Chain Locker (42 page)
“I hear you had quite the walk, eh,” Henry continued. “Where did they pick you up?”
“I almost made it all the way in. It was getting light and I could see houses but I got caught on one piece of ice and couldn't get any further. I started paddling but it seemed like the more I paddled the further I ended up from shore.”
“Sounds like you were caught in the tide. I never realized the currents were so contrary out there.”
“Well, after a while I was so tired I just couldn't keep it up. I got down on my knees to have a spell. I was soppin' wet from the rain and felt like a chunk of ice. I can't remember much else after that until two guys were puttin' me into a boat.”
“And then you came out and found me? I haven't quite got the whole story yet.”
“No, it's a long one⦔ and he related the story of the rescue, ending with a long description of Wints and the bear.
Henry threw his head back with a loud laugh. “He's a hard ticket, that Wints. It's a good thing I wasn't awake or I would have had a bone to pick with him. I allow I would've been doin' some squirmin' with buddy there breathing down on me and me with only one good legâand I don't suppose his breath was all that good either! But I won't be sayin' anything about it to Wints, considering all that he did to get me in. But the one I really got to thank is you.”
Jackie blushed. “Yeah, well, I had to make up for bein' so cranky somehow, I guess.”
“Emily told me you got them fired up to keep searching when the weather wasn't lookin' too good.”
He shrugged. “So she must be the same teacher who knows about the birds, is she?”
“The same oneâ¦and she knows a lot of other stuff, too.”
That evening at Ada's dinner table Jackie held everybody captive with his narration of the week's events. As he answered question after question Emily, Ada, Dorcas and Sadie were spellbound at how calm he was.
“So many close calls, Jackie. You must have been scared to death,” said Ada.
“I guess,” he replied in a monotone, shrugging.
“Oh, come on, now!” said Emily, goading him. “Don't give us that. Especially when you were copying your way ashore; surely you wondered if you would ever make it. And what about when you were in the chain locker?”
“I have a question on a different matter, John,” said Dorcas. “Did you have your father and mother's permission to go away on that sealing ship?”
He hesitated. “No, ma'am. I didn't.”
“Uh-huh. And how do you feel about that, now that you're back? Have you been thinking about them?”
“Yes, ma'am,” he replied without hesitation. “I been thinking a lot about them, especially my mother.”
“And what about getting in touch with them? Do they know you're safe and sound?”
Emily came to his defense. “Jackie sent a very nice telegram to his mother yesterday.”
“Yes, I told her I was sorry.”
“Well, now, I'm glad to hear that,” Dorcas replied and sat back, satisfied.
That was it? He had been bracing himself for a thorough dressing-down. As if to compensate, he continued, “I guess I never really saw my parents as people with feelings and stuff like that. When the ship burned and Henry and me ended up separated from the others, yeah, I was pretty scared. That first night I thought for sure that I was goin' to die, that I wouldn't see my parents or sisters or Wilfâhe's my dogâagain, and they wouldn't even know what had became of me. It made me realize that runnin' away like I did was pretty mean.
“And you're right, Miss Osmond. I was good and scared comin' ashore on my own. But I couldn't let Henry down after all he did to help me; sure, he could have saved himself but he stayed with me 'cause I couldn't swim. If it wasn't for Henry I would be dead for sure now. When he killed that first seal and cut out the heart and handed it to me to eat, all drippin' with blood, I thought he was some kind of crazy man, but he knew exactly what to do to keep us alive.”
The four women screwed up their faces in unison like a quartet of mimes.
“Warm hearts right from the seal; nothing wrong with that,” Jim nodded approvingly as he pushed out from the table and walked over to the daybed to get the
Sun
.
“Oh, yuck,” said Emily, as her mother shuddered.
“The next time you come back from sealing you better not come lookin' for a kiss offa me, without you wash out your mouth with lye soap first,” Ada declared, to a chorus of guffaws.
“Henry always tried to cheer me up,” said Jackie. “He never had a cross word, even when I fell asleep on the watch. I sure was cranky to him a lot of times. He never gave up, though, always thinking and planning and he seemed to be able to figure out where we were practically all the time, by lookin' at the stars, watchin' the sun, feelin' the wind. I couldn't get over how smart he was. He knows how to navigate, you know.”
“Oh, yes, I know.” Dorcas was completely won over by this spontaneous outpouring of affection for her son.
“I started off the trip in that horrible old chain locker,” said Jackie, “and when Simeon told me I could stay aboard the ship and wouldn't be put ashore, I though I had âer made and the hard part was over. Little did I know what was ahead.”
He took a long, deep breath. “But leaving Henry there on the iceâthat was the worse part of all.”
Early Tuesday morning, Basil awoke with an unexpected feeling of liberation. He had decided that he must do the unthinkable. It had struck him while reading the Sermon on the Mount. Though he had read and even spoken on it dozens of times, he had never heard its uncompromising tenets like he heard them in the middle of last night. He had to seek Henry's forgiveness for hating him and cursing him and plotting against him. If he was going to live like the One he claimed to follow, he needed that humbling experience. He had to acceptâeven loveâHenry, to visit him at the hospital as was his duty, and to tell him the truth. He had wallowed in his misery long enough. It was time to do what he preached that others must do.
He marched up the hill to the hospital, where the receptionist met him at the door with a pleasant, “Good day to you, Reverend. Who would you like to see first today?”
“Hello, Dorothy,” he replied. “Today I would like to, um, visitâ¦uhâ¦Mrâ¦.”
“Yes, Reverend?”
He hesitated.
“Who did you wish to see, Reverend?”
“Miss Day!” he blurted out.
“Certainly.”
In New York, shortly after the disaster, Dr. Lewis Frissell got the news that his only remaining son, Varick Frissell, was missing. His other son, Monty, had been killed in a climbing accident when he was eighteen. Dr. Frissell, fearing that the loss of her second son would be too much for his wife, chartered an airplane to do a search of the area in the hope that something might turn up. As the
Sagona
approached St. John's, the aircraft was beginning its search of the outer part of Notre Dame Bay, covering in less than an hour the distance it had taken Henry and Jackie nearly a week to travel. They found nothing. Twenty-six men had disappeared without a trace. Of the three Americans aboard, Harry Sargent had been picked up in good condition with Clayton King, the wireless operator, and Captain Kennedy, the navigator; but cinematographer A.E. Penrod and Varick Frissell, the movie producer, were never seen again, nor were their bodies recovered. After his rescue, Sargent sent a message to the Minister of Marine and Fisheries stating that he had been sitting across the table from Frissell and Penrod when the explosion occurred but that he had not seen them since. The cabin in which they all sat was directly above the explosion. Other survivors reported that at the moment the explosion occurred, Frissell, at the request of the bosun, was in the middle of creating a sign to be placed at the entrance to the powder magazine.
Clayton King was alive but barely. He had the fight of his life ahead of him, having contracted gangrene in his frozen legs, both of which subsequently had to be amputated. Captain Kennedy, the young navigator who had shared the piece of wreckage for two nights with King and Sargent, had clung to life only to succumb to pneumonia just hours before the rescue ship arrived at St. John's.
Three days after the explosion, newspapers reported that Penrod's wife was on the verge of collapse after three days of uncertainty about her husband's fate. Mrs. Penrod had often accompanied her husband when he travelled, but was prevented from sailing on the
Viking
because of a sealers' superstition that a woman would jinx the ship.
The efforts of the people of the Horse Islands received little recognition from the government or the sealing company. All the attention fell on the survivors, the loss of the ship and the loss of twenty-eight men: the original twenty-six, Captain Kennedy, and the man whose body the
Eagle
had recoveredâpresumed to be that of P. Bartlett because of a document found in a pocket.
The report of the inquiry into the disaster was unable to arrive at a categorical conclusion as to the cause of the explosion, other than to say that it was not a boiler explosion, but the detonation of the approximately thirty-five kegs of blasting powder that the
Viking
carried. It highlighted testimony pointing to an additional nine cans of powder, an unspecified number of which were leaking. It said simply that somehow the powder must have come in contact with the small amount of combustion necessary to set it off.
The inquiry also made recommendations for basic regulations on how to store and handle powder aboard the sealing ships, the implication being that during all the decades that sealing ships had carried powder, no such regulations had existed.
This was the last of the big disasters that had accompanied the seal hunt since its inception nearly two centuries before. They had become more frequent as the steamers aged but received only the bare minimum of maintenance. Ten years after the
Viking
's spectacular demise, there were only four of the fabled wooden walls left. Three sank without loss of life. The
Ranger,
which had brought in more than a million pelts under seventeen captains, finally went down in 1942 while engaged in her sixty-ninth year at the ice. The
Terra Novaâ
already famous from taking explorers like Robert Falcon Scott on expeditions to the Antarctic during the first two decades of the twentieth centuryâand the
Neptune
both sank the next year.
That left only the
Eagle II
, Norwegian-built like the
Viking
. Bowring's scuttled the forty-eight year old wooden wall outside St. John's harbour in 1950, and Newfoundland historians have regretted it ever since.