Right up by the stove he has his bed, a wooden bunk laid deep in dried deerskins. The wool of these northern reindeer is thicker than that of the deer of England, the skins more substantial, warm beneath the body and above it as a heavy embrace. They are roughly cured yet do not smell too strong; they will last him out till next summer. The skins and the fire are to be his comforts. Besides these all his furnishings are a plain table and a chair, and the chest, itself overlaid with skins, in which he keeps whatever he has carried about from port to port, a few possessions of use or those that cling to him from the past: clothes, twine, knife, Bible and prayer-book, the cobbling tools with which he once worked on land and which have since whiled away long hours of voyage and waiting, and his fiddle, laid on the top and wrapped about with a length of embroidered cloth.
This he takes out, he unfolds it from the cloth and hangs it on the wall. Not too close to the stove lest it take too much heat. The action of putting out the instrument, laying it across the pegs he has fixed, is a making of home. Gently he handles it, and the fine touch of the wood brings a memory to his fingers. The fiddle has been hung this same way before, once on another wall of wooden planks, beside a square glassless window with a yard and a garden beyond. For a second he caresses it, holds and then with cool self-control dismisses the picture from his mind. In this room there will be no windows, no views of land or sky.
No dreams, he tells himself, but function. This space is designed, fitted, for survival alone. He turns to the things that his shipmates have given him. So much they think a man needs: three muskets, some pounds of shot, a powder-horn and a barrel of powder that he will keep warm and dry before the stove, a sword that he will put beside the door, a prayer-book, an almanac, a telescope, a blank-paged log and a bundle of pens from Captain Duke that he lays neat and square to the right-hand corner of his table. He lays the log down there and hesitates, wonders what record he will make of this day, takes it up again in two worn hands and lays it this time in the centre before the chair. Yet he does not sit, not yet. He goes instead to the door beyond which the provisions were stacked, begins to sort which things he must bring inside the chamber and which can be left out to whatever extreme of climate will occur in the months to come. There are firkins, barrels, casks, sacks; hard bread, ship's biscuits, butter, cheeses, cured meats, dried plums, liquors, sugar, spices. Astonishing to see the complexity of his requirements. They have left him tobacco also, tinder, candles, soap. He begins to lay and sort but has not the heart to finish the job that night. Suddenly he is tired down to his bones, he cannot see the purpose of so many things, so much victualling for him only, just for one man alone; it seems mad and extraordinary luxury as if all a man alone needed might be air.
He will leave everything where it stands, this night at least. He pulls the heavy door to on his cell. In the log he will write one thing only, the title and the date: The twenty-fourth day of August in the Year of Our Lord 1616. To Captain Thomas Marmaduke of Hull, an account of the experience of the seaman Thomas Cave, his stay at Duke's Cove on the shore of the unexplored territory of East Greenland, the first winter any man is known to spend at that place.
3
HE SLEEPS HEAVILY that first night and knows no dream. He wakes innocent of thought in the insulated room, wakes to utter silence and darkness broken only by the glow of embers. How long is it since he has slept without a dozen other bodies snoring, farting, rustling about him? He closes his eyes again, lies back beneath the weight of deerskins and listens, listens with intensity until he can hear the distant screech of gulls and a drumming that might be that of the sea but might be no more than the pulse of blood in his inner ear. It is an instant more before the knowledge of identity and place return to him.
Daylight is so very fine and clean that emerging from the tent he feels as if he has come from some shaft deep underground. He stands and blinks, his hand upon the doorpost. The bright paleness of his eyes reflects that of the sky. Thomas Cave has the look of the North to him even though he was not born to it: tall, long-boned, gaunt in his features, fair in his colouring, some austere Nordic gene in the Suffolk man that gives him ease with this landscape, the spiny peaks, the coldly lapping sea, that gives him also his sureness of movement, walking with loping strides across the scantily covered soil from the tent towards the crease of the rivercourse, along it and away to a slope he knows where the walls of rock curve about and give shelter facing into the sun and the scurvy grass is found.
He carries a sickle and a hessian sack. He has his plan, knows that he must make full use of the daylight and the brief growing season remaining. This day he will cut salad, though salad is a lush name for this grass which is almost the only edible vegetation here, a bitter cress-like herb that the sailors know as a healing plant for ulcers and infections of the mouth, and more importantly as a prophylactic against scurvy. He will work the day through, seek through the bog and across the base of the mountain, fill the sack if enough green stuff can be found and take it in to dry under cover, spread the stalks as once he had done hay on a rack to preserve it through the winter. He knows he is late; stems and foliage are sparse, hard to find, but even the meanest leaves will have value brewed as tea.
Three things they say hold against scurvy: salad and fruit, fresh meat, and activity also, for it is observed among sailors that it is ever the indolent of nature who succumb first to the disease, as if God's judgement might be in it. Only this last point Thomas Cave will not accept, he will not believe such judgements are made on a man in this life but only in the next. His is a modern and reasoning mind, he will not put the cause down to any such superstition but suspects instead that there is some direct correlation to be made there, either that physical activity builds the humours of the body to resistance against the disease or that the lazy have some inbuilt weakness or predisposition upon which the disease may prey. Or it may be that this impression is created only by the apparent indolence of the disease itself, which creeps up on a man and makes him slow and feeble, thins his blood and his fibres so that his lips crack and his teeth loosen, and his energy drains into carelessness until he lies and dies curled on his bunk like a baby with his fists between his folded knees.
Either way he shall hold to his will. If by action he can keep the disease at bay then he shall do so. He ekes his way across the landscape, clump by clump, bending low or sometimes on his knees, looking up at last in surprise to see how the sky has turned colour, how suddenly the sun seems to have slipped down to meet the sea of the bay. It aches to straighten up. He puts downs the sickle and stretches, turns his head in a circular motion to loosen his neck, rubs the muscles of his back where they run down to his waist. His body has become stiff, it is not as supple as it once was. The colour softens and builds, a pink glow that reaches right across the sky and the sea by the time he returns to the tent, the good of the day of labour like a prayer in his heart.
This first day of my sojourn broke clear and fine, for which the Lord be thanked, and I rose early and set about to gather scurvy grass from where I have seen it grow in the lee of the mountain to the south. This I have brought in to the tent and spread for drying there.
No sweetness to its scent as he lays it out but a pungent, sulphurous tang against the smokiness of the atmosphere, the evening air harsh with frost. When night comes the air is cold, the sky stark and with an icy shimmer to it. I do not expect that I shall find much further opportunity for forage.
He closes his eyes, yawns, the quill in his hands. What more is he to write? Life is very plain when it is reduced to one day at a time and to that one day's routine of survival. He has worked, returned, begun the arrangement of his stores. On some pages at the back of the log he sets out a list of the quantity of the stores and begins a calculation of the amounts to be consumed each week.
Only three days more the fine weather holds. The last of those days he allots himself for exploration. He has noted how visibility has become startlingly greater than even on the clea
rest days of summer, when a party of the whalers had gone inland and followed the river course back to the falls and climbed the southern of the two sharp peaks that overlooked the bay. He sets himself the other, northern peak, which is the more rugged, the spinier of the two. So sheer it rises from the beach that he cannot imagine making an ascent from that side, but only from behind, if he is to walk first to the falls and then along the ridge above. He has studied this south-eastern face closely, looking for the possibility of a path, thankful for the angle and sharpness of the morning light which defines and shades each incline, rock and feature of the mountainside as if it were engraved with a fine point.
All is so clear. Distance, foreground, everything has detail. The colours in the stones, the green and yellow blooms of lichen, the stems and reddened leaves of tiny scant plants. The grain of the rock, its cracks and the sharp edges that he can feel even through his boots and that graze the fingers when he must scramble. The mountainside marbled with black ravines, silvery watercourses, snowfields of polished whiteness. The valley falling away beneath him, the blackness of the bog and the glistening of the streams running into it, a tangle of white streaks that weave out and back into one another like the boughs and twigs of a tree.
At the summit there is a wind that stings his eyes to tears. The peak is so sharp that he dare not stand full upon it for more than a second for fear the wind will blow him away. He crouches instead in the lee of a rock, the elation in him holding him taut as a leopard waiting to pounce. Or a watching eagle. Before his eyes an eagle view: throughout his field of vision, mountains in the form of flames, burning white with the sun upon them, and beyond in all directions, smooth and blue-white, a frozen sea.
It is my opinion that this cannot be East Greenland but an island, a place for which we have no name. Our ships had sailed the southern coast and we had thought the land to be a promontory or projection from a greater mainland but yesterday I climbed the mountain to the north and discovered that it was not so, that the place is indeed surrounded by sea in all directions. The sea to the north appears to be frozen so it is yet possible that it may connect by the ice to further land.
On this day, the second of September, I saw for the first time a small quantity of drift ice driving to and fro in the bay, and with the telescope I saw upon one piece far out two sea horses lying asleep. I judged however that they were too far off for hunting.
He saw cloud also, cloud that crept in swiftly from the east as he looked out to sea, that when he turned hung suddenly leaden over the island behind him. The temperature had turned as fast, a sudden drop that was almost as tangible as the loss of light. The first snow to fall since he had begun his time alone was a thin, mean snow, no more than a light fall, just enough to cover the surface of the island, to hide rock and vegetation for one opaque still day until the winds sprang up and stripped some places bare again.
In the snow I have found tracks of deer close to the tent. In the stillness and fog of the previous day I did not like to venture far from the tent for fear that I would be unable to return, but this day it was possible to hunt. I killed a reindeer of good size not one hundred yards from the door. With this in addition to the ship's rations and the birds I have trapped I have hanging in the tent now a good stock of meat.
The deer was a stag and it was clear that it did not know the sight of man. He had worked from downwind, taking every care, walking crouched and with silent footsteps in the snow, and yet just as he came within range the animal had sensed something and looked about and he could have sworn that it looked directly at him, alert for an instant as he had seen deer so many times before, in that intense frozen second before they set to flight. Only this one did not flee but saw him with his arm extended into the musket, taking aim, and put down its great antlered head as if he were nothing animate, nothing more than a piece of driftwood, an alien tree washed up upon the shore, and munched again at some thin mosses where its hooves had churned up a patch of snow.
The stag was too heavy for him to bring and hang inside so he had done his butchery immediately at the site of the killing, with cold hands and the wind swirling odd icy flakes like pinpricks against his face. He skinned, removed the entrails, crudely hacked up the carcase leaving what he did not want for foxes and gulls to scavenge. The pieces he cut off he brought into the tent and there in a copper washed them in vinegar and strewed them with pepper. Suspended between the poles the meat now begins to freeze even as it hangs, leaving on the floor beneath it a pool of iced blood so dark that it is almost black. He has kept back one steak to eat fresh that evening, strong dark meat and very lean.
More deer appear on the following day and he has further success, killing two younger animals, hauling them in to hang in the tent and using pieces of them to bait the snares he has set for foxes. The hours of daylight are short, the sky low, the sun a colour, an idea rather than a form, too often obscured behind a weight of cloud. He feels an urgency to his hunting, each pound of meat to hang and freeze or preserve a piece of time ensured. He does not know what light, what cold, to expect of the winter, nor if there will be any breathing warm-blooded thing to live it through besides himself.
4
MICHAELMAS. THESE THREE days a blizzard has kept me in. Its wildness came upon the place suddenly and with great drama, akin more to an ocean squall than any storm on land. The cell is sound and snug and resists all but the finest whisper of a draught though the wind howls within the shuddering walls of the tent outside and fine snow has penetrated there and piles up in the corners and on the surfaces of the stores and against the far wall. Each day once or twice when the fury of the blizzard has by its sound seemed to drop I have gone to the door of the tent and cleared the space beyond it lest the snow accumulate so high that I am buried within.
There he pauses, and in the vacancy of the moment his imagination catches the word his pen has formed. Involuntarily, he closes his eyes. Every now and then it is so, and the fear takes him. On his eyelids he can feel the snow falling, white blotting out the colour, white flakes gathering, burying him. He can feel the snow in his eyes, growing heavier; cold on his lips, squeezing between them as between the seams of the tent; snow, weightless flakes gathering weight; fingers frozen reaching through snow.
No, buried he will not say. He will say cocooned. He scratches out the first word, spilling a blot of ink, writes the other above, a long comforting word full of encircling 'o's. The snow becomes soft then, a wrapping, a cushion, a downy casing between himself and the outside. In the candlelight, in the silence of the inner chamber, his lips mouth silently what he has written, finding comfort in the forms of words, in the facts stated, the process of stating them, using them to quell the fear.
Lest the quantity of wood be short to last through all the time I may require to spend here, I have made a trial of the fire, setting into the midst of the raked embers a log of elm and piling it over with ashes. I found that it was still alight some sixteen hours after.
That is the sort of thing Captain Duke will want to know. What reason can observe, what the body can do. The Captain has given him the log so that he might record not his thoughts but the facts - the means of survival - so that if he should be no longer alive when the Heartsease returns the book will at least testify to the conditions he has met with and the viability of any future attempt to winter in these latitudes.
Two old shallops that lay abandoned on the beach I have broken up and brought in to supplement the store of firewood. I have stored the planks within my cabin, laying them horizontally across the rafters so that they form a rough ceiling and assist in containing the heat of the fire.The labour itself was warming, the wood of the old whaleboats brittle with age and salt and splitting sharply, releasing the smell of ingrained tar, a sharp, smoky smell that itself carried the memory of warmth.
There remains a quantity of driftwood along the bay but I believe this to be a limited stock. Since there are no trees in these latitudes, all the driftwood on these beaches
must have come off the coasts of Norway, and since no men have lived here before to have the use of it, I can only guess that what I see here is the accumulation of centuries, of all God's time since the world began, and what I use will take many centuries to replace.
Any thought beyond the practical is an indulgence, a vanity. Vain for himself and for his survival and without interest to any other man. It would be a vanity to think that Captain Duke put a value on his thought, on his person even, for all that he had embraced him at their parting and held him close like a friend.
They had only spoken, spoken properly man to man, the one time, some few days after the wager was made when the Captain had him called to his cabin and took him into it alone. He had not seen inside of it before and had been surprised at the warmth and homeliness of it, a warm brown furnished room but cramped, where Duke, being only a short man, could stand, but he must stoop to speak with him and yet could not feel at ease to take up the chair that was offered.
The details of the interview have run through his mind many times, so much in it unspoken which he might, just might perhaps, if he had been another man, have found the words for, and in them explanation, meaning, comprehension, an answer to what lay blank inside himself.
'The men have told me of your determination, Thomas Cave. They say that they would have me hold their money staked against our return next season, yet I will not take it from them until I have your confirmation that you desire it to be so.'
'I do that.'
Only three words there, and those ones came to him clear and without pause. He had said what he had said and did not see cause for the Captain to doubt it.
The Solitude of Thomas Cave Page 3