Ian McGuire - The North Water

They hear the clatter and curse of Cavendish descending from the deck and making his way through steerage. When he steps into the cabin and the others turn towards him, Drax grabs the whalebone off the rack and swings it directly into Brownlee’s forehead, striking him just above the left eye socket and breaking the skull. He pulls it back to swing again, but Cavendish grabs hold of his arm. The two men struggle mutely for a moment. When Drax drops the whalebone, Cavendish reaches down for it and the harpooner grabs him by the hair and brings his knee up hard into his face. Cavendish drops sideways onto the rag carpet, groaning and drooling blood. Sumner, watching on, has yet to move. He is still holding the lancet in one hand and the dead child’s tooth in the other.

“What’s the point of this?” he says. “You can’t escape from here.”

“I’ll take my chances in a whaleboat,” Drax says. “I won’t go back to England to be hanged.”

He picks the whalebone off the floor and hefts it for a moment. The ebony pommel is slick with Brownlee’s blood.

“And I’ll be taking that tooth off you afore I leave,” he says.

Sumner shakes his head, then steps forwards and puts the tooth and the lancet down on the tabletop between them. He glances upwards through the skylight but no one is there. Why is Black not on the quarterdeck as usual? he wonders. Where is Otto?

“You can’t kill us all,” he says.

“I ’spect I can kill enough of you though. Now turn about.”

He waves with the whalebone to indicate his meaning. After a moment’s pause, Sumner does as he is told. While Drax quickly dresses himself, the surgeon stands staring at the dark wood paneling of the cabin wall. On top of the skull, he wonders, or off to one side? One blow or two? If he calls out now, it is possible that someone might hear him. But he doesn’t call out. He closes his eyes. He waits for the fatal blow to fall.

There is a sudden quick commotion outside. A loud rattle of voices. And then, as the cabin door flies open, the unreal roar of a shotgun blast. Dust and fragments of the ceiling cascade around Sumner’s head. He swivels about and sees Black standing in the doorway aiming the second barrel directly at Drax’s chest.

“Give the stick to Sumner now,” Black tells him.

Drax doesn’t move. His mouth is hanging open and his tongue and teeth are wetly visible.

“I can kill you now,” Black says, “or I can shoot your bollocks off and let you bleed out for a while. Whichever you prefer.”

After a pause, Drax nods, smiles faintly, then hands the stick to Sumner. Black steps into the cabin and looks down at Brownlee and Cavendish, unconscious and bleeding on the floor.

“What the fuck have you been doing here?” he says.

Drax shrugs and looks down at the tooth lying on the table where the surgeon left it.

“That tooth int none of mine,” he says. “The surgeon dug it out my arm, but how it got there is the gravest kind of mystery.”

For four days and nights, Brownlee lies insensible on his cot, open-eyed but barely breathing. The left side of his face is blackened and misshapen. His eye is swelled shut. Unknown liquids ooze out of his ear; high on his forehead where the skin is split apart the bone is palely visible. Sumner thinks it unlikely that he will live, and, if he does live, impossible that his mind will ever fully recover. He knows from experience that the human brain cannot tolerate such contusions. Once the skull is breached, the situation is almost hopeless, the vulnerability is too immense. He has seen such injuries on the battlefield, from saber and shrapnel, rifle butts and the hooves of horses — unconsciousness is followed by catatonia; occasionally they shout out like lunatics, or weep like children — something inside them (their soul? their character?) has been scrambled, reversed. They have lost their bearings. It is generally better, he thinks, if they die rather than go on inhabiting the twilit half-world of the mad.

Cavendish has a badly broken nose and has lost several of his front teeth, but is otherwise unaltered. After a brief period on his back sipping bouillon soup from a serving spoon and taking opium against the pain, he rises and resumes his duties. On a gloomy morning with clouds clagging the horizon and the scent of rain hovering in the air, he gathers the men on the foredeck and explains that he is taking command of the Volunteer until Brownlee recovers. Henry Drax, he assures them, will certainly hang back in England for his murderous and mutinous acts but for now he is firmly chained in the hold, rendered incapable of mischief, and he will play no further part in the voyage.

“You may ask yourself how such a fiend came to move amongst us, but I have no good answer to that,” he says. “He bamboozled me as much as he did any man. I’ve known some deviant and malignant fuckers in my time, but none, I confess, a patch on Henry Drax. If the good Mr. Black here had chosen to put that other shotgun barrel in his chest when he had the opportunity, I for one would not be mourning over much, but, as it is, he is caged below like the beast he is and will not see the daylight till we land again in Hull.”

Amongst the crew, the sense of amazement as to what had occurred in Brownlee’s cabin is soon replaced by a general certainty that the voyage itself is cursed. They remember the gruesome stories of the Percival , of men dying, going mad, drinking their own blood for sustenance, and ask themselves why they were ever foolish or ill-advised enough to sign on for a ship commanded by a man so notable for his fearsome ill luck. Even though the ship is less than a quarter full of blubber, they would like nothing better now than to turn round and sail directly home. They fear that worse is yet to come, and they would rather reach home with empty pockets but still breathing than end up sunk forever below the Baffin ice.

According to Black and Otto, who do not try to keep their opinions to themselves, it is too late in the season to be in these waters — the majority of whales have swum farther south by now, and the farther north they stray as the summer recedes, the greater the risk of ice. It was Brownlee’s own particular idiosyncrasy, they say, to set them on this northerly course in the first place, but now that he is no longer in command, the most sensible action is to return to Pond’s Bay with the rest of the fleet. Cavendish, however, takes no account of either the superstitions of the crew or the suggestions of the other officers. They continue moving northwards in the company of the Hastings . Twice they see whales in the distance and lower for them but without success. When they reach the entrance to Lancaster Sound, Cavendish lowers a boat and has himself rowed across to the Hastings to confer with Campbell. On his return, he announces over dinner in the mess that they will enter the sound as soon as a suitable passage opens up in the ice.

Black stops his eating and stares at him.

“No man has ever caught a whale this far north in August,” he says. “Read the records if you doubt me. We’re wasting our time here at best, and if we enter the sound we’re putting ourselves at risk also.”

“A man don’t profit unless he takes a little risk from time to time,” Cavendish says lightly. “You should show more boldness, Mr. Black.”

“It is foolishness, not boldness, to enter Lancaster Sound this late in the season,” Black says. “Why Brownlee took us north again I can’t say, but I know if he were here, even he would not consider taking us into the sound.”

“What Brownlee would or wouldn’t do is moot, I’d say, since he can’t speak or even raise his hand to wipe his arse. And since I’m the one in command now, not you or him”—he nods at Otto—“I guess what I say goes.”