“In your world, right is right and wrong is wrong. But there’s another world where it’s a free-for-all and devil take the hindermost. You’re in that other world now—Bland’s world.”
“Why not relax?” I said. Up there on the deck my sense of proportion had reasserted itself. We were going south into the Antarctic and I’d been given command of one of the catchers. That was quite enough without having Howe on board behaving like a maniac. “There’s nothing you can do about Nordahl’s death now,” I added. “Wait until we get back to—”
“You fool,” he hissed. “Don’t you understand Judie’s a rich woman? She holds the key to the control of the company. When Erik Bland knows that—” He paused and then added, “A man who’s prepared to commit murder to get what he wants won’t stop at that. Just now he’s probably scared. But sooner or later—” He shrugged his shoulders. And then in a matter-of-fact voice he said, “If we stand here talking all day we’ll get wet going over to the catcher.”
I started down the gangway. But then I stopped. There were three boats at the bottom of the gangway and one of them was just pushing off. In the stern sat Judie. She was sitting next to Larvik and her face was tense.
“Why’s she going over to Larvik’s catcher?” I asked. “Did Bland send her?”
“No,” Howe answered. “She sent herself. Bland doesn’t know she’s gone yet.”
“But why?”
“Because I advised her to. She’s safer there than on the Southern Cross.”
“But Good God!” I said. “You don’t think anything would happen—”
“This is the Antarctic,” he reminded me, “not suburbia.” He went down the gangway then. As he dumped his kit aboard the boat I caught the chink of bottles. He grinned as he saw that I’d heard. “Always believe in being self-sufficient,” he said. It was incredible how the man’s mood could change. “You’ve got to be if you want to drink. Officially all these ships are dry.” He sent the two seamen up to bring down his instruments whilst we held the boat to the ship’s side. A few minutes later we had pushed off and were bobbing up and down past the yawning cavity of the Southern Cross’s stern. The clean, ice-fresh air blew the events of the past twenty-four hours from my brain. Ahead of me lay Hval 4, a battered little toy of a boat with a saucy rake to her up-tilted bows. The harpoon gun, loaded and with the tip of the harpoon pointed downwards, was a grim reminder of her job as a killer. The knowledge that this was my new command gradually took hold of me as we approached her through the rising anger of the sea and drove every other thought out of my head.
Olaf Petersen met us as we clambered aboard. He was a big, bluff man with sharp eyes and a queer way of looking around him with a swaying motion of the head, rather like a polar bear. “I am happy to welcome you on my ship.” His English was heavy and solid, like the creaking of something little used. The grip of his hand was the clutch of a bear’s paw. “You haf not meet my daughter.” His head lunged round. “Gerda. Here is Commander Craig.”
I shouldn’t have known she was a girl but for the breadth of her hips, the bulkiness of her chest and the fact that she was clean shaven. She was dressed in a heavy seaman’s jersey, blue serge trousers and wore a fur cap on her head. The only spot of colour was a rather dirty-looking yellow silk scarf half hidden under her jacket. Her hand was rough as it gripped mine. I glanced at her quickly. She had large, very brown eyes. Her face was tanned and smooth, a chubby, friendly face with a lot of fat flesh round the eyes and a nose that was almost flattened as though the Maker had forgotten about it until the last moment and then as an afterthought slapped on a little button of flesh without any bone. There was no resentment as she met my gaze, only amusement. Her eyes twinkled in the creases of fat as though at any moment they would burst out laughing. “I do not expect you have women as officers in your Navy,” she said.
“Only ashore,” I said with a grin.
“Ah, yes. A woman’s place is ashore.” The laughter gurgled up from her throat, warm and happy. “And then you call them Wrens, eh—little birds!”
Her father’s big paw slapped my shoulder so that I nearly lost my balance. “You will haf to get used to Gerda,” he boomed. “Always she make mock of people. Even me—her father—I am to be made mock of. Always since she was so high and learn to speak English she call me landlubber. Me—landlubber.” His great laugh seemed to rattle round the ship, and he slapped me on the back again. But I was prepared for it this time and braced myself for the impact.
“Come,” Gerda Petersen said. “I show you to your cabin. Walter, you come too. What’s in that box—whisky?”
Howe grinned. He seemed relaxed for the first time since I’d met him. And when he grinned like that, it was strange, but he didn’t look ugly any more. “No,” he said. “That’s my instruments. The drink’s in the bag here.” He kicked it and laughed when she scowled at the clinking sound of the bottles. “That means you have not brought enough clothes and we must raid the slop-chest for you.” She glanced quickly at me and added, “For you also, skipper. You look”—she hesitated, her eyes bubbling with laughter—“you look as though you have borrow your clothes from all the crew of the Southern Cross.”
“Gerda!” Petersen’s tone was half amused, half serious. “You will not get in the good books of your new captain if you make fun of him. What must you think, Commander Craig? You will think I have brought up my daughter badly and there is no discipline on my ship. Well, by God there is.”
His daughter laughed. “Take no notice of him,” she whispered. “He is a big bear and he think he is important now he is to be manager of the factory ship.”
Her father shrugged his shoulders in mock despair.
“I’ll be only too glad to borrow from your slop-chest,” I said.
“Fine. Then come and take a look at your new command. I hear you are the devil for spit and polish.” She grinned at me slily over her shoulder. “Well, I can tell you, this ship need some polishing. That dirty man has made a pigsty of her.” With this parting shot at her father she pulled herself up the ladder that led to the bridge accommodation.
The catcher was a good deal smaller than Tauer III. The captain’s cabin was directly below the bridge, a part of the for’ard deckhouse. “I am sorry,” Gerda said, “but we have not the accommodation of a factory ship. You will have to share your cabin with Walter Howe. Do you mind?”
“That’s all right,” I said. “Provided he’s willing to share his Scotch with me.”
She laughed. “Do not worry. I will see that he is not dog-in-the-manger with his drink. I, too, get thirsty.” Her eyes twinkled. “You must excuse me for my rotten English. It is vair rusty.” Howe staggered in then with his box of instruments. “Walter, you will share the skipper’s cabin and he is to share your whisky. Okay?”
Howe’s eyebrows lifted. “He’ll have to drink fast,” he said, “if he is to get the same share of my drink that I get of his cabin.”
They both laughed. They seemed to understand each other. “This ought to be the wireless room,” Gerda said, leading me to the next cabin. “But because I am Olaf Petersen’s daughter, he make a little adjustment. This is my cabin and the wireless is aft in the second mate’s berth. That is the only concession he make,” she added quickly.
She took me on a brief tour of the ship then, introducing me to the crew. “Do not trouble to remember their names,” she said as she noticed my concentration. “You will soon have sort them out.”
The ship was rather like a small Fleet sweeper in appearance with its high bow and high bridge and a long, low after-deck. She was narrow in the beam, built for speed and power. She was capable of about 13½ knots and looked a very seaworthy little ship, though I guessed she’d be extremely lively in heavy weather. Perched on a platform on the bow was the harpoon gun, a deadly-looking weapon with a three and a quarter inch breech and firing a harpoon weighing around a hundredweight. The gun platform was connected to the bridge by a catwalk. Aft of the chain locker
was a hold containing two 500-fathom coils of 2-inch manila. These whale lines ran up to the winches on deck. Each winch had two drums and the line ran three times round each drum and thence up to masthead blocks and so out through a fairlead in the bow. The masthead blocks were connected to huge springs—accumulators—with a pressure of twenty tons. The springs performed the same function as the whip in a fishing-rod, allowing the whale to be played on the winches without the sudden movements of the vessel in a seaway parting the line.
Aft of the hold was the engine-room. Then came the crew’s quarters—cabins with bunks for two or four—and finally the tiller flat. Below the captain’s cabin in the bridge accommodation was the galley and the mess-room.
By the time I had completed the round of the ship Captain Petersen was ready to leave. “Well, I hope you will like Hval 4,” he said, gripping my hand as though trying to squeeze the flesh out from between the bones. “Ja. I hope so. I hope also Gerda behave herself, no? There is one good thing about a woman as first mate—if she do not behave you can always put her across your knee. She has a vair big bottom. You cannot miss, even if you are drunk, eh?” And he went down the ladder to the deck below roaring with laughter.
“You have only the nerve to say that because you are leaving,” the girl answered, two angry little spots of colour showing on the dark tan of her cheeks.
“Because I am leaving, eh? Ja. That is good. When I am skipper here my life she is not worth living. It is Olaf this and Olaf that all day long. I tell you, Commander Craig, it is worse than being married to have a daughter on board.” He turned and looked up at us, his fat face creased in laughter. “One thing I do not haf to worry about. My daughter is safe with any man. She is a nice girl—but ugly as a fat leetle pig, eh?”
Gerda made a face at him and put out her tongue. Still laughing, he climbed over the side into the boat that had been sent across from the factory ship. We watched it bobbing across the waves towards the Southern Cross. “Mange hval,” Petersen roared across at us and with a final wave of his big hand seated himself in the stern.
“I am afraid all this talk will have made you think this is a play-ship,” Gerda said, her voice suddenly serious. “But that is just our fun.”
“I like it,” I said. “I feel at home already. I think the ship must be a very happy one.”
“Ja, I think so too.” She wrinkled her nose. It was a habitual gesture, half serious, half humorous. “You are nice,” she said. “My father and I have been three seasons together out here. We are not bad whalers. We work well together. Last season we are second only to Peer Larvik in the number of whales we have caught. This time we lead all the fleet—though that is not much. We have twenty-two whale so far.”
“I hope we manage to hold the lead,” I said.
She patted me on the shoulder. It was a gesture copied from her father, but I was glad to find it hadn’t the same weight behind it. “I think we get on fine, skipper. But I am not so good a skytter as Olaf. And you will have to learn how to control the ship for me.” She glanced at me quickly. “I know what you are thinking. You are thinking the Antarctic is no place for a girl. But you must remember one thing. We can stand the cold well—I have much fat, eh?” And she tapped her bosom and laughed. I was thinking of the Eskimo women I had met on that Greenland expedition. They had stood the cold as well as the men. Looking at Gerda Petersen, I wondered if there wasn’t some Eskimo or Lapland blood in her—she had the flattened face and narrow, fat-creased eyes of the northern Slav. Later I discovered her mother was a Finn from the Aaland Islands.
As we stood there on the deck a boat came across from Tauer III. It was McPhee. Bland had agreed to his transfer. I watched the Chief Engineer of Hval 4 as he climbed down into the boat. It was clear that he didn’t want to leave his own ship. But I’d had to have one officer that I knew. And McPhee was glad to come with me. I could see that in the dour way he said, “Och, ye dinna ha’ to fash yersel’ aboot me leaving me ane engine-room. Ah’ll soon have this ane as smart as the ither.”
At eight thirty-five there was a series of whoops on the factory ship’s siren. The sea boiled under the ugly cavity of her stem. I ordered Half Ahead, and as the engine-room telegraph rang, the deck plates began to vibrate to the rising hum of the engine as we swung into position astern of the Southern Cross. The other ships took up station and the whole fleet, strung out in a long line behind the mother ship, headed south into the ice.
The sky cleared about eleven that night. The sun was almost due south, a flaming yellow ball, its lower edge just above the horizon. A towering iceberg loomed up to starboard, catching the sunlight and flashing fire like an enormous pink diamond. Fragments of ice began to drift past us—tiny “growlers,” almost completely submerged. And ahead of us the loose pack ice stretched like an unending, broken plain of pink straight into the sun. It was an incredible sight.
Gerda, who was standing between Howe and myself on the bridge, caught hold of my arm and said, “It is beautiful, yes? I bet you do not ever see anything so beautiful as this. You are glad we go south?”
I nodded. But I was looking at Howe. I was thinking—He doesn’t see the beauty of it. But he’s exultant. The ice means something else to him. He was standing quite still, his long neck thrust out and his hand clenched on the canvas windbreaker. His face looked almost ferocious. Again I had that sense of being afraid of him—the feeling that I’d had on Tauer III when Bland had ordered him to prepare that report. It was as though the man were part of the destiny of things. After all he was Bernt Nordahl’s son and I remembered Judie saying—Bernt and Walter were very close.
“Howe!” The unconscious peremptoriness of my tone jerked him away from his contemplation of the ice ahead. “That report you did for Bland. Why did you come to the conclusion that we must go south into the Weddell Sea?”
He stared at me for a moment and the corners of his mouth lifted in that sly smile of his. He didn’t attempt to justify his findings with a lot of technicalities. He just shrugged his shoulders and said, “I wanted Bland to go south—that’s all.”
“Why?”
Again the slight shrug. “Why? God knows why. I just wanted him to go south—away from civilisation.”
“But why?” I asked again.
He let go of the windbreaker then and caught hold of my arm in a grip that hurt, it was so violent. “Because if he’s given enough rope—” He stopped there and gave a quick laugh. “Just leave it at that.” And he turned away and went quickly down to the cabin.
“You find Walter a little queer perhaps?” Gerda said with a laugh that sounded unnatural. “Poor man—he has not had an easy life. And he worshipped Bernt Nordahl.”
“And you”—I said—“what did you think of Nordahl?”
“I think he is a big loss to the company—to all of us who work with him. He was a fine man.”
McPhee came up on to the bridge then to discuss a defect in one of the winches and the conversation was never resumed. By midnight, with the sun lipping the southern horizon, we had entered the ice, following a broad lead and steaming south at about ten knots. The lead was more than a mile wide and the water in it looked black by comparison with the shimmering iridescence of the ice on either side. On our port quarter was a large, flat-topped berg. Apart from this we were surrounded by loose pack—a flat expanse of ice tinged with pink and criss-crossed with innumerable black lines that marked the division between one floe and another. And as the sun climbed and circled northwards towards midday, the colours drained out of the scene and the ice became a blinding sheet of white, very painful to the eyes. Even with dark glasses I found it tiring.
There was nothing dangerous about the ice. The weather remained fair and we were able to observe a steady shipboard routine of watch and watch about. Sometimes the lead was so broad we might have been in the open sea but for the glare. At other times it narrowed down to a dark highway winding between occasional icebergs and surrounded by that unending plain of loose pack.
Only once it petered out and then the Southern Cross thrust into the pack, parting the floes in great sheets that layered one on top of the other until we were in a new lead.
Occasionally we sighted whale. Once a big spermacetti came up to blow almost alongside. They were all headed south. There were plenty of the smaller killer whales hunting for seals among the icefloes. One morning a whole string of these ugly brutes passed across our bows. Their high triangular fins stood about five feet out of the water and the whole line of them rose and fell as they cut through the water, blowing steadily. Gerda and Howe were on the bridge with me at the time and she said, “Ugh, those devils!”
“Orca Gladiator,” Howe said. “That’s the official terminology.
“Gladiators!” Gerda’s voice was almost angry. “For once your official terminology, as you call it, is right. That’s exactly what they are—gladiators. Have you ever seen one close to?” she asked me.
I shook my head. “I’ve never seen them before.”
“Well, I do not advise it. Once I see one close to, and it is enough, I think. When he is full grown the killer is perhaps thirty feet long, his mouth is about four feet wide and he has ugly eyes and uglier teeth. I was hunting for seal with my father. It was near Grytviken and we had left our boat and were on a small icefloe. This killer whale, he start snorting and blowing all round us. Then suddenly he push his nose over the edge of the floe and look straight at us. Then he start to turn the floe over with his weight. Fortunately my father have his gun and he shoot. But it is a very near thing and it is a long time before I go for the seal again.” Later I was to remember this story and wish she had never told it to me.
She was, in fact, a mine of information on the Antarctic and she would talk for hours about whales and ships and hunting expeditions on the ice in the same matter-of-fact way that most women would talk about a shopping expedition in Oxford Street. It was she who picked out a sea-leopard for me in the glasses so that I was able to watch the great spotted brute rushing across the ice with an undulating, snake-like movement as it charged a group of seals. She pointed out to me the small Adelie penguins, and one evening she showed me a little group of Emperor penguins clustered on an ice-ledge, where they bowed and chattered to each other with the distant dignity of foreign diplomats at an Embassy social.
The White South Page 13
