The volcanic eruptions were worse then than when I wintered at Golgotha. These ruptures blocked an attempt that summer to evacuate the wretches. It would seem that the panic had set in among the authorities, as it did at Stockholm, Port Praia, Port Stanley. I also speculate that the darker aspects of the Charity Factor had taken hold: no nation state, no treaty organization, would accept relocated refugees prematurely without an international agreement, for fear that such benevolence might make them host to an alien, dissident population. In brief, desperation made policy: mercy to a point, no voluntarism. Charity Bentham had described a system, New Benthamism, that came to regard the complete salvation of the wretched to be without utility, not the greatest good for the greatest number, and so the Charity Factor was applied in full.
The winter closed on my family on Elephant Island. Their situation was severe, if not as bad as what we found at Golgotha. But then, terror is relative. My family were some of the earliest prisoners of the ice. Grandfather would not quit. Neither would Cleopatra. Those two seemed to have conjoined in will and desire the first winter on Mead’s Kiss. Grandfather did not expand on their negotiations; Cleopatra would later say only that she did what had to be done. The two of them struck a fateful bargain. Cleopatra promised Grandfather that she would help him get what he wanted, into a position where he could continue his search for Grim Fiddle. Grandfather promised Cleopatra that he would help her do what she had to do to save herself, and also, her mother. The very same mother whom Cleopatra had tried to despise as a betrayer of Cesare Furore, Cleopatra transformed into the motive for Cleopatra’s complete sacrifice of her blessings. I shall have much more to say of this perverse turn later, for it hardened the heart of a woman already disposed to imperial coldness. For now, it suffices to say that it was a martyrdom fit for the comedy, to say that the daughter so loved the mother that she gave her only true treasure, her pride, to protect that mother’s only true treasure, her daughter.
Cleopatra became the mistress of one of the ablest officers at the Elephant Island naval station, an African colonial named Peter Grootgibeon. She thereby secured the welfare of her mother and my family through that winter. She might well have gotten them out the next summer: Charity Bentham was a Nobel Laureate, even given that she had forfeited what currency she had in the world in order to regain Peregrine. Their good luck did not hold. A man-made catastrophe intervened. Grandfather said it was a war of shadows. This is descriptive of what must have been a running skirmish fought by warships of republics of the North and South. The war zone stretched from Tierra del Fuego to the South Orkneys to the Antarctic itself. I have been told the antagonists gave the killing a name: the Inaccessible Affair, for the island on the South Orkneys where, it was said, they opened fire.
The Birth of the Ice Cross
And what was at issue in the Inaccessible Affair? I suppose the New Benthamites would hold bald-facedly that the republics of the North and South dispatched warships to secure the pleasure of overlordship of several million square miles of ice and volcanic ash, where nothing of consequence can grow, but where there is a bountiful sea, and where there might be a bountiful’ cave of minerals. The New Benthamites would hold that the pain of not holding the ice exceeds the pain of holding it. More ludicrously, the New Benthamites would hold that the republics of the North and South fought the Inaccessible Affair for the greater good of ruling what the Church fathers once named terra australis incognita. If one deciphers this New Benthamism, one is left with amazement that men went to war for their chauvinist claims over incognita. That war of shadows, that Inaccessible Affair, was a blood feud, without reason. Israel told me the truth of this, and I have seen it: Men will go to war for nothing. In the South, they did go to war for nothing. They feuded for feud alone, and nothing more.
Yes, there must have been claims that the rescue of wretches then pouring into the South Atlantic and Southern Ocean was also at issue: the republics of the North might have said they dispatched warships to administer charity; the republics of the South might have said they dispatched warships to determine if it was charity or imperialism. This was a sham. The victims of their crimes became an excuse for their crimes. My guess now is that the battles in the Scotia Sea were a spillover from larger blood feuds in both South America and Africa. The size of the area of conflict required more bluffing than combat, however, especially in the Antarctic. More, the wild weather in the Scotia Sea probably daunted all antagonists, and when that danger was combined with the threat of the fleet of the damned, the warring nations must have realized that they had to turn from confrontation to subterfuge. That is how the Norse conducted blood feuds—if there was a standoff, retire and wait for night. In the South the darkness was almost complete.
Before the end of the Antarctic summer (March 1998), the antagonists had arranged a cease-fire; the Inaccessible Affair was said to be done. A settlement was negotiated, outside of Cape Town, South Africa; hence it was called the Treaty of Good Hope. That was about the time of the British warship at South Georgia, and I assume that when the captain said there had been no war, he was being both disingenuous and defeatist.
I also assume that when the captain said there was just a bloody shuffle, he was thinking of one aspect of the Treaty of Good Hope, which established an international peace-keeping force to manage the flood of wretches into the South. I cannot be certain whether that peace-keeping force and the International Committee of the Red Cross Antarctica Relief Collective were one and the same, or separate units of a larger, world-scale construction. I have no library to certify any of my speculations. What I do know of those days, however, tells me that the New Benthamites—caught unprepared for the size of the war of shadows and its victims—amended their ways and once again applied the Charity Factor, this time to the whole of the Antarctic. What had been the British Falkland Islands Dependencies’ Antarctic claim (the South Orkneys, the South Shetlands, the Palmer archipelago, Graham Land), was reconstituted into a de-militarized zone, to be administered by volunteers of charity. The Ice Cross was born.
It cannot be accident that the Treaty of Good Hope, which was signed as I spent my third winter on South Georgia, heralded order among republican masters and chaos among the wretches. The camps on the South Shetlands were organized. The roundups, deportations, and transportations in the following summer were orchestrated. I swear it. There was a plan. I cannot prove it, but again, I have never learned anything to contradict my charge. And yet, after all these years, I recoil before the monstrousness of what was done. Could the ice camps actually have been a policy of men? Who could have given such an order? Could they have thought it the solution? There must be records. I have no proof.
I am certain that the British naval station at Elephant Island was transferred to the Ice Cross. It was quickly expanded into a huge warehouse of goods, and into a series of connecting camps that were then filled with wretches gathered from across the South Atlantic, the Scotia Sea, the Southern Ocean. The Ice Cross was mother mercy, and Elephant Island was her hearth.
Peter Grootgibeon
On Elephant Island, Cleopatra’s efforts at this point again seemed to have secured berths for my family on a relocation ship, to leave as soon as the ice broke up in late spring and sufficient transport was arranged for incoming and outgoing refugees. Something ruinous upset this plan. Peter Grootgibeon’s good offices failed. Grandfather said it was a Satan jest played on the Jew. I suppose from this that Israel lost his temper, did something vainglorious to compromise Grootgibeon. As a result, my family was punished. Also, Grootgibeon either resigned from or was transferred out of the British Navy. In either case, he was soon an officer in the Ice Cross.
Grootgibeon might have volunteered. He was a tall, quiet, mercurial man, born in Southwest Africa, raised in the merchant marine, a homeless soldier of fortune. It would seem that he did love Cleopatra, with passionate foolishness, and knew that she did not love him, or would not. Grandfather said he was like Saint Andrew. That was a c
ompliment, and sharp judgment: Andrew, the simplest and most muscular disciple, crucified by the Romans on a cross in the shape of an X, the patron saint of Rusland and Scotland, therefore a Norse saint. Grootgibeon might have been a plain hero, bold, guileless, obedient; or he might have been a clumsy follower, thickheaded, impressionable, spontaneous. He does seem to represent the contradiction of those who aspired to sainthood in the South. There were many like him, quick to fight, slow to think. Lazarus might have described Grootgibeon’s nature best when he said that a good man who determines to fight for dignity and then gets angry will become a moral monster, possessed. And was Grootgibeon limitless? That was determined by his luck.
Grootgibeon was assigned to Ice Cross sea duty, the command of a white cutter. Cleopatra honored her bargain with Grandfather and persuaded Grootgibeon to include Grandfather, Gizur Sail-Maker, Skyeless, and Tall Troll in his crew. This is a clue that Israel’s rashness had tainted Guy, Earle, and Peregrine, along with Thord and Orri. Grootgibeon was assigned a patrol east of the Drake Passage. He ran the Scotia Sea several times that summer, into the fall, once to the Falklands in the aftermath of a battle on Tierra del Fuego. It was then that Grandfather got ashore on Mead’s Kiss to carve his second message. It was all he could do, because of the plague ships.
I have not emphasized the seaport plague to this point, because I never saw it. It did exist. I have heard too many reports from too many different sources, over too long a time, for it to have been a rumor. I do believe that the threat of the plague is what moved so many wretches to dare the Scotia Sea. The plague, more than the volcanoes, would explain the panic on Elephant Island the first summer my family spent there, would explain the growth of the camps throughout the South Shetlands the second summer they spent there, trapped by Israel’s rebellion, separated from Grootgibeon and Grandfather by war. The wretches must have been told, or learned by rumor, that the ice camps were plague-free, that the camps offered health care and food for the broken and malnourished. More, there was the attraction that the ice camps were said to be administered by the Church. Grandfather told one gruesome anecdote about the Church and the plague. He said that he saw that summer a thousand-mile-long coastline under quarantine, and that he also saw several ships commanded by priests like Father Saint Stephen that ran the blockade into the infected areas. They knew there was no return, and yet they had to be shot out of the water.
Grootgibeon was ordered to winter his ship at one of the new camps on King George Island, thus prevented from getting back to help Cleopatra and my family. Grandfather emphasized to me that he convinced Grootgibeon to winter instead on Greenwich Island, cut by the sixtieth meridian, because Grandfather was certain that one day Grim Fiddle would come south on that heading. Grandfather had by then become Grootgibeon’s confessor; he used his familiarity with Cleopatra in order to bend him. Grandfather would not elaborate on his relationship with Grootgibeon; he preferred to speak of their deeds. I speculate that Grandfather gave Grootgibeon the strength of mind he lacked, and that Grootgibeon gave Grandfather the strength of arm he lacked. As Grandfather bartered with Cleopatra, he came to barter with whomever was necessary. I write with pity. Grandfather’s weapons were his will and his magical voice. He was prepared to, and did, forge a pact with violent nature, violent man, deranged politics, anything that would help him achieve his heart’s desire. He said he did not bargain with Satan, however; repeated this to me like a chant. Would he have? He did not.
The Birth of the Hielistos
The Bransfield Strait was filled with the first of the black-ice islands that winter, because of the volcanoes. The eruptions could kill then, a toxin in the fumes that I would witness much later. This poison augured another kind: Privateers came to the South.
The privateers originated because the republics of the South who had signed the Treaty of Good Hope did not genuinely trust New Benthamite diplomacy but could not hope to match the might of the warships from the North. Therefore they in effect hired the pirates who were already preying upon the fleet of the damned, provided them with sophisticated stores and logistics, and dispatched them across the South Atlantic in order to promote their chauvinist interests. Of course, it was folly for the republics of the South to believe—and perhaps they did not—that pirates would do anything but continue to pillage and murder, even with clandestine support by nation states. In the Antarctic, this soon meant that the privateers turned to attacking the Ice Cross and raiding the ice camps. And why? For food and goods, yes, and also for the serpentine strategy of the republican masters; but there was also treasure. Many wretches did carry gold and gems. I know; I have filled caves with the stuff in my time, as useless to me as it was to those privateers.
The threat of the privateers probably explains why Grootgibeon wintered away from Elephant Island—to defend the perimeter from raiders. It also explains the gradual transformation of the Ice Cross in 1998 and 1999 into a war fleet. The privateers were said to be responsible for the first massacres on the ice. (Grandfather said that Golgotha was built on the ashes of an American Quaker camp.) And significantly, the privateers had many bases across the Southern Ocean, from Bouvet Island to Thule in the South Sandwich group to Cape Adare in the Ross Sea, yet there was one group of privateers from South America, and with South American republics’ sponsorship, whose ships were larger, whose reach was farther, and whose commanders were fiercer than all the rest in the South. Their main base was on the remains of a weather station in the Palmer archipelago at the southern end of the Bransfield Strait, at Arthur Harbor on the infamous Anvers Island.
The following spring (October 1999), Grootgibeon was appointed one of the senior field commanders in an Ice Cross campaign launched against the privateers. The Ice Cross’s orders were to exterminate the enemy, and the cruelty on both sides was unbounded from the Falklands to the Ross Ice Shelf.
At that same time, the secret employment of the privateers by some signatories of the Treaty of Good Hope—which had begun as a harassing and reconnaissance tactic—became a general strategy by New Benthamites North and South. Many of the sponsors of the Ice Cross also became sponsors of the privateers. They hired pirates to represent their interests over and against the Ice Cross they also sponsored. They sent a war fleet against their own war fleet.
Again, there is no proof. Grandfather said that Grootgibeon believed it, as did many of the Ice Cross commanders. This treachery prevented the Ice Cross from accomplishing its main task that summer, rescuing and relocating the wretches. More were said to have perished in one season than in all the years previously. This would explain why the fleet of the damned disappeared in the waters around South Georgia. The privateers sank it in order to delay the Ice Cross assault. Grandfather said, “Satan cut the waves.”
By summer (January 2000), Grootgibeon had joined in an Ice Cross siege of the privateer fortress at Anvers Island. They fought on the sea, on the Mount Français glacier, in the caves. Grootgibeon and his subordinate commanders trapped the privateer squadron in a pincer from the Joubin Islands and the Bismarck Strait, so they could not run for the fogbanks in the Bransfield Strait or onto Graham Land. Ice Cross victory was imminent. Grandfather was inexact about the next turn: either Grootgibeon was captured, or he surrendered himself and his flotilla, or he was persuaded by the privateers to negotiate, or he deserted the Ice Cross and went over to the privateers. From what I have learned of the man, and from the feel of him, the last is most likely. He must have had a fast sense of his own dignity. The treachery of the signatories of the Treaty of Good Hope was too much for him. It is also my experience that when a simple and obedient disciple believes himself betrayed by a master whom he has trusted, then that disciple, if he can, will commit himself to that master’s destruction with equal fervor. As Lazarus said, there is a tangible moment when the whip no longer cows the beast. For Grootgibeon, that moment must have come when, deprived of Cleopatra, deprived of the protection of the very ideals he had sworn to, he could no longer kill me
n who were endowed by the same paymaster as he. Could the privateers have purchased his defection? Yes, but not unless he had already made his decision to betray. Thirty pieces of silver will not buy a saint; the saint will fall down, then scoop it up, then laugh.
Grootgibeon’s defection at Anvers might also be explained by the fact that he was under Grandfather’s spell. The depth of the corruption at Anvers, its Babylonian pall, might have fascinated Grandfather. It might have called forth his Norse paganism, that outlaw temperament that once propelled him in the North. If Grandfather saw at Anvers Island that the privateers were more useful than the Ice Cross, were more available to his power and for his ends, then he would not have hesitated to go over, and to take Grootgibeon with him. Grandfather had never had any faith in the greatest good for the greatest number, or even in the greatest good for the least number. He said, in his way, that he believed in one good for one man, Grim Fiddle for Mord Fiddle.
There is also evidence that there were many defections by the Ice Cross that summer, and that the privateers welcomed as much, because they had been abandoned by their sponsors. It would seem that the original sponsors of the privateers—South American republics—had developed reservations about the murder they had engendered. In theory, they had wanted to show their flag. In fact, the master had created what he could not continue to control, and not only in the South but also across the South Atlantic, murder raids from Havana to Buenos Aires, from Tangier to Cape Town, pillaging as far north as the Mediterranean, and warlord conclaves from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean. That South Georgia was spared a murder raid by privateers can only be explained by luck.
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 38