The North Water(8)
The beggar is wearing a grimy and shapeless tam-o’-shanter patchworked from the broken remnants of numerous pieces of older and finer headgear.
“I was in India,” Sumner says.
“Ask anyone around here about the Percival,” the beggar says. “Just say the word Percival and see what comes back.”
“So tell me then,” Sumner says.
The beggar pauses a moment before beginning, as if to better measure the hilarious breadth of Sumner’s naivety.
“Crushed to matchwood by a berg,” he says. “Three years ago now. Its holds were filled up with blubber at the time and they didn’t rescue even one single barrel of it. Not a scrap. Eight men drownded and ten more perished of the cold, and none of those that lived made even sixpunce.”
“Sounds like a misfortune. It could happen to anyone.”
“It happened to Brownlee though, no one else. And a captain that fucking unfortunate doesn’t often get another ship.”
“Baxter must trust him.”
“Baxter’s fucking deep. That’s all I’ll say about fucking Baxter. Deep is what Baxter is.”
Sumner shrugs and looks up at the moon.
“What happened to your legs?” he asks.
The beggar looks down and frowns as though surprised to find them gone.
“You ask Captain Brownlee about that one,” he says. “You tell him Ort Caper sent you. You tell him we was counting up my legs together one fine evening and there seemed to be a couple of ’em missing. See what he says about that one.”
“Why would I ask him that?”
“Because you wouldn’t hardly believe the truth of it coming from a man like me, you’d likely write it off as the ravings of a loon, but Brownlee knows the bloody truth of it as well as me. You ask him what happened on the Percival. Tell him Ort Caper sends his best regards. See what that does to his digestion.”
Sumner takes a coin from his pocket and drops it into the beggar’s outstretched hand.
“Ort Caper’s the name,” the beggar shouts after him. “Ask Brownlee what happened to my fucking legs.”
*
Farther on, he begins to smell the Queen’s Dock—its sour, bathetic pong, like meat about to turn. In the gaps between warehouses, between the piled-up planking of timber yards, he can see the tin-cut silhouetted line of whaling ships and sloops. It is past midnight now and the streets are quieter—some muted sounds of drinking from the dockside taverns, the Penny Bank, the Seaman’s Molly, now and then the noise of an empty hackney carriage or the grumble of a dustcart. The stars have swiveled, the swollen moon is half-hidden behind a bank of nickel-plated cloud; Sumner can see the Volunteer, broad-waisted, dark and thick with rigging, a little farther down the dock. There is no one walking about the deck, at least no one he can see, so the loading must be complete. They are only waiting for the tide now, and for the steam tug to pull them out into the Humber.
His mind moves to the northern ice fields, and the great wonders he will no doubt see there—the unicorn and sea leopard, the walrus and the albatross, the Arctic petrel and the polar bear. He thinks about the great right whales lying bunched in pods like leaden storm clouds beneath the silent sheets of ice. He will make charcoal sketches of them all, he decides, paint watercolor landscapes, keep a journal possibly. And why not? He will have plenty of time on his hands, Brownlee made that plain enough. He will read widely (he has brought his dog-eared Homer); he will practice his disused Greek. Why the fuck not? He will have precious little else to do—doling out purgatives now and then, occasionally certifying the dead, but apart from that it will be a kind of holiday. Baxter implied as much anyway. Implied that the surgeon’s job on a whaler was a legal nicety, a requirement to be met, but in practice there was bugger all to do—hence the risible wages, of course. So, yes, he thinks, he will read and write, he will sleep, he will make conversation with the captain when called upon. By and large it will be an easeful, perhaps a mildly tedious, sort of time, but God knows that is what he needs after the madness of India: the filthy heat, the barbarity, the stench. Whatever the Greenland whaling is like, he thinks, it will surely not be anything like that.
CHAPTER THREE
“The wind’s picking up now,” Baxter says. “I wager you’ll make good time to Lerwick.”
Brownlee leans against the wheelhouse and launches a gob of green phlegm over the taffrail and into the broad brown murk of the Humber. To north and south a scanty shoreline welds the rusted steel of estuary and sky. Ahead, the steam tug chunters flatly onwards, gulls bouncing and water broiling in its wake.
“I truly cannot wait to see what gaggle of shitheads you’ve got waiting for me in Lerwick,” Brownlee says.
Baxter smiles.
“All good men,” he says. “All true Shetlanders: hard workers, eager, biddable.”
“You know I aim to fill the main hold when we reach the North Water,” Brownlee says.
“Fill it with what exactly?”
“With blubber.”
Baxter shakes his head.
“You don’t need to prove yourself to me, Arthur,” he says. “I know what you are.”
“I’m a whaling man.”
“You are, indeed, and a damned fine one. The problem we have is not you, Arthur, and it’s not me either: the problem we have is history. Thirty years ago any half-wit with a boat and a harpoon could get rich. You remember that. You remember the Aurora in ’twenty-eight? It was back by June—fucking June—and with stacks of whalebone as high as my head lashed onto the gunwales. I’m not saying it was easy then, it was never easy, as you know. But it could be done. Now you need—what?—a two-hundred-horsepower steam engine, harpoon guns, and a lot of luck. And even then, odds are you’ll come back clean as a whistle.”