by Janice Clark
• •
Besides the fishing smacks and luggers, and the usual weathered little bumboats that one might expect to see in any coastal town, that day the big island was ringed with seagoing ships at anchor: trim frigates, smart barks, and brigantines from the north. While the Stark sons and their crew hurried about, readying the Venture to depart, a few-score tradesmen and locals from the mainland lingered on the dock, finishing their paperwork or parading up and down the pier, enjoying the pleasantly warm morning before returning to their vessels. Young merchants from the north, city swells in swallowtail coats, their business with the Starks completed, smoked thin cheroots and sauntered along the dock or began to pack up their wares.
Few noticed the six boys in black suits, or if they did, vaguely wondered if the boys were members of some strict sect. The practiced eye of one man, a tailor, recognized their clothes as home-sewn; Patience Rathbone had made a dozen of the suits some thirty years ago for a younger, less muscled set of Rathbones to wear to Sunday mass, before she knew that for a Rathbone a ship was the only church. Eventually she’d put the unworn suits away in a trunk, where they had rested until Bow-Oar retrieved them for this excursion.
Bow-Oar’s eyes ranged past the stacked goods on the pier, over the townsmen and merchants in their fine suits, the trim frigates with sides fresh-painted in stripes of crimson over gray or white on gleaming black. Though he had sailed five seas and viewed the verdant or barren coasts of distant continents from the deck of the Misistuck, he had seldom stepped ashore, all his mind and body devoted only to the whale. Nor had he visited his own country’s great eastern ports, with their teeming harbors towering with trade goods. In all his years at sea, Moses had never permitted men from other vessels to board Rathbone ships. He did not want his sons tainted by the ways of other whalers.
Naiwayonk, though it lay halfway between Boston and the city of New York, might have been hidden deep in a forest or stranded on a vast and empty prairie, so little did its men interact with the world.
Bow-Oar stared at a few strolling swells in their cutaway jackets and buff waistcoats. They wore tall shining boots and doeskin gloves. His brothers had meantime stopped at a table full of bottles of pickled fruits and vegetables, boxed teas and tinned biscuits. Third-Oar lifted a string of sausages high and took a cautious nibble, then began to devour it link by link. His brothers snatched strings of their own and stuffed sausages into their mouths. When Third-Oar lay a gold eagle down in payment, the man behind the table widened his eyes at so large a coin; he began to count out dollars in change.
Bow-Oar continued along the dock, taking it all in. Until that day, the only items he had ever purchased were those ship’s supplies not made by the family or found in the sea: tools to shape the wood shafts of their spears, sturdy boots, hemp for the rope walk. Now he saw barrels packed with bolts of fine cloth of every hue; pallets filled with furniture of oak and mahogany, stacks of dishes, glass, silver. He felt a hunger he had never known before. He began to buy.
• •
Lydia burst into her father’s office, the ivory box in her hands.
“Father. You must come this instant. There are … people in the parlor who do not belong there. You must come and put them out of the house.”
Lydia’s father wouldn’t meet her eye. He was pushing something quickly into the drawer of his desk, something gleaming. When she moved close, he sat back in his chair. His eyes darted to the corner of the room. The boy from the boat, the one she had given the note, was slouched against the wall, hands behind his back, one leg crossed over the other, looking out the window as Lydia spoke.
Lydia stared at the boy, then back at her father. She didn’t know what had passed between them but she felt uneasy. She couldn’t have understood. She had not been there to hear the boy speak to her father about what he could do with the bags full of gold brought that day, with more to follow. She was not there when, as the boy spoke, his voice low and rhythmic, her father’s face changed as the words took hold. He spoke of things that Lemuel realized were already in his mind. The boy had only found them and drawn them out where they wanted to be, but once in the air they grew. Lemuel’s mind slowly turned to grander plans: He would be able to furnish the house as his wife wished and better—yes, he thought, as was proper for a man of his standing. He could dredge and widen the harbor and build larger ships with deeper drafts. Not the mere three he had dared dream of but a fleet of ships that would enable longer, more profitable voyages. Voyages as far as the Orient. He would buy, too, the last of the islets that made up the archipelago, so that all of the chain, which until then had been known by the casual names the sailors gave them, names suggested by their shape or size or what grew on them—Little Cedar, Black Cat, Flea Bite, Bilberry, Willow Rock—would bear instead the name Stark.
Lydia looked slowly from the boy to her father. Lemuel would still not return her gaze. He turned back to the window. Lydia looked out, too; the Venture had weighed anchor and was skimming eastward, all its canvas aloft.
When she looked back at the boy, he was fingering a piece of paper in his breast pocket, staring at her with those too-green eyes. She recognized her notepaper, pale blue with gilt edges. She began to understand, though she didn’t yet believe. She looked down at the ivory box in her hands, opened it, pulled out the gray lump, and flung it at her father. It struck his chest and fell to the floor. He leaned and picked it up, turned it in his hand. He had seen fragments of ambergris before, washed up on the strand or brought back from the open sea by sailors, but never of such a prodigious size. It was said to be vomited up by the sperm whale in its death flurry and was prized by perfumers for its fixative properties, by vintners for its flavor, and by spinsters for its potency in love elixirs. The lump in his hand was worth, ounce for ounce, more than the gold that now filled the drawers of his desk.
Lemuel looked out the window, to where his sons’ sails were edging over the horizon. When the ship was hull down, he turned to the boy. The boy moved from the corner to stand in front of Lemuel’s desk. Lemuel wrapped the lump of ambergris in his handkerchief and stuffed it into his breast pocket. He wiped his oily palm on his waistcoat, reached across the desk, and took the boy’s hand.
• •
By the time the boat was out on the full blue circle of the sound with no land in sight, Lydia’s sisters fell quiet. When they had traveled far enough so that the boat, seen from shore, would have been only a dark smudge against the bright rim of the sea, and still her sisters sobbed and struggled, the boys had bound them.
They hadn’t needed to wait so long. Lemuel was not watching his daughters disappear. He would later tell friends and business associates, when questioned, how his daughters had been sent to study abroad. He would instruct his wife to refer all such questions to him. In a few months he would host a dinner party to commemorate the christening of the first of his new fleet, a fine two-hundred-ton frigate purchased straight from the yard at Bath. In the months and years that followed, Lemuel’s friends and their wives would ask after the Stark daughters less frequently, would be told the girls had stayed abroad and married, and eventually, busy with their own interests, forget them. The friends’ sons would remember the daughters longer but settle in the end for drabber girls from inland families.
Lydia’s father had made no attempt to reason with her. He had told her, standing in his office that day, that her future was his decision alone, that her mother of course agreed with him, that he should not have spoiled his daughters so. She had been too angry to listen then. She felt no real fear until the shore disappeared and her stomach began to rise and fall with the waves. She had never been on a boat of any kind. Now, standing in the stern, staring back toward her house, shame rose up and overcame her seasickness, shame for her sisters’ craven behavior. As the eldest, she was used to setting the example for Priscilla and Miriam, and proud when they followed it. But though she had said nothing as the boat pulled away, determined to give nothing away, her s
isters had begun wailing before they left the house.
The boys had trussed Miriam and Priscilla head to foot, taking seven turns around each girl as they did with their hammocks to keep them neat and out of the way while they chased the whale. Each sister lay in front of the boy to whom she had been allotted, tucked crosswise between bench and bench. Bow-Oar had brought the length of rope Moses had kept on a peg by his high blue bed; each brother had wound the rope around his girl’s hand and his own, as Moses had always done with each of his wives.
Miriam had fallen asleep on the boards beneath Second-Oar’s feet; Priscilla lay and stared, her eyes following Third-Oar’s arm as it stroked back and forth. Their gowns formed golden pools in the bottom of the boat, drifting in sea spray and bilge water, among coiled ropes and bailing buckets. After they were finally quiet the boys had loosened the ropes and freed their hands. The sky, clear when they set out at midmorning, had thickened with cloud, the sea gone dark and rough. Miriam’s boy had draped his jacket over her and swathed her head in his striped shirt to keep her fair skin from the sun. All the boys had taken off their jackets and shirts and boots, and their broad bronze backs moved now with ease, their toes spread wide to grip the boards. Third-Oar murmured to Priscilla, hummed a low song, now and again letting go his oar to pet her hair. He wore a clamshell on his face, tied around the back of his head with strands of sea jerky, over the place where his nose had been before the thrash of a fluke had taken it. Lydia watched Fourth-Oar reach forward, toward Priscilla’s breast. Third-Oar turned and slashed at the hand with his oar.
Lydia’s legs ached from standing, trying to balance on the thickening swells, though her stomach was settling. She stood in the stern, just behind Bow-Oar. Each time he drew his oar in a stroke he leaned back and upset her balance. Finally she sank down and sat in the hull. She was afraid, but her sisters’ stronger fear helped steady her. She wouldn’t let these boys overpower her. She wouldn’t think about how easily her father had let her go, how he’d waited until her brothers were well away. She looked forward, to where Bow-Oar stood. Rather than row as his brothers did, all facing her, he stood in the bow, never turning his head to look at her, always facing their destination, still invisible over the rim of the horizon. He had not stripped off his shirt like the others and wore, she now noticed, a different suit of clothes; he must have bought it from someone on the docks. It was a suit somewhat like those her father wore, of fine blue twill, though her father’s were soft and this one was new and stiff. It fit the boy well across his deep chest and around his strong legs, and his trousers were of a correct length. His thick dark hair was sleeked down and caught in a neat club. His smooth cheeks shone. She caught a drift of witch hazel on the breeze.
Lydia couldn’t see where they were headed, sea and sky having merged into a cold gray mist. It began to rain. She looked down at her gown. The rain didn’t matter; the silk had already been drenched by salt spray, and had great dark spots of oil from bilge water. Among old wooden tubs full of coiled rope, lantern kegs, and floats were stacks of fresh packages tied with paper and string and wrapped in oilcloth to keep them dry.
Bow-Oar pulled another such package from the inside pocket of his jacket and unwrapped it. He drew out a gleaming arc of metal and mirror that made his brothers murmur, backing away and shaking their heads. A harsh croak sounded from above; from the mast top a crow swooped down and tried to seize the glittering object, to which Bow-Oar held fast, swatting away the crow with his free hand. The crow veered off, cawing, and winged away ahead of them, up and into the clouds. Lydia had seen her own brothers use such an instrument, raising it to the horizon on the Venture and marking down measurements; a sextant, she thought it was called. Bow-Oar now turned it in his hands, examining its parts, adjusting. Soon he was holding it up to the horizon toward which they sailed.
• •
Moses Rathbone lay in his high blue bed, his head turned toward the light where he knew the Misistuck was docked. He saw only its ghost through once-bright eyes, their green scorched by sun and sea to nearly clear. His sun-browned skin, though still smooth, had stiffened so hard that if struck it might have clanged or rung as hollow as a sea-turtle shell. His limbs waved slowly, barely stirring the blue blankets. His breath came in slow gasps.
Moses had not sailed in eight years. Though he was a man of only fifty-odd years, his long exposure to sea and salt, wind and whale, had worn him down to a twist of driftwood. He had poured forth all his strength into his sons and had little left for himself.
One day he mistook the rising sun for the disk of the moon, it seemed so pale and cool. Another day he’d remarked on the constancy of the fog to one of his sons, who replied in surprise, “Why, Father, we’ve had nothing but sun.” The boy had clapped him on the back and laughed at his joke. Though his vision was failing, he got by easily enough; he knew every part of his ship, the Misistuck, without his eyes and knew his boys by their voices and smell and the way they moved. When the lookout spotted a sperm, Moses had no need to see its spout to know where it breached and where it would sound again; he might have easily sent the harpoon home with his eyes closed. But his limbs were too stiff; his arm would no longer answer.
He lay thinking of that day long ago when he had killed his first whale. He had envisioned a single ship, manned by his sons, a fine brig with a full set of sails. Enough sons to be sure that no whale would be lost, no villager would go hungry or be cold when winter came.
But one ship had not been enough for his sons. The wives produced a steady stream of boys, enough so that, though some didn’t return from sea, many were left to vie for places on the whaleboats. All were reluctant to be left behind on the ship or, worse still, left at home, waiting out the months until it was their turn to sail. The sons clamored for more ships, and more ships Moses had given them; there was gold in plenty to buy more. On and off, staggered between voyages, Naiwayonk harbor held a pair of brigs—the Sassacus and the Misistuck—and a square-rigged bark, the Paquatauoq, all deep-drafted vessels capable of ever-longer voyages, to the Pacific Ocean, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. In the Thousand-Barrel Years some thirty sons slept in Rathbone House.
But the whale was always honored, as Moses had planned. Once the oil was rendered and the barrels filled, the body stripped of all that the men could use, the carcass went to the sharks. At the end of the hunt, Rathbone ships always lingered one last night at sea, to give thanks for the hunt. A great iron try-pot filled with the whale’s blood and organs boiled on the deck, the fire lighting up the ship as if it were burning—red and gold, the sails white flames above. By the whale’s light the men sat in a circle and, first setting aside Moses’s portion, cut up and shared the whale’s raw heart, big as a man. They raised their voices to the sky and to the dark waters around their ship, and gave thanks for a successful hunt, the flames a beacon of their arrival.
Moses had been expecting the arrival of the Misistuck, aware of its approach long before it was finally seen, hull up on the horizon, the night before. There was no fire, no beacon; the decks were cold and dark. The ship had docked early that morning after a voyage of eighteen months, its stern trailing a mile of weed from weeks becalmed in the southern latitudes, its hold two layers deep in sperm oil, every barrel filled. Moses was impatient for news of the voyage. He longed to see Bow-Oar, the Misistuck’s captain, and to find out why no fire had been lit. But no sooner had the ship docked than Bow-Oar left again. While other brothers streamed into the house, laughing and jostling each other up the ladders and through the door, eager for fresh food and dry beds, Bow-Oar was setting off in one of the ship’s whaleboats with his boat crew, none of the six having set foot on dry land, though all had been a year and a half at sea.
Bow-Oar had been less attentive to his father in recent years, in those few weeks when he had been home between trips, but Moses knew that his son was busy with his many duties. He had always been Moses’s favorite and closest to him in skill. Like his father, Bow-Oar could ki
ll a sperm with one strike of the spear. Other sons could occasionally kill with one thrust, but not every time as Bow-Oar did. As the surviving eldest, many older brothers having gone to the whale, he was responsible, too, for overseeing the training of green whalers. Moses knew that he had not come ashore with the rest of the returning crew and had been absent all day. He was pleased to finally hear Bow-Oar’s step, more so because none of his other sons had paid their respects since returning nor had they brought any offering of the whale.
Heavy steps approached along the hall. When Moses turned his head, Bow-Oar was standing at the foot of his bed, something long and golden draped over his shoulders.
Maybe here, at last, was his offering. Bow-Oar stepped close to the high blue bed; Moses craned over the edge and reached to touch Lydia’s dangling arm.
The girl didn’t feel right. She was not like the other wives. She had no mineral tang, no whiff of sulfur, and no salt at all. Her eggs were not fat and thickly bobbling but lay in slender yellow threads.
He beckoned his son close, so that his voice, a hoarse whisper, could be heard.
“This pale thing? This is what you have brought me?”
Bow-Oar stepped back, clutching Lydia tighter at wrist and ankle.
“No, Father, this one is for me.”
Moses drew his arm away and sank back in his bed.
“Where is my offering, my proper portion?”
Bow-Oar hesitated. It wasn’t too late then. He could have chosen to explain it all to his father.
He had driven his men hard all the way home. The whaling grounds of the South Atlantic were thick with sperm, but before the Misistuck’s two thousand barrels were all filled with oil, Bow-Oar had decided to start north. He planned to fill the remaining empty barrels—a hundred or so, a few whales’ worth—on the voyage home. They had been at sea for sixteen months, and Bow-Oar longed to get back.
