I had known Hillary Currey nearly all my life. We had first become friends at Michaelhouse, where Hillary, a popular boy who made a good fist of appearing responsible, rose to become Head Boy while I did everything I could to buck the system. Later, Hillary and I had gone to Rhodes University together. He was the sort of friend who proposed wild adventures in which I would become a more than willing participant. During the long varsity vacations, I would work, and on one Christmas vacation, Hillary suggested how we could make more than £60 a week. It would be easy, he said, we’ll get a job on the fishing boats.
Now, somewhere in the middle of the Namib desert, this did not seem like such a good idea. I looked at Hillary, encrusted in the sand and grime of the sun-blasted landscape, and wondered if he was thinking the same.
It was approaching Christmas, 1953. The bushmen of the Namibian interior called this place “The Land God Made in Anger.” The Portuguese sailors who once made landfall at the port where we were heading had called it “The Gates of Hell.” We were bound for the fishing town of Walvis Bay, sitting at the head of the newly christened Skeleton Coast, but between us and the water there was endless, unchanging desert. It was a journey of 1500 miles and would take us six days and we had now been two days without a lift. Until then we had cadged rides with local farmers and traveling salesmen, but good fortune had deserted us. We tramped in silence along the Trans Namib railway line that stretched all the way from the Namibian capital Windhoek to the coast, lost in our own thoughts of incipient despair and the folly of youth.
From behind us came the creaking of something approaching along the rails. At first, I could see nothing in the heat haze—but slowly the sound grew louder, and an image began to coalesce out of the rippling air. It was a maintenance buggy, rattling its way along the tracks by means of a pump worked by a red-faced engineer.
We flagged it down, gesticulating wildly. No doubt perturbed by the sight of two twenty-year-old white men tramping through the midday heat, the engineer slowed the buggy.
“What’s happened here, boys?”
“Room up there for two more?” Hillary asked.
The engineer looked at us like we were about to steal his lunch.
Nobody hitch-hiked on the railways.
Then Hillary fished out a couple of bills from his pocket, and the driver took them.
“Climb up back,” he said, “you’re going to die out here else.”
And that was how we arrived, exhausted and stinking of the desert, into the fishing port of Walvis Bay.
•••
Walvis Bay was a natural deep water harbor where the seas were alive with pilchards, plankton and the whales after which the settlement was first named. There had been a town here since the fifteenth century, when the harbor was a valuable haven for European ships sailing around the perilous Cape of Good Hope. Out on the seafront lay half a mile of jetties, and at dusk the waters of the harbor thronged with more than a hundred fishing trawlers, each fit for seven or eight men. We wanted a job on one of the pilchard boats.
We spent two days walking up and down the docks asking for work. But no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t find a captain to take us on. Naturally, the first thing the skippers asked was how much experience we had. The answer was simple: none. I was used to boats, that much was true—we had spent long childhood vacations up and down the Zambezi and Kafue rivers, out on the Great Lakes in Malawi, or off the coast at Maputo in Mozambique, game fishing in the Indian Ocean—but I knew nothing about trawling for pilchards. The captains looked at my soft hands and laughed in my face. Everyone declined our services, some not so politely. “Go home to Mummy, little boy,” was perhaps the gentlest.
Someone finally took pity on us. The Kingfisher—a little trawler owned, like several of these pilchard boats, by a pair of affluent Cape Town brothers—was at jetty and about to cast off when we approached. Her skipper, a giant of a man named “Boots” Botha, took us on for five weeks, on a commission-only basis. If we didn’t catch we didn’t get paid. At thirty-five years old, Boots was ancient to us—a hardened man of the sea—but he must have had a soft spot, or else he could see the desperation in our eyes.
The work would be hard, he said, we would be the dogs of the boat, doing all the tasks his experienced crew hated to do themselves—but in the evenings the beer would flow freely at the hotel where all the fishermen gathered and we would get a place to bed down in the boat’s cabin.
That same day, we went to sea.
•••
Like all new initiates, we were treated as pond life. True to his word, Boots gave us all the dangerous jobs which we jumped at because we knew no better. If there was a practical joke to be played, it was at our expense. My own initiation came early. Sent by the ship’s engineer to bring up cotton wastes from below deck, I plunged my arm into a container—only to discover it was the engineer’s latrine, the cotton wastes used in lieu of bog paper. From that day on I was christened Spook-gat or “ghost’s asshole” in Afrikaans.
Those first weeks aboard the Kingfisher were back-breaking. Never had I put my body through so many sustained trials. Though I was barely twenty years old, my joints ached and my muscles groaned—and only after days of hard work did I grow accustomed to the grind. There was much to learn but, before the first week had passed, I gained a special position on board that went some way to elevating my standing.
The casting of trawler nets was a complicated business. With one end of the line attached to the trawler, and the other to a little rowboat towed behind, we would head for what the skipper thought were the day’s best waters. At the back of the trawler, Boots Botha would survey the water for the first sign of a shoal. Usually it would be the darting of a pilchard just below the surface, perhaps even one or two cresting out of the swell. Pilchards gather in vast shoals, so as soon as one was spotted, we knew there were thousands more lurking underneath. It was at this point that the trawler would begin its circuit, lapping the shoal in ever decreasing circles, bunching it into a tighter and tighter space. Sometimes the shoals would be so big that we’d have to unleash the rowboat, working the shoal so that it separated into two or three smaller shoals, whatever size best fitted our nets. As soon as the shoal was constricted, the surface of the water would come alive, quivering and glittering with the agitation of so many fish.
At the skipper’s command, the rowboat would be thrown loose, its ties unfastened so that it could stream off, trailing the net behind. Soon there would be two hundred feet of net out in the water. Only then would the skipper bring the trawler around the shoal to pick up the rowboat again and retie it, the shoal being surrounded by netting.
The fish were crowded together close to the surface while, underneath them, the net hung open. Now came the moment to close the net, trapping the fish within. Around the bottom of the net ran the lead line, laden with lead weights to hold it down. It was this line that had to be gathered up, taken back on board the trawler and put onto a winch to draw the bag closed. Yet, the net could not be fully closed until the heavy steel rings around the lead line were taken off.
The critical point came when the whole bunch of the net was up. The rings had a thick cable running through them but, to take them off and bring in the net, another line had to be fed through so that the thick cable could come out and the steel rings be taken off one by one. A man at the back of the boat would reach for a stick and try to feed this new line around. It was a painstaking job, but nothing else could happen until it was done. The rest of us had to wait.
After three days of watching the crew clumsily feeding the line through the rings, I jumped forward and put my arm through the rings and pulled the new line through. I was the only one on board whose hands could fit through the rings. The trawler men were amazed, even though it seemed to me like an obvious thing to do.
The following day, when the net came up from the water, I was summoned. “Spook-gat!” cried the boatman. “Here, Spook-gat, put your hand through here . . .”
I slipped my arm through the rings and fed the line again. I was pleased with my work. Every day I was saving the crew a half hour of frustration and impatience and, after that, the crewmen never looked at me with quite the same disdain.
•••
At the end of every day, back at the jetties, suction pipes drew up our catch from the deck of the boat, and Boots Botha was paid. Nights were spent in exhaustion, or in drink, and come the next dawn, we would be back on shore, warming ourselves with coffee and waiting for the sun to spill enough light over the water to make fishing possible again.
We started to earn money. At first, it was enough for beer on nights when the hotels in Walvis Bay rang with the raucous sounds of fishermen who had come in from the sea. Then, as our catches grew bigger, so too did our cash and by the end of our trip I had made about £450, which was a king’s ransom in those days.
But it was blood money, sometimes literally. At sea, men risked their lives daily. Fingers were sliced off at the knuckles when the sea suddenly surged, tightening or wrenching at the nets. Hands were mangled or crushed against the sides of the boats. And, on one occasion I will never forget, I saw a man lose his life to the fickleness of the sea—an experience I would later use in my novel The Burning Shore.
We were some distance off coast, with our nets already winching up, when our sister boat, owned by the same Cape Town brothers as the Kingfisher, drew near. Across the waters, we watched as they cast their nets, the line streaming off the back of the trawler. I saw one of their crewmen stumble, his ankle caught in the running line. For a terrible second, he stood tall, then the sea was dragging the line away, his body snapped taut—and he was gone cartwheeling over the side. As he hit the water, still entangled in the netting, his crew rushed to snatch him from the depths but it was too late. The line was already thirty feet under water. By the time he surfaced, he would be dead.
An hour passed. Maybe more. When it came time to draw in the nets, filled with pilchards, plankton—and the occasional shark or barracuda, to be cut free and tossed back into the water—there lay the man’s body, already beginning to bloat.
After four weeks working the Kingfisher, we had gained the grudging respect of Boots Botha and his crew. Both Hillary and I were hard-working boys, and one night we all went out on the town. The hotel in Walvis Bay was heaving with trawler men, and the crew of the Kingfisher were already deep into their cups. At the bar, Hillary and the chief engineer were rounding up more drinks while I propped up a table with Boots Botha and the rest. It had been a good day. One of our sister ships had been trapped at sea, their net filled with so many pilchards from such an unexpectedly vast shoal that they were laden down, unable to move. The Kingfisher came to the rescue and we spent the day ferrying parts of their catch back to port and, in doing so, had the most profitable day in the crew’s memory. Most of it was being spent in the hotel that night.
Boots was smashed out of his skull and he pulled me over for a heartfelt chat: “Spook-gat,” he said, struggling to remember my real name. “Wilbur isn’t it? You’re a good man, I like you, so let me tell you. Every time you stick your bleddy arm through those rings, I get such a fright . . .”
Boots’ eyes were bloodshot with beer, and he seemed to be laughing at some joke only he knew the punch line to, his spittle flecking my ear.
“Why?” I asked.
“Spook-gat, if the line breaks when your arm’s in the rings, all those rings are going to separate—and they’re going to have a pressure of about three hundred tons on them and your arm will look like a sliced loaf of bread.”
Now I understood the looks of consternation whenever I put my arm through the rings. I gazed around the room, at Hillary drinking, at the other members of the crew who all knew this simple truth that I did not. I had been risking my arm, perhaps my life, and not one of them had breathed a word. It was the law of the jungle and I was the little baby antelope squinting in the sun wondering why all the other animals had run away when a predator emerged. I smiled at my naivety. At least I was still alive to tell the tale.
The next day, as we rode the waves beyond Walvis Bay, casting our nets and preparing to draw them in, the cry went out—“Spook-gat! Put your hand through these rings!” I took one look at the grinning crew and told them in trawler man’s language that I was never going to put my hand in there again. “Go get your stick,” I shouted. They’d been rumbled.
•••
The time we spent aboard the Kingfisher had been as grueling as I could remember. Hillary and I set off eastward, along the railway that would take us back across the desert, to Windhoek and, from there, to South Africa and Rhodes University; our pockets were flush, our bodies were strong, and my mind was filled with a new understanding of the sea. It was unforgiving and cruel, it took life with impunity, but it was also magnificent, wild and beautiful and rewarded those who understood her with the riches of comradeship and stirring narratives of life on the waves. In the years to come, I would return to those stories, to men like Boots Botha and the crew of the Kingfisher. Looking back, the seeds of future novels like The Diamond Hunters and The Eye of the Tiger, and even the character Lothar de la Rey from The Sound of Thunder, were all being sown in those experiences at sea.
Those novels were still more than a decade away—and, before then, the sea would come calling again.
•••
The next Christmas vacation, I thought that, having survived working on a pilchards’ trawler, I was tough enough to do a season with the whaling fleets which left from Cape Town in November and sailed down almost to the South Atlantic. I had heard from a friend that a Japanese whaling fleet was looking for labor.
The docks in Cape Town were vast, heaving with freighters, liners and pleasure boats. Before I was born, whaling in this part of the world was centered a couple of hundred miles up the coast at Durban, where the blue whales ran into the warmer northern waters, but this Christmas it was colder waters to which I was bound. Once signed up by a representative of the Whaling Company, I boarded a resupply boat, along with dozens of others like me, and we began the long voyage. Our destination was as far south as I had ever been in my life, and as far south as I was ever likely to go. We were bound for Antarctica, the cold majesty of empty ocean and icebergs. Down in those waters, the humpback, sperm, and southern right whales were to be our prey.
The whaling company had been in Antarctic waters since November, when the whaling season began, and the boat I was traveling on was one of many resupply vessels that regularly plied this route, delivering new men, goods and specialist supplies to the fleet. For five nights and four days we plowed south, a journey of stultifying boredom, across boundless oceans, where there was nothing to see but the curve of the horizon, growing more pronounced the further we went. The crew on board, a mixture of South Africans and Japanese, were hard, taciturn men—and before we were one night out of port, I knew that this was no Kingfisher.
At dusk on the fourth night, we saw the blue expanse of the ocean broken, for the first time, by jagged peaks of white. Icebergs pocked the horizon and, as we entered the ice field, I realized we were close.
On the fifth day, we reached the site where the whaling fleet was working. It was the stench that hit us first. I had not encountered the foul smells of whale blubber and meat before, nor do I want to again. The odor was thick and loathsome, and seemed to taint everything in the atmosphere. The closer we came, the more the oily fug wrapped around us, suffocating us with its miasma of putrefaction and death.
In an expanse of open water, shimmering with the run-off from the butchery on board, lay the factory ship of the fleet.
Antarctic whaling was built around processing stations on the ice shelf itself, but the need for more efficient butchery—and to avoid regulation by any government in the world—had led to the first factory ships being built so that whaling could take place entirely at sea. When we boarded her, the factory ship seemed like a world in itself. I imagined the Antarctic as the place of beauty and grandeur I had conjured up by reading classic tales of exploration and heroism—of Robert Falcon Scott and his doomed mission to reach the South Pole, of Ernest Shackleton and the crew of the Endurance, abandoning their ship to the pack ice and yet somehow returning home without losing a single man—but there was little triumph or adventure in what the next month had in store. The factory ship was an open-air abattoir, her every surface slick with whale oil and blood. For the rest of the season, she was to be my home.
•••
If my first days aboard the Kingfisher had shown me how unprepared I was compared to the trawler men who worked those waters every day, my first days aboard the factory ship revealed how naive I had been to think of the trawler as any kind of preparation for a life like this.
Days were spent in long shifts on the factory deck. There were eight harpooning boats in the fleet. At first light, they would set out to hunt their prey, returning at intervals with rivers of blood trailing behind them. The carcasses of the whales were towed in by the catchers, and winched up the slide in the stern of the mothership by great mechanical claws. Then our work would begin. Armed with flensing knives, the crewmen sliced open the layers of blubber, systematically taking the great animals apart. The team of which I was a junior member hooked on cables that peeled the blubber off. It was hard, unrelenting work on a slippery, rolling deck, in gale-force winds which whipped across us, carrying with them all the freezing bitterness of the Antarctic. We were surrounded by heavy, moving machinery, while the knives swung with wild abandon by the Japanese could decapitate or disembowel a man. By comparison the pilchard trawler was a luxury pleasure cruise.
Once flensed—stripped of every scrap of fat, flesh and bone that could be processed, used or sold—the carcasses of the whales were pushed back out to sea. Somewhere, further south, they would wash up on the shores of the Antarctic ice shelf where vast bone yards would collect—a veritable skeleton coast.
I spent my nights in quiet solitude, too exhausted to do anything but sleep. I had no companions here—and no chance of making them. The men of the Kingfisher had become friends, but these whaling men were a different breed. Even those who spoke English had a glazed, faraway glint in their eyes. There was no camaraderie between them, only work, blood, blubber and bone.
By the end of the fourth week I felt as if I had been here a lifetime. The place was less a factory ship than a mobile slaughterhouse. The visceral mess of death was all around. I spent another long day toiling on the cadaverous deck, and, when I retired that night, every inch of me glistening with whale oil, I knew what I was going to do.
The next day, I made my way across the slippery decks to find the ship’s doctor. I told him I had a pain in my abdomen that wouldn’t go away. He laid me down, felt my gut but found nothing. He told me to go back to work. “Surely,” I said, “you don’t want somebody to die on this ship? That’s how bad it feels.”
He picked up a pen and began to fill out a form. He’d heard this story before and knew it wasn’t worth questioning. That day, when the resupply ship came down from the Cape, there was one extra passenger on its manifest for the return route north. Two months earlier than I’d thought, I was saying goodbye to that floating hell upon the water. It would take me days to feel civilized again, weeks until I could no longer feel the residue of whale oil between my fingers, or smell the noxious vapor of the factory ship in my hair. The return journey was long and unsettled, the seas squalling under tempestuous skies—and Cape Town couldn’t come quickly enough.
One day, I would write a novel called Hungry as the Sea and draw on my experiences in the Antarctic. Hungry as the Sea would be my twelfth book and the first I had ever written partially set in the US. It was a story about Nicholas Berg, the golden prince of Christy Marine, who had got to the top of the shipping world through hard work and ability, only to lose his position to a glib London city boy, who stole his wife for good measure. Now, with only a tugboat to his name, Berg had to brave the chilly wastes of the Antarctic, rescue one of his former company’s luxury cruise liners and then prevent his cuckolder from killing his estranged wife and son.
I had no knowledge whatsoever of the big ships and the arcane world of high sea salvage. Safmarine, South Africa’s merchant navy, was particularly helpful, being one of the big world players in maritime freight and shipping, but the greatest lure for me was Safmarine’s ownership of two of the biggest and most powerful sea tugs in the world, the John Ross and the Wolraad Woltemade, known as the greyhounds or the vultures of the Cape, depending on your viewpoint. They both regularly docked in Cape Town. I spent hours aboard with the captains and crews who, very generously, shared their knowledge and stories of high drama on the worst seas of the world.
As for whaling and the Antarctic, if I never saw those icy wastes again, it would be too soon.