Morning came and the air was still though the ship continued to toss with the power of the storm. I had slept some hours at last and I woke and came on deck, and it was as if a conjuring trick had been performed there and opened the fjord before us. The solid icescape that we had known so well for all those days, every bay and peninsula and hummock of it, was gone, and in its place was a dark blue sea with a great swell on it, and great blocks of ice drifting past us, clean-broken ice with glassy tints of turquoise and green to it in the light. We said a prayer and began a slow passage north to the place we called Duke's Cove - it still has that name even now, though sometimes changed by the Hollanders' use to Dusko or Disko. Our progress was slow because the sea was still big and the broken ice was a danger to us, some of it floating almost submerged and showing only in a ghostly manner beneath the surface of the water so that lookouts had to be constantly posted to watch against any collision that might cause damage to the hull.
Again we heard whales, and saw them break the water but too far off still for the hunting. Sometimes we could see right across the fjord, some thirty miles or more, to the savage dark walls and peaks on either side, their black and purplish rock bared since the storm though snow held to the ravines and valleys and on the glaciers, and then a fog would roll out down the channel and the world would suddenly contract to the familiar one of wood and canvas and Englishmen and water, and I would feel that I had seen a vision that had never existed. A fog like that came upon us just as we approached the bay where we had left Cave, and Captain Duke would not risk the ship in close but asked for volunteers to take one of the boats in and look if he was alive.
I was one of those who stepped forward, and a half-dozen others who included Ezkarra the Biscayan harpooneer, and Marmaduke's son Edward, though his father forbade it at first and said he should wait and land with the rest when the time came; but Edward pressed him, he was ever one to get his way, until his father agreed that there was no danger but only adventure to the outing. The last man to step out to join the boat, even as it was lowered into the sea, was Carnock, and it seemed right that he was there.
We rowed slowly through strands of fog, the oars sometimes slapping against plates of ice, the water strange and greenish when there was light upon it, the ice dark and discoloured. The land when we saw it loomed high above our heads, the cliffs and rocks seeming so tall and unfamiliar that for some moments I did wonder whether we were in fact in the right place or whether we had overshot the point and come to some other unknown bay further up the coast. 'That's it, over there. We'll pull up on the shore there.' Carnock knew it. He had been there many more seasons than I. It was a rare kindness in him to take the time to explain to me that the apparent height of the land was an illusory effect of the fog.
Perhaps we all felt that there was time to spare, going ashore at last in that grey and melancholy silence, time to spare and to lose. As the hull of the boat grounded the man in its bow cleared the lip of the waves with a great soft leap and pulled us in. We came behind him slow, one after the other. The fog let through a muted light and all the ground beyond where the sea had washed was a floury white, powdered over with a fine new snow.
'Which way is it?'
Whoever spoke did no more than whisper, but the question carried through our huddle.
'Here, to the right. See, we have landed somewhat down the shore from our accustomed place.' Carnock of all of us seemed to know best where he was, and his square form led the way then along and up the beach.
We followed in a loose line like a knotted string, walking with unsteady steps as we had so soon come to land, taking bearings, stumbling on the shingle and over rocks that were capped with snow. Marmaduke's son walked just before me, then stopped and held a moment until I came alongside that he might speak what he was pressing to say.
'What a place! I had not imagined it could be so dismal as this.'
'It's dismal now but wait till you see it when it clears.'
'So cold, the fog so thick that it clogs the eyes. It is like a place of doom.'
'Wait,' I said. 'Wait until you see it on a day of sun. It's beautiful then, all crystal and dazzling.'
He looked away as if he did not believe me, walked on, then stopped and turned his head again.
'And you were here last year, and you knew this man Cave?'
'That was the first time I came.'
'Was he not afraid, to do what he did? Why, I would not be alone here a single day!'
So brightly he said it that the men must have heard all up and down our line. (Looking back, knowing what was to come later, I wonder now if it was not some premonition in him that heightened his first impression of the place.)
Whoever heard, none answered him. No more words there were for some time, but only a muttered curse as a man tripped, the tread of our boots and the pulse of the sea that was behind us and already lost in fog. The cookery loomed up slowly. Hard to know it at first, coming at it from that unfamiliar angle, it was all so still and shrouded and quiet.
'There! Over there! Is that it?'
Edward spoke full out and the sudden freshness of his voice shook me like a shout in church. Did he have no fear, no respect? Or was his excitement driven by his fear?
There was no sign of living man to be seen. Nothing disturbed, no footprint besides our own, no marks on the snow save the spider tracks of birds. The tent stood before us like a great square tomb.
And then we heard a sound which my ear at first took for wind, some strange effect of wind despite the stillness about us; so sure was my fatalism that this was what I thought before my consciousness recognised the sound for what I knew of course it was: the sound of a violin.
Ezkarra pulled out the cross he wore about his neck and kissed it, speaking a gravelly prayer beneath his breath.
'See, boy, so your friend lives after all.'
He held the cross to me that I too might kiss it. It was a plain, savage-looking cross that he had made himself from whalebone and engraved with a long and contorted Christ. I had a sudden urge to make the gesture, alien though it was to me.
And then Carnock spoke darkly and made us all afraid. 'Unless it be his ghost.'
No ghost he was but changed. How changed I was to learn only in time. To me then, seeing him, all the change I saw was physical: how thin he was, how his hands dangled off him, how old he looked, and how still his eyes.
He did not see us as we entered. His back was turned, his head bent, his body swaying with the tune which seemed some sedate lament. It was extraordinary for being so homely, the sight of a man playing his music by lamplight in a warm room, a fire in the stove, a scrubbed table holding the remnants of a meal, a high cot covered in furs, a pretty embroidered cloth hung on the wall. When he saw us, or rather, felt our presence, for he did not turn immediately, he lowered the fiddle and spoke without any tone of surprise.
'Ah, so there you are.'
He might have said the same if we had been gone only a week or a morning.
'What kept you? I had been expecting you.'
He looked a decade, not a winter, older. He looked older than my father whom I had seen so little a time before as Easter. There was more sense of age in him in that moment than in any old man I ever knew. He was old like an apostle or a prophet carved at the door of a church. His hair and beard were long and matted, the lines on his face deep and etched with soot, his hands that held the instrument thin and knobbled, the whole of him thin. Thomas Cave had been gaunt already but now he was a man of sticks; his head and hands, the feet that weighed him down, all seemed too heavy for the frame that held them.
He moved those long limbs with a strange gentleness, as if they were very fragile, or as if he were a saint from a statue only that moment come to life. He looked at us without surprise or shock of recognition, laid the fiddle gently across the scrubbed table and the bow beside it. I noticed how clean the table was, how neatly the cabin was arranged, and wondered if he had cleaned it in expectation
of our arrival. Only the roof space above our heads had not been swept: the rafters and the chimney hood were coated with great black flakes of soot, and as we stood there the draught that came through the open door set them fluttering down like leaves from trees in the forest and showered the table and the floor. With a skeletal hand Thomas Cave flicked at one that clung to the mat of hair on his brow, and for the first time now an expression crossed his face. I think that it was a smile.
17
HE WOULD NOT come to sleep on board the ship with us that night but insisted that he remain in his cabin. That seemed lonely to us but we could see how it was his home. He had offered us his best hospitality, a cup of water which we must pass around and a plate of some strong black stew of venison. We had taken a small portion out of politeness though in truth it was pretty vile. When we left him we said that we would be back the next day with ale and wine and whatever else he asked for, and that we would take him then to visit the ship.
As we slept the wind changed and cleared the fog and the tide swept the last of the ice away from the shore. The day to which we woke was as unlike the one before it as any two days can be: bright in that way that is peculiar to the North and that I have seen nowhere else, bright with that rare, sharp, glassy light, and we took the Heartsease in a little way and dropped anchor as close as we might to the shore. Thomas Cave did not say a word as we rowed him out, but gazed on her and looked all about him rather as a child does in a new place.
'Is this the same ship on which I came?' he asked at last. 'She looks so big.'
She looked the bigger the closer we got, her sturdy hull rising above us in the water. The receding cold had left every surface of her coated with a thick rime, her decks, her furled sails, her rigging all glistening with slivers of frost, and the air about her glistened with crystals that fell away with each moment in the sunlight.
'Why, she is like an island.'
He climbed up on deck and Marmaduke greeted him closely and hugged him, and then took him away to his cabin. He had with him the book in which he had recorded all the details of his survival, a logbook wrapped around with cloth that he had held tight to his chest all the time that we rowed him out to the ship. I do not know what was in it, though at that time I longed to. I longed for stories, for the tale of his adventure that he was never in my hearing to divulge. I reckon that that book he gave to the Captain had in it all that he was ever to say of his experience.
'See how he clutched the book to him. There is madness in it.'
Marmaduke did not come out for hours and we worked without him, to and fro from ship to beach, bringing on to land our stores and all the cumbersome equipment of our summer's business. It is like setting up a little town, putting together a whaling station, all the barrels and tools as well as the hoists and coppers and furnaces.
'Did you see the way he looked at the ship? He may have survived but he's lost a part of his mind. Something's frozen in him.'
'When we came upon him, that first moment when he saw us, I had a feeling that he did not like it. I thought that he did not want to see us at all.'
'Of course he did, wouldn't any man? How could you doubt it?'
Again we rowed back empty to the ship through water that was so clear that we could see the shadow of our boat on the sand beneath. Each one of us had been watching Cave and puzzling over him.
'I know what you mean,' said another. 'It makes no sense, but it was how he looked when we came in. The blank way he looked at us.'
'He's just a trifle mad. Who wouldn't be in the circumstances?'
'He was mad from the start if you ask me, mad to say he'd do such a thing.'
'Cave is not mad but dazzled.' Joseph Hailey had more knowledge of the northern seas than any of us save Marmaduke, had sailed up there a decade or more. 'I have seen that look in men's eyes before. Once I went with a Danish ship to the west of Greenland, and there is a tribe of men who live there, dark sturdy hunters who know the ways of living amongst the ice. I saw the same in them, in men we met alone when we put in along the coast, men who must have been away from their people for many days. I imagine that it is like a kind of snow dazzle, when you look before you but see only whiteness. They say that sometimes in those parts it comes upon a man so bad that he runs away from everyone he meets, away into the white, and is never seen again.'
Mad, dazzled, yet the proof of his sanity was there in material things before our eyes: the order of his cabin which demonstrated the orderliness of his life through the months of his hermitage, the cooking arrangements, the cobbling tools and the ranks of wooden heels he had made that were enough to fill a whole barrel when at last we went home. Then there was his apparent physical health, despite his thinness, and all the evidence of his hunting: the great bearskin that he had scraped and spread on poles to cure, one bigger than any I had ever seen, its thick fur almost butter-coloured in that day's bright and melting light, and the many bones and carcases of other animals that were strewn about, both close by the tent and further off where he had butchered them at the site of his kill.
I wonder now if the madness that we thought we saw in him that day was in part a reflection of the fear in ourselves? We looked at him and did not see Thomas Cave but imagined only the cold and the darkness and the solitude, and did not think that we could bear it, and I could not have said which one of these three horrors to me was the worst.
It would have made it easier for us if he had told us tales. Words, our English words, would have reduced all that we imagined to reality, put the miracle of his survival into pieces that we could hold. But he chose not to speak, or perhaps he could not find the words to speak with. Only physical information escaped him. He told us of his discovery that the place where we were, which we had supposed to be an extension to the east of the land that we already knew as Greenland, was not so but an island on its own, and he pointed out where on a clear day we might climb to ascertain this fact. He told us where particular herbs and grasses might be found among the mosses and the lichens on the mountainsides. He had learned better than the most experienced of the sailors the ways of the northern weather, could predict its moods and sudden changes. Yet all this he told us in connection with the present time only, and never did he refer back to what was past. All that was left for us to guess and wonder at.
'You ask him, Goodlard, he'll talk to you,' the others said to me. 'Why, last year we saw that you were like a son to him.'
I tried, believe me. My curiosity was as great as anyone's. But Cave seemed not to hear us, and looked across to us from that distance of his and held his silence. Even now, and I was his companion for some long time after that voyage was done and we had returned to England, I have nothing to tell you of what occurred to him in that winter. I cannot even say what injury it was that caused the slight limp which I discerned in him, which he was never to lose, some injury which he must have sustained to the ankle or the knee of his right leg that just so little skewed his walk. I thought it like the limp that Jacob had after he had wrestled with God in his dream and God had struck him. The mark of God on him, that's what I thought it was.
18
THE WAY I talk now, it seems as if Thomas Cave was at the centre of my thoughts all of that summer. This was not so, of course. I recount only what my memory selects and what it seems of interest to tell, the things that stand out and are particular to that one season of the many I have spent up there in the Greenland seas. The truth of it is that I did not much preoccupy myself with Cave, not after those first few days of finding him again. How could I when there was so much else, so much that was more immediate and demanding of the senses?
I do not know if you have seen a whale. It is a beast of a size which it is only reasonable to imagine in the vastness of the ocean. On land it seems monstrous and alien. Did you hear the story how, only a couple of years ago, one came up the river close by Ipswich? It was washed there by some freak, and men heard of it and crowded to the estuary, and came out in boats and on
to the mud when the tide was down with every kind of weapon they could muster, spears, swords, guns, hatchets, billhooks and axes, and tried to kill it as it floundered in what little water remained for it to swim in. They did not succeed in making a death blow until they had an anchor stuck in its nostril and it was gushing blood, like water from a pump, and all those about the river were red as if they had worked in a slaughterhouse; and then they cut it up into thousands of pieces, that any man or woman or child that had tuppence to pay for it might take home, and some ate their meat while others put it away like some famous relic and accounted it a wonder and a marvel. And before they cut up the whale a man had the wit to measure it, and it was a full fifty-eight foot in length, twelve foot high, and two foot between the eyes.
Take that to your mind and then imagine the whales as they are in their own element, in the sea, whales of this size and more, swimming north up the broad sea of the great fjord. We could see them from the rocks of the point, see the tracks they made in the water, the spouts they blew like so many fountains shooting into the air, see their black backs as they surfaced and their great shining tails which they thrashed into the sea with a sound like a whipcrack that carried for miles. They came in flocks, scores of them as you would commonly see shoals of fish, more spouts and tails than you could begin to count, and many of them came into the calm of the bay as if they would bask and play there all the summer, only that the Heartsease was there waiting for them.
The first whale was killed within two days of our coming, killed at the mouth of the bay and three boats towed it back to the ship, floating belly-up and trailing red clouds in the water, a huge old beast whose crinkled skin was all barnacled and thick with sea lice, and it was tied up there to the stern of the ship, still floating, and we left it a day to settle before we began the task of butchery.
The Solitude of Thomas Cave Page 12