The Solitude of Thomas Cave (17 page)

'I cannot say when it began precisely, or how, only that the people who came to me began to ask for other things. They saw
something in me besides the cures that I had done, saw what perhaps they sought to see, what I can only explain as a reflection
of their fear and their incomprehension. They began to say that I had powers.' He spoke the last word with a strange emphasis,
his eyes wide like innocence in the old parchment of his face.

'I do not have powers, Tom Goodlard, believe me.

'I do what I do, that is all. I have experience and I use a few herbs such as could be found by any man or woman who has the
sense to look. I speak to men and I appeal to them with reason. And that is all there is to it. Anything else is lies and
fancy. What did they tell you of me, those who told you where to find me? What did they say?'

'That you had been North and that you travelled about. I guessed that it was you from the description. There are not so many
of us whalemen hereabouts.'

'And what else? What was it made them speak of me to you?'

'That, and also that you saved a man, and I remembered how something like it occurred with one of the men from the
Heartsease
there on the island shortly before we left.'

I saw at once that I should not have said that. What better thing I could have said though I do not know. Now again he doubted
me. His face clammed tight although his touch remained on mine. I left the words time to fade. We walked on until we reached
a wide creek where we had no choice but to turn. For the first time we could see the world of men beyond the marsh: the roofs
of a village and a church tower in the distance. We walked back the way we had come, only the sea was on our left now and
the sun was in our faces and dazzling.

'They say I cast out devils, don't they? And perhaps you have said it also. No, do not deny it.'

The sun was too bright for him and he looked at the ground as he walked, down at the broken shells and the high-tide debris
at his feet. He seemed so old in that bright light that I felt tender to him.

'Do you know what else they say?' he went on. 'You must have heard what else they say. They say that because I seem to have
the power to drive out devils I myself am some kind of witch. What fools we have in the world.'

A large bird wheeled over the sea, over our heads. Snow-white feathers, and a shadow passed over me. But when it turned I
saw that its back was grey: it was only a common gull, of which there must be a million down this coast.

'You have found a good place here, Thomas Cave. You will be safe here.'

'Safe? From what must I be safe?'

'From devils. From harm. From those fools you speak o f

We parted beneath the cliff. No white birds here but swallows, a flock of them darting in and out of the nests they had in
its pitted side. Thomas Cave offered me one last piece of himself.

'If there was one thing I learnt in the North, Tom Goodlard, it was this: that there are no devils out there. No devils in
the ice or the snow or the rocks, none but those inside us, those we bring. That is why they can be dispelled, because they
are all in our imaginations; how could it happen otherwise? They can be dispelled because they are not there, because they
are no more than words, dreams, pictures in the mind.'

I think that was his drift, so far as I could follow it. I am a simple man. I know nothing of imagination. I know no more
than what I can see and hear, and what is in the Testaments. Cave spoke of things that went beyond me.

'Think of that place before we got there, lad.' He called me that as if he had forgotten that I was grown, had me there again
a boy at his side. 'Think of it before Barents, before Marmaduke, before any man stepped upon it. Only the place and the surprising
abundance of Nature in it. So cold, so inhospitable it looked to us, but in the season so much lived there. The whales, the
seals, the birds, so many birds, like these swallows here. In its cold way it was a paradise. No man there, no devils, nor
even, I came to think, a God, or not any God that we know. Only itself. And then we came. We came with our killing and our
fear and saw devils there. Did you never think that? Did you never look at it? Never once stand back, when it was so bright
about us, and see it, the horror of it, the blood that stained the sea, the grease and smoke, the violation? Did you never
have the urge to run off into the whiteness, into the ice, dissolve into it, wipe yourself clean? Now that I am old I have
that feeling again and again. I have it when I look at the sea. I stand here with my back to the cliff and the works of men
behind me, and I look at the sea and at the waves coming in, and hope that my soul will merge with it and be washed away.'

What could I say to that? Such fluent intensity in his voice, and his meaning flying out somewhere just beyond my comprehension.

I spoke my farewell in common and mundane terms, the only words that were available to me, and found my path home.

24

T
HEY STILL SPEAK of him in the Greenland seas. Of Cave, or I think it is Cave, and his endurance. It is as if the memory of
him were frozen, preserved like everything else, only thinned and refined over time, worn down by the wind and ice, so that
he becomes less and less a real man that others once sailed with, and more a figment of their minds.

Sometimes his name is changed or lost, and he becomes a Dane or a Dutchman and no longer an Englishman, and yet it is surely
his lone ordeal that is remembered and embroidered and retold. I have heard it in many places from men of different ships
and different nations: that years back, at the beginning of the trade, a man had wintered on the shore alone, and the reasons
they give for this are various. Some have said that he acted out of his own inexplicable will, others that it was fate alone
and that he was cast away by chance, yet others that he had an evil spirit in him and was left a Jonah by his shipmates who
were fearful of his presence on the voyage home. Many things are said, some approaching the truth and some far from it and
laughable. I heard one story that when his ship returned he had written a fine poem of a hundred stanzas and set it to music,
another that out there on the snow he had fought a great white bear with his own hands, and though he bore for the rest of
his life the stripes of its claws across his face, he had at last tamed it so that it followed him like a dog and came to
its name, and he fed it fish and tidbits of seal.

There are other men who have attempted to repeat his action, not lone men so far as I know but whalecrews who by mischance
or to stake their company's claim have stayed back to pass the winter on the ice. And though one year or two they have succeeded,
the half of them have perished, and these dead men have left the log of their dying beside their scurvied and frozen bodies.
I have heard sailors say that it is a horror to come upon them, to see their hollow staring eyes.

Once, in the early days, when all the different nations were first competing for the whaling grounds and stations, the Muscovy
Company of London obtained a band of condemned criminals and brought them north, and offered them their reprieve if they would
overwinter and hold the ground for the next season. The men worked the summer alongside the regular sailors, and at the end
of it when the ship was readied to leave they were supplied with all the necessary provisions and the promise of generous
pay to follow, besides their pardon. And as the last boat pushed out they looked about them and felt the breath freeze in
their nostrils. They cried out and called the boat back. They begged the captain to put them again into their chains and take
them home. They would not stay. No, for fear. Rather the company of men and the sentence that awaited them, even if this were
hanging.

There was something there that they dreaded more than death. What was it? I ask you. Was it the ice or the unknown, the sheer
unnamedness of the place? Or was it the solitude?

Even now after so many years, I can close my eyes and bring looming from the darkness the image of Thomas Cave as we left
him, as the
Heartsease
took sail and the empty land receded, a man seeming no longer a man of flesh and blood but a stick figure, and then no more
than a stick, a drawn wavering line on the whiteness of the shore. I see him growing ever smaller and I try to make the leap
across the widening gap. How was it there, I ask myself, for him? Seeing what he saw, seeing us go. Such a hard thing it must
have been to stand thus far off and have a view so clear, and look back at the rest of humankind.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge a particular debt to two past sailors to the North: to the Icelandic seaman Jon Olafsson, whose
narrative of his life (published by the Hakluyt Society) includes an unsubstantiated anecdote about an Englishman's wager,
and to the Whitby whaler William Scoresby, whose extraordinary observations are recorded in his
Account of the Arctic Regions.
There was a real Captain Thomas Marmaduke of Hull who made independent whaling voyages to the uncharted east of Svalbard;
I have borrowed his name and that of his ship, the
Heartsease,
but all else concerning him is fictional.

I would like to thank Broo and Alexandra for making it such a pleasure getting this published. And David, for the harpoon
and much else besides.

NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Georgina Harding is the author of two works of non-fiction:
Tranquebar: A Season in South India
and

In Another Europe.
This is her first novel.

Copyright © 2007 by Georgina Harding

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR.

ISBN-13: 978-1-59691-272-4 (hardcover)

First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2007
This e-book edition published in 2010

E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-974-7

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