A Grue Of Ice Read online

  1. The Albatross' Foot

  " Drake Passage!"

  I shook my head. Sailhardy was wrong. The thin, sharp

  stiletto of wind did not even ruffle the surface of the sea, it was slight. It was there, though. Sailhardy unlashed the mainsail's crude fastening. His hands were as rough as the knotted wood of the whaleboat's ribs. The boom carrying the sail slatted untidily. Way dropped off the deep, thirty-foot craft. She settled into her own reflection, yellow to yellow, blue to blue white to white. The islanders' garish sense of paint did nothing to conceal the sweet lines of the boat.

  " South Shetlands," I countered.

  Sailhardy didn't seem to hear me. He crooked a knee into the starboard forward rowlock. His action was unstudied, but there was a pointer's tenseness in it. I found another lead sinker for my special net among the long oars on the gratings. I knotted it lazily to a hundred-fathom line coiled on the bottom-boards. Sailhardy's taut caution seemed out of place. I suppose fishermen are fishermen the world over, and my enjoyment in sending down my special nylon net to the depths of the ocean here on the fringes of the Southern Ice Continent for tiny plankton sea-creatures was as keen as it would have been in casting a fly six thousand miles away in Scotland. Sailhardy's lean shoulders shrugged under the faded red-orange windbreaker. His was the inborn alertness which made a man survive the sea-enemy, in these Antarctic waters more pitiless than anywhere else in the world. I was fishing, and it lulled me out of feeling that I was a man with a mission, let alone a scientist of the Royal Society of London.

  " No, Bruce . . ." he began.

  I grinned at him as I dropped the heavy lead sinker over the side. The use of my Christian name still came a little hard off his tongue. After all, a lower-deck man does not call his captain by his Christian name. Not in the Royal Navy anyway. For two long, bitter years Sailhardy had been my leading torpedoman aboard H.M.S. Scott during the war. My job, as commander of His Majesty's South Shetlands Naval Force, based on Deception Island, five hundred miles south of the southernmost tip of South America, had been to guard the sea passage between the Pacific Ocean and the South

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  Atlantic—the Drake Passage. It was the favourite route for German-armed merchant raiders, U-boats and Japanese submarines. They chose it because its fog-bound waters, con-tinually lashed by gales, made it impossible to find a ship, even if you were within five miles of it. I knew the Drake Passage —only too well. The name sang in my mind like a gale through the futtock shrouds of an old clipper. It was maybe fifteen years since I had last seen its wild waters from the bridge of my small destroyer, but its screaming hell-fiends of wind and ice still bit into my memory. Sailhardy's tenseness this quiet, sunny afternoon on the fringes of the wild ocean we had once guarded was a living memory, too, of the inborn sea-vigilance of a Tristan islander. Man against the sea. In these Southern waters we both knew that the cards were stacked against the man.

  I assumed my captain's voice. " Leading Torpedoman Sailhardy . . ." I couldn't help myself. I grinned at him again.

  His eyes were as far away as the horizon. " Relax," I said: "

  You look as if you were trying to see all the way to the South Pole."

  " I wish I could," he said. " Then I'd know what sort of a gale is due to hit us."

  I gestured towards the quiet scene. The big island lay some miles astern of the boat, and two smaller ones were visible above the horizon ahead. They made a triangle with unequal sides roughly ten and twenty miles long. The big island was closest to us.

  " Nothing is going to hit us," I said lazily. " Nothing at all."

  Sailhardy glanced back at the big island, his home, as if to take strength from its sombre cliffs.

  " The watch never goes below on Tristan da Cunha," he said with a curious intonation. " That is why we islanders have survived. There's a great storm behind this little wind."

  I, too, turned and looked at the near-by island. A giant flock of Cape pigeons made a white socket of light against its towering throne of darkness ; matching their whiteness, a crown of snow rimmed the island's 7,000-foot extinct volcano: Tristan da Cunha, the loneliest inhabited island in the world. It lies, with its two tiny neighbours whose summits I could just see ahead, midway between Africa and South America on a line between Cape Town and Montevideo, and an almost equal distance of two thousand miles from the nearest tip of the Antarctic ice continent.

  Before and immediately after Napoleon's time Tristan da

  10

  Cunha was an important base for British and American sealing ships making for the hunting-grounds of the frozen South. Its first three permanent settlers, half a century before the Civil War, were, in fact, American sailors. During Napoleon's exile on St. Helena, 1,500 miles to the north-east, the British stationed a garrison on Tristan, and the remains of that garrison, plus the Americans, formed the stock from which the island's present inhabitants have sprung. For nearly a century and a half, the island remained cut off from the world, except for a rare visiting ship.

  During the war I had brought to Tristan from Cape Town a force of Royal Navy and South African Air Force men to man a radio station. From Tristan I had taken my small task force under H.M.S. Scott two thousand miles to the south and had based in on Deception Island, a flooded volcanic crater on the edge of the ice continent. The two neighbours of Tristan I could see ahead now were Nightingale and Inaccessible Islands. In every direction beyond them, for thousands of square miles, lay completely empty sea.

  The Cape pigeons, in splendid white resilience, made for the haven of Tristan da Cunha. Sailhardy unhooked the triangle of foresail forward of the mast, as if to emphasise the danger he feared.

  I could not take his forebodings seriously. It was all too peaceful. I was to learn—soon—how much of my ice-lore I

  had lost.

  " I'm a scientist," I replied easily. " I've got a posh title to prove it—holder of the Royal Society's Travelling Studentship in Oceanography and Limnology. You do the sailing."

  He caught my mood, and grinned back. " I remember I was nearly sick with fright when you took me aboard H.M.S.

  Scott from Tristan during the war. Naval captains were God to me."

  " Who ever told you to address me as professor-captain that day?" I laughed.

  " One of the midshipmen," he said. " He told me the captain had been a professor of science in peace-time before commanding the ship." He grinned at his own discomfiture. " So you had to be professor-captain."

  " I wasn't a professor," I said. " Never have been. I'd merely made special studies in oceanography. I was too young anyway to be a professor."

  " You were twenty-seven then," he said, " that makes you forty-two now."

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  I remembered his hesitation a few minutes before about my Christian name. " I'll bet that the day you walked on to my bridge you never thought you would be calling me Bruce," I said.

  " Bruce." He paused a moment, and then went on: " You would have remained Captain Wetherby to me all my life—

  if it hadn't been for what you said that day you came back to Tristan after the war. That's twelve years ago now. We Tristan islanders live a hard life. We live off the sea, except for a couple of acres of potato patches and some apple trees, and maybe a hundred cattle and sheep. You had the world at your feet after the war. You'd had a brilliant war-time career, and a brilliant university career before that. I remember how you stepped off the freighter out in the roadstead. Mine was the first boat there. I didn't know you were coming. ' Captain Wetherby!' I said. I'll never forget your reply. ' No, Sailhardy. This is Bruce. Captain Wetherby went down with the raider. I've come back to the things I want—

  Sailhardy, Tristan, the Southern Ocean.' "

  I played it l
ightly. " You forget, I said I wanted your boat, too." I smiled.

  He gave a low laugh. Tristan's long isolation from the world has left the islanders a curious heritage—even to-day, their speech is a strange mixture of English West Country speech shot through with the twang of long-dead New England whalermen, drawn out and enduring as the West Wind Drift.

  " My boat," he said. " That is to ask everything from a Tristan islander. We are the poorest people in the world.

  A boat like this makes me one of the richest men on the island. A boat, you said: you would need a boat to try and find one of the greatest sea mysteries."

  Sailhardy stowed the mainsail and his eye ran affectionately over the whaleboat, with its six long oars lashed to the bottom gratings. Just as the Viking long-boats gave Greenland the kayak, the New Bedford whalers left the secret of their fast, seaworthy chasers to Tristan. And the islanders, born and bred to the sea, added to that knowledge, until to-day the Tristan whaleboat is as indigenous to the lonely island as a Baldie to Leith or a Sixern to the Shetlands. There is almost no wood on Tristan, so the islanders make them of canvas. The wood for the ribs—

  as precious and as scarce as fine gold—comes from the stunted, wind-lashed apple trees that cling for an existence 12

  under walls alongside the stone houses, which are sunk half underground like Hebridean crofters' cottages to escape the gales. I noticed that the forward port-side strake of Sailhardy's boat was splintered ; it would remain so, just•

  because there was no timber to spare for repairs. The boats are daubed—one can hardly call it painted—in bright, garish colours of yellow, blue and white. It is for a purely functional purpose, to waterproof the canvas, and they splash on whatever paint they can find, or beg from the occasional ship.

  The boats are the finest sea-going craft in the world. I would go anywhere with a crew of ten Tristan boatmen and a Tristan whaleboat. The boatmen have been apprenticed the hard way by the great seas, and they have learned to bring in the whaleboats to Tristan's rough shingle beaches and rock-strewn cliffs in a way which even to my sailor's eye is uncanny.

  A hunk of kelp, as thick as a man's body, and perhaps twenty feet long, drifted past. We were about five miles from Tristan, which is ringed by a huge barrier of kelp.

  Inside that barrier the sea is tamed by the fronded fetters to a grey sullenness. Sea mystery! In that moment I wished that the drifting length of kelp was the pointer to the mystery I had come thousands of miles to try and find, rather than the minute plankton my special net was seeking hundreds of feet below the surface.

  Sailhardy seemed to anticipate my thoughts. " Any luck?"

  he asked.

  I shook my head.

  The Albatross' Foot! It had a selling title, one of the learned gentlemen of the Royal Society had said, and he was right. That strange, almost mesmeric name was woven into the fabric of my war years, with Sailhardy, with Tristan da Cunha. Little had I thought, the day Sailhardy had come aboard my destroyer in the Tristan anchorage, that he and The Albatross' Foot were to become the star which I had followed actively down-horizon for a dozen years. Before that I had lived with the magic of the name for a further six.

  Science had never heard of The Albatross' Foot! Nor had I, despite my advanced researches before the war into oceanography. Sailhardy had told me it was the inmost secret of the Tristan islanders. They maintained it was a gigantic warm current which swept down in spring—not every spring, but at irregular intervals—between Africa and South America, bearing countless billions of the microscopic 13

  sea creatures called plankton, which are the food of everything in the Southern Ocean, from the smallest fish to the whale. The islanders called it The Albatross' Foot, so Sailhardy had said, because the current resembled, in macrocosm, the warm double vein in an albatross' foot with which the great bird hatches its eggs. The only warm thing in an albatross' nest in sub-zero temperatures is that life-giving warm vein. Life-giving it was, said Sailhardy, in the truest sense, because it brought in early summer the basic plankton-life for all other life to the frozen seas round Tristan, and by its warmth dispersed the ice.

  " Drake Passage," repeated Sailhardy. " There's a gale coming, and it's from the Drake Passage. I smell it. It's not coming from the South Shetlands at all." His voice, with its strange fascinating accent, had a curious clarity of modula tion, as if he had learned the trick of talking against a storm without having to raise his voice. The flat calm was broken only by an occasional cat's-paw of wind.

  " Does it matter?" I asked.

  He looked at me sternly. " Bruce," he said, " you've been away from the Southern Ocean too long. You've forgotten.

  You came back to Tristan that once after the war—you stayed a whole year until the next ship—but for the rest of the time you've been in Cape Town and London."

  I laughed. " A man must live, Sailhardy, even an oceanographer. I came back to Tristan after the war and spent every penny of my war-time gratuity trying to find The Albatross' Foot. You know. How many days of that year did we spend at sea together, you and I, in this very boat?"

  He came over to the stern and unshipped the high, clumsy tiller, as if to reiterate his warning of an impending storm. "

  It wasn't long enough," he said. " It took three years before The Albatross' Foot came again. You should have waited."

  " I want proof," I said. " I want plankton. I want eighty-eight million plankton."

  He pulled the battered, Navy-style cap back from the red-brown balaclava cap beneath, and looked speculatively at me.

  " Eighty-eight million?"

  I grinned at him. " My special net will hold exactly one quart of sea-water, and one quart of sea-water, in the concentration I need to prove The Albatross' Foot, will contain eighty-eight million of the little so-and-so's. When—and if—

  we ever do find them, you shall see what a little beauty a 14

  plankton really is. Under the microscope. It's octagonal, with a magnificent six-starred centre. The middle is round, and is all fluted and grained like machined silver wire."

  " You'd better hurry and get that net up," he said. He reached out and took the hard collar of my buttoned-up

  anorak jacket and rubbed it against the cloth by my throat.

  " Listen!" he said. " Listen. If it were dry, you'd hear it squeak. That would mean your storm is from the South Shetlands. But it doesn't. It's wet. It means it's from the Drake Passage."

  I could see it in his face. He was willing the storm—a

  storm of which I could see not the slightest sign—to come. He wanted to pit the whaleboat against a full gale in the Southern Ocean. He looked to his right, to the south-west first, and then to his left, to the south-east. Then he swung round and gazed at Tristan itself, dominated by the old snow-capped volcano and slightly masked by cloud, like a miniature version of the famous Table Mountain tablecloth at Cape Town.

  " Masthead," he said, so softly that I had to strain to hear. " Tristan da Cunha, the masthead of the world!"

  I ran my eye over the lean figure. I knew he was my own age, but the attrition of wind, sea and ice had weathered his face to an age anywhere between forty and sixty.

  " And a masthead must have a lookout," I joked. " That is why I took you with me during the war. What did I know of the Southern Ocean then? I wanted a man with all the sea-lore of this ocean at his fingertips. I was as scared as hell of losing my ships before I even got a sight of a raider. I found my man—Sailhardy."

  " I nearly let you down the very first time we entered Deception harbour," he said quietly. " Do you remember Neptune's Bellows?"

  " I still get the heebie-jeebies when I think of it," I grinned. " Thank God I brought you on the bridge."

  " Neptune's Bellows is just about right," said Sailhardy, "

  the way the wind rips through the gap."

  " It caught old H.M.S. Scott's bows," I filled in. " Dear Heaven! The way her bows whipped in towards those rocks!"

  I cou
ld still see the way Sailhardy had taken hold of the situation as the flagship teetered on the edge of destruction in the narrow gap which leads into the deeper anchorage—the flooded volcanic crater—beyond.

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  " It was that afternoon," I said slowly, " that you told me about The Albatross' Foot."

  Deception harbour had been full of bergy bits of ice.

  They had come in crabwise through Neptune's Bellows and started to freeze together in the inner anchorage. It seemed quite clear to me. what would happen: my small force was about to be frozen solid in the harbour. As I had seen it, it would have remained bottled up there for the next six months, unable to move, while the U-boats and raiders sneaked past in the Drake Passage. Destroyers and frigates are not sturdy ships like whale catchers ; the ice would have damaged them severely. There were no installations or dockyards to repair them. As the harbour started to freeze, I had climbed the cliff entrance and had been appalled at the gigantic phalanx of solid ice moving through the strait between Deception and the mainland. Some of it was turning aside from the main body into Deception harbour. If enough did—it would have meant death to my whole task force.

  Sailhardy had stood with me gazing at the fantastic sight. "

  The Albatross' Foot!" he had exclaimed softly. " The warm current was sweeping past Tristan as we left the other day. It will be here in a day or two. It will cut that ice up like a hot knife through butter."

  It did. I watched in amazement as Sailhardy's strange story of the warm, life-bringing current came true. The great moving battalions of ice, and even the landfast ice on the mainland, wilted before the attack of The Albatross' Foot.

  In a world where everything was frozen, The Albatross'

  Foot was the only warm thing. I blessed the day I had brought the islander with me. My squadron was saved. During the next two years, Sailhardy told me many things about the strange current of Tristan da Cunha—completely fascinating to an oceanographer like myself. But it was war, and we had work—grim work—to do, and there was not time or opportunity to carry out even the preliminaries to the study I wished to make of The Albatross' Foot. After the squadron had been saved Sailhardy had enjoyed a privileged position on the bridge of H.M.S. Scott.