Antarctica Escape from Disaster

by Peter Lerangis

  From the port side came a deep watery bellow like the sudden release of a thousand fire hoses.

  Philip was afraid to turn and witness the thing that was now reflected in the eyes of both Colin and his father.

  As he peeked slowly over his shoulder, he saw the flank of a humpback whale submerge, and the beast’s tail slap the surface of the water like a gunshot.

  Part Five

  Desperation

  21

  Jack

  February 9, 1910

  “IT MUST THINK WE’RE a fish!” Colin shouted.

  “It doesn’t think!” Philip shouted. “It’s a beast. It destroys!”

  Jack stood at the bow. The fall onto the gunwale had raised a bloody welt on his head, and it throbbed. His bandage was wet and sticky, and his brain felt three sizes too large.

  He held the broken mast waist-high, waiting for the whale to emerge. If he struck it, it might turn away from the boat and leave them alone. Or it might be angered into fighting back.

  Which?

  In an emergency you asked the right question. Every problem yielded somehow. But a whale was different.

  A whale decided your fate.

  No cleverness, strength, or skill prepared you for its attack. Its victims littered the seafloor. With a shift of its bulk, it could break the hull of a five-masted whaling vessel containing two-score crew. Melville called it the Leviathan, a sea monster conquerable only by God.

  The Horace Putney didn’t stand a chance.

  Colin rowed with powerful strokes, trying to direct the boat away from the beast.

  It was thrashing, kicking up its tail as if the boat had poisoned the water. A plume rose from its back. Water rained down in thick, putrid drops.

  Philip sat staring at it, his oar still.

  “Row, Philip!” Colin shouted.

  The boy was paralyzed. Laying down the mast, Jack took up the oar. He shoved Philip aside and plunged it into the surf.

  “It’s … bleeding,” Philip said.

  “It must have scraped itself on the hull!” Jack replied.

  “No wonder it’s angry!” Colin shouted.

  “No,” Philip said. “That’s not why. It has something in its side.”

  Jack glanced over his shoulder. “What is it?”

  “A harpoon,” Philip said.

  “How can it have a harpoon out here in the middle of—”

  Colin was cut off by a high, screaming sound. A long object burst through the clouds.

  TTHHHHWUCK!

  Jack stopped rowing. “What the —?”

  As the whale dived underwater, it rolled over. One long metal spear pierced its flank, another jutted from below its blowhole.

  “Father!” Colin cried out.

  “You see?” Philip said, leaping to his feet. “We’re saved! Ho, there! Whalermen!”

  “Sit down!” Colin admonished.

  SHHHHINNNG!

  Another harpoon whizzed over the deck of the Horace Putney, narrowly missing Philip.

  Philip dropped to the deck. “Just call me Moby.”

  “They don’t see us!” Jack exclaimed.

  “We can’t survive this far to be speared like animals!” Philip shrieked.

  Colin crawled under the deck and came back with a hurricane lamp, filled with seal blubber.

  Jack pulled the box of matches from his pocket. Only two left. No time to cut these in half.

  He cupped his hand around the match. Colin put a hand overhead as an umbrella. Jack struck the match and held it to the wick.

  It blew out.

  One left.

  “Philip, help!” Jack commanded.

  Philip removed his coat. He huddled with Colin and Jack, holding the coat over their heads.

  Light. Please. Please, Lord, don’t let this blow out.

  He struck again. The match flared.

  A gust of wind sneaked under the coat, and the flame blew sideways.

  Colin and Philip squeezed closer to Jack, blocking the wind.

  Jack thrust the flickering match into the lamp.

  It went out again.

  But slowly, the seal blubber began to glow. As Colin slammed down the glass housing, the flame rose. And danced.

  Colin held it high.

  “H-O-O-O-O-O-O-O.’” the three bellowed.

  The whale rose again from the depths. Closer now.

  TTHHHHHWUCK!

  A fourth harpoon grazed its side, opening a long gash. Blood sprayed into the foam. The whale was enraged, desperate. Like a stuck bull, it snorted and heaved its bulk high into the air.

  It crashed down beside the Horace Putney, sending up a tremendous wake.

  The boat’s port side lifted upward. Jack, Colin, and Philip fell to starboard. The lamp flew out of Colin’s hand and into the sea.

  All three grabbed onto the boat’s frame and, held on as the whale slammed against the keel, shattering it. Jack felt his fingers slip. He heard Philip shriek. He turned to look for his son, but his back hit the water and he sank fast.

  He tried to swim upward but the shock immobilized him. He saw pieces of boat fall around him in slow motion.

  Colin. Where was Colin?

  He kicked. He swept his arms down to his side and rose. He thought of the word shock — quick, percussive—it really wasn’t like that, was it? It overwhelmed you head to toe then

  gradually took away

  all

  your

  energy.

  Jack burst above the surface. The two boys were alive. Next to him. They were young. They had a fighting chance. Maybe.

  He tried to say good-bye but he had no strength.

  Through his heavy eyelids he saw a gargantuan gray shadow come toward them out of the fog.

  22

  Nigel

  February 9, 1910

  NIGEL WAS AT THE end of the tie-line — the last person of the team, pushing the stem of the Raina over the ice.

  It was the worst place to be when every man’s stomach jittered like a pricked balloon on account of severe gas pains brought about by hunger.

  The snow blew in his face so hard that it left pockmarks on his goggles. The wind felt as if it were scraping his cheeks to the bone. His fingers, because they no longer had meat on them, chafed inside thick gloves. His sweat tasted funny, like a medicine, which anyone knew was a sign your body was breaking down. The ice under his boots still looked thin, which meant the team had a long way to go. There wasn’t a seal or penguin in sight. Nigel’s stomach was convulsing.

  And on top of all of it was the smell.

  It was a bloody torture of all five senses.

  “Gen’l’men, kindly refrain from coupin’ le fromage, if you catch me driftwood,” Nigel said. “It breaks me consecration.”

  “Drift,” Siegal corrected.

  “Concentration,” muttered Robert.

  “I don’t care wha’ you call it!” Nigel shot back. “Drift, concentration, crepitation, flatus, cheese cuttin’, wind breakin’, gas warfare — a fart’s a fart. Now just stop it.”

  One or two of the traitors were laughing. It took a lot to laugh while you were face into a blizzard, pushing a loaded boat across old, bumpy ice. It took a bloody good joke.

  Nigel was not joking.

  Everyone was sick. Brillman had scurvy. Probably Oppenheim and Petard, too. Nigel had seen it happen to a hundred sailors. It was nothing a little warmth, relaxation, and fresh lemons couldn’t cure.

  They were dead men.

  Nigel was a dead man. And Andrew and Barth and the entire crew. None of them wanted to say it, but they couldn’t stop him from thinking it. It was lunatic to be moving into the ice. Even the mightiest seagoing fleet with a crew of thousands could never actually find them here. The idea that they could have met Slappy— or whatever that American mapmaker was called — was absurd. And as for the other two boats — well, if they’d been able to return, they would have. Jack would have seen to it.

  They were dead, too.
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  Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.

  The snow fell like bullets now. The wind screeched, mocking them, mocking their clothing — informing them, Sorry, they’d overstayed their welcome and must be eliminated.

  Barth was calling out. “Stay together! I can’t see you — count off!”

  Nigel called out his name along with the others, but his voice no longer came from himself. It came from another man, a blighter he’d once known, a fool who had the dunderheaded idea to hide in the storage hold of a barquentine for what he figured would be room, board, and a little adventure.

  That man was fading away.

  Soon Nigel’s fingers slipped from the boat and his legs stopped.

  Someone called to him but he didn’t move. His tie-line, slack at first, grew taut.

  The roar came at him like a solid thing, louder than the wind. He’d never heard it before, but he knew what it was. He had expected to find it here eventually. No one believed him. Lucky souls. It only sought out the ones who believed.

  Now Nigel felt five sharp pulls on his line. Come along.

  He reached into his trouser pocket, pulled out his pocketknife, and cut himself loose.

  He was free.

  The yeti summoned. You could resist its call, they said. But you always gave in.

  The howl came from all directions but he knew its source. He walked into the blizzard — but he felt his body growing slowly warmer. Such was its power, they said. It drew heat from the cold and flesh from ice. They said.

  After a long time he came upon footsteps, large footsteps. As he followed, the snow blew over the prints. In a moment no one would be able to tell a soul had been there.

  The footsteps circled around the side of a ridge. They ended at the mouth of a cave.

  The roar beckoned. The beast would be satisfied.

  Nigel walked into the cave.

  The snow rushed in behind him.

  23

  Colin

  February 9, 1910

  BLIND.

  He was blind. He couldn’t see a thing, couldn’t feel (the whale, where was the whale?) because the water was hungry; first it sucked the heat from him and then it went after his life. “F — fahh — ther!” he cried out. “Ah — I ca — nn’t —”

  The darkness lifted. He saw shadows, foam. Whitecaps. Two shapes.

  Philip, flailing.

  Father, going under.

  His fingers closed around his father’s shirt and he pulled.

  Philip tried to swim toward them. He was blue. His eyes were strangely wide and luminous, as if the lids had been peeled away. Reaching out weakly, he too tried to hold up Father.

  “S-Save … yourselves,” Father said.

  “W-We do this t-together, Father.” Saltwater rushed into Colin’s mouth. He was sinking, losing his senses. “Ph — ilip?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks.”

  “For —?”

  “S-Saving our lives. For … rowing out of … the m-m-maelstrom.”

  There. Colin had owed him that.

  Behind Philip’s head, the gray shape loomed toward them.

  Colin felt no fear. It was time.

  He prayed silently that the water would take them before the whale did. That they would be claimed by the sea, the way Mother had been claimed.

  But the shape was gaining steadily.

  As the fog rolled aside, Colin saw it clearly.

  It was not a whale.

  It was a prow.

  “C-Colin … ?” Philip coughed.

  A good high one, fanning back to outline a broad beam.

  The hull was encrusted with barnacles and smeared with blood. Five stout square-rigged masts emerged from the fog, interlaced with staysails. Attached to the ship’s bowsprit was a figurehead, a wooden statue of a mermaid. Two towering metal winches hunched over gunwales laden with long rowboats, racks of spears, and harpoons. Along the bow, peeling gold-and-green letters spelled out the name NOBADEER.

  A whaling ship, full-tilt after a catch.

  “H-H-Help —” Philip sputtered.

  Colin tried to cry out, but his voice was frozen.

  The ship’s crew stood at the port bow, facing away from Colin and Philip, searching the seas ahead. As the bow cut swiftly through the water, it smashed through the floating remnants of the Horace Putney.

  The water closed around Colin like a fist (why, Lord) and he realized he would die within hailing distance of a ship that by all odds shouldn’t be here, and whose disappearance meant the certain death of the entire expedition.

  “W-W-W —” Father said.

  “What?”

  “WAVE!”

  Colin raised an arm limply. The beam of the Nobadeer glided past them now, sending a powerful wake.

  “C-Col— lin —” Philip said. “Look. Up.”

  As they rose on the wake, Colin saw over the starboard gunwale. The men were swarming the masts, pulling at halyards, slackening the sails.

  The ship was losing speed.

  One by one, sailors in striped shirts gathered at the port rail like sparrows on a telephone wire. They waved and pointed, shouting incoherently.

  A lifeboat began to swing, and then it slowly descended. Over the side peered two men, goggle-eyed with surprise, as if having suddenly come upon flamingos. One had a robust red beard and the other was clean-shaven and craggy-faced. Both were enormous fellows, burly and well fed. Colin had forgotten that men could be that big.

  “Ahoy! Cavortin with the merpeople, are ye?” called Red Beard.

  “Oh, no, a Br —Briton!” Philip’s eyes rolled upward and he sank.

  The lifeboat splashed down. The men immediately rowed toward Philip with powerful synchronized strokes.

  “Up ye go, matey!” Crag Face reached into the water, fished out Philip, and plopped him roughly in the boat. “All right, the old man next!”

  Father was too weak to reach upward.

  “Didn’t eat our sausage this morning, did we?” Red Face said, yanking Father on board, and then Colin.

  Colin fell to the floor of the ship. Father was immobile but breathing. Philip was blue.

  “Shall we take the lift, Mr. Harkness?” asked Crag Face.

  “Yes, indeed, Mr. Bardsley,” Red Beard answered.

  They hung onto Colin’s words and asked him to repeat himself constantly. They interrupted his tale with shouts of “Garn!” and “Bloody ’ell!” and “Good God!” and other more colorful phrases that made even Colin blush.

  The sailors’ quarters, the fo’c’sle, was small and warm and cramped, and it stank of fish and whale meat. Colin felt he could live here forever.

  Father was sitting on a wooden stool, sipping strong tea. He wore a black wool watch cap on his head and two thick blankets around his torso and legs. His feet were nestled in a metal pail of hot water.

  Philip lay passed out on a cot.

  “So, let me ’ear ye straight,” Harkness said. “Y’say the mutiny come after the return of the South Pole team —”

  “And then the ship sunk,” Bardsley added, “and then come the trek across ice — and the whirlpool —”

  Colin could hardly believe the story himself. It had the pace and the outlandishness of an oft-told fairy tale, and he felt as if he were back home, outside the school, trading stories with his friends. He sipped his tea and tried not to burst out laughing. “Yes. Then Philip rowed us out — somehow — all by himself. He saved our lives.”

  “Just in time for the whale,” Bardsley said.

  “And the rescue by yours trulies,” Harkness added.

  “But yer shipmates is stranded in some cove south-by-southwest,” Bardsley said, “and ’alf yer crew’s back in the Ross Sea, if they’re still alive.”

  “Yes,” Colin said, lifting the cup to his lips.

  “And if you could help,” Father said, “we’d be sure the United States government found out about your deed.”

  They were silent. Staring at Father un
comprehendingly.

  “Yer ain’t serious, are ye?” asked Bardsley.

  “Ye’re pulling our leg,” said another sailor. “Like, maybe ye was just out ’ere a-fishin’?”

  Harkness exploded with laughter, sending a spray of Assam tea across the room.

  A good part of it landed on Philip. He woke up with a start. “Oh! Oh bloody yes, take me already! How many times must I put up with these confessions —”

  Philip blinked. He swallowed his words and looked around, the tea dripping off his brow and onto his lips. “Oh. Hello. Is it teatime?”

  Bardsley belched a laugh. And now all the sailors joined in, doubling over, slapping one another’s backs, snorting and spitting and stomping their feet until Colin began to worry about the decking.

  “I have seen the underworld,” Philip murmured, “and it looks and smells like a fo’c’sle.”

  “Ye three ain’t exac’ly gardenias yerselves,” Bardsley grumbled.

  “Colin ’ere tells us you’re a ’ero,” Harkness said, wiping his brow.

  “You’re — British, aren’t you?” Philip said.

  “English,” Harkness said proudly. “Me accent give it away?”

  “Do you … happen to know who I am?”

  Harkness leaned in. The laughter had died down and now every man joined in examining Philip’s face.

  “Yeah …” Harkness said, his eyes widening. “Yeah!”

  Philip moaned. “Oh, I knew it …”

  “Blimey, lads!” Harkness slapped his forehead. “We were supposed to bag us a whale. And ’ere we go pickin’ up the Prince of Wales!”

  “Hooo-haaahahah!” Bardsley bellowed, setting off another round of laughter.

  “WHO LET THE MONKEYS ON THE SHIP?”

  The voice cut through the noise.

  All laughter ceased. Polished black leather boots stomped down onto the ladder, followed by a cape made of thick, boiled wool with a brocaded edge. A golden scabbard clanked loudly on silk breeches as the man descended.

  At bottom he turned to face the men. He resembled an old pirate king, still stuck in the nineteenth century. His eyes were coal-black, floating in the shadow of a heavy brow, and a long mane of silver-black hair streamed thickly beneath a beaver-skin hat. His nose’s journey from forehead to lip had been detoured at least three times, and a long scar under his right eye locked a permanent lopsided grimace onto his face.