The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica

by John Calvin Batchelor

  This speech is probably a conflation of many remarks Cleopatra made to me during the voyage; nonetheless, if it is, it touches the themes she reiterated that night. I could not answer her. I felt humiliated. How cruel she was. A man speaks better of his dogs than that. It still hurts to recall her compassionless appraisal of me as if I were a specimen in a cage. It would please me if I could now declare that she was wrong. She was not right.

  At the time, Cleopatra’s reference to Peregrine’s so-called fear of me made me most ashamed—of what kind of son I was and had been on board Angel of Death. It was that remorse, for faults I see now were not mine but the result of fate, mixed with my boyish adoration of Cleopatra’s intelligence, that turned me once again. I wanted to show Cleopatra that I could act with reason and utility. (New Benthamism was on my mind, although not as now, for I was not bold enough then to challenge Cleopatra on her mother’s prodigies and how ruinous they seemed for the outcasts we had encountered in the Atlantic, sacrificed hideously for someone’s idea of the greatest good for the greatest number.) I wanted to show Cleopatra that I could think abstractly, could imagine, could choose.

  I was a fool, as I tangled myself up again racing between Grandfather and Israel. Having been finally disloyal to Israel after The Free Gift of God, I was willing to be disloyal to Grandfather too. I should have minded Grandfather. He told me what I myself believed. We were lucky on Mead’s Kiss. We should not have asked more. I confounded myself. There were good reasons, utilitarian reasons, to follow the council’s vote for a reconnaissance to the Falklands. Molly needed vegetables. I needed charts. There was a sound argument that we were being overcautious, that the Falklanders would welcome us not as refugees but as a ship in distress. I know now that all the reason in all the books cannot change fate, or provide a flicker of the wisdom one gains if one heeds a prophetic voice like Grandfather’s.

  I understand now that those two weeks of Norse luck on Mead’s Kiss had lulled us, so that the inexplicable outrages of our Atlantic crossing no longer weighed on us. It was profoundly wrong of us not to concentrate on what we had learned out there, on what was right in front of us, that dirty rain and those ash deposits and those deep, resonant boomings from the south. It is my experience now, as it was not then, that tragedy—I mean drama of catastrophe on a global canvas, like the Greeks’ Troy, the Romans’ Rome, the Lutherans’ Saxony—is like a living thing, with genesis, personality, talents, especially with times when the despair seems to have done. This apparent respite is where the irresolute fail. One is beaten by turning from themes established and explicated. When under attack, one is always in peril, even during the lulls. I shall be specific. It was possible to reconsider our voyage from Stockholm harbor in such a way that our escape from the King’s Spies, the German “wolf,” the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese cutters, the massacre at Port Praia, the tempest, the burning sea, Father Saint Stephen, were not simply defeats, were also victories—that we were fortunate, blessed, very, very lucky to have made Mead’s Kiss. However, this did not mean that the tragedy was complete. We were still in jeopardy. We were still lost, outside, exiled. It was stupidity to let down our guard. Indeed, if Israel and Guy and Thord and the Furores had one common fault, it was not that they could not believe in goodness, it was that they could not believe in irredeemable and nonrational badness. Cleopatra was wrong. There are villains. Israel was wrong. There is darkness. For all his shameless excesses, Grandfather could look at those villains and into that darkness and endure, more, he could keep fighting for his own. The others looked at darkness and begged parole, pleaded for a peace that did not exist.

  I pushed off in Black Crane at twilight. I took with me the Turks, Otter Ransom, Lazarus and Orlando the Black, and Iceberg, who had weathered the tropical crossing better than Goldberg and the two pups. Grandfather’s final warning to me was clear: he took me behind the sealer’s shack, stood me up against a huge boulder protruding from the hillside, and lectured me with an intensity that was a blend of his dread, wisdom, resolve, might, and love. He told me that if there was trouble and I could not get back to Mead’s Kiss, or if he was forced to retreat from Mead’s Kiss, I was to sail Black Crane due south on the sixtieth meridian, and he would find me no matter how long it took, “as Lord God is my witness and judge, I swear.” If only I could report equally meaningful exchanges between me and Peregrine, Israel, Guy, Earle, Thord, Orri, Gizur, Molly, even Charity. My farewell was subdued. I was too superstitious to say good-bye. How profoundly I regret that now.

  East and West Falkland are like two crabs, back to back, divided by a one-hundred-mile-long and ten-mile-wide funnel of water, bordered by out islands like droppings, especially west of West Falkland. The archipelago lies about four hundred miles off Tierra del Fuego, on a part of the ocean floor that is called the Falkland Plateau. What I knew about the Falklands that day was concise; wind, rain, birds, seals, and a dampness that frosted one’s beard. I approached cautiously, intending to swing around East Falkland in three days, my original plan was to circle east through the Falkland Sound and come around to approach Port Stanley, at the eastern most tip of East Falkland, from the northwest.

  We crossed what was called the Eagle Passage between George Island and East Falkland without incident but with difficulty, the seas sloppy, the fogbanks and steady wind dangerous in lumbering Black Crane. The out islands showed concentrations of fires, and wreckage that was likely other derelict vessels piled up on rocks. East Falkland showed encampments inland. Lazarus made sense when he said there seemed more fires than there were supposed to be people in the Falklands. And where were the flocks, I asked, the islands were supposed to be covered with sheep ranches. I bypassed the first villages we sighted on East Falkland as we moved into the Sound, more for uncertainty of tides than for worry. By midnight, we felt more of those very deep rumblings from the southwest. Wild Drumrul used a Turkish word that I was to learn meant earthquake.

  When Wild Drumrul spotted several long boats filled with men and rowers making for us from East Falkland, we must have been twenty-five miles inside the Sound. My crew reacted well, no alarm, steady-handed. We were pressed maneuvering the mid-Sound islets and rocks, because the water was choppy, the tide dragging us westward. I struggled to keep our bow up to the threat. The longboats passed us as if we were not there. I counted four craft, heavily laden so low in the water, pulling in haste toward West Falkland to the northwest. I liked their look. What a peculiar explanation for a choice that would mean everything to my fate. It is so; I liked the look of purpose about them: determined, sure, hard-set, well done. I brought Black Crane about and fell into their wake. We could not keep up with the wind against us, so I struck sail, put us under oar. Soon after, we heard explosions to the far east; Otter Ransom agreed with Orlando the Black that it was an artillery barrage. We pulled across the Sound’s centrifugal tidal rip, returned to sail.

  By first light, we had lost the longboats, but we had found an inviting West Falkland inlet, with what seemed a ramshackle village at its northern end, sprawled between cliffs and rolling moors. We passed outlying jetties, saw holes that resembled impact craters. It was early morning as we came about to clear the sandbars, took in sail, pulled into the inlet. We passed two old men working on sails on the stony beach. At the inmost wharf, there was a sandbag redoubt, and a flagpole bearing a blue and white pennant showing a yellow sunface. None of us recognized that it was the flag of the Argentine Republic. What we saw seemed quiet, not dangerous—deep poverty. My explanation for the fact that we were ignored is that several other boats came into the inlet after us, and more were already tied up. There was a festive mood. When church bells began tolling from the town, I made my decision to land. We tied up, and Lazarus, Otter Ransom, and I set off for the village. We fell into a rush of men and boys from shacks on the shore, and we were swept along to the village square—muddy holes, plenty of dogs, several rusted vehicles, a church, and a row of stone huts. The bells stopped as a tattered pl
atoon of soldiers in green woolen uniforms emerged from the church doors. I quickly made sense of the scene. There was to be an execution by firing squad. Though we were strangers, there were many there not of the village, and we were overlooked in the excitement. We slid toward the church side of the square, near several ancient-looking nuns—whom I thought out of place, given that the church was Protestant, by the cornerstone, the First Presbyterian Church of West Falkland. There was also a scaffolding there. I tell this about that scaffolding: There were wagon wheels raised above its platform; there were decaying corpses tied on top of those wheels. The crowd became lively, expectant, when the soldiers led out a dozen prisoners chained together in threes.

  Lazarus translated the commanding officer’s speech to the crowd, whom he called “the vigilant home guard of the liberated village of 2 de Diciembre.” His talk included sufficient references to invasion, sedition, sabotage, and counterrevolution for us to conclude that the Falkland archipelago—two hundred treeless, wind-scourged islands of shepherds and fishermen—was buried in a civil war. Lazarus said the soldiers were Argentines, though the officer also used the word Patagonians, meaning they were from that region of Argentina. They belonged to what was called “El Ejercito de la Tierra del Fuego,” which means, literally, the army of the land afire, or, figuratively, The Army of the End of the Earth.

  “I’ve seen this before, read about it all my life,” said Lazarus. Its too familiar. It’s routine. This town is the front, or was recently. A good guess is that it fell to these troops last December, in a late spring campaign. These campesinos are the militia. Our commandant is regular army, a drunkard, to hear him. He’s probably assigned to organize the villagers. What war this is, and who the enemy is, well, I can make a good guess.”

  Lazarus was interrupted as the executions did proceed with a routine. The first trio, a Negro and two gray little men, died badly. The subaltern’s pistol misfired at the coup de grace. The commandant was furious with the ineptitude of his men. His temper seemed to amuse the crowd. And once the corpses were cleared, the gathering relaxed noticeably. Women and children appeared from the stone huts. Altogether, the villagers appeared as condemned as the prisoners—beaten down, starving, hanging on. The idea of politics in such a place was ridiculous, what Grandfather would have said was a Satanic jest. The highest form of civilization in 2 de Diciembre was the firing squad. The second trio of prisoners was dragged to the posts.

  The women behind us let out a wail. I realized then they were not nuns, just hags in black. One stout hag churned across the yard, heaved herself down before the post of one of the condemned, a thin, boyish white man with a mangled arm. The subaltern tried to pull her away. The boy sagged to her, held up only by his bonds. The display seemed to embarrass the commandant. From the graveyard gate, a stocky black-bearded man appeared. He wore a broad-brimmed hat and a clerical collar as would a minister calling on his parishioners; oddly, he also wore excellent brown seaboots. Black-beard made for the hag. He carried a shovel, and it occurred to me that he was both pastor and gravedigger. He moved with a weight and dexterity that attracted me—more animated than the whole assembly. He got the hag up, took her back to the scaffold steps, consoled her like a worried son. It was bizarre yet sad-making. I suppose that explains why the commandant was not alarmed. The subaltern ordered his men to get on with it. Black-beard shouted at the subaltern in Spanish, then walked toward the commandant, turned to the crowd, began a speech in broad English, “What ye’ve done, there’s no forgiving! She raised that boy after his folk was killed by yerr butchers! Ye tortured out his mind! I want ye to know, it’s important to myself ye know, I don’t see an end to this! Don’t want an end! Yerr Republic be a thief! What’s ours be ours by right!”

  The soliloquy was a ruse, as Black-beard was a masquerade, neither pastor nor gravedigger. He was the enemy. His talk distracted the mob, astounded the soldiers, signaled the attack. Black-beard arched back and swung his shovel, felling the commandant. The square was suddenly awash in ricocheting bullets. Explosions tore apart the church tower and the second stories of the only two real buildings in town. The scaffolding took a direct mortar hit and toppled in pieces. We three broke for the inlet, were cut off by firepower and the hysterical crowd. Otter Ransom dragged me and Lazarus behind the trough of a well.

  The assault was intended as a rescue, became a fiasco. The condemned died with their captors. The subaltern waved at the warehouse down the cliffside, the origin of the heaviest fire, and gathered what men he could for a charge that did not lack courage. Two small groups of men firing pistols and rifles then rushed the square from the north side to outflank the militia. The combat was hand-to-hand, fanatical. We had to scramble again, Iceberg right with us, through the shattered church, through falling timbers, over the iron gate, and into the graveyard. We worked from stone to tomb back to a stone-built shed. We were moving away from Black Crane. Behind the shed was a sloping heath, beyond that, hillocks and treeless moors. As we rested, Lazarus said he hoped Orlando the Black had pushed off. I said that would make us dead men. He returned that I was a coward, this was “the revolution.” I can see now that he was as frightened as I was, that his dogma was disguised panic. At the time, I cursed him, we cursed each other, over the gunfire and explosions.

  We did not do more than yell at each other, however, too terrified to swing. It was childish hysterics. I understand now that I despised Lazarus not, as I then thought, because he was a braggart and poseur, or because I did not understand why he had murdered that pathetic priest; I hated him because he was my rival for Cleopatra. I knew he thought me a dumb beast; I thought him a sly cheat. More, I had reason—incidents on board Angel of Death I have passed by—to believe that he and Cleopatra were lovers. This seems as inappropriate a revelation here as it was an inappropriate interlude then. We were trapped by massacre. Yet I had deceived myself for months about the two of them. She had shown her condescension toward me the night before. I blamed Lazarus. I was a young man. I had naive fancies. I do even now, without the youth. I suppose that I have delayed until here to mention my longing and jealousy because I have yet to accept completely our baleful, never resolved triangle.

  Lazarus and I were interrupted in our squabbling by the appearance in my life for the second time of the very same bold, graceful, sad-eyed seaman who had earlier heralded the battle with a shovel. There should be some more telling way I can introduce Germanicus. It does not come to me. Germanicus Frazer himself, stockily built, black-bearded, proud-hearted, girded with iron determinism as Grandfather was with his ineffable Lord God, then pushed through the graveyard’s postern gate. He had the boy with the mangled arm across his shoulders, and the stout hag in tow. He saw us before we did him, crouched, gritted, waved a black horse pistol to keep us at bay while he weighed his chances.

  He began heavily, “I’m Frazer, of the South Georgia Volunteers. I need yerr help. Give it, or I take it. She’s bad hurt, he’s near dead. I need ye”—he pointed at me—“to carry her. We got to get up there.”

  “It’s not our fight,” said Otter Ransom to me in Swedish.

  “We have people back there,” I said to Germanicus.

  “Dead or gone now. With me or divil take ye,” he said, shifting the boy on his shoulders. That was not a choice. I got the woman up, and we ran for it. We climbed, dodged, up above the town, back across to the cliffs. Germanicus was stalwart, not suspicious, though I doubt we could have overpowered him. He had the aura of the indomitable; if one has met such, one knows the effect is absolute. We rested at a vantage that showed the inlet. Black Crane was gone. Through the mist, we spotted a patrol in pursuit, shooting at us from great range. We got up to the peak of the cliffs, plunged to our fate. We slid the last fifty yards to a boulder-strewn shore. There were four long boats in the shallows, the same ones I had chanced to follow the night before. I cursed my luck. All happened quickly. We three were deliriously winded by our escape, clinging to each other, lost. Germanicus was a
lert and tireless, ordering the men in the boats to action. We handed over the boy and the hag to a boat already filled with wounded. Their attack had failed so badly that there were only enough left to man three of the craft. Germanicus was second-in-command; his captain was seriously wounded. The company, grizzly, sheepskin-wrapped, heavily armed, was, I would later learn, a guerrilla group from the South Atlantic island of South Georgia, calling themselves the South Georgia Volunteers.