remains of countless hapless and unfortunate leviathan.

  Arthur Alesworth, a crewman of The Elizabeth, cut the water hard with anticipation from his seat third back from the bow, as he cast his eye eagerly toward shore. Arthur had embarked with The Elizabeth, one of the very few British whalers to set out from Philadelphia, to the reportedly bountiful coasts of New Zealand. The four-month journey during 1828 had taken its toll, even on this strong young man.

  He yearned for land, and the fresh scent of this strange new world was just what he needed to revive. What struck him first, though, was the sharp stench of the rotting sea giants that littered the beach. His heart plummeted into his churning stomach. He looked around wildly, searching the beach for an open space that might be free of the carrion-clad bones of the offending beasts. His panic only increased as he found no relief from the hellish smell of boiling flesh and putrid oil. His acute suffering was punctuated by the stinging crop of the First Mate, seated astern, who cried sharply, “Row harder, Harper, or swim with the sharks!”

  Arthur flinched on the gunwale while on the shore they flensed the whale.

  Chapter 7

  May 30th, 1828. Te Awaiti Bay, New Zealand’s first whaling station:

  Arthur had barely gotten his land le
gs back before he was called to attention for the work detail. Standing in a line across the beach, arms stiffly held to his side and chin out, Arthur felt the resurgence of the nausea that he had fought with and conquered just outside of Philadelphia harbor. Could there be such a thing as land sickness? He wondered. The wild smell of charring whale flesh made it worse. His inspection did not seem fitting for the lurid tasks he saw being performed on the gargantuan fish lying about the beach before him.

  A large burly man with a bushy, black beard walked away from a whale up to the company of new arrivals. He turned on his heels in the sand at the end of their line, gingerly stepped back to front-and-center, and began to shout.

  “Right! This is my beach! There will be no mucking around!” He looked each man squarely in the eye one by one as he spoke. “This is the first successful whaling station on the South Island of New Zealand. I intend to keep it that way! Understood?”

  The sailors broke stance and began to hiss and snigger as they cajoled one another with snide remarks and elbows.

  “Right!” began the man again. “At attention, eyes front, or you can row right back out to your ship and tell your Captain it's open-ocean whaling for the lot of you!” This statement hit its mark, and the men straightened up. “Right! Now each of you will find plenty to do here on shore between proper whale hunts. Every one here helps everyone else, regardless of who killed which whale, or which ship the whale’s bones and oil are leaving on. Whales brought in by a ship’s crew will be marked; and that whale will be tagged and tracked through processing, from flensing to boiling. Everything is above board here, and no one is to be cheated. We’re counting on your honesty!” He said. The men began to turn their heads and chatter again, mocking the man.

  “Right! While on shore, normal work hours are from six in the morning until six in the evening; unless we get a late whale, at which point, all hands will assist in securing the whale to the sheers for the following day’s processing. You see those long poles sticking into the water there, look like they were made from huge trees?” The men turned briefly and looked toward the water. “Those are the sheers. You tie the whales to those like your mother’s life depended on it, because there is nothing worse than waking up the next morning and finding that the tide and the sharks have had their way with your fortune!”

  “Whales are hunted in rotation among the teams; unless more than one whale broaches in the bay at the same time, at which point, each ship’s hunting party will be dispatched by me, in order, according to the roster. If it happens that all hands are at sea chasing whales at the same time, the station will continue processing with the skeleton crew of women and natives. The first boats back are always the first boats to go back out, and so on. It’s a case of the rich getting richer, gentlemen. That should give you some motive to be quickest to the chase!” The man paused, watching the men digest his words.

  He continued, “Right! For now, I don’t know how much you know about shore whaling, but I am going to assume that it is next to nothing. Each of you spread out and choose your own working party. Do not get in the way! Do not ask questions unless asked! When you feel handy with the work being performed at your station, then join in. Remember, we all depend on one another here to survive and to succeed. Any questions?” the man asked as he looked up and down the line. He finished by saying, “Good! Dismissed!”

  The men looked around hesitantly; and then began to meander up the beach leisurely in all directions.

  “Move! Run!” The big, bushy-bearded man bellowed.

  The men scattered like startled cats. They each blended into different groups of a few men already working. One or two stopped at different steaming cast-iron cauldrons; others gathered around several large whale carcasses being stripped of blubber; and the rest crowded around the odd collection of huge bones being dried and picked clean in the sun.

  Arthur felt drawn to the huge, bubbling cauldrons. He had seen humorous bills posted back home depicting primitive natives cooking men alive in such pots. He chuckled to himself, but remained silent as he had been instructed. He soon realized that these large, cast-iron cookers were arranged in groups of three, strapped together tightly in a triangle. He soon learned by listening to the more experienced workers that the process involved with the pots was also itself called trying, which referred to the boiling and breaking down of the large chunks of blubber into useable oil. So it made sense to him when one of the workers called it a try-pot. He watched as long strips of blubber, two-feet wide and about twenty-feet long, were carried over from the flensing station where they were being peeled off of the side of the leviathan with large, hooked blades strapped to the end of long poles. These were the flenses, similar to medieval implements of battle. He witnessed the cutting of the strips into one-foot by two-foot blocks, which were laid out ready to be cast into the cauldrons. Smaller loose chunks and remnants were thrown under the pots into a makeshift furnace, the whale supplying the bulk of its own fuel for burning. The smell of incinerated whale fat did not wholly sicken Arthur, as he had felt before. He remembered roasting wild game back on the plantation.

  His job seemed to be the simplest on the shore from what he could see; but Arthur hedged his enthusiasm and kept his head down, so as to hide any weakness and prevent any ribbing from his unfamiliar workmates. Everything went well, and Arthur soon began to grab chunks and chuck them into the pots. The other men on his team were either disinterested in Arthur, or they had become indifferent to everything in the face of long, hypnotic hours of monotonous labor. Arthur had happily resigned himself to anonymity, when suddenly one of the men spoke up.

  “Where are you from, mate?” he asked in a British accent. The front of his grubby uniform was smudged with oil and dirt, but his spirits seemed bright.

  “America.” Arthur said.

  “Ah, a Yank!” said the man. “John, we got a Yank in our midst!”

  “I heard, I heard.” the other Brit said.

  “Go on, mate. Which ship is that you came in on?” asked the first man, looking over his shoulder toward the bay. “That’s not American, is it?” he asked.

  “The sh...sh... Shibboleth.” Arthur stammered.

  “The what?” asked the first Brit. “Oh! The Elizabeth! That’s right. But what are you doing on an English ship, mate?” he asked.

  Arthur appreciated the man’s liberal use of the word mate. He replied, “Yeah, that’s it. She was in Liberty Town, takin’ on supplies and men. The First Mate said somethin’ about ‘no whales off Nantucket, goin’ to New Zealand.’ So’s I said take me! Hell, I didn’t know it was this far. Neither did they, if you ask me.” Arthur finished with a grin. Both men chuckled.

  The Brit said, “Mate, you’re all right. I don’t think I’ve seen any black men down here, except for the Maori. In fact, last I heard, they don’t let your kind out of the country where you come from, right?”

  Arthur shrank from the question. He said timidly, “No. They don’t. I is one of the lucky ones.”

  “Well, mate, I think that’s just great! The first Yank down here, and a black Yank at that!” the Brit exclaimed. He asked, “What’s your name, mate?”

  Arthur said, “Arthur, sir.”

  The first Brit said, “Sir? What the hell you calling me sir for? I work for a living, just like you. Never mind mate, it’s just as well. We call everyone new around here ‘Jack.’ Isn’t that right, John?”

  His friend said his words through a loud, wet belch, “Yeah, sure, Jack.”

  The first Brit turned back to Arthur and said, “Don’t mind that shite head. Your name’s gonna be ‘Black Jack’. What d'ya think about that, mate?”

  Arthur didn’t see any choice but to accept his new moniker cheerfully. He replied, “Yeah, sure mate, that’s great.” He asked, “What’s your name?”

  The first Brit perked up at Arthur’s interest in him; and he replied, “Groggy Jack, mate! And that snot there is Happy Jack.” He laughed, looked around, and in a low, cheeky voice
, said, “And tonight you’ll find out why!” He laughed again as he continued stirring the steaming, odorous lard.

  II

  “Work’s almost finished, Black Jack!” exclaimed Groggy Jack. He turned to his other, less gregarious partner, and said, “Get the wash water ready, Happy Jack!” The other man snorted and grunted a mumbled agreement. “You can start getting ready for your bath, Black Jack.”

  Arthur hesitated with uncertainty, looking around the beach. The roving watch told each party the time was just past six. Arthur could see several men from each group putting down their tools and standing fast. No whales had come in that day. It was early in the season, and the migratory whales would arrive when they wished. Arthur was lucky to see some of the waning warm weather of the South Pacific. Noticing the sun stood unusually high in the evening sky, Arthur was grateful to feel the last bit of Fall before the cold, wet winter set in.

  With no whales being dragged in from the sea, and no new ships arriving, the men were free for the night. Arthur could see that the men of the beach were in a festive mood, even though he had heard throughout the day that riotous celebration normally followed a large catch.

  “What are you doing, Black Jack?” Groggy asked. “Get those clothes off, and get ready.”

  Arthur paused for another moment. He scanned the beach further, and saw men engaged in happy chatter undressing unceremoniously. Also, many women, both white and brown-skinned, had begun to move among the groups and collect the discarded garments, seemingly indifferent to the natural state of the nude whalers. Arthur finally began to undress.

  “Mate, what the hell is wrong with that uniform?” demanded Groggy in a joking manner. “Did they issue the cabin boy’s spare to you?” he asked.

  “I am the Cabin Boy.” Said Black Jack. He didn’t fully understand the sleight behind Groggy’s comment. “I think I grew a little bit on the trip.” Said Black Jack.