The Solitude of Thomas Cave
Read The Solitude of Thomas Cave Online
Authors: Georgina Harding
THE SOLITUDE
OF THOMAS CAVE
GEORGINA HARDING
BLOOMSBURY
To Nell and Tom
THE NARRATIVE
OF THOMAS GOODLARD
Related on the Suffolk coast, one evening of June 1640
CONTENTS
I
SHALL NOT FORGET the sight of him as we left, that picture stays strong with me: his figure still and straight on the wide
shore, the land huge and bare about him, the snowy dip of the valley at his back, the mountains on either side, twin peaks
they were of seeming identical height, rising steep and smooth and streaked with grey as if in some strange reversal the rock
were ashes that had been poured down on to the snow from heaven; the sea a darkened pewter and having that sluggishness to
its movement that comes when it is heavy with the beginnings of ice. In all God's Earth, from the tip of Africa to the Indies
or the wide Pacific, a man might never see a sight so lonely.
Other times there would have been talk in the boat as we rowed out to the ship where it lay at anchor. Some way to go, as
the bay there is wide and shallow, the boat crammed with men, with the last of us and the last bits of stuff that we must
take with us, the
Heartsease
already laden heavy for the voyage home, with its weight of whalebone and sea-horse tusks and one hundred and fifty tons of
whale oil from what had been a slow but at the end bountiful season; in other times there would have been a chorus of talk
rich as you might hear on land in an inn after market day, richer, the resonant talk of men with hard and perilous work done,
money made, going home. You know how it is at times like that: the jokes run fast and the long voyage south seems but a spin
before the breeze.
This day there was scarce a sound to be heard. Not even William Sherwyn the carpenter uttered a word, and he was ever a talker,
though once I think I caught his eye and saw his lips begin to move and then to clip shut again. Juan or John Ezkarra who
was a Biscayan tried to whistle one of his country's yearning tunes but the notes came thin and pained in that frigid air
and after a couple of phrases he relinquished the effort. From then on there was only the dip of the oars in the slow water.
That, and as we neared the
Heartsease,
the creak of the ship herself as she moved, the thresh of ropes as they were caught in the wind, the to and fro of sailors
that were beginning to be busy in the rigging and on the deck. Our boat banged against the ship's side, we stowed the oars,
tied in, and one by one and slow as seals that lumber on to land we made the climb on board, each man pulling up his feet
after him as if they might be heavy as lead, looking back when he reached the deck and Captain Marmaduke standing there, following
the Captain's gaze and turning to see the land again and make out through narrowed lids the still figure at the edge of the
bay. Any person that observed in ignorance might have said from our faces that it was we who were the men set to serve a sentence,
that it was any one of us, not he ashore, that looked on this pale day with the dread prospect of darkness before him and
the knowledge that he might never again see the green sweep of his native coast.
And all that time it seemed to me that he only stood and watched. I went up to the masthead as we set sail, as the light north-easterly
picked up and gently bore us away. I saw him standing still as a post or a tree in a land where there were no trees, watched
as he thinned and faded, and the land about him looked so huge and cold and stony still you had not believed a single man
might walk upon it.
I never thought to see Thomas Cave alive again.
We tacked to and fro amongst the incoming ice and made our slow way down the great fjord, a luminous streak in the sky like
mother-of-pearl showing where the expanse of the Greenland seas opened before us. At the last sight of the bay, Marmaduke
had a cannon fired. The noise of the shot was so big in the emptiness that I was sure that it must have shaken him there,
shaken too the last of the birds from the rocks come to dive and wheel and scream like dervishes about him.
Carnock did not speak save for the necessary, not a human word out of him that day, nor most of the next. He knew that eyes
were on him: for asking the question, making the challenge, pushing the man into what he had done. Carnock was never one who
knew when to stop.
Only Ezkarra the Biscayan spoke to him direct. A dark man with dark rings beneath his eyes like he had overworked them, a
harpooneer with more knowledge of whales than any other man aboard. 'It is not for you he does this, even though he makes
you think that way.'
'How can you say that?' says Carnock, sullen in his responsibility. 'You were there. You heard it.'
'I hear his words, but I am sitting away from you, I can see his face. He had the will on him to escape you all. I see that.
I see that he is like a whale that must make its run to the ice.'
'Don't talk in riddles, man. What do you mean?'
'I mean that he goes to hide himself in the ice. His instinct tells him that of all the places in the world the ice is safest
if it is man that he wants to escape, that in the ice he is out of reach.'
'He made a boast, the drink took him, that's all. There was a devil of a mood in him that night, you all saw. And he was too
proud to go back on his word once he'd spoken it. He's never a man of many words, Cave, but by God when he speaks 'em he means
to hold to 'em. He's a stubborn proud man.'
'It is possible, Mister Carnock.' Ezkarra's voice was smooth as oil on water. 'But it is possible that he does it anyway.
I think that he is only looking for a cause.'
Those light nights get to men. I knew that by then. I had learnt much over that first northern summer. You get dizzy with
the light, as if all the time you were a little drunk. Cave got reckless with it. No doubt he wasn't the first and he won't
be the last: mild, God-fearing men driven reckless out there, men not in their right world as if the Lord had never meant
them to go there, out of reach of all they were born to, that gives them proportion, all that is blessed by God and human-size,
where day runs into night and the works of man are hellish and the beasts so monstrous that the object of the hunt is bigger
than any creature should rightly be.
There had been no whales for some days. I remember well the whole sequence of events. We had not seen a whale nor heard the
sound of one since the fog had come in more than a week earlier, rolling up before the south wind to stand and intensify in
the bay. For days we had seen no more than the looming shapes of the cookery, the tents and the weird grey outlines of all
the hoists and coppers and paraphernalia with which the oil was rendered, and amongst these, the looming forms of other men
that sometimes we took to be bears and the forms of rocks that we took to be men. Nothing I have seen is so disorienting as
that summer fog, disorienting as much in the mental as in the visual sense since there is no distinguishing any one of twenty-four
hours, no time to be estimated by position of sun or planet nor by any alteration of light whatsoever. In conditions such
as that it is not uncommon for a man to look up from his work in which he has been absorbed for some hours' monotony, to start
and look about him in bewilderment, and look to his companions and ask if it be day or night, and they cannot tell him and
it becomes a subject of debate.
After days such as those I cannot describe the beauty of a change of weather. A movement of moisture, a shift of air that
broke it into separate strands of opacity and translucence. A breath of air down our necks that made us shiver. We looked
up to the forgotten sky and the fog had become no more than a fine veil that all of a sudden was drawn away, and the mountains
that had ceased for us to exist were revealed sharp as knives with that extraordinary blue distance above them, and then we
looked about us and saw the shore where we had been used to groping like blind men, the strewn ugliness of our setdement,
the machinery and the tents and the barrels of oil, and here and there in the discoloured and greasy water of the shallows
the putrid remnants of all the great beasts we had caught since the start of the season, stripped of what remained of their
flesh through the days of fog by an eerie white seethe of seabirds. The clean breeze pushed on and within a day had cleared
the bay before us free of all ice, leaving the water open and dark as a lake inviting pleasure boats upon it. And there was
not a whale in sight.
At once the harpooneers set out, five or six gangs in the whaleboats, to see what hunting might be found along the coast.
We had loitered about so long that there was impatience amongst all of us for action. Marmaduke himself took some men with
him inland. He said he meant to explore and to see if he could climb one of the peaks behind the bay; see what might be seen
from there, signs of whales, of ice far out, of other ships that might have found the quarry. Up there, if God were willing,
the ascent easy and the sky clear, he would have a view far across and down the fjord to the open sea, a view along the shore
in both directions and one inland of regions where no man of our knowing had ever yet penetrated.
The rest of us were left to kick our heels under the command of the Mate Carnock. I hardly wished that but as the youngest
of the crew I did not have the choice. I recall that I envied the men who set off with the Captain, jealous of their adventure
and also, as I think now but would not have put it then, that they would for the duration of their expedition have escaped
the restless ocean, that they would have the touch of soil and whatever greenness the land offered beneath their feet. It
was just at that moment that Thomas Cave came by, and stood there by me, and he saw what was in my mind though the two of
us had exchanged scarce more than a word before that day.
'You'll get your chance,' he said.
And I, watching them go up off the rocky shore and along the valley: 'There's grass there, see, and flowers, on the slope
that faces the sun.'
'Aye, boy, it's happy as a meadow, isn't it? And who'd have thought it here? And do you know, if you look, you'll find tiny
wizened trees that stand no more than two inches high?'
'They'll have the hay in by now at home,' I said, 'dry and stacked.'
So he asked me where my home was and I told him. In Suffolk, inland, in the valley of the Aide. And I told him the name of
my village even, but said the word for myself only in my moment's homesickness, that I might speak it aloud and hear its familiarity,
never suspecting that he should know of it.
At that he looked at me hard, and for the first time I felt the clarity of those pale eyes of his that were like a fine December
sky. He looked, and a slow smile broke on his face so that he seemed quite unlike his former self. I had thought him a stern
and watchful man; I did not expect to see such softness in him.
'Why, that's a mere handful of miles from my own home!'
And I said how I had travelled from there to the sea, two days it took and it was the only journey that I had made, and he
nodded at the names of the places I had passed through as he knew them also, and all the time he smiled, so widely that it
warmed me, and put a hand to my shoulder, and that was warm too.
'A Suffolk lad,' he said. 'I had the thought of it. I thought some time ago that I might have heard it in your voice but doubted,
I had been away so long, thought that there was something in you that I knew and now I see it's that, and it's not the name
alone that we bear in common, common enough a name as it is. So what brought you here of all places, Thomas, what brought
you to this God-lorn spot?'
'My cousin's ship brought me to Hull and there I found a place on this one. To try the whaling.'
'Your cousin's ship?'
'I had been sent to my cousin who worked a ship out of Aldborow. There were too many of us, you see, to stay at home.'
'And did you want that?'
'Oh, yes and no, sir. I mean that I miss my home and all but it's a wonder to be here, isn't it?'
'What's a wonder?'
'Why, the place. The adventure. The difference of it. It's all so very different.'
'Ah, Thomas, Tom, do they call you Tom? And so you like adventure? And no doubt you've heard of Eldorado?'
'Who's Eldorado?'
Thomas Cave laughed. He laughed as if he had not done so in years. He was a tall, gaunt man, no longer young, and when he
laughed like that he hollowed out and bent over and went on till he coughed, and put a hand on my shoulder to straighten himself
so that I saw that his eyes brimmed with tears.
'It's a place, Tom, and no one knows where it is. And a man might put it before anything else, and go in search of it, and
find himself instead in a land of ice.'
And again he laughed, but I heard a harshness there that made me ill at ease, and shy, as I did not know what cause he had
to laugh so hard at me.
I did not like to say then that I still did not understand what he spoke. Yet as we became friends in the weeks that followed
he spoke of it again as if it was often in his mind, some meaning or reflection in the word that threw a glow of yellow sunlight
across the ice about us: that land of gold that the Spaniards have a name for but have never found, that Raleigh had sought
and, though we did not know it, was seeking again those very days as we worked there in the cold, and for which in the end
he was to lose first his son and then his life. It came clear to me in time that for Thomas Cave also Eldorado had been a
dream and that the irony that stung me in his laughter was no more than the irony with which he had come to regard his own
youth, his lust for adventure, his coming to sea at all.
But I run ahead. This came later. My knowledge and my friendship for the man came later. I was meaning to speak of this one
day, this one day and the night when the wager was made.
We talked and watched until the exploration party was quite lost from view, and then we heard the calls of the others who
had remained on the shore. They had sighted on the rocks about the point a group of seals and wanted the hunting of them,
a last chance for it was late in the season and the great multitude by now had reared their young and gone. So we went and
joined them and set out swiftly in the one boat that was left to us - if the harpooneers were to find no whales, we thought,
here at least God's bounty might offer us some small opportunity of profit. Yet it was hardly a herd at all, so small a number
of individuals that would not yield a caskful of oil. We satisfied ourselves with killing one for our dinner and then we had
some sport. There were some pups among them and three of the men took one of these and flayed it alive as it was, and then
threw it back into the surf for a prank, and it swam about in its red suit and writhed and twisted as its companions came
frisking and barking about it. You cannot imagine if you have not seen it, how strong a seal may be, so strong in muscle and
so tenacious of life that it will swim unto the very last. We watched until the commotion was done, and then we went back
and built a fire to cook by, and waited for our shipmates to return from their exploration.