Read The Solitude of Thomas Cave Online
Authors: Georgina Harding
The Solitude of Thomas Cave (3 page)
His was the largest share of this since it was he who had found the skull, on the strand line of a narrow beach beyond the
mountain north of our bay, the skull of a strange beast with this one huge whorled shaft, a full eight foot long, projecting
from it.
'No, sir,' I said, unable to admit this favour from the man whose fate seemed so inevitable before me. 'I will not take it.
I will hold it for you.'
'Take it, Tom. Invest the money well. You are young. You may use it to build a future. A few good voyages and you may yet
have your own ship, you never know, or if you choose, a place on land.'
'Till next season, I will hold it.'
'No. You will take it for your own.'
I gave in before his determination. If he needed to hear me speak so at that moment I would do as he desired. What would occur
when I returned the next year, if by some wonder or magic he had survived and I found him there, would be another matter.
'Good.' He put a hand to my shoulder, looked at me clear. Though I was pretty much as tall as he already I had the feeling
when he stood before me like this that I was looking up to him.
'But, Sir, won't you be needing it, next year won't you have need of it?'
His smile creased no more than the corners of his eyes. 'You forget that I will have the wager.'
I
N THE LIGHT of the North distances deceive. The stationary man watches the ship depart, so slowly that the steely band of
water before it can barely be perceived to extend. The clarity of the Arctic air is such that even when the ship is far off,
sails, masts, details stand out sharp to the eye as if they were still close in, and he has the impression that he could yell
out and call back a boat long after all on board are out of earshot. Though he does not will it, a cry of a kind eventually
escapes him, a cry that comes as much from the heart as the lungs, and that is swiftly swallowed into the lap and draw of
wave on shingle.
At last a single sound comes back to him, a cannon shot that by its faintness confirms just how far the ship has travelled.
As if he did not know. He has spent enough time in these seas to recognise such effects of the atmosphere. He has seen an
experienced pilot stand to some three or four hours from the shore for fear of running on to rocks that appeared alarmingly
close to his eye; then, too, with a slight change in the air, he has seen land appear to recede before an approaching ship,
retaining the same clarity and proportion for many hours though the wind would seem to drive towards it, so much so that sailors
have become spooked and spoken of being held back by some hidden loadstone beneath the sea. In these regions a man cannot
always trust his eyes but must turn to reason and calculation to determine what is before him. And Thomas Cave feels the wind
on his cheek, a light breeze coming off the land behind him, cold from the north, and knows that it is taking the ship away
though she seems quite still out there in her silence, a fine outline that holds each time he looks back to it, that does
not appear to diminish but in the end only to dissolve, all at once, as the luminosity itself disappears from the horizon.
He gives a little shake then as if a cloak has been taken off him, looks about him alert as if he has just perceived the cold,
the tent behind him, the fact that it is about to be dark. Beyond these simple observations thuds a deeper knowledge which
his mind is momentarily unable to process: the enormity of what he has elected to do.
He raises his chin as if to open the passage of his throat so that he can breathe the better, makes a slow inhalation and
holds it down until the thought is quelled.
Then he puts his back to the sea and the absence of the ship and begins to walk up the rise of the beach. After a few steps
something catches his eye. He bends to take up a stone, a slim grey disc of granite. He weighs it in his hand, sees how fine
and perfect it is, how neatly it fits into the curve of the thumb and forefinger as if it were made to lie there, and then
he turns again, towards the sea now, puts his side to the waves, curves his back and arcs his arm behind him. With a whip
of his wrist he lets the stone fly, on a horizontal trajectory so that it does not strike water until it is many yards out
from the wave edge. Once, twice, again and again it skims the dark surface, eight times in all.
Emptiness so resounds about the whale station that it might have been abandoned not for hours but for years. Only the smell,
at once cloying and rancid and sooty, and the sheen of grease that holds to every surface testify to its recent use. Even
to the man walking back there these structures seem alien: the vats, the cauldrons and boilers, the great low tent of sailcloth
that was warehouse and workshop and is now, with a fine string of smoke above it grey before a greying sky, to be his home.
Not two decades since this land was known and already man has placed his mark upon it, set down in the wilderness works of
a solid, squat ugliness that will never in a hundred years belong. Yet God, he has no doubt, is patient. God will know how
small and how feeble are the works of man. How all this will return to ashes and dust. A little way off, spread beside the
shoreline, lie the remnants of the carcases of a dozen whales, heaps of bones with a raucous multitude of gulls still picking
and screaming amongst them, milling beneath the great white jawbones like the congregation of the damned beneath the arches
of a fallen cathedral.
Their racket recedes as he enters his inner chamber, closes behind him the thick wooden door that itself weighs like the door
of a church. His hermitage. He kneels before the stove and throws on a slab of blubber that spits and flames up in the half-light.
Only that morning there had been a gang of men at work in the room. There was noise, crowding, the stink and warmth of labouring
bodies. They had helped him to build the wooden cell inside the walls of the tent, hammering planks, pouring sand. Their absence
now is all the more tangible as here in the enclosed space even more than outside their smell remains, an animal reek of bodies
and sweat and fish oil, a fetid den smell that he notices only now that they are gone.
The room is barely ten foot square, the stove at the centre of it, the smoke drawn up through an opening in the ceiling funnelled
with sailcloth. It is part underground, the floor dug down through the sand to the underlying rock, and the walls above ground
are thick, made from two layers of close-fitting deal planks and the cavity between them filled with sand, buckets of the
stuff, until a sprinkling of grains welled out between the flaws in the plank seams. It was, he thinks, a satisfactory labour.
Insulated in this way the walls will not permit the penetration of the sharpest wind or blizzard however it may swirl about
in the tent space beyond; and so muffled it is within the chamber that when he falls still there is only the companionship
of the fire to keep him from the sense that he is deaf.
Right up by the stove he has his bed, a wooden bunk laid deep in dried deerskins. The wool of these northern reindeer is thicker
than that of the deer of England, the skins more substantial, warm beneath the body and above it as a heavy embrace. They
are roughly cured yet do not smell too strong; they will last him out till next summer. The skins and the fire are to be his
comforts. Besides these all his furnishings are a plain table and a chair, and the chest, itself overlaid with skins, in which
he keeps whatever he has carried about from port to port, a few possessions of use or those that cling to him from the past:
clothes, twine, knife, Bible and prayer-book, the cobbling tools with which he once worked on land and which have since whiled
away long hours of voyage and waiting, and his fiddle, laid on the top and wrapped about with a length of embroidered cloth.
This he takes out, he unfolds it from the cloth and hangs it on the wall. Not too close to the stove lest it take too much
heat. The action of putting out the instrument, laying it across the pegs he has fixed, is a making of home. Gently he handles
it, and the fine touch of the wood brings a memory to his fingers. The fiddle has been hung this same way before, once on
another wall of wooden planks, beside a square glassless window with a yard and a garden beyond. For a second he caresses
it, holds and then with cool self-control dismisses the picture from his mind. In this room there will be no windows, no views
of land or sky.
No dreams, he tells himself, but function. This space is designed, fitted, for survival alone. He turns to the things that
his shipmates have given him. So much they think a man needs: three muskets, some pounds of shot, a powder-horn and a barrel
of powder that he will keep warm and dry before the stove, a sword that he will put beside the door, a prayer-book, an almanac,
a telescope, a blank-paged log and a bundle of pens from Captain Duke that he lays neat and square to the right-hand corner
of his table. He lays the log down there and hesitates, wonders what record he will make of this day, takes it up again in
two worn hands and lays it this time in the centre before the chair. Yet he does not sit, not yet. He goes instead to the
door beyond which the provisions were stacked, begins to sort which things he must bring inside the chamber and which can
be left out to whatever extreme of climate will occur in the months to come. There are firkins, barrels, casks, sacks; hard
bread, ship's biscuits, butter, cheeses, cured meats, dried plums, liquors, sugar, spices. Astonishing to see the complexity
of his requirements. They have left him tobacco also, tinder, candles, soap. He begins to lay and sort but has not the heart
to finish the job that night. Suddenly he is tired down to his bones, he cannot see the purpose of so many things, so much
victualling for him only, just for one man alone; it seems mad and extraordinary luxury as if all a man alone needed might
be air.
He will leave everything where it stands, this night at least. He pulls the heavy door to on his cell. In the log he will
write one thing only, the title and the date:
The twenty-fourth day of August in the Year of Our Lord 1616. To Captain Thomas Marmaduke of Hull, an account of the experience
of the seaman Thomas Cave, his stay at Duke's Cove on the shore of the unexplored territory of East Greenland, the first winter
any man is known to spend at that place.
H
E SLEEPS HEAVILY that first night and knows no dream. He wakes innocent of thought in the insulated room, wakes to utter
silence and darkness broken only by the glow of embers. How long is it since he has slept without a dozen other bodies snoring,
farting, rustling about him? He closes his eyes again, lies back beneath the weight of deerskins and listens, listens with
intensity until he can hear the distant screech of gulls and a drumming that might be that of the sea but might be no more
than the pulse of blood in his inner ear. It is an instant more before the knowledge of identity and place return to him.
Daylight is so very fine and clean that emerging from the tent he feels as if he has come from some shaft deep underground.
He stands and blinks, his hand upon the doorpost. The bright paleness of his eyes reflects that of the sky. Thomas Cave has
the look of the North to him even though he was not born to it: tall, long-boned, gaunt in his features, fair in his colouring,
some austere Nordic gene in the Suffolk man that gives him ease with this landscape, the spiny peaks, the coldly lapping sea,
that gives him also his sureness of movement, walking with loping strides across the scantily covered soil from the tent towards
the crease of the rivercourse, along it and away to a slope he knows where the walls of rock curve about and give shelter
facing into the sun and the scurvy grass is found.
He carries a sickle and a hessian sack. He has his plan, knows that he must make full use of the daylight and the brief growing
season remaining. This day he will cut salad, though salad is a lush name for this grass which is almost the only edible vegetation
here, a bitter cress-like herb that the sailors know as a healing plant for ulcers and infections of the mouth, and more importantly
as a prophylactic against scurvy. He will work the day through, seek through the bog and across the base of the mountain,
fill the sack if enough green stuff can be found and take it in to dry under cover, spread the stalks as once he had done
hay on a rack to preserve it through the winter. He knows he is late; stems and foliage are sparse, hard to find, but even
the meanest leaves will have value brewed as tea.
Three things they say hold against scurvy: salad and fruit, fresh meat, and activity also, for it is observed among sailors
that it is ever the indolent of nature who succumb first to the disease, as if God's judgement might be in it. Only this last
point Thomas Cave will not accept, he will not believe such judgements are made on a man in this life but only in the next.
His is a modern and reasoning mind, he will not put the cause down to any such superstition but suspects instead that there
is some direct correlation to be made there, either that physical activity builds the humours of the body to resistance against
the disease or that the lazy have some inbuilt weakness or predisposition upon which the disease may prey. Or it may be that
this impression is created only by the apparent indolence of the disease itself, which creeps up on a man and makes him slow
and feeble, thins his blood and his fibres so that his lips crack and his teeth loosen, and his energy drains into carelessness
until he lies and dies curled on his bunk like a baby with his fists between his folded knees.
Either way he shall hold to his will. If by action he can keep the disease at bay then he shall do so. He ekes his way across
the landscape, clump by clump, bending low or sometimes on his knees, looking up at last in surprise to see how the sky has
turned colour, how suddenly the sun seems to have slipped down to meet the sea of the bay. It aches to straighten up. He puts
downs the sickle and stretches, turns his head in a circular motion to loosen his neck, rubs the muscles of his back where
they run down to his waist. His body has become stiff, it is not as supple as it once was. The colour softens and builds,
a pink glow that reaches right across the sky and the sea by the time he returns to the tent, the good of the day of labour
like a prayer in his heart.
This first day of my sojourn broke clear and fine, for which the Lord be thanked, and I rose early and set about to gather
scurvy grass from where I have seen it grow in the lee of the mountain to the south. This I have brought in to the tent and
spread for drying there.
No sweetness to its scent as he lays it out but a pungent, sulphurous tang against the smokiness of the atmosphere, the evening
air harsh with frost.
When night comes the air is cold, the sky stark and with an icy shimmer to it. I do not expect that I shall find much further
opportunity for forage.
He closes his eyes, yawns, the quill in his hands. What more is he to write? Life is very plain when it is reduced to one
day at a time and to that one day's routine of survival. He has worked, returned, begun the arrangement of his stores. On
some pages at the back of the log he sets out a list of the quantity of the stores and begins a calculation of the amounts
to be consumed each week.
Only three days more the fine weather holds. The last of those days he allots himself for exploration. He has noted how visibility
has become startlingly greater than even on the clearest days of summer, when a party of the whalers had gone inland and followed
the river course back to the falls and climbed the southern of the two sharp peaks that overlooked the bay. He sets himself
the other, northern peak, which is the more rugged, the spinier of the two. So sheer it rises from the beach that he cannot
imagine making an ascent from that side, but only from behind, if he is to walk first to the falls and then along the ridge
above. He has studied this south-eastern face closely, looking for the possibility of a path, thankful for the angle and sharpness
of the morning light which defines and shades each incline, rock and feature of the mountainside as if it were engraved with
a fine point.
All is so clear. Distance, foreground, everything has detail. The colours in the stones, the green and yellow blooms of lichen,
the stems and reddened leaves of tiny scant plants. The grain of the rock, its cracks and the sharp edges that he can feel
even through his boots and that graze the fingers when he must scramble. The mountainside marbled with black ravines, silvery
watercourses, snowfields of polished whiteness. The valley falling away beneath him, the blackness of the bog and the glistening
of the streams running into it, a tangle of white streaks that weave out and back into one another like the boughs and twigs
of a tree.
At the summit there is a wind that stings his eyes to tears. The peak is so sharp that he dare not stand full upon it for
more than a second for fear the wind will blow him away. He crouches instead in the lee of a rock, the elation in him holding
him taut as a leopard waiting to pounce. Or a watching eagle. Before his eyes an eagle view: throughout his field of vision,
mountains in the form of flames, burning white with the sun upon them, and beyond in all directions, smooth and blue-white,
a frozen sea.
It is my opinion that this cannot be East Greenland but an island, a place for which we have no name. Our ships had sailed
the southern coast and we had thought the land to be a promontory or projection from a greater mainland but yesterday I climbed
the mountain to the north and discovered that it was not so, that the place is indeed surrounded by sea in all directions.
The sea to the north appears to be frozen so it is yet possible that it may connect by the ice to further land.
On this day, the second of September, I saw for the first time a small quantity of drift ice driving to and fro in the bay,
and with the telescope I saw upon one piece far out two sea horses lying asleep. I judged however that they were too far off
for hunting.
He saw cloud also, cloud that crept in swiftly from the east as he looked out to sea, that when he turned hung suddenly leaden
over the island behind him. The temperature had turned as fast, a sudden drop that was almost as tangible as the loss of light.
The first snow to fall since he had begun his time alone was a thin, mean snow, no more than a light fall, just enough to
cover the surface of the island, to hide rock and vegetation for one opaque still day until the winds sprang up and stripped
some places bare again.
In the snow I have found tracks of deer close to the tent. In the stillness and fog of the previous day I did not like to
venture far from the tent for fear that I would be unable to return, but this day it was possible to hunt. I killed a reindeer
of good size not one hundred yards from the door. With this in addition to the ship's rations and the birds I have trapped
I have hanging in the tent now a good stock of meat.
The deer was a stag and it was clear that it did not know the sight of man. He had worked from downwind, taking every care,
walking crouched and with silent footsteps in the snow, and yet just as he came within range the animal had sensed something
and looked about and he could have sworn that it looked directly at him, alert for an instant as he had seen deer so many
times before, in that intense frozen second before they set to flight. Only this one did not flee but saw him with his arm
extended into the musket, taking aim, and put down its great antlered head as if he were nothing animate, nothing more than
a piece of driftwood, an alien tree washed up upon the shore, and munched again at some thin mosses where its hooves had churned
up a patch of snow.
The stag was too heavy for him to bring and hang inside so he had done his butchery immediately at the site of the killing,
with cold hands and the wind swirling odd icy flakes like pinpricks against his face. He skinned, removed the entrails, crudely
hacked up the carcase leaving what he did not want for foxes and gulls to scavenge. The pieces he cut off he brought into
the tent and there in a copper washed them in vinegar and strewed them with pepper. Suspended between the poles the meat now
begins to freeze even as it hangs, leaving on the floor beneath it a pool of iced blood so dark that it is almost black. He
has kept back one steak to eat fresh that evening, strong dark meat and very lean.
More deer appear on the following day and he has further success, killing two younger animals, hauling them in to hang in
the tent and using pieces of them to bait the snares he has set for foxes. The hours of daylight are short, the sky low, the
sun a colour, an idea rather than a form, too often obscured behind a weight of cloud. He feels an urgency to his hunting,
each pound of meat to hang and freeze or preserve a piece of time ensured. He does not know what light, what cold, to expect
of the winter, nor if there will be any breathing warm-blooded thing to live it through besides himself.