The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica

by John Calvin Batchelor

  (I write them. That is inexact. I have called them refugees without refuge. Peregrine called himself an exile. They called themselves damned. The South Georgians called them beasties. And yet I resist. None of these words are adequate for those hollow faces, swollen bellies, filthy complexions, terrified eyes, open sores, narrow and bent figures squatting in dust and mud, silent, past weeping, though it was true they cried out when they died. I feel now I have not been rigorous in my characterization of them. It is important to get it right here, at the beginning of my time among them. I am in conflict between calling them people or continuing to name them for what they appeared: broken, discarded, starving, diseased, deranged, half-men. I see something, a new thought. The Norse had a word for the North American Indians they discovered in their voyages beyond Greenland; they called them Skrcelings, which means wretches. In the Fiddle Bible there is much talk of the wretched; Jesus came not for the blessed but for the wretched; Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt, and from what Israel once told me, the word Hebrew might have meant wretches to the pharaoh. Also I recall that at some point during our exodus on. King James, I began to think of the people out there on the ocean as wretches. This might seem a small point, but it occurs to me that on King James I was struggling to describe to myself how I and mine differed from the people we found on the sea, on Mead’s Kiss, and after. That was false discrimination. I understand now that I was one with them, and I should now have the will to call myself whatever I want. I call myself wretched. I call them wretched, not hopeless, not beaten, not damned—wretched.)

  My encounter with those wretches at the ruined weather station on Mead’s Kiss was grisly revelation. They had set no pickets. There were more than forty of them, in clumps, a few women, no children. We surrounded them. Motherwell barked an order.

  “No, no!” a tall man shouted in broken English. He urged his compatriots in Portuguese to remain still; the women bunched to the side. He said, “No gold! No guns! Over there, guns and gold, yes?”

  The tall man with the red face kept babbling as we searched; they did have rifles, pistols, ammunition. Motherwell had the men lie face down in the mud. Wild Drumrul motioned me toward him; he pointed down an incline behind the wall of the weather station. The smell told what the shadows did not show. I asked if it was a graveyard. Wild Drumrul said no, a massacre, children too. Motherwell reported that the tall man said he was a French physician, an apparent lie, and that he thought we were Englishmen because we were so large. There was another Frenchman, at least in part, who said he was a priest, another likely lie. A third man, a leathery Negro, said he was first mate on the trawler. We got these three apart from the rest. Otter Ransom came out of the weather station, spitting, angry, shaken, said they had cut up some women in there.

  “Pirates, murdering pirates,” said Motherwell.

  I ordered him to deploy scouts up the hill to check on the other side, told Indigo Zulema to get the three ringleaders over to the wall for interrogation.

  They said they had been at sea more than six weeks, embarking from the Greater Antilles, from Haiti, or, in another version, from the Lesser Antilles. We struggled with our talk, because we had no French or Portuguese, they had bad English, so we used crude Spanish. The Frenchman, who called himself Monsieur le Docteur, said their party had been twice this size; bad weather and pirates had forced them to land repeatedly on the continental coast, where some had run away, others had died of wounds. He emphasized they were free of disease, that they had lost no one to le cholera. He said there was a war in northern Brazil, with airplanes. Monsieur le Docteur was partly educated, no university doctor, more likely a half-breed who had worked at a clinic. He was guileful, seemed well-fed, wore good boots and filthy clothes, had a woozy laugh. He asked, were we South Africans?

  The fake priest, Raul, most likely a runaway from a monastery, said that he and some parishioners had been chased out of Fort-de-France by pirates, had purchased their way onto a boat only to have the captain desert them. He later said he had fled an epidemic. He was about to admit that it was plague, was jarred by Monsieur le Docteur, added they had seen plague in Brazil, had stayed clear. When they saw we balked at this, Monsieur le Docteur elaborated, telling of blockades, quarantines, mass deaths, warships sweeping through refugee ships sinking any boat with sickness. Of note, Raul was frightened of Wild Drumrul unusually, called him le Maure, and when questioned about this said that he had heard Moslems were slaughtering Christians off Africa. Neither of them mentioned America. When we asked, they hung their heads, said the Americans were a great people, were we Americans?

  In sum, the two Frenchmen were full of lies, and when they did not deliberately lie, they confused what they had seen with what they thought we wanted to hear. They had advanced faculties to say and to do whatever it took to stay alive. They were wretched, probably killers, but they fought. They wanted ‘us to take them along with us. We asked, all of them? Monsieur le Docteur said no, only those strong enough to make it through. This was our first hint that they had a destination.

  “Where bound?” said Indigo Zulema in Spanish.

  Monsieur le Docteur tensed, spoke French, then English. “The relief camps.”

  “Camps of the church,” said Raul in Spanish.

  The Negro asked for another smoke, spoke Portuguese, pointing. Motherwell gave it to him, told him to speak plain.

  “South,” he said in Spanish, pointing.

  We recoiled, looked at each other. At that, Monsieur le Docteur and Raul opened up and rambled, as if our incredulity threatened their shaky but bright hope and they had to convert us immediately and totally to their fantasy. They overlapped each other in French, Portuguese, Spanish, broken English. What emerged was irrational and compelling: relief camps, church camps, food, clothing, Americans, Europeans, relocation centers, mercy ships, resettlement to Australia, America, Alaska. They stressed repeatedly that they did not mean the arctique, instead islands off the coast of Antarctica.

  “Them’re lyin’, plain,” said Motherwell.

  “Where’d them hear it?” asked Davey Gaunt.

  “Shoot one, them’ll tell,” said Motherwell.

  Indigo Zulema said that the fat one, Raul, said that the priests knew about the camps, and that the fathers at Fort-de-France had known, and that the church would save those that got through the pirates and the plague.

  “It is a lie,” I said.

  “Them’ll say Hell’s froze to save their skins,” said Motherwell.

  “They’re not lying,” I said. I had Indigo Zulema interrogate them again, from their embarkation—this time it was Brazil—to their landfalls on the continent, the pirates, the sweeps, the storms, their landing on Mead’s Kiss after they were turned away from East Falkland by gunboats. They said they knew nothing of the bodies in the ravine or the corpses in the weather station. We listened again to their vision of the relief camps, “les camps de secours.” Raul repeated, “les camps catholiques”; he added also “les camps glaces” or the ice camps. They portrayed an ever more fetching scene: dormitories, clinics, transportation to new countries welcoming refugees. They believed by then that we were ignorant of the camps and that we wanted to join the exodus, so they tried to make it as attractive as possible, hoping we would take them with us. Thus, as we asked more questions, they got farther from what they knew, pathetic as it was, and we got farther from discovering where they could have heard such stories. What they said sounded fabulous. However, in their mouths and eyes, it seemed available, a genuine release. They proselytized a heaven on earth.

  I walked away. It was their fear that made them convincing. I took in the stench of bodies, corpses, mud. I turned toward the wind. I regained my balance and purpose. I found Grandfather’s marker, that same weathered, convex gray boulder he had stood me up against just before I had left him almost six years before. It backed on the weather station. A small female crouched there, fell down trying to flee me. I reached out to help, thought better, shooed her awa
y. Grandfather’s rock was his temperament, a giant stone tablet. I remembered it clean of markings; now it was covered with pitiable graffiti: names, initials, curses, dates scratched in many languages, scratched with knives, stones, hearts—all that was left to tell the tale of the thousands who had passed there.

  Across the center, at what was my line of sight, were thick, well-cut letters. The message, “fiddle februari 98.”

  I touched the letters, felt nothing. No, I felt very tired. Looking up, I noted smaller letters above, not obvious at first, something one would only note by accident, or luck. I reached as high as I could, brushed away black dust—fallout from the volcanoes—and found “m fiddle 11/96 60w.”

  It was lighting up by then. There were shots from the hillside above me. In the surprise, one of the pirates got a pistol and shot one of my men. Indigo Zulema fired wildly in defense. Monsieur le Docteur and Raul, sure we would kill them, tried to control their men, were shot down for it. There was more fire from the ridge, an attack from another encampment. We were off at a run. The Negro ran with us. At the waterline, while Davey Gaunt set fire to the trawler and Motherwell set our perimeter, the Negro became crazed, crawling, begging in Spanish, “Save me! I know the way!” In the dawn mist the skirmish was a draw. We might have been trapped; the absence of an enemy commander spared us, since the pirates were required to fight to save their ship rather than to pursue us. As we got our boat into the surf I looked at the pleading Negro and made a decision. I was later glad for it. From what the Negro told Indigo Zulema on the beach, and, after we took him along, from what he told Lazarus and one of our Portuguese-speaking couples back on board King James, I learned much of the plight of the fleet of wretches, the wretched, in the Southern Ocean.

  His name was Xique. He had been a seaman on a coastal freighter that had been scuttled in northern Brazil, at Recife, a year before. He said he had escaped overland, fought as a guerrilla, worked for the army as a gravedigger, then led a band of deserters down a large river until he was captured by the army, escaped, got on a frigate that worked first as a troop transport, later as a raider on the coast, and once as a mercenary blockade- runner to evacuate soldiers from Africa’s Gold Coast. This ship was sunk by a gunboat at Rio de Janeiro, and he escaped again in an open boat with a group of seamen who soon forced their way aboard a trawler from the Caribbean—the same trawler Davey Gaunt had burned. That was where he met the two Frenchmen. They were killers, had murdered their captain and been chained as mutineers, and only the intervention of Xique and his mates saved them. The trawler then theirs, they had put in at various small ports down the coast, selling passage to refugees. Once at sea, they threw their victims overboard and put into port again.

  His fantasies and deceptions aside, what he said that was most important to me was of the time he had spent on the coastal freighter before it was scuttled at Recife. His ship had been hired several times to run in convoys south to relief camps on islands off the coast of Antarctica. He described what sounded to my sealers to be the South Shetland Islands. When we challenged him for details, he said he did remember one island called “Elephant.” That had been four years before. Also, the two Frenchmen had sold passage to a Brazilian man and his family, whom they had then drowned, but not before the Brazilian had told Xique that the relief camps were relocating refugees, had told Xique that he had been there as a seaman and seen such the year before.

  At that point, Xique utterly contradicted and degraded his story, claiming he had been at the camps the year before, claiming he had been a soldier and not a pirate. Xique said the sea was covered with pirates and plague ships and warships, that we should be particularly afraid of raiding ships from Africa, because that was where the sickness was worst.

  Xique said he could take us to the relief camps. In Portuguese he called them ice camps. He said a ship as good as ours was sure to be welcomed by the priests and the soldiers there. The oddest, saddest detail was that he kept talking about “English nurses.”

  My memory is that the very next day was Sunday. That may be off, a few days might have passed, since it took us time and seamanship to find Candlemas Packet, where conditions had continued to deteriorate. At Longfaeroe’s service that morning, it was announced that I had forbidden anyone from voluntarily going over to Candlemas Packet. Longfaeroe’s sermon was furious and blunt about the sternness and stoutheartedness of David of Jerusalem; he added a scripture lesson from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus’ words to the effect that “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.”

  I ruled a house divided. I had Germanicus announce our sailing course, which I had arrived at without counsel. The reaction was not pronounced—they were tough and pragmatic—rather it was skeptical, cautious. Longfaeroe’s service ended and the debate began.

  “More of the same!” said Lazarus. “The face of the bully!” What relief camps? What proof? A killer’s lies? And show me the plague! Cholera, yes, typhus, yes, but where is this plague that chases us? Show me that we can’t get ashore on Patagonia. Show me we can’t run for America. Let Grim Fiddle answer me. He is using us, and all to look for a man, a monster, his grandfather, who is dead, dead! I know you, Grim Fiddle. I know your mind!”

  “What’ve we become?” said Jane. “What sets us other than the Hospidar, to let those poor folk on Candlemas Packet die? And what if the sickness starts here? Throw bairns over? We have medicine. We can fight it!”

  “My people are afraid,” said Toro Zulema. “We are not sailors. I cannot know if that man is truthful. We fear the sickness and pirates. We want to go home. I cannot know if these camps, or the priests, will help us. I do not want to speak against Grim Fiddle. My people need help.”

  “Me, I seen the Shetlands, and ye that have too know,” said Christmas Muir. “Ice and more. I ain’t sayin’ couldn’t be camps. I ain’t sayin’ I won’t go. I ain’t sayin’ I ain’t scared of that Satan’s Seat. I ain’t sayin’ I got answers. It be ice there, and more ice.”

  The talk did not sway the Volunteers under Motherwell, or the crew under Germanicus; it did not leave them untouched, either. There is much more I could write of the dissent. I push that aside now. My mind was set, perhaps from a point I cannot find, and it is misleading to detail the controversy, the more so because Lazarus was right.

  The truth is that I did not care about the reasons to go south or not to. I was trusting my luck. I figured loosely: that if Grandfather had gone ashore on East or West Falkland, he was dead; that if he had gone ashore on the continent, he was lost; that if he had foundered, there was no hope. Yet he had gone somewhere between November of 1996 and February of 1998, somewhere that permitted him to get back to Mead’s Kiss. In my mind, there was one chance. The relief camps might have been a fantasy. My quest for Grandfather might have been a fantasy. I married them, a union that I could not reveal to my people because it could not have withstood light.

  Was I right to plunge them into the ice? Was I right to pursue Grandfather at the sacrifice of decency? I intend to be as harsh on myself now as I was on those people then. I was wrong. I have come up against this puzzle many times in my mind; I have told myself that I knew we were doomed, that I knew I could have given Germanicus sailing directions for any point on the compass and the end would have been the same, or worse. I remain unconvinced by this rationalization, because it is based upon an event and a decision that lacked reason. I put my desire before the high dreams left those one hundred and fifty on board King James and one hundred on board Candlemas Packet. I made a rash decision for the most good for the least number. I was no Beowulf, and knew it then—what vain romanticism—nor was I a David of Jerusalem, though I let Longfaeroe preach that imagery to reinforce my rule. I might have been doomed; I condemned those people. I might have been fated to hear the whispers of a thousand-year-dead outlaw, to converse with a pale albatross, to lose heart in a ruthless scramble for justification. That gives me no cause now, nor did it then, to drag, not plunge
, to drag my people into my crimes. I was wrong.

  I took my stand on the quarterdeck, and it meant that I turned my back on my people. The pride and anger in me matched that tumultuous sky of black and gray clouds above the most violent sea on earth, a steady westerly swell with thirty-foot rollers coming at us in groups of five, so that only when King James rose atop the last crest was it possible to study the horizon. The weather seemed to change hourly, a calm followed by a squall of icy rain, so that Germanicus would have to turn us to the wind to clear our lines of ice, followed by a sunburst that transformed the color of the sea from gray to ultramarine with red streaks, almost purple toward sunset. And around me, thousands of whalebirds, ice birds, shearwaters, and albatrosses, feeding off the flotsam, searching for more sizable detritus. We were not alone out there. There were large ships to the east, small ships to the west, some running under sail and alone, others under power and listing badly in the swells—either poor seamanship or badly loaded.

  The wretched threw themselves into the Scotia Sea. Open boats and wreckage were indistinguishable from bergy bits and small ice floes tossed like balls by the hills of water moving in diverse direction to form momentary mountain ranges. A sudden blow at evening of one of the first few days south of Cape Horn scattered the small ships, drove us east toward the big ships. We kept Malody in sight as long as possible, then radioed rendezvous points along our sailing course, south on the sixtieth meridian. The next morning, we were all eyes for Candlemas Packet, did not find her until we passed what is called the Antarctic convergence, what the sealers called “can’t-no-more,” meaning the weather becomes dominated by the wind off Antarctica and one can no longer predict the next day s sail. The wind stiffened, from the steady thirty knots of the “filthy fifties” to well over forty knots. We ran with topsails, were most concerned with keeping our bow up to the sea and our masts free of ice. A thick, sudden snowstorm covered us with large dirty flakes, kept the crew busy clearing the deck; it continued the next day, slackening to a driving sleet.