Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  Harry was a genius of seasonings. I think he even added some of his hoarded wine to sharpen the piquancy of the flavor. The turtle meat itself was savory and soft.

  Oddly, Kit refused to eat it. “It’s a curse to eat turtle meat,” he said, but I coaxed him to try the broth.

  The shell was enough of a wonder to us that the captain allowed it to remain on deck. It would have made a nice boat for a child on a pond. Chester and I sometimes lounged against the greenish turtle back after we had finished our morning constitutional. Many days passed thus pleasantly. The two masts served us well, and we were in no great hurry, for we were again in cruising territory for whales. Chester told me it was his father’s intention to put in at Hawaii, though it was still a very far distance. If the “frost wind” had not caught us in its breath, we would have put in on the coast of Chile, at Santiago, for repairs and supplies. But, really, we felt the need of nothing. Giles had suggested to Harry that he capture some of the torrents of rainwater to replenish our supply, and he had done so during the storm. The splintered stub of the mainmast stood like a totem over serene seas.

  Nonetheless, we were a whaling ship, and to complete our completeness, if that is a possible idea, we began to watch eagerly, again, for a whale.

  Aloft once more, I felt seasoned and relaxed. The height and the motion of my roost seemed natural to the world in which I lived. Since both Kit and Giles knew my identity, my very bones felt more comfortable and free of dread: the precautions I took with the other men and with Harry, Chester, and Captain Fry were habitual now. Sometimes I even thought of myself as a man and was proud of my manliness.

  The question of the horror of killing and butchering another leviathan I tried to defer. I looked at the near and far heaving of the green sea and loved and relished the sight. Should a dark shape, moving—perhaps spouting—appear, I supposed that I would look carefully and then sound the expected cry. It was not my job to ride in a whaleboat, to row in pursuit, to dart the harpoon, to plunge in the lance. No. I was a pair of eyes. And when I tired of the sea, there was the cloud laden sky inviting my soul into its blue expanse. If I gazed there, why, then there was no chance of sighting a whale.

  Sometimes I saw other ships at a great distance—I had new letters ready in their envelopes—but Captain Fry was not interested in gamming. He had his Shakespeare and his son; now he had Giles to converse with, too, and he did not wish to stop his work to entertain himself. Perhaps the broken mainmast embarrassed him, too. The mates were so quiet and content on board the Sussex that I asked Harry if they were opium eaters. To my surprise, he said he did think they took a few grains occasionally.

  As for Giles and Kit, we were friendly, but it seemed for Giles that conversations with us were perhaps less interesting than molding the young mind of Chester, or benefiting from the captain’s broad nautical experience. Giles made little effort to talk with Kit or me since our stormy picnic in the blubber room.

  Kit seemed to me a person apart simply because he was melancholy. Whatever pain had alienated him from Giles he never spoke of. He seemed to try to assume an air of normality. The other crew members enjoyed Kit’s quick and unlikely wit, like the spurt of a match in darkness. The ship was not paradise, but there was order and goodwill to be found there, if not the vitalizing force of love or the pleasure of intimacy. And besides, we were in motion. New regions would appear. Weeks passed. I did my duty and waited for change.

  From my perch aloft, I thought the smudge on the horizon betwixt the green sea and the pale sky too large to be a whale. Its shape reminded me a bit of the Island at home, for there was a steepness on one side like the headland under the Lighthouse and from that there was a gradual long slope into the sea. There was no tinge of green to this South Pacific island, such as one usually sees in mild climes. Instead it had a blackish appearance, and I wondered if it might be the eroded tip of an underwater volcano, basalt often having a deep blackness to it.

  Then there was a small eruption—a short plume of smoke went up, strangely familiar in shape. Could the sterile isle be inhabited? Had I seen a sort of smoke signal such as the Indians of the American West were said to use? Surely it was a signal or a sign, but my brain refused to interpret it. Then the island sank from sight. I rubbed my eyes. Could it be so near to sea level that sometimes the waves covered it? Surely there were some islands somewhere even now being built up from their bases at the bottom of the sea. Was I to be privy to such a land-forming process?

  It was a drowsy day, and patience came easily. I thought of the six little plum trees at home and wished that I had a plum. I thought of Uncle and Aunt and Frannie. I pictured them around their new baby. I looked down to the deck. I saw Kit clap Giles on the shoulder in quite a natural and friendly way, and I was glad. Surely this was real friendship and not just gesture. Then I looked again for the black island.

  Perhaps I had only dreamed. It would be nice to have a pet in the crow’s nest—a little mouse would be fine, or a bumblebee that buzzed just for me. What kind of pet would a ship rat make if it was handled frequently and lovingly from birth? The knobby, hairy white knees of Apron came to mind, when she was a little goat. I sighed. I wanted to fold my arms on the edge of the crow’s nest, close my eyes, and dream, lulled by the sea.

  How was it that I had received a loving rose from a man who walked the deck below me but who now treated me like the man I pretended to be? How was it that another man had lusted for my body and now found little delight in looking at me? Was it a pact between them not to compete when the arena was so small? And what was the cause of the coolness between them? Had they quarreled about me?

  I wanted no quarrels, but here in the Pacific, I had rather expected to return to the intense communion we had all had on the Island. They, on the other hand, having been so little expectant of seeing me, now seemed to discount the reality of my presence. I didn’t care, I decided. I would marry Captain Fry! That would show them. And then I smiled at my childish petulance and felt lazier than ever.

  I would not marry anyone anytime anywhere. I would sail as a man and live ashore as a woman. I would do just as I pleased. So long as I hurt no other being, why not do exactly as I pleased?

  The black island was back. I had not realized that we had come round. I checked the azimuth. We had not come round; the island had.

  “Shoals ahead!” I shouted down, for who knew how close our keel was to submerged rock or what new formation of land might rise hidden under our keel and scrape us out?

  “Thar she blows!” shouted the other lookout.

  No island, but an enormous black sperm whale, with a head steep as a cliff, erupting not volcanic smoke but a huge spume of water vapor.

  “Lower way!” Captain Fry himself shouted the command, and there was a boyish crackling of excitement in his order. I didn’t like such jejune glee. Instantly the crew rushed to the boats and piled in, and they began to be lowered into the rocking sea. The black whale seemed unaware of us. He lay on the water like a slope of coal. I imagined his tiny eye, the wrinkles around the socket. King! the word came strangely to mind, startling as the retort of a rifle. King of all lunged creatures, this whale; king, thus, of mankind? And then this dark idea spelled its way across my mind: We shall never take him.

  I had seen bulls in the fields of Kentucky, and in their shoulders there was always such a concentration of unintelligent power that I always thought the word brute. Well, here was the Brute of Brutes. Though he had no shoulders in the bovine sense, there where shoulders are was that same concentration of force. How feminine we, the ship, seemed in comparison—how white and swanlike, despite our jagged stub, we had moved before the stream of frost wind. No wind would move his mass. Black and dense, completely powered only by his own will and muscle, he lolled before us. Who was Captain Fry to let his men attempt to dismantle this? Let them rather choose to assault a volcanic rock such as I had thought that I was seeing! Let them take little spoons and try to dent hardened lava! Let them try t
o shovel up an Alp and fling it into the Mediterranean! I wanted to tell him so, from aloft.

  Bring them back aboard, I wanted to say. Keep them safe. I saw the captain at the helm, and I knew that he but waited for the small whaleboats to clear the ship before he himself would use the ship as the largest whaleboat and sail directly upon the beast.

  The whale’s eye was like a star embedded in a night with only one light. Suddenly the great beast dove. Such a volume of water did he displace that I felt the ship rock with his passage downward. How could anything alive be so large? He was nearly twice the size of my sixty barrel whale. Could the animal really be stowed below as small casks of oil? At your own death, I asked myself, can the vastness of your own experience be buried in the ground, funneled into nothing but the shape of a grave? For how long could those gigantic lungs sustain him underwater? water? And if this leviathan did fall to us, despite all his hugeness, what would be the quality of the oil?

  “He rose in the vertical, jaw agape….”

  He rose in the vertical, jaw agape under the lead whaleboat. It rose in the air with him, men falling into the sea, the boat shivering into planks and splinters. The men were tiny in the water. Foam and splash and bubbles washed over them. Immediately a boat turned to pick up its comrades. I watched as the eagle watches—high and detached. There was no blood. The black boulder dropped again; the foam subsided. The swimmers were pulled aboard.

  Now we waited. I peered into the depths but saw no movement.

  Captain Fry called up, “Cry out, Billy, if you see him flutter.”

  I waited and watched. Like a mass of kelp, the wavering began deep in the sea, and I shouted out his position. He was going to come up under the double-laden whaleboat. Not waiting for the captain to direct, I yelled, “Pull for the ship!”

  And they did. The shadow of the tip of my mizzenmast fell across them as they neared the boat. It was a pointer for the demon. This time he butted the boat into the air, and the men flew out like moisture along the curving lash of a whipline, their backs and necks flexed beyond endurance.

  Again I saw no blood, but only a few souls came up swimming—three of sixteen. These flailed their arms and kicked their legs, swam straight for the safety of the ship, and my eyes filled with pity’s tears.

  From my perch I could see underwater where the whale changed the angle of his ascent, slanting outward. Glad-hearted, I called down to Captain Fry: “He’s going away!” Could something so massive move with such speed? Underwater, the great tail muscle worked up and down, causing the dark body to leap ahead through the depths, angling away from us.

  Dimly I heard the captain order me to come down, but I could not remove my gaze from the swimming monster. His outline was distorted by the water, of course, so I saw him as a great inkiness as though exuded from an octopus, an amorphous blackness. But he had been close enough for me to see the wrinkles in his skin, and I knew the intimacy of his eye. Now I saw a human body floating, facedown, and I called to the remaining boat and pointed out the form, but they did not hear me, for they were pulling for the ship.

  The whale continued to move underwater like a dark, misshapen comet swinging out of our universe.

  “What ho?” the captain yelled up.

  “In retreat,” I replied. “Southwest.” I wanted to speak of his speed, but the number of knots he made I thought to be beyond credibility.

  The captain went to the side and yelled to the approaching boat to turn and pursue the whale. To my amazement they continued to come mutinously home, and yet it was what I would have advised them to do.

  “Southwest!” Captain Fry bellowed, stabbing the air with an impotent finger.

  The whale was swimming with unbelievable velocity; no human crew could catch that torpedo of destruction. Then I saw the whale deviate from his trajectory, a curling round. He dashed at us, as though he intended to ram the ship. The crown of the massive head emerged.

  “Reversed! Reversed! He closes on us!” I shrieked.

  Then I stood still in mute disbelief. Whales attacked small whaleboats. Never the ship. Yet he closed on us. His blunt forehead, high seeming as a headland, plowed toward us. Then he submerged.

  “Billy!” Captain Fry roared. “Come down! Come down! You’ll be tossed!”

  Immediately I understood his logic, but there was no logic in what I beheld. A natural whale would not ram a ship. My body weakened at the uncanny wonder of it. Across the void over the broken mainmast, the legs of the other lookout gave way, and he clutched at the yardarm.

  I was so horrified by the whale’s deliberate charge that I could not move. Then my own name flew up from below like a spear: “Una!” Giles’s voice broke my trance, and I scrambled down the rigging. No sooner did my foot touch the deck than there was such a lurch that I fell to my face. I heard and felt the boards break below the waterline, the copper sheathing nothing but decorative foil. The whole ship shuddered. A death throe. I looked up; the other lookout had disappeared. As soon as he could stand, Captain Fry ran below to assess the damage.

  When he reappeared, he shouted, “The pantry’s full of water,” and I saw by his eyes that Harry was gone, but Chester was at his father’s side. Both were wet to the knees. The captain carried the saber that I had seen on the wall alongside his bed. Chester clutched the zebra skin.

  Giles and Kit were already loading the spare whaleboat. To look at Giles’s face was to see question and catalog move through his brain—what was most needed, what next in priority, and where was it? Captain Fry ordered me to sit in the boat with Chester, neither of us to leave it for any reason. A barrel of biscuits was put aboard. Giles would have loaded a bundle of knives, but the captain rejected the idea; then he gave me the saber to put under our seat. Rope, fishhooks, tarps, three kegs of water.

  The Sussex was listing badly now, and those who crossed the deck ran uphill. “My dagger!” “My slicker!” “My letter!” Men cried out for their possessions. “Food! Bring only food!” a frantic voice directed. The other spare boat was readied. A lantern smashed as it was thrown against a bailing piggin, and the crew scrambled into the second boat atop the disordered gear. In the offing, the whaleboat which had not reached the ship waited. “Stay back! Stay clear!” Two whaleboats already sunk, one in the water, two coming down.

  As soon as the other boat was lowered, we followed, smacking hard onto the water. “Row for life!” Our oars were put into service and we joined the other two boats at a distance. A sad pod of three whaleboats, we focused our gazes across the green water to watch the Sussex sink.

  No sign of her assailant surfaced. Perhaps that murderous forehead had been so wounded that the whale sank and would soon lie a few rods from the ship on the ocean floor. But not a drop of blood reddened the water. Perhaps he swam underwater unscathed, to masquerade again in black ambush.

  Thus began, amid such speculations, the ordeal of being at sea in an open boat.

  CHAPTER 38: The Course

  WHEN CAPTAIN FRY said we must set our sails for Tahiti, a murmur went up from the other two boats. Men in those boats had heard that Tahiti was a habitat for cannibals. In our boat, at that word, we all looked questioningly at the captain. I felt myself fill with fear, but I only stared at the water.

  The captain explained that we must choose between Tahiti and Chile, which latter lay to the east many thousands of miles.

  When this idea of the great distance to the South American coast did not convince them to prefer Tahiti as destination, Giles said he knew that Tahiti had been purged of cannibals by the Christian missionaries. All the men had developed, through Harry’s open admiration, an idea of Giles’s great store of knowledge and of his intellectual abilities in general, and his statement gave them pause.

  But one of the men in the fartherest boat called, “What was the name of the missionary?”

  Giles replied that the names of missionaries were not something that interested him. And with this admission of ignorance all his credibility evaporated
.

  “Hammersmith,” I shouted out. “His name is Hammersmith.” I did not know why I made up that name on the spot, but it was to no avail. I was only a pair of eyes, a redundant cabin boy, small of stature.

  “Christopher Jones,” Kit called out. “Solomon Brown.”

  The men in the far whaleboat took up their oars, and their boat began to turn away. They were lightly manned compared to us.

  The captain ordered them to remain with us, but they did not obey. The boat between us and them, carrying only four men, also took up oars and moved to join the rebels, pulling for the east.

  From his belt, the captain drew out his pistol. He stood, and again he ordered the two boats to turn.

  “Fire!” Giles yelled.

  Captain Fry did fire, but he aimed into the air.

  The shot was ignored.

  Quietly Giles asked, “Will you reload?”

  “I cannot fire on my own men,” the captain said.

  Aboard our overcrowded boat, a man with pointed shoes stood on one of the seats and said, “We’ll not sail to Tahiti either.” He stood with his hands on his hips, leaning belligerently toward the captain. Kit tensed as though he might spring on the man, but his companions rose beside him. The boat rocked dangerously. Captain Fry looked sadly at the men and slowly lowered the pistol.

  I looked to Giles, but he said nothing.

  With a sweep of his arm, Captain Fry flung the pistol into the sea. “As you will,” he said and sat down.

  And our boat, too, began the long journey, in the face of the prevailing wind, toward Chile.

  Captain Fry draped his arm around his son and bowed his head. Chester fastened his eyes on Giles.

  All day we rowed in dejection toward the east. Only a few words were spoken. Giles moved beside me and said the course was well aimed, though ill-chosen. I was heartened by this, for it had seemed to me that we were merely following the other boats.

  During the first night, we lost sight of the other boats. Perhaps they slipped away on purpose. We had lit candles from the lantern keg to signal our whereabouts, but they had not.