The Voyage of the Dolphin (5 page)

Three days later they had skirted the northeastern edge of Ireland, Crozier's homesickness not helped by Rafferty playing
Mountains of Mourne
on his banjolele, accompanied by a howling Bunion. They threaded their way among the Inner Hebrides, through the Sound of Mull and the Sound of Skye, and into the Minch, heading for the Western Isles. The light, as they made their way north, thinned and became more delicate, the distant hills on the islands they passed shimmering behind a silvery haze. At night, under starscapes of breath-taking clarity, lamps in the windows of crofters' cottages flickered yellow in the deep darkness.

Though sheltered from the turbulent Atlantic, the going in some of the channels was surprisingly choppy, but in the calmer stretches they fished for mackerel, which were plentiful. Cooked simply, fresh from the sea, they were a welcome relief from the standard rations. (Victoor, it had transpired, was actually marginally worse at cooking sober than he was drunk.)

Excitement had been provided for Crozier, who was a keen amateur naturalist, by a sighting of a golden eagle (
Aquila chrysaetos,
according to his reference book) riding a thermal above one of the islands off Skye. He watched through field glasses as the bird, with a wingspan, he estimated, of some seven feet, spiralled downwards, intrigued by a pair of goats and their kid that were traversing the cliffside. Legs splayed, it made several speculative swoops towards the youngster but eventually climbed back to the clifftop and disappeared. Later that same day they were joined by a pod of seals that kept pace with the ship for half a mile, stealing curious sideways glances with their oddly affectionate eyes before vanishing beneath the waves.

Working life on board the
Dolphin
had quickly settled into a routine, with the three greenhorns following, more or less, the instructions of the bosun and starting to take on a little nautical training, largely ropework, but also some rudiments of navigation using charts and quadrants. Having spent a couple of summers sailing in his youth, Fitzmaurice was making most progress and even won some grudging approval from McGregor for his knotting prowess. Overall, though, the ship's captain, who had by dint of hard labour and sheer desperation hauled himself from the echoing squalor of a Glasgow tenement, remained suspicious, scornful even, of the half-millennium of unearned privilege he perceived in the sheen of the younger man's curls. He was none too pleased either to discover Fitzmaurice's pet. According to Harris, who had been in the galley at the time of the encounter, both parties had performed a double-take, a disk of dried banana halting sharply on the way to Bridie's mouth, a teacup en route to the skipper's. They had then stared at each other for a full minute before McGregor turned on his heel, muttering something about ‘Noah's f---ing Ark'.

The ship's dog, meanwhile, long shunned by the crew, had attempted to ingratiate itself among the new recruits and, after much rejection (and many unkind words), eventually found Crozier's resistance to be the weakest. It took to following him around and sat watching him from a distance while he worked. It scraped at his cabin door at bedtime, and each evening having been denied entry, snored loudly in the passageway. One night, the latch having failed to engage, Crozier awoke to find the beast's gnarly snout opposite him on the pillow, its tongue lolling, its swamp-gas breath condensing on his cheek.

 

The port of Stornoway, with its dark stone buildings and looming church steeples, was their last land contact before the open sea. They dropped anchor in the deserted harbour – the fishing boats, according to McGregor, having pursued the shoals of silver herring north to Shetland – and the first mate and the cook rowed ashore. After several hours they reappeared, accompanied by two youths pushing barrows full of vegetables, and a man on a horse pulling a cartload of coal. Harris and Victoor between them also lugged rum, tobacco, milk, cured meats, strings of kippers, and another half-dozen chickens, tied by their feet, to replace those abducted for the pot.

Later that afternoon the
Dolphin
cleared the Isle of Lewis, and with a fresh magnitude of wind in her sails, bore northwest into the marble-green sweep of the Atlantic. The new hens were acquainting themselves with the resident fowl (and a somewhat reassured cockerel); the Antwerpian was picking over his supplies and making plans; Doyle and the twins were fine-tuning the rigging. Having finished their scrubbing duties for the day, Crozier and Rafferty were lolling on deck and Fitzmaurice, tired of the endless sandpapering, was idly scanning the horizon off the port side.

‘A whale!'

The others rushed over.

‘I don't see anything,' Rafferty said. ‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes, yes, it was just there.' Fitzmaurice indicated the middle distance. ‘It was half out of the water. I saw its fin and everything.'

‘What size was it?' Crozier said.

‘Not giant, but big enough. And grey and shiny.'

‘Probably a minke. Though it could have been a right whale.'

‘As opposed to a…'

‘Yes, indeed. Although, I suppose there's also a chance it was a small sperm whale. Though I doubt it.'

‘I'm not sure it
was
a whale. Probably the seals again.'

‘It was definitely a whale,' Fitzmaurice snapped.

‘Or a sea cow.'

‘Too cold for sea cows,' Crozier said. ‘They prefer warm, shallow waters.'

‘I wonder if sea cows' milk is salty,' Fitzmaurice mused. The other two looked at him and Crozier opened his mouth to say something, then didn't.

‘Imagine falling overboard and being swallowed by the brute,' Rafferty said. ‘How dark it would be in there.'

They pondered this and Fitzmaurice shivered.

‘Makes you wonder how old Jonah survived.'

‘Well, he couldn't have,' Rafferty said.

‘Couldn't have what?'

‘He couldn't have survived.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘I mean he would have been dissolved by the whale's gastric juices. He would have been digested. It's just a parable.'

‘I'm sure you're mistaken old man. Jonah and the Whale's a true story, isn't it Crozier?'

‘All stories are true,' Crozier replied. ‘And some of them actually happened.'

‘See, I told you.'

‘I read a real-life account of a man being swallowed by a whale once,' Rafferty recalled. ‘Fell off a harpoon boat. When they cut the whale open he'd been bleached white and gone completely blind. And he'd only been in there for half a day.'

‘Crikey.'

They watched for a while longer but the sea was keeping its secrets.

‘Right,' Fitzmaurice said at length, ‘I suppose we'd better make a start on the photographs.'

The others groaned. Along with Jacob's Cream Crackers, and O'Shea's Tinctures, Salves & Balsams, one of the main sponsors of the expedition was a gentlemen's outfitters, Savage Newell of Kildare Street, a firm that had gained a foothold selling cheap, tight uniforms to British regiments during the Boer War. They required, in part-return for their donation of one hundred pounds, a set of publicity photographs of the intrepid lads sporting their outdoor clothing in a variety of rugged scenarios. To this end they had provided a handsome square-bellows camera (the latest model) and several boxes of trousers, pullovers, vests, mitts, balaclavas, reindeer-hide boots, stiff gabardine coats and prickly woollen longjohns.

‘I'll fetch the equipment, you fellows go and put on the garments.'

 

The camera, a Magiflex Rectograph Imperial, was a large and unwieldy device made of brass-bound mahogany, and it was with some difficulty that Fitzmaurice secured it to its tripod. He stared at the instructions.

Once fitted to the tripod and with
glass plate inserted on the rear standard (fig.1), open
the shutter on the lens (fig.2) to focus and
compose the image.
Straightforward enough.
The taking lens may be
stopped down (fig.3) to help gauge depth of field
and vignetting, and a focusing cloth may be used in
conjunction with a Fresnel lens (fig.4) or a loupe
(fig.5)…
He frowned.
To make a photograph pull
back the ground glass (fig.6) and slide the film
holder into place within the plane of the lens (fig.
7) taking care not to damage the springback mechanism (fig
8)…
Breathing heavily through his nose he skipped twenty or thirty pages ahead
. Close and cock the shutter (fig. 193)
and set speed and aperture before removing the darkslide...

‘Christ.' He looked up. Crozier and Rafferty were loitering bulkily around the companionway in their Savage Newell coats, knickerbockers and gaiters. Rafferty was additionally wearing a thick balaclava, that combined with his milk-bottle glasses to give the impression of a diving helmet, or an insect head on a human body.

‘Right-o, stand over there by the rigging and act as though you know what you're doing. As if you're expert sailors.'

Crozier seized a brush and made sweeping motions; Rafferty attempted to reach up and grasp the rigging but the seams beneath his armpits refused to yield and he had to settle for resting his hands on his hips in an approximation of a jolly tar about to dance the hornpipe.

‘Good. Now hold it like that.'

Fitzmaurice squinted again at the manual then reached into the box and drew out a pane. It slipped from his fingers and shattered. He extracted another and after several attempts from a number of angles managed to insert it into the rear standard
(fig.1)
. He opened the shutter on the lens
(fig.2)
.

‘How long do we have to stand here?' Rafferty wanted to know.

‘I'm not sure.' Fitzmaurice peered at
fig.3
and wondered whether he should use a focusing cloth. ‘Just bear with me.'

Not having any idea what either a Fresnel lens or a loupe was, he moved on to
fig.6
and pulled back the ground glass to slide the film holder into place within the plane of the lens
(fig.
7)
. There was a crunching sound. He adjusted the film holder but this caused a sharp snap, as of an over-stretched spring returning to an unextended position, and a fragment of glass shot out of the side of the bellows.

‘Come on Fitz, what's taking so long?'

‘Just another minute. We're almost there.'

He opened the lens wide and peered through the viewfinder at the ghostly forms in front of him. It was no good. He removed his jacket, draped it around his head and leant over the apparatus, pulling the fabric close to block out the light. He began to ease it all into focus, and slowly, slowly, the picture began to form. Slowly… And then, the dinner gong sounded, a low rumbling came from the bow and the cabin boy and the twins thundered into and through the camera's range of vision plucking Rafferty, without a word or backward glance, into their slipstream.

‘Bloody hell,' shouted Fitzmaurice.

 

Crozier wasn't hungry (it was salt-beef and boiled cabbage and he could abide neither) so he stayed on deck and settled himself on a perch below the bridge to watch some gannets
(Morus bassanus
)
diving for fish. The
Dolphin
was managing a good six knots and it wasn't long before they were gone from view. He lay back and listened to the myriad sounds of the ship: the creaking and ticking of her timbers, the seethe and plash of the ocean against the hull, the whip-crack of the sails; all the various inexplicable tinklings and clankings sought out by the wind. Above him a gull was dreaming at the masthead, floating with barely a wingbeat, and he marvelled at its effortless detachment. What would it be like to be as free as a bird?

Just as the question formed he was distracted by a sound on the starboard side of the deck. It was coming from the lifeboat. Shielding his eyes against the sun, which had just pierced the clouds, he watched as the canvas tarpaulin that was stretched over the mouth of the craft went slack and dropped away, and to his utter amazement a face appeared. It was deathly pale. A pair of wild eyes peered from beneath a tangle of dark hair. He squinted. The creature looked around, listening intently, then rose further into the light and after one more scan (Crozier was largely hidden by the mainmast) vaulted nimbly onto the deck and loped with silent footsteps over to the water butt that stood beside the hatchway.

He could see now that the figure was a young woman in a grimy white blouse and ragged grey skirt. She took the tin scoop from its hook and drank, droplets spilling down her chin. And again. She replaced it, then froze, head on one side. She had sensed him. He shrank back into the shadow of the mast, holding his breath, his heart pounding. When he ventured another peek, she had vanished.

He sat thinking about what he'd just seen, wondering if he had, in fact, seen it. Could he have hallucinated? There was no doubt that he'd been feeling unusual of late, what with the seasickness and the hit-and-miss nutritional value of Victoor's
basse cuisine
. Or had he witnessed an apparition? It wouldn't have been the first time. As a child he'd described to his nervously-smiling family a number of other-worldly encounters, later referred to,
sotto voce
, as ‘Walter's visions'. These included a conversation with a neighbour's wife dead some fifteen years, and a premonition, relayed with great excitement to an uncle who worked for Harland & Wolff Heavy Industries, of the sinking of a mighty ship between ‘white mountains'.

 

‘Are you sure it was a woman?'

‘I told you, she was wearing a skirt.'