Isvik Page 27

  Heads turned abruptly to stare upwards, towards the upper steering position. I rushed out of the wheelhouse, already guessing what I would see. It was Ángel Connor-Gómez standing there with his .22 laid across his arm, a thin wisp of smoke curling out of the barrel, and he was smiling down at us, pleased at the effect his action had had.

  ‘You bastard!’ I said, instinctively choosing the one word that I knew got through to him. ‘Don’t you realise –?’

  ‘I know the legend, yes.’ His smile broadened. ‘But see, I don’t kill the bird. I only wing him. In the joint.’

  ‘Why?’

  He shrugged. ‘Why not? It is to prove my shooting is still good and the gun accurate.’

  ‘You could have used something else for a target.’

  ‘It was following us.’

  Nobody said anything then, all of us staring up at him. ‘What do you mean?’ somebody breathed.

  ‘Nobody, nothing, not even a bird follows me.’ He said it so quietly I barely heard him. ‘Not where I am going.’

  Was he mad? His gaze had shifted to the horizon, a far-away look in his eyes. South Georgia had disappeared and the sun blazed a golden glitter across the waves. I looked astern, but the albatross was lost to sight. Andy turned away. To him it was just a bird, nothing more. But for Go-Go it was different, her eyes staring blankly at nothing and tears welling up as though somewhere in the recesses of her partly Aborigine mind she saw it as a manifestation of the Dreamtime.

  That little episode seemed to epitomise the whole nature of the man. But when I said that to Iain, he just shrugged. ‘One shot, a crippled bird and he had yer attention, everybody gawpin’ at him. Aye.’ He nodded slowly, then turned away. ‘He likes an audience,’ he muttered as he headed back down to his cubicle.

  Late that evening I think we must have crossed the Antarctic Convergence, the line where the surface layer of cold polar water dips below the warmer waters to the north. The sea became very confused and there was a sharp drop in temperature accompanied by an increase in both cloud and wind. By evening the Satnav positions indicated a 2-knot drift to the north-east, and the following morning, when we were midway between South Georgia and the South Orkneys, we were into the cause of that drift current, the south-westerly gales that blow almost continuously from the horn-like peninsula of Graham Land.

  For the better part of three days we had a wild, broad-reaching run. Conditions were so bad at one point that we were almost broaching on the breaking crests and in danger of a knock-down. If the crew had been stronger I think I might have put a sea anchor out and hove-to under bare poles. She was going so fast at times it seemed she might pitch-pole end over end, for every so often a real giant of a wave would rear up like a mountain on our starb’d quarter.

  Down below, of course, it was chaos, everything that could break loose flying all over the place, and Carlos as well as Andy so sick they were useless, Andy in particular retching his guts out with nothing more to bring up, just black bile, so that I feared for his lungs and the walls of his stomach. Fortunately Go-Go had a natural balance that enabled her to adjust very quickly to the unpredictability of the boat’s movements. She was the one person who seemed totally unaffected by the swoops and jerks, the poundings, the crash of the bows, the roar of the water and the constant, high-pitched, demoniac sound of the wind tearing through the rigging. All the rest of us were affected to some degree, and in the circumstances, I soon learned who I could rely on in an emergency. Nils was like a rock, steering the boat through the worst of the seas hour after hour. Ángel slept through it all. At least, he kept to his bunk, firmly strapped in, but his breathing and his colour were normal and whenever I looked in on him he would open an eye. But he didn’t say anything, and I had the feeling he was still resenting my having called him a bastard.

  Iain also kept to his bunk, his face drained of blood and feeling the cold so badly that his body shivered uncontrollably. Twice I saw Iris get up and make him a hot drink. She hadn’t a cast-iron stomach, but she had the will to force herself to wedge her body into the galley and produce mugs of soup for us and thick wodges of coarse brown bread spread with Marmite.

  In those three days I learned a lot about the people I was sailing with, their good and their bad points, their weaknesses and their inner strengths. Gradually I realised we were moving out of the area where great mountains of water spilling white crests reared up behind us to come crashing down on our stern. The wave trains were still there, but the rogues were gone. I had altered course the previous day to the south-east and we were no longer getting the full weight of the wind roaring untrammelled round the southern globe; we were coming under the lee of the land and the attendant pack ice. It was bitterly cold.

  As conditions quietened, the strain eased, and with miraculous speed our bodies recovered. Suddenly there was energy and warmth in the big central saloon-cum-galley, everybody in good humour and looking to the future, to the moment when we should close the pack and the seas would be diminished by the weight of it. The clouds lifted and the sun came out.

  We were then right in the centre of the triangle formed by South Georgia, the South Orkneys and the Sandwich Group. Gradually I had been altering course further to the south so that we were now headed straight down into the Weddell Sea. It had been a fast run so far, and with the sunshine and the lengthening days there was an undercurrent of excitement and anticipation on board. Or am I writing that because it was the way I felt?

  Forgotten now was the impersonal way I had been fired from my job, the months I had spent trying to build up a business of my own. All I could think of was the ice getting nearer and that lost ship, the mystery of it, the loneliness. We were broad-reaching at 9 knots in force 5, the bow wave sparkling in the sun, and there were whales, three of them dipping and spouting across our wake. Birds, too – petrel, terns, a solitary sooty albatross.

  Next morning, as the sun lifted off the horizon, we caught the first glint of the iceblink, a pale translucence reflected in an overcast sky far to the south and south-west. Nils produced akavit from his own secret store and we stood out on deck, with the night’s coating of ice dripping from the rigging, and drank a toast to the unknown ahead. None of us had any experience of pack ice, so the excitement of seeing it mirrored there, just below the southern horizon, was tinged with the sense of danger ahead. Ángel, I noticed, was the only one of us whose face did not show some reflection of the excitement I was feeling. Instead, he stood there, the drink in his hand, his gaze fixed on a point somewhere off the starb’d bow. His teeth seemed set, his lips a tight line, and there was something in his expression – fear, desperation, a steeling of the heart against things out there that had to be faced? I couldn’t tell. But it has stayed in my mind that just for that moment he was a changed man. He looked older, less sure of himself. But it was only for a moment, then the mood was gone and he lifted his drink, knocking it back in one gulp. He must have sensed I was watching him, for suddenly he was looking straight at me, his eyes narrowed. ‘You are wondering – what? How we face the ice!’ He smiled. ‘We see what that does to us, eh?’

  There was something in the way he had smiled that sent a cold shiver of fear down into my stomach. Why was he here? Why was he so anxious to reach the ship? Those, and other questions, rattled round my head as I lay in my bunk that night, listening to the sound of water against the hull, so close to my ear, to the creaks and groans, the frapping of ropes against the mast, the occasional slat of a sail. And what was I doing here? Why hadn’t I gone back home while I had the chance? It was crazy, lying here, frightening myself with wild imaginings, images of Flying Dutchmen and Marie Celestes flitting through my tired brain, and all the time thinking of Ángel and the dilapidated rows of huts just back of where I had found him waiting for me.

  And in the morning Iain got him into the wheelhouse, stood him in front of the chart and said, ‘Now then, Mr Connor-Gómez – where is it? Ye say ye know the position, that it’s in the ice in the Wedd
ell Sea and when we’re down there ye’ll give us the co-ordinates. Well, we’re in the Weddell Sea now and there’s the ice, so the time has come fur ye to show us where it is on the chart.’

  At first he said we must wait until we were actually in the ice. He’d have to see what the rate of drift was. ‘I know where I saw her, but that was almost eighteen months ago. The ice will have carried her to the north since then.’ How far he didn’t know. ‘There is a northerly drift on the west side of the Weddell Sea. Your man, Shackleton, in his Endurance drifted over four hundred miles in nine months. That is a daily drift rate of about one and a half miles. But this is an unusual year. I don’t know what the drift rate will have been.’

  Iain accepted that. The man had done his homework and couldn’t be expected to pinpoint the position of the ship now. ‘Aye, well – let’s go back to that test flight of yers when ye actually saw her. Ye mark in that position on the chart and we’ll take it from there.’

  Ángel hesitated. But in the end he gave in with a little shrug. He didn’t have to refer to a notebook. He had the co-ordinates in his head and using the big perspex ruler he marked in a little cross at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. And when Iain said immediately that it was quite a way to the west of where the Endurance was beset, I realised that Ángel wasn’t the only one who had done his homework. ‘Eighteen months, ye say.’ Iain reached up to the bookcase and pulled out Shackleton’s South, turning immediately to the map at the end which showed the drift of the Endurance. ‘If yer vessel experienced the same sort of northerly drift, then by now she would be free of the ice and somewhere off Graham Land.’

  ‘Or grounded on the coast,’ Ángel said.

  ‘Aye. Or crushed by one of the bergs breakin’ off from the Ronne Ice Shelf.’ He pronounced it ‘Ronnay’. ‘Or wrecked, or sunk,’ he added, ‘or just crushed to pieces by the layerin’ of the pack. So, just how dae ye propose to find her?’

  Silence then and Ángel standing there, head in hand, staring down at the chart, deep in thought.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You leave it to me. I will find it.’

  ‘But how, man – how?’

  ‘That is my problem.’

  ‘But ye’ll find her, ye’re sure of that?’

  And when Ángel nodded, Iris chipped in with the question that was on the tip of my own tongue, ‘You know where it is, don’t you? That’s what you told me.’

  He hesitated, then suddenly turned on his heel and walked out on to the deck, Iris calling after him, ‘If you know, why don’t you tell us?’ The sliding door slammed shut and she turned to Iain. ‘What do you think? Does he know, or is he just leading us on, playing some sort of game?’

  Iain shrugged. ‘Yer guess is as good as mine, m’dear, but if he does know, then it can mean only one thing, the wreck is in a fixed position, held in ice that’s grounded against the coast. That right?’ He turned to me. ‘D’ye agree that if he knows where it is he must be damned sure the ice that’s holdin’ it isn’t driftin’?’

  I nodded, and he added, ‘And if it’s not driftin’, then it’s bein’ held by somethin’, and that can only be the shoreline. Ye agree?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He turned back to Iris. ‘So, we wait and watch. Keep yer eye on him, both of ye.’

  IV

  ON ICE

  ONE

  We entered the pack on the second day of the New Year in the company of two humpback whales. We were then under fore-and-aft rig, having handed our running gear and lashed the yards along the gunn’ls. Sailing south now and well over to the eastern side of the Weddell Sea, the current, which runs clockwise, was still helping us, and with the stars diamond-bright in the shortening periods of darkness, I was able to get a whole series of fixes, thus establishing our position without any doubt.

  The previous day we had been lucky enough to have perfect iceblink conditions, which had given us an upside-down view of the open water leads through the pack that stretched ahead of us. We had chosen the largest of these, a gap well over a mile wide, the ice on either side already so degraded by the long daylight hours it was virtual brash. Sailing conditions became superb, a steady force-3 breeze from slightly north of west and virtually no sea, just a long, slow swell. Isvik revelled in it, chuckling along at between 6 and 8 knots, and all of us on board in a very relaxed mood.

  From north to south the Weddell Sea is the better part of a thousand miles, and sailing the course dictated by Ángel, not direct, but jinking from lead to lead, often with one of us balanced on the foremast yard brackets to con the ship, we managed to make steady progress along a line 192 degrees, which cut the coast well to the west of the BAS base at Halley Bay, even to the west of Vahsel Bay on the Leopold Coast, and not a hundred miles from where Shackleton’s Endurance was beset on 18 January 1915.

  More and more, as we made our southing, our movements were controlled by the ice, which gradually became thicker, less degraded, and the leads between fewer. There was a storm on the 12th, a real Antarctic blizzard with driving snow, wet and sticky, so that it clung to the wheelhouse and masts, and during the cold of the short night had to be chipped off with ice axes. With all the cargo we carried on deck, there was always a danger of the ship’s centre of gravity being so badly affected that she became top-heavy. The thought of being rolled over in these waters in the dead of night with the black, snow-laden wind gusting 70 knots was not attractive!

  Once the storm had blown itself out, the sky cleared, and our whole icebound world became still and beautiful. This summer interlude lasted four days, and with no wind we had to motor, the lanes of open water always enabling us to steer a generally southerly course. But conning the boat was a strain, the ice so dazzling white that the sun’s reflection seemed to burn into our eyes, even through dark glasses.

  The two girls took advantage of the brilliant sunshine, and armed with bottles of sun lotion disappeared behind a canvas screen they rigged for’ard of the mainmast on the port side. I forgot about this at one point when an open lane, narrowing to what appeared to be a cul-de-sac, forced me to run up the ratlines and search ahead for a way through. In fact, the lane we were in was not a cul-de-sac. Instead, it bent sharply round to the east, to an icebound lake, a polynya, from which several dark threads of open water led southwards again.

  Once I had satisfied myself that the way ahead was still open, I stood there for a moment, balanced on the yard brackets, enjoying the endless vista of broken ice, the sun and the breeze of our passage. I was watching the slow emergence and submergence of a couple of Orcinus orca, the so-called Killer Whale, the white of their bellies looking almost muddied by contrast with the brilliant whiteness of the world that was their playground. A seal surfaced almost alongside us, and as I watched it heading for the bow wave on our port side, I found myself looking straight down at the two figures behind their canvas screen, their skin glistening with suntan oil. They were lying buttocks-up on their stomachs, one darker than the other, but there was a beauty and an innocence in the way they lay there, stark naked and totally exposed to my gaze, so that I held my breath for fear even my breathing would break the beauty of the scene.

  Then one of them stirred. It was Iris and she rolled over on her back, her eyes open and staring straight up at me. She smiled and waved, and I hurried back down, feeling embarrassed by the way I was suddenly swelling up. I think by then I was slightly in love with her myself.

  Perhaps because of the nature of my thoughts it did not shock, or even surprise me, when, late that evening, I saw Ángel walk up to Go-Go and put a hand on her buttocks. I was on the port side, helping Nils pump a canful of paraffin out of one of the deck drums. The sun had just set, a bright orange flaring, the sky streaked with lines of thin white vapour interspersed with cold, translucent green. It was very beautiful and, the can full, I straightened up, standing there, staring at the wonderful Turneresque colouring of it. Go-Go was taking in some washing she had pegged to the guardrails, her body bent down,
the fabric of her pants stretched tight across her bottom. Ángel appeared as a black cutout in silhouette against the evening light, his hands reaching out to caress her.

  She reacted quick as a flash, straightening up and brushing his hand away. She said something, I couldn’t hear what, but he took no notice, reaching out both hands to grasp hold of her. She seized one of them and for a moment I thought she was pulling him into her. So did Ángel. He laughed, and in that laugh was the excitement of conquest. He had, I think, a firm belief that he was irresistible to women. But then she suddenly bent down, jerking his arm forward and at the same time twisting it. The effect was startling. With a cry of pain his body was bent sideways and he went sprawling over her shoulders to land up flat on his back on the deck.

  Before I could move Iain had erupted out of the wheelhouse. Go-Go was standing there, looking down at her tormentor. I couldn’t hear what she said to him, but her voice was tight with fury. Then she turned, almost colliding with Iain, who, to my surprise, ignored the figure slowly picking himself up off the deck and addressed himself only to Go-Go. ‘Ye’re a bloody fool, girl. Suppose he’d caught his head on a steel deck plate or the corner of the hatch there?’ He left it at that, adding, ‘Don’t flaunt yerself or we could end up on a voyage without a purpose. Find yer husband now. Tell Andy Ah want to see him in the wheelhouse.’

  ‘Why the hell are you blaming her?’ I demanded as she ran, crying, for’ard along the deck.

  He glanced down at Ángel, with an expression of something near to contempt on his face, then turned to me. ‘Think it out for yerself,’ he said and went back into the wheelhouse.