At least, that is my memory, though I cannot be sure now of the exact order of squalls, gales, calms, ice floes, and snowstorms. We experienced no murderous blow, a possibility that is remote but not impossible in early summer. Importantly, there were more calm days than bad ones, sometimes even a glassy sea, sun-kissed and magenta. I recall we spent Christmas Day fighting fifty-foot crests and contrary winds, so that Longfaeroe had to hold his service in parts belowdecks, most too seasick to sing. We were another week in the crossing, because we had to double back to find Malody, and because Germanicus and I grew increasingly wary of the large ships that passed to the east. We listened to their radio traffic, heard many languages, bizarre codes, little substance. They seemed cargo ships; at least one of them was a warship.
I sense I am making that voyage sound sensible. It was elemental terror. Germanicus was not intimidated by the weather; he and the sealers had crossed the Scotia Sea length and breadth their whole adult lives. However, the icy blows combined with the scattered ships of wretches were too much. We surrendered to our worst expectations, for good cause.
“There, hears it?” said Christmas Muir, an incident I recall because it was my first experience with the ice continent. We could hear a rumbling, just distinguishable from the howling wind and the heavy wash of the sea. “Tol’ ye like, my ears, me and them whales, hears it. See there, the sky, lordie!”
The sky did darken, wet weather, ravaging raw cold, and a canopy of ashen clouds mixed into the fogbanks. We lost the sun. The rumblings strengthened to a low thumping. We were rolling into an oily sea of brash ice flecked with black cinders. On the morning it cleared, I was prepared to strain my eyes to the south. That was unnecessary. To port, fifty miles distant, loomed the giant mountains of Elephant Island, shrouded at their base by a thick mist that pushed miles to sea. Shafts of sunlight reflected off the glacier that wrapped the center of the island and atop it all a steady thin and black plume of smoke poured from the lip of an active volcano. As a result, the ice and snow were dirty, gray, black in patches. The volcano seemed to have a twin—unless it was a separate crater of the same—up and behind it, smaller but smokier, the two of them like black pyramids in that mist-shrouded range.
Neither of them was Satan’s Seat; rather, that chain of islands before us, the South Shetlands, was a volcanic chain, part of the volatile Scotia Arc that curls from the Antarctica peninsula (Graham Land) northeast through the Palmer archipelago, the South Shetland, South Orkney, and South Sandwich islands, then curls back northwest through South Georgia and the Falklands to the tail of the Andean mountain chain in Tierra del Fuego. It was our discovery that the sealer tales of Satan’s Seat (it did exist) had overlooked a whole chain of eruptions. The South Shetlands’ volcanoes were awakened anew. Every one of the major mountains and some of their satellites seemed in various stages of eruption; tremors, seaquakes, steam venting, banks of ash and sulfurous poisons, lava bubbling up through fissures in the craters. It was not a cataclysm of fire on ice, instead a slow rupture of the earth, shaking, pounding, crumbling. I cannot now say how complete the rupture was, whether what appeared a general salvo was in fact only two or three volcanoes pouring steam and ash through seams in the mountains, like burrowing by a fantastic being. More, I have no science to report why it had happened, how long it had been happening. I can only report what I saw then and over the next twenty years.
That first day under that thunderous gloom—the stench of sulfur, the lash of ashen waves—was filled with surprises. The major revelation was not the volcanoes, instead that the sea was pocked with ships arriving from the northeast, northwest. I took careful stock, helped by the fact that visibility in the Antarctic can alter suddenly from nothing to stunning clarity—what is one hundred miles can appear at hand. In between the banks of ash and steam, I watched the small flotillas of the wretched being intercepted by small white cutters. One such white cutter made for us. It signaled in international code. It wanted us to heave to for boarding. It did not threaten warfare. I put my glass on its side, did not hesitate; I ordered Germanicus to signal Malody, to bring us about to the west. The white cutter pursued but eventually veered off for a single frigate with a broken mainmast. We put to sea for the cover of a fogbank. The next day, we eluded another white cutter by heading into the steam canopy that ringed King George, the largest and most foreboding island in the South Shetlands. I ordered Germanicus to keep on slow for the sixtieth meridian.
I do not intend this narrative to become confused with mystery. I made a good guess of some of what we found those first two days, and with Xique’s answers I realized more, far from the truth. The white cutters, marked with the red cross of international relief, were part of the fleet of what was called, what I called, the Ice Cross. They were dispatched to corral into sheltered anchorages the wretched arriving pell-mell and battered. There were relief camps at those anchorages. Xique could only confirm for me then that there was one large camp on the lee shore of Elephant Island. He provided some details of the camp, but that information was four years out-of-date. More, I recognized that the large freighters were part of the relief effort, bringing in food and goods even as more wretches arrived. I only sketch here. Those camps were no relief; those mercy ships were no mercy. All this I would learn later. Then, off King George and heading for Roberts Island, I assumed that my magic had worked, my luck had held. I assumed that I had pursued a fantasy to discover a world of ice and ash and, yes, charity.
There is more that I do not want to become confusion—the portents by Lamba of Skallagrim Strider and me. Was he with me, that outlaws ghost? It is a distortion to say yes, he stood at my ear as King James ran from Mead’s Kiss to Elephant Island. Yet I did experience the phenomenon of seen-twice. I am aware that seen-twice might be an inappropriate explanation, for it can imply some form of reincarnation, as if one has lived the experience before in a previous life. I make no such claim, make a strange point nonetheless, consistent with Norse ways. The ghost of Skallagrim Strider seemed to whisper to me, seemed to give me the feeling that I had seen those hundred-foot crests and that purple sea and those thousand screaming petrels before. I was not Skallagrim Strider come again. I was Grim Fiddle come for the first time, somehow with the memory of a man who had been there. I too blink at the antirational nature of my talk. But how else was I to explain to myself that when King James was swamped by fog or snow, I knew what I would see when we emerged? It was an exact power: I could look at my hands stiff on the rail in the damp, could smell the brine and taste the weather, and believe that I had known what it was like to be there. I was not a timeless soul. That is not Norse. In philosophical talk, I was precognitive. The forbidding pinnacles of Elephant Island were awful, but as I studied them I realized that I was afraid of something with which I was profoundly familiar. I also had a sense of direction that should not have been mine, knew before Germanicus told me the proportions of King George, the sailing course toward Greenwich Island, the perils of the sound between Roberts and Greenwich islands. And most bizarre to me on board King James, I believed I could feel what it was like to be ashore on those islands, knew where the sea leopards and elephant seals gathered, where the penguins and cormorants flocked, knew how Germanicus had to keep close watch for the venting fin whales that crisscrossed our path.
This power, my ghostly familiarity, was not as helpful as one might suppose. It dulled my sense of self-defense, gave me a false sense of omniscience. It also made me at once keen for physical detail and careless about interpreting the meaning of the wretched. And because I felt that I was informed, as if I had been there before, and because I felt that Lamba’s portents might have merit beyond precognition to some form of personal invulnerability, I set myself apart from the very people to whom I was most responsible. I had turned my back on them; now I dismissed them completely. As I had elected myself to the extraordinary, I condescended to rule their ordinariness. As I challenged myself, I spited others. Grim Fiddle was becoming a stranger to reason
and decency.
The fourth night off the South Shetlands we held an exhausted counsel. We were standing off Greenwich, an island of three precipices, one venting steam, wedged between the smaller Roberts and the large, W-shaped Livingston Island. Significantly, Greenwich was cut by the sixtieth meridian. We gathered in the surgery. Lazarus was edgy, not as disturbed as the rest; he made a long speech of no consequence, then added, “I won’t judge this. Did we have to come to this place? Was there no other way than this?”
Jane and Violante reported on our rations, Annabel Donne on the health of the passengers, all done in voices cracked with anxiety. They wept. I realized then how beaten down they were. The sealers said they were not for the South Shetlands but would go there if ordered. They said they had hunted there in their time, and that Ugly Leghorn and some others had wintered there. They were obsessed with the volcanoes, talked out of turn. Germanicus was subdued about the ship and crew, said Malody’s reports made it imperative he be permitted to get his people ashore immediately.
“For his sake, Grim,” said Germanicus, “we should let those cutters take us in.” It was generally understood that the relief camps would help us, and that my resistance to such a course was either misinformed or deranged.
I told them I wanted to reconnoiter one more day, perhaps two, before I decided about the camps. I did not mention Grandfather or Angel of Death. They did not agree, they did not rebel. We came about, Candlemas Packet lumbering in our wake, and moved slowly into the mist filling the sound between Roberts and Greenwich islands. I studied the shorelines as best I could—seals, penguins, thousands of birds nesting and circling; their cries overwhelmed our conversations. The lower slopes of both islands were ice-free, matted with lichens and moss, which Peggs told me was not unusual in summer. Other than the lack of heath grass, those islands looked the same as South Georgia: cliffs, crags, plateaus, unearthly solitude. The sealers pointed to the slick gray cliffs above, worried that the volcanoes were melting the ice. Christmas Muir blamed every little problem that day on Satan’s Seat, which he said was way to the southwest, on the peninsula of Antarctica.
We were attacked late in the day, as we cleared the tidal rip past Roberts Island and came about into the Bransfield Strait, turning to starboard along the lee shore of Greenwich. I was on deck, distracted. Two small cutters, single masts, rushed from the mist and opened fire with heavy automatic firearms. I did not witness the entire action, kept down by bursts, so my account must be general. We were blasted. Our helmsman was shot down first. Davey Gaunt crawled to the wheel and held our course until his wounds overcame him, and then Ferraro, a young Falklander, took his place until he was shattered by flying splinters. Our return fire was ineffectual. We clung to the deck and waited to die. The sea helped us at first, running up heavy, and strong gusts kept us ahead of the attackers, heaved us toward rocks that might have ripped us apart, did not, but kept the attackers back. There was no help for Candlemas Packet; it came under cross fire, lost its foremast, was set afire. I do not know how long we took it. At some point the firing ebbed, and there were boarders on deck. Motherwell and the Volunteers fought hand to hand. Germanicus, Otter Ransom, Wild Drumrul, and I held the quarterdeck with Indigo Zulema and five Falklanders. We killed small, dark-faced creatures, filthy and animal-quick, without self-regard or sensible tactics. They were dressed in sealskins, smelled rancid and smoky like burned wood, were armed with harpoons, knives, clubs, no firearms. We shot and shot and they kept coming on. I saw one try to bite Indigo Zulema’s leg, as would a wolf. A fire was set on our portside that we could not control. There were screams from below as the boarders got into the hold. Germanicus and I fought side by side through them; they fell easily, would not stay down.
We were rescued. That is the simple fact of it, and regardless of the outrages I would later discover done by the Ice Cross, I do not want to take from it the credit for the lives of me and mine that day. A large white cutter came out of the mist and opened fire on our attackers. It passed us on our starboard quarter, hard on for Candlemas Packet, launched boats, rammed the smaller attacking boat. I cannot say what else was done, because I was too occupied on King James’ s deck. The white cutter withered the enemy. The undamaged attacker broke off and escaped into a fogbank to the south. By then Candlemas Packet was sinking. The white cutter took off survivors; however, Malody’s people were kept in longboats rather than taken on board the cutter. After we had cleared our decks (and I note how perplexed I was to find the dark-faced creatures seemed hardly to bleed), I ordered Germanicus to try to clear one of our boats to help the rescue of Malody’s people. We were signaled by the white cutter to do nothing, then signaled to follow. Another white cutter appeared. Germanicus reported our radio was cluttered with orders in Spanish back and forth between the two rescuers. We had drifted well into the Bransfield Strait. Across, one hundred miles to the south, was the blue-black landscape of the Antarctica peninsula, now and again visible through dancing fogbanks. That was my first glimpse of the continent. I was in shock, covered with blood, and it did not signify. What did was our casualty report: at least a dozen dead, including brave Ferraro and our greatest loss, Toro Zulema. There were so many wounded, we did not count. And belowdecks there seemed carnage, for the attackers had gotten down there and cut their way through women and children. Motherwell assembled the Volunteers at the mainmast and then reported the missing-in-action, including Peggs, Ensign Ewart, the little harpoonist Khartoo, and, worst of all for me, Wild Drumrul.
King James’s steering was wrecked. We were afire, but with muscle and plain courage Germanicus and Half-Red Harrah got us about, controlled the smoldering, and followed the white cutters into the mist along Greenwich’s coast. Sometime that evening (there is no sundown in Antarctica’s summer), we dropped anchor in Aurora Bay, off the lee shore of Livingston Island, before the wharves and outbuildings of an ice camp.
What did I see first? Aside from the other ships, and a small steamship off-loading goods, there were long, low-built structures on the shoreline, tucked cleverly into the ravines in the rockbed; there were the two white cutters we had followed in; but the most striking feature was the sheer wall of gray-white stone that shot up from the interior of the bay to disappear in the mist above. That wall of rock shuddered with each rumble from the volcanoes; it would come to represent a gigantic clock, new cracks for new eruptions, seams growing ice-crystal arrays whenever the wind poured a gale from the Scotia Sea.
I was wounded, splinters and burns, was bandaged below. The Ice Cross men were waiting for me on deck. There were more than two dozen of them, well-armed, in dirty white parkas, bearded, weathered, the confidence of veterans and the posture of the forever tired. Their leader was a German named Dietjagger, or something like that. He asked my name and our port of origin. Germanicus did not want me to talk with him. I understood that I must. I answered his bad English in my poor German. That surprised him and, I think, explains why he was as forthcoming as he was, something I know was not procedural. He had an impossible, defeated, vile job and knew it. He was to judge us, asking for details that centered on our health. That was the crucial issue, what determined our fate. Dietjagger insisted his men inspect belowdecks. This took time, and meanwhile Dietjagger hinted at affairs. He used much obscure language, and preferred jargon and half-sentences. It was from Dietjagger that I first heard of the Ice Cross. There were other clues about the situation in Antarctica, most of which were no help then. Now I know, better than any man alive, and can translate Dietjagger’s obtuseness. The Ice Cross was a colloquialism for the International Committee of the Red Cross Antarctica Relief Collective. That was mother mercy on the South Shetlands; it was sponsored by many sorts of patriarchs, such as the Antarctique International de Paris, the same in Rome and Munich and many more: Europe, Africa, the Americas. The Ice Cross men knew their sponsors by their myriad acronyms and by nicknames, such as the one Dietjagger used about his masters in Munich, Der Eisvater. Altogether there was no
real international community involved, only haphazard confederacy, funds from here, goods from there, food from governments and private industrial consortiums, and most especially from the Roman Catholic Church. Altogether they were charity. The Ice Cross was the enforcer of this charity. It should not have functioned as well as it did, staffed with volunteers, convicts, pilgrims, true patriots, truer saints, and what came to be an elite of the world’s crudest and most rugged mercenaries—soldiers of fortune, though I would prefer to name them soldiers of charity.
All that, I would learn later; then Dietjagger explained matters to me in a ritualistic, high-handed manner. He said the camp before us on Aurora Bay was administered by a Roman Catholic order, the Brothers of Perpetual Witness at Golgotha. He said that once we were ashore, he had neither jurisdiction nor concern. His advice was to keep my people together. He said the Brothers were better than most, that they had spiritual concerns, that the food was said to be regular. He pointed to the off-loading freighter as proof of our welfare. He added, flatly, not as if he believed it, that as soon as possible I should seek out a representative of a treaty organization for petition for resettlement—I forget the acronym he used, probably SATORE, at that time the relief network with jurisdiction over offshore African islands. He did not explain how it was I could seek out this patron.
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 33