The North Water(30)
They bore two holes in the tail and secure the dead whale to the bow of Cavendish’s boat. They lash the fins together, retrieve and coil the whale lines, and then begin to tow the corpse back to the ship. As they row, they sing. Sumner, descended to the deck, hears their voices coming across the water, tuneful, gruff, carried by the cool damp wind. “Randy Dandy-O” and “Leave Her Johnny.” Three dozen men in unison. He feels again, and almost against his will this time, that he is part of something larger and more powerful than himself, a joint endeavor. Turning away, he notices Joseph Hannah standing by the fore hatch talking happily with the other cabin boys. They are reenacting the recent kill; they are throwing imaginary harpoons, plying imaginary lances. One is Drax, one is Otto, one is Cavendish.
“How are you, Joseph?” he asks him.
The boy looks back at him blankly, as if they have not met before.
“I’m well, sir,” he answers. “Thankee.”
“You must come to my cabin again tonight for your pill,” he reminds him.
The boy nods glumly.
What has the boy told his friends about his injuries? Sumner wonders. Has he made up some story, or do they know the truth? It strikes him that he should question the other boys also. He should examine them too. What if they have suffered in the same way? What if the secret is not Joseph’s alone but is something they share amongst them?
“You two,” he says, pointing to the other boys. “After supper you come to my cabin with Joseph. I want to ask you some questions.”
“I am on the watch, sir,” one of them says.
“Then tell the watch commander that the surgeon, Mr. Sumner, has asked to speak to you. He will understand.”
The boy nods. All three of them, he can see, wish he would now leave them alone. The game is still vivid in their minds, and his is the voice of dullness and authority.
“Go back to your pleasures now,” he tells them. “I will see the three of you after supper.”
The whale’s right fin is lashed onto the larboard gunwale with its head facing sternwards. Its dead eye, not much larger than a cow’s, peers blindly upwards at the shuffling clouds. Strong lines are secured to the nose end and rump, and its belly is heaved a foot or so out of the water by means of a block attached to the mainmast and a rope hooked onto the whale’s neck area and brought to tension through the windlass. Brownlee, after measuring the corpse’s length with a knotted line, estimates it will yield up ten tons of oil and half a ton or more of whalebone—a value of close to nine hundred pounds at market, if prices hold firm.
“We may yet be rich, Mr. Sumner,” he says with a wink.
After resting and taking a drink, Otto and Black strap iron crampons to their sea boots for grip and climb down onto the whale’s belly. They carve out strips of blubber with long-handled knives and chisel off the baleen and the jaws. They cut off the tail and the fins, and then remove the nose and rump tackles and allow the dilapidated purple carcass that remains to sink under its own weight or be eaten by sharks. The flensing takes four hours in all and is accompanied throughout by the stench of grease and blood, and the endless cawing of fulmars and other carrion birds. When it is over—when the blocks of blubber are stowed in the flens-gut, the deck is scoured a dull white, and the knives and spades are rinsed clean and put away—Brownlee orders an extra ration of rum for each sailor. There are cheers from the forecastle at the news, and, only a little later, the sound of a Scottish fiddle and the thump and cry of men dancing jigs.
Neither Joseph Hannah nor his friends appear, as they were bidden, at Sumner’s cabin after supper. Sumner wonders whether to search them out in the forecastle, but then decides against it. There is nothing that can’t wait until the morning and, in truth, Joseph’s simpleton wretchedness is beginning to gall him. The boy is a hopeless case, he thinks: feebleminded, a congenital liar according to Drax, prone no doubt to hereditary disease (both mental and corporeal) of every kind. Evidence suggests he is the victim of a crime, but he will not name his abuser, will not even admit that he has been abused—perhaps he has forgotten who it was, perhaps it was too dark to see, or perhaps he does not think of it as a crime at all but as something else instead? Sumner tries to imagine inhabiting the mind of a boy like that, tries to grasp what it would feel like to see the world through Joseph Hannah’s sunken, shifting, squirrel eyes, but the effort seems both absurd and faintly terrifying—like a nightmare of being transformed into a cloud or a tree. He shudders briefly at the thought of such Ovidian transformations, then, with relief, reopens The Iliad and reaches into his coat pocket for the small brass key that commands the medicine chest.
The next day, two more whales are killed and flensed. Sumner, since he is otherwise unoccupied, is given a pick haak and a long leather apron. Once the strips of blubber have been hauled on board ship and cut up into foot-square blocks, it is the surgeon’s newly appointed task to take the blocks from the foredeck to the hold and pitch them down to the men working below, who will store them in the flens-gut until the time comes for making off. It is dirty and exhausting work. Each block of blubber weighs twenty pounds or more and the ship’s deck is soon slick with blood and grease. He slips several times, almost topples into the hold on one occasion but is saved by Otto, and ends the day bruised and aching but with a sense nonetheless of rare satisfaction: the crude, physical pleasure of a task accomplished, of the body tested and proved. He sleeps for once without the aid of laudanum, and in the morning, despite the ungodly stiffness in his shoulders, neck, and arms, breakfasts well on barley porridge and salt fish.