The Solitude of Thomas Cave (13 page)

'See, boy, so your friend lives after all.'

He held the cross to me that I too might kiss it. It was a plain, savage-looking cross that he had made himself from whalebone
and engraved with a long and contorted Christ. I had a sudden urge to make the gesture, alien though it was to me.

And then Carnock spoke darkly and made us all afraid. 'Unless it be his ghost.'

No ghost he was but changed. How changed I was to learn only in time. To me then, seeing him, all the change I saw was physical:
how thin he was, how his hands dangled off him, how old he looked, and how still his eyes.

He did not see us as we entered. His back was turned, his head bent, his body swaying with the tune which seemed some sedate
lament. It was extraordinary for being so homely, the sight of a man playing his music by lamplight in a warm room, a fire
in the stove, a scrubbed table holding the remnants of a meal, a high cot covered in furs, a pretty embroidered cloth hung
on the wall. When he saw us, or rather, felt our presence, for he did not turn immediately, he lowered the fiddle and spoke
without any tone of surprise.

'Ah, so there you are.'

He might have said the same if we had been gone only a week or a morning.

'What kept you? I had been expecting you.'

He looked a decade, not a winter, older. He looked older than my father whom I had seen so little a time before as Easter.
There was more sense of age in him in that moment than in any old man I ever knew. He was old like an apostle or a prophet
carved at the door of a church. His hair and beard were long and matted, the lines on his face deep and etched with soot,
his hands that held the instrument thin and knobbled, the whole of him thin. Thomas Cave had been gaunt already but now he
was a man of sticks; his head and hands, the feet that weighed him down, all seemed too heavy for the frame that held them.

He moved those long limbs with a strange gentleness, as if they were very fragile, or as if he were a saint from a statue
only that moment come to life. He looked at us without surprise or shock of recognition, laid the fiddle gently across the
scrubbed table and the bow beside it. I noticed how clean the table was, how neatly the cabin was arranged, and wondered if
he had cleaned it in expectation of our arrival. Only the roof space above our heads had not been swept: the rafters and the
chimney hood were coated with great black flakes of soot, and as we stood there the draught that came through the open door
set them fluttering down like leaves from trees in the forest and showered the table and the floor. With a skeletal hand Thomas
Cave flicked at one that clung to the mat of hair on his brow, and for the first time now an expression crossed his face.
I think that it was a smile.

17

H
E WOULD NOT come to sleep on board the ship with us that night but insisted that he remain in his cabin. That seemed lonely
to us but we could see how it was his home. He had offered us his best hospitality, a cup of water which we must pass around
and a plate of some strong black stew of venison. We had taken a small portion out of politeness though in truth it was pretty
vile. When we left him we said that we would be back the next day with ale and wine and whatever else he asked for, and that
we would take him then to visit the ship.

As we slept the wind changed and cleared the fog and the tide swept the last of the ice away from the shore. The day to which
we woke was as unlike the one before it as any two days can be: bright in that way that is peculiar to the North and that
I have seen nowhere else, bright with that rare, sharp, glassy light, and we took the
Heartsease
in a little way and dropped anchor as close as we might to the shore. Thomas Cave did not say a word as we rowed him out,
but gazed on her and looked all about him rather as a child does in a new place.

'Is this the same ship on which I came?' he asked at last. 'She looks so big.'

She looked the bigger the closer we got, her sturdy hull rising above us in the water. The receding cold had left every surface
of her coated with a thick rime, her decks, her furled sails, her rigging all glistening with slivers of frost, and the air
about her glistened with crystals that fell away with each moment in the sunlight.

'Why, she is like an island.'

He climbed up on deck and Marmaduke greeted him closely and hugged him, and then took him away to his cabin. He had with him
the book in which he had recorded all the details of his survival, a logbook wrapped around with cloth that he had held tight
to his chest all the time that we rowed him out to the ship. I do not know what was in it, though at that time I longed to.
I longed for stories, for the tale of his adventure that he was never in my hearing to divulge. I reckon that that book he
gave to the Captain had in it all that he was ever to say of his experience.

'See how he clutched the book to him. There is madness in it.'

Marmaduke did not come out for hours and we worked without him, to and fro from ship to beach, bringing on to land our stores
and all the cumbersome equipment of our summer's business. It is like setting up a little town, putting together a whaling
station, all the barrels and tools as well as the hoists and coppers and furnaces.

'Did you see the way he looked at the ship? He may have survived but he's lost a part of his mind. Something's frozen in him.'

'When we came upon him, that first moment when he saw us, I had a feeling that he did not like it. I thought that he did not
want to see us at all.'

'Of course he did, wouldn't any man? How could you doubt it?'

Again we rowed back empty to the ship through water that was so clear that we could see the shadow of our boat on the sand
beneath. Each one of us had been watching Cave and puzzling over him.

'I know what you mean,' said another. 'It makes no sense, but it was how he looked when we came in. The blank way he looked
at us.'

'He's just a trifle mad. Who wouldn't be in the circumstances?'

'He was mad from the start if you ask me, mad to say he'd do such a thing.'

'Cave is not mad but dazzled.' Joseph Hailey had more knowledge of the northern seas than any of us save Marmaduke, had sailed
up there a decade or more. 'I have seen that look in men's eyes before. Once I went with a Danish ship to the west of Greenland,
and there is a tribe of men who live there, dark sturdy hunters who know the ways of living amongst the ice. I saw the same
in them, in men we met alone when we put in along the coast, men who must have been away from their people for many days.
I imagine that it is like a kind of snow dazzle, when you look before you but see only whiteness. They say that sometimes
in those parts it comes upon a man so bad that he runs away from everyone he meets, away into the white, and is never seen
again.'

Mad, dazzled, yet the proof of his sanity was there in material things before our eyes: the order of his cabin which demonstrated
the orderliness of his life through the months of his hermitage, the cooking arrangements, the cobbling tools and the ranks
of wooden heels he had made that were enough to fill a whole barrel when at last we went home. Then there was his apparent
physical health, despite his thinness, and all the evidence of his hunting: the great bearskin that he had scraped and spread
on poles to cure, one bigger than any I had ever seen, its thick fur almost butter-coloured in that day's bright and melting
light, and the many bones and carcases of other animals that were strewn about, both close by the tent and further off where
he had butchered them at the site of his kill.

I wonder now if the madness that we thought we saw in him that day was in part a reflection of the fear in ourselves? We looked
at him and did not see Thomas Cave but imagined only the cold and the darkness and the solitude, and did not think that we
could bear it, and I could not have said which one of these three horrors to me was the worst.

It would have made it easier for us if he had told us tales. Words, our English words, would have reduced all that we imagined
to reality, put the miracle of his survival into pieces that we could hold. But he chose not to speak, or perhaps he could
not find the words to speak with. Only physical information escaped him. He told us of his discovery that the place where
we were, which we had supposed to be an extension to the east of the land that we already knew as Greenland, was not so but
an island on its own, and he pointed out where on a clear day we might climb to ascertain this fact. He told us where particular
herbs and grasses might be found among the mosses and the lichens on the mountainsides. He had learned better than the most
experienced of the sailors the ways of the northern weather, could predict its moods and sudden changes. Yet all this he told
us in connection with the present time only, and never did he refer back to what was past. All that was left for us to guess
and wonder at.

'You ask him, Goodlard, he'll talk to you,' the others said to me. 'Why, last year we saw that you were like a son to him.'

I tried, believe me. My curiosity was as great as anyone's. But Cave seemed not to hear us, and looked across to us from that
distance of his and held his silence. Even now, and I was his companion for some long time after that voyage was done and
we had returned to England, I have nothing to tell you of what occurred to him in that winter. I cannot even say what injury
it was that caused the slight limp which I discerned in him, which he was never to lose, some injury which he must have sustained
to the ankle or the knee of his right leg that just so little skewed his walk. I thought it like the limp that Jacob had after
he had wrestled with God in his dream and God had struck him. The mark of God on him, that's what I thought it was.

18

T
HE WAY I talk now, it seems as if Thomas Cave was at the centre of my thoughts all of that summer. This was not so, of course.
I recount only what my memory selects and what it seems of interest to tell, the things that stand out and are particular
to that one season of the many I have spent up there in the Greenland seas. The truth of it is that I did not much preoccupy
myself with Cave, not after those first few days of finding him again. How could I when there was so much else, so much that
was more immediate and demanding of the senses?

I do not know if you have seen a whale. It is a beast of a size which it is only reasonable to imagine in the vastness of
the ocean. On land it seems monstrous and alien. Did you hear the story how, only a couple of years ago, one came up the river
close by Ipswich? It was washed there by some freak, and men heard of it and crowded to the estuary, and came out in boats
and on to the mud when the tide was down with every kind of weapon they could muster, spears, swords, guns, hatchets, billhooks
and axes, and tried to kill it as it floundered in what little water remained for it to swim in. They did not succeed in making
a death blow until they had an anchor stuck in its nostril and it was gushing blood, like water from a pump, and all those
about the river were red as if they had worked in a slaughterhouse; and then they cut it up into thousands of pieces, that
any man or woman or child that had tuppence to pay for it might take home, and some ate their meat while others put it away
like some famous relic and accounted it a wonder and a marvel. And before they cut up the whale a man had the wit to measure
it, and it was a full fifty-eight foot in length, twelve foot high, and two foot between the eyes.

Take that to your mind and then imagine the whales as they are in their own element, in the sea, whales of this size and more,
swimming north up the broad sea of the great fjord. We could see them from the rocks of the point, see the tracks they made
in the water, the spouts they blew like so many fountains shooting into the air, see their black backs as they surfaced and
their great shining tails which they thrashed into the sea with a sound like a whipcrack that carried for miles. They came
in flocks, scores of them as you would commonly see shoals of fish, more spouts and tails than you could begin to count, and
many of them came into the calm of the bay as if they would bask and play there all the summer, only that the
Heartsease
was there waiting for them.

The first whale was killed within two days of our coming, killed at the mouth of the bay and three boats towed it back to
the ship, floating belly-up and trailing red clouds in the water, a huge old beast whose crinkled skin was all barnacled and
thick with sea lice, and it was tied up there to the stern of the ship, still floating, and we left it a day to settle before
we began the task of butchery.

This butchery is work on a scale that you cannot imagine if you have slaughtered only pigs or cattle, work that is more like
the activity of ants when they combine to pull away to their nest some great cockroach or scrap of dead meat twenty times
their size: the dismantling and transferral on to shore of the pieces of a beast that may be almost as long as a ship itself,
a piece of prey and yet it towers above the men who work on it, who walk on it and slip on its skin, who cut at it with great
knives that seem proportionately no more than pins. The blubber lies directly beneath the hard black skin, a broad layer of
yellowish lard. Slice at it sharp and sidelong as a butcher slices the fat off a piece of meat, and it pulls away clean, clean
in itself too at first as if you might eat it, buttery coloured and pure and smelling of nothing but itself, though if it
is left under a warm sun it soon becomes putrid and sets off a stink that clings like its grease to all that touches it.

There's a skill to this that we call flensing, like the skill of a master butcher, and it was one of the Biscayans who did
that work, a little dark bow-legged man who walked barefoot on the whale and never lost his grip. Cave, always neat with his
hands, used to work with him; I saw that sometimes, saw the two of them, tall and small, progressing down the body of the
beast where it lay in the water, cutting blocks and stripping them off, long slabs of blubber like tombstones oozing oil.
Sometimes Cave was not there and the Biscayan worked alone or took some other one of us to help in Cave's stead. The pieces
of blubber they threw down to the sea to be towed ashore, and there we chopped them down further, raked them up and ladled
them into a great tub that hung from the arm of a gibbet that turned to and fro between the chopping benches and the coppers
upon the furnaces. Picture this if you can in such a scene of cold grandeur as only those northern coasts can produce: the
smallness of the men and the ugliness of their contrivances, the smoke, the soot, the pervasive oil and its ever more pungent
smell, and above it all the voracious flocks of birds that at every stage attended us, the gulls swirling and diving amongst
us.

And then there is the reverse of the process: the removal of the rendered blubber; its steam and sizzle as it is ladled into
cooling vats filled with water; how it is drained out and down a series of gutters and coolers and at last into the barrels.
Meantime others have cut off the head from the beast and brought it in and drawn it up on the shore as far as they and the
tide can pull it, for it is heavy with bone, and walked in between its jaws and sliced out all the slim fins of whalebone
and scraped them down and rubbed them with sand. Besides what meat we choose to cut — and the meat is good, red and fleshy
like the richest beef and not at all like fish or anything that comes out of the sea - the rest of the whale is waste, and
is left to sink or wash to and fro in the water of the bay which close to the shore has become dense and still, so loaded
it is with grease.

That summer the work like the days never seemed to end. We took fifteen whales, near one thousand five hundred hogsheads of
oil, barrel upon barrel floated out again and loaded on to the ship. It was a great catch. And the weather was free of storms
and, until the end, free of that stifling fog, day after day of workable if chill weather with most times a layer of cloud
to take the sharpness from the sky and keep our shadow off the sea to make the fishing good. All in all it would have seemed
an exceptional and lucky season despite the slowness of its start, a blessed season even, were it not for those things that
happened at its close.

Until those events there is nothing much that I can tell you of Cave. I can give you only these odd pictures of him that I
keep in my mind: walking among us on shore like a shadow, hair and beard trimmed, his strangeness muted as he assimilated
once more into the company of others; or grimly working the carcase of a whale where it floated at the stern of the ship,
atop the black and shining mound, his gaunt figure with the flensing knife in its hand silhouetted one day like a stag oak
against a rare bright sky. I remember that I came beneath him in a boat as we tied the whale in and he spoke and gestured,
but in that light he could see me so much more clearly than I might see him, and there was only his outline rearing down on
me and his expression was indeciperable.

A fine day, I think I called that it was a fine day, and indeed the sun fell hot on my face and dazzled as I looked up to
him.

I was not sure of the words I caught coming down. The pity of it, it might have been, but I hear him now with twenty years
of hindsight. Could it have been that? That is how I picture it now. There is the sea, the ship, the carcase of the whale,
all raw with the brightness of the day, and Thomas Cave stretches out his arms in an awkward frame about the scene, and that
is what he says.

Some days I saw that he worked and then for some days he was not there. I heard it mentioned that there was a madness on him,
but others said that it was not so much a madness as a melancholy, that he had gone to sit alone in some dark corner like
a brooding hen. And when he was in the company of men it was the Biscayans he sought rather than ourselves. The Biscayans
were a haughty and separate bunch and I never saw any other Englishmen find any level of intimacy with them, even those who
had picked up a piece of their language or spoke some French or Spanish or whatever tongue it was that they had in common.
Yet they took to Cave and sometimes when work was done I saw that he sat and ate and drank with them.

The other pictures I have of him are from that summer's end, the weather already on the turn and the nights beginning and
the looking-out for ice.

I see Cave standing for hours on end on the rocks of the point on the northern tip of the bay when all the sea before him
is swathed in fog, standing alert, listening where he could not see, as if with his ears he might penetrate where his eyes
are blind.

Carnock's boat was lost. Six men in it, counting himself. It was last seen by one of the other whaleboat crews as the fog
was rolling in, no more than a hundred, a hundred and fifty yards' visibility, they said, and it was chasing a whale. The
boats behind had heard the yell of the harpooneer as he made contact, the surge and the zip of the rope as the whale pulled
away, and followed though they could not see in what direction it was gone. And that was the end of it. Not a sound, not a
cry more, they said, no sight, but only the strip of frothing water that they came to where they knew the whale had fought.

No way could they tell what had occurred. A chase like that is terrifying in the fog. The whale pulls away and the men on
the harpoon boat that holds to it cannot know where they go nor reckon how far, nor how close the other boats remain behind
them or if they will be able to follow and pick them up should they be overturned into the sea. I have heard of boats dragged
many miles blind in that way and scarcely able to find their way home, and of others more fearful who swiftly cut the rope
that tied them to the whale. Carnock was not the sort of man to have taken that course, we knew that Carnock would have held
on long as he could. How far the whale took him and his men we could not begin to guess. It could have been hours, days, out
into the fjord and the ocean beyond; or it was possible that it was a few minutes only, a mere snatch of time, and that they
were pulled down into the vortex of the whale's dive or simply overturned by a flick of its tail and drowned close by us unseen
and unheard in the muffling confusion of the fog.

I was at the cookery when the news of it came to me, in the heat of boiling blubber. A boat lost out in the bay, and I took
in the words and worked on as I must for the fire was up and needed stoking. I did not even know till after who was in it,
not until I wiped the grease off me and went to the water's edge.

Some few of us were left there on the shore. Most had gone out in the boats and we could hear their calls though we could
not see them.

It was a time before we put together the names of all that were there with Carnock: a harpooneer that was one of two Biscayan
brothers, a sailor called Jonas Watson who had been good to me, two others that I knew not well, and Edward Marmaduke. That
shocked me, to hear that. All of it was a shock, even though it was an occurrence that is ever, in those seas, half-awaited,
such things are always a shock when they become fact. Yet this loss, this sneaking fog-bound silent loss, touched us more
than any for the loss of the Captain's son, and the Captain loved by all and the son no more than my age and such a vivid
strutting cockerel of a boy.

The boats stayed out for hours, far longer than any swimmer might have lasted in that cold and inky water, zigzagging across
the empty sea, calling out and staring into nothingness. We on the land walked the shore along the full length of the bay,
looking and calling likewise, drawn to every other looming rock to see if it might be a piece of boat or a man washed up.

I came upon Cave at the rocky point on the northern spur of the bay. It was a good place to stand as the current swept by
there. I went and stood beside him and he lifted a hand to me and would not speak but only listen, his concentration so intense
that I felt it myself, and felt as I stood there beside him that I could hear more closely the movement of the waves, make
out in it any slight erratic distant sound that might have been that of an oar.

Once I heard a call that I thought could be that of a man.

'Only a seal,' he whispered. 'Listen, it is more like the cry of a child than of a man.'

Just then a flight of gulls passed overhead and the sound was lost but I believed that what he said was true.

At last even he gave up his watch, and it was he who went out to Captain Marmaduke, who had waited shut in his cabin all of
this time, and later the two of them came back to shore and walked in the half-light.

I think that for a grown man it is like his own death to lose his only son; a double death, for a man means his son to follow
on, to carry on his name and be his escape from his own mortality. Captain Marmaduke took it hard. He walked a long time with
Cave and then he had them row him back to the ship, and went straight to his cabin and did not come out of it for days on
end. By that time it was late in August. The whales were on the move away and we too began to pack up on shore, loaded the
hold, waited for the word to sail. The fog that had swallowed the boat persisted about us, sometimes thinning, sometimes giving
way to flakes of snow. These were days of mourning and of awful tension. We prayed the prayers for the drowned but looked
at the water and all of us I believe still hoped to see a form emerge from it or hear the creak of the returning boat within
the mist, and at the same time we looked at the ship where the Captain was closed away and longed to be gone.