Ian McGuire - The North Water

The whale’s right fin is lashed onto the larboard gunwale with its head facing sternwards. Its dead eye, not much larger than a cow’s, peers blindly upwards at the shuffling clouds. Strong lines are secured to the nose end and rump, and its belly is heaved a foot or so out of the water by means of a block attached to the mainmast and a rope hooked onto the whale’s neck area and brought to tension through the windlass. Brownlee, after measuring the corpse’s length with a knotted line, estimates it will yield up ten tons of oil and half a ton or more of whalebone — a value of close to nine hundred pounds at market, if prices hold firm.

“We may yet be rich, Mr. Sumner,” he says with a wink.

After resting and taking a drink, Otto and Black strap iron crampons to their sea boots for grip and climb down onto the whale’s belly. They carve out strips of blubber with long-handled knives and chisel off the baleen and the jaws. They cut off the tail and the fins, and then remove the nose and rump tackles and allow the dilapidated purple carcass that remains to sink under its own weight or be eaten by sharks. The flensing takes four hours in all and is accompanied throughout by the stench of grease and blood, and the endless cawing of fulmars and other carrion birds. When it is over — when the blocks of blubber are stowed in the flens-gut, the deck is scoured a dull white, and the knives and spades are rinsed clean and put away — Brownlee orders an extra ration of rum for each sailor. There are cheers from the forecastle at the news, and, only a little later, the sound of a Scottish fiddle and the thump and cry of men dancing jigs.

Neither Joseph Hannah nor his friends appear, as they were bidden, at Sumner’s cabin after supper. Sumner wonders whether to search them out in the forecastle, but then decides against it. There is nothing that can’t wait until the morning and, in truth, Joseph’s simpleton wretchedness is beginning to gall him. The boy is a hopeless case, he thinks: feebleminded, a congenital liar according to Drax, prone no doubt to hereditary disease (both mental and corporeal) of every kind. Evidence suggests he is the victim of a crime, but he will not name his abuser, will not even admit that he has been abused — perhaps he has forgotten who it was, perhaps it was too dark to see, or perhaps he does not think of it as a crime at all but as something else instead? Sumner tries to imagine inhabiting the mind of a boy like that, tries to grasp what it would feel like to see the world through Joseph Hannah’s sunken, shifting, squirrel eyes, but the effort seems both absurd and faintly terrifying — like a nightmare of being transformed into a cloud or a tree. He shudders briefly at the thought of such Ovidian transformations, then, with relief, reopens The Iliad and reaches into his coat pocket for the small brass key that commands the medicine chest.

The next day, two more whales are killed and flensed. Sumner, since he is otherwise unoccupied, is given a pick haak and a long leather apron. Once the strips of blubber have been hauled on board ship and cut up into foot-square blocks, it is the surgeon’s newly appointed task to take the blocks from the foredeck to the hold and pitch them down to the men working below, who will store them in the flens-gut until the time comes for making off. It is dirty and exhausting work. Each block of blubber weighs twenty pounds or more and the ship’s deck is soon slick with blood and grease. He slips several times, almost topples into the hold on one occasion but is saved by Otto, and ends the day bruised and aching but with a sense nonetheless of rare satisfaction: the crude, physical pleasure of a task accomplished, of the body tested and proved. He sleeps for once without the aid of laudanum, and in the morning, despite the ungodly stiffness in his shoulders, neck, and arms, breakfasts well on barley porridge and salt fish.

“We will make a whale man of you yet, Mr. Sumner,” Cavendish jokes, as they sit in the mess cabin smoking their pipes and warming their feet by the stove. “Some surgeons would be too dainty for the pick haak, but you took to it nicely, I’d say.”

“Flensing is a good deal like cutting turf,” Sumner says, “and I did plenty of that when I was a boy.”

“That’s it then,” Cavendish says. “It’s in your blood.”

“The whaling is in my blood, you think?”

“The working,” Cavendish says with a smile. “The Irishman is a laborer at heart; that’s his true calling.”

Sumner spits into the stove and listens to it fizzle. He knows enough of Cavendish by now not to take his taunts to heart, and his mood is too light this morning to be seriously baited.

“And what is the Englishman’s true calling, I wonder, Mr. Cavendish?” he answers. “To grow fat off the labors of others, perhaps?”

“There are them that are born to toil, and them that are born to grow rich,” Cavendish says.

“I see. And which one are you?”

The mate leans back complacently in his chair and flares his pinkish lower lip.

“Oh, I’d say my time is coming, Mr. Sumner,” he says. “I’d say it’s coming pretty soon.”

* * *

It is a quiet morning. No more whales are sighted and the hours before noon are spent cleaning the decks, reeving lines, and restocking the whaleboats. Sumner, who has not seen or spoken to Joseph Hannah since the time he saw him horsing with his friends near the fore hatch, decides to seek the boy out. He notices one of the other cabin boys on deck and asks for Joseph’s whereabouts.

“We were told he was to bed down in the tween decks from now on,” the boy says. “I have not seen him since yesterday.”

Sumner ventures into the fore-tween decks, where he finds a grubby wool blanket nestled between a sail chest and a pile of bundled staves but no other sign of the boy. He climbs back up and looks about. After checking that Joseph is not hidden from sight behind the spare boats, the windlass, or the deckhouse, he peers down into the forecastle. Some of the men are on their bunks asleep, others are seated on sea chests smoking, reading, or carving wood.

“I am looking for Joseph Hannah,” he calls. “Is the boy down there?”

The seated men turn to look at him. They shake their heads.

“No we hant seen him,” one answers. “We thought he were staying aft with you, Mr. Sumner.”

“With me?”

“In officers’ quarters. On account of his illness.”

“And who told you that?”

The man shrugs.

“That’s all what I heard,” he says.

Sumner, touched now with the beginnings of impatience, returns to his cabin and retrieves a candle with the intention of exploring the holds (although why the boy would be concealing himself anywhere in the holds is beyond him). He sees Black emerging from the captain’s cabin carrying the brass sextant.

“I’m looking for Joseph Hannah,” Sumner says to him. “Have you seen the boy about?”

“The one with the sore arse?” Black says. “No, I can’t say I have.”

Sumner shakes his head and sighs.

“The Volunteer is not such a large vessel. I’m surprised a boy can so easily go missing.”

“There are a thousand nooks and crannies on a ship like this one,” Black says. “He’s probably off pulling his pizzle somewhere. Why do you need him?”

Sumner hesitates, aware that his concern with the health of Hannah’s fundament has already become something of a joke amongst the officers.

“I have a task for him,” Sumner says.

Black nods.

“Well, he’ll emerge by and by, you can be sure of that. The boy is an awful malingerer, but he’ll not miss his rations when they’re served.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Sumner says, looking at the candle for a moment, then dropping it into his jacket pocket. “Why should I trouble to search for someone who doesn’t want to be found?”