The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica

by John Calvin Batchelor

  The Free Gift of God

  ONLY Grandfather’s metaphor is appropriate to the tempest that swallowed us southwest of Port Praia. We sailed into oceanic valleys of the shadow of death. We had the force of several gales over the deck and were picked up and carried along the crest of the waves like a twig; if we had fallen off line just a touch we would have gone over. I recall one moment that overwhelmed me: I was struggling at the wheel to keep us into the wind, when of a sudden I looked up to see what I thought were clear skies to the east. I called to Grandfather and the rest, that we were saved, that the storm was broken. Grandfather catapulted into the cockpit, wiped his eyes clear of caked salt, and looked up to where I pointed. He straightened gracefully, then he raised his arms high and screamed, “A fine laugh, Satan!” I saw my error. What I had thought were white clouds marking a break in the weather was in fact the white crest of a cliffside of water. Angel of Death shot up that wall, dipped hard at the top, then plunged again toward the center of the sea. There were times, as we rode up and down those canyons, that I hoped for an end, relief, release from that vast tomb of salt water. I kept my station, held to life by a power that I realized would let me go when and if it chose. Grandfather told me that storm was a sign from Lord God. I puzzle now if it was not a welcome into our time in the wilderness.

  We nearly lost Skyeless on the second day, which was Christmas 1995, as a rogue wave crashed over us, with him and Orri at the boom; only luck and a lifeline saved him, half insane from being snapped back from his grave, his leg smashed up. We did lose Hallverd, the King’s Spy, on the fifth day: delirious with fever, he charged on deck and threw himself off the stern; a wave caught him in midair and drove him back half the length of the ship before it pulled him under. We lost the top of our foremast on the seventh day. The sea still whirled as the sky raged, lightning bolts like claws leaping as if from wave crest to wave trough—an illusion that was magnificent and awful. By the ninth day, the first day of 1996, we could not pull ourselves to duty on the foredeck. Grandfather lashed himself to the wheel, ordering the heaviest crew members to take alternate turns holding his legs to provide him leverage against the rudder. We gave ourselves up to fate. Grandfather did not sleep; he prayed, he sang psalms, he argued with his Lord God: “You should not abandon us here! We have not begun to suffer! We are vain sinners! What purpose my work if this is an end? I must deliver him from their ways! Satan cannot take me! I feel your hand cradling me! Test me, break me! I shall not relent!”

  When the storm did break, we were straddling the equator, approximately one thousand miles from Africa and a little less from South America. The waves poured us like debris into an unholy heat. With Babe’s help, I untied Grandfather and pulled him below. Cleopatra helped us undress him, wash him, lay him out to sleep. We were too exhausted to talk, collapsed in our own berths. I do not know how many days it took us to recover, Angel of Death drifting in the humid calm.

  It was Wild Drumrul, asleep on deck to avoid the swelter below, who first smelled the smoke; unless it was Iceberg and Goldberg and their pups up top, also to escape the heat, who licked Wild Drumrul to alarm. He awoke me, screaming in broken German, “The fire! The sea is on fire!”

  We awakened Guy, Israel, and Thord, and we five stood aghast at the stern. It was midmorning, the sea nearby like green glass. Above, the sky was whitish blue with the heat. And before, at a great distance to the west, there was a shimmering fire line, subtending a ninety-degree angle. A thin smoke hugged the water in the near distance, and as we watched it curled across the sea to wash over us in the light breeze that fluttered our single sheet, then died. The calm was complete. The view was unconvincing, another illusion, and one had to turn away and look again, several times, to judge time and space. There was a fire line there, like ragged red crystal between the green blue sea and the pale blue sky.

  We drifted in the strong westerly current toward the burning sea. At twilight, no indication of a wind from any quarter, all of us save Peregrine, Charity, and Grandfather gathered on deck to lounge before that terrible beauty.

  “Water cannot burn,” said Wild Drumrul to me.

  “Is it the coast?” asked Israel.

  “I don’t think we can see that far,” I said.

  “Water cannot burn,” said Wild Drumrul to Israel.

  Full night displayed the Magellanic Cloud above and a spectacular seascape below, the fire starkly clear. We were still dazed from the storm, so I suppose more available to hypnotism. It did not occur to us to think of jeopardy. There was not a harsh word all day. It was Grandfather, emerging past midnight, surly and mighty again, who upset us, especially me. He paced the deck, then turned to drag me to the foredeck, another private conference.

  “Greenland! You have not declared yourself,” he said.

  “I can’t do it, please, you see,” I tried.

  “Knowing what I have said is true? We might have a chance.”

  “This is my family. You are my family. You said that to fight for what is mine is not wrong.”

  “Lord God is angrier than I had thought,” he said.

  “Do you know what that is?” I asked, pointing to the fire.

  “You know!” he boomed, springing to the mainmast to preach. “You all know what you see! My children, how long will you not see? You lie there beaten, even as you are sucked into the maelstrom.”

  “A fire storm!” said Israel, standing up in excitement as I translated Grandfather’s idioms. “That is what. Old man, you are crazy, but you do see things. Don’t you understand, Guy? Grim says we’re in the doldrums. The variables. It’s where the junk collects, right? An enormous stagnant pond, between the winds and currents of the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic. That junk, it’s been ignited into a fire storm, fed by waste.”

  “That’s farfetched,” said Guy.

  “So were those pirates. So was Praia,” said Israel.

  Gizur told Grandfather what they had said; Grandfather stamped the deck. “Your godless science and your perversions have blinded you. Look again, then pray for our delivery from such evil.”

  “It is Satan,” said Gizur, who had fallen under Grandfather’s spell more than any of us, his mind weakened, now crumbling.

  “That doesn’t help anyone, Gizur, that nonsense,” said Israel.

  “Accursed Jew!” said Grandfather.

  “None of that,” said Thord, moving to shelter poor Gizur.

  “Unrepentant Sodomite!” said Grandfather. “Heed the boy! Hell has burst into the world! Satan has torn creation open! There’s the wound! Perdition!”

  Guy, Israel, and Thord collected forward to confer. I sensed their digust with Grandfather. It was deserved. He had quit decency again, permitting his genius for metaphorical persuasion—which supported his superhuman resolve in a crisis—to become distorted in the calm, moving him to cruelty, hysteria. It was much the same distortion that had carried him from the Gulf of Bothnia to the pulpit of the Pillar of Salt to the near dictatorship of the North. I saw this, and tried the impossible, to give my loyalty to two irreconcilable parties.

  “Whatever it is,” I began, “it must feed on the wind. If we try for the trades to the Caribbean, we have to risk being dragged into that. It blocks us. We shouldn’t go back there.”

  “It is Satan, Grim,” said Grandfather.

  “Shut up, old man, I swear,” said Israel.

  “Act, for pity’s sake, act,” spoke up Cleopatra. “What good is your talk?”

  As Gizur explained her words Grandfather clapped his hands, well pleased with Cleopatra. We stood there gripped by her cold, obvious fact. Either we found the wind and sailed out of that calm, or the back draft of the fire storm would drag us into the burning sea. We had less choice than I had presented.

  Grandfather thundered forth Psalm 100, “Acclaim the Lord, all men on earth, worship the Lord in gladness, enter his presence with songs of exultation, know that the Lord is God!” pausing between his bursts to order us to launch Black C
rane and the jolly, to take to oars in teams, and, in Grandfather’s words, to tow Angel of Death “free of the fumes of Hell.”

  “Pull, children!” Grandfather cried from the bow. “Until you know perdition when you see it, pull! Until you fear damnation more than death and death more than pain, pull!”

  And I remember this: while I was going out to my shift and Lazarus was returning from his, I overheard him and Cleopatra; she pointed to the burning sea and asked, “Could there have been a war?” It was an idea that had not occurred to me, for I was ignorant of Lazarus’s so-called political science. I waited to hear Lazarus say, “Nothing so easy, wilder, no explanation, none,” and then he slumped to her.

  We did catch the wind, after three days of rowing that wore us down badly and broke Earle’s health. Grandfather thereupon proclaimed his own counsel. Hell was behind us, he said, he would not go back, and as master of Angel of Death, he would not risk proceeding east or west into the trades without trying for a landfall to mend the foremast and other minor damage that would worsen in a blow. At our council there was a bitter argument about Grandfather’s fitness to continue as captain of the ship. I opened my charts to assist their decision. Guy wanted to go back, arguing the fire would burn out; Israel was wary of another calm, and equally of another storm. I told them we were three degrees south of the equator. If we were to continue without repairs, our choices were: either make for the southeast trades and ride the Benguela Current into an African port along the Gulf of Guinea, risking pirates and cutters; or to ride the trades across the Atlantic to catch the Brazil Current and, bypassing American ports for the same reason we should avoid Africa, try for the Pacific via the Strait of Magellan, the legendary grave of all ill-crewed, ill-equipped ships. I pressed them that making for the southwest seemed safest, and mending our foremast beforehand seemed most prudent. Grandfather’s preference for a landfall midocean had two possibilities: either Saint Paul’s Rocks to our northwest, an uninhabited desolation; or Ascension Island to the southeast, a British naval station that might be as hostile as had been the British Isles.

  Israel and Guy listened and studied, then gave a qualified assent to Ascension for repairs, saying that only then would they decide whether we went west, east, or back north.

  This was good caution; it was bad luck. Making for Ascension was another defeat. I am unsure if there were better choices; still, there might have been some other way than I was able to formulate, some other way that I could not see, that would have carried us back inside civilization. I stress this; it is not exaggeration. We knew we were in absolute peril, though we deceived ourselves, though we had known it since first we heard the word cholera. It was not something we were strong enough to share at meals. How does one say, “I think we are lost”? I could place us on the chart. Yet we were lost. Somehow, at some point, for a reason I do not yet comprehend (a mystery that compels this story), we on board Angel of Death had passed from the inside of civilization, reason, decency, privilege, common sense, and security to the outside of civilization, where there was no sense, only terror, silence, worse upon worse. Did it happen in Stockholm harbor when we stole Peregrine? Did it happen when we obeyed the exclusion by the cutters and fled? Did it happen when we ignored the massacre of children off Portugal? Did it happen when we walked through Port Praia in a nightmare? Did it happen when we survived a tempest that would have destroyed us except for Grandfather’s bravado and our luck? Had we failed and were we condemned, had we dared and were we trapped, or had we stumbled and were we being tempted? It was this: We were lost to what we had had, by fortunate birthright, back in Sweden and America; and it became necessary to find a new life that was outside, other, incredible. If there was a greatest Good, it was no longer for us.

  A week of rugged sailing brought us windward of Ascension Island. Thick weather had closed about us, and the rains were down in sheets, solving our fresh-water problem but keeping us at the pumps. We beat up hard toward where Ascension should have been. A sharp squall picked us up, drove us southward. I was not yet a certain navigator, but good enough to tell Grandfather that unless I was backward, Ascension should be to the east when the weather broke. It was not, more fog and rain. We took a new tack, listened for a foghorn, watched for lights. I reworked my figures. It was twilight, and I was going topside to admit my miscalculations again, when, simultaneously, Wild Drumrul cried, “Land to port!” and we heard the screams.

  Did we hear anything? Did we see anything? I must explain that I was assuming that we had missed Ascension during the night. I blamed the squall for driving us more south than I had been able to determine: our instruments were antique, and without the stars to resight (even with them, for the southern heavens were new to me and Grandfather), I was mostly guessing. When Wild Drumrul cried, “Land to port,” I quickly supposed that the land he sighted was not Ascension, was rather uninhabited volcanic formations, of the sort that poke up from the mid-Atlantic ridge, treacherous for uninformed sailors like us.

  The screams dumbfounded us. The half-moon gave enough light to risk a pass close to the lee of the largest visible peak. Wild Drumrul cried again, this time a new surprise, “Light to port!” He identified the source as a ship at anchor a mile off the rocks. We scrambled to a new tack to take us toward the light. As we came about, there were more screams. We strained our eyes into the dark. We could make out a natural harbor, shaped by two hornstone ridges slanting down into the sea. In that cove appeared a heap of man-made things—boats, barges, rafts, frigates. The waves jammed them against each other, making snapping, thumping, squeaking sounds, some ripping open, some slipping underwater. We studied the ridges for signs of the crews and passengers. The rocks were barren of vegetation. There were no campfires. I called to Wild Drumrul that he must see signs of life. There were none. There were more screams.

  “The wind, through the rocks, it’s possible,” said Israel.

  “Speak your blind lies, Jew,” said Grandfather, ordering us to shorten sail.

  “I can see them!” cried Gizur to Orri, pointing to the rocks.

  There was nothing to see. That is accurate. Yet when I swung free of our foresail, I did see something. I asked Babe with a shrug. Though he was deaf, he nodded yes. I asked Little Dede Gone; he ran to his brother. I went back to Grandfather. Angel of Death caught the wind and listed. Cleopatra came up top with Lazarus. They were arguing. I turned to them as another scream startled us, a barrage of screams, a chorus in pain.

  “What is it?” said Cleopatra, more to me than Lazarus.

  “Port of the damned,” said Lazarus. He was angry. I understand now that he was jealous of me.

  “You don’t believe that,” I said to Lazarus. “Those are just derelicts piled up here by the storms.”

  “And you don’t believe that,” said Lazarus.

  Orlando the Black swung down beside us. He looked stern. He spoke patiently. “I see three sharp ridges forming a peak. Ocean, and clouds over the moon. Flotsam and jetsam. That is all.”

  Grandfather ordered us to stations; we came about one more time. Otter Ransom and Tall Troll readied for combat. We chose not to talk more of those screams, of those shapes and figures on those rocks, which none of us saw, which we only thought we saw, which we sensed. The ancient Norse held that an unburied corpse, especially if death was by misadventure or murder, can seek out the living, can walk and talk and scream, for retribution, for their regrets. Did we see the dead? We were exhausted, frightened, lost. It was the wind. We did see that lone ship’s light.

  They said they were missionaries. Their ship was a badly dilapidated cargo bomb, nearly a century old, a wooden hull, four masts for sail, and aged diesel engines added at some point in a makeshift reconditioning. It was named The Free Gift of God, out of Luanda, which Lazarus told me was the capital of the People’s Republic of Angola. At our first pass, several of the missionaries appeared on the forecastle, robed, ebullient, and threw us greetings in English and Portuguese, holding up a crude wooden
cross, calling “Hallelujah!” We chose to drop anchor off a small rock formation at a good distance from the freighter’s stern, wary of the tide and unseen rocky teeth. Once we had anchored, our cable out forty feet, the weather cleared enough for me to resight our position. I remember no special shock at my discovery that the land behind us was indeed Ascension Island, marked on my charts as populated by four hundred people.

  “I never doubted it,” said Grandfather when I told him.

  I did not go in the jolly with our lead party of Israel, Guy, and the Furores. The Furore brothers returned within the hour in dismal moods. Lazarus said the missionaries seemed Roman Catholic mendicants, a lay order, possibly a rogue order. They offered us assistance and what supplies they had. Lazarus also said they behaved strangely, as if none of what we were witnessing was out-of-the-ordinary. Lazarus said that Israel wanted me, Grandfather, Otter Ransom, Tall Troll, and Wild Drumrul to row over in Black Crane as soon as possible.

  The Furores brought back with them two of the missionaries: a thin, old man of mixed blood, Father Hospital; and a nimble, middle-aged, very dark Negro, Father Novo Pedro. They spoke Portuguese, had some corrupt, plausible British-English, were dressed in heavy robes and skullcaps, and carried ornate crucifixes. The first thing they did was to announce they were ready to hear our confessions as a prelude to offering Holy Communion. Father Hospital asked me if anyone was in need of the sacrament of the last rites. I translated all this for Grandfather.

  “I’ll have none of that on my ship!” said Grandfather.

  “Are you in need of absolution, my son?” Father Hospital said to Grandfather. Grandfather scowled at him, waved him back as he gave orders to lower away Black Crane. I explained to the fathers that we were mostly unchurched, but that my grandfather was a pastor in the Swedish Lutheran Church. They smiled pleasantly. I could see what Lazarus meant by peculiar. I asked Father Hospital, “What happened to Ascension?”