Antarctica

by Peter Lerangis

  “Ready to pull, or do we need to put you in the boat with Lombardo, Andrew, and Oppenheim?”

  “Anything but Oppenheim.”

  Colin smiled. “You’re a lot tougher than I gave you credit for. Andrew’s dead to the world.”

  “Andrew was bitten. I merely froze.” Philip slowly rose to his feet, his shirtsleeve falling far down over his hands. “You gave me your clothes yesterday, didn’t you?”

  “They were spares.”

  “After that cruel treatment I received, you fed me and made sure I was warm. I shan’t forget that.”

  “Look, it wasn’t a proposal of marriage, Philip. I was looking out for Andrew, and you happened to be in the tent, too.”

  “Thanks anyway.”

  Colin gave him a half smile, then ran off to breakfast.

  Humanity lived, after all, in Camp Perseverance.

  The penguin pemmican tasted especially foul this morning, the coffee like charcoal. The teams were already hitching their dogs to the sledges, and men had begun slipping into their traces.

  Andrew lay on a cot, alone on the Horace Putney. Lombardo had insisted on skiing.

  “Philip, when you finish dining, take the harness next to Oppenheim,” Mansfield said. “He’s giving it a try today.”

  Philip’s heart sank.

  Oppenheim turned toward him with a wide smile. “I’m going to ride the chariot in the morning, Lord! Oh, I’m getting ready for the Judgment Day.…”

  Three hours of hard labor with a madman.

  Philip took a bite of penguin pemmican and chewed. Slowly.

  The clouds had rolled in again overnight, hiding the sun and the horizon. He wished he could roll away with them.

  Everything of value to him was gone — the money, the photographs, his pride. What was the point of going home? Mum had gotten rid of him. Uncle Horace couldn’t stand the sight of him. The only people who wanted him were the police; they’d be waiting with open shackles.

  Of course, he could escape after landing, as Nigel had proposed — but then what? Hop Argentine freighters … with Nigel? Pick bananas in Honduras?

  Colin should have let him sink. No one would have shed a tear. For the first time in his life, he’d have brought a little good into the world.

  “’Ay, Philip, whatcher waitin’ for, an engraved imitation?” Nigel yelled. “We need yer sorry carcass!”

  Philip spat out the pemmican, walked to the boat, and picked up his traces.

  9

  Jack

  February 4, 1910

  “AVAST — HO!” JACK CRIED out.

  He was exhausted and short of breath. The sweat stung bitterly when it dripped into his eyes, and it left a brackish taste on his lips.

  The air had changed. It was sea air, and he’d smelled it miles away. Anyone who knew the sea could detect its fragrance in the unlikeliest of places — in the grimy industrial air of New York City and the bone-dry California deserts, in the rainy mountains of Washington State and the dusty Texas plains.

  Salt had no odor, and neither did water — but together with the rotting algae, the fish carcasses, and the mold in the air, the scent was unmistakable.

  To a sailor, it was perfume.

  All three teams slowed to a halt. The ice here was crisscrossed with webbed footprints, the distant ridges lined with penguins, gulls, and terns. A lone skua swooped overhead, screaming. In the distance, a gliding bird plummeted from the sky toward its prey below.

  The dogs yapped madly, lurching toward the birds, pulling the sledges in all directions.

  Over the last two days, the pulling had become almost impossible. The wet snow clung to the soles of Jack’s boots, and his team had nearly lost the Raina when its runners caught in a field of hummocks.

  Not far ahead of them were three good leads, long fingers of deep blue water thrusting through the surface. Maybe a half mile farther, the floes broke up into choppy brash ice. Beyond that would be open sea.

  “This is as far as we go,” Jack announced.

  “I could have told you that,” Siegal said.

  Mansfield thrust a fist into the air. “Hip hip—”

  “Feet feet,” Ruppenthal grumbled, “shoulders shoulders, knees knees— they all hurt.”

  The men unhooked themselves and sat on the ice, one by one, as O’Malley and Stimson untied the food bags. A few of the men — Colin, Mansfield, Barth, Siegal, Kennedy — seemed relieved, but most were too tired to react.

  Of the sick men, Kosta and Lombardo were doing the best. Oppenheim, however, was hurling oaths and chunks of ice back in the direction they’d come.

  Jack walked back to the Horace Putney with Captain Barth. “How’s Andrew?”

  “Sleeping,” Colin said.

  Dr. Montfort nodded reassuringly. “The gash is healing well. It wasn’t as deep as I’d feared. No broken bones or torn ligaments — he’ll have a whopping bruise for a while, but that’s about it. He’s one lucky kid.”

  “Brave, too,” said Captain Barth.

  Jack nodded. Andrew would need bravery. And good health.

  What came next would require both in spades.

  “What now, Father?” Colin asked.

  “We can’t stay here,” Jack said. “The ice isn’t stable enough — especially if the weather turns warmer.”

  “We have to decide something fast, Jack,” Captain Barth said. “To keep the peace.”

  Raised voices echoed from the men’s encampment — Lombardo and Ruppenthal, Nigel and Philip, Oppenheim and Rivera — arguing, taunting, everyone at the end of his tether.

  Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out a small American flag wrapped around a crumpled, water-soaked sheet of paper. Carefully he unfolded the paper and read the India ink inscription on top.

  Below it was a neatly drawn map of Antarctica, the coasts in great topographical detail, the interior a blank expanse of white.

  Walden had planned to map every inch of the Antarctic shoreline. He would move slowly, returning to the mainland for fuel when necessary.

  The two men had met in Argentina. For good luck, each had agreed to give the other a souvenir. Walden had given Jack the flag and the map. Jack, distracted by problems, had returned nothing — and had been haunted by that ever since. A broken gesture had power. It worked on your mind in quiet ways, weakening your resolve and your courage.

  Now the map might come in handy.

  “Gather, men!” Jack called out.

  “What’s the plan?” Ruppenthal called out.

  “Put to and sail out of here, I’ll bet,” Siegal said.

  “We can’t sail these dinghies in this mess,” Windham said. “We’ll capsize.”

  “Pop, I say retreat to a stabler floe and wait out the summer,” Mansfield suggested. “In a couple of months the Ross Sea will freeze up right to the ocean, which’ll give us another fifty miles or so of ice —”

  “A couple of months?” Cranston snapped. “We can’t survive here that long!”

  “Death never takes the wise man by surprise,” Oppenheim shouted. “He is always ready to go!”

  “Listen up — I have Chappy Walden’s map and itinerary,” Jack announced. “He left three weeks after we did, sailing west to circumnavigate Antarctica and map the coast. He drew his route for me on this sheet, pinpointing dates and locations. If he has stuck to his schedule, he should be approaching the Ross Sea right around now.”

  “So … we stay here and wait for him?” Philip asked.

  “Right, and wave to ’im wif our ’ankies?” Nigel said. “Yoo-hoo! Captain Wa-a-a-alden!”

  “Staying here, we have little chance of seeing him or being seen,” Jack said. “If we sail now, making our way slowly through the brash —”

  “And bergs,” Mansfield interrupted.

  “— we’ll reach the shelf ice in two or three days. Fewer if we’re lucky. One thing we know about Walden — he’ll be hugging the coast. Chances are good we’ll cross paths.”

  “Ho
w close to the shore?” Oppenheim blurted out. “Can anyone really know that?”

  The commotion stopped, and all eyes turned to Oppenheim.

  “What are the real odds of two vessels actually crossing paths in this vast sea?” Oppenheim pressed on. “And what if we don’t find him? We marry the penguins and settle in?”

  He was making sense. His words were brutal and honest.

  Looking at Oppenheim’s face, Jack realized that “crazy” was an easy label. Oppenheim was a rational man with an impossible task — to function as a human without any hope and faith. In his eyes, Jack saw the despair of every man in the crew. And, possibly, their future.

  “If all else fails,” Jack said, “we make our way along the western coast until we reach the Antarctic peninsula— which we will follow north to Deception Island. There we’ll find a whaling station.”

  “How many miles away is Deception Island?” Andrew chimed in from the Horace Putney.

  The crew turned. Andrew was sitting up with great effort.

  Jack wished he could greet him with good news. Instead he told the truth. “About twenty-five hundred.”

  “Impossible!” Bailey said.

  “Gar!” Nigel shouted. “In lifeboats?”

  “My good man, that is the entire length of your country,” Philip said, “give or take a state or two.”

  “Father, how can we possibly do this?” Colin asked.

  Oppenheim began to pace back and forth. “We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.”

  “It has been done,” Jack said confidently, “by lesser men than we. It is our backup plan, remember. We’ll start tomorrow morning.”

  The men studied his face. He kept a confident cut of the jaw, an upbeat expression.

  Confidence was the key.

  The journey hadn’t been done. It was impossible.

  But that didn’t matter. Walden was out there.

  And they would find him.

  Part Three

  Launch

  10

  Colin

  February 5, 1910

  “HEEEEAVE-HO-O-O!”

  Colin gave a solid push and the Horace Putney slid off its runners. Its bow slapped into the water.

  Day one.

  If he thought about it, he would count the men and dogs — thirty and thirteen — and then count the boats — four — and he would imagine those four lifeboats on the same savage sea that had battered the Mystery. All heading off to die foolishly.

  If he thought about it.

  But so much had to be done — checking and packing and discarding and rigging and rounding up — that he could easily choose not to think about it at all.

  “We can’t fit the seal chops!” O’Malley shouted.

  “Toss ’em or eat ’em now!” Captain Barth replied. “We’re only packing penguin hoosh, hardtack, and pemmican! We’ll anchor and hunt when the need arises.”

  “Can’t anyone get these bloody pigeons away?” Philip shouted, shooing a bird away from a chunk of meat cooking on the stove.

  “They ain’t pigeons, ya blighter—they’s seagulls!” Nigel said.

  RRRROWFF! Socrates lunged at a tern, knocking over the stove. The meat fell to the guano-covered rocks.

  “My seal!” Philip whined.

  “We could fit the meat in the boats if we didn’t have the dogs,” Ruppenthal snarled.

  “Don’t start in about them again,” Talmadge said.

  The dogs had been a problem. A couple of the men had wanted to abandon them. But Jack had said no, they come, too.

  The stove and many of their supplies would be left behind. The men would take two Primus stoves, Ruskey’s photographic plates, weapons for hunting, buckets for bailing, string and frozen seal blood for repairs, a Bible, lots of extra wood — and, of course, ballast. With the weight so evenly spread port-to-starboard, the boats would need to be ballasted properly to prevent heeling.

  No extra clothes.

  “Dogs first, then men!” Jack cried out.

  “Socrates! Demosthenes! Iosif! Kalliope!”

  Socrates ran for the Samuel Breen. The others ran away.

  “Ellàteh, paithià mou!”

  Socrates leaped. His front legs locked onto the gunwale, but he fell back into the water, dousing Nesbit.

  Demosthenes jumped on Socrates. Kalliope jumped on Nesbit.

  “Get this thing off me!” Nesbit shouted.

  Mansfield let out a whoop. “This is war!”

  The men ran after the dogs, picking them up one by one and depositing them in the boats.

  One by one, the dogs jumped out.

  Lombardo fell to the ice as Fotis licked his face. Ireni began digging a hole. Nikola bayed at an albatross.

  It took the better part of a half hour to get the dogs settled. By then everyone was soaked and in high spirits.

  Except Philip. Philip was dry and miserable. “I request a canine-free vessel,” he said.

  “You’re coming with me in the Horace Putney,” Jack said, reading from a handwritten list, “along with Colin, Mansfield, Cranston, Sanders, and Kennedy.”

  Philip?

  Colin couldn’t believe it. As Father turned for the boat, Colin elbowed him. “Why’d you pick Philip?”

  “For his protection,” Jack replied. “If I put him on any other boat, the men’ll kill him.”

  Now the opportunity’s all mine, Colin thought.

  Jack gathered the men into a circle. He linked arms with Colin on one side and Andrew on the other.

  One by one, the others locked arms, too.

  “We are a chain,” Jack said. “We must stay together, in each other’s sight, at all costs. We’re loaded beyond any reasonable standards. Exercise extreme caution. If we separate — if one boat is damaged — our return voyage is doomed. With God’s help, we’ll find Walden soon. I believe that with all my soul.”

  Silence greeted the speech, but no words were needed. In glances and facial tics, posture and movement, the men spoke volumes. Despair for the unreasonable, hope for the impossible.

  The boats now lay half in the water. Colin committed the personnel of each to memory. The dogs were already in: Ireni, Maria, and Stavros in the Horace Putney; Kalliope, Fotis, and Martha in the Iphigenia; Demosthenes, Socrates, and Yiorgos in the Samuel Breen; and Kristina, Iosif, Nikola, and Panagiotis in the Raina.

  Into the Iphigenia climbed Rivera, Riesman, Talmadge, Windham, O’Malley, Flummerfelt, Ruppenthal, Ruskey.

  The Samuel Breen: Siegal, Nesbit, Petard, Brillman, Stimson, Bailey, Hayes.

  The Raina: Barth, Andrew, Montfort, Kosta, Lombardo, Oppenheim, Robert, and Nigel.

  Some would be standing — there was no way to prevent that. The dogs would have to lie on the ballast and in men’s laps. And Father had made it clear that the personnel should switch boats regularly at each stop along the coast.

  Colin gave the Horace Putney’s stern a hard push until it was afloat, then jumped in himself.

  The boat rocked on a strong, choppy current. The brash ice billowed against the hull, making a noise like crunching gravel. Cranston took the tiller as Colin and Jack used oars to push against the larger blocks of ice, guiding the boat northeast, toward a break near the horizon.

  “Oh, I believe I am getting sick,” Philip moaned.

  The dogs whined, moving around in circles. Colin was jammed against the starboard hull and had poor leverage.

  The boat was uncomfortable. Badly balanced. Slow.

  And thrilling.

  The land had not been kind. The sea was a friend; the sea had gotten them here alive, and now perhaps it would deliver them.

  The current pulled the boats steadily northwest, aided by a sharp crosswind. They were headed for a field of freshly calved icebergs, about three-quarters of a mile away.

  “Set the sails!” Father called out.

  Kennedy and Mansfield scrambled to unlash the sail and lower the boom. “Ready about!” Kennedy cried, pull
ing the sheet.

  The Iphigenia was directly behind them. The Raina and the Samuel Breen had drifted west and were tacking to catch up.

  “It doesn’t look like we’re getting away from those bergs!” Cranston shouted.

  “The bergs are moving, too,” Jack replied.

  “Shouldn’t they be moving the other way?” Kennedy asked.

  “Must be some kind of crosscurrent,” Mansfield said. “Watch for a strong riptide — or whirlpool.”

  A cloud cover had developed in the south, over the Antarctic plain. It loomed behind the other three boats, growing fast.

  “Jibe to the east and be prepared to lower sails!” Father shouted.

  The wind was at their backs, forcing them to zigzag in order to catch a good crosswind. For a good forty-five minutes, Colin watched the cloud gradually turn black. It swallowed the Raina and Samuel Breen first, then quickly engulfed the Iphigenia.

  “Bring her around and heave to! On the double!” Jack commanded. “READY ABOUT.”

  Philip ducked under the forward decking. Mansfield and Kennedy released the sheet and let the boom swing again.

  They trimmed the sail and brought the Horace Putney about so that its bow faced into the wind. Again they let the sheet loose and the sail went slack. As the two men secured the sail, Sanders kept a firm grip on the rudder, making sure the boat stayed properly hove to.

  The wind struck like a cannon. It blew rocks and ice into their faces and sent up swells that tossed the boat furiously.

  Stavros began yowling from the bottom of the boat. Instantly the other dogs — and Philip — joined.

  “Stay low!” Sanders called out.

  Colin and Jack inserted their oars into the oarlocks. For stability they extended the oars, feathering them so that the blades rested flat on the water’s surface.

  “I see the Iphigenia!”Colin shouted.

  He shielded his face, keeping his eyes on the place where he’d spotted the boat’s silhouette. It peeked in and out of the fog, heaving to and tossing on the waves.

  As the wind increased, the clouds began to blow off.

  “Where are the other two?” Mansfield shouted.

  The Iphigenia had held position fast. But the Raina and the Samuel Breen were nowhere in sight.