I WENT BOBBING out on deck into the bright warm sun. The sudden brightness was too much for my eyes and I sneezed loudly.
I immediately heard ’Mlangeni’s deep voice go up from behind the main hatch. “Tutuka, ’Nkosan, Tutuka! Grow, little Prince, grow!”
His tone was warm with satisfaction, for among his people, as among my Amangtakwena, sneezing was regarded as a lucky sign showing that the spirits of a person’s ancestors had entered him to protect him.
There were many ways of responding to the salutation I had just received from ’Mlangeni, so I did what custom demanded and called on all the spirits of his ancestors and mine, associating him with whatever good fortune the sneeze portended. “Bobaba, fathers, look upon us, and do not turn your backs on us.”
“You will grow, ’Nkosan, do not trouble, you will grow,” ’Mlangeni said approvingly as I made my way to join him.
He was seated on deck, his broad back against the sides of the forrard hatch, his long legs wide apart and stretched full out in front of him, and on the warm, golden wood between them were set a mug of steaming coffee and a platter piled high with slices of bread, butter and yellow cheese. He might have been sitting against the wall of his bee-hive hut in his own kraal at Icoco, so thoroughly at home did he look there in the sun. Not even those pinpointing eyes of Thor Larsen’s constantly examining and reappraising the actions of all within sight could abolish the feeling of indigenous calm and contentment that ’Mlangeni gave out. For soon I noticed that, whenever he bothered to catch the Captain’s eye directed at him like a demand for an immediate explanation of his presence on deck when he should, perhaps, have been at his fire below, ’Mlangeni merely looked up at the safety valve beside the funnel implying that Larsen, too, might look for his answers there. And indeed, since the Kurt Hansen had reduced speed the excess steam in her boilers was so great that it was forcing its way into the air with a loud continuous hiss which would have made talk on deck inaudible had not the movement of the ship carried the noise abaft.
Clearly two could play at the game of wordless intercommunication. ’Mlangeni’s response was, of course, a perfectly calm and just response to the Captain’s unreason. But like most of us, the Captain would have found bias, particularly bias in his own favour, easier to endure than an absolutely impartial and just desert.
“Here, ’Nkosan,” ’Mlangeni now said the moment I reached him, holding the plate of bread and cheese up to me with both hands. “Eat and grow.” Native good manners demanded the gesture. I have never known Africans, no matter how poor, who do not offer to share their food even with strangers who happen to find them eating.
I was about to refuse and explain why when a gruff voice with a Norwegian accent broke in: “Say, what you two talk about?”
It was the man at the winch which was just forrard of the hatch. His name was Nils Ruud.
Gorgeous, who thought punning by no means the lowest form of wit, was later to say repeatedly of this man to me that he was a “Rude Ruud man, in manner and deed,” but actually Nils Ruud’s bark was much worse than his bite. His greatest defect was that he had no imagination and consequently was more literal, self-willed and opinionated than he should have been. At heart he was a decent enough fellow and, like the rest of the crew, always kind to me.
“What does he say?” he asked again as, taken by surprise at this interruption, I stared at him standing there, oil-can in a large red hand, his grease-stained overalls hanging on his burly frame and his small determined blue eyes bright with obstinate enquiry.
“Oh, we’re just exchanging the time of day,” I answered rather lamely.
“A long time and much words you take for your time of day,” he repeated unbelievingly after me.
I said no more and he had to stoop, unanswered, towards his machine and resume making a show of oiling an engine that needed no oiling for the benefit of Thor Larsen, who never had his eyes off us for long.
I had not said more to Ruud because I had a hunch that the less I told the rest of the crew about my exchanges with ’Mlangeni the easier it would be for him to confide in me. Also how explain to a man like Nils Ruud what had just passed between the two of us? How make a regular church-goer like Nils understand that ’Mlangeni, ostensibly one of the benighted heathen, was more aware of the world of the spirit and its claims than most of us? To ’Mlangeni everything from a grain of sand to the fire underneath his boiler, from the movement of an ant to the lowing of cattle at night, even the sneeze of a boy, were all significant manifestations of meaning. What would Nils Ruud have said had I told him that ’Mlangeni was such a dedicated, accepting servant of the spirit that we, by comparison, became brutal materialists rejecting it?
Besides, it was even more complicated than that. For one thing, there was the fact that ’Mlangeni was black. I am not suggesting that the crew of the Kurt Hansen suffered from the kind of highly organised colour prejudice from which so many of my countrymen suffered. They were remarkably free of it and happily shared their quarters, ate at the same mess table with ’Mlangeni and shook hands with him as they did with one another. Yet his blackness did make a difference to them. Had he been white he would not, I am certain, have excited the constant curiosity that he did. Yet I had already learnt that there are many Europeans who are curious about primitive peoples not in order to understand them better, but just to laugh them out of the way. There had become something frightening to me about the European laughter over Africans and African practices. It was significant how, once the crew knew I spoke ’Mlangeni’s language, they could never see the two of us in conversation without being drawn to us, like iron filings towards a magnet, to demand what we were discussing.
I suppose black is the natural colour of what is strange and secret in the human spirit. It is the uniform of the unknown. Somehow ’Mlangeni, through his blackness and his nearness to nature, was a personification of those aspects of the Kurt Hansen’s blond crew which were hidden, or estranged from them; a living mirror wherein they saw the dark face of all that was rejected and out of reach in them themselves.
Unfortunately, therefore, since the process of acquiring self-knowledge is by no means painless or without humiliation, their natural curiosity had an undertow of suspicion and apprehension. It seems an a priori condition of our so-called success in civilising ourselves that what is to be rejected must in itself be proved to be something discreditable. Consequently the crew were both attracted and repulsed by ’Mlangeni. Not, I stress, because of anything in his character but because unknowingly they associated him with their own.
All this I was to learn much later; as also that it applied particularly to Thor Larsen. He did not even allow himself to be curious about ’Mlangeni, just suspicious. Here in his own ship, where everything exacted a Captain’s commitments from him, he was inclined to be subtly uncomfortable whenever he set eyes on ’Mlangeni. And whatever caused discomfort to his spirit was at once suspect or rejected.
I was to become aware later that, had ’Mlangeni not been so outstandingly good at his job, Thor Larsen would have got rid of him. But he was too good a seaman not to recognise ’Mlangeni’s signal uses. His, for instance, was the only ship in the fleet with just one full-time stoker. All the rest had two. Only a person of ’Mlangeni’s superb physique, and his pride in using it, could have succeeded in so exacting a task. There were very few occasions on which he was given help at his engineer’s insistence because we had been at sea overlong. That ’Mlangeni did all this where no European could was, ironically, cause not for gratitude but for more suspicion. Why did he do it, when no one else did or could? What was he getting out of it?
That he was just an ignorant savage and knew no better served as an answer for some, though it soon wore threadbare in daily contact with ’Mlangeni. Even Leif at our first meeting the evening before had implied how questions like these could rankle with someone like himself who liked ’Mlangeni. They troubled Larsen and his crew even more, and over the seasons I was to see the suspicion grow that there had to be more to it than the modest wages paid to ’Mlangeni. Similarly I in my turn was neither quite as fair nor as aware as I might have been.
So, standing there on deck rather abashed by Nils Ruud’s obvious disbelief of my explanation, I was relieved to hear ’Mlangeni’s round, unperturbed voice imply approval of my behaviour; saying, “Do not trouble, ’Nkosan. He is a ‘With-ears-that-do-not-hear’fn1 man. Come and eat.”
I went and sat down beside him, thanking him and explaining that I had already breakfasted.
I had hardly finished when Larsen hailed the crow’s-nest. His voice shattered the calm of the great glass-palace of a day like a brick hurled through its roof and the splinters fell down into my mind like hail.
Immediately we saw that another sailor was already hurrying on his way up aloft.
Disconsolate, the look-out handed over his glasses to the newcomer, climbed out of the tub and back down to the deck where he stood for a moment staring at the bridge. He then signalled again “Nothing to report” emphatically with his arms as if in outraged self-justification. Larsen ignored the man completely who then turned about defiantly and ducked below.
After a while, when the new look-out also signalled “Nothing to report”, Larsen began to move, practically throwing himself from side to side of his small bridge, barely three strides wide. He made me think of a black bear I had once seen pacing to and fro in a cage in Pretoria’s zoo.
“Patience, ’Nkosan,” between great uninhibited munches and smacking his lips between each bite, ’Mlangeni let me know what should be thought of the abrupt switching of look-outs in particular, and the Captain’s behaviour in general. “Patience is an egg that hatches great birds. Even the sun is such an egg.”
He extended his right arm to trace the course of the sun from horizon to horizon with a long dark finger.
“And which came first, the egg or the bird?”
I couldn’t resist teasing him with the question our agnostic science master at school had loved to inflict on his pupils.
“Auck, now you are a trickster again.” ’Mlangeni grinned largely. “You should know that neither bird nor egg came first.”
“Neither?” I questioned.
“Neither. Because patience came before everything!” Suddenly ’Mlangeni stopped me with an urgent: “Hush, ’Nkosan! Hush, and hasten. The little-killer-of-great-fish wants you!”
Disturbed by the tone of his voice, I looked instantly at the bridge.
Larsen was beckoning imperatively in our direction, but as there were several other people including Nils Ruud within the range of his gestures, how ’Mlangeni knew that I was the target, I could not tell.
I only knew that I believed him and got to my feet in such a hurry that it was not until the day was over that I realised ’Mlangeni had paid me the compliment of revealing to me his own favourite name for the Captain.
“Did you want me, sir?” I asked, as I popped out on the bridge, somewhat breathless from the speed with which I had come.
“Better you stay here.” Larsen’s tone implied a rebuke even though his actual choice of words did not. “Better for to see when the whale comes.”
True as the explanation was, the real reason I suspected was different. The young are only inexperienced in terms of our brief and brittle concerns here. As far as the rest of life is concerned, they are as old as time. Some instinct told the fourteen-year-old boy I was then that the Captain got me away from ’Mlangeni because he was jealous of his stoker. Not because of me but because he saw in ’Mlangeni a kind of rival, another Captain in some right of his own in a dimension to which even Larsen’s presumptuous brief did not run.
This was proved to me by the fact that, having once got me on the bridge, the Captain immediately lost interest in me, and resumed his preoccupations as if he had never relinquished them.
I longed to go back on deck to join ’Mlangeni and be free to scramble all over the ship among the many new and strange things so neatly laid out and arranged in the classical manner of the sea, and all transformed into treasure in my imagination by the lovely light of our sub-tropical winter’s sun. Just the mere rope plaited and coiled beside the harpoon gun, behind the winch, the gleaming derricks, or the shining davits were all exceedingly beautiful to me. I longed to go and examine the ship more closely and discover the reasons and uses for everything. This longing was encouraged by the size of the Kurt Hansen herself. In comparison with the ships we had left crowded in Port Natal she looked not yet fully grown, and this morning her young proportions made her all the more appealing to a boy’s imagination; as if she had been designed with the express purpose for young hearts to play with her.
But there I was, stuck on the small bridge, physically and mentally uncomfortable because I felt continually obliged not to encroach on such room as there was for the man at the wheel, the restless, driven Captain. As a result, despite my interest in the sea around us, there began one of the longest mornings I have ever known. But long as it was for me, I am sure it was far longer for the Captain.
I saw ’Mlangeni finish his breakfast and watched him sitting warm and content in the sun, his head slightly on one side rather like that of a hen brooding over her eggs. He looked indeed as if he were patience itself hatching one of those great birds of which he had spoken. Presently, without a sign or hint from anyone, he rose to his full height, stretched himself with hands and arms flung out straight and wide, then bent down to scoop up his breakfast things and went below. Clearly ’Mlangeni’s fire was due for another feeding. But the deck looked bleaker for his going.
Thor Larsen, of course, did not fail to notice his stoker’s departure. He snorted loudly.
The higher the slow sun climbed with the step of a somnambulist walking in a yellow poppy-drunk sleep, the bluer, the calmer, the blanker and the more reluctant the day seemed to become.
The early morning activity vanished. I no longer had any dolphins or porpoises to watch on a sea without ripple, only that dark dorsal sail of the shark’s fin remained in station with us: and curiously it seemed to be the one thing that did not displease the Captain. He repeatedly turned to look behind to see ifit were still there. Only once, speaking out of the middle of his preoccupation, he remarked: “It is there because it knows as I know.”
Larsen had changed our first look-out at nine. He changed his successor at ten, and thereafter at every hour a replacement was sent up aloft to come down as unsuccessful as his predecessor.
Always the Captain made it clear without a word how deeply disappointed he was with us all; and the sense of failure among the men in the ship consequently became almost a tangible physical element. Men either stopped talking to one another, or did so in whispers, like persons in a deep Alpine valley afraid that the sound of the normal human voice would be enough to bring down an avalanche from snows piled on the steep heights above them.
Even Leif, when he appeared on the bridge at eleven with coffee, did not speak. The only bright sign was that the Captain drank two mugs of hot liquid quickly one after the other without waiting for it to cool.
By this time I was so uncomfortable that I seized the opportunity of this break in the Captain’s concentration to ask him if I might slip down below to see my friend?
Thor Larsen glared at me over his mug of coffee as if amazed that I should continue to bother about such a triviality. But he nodded his head and as he handed his last mug to Leif, he ordered me bluntly: “But mind, not to interrupt that black stoker again, not? And you come back soon to see whales blow!”
Having delivered himself of this command, he gave the crow’s-nest another fierce look, went silent, and resumed his bear-like movement from side to side on the bridge.
Close as I had been to him, even I had not realised what a potent weapon was this silence of the Captain’s and how much it had affected the crew. Whenever two of them met they were now raising a different kind of mutter. I knew no Norwegian yet but the tone alone was enough to suggest they were beginning to resent this silence, were perfectly aware that it was being used against them as a weapon and thought it unfair. Steady, patient, phlegmatic as most of them were, they were beginning to criticise Thor Larsen openly in voices so low that only they could hear. I knew this simply because, as we passed the foremast, the last replaced look-out reached the deck and paused to speak to Leif.
“What did he say?” I couldn’t resist asking.
Leif shrugged. “He said that it’s unfair of the Captain not to speak his mind. He says it is not his fault there are no whales about.”
Another man talking to Nils Ruud at the winch was even more downright. According to Leif he told Ruud: “By God, he’s no right to behave as if we are in the wrong. It is he who’s in the wrong. If he had gone back in the direction where we left the whales on Saturday, as the other ships will have done, we would have caught some by now.”
I did not dare stay down below long. I made a perfunctory call on Eric and then tried to prolong my absence from the bridge by calling on Leif in his galley. But he, for once, would have none of me, although I believe he came very close to knowing how deeply uncomfortable the Captain and the atmosphere in the ship had begun to make someone as young as myself feel.
He tried to reassure me. “Look, don’t worry. It’s always like this the first day or two. No harm will come of it. Just you get back to the bridge as soon as you can and do what he wants you to do.”
So I hastened back to the bridge. My prompt reappearance obviously pleased the Captain, though he still did not speak. But apart from this flicker of emotion, the atmosphere without and within was even tenser than before.
The day was at high noon now, and on the stroke of twelve the Captain roared for his first spotter of the day to do another turn of duty aloft. The sound of his angular voice killed the silence.
I looked about and thought I had never seen so unresponsive and lifeless a scene as that buckled Indian Ocean, implacably lifting us up only to put us down again, like a deranged mind perpetually raising and re-raising the one thought it can neither penetrate nor escape. I have never seen a similar scene except, perhaps, at the height of summer in one of our terrible droughts on that wide plain deep in my native interior, which is called in Sindakwena the ‘Where-even-courage-is-lost’ plain.
I was jerked out of my contemplation of the sea by Thor Larsen suddenly bawling out to me.
“Ah! My young Boher! Your eyes damn good! Your reflex damn quick on tennis courts! You show me how good they are at sea, not?”
I turned about, afraid of what I would see on his face, but to my surprise he was looking rather pleased with himself.
“You get up there in the crow’s-nest with Johansen quick and you spot me the whale damn quick, not?”
I didn’t answer him. The moment I took in the import of Thor Larsen’s command my heart started beating fast with excitement. I just made straight for the ladder, the first laugh of the day from the Captain grating out loudly behind me to encourage my eagerness to obey. I went down it in such a rush that I nearly fell and was at the foot of the port ladder to the crow’s-nest almost as soon as Svend Johansen, the re-summoned first look-out of the day, reached the starboard one. Since there were to be two of us in the crow’s-nest, we waited, our hands on the ropes, for the discredited look-out to descend. While he had a brief word with Johansen and handed over the glasses to him I beat the pistol as athletes say, and went up my side as fast as I could. Oddly enough, although I had never done anything of the sort and might have been expected to mount carefully if not apprehensively, the close attention I had paid since morning to the way the various look-outs went aloft gave me confidence and enabled me to climb the rope ladder itself without fear as if I had done it all my life. Leif told me afterwards that everyone who saw my climb was convinced I had done it many times before.
But the fear I had then was of a totally different kind. I was terrified that I, too, would fail to spot a whale.
It seemed to me just then that suddenly everything had come to depend on me and that, if I failed, the consequences for us all, particularly the Captain, would be disastrous. I knew my eyesight to be unusually good, but except in illustrations in books in our school library I had never seen a whale blow, and these, I had already gathered from Leif, were totally unlike the real thing. So even if I saw a blow where Johansen did not, would I recognise it for what it was?
So great was my fear of failure and so intense my sense of the importance of what Thor Larsen had commanded me to do that I went up that ladder praying silently to myself “Dear God, please let me find a whale, and I will never do anything wrong again as long as I live.”
So fast did I climb that I was in the crow’s-nest before Svend Johansen. He came over the edge of his side slowly and lowered himself ponderously with a breathless grunt to the floor. He was to become one of my favourites in the ship but I was aware at that moment that he was not over-pleased to have me up there, not only because my presence in so tight a place, and the restlessness he expected from a boy might distract him; but also because he regarded me as a testimony of his Captain’s lack of confidence in his powers of observation.
As a result, he gave me no welcome but just looked me straight in the eye and said in his frank way: “You keep still and just look. You see anything, you tell me first. You tell me before you shout, not?”
“Certainly, sir,” I replied, looking him back in the eye.
He was, I should think, a man of about forty-five and there was just a suggestion of sadness around his honest blue eyes and a slight but distinct tensing of the muscles in their corners whenever he focused them on anything definite which made me suspect that, good as his eyesight might be, it had begun to decline, and that knowing it, he felt correspondingly insecure and vulnerable.
While he re-focused the glasses and began methodically to examine the sea ahead, I had my own look around. I looked quickly all over the sea first, saw nothing and then glanced below. It was amazing how the human face stands out from everything else when you look down on it from a height. All the faces below in the light of the sun were extraordinarily white, and every one of them, from Larsen’s to Nils Ruud’s, even that of the man at the wheel, was raised staring as if hypnotised at the crow’s-nest. The other striking thing was how clearly and how deeply I saw into the shining blue sea-water. For instance, the shark still in station was no longer just a dorsal fin. I could see its full shape and every easy flicker of its tail sending it not moving so much as gliding lightly beside us.
It was an enormous fish. The time was to come when I would see men at Port Natal catch sharks weighing over a ton with mere line, hook and four-gallon petrol tins as floats. But this fellow below us I am certain was heavier. There was a terrible kind of perfection about his shape, as if he were the master model, the latest design, of an instrument intended solely for quick underwater battle and infallible destruction. Stranger still to me was the fact that the shark’s shape did not look old like that of giant lobsters, octopus or squids, cunningly caught, as they seem to be, in the long tentacles of time. This shape was highly contemporary, even futuristic, as if the shark were the product not of Darwinian evolution but a conscious engineering feat accomplished from the blueprint of some avant-garde in the laboratory of life. I have lived to see missiles lifting themselves off the earth to enter outer space shaped not unlike that shark which was in orbit round the Kurt Hansen that high-noon day. But at that time the shark was, to me, the ultimate in the ballistics of disaster and death at sea.
All this took but a moment, and then my anxieties regarding my new task quickly compelled me to return to look at the water around. Svend Johansen was slowly and methodically examining the ocean ahead, first with naked eyes, and then through those wonderful German glasses that the Kurt Hansen provided. Although it may have seemed an unusual thing to do, my experience of tracking game (which was all I had to help me at that moment), made me turn my back on the ship’s bows and look astern to re-examine the way we had come. That was the inexorable rule for two alone in the bush: one took care of the front, the other of the rear in case, as often happened, the quarry they stalked was stalking them in turn.
The immensity of the view, the great blueness of sea and translucent swell making for the distant land impressed me profoundly. So clear was the day that to the north-west from behind a gleaming coil of horizon I could see a thick brown haze of smoke stand in the windless air like the tops of a grove of trees. Most exciting of all, between me and the smoke just on our side of the horizon, I saw in astonishing detail the purple Royal Mail steamer with her purple hull and scarlet funnels which we had left vibrating with impatience in the harbour the night before. Now she was going all out like a racehorse finding the straight on the track for the Cape of Good Hope to home. So clear were all the colours of sea, sky and ship, and so regular the rhythm of the swell, so symmetrical and formal everything in sight that it all looked like a conventional painted picture of the Seven Seas.
Loveliest of all, beyond the ship I saw the land of Africa which always rises steeply from the sea, first a wedding-ring on a finger of yellow sand, then a long band of blue, darker than the ocean but finally so illuminated with sunlight as it soared to the interior that it hung like a fall-out of volcanic ash on the air. It was all a great surprise to me because I had thought us far out of touch with land. But I expect the slow circle that Thor Larsen had set for our course had kept us closer to it than usual.
Looking at all this still entranced, for I had been barely five minutes in the fore-top, my eyes were suddenly diverted by a flicker of a something reaching them at an acute angle in their corners.
So slight was it that had I been a townsman I might have ignored it. But my boyhood in the bush with men of great experience in these matters had impressed on me that the greatest of events often showed themselves as the most subtle and apparently most illusory of movements.
Instinctively I turned towards it and there, away to the north-west well beyond the murk of Port Natal, and about three of my fingers’ width on the Kurt Hansen’s side of the horizon, I saw a little cloud of vapour spun as transparent silk form on the air and then suddenly vanish. I was still watching the spot not believing my eyes when suddenly there rose from the sea a jet of vapour to stand for a second on the blue water not like a palm so much but like one of the delicate silver poplars that I was to see later in the war all of a tremble on the rim of an oasis in Arabia.
I knew with certainty, as if I had been whaling all my life, that it was a whale; and also that it had to be a jolly big one to send up such a high secondary blow, to be seen so easily at so great a distance. My heart bounded like an Olympian hurdler and it was all I could do to prevent shouting. I just restrained myself, turned to seize Svend Johansen by the arm, jerked him about and pointed saying: “Look, a whale, way behind us!”
He came about as if having been stung, stared along my arm for a moment and then said sceptically: “I don’t see a thing.”
As he said it, the whale blew again, though not nearly as high as before but plainly enough to my eyes.
“My God!” I exclaimed. “There she blows again. Can’t you see?”
He stared hard, shook his head and said lugubriously, “I wish for it to be so, but you mistaken.”
It was too much for me. As I saw two more diminishing blows follow on one another and he still could not see them, I let my hand fall from his arm while I pointed with the other at the spot where I had seen the blows. In English, for I knew no Norwegian yet, and in the manner prescribed for these occasions in the books of adventure for boys in any library at school, I yelled as loudly as I could: “There! She blows!”
Poor old Svend gave me a look as if I had stabbed him in the back. Then instantly, feeling he could not afford to be neutral, put out his hand parallel with mine to repeat in his deep, manly voice in Norwegian: “Blāst! Blāst! Blāst!” Then, almost in a whisper, added ominously to me: “I hope before God you not make mistake!” And again urgently, as I was about to draw my arm back to my side, he ordered: “Keep pointing, boy. Point! Point! Point at the right place!”
My voice, Leif said afterwards, was so clear, loud and urgent that he heard it below and it brought him on deck. Johansen’s call following hard on mine, according to Gorgeous, made it all resound like the beginning of an Hallelujah chorus from Handel.
It was extraordinary how instantly not only the ship but also the whole day and sea came out of their trance. Even before Johansen’s first cry of “Blāst!”, I heard the signals to the engine room ring out loud and clear as Larsen pulled at the levers on the bridge in his quick imperious manner. Unlike Johansen, he instantly accepted my shout as valid.
Even in the crow’s-nest we felt the quickening vibration as the engines were thrown over into full speed. Much as we were rocked from side to side at the end of the inverted pendulum of the mast whenever the swell from the Indian Ocean crossed us, now as the helm of the Kurt Hansen was thrown hard about and we turned fast around at the swiftly accelerating speed, we heeled so far over that I was almost afraid of falling out of the tub. I dropped my outstretched arm to grasp its edge.
“Point boy! Good God, point!” Johansen corrected me, his voice fierce with desperation, making me realise he had no real idea where the whale had blown.
It was not difficult for me to keep a finger on the exact spot because born on the wide, empty, almost featureless high veld, I had developed a lively sense of the importance of whatever slight variation there might be in the scene and always related my bearings automatically to them. Just above the place where the whale had blown there was a tiny pimple of yellow sand from a dune higher than the rest breaking the gleaming ripple of the horizon. I kept my finger firmly on it, and in the odd glances I stole at the deck below the real cause of Johansen’s desperation became plain to me, for I could see Thor Larsen’s head turning continually from his compass to the bows of the ship and then up to our outstretched arms in the crow’s-nest and back again. The moment the bows had swung round white with sea foam he steadied the ship, and I was amazed at the speed with which the Kurt Hansen leapt forward towards the place where I had seen the whale blow.
The moment he was certain that he had his ship on the true course, Larsen looked up and roared for Johansen to come down to him. I think Johansen had no special taste for the cross-examination he knew was to come, for, as he told me rather wearily, “Not necessary. Point now, boy”, there was a despondent if not apprehensive expression at the back of his blue eyes.
He climbed slowly over the edge of the tub and went down backwards with reluctance. Leaning, with my arm tired from pointing on the crow’s-nest, I resumed my watch ahead. I very nearly shouted once more out of sheer exultation, for almost in the same place I saw another blow followed by four more diminishing ones, and close by to their right came four others in the same descending order. I knew from what Leif had told me that they could not be from the same whale for, after blowing, the great fish invariably sounded—in other words, he vanished for anything from fifteen to thirty minutes or more according to size and species. There were, therefore, I concluded, at least three whales in the sea ahead of us.
I had hardly reached this conclusion when another bellow from the Captain made me look below. He was beckoning to me impatiently to come down. Apprehensive in my turn, I went down the ladder as fast as I could go, for I had never known any other way of dealing with my anxieties except by meeting them as quickly as I could before such courage as I had had left me.
I arrived on the bridge to see Gorgeous back at the wheel but this time with a brilliant light in his eyes that I had not observed before.
Larsen too was a totally different person. The look of “nothingness” had vanished. He looked unusually resolved and composed and quite indifferent to the fact that since the whales were behind us he had been right all along and that one or more of his look-outs must have slipped up badly not to spot them before. He not only made no reference to the fact but gave me the impression that victory had made him magnanimous, and I liked him the more for that.
“Johansen tells me,” he said warmly, “that you saw the first blow.”
Remembering the look of apprehension on Svend’s face up in the crow’s-nest and with a flush of respect for his honesty, I felt a need to shield him, and began, “Yes, sir, but only because as he was examining the sea ahead, I thought it best to look behind us. We do that when tracking elephant or other big game up-country. One man . . .”
“Yes, yes.” He interrupted me impatiently. “You both did right. But what I want, my young Boher, is for you to tell about first blow and how far away, you think.”
“I don’t know distances at sea, sir. But the first blow I saw dissolved in a cloud of mist above the horizon. The second came out of the sea, as I measured it, three of my fingers held out at arm’s length below the horizon.”
“You see tail when fish sounded?” he asked almost before I had finished my answer.
“No, sir. Nothing at all except the blow,” I replied.
“Good, good, you young Boher. Good! One damn big whale!” Thor Larsen exclaimed delighted. “Blue, female and fat and perhaps an hour’s full steaming away. Now you two get back up top quick and watch damn well!”
Svend was already turning about to obey but I felt compelled to add: “That was not all, sir. While Mr. Johansen was below I saw two more whales blowing in the neighbourhood of the first.”
I described what I had seen and added diffidently that since the blows did not seem so high as the first, I thought they might have been smaller whales.
Although this was final overwhelming proof of how right he had been all along, the Captain still remained utterly indifferent to the fact. He just seemed more delighted than ever, patted me affectionately on the shoulder and remarked, almost as a colleague, “Good! Good! You’ve done good. I, Thor Larsen, I thank you! And please now to get up top as soon as you can!”
We promptly did as ordered, but quick as we were I had time to notice how the whole mood of the ship had changed. Everyone stood alert at their stations, peering ahead with wide-open, bright eyes. Everyone moved at the double. One and all appeared invested in a rediscovered sense of importance together with that ancient excitement of the hunter who has found his quarry and has only one thought and that to kill as quickly as possible.
I realised that the dark void in the day behind us was now filled to overflowing with this ancient light blazing in all minds and emotions. What else in life, I wondered (as I had often done in the hunter’s environment of my up-bringing), could make men feel so important and full of purpose, as when they were given a chance to kill?
The next blow was seen simultaneously by Svend and me.
Experienced whaler that he was, I found that in spite of his scepticism he had looked immediately at his wrist-watch when I had first shouted “There she blows!” Now it was exactly twenty-seven minutes and fifteen seconds later. The blow came out of the sea with such force that Svend estimated it to reach a height of at least fifty feet. It stood there before our eyes for perhaps five full seconds, a shining poplar of pearl in a mirage of early afternoon flame before it lost its silver stem in the dark-blue sea, to gather itself up swiftly into a cloud of mist and dissolve with the same suddenness that it had come.
I thought it one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen: it reminded me of Tennyson’s description of the arm clothed in white samite which came out of the black water of Avalon to receive Arthur’s great sword back into its waters, which I had read two years before. Even today this whale spout holds place in my heart with the manifestations of nature that I treasure most—the sight of a shooting star, a comet before dawn in Africa, the roar of a lion, the long lightning and the sound of distant thunder up-country foretelling the break of a great drought, and the mythological sunsets of my native high veld. More, just as the return of the Excalibur of the dying Arthur marked the end of an epoch, and the re-approach of confusion and darkness in the spirit of man, I had a strange feeling that the spout that Svend and I had seen so swift and shining before our eyes also signified the end of a period for me, as if I had just crossed a frontier and had ceased forever to be a boy.
There was no need for me to shout or point this time. Svend did both immediately. The whale was a few points south-west of where I had first seen it blow and clearly it was cruising unalarmed and at leisure. I had been told that the species to which it belongs can be over ninety feet long and weigh more than a hundred and thirty tons, can swim without trouble for some hours at fifteen knots and in a crisis work up to sprints of twenty knots or even more. Clearly this fellow, had he been going at anything like fifteen knots, would have been far more to the south of our own course.
“Blahval. Blue whale!” Svend remarked to me, after his shout, as he pointed: “Very, very big. And cow not bull!” And then after a slight pause, he added something which endeared him to me for good: “Thank you, boy.”
We watched four more blows following hard on the first, each less than its predecessors but all formidable enough to confirm that the whale was an unusually big one.
Gorgeous, under Thor Larsen’s instant re-direction, deftly set the Kurt Hansen accurately on the whale’s track.
Svend said the whale had been travelling on a slightly converging course to ours and had blown at the most five miles away.
The return of his confidence was so great that on this occasion he did not wait on the Captain to summon him. The moment Gorgeous had steadied the ship in the direction that he pointed, he left the crow’s-nest and hastened to report all he had seen and deduced to the Captain on the bridge. He returned to the crow’s-nest like someone released from a great burden. When I told him that I had again seen in his absence the other two whales blow somewhat to the north of the first, he patted me on the shoulder and said warmly: “You very, very good boy.” Though grateful, I wished that he hadn’t called me “boy” again. That, however, was soon to be put right.
The Kurt Hansen, Svend said, had never before steamed faster. He thought she was doing a full thirteen knots. I made a quick calculation, realizing that, provided Svend’s calculation of our speed was right and the whale remained submerged again for another twenty-seven minutes and fifteen seconds, we would at that rate overshoot by nearly a mile the spot where the whale had sounded at his estimated distance of five miles. The Captain obviously had made the same calculation. Instead of steering the Kurt Hansen as one would have expected him to do, straight at the place where the whale had vanished, Thor Larsen aimed his ship a little north-west of it. We were already in the realm of circumstances where skill, reason and powers of observation all would count for less than the hunches and luck of which I spoke at the beginning.
The manoeuvre did not pass unnoticed by Svend, for the moment the alteration showed in the graph of our milky wake he grunted to himself and shook his head disapprovingly. I happened to look down at the deck immediately afterwards and could somehow feel that everyone was taken aback by this enigmatic variation in our direction.
For twenty minutes we travelled this way at full speed. At the end of this time the Captain signalled his engineer to stop his engines. The signal and his acknowledgement rang out with astonishing force and clarity in the stillness of that placid afternoon.
For five minutes or more the Kurt Hansen glided forward with falling speed until it had movement enough left only for Gorgeous to keep its nose pointing the way the Captain wanted.
Two minutes later the whale broke surface a mile further to the north of where it had last sounded and farther away than even the Captain had anticipated. This time everyone saw it blow five times, the first rising magnificently, as Svend had estimated, a full fifty feet into the air. The elimination of doubt, however slight it may have been, has a positive effect on the human spirit out of all proportion to its substance. Captain, crew, bridge, deck, crow’s-nest, ship and all became one dynamic entity at the visual confirmation of Larsen’s anticipation, and that was as exciting a thing as I have ever experienced.
The whale sounded after its last blow, its dark back arched just visible above the sea but, in the manner of the blue whale, without showing its lovely fluked tail.
This time the Captain aimed his ship well to the south-west of where it had vanished, and I knew there was not a man in the crew who was not at one with him on this occasion.
A mile further on this course, Larsen stopped the engines to let the Kurt Hansen drift. Over three full seasons, in the long moments of leisure between watches in the ship, I was to hear this kind of manoeuvre debated, with heat, again and again.
Some of the wisest of whaling men would have maintained that Larsen should have stopped his engines half a mile before he did. They would argue that whales, with their sensitive hearing under water, pick up the noise of screw and engines at great distances and when they hear it coming closer towards them they become alarmed, change direction, and make off at high speed. In their view the best course is to wait until the whale surfaces again, when its hearing, according to them, is least acute, and then charge down on it at full speed but stopping the engines to drift again the moment the whale sounds. In this way, the whalers work closer and closer, until at last the ship is near enough to fire a harpoon. The crew in the Kurt Hansen had a special word for this method. They called it “Luse Jag” and it was, as far as I could make it out, the equivalent of what we mean by stalking.
Others as experienced maintain that the only course is to make for the spot where the whale is expected to reappear, with utter disregard of the danger of alarming it. In fact some held that alarming it has its advantages because fear drives the whale to sound more quickly than it would normally have done, thus forcing it to take in less air than usual and so be compelled to re-surface sooner. I came to know gunners in our fleet who even fired their harpoon guns at whales when they had little chance of killing them in the belief that the boom of the gun would drive them under water all the quicker and so accelerate the process I have just described in which the whale at last rose comparatively helpless for want of air. Our crew again had their own word for that: they called this method “Pröyse Jag” or what I would in plain English have called “hunting them down”.
I never saw Thor Larsen go so far as to waste a shot just to frighten a whale. But I was to see him use a combination of both methods so effectively that he was by far the most versatile as well as successful hunter in the fleet.
The moment he stopped the engines, Larsen beckoned his bosun-mate to the bridge, left him there in charge, with Gorgeous at the wheel, came down the ladder with the cold deliberation that intense inner excitement produces in the natural man of action, and crossed the deck with a bearing suddenly so magisterial that his oddly anthropoidal walk could not mock it. He mounted the gun platform in the bows and stood with his hand on the slender pistol butt of the great gun, as immovable as a carved figure-head in the prow of a wooden ship, staring at the ocean ahead.
Simultaneously we all saw the next blow, for it shot up out of the sea less than half a mile dead ahead. Thor Larsen’s signal to the bridge for full speed was unnecessary for as he raised his hand the bells in the engine room rang out like a summons for action-stations in a battleship. The Kurt Hansen bounded ahead in the manner for which she was famous.
The blow showed the whale to be going in the same direction as we were. The pressure in the Kurt Hansen’s boilers now was so great, as a result of ’Mlangeni’s stoking, that, despite our speed, there was an excess of steam escaping through the safety valves by the funnel.
This time we came near enough not to frighten the whale but to make it cautious. It blew four times only, the fourth being barely a puff of smoke on the sea, all because of its desire to take preventive action by getting away from whatever it was that the noise of the Kurt Hansen’s screw and engines portended. But just for a moment before it sounded, there, in the shadow of a deep valley of two great swells and in the slanted sun, the great back of the whale stood out like an arch of triumph moulded in black marble.
We went at full speed through the slick hard on its sounding but, deeply as I could see into the water, the whale was out of sight. The great size of the slick in itself was a thing of wonder to me, the word perfectly describing the glossy and on this occasion long rectangular patch left on the water’s surface where the whale had sounded. The older sailors in the ship were convinced it was caused by a discharge of oil from the whale and took it as a sign that we were after rich quarry indeed. Later I was to argue the point because I had noticed often how the naked bodies of young boys, diving steeply into one of our river pools up-country, left a little slick of their own on the water which certainly could not have been oil.
But stranger still than the whale’s slick was the column of smell that stood tall in the windless air above it. Thinking back, I am surprised that I was not overcome by disgust at this stink which stood there so solidly in the pure sea air. But this first encounter with the breath of the whale excited me even more than the first archaic smell of its body which was still clinging faintly to the Kurt Hansen when I had first boarded her in harbour. It made me feel strangely privileged, as if I really were sniffing the breath of the first life itself. I was even to remember this moment on my first battle-field smelling the human dead, and being moved by the element of strange sweetness in that last terrible scent of the human body. It was there in the compound of decay as if to remind us not only of the undying presence of the love we all feel but also of the compassion with which life gathers back into itself the humblest of its children whom the world betrays. But on this day at sea, on the tail of my first whale, it was the sense of the aboriginal commitment evoked by the smell in the air that stirred me so deeply.
We cut fast through swell and slick and went straight on for about a mile, turned sharply about and, pointing directly down our wake to where the whale had vanished, stopped our engines for nine minutes. Then at a signal from Thor Larsen we went back on our wake at full speed.
We made what was left of the slick about four minutes later, swung a few points to the north-east of the spot, and continued at full speed ahead. After about four minutes, two hundred yards to our starboard, I thought I saw nose-up an enormous torpedo body down in the placid water illuminated by the clear sun which was striking the ocean at a more and more obtuse angle from the west. As I saw it, it turned swiftly about and vanished in the direction from which we had come. Everyone in the ship later said it was a happy illusion.
I know Svend did not see it although my eyes were still on it. But having more confidence in myself now, I yelled and pointed without hesitation: “Ahoy! Ahoy! There she goes. Ahoy!”
Gorgeous, with his quick intuitive reactions that made him so expert at the wheel when the hunt was full on, understood at once. The bosun-mate in charge on the bridge was not at all certain what my cry, lifted straight from a boy’s book of adventure, meant and was looking to Larsen in the bows for a sign. Larsen, who for once was not as quick to respond as usual, just turned about at this unusual cry to stare up at me. His English was not good enough, unlike that of Gorgeous’s, to take in the verbal import of my cry. But though the words puzzled him, their meaning and the direction in which I was pointing made immediate sense in the idiom of his own hunches. Even so, quick as he was in matching the two things, by the time he was ready to signal to the bridge, the Kurt Hansen was heeling hard over with the speed at which Gorgeous was swinging her round. In these moments, so close was the rapport between helmsman and Captain that Thor Larsen merely signified his satisfaction and then turned to brace himself, legs well apart, for a firm balance behind the gun.
Watching it all from above, I saw in a flash the reason why the Captain had kept his ship under weigh all this time, for at full speed she was as manoeuvrable as a hare before a greyhound. All this raised the excitement in the ship to a brilliant pitch.
It even brought my poor sick friend up from below, for as I looked down I saw him, white-faced, helped and exhorted by Leif, emerge on deck. He was an enthusiastic photographer and had one of the most expensive German cameras hanging by a strap round his neck. Once on deck he had barely taken two paces across it, when he broke away from Leif, made for the side of the ship and was violently sick. That, as Leif had predicted earlier, clearly made him feel much better, for, after leaning against a stanchion for a few seconds, he looked up at the crow’s-nest and waved feebly to me. I waved back, overjoyed, and resumed my watch.
Quickly as all this happened, I was not a moment too soon. Almost at once I saw the whale not far away swimming at a long angle towards the surface and a few points to starboard in a similar direction to our own.
Again Svend could not see it but Gorgeous responded at once to my cry and adjusted his helm to steer the ship to where I was pointing.
Some moments later, dead ahead, came the first great blow from the water. It came with such force through the whale’s nostril that it screamed in my ears like more excess steam from the ship’s safety valve. It lasted a full five seconds, showing how great was the whale’s need of airing its lungs. A second and a third blow followed. I expected a fourth but it did not come.
Now thoroughly on the alert, the whale prepared to sound. A good fifty yards away its great back began to arch above the water. It was a chance at maximum range. Gunners in those days did not like taking on quarry at over forty yards. Aiming and firing the harpoon gun was a great art because the harpoon once launched travelled in a curve. It had to be aimed above the whale’s back in order to hit—how far above depended on the gunner’s estimate of the distance, force of wind, angle of platform on firing, and so on. There was no wind on this occasion but the distance was extreme and a swell was rolling the Kurt Hansen far over. Yet Thor Larsen, who had his gun following the whale from blow to blow, fired it the moment the steel-blue back first showed a sickle-edge above the water.
I thought he had aimed much too high. The harpoon at first seemed to travel so far above the whale with the attached line following after like a yellow cobra speeding to the attack that I was convinced it would overreach. But the harpoon quickly achieved the summit of its own curve and began to drop just as the back of the enormous whale rose high out of the water towards it. As the whale reached the peak of its own arc, ready to go over into its rounded slide back down into the depths of the sea, the harpoon struck it in the middle of its body well below the spine.
It was a wonderful shot at that distance and unfortunate only in that it did not hit the whale higher up. I was to learn later the ideal shot is to hit the whale high enough for the explosion of the war-head of the harpoon to break its back. No one could hold it against Larsen that he failed at such a distance, since it was almost a miracle that he had hit the whale at all. None the less the results were distressing. As the harpoon struck there was an instant explosion. White spray and mist shot up from the water against its flank, followed by bits and pieces from the whale’s inside, like lumps of clay thrown up by a mortar bomb exploding in damp earth.
Shattered as it was inside now, in great agony and terror the whale made a desperate effort to escape the death that was within it by dashing straight ahead. The slack on the harpoon line was soon exhausted and the spring to which it was attached by way of the pulley on the foremast, and which could take a strain of some twenty tons or more, was quickly stretched to breaking point.
Here the experience of the crew and the way Larsen had trained them was most impressive to watch. Each man did what was necessary, without a word of command or even a glance from the Captain. He had immediately re-loaded the gun with the help of a hand who sped on to the platform and was keeping his own eyes in the direction of his vanished quarry swimming with the speed and determination of life in a race against death. The mate on the bridge never took his eyes off the rope, pulley, spring and man at the winch. The moment the whale was hit he had reduced the speed of the Kurt Hansen. Now whenever the strain on the spring neared breaking point he increased the speed of the ship. At the same time Nils Ruud would release the brake on the drum of his winch and let the rope on it unwind bit by bit until more than half a mile of it had been run out. The ship indeed had become a mechanical rod and fishing line, and the technique used from now on was the same as that of the classical angler. Not a foot of extra rope or of forward speed from the Kurt Hansen was allowed the whale until absolutely necessary. Even so it was two hours before the Kurt Hansen, without any weigh on her and her whole bulk acting as a brake, achieved the moment when the whale could be reeled inwards fathom by fathom on Ruud’s winch.
When this process started everyone in the ship, with the exception of ’Mlangeni, was on deck to see what mystery the sea was about to yield. At the time I thought ’Mlangeni’s absence below was due to the needs of his fire, but as, season after season, he never once appeared on these occasions, I began to wonder about it. On this evening, however, I was too involved in the excitement of the chase to take much notice.
Long as the fight had lasted and injured as the whale was, who can know with what agony, still fighting, it was drawn in towards the ship. Every now and then another violent impulse for freedom flared up in it and it would try to get away, even on one occasion towing the motionless ship after it.
I began to watch it all with increasing dismay and wondered in a way that was useless and perhaps irrelevant, if the old hand-harpooning method had not been kinder and the custom of following up the harpoon as soon as possible with a long lance, stabbing cleanly at the whale’s vitals to kill it swiftly (as described in the books I had read), was not less cruel than this mechanical rod-and-reel game with an internally lacerated whale. Certainly the danger to the hand-harpooner as a person was greater. But here there was nothing of the element of fairness that danger introduced in the contest between man and animal. But what had fairness to do with it all? I had no answers then or, for that matter, no time to seek them.
These feelings reached a climax when within seventy yards of our bow the whale went into its “flurry”, as whalers so aptly call the last heaving convulsions of the great mammal. It turned and twisted and rolled, everything about it shaking, quivering, trembling and rocking as a mountain of dark African soil caught in an earthquake. Where pearly vapour had recently spurted from its nose, now thick jets of blood, Indian ruby in the sun, burst into the air. Its fluked tail, those delicate, elegant products of the most experienced and loving technology of the Seven Seas, rose to smack the water as if knocking for shelter at the door of a home from which it was locked out.
Then suddenly it went still, turned over and lay on its back; the great yellow-white corrugated stomach, which had made the British whalers call the species “sulphur bottom”, showed above the water, while at the same time the last of its warm blood, crimson in the sun, spread itself shining like a mantle of silk far and wide around it. Already I saw the dorsal fin of the shark appear at the hem of the mantle and vanish as it dived underneath. The feeling of so much death was almost black in front of my eyes. I thought the whole lovely day would have been profoundly changed because of it. But the sun now was just a little lower in the sky, and the light more charged than ever with angelic gold. I had the oddest and most absurd of sensations that I had been there before at the same time and place. Or was it merely that some submerged element of inherited imagination had fore-suffered it all?
I looked at Svend. He indeed must have been through all this scores of times, yet there plainly was discomfort on his simple face and a look of conscience in his guileless eyes.
I think he knew what was passing through me, or perhaps it was merely to excuse himself, for he remarked as if replying to a question: “You see, boy, a catch like this one, so much big, help our people at home very much. And food now for many men.”
I watched as the whale was then quickly pulled in alongside. The round shaft of the tail, just where the finely chiselled flukes joined it like the wings of a bird, was firmly caught in a noose of cable and drawn securely fast to the heavy chains of the two twin hawser pipes in the foreward bulwarks. All our catches were so equipped in order that they could easily tow at least two whales at a time. I saw the deck-hands plug with some sort of cotton waste the holes blown in the whale by the explosion of our war-head. Then with a long whaler’s lancet they pierced a hole of their own straight down into the stomach of the dead whale, inserted a nozzle of the tube from one of our air-compressors, and pumped it up like a rugger football to keep it afloat. That done, they plugged the last hole most carefully of all.
They had hardly finished when I realised that, in the excitement, I and possibly all the others had forgotten about the two lesser whales we had seen blowing in the tracks of our dead quarry. I looked quickly about and there, about half a mile at right angles to our starboard stern, I saw another blow, smaller than that of the dead whale but big enough.
Suddenly I felt an old hand at all this. I did not wait for Svend. I just yelled: “There she blows!” and pointed.
Svend turned about to see two blows follow on the first one that I had seen before the whale sounded. We waited for the other whale to blow too, but nothing happened. Either it had done so before I spotted its companion, or had made off in another direction.
Svend thought this last was the real explanation, for as the whale sounded he remarked to me: “Young bull sounding, wondering what’s happened to cow, staying near for to find out! Other one may be frightened away.”
Meanwhile my shout had set everyone working as fast as they possibly could. Thor Larsen, for the first time since we had spotted our dead quarry, began shouting commands at his crew. He had rushed down on deck, saw that the whale was well and truly lashed alongside and, the moment he was satisfied, beckoned to the bridge to resume the hunt.
With luck there was just enough of the afternoon left to kill another whale. And luck we had to overflowing. Young and inexperienced, bewildered and naïve with profound anxiety over the disappearance of the great female he had obviously been courting, the bull was no match at all for the Kurt Hansen and her strange, intuitive Captain. Thor Larsen shot a harpoon into him when the sun had still a quarter of an hour’s light left to give us, and this time so truly that the bull’s spine was broken. There was hardly any struggle and the feeblest of “flurries” as a result. We had the whale alongside and securely lashed into the last red afterglow of the long day.
fn1 Zulu idiom for a person without marked powers of understanding or inclination to listen to others.