The North Water (13 page)

“We will make a whale man of you yet, Mr. Sumner,” Cavendish jokes, as they sit in the mess cabin smoking their pipes and warming their feet by the stove. “Some surgeons would be too dainty for the pick haak, but you took to it nicely, I'd say.”

“Flensing is a good deal like cutting turf,” Sumner says, “and I did plenty of that when I was a boy.”

“That's it then,” Cavendish says. “It's in your blood.”

“The whaling is in my blood, you think?”

“The working,” Cavendish says with a smile. “The Irishman is a laborer at heart; that's his true calling.”

Sumner spits into the stove and listens to it fizzle. He knows enough of Cavendish by now not to take his taunts to heart, and his mood is too light this morning to be seriously baited.

“And what is the Englishman's true calling, I wonder, Mr. Cavendish?” he answers. “To grow fat off the labors of others, perhaps?”

“There are them that are born to toil, and them that are born to grow rich,” Cavendish says.

“I see. And which one are you?”

The mate leans back complacently in his chair and flares his pinkish lower lip.

“Oh, I'd say my time is coming, Mr. Sumner,” he says. “I'd say it's coming pretty soon.”

*   *   *

It is a quiet morning. No more whales are sighted and the hours before noon are spent cleaning the decks, reeving lines, and restocking the whaleboats. Sumner, who has not seen or spoken to Joseph Hannah since the time he saw him horsing with his friends near the fore hatch, decides to seek the boy out. He notices one of the other cabin boys on deck and asks for Joseph's whereabouts.

“We were told he was to bed down in the tween decks from now on,” the boy says. “I have not seen him since yesterday.”

Sumner ventures into the fore-tween decks, where he finds a grubby wool blanket nestled between a sail chest and a pile of bundled staves but no other sign of the boy. He climbs back up and looks about. After checking that Joseph is not hidden from sight behind the spare boats, the windlass, or the deckhouse, he peers down into the forecastle. Some of the men are on their bunks asleep, others are seated on sea chests smoking, reading, or carving wood.

“I am looking for Joseph Hannah,” he calls. “Is the boy down there?”

The seated men turn to look at him. They shake their heads.

“No we hant seen him,” one answers. “We thought he were staying aft with you, Mr. Sumner.”

“With me?”

“In officers' quarters. On account of his illness.”

“And who told you that?”

The man shrugs.

“That's all what I heard,” he says.

Sumner, touched now with the beginnings of impatience, returns to his cabin and retrieves a candle with the intention of exploring the holds (although why the boy would be concealing himself anywhere in the holds is beyond him). He sees Black emerging from the captain's cabin carrying the brass sextant.

“I'm looking for Joseph Hannah,” Sumner says to him. “Have you seen the boy about?”

“The one with the sore arse?” Black says. “No, I can't say I have.”

Sumner shakes his head and sighs.

“The
Volunteer
is not such a large vessel. I'm surprised a boy can so easily go missing.”

“There are a thousand nooks and crannies on a ship like this one,” Black says. “He's probably off pulling his pizzle somewhere. Why do you need him?”

Sumner hesitates, aware that his concern with the health of Hannah's fundament has already become something of a joke amongst the officers.

“I have a task for him,” Sumner says.

Black nods.

“Well, he'll emerge by and by, you can be sure of that. The boy is an awful malingerer, but he'll not miss his rations when they're served.”

“Perhaps you're right,” Sumner says, looking at the candle for a moment, then dropping it into his jacket pocket. “Why should I trouble to search for someone who doesn't want to be found?”

“There are other cabin boys,” Black agrees. “Ask one of those.”

Later that afternoon, since there are still no signs of whales and the weather is calm enough, Brownlee orders the men to commence the making off. They reduce the sails and begin to break out the main hold. Eight or ten casks, previously filled with water for ballast, are brought up onto the deck, thereby exposing the lowest stratum of casks, the ground tier, which will be first to be filled with the minced-up blubber. The men on deck make ready the equipment (speck trough, lull, chopping blocks, and knives) needed to separate blubber from muscle and skin, and to cut it into pieces small enough to be squeezed through the bunghole of a cask. Sumner keeps an eye out for Joseph Hannah, assuming he will appear soon enough, roused by all this commotion from whatever hiding place he has found.

“Where's that little shit Hannah disappeared to?” Cavendish shouts out. “I need some knives taken down for sharpening.”

“He's missing,” Sumner says. “I was looking about for him this morning.”

“He's a shiftless little cunt, that one,” Cavendish says. “I'll show him the true meaning of a sore arse when I discover him.”

The casks on deck are emptied of water one by one, by means of an iron hand pump. Otto takes charge of this operation, inserting the pump's end into the bunghole, draining off each cask, and then mopping it dry. The ballast water, which sloshes across the deck and out through the fore-channels, gives off a noxious, sulfurated reek caused by long contact with the rotting residues of blubber left in the casks from previous voyages. Other men climb the rigging to escape this eye-watering miasma, or tie scarves across their noses as they work, but Otto, putty-faced, thick-shouldered, slow and deliberate in all his actions, seems immune to the repellent stench. After emptying four casks, he discovers the fifth one has been damaged. The head has been partly stoved in and most of the water appears to have leaked out already. He calls over the cooper and asks if it can be repaired. The cooper leans down, pulls out a piece of the broken cask head, and examines it.

“It ain't rotted away,” he says (he has his hand against his nostrils as he speaks). “No reason for this to crack on its own.”

“But it's cracked all right,” Otto says.

The cooper nods.

“Best break it up and start again,” he says.

He tosses the splintered wood aside, then peers indifferently and without expectation back into the half-empty barrel. He sees curled up inside it, part submerged in the remnants of the ballast water, like some monstrous fungal knottage, bred and nurtured in the fetid petri of the hold, the torn, dead, and naked body of Joseph Hannah, cabin boy.

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

They carry Hannah's body down to the mess cabin and lay it out on the table for Sumner to examine. The room is crowded but silent. Sumner, who can feel the heat of the other men's breathing and sense the dour intensity of their concentration, wonders what they expect him to do exactly. Bring the boy back to life? The fact that he is a surgeon makes no difference anymore. He is as helpless and useless as they are. Trembling, he takes hold of Joseph Hannah's hairless chin and moves it gently upwards to better note the dark chain of bruises around his neck.

“Strangled,” Brownlee says. “It's a fucking outrage.”

There is a murmur of assent from the other men in the room. Sumner, feeling a degree of reluctance and shame, turns the boy over onto his side and pulls apart his pale buttocks. Some of the spectators lean in to look.

“The same or worse?” Brownlee asks.

“Worse.”

“Fuck.”

Sumner glances up at Cavendish, who has looked away and is whispering something to Drax. He turns the boy over again and presses down on his ribs to count the fractures. He opens the child's mouth and notes that two of his teeth are missing.

“When did this happen?” Brownlee barks. “And how in God's name is it possible that no one noticed?”

“I last saw the boy the day before yesterday,” Sumner says. “Just before the first flensing.”

There is a garbled rush of other voices as the rest of the men in the room recall their last encounters with the dead boy. Brownlee shouts them down.

“Not all together,” he says. “By Christ.”

The captain is pale and furious; his agitation is profound. He has never even heard of a murder occurring on a whale ship before—there are fights between crewmen, of course, plenty of those, stabbings even on some rare occasions, but not an outright murder and not of a
child
. It is an appalling thing, he thinks, repellent, sickening. And that it should happen now, on his final voyage, as if the
Percival
was not enough to darken his reputation forever. He looks around at the twenty or thirty crewmen packed into the mess cabin—grubby and bearded all of them, their faces burned and blackened by the arctic sun, their blunt hands clasped in front of them as though at prayer, or pushed deep into pockets. This is Jacob Baxter's doing, he tells himself, that unrighteous bastard: he chose this idiot crew, he set this whole unnatural scheme in motion, he is responsible for the calamitous consequences, not I.

“Whoever is guilty will be taken back to England in chains and hanged,” Brownlee says, scanning the vacant twitching faces. “I promise you that.”

“Hanging's too good for a fucker such as that,” one man says. “He should have his balls cut off first. He should have a red-hot poker rammed up his arse.”

“He should be whipped,” someone else suggests, “whipped down to the fucking bone.”

“Whoever he is, whatever he is, he will be punished according to the extent of the law,” Brownlee says. “Where is the sailmaker?”

The sailmaker, an aged, lugubrious man with vague blue eyes, steps forwards, his greasy beaver cap clutched in his hands.

“Stitch the boy into his shroud now,” Brownlee tells him. “We'll bury him betimes.” The sailmaker nods and sniffs. “And the rest of you men get back to your duties.”

“Will we continue with the making off now, Captain?” Cavendish asks.

“Indeed we will. This atrocity is no excuse for idleness.”

The men nod meekly. One of them, a boat steerer named Roberts, raises his hand to speak.

“I saw the boy down in the forecastle after the first whale was flensed,” he says. “He was listening to the fiddler and watching the men dance their jigs.”

“That's true,” another man says. “I saw him there too.”

“Did anyone see Joseph Hannah later?” Brownlee asks. “Did anyone see him yesterday? Speak up.”

“He was sleeping in the tween decks,” someone says. “That's what we all believed.”

“Someone here knows what happened to him,” Brownlee says. “The ship is not so large that a boy can be killed without making some noise or leaving some trace.”

No one answers. Brownlee shakes his head.

“I will find the man who did this and see the bastard hanged,” he says. “That is a certainty. That is something you may all rely on.”

He turns to the surgeon.

“I would speak to you in my cabin now, Sumner.”

Once inside the cabin, the captain seats himself, removes his hat, and commences rubbing his face with the heels of his hands. When he is finished rubbing, his face is bright red and both his eyes are bloodshot and watery.

“Whether he acted out of pure evil or from a fear of being exposed for his perversions, I don't know,” Brownlee says. “But whosoever sodomized the boy killed him also. That is plain enough.”

“I agree.”

“And do you suspect Cavendish still?”

Sumner hesitates, then shakes his head. He knows the first mate is an oaf, but he is less sure that he could be a murderer.

“It might be anyone,” he admits. “If Hannah was sleeping in the tween decks the night before last, then almost any man on the ship could have gone in there, strangled him, and lowered the body down into the hold without too much risk of being noticed.”

Brownlee scowls.

“I moved him from the forecastle to keep him away from difficulty, but I succeeded in abetting his murder.”

“He was a wretched and ill-starred child, all in all,” Sumner says.

“Fuck yes.”

Brownlee nods and pours them both a glass of brandy. Sumner feels humiliated, weakened, by this new outrage, as if the boy's cruel death is a part of his own profound and lengthier diminishment. His right hand shakes as he drinks the brandy. Outside the room, the sailmaker whistles “The Bonnie Boat” as he sews the dead boy into his canvas coffin.

“There are thirty-eight men and boys left aboard this ship,” Brownlee says. “If we take away the two of us and the two remaining cabin boys, that leaves thirty-four. After the making off is finished, I will speak to all of them singly if necessary. I will find out what they know, what they have seen and heard, and what they suspect. A man does not develop such foul proclivities overnight. There will have been signs and rumors, and the forecastle is a hive of gossip.”

“The man, whoever he is, is likely insane,” Sumner says. “There's no other explanation. He must be afflicted with some disease or corruption of the brain.”

Brownlee grinds his jaw one way, then the other, and pours himself another brandy before replying. When he speaks, his voice is low and taut.

“What kind of a crew has that Jew bastard Baxter afflicted me with?” he says. “Incompetents and savages. The filth and shite of the dockyards. I am a whaling man, but this is not whaling, Mr. Sumner. This is not whaling, I can assure you of that.”

*   *   *

The making off continues for the rest of the day. When it is done and the blubber casks are safely stowed away, they bury Joseph Hannah at sea. Brownlee grumbles some suitable verses from the Bible over the body, Black leads the men in a rough-hewn hymn, and the canvas shroud, weighted with shot, is tossed over the stern and swallowed by the flintish swell.