by Jeremy Page
Captain Bray drained an entire glass of wine before continuing. ‘We anchored October, no, late September—it was the first week of October, it was, and spent many weeks trading and preparing for the winter and the like. I shot caribou, Sykes—you must try it, for they fall like oak trees—got the beast right in the ear—and the meat was hot-smoked and is excellent for avoiding the scurvy. We fetched this pond water and what provisions the locals could muster, although their diet is usually quite terrible. Most of their food remains in the gaps in their teeth. I arranged for the topmasts to be removed, and we tented the decks to protect against the ice.’ Bray looked at me directly: ‘You know that an icicle falling from the yards can kill a man? I heard of it happening, speared him right through from neck to heart. I think it was on Jan Mayen, but I might be wrong. We tied ourselves to the Yankee whaler, the Mystic, that had decided to overwinter with us. No, on Jan Mayen it was the frostbite, that’s right. Where the man lost his nose. By late October there was no choice but to stick it out, you see. The bay ice had come in, uncommonly like porridge it was, with higher blocks coming in off the streams and fixing the sea rapidly. You could hear it growling and your instinct is to sail, sail, sail—you understand that, Sykes, don’t you? We’ve all dreamt of ice.’
‘I dream it before each voyage, without fail. In fact, if I didn’t dream it, I might decide to stay on shore.’
‘When the ice was as thick as this fist of mine, we weighed the anchors through these fine-cut holes we’d made. It was the ice that held us, nothing more. You would think it sets like a sheet of steel, gentlemen, but over the months we travelled several hundred yards across the bay. A snail’s pace.’
Bletchley braved a question: ‘So what did you do for all that time?’
Bray looked back at him, expansive. ‘Oh, much fun, on the whole. And plenty of hours for your fancy needlework, Sykes. Many evenings mallymarking with the Yankee boys and some with the Esquimaux. They cannot take their drink, no, not at all. Unlike the Americans, who can’t take being sober. We had a Christmas dance and game of football on the ice.’
‘Against the Americans?’ Bletchley asked.
‘Absolutely. The Esquimaux refuse to use their feet. They keep picking up the ball and running away with it.’
‘What was the score?’
Bray slapped the table. ‘A victory, gentlemen, of eight to five! With our goal only this much smaller than theirs!’
Bray was enjoying the sound of his own voice, and the taste of our food, often speaking through a mouth half filled with cold cut ham. He told us about the aurora lights that filled the night with eerie ribbons of colour, how the deck and ice and even the smoke from the men’s pipes would be lit with these strange glows. ‘Sometimes, you imagine a sound that accompanies the lights,’ he said, oddly, then continued to tell us that he had found a new respect for the ice and the world it creates. ‘When the sun returned it came first as a glow sitting on the horizon, as if a bonfire was set there, beneath the curve of the world. We stood on the ice to welcome it back—the entire crew. A curious thing, Sykes, I tell you, the sun broke through the horizon, yet our shadows all pointed towards it, for the moonlight was stronger.’ He stopped, abruptly. ‘Of course, here’s me talking about this and yet with us is Mr Talbot, who knows more about surviving on the ice than the rest of us put together. When your ship was crushed, how long did you spend on the floe?’
I thought Talbot was not going to answer. He chewed his food for a good time, considering the question.
‘Five weeks, sir.’
‘Five weeks, you say? That is a length of time! What was your shelter—did you tent?’
‘Carpenter built some shacks from the timber. We had the whaleboats, too, upturned. And six months of rum.’
‘With reason to drink it,’ Sykes added.
Talbot was surprisingly keen to say his part. ‘What we done was have these two men on the edge of the floe, on the lookout for passing ships. The rest of us was just waiting, twenty mile off, roaring drunk for most of the time—I honestly remember little of it.’
‘How cold did it become?’ Bletchley asked. Talbot looked at him, as if being bothered by a mosquito.
‘Like I says, I don’t remember.’ He sat still for a while. Neither captain spoke. Perhaps they knew that, given time, Talbot would continue.
Sure enough, he did. ‘Only two things. The iron went brittle, it could shatter with just a tap here and there. And the rum began to freeze, even though it were wholesale strength. So we took turns keeping the barrels warm.’
‘So you keep the liquor warm first, before the men!’ Bray said.
‘That’s just about right, sir. It took ’em a month till those ones on the edge of the floe flagged a ship. But when they came back to our camp, bringing some of the other crew, that crew sat down on the ice and got drunk with us, too. Thing was, we couldn’t carry all those barrels of rum, see, and not one of us wanted to leave it. So when we set out for the rescue ship, we was wandering in all disarray, and weren’t prepared. We was nearly at the edge of the floe and that was when the blizzard came.’
‘With no shelter?’ Bray asked.
‘Most of the men lay down and slept. Still drunk on the rum and that.’
‘How long was the storm?’
‘There were fifty-five men on that ship, plus twelve from the rescue ship, and six who made it off the ice.’
Talbot took a pause and Captain Bray leant over the table and filled his drink for him. Talbot thanked him, and held up his left hand in display. For the first time I noticed the ends of three of his fingers were missing. He let them be examined, turning his stumped fingers this way and that for all to see. They had the appearance of wax candles that might have been left on a windowsill, broken and half melted. I was quite amazed that I had never noticed them before. ‘And I hant got no toes to count of,’ he said, with a proud smile, directed at Bletchley and myself. Talbot had a shuffling walk, and he refused to shake hands with people. It made sudden sense.
‘Yes, the Arctic is a cold mistress,’ Bray answered in a similar vein. ‘She will invite you into her bed and you are best not to sleep with her. The sea has options, but the ice, no. This spring, when the floe opened in March we sallied the ship and were quickly out.’
Bletchley interrupted: ‘What does sallied mean?’
Sykes answered for the other captain by rocking his hand in the air. ‘Most amusing to watch—the men run from side to side across the deck, forcing the ship to sway and break free of light ice.’
‘Within a week we were in the hunting grounds,’ Bray went on. ‘We made many kills of Greenland whales, especially as the mothers were sluggish with their calving. Very fine hunting. But inexplicably the whale herd disappeared, we do not know where they went. There was nothing to be done. We killed a few dozen seals, but it was wasted effort. Then without warning we were in the most terrible storm. Those whales must have smelt it, you see. They knew and we didn’t—we have only that brass barometer fixed there for us, whereas they have their thick wise old heads. We had to bare-pole it, but even that was of no use. That’s when we sprung the foremast and then lost it altogether, and we had just made good of that when we had the fire in the try-works on deck. One hell of a storm it was, too. It even rained fish, can you wonder at that. Bouncing on the deck as high as a man’s waist! No, I am totally mistaken: first it was the fire, and then the storm. It doesn’t matter—the wisdom of it is that we are returning to Hull, barrels still not made, and rather at a limp.’
The two captains had known each other for many years. They discussed at length the current conditions of ice and the advancement of the seasons, the patterning of bergs and the compaction of floes near glaciers, but I had the sense that neither one was really listening to the other. Rather, they were manufacturing the time necessary to drink several bottles of wine we had brought over. Fairly soon, I realised they were both quite drunk, and my own glass had been refilled so many times that I was viewing
the room with a certainty of familiarity and uncertainty of focus, where both captains—being small, rotund and rounded in the back—appeared plausibly related or very possibly the same man. Bletchley, too, was being filled with wine. He repeatedly laughed with a shrill high-pitched giggle I had not heard before, and was not keen to hear again. Only Talbot appeared sober. Or his saturnine temperament gave him the impression of sobriety. Recounting the tale of being stuck on the ice had been the longest speech I had heard him construct, and it appeared to have exhausted him. For the rest of the meal he sat brooding under a contracted brow, as if he was carved of oak.
Bray leant forward and whispered carefully, ‘I have something to show your passengers, Sykes. It will open their eyes.’
Sykes raised his eyebrows, drunkenly: ‘By all means.’
‘This way, gentlemen.’ Bray pushed his seat back with a loud scrape, letting it fall noisily behind him. He didn’t bother to pick it up.
‘Excuse the stink,’ he said, amusing himself, as he led us onto a lower deck strewn with sacking and barrels, canvas, coils of rope, cooper’s hoops, barrel staves, chains, hooks, tools and cases. I stood among the mess, feeling sick and disorientated. It looked as if the ship had rolled and the only things that had remained in place were the thirty or so hammocks that hung from bolts in the beams. In the dim light, I imagined that these hammocks—filled with blankets and one or two sleeping men—were the burial shrouds of some forgotten expedition.
‘Careful where you tread, it is the flinch gut here, and still rather greasy,’ Bray advised, perhaps viewing the disorder of his ship for the first time and attempting to tidy it up with a shove of his foot. ‘There are men asleep. I think there are, anyhow.’ I paled at the thought of an entire Arctic winter spent down here, with virtually no light, the air dense with smoke and the foul reek of unwashed men, while a howling wind tore down the slopes of barren mountains outside.
Bray was keen to explain: ‘The gas from the blubber casks was so virulent, several of the men have been blinded. They are as sightless as worms down here. But I have seen it before, they’ll be fine in a week or two. You might have noticed our brass work has turned bluish-black? It is the effect of the gases.’
Approaching the end of the ship, the deck curved upwards at such an angle that even Bray had to bend his neck below the beams. There was a noticeable and inexplicable cooling of the air, and a scent of ice, as if part of this dirty, fire-blackened ship had remained frozen. I touched a beam and felt its cold damp surface, and quickly wiped my hand on my handkerchief.
It was now so dark on the lower deck Bray ordered a lamp to be brought. We passed it down the line, as miners might do in a pit. At the head of us, the captain was busy dismantling a rough wall which had been built of packing crates, talking to himself all the while, an image of derangement, as if he was intent on loosening the supports until the roof fell upon us.
At last, with a cry of satisfaction, he made an entrance of sorts among the packing crates. He turned to us, holding a gravedigger’s lantern, and said: ‘The most wondrous sight on earth.’
I followed Bletchley, who was for once totally quiet, into an enclosed space which was entirely floored with large blocks of cut ice. The captain hung his lantern on a beam nail and immediately we saw the spectacle he had led us to. Across the bed of ice, a giant white bear had been laid out. It was a vast animal, two or three feet high at the waist, and sloping in a thick hide of matted fur towards a head that was the size of several blacksmith’s anvils.
‘Christ!’ Bletchley exclaimed.
‘Your first bear?’ the captain asked, his eyes glinting happily.
‘Yes. Yes, absolutely.’
One after the other, Sykes and Talbot crawled into the space, and uttered amazement when they saw what was there.
‘She came to the ships in January, during the night,’ Bray said, proudly. ‘I believe she was starving. She moaned on the ice below us and scratched at the hull. It was a quite terrible sound to listen to, and a dreadful sight. She was like a ghost down there—if you looked directly at her, then she vanished, she was as grey as bone, as was the ice. All you could see were her eyes, for they are as black as Whitby jet. On your departure, you might see the marks where her claws worked the wood. They’re deep, gentlemen—make no mistake how soft her claws would find the human body, if she were to bestow you one of her affections.’
‘Who shot her?’ I asked.
‘I had the pleasure myself,’ the captain replied, squinting an eye and pulling a trigger finger, once more, at his victim. ‘But I was careful not to aim for the head, so it took a few bullets to finish her off. Her keel is full of lead ballast!’
‘Why didn’t you aim for the head?’ Talbot asked.
‘Because this, men, is a fortune you are looking at. I shall sell this white beast to a fat country squire who wants to scare his guests at Christmas by placing her in the entrance hall of his manor. When she’s stuffed she will be worth several dozen barrels of finest spermaceti. With her I’ll be able to fix much of the Jester.’
‘Why haven’t you skinned her?’ Sykes asked.
‘An Esquimaux boy was going to perform it for me, but an intact body is far more valuable. Without the bones and flesh the English taxidermist has very little accuracy in reconstructing its true size. They stuff ’em like settees, gentlemen, and then they’re worthless.’
The neck lay stiff as a wooden bough, but the aspect of her expression was that of a sleeping animal. The weight of the jaw had created a slight dish to the ice below it, and the bear nestled into this hollow, as if at peace. Fortunately, I was positioned directly by the head, so I was able to crouch down to make an examination. She had a dark-lipped mouth, open enough for me to see the points of several teeth. With the stem of my tobacco pipe I parted the lips, gradually, though there was much resistance, until a fang the length of an index finger was revealed. Behind it, I saw a livid tongue vanishing into the deep shadow of her throat, and beyond that was the cruel wild interior of the animal. I wondered if this beast had killed a man. He would have had a similar view into this terrible aperture, just before his death. But now, on the bed of ice, the ferocity and malice of the bear had gone, especially as the tip of my pipe gave it an almost comical look, as if she was going to smoke with us.
‘You must shake hands with her,’ the captain suggested, pushing one of the paws towards us with his boot.
Bletchley tried first, lifting the great paw with both of his hands until it was just clear of the ice. He passed it to me. The weight of the bear’s fist, and her arm, was considerable. The fur was so deep and dense my fingers disappeared far into it, yet still my hands were unable to reach either side of the paw. I felt the abrasive surfaces of the pads, as rough as tree bark, and the curve of several claws that had the smooth hard feel of carpenter’s nails.
‘It had a young with it,’ Bray said, somewhat wistfully. ‘It fled across the ice when we fired the guns,’ he continued, his theatrical ringmaster tone returning. ‘And you have shaken hands with its mother, now. That cub will smell her scent on you, gentlemen, beware.’
I realised his joke was not all humour. He looked back at me with a small-eyed stare, midway between amusement and something more diabolical, and I thought, it is you, Captain Bray, it is you who have the eyes as dark as Whitby jet.
6
OUR TWO SHIPS WERE separated by the same wind, one back to a British port, and the other towards an Arctic which was dangerous and unearthly. The evidence of fires and storms, the filth of butchery, the below-decks world of a charnel house where the bear was frozen, a corpse in a tomb, all these things had unsettled me. But it was the frost-blackened faces and dirty hands of the Jester’s crew—standing in threadbare clothes made good, mended, patched and neglected—that awoke in me an apprehension I could not control. They had had a look in their eyes that gauged—with a quick dark measured glance—the strength of your heart. And your chance of survival. The Arctic held a tragedy for an
y one of us. They measured these things effortlessly, with experience, and it had showed in the flicker of a smile at the corner of a mouth, or the suggestion of a raised eyebrow. Certainly, Bletchley, with his ridiculous mustard trousers and conker-polished riding boots, had been a figure of amusement: a fool, in a part of the world that had no time for fools. Me, they were probably less sure of. More than likely they had seen the clothes of a gentleman, and thought nothing more.
I think it was Captain Bray who, despite his showmanship and theatrical manner, had sensed more in me than I have revealed for many years. He knew, while I was being led through the foul belly of his ship, that I was afraid. Afraid of the Arctic. Back in my cabin I was unable to forget the sight of the splintered hull of the Jester, where the ice had dragged its fangs along the timber, and the gouges where the polar bear had tried desperately to dig her way into a ship that smelt of food and human cargo. I lay on my bunk and imagined the bear’s greyness in the polar night, how she must have looked as she stood on the ice by the ship, with hungry black eyes looking at the strange wooden vessel that was stuck fast in her world. Overhead, the spectral green streamers of the aurora borealis, twisting and lurking in the heavens with unknown intent. How could a man not lose his mind in such ice, such darkness, such absence as that?