This butchery is work on a scale that you cannot imagine if you have slaughtered only pigs or cattle, work that is more like the activity of ants when they combine to pull away to their nest some great cockroach or scrap of dead meat twenty times their size: the dismantling and transferral on to shore of the pieces of a beast that may be almost as long as a ship itself, a piece of prey and yet it towers above the men who work on it, who walk on it and slip on its skin, who cut at it with great knives that seem proportionately no more than pins. The blubber lies directly beneath the hard black skin, a broad layer of yellowish lard. Slice at it sharp and sidelong as a butcher slices the fat off a piece of meat, and it pulls away clean, clean in itself too at first as if you might eat it, buttery coloured and pure and smelling of nothing but itself, though if it is left under a warm sun it soon becomes putrid and sets off a stink that clings like its grease to all that touches it.
There's a skill to this that we call flensing, like the skill of a master butcher, and it was one of the Biscayans who did that work, a little dark bow-legged man who walked barefoot on the whale and never lost his grip. Cave, always neat with his hands, used to work with him; I saw that sometimes, saw the two of them, tall and small, progressing down the body of the beast where it lay in the water, cutting blocks and stripping them off, long slabs of blubber like tombstones oozing oil. Sometimes Cave was not there and the Biscayan worked alone or took some other one of us to help in Cave's stead. The pieces of blubber they threw down to the sea to be towed ashore, and there we chopped them down further, raked them up and ladled them into a great tub that hung from the arm of a gibbet that turned to and fro between the chopping benches and the coppers upon the furnaces. Picture this if you can in such a scene of cold grandeur as only those northern coasts can produce: the smallness of the men and the ugliness of their contrivances, the smoke, the soot, the pervasive oil and its ever more pungent smell, and above it all the voracious flocks of birds that at every stage attended us, the gulls swirling and diving amongst us.
And then there is the reverse of the process: the removal of the rendered blubber; its steam and sizzle as it is ladled into cooling vats filled with water; how it is drained out and down a series of gutters and coolers and at last into the barrels. Meantime others have cut off the head from the beast and brought it in and drawn it up on the shore as far as they and the tide can pull it, for it is heavy with bone, and walked in between its jaws and sliced out all the slim fins of whalebone and scraped them down and rubbed them with sand. Besides what meat we choose to cut — and the meat is good, red and fleshy like the richest beef and not at all like fish or anything that comes out of the sea - the rest of the whale is waste, and is left to sink or wash to and fro in the water of the bay which close to the shore has become dense and still, so loaded it is with grease.
That summer the work like the days never seemed to end. We took fifteen whales, near one thousand five hundred hogsheads of oil, barrel upon barrel floated out again and loaded on to the ship. It was a great catch. And the weather was free of storms and, until the end, free of that stifling fog, day after day of workable if chill weather with most times a layer of cloud to take the sharpness from the sky and keep our shadow off the sea to make the fishing good. All in all it would have seemed an exceptional and lucky season despite the slowness of its start, a blessed season even, were it not for those things that happened at its close.
Until those events there is nothing much that I can tell you of Cave. I can give you only these odd pictures of him that I keep in my mind: walking among us on shore like a shadow, hair and beard trimmed, his strangeness muted as he assimilated once more into the company of others; or grimly working the carcase of a whale where it floated at the stern of the ship, atop the black and shining mound, his gaunt figure with the flensing knife in its hand silhouetted one day like a stag oak against a rare bright sky. I remember that I came beneath him in a boat as we tied the whale in and he spoke and gestured, but in that light he could see me so much more clearly than I might see him, and there was only his outline rearing down on me and his expression was indeciperable.
A fine day, I think I called that it was a fine day, and indeed the sun fell hot on my face and dazzled as I looked up to him.
I was not sure of the words I caught coming down. The pity of it, it might have been, but I hear him now with twenty years of hindsight. Could it have been that? That is how I picture it now. There is the sea, the ship, the carcase of the whale, all raw with the brightness of the day, and Thomas Cave stretches out his arms in an awkward frame about the scene, and that is what he says.
Some days I saw that he worked and then for some days he was not there. I heard it mentioned that there was a madness on him, but others said that it was not so much a madness as a melancholy, that he had gone to sit alone in some dark corner like a brooding hen. And when he was in the company of men it was the Biscayans he sought rather than ourselves. The Biscayans were a haughty and separate bunch and I never saw any other Englishmen find any level of intimacy with them, even those who had picked up a piece of their language or spoke some French or Spanish or whatever tongue it was that they had in common. Yet they took to Cave and sometimes when work was done I saw that he sat and ate and drank with them.
The other pictures I have of him are from that summer's end, the weather already on the turn and the nights beginning and the looking-out for ice.
I see Cave standing for hours on end on the rocks of the point on the northern tip of the bay when all the sea before him is swathed in fog, standing alert, listening where he could not see, as if with his ears he might penetrate where his eyes are blind.
Carnock's boat was lost. Six men in it, counting himself. It was last seen by one of the other whaleboat crews as the fog was rolling in, no more than a hundred, a hundred and fifty yards' visibility, they said, and it was chasing a whale. The boats behind had heard the yell of the harpooneer as he made contact, the surge and the zip of the rope as the whale pulled away, and followed though they could not see in what direction it was gone. And that was the end of it. Not a sound, not a cry more, they said, no sight, but only the strip of frothing water that they came to where they knew the whale had fought.
No way could they tell what had occurred. A chase like that is terrifying in the fog. The whale pulls away and the men on the harpoon boat that holds to it cannot know where they go nor reckon how far, nor how close the other boats remain behind them or if they will be able to follow and pick them up should they be overturned into the sea. I have heard of boats dragged many miles blind in that way and scarcely able to find their way home, and of others more fearful who swiftly cut the rope that tied them to the whale. Carnock was not the sort of man to have taken that course, we knew that Carnock would have held on long as he could. How far the whale took him and his men we could not begin to guess. It could have been hours, days, out into the fjord and the ocean beyond; or it was possible that it was a few minutes only, a mere snatch of time, and that they were pulled down into the vortex of the whale's dive or simply overturned by a flick of its tail and drowned close by us unseen and unheard in the muffling confusion of the fog.
I was at the cookery when the news of it came to me, in the heat of boiling blubber. A boat lost out in the bay, and I took in the words and worked on as I must for the fire was up and needed stoking. I did not even know till after who was in it, not until I wiped the grease off me and went to the water's edge.
Some few of us were left there on the shore. Most had gone out in the boats and we could hear their calls though we could not see them.
It was a time before we put together the names of all that were there with Carnock: a harpooneer that was one of two Biscayan brothers, a sailor called Jonas Watson who had been good to me, two others that I knew not well, and Edward Marmaduke. That shocked me, to hear that. All of it was a shock, even though it was an occurrence that is ever, in those seas, half-awaited, such things are always a shock when they become
fact. Yet this loss, this sneaking fog-bound silent loss, touched us more than any for the loss of the Captain's son, and the Captain loved by all and the son no more than my age and such a vivid strutting cockerel of a boy.
The boats stayed out for hours, far longer than any swimmer might have lasted in that cold and inky water, zigzagging across the empty sea, calling out and staring into nothingness. We on the land walked the shore along the full length of the bay, looking and calling likewise, drawn to every other looming rock to see if it might be a piece of boat or a man washed up.
I came upon Cave at the rocky point on the northern spur of the bay. It was a good place to stand as the current swept by there. I went and stood beside him and he lifted a hand to me and would not speak but only listen, his concentration so intense that I felt it myself, and felt as I stood there beside him that I could hear more closely the movement of the waves, make out in it any slight erratic distant sound that might have been that of an oar.
Once I heard a call that I thought could be that of a man.
'Only a seal,' he whispered. 'Listen, it is more like the cry of a child than of a man.'
Just then a flight of gulls passed overhead and the sound was lost but I believed that what he said was true.
At last even he gave up his watch, and it was he who went out to Captain Marmaduke, who had waited shut in his cabin all of this time, and later the two of them came back to shore and walked in the half-light.
I think that for a grown man it is like his own death to lose his only son; a double death, for a man means his son to follow on, to carry on his name and be his escape from his own mortality. Captain Marmaduke took it hard. He walked a long time with Cave and then he had them row him back to the ship, and went straight to his cabin and did not come out of it for days on end. By that time it was late in August. The whales were on the move away and we too began to pack up on shore, loaded the hold, waited for the word to sail. The fog that had swallowed the boat persisted about us, sometimes thinning, sometimes giving way to flakes of snow. These were days of mourning and of awful tension. We prayed the prayers for the drowned but looked at the water and all of us I believe still hoped to see a form emerge from it or hear the creak of the returning boat within the mist, and at the same time we looked at the ship where the Captain was closed away and longed to be gone.
19
MANY OF US in that time found that we could not sleep, so much the rhythm of night and day had been broken in us. In the tent where we stayed together there was scarcely a moment of stillness for all the turning and sighs of waking men. Even those who did sleep were not at peace. We all of us had strange and heavy dreams, and often men muttered in their sleep or moaned or sometimes woke themselves and the rest of us with a yell.
So it was that fear began to grow in us.
When we slept, there were the dreams. When we woke, there was something else I cannot name. I remember lying there and feeling the hugeness of the place thud in my soul where the knowledge of God had been, a huge frozen emptiness inside and a fear that it would expand and consume me. I shared a bunk with William Sherwyn, a restless knotty little man all knees and elbows. When I opened my eyes I saw that he lay on his back staring upward, and he became aware of me and spoke in a nervous rush. 'You know what it is, don't you? You know what this means? The ice will come in soon. The currents drive it early up the fjord, that's why no one but Captain Duke will bring a ship in here. Someone said that to me, back in Hull before we sailed. You chance your luck with Duke, he said, he's a great whaler of course and he knows those northern seas better than any other Englishman but one of these days he'll be caught, beset, held fast, and that'll be the end of it. It happens to all the great navigators, he said. It happened to Barents. It'll happen to him. They all go too far in the end, stay too long. Sail too close to the ice.'
'It's August,' I said, 'only August.'
'We were gone by this day last year.'
'Last year was colder.'
'Doesn't take long for the ice to come in. All it takes is a change of wind.'
'But it's only a day's sail out to the cape and the sea.' I shut my eyes again and imagined the movement of the ship as it would be beneath me, the sight of the southernmost cape of those islands receding, the knowledge of open water down to the coast of Norway. I must then have slept a little. When I was next conscious Sherwyn was holding me.
'What is it, lad? What is it makes you scream?'
Only a piece of my dream stayed in my head: the terrible sensation of falling into utter and endless icy space.
If only the fog had lifted. If there had been light to see by: God's light, God's day. We would have seen the crispness of the sea where the lost boat had been and known for sure that no one was to come back from it. Captain Duke would have seen it also. He would have come to the deck and called us to weigh anchor. But the fog held us there suspended, its muffled forms and sounds offering so many possibilities of denial. It was the sounds most of all: the bark of a walrus that one of us took for a man's call; the way the screech of gulls would erupt all of a sudden out of intense silence; the creak of footfalls on snow; the lapping of water against the rocks which was at moments like the plash of oars. Sometimes it seemed that we waited for men, sometimes for ghosts. There was a murmur went about that the place had bewitched us and would not let us go.
There is power in the Biscay language. I know nothing of it, only that it is different from any others I hear, the people of that region a race distinct though they have no land but only a sea to call their own, and that the roughest sea in Europe. Their speech is full of harsh zeds and k's, savage sounds and angry rhythms that make our English by comparison seem soft and sleepy. Screamed out in a close room it claws and tears at the nerves like no other sound I have ever heard.
It was the flenser, the little bow-legged man who cut the whale. He was out of his bunk in the centre of the cramped room, half-dressed and screaming at us all wild-eyed. I thought something had happened, that there was a landslide or a bear at the door, or that he had been out and seen that the ship had gone and left us. Or that there was some quarrel between him and one of the others of his people, for the rest of them either got down or sat up in their bunks and set to yelling back. It was truly a scene from Bedlam, this incomprehensible ranting to and fro, and the dazed looks of the rest of us as we stirred in its midst.
I do not know how many of you have seen a man gone mad. You do not want to look, and yet you do, and when you do he draws you into his horror. All of us watched as Ezkarra, the tall harpooneer who was often the leader among them, made the others hush and went and took the little man tight in his arms as if he were a child. For an instant he was silenced, and dropped the lids on his staring eyes, and I thought that he was soothed, but it was only an instant like the trough of a wave and then his mouth frothed again and he broke out and struck Ezkarra so hard in the stomach that it doubled him over, and launched again into such a grotesque stream of words that I knew that they could be nothing but blasphemies and obscenities.
We stood back then, made a way for him as he ran to the door, backing away from him in the cramped space as if from some contamination. He is possessed, we said, and it was shocking to think that a devil had come and possessed one amongst us and left the rest of us sane. Ezkarra then called us to silence and spoke to us in his English. The man was the brother of the harpooneer from the lost boat, he told us. He had the spirit of his drowned brother in him. And he crossed himself and said a popish prayer. Yet others of the crew whispered as instantly that it was some witch amongst us or some demon of the place who possessed him, that this man was only the first and that his madness would come to all of us in time. For myself, I did not speculate but could only watch and follow. I put on my jacket and boots and followed where the man had gone. Some others did likewise. We went out and kept a watch on him as he threw himself down on the stones before the shore and rolled over and over and beat his head against them.
He b
eat himself bloody and then Ezkarra went again to soothe him, and again he would not be soothed, but this time he ran and took up his flensing knife where it lay among the tools and came back at Ezkarra as if he would slice him in two. I cannot say why it was that he did not, but stalled with the long-handled knife in the air like a maddened, half-naked Abraham, and threw it away then so that it clattered on the stones, and ran off barefoot up the shore and on to the mountain.
A case of possession, or madness, whatever you want to call it. These things occur, among a crew of men alone in the North or on the deep ocean as they do here in our English towns and villages. What I mean to tell you is that it was Thomas Cave who brought him back. Cave did not let him go on alone but followed at a calm pace. There was visibility enough that day just to make out the two men on the mountainside, no more, no detail: two moving figures against the grey stillness of the rock, climbing, turning, tacking upwards, the Biscayan in a strange panicky rush that we could see even at that distance, Cave slow behind him, deliberate. Cave never once lost track of him though sometimes he took an entirely different path, switching back and working round where the madman scrabbled up too-sheer walls or unsafe shale in such a hectic way that to us observing below it seemed at times a wonder, or a symptom of the demonic nature of his possession, that he did not fall.
Cave caught up with him at last on a ledge overlooking the sea. We could not see what passed between them, only that they were still for a long time and that at last they turned and began a slow descent in single file. When the Biscayan got back to us he seemed to have forgotten all that occurred and followed Cave quiet as a lamb.
The Solitude of Thomas Cave Page 13