The Corvette

'Secure the starboard guns, Mr Bourne, and draw the charges!' He heard the mutter of disappointment from the starbowlines. 'Silence there!'

A new danger suddenly occurred to him. The sloop lay in the path of the advancing animals. The death of some of their number had communicated an alarm to the others and their motion was full of turbulent urgency. He did not wish to think what effect one of those bluff heads would have upon Melusine's hull. 'Haul the mainyard, Mr Hill and put the ship before the wind…' Hill grasped the sudden danger and Melusine turned slowly to larboard as she again gathered headway. She had hardly swung, presenting her stern to the onrushing whales when their attention was attracted by shouts to the south, to larboard. One of the boats that had been fast to a fish had been dashed to fragments on the ice edge two miles away as the tortured beast had dived under the ice. The alarm had been raised by another boat, towing past Melusine's stern, who hailed the sloop to request her rendering assistance and allowing them to hold onto their whale. It was while clearing away the quarterboat that the whale struck them. A large gravid female in the last stages of her pregnancy had been terrified by the slaughter astern of her. The ship shook and the stunned animal rolled out from under the quarter, almost directly beneath the boat. Her astonished crew, half-way down to the water's surface looked down into the tiny eye of the monster. The whale spouted, then dived, her flukes hitting the keel of the suspended boat but not upsetting it.

A few minutes later, under the command of Acting Lieutenant Gorton the boat was pulling across a roil of water, avoiding the retreating whales with difficulty, on her way to rescue the crew of the smashed whale-boat. It did not appear that Melusine had suffered any damage from the collision.

The whalers hunted their quarry for fifty hours while the sun culminated and then began its slow unfinished setting, its azimuth altering round the horizon to rise again to each of two successive noons. Melusine was quite unable to stem the escape of the whales and in the end Drinkwater agreed to the boats securing their captured whales to her sides.

'As fenders!' Harvey had hailed, his eyes dark and sunken in his head with the fatigue of the chase, 'in case the ice closes on you!' The jest was made as he went in pursuit of his eighth whale, his cargo almost complete. Now the five ships lay secured along the ice edge on the northern side of the lead, tied up as though moored to a quay, their head and stern lines secured to ice anchors. Each had a pair of whales alongside, between hull and ice, while rafted outboard in tier after tier lay the remainder of the catch. While Melusine's company stood watch, the exhausted whalers turned below to sleep before the flensing began. They had taken more than thirty whales between them and the labour of cutting up the blubber and packing it in casks took a further two days of strenuous effort.

Melusine's midshipmen went out on the ice with Mount and a party of marines and took some more seals, returning to the ship to pick off the brown sharks that clustered round the whale corpses as they sank after flensing. The fine weather held and the whale-captains expressed their good fortune, accepting an invitation to dine with Drinkwater the instant the flensing was completed. Even Sawyers seemed to be un- Quakerishly cheerful, and Drinkwater, anticipating an early departure from the Greenland Sea, ordered Tregembo to get Palgrave's carvers, silver and plate out of storage.

The high good humour that seemed to infect them all after the success of the last few days allayed his worries about the possible closure of the ice. Besides, he twice-daily ascended the mainmast to the crow's nest, spending as much as half an hour aloft with the big watch glass and making note of the bearings of familiar ice hummocks with a pocket compass. The variation in their positions was minimal, the movement of the ice, like the weather, seemed suspended in their favour. His own natural suspicions, those fine tunings of his seaman's senses, were blunted by the triumphant confidence of Harvey, Renaudson, Sawyers and Atkinson of the Truelove.

As they gathered in Drinkwater's cabin sipping from tankards of mimbo, a hot rum punch that Cawkwell concocted out of unlikely materials, their elation was clear. So great had been their success that the customary jealousy of one whaler who had done less well than his more fortunate colleague was absent. It was true that Harvey's harpoon gun had proved its value, netting him the largest number of whales, but he endured only mild rebukes from Sawyers who claimed the method un-Godly.

'Never a season like it, Captain,' Renaudson said, his face red from the heat in the cabin and the effects of the mimbo. 'Abel bleats about God like your black-coated parson,' he nodded in Singleton's direction, 'but 'tis luck, really. A man may fish the Greenland Seas for a lifetime, like, then, ee,' he shook his head slightly, a small grin of disbelief in his good fortune crossing his broad, sweating features, 'his luck changes like this.' He became suddenly serious. 'Mind you, Captain, it'll not happen again. No. Not in my lifetime, any road. I've seen the best and quickest catch I'm ever likely to make and I doubt my son'll see owt like it himself, not if he fishes for twenty year'n more. Abel's lucky there, both him and his son together in one great hunt.' He drained the tankard. 'I see tha's children of thee own, Captain.' He nodded at the portraits on the bulkhead, his accent thickening as he drank.

'Yes,' said Drinkwater, sipping the mimbo more cautiously. It was not a drink he greatly cared for, but his stocks of good wine were almost exhausted and Cawkwell had suggested that he served a rum punch to warm his guests. Harvey joined them.

'Ee, Captain, your guns weren't as much good as mine.' He grinned, clearly happy that his beloved harpoon gun had established its reputation for the swift murder of mysticetae. 'I shall patent the modifications I've made and make my fortune twice over from this voyage.' He nudged Renaudson. 'Get th'self a Harvey's patent harpoon gun for next season, Thomas, then th'can shoot whales instead of farting at them.' The dialect was thick between them and Drinkwater turned away, nodding to Atkinson, a small, active man with a lick of dark hair over his forehead, who was talking to Mr Gorton. Drinkwater had invited only Hill, Singleton and the lieutenants to the meal, there was insufficient room for midshipmen. Besides, he knew the whalemen would not want the intrusion of young gentlemen at their celebrations.

He found himself confronted by Singleton's blue jaw. His sobriety was disquieting amongst all the merriment. 'Good evening, Mr Singleton.'

'Good evening, sir. A word if you please?'

'Of course.'

'I deduce this gathering is to mark the successful conclusion of the fishery.'

'So it would appear. Is that not so, Captain Sawyers?' He turned to the Quaker who had, as a mark of the relaxation of the occasion, removed his hat.

'Indeed it is, although a few of us have an empty cask or two left. The Lord has provided of his bounty…'

'Amen,' broke in Singleton, who seemed to have some purpose in his abruptness. 'Then may I ask, sir, when you intend landing me?'

'Landing thee…?' Sawyers seemed astonished and Drinkwater again explained for Sawyers's benefit.

'It seems the Almighty smiles upon all our endeavours then, Friend,' he said addressing Singleton, 'and perhaps thine own more than ours.' He smiled. 'This lead towards the south-west will bring you close to the coast of East Greenland, somewhere about latitude seventy. I have heard the coast is ice-free thereabouts, although I have never seen it close-to myself. You may see the mountain peaks in clear weather for a good distance. Nunataks, the eskimos call them…'

'Then we had better land you,' Drinkwater said to Singleton, 'but I am still uncertain of the wisdom of following this lead into the ice shelf. Do you not think it might prove a cul-de-sac?'

Sawyers shook his head. 'No, the fish would not have entered it if some instinct had not told them that the krill upon which they feed were rich here, and that open water did not exist ahead of them…'

'But surely,' Singleton put in, his scientific mind engaged now, 'the whales may dive beneath the ice. My observations while you have been hunting them show they can go prodigious deep.'

'No, Friend,' Sawyers smiled, 'their need of air and their instinct will not persuade them to dive beneath such an ice shelf as we have about us now. Surely,' he said with a touch of irony, the dissenter gently teasing the man of established religion, 'surely thou sawest how, even in their terror, they made no attempt to swim under the ice?'

Singleton flushed at the mocking of his intelligence. Sawyers mollified him. 'But perhaps in the confusion of the gun smoke thine eyes were misled. No, mysticetus will dive only under floes in the open sea and beneath bay ice through which he breaks to inhale…'

'Bay ice?' queried Drinkwater.