Collector of Lost Things

by Jeremy Page

  ‘It is her duty to open my nostrils to the stinks it no longer registers,’ Sykes said, enthusiastically. ‘We must remind the men their yearly brushing is due once more, what do you think? But tell me,’ he continued, not yet finished with Clara, ‘why a lady such as yourself should be on a voyage to the Arctic, where it is nothing but cold and draughty and quite thoroughly miserable?’

  Bletchley stepped in, keen to reply: ‘I have dragged her along, sir, that is the short of it—’

  ‘Thank you, Edward,’ she interrupted. ‘I am quite able to answer for myself.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he replied, hasty to backtrack, ‘and your voice is so pretty, too, my pippin. You talk so very eloquently, also. I was merely saving you the effort.’

  The look that she gave Bletchley was remarkable. It was piercing, as a heron’s is piercing when it stares into the water ready to strike. Bletchley recoiled as if seared, his hands raised melodramatically in apology.

  ‘I am on this ship,’ she explained, ‘for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes you can be at a place only because you can be at no other place. Will that suffice for an answer?’

  Sykes seemed unsure how to reply.

  ‘You might consider me as you did that finch this afternoon,’ she continued, coming to the point. ‘It landed upon this plank only because it could land nowhere else.’

  She had momentarily silenced the room. Again Bletchley felt he needed to step in: ‘It has also been generally agreed that clean cold air will greatly improve her health.’

  ‘Strange. It’s been the ruin of mine,’ Sykes replied, glad of the opportunity to joke. ‘Will you hunt?’

  Clara regarded at him with a dark expression, wishing to be left alone. ‘I abhor violence of any kind, Captain Sykes.’

  ‘Very well said,’ he replied, picking at his teeth with a fingernail. ‘We will benefit from having a woman on board, it will civilise us, for men are very simple and brutish animals.’

  Bletchley complimented at the captain, amused and excited, not knowing whether to take him seriously or not. ‘I believe you are making a joke,’ he said.

  ‘Half,’ Sykes replied, giving him a wink, but that too felt inconclusive. Clara sighed and Bletchley reached for her hand, but missed, patting the table instead.

  She looked up, not at her cousin, but directly across the table at me. For a second she held my gaze—an expression in her eyes that was liquid and surprising, as if she was trying to figure out something I had said. In my confusion, which felt overwhelming, I heard her speak. Save me from this place, she said, and even as I heard her words, I knew that her lips had not moved and she had not spoken. I looked down at my plate, startled. Not here, I thought. Be calm. Be focused.

  ‘Quinlan French!’ the captain called out. ‘For God’s sake man, get your eyes off that candle!’

  The first mate visibly jolted in his chair. I realised he had been intently gazing at one of the dining candles before him. ‘I need your eyes to be good!’ Sykes added.

  French slid his plate away, before standing. ‘I shall prepare for my watch now, sir. Gentlemen, Miss Gould, if you will forgive me.’

  Sykes waved him off as he would a fly, waiting for him to leave the room, then saying in a conspiratorial tone, The navy won’t have the fellow, so he is left with us. It is our burden but we do our best.’

  We listened to French’s footsteps crossing the deck above us as he went to the helm. Almost immediately he must have turned, for we heard the same steps returning, rather more quickly. He came down the companionway and leant into the room.

  ‘Captain, we are in sight of the Rock,’ he said.

  Sykes raised an eyebrow and consulted his watch. ‘Very good, we shall come up on deck.’

  The sight that awaited us was one of the most unforgettable of my life. Amid an almost totally tranquil sea, whose water was as smooth and reflective as polished steel, was the dark and foreboding profile of a single rock. It rose, as bold and as jagged as a dog’s tooth, perhaps a hundred feet tall, but little more than the girth of a large house at its base.

  ‘What is this thing?’ I asked Mr French, as we stood at the rail to admire it.

  ‘Rockall,’ he replied. ‘It is the furthest extremity of the British Isles. Beyond this point it is merely water.’

  Sykes went to the wheel. ‘Keep her to larboard, helmsman,’ he said. ‘Have you sighted the Hasselwood?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Very good. Keep your eye on the overfall.’

  Such a blunt finger of solid crag in all this ocean was extraordinary. And even at this distance, of perhaps half a mile or so, the outline of the rock seemed to shimmer. I realised, by shielding my eyes against the setting sun, that its shifting profile was due to the many hundreds of birds that were flying from it, collecting almost in a haze above the isle as if their bodies had formed a smoke.

  ‘Has man ever landed on this rock?’ I asked Mr French.

  ‘Certainly not,’ he stressed. ‘He would die in the attempt. The surge would destroy the tender and there is no purchase of any kind. A single ledge, I believe, that not even the birds use. It has no water and no other shelter. He would be mercilessly pecked at, blown off by the wind and swept away by waves.’ He laughed. ‘But the captain is fond of it. He always steers by the Rock. Is that not right, sir—you love this unholy spike of dry land?’

  Sykes smiled broadly. ‘She has a special place in my heart,’ he said, patting his chest. ‘I am attracted to the lost and the lonesome.’

  Across the water, the eerie cries of the kittiwakes could be heard, alongside the rough barks of the fulmars and gannets. Several cormorants were lined along the top, their wings outstretched in cruciform shape.

  I thought of the great auks that may have once sought out such a barren perch as this. A single rock several hundred miles from the mainland and surrounded by countless acres of empty ocean, yet even here they had been hunted down and destroyed. If they could not be safe in this most remote of places on the earth, then it was no wonder they were extinct.

  Further along the ship’s rail, I noticed Clara staring intently at the isle, her lips silently mouthing a prayer. A strange shine emanated from the pale gold of her dress, a flower grown where there could be no root. So, too, her skin, which was lit up by the evening sunlight.

  ‘You seem enchanted by the sight,’ I said, approaching her.

  ‘Have you ever felt that you have seen a place before—but it’s a place that you cannot possibly have been to?’ She nodded towards the rock. ‘Even though it is at the end of the world. Is it possible that I have seen this thing in my dreams?’

  ‘I have felt such a thing, too.’

  ‘You have? Yes, I can see you have.’

  ‘You’ve seen this island before?’ I asked.

  ‘In dreams.’

  ‘Then you’re not just on the ship for all the wrong reasons.’

  She smiled, quite wonderfully. ‘I think you will be my only friend on this journey,’ she said. ‘Would you be my friend?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  She turned back to gaze at the rock. I studied her, closely. At that moment I really believe she saw something that no one else on board was able to perceive.

  5

  WE TURNED DUE NORTH, and for the next few days saw nothing but ocean. Occasionally, lines of birds would stream past us, so fast their wings were blurred. I made sketches as they raced by, noticing how their wingtips would touch the water at speed as the flocks repeatedly rearranged formation. The only other birds we saw were the deep ocean species that were able to live out here, rafting and diving, away from land. They were wild and spear shaped, barbarous skuas and petrels, passing the ship in sweeping glides, a cruel eye cast across the deck as if in their glance they weighed a man’s soul.

  I quickly learnt the sailors’ names for the birds I knew. They called most gulls mollies, or mallemokes, and there were always five or six following us, at any one time, unless Bletchley was practi
sing with his guns. Little auks were dovekies, Brünnich’s guillemots were looms. Kittiwakes they had improved, with the name tat-a-rats, and ivory gulls were romanticised as snowbirds. Richardson’s skuas were called boatswains, and glaucous gulls burgomasters. In all these names I sensed a relationship to nature that was practical, sometimes humorous, but not particularly affectionate.

  I had learnt about birds during my childhood in Suffolk. Their times of flocking would announce the changes of season: mallard, widgeon, pintail, teal and geese in winter, greenshanks, redshanks, sandpipers, terns and stints in summer. I would study their migration and draw their eggs, and knew they were a connection to a world that existed beyond my horizons. Like the clouds, they came from distant lands. Arctic terns arrived from Africa and departed to the northern wastes of Greenland and Iceland. Swifts and swallows, arriving in summer, still had the dust of deserts falling from their wings. Swans, flying in formation from Russia and beyond; their secret calls and mutterings whispered great truths about a world I could only dream of.

  The further north we sailed, the thicker the weather became. Fogs descended, as if the top of the world was hidden in clouds and vapours. Through the mist, curtains of stinging rain swept across the sea, drenching the decks in a matter of seconds. Cold steam rose from the wood. After these downpours, the rainwater poured away through the scuppers with a noisy gurgle of streams, returning to the ocean. Then all would be quiet again, the men would come out of the fo’c’sle and continue the jobs they had started, and the sails would drip and shine like faces of wet rock above them. The sea itself changed colour almost as rapidly, from a green-grey to an almost perfect black, and occasionally a vivid cloudy green as we drifted through fields of plankton.

  It was in one of these lulls, between the rainstorms, that a ship was sighted, a few miles off, sliding between the veils of mist. I was on deck when it was seen, and was there to see it vanishing too, a dark low bulging shape removed, bit by bit, by the advance of the clouds. A mast remained, improbably, like the cross above a church steeple, before it too became grey, then faded, and was gone.

  There was much excitement on the decks of the Amethyst. The men went forward, hoping to spot her again. In so many miles of ocean, in such strange weather, the view of the ship had been more ghostly than I could have imagined. A low brooding hulk that belonged to another century; but no one on deck seemed to share this superstitious feeling of mine. After a few minutes, through some motion of the fogs or direction of the vessels, the phantom emerged once more, angled to us but turning in our direction. I could see the churn of foam beneath its bow and, above deck, a solitary sail being furled among a peculiar arrangement of rigging.

  It’s the Jester!’ Sykes announced, balancing his telescope through a foothold in the rigging. ‘Man, she has seen some weather! Helmsman, bring her abaft, she is slowing towards us.’

  Not only was it heavier and built lower than the Amethyst, with four longboats tied to her side, but the tops of the masts had gone and part of the foremast had been tied off at a peculiar angle. Only the mainmast appeared to be functioning.

  ‘Bray has nearly wrecked her!’ Sykes continued, highly amused, to the men standing along the rail. ‘Get the whale-boat ready. I shall be going across.’

  The men went to the task, uncovering one of the whale-boats from the fo’c’sle roof and carrying it to the port-side davits, stowing the oars and making it ready to lower. It was a fine long craft, pointed at both ends, with a smooth carvel-built hull, partially covered in zinc to protect it from ice.

  ‘Mr Saxby,’ the captain called, searching for me on the deck. ‘Ah, yes, there you are, always where I least expect you. Would you like to visit a whaling ship?’

  Sykes, Talbot, Bletchley and myself were rowed over in the launch, shoulder to shoulder with each other on the simple benches. Bletchley, wearing bright mustard-coloured breeches, his blue pilot coat and his polished riding boots, looked dressed for a gallop in the country. Both ships towered darkly above us as the mist once more began to move in, drifting like bonfire smoke, obscuring the shapes of the rigging and masts. Surrounded by little more than the sound of dipping oars, we rowed through a mossy cloud of green plankton, and I imagined the depths of ocean that must be beneath us. The sensation of a small boat on a vast ocean made me uneasy. How could I have become used to the Atlantic, I wondered, when it was so terrifyingly deep as this?

  Sykes noticed me gazing at the water. ‘Good for whaling,’ he said, pointing at the plankton. ‘Makes the whales blinded, so the hunter has the advantage.’

  We smelt the other ship before we reached it: a deep tarry smell of oil and smoke and butchery. The sides of the hull were as dark as bog oak, and streaked with long stains of what appeared to be blood. Gouges and lacerations covered the planks above the waterline, giving the cladding a splintered look that meant it couldn’t have been watertight. Talbot grabbed the pilot ladder with a gaff hook, and Sykes hailed the other captain, repeating his joke that Bray had damned nearly wrecked his ship.

  ‘Tried my best I did, Sykes,’ came a call from above the black-strake, ‘froze her and burnt her ’n’ just about holed her through the stern but she just won’t go down!’

  We climbed the ladder, helped by some of the Jester’s crew, and were confronted by a scene of great disorder. In the centre of the deck, the fire-blackened blocks of a rendering house lay partly dismantled. The roof had gone, and two of the walls were blown, with bricks lying about in a ruined heap. Leading out from them, the deck planks were pitted and scarred with ruts of charred wood, the signs of a considerable blaze that must have stretched the entire width of the ship.

  ‘Blast it, Bray, you’re not fit for the sea!’ Sykes stated, looking at the chaos with a mixture of disapproval and glee. ‘What the devil has occurred here?’

  ‘As I said,’ came the reply. ‘Just about all the gods have to throw, and some more than that, too.’ Captain Timothy Bray was a short man, with a bald head and a straggly beard. Although small in stature, he was dressed in a long coat, more like a dressing gown, lined with animal fur. ‘Careful of your dandy trousers, sir,’ the captain said to Bletchley, ‘you will pick up oil in no time.’

  Bletchley nodded in agreement, keeping clear of snags. Bray raised his eyebrows at Sykes. ‘Ferrying peacocks this time?’ he said, for everyone to hear.

  But it wasn’t the condition of the ship that fascinated me. It was the state of the crew. To a man they were dirtied and ageless, with stained hands and faces and strong full beards the hue of tobacco. Their caps were the colour of grease, and their clothes were ragged and mended and appeared to have been woven from a material soaked in oil and smoke. Some of them wore hats of brown fur, the animal hide turned outwards, with rough stitching as if surgeon’s scars were running across their heads.

  ‘Mind the ropes,’ Sykes advised, as he crossed the deck with his sprightly gait, heading for the other captain. ‘So, the story?’

  Bray was delighted to brag. ‘The wind took her foremast tops off—whipped ’em like a dog pulling a stick. Cer-rack!’ he cried. ‘Then, of all curses, I must be a cursed man, the lightning nearly did for us with a fire.’

  The deck felt greasy underfoot. It smelt horribly, of an animal flesh, partially decomposed, alongside the smells of fire and charred wood and a dark smell of mouldy ballast coming from the hatches. Flensing hooks hung from blocks the size of bull’s heads, swinging freely above the deck and still coated with the remnants of meat or blubber that had dried onto the iron in strips. Ropes snaked carelessly across the decking, mixing with chains and gearing and more blocks and tackle, and at the opposite side, below the rail, several large grey bones each as long as a horse had been tied to the gunwale.

  ‘Look,’ I said to Bletchley, ‘see the whale bones?’

  Surprisingly, Bletchley had lost his usual enthusiasm. He glanced at the bones and then proceeded to put on a pair of calfskin gloves. ‘Most unpleasant,’ he said, with uncharacteristic disdain.r />
  I noticed, in the fore-rigging, several other jawbones. They hung there dark and wet, and resembled the spars and yards that remained around them, but their presence made the ship seem half animal. I decided not to point them out to Bletchley. He was in a peculiar mood.

  Sykes had had the foresight to bring our lunch over with us, suspecting the provisions on the Jester would be in a poor state. Bray was overjoyed, personally going through the hamper and finding the jugged rabbit, the Wiltshire ham, fresh eggs and suet pudding as if each parcel was a Christmas present. He ordered his own steward to lay the food out, and invited us to join him at his table. Below deck, the Jester had a similar layout to the Amethyst, but it was only when I saw the spartan nature of the walls, the lack of ornamentation or cushioning, the absence of settees, that I realised our own ship was rather more geared towards passengers than this one.

  Sykes took a sip from his glass and theatrically spat it out onto the floor. ‘Your water is foul, man!’ he said, grimacing like a dying man.

  Bray was greatly amused. ‘Pond ice, sir. You’ve been harboured too long, Sykes.’

  They continued in this vein, trading insults like schoolchildren, neither of them making any concession to myself or Bletchley. Formal talk was thin and discarded easily out here. Bray talked enthusiastically, his eyes red-rimmed but sparkling with life, and he repeatedly glanced with a beady look at each of his guests, maintaining us as his audience. He had stories to tell, and had had no one new to listen for a long time.

  He began by recounting how the Jester had overwintered in Cumberland Sound, a practice almost entirely unheard of, tied to an American whaler. ‘A couple of the New Bedford lot tried it two years ago—no, I lie—three years back—and were almost destroyed with scurvy and madness and the blasted longing for their wives—not a thing I personally subscribe to. I believe you are the same Kelvin? Aha—a raised eyebrow I spotted there. Did you see it, gentlemen? Where was I—yes—we had such a poor season last year it wasn’t worth our returning to port, so we sailed for Cumberland Sound before the weather changed. It’s a good spot, well found by the Yankees,’ he raised his hands dramatically: ‘mountains this high, all sides, protect it from the wind, which means the bay ice forms with regularity and without much current. Oh, and yes, there is also a very friendly Esquimaux settlement there, which was most useful. We had one Esquimaux fellow, paddled out in his skin kayak—fifteen feet long it was, adorned with knobs of ivory. His coat was lashed tight to repel the water, so there was no way of pulling him out from his craft—cork in a bottle, he was. So you know what we did? We lifted the whole boat on the flensing pulleys, with him in it, and set it down on the deck. He thought that was capital, you should have seen his smile. Great white teeth like piano keys.’