Read The Solitude of Thomas Cave Online
Authors: Georgina Harding
The Solitude of Thomas Cave (12 page)
T
HOMAS CAVE WALKS among the seals and either they are not aware of his presence or they trust the man as if he were one of
their own. The colony is incessantly watchful, ever a number of heads raised to look about for a source of danger, those at
the edge ready at the slightest notice to plunge back off rock or ice into the sea. The sight of a bear runs through the massed
bodies like an earthquake and scatters hundreds at an instant's delay. Yet, Thomas Cave observes, the seals have not learnt
yet what he knows: the danger inherent in a man.
Does not one of them remember last summer, how the men of the
Heartsease
came amongst them and clubbed hundreds of their number in a single working shift? How on days when the ice drove in or the
bay was held in fog the whalers kept on shore and walked through the strands of mist between the blackness of rock and the
blur of snow, weaved among the dense herds of parents and young and clubbed them, one after another? The seals were such easy
hunting, so easy to stun them with a single blow of the club to the nose and then to finish them with a knife, hunting as
easy and as close as killing a pig in a yard. They butchered them where they killed them and stripped them of their blubber,
tens, hundreds at a time, and boiled all the blubber down into oil so that the fishery was thick with the grease and smoke
of industry even when they had no sight of a whale.
It seems fantastical to recall, such slaughter in this one spot. The butchery, the boiling, that went on here, the scavenging
gulls and the stink of carcases. Yet even now on those rare and lovely days when the sun warms the residues in the boilers
and on the ground, a whiff of it trails again in the air.
Where the snow becomes soft and waterlogged, a red staining appears and begins to spread across it. This I have observed in
past years, when we have come in the summer and found sometimes whole fields of snow that are stained pinkish red right across
their surface. I have met no man yet who could explain to me what it is that causes this curious discoloration.
He cannot understand and yet, this year of all years, the phenomenon seems to him to signify a meaning.
Carnock's big laugh, that echoed off the hardness of rock.
'I'll give you a show, boys.'
Mister Carnock, Mate of the
Heartsease,
pulling in his audience like a man with a freak to show at a fair. He had never liked Carnock, had taken him from the first
as a loud, bragging man, knew him the more so as he swaggered in the bows of the whaleboat as it passed beneath the cliff.
A small herd of seals, stragglers that had had their pups late, on the rocks of the point, only a few of them, slipping into
the sea as the boat approached. There was one pup that was very pale and marked with white, just three foot long, and it was
cornered in a shallow pool among the rocks, no room for it to dive beneath the boat and join the others that seemed to wait
out in the open sea. Carnock threw a net about it and caught it alive, unharmed.
'There's a beauty!' He pulled it in, held it upside down like a trophy, held it by its tail so that its head thrashed against
the sides of the boat. Carnock was not a tall man but strong. You could see the strength in his shoulders, even in the way
he stood, braced and square.
He threw the pup down on to the floor of the boat and called for men to hold it still. One man sat astride it. Another held
its head. Its eyes were huge, rolling, white-edged.
Carnock was precise with his knife, slitting first behind the ears and then along its stomach and around the tail. Every man
present had seen a seal flayed before, many times, but never one alive, nor ever heard such yelps of pain. The boat rocked
as it writhed about in the pool of blood and bilge.
'There's my baby, there it goes!'
The three of them eventually succeeded in heaving it over the side and back into the sea. It was so slippery without its skin
that they had dropped it many times. In the water it straightened and shot off to join the rest, its strength apparently undiminished,
and the other seals came and swam about it in a frenzy, frisking and barking in such a strange way that, were it not for the
reddening of the water, it might have seemed a celebration.
Thomas Cave heard the laughter of the men about him. It was mob laughter and he closed his ears to it. Inside him was only
a terrible silence. His awareness was all for the seal, a mangled length of muscle that continued to swim away with a wake
of blood behind it, one long swimming wound like a gash in the sea itself.
As the bay clears of ice it becomes his habit to climb to his lookout on the mountain to watch for the ship as he used to
for the sun. Some moments he thinks he cannot bear his isolation a day more, and his longing turns ice floes into sails and
makes ships where they do not exist; and yet it can seem a reprieve when a storm comes and holds him again tight indoors as
he was through the winter, and when he emerges to see that the ice has come back in. Even as he yearns for the company of
men he dreads their return.
Blotches of red on the snow below. A cry that rises to him, the cry of a seal or walrus cub. It is like the cry of a human
child.
He remembers how it came at last. The birth. The midwife calling to him, and he going in. The slippery being in her hands,
a blind limp thing mouthing for breath like a bloodied fish in air. Its mother dying beside it, the blood run out of her.
At Duke's Cove
T
HAT VOYAGE BACK was slow, slow as if the
Heartsease
herself were reluctant to go north. I remember that I ached with the slowness of it. I was so young, eager with youth. I was
at that age when any time of tedium seemed like a weight that dragged against me.
The winds were fickle from the outset, a chill head wind blowing up all of a sudden as we lifted anchor at Hull on a pretty
May morning though we had seen another ship slip away ahead of us on the very same tide. Two days then we were held before
the mouth of the Humber, riding out the nights first at Paull Road and then at Clee Ness, looking out from the stubborn river
across land that was glum even under the brightness of spring, of such dreary flatness that not even the rise of a great church
spire across the marshes could make it friendly to the eye.
Slow we came out to sea, slow round the mean tongue of earth that bent across the river mouth, and the waves when we met them
were welcome, iron grey after the mud stained water of the river. Yet even as the sails filled I felt a heaviness in me like
that of the dullest calm, and wondered if the others on the ship felt it also. I cannot say if this was so. Perhaps to them
it was like any, another voyage, nothing particular to it, only life passing. Perhaps I alone was so aware because I kept
that money still, his coins held for all of that year in my trunk as in a hot fist.
We were the same men who had gone before, most of us. There was Carnock; there was the same band of a dozen Biscayans who
had gone on south to their own people for the winter but returned now to Hull and to Marmaduke, a face or two among them changed
but the same dark and wiry look to all and the same aloofness from the rest; and there were others too, sailors, carpenters,
coopers, that I knew from before. Captain Duke had brought his son with him, his first time out, a lad little more than myself
in age but with a cocksure manner and a burn to his look that made me shy of him. Edward Marmaduke stood beside his father
on the deck, the image of him only fleshier, without the elder man's compactness, and despite, or perhaps it was because of,
his youth and inexperience seemed to look down at us and out to the flat line of the horizon as if he had nothing but certainty
of what lay beyond it.
North we went, along the coast past the high cliff church of Whitby, close in past the great Bass Rock that flickered white
with gulls, along the dour coast of Scotland and across the open sea to Shetland, where again we added a last couple of men
to the crew. I have made that route so many times I have each landmark of it imprinted on my memory but never I think was
I so aware of each stage of the passage as on that second fretful voyage. My eye at once clung to each successive piece of
land and at the same moment wanted it gone behind me, wanted the journey done. There was both dread and longing in the idea
of the ice and the northern seas, of the cold and the fog and the dazzle, the stark impossibility of a landscape whose forms
are like the peaks and troughs of waves but moulded hard out of rock and ice. Even when you have once visited the North it
seems when you have been away from it scarcely believable, its unearthly atmospheres a dream and delusion of the senses. Less
probable still is the idea of a lone man's survival in such a place.
We did not speak of him, the man I remembered. Yet whenever I looked up ahead of us, when a cloud turned the sea to lead or
when the sun came out and made it shine like silver, I held his figure small in the back of my mind like a mark that I could
not erase. Again I say that I do not know how it was with the others but I know that he was with me through the day and in
the cramped darkness of the night. I believed that he was Captain Duke's preoccupation also, for never had I seen the Captain
so impatient as on this voyage. From the dock outwards, even from the moment of our loading, he had tramped about the deck
chivvying and swearing, chafing at each little delay, that small, powerful, dark man stomping and blowing so that I thought
of a small black bull in a pen. Those who knew him best said that it was not like him to be so tight. He did not even let
us halt, as was the usual pattern, to do some sealing on the way, though we sighted great numbers of seals in the clear weather
as we left the Shetlands. No, he must hurry us on. A southerly breeze was a direct gift from God to the
Heartsease
and it would be sin to turn across it, but we must put our sails full before it; and even if it dropped, as ever and again
on that trip it did, falling away soon as we had it behind us, we would set our course that way and no other. There was the
inevitable grumbling among the men at that, mutterings that made the mood on board at times difficult and sullen, but none
spoke loud against it. It was clear I think to others besides myself that Marmaduke's frustration was born of this particular
cause, that he was driven so not by the requirements of the whaling but by the simple need to see whether or not his man had
perished.
When we got there, the great fjord was still blocked by ice. We knew of the ice before we reached it, for the lookout at the
masthead had a day before seen the reflection of it on the clouds up ahead. To those with experience of the North, it shows
like that, a frozen sea: a white glare on the underbelly of the clouds as if they are lit by a harsh light beneath them.
But for Cave we might have turned straight about and worked along the western coasts which we knew were free. We had seen
whales already on the sea, heard them blow and seen their distant spouts; there was every hope of a good season. Instead we
sailed slowly about the edge of this ice, teasing at every apparent opening, looking for a passage, hoping to see it slacken.
After two days we met a pair of whaleships out of Amsterdam, and they were coming to us from the direction in which we were
headed. Not a chance, they said, the westerly winds were only packing the ice more densely with each day that passed. They
were going south to Jan Mayen. There was consolation, they said, in the knowledge that if the ice held us back then it must
also hold back the whales. Captain Duke put that down to the complacency of their nation and sailed restlessly on, went up
to the masthead himself and spent stubborn freezing hours there wrapped in canvas, looking for a break in the frozen ocean
or any sign of it in the sky. These were eerie days, endless days for it was by then the end of June and we were far north.
Often there was fog, a fine fog with crystals of ice in it that you felt in your nose when you breathed, and visibility was
close and we could do nothing but wait. And then the sky would clear and we could see for a great distance, and the sun showed
above the horizon for all of the twenty-four hours and threw strange colours and long shadows across the ruckled surface of
the ice. At times the creeping shadow of the
Heartsease
extended for miles, her black bulk, her three masts, even the figures on her deck, and yet never had I felt the ship to be
so small and insignificant, puny as a beetle fidgeting along the edge of that frozen sheet of space. Even though I was young
I had an extreme sense of man's smallness and the futility of all his works. That is what it does to you, a place like that.
The storm when it came was almost welcome. Storms come fast up there, the weather like the passage of the hours so much more
intense than it is in our moderate land. There was barely time to put off what seemed a safe distance from the ice edge to
ride it out. Only a day, but it was like a day of most savage winter, wind and snow like knives and a mountainous black sea.
The
Heartsease
was broad and sturdy like the Ark and we prayed that the Lord would preserve us and huddled within its heaving timbers and
felt and listened to the storm. And through it, beneath the howl of the wind and the crash of the water, we thought we heard
a thunder that was the ice cracking, and when we came again on deck must watch in terror as pieces of it came hurtling at
us in the waves.
Morning came and the air was still though the ship continued to toss with the power of the storm. I had slept some hours at
last and I woke and came on deck, and it was as if a conjuring trick had been performed there and opened the fjord before
us. The solid icescape that we had known so well for all those days, every bay and peninsula and hummock of it, was gone,
and in its place was a dark blue sea with a great swell on it, and great blocks of ice drifting past us, clean-broken ice
with glassy tints of turquoise and green to it in the light. We said a prayer and began a slow passage north to the place
we called Duke's Cove - it still has that name even now, though sometimes changed by the Hollanders' use to Dusko or Disko.
Our progress was slow because the sea was still big and the broken ice was a danger to us, some of it floating almost submerged
and showing only in a ghostly manner beneath the surface of the water so that lookouts had to be constantly posted to watch
against any collision that might cause damage to the hull.
Again we heard whales, and saw them break the water but too far off still for the hunting. Sometimes we could see right across
the fjord, some thirty miles or more, to the savage dark walls and peaks on either side, their black and purplish rock bared
since the storm though snow held to the ravines and valleys and on the glaciers, and then a fog would roll out down the channel
and the world would suddenly contract to the familiar one of wood and canvas and Englishmen and water, and I would feel that
I had seen a vision that had never existed. A fog like that came upon us just as we approached the bay where we had left Cave,
and Captain Duke would not risk the ship in close but asked for volunteers to take one of the boats in and look if he was
alive.
I was one of those who stepped forward, and a half-dozen others who included Ezkarra the Biscayan harpooneer, and Marmaduke's
son Edward, though his father forbade it at first and said he should wait and land with the rest when the time came; but Edward
pressed him, he was ever one to get his way, until his father agreed that there was no danger but only adventure to the outing.
The last man to step out to join the boat, even as it was lowered into the sea, was Carnock, and it seemed right that he was
there.
We rowed slowly through strands of fog, the oars sometimes slapping against plates of ice, the water strange and greenish
when there was light upon it, the ice dark and discoloured. The land when we saw it loomed high above our heads, the cliffs
and rocks seeming so tall and unfamiliar that for some moments I did wonder whether we were in fact in the right place or
whether we had overshot the point and come to some other unknown bay further up the coast. 'That's it, over there. We'll pull
up on the shore there.' Carnock knew it. He had been there many more seasons than I. It was a rare kindness in him to take
the time to explain to me that the apparent height of the land was an illusory effect of the fog.
Perhaps we all felt that there was time to spare, going ashore at last in that grey and melancholy silence, time to spare
and to lose. As the hull of the boat grounded the man in its bow cleared the lip of the waves with a great soft leap and pulled
us in. We came behind him slow, one after the other. The fog let through a muted light and all the ground beyond where the
sea had washed was a floury white, powdered over with a fine new snow.
'Which way is it?'
Whoever spoke did no more than whisper, but the question carried through our huddle.
'Here, to the right. See, we have landed somewhat down the shore from our accustomed place.' Carnock of all of us seemed to
know best where he was, and his square form led the way then along and up the beach.
We followed in a loose line like a knotted string, walking with unsteady steps as we had so soon come to land, taking bearings,
stumbling on the shingle and over rocks that were capped with snow. Marmaduke's son walked just before me, then stopped and
held a moment until I came alongside that he might speak what he was pressing to say.
'What a place! I had not imagined it could be so dismal as this.'
'It's dismal now but wait till you see it when it clears.'
'So cold, the fog so thick that it clogs the eyes. It is like a place of doom.'
'Wait,' I said. 'Wait until you see it on a day of sun. It's beautiful then, all crystal and dazzling.'
He looked away as if he did not believe me, walked on, then stopped and turned his head again.
'And you were here last year, and you knew this man Cave?'
'That was the first time I came.'
'Was he not afraid, to do what he did? Why, I would not be alone here a single day!'
So brightly he said it that the men must have heard all up and down our line. (Looking back, knowing what was to come later,
I wonder now if it was not some premonition in him that heightened his first impression of the place.)
Whoever heard, none answered him. No more words there were for some time, but only a muttered curse as a man tripped, the
tread of our boots and the pulse of the sea that was behind us and already lost in fog. The cookery loomed up slowly. Hard
to know it at first, coming at it from that unfamiliar angle, it was all so still and shrouded and quiet.
'There! Over there! Is that it?'
Edward spoke full out and the sudden freshness of his voice shook me like a shout in church. Did he have no fear, no respect?
Or was his excitement driven by his fear?
There was no sign of living man to be seen. Nothing disturbed, no footprint besides our own, no marks on the snow save the
spider tracks of birds. The tent stood before us like a great square tomb.
And then we heard a sound which my ear at first took for wind, some strange effect of wind despite the stillness about us;
so sure was my fatalism that this was what I thought before my consciousness recognised the sound for what I knew of course
it was: the sound of a violin.
Ezkarra pulled out the cross he wore about his neck and kissed it, speaking a gravelly prayer beneath his breath.