Alaska (28 page)

Pym, once the ice was broken, enjoyed the swift interchange: 'Six men in Boston own the Evening Star and they award me a full share for serving as their captain.'

'Do you also receive pay?' Innokenti asked.

'Small but regular. My real pay comes from my captain's share of the whale oil we deliver and the sale of goods we bring home from China.'

'Do the sailors share?'

'Like me, small pay, big rewards if we catch whales.' Pym pointed to a sturdy young fellow, a New Englander almost as hefty as Zagoskin and with the same kind of scowl: 'That's Kane, our harpooner. Very skilled. Gets double if he succeeds.'

'Why have you come into our waters?' Innokenti asked, and Harpooner Kane frowned at the word our, but Captain 177

Pym answered courteously: 'Whales. They must be up there,' and he pointed toward the arctic.

Zagoskin broke in rudely: 'We see them coming past here sometimes,”and he would have said more had not Innokenti signaled that this was privileged information. The baldheaded Russian was obviously irritated by this tacit reprimand, and both Pyrn and Atkins caught the warning, but neither commented.

On the third day the men of the Evening Star met Trofim Zhdanko, now in his late seventies and still unbearded out of his respect for the memory of Tsar Peter, and they liked him from the start, in contrast to their rejection of the two younger men. The old fellow, at last in the company of someone who could speak Russian, poured out his recollections of Captain Bering, that hard winter on Bering Island, and the remarkable accomplishments of the German scientist Georg Steller: 'He went to four universities and knew everything. He saved my life because he made this brew of weeds and things that cured scurvy.'

'Now what might that be?' Pym asked. He had the habit of staring hard at anyone with whom he was speaking on important subjects, his small eyes closing almost to beads, his close-cropped head of brown hair bent forward.

'Scurvy is what kills sailors.'

'I know that,' Pym said impatiently. 'But what was in the brew this Steller made?'

Trofim did not know exactly: 'Weeds and kelp, that I remember. First time I tasted it I spit it out, but Steller told me, right over there it was, behind that group of rocks, he said: ”You may not want it but your blood does,” and later on, when we spent that dreadful winter on Bering Island, I looked forward to the little amount of brew he allowed me each day. It tasted far better than honey, for I could feel it rushing into my blood to keep me alive.'

'Do you still drink it?'

'No. Seal meat, especially blubber and guts, they're just as good. You eat seal you never have scurvy.'

'What will happen up here?' Pym asked. 'I mean Spain, England, France, maybe even China? Don't they all have an interest in this area?' And he pointed eastward to the unknown area which the Great Shaman Azazruk had once called Alaxsxaq, the Great Land.

'It's already Russian,' Trofim said without hesitation. 'I was with Captain Bering when he discovered it for the tsar.'

On the evening before departure Captain Pym broached with Zhdanko the navigational problem which had brought him to Lapak, and it was premonitory that he did not reveal his questions to either of the two Russian leaders, for he 178

already distrusted them: 'Zhdanko, what do you know of the oceans north of here?'

Since it was obvious that Pym was toying with the idea of sailing north, a difficult adventure, as Zhdanko had learned from his own explorations beyond the Arctic Circle, the cossack felt he must warn the American: 'Very dangerous. Ice comes crashing down in winter.'

'But there must be whales up there.'

'There are. They swim past here all the time. Going, coming.'

'Has any small ship . . . like ours . . . sailed north?'

Since Zhdanko did not know where Captain Cook had sailed after leaving Lapak Island, he could honestly warn Pym: 'No. It would be too dangerous.'

Despite this advice, Pym was determined to probe the arctic seas before other whalers would dare to venture into those icy waters, and he remained firm in his desire to explore them, but he did not share with Zhdanko his plans, for he did not want the other Russians to know them.

Next morning, Pym allowed himself an uncharacteristic gesture: he embraced the old cossack, for he saw in his noble bearing and generosity in sharing his knowledge of the oceans a man in the true tradition of seafarer, and he felt renewed for having been in contact with him. Summoning Atkins, he said: 'Ask the old fellow why he lives alone in this little hut?' and when the question was put, Zhdanko shrugged, pointed to where his stepson and Zagoskin were whispering, and said with resignation and repugnance: 'Those two.'

AFTER PYM, WITH NO KNOWLEDGE OR CHARTS TO GUIDE him, sailed his Evening Star north from Lapak, he entered a world into which no other American had ventured or would soon do so. Yankee ships had penetrated the rest of the major oceans, following quietly in the more spectacular wake of Captain Cook's ships. But the constant search for whales, whose oil for lamps, ambergris for perfumery and baleen for the stays in women's corsets would produce fortunes for ship owners and their captains, made exploration of untapped seas obligatory. To go north of the Aleutians was daring, but if whales existed in the area, the risk was worth it, and Noah Pym was a man to take that risk.

He lived a hard life. He was a devoted father, but he was away on his voyages for years at a time, so that when he returned home he scarcely knew his three daughters.

But the results were so profitable to all concerned in his expeditions that both his owners and his crew urged him to sail yet again, 179

and he did much sooner than he would have on his own account. He kept a cadre of reliable hands with himJohn Atkins, who spoke both Chinese and Russian; Tom Kane, the expert harpooner without whom the ship would have been powerless when a whale was sighted; and Miles Corey, the Irish first mate, who was a better navigator than Pym himself and even in bad weather he slept easily knowing that these men and others like them were in charge. He suspected that Corey was a crypto-Catholic, but if so, he created no problems aboard ship.

With the Aleutians left far behind, the Evening Star entered upon those dangerous waters which seemed so congenial in early spring, so fearful in October and November, when ice could form overnight, or come crashing down of an afternoon, already formed into great icebergs farther north and now cruising free on their own.

Noah Pym, in search of whales instead of knowledge, captured one whale south of that narrow strait where the continents seemed to meet, and having heard in Hawaii the rumor that Bering and Cook in their larger ships had proceeded farther north without incident, he decided to do the same. In the Arctic Ocean, Harpooner Kane struck a large whale, and when Pym laid his ship close to the dying beast, landing boards were laid to its carcass so that sailors could cut it up, searching for baleen and ambergris and throwing great slabs of blubber on the deck for reduction to oil in the smoking pots.

While the brig lay idle as the oil was rendered, Corey, in a voice that betrayed no panic, warned the captain: 'Should the ice start to move down upon us, we must be prepared to run.' Pym listened, but since he had no experience in such waters, he did not appreciate how swiftly the ice could strike. 'We must both watch it closely,'

he said, but when the harpooner stabbed a second whale with a splendid shot, work on salvaging it became so exciting, with promise of full casks for the long sail home, that Pym forgot about the impending ice, and for several triumphant days attended only to the bringing aboard of baleen and blubber.

Then, like some giant menace looming out of a fevered dream, the ice in the arctic began to move south, not slowly like a wanderer, but in vast floes that made giant leaps in the course of a morning and stupendous ones overnight. When the floes appeared, almost out of nowhere, the free waters around them began to freeze, and it required only a few minutes for Captain Pym to realize that he must turn south immediately or run the risk of being pinned down for the entire winter. But when he started to give the order to hoist

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all sails, First Mate Corey said in a voice that still showed no emotion: 'Too late.

Head for the coastline.'

The advice was sound, the only one that would enable the Evening Star to avoid being crushed by the oncoming ice, and with an adroitness that far abler navigators than they might not have been able to exercise, these two New England men used every breath of wind to shepherd their little whaler with its thrice-precious cargo toward the northern coastline of Alaska, and there at a spot almost seventy-one degrees north, later to be christened Desolation Point, they stumbled by sheer luck into an opening which led to a substantial bay, at whose southern end they found a snug harbor surrounded by low protecting hills. Here, shielded from pounding ice, they would spend the nine-month winter of 1780-81, and often during that interminable imprisonment the sailors would not curse Pym for his tardiness in leaving the arctic but praise him for having found 'the only spot on this Godforsaken shore where the ice can't crush us to kindling.'

They had barely started constructing a refuge ashore when Seaman Atkins, the one who spoke Russian, cried: 'Enemy approaching over the ice!' and with expressions of fear that could not be masked, the twenty other crewmen looked up from their work to see coming at them across the frozen bay a contingent of some two dozen short, dark-faced men swathed in heavy furs.

'Prepare for action!' Captain Pym said in low voice, but Atkins, who had a good view of the oncoming men, cried: 'They aren't armed!' and in the next tense moments the newcomers reached the Americans, stared in amazement at their white faces, and smiled.

In the days that followed, the Americans learned that these men lived a short distance to the north in a village of thirteen subterranean huts containing fifty-seven people, and to the vast relief of the whalers, they found that the villagers were peacefully inclined. They were Eskimos, lineal descendants of those adventurers who had followed Oogruk from Asia fourteen thousand years earlier. Six hundred and sixty generations separated them from Oogruk, and in the course of time they had acquired the skills which enabled them to survive and even prosper north of the Arctic Circle, which lay nearly three hundred miles to the south.

The Americans were at first repelled by the meagerness of the lives these Eskimos lived and by the tight meanness of their underground huts roofed by whalebone covered with sealskin, but they quickly came to appreciate the clever ways in which the chunky little people adjusted to their inhospitable environment, and were dumfounded by the courage and

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ability the men exhibited in venturing forth upon the frozen ocean and wresting from it their livelihood. The sailors were further impressed when half a dozen men from the village helped them build a long hut from available items like whalebone, driftwood and animal skins. When it was completed, large enough to house all twenty-two Americans, the men had reasonably comfortable protection against the cold, which could drop to fifty degrees below zero. The sailors were awed when they saw how much these short men, rarely over five feet two, could shoulder when helping to carry the Star's

supplies ashore, and when all was in place the Americans settled down for the kind of winter they had known in New England four months of snow and cold and they were astounded when Atkins learned from sign language that they could expect to remain frozen in for nine months or perhaps ten. 'Good God!' one sailor moaned. 'We don't get out till next July?' and Atkins replied: 'That's what he seems to be saying, and he should know.'

The first indication of how ably these Eskimos utilized the frozen ocean came when one of the powerful younger men, Sopilak by name, if Atkins understood correctly, returned from a hunt with the news that a monstrous polar bear had been spotted on the ice some miles offshore. In a trice the Eskimos made themselves ready for a long chase, but they lingered until their women provided Captain Pym, whom they recognized as leader, Seaman Atkins, whom they had immediately liked, and husky Harpooner Kane with proper clothing to protect them from the ice and snow and wind. Dressed in the bulky furs of Eskimos, the three Americans started across the barren ice, whose jumbled forms made movement difficult. Such travel bore no relationship to ice travel in New England, where a pond froze in winter, or a placid river; this was primeval ice, born in the deeps of a salty ocean, thrown sky-high by sudden pressures, fractured by forces coming at it from all sides, a tortured, madly sculptured ice appearing in jagged shapes and interminably long swells that seemed to rise up from the depths.

It was like nothing they had seen before or imagined: it was the ice of the arctic, explosive, crackling at night as it moved and twisted, violent in its capacity to destroy, and above all, constantly menacing in the gray haze, stretching forever.

It was upon this ice that the men of Desolation Point set forth to hunt their polar bear, but after a full day's search they found nothing, and night fell so quickly in these early days of October that the men warned the seamen that they would probably have to spend the night far out on the ice, with no assurance that they would ever find the bear. But just

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before darkness, Sopilak came plodding back on his snowshoes: 'Not far ahead!' and the hunters moved closer to their prey. But it was a canny bear, and before any of them had a chance to see it, the first of its breed any American would encounter in these waters, night fell and the hunters fanned out in a wide circle so as to be able to follow the bear should it elect to flee in the darkness.

Atkins, who stayed close to Sopilak and who seemed to be learning Eskimo words by the score, moved about to caution his mates: 'They warn us. The bear is dangerous.

All white. Comes at you like a ghost. Do not run. No chance to escape. Stand and fight and shout for the others.'

'Sounds dangerous,' Kane said, and Atkins replied: 'I think they were trying to tell me they expect to lose a man or two when tracking a polar bear.'