The North Water(13)
“Hindoo loot from Delhi,” Cavendish says. “The lying bastard. But why not sell it on?”
“Just in case,” Drax explains, as if the answer is obvious. “He thinks it makes him safer.”
Cavendish laughs and shakes his head in amazement at the folly of such a notion.
“A whaling voyage is full of dangers,” he says. “A few unfortunates amongst us will not get home alive. That’s a simple fact.”
Drax nods and Cavendish continues: “And if ever a man perishes while on board, of course, it is the appointed task of the first mate to auction off his possessions for the sake of the poor widow. Am I wrong?”
Drax shakes his head.
“You’re right,” he says. “But not yet. Not in Lerwick.”
“Fuck no. Not yet. I don’t mean yet.”
Drax puts the ring and the discharge papers back in the envelope. He puts the envelope back into the bottom of the trunk and arranges the rest of the contents over it just as before. He closes the padlock with a click and pushes the trunk back under the bed.
“Don’t forget the keys,” Cavendish tells him.
Drax returns the keys to Sumner’s waistcoat pocket and the two men step out of the cabin into the companionway. They pause a moment before parting.
“Do you think Brownlee knows?” Cavendish says.
Drax shakes his head.
“No one knows but us,” he says. “Just thee and me.”
CHAPTER FIVE
They sail north from Lerwick through long days of fog and sleet and bitter wind, days without ease or letup, when the sea and sky meld together into a damp weft of roiling and impermeable grayness. Sumner stays in his cabin puking incessantly, unable to read or write, wondering what he has done to himself. Twice they are hit by gales from the east. The cables screech, and the ship slumps and pitches amidst the seething hillocks of an adamantine sea. On the eleventh day the weather settles and they encounter sea ice: shallow, disconnected blocks of it several yards across rising and falling on the moderated swell. The air is newly cold, but the sky is clearing and they can make out in the far distance the white volcanic nub of Jan Mayen Island. The slop bags are heaved on deck and gunpowder, percussion caps, and rifles are given out. The crew begin molding bullets and sharpening their knives in preparation for the sealing. Two days later, they see the main seal pack for the first time, and at dawn the next day the boats are lowered.
Out on the ice, Drax works alone, moving back and forth, patient and relentless, from one group to the next, shooting and clubbing as he goes. The young ones shriek at him and try to waddle away but are too slow and stupid to escape. The older ones he puts a bullet in. When he has killed a seal, he turns it over, cuts round the hind flippers, then slashes it open from the neck to the genitals. He pushes the edge of his knife into the gap between the meat and the blubber and begins to cut and prize away the outer layers. When he is finished, he hooks the severed skin onto a line for dragging and leaves the blood-sodden and meat-streaked krang, like a gruesome afterbirth on the snow, to be pecked at by gulls or eaten by bear cubs. After hours of this, the ice pack is as spattered and filthy as a butcher’s apron, and each of the five whaleboats is laden with a reeking pile of sealskins. Brownlee signals the men back. Drax hauls his last load, stretches himself, then leans and dips his flensing knife and club in the salt water to rinse off the accumulated gobs of blood and brain matter.
As they are winched on board in dripping bunches, Brownlee counts the sealskins and calculates their value. Four hundred skins will yield up nine tons of oil, he estimates, and each ton at market will bring in, with luck, some forty pounds. They have made a good beginning but must press on. The seal pack is beginning to divide and scatter, and there is a small flotilla of other whaling ships, Dutch, Norwegian, Scotch, and English, gathered at wide intervals along the floe edge, all competing for pieces of the same prize. Before the light fails, he ascends the crow’s nest with a telescope and decides on the most promising spot for the next day’s hunt. The pack is unusually large this year and the ice, though uneven and thin in places, is still navigable. Fifty tons would be within his grasp if he had a passable crew and, even with the slender bunch of shitwicks he has been given by Baxter, he believes he can net thirty easily, possibly thirty-five. He will send another boat out tomorrow, he decides, a sixth boat. Any cunt who’s breathing and can hold a rifle will be out there killing seals.
It is light at four, and they lower the boats again. Sumner is sitting in the sixth boat with Cavendish, the steward, the cabin boy, and several of the more persistent malingerers. There is eighteen degrees of frost outside, it is blowing a light breeze, and the sea is the color and consistency of London slush. Sumner, who fears frostbite, is wearing his Ulan cap and a knitted muffler. He is holding his rifle clamped between his knees. After rowing southeast for a half hour, they see a dark patch of seals off in the middle distance. They anchor the boat to the ice and disembark. Cavendish, whistling “The Lass of Richmond Hill,” leads the way and the rest follow after him in a straggly single file. When they get within sixty yards of the seals, they spread out and commence shooting. They kill three adult seals and club to death six infants, but the rest escape unharmed. Cavendish spits and reloads his rifle, then climbs to the top of a pressure ridge and looks around.
“Over there,” he shouts out to the others, pointing off in different directions, “over there, and over there.”