THERE WAS NO one in the Kurt Hansen when I boarded her that Saturday evening for my fourth season as a spotter with the Norwegian whaling fleet based on Port Natal. As the ship which had held the record the past three years for the greatest number of catches, she occupied the obvious place of honour: immediately alongside the quay and at the head of the line of twenty-four whalers, moored three abreast in the crowded harbour. Like the rest of the little ships, she appeared in that restricted berth even smaller than usual.
Her crow’s-nest, which, when I occupied it on watch at sea, always seemed to me to stick out so far above the water, now barely cleared the stern rail of the purple Royal Mail steamer which had called in at dawn that morning, in a hurry as usual, and now, with fires undrawn in her boilers, was lying almost against the Kurt Hansen’s nose, trembling with impatience to be off again.
At the other end of the line of whalers rose the black bow, tall saffron masts and long black funnel, topped off with two thin bands of red, of the Clan MacGillivray, a bulky turretship, whose Blue Peter, hoisted limp in the still air, signified that she was about to resume her beat for freight around the world. Beyond both mail ship and tramp rose the funnels and masts of many other vessels, their flags flapping like household dusters on the sky-line, and all anointed and shining with the yellow of the sinking sun. As I knew, there was not a single hull in this great concourse of shipping that did not exceed the combined tonnage of the fleet to which the Kurt Hansen belonged. Indeed one could easily have had the impression of pigmies huddled together for protection in the world of giants, were it not for the way the whalers turned up their noses at the glittering pinnacles of glass and painted steel that surrounded them. This air of self-assurance if not impudence seemed to me most marked in the Kurt Hansen, perhaps because after three seasons in her my senses were not free of bias.
For me the extraordinary thing about those remarkable little ships was that ultimately no two of them were alike. Built by the same people in the same yard to the same design, they were technically not just sister ships but twelve identical pairs of identical twins whose nurses, at sea, could never tell them apart without referring to the names inscribed on their sterns. Yet for us who sailed in them, there was always something, an oddity of mast, cat’s-cradle of rigging, set of wheel house, mounting of harpoon gun, grip on water, or just subtle departure in general line which distinguished one ship from the others.
These differences, of course, manifested themselves also in their behaviour at sea, and I never ceased to marvel how members of the same united brood could differ so much in their performance. One would excel at pert answers to her helm, another rejoice in the roughest of storms, another make light of towing the heaviest of catches, and yet another out-distance all in the vital matter of sprinting from the drifting position with her engines stopped to full speed ahead where a vanished whale had suddenly re-appeared in an unpredicted quarter of the ocean. Or, to return to the ship which mattered most to me, to combine so many refinements of these qualities as to become the greatest all-rounder in the fleet.
I know there are people who, lacking direct experience of these ships, try to explain away these differences as consequences not of the individuality of ships themselves but of variations in the capacity of the crews who man them and, above all, the quality of the Captains who command them. Of course, no one could have served in these ships for long, particularly not in the Kurt Hansen, without appreciating the very great importance of the human element in these matters, but in the end the skill and devotion of sailors only mitigated and did not abolish the influence of the difficulties of which I have spoken. I sensed that there was only one element that could over-ride even the most formidable combinations of these differences, technical skills and human qualities, and that was the infinitely mysterious matter of luck.
Before I joined the Kurt Hansen for the first time as a boy of fourteen on long vacation from school up-country, I had never given this question of luck a thought. Since then we had rarely returned to land a catch at the slipway for the factory on shore without my respect for this awesome phenomenon being greatly enhanced. Indeed, it would have comforted my imagination even in those comparatively care-free days of my boyhood if I could have discovered some law which was in charge of the workings of luck in life and circumstance on earth, some calculation why, for instance, one ship and set of men should have so much of it, and others so little. It would have helped if I could have believed fully that luck could be earned and that we all, ships, men and stars, got the luck we deserved. But I soon discovered that this was only partially true and that, however wise it was to do all one could to draw luck one’s own way, fortune was no mere extension of a system of human ethics, however exalted, nor just an instrument of some discernible principle of promoting life by injecting incentive of good and deterrents of bad into its processes. Where it appeared one day to coincide completely with the deserts of the recipients, the very next day it would shower good fortune on others who one would have thought utterly unworthy of such bounty.
We had, for example, one ship in our fleet which had been notoriously unlucky ever since the day of her launching fifteen years before. I am deliberately not mentioning her by name because of the belief held by all members of the Kurt Hansen’s crew that to do so would bring down on ourselves some of the unfortunate ship’s capacity for mis-timing and mishap. I know that this will be dismissed as ridiculous superstition by most people on shore, where life in its metropolitan context wears such a plausible air of logic and security that they overlook what a fundamentally brief, brittle and insecure business it is, rather as persons who, shutting out the night by drawing the curtains and lighting a lamp in their locked rooms, no longer remember how great is the darkness and how remote the pin-prick of stars outside. But those of us who encounter life beyond the fortifications of towns and civilization, who still climb mountains and experience their fall of cliff and avalanche, who till the land and endure the inconstancies of rain and harvest or sail the seas to hunt for whales, enter an uncircumscribed area of existence where all our brightest knowledge and deepest experience often fail and what is despised as foolish superstition becomes the best available answer to the onslaught of the great unknown in the mind and life of man.
Certainly the most successful whalers I had met in my short time at sea were those who combined a regard for efficiency and the disciplines of their calling with an almost religious observation of the rules prescribed by superstitions born long before their own day. Even my own Captain, who tended to be an exception in this regard and whose crew despite his great success and undoubted skill were worried by a suspicion of flippancy, if not cynicism, in his attitude towards their own deeply entrenched superstitiousness, would never let the name of this particular unlucky ship pass his lips. When he was forced to do so, I noticed that he never failed to spit after its utterance with the same lack of inhibition and no doubt the same instinctive purpose as the Amangtakwena, the Bantu people among whom we lived up-country who, whenever they caught the stink of a dead animal rotting on the veld, spat vigorously, convinced that thereby they ejected the spirit of evil which death symbolized and which had just tried to enter their person through their nostrils.
Now this unmentionable and unfortunate ship in the fleet could never do anything right. Some of the best crews and Captains had been assigned to her and had all been defeated in their turn, not one particular combination of men serving more than a couple of seasons in her. The representative of the owners, who lived in great luxury in a large house on the fashionable heights overlooking the city and bay of Port Natal and whom one would have thought safely padded against the pricks of superstition, had been so wounded by the ship’s continued misfortune that he had already sanctioned three changes of her name because some of his more experienced skippers held that he might alter her luck thereby. Luck, however, is nothing if not a seaman too, and needed no names to tell one ship from the others. For reasons strictly its own, it went on resolutely avoiding the wretched little ship. All in all, everything that was technically and humanly possible was tried to obtain better terms from fate for her, but up to this moment without marked effect.
I do not know whether they relished it, but in their plight, the ship and her changing crews should have had one great consolation: they were exceedingly popular in the fleet. One reason, of course, was that everybody felt free to be sorry for them and all the better in themselves for indulging their sense of commiseration. Another was that no one could possibly envy them as they envied the Kurt Hansen.
Just as the seasons behind me had been my kindergarten in the education of luck, so they were primary lessons for me in the radio-active fall-out of envy in the condition of men and their relationships. Our sister whalers may not have actually hated us, but there was not one among them, I am certain, who did not long for the Kurt Hansen to be reduced to their ranks with the same ration of success as they themselves received from the fates. It was as if in this regard they looked on luck as some kind of black marketeer of providence, and the Kurt Hansen its favourite spiv; whereas they valued our unfortunate sister ship as a kind of lightning conductor which would prevent the cumulative electricity of misfortune from being discharged through any single one of them. While this ship was there with them and continued to be so unlucky, they somehow assumed their own misfortune could never be too great.
And so I could go on multiplying examples, but I think this is enough to suggest how complex and pervasive this influence was in our minds and life at sea. I myself found some comfort in one thing only; a growing suspicion that luck, however much appearances were against it, was not capricious. I had a feeling that if we knew all now, in the beginning as at the end, we might see it woven into a surpassing pattern, an unbroken thread of such a multi-coloured brightness that we would find it difficult to forgive the limitations and blur of perishable senses which seemed to us so final and authoritative. I wondered more and more whether there could not be some vital link between good and bad luck. Perhaps the only thing to do was to trust one’s bad as much as one’s good fortune. Could not what seemed to be so inexplicably bad today turn out years later to have been a stroke of good fortune and both be part of a meaningful whole amounting to something which was greater even than the sum of their parts?
In fact I found it of help to admonish my own impatient thinking by adapting a famous New Testament observation and contemplating the probability that the children of this world might well be luckier in their own generation than the children of the light. Perhaps this is what we all unconsciously implied when we said that so and so or such and such were “lucky devils”. Who, after all, had ever spoken of “lucky angels”? The matter, I felt, could not be disposed of on all levels until one had faced also the awful question: “Who was the more fortunate, Barabbas or Christ?”
Now I have discussed all these differences and particularly this matter of luck at such length because suddenly they were very much on my mind that Saturday evening. I had no sooner done with the water policeman on duty at the gates to the docks and picked out the Kurt Hansen than these considerations assailed me.
All these differences between our whalers that I have mentioned were somehow expressed in the paintwork of each ship. It was as if the experience of each, though vanished behind them, had left fingerprints in the varying patches of paint applied to repair the damage which sea, weather and time had inflicted on them. At least so it had always struck me until this particular evening when, for no known reason, at my first glimpse of them in the last light of the sun, I seemed to be looking not at sets of fingerprints but into the hand of providence itself. Proud, perhaps self-assured even to the point of arrogance so tempting to the small, as the Kurt Hansen lay there, my delight at seeing her again was spoilt by an involuntary apprehension, and the valedictory light of the dying winter’s day seemed to enfold her like a mantle of fate. My uneasiness was increased when next I hailed her and got no answer.
I quickly boarded her, opened the door at the head of the companion-way leading down into the forecastle where someone on duty was most likely to be, called out loudly “Anyone aboard?” but got no reply.
I tried the door to the saloon next with the same result. This was so unusual, even for ships as notoriously informal as whalers, that the more I thought on it, the more uncomfortable I became. We may never have considered it necessary to go to the lengths of the great ships all around us who set continuous watches night and day on their gangways but, as far as I knew, it had always been a rule to have at least one man always on duty in ships lying alongside the quay as was the Kurt Hansen. However, telling myself not to be too fanciful and that a perfectly simple explanation for it all soon would be available, I took my gear down into the saloon.
The air in this small triangular compartment was heavy with the smell of the cigarillos the Captain incessantly smoked. He anyway could not have been gone long. In fact a glass, which I was certain had been emptied not long before, of a good measure of schnapps still stood by his place at the head of the small table as if he had left in too great a hurry to put it away. Wide open beside the glass lay the ship’s big black Norwegian Bible. This was even more astonishing.
The Captain, although a man of deep feelings, was not an overtly religious person. In fact on Sunday, when most of his colleagues and their crews were attending evening service at the small Norwegian church close by the harbour gates, he preferred to call on the owner’s representative where after a day of tennis there was always a lively assembly of people and a great deal to drink. Now not one of the least of odd things about it all was that the Bible was open at the 38th chapter of the Book of Job. Since Job is perhaps the greatest text-book available to any student of luck, I need not stress how the sight of it stimulated the mood I had brought on board with me.
I noticed that the Captain had underlined the sixteenth and seventeenth verses, but as I read no Norwegian it was not until I looked it up in the Authorized Version a week later that I got its drift. I found then it consisted of some of those terrible rhetorical questions that answer themselves only too convincingly and which the Almighty seemed to have used deliberately to increase the temptations of doubt and the feelings of helplessness in the heart of his good and faithful servant Job sitting there on his ash-heap already stricken so unfairly by any earthly measure of justice. “Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea?” Jehovah had thundered at Job, as if the answer were not self-evident. “Or hast thou walked in search of the depth? Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?”
What on land or sea could have set the Captain reading Job all of a sudden? And why mark these particular lines which, considering the moment of the occasion, were so uncalled for in character? I turned over the pages and found the first sentence of the first verse of the 31st chapter similarly underlined. My immediate thought was that the Captain’s reading had been as extensive as it had been out of character. Then I had no means of telling that it was this sentence which had fired his interest and made him probe backwards into this disturbing book. It was, of course, the famous question: “Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?” I was not surprised to learn later that he had answered both the book and the man of whose visit there was at this time no sign with a triumphant: “A thousand times, yes,” since by nature our Captain specialized in answers rather than questions.
I know that there are great scholars today who translate the original Aramaic word in this sentence not as “Leviathan” but as “crocodile”. I do not think, however, that this is of any importance at all because all of us concerned in this story took “Leviathan” to stand for whale and “hook” for harpoon, and this fact, combined with its numerous references and profound feeling for the sea, drew me, for one, closer to that enigmatic Book.
As for myself at that moment my own questions had no answers but there did occur to me suddenly several remarks I had constantly overheard in the fleet which may have had some submerged connection with the matter since they occurred unbidden to me. “That Larsen’s a lucky devil, he sure is.” Or another as common, but perhaps more disturbing was: “Larsen pushes his luck very hard and one of these days he is going to push it too far.” And yet another uttered by the oldest skipper in the fleet at a farewell party given to him on his retirement by the owner’s representative: “I have learnt not to call any sailor lucky until the end of his days at sea. Larsen has had three lucky seasons, the third luckiest of all. And third time lucky, we say. But I would not assume he can do it again. If he does . . .” The old sailor had shrugged his shoulders.
Finally, there was the remark that perhaps weighed most with me and was often reiterated by the ship’s cook. He was an experienced sailor and had also all the instincts of a philosopher. He knew the seas from the black lava cliffs of Iceland to the white Antarctic fringe of the South Atlantic, and was perhaps the severest critic of the Captain. I had heard him say over and over again: “We take our luck in this ship too much for granted and no good will come of it in the end.” And by “this ship” we knew, of course, that this proved and faithful servant of the sea really meant the Captain. Was not the fact that the ship had been left unguarded some evidence of the truth of the cook’s observation?
I stood there with all this going through my mind, while my eyes looked over the tiny saloon, the tablecloth of a faded yellow plush with its fringe of tassels like mimosa blossom; the covers on the two built-in benches; the curtains which served as a door over the entrance to the Captain’s cabin; and the small glass case, suspended in mid-air on brackets in the corner, which held the ship’s manuals, Lloyd’s register of shipping, pilot books and three fat manuals bound in brown morocco that looked like family portrait albums but were Larsen’s “game books”, since they contained the entries made in his sprawling hand, of all his catches, their time, place, duration of struggle at the end of the harpoon, their tonnage and finally the bonus paid on them by the owners to his ships. I might have been standing in a respectable Victorian deep-sea fisherman’s parlour, and not the saloon of a modern whaler. Everything was as I had seen it last a year before, except for some things slightly out of position, like the dirty glass on the table, the open Bible, and above it the dark gap it had left in the line of erect books on the shelf, as conspicuous as the space in a line of Guardsmen made by a soldier fallen out in a faint with the heat and stress of a Royal parade.
Were these inanimate things out of position signs that the Kurt Hansen had moved out of orbit, too? At seventeen, as I then was, a year feels far longer than it does at three score years and ten, and this year now became so crowded with possibilities that my imagination could readily conceive it long enough to have affected a radical alteration in any scheme of things. Life, after all, is nothing if not movement and change without cease, and it was change and movement that then seemed to give tongue in the long cello sound drawn from the Kurt Hansen’s mooring-ropes by the rise and fall of a sea which is never quite still, not even in so locked and so great a harbour. Also, whenever a lift of water more powerful than the rest gripped the little ship there was a squeak that came from the metal deep within her like that of a mouse suddenly gathered between the paws of a cat. I was half-inclined to climb back up the steep companion-way on deck in order to draw reassurance from the orderly and calm week-end scene outside in Port Natal. But the feeling seemed so irrelevant that I dismissed it.
I went through the plush curtains into the Captain’s cabin. There were two bunks in it, and quickly I stowed my gear in the mahogany drawers underneath the one which had been allotted to me three years before. This unusual privilege was originally conferred on me because I was not a regular member of the crew. This ship, like all the rest, was manned largely by Norwegians brought out specially each year from Norway for the short whaling season in South African waters. One of the exceptions to this was our Zulu stoker ’Mlangeni, who had been with the fleet for many years. I was another exception, of course, and to the end remained the only amateur and outsider among them. In the tight establishment laid down for the little ships there was no room for someone exclusively occupied with the task of spotting whales, which was my task. In all the other ships, the deck hands each had their turn of duty in the crow’s nest to perform. The Kurt Hansen was the first and may well have been the last to depart from this procedure.
It all came about in a way which is worth recalling if only for the light it throws on our Captain’s character.