Toward the Sea of Freedom (36 page)

Kaikoura lay more than a hundred miles from Nelson, but Michael’s drinking buddy was a sailor, and he told him he’d ask his captain to give Michael a ride on his ship, which took train oil and whalebone to Europe. It had taken on some freight on the West Coast but would mainly be supplied in Kaikoura.

“Can’t I just come along to England?” asked Michael, who could hardly believe his luck. “I’ll make myself useful, I swear.”

The vessel’s very small crew did not need any more members, and the captain showed little interest in teaching a landlubber. He did agree to take Michael to Kaikoura, but he immediately made it clear that passage was not free.

“Old Fyfe’ll pay your way when we get there,” the captain said. “A big, strong lad like you, he’ll be licking his chops. You’ll have to work it off, of course. But not to worry.”

Robert Fyfe was the founder and proprietor of the whaling station, and it did sound as if he were hungry for workers. In any case, the captain was willing, so Michael boarded a ship once again, leaving Nelson—and Lizzie Owens—behind without a second thought.

Kaikoura proved an idyllic peninsula separating two bays with beaches that were part rock and part sand. In one of these bays lay the whaling station, Waiopuka, which was dominated by a stately manor, its founder’s house.

“Built on a foundation of whalebone,” Michael’s drinking buddy explained. “There’s hardly any wood here, you see.”

Indeed, even the tombstone crosses of the men who met their end in Kaikoura were made of whalebone. The bodies of the powerful sea creatures could be used in a number of ways, and their capture must have been profitable. Robert Fyfe, a wiry man with sparse red hair and skin weathered by wind and sea, readily advanced Michael the money for his voyage.

“You can build a shack up there,” he instructed his new worker, pointing at a meager settlement past his house.

The whalers built their shacks from tree bark and fern branches. They hung doors and windows with tarpaulin or sackcloth to keep out the worst of the wind and rain. Michael’s future neighbor, Chuck Eagle, invited him right away into his shack, which he had furnished only with a cobbled-together table and chair made of whalebone. It smelled beastly—apparently the bones had not been boiled long enough. Or did the stench emanate from Chuck and his clothing?

“You get used to it,” Chuck said amicably when he noticed Michael crinkling his nose. He held out a bottle of whiskey, and Michael took a deep drink. “The fishies stink—especially if we don’t get ’em on land right away. We try to keep ’em on the hook and pull ’em onto the beach, but sometimes the harpoons get loose, and then the body sinks down. Not so bad, really. It fills with gas, and after a few days, floats back up. But stinks something awful.”

“On the hook?” asked Michael. “You hook these monster fish?”

He had never seen a whale, but the skeletons on the beach had given him an impression of what he had to expect.

Chuck laughed uproariously. “Nah, then we’d have to hunt the bait too. A sperm whale’d swallow a whole shark. No lie, the beasties gobble fishes more than twenty feet long. In one bite. Though they’re not fish themselves, they say. ’Cause they feed their young like cows. Anyway, we hunt them with harpoons.”

What that looked like, Michael saw the very next day. Which, according to Chuck, was a stroke of luck.

“We used to net one every week, but now they’re getting careful. Or maybe the area’s fished out; who knows? Sometimes it’s bad for weeks, and then you don’t make much either.”

Earnings at the station were graduated. The harpooners, who had to fire their massive weapons as accurately as possible in order to weaken the whale with the first shot, received the most. The barbs had to bite deep into the whale’s flesh. If they fell out, the contest was lost, as a rule. Wounded, the whale would submerge, surviving or perhaps dying who knows where. The beasts could cross monstrous distances when they swam, so there was no hope of finding the body if a whale survived a harpooning.

Yet if the shot landed right, the whale truly did hang “on the hook,” so to speak. The harpoons trapped it on a long rope tied to the boat. The whale would pull the boat behind it as it fought for its life, a hellish ride that also justified the high pay for the six rowers and the helmsman. Boats were always flipping over, their occupants losing their lives in the water. The most skilled and bravest rowers and harpooners at Fyfe’s station were uncommonly strong men with brown skin and dark, sleek hair, which they often wore tied in a sort of knot.

“Maori,” said Chuck. “They came to New Zealand as settlers a few centuries before us whites.”

Michael was surprised. Since there had been no “savages” in Van Diemen’s Land for a long time, he had not expected any natives in New Zealand, either. The Maori at the whaling station did not seem particularly savage, however. They were actually quite approachable, once one had gotten used to the tribal symbols tattooed on their faces. They wore the same work clothes as the white whalers: loose shirts, linen pants, and wide hats. They also spoke English—not perfectly but comprehensibly. They laughed at the same jokes as the whites, or at least pretended they understood the innuendos, and they did not say no when a bottle of whiskey made the rounds. However, they did not live in the provisional shacks at the station but at night went home to their village—a walled settlement consisting of wooden houses decorated with complicated carvings.

“They all sleep in one room,” Eagle told a stunned Michael. “The girls too.”

The Maori girls were not particularly lovely by English standards of beauty. Like the men, they were of stocky build and, even as young women, often plump. Their faces were also tattooed, which revolted Michael at first. Yet they were friendly and exceedingly sexually free. They often went topless in the warm weather, walking around the village or staging dances with their breasts swinging, and slept with any man they liked. Apparently, no one checked on whether a girl was sneaking out of the sleeping lodge at night.

“And they don’t even want anything for it,” Chuck said excitedly. “Although, naturally, they’re happy if you give them some trinket. Strange customs, but very pleasant.”

Michael did not think of girls at first. After he slaughtered a whale for the first time, he had no desire for company, really for anything but a great deal of soap and water—and a bottle of whiskey in order to forget it all. Michael was not yet allowed on a boat.

“Have to see if you can row first,” said Fyfe.

Michael, who was after increased pay, did not reveal to him that he had never done it before. He was sure that after years of forced labor in chains, he could muster the strength for it without a problem.

Fyfe seemed able to read the lie on his face, however. “Well, watch for now and help cut up the whale. Then we’ll see.”

Michael watched from the shore as the whale dragged the harpooners’ boat behind it. Once it tired, the helmsman shoved a lance into its body—leaving scarcely enough life in the whale that it remained just under or just above the water. Then the boat dragged the whale ashore, and the men began to eviscerate it.

“It’s not dead yet,” Michael shouted. He was horrified as the first knives were stuck into the massive body to remove the layer of fat beneath the skin.

“Less chatter, more work,” Eagle instructed him.

The body had to be dismembered, and Michael tried not to look toward the animal’s eyes as he stuck his own wide knife into its flesh. The fat was white-gray, slippery, and disgusting. Michael did not want to touch it. He preferred to operate the winches that transported the pieces of fat to the kettles, where they were boiled down.

The yellowish fluid was then poured out of the kettles and into barrels. One whale yielded up to twenty barrels, and they fetched a good price. In the meantime, the butchers had made it down to the bones and were separating them from the meat. The men divided the bones and told Michael and a few others to bury them in the sand.

“Then they won’t smell as bad while the meat rots,” Chuck explained.

Though Michael wondered how much difference it would make, he dug energetically. In a few weeks, they would dig the bones out again and sell them. Ladies’ corsets were made with them in England, and the light, flexible, yet sturdy material was also used for hooks and in the suspensions for coaches.

Michael found the slaughtering disgusting. He also did not want to eat any of the whale meat, which the men cooked in the same kettles they had used for the blubber. He was happy when they finally opened a water pipe through which the rest of the dismembered whale was washed back out to sea. It cleaned the beach, but even after a thorough bathing Michael thought himself foul-smelling and soiled. Fyfe kept half Michael’s pay as a first payment for his passage; Michael drank away the other half.

“Eh, you don’t make much on land,” Chuck comforted him, thinking his mood was a result of the paltry and quickly liquidated pay. “Next time, you’ll row with us; then you’ll make more.”

A few days later the next whale emerged, and by then, Michael had figured out the rudiments of rowing. Tane, one of the strong Maori men, sat beside him and offered instruction.

“We’ve always done,” he said amicably when Michael had some difficulty at first. “We came in canoes—many, many lives ago. My family come with Aotea, great, proud canoe.”

“You came here in a rowboat?” Michael asked, taken aback. “From where?”

On his trip to Kaikoura he had thought more kindly of Lizzie Owens, as he did again now during his first attempt at rowing. What would have happened if she had not taken the initiative and instead had let him set out with his comrades did not bear thinking about. Even the little assistance he had been allowed to offer on the boat had shown him how hard it was to maneuver a sailing ship. And that was just the Tasman Sea.

“From Hawaiki, land we come from. Far, far away. Kupe, first man in Aotearoa—what we call this island—killed husband of Kura-maro-tini. Was very beautiful woman. Then fled with her here.”

“That was a while ago though, right?” Michael asked Chuck Eagle later.

He laughed. “Six hundred years. But anyway. They’re settlers too. The land belongs to them same as to us. And besides, they take a good bit of money when they sell us some of it.”

Chuck was saving for his own bit of land. He dreamed of a farm, but it wasn’t clear whether he’d done any farming in England. Probably he had gone to sea instead, but Michael did not ask. Except for the Maori, everyone there was running from something.

The Maori were also the ones who coped best with the gruesome work. Tane muttered a sort of invocation in his language as he crouched down next to Michael in the boat the next time they went whaling. The harpooner had just pulled the trigger, and the hooks dug into the flank of an imposing sperm whale.

“Telling sorry to Tangaroa, god of sea,” Tane explained. “Sorry that we kill and thanks for sending us whale. And ask for help with hunt.”

While the Maori was still talking, the struck whale tossed about. For Michael and the others, the hellish ride began. As the whale shot back and forth in a panic to free itself of the harpoon, it wrenched the rowboat behind it. Water soaked the men. Michael swallowed a swell of the salty drink in fright. When the boat threatened to capsize, he was sure he would soon die. Tane and the others tried through skillful use of oars and their weight on the benches to maintain balance, but Michael could no longer even think.

In the end, the whale exhausted itself in the water—and Michael vomited over the side of the boat when the helmsman stabbed his lance into the helpless animal. When they began to row again, Michael felt as if the dying whale’s eyes were following him. Surely it was an illusion. He did not look at them to convince himself, but the whale’s silent accusation did not let go.

Michael had caught fish and hunted rabbits before. He’d trapped little animals and broken their necks. In times of starvation, one ate what one could get, so Michael had never felt guilty. But this was something else. This was merciless slaughter for goods that, strictly speaking, no one needed. England would survive without whalebone and train oil, no matter what price it all fetched. Michael was firmly convinced that Tane’s prayer had not been heard. The god of the sea could not forgive this.

That evening Michael drank the memory away—for which he needed far more whiskey than usual. The other men ate the whale meat, unbothered by the killing and seeming not even to perceive the stench around them. Michael never wanted to ride along in the rowboats again, and by no means was he eager to take the post of helmsman or harpooner. He silently bore the laughter of the men, who teased him for having gotten scared and sick, and he considered how he could get away from the whaling station as quickly as possible. He had to work off his debt. But to stay until he had earned enough for passage to Ireland? Unimaginable.

Chapter 2

Never before had Lizzie been as close to a righteous life than as a maid at the Laderers’ farm in Sarau. Their farm lay just outside the little village in the Marlborough region at the edge of the Waimea Plain. The earth was fruitful, and the settlers showed their gratitude for that—especially since their first few years in the new country had not been blessed with good fortune. Closer to Nelson, there was little farmland and, worse yet, they had been plagued there with flooding.

But Otto Laderer was not frightened by these setbacks. After first settling in Nelson, he had risked a second new beginning here in Sarau. He was always clearing more land, and his cattle breeding flourished as well. His wife, Margarete, a strong, sturdy woman, worked just as hard as he, as did his two sons. Neither their father nor the two sons, for whom wives had already been found, regarded Lizzie lustfully.

The Laderers began their work before dawn and went to bed when it was dark. They expected the same of Lizzie. The work was hard, but the meals were regular and ample, and she was paid on time at the end of each month.

The Laderers called their new maid Liese or Lieschen and did not even ask for her last name. “How could come from England with only one dress?” was the only question Mrs. Laderer ever asked Lizzie. She seemed not to care at all about Lizzie’s previous life.