The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica

by John Calvin Batchelor

  Cleopatra bridled at this. I was surprised, since I had thought Lazarus did no more than express her opinions. She said, “This is the late twentieth century, Lazarus, there are no villains.”

  Grandfather was hunched in the galley; he spoke across to me as soon as Gizur translated what Cleopatra had said. “The darkness, Grim. Satan smiles.”

  We passed into the main lanes south of Lizard Point, still struggling with heavy seas as we made for the Bay of Biscay. We intended to make our Atlantic crossing with the northeast trade winds from the Cape Verde Islands. We sighted numerous gleaming freighters earning on as usual. Another blow off Ushant made us run seaward, away from a battered-looking frigate that, at a distance, appeared dismasted. We were days beating off that storm, and I think the better for it, since those wild Atlantic gales improved our seamanship, forced us to learn to work together, prepared us for the ordeal ahead. It was not until the end of November that we chanced upon our first unambiguous evidence of outrage.

  We were east of Cape Finisterre at dawn. I recall it vividly because Earle had urged me up the mainmast to watch a school of phosphorescent fish pass beneath us. Wild Drumrul was already above me, near the top. There, he spied a small vessel adrift up wind to the west. She was also on fire, for within minutes a thickening spume marked her for all on deck to see. Grandfather ordered us about, and we made toward her slowly. We were shocked to see, after half an hour, a small motorcraft shoot away from the derelict and toward the coast just as an explosion ripped the hulk’s bow. Someone had managed to launch a jolly, which did not make for us, just wallowed. There were ten bodies in the jolly, eight dead of smoke and burns, one child dead from unknown causes, and a tenth, a small man, dying of a mangled torso. The sea about us was strewn with corpses. Tall Troll, who had a worrisome talent for clear thinking in the midst of murder, estimated one hundred bodies, mostly children. We worried about infection. That officer had said “Cholera.” Without agreement, we pulled that survivor on board. He replied to three questions before he died.

  “Who did this to you?” asked Lazarus.

  “They wanted gold! We have no gold! We have children! We need water! They killed us for gold!”

  “Where did you come from?” asked Lazarus.

  “The fleet of the damned!” he said.

  Israel heard Lazarus’s translation, turned away, looked at me, dark-faced, as if he had been shot, and said, “It’s not possible. It isn’t. Not now.”

  “Where were you bound?” asked Lazarus.

  “Water! They would not give us water! They wanted gold! Get the children to America! I have cousins!”

  Grandfather held him tenderly, prayed over him loudly enough to protect us from hearing his cries. The final question the man answered dead. He was not from the Baltic or northern Europe. He was not Spanish, Moroccan, African Negro. He was a Moslem, Lazarus said, probably a descendant of people originally from what was then the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. He spoke Portuguese. Lazarus guessed he was a refugee from the People’s Republic of Angola.

  “The fleet of the damned,” we said to each other. Lazarus said this was a crude translation and could also be “ships of the accursed” or “boats of demons.” Wild Drumrul said it would have been the same in Turkish. Orlando the Black added it was the same in Spanish. Guy said it was the same in French. I knew it was the same in Old Norse, Swedish, German. Only in English did it sound stilted, fantastic, hallucinatory. Israel said it was the worst kind of humor, the most appalling sort of joke—completely contagious. He also said it was near enough in any language to the unspeakable.

  We tried not to speak of it as we carried as much sail as possible running the Portuguese trades down the Iberian coast. We slept badly, since we established extra and military round-the-clock watches. Otter Ransom gave lessons on weaponry; Tall Troll and Skyeless made plans for dealing with boarders. Wild Drumrul lived on the mainmast, eyes set to the east for motorcraft. We were blacked out at night, during the day kept well seaward of the shipping lanes. We remained in this panic until well past Cape Saint Vincent, when we could be reasonably assured we were beyond shore-based boats.

  Orri upset our supper one night by speaking aloud our worst fantasy, to Thord, though we all heard: “But pirates? Off Portugal?”

  Thord shushed him. Guy said it was not possible, said that it was unwise with people with as little information as we had to suppose that those Pakistanis had been murdered by pirates operating in daylight in the most heavily traveled sea lane in Europe, Ushant to Gibraltar. Grandfather, sitting nearby, reading the Fiddle Bible, listened to Gizur’s translation, then looked accusingly at Guy. Guy returned the stare and said, “It was a freak.”

  Later, Lazarus took me, Israel, and Guy aside to explain how he had reworked his earlier thesis; he said that it was well within Europe’s talent to organize a conspiracy of indifference. He grinned in that self-satisfied way of his, brainy, arrogant; he added that if one took into account the violence of the weather, the sea, disease, and those jackals in the boat, such a conspiracy of indifference could mean murder on a massive scale of all those caught helpless, without a nation, a coastline, an island, a rock to cling to.

  We sighted Porto Santo, the small island to the northeast of Madeira, at first light on my twenty-second birthday. We were not celebratory. Peregrine told me, “We’ll party when we get to Baja.” Israel overheard this, did not conceal his sigh. We needed water, relief. The sea ran dark and the sky closed about us as we wore away to the west to sight Madeira’s central mountains, shrouded in a dense mist. We intended to clear the stacks on a port tack and come around to the south of Madeira, to anchor at the Funchal Roads by nightfall. I was delighted with myself, not because of my birthday, rather because I was improving quickly as Grandfather’s navigator. I had us exactly on course. It was not to be. A Portuguese cutter boomed out of the lee shore of Madeira to intercept us with unmistakable malevolence. Earle hurried Molly below. Grandfather gave an order and we came about for the southwest. In council that night, Israel and Guy took over an hour to reach the same decision Grandfather already had made about our sailing course. I was bothered that they made such a show of their authority in the command of the ship. But it seemed important to them to be able to tell Grandfather what to do. They ordered Grandfather to continue to the southwest.

  Over the next week, we decided to go on two-thirds rations until the Canary Islands. That was our first defeat, and it invited bad turns. We were baffled by light winds, calms, thick pools of gray ooze that seemed to ride the northwesterly swell. We carefully avoided other traffic. We were a day out of Tenerife, the central island of the Canary group and our destination, when we sighted a large mass of dead fish, including several dozen dolphins, belly up, half rotted, riding the crest of a multicolored stain across our front. A fair wind at our quarter spared us the smell, not our doubts. Lazarus, through Gizur, asked Grandfather if this was unusual. Grandfather replied, “Very old.” Israel tried to start an argument with Grandfather, decrying his black fatalism. Grandfather shrugged. It hurt me to see those two dig at each other, especially since, out on the ocean, Grandfather outclassed Israel.

  It was the same at Tenerife as it had been at Madeira, with the distinction that one of the two Spanish cutters that came out after us did pass close enough to shout across that we could tie up at the harbor’s breakwater in exchange for gold. They named an astronomical sum and specified it must be gold, not gems or cash money.

  On bad rations, save Molly and Peregrine, we made for the last landfall feasible before our Atlantic crossing, the Cape Verde Islands, a week to the southwest. Goggle-Eye was the first of us to sicken. Hallverd, the young King’s Spy (or Evangelical Brigade-man) we had taken with us—and had not been able to land—collapsed with a similar fever soon after, confounding us because we assumed Goggle-Eye’s poor health history made him exceptionally susceptible to infection. We continued to boil the water, which cut further into our supply. We argued the problem might
be the fish we caught, or the flying fish that caught themselves. We ran with the wind and in fear of microbes. If it was cholera, we were finished; so we assumed otherwise, and no one else got sick. There was still no margin left. Israel and Guy declared at a council that we should not turn away from any Portuguese cutter without a fight. We readied ourselves for a struggle which did not come, at least not as we anticipated. We sighted Sal, the northeastern island of the Cape Verde archipelago, at midmorning, and swung well clear during the day, passing Boa Vista and Maio cautiously. There was nothing but mist, dark seas, quiet. We slid into Port Praia, on the lee shore of the main island, Sao Tiago, at dusk.

  The silence was representative. The town was in ashes. Lazarus’s spontaneous reaction to the sight of the smoldering wharves—for Cleopatra’s benefit, but I overheard—was that there had been another failed revolution that had consumed itself with blood lust. He said he had heard of a “liberation struggle” there in the 1980s, that this must be the latest outbreak. His smugness did not suit the facts. The ruin was total. Studying Sao Tiago, in that dense weather, under the moonlit profile of those volcanic peaks, it was clear to me there had always been famine and turmoil there, even in good years. It was as clear to me that only man could have reduced everything so maliciously. The few victims we spotted camped at the waterline scampered away like vermin. The muggy doom unnerved us. The near shore was littered with dark lumps being picked over by dogs and birds. The evening’s land breeze, as it shifted, poured a stench over us, that sweet, clinging, dizzying smell of death. We moved twice to avoid that stench, finally dropping anchor a hundred yards off an unburned pier. We made our plan quickly: me, the Furore brothers, Otter Ransom, Tall Troll, and Skyeless, plus Iceberg as scout, going ashore in the jolly by relay. We needed water, food, information. I waited on deck for my turn in the boat, did not talk with Israel and Guy, who stood behind me mumbling heavily, nor did I acknowledge Earle as he went forward to man the automatic weapon. I thought my conduct appropriate impertinence at the time, expressing my anger at them for not heeding Grandfather’s advice to try for America on a northern route. I see now it was more honestly an expression of disloyalty to my family.

  When I got ashore, I sent Iceberg ahead. Not one of us was bold enough to pause beneath the banner that some desperate official had strung like a shroud across the pier’s main pylon, which read, in Portuguese, danger quarantine. We had vowed we would not be turned away by men, and this meant the diseases of men as well. Lazarus found the other news, once we had gotten off the pier and formed a skirmish line, at Otter Ransom’s direction, to walk into town. Painted in black tar across the concrete sea wall was a sinister Portuguese graffito; Lazarus translated literally, “Enter into despair.” In English, Lazarus said, that would be “abandon hope.”

  I thanked Grandfather’s Lord God that it was night, sparing us from seeing most of what a tropical climate—we were fifteen degrees north of the equator—does to a massacre, for that is what we found. Iceberg growled steadily, her hair up, teeth bared, blood sense alert. We soaked handcloths in Otter Ransom’s whiskey flask and held them to our faces, fended off the flies as best we could.

  There were survivors, those either too ill or too beaten to have fled. We stayed on the main avenue, making our way by moonlight, listening to the cries, low and not necessarily human. Iceberg marked the rats. We found signs of a battle near the central square, unburied human parts, burned-out vehicles. We did not examine the heap beside the town hall, instead turned away when we saw the main well was poisoned by corpses. It took us some time to locate an artesian well, down a side street, whose water Tall Troll tasted, pronounced potable. As we filled our casks, a man walked out of one of the huts, right toward us. He was old, withered, drunk. Several other ancients followed him, and they gathered to watch us. Lazarus started a conversation with them. I did not pay mind until our work was done and we were ready to leave. The chief informant gave no name, seemed older than the corpses we had seen. He spoke to me as I approached; Lazarus translated nearly simultaneously, “This is my ghost. I am dead and buried.”

  The ancient also answered questions: “They came in howls. There were many, many, like ants. We beat them. Then the sickness. They took our food. They came again. They took everything. The shit! They could not eat our food. They ate it and died. What men cannot eat food? My son, he told me these are devils. That was what the priest said. That Hell was full. Satan has returned them to the earth. From long ago, the priests say, the worst sinners, Pontius Pilate and Judas. They were little. They were hungry. From Hell. That is why they could not eat our food. The priest said. We begged them to leave us. They died. It burned! It was Satan. Mother of God, our cathedral burned like a stable. Only the shit did not burn. What sort of shit is it? It moves!”

  We ran back to Angel of Death, as fast as I hasten to close this episode. I am hard-pressed, even now, to recall the first shocks of those times. Also, I do not want to dwell on Port Praia, because it was not extraordinary. I can suppose there are accounts of worse elsewhere in the Atlantic that are unavailable to me; if not, I shall tell things that make that island seem merciful. We gathered our water. Port Praia gathered nothing.

  Goggle-Eye died while we were ashore. He rolled over in his bunk and melted with fever. Wild Drumrul came to the rail to tell me. I looked to Israel for guidance; he ignored me, holding Molly close. Peregrine and Charity were of no use to me, remaining huddled below. We stowed our water casks, then wandered about the deck. We talked in spurts, me to Guy, Otter Ransom to Thord, Lazarus to Cleopatra, then we fell into a silence that matched the night’s. Dawn surprised me, a thick soup over the sun, the onshore breeze stirring the cinders in the ruins into new fires. It did seem as if an evil force raced through Port Praia with a torch. That place drained us of desire. If not for Grandfather, we might have laid in anchor until self-pity finished us. That is a dull sort of exhaustion. One cannot eat, or drink, or think in a reasonable pattern. Perhaps that is why Grandfather could act so effectively. His thinking was not reasonable, part in the present and part in the Sinai, or Palestine, or Babylon, wherever there was a space and time that called forth the prophetic. While we whined about cholera, dysentery, the charnel house that was Port Praia, Grandfather pursued his ministry. He got below, wrapped Goggle-Eye’s body in a blanket, weighted it, prayed loud and long over it, then passed it over the side with a psalm (131 in the Fiddle Bible): “Lord God, my heart is not proud, nor are my eyes haughty. I do not busy myself with great matters or things too marvelous for me. No, I submit myself, I account myself lowly, as this weaned child once clung to its mother. O Israel, look for Lord God now and evermore!”

  There was a splash. Grandfather sobbed, stood, turned on us, then exploded in a muscular scolding, “You are alive! Sinners, you live!” He strode from the bow to the cockpit, shouting, “Praise Lord God we have lived while one of his children, one of the meekest among us, has not! If we all die now, we have received infinitely more than that poor dear child ever got! Are you thankless fools? Clear way! All hands to stations! Passengers below! Make ready the lines! Up anchor! And praise Lord God! Praise him!”

  I threw myself at the mainmast and hauled lines in a fit. I wanted to hurt myself, anything to make me feel alive, to make me forget that old man’s, that ghost’s, story, to keep myself from seeing what had probably come to me, a true vision, when that old man had said, “Hell was full.” So I worked, shouted orders, helped Wild Drumrul with the anchor. We all scrambled over Angel of Death, feeding on the energy that was Grandfather. We left the harbor in a daze. The sea was up, and we were rocked hard with double-crossing waves. There was a tightening in the electrically charged air; there were deep reports to the west, not gunfire this time, thunderclaps across the sea. We knew we were heading into a storm. We were for it. We had to clear Port Praia. We wanted bad weather to wash off some of that rot. I understand now that I was in some sort of mind-fever—another hint of the shape-changing that would overwhelm me lat
er in life—which I did not come out of until I paused to pull on my foul-weather gear. While I was in the gangway, Cleopatra came up behind me suddenly. Her eyes were red, her face glowed with a beauty and a fear I remember now as her very nature. It was certainly one of the things that made me love her. The truth, Grim Fiddle says, is that she was my graven image. I stopped before her like a pagan. I started to weep, for Goggle-Eye, for Port Praia, for us. It is the first instance I can recall that we shared an intimate thought, even if it was just to acknowledge that we were too young, and that there were things in heaven and earth that we had never imagined. She broke the spell, asking, “Lazarus won’t, can’t. What did you find?”

  “I can’t either. I just can’t.”

  “It is important, Grim. Tell me what you saw. Who did that? You know. What is it? What’s wrong? Why won’t you tell me?” “What do you want me to do, describe that? Who did it? Don’t ask me, don’t ask me again!” I raised up. I raised my hand. And why? Earle must have been watching us; he was instantly there, stepping between, turning her away, blocking me with the same enormous backside that had given me privacy at conception. A swell took the ship, throwing me to the deck. I rolled over and got topside, remained there daylong, driving myself, taking in the sounds of the building storm and of Grandfather’s fair-equal temper. It was exhilarating, rejuvenating, and up there I regretted my transgression. I was ashamed of how I had acted with Cleopatra, because I understood that when I had made ready to strike her, her imperious demands, it had not been Cleopatra I was striking out to silence, it had been my own prodigy. I had panicked rather than confront what I saw clearly for what it was the moment she forced me to think. I saw that Port Praia had been destroyed by the exiles and refugees who called themselves the fleet of the damned.