‘But there must be whales up there.’
‘There are. They swim past here all the time. Going, coming.’
‘Has any small ship … like ours … sailed north?’
Since Zhdanko did not know where Captain Cook had sailed after leaving Lapak Island, two years earlier, he could honestly warn Pym: ‘No. It would be too dangerous.’
Despite this advice, Pym was determined to probe the arctic seas before other whalers would dare to venture into those icy waters, and he remained firm in his desire to explore them, but he did not share with Zhdanko his plans, for he did not want the other Russians to know them.
Next morning, Pym allowed himself an uncharacteristic gesture: he embraced the old cossack, for he saw in his noble bearing and generosity in sharing his knowledge of the oceans a man in the true tradition of seafarer, and he felt renewed for having been in contact with him. Summoning Atkins, he said: ‘Ask the old fellow why he lives alone in this little hut?’ and when the question was put, Zhdanko shrugged, pointed to where his stepson and Zagoskin were whispering, and said with resignation and repugnance: ‘Those two.’
After Pym, with no knowledge or charts to guide him, sailed his Evening Star north from Lapak, he entered a world into which no other American had ventured or would soon do so. Yankee ships had penetrated the rest of the major oceans, following quietly in the more spectacular wake of Captain Cook’s ships. But the constant search for whales, whose oil for lamps, ambergris for perfumery and baleen for the stays in women’s corsets would produce fortunes for shipowners and their captains, made exploration of untapped seas obligatory. To go north of the Aleutians was daring, but if whales existed in the area, the risk was worth it, and Noah Pym was a man to take that risk.
He lived a hard life. He was a devoted father, but he was away on his voyages for years at a time, so that when he returned home he scarcely knew his three daughters. But the results were so profitable to all concerned in his expeditions that both his owners and his crew urged him to sail yet again, and he did much sooner than he would have on his own account. He kept a cadre of reliable hands with him—John Atkins who spoke both Chinese and Russian; Tom Kane, the expert harpooner without whom the ship would have been powerless when a whale was sighted; and Miles Corey, the first mate, who was a better navigator than Pym himself—and even in bad weather he slept easily knowing that these men and others like them were in charge. He suspected that Corey was a crypto-Catholic, but if so, he created no problems aboard ship.
With the Aleutians left far behind, the Evening Star entered upon those dangerous waters which seemed so congenial in early spring, so fearful in October and November, when ice could form overnight, or come crashing down of an afternoon, already formed into great icebergs farther north and now cruising free on their own. When Captain Cook had faced this emerging barrier in August of 1778, he took one look, remembered the towering ice fields he had seen in Antarctica, and fled, as any sagacious mariner should.
Noah Pym, in search of whales instead of knowledge, captured one whale south of that narrow strait where the continents seemed to meet, and having heard in Hawaii the rumor that Bering and Cook in their larger ships had proceeded farther north without incident, he decided to do the same. In the Arctic Ocean, Harpooner Kane struck a large whale, and when Pym laid his ship close to the dying beast, landing boards were laid to its carcass so that sailors could cut it up, searching for baleen and ambergris and throwing great slabs of blubber on the deck for reduction to oil in the smoking pots.
While the brig lay idle as the oil was rendered, Mr. Corey, in a voice that betrayed no panic, warned the captain: ‘Should the ice start to move down upon us, we must be prepared to run.’ Pym listened, but since he had no experience in such waters, he did not appreciate how swiftly the ice could strike. ‘We must both watch it closely,’ he said, but when the harpooner stabbed a second whale with a splendid shot, work on salvaging it became so exciting, with promise of full casks for the long sail home, that Pym forgot about the impending ice, and for several triumphant days attended only to the bringing aboard of baleen and blubber.
Then, like some giant menace looming out of a fevered dream, the ice in the arctic began to move south, not slowly like a wanderer, but in vast floes that made giant leaps in the course of a morning and stupendous ones overnight. When the floes appeared, almost out of nowhere, the free waters around them began to freeze, and it required only a few minutes for Captain Pym to realize that he must turn south immediately or run the risk of being pinned down for the entire winter. But when he started to give the order to hoist all sails, First Mate Corey said in a voice that still showed no emotion: ‘Too late. Head for shore.’
The advice was sound, the only one that would enable the Evening Star to avoid being crushed by the oncoming ice, and with an adroitness that far abler navigators than they might not have been able to exercise, these two New England men used every breath of wind to shepherd their little whaler with its thrice-precious cargo toward the northern coastline of Alaska, and there at a spot almost seventy-one degrees north, later to be christened Desolation Point, they stumbled by sheer luck into an opening which led to a substantial bay, at whose southern end they found a snug harbor surrounded by low protecting hills. Here, shielded from pounding ice, they would spend the nine-month winter of 1780–81, and often during that interminable imprisonment the sailors would not curse Pym for his tardiness in leaving the arctic but praise him for having found ‘the only spot on this Godforsaken shore where the ice can’t crush us to kindling.’
They had barely started constructing a refuge ashore when Seaman Atkins, the one who spoke Russian, cried: ‘Enemy approaching over the ice!’ and with expressions of fear that could not be masked, the twenty other crewmen looked up from their work to see coming at them across the frozen bay a contingent of some two dozen short, dark-faced men swathed in heavy furs.
‘Prepare for action!’ Captain Pym said in low voice, but Atkins, who had a good view of the oncoming men, cried: ‘They aren’t armed!’ and in the next tense moments the newcomers reached the Americans, stared in amazement at their white faces, and smiled.
In the days that followed, the Americans learned that these men lived a short distance to the north in a village of thirteen subterranean huts containing fifty-seven people, and to the vast relief of the whalers, they found that the villagers were peacefully inclined. They were Eskimos, lineal descendants of those adventurers who had followed Oogruk from Asia fourteen thousand years earlier. Seven hundred and twenty generations separated them from Oogruk, and in the course of time they had acquired the skills which enabled them to survive and even prosper north of the Arctic Circle, which lay nearly three hundred miles to the south.
The Americans were at first repelled by the meagerness of the lives these Eskimos lived and by the tight meanness of their underground huts roofed by whalebone covered with sealskin, but they quickly came to appreciate the clever ways in which the chunky little people adjusted to their inhospitable environment, and were dumfounded by the courage and ability the men exhibited in venturing forth upon the frozen ocean and wresting from it their livelihood. The sailors were further impressed when half a dozen men from the village helped them build a long hut from available items like whalebone, driftwood and animal skins. When it was completed, large enough to house all twenty-two Americans, the men had reasonably comfortable protection against the cold, which could drop to fifty degrees below zero. The sailors were awed when they saw how much these short men, rarely over five feet two, could shoulder when helping to carry the Star’s supplies ashore, and when all was in place the Americans settled down for the kind of winter they had known in New England—four months of snow and cold—and they were astounded when Atkins learned from sign language that they could expect to remain frozen in for nine months or perhaps ten. ‘Good God!’ one sailor moaned. ‘We don’t get out till next July?’ And Atkins replied: ‘That’s what he seems to be saying, and he should k
now.’
The first indication of how ably these Eskimos utilized the frozen ocean came when one of the powerful younger men, Sopilak by name, if Atkins understood correctly, returned from a hunt with the news that a monstrous polar bear had been spotted on the ice some miles offshore. In a trice the Eskimos made themselves ready for a long chase, but they lingered until their women provided Captain Pym, whom they recognized as leader, Seaman Atkins, whom they had immediately liked, and husky Harpooner Kane with proper clothing to protect them from the ice and snow and wind. Dressed in the bulky furs of Eskimos, the three Americans started across the barren ice, whose jumbled forms made movement difficult. Such travel bore no relationship to ice travel in New England, where a pond froze in winter, or a placid river; this was primeval ice, bora in the deeps of a salty ocean, thrown sky-high by sudden pressures, fractured by forces coming at it from all sides, a tortured, madly sculptured ice appearing in jagged shapes and interminably long swells that seemed to rise up from the depths. It was like nothing they had seen before or imagined: it was the ice of the arctic, explosive, crackling at night as it moved and twisted, violent in its capacity to destroy, and above all, constantly menacing in the gray haze, stretching forever.
It was upon this ice that the men of Desolation Point set forth to hunt their polar bear, but after a full day’s search they found nothing, and night fell so quickly in these early days of October that the men warned the seamen that they would probably have to spend the night far out on the ice, with no assurance that they would ever find the bear. But just before darkness, Sopilak came plodding back on his snowshoes: ‘Not far ahead!’ and the hunters moved closer to their prey. But it was a canny bear, and before any of them had a chance to see it, the first of its breed any American would encounter in these waters, night fell and the hunters fanned out in a wide circle so as to be able to follow the bear should it elect to flee in the darkness.
Atkins, who stayed close to Sopilak and who seemed to be learning Eskimo words by the score, moved about to caution his mates: ‘They warn us. The bear is dangerous. All white. Comes at you like a ghost. Do not run. No chance to escape. Stand and fight and shout for the others.’
‘Sounds dangerous,’ Kane said, and Atkins replied: ‘I think they were trying to tell me they expect to lose a man or two when tracking a polar bear.’
‘Them, not me,’ Kane said, and Atkins proposed that in the coming fight, the three Americans stay together: ‘We have guns. We’d better be prepared to use them.’
The Americans and most of the Eskimos slept uneasily that night, but Sopilak did not sleep at all, for he had hunted polar bears before, with his father, and had been present when a great white beast, taller than two men when it reared on its hind legs, had crushed a hunter from Desolation with one smashing blow from its paw. It had driven the man right down against the ice and then torn at him with all four of its sets of claws. The man and all his clothing had been left in shreds, and that bear had not been taken.
There had been other hunts, some of them led by Sopilak himself, in which the monstrous beasts, more beautiful than a dream of white blizzards, had been tracked for days and brought to heel by wisdom and courage. Toward dawn Sopilak instructed Atkins: ‘Tell your men to watch me,’ and though the seaman tried to explain to the Eskimo that the Americans had guns, which would give them a sizable advantage if the fight did materialize, no matter how often in the darkness Atkins raised his arms and went ‘Bang-bang!’ Sopilak did not understand. He saw only that they had no clubs or spears, and he feared for their safety.
When a pale, silvery cold light broke, a scout far to the north signaled that he had the polar bear in sight, and none of the three Americans who experienced the next moments would ever forget them, for when they rounded a huge block of ice thrown high above the surface of the frozen sea on which they moved, they saw ahead of them one of the world’s majestic creatures, as grand an animal as the mastodons and mammoths that had once crossed over to Alaska at this point. It was huge, so completely white that it blended with the snow, and agile with a lumbering grace that caused the human heart to hesitate, so overpowering was the sense of beauty and awkward energy the bear exhibited as it began to move away. A supreme example of animal majesty, it seemed to be at one with the ice sheet and with the frozen sky. A light snow that began to fall as day brightened enhanced the dreamlike quality of the hunt as Sopilak’s men began their chase.
The polar bear, unique among its genus in color, size and speed, could easily outrun any one man, and it also had the capacity to dive headlong into those strange openings in the ice where water flowed free, swim vigorously to the other side, clamber with amazing ease onto the new ice, and scamper off to other frozen areas where the men could not pursue, since they could not cross the open water. But it could not outrun half a dozen pestering men, especially when with spears and clubs and wild shouting they prevented it from attaining open water. So the long day’s fight was about equal: the men could harass it and keep it from open water; it could outrun them and swim short distances to new positions. But in the end their persistence and anticipation of its moves enabled them to stay close and to drive it so that it winded itself, and in this manner the fight continued.
But as day began to wane, and it was brief at this autumn latitude, the men realized that they must soon come to grips with the bear or run the risk of losing it in the long night. So two Eskimos, Sopilak and another, became much more daring, and in a pair of coordinated thrusts they ran at the bear, confused it, and with Sopilak’s spear damaged his left hind leg, and when they saw that he was wounded, two other men dashed in from behind, evaded the deadly swipe of forepaws when it turned, and struck again, in the same leg.
The bear was now seriously wounded, and knew it, so it retreated until its back was against a large block of ice which protected it in that quarter, and now the men had to attack from positions where it could spot them from the moment they began to approach, and in this posture it was formidable, a towering white giant, red-bloodied in one leg but the possessor of claws that could rip out a man’s guts.
In this moment of equal battle, when the Eskimo who first charged knew that he stood a strong likelihood of being disemboweled, none of Sopilak’s hunters volunteered to make the possibly sacrificial run, so the master hunter knew that it devolved upon him. He succeeded in striking the bear’s undamaged right leg, but in endeavoring to escape, he fell under the bear’s full glare, and a mighty swing of the right paw sent him sprawling flat upon the ice and exposed to the bear’s revenge.
In this extremity, two Eskimos darted bravely out to incapacitate the bear, regardless of what happened to Sopilak, but they were so tardy that the bear had time to leap at its fallen enemy and would have crushed him and torn him apart had not Captain Pym and Harpooner Kane discharged their rifles at this moment to stagger the great white monster. With two bullets in it, an experience never known before, the bear stopped and gasped, whereupon Atkins fired his gun, and this bullet lodged in the bear’s head, causing it to lose control and to fall powerless across the prone body of the master hunter.
There the marvelous bear died, this creature of the frozen seas, this magnificent giant whose fur was often whiter than the snow upon which it moved, and when the seven Eskimos saw that it was truly dead they did something that amazed the three Americans: they began to dance, solemnly and with tears streaming down their faces, and the man holding wounded Sopilak erect so that he too could participate began to chant a song that reached back five thousand years, and there as darkness fell the men of Desolation wept and danced in honor of the great white creature they had killed. Seaman Atkins, watching this performance, appreciated its meaning instantly, and in response to some ancient force that his ancestors in Europe had revered, he dropped the gun which had been instrumental in killing the bear and joined the dancers, and Sopilak took his hand and welcomed him to the circle, and picking up the rhythm, Atkins joined the chant, for he too honored the splendid white
bear, that creature of the north that had been so majestic in life, so brave in death.
Sopilak had a fifteen-year-old sister named Kiinak, and in the days following the kill of the polar bear she worked with her mother and the other women of Desolation in butchering and tending to the valuable bones, sinews and magnificent white skin. As she did so, she became aware that the young seaman from the Evening Star was placing himself near her, watching her. With the Eskimo words which he was acquiring so rapidly, he had been able to explain to Sopilak and his mother that he, Atkins, as one of the cooks aboard the American vessel, wanted to learn how the Eskimos handled the meat of the bear, the walrus and the seal that they caught in winter, and this explanation was accepted.
But the Eskimo men who had participated in the famous hunt of this bear also knew that it was only the bravery of Atkins and his leader, Noah Pym, that had saved the life of Sopilak, and since they had told the story of those culminating moments, the heroism of the young man was known throughout the village, and his attendance upon the butchering and Kiinak was accepted and even encouraged. Several times Sopilak told the villagers: ‘The young one saved my life,’ and whenever he said this, Kiinak smiled.
She was a lively person, just under five feet tall, broad-shouldered, broad-faced, with a smile that charmed all upon whom it fell. But her outstanding characteristic was a heavy head of very black hair, which she kept cut so low that it obscured her eyebrows and shook from side to side when she laughed, which she did many times each day, for she loved the great nonsense of the world: the pomposity of her brother when he killed a walrus or captured a seal, the posturing of some young woman trying to attract the attention of her brother, or even the whimpering behavior of a child who was trying to enforce his will upon his mother. When she talked, she had the habit of using her left hand in a wide, careless sweep to brush the hair out of her eyes, and at such times she seemed quite gamine, and the older women of the village knew very well that this girl Kiinak was going to give the young men of the village much to think about as the time came for her to select a husband.
Legacy: A Novel Page 15
