The Corvette nd-5

by Ричард Вудмен

  He shook off the ridiculous feeling. 'Mr Quilhampton!'

  'Sir?'

  'Aloft with you, we shall run into the ice lead and work ahead of the whales.'

  'Aye, aye, sir.' Drinkwater looked at the compass.

  'Steer west by north.'

  'West by north, sir… west by north it is, sir.'

  'Sheet home there! Belay!' Rispin at last pronounced topgallants hoisted.

  'Square the yards, Mr Rispin, course west by north.'

  Rispin acknowledged the order and his voice rose again as he bawled through the trumpet.

  'After guard and marines to the weather mainbrace! Forebrace there! Bosun's mate start those men aft here! Haul in the main brace, pull together damn you and mind the weather roll! That's very well with the main yard! Belay there! Belay! Belay the fore-yard, don't come up any…!'

  It went on for some minutes before Mr Rispin, fussing under his captain's eye, was satisfied with the trim of the yards and Melusine had already gathered way. From her leeward position she was up among the whalers and their boats now. Two boat-flags were already up, with Narwhal's colours on them, Drinkwater noticed. He raised his hat to Harvey's mate who conned the whaler while his commander was out after the fish. He saluted Abel Sawyers as Melusine swept past the Quaker in his boat, his men pulling furiously to catch a great bull whale a musket shot on the sloop's starboard bow. Then they were in among the whales, the air misty with their breathing, a foetid taint to it. The humps of the shining backs, the flick of a great tail and once a reappearance of that great ugly-noble head as it sluiced the water through the baleen in an ecstasy of surfeit.

  'Beat to quarters, Mr Rispin,' Drinkwater said it quietly, watching the young officer's reaction. He noted the surprise and the hesitation and then the acknowledgement.

  Pipes squealed again and the marine drummer began to beat the rafale. Men ran to their stations and knelt by the guns, the officers and midshipmen drew their dirks and swords and the gun-captains raised their hands as their guns became ready.

  'Sail trimmers, Mr Hill. We'll heave-to and fire a broadside ahead of the leading whales!' Hill was at his station and had relieved Rispin. There was now an economy of orders as Hill deployed the men chosen to trim the Melusine's sails and spars in action. Bourne too was beside him, ready to pass orders to the batteries. 'Load ball, Mr Bourne, all guns at maximum depression, both broadsides to be ready.'

  'Aye, aye, sir.'

  Melusine had entered the lead now. On either side the backs of whales still emerged, their huge tails slowly thrusting the water as they drove majestically along. Beyond the whales, close to larboard and some miles distant to starboard, the ice edge glittered in the sunlight, full of diamond brilliants shading to blue shadows with green slime along the waterline.

  He was aware of Mr Singleton on the quarterdeck. 'Should you not be at your station?' he asked mildly.

  'I beg your pardon, sir, I took it to be another of these interminable manoeuvres that…'

  'Never mind, never mind. You may watch now you are here.'

  Singleton turned to see Meetuck pointing excitedly from the fo'c's'le as a female whale rolled luxuriously on her side, exposing her nipple for her calf. 'It seems scarcely right to kill these magnificent creatures,' he muttered to himself, remembering the Benedicite. The mother and calf fell astern.

  'Down helm, Mr Hill, you may heave the ship to…' There were more orders and Melusine swung to starboard, easing her speed through the water to a standstill.

  'Larboard battery! Make ready!' The arms went up and he nodded to Bourne.

  'Fire!'

  The broadside erupted in smoke and flame with a roar that made the ears tingle. The balls raised splashes, a cable to leeward where two big whales had been seen. Through the drifting smoke Drinkwater saw one huge fluke lift itself for a moment as the whale dived, but he had no idea whether he had reversed its course.

  'Reload!' There was a furious and excited activity along the larboard waist. There was nothing to compare with firing their brute artillery that so delighted the men, officers and ratings alike.

  'You may give them another broadside, Mr Bourne.'

  Again the arms went up and again the shots dropped ahead of the whales. Drinkwater turned to starboard, to look back up the strait. The whalers were three miles away and between them and the Melusine was a most extraordinary sight. The sea seemed to boil with action. He could see more than a dozen boats. Three were under tow by harpooned whales, others were in the act of striking, their harpooners up in the bows as the tense steersmen brought their flimsy oars into the mass of whales that had now taken alarm and were swimming south-west, along the line of the lead. Beyond these two boats crews were lancing their catches, probing for the lives of the great beasts as their victims rolled and thrashed the water with their great tails. Through his glass Drinkwater could see the foam of their death agonies tinged with blood. A few flags were up on dead carcases and these were either under tow to the whalers or awaiting the few boats that could be spared for this task.

  Drinkwater saw at once that he could not fire his starboard guns without endangering the boats but their crews were excitedly awaiting the order that would send their shot in amongst the whales.

  'By God,' he heard Walmsley mutter to Glencross, 'this is better than partridge.'

  'Secure the starboard guns, Mr Bourne, and draw the charges!' He heard the mutter of disappointment from the starbowlines. 'Silence there!'

  A new danger suddenly occurred to him. The sloop lay in the path of the advancing animals. The death of some of their number had communicated an alarm to the others and their motion was full of turbulent urgency. He did not wish to think what effect one of those bluff heads would have upon Melusine's hull. 'Haul the mainyard, Mr Hill and put the ship before the wind…' Hill grasped the sudden danger and Melusine turned slowly to larboard as she again gathered headway. She had hardly swung, presenting her stern to the onrushing whales when their attention was attracted by shouts to the south, to larboard. One of the boats that had been fast to a fish had been dashed to fragments on the ice edge two miles away as the tortured beast had dived under the ice. The alarm had been raised by another boat, towing past Melusine's stern, who hailed the sloop to request her rendering assistance and allowing them to hold onto their whale. It was while clearing away the quarterboat that the whale struck them. A large gravid female in the last stages of her pregnancy had been terrified by the slaughter astern of her. The ship shook and the stunned animal rolled out from under the quarter, almost directly beneath the boat. Her astonished crew, half-way down to the water's surface looked down into the tiny eye of the monster. The whale spouted, then dived, her flukes hitting the keel of the suspended boat but not upsetting it.

  A few minutes later, under the command of Acting Lieutenant Gorton the boat was pulling across a roil of water, avoiding the retreating whales with difficulty, on her way to rescue the crew of the smashed whale-boat. It did not appear that Melusine had suffered any damage from the collision.

  The whalers hunted their quarry for fifty hours while the sun culminated and then began its slow unfinished setting, its azimuth altering round the horizon to rise again to each of two successive noons. Melusine was quite unable to stem the escape of the whales and in the end Drinkwater agreed to the boats securing their captured whales to her sides.

  'As fenders!' Harvey had hailed, his eyes dark and sunken in his head with the fatigue of the chase, 'in case the ice closes on you!' The jest was made as he went in pursuit of his eighth whale, his cargo almost complete. Now the five ships lay secured along the ice edge on the northern side of the lead, tied up as though moored to a quay, their head and stern lines secured to ice anchors. Each had a pair of whales alongside, between hull and ice, while rafted outboard in tier after tier lay the remainder of the catch. While Melusine's company stood watch, the exhausted whalers turned below to sleep before the flensing began. They had taken more than thirty whales between them and
the labour of cutting up the blubber and packing it in casks took a further two days of strenuous effort.

  Melusine's midshipmen went out on the ice with Mount and a party of marines and took some more seals, returning to the ship to pick off the brown sharks that clustered round the whale corpses as they sank after flensing. The fine weather held and the whale-captains expressed their good fortune, accepting an invitation to dine with Drinkwater the instant the flensing was completed. Even Sawyers seemed to be un-Quakerishly cheerful, and Drinkwater, anticipating an early departure from the Greenland Sea, ordered Tregembo to get Palgrave's carvers, silver and plate out of storage.

  The high good humour that seemed to infect them all after the success of the last few days allayed his worries about the possible closure of the ice. Besides, he twice-daily ascended the mainmast to the crow's nest, spending as much as half an hour aloft with the big watch glass and making note of the bearings of familiar ice hummocks with a pocket compass. The variation in their positions was minimal, the movement of the ice, like the weather, seemed suspended in their favour. His own natural suspicions, those fine tunings of his seaman's senses, were blunted by the triumphant confidence of Harvey, Renaudson, Sawyers and Atkinson of the Truelove.

  As they gathered in Drinkwater's cabin sipping from tankards of mimbo, a hot rum punch that Cawkwell concocted out of unlikely materials, their elation was clear. So great had been their success that the customary jealousy of one whaler who had done less well than his more fortunate colleague was absent. It was true that Harvey's harpoon gun had proved its value, netting him the largest number of whales, but he endured only mild rebukes from Sawyers who claimed the method un-Godly.

  'Never a season like it, Captain,' Renaudson said, his face red from the heat in the cabin and the effects of the mimbo. 'Abel bleats about God like your black-coated parson,' he nodded in Singleton's direction, 'but 'tis luck, really. A man may fish the Greenland Seas for a lifetime, like, then, ee,' he shook his head slightly, a small grin of disbelief in his good fortune crossing his broad, sweating features, 'his luck changes like this.' He became suddenly serious. 'Mind you, Captain, it'll not happen again. No. Not in my lifetime, any road. I've seen the best and quickest catch I'm ever likely to make and I doubt my son'll see owt like it himself, not if he fishes for twenty year'n more. Abel's lucky there, both him and his son together in one great hunt.' He drained the tankard. 'I see tha's children of thee own, Captain.' He nodded at the portraits on the bulkhead, his accent thickening as he drank.

  'Yes,' said Drinkwater, sipping the mimbo more cautiously. It was not a drink he greatly cared for, but his stocks of good wine were almost exhausted and Cawkwell had suggested that he served a rum punch to warm his guests. Harvey joined them.

  'Ee, Captain, your guns weren't as much good as mine.' He grinned, clearly happy that his beloved harpoon gun had established its reputation for the swift murder of mysticetae. 'I shall patent the modifications I've made and make my fortune twice over from this voyage.' He nudged Renaudson. 'Get th'self a Harvey's patent harpoon gun for next season, Thomas, then th'can shoot whales instead of farting at them.' The dialect was thick between them and Drinkwater turned away, nodding to Atkinson, a small, active man with a lick of dark hair over his forehead, who was talking to Mr Gorton. Drinkwater had invited only Hill, Singleton and the lieutenants to the meal, there was insufficient room for midshipmen. Besides, he knew the whalemen would not want the intrusion of young gentlemen at their celebrations.

  He found himself confronted by Singleton's blue jaw. His sobriety was disquieting amongst all the merriment. 'Good evening, Mr Singleton.'

  'Good evening, sir. A word if you please?'

  'Of course.'

  'I deduce this gathering is to mark the successful conclusion of the fishery.'

  'So it would appear. Is that not so, Captain Sawyers?' He turned to the Quaker who had, as a mark of the relaxation of the occasion, removed his hat.

  'Indeed it is, although a few of us have an empty cask or two left. The Lord has provided of his bounty…'

  'Amen,' broke in Singleton, who seemed to have some purpose in his abruptness. 'Then may I ask, sir, when you intend landing me?'

  'Landing thee…?' Sawyers seemed astonished and Drinkwater again explained for Sawyers's benefit.

  'It seems the Almighty smiles upon all our endeavours then, Friend,' he said addressing Singleton, 'and perhaps thine own more than ours.' He smiled. 'This lead towards the south-west will bring you close to the coast of East Greenland, somewhere about latitude seventy. I have heard the coast is ice-free thereabouts, although I have never seen it close-to myself. You may see the mountain peaks in clear weather for a good distance. Nunataks, the eskimos call them…'

  'Then we had better land you,' Drinkwater said to Singleton, 'but I am still uncertain of the wisdom of following this lead into the ice shelf. Do you not think it might prove a cul-de-sac?'

  Sawyers shook his head. 'No, the fish would not have entered it if some instinct had not told them that the krill upon which they feed were rich here, and that open water did not exist ahead of them…'

  'But surely,' Singleton put in, his scientific mind engaged now, 'the whales may dive beneath the ice. My observations while you have been hunting them show they can go prodigious deep.'

  'No, Friend,' Sawyers smiled, 'their need of air and their instinct will not persuade them to dive beneath such an ice shelf as we have about us now. Surely,' he said with a touch of irony, the dissenter gently teasing the man of established religion, 'surely thou sawest how, even in their terror, they made no attempt to swim under the ice?'

  Singleton flushed at the mocking of his intelligence. Sawyers mollified him. 'But perhaps in the confusion of the gun smoke thine eyes were misled. No, mysticetus will dive only under floes in the open sea and beneath bay ice through which he breaks to inhale…'

  'Bay ice?' queried Drinkwater.

  'A first freezing of the sea, Captain, through which he may appear with a sudden and majestic entrance…'

  They sat to dinner, cod, and whale meat steaks with dried peas and a little sauerkraut for those who wanted it, all washed down with the last bottles of half-decent claret that Tregembo had warmed slightly in the galley. As was usual in the gloom of the cabin despite the low sunshine outside, Drinkwater had had the candles lit and the spectacle of such a meal etched itself indelibly upon his mind. Alternating round the table the whale-ship masters and the naval officers made an incongruous group. In eccentric varieties of their official uniform the lieutenant and the master agreed only in their coats. Beneath these they wore mufflers, guernseys and an assortment of odd shirts. Gorton, presumably slightly over-awed to be included in the company, wore shirt and stock in the prescribed manner, but this was clearly over some woollen garment of indeterminate shape and he presented the appearance of a pouter pigeon. The whale-captains were more fantastic, their garb a mixture of formality, practicality and individual choice.

  Sawyers, with the rigidity of his sect, appeared the most formal, clearly possessing a thick set of undergarments. His waistcoat and coat were of the heaviest broadcloth and he wore a woollen muffler. Renaudson, on the other hand, marked the perigee of Arctic elegance, in seal-skin breeches over yellow stockings, a stained mustard waistcoat and a greasy jacket, cut short at the waist and made of some nondescript fur that might once have been a seal or a walrus. Atkinson was similarly equipped, although his clothes seemed a little cleaner and he had put on fresh neck-linen for the occasion, while Harvey, his neckerchief filthy, sported a brass-buttoned pilot jacket. Drinkwater himself wore two shirts over woollen underwear, his undress uniform coat almost as salt-stained as Harvey's pilot jacket. But he was pleased with the evening. The conviviality was infectious, the wine warming and the steaks without equal to an appetite sharpened by cold.

  The conversation was of whales, of whale-ships and captains, of harpooners and speksioneers and the profits of owners. There were brief, good-natured arguments as
one challenged the claims of another. For the most part the whalers dominated the conversation, the young naval officers, under the eye of their commander and overwhelmed by the ebullience of their guests, playing a passive part. But Drinkwater did hear Singleton exchanging stories of the eskimos with Atkinson who seemed to have met them whilst sealing, and they were debating the reasons why they took their meat raw, when methods of cooking it had been shown to them on many occasions. Thus preoccupied he was suddenly recalled by Sawyers on his right. Above the din Sawyers had been shouting at him to catch his attention.

  'I beg your pardon, Captain, I was distracted. What was it you were saying?'

  'That thy guns were of little use, Friend.'

  'In the matter of stopping the whales? Oh, no… very little, but it allowed my people to share the excitement a little, although,' he recollected with the boyish grin that countered the serious cast to his cock-headed features, 'I think that my order to secure the starboard guns without them being fired, near sparked a mutiny'

  'That was not quite what I meant, Friend. I had said that we had no need of thy guns, that thy presence here has proved unnecessary. Oh, I mean no offence, but whatever hobgoblins the enemy were supposed to have in the Arctic seas have proved imaginary.'

  Drinkwater smiled over the rim of his glass as he drained it, leaning back so that Cawkwell could refill it. 'So it would seem…'

  'Sir! Sir!' Midshipman Frey's face appeared at the opposite end of the table and the conversation died away.

  'Narwhal, sir! Narwhal's taken fire…!'

  Chapter Twelve

  Fortune's Sharp Adversity

  July 1803

  From Melusine's deck they saw Narwhal already blazing like a torch. Great gouts of flame bellied from her hold and tongues of fire leapt into the rigging. She was moored beyond Truelove, ahead of the sloop, and her crew could be seen rushing down upon the ice. For a second the diners stood as though stunned, then they made for the gangplank onto the ice, led by Harvey.