I WENT BACK to my ship as the sun went down in a far better frame of mind than when I had left in the morning at the first sign of its light. I even ate a supper which astonished and delighted Leif and was on deck at nine with the Captain, to watch de la Buschagne come on board, his nine millimetre Mauser slung on a shoulder and one hand holding the strap to keep it in position; in the other he carried a cheap little suitcase. Thor Larsen must have noticed the gun, and though I believe it was the first time he had ever carried an armed passenger, he did not comment on it but welcomed de la Buschagne warmly on board and took him off at once to take my place in the cabin below. I could not tell whether de la Buschagne even saw me or not, for he did not greet me. He had eyes only for the Captain, and there was a light in them which made me suspect that for the first time in his life he was not only excited but exalted, carrying himself like some Old Testament seer about to receive a new revelation of the God he served.
He was up and dressed as soon as the Captain and I were and in the wheelhouse to see Gorgeous deftly guide the Kurt Hansen out to a regular sea. He proved himself a good sailor, and was not sea-sick. When I climbed up the fore-top at first light, installed myself for the day in the crow’s-nest and started to look about me, the first thing I saw below on deck was de la Buschagne staring up at me. He had taken off his wide-brimmed hat because the Kurt Hansen’s speed created a brisk wind, and was holding it in his hand. He was dressed in his hunting clothes, a khaki whip-cord bush jacket and trousers and heelless shoes that, I was to discover, he had made out of leather he had cured and tanned himself. He looked strikingly incongruous on the Kurt Hansen’s deck, with a whaling crew all round him getting the ship ready for action. But on his face I saw the same exalted and expectant look of the evening before.
He was soon joined by Thor Larsen and taken off to the bow to watch the harpoon gun being stripped, and to inspect its mechanism. Thor Larsen went again and again through a pantomime of swinging, aiming, and firing it so realistically that I was almost surprised not to hear the gun boom. When he was certain de la Buschagne understood, he made him grip the gun and go through the motions himself. I was amazed then how instantly our visitor seemed to belong and become one of us, so certain were his actions and so authoritative his stance behind the gun. Thor Larsen himself was obviously surprised and impressed, because I saw him slap de la Buschagne approvingly on the shoulder and take him down below for breakfast.
They had hardly gone when ’Mlangeni appeared and seated himself on deck, legs wide apart and his broad back against the hatch. He did not at once look up and wave at me as he had always done but sat there, head bowed, picking half-heartedly at the plate in front of him. Finally he looked up and waved at me. Grateful as I was, I knew that, despite the sun and the healing blue of the day, he was feeling black and dishonoured inside. When de la Buschagne reappeared and, although startled to see a black man on deck, would have spoken to him, ’Mlangeni made it impossible by keeping his eyes on his plate. As soon as he had finished his food he gathered up his plate and mug, went to the Kurt Hansen’s side, and spat into the sea as his dead “brother” Jack had once years before exhorted me to do on leaving Thor Larsen’s presence.
Not long after I spotted our first whale. It was a great blue one and it took Thor Larsen until four in the afternoon to harpoon her and get her alongside the ship. He had made de la Buschagne sit on the gun platform just where the ladder from the deck joined it, because the platform was too small to carry another man who had not yet got his sea-legs and could easily, therefore, get in the Captain’s way. But it was a place where de la Buschagne, tall as he was, could sit down and follow every detail of the real hunt and kill. When the gun boomed, however, it was too much for him. In an instant he was on his feet, watching the yellow line snaking at the back of the whale to hit truly home. At that he waved his hat triumphantly in the air and called out something in Thor Larsen’s ears.
Certain that his quarry was properly hooked, he turned to de la Buschagne. I thought they were about to embrace but he took his guest’s outstretched hand in both his, and then made him stand beside the gun while he reloaded it. Even when that was done they stood there, side by side, until the whale after one last great “flurry” lay alongside, sulphur bottom up, in a crimson shroud of its own blood.
So big was the whale, so late the day, and so empty the placid sea where I had searched in vain for another blow, that Thor Larsen turned about for Port Natal with the intention of dropping his quarry at first light and being out at sea again before the daylight. All the same I stayed in the fore-top as was our custom until sundown, looking round about me for any intelligence that might help us the following day.
As the sun went down I went below to join Leif, Gorgeous and ’Mlangeni for a gramophone session on the foreward hatch. As I was about to sit down with them, de la Buschagne came by on his way below, calabash pipe in hand, smoking.
“This is better than shooting elephant, isn’t it, Cousin?” he called out, the light of the chase in his eyes.
“Perhaps,” was all I could say, so distasteful was his attitude to me.
Gorgeous had put on the gramophone first Strauss’s “Death and Transfiguration”, and then Verdi’s “Requiem”. It was great and tragic music, resolved not in the abolition of the tragic but in its acceptance and, through acceptance, the discovery of meaning in suffering. As I listened, and watched the stars come out and the night deepen, it did me a great deal of good and made the Kurt Hansen’s deck a natural temple. Nothing could have served ’Mlangeni better either, for in tears it took the bitterness out of him, made him “string his beads” and accomplish his “necklace of sorrow”, to hang around his proud and wounded spirit.
I put out my hand and pressed his arm—and there we were once more four-square against whatever life had ahead for us. So reassuring was the feeling that I had no desire to go to the saloon and end it by facing de la Buschagne. When the music was over I went to supper with Leif in his galley and didn’t go to my couch in the saloon until it was late.
I felt somewhat ashamed then of my judgement of de la Buschagne because, as I went quietly past the clear way of the saloon, the lights were full on and de la Buschagne was kneeling on the floor, his grey head buried in the Captain’s chair, his hands clasped devoutly before him, his black Bible open on the saloon table, saying his prayers. I stood there for a moment and he sighed deeply, stood up, and saw me.
Briefly we looked in silence at each other before he said quietly in Afrikaans, “Cousin, good night, sleep tight.” On that note he went through the curtains to his place in my bunk in the Captain’s cabin.
Twice more, on the Tuesday and the Wednesday, we had an almost exact repetition of our experience on Monday, on each occasion taking an outsize blue whale to its last home in the owner’s factory. After the third, Thor Larsen announced that in his opinion de la Buschagne was now sufficiently prepared to have a shot at the very first Caesar that came along. He did this unaware of the unanimous disapproval of his decision among his crew. After all, to them whaling was a straightforward business and every whale caught made a financial difference to them because of the liberal system of bonuses paid for each catch by the owners. For that reason the harpooner among them was always the best and most experienced gunner, and by no means always the Captain. The news that Thor Larsen was allowing this incongruous stranger to try and shoot a sperm, still the most valuable of all whaler’s quarries, struck them as utterly irresponsible and unworthy. They were all convinced that de la Buschagne, who had never been at sea until a few days before and certainly never fired a harpoon gun, would miss and—as they all put it—“miss at our expense”.
Leif and I did what we could to counter the sudden discord by telling them of de la Buschagne’s unique career as a hunter and great reputation as a natural shot. They scorned the argument, remained unconvinced, dissatisfied and irritated with their Captain, though too frightened of him openly to protest. Suddenly we became an unhappy ship, charged with sullen electricity. I had never before seen our Norwegians so moody. Often I saw them stand up from their work as Thor Larsen and his guest, now inseparable, went past, giving them a dark look which one would have believed impossible from such blue eyes.
But the Captain, so intuitive in all else, was strangely impervious to the change of mood in his ship. He was so absorbed in de la Buschagne that, seeing them together, for all their differences in appearance, race and vocation, they looked like a pair of fateful Siamese twins. I think they themselves felt that their lives had been joined together by fate and only some mystery of chance and circumstance could put their union asunder. That knowledge gave them an exaggerated sense of privilege denied to ordinary men, and a feeling of being above the common law of life which seemed, to me, at its most intense that Thursday morning when at dawn we dropped our third giant blue whale at the slipway.
It was an odd morning for a winter in Port Natal, being unusually warm and close. I myself, in the fore-top just for the fun of seeing the Kurt Hansen into the harbour, had not at all liked the way the sun came up over the sea. There was neither cloud in the sky nor wind, yet out in the east, where the sun was burning, there was something in the atmosphere which blurred its winter clarity, seeming to slow down its movement, making it rise heavily and turning it yellow as the yolk of a broken egg.
When I came down on deck I found everyone complaining of the airlessness and warmth of the morning. As in a hurry we were just about to cast off, a messenger came running down from the factory as fast as he could, waving a white paper at the ship. It was a message from the owner’s representative. The most alarming weather reports from ships and meteorological stations were pouring into the port office. The glass was falling in a melodramatic way. There was no doubt that a cyclone of unusual force was moving in from Madagascar and Mauritius. For the first time in known history it was feared a cyclone might hit Port Natal itself, and Thor Larsen was strongly urged not to put to sea. Far from being alarmed at the news, the Captain was delighted.
Had he not been right about that feeling in his bones that a reckoning with Caesar was close at hand? Sperm always came in the teeth of storms, the greater the storm the greater the sperm, and here—he waved the note on company paper he had just received like a flag for battle at de la Buschagne and me—was confirmation that one of the greatest storms in history was near. Of course, he would not dream of missing such an opportunity. We would just go straight out to sea and find our Caesar.
“One moment, Cousin,” de la Buschagne called to me as I turned to go back to my post and Thor Larsen walked across the deck to go to his bridge. “Why does the Captain say great sperm come with storms?”
“There’s no exact why,” I told him. “He thinks it’s just so, in the mysterious way of the sea. He once told me that in stormy weather the great squids on which the sperm feeds are forced out of hiding in the valleys where they live at the bottom of the sea, and come up for air. It is easier then for the sperm to attack and eat them.”
He would have liked me, I know, to stay and answer more questions but at that moment there was a roar from the Captain, already on the bridge, for de la Buschagne to join him.
Soon we slipped away smartly from the factory side and turned about deftly into the main channel of the Bay, only to be held up by two large cargo ships, deep in the water with freight, coming in to dock. First I was astonished and then uneasy when I recognized them as ships I had seen leaving port just before we entered it at dawn that morning. They could have turned about only because their agents, as a result of the latest weather reports, had recalled them. They were ships of about ten thousand gross each, one of the Clan, the other of the Harrison line, both reputable companies of great experience. I knew they would not have turned their ships back without good reason in these desperate post-war days of cut-throat competition at sea. I comforted myself with the thought that all sailors, not excluding Mr. White and Mr. Clarke, had always said that in a great storm they would prefer to be in a whaler than any other ship, particularly ships deep with cargo. But this comfort did not last long, for as we came down the final channel to cross the bar, I saw from all sides that the whalers of our fleet were making for the harbour.
My first thought was that our fleet had been unusually lucky and come in all together with record catches. But my glasses soon showed them to be empty-handed. Their falling barometers and the good sense of their Captains must have been the incentive that sent them thus running for shelter.
But even this did not bother our Captain, once he had reassured himself that they were without exception empty-handed. I could see him pointing out one after the other to de la Buschagne, laughing because they were without catches whereas he had just dropped so rich a one. When one of them, not believing that even the Kurt Hansen could be so foolhardy, closed in on us and bellowed through a megaphone at the bridge to ask whether Thor Larsen had looked at his barometer, he just laughed all the more, telling them they could run back to mother earth, but he was going out for sperm.
The moment we were out in the roadstead Thor Larsen set a course almost due east, as far as I could judge, on a bearing pointed half-way between the southernmost tip of Madagascar and Mauritius, the quarter in fact in which the cyclone was most likely to be spinning. From there on the day began to change rapidly. The sky lost its blue, became a milky white, then sulphur yellow and finally a murky brown with strange streaks of orange in it. The atmosphere became so heavy even in the fore-top and so solid in front of my eyes that I found myself trying to move it by brushing it constantly with a kind of reflex action of my hands from the front of my eyes. By noon the sun was so veiled and morose that I could look it reprovingly in the face with my naked eyes.
The sea itself was completely smooth, like some kind of silk, and the weight of air ironed out the great Indian Ocean swell almost level with the brown, dull surface, until it had hardly any spirit left to rise. At noon we saw several blue-whale blows, and hard on them in seven different places seven giant torpedo bodies leaping, like salmon, high into the air and coming down with a splash that raised fountains of pure white water. It was rare, and almost miraculous, to watch a hundred tons or more of warm flesh and blood take to the air as easily as sparkling sprats, hang there gun-metal bright for a moment before falling back into the sulky sea. But the sight was also sobering because I realised that even the whales were finding it too oppressive below, and coming up for more and more air. Then I pointed and shouted: “There! There! They blow!”
Usually there was an immediate response from the helm to my shout as the Kurt Hansen swung at once like a greyhound rounding on a hare, towards the direction in which I pointed. But this time she kept steadily on her course. I thought the atmosphere was so heavy and thick that my shout had not reached the bridge and shouted again as loudly as I possibly could. I drew only a loud bellow from the Captain on the bridge and, turning to look down, saw he was beckoning me impatiently.
Almost dazed with unbelief at such an unusual reaction, I hurried below. I could see at once that every one about on deck was as mystified as I was.
“What whales blow, Eyes? Blue or sperm, quick?” Thor Larsen asked me, his intense grey eyes as full of fire as I had ever seen them.
“Blue, sir,” I told him, then went on to say that I had not only seen them blow, but seven of them leaping high out of the brown water like salmon.
“Ah, trying shake sea-bee and barnacles from sulphur bottoms,” he commented, highly satisfied. “Good sign. Always bellies itch more when storm coming. Like old men with their rheumatism, not?”
He laughed at that as I stood there unable to comment.
He searched his mind for words for his next thought as he often did. “Look, Eyes,” he told me finally, grinning, as if he was well aware of the enormity of the gamble he was taking and excited by all he was wagering against reason, experience, and traditional practice. “Today Thor Larsen not interested in blue whale or any other damn whale. Only sperm. Great sperm soon to come and you not to shout until sperm blows, not?”
I nodded, too amazed to speak and too much aware of how such conduct would provoke a crew already irritated and highly critical of their Captain.
“Good, my Eyes.” He put his hand on my shoulder and pressed it as warmly as he had ever done. “Always I not forget you good, damn good. And today you find Caesar for me and Mr. Hunter, my friend? Then to go, quick, my Eyes!”
There was such an Elizabethan finality and something so valedictory in his tone and action that I was moved by it, as well as by the warm unexpected tribute which went with it.
I went from the bridge and across the deck without looking at anyone, ignoring even a loud whisper from Nils Ruud, who was standing at his winch, obstinate in his disapproval of his Captain and anxious to feed it with the latest news. I went up the ladder and had just settled myself into position when the whole sky began to groan, creak and squeak as if the imponderable lead of the atmosphere were too much and about to force the heavens to crack. At the same time the Kurt Hansen gave a sudden little jump up and sideways, like some living thing that had nearly trodden on a snake on the road. Perceptibly surprised, her impudent nose went into the air, a shiver went through her which I felt even in the crow’s-nest, and she came down again into the water with an audible complaint from the metal. I saw then the strangest movement of sea-water that I had ever seen: a series of what seemed little more than great ripples rolling towards us out of the east in a long unbroken line from north to south. Even the greatest of the Indian Ocean swells that I had so far experienced had never shown such continuity and perfect coordination of movement. Then the ripples without altering direction or purpose would divide into shorter segments, curving and breaking independently of one another. But these ripples presented a united front as they rolled towards us over a brown sea, with a dull metallic glint on top and a line of black shadow in their wake. They could mean only one thing: they were the silent, swift-footed scouts of a greater disturbance so dense, single and compact that it had hit the ocean like a great rock hurled into it by an Odyssean blow. I had no doubt that we had crossed the far frontier of one of those storms I’ve already described when I saw my first sperm three seasons before.
I looked astern, and between the Kurt Hansen and the sun I could just make out the mist of pearl of some blue whale dissolving in the dense air. Out there it looked so calm, bright, and normal that when I resumed searching the ocean ahead and saw how fast the sky was losing lustre without a single cloud to account for it, I had an overwhelming conviction that we were heading in the wrong direction. Strangely, there was no wind to explain either the great ripples or that strange moaning sound in the sky. The air remained heavy and without movement and yet all the time the ripples rapidly grew into swells which increased in stature until the Kurt Hansen, going all out, was riding them high and sliding fast down their smooth sides to pick great sprays of white in their sombre valleys. Meanwhile the wailing, like Valkyries massing somewhere beyond the sullen sun to bemoan their losses in a battle for Valhalla, grew louder in my ears, making me feel extraordinarily lonely and exposed in my tub high in the air. When right ahead low on the horizon in the east the sky went a strange distorted black and became visibly tormented and in violent movement, as if I were watching the prancing shadows thrown up by a great ring of dancing devils, the feeling soon became something akin to a nameless fear. And by then the new swell rolling down on us out of the east had grown truly great and terrible. We hit it with such increasing force that the explosion of the impact scattered spray right up to the mast head. I thought the Captain would at any moment reduce speed if not turn about. But one glance at the bridge where he stood with de la Buschagne beside him, both looking more than ever like partners in a singular fate, showed me that he had no such intention and was enjoying himself hugely.
Far away to the south-east against the band of shifting shadow on the horizon, the curtain of the day had a black hem fluttering in the draught of a weird whistling. It was there that I saw the unmistakable, sharply angled, white blow of a sperm. It came out of the dark sea with such purpose, speed and power that it passed before my wondering eyes like a shooting star at twilight, before gathering itself into a ball of mist, light as thistledown, and slowly vanishing. It was the greatest blow by sperm I had ever seen, and even as I shouted and pointed, the thought “Caesar, at last!” flashed into my mind.
The response of the Kurt Hansen was immediate. She swung from east-north-east to south-east as fast as she had ever done and steadied herself on the quarter at which I was still pointing. Only then did I turn to look at the bridge expecting the Captain to summon me for a detailed report but he signalled back that it was unnecessary.
I warmed at this sign of his confidence and, in order to show him that I was convinced we were at last after the real quarry, gave him a “thumbs-up” sign which drew a grin and another approving wave from him. I was about to resume my watch on Caesar when away to the north-east I saw twelve more sperm blowing. I felt in duty bound to call out and direct my Captain’s attention to them. But as I expected he was not interested in them and signalled me to concentrate on the first blow. All the same, the news obviously pleased him greatly, for it seemed confirmation of what he had always firmly contended; that sperm not only kept close company with storms but also travelled in schools, with the exception, of course, of the Caesar who preferred to “go it alone” and hold the rest of his kind at their distance.
Fifteen minutes later, almost exactly in the same place, Caesar announced himself with another series of great blows. It needed only the slightest of corrections from Gorgeous at the wheel to send us pounding down on to the spot like a racehorse coming into the straight. By then I was myself so absorbed in the excitement of so unusual a hunt that I hardly noticed how the Kurt Hansen, on her new course, was catching the huge swell still mounting steadily sideways. She was pitching deep into dark valleys of water, but as she pitched, rolling so far over that instinctively I gripped the sides of my tub in case I fell out into the water. There I could see not one black tri-sail of a shark but a dozen or more like those of a convoy of death keeping station on its flagship. I could tell from the movements and stance of the crew at action-stations that they too had been drawn out of all irritation and doubt into their Captain’s mood. Thor Larsen possessed a dark genius for making all men who served with him, whether they liked it or not, into an extension of his own will.
The next time Caesar blew, he was barely three-quarters of a mile away and still almost in exactly the same place. This was so unusual that my direction was challenged from the bridge and a deck-hand sent running to question me. He had great difficulty getting up the rope ladder, so fast and deep was the ship pitching and heeling. When he reached me he made no effort to climb over the top but hung there rather precariously while I reassured him and gave him precise details of Caesar’s position and extraordinary behaviour. There was still no wind, just this immovable, heavy air of which I have spoken, but such a moaning and groaning was going on that we had difficulty in hearing each other.
All the time we talked I kept on looking at the place where Caesar was blowing. We had just finished when I saw his wonderful, fluked, butterfly tail appear on the crest of the great black swell barely a quarter of a mile away. He sounded steeply and seemed to me to be in a great hurry. Yet I suspected that with all that moaning of the universe and those walls of black sea-water, like mounds of some archaic fortifications, between him and us it was not the sound of the Kurt Hansen’s racing approach that alarmed him. He had private reasons of his own for diving as fast as he had done and in the same area. Out of all that Thor Larsen had told me about sperm and his eternal battle with the giant squid, “the monster of evil” as the Captain had years ago called it, the conviction came to me that one of the greatest sperm bulls in history was behaving in such a manner because in some deep-sea valley below us he had located evil of unimagined proportions, perhaps tempted out of its submarine fortifications by the storm just over the rim of the horizon, and this was Caesar now engaged in the most formidable encounter of his long lone life.
So great was my faith in this conclusion that I told the deckhand, “Tell the Captain that when we reach the exact spot where the sperm sounded I’ll raise my hand.” I hesitated, appalled for a moment by my own temerity, but my firm conviction drove me on to add, “Tell him I suggest we stop there and wait. He’ll be up soon and not far away, judging by his strange behaviour. Tell him this is a whale like no other we have ever hunted!”
Even so, I was relieved when I saw the Captain signal that he had not only understood but approved my message. I saw him almost at once then ring for half speed to the engine room, hand over to ‘Papa’ bosun and Gorgeous, and go down on deck followed by de la Buschagne. I was amazed how well the latter walked the heaving deck and climbed on to the harpoon platform which now, with the ship’s reduced speed, was no longer shipping either water or spray. Even so the ship was dipping so deeply into the swell that the water rose to within a foot or two of the bow’s brim. I knew it was going to be one of the most difficult shots in whaling history even if we got the chance to harpoon at all. But what was going to be even more difficult in that sea of mountains would be playing the whale and getting it lashed alongside. I dismissed the thought as quickly as I could because that way was exposed the madness of what Thor Larsen was trying to do. Instead I drew comfort from the sight of the Captain’s confident stand by the harpoon gun, his testing it and aiming it this way and that, as at ease as if doing no more than giving a demonstration in the great tranquil harbour behind us.
I had a return of misgiving, as I am certain all the crew had, when he handed over the butt of the gun to de la Buschagne. But even that lightened when I saw this singular old man, his bush shirt lightly flapping in the air of the Kurt Hansen’s reduced speed, his hat deeply pulled down about his ears, the glowering light like yellow oil on the snakeskin band about its crown, incongruous-looking as ever yet repeating the Captain’s exact movements without hesitation as if he had done nothing else since boyhood.
They had barely established themselves in the bows when we hit the whale’s immense slick, satin on the swell, and as arranged I had to signal to the bridge to stop engines. We lay there for some seven minutes with no vibration from the engines to remind us that the Kurt Hansen had power of her own. She lay there like the powerless plaything of those monumental swells. With the moaning of the air unabated and the shadow-show of dancing devils on the horizon growing higher and wilder, it felt as if we were utterly abandoned. Even the sharks had gone, and although I looked everywhere I could see no signs of their fins. Between the moaning of the sky I heard the rustle, swish and whistle of the heavy smooth swell brushing and rebrushing urgently against the Kurt Hansen’s sides.
Then suddenly, almost straight ahead, less than a hundred yards away and right on the summit of a long black range of water, the blow came again. It came from behind a swell with such force that despite the moaning in the air I could hear it hiss like a volcanic geyser. My shout was still ringing in my ears when I saw a range of swell following the first but rising to such a frightening height that despite the sullen light it grew translucent as it rose upward. Rising with it, deep inside the amber water I saw from end to end the body of a great bull sperm, head up, tail down, stretched out like a fish in aspic. Hard on this there was a swirl of water as the swell reached its peak and a ruff of foam, the colour of coffee and milk, unfolded all along the velvet crest in which imperial Caesar lay blowing again a great but muffled blow.
This time every one in the ship saw its blow and the Kurt Hansen, already leaping forward at full speed from my first shout, was fast closing the narrow gap between Caesar and ourselves. But so quickly was the swell rushing, like a wave of crude oil, towards us and blocking the view below, that I doubt if anyone saw what I saw. I saw Caesar’s great square battering head, his jaws slightly parted and the corner of his long mouth upturned as if in a grin of triumph. His dreadnought head seemed covered, as I thought, with giant sea-weed from the jungle in the ocean valley from which he had just come. But when instantly I put the ship’s glasses on him I saw that they were long writhing tentacles trying to get a hold, or purchase, on that platinum crown of Caesar’s. They failed, and during the seconds when I had Caesar in the focus of the glasses I saw them being sucked like some kind of deep-sea spaghetti into his mouth. I had no doubt that we had found Caesar in his moment of victory devouring a great cephalopod of evil for his high tea. That accounted for the strange muffled blow: and also for the fact that he lay there wallowing in front of us singularly preoccupied and unobservant like a ship of war, battle over, with engines stopped.
Thor Larsen had taken in the situation immediately and I could see him stand at de la Buschagne’s left shoulder with uplifted hand ready to give the signal to fire. De la Buschagne, legs well apart and, because of his great height, somewhat crouched, had swung the harpoon on the place where Caesar had just slid down the slope of the swell rolling towards us. As the swell took us, lifting us rapidly until it held us aloft on its crest, there was Caesar rising on the slope of the next great wave, busy completing his swallow. Again I was astonished how naturally and expertly the harpoon gun in de la Buschagne’s hands followed Caesar’s movement. Just before Caesar came to the crest of another lull of black water, Thor Larsen dropped his raised arm and shouted so loud that I heard it in the fore-top. “Take him!”
The gun boomed and there followed that exciting serpent-like flight, mamba-swift, of harpoon head and yellow rope through the air and above the swelling mound of water. As always, it looked as if the harpoon had been aimed too high, but at the last moment it fell quickly. Just as Caesar was lifted high into the air like a conqueror by his own element, the harpoon struck him in the middle of his long battle-worthy body. Unfortunately it hit too low to break his spine, but considering the conditions it was miraculously well aimed. There was an explosion like a bomb against Caesar’s side just as he started to slide over the steep crest of the wave and immediately vanished into the sea behind. I had never seen the slack in the rope of the harpoon run out quicker. Before Nils Ruud could unwind his winch the buffer spring at the end of the Kurt Hansen’s derrick was stretched taut and dangerously quivering. Caesar, fatally wounded, had not dived straight ahead in line with the ship’s course but gone off at high speed at a right angle to it, moving with such power that for the moment the Kurt Hansen was being pulled slowly broadside to the swell, labouring with her head held well down.
But what horrified me most was that, when the war-head within the harpoon exploded and showed us all how well Caesar had been hit, de la Buschagne, exalted and triumphant, turned his back on his quarry in the sea and put both his hands on Thor Larsen’s shoulders shouting: “I got him, I got him, my friend!”
I was as astonished as I was dismayed by this action, for I would have thought he would have been prevented from making so foolish a move by his hunter’s training. One of the most elementary rules is that one does not turn one’s back on one’s quarry until one has walked up to it, gun at the ready, and made certain it is dead. The greater and more dangerous the quarry the more imperative the rule. The Captain, too, was for a moment tricked out of his professional self, and delighted to put both his broad harpooner’s hands on de la Buschagne’s shoulders.
They stood there together, a pair of prodigal brothers, in the bows, unaware that as the Kurt Hansen dipped low a wall of eager black water was rising above them. Normally the Kurt Hansen would have risen to take it like a chamois but with Caesar desperate with death, pulling it deeply down and also athwart the weather, the buffer-spring of the derrick (which could take a strain of twenty tons or more) snapped, releasing a sound like the vibrations of some outsize tuning-fork loud on the morning air.
At once the ship lurched awkwardly, stumbled in its stride, head half on to the wall of water. I saw both Thor Larsen and de la Buschagne thrown off balance, fling their hands out wildly for support from the harpoon gun. They missed, and the sea came green over the bow washing deeply over the deck so that Nils Ruud only saved himself by embracing the levers of his winch.
When the Kurt Hansen, shuddering, shook itself free of the sea again, Thor Larsen and de la Buschagne had vanished. I looked about and astern of the Kurt Hansen but there was no sign of them. Then, aloft between me and the yellow afternoon sun on the summit of a swell rolling majestically towards the far-off coast of Africa, I distinctly saw de la Buschagne’s hat with its snakeskin band, floating away from us.
Without hope I shouted at the bridge and pointed. But there was no one on the bridge except Gorgeous skilfully doing the best he could against the sea and Caesar. ‘Papa’ bosun had left it already, carrying in his hand the axe which was always kept for emergencies in a bracket against the wall behind the wheel. Going as fast as his frame and the heaving sea would let him, he went to join Nils Ruud where the harpoon cable was at last beginning to unwind, smoking, from the winch’s drums. Already another swell was bearing down on us. Whalers say that the sea grades its waves in ascending scales of seven. This swell must have been the seventh, and I had a feeling of doom as I watched it coming towards us, with such an easy and oily approach. It was utterly impossible for us even to think of turning about to search for the Captain and de la Buschagne. Thank Heaven ‘Papa’ bosun was as strong as he was determined. He raised his axe swiftly, brought it down fiercely at least four times because the manilla cable was about to meet the eye of the hawser of steel which was coiled around the rest of the drum. Then, mercifully, the cut cable vanished from the deck and shot with the speed of a bullet through the hole in the gun platform, still dripping with sea-water.
Immediately the Kurt Hansen, down by the bow and listing heavily to port, bobbed upright, her old resilient self, just in time to take the giant swell without shipping too much water. Before the next onslaught Gorgeous had her facing the sea, nose dead on. With her speed reduced to a quarter she began to ride the swell as easily as a duck some troubled water. For the moment we were out of danger, but one glance ahead showed me how far we still had to go before we were safe. I was deeply amazed to observe since I had last watched the eastern horizon how high and wide the whirling, fluttering, ragged shadows dancing there had risen. Now, as far as I could see in front of us there was nothing but range upon ascending range of black-brown mountains of water with great valleys of shadows in between, like the foothills of some oceanic Himalayas. So bad was the prospect, in fact, that I knew I had to leave my fore-top immediately if I was ever to get down that day. There was no duty now to keep me there, and no sooner did I realise this than I climbed out with great difficulty, if not hazard, and made my way slowly below. ‘Papa’ bosun was back on the bridge with Gorgeous, and I went straight up to tell him how things ahead looked from on top. He just nodded and spoke to Gorgeous in Norwegian.
On the peak of the last wave ‘Papa’ bosun rang for full speed ahead, Gorgeous brought the wheel full round and the first in the next ascending order of seven waves had not yet taken us when the Kurt Hansen’s upturned nose started swinging around. The fourth wave in the series took us half astern; the last, with us running straight before it, lifted us and seemed to carry us up and on as easily as a surfboard towards Port Natal and straight into the setting sun. Somehow I knew then that the Kurt Hansen and we who were left in her were out of danger, so easily did she ride, thrust and parry the great seas driving after her.
But what of Thor Larsen and de la Buschagne? There could be no question of searching the sea for them in those conditions. And if they had been alive, swimming or floating in the waters, I would have spotted them before I came down.
Sick and sad at heart, I went below to the saloon. Leif was waiting for me. For a long while we did not talk, but he sat there with me and because I was shivering he took out Thor Larsen’s tantalus, poured some rum from a decanter into a mug of boiling coffee and made me drink it. Only then did we talk the platitudes of the great recurring finalities of life like birth, love and death, forever old and yet forever new. They have, these platitudes of tragedy, all the force of the original, as if they had never occurred to mankind before.
When at last Leif left me to go to his galley because he said the crew, cold and stricken at heart too with tragedy, would need the hottest and best supper he could give them, I sat there staring into space. I realised then that I had never known how much I could miss the Captain. Thinking thus, I saw first his lone sperm-tooth paper-weight standing on the plush of the saloon tablecloth. Beyond it, in the corner underneath the bracket containing Thor Larsen’s manuals and game books, was de la Buschagne’s gun garlanded with his bandolier. I choked back my feelings, and an instinct that I could not refuse made me pick up the paper-weight and the gun and bandolier and go up on deck with them.
It was dark outside. The stars and Milky Way were visible, but in the haze spread around the storm like pollen their light was blurred and oddly yellow. The moaning sound had gone from the sky but the black air was loud with the swish and hiss of mountainous water thrusting by us. The Kurt Hansen was riding the sea superbly and leaving its gallant mark in a trail of phosphorescent steam behind her. There were no lights except a glow at the mast-head from our riding-lamp and another fainter one over the compass in the bridge. I went to the side of the ship then, and after a moment of awesome hesitation tossed de la Buschagne’s gun and bandolier into the sea, feeling that they belonged there. I was about to toss Thor Larsen’s tooth after them when some disproportion in the act stopped me. We had had already enough of disproportion. Our Captain now had Caesar to keep him company and that should be enough.
Alone I stood there for a long time, feeling calmer both for what I had done and for what I had not done. Though still heavy with grief almost beyond endurance, and despite the strange windless storm raging around me, I recovered some of the old feeling of belonging that I had experienced on my first night out at sea in the Kurt Hansen. It was as if I were no longer trying to be what ’Mlangeni had suggested at the beginning of the season, “a little star out of course”. Rather was I coming back through this tragedy into the progression of time and order of day, night and seasons. How long I was there I do not know, but when I went into the saloon Leif was waiting to give me my supper. I told him what I had done before I sat down.
“Good, Pete,” he told me simply, patting my shoulder.
“But this,” I said, taking the sperm tooth out of my pocket: “I wanted to send this after him as well but I couldn’t.”
He nodded his head in understanding and I went on: “I thought I’d give this to ’Mlangeni. I thought it would somehow make Thor Larsen and ’Mlangeni right with each other. Things were never as they should have been between them.”
“I agree,” Leif said. “Thor Larsen has no living relatives. I believe you and that strange old man who died with him this evening were the nearest to him that he ever had. So do what you will with it.”
Later in the evening Leif brought Gorgeous, just relieved at the wheel, and ’Mlangeni to join me for more coffee and rum in the saloon. We talked little, but just being together seemed to break up the load of what had happened into four separate parts, thus making it easier to shoulder. Sometime towards midnight we mentioned the future. I think Gorgeous did so first, stammering a bit after the strain of all he had been through. No one knew better than I how wild, wide, high and abandoned had been the water coming against us, and how expertly Gorgeous first had rid us of Caesar, and then turned dangerously about to run with the sea. He said now that he had done with whaling and would not renew his contract. He’d give up his flat in Port Natal and go to Europe, at last, to listen to truly great music before it was too late.
“I would,” Leif agreed. “You’ve long owed it to yourself.”
Gorgeous answered with rare self-knowledge, “This time I don’t think I’ll go back on myself.” He turned to ’Mlangeni. “But I’ll miss you and your teasing, Langenay, old friend.”
“Auck, ’Nkosan Gorgeous,” ’Mlangeni replied, “ ’Mlangeni will always be there at Icoco, to keep this one true thought alive for you.”
“At Icoco, ’Mlangeni?” I asked.
“Yes, my ’Nkosan,” ’Mlangeni replied, his deep voice full with feeling. “I shall ask at once for permission to go back to the Amageba. I have been here too long already.”
I was moved by his use of the word “Amageba”. It is the ancient name of the Amazulu for themselves and means the shadows left by the departed sun which rest on the mountain tops in the west. It expressed in a single image everything that was best in ’Mlangeni’s heart and mind.
“Then when you go, ’Mlangeni, please take this with you.” I took Thor Larsen’s sperm tooth out of my pocket and put it in his hand.
He stared at it unbelievingly before asking, “All this for me, ’Nkosan?”
“Yes,” I told him. “Leif agrees with me that our Captain would have wanted you to keep it to show the Amageba. It’s a memorial of all you’ve done, and of all the fires you’ve lit and kept bright all these long years on the great water.”
“Auck, ’Nkosan,” ’Mlangeni said and bowed his great head.
“And you, Leif?” I asked quickly. “What will you do?”
“I shall carry on as before, Pete,” he answered slowly. “I have some years to go before I’ll be free of all my responsibilities.”
“No, Leif,” Gorgeous protested. “I’d chuck it. You’ve done more than your bit. You deserve a break.”
“The break for some of us is doing what’s nearest at hand,” Leif answered steadily.
Steaming at half speed, we made the roadstead of Port Natal at noon the next day. We had it to ourselves and lay there riding the biggest swell the people of the city had ever seen. The spray from the surf between us and the land rose so high and thick that I felt, still with the sense of death strongly in me, as though it were the seventh veil of the ultimate mystery. We lay there all day. Towards sunset, with the veil of spray between us and the city smoking with rainbow colour, ‘Papa’ bosun was tempted to run for the harbour longing, as we all were, to unload the Kurt Hansen of the heavy news she carried, and reluctant also to have another black night outside the harbour to join the dark inside us all. However, he wisely decided that nimble as the Kurt Hansen was, we should not run across the bar before the swell had abated somewhat.
All that long afternoon in spite of the spray I could with my glasses pick out the “Ailsa Craig” on the sea front and wondered, heavy at heart, about de la Buschagne’s daughter. How was I to break the news to her and what was to become of her? I was certain that Mr. White and Mr. Clarke would at once have reported to her our arrival in the roadstead, for they’d have known how the cyclone alert, published with banner heads in all the papers, would have alarmed her.
I was to learn afterwards that that was exactly what had happened. Mr. Clarke, focusing his glasses on us and methodically examining the Kurt Hansen as she stood in the roadstead had noticed the damage to the forrard derrick, but supposing it to be nothing much had made no mention of it when telephoning “Missie”.
She had hurried down at once to the signals station, frightened, at first, by the thunder of the sea and the way the enormous swell tossed us high and then sucked us low but overjoyed to see the Kurt Hansen still intact. In the end the two signalmen had reassured her completely with their genuine belief in the superb seaworthiness of whalers, while they brewed her several pots of tea and fed her with English biscuits. When night fell, she had gone back happily to her hotel.
At sunrise we saw that the black storm-cone on the signals mast had been lowered, for the swell had gone down considerably in the night. Moreover all the jaundice of the cyclone had spun away from Port Natal and vanished from the sky in the east where the air was blue, fresh and innocent. We made our run for the harbour, Gorgeous timing his approach perfectly, taking us in dead on centre of the channel. By nine we were docked at the quay to see the anxious owner’s representative, warned of our approach by the signals station, and also the Port Captain, watching our mooring operations. The gang-plank was hardly ashore before they were on it and crossing on board. ‘Papa’ bosun, with Leif to interpret for him, was there to receive them while I stood well away on the far side of the deck. I could not hear what was said but it was not much and they went below to the saloon almost immediately.
They had not been there long before Leif reappeared, called me to him and said: “You’re wanted, Pete.”
There was a warning note in his voice, though I couldn’t imagine why. But I had never been able to find any reason in Andrew Watson’s attitude to me.
I found the Port Captain installed at the head of the table, Watson at his side, then ‘Papa’ bosun, and a place opposite them left for Leif and myself.
“This is the boy I told you about,” Watson, without looking at me, told the Port Captain as I sat down.
I had then my first good look at the Port Captain. His name was Harry England and he looked to me as English as de la Buschagne had looked a Boer. He was not tall but very broad-shouldered, had thick fair hair going grey at the temples, a pleasant long face with a somewhat determined jaw, firm mouth, very blue eyes, observant and quick, and a pair of thick bushy brows above them. His face was both red and deeply tanned by wind and sun. He carried three rows of war ribbons on his navy-blue jacket, among which were the D.S.O., D.S.C. and Croix-de-Guerre. The buttons of his uniform shone like gold, his starched collar was without a blemish and everything about him suggested that he was a fastidious, frank and immensely experienced person.
He looked me straight in the eye and said: “I understand you were aloft in the fore-top when this tragedy occurred, and therefore best placed to see what happened. Could you please tell us in sequence how you saw it from beginning?”
I told them my story, from the moment when I had been told by Thor Larsen to ignore any other blows except those of a sperm right to the moment when de la Buschagne made the fatal mistake of turning his back on the sea and both he and the Captain were lost overboard.
He didn’t interrupt me or ask any questions. At the end he merely turned to Watson to say: “Well, I think that’s all plain sailing. I’ve nothing to ask. This young man has told his story extremely well to my way of thinking, but perhaps you—”
“Yes, I have,” the man interrupted brusquely as he looked at me for the first time. If anything he seemed to dislike me more than ever.
“You say,” he told me, “that you had never seen so wild and dangerous a sea as you were heading for?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, “But—” I intended to add that I was a relatively inexperienced sailor.
“Yes or no will do from you,” he snapped.
I saw the Port Captain’s bushy eyebrows rise with surprise and his frank blue eyes focused sharply on my questioner’s face as if he were seeing the prosperous, popular whaler-owner’s representative in a new light.
“When you spotted the sperm whale, could anyone else below have done so as well?” Watson continued, as aggressive in tone as ever.
“No, they couldn’t, sir,” I answered.
“Therefore, if you had not chosen to call attention to that blow, none need ever have been the wiser?”
I saw the Port Captain’s face cloud with disapproval at the whole trend of the questions but he restrained himself and said nothing.
I began to protest. “But our Captain, sir, had—”
“I don’t want any arguments from you. The fact is that if you had not been so irresponsible as to report this blow in conditions that you yourself have confessed you knew to be highly dangerous, this tragedy would not have happened?”
I was spared answering him. Harry England, with the fairness which was perhaps the one great passion of an otherwise unimpassioned nature, became really angry. “I don’t understand you or your question at all, sir,” he said, his voice cool as it is in those who know how to use their anger legitimately and not to be used by it. “This young man was not in command of the ship. He was under orders, obeying orders, and merely doing his duty as he had to.”
“Duty, my foot!” came the reply. “I’ve known this boy far longer than you have and he’s always been irresponsible and a source of great trouble from the beginning.”
“That’s not true, sir,” Leif had turned to the Port Captain and was speaking up quietly without apparent emotion. “He’s been with us for four seasons now and never caused any trouble at all. On the contrary he has been one of the best, hardest-working and most liked members of this ship’s crew. Our dead Captain trusted him as he did no one else.”
“Well, the Captain did wrong to trust this fellow in the end, as he’ll no doubt know by now,” the owner’s representative replied rather brutally with a cynical laugh. “Duty or no duty, this lad will never be allowed in any of this Company’s ships again.”
“And that,” Harry England told him politely, “will be your Company’s loss. But in any case this young man is not on trial. He has told us all he can and we can now go on to hear the rest. Thank you very much.”
He not only held his hand out to me but got up and walked to the entrance with me, saying: “You’ve nothing to blame yourself for. You’ve done well. Remember always, taking and giving, giving and taking orders as you did that day at sea, is the lot of a man. Good luck to you.”
I went on deck and, because my hours in the Kurt Hansen were now numbered, since I had decided long since that I would leave whaling for good, I thought I’d climb up to my beloved fore-top for one last look around.
It was a lovely morning. I could still hear the unusually loud swell on the breakwater beyond, but it was clearly diminishing because even as I watched I saw a line of signals being run up to the head of the tall mast on the bluff, giving a ship standing up over the horizon her order of permission to approach and enter. The lighthouse behind in the clear air was white and trembling, and the dark evergreen of Zululand was sparkling with sunfire. The water of the bay was a silver-smooth looking-glass made especially for the serene face of the madonna-blue sky. The smoke from scores of funnels and factory chimneys grew blue and tall like palms of a distant desert mirage in the tranquil air; on the heights beyond, the flowering trees and shrubs sparkled, shone and flickered as if all were eager, young and innocent, and death still only some far away event. I went over every detail of the scene as if looking on it all for the last time. At the same time I wondered how all this bright pageant of nature and human enterprise before me could show no sign that something had gone from it for ever and that it would never know our Captain and de la Buschagne again.
As I thought thus, I had an odd vision of a world of pale shadow and fierce sunlight in the burning bush beyond Fort Herald in the far interior of Africa. I saw Sway-Back, secure now against human betrayal, standing fast asleep and dreaming of the hunter who had renounced death as a means of mastering him even after the long, harsh decades spent on his spoor: and as he dreamed all the ghosts of Africa walked around him. At the same time the strange matter of luck recurred to me, suggesting that the answer to it lay somewhere in that vision of Sway-Back. Perhaps even the deaths of the Captain and his friend, both tools and instruments of the tragic fate through which they had come together for an end to which they were born, could be called luck. And perhaps sometime, somewhere, despite all appearances against it, that luck could prove to have been good since it seemed to make the future whole?
I came out of this introspection which flashed like a shooting star through the darkness of my mind, to look at the heights above the harbour still leaping with morning fire. Never had I seen the blue over the interior of Africa stand up so high and wide, like an archangel with wings outstretched in welcome, beckoning me home from the sea. I heard human voices and, looking down, saw the owner’s representative and the Port Captain below me saying goodbye to the Kurt Hansen’s crew and then going ashore and driving away in the former’s large car.
I went down to the saloon, thinking I would now get my things together, say my goodbyes and close this chapter of my young life as quickly as possible before seeking out de la Buschagne’s daughter.
Finding the saloon deserted, I could not resist sitting down at the table to give it all a last, long glance. Looking round it, my eye caught sight of Thor Larsen’s game book on the bracket against the wall. I got up, took it out, and lay it open on the table in front of me. I read the last entries of the three great blue whales we had caught that week written carefully, painfully and yet also confidently, sprawling in Thor Larsen’s thrusting harpooner’s hand, the ink of the writing astonishingly fresh. I took up the dead Captain’s pen and wrote something below his last entry. It is significant that suffering revives something so old and abiding that it compels thought into archaic forms. I wrote, “Killed perhaps the greatest bull sperm of the seas,” and also added below it, “Here endeth the last and final chapter of the life of Thor Larsen, sea captain and great harpooner of whales.”
I had hardly finished my writing when I heard ’Mlangeni’s voice on deck. Perhaps we all need suffering before we can understand what creation suffers continuously and forever on behalf of life on earth. I could tell from the way ’Mlangeni’s beautiful Zulu voice now came as it were from the pit of his stomach, that out of his own experience he was wide open to the suffering of someone else.
“’Nkosanana, Little Princess,” he was saying gently, “prepare to string the beads.”
I jumped up. De la Buschagne’s daughter, her anxiety no longer to be endured since our ship had been signalled in at the main quay at nine and she had had as yet no sign of her father, had obviously come to find out the reason for it.
I rushed on deck. She was standing on the quay by the gang-plank, not daring to set foot on it because of the way Thor Larsen had ordered her off that Sunday morning. She was looking at ’Mlangeni, not understanding his words but alarmed by his tone, her eyes dark and her beautiful face full of concern.
When she saw me, however, she smiled and called out gladly, “Ah, there you are, Cousin. I’m so glad. D’you think I could just have a word with father?”
“Come on board, little Cousin,” I answered quietly.
The smile left her and looking puzzled she said hesitantly, “But Cousin, I can’t. I’m not allowed—”
“Today you can, little Cousin,” I interrupted her. “Please come on board.”
She came up the gang-plank then with a look which I shall never forget. It was the look of a woman knowing that she is about to receive confirmation of what she has all along known and feared despite the reasons, arguments, logic and denials brought to bear against her.
When we were both seated alone in the saloon I told her, “Your father and my Captain are both dead.”
She did not cry at once as I had expected. Perhaps she had known, foreseen and in a sense fore-suffered it all for far too long. Quietly she begged me to tell her all. Only when I came to the moment when her father, in his moment of triumph, had vanished overboard with my Captain, did she put her head between her arms and cry. I went on with my tale, and she stopped crying only when I told her how I had thrown her father’s gun and ammunition into the sea that same night. Lifting her head she said: “I’m so glad, Cousin. That was right.”
She cried a while longer before taking out a handkerchief to wipe her eyes. Then she asked uncertainly, “I wonder what I should do now?”
I remember that the silence that followed her question was filled with the metal in the Kurt Hansen squeaking from the surge of the great swell outside, the loud call of the gulls and the warning wail of a ship siren signalling she was going full speed ahead down the main channel out to sea.
I answered, “You are coming with me.”
She began to protest. “But, Cousin, how—” She stopped suddenly.
It was then that I was sensible of a conviction and an authority which can only come to us when we have encountered and experienced death in life, and out of that experience have realised that chance and circumstance which when they have us in their grip appear so haphazard, yet, when looked at through the focus of an end such as that of de la Buschagne and Thor Larsen, can be seen to have been working with amazing and mathematical precision. All the evidence of how fine a slide-rule and how great a sextant so-called chance had used was plain to me now in the hair-fine way that it had had navigated the lives of two people of such different races, origins, ages and calling as de la Buschagne and Thor Larsen, so as to bring them together to meet for their predestined end. I did not doubt that something of the same precision had brought de la Buschagne’s daughter and myself together at that moment in the Kurt Hansen’s tiny saloon. This gave me courage to see through the fog and uncertainty of life which clouded me at that moment.
I took her hand in mine and asked, “How long will it take you to pack?”
“An hour at the most,” she answered, too surprised to argue.
“Give it an hour and a half then, little Cousin,” I told her firmly. “Then I’ll call to take you home.”