The Voyage of the Dolphin (15 page)

A shout came from high in the rigging. It was the cabin boy. Crozier set down the breakfast dish he had been drying and hurried up to see what was happening. Rafferty and Phoebe were already at the starboard rail. Phoebe pointed. A line of white peaks loomed in front of them like jagged clouds rising from the water. They had seen icebergs before but much smaller and only in ones and twos. These were of a different order, some of them soaring to two and three hundred feet. McGregor was nearby, binoculars in hand, calling out instructions while Doyle and the twins hauled on ropes, adjusting their trajectory. As they progressed, the titanic scale of the formations became clear, their frozen spires, cambered and chamfered by the wind, towering over the ship, their high, winnowed archways like cathedral vaults.

At closer range the things revealed themselves not to be wholly white: here and there, where interior flaws were most stressed or where huge sheets had fractured and sheared off, they were striped with green and glacial turquoise. Smaller bergs, some as big as trams, many of them eroded into strange, contorted shapes, drifted in the avenues.

The
Dolphin's
engine was shut down for fear of damaging the propeller and the vessel slowed almost to a walking pace, running on the fore topsail alone. But for the low groaning and creaking of ice, and the occasional bird cry, all was quiet. McGregor, leaning out over the rail, signalled by hand back to the wheelhouse and, gradually, they picked their way among the dazzling giants.

‘Just imagine,' Crozier said, breaking the silence, ‘only a tenth is visible.'

No one else spoke. They were each gripped by a sense that this field of crystal mountains, thousands of years suspended at their core, was a signpost, a boundary, a signal that they were entering another realm.

*

It had been several weeks since they had left The Place of Polar Bears and, with a stout new mast and refreshed sails, ploughed north into the Davis Strait bound for Baffin Bay. A vicious fall in temperature as they rounded the tip of Greenland had triggered urgent rummagings among the Savage Newell supplies, with the result that all onboard were now bulkier and slower moving. Even Bunion had finally been forced to wear the tartan waistcoat packed for him by the skipper's wife.

Harris took some time to recover, first, from the grisly aftermath of the flenser schnapps, and thereafter from the residual infection in his hand, which brought him to a point of fever so high Rafferty feared it might engulf him. At last, after a week of more or less continuous sleep, the first mate emerged, pale and shaky but with a ravening hunger, and was pronounced cured.

So successful had the surgery been that Rafferty was viewed with new and wondering respect by the rest of the crew and it wasn't long before they began to make their way to his cabin for consultations on various personal matters. First to show, one morning after breakfast, was Victoor, revealing a third nipple under his armpit, where it had been rubbing and chafing his entire life. With the numbing aid of a bottle of oil of cloves from the galley, Rafferty excised the rogue teat and sealed the wound with a passable cross-stitch. A quick application of O'Hara's Pine Tar Salve, and Victoor winced off back to the galley.

That afternoon, the cabin boy appeared, and after fifteen minutes of swivel-eyed mumbling, finally lifted his sweater to display a bulbous mole that all but obscured his navel. This was not quite so straightforward a procedure. Despite copious clove oil and ice there was much screaming and blood until eventually, much to the surgeon's relief, the boy passed out. As he threaded his needle, a newly confident Rafferty became infused with a sense of Hippocratic beneficence and, casting around in his mind for worthy recipients resolved, with great magnanimity, to carry out an act of mercy on the ship's dog's chin.

‘I'm not sure that's such a good idea,' Phoebe said at dinner.

‘Why not? The thing's an absolute sight. I swear it's getting bigger.'

‘I just don't think it's fair. What are you going to do, make a dog drink a bottle of rum? Anyway, it's part of Bunion's identity.'

‘Really? Do dogs have identities? As such? Crozier?'

‘An interesting question.' Crozier set down his spoon. ‘He responds to his name, so in one sense he
is
Bunion, but I don't believe he has sufficient self-awareness to justify the term “identity” as we understand it – that is, he doesn't look in the mirror and think to himself “I am Bunion and, you know what, I think that goitre on my chin really suits me”.'

‘That's because he doesn't have the necessary language. It doesn't mean he wouldn't miss his …
is
it a goitre? Or a canker?'

‘I think it's a carbuncle,' said Fitzmaurice.

‘It's not a carbuncle, it's just a huge wart,' Rafferty slapped the table. ‘And it's coming off.'

His crusading zeal was soon curtailed however. The next day, as he was examining Victoor's nipple under the microscope in Fitzmaurice's cabin, there was a smart rap at the door and the room was suddenly full of huge beards and flashing Nordic teeth. ‘Skål!' The twins removed their woollen caps and stood before him, nodding and grinning.

‘Good morning gentlemen, and what can I do for you today?' Rafferty eased back in his chair, tapping a scalpel against his thigh.

The twins both began to speak at once, an unintelligible babble of which he could discern only repetition of the word
doktor
and something else that may have been
dingle
. Perceiving after a while his incomprehension, the pair began pounding on their chests, pointing at him, and making snipping motions with their first and second fingers.

‘I see. There's something that needs to be removed, is that it?
Snip snip?
'

‘Ja, ja.
Sneep sneep
. Ja.'

‘I thought as much.'

The twins continued to smile and nod.

‘Well?' Rafferty made a wafting gesture with his hand. ‘Which one of you?'

Puzzlement. They both slapped their chests again.

‘
Both
of you?'

‘Ja, ja.'

Rafferty's eyes narrowed and the scalpel ceased its tapping. He sat up.

‘Right-so. I suppose we'd better have a look.'

Exchanging glances, the twins turned to face the door, then, with a sudden synchronised swoosh of oilskin, dropped their trousers and bent over to within touching distance of their toes.

‘Oh Holy Mother of God,' said Rafferty.

 

They crossed the Arctic Circle (Lat. 66° 33
ʹ
44
ʺ
N), at mid-morning on the 24th of May, marking the occasion with beakers of rum on deck. Shortly after, the sea became noticeably soupy and they had their first sight of pack ice: a vast jigsaw of white scruff stretching for many leagues to the northwest. Changing course in order to skirt it, McGregor began to fret that they were too early in the year, that there had been insufficient meltage, and that the voyage was futile.

‘We've only a couple of months tae get in and out,' he grumbled. ‘Once the big freeze starts again we'll be caught like rats in a f—ing trap.'

His mood infected everyone on the ship. Except for Fitzmaurice.

‘Fortitudine
vincimus
, gentlemen,' he chirped. ‘As my Uncle Ernest always says: by endurance, we conquer.'

Their next port of call was a trading depot on one of the Whalefish Islands at the edge of Disko Bay, where they replenished their stocks of coal, taking on an additional twenty tons which they stored on deck. This brought their total to ninety-five tons, enough for nearly fifty days of steaming, used wisely.

Uncertain of both voyage duration and the supply opportunities ahead, they also purchased the last of their bulk provisions. These included ninety pounds each of salt-cod, caribou, ox, and whale suet, and forty pounds each of smoked ham, smoked herring, lump sugar, salt, flour and oatmeal. As well as extra coffee, tea, tobacco and jam, they stowed crystallised fruit, thirty gallons of rum, fifteen gallons of Rose's lime juice and ten gallons of vinegar, along with a flitch of dried narwhal for Bunion. Much to his surprise, Rafferty found medical supplies that had been out of stock at The Place of Polar Bears, including small quantities of sulphate zinc and cocaine, opium tablets, ether and chloroform, linseed poultices and various ointments and compounds, among them quinine, bromide and a vegetal laxative with ‘caution' stamped in red letters across its label.

From the cheerful Dane in charge of the stores they learned that a whaler tracking bowheads along the coast had returned the previous week and reported that the ice was loose as far as the 75th parallel – news that came as a relief to McGregor as it greatly increased their prospects of reaching the Northwest Passage, some four hundred miles above them, by the end of the month.

Further good fortune materialised just as they were preparing to weigh anchor. A group of Inuit rowed out to them in kayaks with fresh goods to trade, and in exchange for knives, fish-hooks and brightly-coloured handkerchiefs brought for the purpose, handed over a dozen eider ducks and their eggs, four sacks of seal-meat and a haunch of something that, judging from the fearsome face-pulling and air-clawing, was probably polar bear.

‘Are they Eskimos or Inuits?' Rafferty wanted to know as Victoor brought the dumb-show of commerce to a close.

‘As far as I understand it,' Phoebe said, ‘we say “Eskimos” but they call themselves “Inuit”, with a single “Inuit” being an “Inuk”. The word “Eskimo” just means “raw meat-eater”.'

‘Squawmucks,' McGregor muttered. ‘Blubber-munchers.'

‘You should have some respect. I'd like to see
you
survive here all year round.'

McGregor initiated one of his terrifying throat clearances, the resultant projectile landing with a loud splash. Three weather-burned faces jerked up in alarm.

‘I'd like to see yon boys survive one f—ing week in the Gorbals,' he growled.

 

In the days that followed, the
Dolphin
made smart progress under sail through long swathes of open water, keeping to the eastern side of the bay, even though it was a longer route, in order to avoid the immense central ice field. Wildlife was in abundance, with many sightings of narwhals, walruses, seals, and beluga whales, the latter in particular showing great curiosity about the ship, their blunt white heads appearing to sniff the air as they surfaced. Announcing their arrival with jets of water blasted high in the air, the huge creatures would bob around in groups of up to a dozen calling to each other with incongruous, strangely bird-like whistling sounds. (‘I could have sworn I was listening to a cloud of blackbirds,' Crozier exclaimed on first hearing them.)

The narwhals too were a source of wonder, the males clustering along the edges of floes clashing their long, spindly tusks together like bands of musketeers. Herds of seals, numbering into the high hundreds, passed them on several days heading north, and both the skipper and the cook were encouraged by their profusion. ‘We could be needing a few of those wee buggers soon enough,' McGregor said, though he had struggled more than most with the cook's seal experiments to date, the meat being viciously fishy.

Of birdlife, Crozier listed in his notebook: skuas, Arctic terns, black guillemots
(Cepphus grylle),
Brunnich's guillemots
(Uria lomvia),
fulmars
(Fulmarus
glacialis),
little auks
(Alle alle)
and the usual gull suspects
.
One evening, loitering on deck before dinner, he witnessed a snowy owl (
Bubo scandiacus
) skim the ice to port and snatch a guillemot from a strip of open water before wheeling east with its victim flapping and protesting beneath it.
‘Most surprising
,' he wrote.
‘One would have thought, given
their nature, that these predators would not venture beyond the
tundra at these latitudes. (NB: report sighting to School of
Zoology on return.)'

The pack, after they passed through the field of giant icebergs, became thicker and more extensive and they had to take more care, having travelled for the best part of one day into a dead-end, in picking their leads. As they worked their way along the edge of Melville Bay, they settled on conning the ship from the crow's nest, with the fore-sail reefed for a clear view. This afforded them some warning of impenetrable stretches and enabled them at times to plot the course in advance. Watch was taken in turn by Harris, Doyle, and the cabin boy, with orders being called down to the wheelhouse and a wire running down to a bell in the engine room where one or other of the twins was on stoking duty. Where the ship became stuck fast they used steam power to reverse, then, under full sail and with engines at high pressure, rammed the ice repeatedly. The
Dolphin's
bows would rise and chunks of ice would buckle and tumble to either side, and eventually a lead would open up. It was laborious work and sometimes they spent whole days thrashing around, going nowhere.

Where the pack had broken up and was freezing over again ‘frost-smoke' gushed from the surface and formed cumulus clouds, giving the impression at times that the
Dolphin
was sailing through the sky. The quality of light as they moved north also changed, the ice-haze in the atmosphere causing many distortions and mirages: double suns, land where there was none, icebergs and islands hovering in mid-air. At one stage Doyle was convinced he could see, far in the distance, the flat top of Ben Bulben, his native county's most distinctive mountain. Another day, McGregor was spooked by a ship following in their wake, a black-sailed schooner, that had evaporated by the time the field glasses were located. As it wasn't long until the summer solstice there was, after a while, barring heavy cloud cover, almost continuous sunlight, a phenomenon that soon began to blur the boundary between wakefulness and dreaming aboard the
Dolphin
.