Geoffrey Jenkins: Southtrap

Erebus and Terror. The gates of hell. Darkness. Fear. That is what the words meant.

I shivered. The banner which bore these names bellied in the soggy, warm wind from the ship's gangway to which one end had been tied. Then it thumped against her plating, a dull sound like a boxer's punch that hasn't landed square.

'Erebus-Terror Cruise to Prince Edward Island and the Sub-Antarctic Regions.'

The banner had been a tourist winner all right, ever since Captain Prestrud had brought the Quest into the Cape Town docks ten days before. I wondered whose imaginative brain in Orbit Travels had conjured up the gimmick. We could have filled the Quest's passenger accommodation three times over from the demand it had brought.

Nevertheless, it went against my seaman's grain to dredge up the names of two great ships from their graves — unknown graves in the frozen wastes of the North-West Passage — and exploit them the way the travel agency had done. When ships die, they die. True, HMS Erebus and Terror had sailed the way we were going to sail — first to Prince Edward and Marion Islands, 2300 kilometres from the Cape and a fifth of the way to Australia, — then on eastwards to the Crozets Group, next Kerguelen, and finally New Zealand. That had been in the middle of the last century. They had been under the command of the great polar explorer, Sir James Clark Ross. They had broken open the way to the South Pole and Ross had put a ship's keel where none had ever dared before.

I was now thinking of the ultimate dreadful fate of Erebus and Terror as I stood on the quayside awaiting a taxi to take me to the hospital. The way the banner flapped kept drawing my attention to it. This warm, sunny, mid-January morning — a slight south-easter was raising an ensign of cloud on Table Mountain — seemed a strange time to be thinking of their fate. But anyone venturing into ice automatically challenges fate as did finally Erebus and Terror, despite their double oak hulls braced with massive beams, their water-tight compartments and reinforced decks. In the end nothing could have saved them from a fearful death in the ice.

Erebus, I seemed to recall, meant darkness. A name given to the icy regions through which the dead pass into hell. No wonder it was linked with terror.

Now the Quest had been linked with them. And the Quest wasn't even ice-strengthened.

I shivered.

'Captain!'

I had not noticed the man approach. He seemed to spring from nowhere out of the dockside clutter of cranes, bollards and hawsers. Except that you couldn't hide a man like that, as far as size was concerned.

The sullenness and intensity of the way he addressed me took me entirely by surprise. I guessed him to be in his fifties, but it was hard to tell his age. Weather exposure or possibly whaling could have chiselled his tough features at any stage of life and his looks were not enhanced by a stubbly beard. He wore a sailor's dark rig and a cap without a badge. His gear might have been stamped with the hallmark 'Southern Ocean'.

'Yes?'

He had been waiting for me to respond to the 'Captain', and when I did, a curious flash appeared in his light-blue Viking eyes. It was as out of place as a lightning-strike on a clear day — and as menacing. It was gone in a moment.

He raised his right hand in a kind of salute. If the first two fingers of the hand had not been missing, it might have been a V for Victory sign. As it was, the unnatural gap made a claw, an outsize crab's pincer, of the limb. The action and the hand were jerky and grotesque. They seemed to be activated by inner pressures.

'Captain…?' He left the question open-ended.

'Shotton,' I replied. 'John Shotton. And for the record…'

He crowded me before I could finish. For some reason he appeared desperately anxious about the captain bit.

'Captain Shotton — sir.'

His attempt at deference didn't come off. It sounded like something he'd worked at, trying to hold down his natural truculence. He wasn't a deck-hand. He'd been used to have men obey him — at the double.

'Wegger.'

He introduced himself in a formal Teutonic way. From his bearing and blue eyes, however, I would have put my head on a block that he was Norwegian, like most of Quest's crew.

'Rolf Wegger. I'm looking for a berth. Your ship — ' he jerked his head in the direction of Quest — 'is going South. I know the ice. Whalerman. Know it well.'

I indicated the flapping banner while my mind tried to assess him. I temporized. I might well need the man. Half an hour ago an urgent call from the hospital had summoned me from the bridge: 'Come at once,' it had said. 'Casualty Department, Groote Schuur Hospital. Captain Prestrud is badly injured.'

This isn't a whaling cruise,' I said to Wegger. 'It's…' I fumbled. What was the Erebus-Terror Cruise? Quest certainly was not the Lindblad Explorer; she was a converted freighter-cum-passenger vessel a quarter of a century old. That didn't mean to say she hadn't been beautifully built. She had first taken the water from a Bergen shipyard. She was one of the Thor type ships. You can always sell an ageing Thor ship anywhere. The thirty passengers and scientists the Quest would carry were not going to be cosseted behind air-conditioned promenade decks sipping gin and watching Antarctica slide by from a cosy capsule. They were a keen lot. They were going for adventure. The Quest's other name in a safe, dreary world was Adventure.

It's a special kind of cruise,' I told Wegger. 'Semi-scientific. No whales. Whaling is dead in the Southern Ocean anyway. It has been for years.'

'I should know.' He spoke with bitter vehemence. 'I should know.'

'Look here,' I went on. 'I'm not in a position to offer you anything now. I may know more in a couple of hours.'

He said, 'Captain Prestrud — I heard… I mean, him being hurt and all that — does it mean the cruise is off?'

There was a curious note in his voice, almost as if he feared to ask the question. He had a grudge against life in his eyes. The cruise — well, I couldn't answer that myself. It depended on how bad Captain Prestrud was.

'Maybe, maybe not. If not, then I may need an officer who knows the ice. What's your experience? Qualifications?'

The tone of his reply surprised me. It was over-eager, almost pleading.

'All the usual certificates. Also radio. I was in catchers — until the international convention killed whaling.'

I wondered for a moment at his mention of radio, an unusual qualification for a catcher skipper. And at his age he must have been that. I would have to take his word for a lot of what he said; Quest was due to sail the next day and there would be no time to check. Yet he seemed competent enough. Quest's second and third officers were young and inexperienced and Wegger could provide the sort of back-up I would like to see. I found myself thinking as though I were already in command of Quest, although nothing was more uncertain than that at the moment. Where in hell was that taxi? 'I'll see you aboard at eleven,' I told him. 'I'm on my way to the hospital now. I won't know any of the answers until I have seen Captain Prestrud.'

'He's bad?'

I eyed Wegger curiously, and couldn't help wondering how he'd heard. He was making a great effort to appear casual. I reasoned at the time that his probing about the injured skipper was due to anxiety about the job. He must have been badly on his uppers if it meant that much.

His inquisitiveness made me clam up. 'The hospital didn't say. I didn't speak to a doctor.'

'How come you go to Prince Edward Island?'

The unexpected question brought me up with a start. It was full of vehemence, as if he couldn't hold it back any longer. He took a half-step towards me, the sort of step a boxer makes before a punch.