fined the Captain a thousand pounds. It was the Japanese who perfected
the 'long line'/ Nick agreed, the endless floating line, armed with
specially designed hooks, and laid across the lanes of migration of the
big pelagic surface-feeding fish, the tuna and the marlin. They wipe
out the shoals as they advance - wipe them out to the last fish. You
cannot reduce any animal population beyond a certain point. Samantha
seemed much older as she turned her face up to Nick. Look what they did
to the whales. Together they turned back to the windows, gazing out for
a glimpse of that gentle monster, doomed in hope of another now to
extinction, one last look at another creature that would disappear from
the seas The Japanese and the Russians again/ said Nick. They would not
sign the whaling treaty until there were not enough blues left in the
seas to make their killing an economic proposition. Then they signed
it. when there were two or three thousand blue whales left in all the
oceans, that is when they signed. 'Now they will hunt the fill and the
seal and the minke to extinction. As they stood side by side staring
into the bizarre sun-lit for that spark of life in the watery night,
searching vainly wilderness, without thinking Nick lifted his arm; he
would have placed it around her shoulders, the age-old protective
attitude of man to his woman, but he caught himself at the last moment
before he actually touched her. She had felt his movement and tensed
for it, swaying slightly towards him in anticipation, but he stepped
away, letting his arm fall and stooped over the radarscope. She only
realized then how much she had wanted him to touch her, but for the rest
of that evening he stayed within the physical limits which he seemed to
have set for himself.
The next evening she declined the wardroom's importunate invitations,
and after dinner waited in her own cabin, the door an inch ajar so she
heard Tim Graham leave the bridge, clattering down the companionway with
exuberance, relieved once more of his watch. The moment he entered the
wardroom, Samantha slipped from her cabin and ran lightly up to the
bridge.
She was with him only minutes after he had assumed the watch and Nick
was amused by the strength of his pleasure. They grinned at each other
like school children in a successful piece of mischief.
Before the light went, they passed close by one of the big tabular
bergs, and she pointed out the line of filth that edged the white ice
like the ring around a bathtub that had been used by a chimney sweep.
Paraffin wax/ she said, and undissolved hydrocarbons. No, he said,
that's only glacial striation.
It's crude oil/ she answered him. I've sampled it. It was one of the
reasons I took the guide job on Golden Adventurer, I wanted first-hand
knowledge of these seas. But we are two thousand miles south of the
tanker lanes. The beach at Shackleton Bay is thick with wax balls and
crude droplets. We found oil-soaked penguins on Cape Alarm, dead and
dying. They hit an oil slick within fifty miles of that isolated shore.
I can hardly believe -'Nick started, but she cut across him.
That's just itV she said. Nobody wants to believe it.
just walk on by, as though it's another mugging victim lying on the
