Now that the winter is over, he has written in his log, there is such an abundance of creatures and species here that it altogether boggles the mind, such numbers coming off the sea that you had not thought so many creatures could have survived and reproduced themselves since Noah's Flood.
There were reindeer corning in, corning up to the tent and looking at him without any appearance of fear, and they were lean as sticks after the winter and hardly worth the killing. He did not know from where they had come, and marvelled that they came at all for there was so little for them to feed on at first, the vegetation so recently stripped of snow that it had not even greenness to it yet every patch of pale moss on the mountainside behind the shore was marked with the glossy piles of their droppings.
With such plenty about him he saw that he could choose what he might hunt, knowing that whatever he required for his survival was so infinitesimal that its loss could hardly be reckoned. He phrased a prayer of thanksgiving in his mind and remembered how Adam had lived alongside the beasts in Eden, and made it his rule to kill no more than he needed. Gulls dived so close to his head that their wingtips brushed his hair but he made no attempt to knock them down; their eggs alone were enough to feed five thousand. And then there were the seals that came soon as the ice had broken apart and given them passage, these too in huge herds that played together in the water and then drew themselves on to the beach, steaming and snorting and jostling one another like cattle crowded into a market. The company of the seals touched him as that of none of the other creatures had, some kinship about them that made him at once warm and alone. It was their great uncanny eyes, so redolent of human expression as they popped their heads out from the ice and watched him. They made him conscious of himself as he had not been since he had last seen men, as he had thought he could not be save before another human being.
He walked out on the ice as far as he dared and crouched down on his hunkers before the ice holes and gazed back at them, eye to eye, and at last he began to speak to them, beneath his breath, just for the relief of it, and then one day one of them popped up its head before him and fixed him with such a very human look that he spoke to it aloud. He greeted it and asked it from where it had come, and it turned its head around and looked at him again as if there were indeed words forming there behind its eyes. He laughed at himself then for his fantasy and took himself back to his cabin. Later he went down to the very same hole and this time he had brought his violin with him that he had at last taken down from its pegs on the wall, and he had prepared the bow and tuned its untouched strings as best he could. Seals loved music, the sailors said; there were seals in tales that had human souls and deep under water where men could not see them they danced.
He stood at the edge of the hole in the ice and played, softly, waveringly at first, the notes creaking out of disuse. It was so very long since he had played. So long since he had heard music of any kind. And yet it still existed, he could bring it out of himself. He played to the empty hole and as he did so the tears rose in him and flooded out from his eyes. He held the instrument tighter to his chest then and played the harder, played now from deep within him, played to rouse and exorcise. Suddenly there was a splash and a pop in the hole before him as a seal came up and blew out a spray of water. He played on until his fingers were sore, and took a bow in a second of silence, and not until that was done did the seal dip and disappear.
With the presence of the seals it is as if I live once again in a populated world. Their barks fill the air, and the yelps of the pups that begin to be born now and grow and play at their mothers' sides between the rocks on the strand. The cry of a seal pup is more akin to the cry of a human child than any voice I have otherwise known. Massed together the sound is something like the yells of a mob of children playing, but singly and in distress a man could not I think tell it from the call of fear a human child makes to its parent. I know of no cry so plaintive to my ear as the cry of a seal pup left by its mother alone among the mass. It lies with just the narrow cleft, the idea of a space between itself and all the rest that are strange to it, and reaches up its head and calls that very human and personal cry that seems directed precise as a name, to its mother and to no other. I think that the sense of hearing owned by these beasts must be very acute, for they seem to react to music and even to hear it and be drawn to it from under water, and come then to the surface and crane their necks to listen.
15
THOMAS CAVE WALKS among the seals and either they are not aware of his presence or they trust the man as if he were one of their own. The colony is incessantly watchful, ever a number of heads raised to look about for a source of danger, those at the edge ready at the slightest notice to plunge back off rock or ice into the sea. The sight of a bear runs through the massed bodies like an earthquake and scatters hundreds at an instant's delay. Yet, Thomas Cave observes, the seals have not learnt yet what he knows: the danger inherent in a man.
Does not one of them remember last summer, how the men of the Heartsease came amongst them and clubbed hundreds of their number in a single working shift? How on days when the ice drove in or the bay was held in fog the whalers kept on shore and walked through the strands of mist between the blackness of rock and the blur of snow, weaved among the dense herds of parents and young and clubbed them, one after another? The seals were such easy hunting, so easy to stun them with a single blow of the club to the nose and then to finish them with a knife, hunting as easy and as close as killing a pig in a yard. They butchered them where they killed them and stripped them of their blubber, tens, hundreds at a time, and boiled all the blubber down into oil so that the fishery was thick with the grease and smoke of industry even when they had no sight of a whale.
It seems fantastical to recall, such slaughter in this one spot. The butchery, the boiling, that went on here, the scavenging gulls and the stink of carcases. Yet even now on those rare and lovely days when the sun warms the residues in the boilers and on the ground, a whiff of it trails again in the air.
Where the snow becomes soft and waterlogged, a red staining appears and begins to spread across it. This I have observed in past years, when we have come in the summer and found sometimes whole fields of snow that are stained pinkish red right across their surface. I have met no man yet who could explain to me what it is that causes this curious discoloration.
He cannot understand and yet, this year of all years, the phenomenon seems to him to signify a meaning.
Carnock's big laugh, that echoed off the hardness of rock.
'I'll give you a show, boys.'
Mister Carnock, Mate of the Heartsease, pulling in his audience like a man with a freak to show at a fair. He had never liked Carnock, had taken him from the first as a loud, bragging man, knew him the more so as he swaggered in the bows of the whaleboat as it passed beneath the cliff.
A small herd of seals, stragglers that had had their pups late, on the rocks of the point, only a few of them, slipping into the sea as the boat approached. There was one pup that was very pale and marked with white, just three foot long, and it was cornered in a shallow pool among the rocks, no room for it to dive beneath the boat and join the others that seemed to wait out in the open sea. Carnock threw a net about it and caught it alive, unharmed.
'There's a beauty!' He pulled it in, held it upside down like a trophy, held it by its tail so that its head thrashed against the sides of the boat. Carnock was not a tall man but strong. You could see the strength in his shoulders, even in the way he stood, braced and square.
He threw the pup down on to the floor of the boat and called for men to hold it still. One man sat astride it. Another held its head. Its eyes were huge, rolling, white-edged.
Carnock was precise with his knife, slitting first behind the ears and then along its stomach and around the tail. Every man present had seen a seal flayed before, many times, but never one alive, nor ever heard such yelps of pain. The boat rocked as it writhed about in the pool of blood and bilge.
<
br /> 'There's my baby, there it goes!'
The three of them eventually succeeded in heaving it over the side and back into the sea. It was so slippery without its skin that they had dropped it many times. In the water it straightened and shot off to join the rest, its strength apparently undiminished, and the other seals came and swam about it in a frenzy, frisking and barking in such a strange way that, were it not for the reddening of the water, it might have seemed a celebration.
Thomas Cave heard the laughter of the men about him. It was mob laughter and he closed his ears to it. Inside him was only a terrible silence. His awareness was all for the seal, a mangled length of muscle that continued to swim away with a wake of blood behind it, one long swimming wound like a gash in the sea itself.
As the bay clears of ice it becomes his habit to climb to his lookout on the mountain to watch for the ship as he used to for the sun. Some moments he thinks he cannot bear his isolation a day more, and his longing turns ice floes into sails and makes ships where they do not exist; and yet it can seem a reprieve when a storm comes and holds him again tight indoors as he was through the winter, and when he emerges to see that the ice has come back in. Even as he yearns for the company of men he dreads their return.
Blotches of red on the snow below. A cry that rises to him, the cry of a seal or walrus cub. It is like the cry of a human child.
He remembers how it came at last. The birth. The midwife calling to him, and he going in. The slippery being in her hands, a blind limp thing mouthing for breath like a bloodied fish in air. Its mother dying beside it, the blood run out of her.
THE NARRATIVE
OF THOMAS GOODLARD
Related on the Suffolk coast, two summer evenings of 1640
At Duke's Cove
16
THAT VOYAGE BACK was slow, slow as if the Heartsease herself were reluctant to go north. I remember that I ached with the slowness of it. I was so young, eager with youth. I was at that age when any time of tedium seemed like a weight that dragged against me.
The winds were fickle from the outset, a chill head wind blowing up all of a sudden as we lifted anchor at Hull on a pretty May morning though we had seen another ship slip away ahead of us on the very same tide. Two days then we were held before the mouth of the Humber, riding out the nights first at Paull Road and then at Clee Ness, looking out from the stubborn river across land that was glum even under the brightness of spring, of such dreary flatness that not even the rise of a great church spire across the marshes could make it friendly to the eye.
Slow we came out to sea, slow round the mean tongue of earth that bent across the river mouth, and the waves when we met them were welcome, iron grey after the mud stained water of the river. Yet even as the sails filled I felt a heaviness in me like that of the dullest calm, and wondered if the others on the ship felt it also. I cannot say if this was so. Perhaps to them it was like any, another voyage, nothing particular to it, only life passing. Perhaps I alone was so aware because I kept that money still, his coins held for all of that year in my trunk as in a hot fist.
We were the same men who had gone before, most of us. There was Carnock; there was the same band of a dozen Biscayans who had gone on south to their own people for the winter but returned now to Hull and to Marmaduke, a face or two among them changed but the same dark and wiry look to all and the same aloofness from the rest; and there were others too, sailors, carpenters, coopers, that I knew from before. Captain Duke had brought his son with him, his first time out, a lad little more than myself in age but with a cocksure manner and a burn to his look that made me shy of him. Edward Marmaduke stood beside his father on the deck, the image of him only fleshier, without the elder man's compactness, and despite, or perhaps it was because of, his youth and inexperience seemed to look down at us and out to the flat line of the horizon as if he had nothing but certainty of what lay beyond it.
North we went, along the coast past the high cliff church of Whitby, close in past the great Bass Rock that flickered white with gulls, along the dour coast of Scotland and across the open sea to Shetland, where again we added a last couple of men to the crew. I have made that route so many times I have each landmark of it imprinted on my memory but never I think was I so aware of each stage of the passage as on that second fretful voyage. My eye at once clung to each successive piece of land and at the same moment wanted it gone behind me, wanted the journey done. There was both dread and longing in the idea of the ice and the northern seas, of the cold and the fog and the dazzle, the stark impossibility of a landscape whose forms are like the peaks and troughs of waves but moulded hard out of rock and ice. Even when you have once visited the North it seems when you have been away from it scarcely believable, its unearthly atmospheres a dream and delusion of the senses. Less probable still is the idea of a lone man's survival in such a place.
We did not speak of him, the man I remembered. Yet whenever I looked up ahead of us, when a cloud turned the sea to lead or when the sun came out and made it shine like silver, I held his figure small in the back of my mind like a mark that I could not erase. Again I say that I do not know how it was with the others but I know that he was with me through the day and in the cramped darkness of the night. I believed that he was Captain Duke's preoccupation also, for never had I seen the Captain so impatient as on this voyage. From the dock outwards, even from the moment of our loading, he had tramped about the deck chivvying and swearing, chafing at each little delay, that small, powerful, dark man stomping and blowing so that I thought of a small black bull in a pen. Those who knew him best said that it was not like him to be so tight. He did not even let us halt, as was the usual pattern, to do some sealing on the way, though we sighted great numbers of seals in the clear weather as we left the Shetlands. No, he must hurry us on. A southerly breeze was a direct gift from God to the Heartsease and it would be sin to turn across it, but we must put our sails full before it; and even if it dropped, as ever and again on that trip it did, falling away soon as we had it behind us, we would set our course that way and no other. There was the inevitable grumbling among the men at that, mutterings that made the mood on board at times difficult and sullen, but none spoke loud against it. It was clear I think to others besides myself that Marmaduke's frustration was born of this particular cause, that he was driven so not by the requirements of the whaling but by the simple need to see whether or not his man had perished.
When we got there, the great fjord was still blocked by ice. We knew of the ice before we reached it, for the lookout at the masthead had a day before seen the reflection of it on the clouds up ahead. To those with experience of the North, it shows like that, a frozen sea: a white glare on the underbelly of the clouds as if they are lit by a harsh light beneath them.
But for Cave we might have turned straight about and worked along the western coasts which we knew were free. We had seen whales already on the sea, heard them blow and seen their distant spouts; there was every hope of a good season. Instead we sailed slowly about the edge of this ice, teasing at every apparent opening, looking for a passage, hoping to see it slacken. After two days we met a pair of whaleships out of Amsterdam, and they were coming to us from the direction in which we were headed. Not a chance, they said, the westerly winds were only packing the ice more densely with each day that passed. They were going south to Jan Mayen. There was consolation, they said, in the knowledge that if the ice held us back then it must also hold back the whales. Captain Duke put that down to the complacency of their nation and sailed restlessly on, went up to the masthead himself and spent stubborn freezing hours there wrapped in canvas, looking for a break in the frozen ocean or any sign of it in the sky. These were eerie days, endless days for it was by then the end of June and we were far north. Often there was fog, a fine fog with crystals of ice in it that you felt in your nose when you breathed, and visibility was close and we could do nothing but wait. And then the sky would clear and we could see for a great distance, and the sun showed a
bove the horizon for all of the twenty-four hours and threw strange colours and long shadows across the ruckled surface of the ice. At times the creeping shadow of the Heartsease extended for miles, her black bulk, her three masts, even the figures on her deck, and yet never had I felt the ship to be so small and insignificant, puny as a beetle fidgeting along the edge of that frozen sheet of space. Even though I was young I had an extreme sense of man's smallness and the futility of all his works. That is what it does to you, a place like that.
The storm when it came was almost welcome. Storms come fast up there, the weather like the passage of the hours so much more intense than it is in our moderate land. There was barely time to put off what seemed a safe distance from the ice edge to ride it out. Only a day, but it was like a day of most savage winter, wind and snow like knives and a mountainous black sea. The Heartsease was broad and sturdy like the Ark and we prayed that the Lord would preserve us and huddled within its heaving timbers and felt and listened to the storm. And through it, beneath the howl of the wind and the crash of the water, we thought we heard a thunder that was the ice cracking, and when we came again on deck must watch in terror as pieces of it came hurtling at us in the waves.
The Solitude of Thomas Cave Page 11