Antarctica (6 page)

“Sir,” Philip cut in, “if I may be so bold, none of my work experience qualifies me for such menial tasks—”

“Excellent, Westfall. Then you will learn something. Begin with the deck floors. You know where the supplies are.”

“I fank you, sir,” Nigel said, “for your kind understanding of me circumlocutions.”

“Dismissed.”

Philip looked as if he were going to cry. Before he could protest, Nigel grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the hatch.

“Andrew,” Jack said, “at the first sign of the horizon, would you give the captain a reading? Colin, rouse the men and tell them to rig a new foresail—then let’s raise the mainsail and see how she sets. Captain Barth, you and I will take stock of the damage to the stores.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Andrew said.

Before leaving, Jack gave a sharp look to Colin, who turned away.

“‘Aye, aye, sir,’” Colin sang softly in a mocking, high-pitched voice as he headed toward the hatch.

Do not rise to the bait, Andrew told himself.

He took the sextant, a logbook, and the navigator’s map from the compass binnacle. Carefully he looked through the sextant lens. The view was split down the middle, one half circle looking straight ahead, the other reflecting an image from a moveable mirror. You were supposed to find the horizon on the one side and the sun on the other. Then, using a handle that swiveled along a U-shaped index arm, you brought the sun’s image down to line up with the horizon. That gave you the angle of the sun, which you then matched to certain nautical tables to tell your exact latitude, longitude, and bearing. You compared that to your course and made adjustments.

Andrew had read all about it. Studied the technique. He felt confident he could do it.

But in the mist, he couldn’t see the horizon line.

He looked away from the sextant, gazing out to sea, looking for someplace where the fog had burned off.

By now, the crew was waking, the smell of coffee and bacon wafting up from below.

“Look who’s setting our course!” Hayes shouted from the hatch.

“Uh-oh, South Africa, here we come,” said Oppenheim, a nervous fellow with a sarcastic edge.

“See any mermaids?” Lombardo asked.

Andrew ignored them. Slowly but surely, he would learn. He would learn it all, until he was the best navigator, the best seaman on board.

Then no one would mock him.

He stared through the viewfinder intently, finally seeing a slight shift in the quality of light across the left circle. It was the closest thing to a horizon he’d seen.

He lined up the sun with it, matched its angle to the appropriate column in his nautical logbook, and wrote down the reading: Longitude 122° 14’ W., latitude 65° 02’ S. and heading west by southwest. Only two degrees north of the Antarctic Circle. A slight southward adjustment would put them back on the course outlined on the navigator’s map.

Now about half the men were on deck, raising the sails, swabbing the decks, letting down dredge nets off the port bow. Ruskey leaned over the starboard hull, photographing a distant school of killer whales.

Andrew opened the binnacle to put away the sextant.

“If you’re off by the slightest amount,” Colin called out, “we’re in big trouble.”

Andrew held the sextant toward him. “Fine. You do it.”

Colin grabbed it and casually looked through it. After a few quick shifts of the arm, he announced his reading.

Longitude 122° 14’ W., latitude 65° 02’ S., heading west by southwest.

“Thanks,” Andrew said with a smile.

He turned away and headed for the hatch. Captain Barth was just below, barking orders to everyone.

“Sir,” Andrew said, holding out his book, “our course readings.”

Barth grabbed it abruptly and called into the cabin: “Mansfield, get off your duff and set your course by this, on the double!”

“Can I finish breakfast?” came Mansfield’s voice.

“You should be done by now!”

His mouth full, Mansfield bounded up the ladder. As he passed Andrew, he muttered, “Knock him over the head with the sextant. He needs the sleep.”

Andrew followed him to the wheelhouse. Colin was nearby, and he glanced at the book as Mansfield set it by the tiller, open to Andrew’s reading.

“Hey, you wrote down my numbers,” Colin said.

“They were the same as mine,” Andrew replied.

“Liar.”

“Decency, Colin,” Andrew reminded him. “Remember what you promised Pop.”

“He’s not your pop.” Colin turned away abruptly. “Don’t try to compensate for what you don’t have.”

Andrew grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. “I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me.”

“I have a father, Colin.”

“Harding Douglas the Third? When was the last time you heard from him?”

“That’s no business of yours.”

“What kind of man breaks off contact with his own son for no good reason?”

“My mother left him—for your dad!”

“No, she didn’t leave him. Not totally. She got stuck with his carbon copy.”

Enough. That was enough. Andrew didn’t care how big Colin was. He hauled back and threw a punch.

Colin ducked away, laughing. “Come on, Andrew, this time you land the first blow. See what Jack says to that.”

Andrew reared back again—but he lost his balance. The ship gave a sudden lurch to port.

“Iceberg!” shouted Rivera.

“Head to starboard!” Lombardo boomed.

By the starboard railing, Robert was waving his arms frantically. “Man overboard!”

Ruskey was gone.

October 31,1909

B
ARTH BRACED HIMSELF AS
the
Mystery
heeled hard. The iceberg passed to port, not 200 yards away. It had been a close call, yet only five men—Mansfield, Siegal, Rivera, Jack Winslow, Robert—were handling the maneuver. The rest were gathered at the starboard railing, everyone shouting instructions and no one doing a thing.

Fools, Barth thought. Every last one of them.

It was a ship of fools.

A man overboard, no doubt. And all they could do was yammer. Where was the discipline? Nowadays the men had shoddier character, pudding for brains.

Barth elbowed his way through them. “Throw him a line!” he cried out.

“He has one,” Rivera replied.

The idiot photographer was hanging on a halyard, swinging over the water with one arm, holding his camera with the other.

“Pull him up!” Barth commanded.

“He won’t come up,” said Robert.

Ruskey’s legs were wrapped around the halyard, bearing some of his weight. With his free hand, he was aiming the camera downward, snapping photographs of the ice-chunked water.

Photographs!

“Sailor, get up here right now!” Barth barked.

Ruskey was beaming. “This is absolutely remarkable!”

“I don’t care!” Barth replied. “I can’t afford to have you—”

With a loud crunch, the ship jolted again.

Ruskey lost his balance. His camera flew into the surf. He let go of the halyard, whirling his arms, screaming.

Barth lunged forward and grabbed the line. Ruskey hung from the end of it, suspended by the loops around his feet.

Barth pulled, but the halyard slipped. It had iced up.

Bodies jostled him from all sides. Total chaos. No organization whatsoever.

“Let me do it!” a voice cried out.

A pair of arms muscled Barth aside and grabbed the line from him.

It was Winslow’s son, the big, lazy one. Colin. He wrapped the halyard around his right wrist and began to pull, yanking Ruskey upward as if he were a child.

Astonishing. The boy had the strength of a moose.

In a moment, Ruskey was sprawled on the deck, breathing in violent gasps. His eyes darted. He was obviously in shock—yet the crew just stood there, cheering. Brillman was taking off his shirt and threatening to retrieve the camera. Hayes was asking Ruskey if he’d kissed any fishies.

Idiots.

Dr. Montfort was at the edge of the crowd, blocked by the oblivious men. Barth shoved his way back through and pulled him toward Ruskey.

But Ruskey was sitting up and laughing now as the men slapped him on the back. As if they were in a beer hall. A saloon. Montfort could hardly get through them.

Ruskey would be punished as an example to the others. Calculated risks were part of a seaman’s trade; careless behavior weakened the moral fiber of the crew.

They would need moral fiber in spades. This voyage was a war, really, fought on a hostile battlefield against an enemy whose face was blindingly white and whose weapons were wind and cold. It would require the best of every man.

Captain Barth watched Colin move away from the periphery of the group. “Bully job,” he called out. “You saved his life.”

Colin nodded tersely and walked away, back to the rigging.

Strong, heroic—but rude. The boy needed a lesson in manners.

The men were helping Ruskey toward the hatch now. He limped along painfully. Beyond them, the sun had burned off most of the mist.

Captain Barth narrowed his eyes. The surf looked white-capped, yet its motion was a gentle rolling. He grabbed a telescope from inside the binnacle and looked through.

Brash ice.

It was unmistakable—broken up bits of ice floes, bobbing on the sea. In the distance, he could hear a faint, high-pitched sound, like the moan of an old woman.

Mansfield had heard it, too. “What on earth is that, Captain?”

“The ice,” Barth said.

It was exactly as Scott had written. As the edges of the floes scraped against one another, they made a noise that reverberated through the ice as a loud groan.

But where were they? It was hard to tell. The sound seemed to be coming from all over.

“How close are we?” Mansfield asked.

Barth grabbed the sextant and pointed it toward the horizon line. Taking a reading, he checked it against the course. “Head to starboard again, Mansfield! We’re off by five degrees. At this rate we’ll plow into an ice shelf before we reach the Ross Sea.”

“Five degrees? Who set this course?”

It was the boy, Barth realized. Andrew. How stupid to have trusted him to take the reading.

“Just set her right! We’re heading into Antarctica, my friend, dead or alive.”

November 6, 1909

“L
OOKS LIKE WE’VE GOT
a nor’easter!” Bailey called from the foretop.

Colin was already at work, setting the mainsail, then helping Bailey trim the fore topsail against the freshening wind.

They were running before a high following sea and picking up good speed. The
Mystery
had been sailing due west-southwest for six days now, finally within the Antarctic Circle, tracing a semicircle parallel to the continent. Although the summer sun was out nearly all day, every day, today the mist obscured the light. Colin looked out at a leaden sea, mostly stream ice, easy enough to navigate.

He had seen it before, in the bays and inlets of the north: the freak weather conditions, the tricks that the light played on your perception, the way the ice sang as it froze. His mother would sing along with it as they sailed, somehow finding a strange melody that connected the drone of the ice to the call of the petrels. Here the music was deeper, fuller.

After a week of calm seas, the
Mystery
was rocking again. She wasn’t built for comfort in storms. Her keel was rounded, like a bathtub, so that ice encroaching from the sides would slide underneath and simply lift her out of the sea. The shape had its disadvantages: The ship rode “soft,” more susceptible to heeling and rocking. Everyone but Barth had experienced seasickness so far.

Colin had grown to love the ship. She was a wonder of construction, her hull reinforced with more than two feet of the sturdiest oak and Norwegian mountain fir. Her bow, where she would meet the ice, was twice as thick, constructed of specially chosen oak timbers whose natural curvature matched that of the ship’s design. Breen had doubled the number of frames—the ribs of the ship—and doubled their thickness, too, to more than ten inches. The entire hull had been sheathed in a remarkable wood from a South American evergreen called greenheart, heavier than metal and tough enough to break ordinary tools.

The
Mystery
was as close to unbreakable—and iceproof—as they came.

Those qualities would come in handy soon. If all calculations were correct, they were approaching the eastern edge of the Ross Sea, where they’d tack and turn in.

Around them were abundant signs that they were near land. Terns, petrels, and fulmars screamed overhead. A giant albatross had landed on deck the day before, strutting imperiously. Killer whales had followed the
Mystery
for miles, maybe hoping for another try at Ruskey, and Nesbit, the biologist, claimed to have spotted crab eater seals on a distant ice floe.

As Colin secured the staysail halyard, he heard a sudden, bellowing whoosh of water to starboard.

Less than 100 yards due north, a blue-gray swell arose from the sea. It arced high, the water rolling off to reveal a leathery body, both fluid and impossibly massive, maybe 100 feet long.

A blue whale. The largest living thing on earth.

“Thar she blows!” Colin shouted.

The entire crew raced over to look. The geologist, Shreve, was bug-eyed, screaming for Ruskey to take photos.

“I didn't know they lived in waters this cold,” Sanders remarked.

“Maybe that’s why they’re blue,” Flummerfelt said.

“Where are the whaling ships?” asked Ruppenthal, a shrewd, tempestuous sailor with a head of flaming red hair.

“Around,” Pop replied. “There are whaling stations in the Antarctic.”

The dogs, who had been fast asleep in their kennels, now jumped to attention. But they headed in the opposite direction, toward port.

There, Kosta was clapping his hands and howling with glee. Not far away a group of pear-shaped, black-suited penguins were flopping onto the ice and sliding on their bellies.

Some of the men had gathered around Kosta, laughing and imitating the birds’ peculiar sound.

Baart! Baart! Baart!

“Hey, Cap’n, they’re calling you!” Lombardo shouted.