The radio crackled. Then clear and distinct came a voice speaking in Norwegian. I guessed it must be the Southern Cross, for Bland stiffened and his head jerked round towards the receiver. The radio operator leaned down towards the mike. “’ Ullo-ullo-ullo—Syd Korset. Tauer III anroper Syd Korset.” There was a quick exchange in Norwegian and then he turned to Bland. “I have Captain Eide for you,” he said, and passed the microphone across to him. The chairman’s thick fingers closed round the bakelite grip. “Bland here. Is that Captain Eide?”
“Ja, hr. direktor. This is Eide.” The voice crackled in sing-song English faintly reminiscent of a Welsh accent.
“What’s your position?” I nodded for Sparks to take it down. Fifty-eight point three four south, thirty-four point five six west. I made a swift mental calculation. Bland’s eyebrows lifted in my direction. “That’s about forty miles west of us,” I said. He nodded, and resumed his conversation, this time in Norwegian. I didn’t listen. I couldn’t concentrate enough to pluck the sense out of it from the few words I’d managed to pick up. The warmth of the cabin was enveloping me. My eyelids became unbearably heavy. Sleep rolled my head against the wood panelling of the cabin wall.
Then suddenly I was awake again. A new voice was talking over the radio, talking in English. “They’re holding out for an enquiry. I’ve told them there isn’t going to be any enquiry. It’s a waste of time. There’s nothing to enquire into. Nordahl’s gone, and that’s all there is to it.” It was an easy, cultured voice—smooth like an expensive car. But it was just a veneer. It revealed nothing of its owner. “The real trouble is that the season’s been terrible. Even the Sandefjord men are grumbling. As for the Tönsberg crowd—they’re more nuisance than they’re worth. If you hadn’t been coming out I’d have sent the whole lot home.”
“We’ll talk about that when I see you, Erik,” Bland cut in, his voice an angry rumble. “How many whale have you caught so far?”
“Fin whale? A hundred and twenty-seven—that’s all. The fog’s just beginning to lift now. Perhaps the luck will change. But there’s pack ice to the south-east of us and the men don’t like it. They say conditions are abnormal.”
“I know all about that,” said Bland. “What are your plans?”
“We’re cruising east now along the northern edge of the pack. We’ll just have to hope for the best.”
“Hope for the best!” Bland’s cheeks quivered. “You get out and find whale—and find ’em damn quick, boy. Every day without whale is a disaster. Do you understand?”
“If you think you can find them when I can’t—well, you’re welcome to come and try.” The voice sounded sharp and resentful.
Bland gave an angry grunt. “If Nordahl were alive—”
“Don’t you start throwing Nordahl at me,” his son interrupted in a tone of sudden violence. “I’m sick of hearing about him. He’s dead, and the mere mention of his name, as though it were a sort of talisman, won’t produce whale.”
“We’ll be with you in a few hours now,” Bland said soothingly. “We’ll talk about it then. Put Eide back on.” Eide’s voice was comfortingly calm. He spoke in Norwegian and Bland was answering him in the same language. There was a pause. Then suddenly his voice was back in the cabin abain, shouting. “Hval! Hval! En av hval-baatene har sett hval!” Bland’s face relaxed. He was smiling. Everybody in the cabin was smiling.
I looked at Judie. She leaned towards me, and I saw that even she was excited. “They’ve sighted whale.” She turned her head to the radio again and then added, “They have seen several pods. They are all going south—into the ice.”
“How many whales to a pod?” I asked.
She laughed. “Depends on the sort of whale. Only one or two in the case of the blue whale. But three to five for the fin whale.” She shook her head. “But it’s bad for them to be going south.”
The skipper of the Southern Cross signed off and Bland turned to me. “You got their position?” he asked.
I nodded and got stiffly to my feet. Sparks handed me a slip of paper on which he’d written the present position and course of the Southern Cross. I climbed up to the bridge and laid our course to meet up with the factory ship. Tauer III turned, heeling slightly as the helmsman swung her on to the new bearing. I told the coxs’n to wake me in four hours’ time and went below for the first real sleep I’d had in eight days.
But I didn’t get my full four hours. The messboy woke me just after midday and I dragged myself up to the bridge. The coxs’n was there, sniffing the air. “You smell something, ja?” He was grinning. I smelt it at once—a queer, heavy smell like a coal bi-product. “Now you smell money,” he said. “That is whale.”
“The Southern Cross?”
“Ja”
“How far away?”
“Fifteen—maybe twenty mile.”
“Good God!” I said. I was imagining what the smell must be like close to. I ordered the helmsman to point the ship up into the light southerly wind. An hour later the fog began to lift and I ordered full speed. Slowly the fog cleared, revealing a bleak, ice-green sea heaving morosely under a low layer of cloud. Away to the southeast I got my first sight of the ice blink. This was the light striking up from close pack ice, its surface mirrored in the cloud. The effect was one of brilliant whiteness, criss-crossed with dark seams. The dark seams were the water lanes cutting through between the floes, all faithfully mapped out in the cloud mirror above it.
Bonomi was up on the bridge with his camera. When I’d worked out our position and sent a lookout to the masthead, he came across to me. “You feel good now, eh? Everything is fine.” He grinned. His cheerfulness added to the sense of depression that had been growing up inside me. I wasn’t looking forward to closing with the Southern Cross. For one thing, it meant the end of my temporary command. For another—well, all I can say is that I had developed an uneasy feeling about the Southern Cross.
“Bland is saying we must go south into the Weddell Sea,” Bonomi babbled on. “I ’ope so. He says that after Nordahl, Hanssen is the best whaler in Norway, and if he take the Haakon south, then we shall go too. In the Weddell Sea I think I get very good pictures. You will see.”
He was getting on my nerves and I was too dead with lack of sleep to have any hold over my tongue. “Don’t you think of anything else but your bloody pictures?” I said.
He looked up at me with a sort of shocked surprise. “But what else should I think of?” He peered up at me as though gauging my temper. “Do not worry about losing the ship. I find a nice job for you, eh—carrying my camera?”
We were both laughing at his little joke when there was a cry of Ship ahoy! from the masthead. Ten minutes later a thick blur of smoke, fine on the starboard bow, was visible from the bridge. Bland, Judie, Weiner—they all came up, gazing excitedly at that first glimpse of the factory ship. “Trying out by the look of it,” Bland said. I glanced at him quickly. His small eyes gleamed behind their glasses. For him the smoke meant money. For Judie it meant something different and her gaze was clouded. Bonomi was excited. He positively bounced up and down and insisted on shaking everybody by the hand. Weiner looked at it with the apathy of a man to whom nothing has a sense of reality. Howe also came up on to the bridge and stood, a little removed from the rest, gazing out towards the smoke. I wished I could read his thoughts. I saw him glance covertly at Bland and then back again towards the smoke on the horizon. And in that instant I felt a tingle run up my spine.
Judie caught my eye. “I hope the whales—” She didn’t finish the sentence, but stared at me, her mouth slightly open, caught in the utterance of the next word. I think she knew that Howe worried me.
Bland went aft to the wireless room then. The others followed. Howe was the last to go. He stood, gripping the windbreaker with his bony hands. Conscious of my gaze, he turned and looked at me. Then he swung away and stared for a moment south, towards the ice blink. I watched him, fascinated. His glance went once more to the factory ship, and then b
ack to the mirrored brightness of the pack ice. He stared at it for a long time. Then he turned quickly. “I must go and prepare my report,” he said and there was a curiously sly lift to the corners of his mouth as he said this.
Once I went down to the wireless room. It was a babel of sound. Norwegian voices boomed out of the R/T receiver; catchers to the factory ship, the factory ship to the buoy boats and tow-ers—everyone was talking on the air at once. I gathered the whales were plentiful. Bland was smiling. And in intervals between communications he was discussing the new electrical equipment with Weiner, sometimes in English, sometimes in German.
It was a strange and rather wonderful sight as we closed the Southern Cross. It wasn’t just a factory ship. It was a whole fleet of ships. I examined them through my glasses. There were five catchers strung out in a line behind the Southern Cross. They appeared to be idle. Another catcher was almost alongside. There were two towing ships. I recognised them by their corvette lines. There were also two old-type catchers that I was told were buoy boats—that is to say, they were towing vessels that could be used to supplement the catcher fleet if required. Behind these was an old whaling ship which ferried the meat to the refrigerator ship, a vessel of about 6,000 tons which was lying astern of the others. Near this was a large tanker and more catchers were scurrying about on the horizon. To see all those ships gathered together in these hostile southern seas fired the imagination. It was such a gigantic operation—a litter of masts that reminded me of D-Day.
Bonomi gripped my arm and pointed across the port bow. A spout of vapour rose not two cables’ length away from us, and the water boiled as a smooth, sleek shape, like a submarine, dived. There was a snort almost alongside and another spout thrust ten or fifteen feet into the air, so close that the wind whipped some of the water on to our decks. It was our first sight of whale. Bonomi dived for his camera. We were in the midst of a pod.
I brought the ship round in a wide circle to come up parallel with the Southern Cross. In doing so we passed right through the black, oily smoke that drifted to leeward of her. The thick, noisome smell closed down on us like a blanket. It was a heavy, oily, all-pervading smell. It seemed to weigh down on the senses, thick and cloying and penetrating.
As we emerged from it, I could hear the sound of voices on the factory ship and the clank of winches. The stern was open, like a dark cavern, and a whale was being hauled up through it to the after-plan. The ship was big—about twenty thousand tons. Her steel sides, already rusting, towered above us as we glided alongside. Up on the bridge a man in a fur cap held a megaphone to his lips and called down to us. It was Eide. I caught the name. That was all. The rest was in Norwegian. Judie said, “He’s lowering a boat and coming over to us himself.” Her face looked puzzled. “I wonder why?” she added.
I glanced across at Bland. He was standing in the port wing of the bridge, gazing aft to where the catchers were strung out in a line. His brows were dragged down and his face had a thunderous look.
We were all there on the bridge when Eide arrived. He was a gaunt, bony man with hatchet-like features and a trick of continually chewing on a matchstick which he slipped to the corner of his mouth when he spoke. He was wearing a thick polo-necked sweater and his gabardine trousers were secured by a wide leather belt with a silver buckle. “Well?” Bland barked at him. “What’s the trouble? Why aren’t all the catchers out?”
Eide looked quickly round. “I will speak in English,” he said, noticing that the man at the helm was watching him. “There is trouble. Half the men in the ship have struck. Also the men on five catchers and one towing ship.”
“The Tönsberg men?” Bland asked.
“Ja. They have threatened to stop the others working. But they have not yet made any trouble.”
“They’re waiting to see what I do. Is that it?”
Eide nodded.
Bland’s fist thudded on the bridge rail. “You’ve not much more than a hundred whales to show for six weeks’ work.” He was almost shouting. “And now, when we are right in the midst of whale, they strike. Why? What’s their complaint?”
“They want an enquiry into Nordahl’s death.” Eide hesitated and then said, “Also they wish your son to be removed from the position of acting manager.”
“Who’s behind all this?”
“Kaptein Larvik, I think. He speaks for the others. As you know he was a great friend of Nordahl. It is he, I think, who start this idea of an enquiry. But they are all of them in it now—Larvik, Petersen, Korsvold, Schnelle, Strand and Jensen.”
Bland’s hand clenched into a fist. Then it relaxed. He took off his glasses and wiped them slowly. His heavy jaw was set, his small eyes steely. I watched his mouth spread into a tight-lipped smile. Then he put his glasses f on again. “Very well,” he said quietly. “If that’s the way they want it—” He glanced quickly at Eide. “Who do they want as factory manager instead of my son?”
“Kaptein Petersen,” Eide replied. “He is a good leader and he manage one of the South Georgia stations for three seasons. He returns to catching because he likes the active life.”
“All right, Captain Eide. You will signal for the captains of those five catchers and the towing ship to come on board for a conference with me. I shall then give them an ultimatum—either they get on with the job or they are relieved of their commands.”
“Perhaps they will refuse to come.” Eide’s voice sounded embarrassed.
“Good God!” Bland exploded. “If things have been allowed to get as out of hand as that, then there are other methods of dealing with them. How will they get on in the Antarctic without oil and supplies from the factory ship? Come, pull yourself together, Eide. We can be just as tough. Get down to the wireless room and instruct them to come on board the Southern Cross right away.” His jaw thrust out suddenly. “And if they try to make conditions, tell them they’d better not aggravate me further. Whilst you’re doing that, we’ll get our things into the boat. Craig,” he said, turning to me, “you’ll come with us. The coxs’n can take temporary command here. Before you know where you are you’ll be in charge of a catcher.” He was almost grinning now. He was the sort of man who thrived on a fight. But I must say I didn’t much fancy the roll of strike-breaker amongst a lot of Norwegians whose feuds I didn’t fully understand.
Eide was leaving the bridge now, but Bland stopped him. “Why didn’t Erik come to report this himself?” he demanded.
The skipper of the factory ship hesitated. Then he said, “He is on the fore-plan. He could not come.”
Bland grunted. “He’s got assistants, hasn’t he?” he growled.
I must say that at that moment I felt some sympathy for Erik Bland. Whatever the man’s nature, he’d certainly been handed a tough job, and I didn’t blame him for staying up on the fore-plan. I looked at Judie to see whether she was feeling sympathy for her husband’s position. But she was staring up at the towering, ugly bulk of the Southern Cross and I realised that her thoughts were on her father.
IV
I WASN’T PRESENT at the meeting between Bland and the skippers of the Tönsberg catchers. But I saw them leave and I got the impression that Bland had given them something to think about. There were five of them—tough, bearded men with fur caps on their heads, thick jerseys under their windbreakers and feet encased in knee-length boots. They stopped at the head of the gangway, talking together in a little bunch. They were joined almost immediately by two other men. One was short and stout with a jolly, wrinkled face and the appearance of a seal. The other was a big man with a jagged scar on his cheek over which his beard refused to grow. They stood a little apart from the others for a moment, talking earnestly in low voices. As I passed them I heard the man with the scar say, “Ja, Kaptein Larvik.” Then he turned away and the other joined the group at the head of the gangway.
I was being conducted round the ship at the time. Captain Eide had allocated me a bunk in the second officer’s cabin and had detailed one of his officers, a Sc
ot from Leith, to show me round.
My guide had taken me first to the flensing decks. This is the centre of activity in a factory ship when the whales are coming in. There are two flensing decks—the fore-plan and the after-plan. And both looked the sort of charnel house you might dream up in a nightmare. Men waded knee-deep in the bulging intestines of the whales, their long-handled, curved-bladed flensing knives slashing at the bleeding hunks of meat exposed by the removal of the blubber casing. The winches clattered incessantly. The steam saws buzzed as they ripped into the backbone, carving it into star-shaped sections still festooned with ragged strands of red meat. Men with huge iron hooks dragged blubber, meat and bone to the chutes that took it to the boilers to be tried out and the precious oil extracted. The noise and the smell were indescribable. And the work went on unceasingly as whale after whale was dragged up the slipway, the men working like demons and the decks slippery with blood and grease.
I followed one whale as it came up through the cavity in the stern. It was eighty feet long and weighed nearly a hundred tons. The men on the after-plan fell on it when it was still being winched along the deck. The flensers cut flaps of blubber from around its jaws, hawser shackle was rigged in holes cut in these flaps and in a moment the winches were ripping the blubber off the huge carcase, the flensers cutting it clear of the meat as it was rolled back. To clear the blubber from the belly, they winched the whale over on to its back, and as it thudded over on the deck urine poured out of its stomach in a wave and the pink mass of the tongue flopped over like a huge jelly. Stripped of its blubber it was winched to the fore-plan. The meat was cut away from the backbone and then the bone itself was cut up and sent to the pots. In just over an hour that hundred-ton monster had been worked up and absorbed by the factory ship.
The White South Page 8
