Loe raamatut: «The Voyage of the Narwhal»

1 HIS LISTS

(MAY 1855)

I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There…the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendor. There…snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe…What may not be expected in a country of eternal light?

—MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein (1818)

He was standing on the wharf, peering down at the Delaware River while the sun beat on his shoulders. A mild breeze, the smells of tar and copper. A few yards away the Narwhal loomed, but he was looking instead at the partial reflection trapped between hull and pilings. The way the planks wavered, the railing bent, the boom appeared then disappeared; the way the image filled the surface without concealing the complicated life below. He saw, beneath the transparent shadow, what his father had taught him to see: the schools of minnows, the eels and algae, the mussels burrowing into the silt; the diatoms and desmids and insect larvae sweeping past hydrazoans and infant snails. The oyster, his father once said, is impregnated by the dew; the pregnant shells give birth to pearls conceived from the sky. If the dew is pure, the pearls are brilliant; if cloudy, the pearls are dull. Far above him, but mirrored as well, long strands of cloud moved one way and gliding gulls another.

In the water the Narwhal sat solid and dark among the surrounding fleet. Everyone headed somewhere, Erasmus thought. England, Africa, California; stony islands alive with seals; the coast of Florida. Yet no one, among all those travelers, who might offer him advice. He turned back to his work. Where was this mound of supplies to go? An untidy package yielded, beneath its waterproof wrappings, a dozen plum puddings that brought him near to tears. Each time he arranged part of the hold more of these parcels appeared: a crate of damson plums in syrup from an old woman in Conshohocken who’d read about their voyage in the newspaper and wanted to contribute her bit. A case of brandy from a Wilmington banker, volumes of Thackeray from a schoolmaster in Doylestown, heaps of hand-knitted socks. His hands bristled with lists, each only partly checked-off: never mind those puddings, he thought. Where were the last two hundred pounds of pemmican? How had half the meat biscuit been stowed with the candles and the lamp oil? And where were the last members of the crew? In his pocket he had another list, the final roster:

FREDERICK SCHUESSELE, Cook

THOMAS FORBES, Carpenter

Seamen:

ISAAC BOND, NILS JENSEN, ROBERT CAREY,

BARTON DESOUZA, IVAN HRUSKA,

FLETCHER LAMB, SEAN HAMILTON

Fifteen of them, all hands counted. Captain Tyler, Mr. Tagliabeau, and Mr. Francis, who together would have charge of the ship’s daily operations, were experienced whaling men. Dr. Boerhaave had a medical degree from Edinburgh; Schuessele had been cook for a New York packet line; Forbes was an Ohio farm boy who’d never been to sea, but who could fashion anything from a few odd scraps of wood. Of the seven unevenly trained seamen, Bond had reported for duty drunk, and Hruska and Hamilton were still missing.

Their companions, invisible in the hold, waited for directions—waited, Erasmus feared, for him to fail. He was forty years old and had a history of failure; he’d sailed, when hardly more than a boy, on a voyage so thwarted it became a national joke. Since then his life’s work had come to almost nothing. No wife, no children, no truly close friends; a sister in a difficult situation. What he had now was this pile of goods, and a second chance.

Still pondering the puddings, he heard laughter and looked up to see Zeke hanging from the rigging like a flag. His long arms were stretched above a thatch of golden hair; as he laughed his teeth were gleaming in his mouth; he was twenty-six and made Erasmus feel like a fossil. Everything about this moment was tied to Zeke. The hermaphrodite brig about to become their home had once been part of Zeke’s family’s packet line; with his father’s money, Zeke had ordered oak sheathing spiked to her sides as protection against the ice, iron plates wrapped around her bows, tarred felt layered between the double-planked decks. In charge of the expedition—and hence, Erasmus reminded himself, of him—Zeke had chosen Erasmus to gather the equipment and stores surrounding him now in such bewildering heaps.

Where was all this to go? Salt beef and pork and barrels of malt, knives and needles for barter with the Esquimaux, guns and ammunition, coal and wood, tents and cooking lamps and woolen clothing, buffalo skins, a library, enough wooden boards to house over the deck in an emergency. And what about the spirit thermometers, or the four chronometers, the microscope, and all the stores for his specimens: spirits of wine, loose gauze, prenumbered labels and glass jars, arsenical soap for preserving bird skins, camphor and pillboxes for preserving insects, dissecting scissors, watch glasses, pins, string, glass tubes and sealing wax, bungs and soaked bladders, brain hooks and blowpipes and egg drills, a sweeping net…too many things.

Erasmus stroked the wolf skins his youngest brother had sent from the Utah mountains. Just then he would have given anything for an hour’s conversation with Copernicus, who understood what it meant to leave a life. But Copernicus was gone, still, again, and the wolf skins were handsome, but where would they fit? The sledges, specially constructed after Zeke’s own design, had arrived two weeks late and wouldn’t fit into the space Erasmus had planned for them; and he couldn’t arrange the scientific equipment in any reasonable way. Every inch of the cabin was full, and they were not yet in it.

On the Narwhal Zeke slipped his feet from the stay, hung by one hand for a second, and then dropped lightly to the deck. Soon he joined Erasmus among the wharfs clutter, moving the theodolite and uncovering a crate of onions. “These look nice,” he said. “Do we have enough?”

While they went over the provision lists yet again, Mr. Tagliabeau walked up with the news that their cook had deserted. He’d last been seen two days earlier, Mr. Tagliabeau reported. In the company of a red-headed woman who’d been haunting the docks.

Zeke, his hands deep in onions, only laughed. “I saw that hussy,” he said. “What a flashing eye she had! But that it should be Schuessele who got her, with that monstrous beard of his…”

The wind tore one of Erasmus’s lists away and sent it spinning through the masts. “We’re leaving in three days!” he shouted. Later he’d remember this display with embarrassment. “Three days. Where are we going to find another cook?”

“There’s no need to get excited,” Zeke said. “The world is full of cooks. Mr. Tagliabeau, if you’d be so kind as to take a small recruiting tour among the taverns…”

“Wonderful,” Erasmus said. “Do find us some criminal, some drunken sot.”

They might have quarreled had not a group of young men dressed in Lincoln-green frock coats, white pantaloons, and straw hats trailing black ostrich feathers come dancing up the wharf. The United Toxophilites, Erasmus saw, making a surprise farewell to Zeke. The sight made him groan. Once he’d been part of this group of archers; once this had all seemed charming. Resurrecting the old sport of archery, flourishing the arrows retrieved from those first, magical trips to the Plains—as a boy, he’d participated in a meet that drew two thousand guests. But he’d lost his taste for such diversions after the Exploring Expedition, and he’d let his association with the Toxies lapse. Zeke, though, was part of the new young crowd that had taken over the club.

“Voorhees!” the Toxies cried. All around them, crews from other ships stared. “Voorhees! Voorhees!”

They gave Zeke three great cheers, hauled him down the length of the wharf, and formed a circle around him. Erasmus received courteous nods but no recognition. He listened to the mocking, high-spirited speeches, which likened Zeke to a great Indian chief setting off on a buffalo hunt. One youngster with a shock of red hair presented Zeke with a chalice; an elflike boy offered a patent-leather belt from which dangled a grease box and a tassel. Zeke accepted his gifts with a smile and a handshake, thanking each man by name and showing the poise that had made Erasmus’s sister call him a natural leader.

Yet what had Zeke done? So very little, Erasmus thought as he eyed the grease box. A few years of sailing from Philadelphia to Dublin and Hull on the ships of his father’s packet line, investigating currents and ocean creatures, although often, as he’d admitted to Erasmus, he’d been too seasick to work. Other than that all his learning came from books. As a boy he’d insinuated his way into Erasmus’s family, through their fathers’ friendship and an interest in natural history. Now they were further bound by Lavinia. But that Erasmus should be standing in Zeke’s shadow, setting off for the arctic under the command of this untried youth—again he was amazed by his decision.

Zeke, as if he heard what Erasmus was thinking, broke through the circle of green-coated men, seized Erasmus’s arm, and drew him into the center. “I couldn’t do this without Erasmus Darwin Wells,” he cried. “Three cheers for our chief naturalist, my right hand!”

Erasmus blushed. Was this what he wanted? A kind of worship, mixed with disdain; as if Zeke wanted to emulate him, but without his flaws. But exactly this grudging caution had stranded him alone in midlife, and he pushed the thought aside. When the Toxies presented their green-and-gold pennant, he grasped the end marked with a merry archer and smiled at Zeke. Zeke made a speech of thanks; Erasmus made a shorter one, not mentioning that he’d known the club’s founders or that he’d learned to shoot a bow when some of these men were still children. As he spoke he saw Captain Tyler hanging over the Narwhal’s rail, gazing curiously at them. His face, Erasmus thought, was the size and color of a ham.

The Toxies departed, Zeke climbed back on the Narwhal, and Erasmus was once more alone. He folded the pennant and tucked it into the wolf skins. Then he reconsidered the stowing of the sledges: back to front in a line down the center of the hold? or piled in a tight tower near the bow? He worked quietly for an hour, pushing down his worries by the repeated checking of items against his lists. Mr. Tagliabeau interrupted him, returning to the wharf in the company of a fresh-faced, dark-haired, blue-eyed boy.

“Ned Kynd,” Mr. Tagliabeau said. “Twenty years of age.” Zeke hopped down to investigate. After making introductions all around, Mr. Tagliabeau added, “Ned would like to join our expedition.”

Zeke, hovering once more near the mound of supplies, looked Ned over. “You’ve had experience cooking?”

“In three places,” the boy said shyly. As he listed them, all in the rough area by the wharves, Erasmus noted his heavy Irish accent.

“And have you been to sea?” Zeke asked.

Ned blushed. “Just once, sir. When I made my crossing.”

“But the sea suits you?”

“My…circumstances then were not such that anyone could have enjoyed them. But I believe I would have, if I’d had work and meals and a place to sleep. I enjoyed being on deck very much. I like to watch the birds and fish.”

“You’d be cooking for fifteen men,” Erasmus said. “You’re capable of that?”

“I wouldn’t like to boast, but many a night I’ve cooked for three or four times that number. I was at a logging camp in the Adirondacks for some time, before I made my way to this city. Loggers are hungry men.”

Zeke laid a hand on Erasmus’s shoulder. “If he can feed loggers, he can surely feed us.”

“You’d be bunking in the forecastle,” Erasmus said. “With the seamen. They can be a bit rough.”

“Not rougher than loggers, I wouldn’t guess.”

“Done, then,” Zeke said. “And welcome. Gather your things and say your good-byes, we leave in three days.” Off he went, bounding down the wharf like an antelope.

And so it was that Ned, hastily engaged to fill Schuessele’s shoes, came to join the expedition. Later Erasmus would think many times how little might have steered Ned away. Mr. Tagliabeau might not have bumped into him beneath the chandler’s awning; the Toxies’ ostrich-feathered hats might have spooked him had he arrived but a few minutes earlier; Zeke might not have been there to interview him had he arrived but a little later. Any small coincidence might have done.

THAT NIGHT ERASMUS was sleepless again. In the Repository, his family’s little natural history museum, he rose and paced the floors and tried to understand what he’d been doing. For twelve years he’d been camped out here, his world contracted to display cabinets stuffed with dead animals, boxes of seeds and trays of fossils, the occasional stray beam of light shining through the windows like a message from another planet. Framed engravings of eminent naturalists leaned down from the bookshelves, watching benignly as he bent to work that wasn’t work, and went nowhere. Who could understand that life? Or how he’d decided, finally, to leave it?

Across the garden loomed the house he hadn’t slept in for more than a decade. Everything showed his father’s hand, from the carved ferns on the moldings to his own name. He was Erasmus Darwin for the British naturalist, grandfather to the young man who’d set off on the Beagle; his brothers were named after Copernicus, Linnaeus, and Alexander von Humboldt. Four boys gaping up at their father like nestlings waiting for worms. An engraver and printer by trade, Frank Wells’s passion had been natural history and his truest friends the Peales and the Bartrams, Thomas Nuttall and Thomas Say, Audubon of the beautiful birds and poor peculiar Rafinesque, who’d died in a garret downtown.

On summer evenings, down by the creek, Mr. Wells had read Pliny’s Natural History to his sons. Pliny the Elder had died of his scientific curiosity, he’d said; the fumes of Vesuvius had choked him when he’d lingered to watch the smoke and lava. But before that he’d compiled a remarkable collection of what he’d believed to be facts. Some true, some false—but even the false still useful for the beauty with which they were expressed, and for what they said about the ways men conceived of each other, and of the world. Sometimes pacing, sometimes sitting on a tuft of grass, Erasmus’s father had passed down Pliny’s descriptions of extraordinary peoples living beyond the edge of the known. A race of nomads with legs like snakes; a race of forest dwellers running swiftly on feet pointed backward; a single-legged race who move by hopping and then rest by lying on their backs and raising their singular feet above their heads, like small umbrellas. Stories, not science—but useful as a way of thinking about the great variety and mutability of human nature. How easily, he’d said, might we not exist at all. How easily might we be transformed into something wholly different.

In those old stories, he’d said, were lessons about gossip and the imagination and the perils of not observing the world directly. Yet although he was a great collector of explorers’ tales he’d traveled very little himself; Erasmus had never known what his father would most like to have seen. As a counterpoint to Pliny he’d offered his sons the living, breathing science of his friends. They’d helped design the Repository and delighted Erasmus and his brothers with accounts of their travels. When Lavinia was born, they’d named her after her dying mother and tried to distract their friend from his grief with bones and feathers.

Now Erasmus followed the tracks of those men across the polished floor. He stopped at a wooden case holding trays of fossil teeth. Beneath the third tray was a false bottom, which only he knew about; in the secret space below the molars was a woman’s black calf walking boot. His mother’s; once he’d had a pair. Before the servants took her clothes away, to be given piece by piece to the poor, he’d stolen the boots she’d worn most often. For years he’d hidden them in his room, sometimes running his hands up the buttons as another boy might have fingered a rosary. Later, about to leave on his ill-fated first trip, he’d given Lavinia the left boot after swearing her to secrecy. This other he’d buried. Had it always been so small? The sole was hardly longer than his hand, the leather was cracking, the buttons loose. Where Lavinia’s was he had no idea.

Four years ago, when his father died, he’d received the house, the Repository, a small income, and the care of Lavinia until she married. Which meant, he thought, that he’d inherited all the responsibility and none of the freedom or even the solid work. Was it his fault he hadn’t known what to do? The family firm had gone to his middle brothers, who’d settled side by side downtown, within walking distance of their work: two moons, circling a planet that didn’t interest him. Meanwhile Copernicus had headed west as soon as he received his share of the estate. Out there, among the Indians, he painted buffalo hunts and vast landscapes while Erasmus and Lavinia, left behind, leaned against each other in his absence.

Copernicus sent paintings back, some of which had already been shown at the Academy of Fine Arts. And sometimes—when he remembered, when he could be bothered—he sent packets of seeds, shaken from random plants that had caught his eye. His afterthoughts, which had become Erasmus’s chief occupation. Erasmus had examined, classified, labeled, cataloged, added them to his lists. He filed them in tall wooden towers of tiny drawers, alongside the seeds his father’s friends had brought back from China and the Yucatan and the Malay Archipelago, and those he’d salvaged—stolen, really—from the collections of the Exploring Expedition. When his eyes grew strained and his skin felt moldy, he retreated out back, between the house and the river and behind the Repository, planting samples in oblong plots and noting every characteristic of the seedlings.

But all that was over now. He put the boot away and returned to bed. In Africa, his father had said, are a tribe of people who have no heads, but have mouths and eyes attached to their chests. Sleep eluded him yet again and his lists bobbed behind his lids. In Germantown and along the Wissahickon, people sent him socks and marmalade and then dreamed of this expedition. Vicarious travelers, sleeping while he could not and conjuring up a generic exotic land. Lavinia had friends like this, for whom Darwin’s Tierra del Fuego and Cook’s Tahiti had merged with Parry’s Igloolik and d’Urville’s Antarctica until a place arose in which ice cliffs coexisted with acres of pampas, through which Tongan savages chased ostriches chasing camels. Those people sent six candles encased in brown paper but couldn’t keep north and south straight in their minds, placing penguins and Esquimaux in the same confused ice and pleating a continent into a frozen sea.

None of them grasped the drudgery of such a voyage. Not just the planning and buying and stowing but the months sitting idly on the decks of a ship, the long stretches when nothing happened except that one’s ties to home were imperceptibly dissolved and one became a stranger to one’s life. No one knew how frightened he was, or the mental lists he made of all he dreaded. Ridiculous things, ignoble things. His bunk would be too short or too narrow or damp or drafty; his comrades would snore or twitch or moan; he’d be overcome by longing for women; he’d never sleep. Sleepless, he would grow short-tempered; short-tempered, he’d say something wrong to Zeke and make an enemy. The coarse food would upset his stomach and dyspepsia would upset his brain; what if he forgot how to think? His hands would be cold, they were always cold; he’d slice a specimen or stab himself. His joints would ache, his back would hurt, they’d run out of coffee, on which he relied; a storm would snap the masts in half, a whale would ram the ship. They’d get lost, they’d find nothing, they’d fail.

Giving up on sleep, he lit a candle and reached for his journal. On his earlier voyage this had been his constant, sometimes sole, companion, but tonight it let him down. Pen, inkpot, words on white paper; an inkstain on his thumb. He couldn’t convey clearly the scene at the wharf. He gazed at his first messy attempt and then added:

Why is it so difficult simply to capture what was there? That old problem of trying to show things both sequentially, and simultaneously. If I drew that scene I’d show everything happening all at once, everyone present and every place visible, from the bottom of the river to the clouds. But when I describe it in words one thing follows another and everything’s shaped by my single pair of eyes, my single voice. I wish I could show it as if through a fan of eyes. Widening out from my single perspective to several viewpoints, then many, so the whole picture might appear and not just my version of it. As if I weren’t there. The river as the fish saw it, the ship as it looked to the men, Zeke as he looked to young Ned Kynd, the Toxies as they appeared to Captain Tyler: all those things, at once. So someone else might experience those hours for himself.

Irritated, he put down his pen. Even here, he thought, even in these pages meant only for his own eyes, he wasn’t honest. He’d left out the first mate’s self-important strut; the appalling sight of his own hands, which amid the onions had suddenly looked just like his father’s; and the sense that they were all posturing in front of each other, perhaps for the benefit of the green-coated boys. He rubbed at the stain on his thumb. Nor was it true, or not wholly true, that he wanted to paint the scene as if he weren’t in it. He did want his own point of view to count, even as he also wanted to be invisible. Such a liar, he thought. Although chiefly he lied to himself. He’d wrapped himself in a cloud. Beyond it the world pulsed and streamed but he was cut off; people loved and sorrowed without him. When had that cloud arrived?

STILL THEY WEREN’T ready to leave. Captain Tyler banished Zeke and Erasmus the next afternoon, while the men tore out and then rebuilt the bulkheads in the hold. The sledges hadn’t fit after all, in any configuration; the wood took more space than planned and the measurements on Zeke’s sketch had turned out to be wrong. A clock ticked in Erasmus’s chest: two days, two days, two days. They could leave no later, they were already late, the season for arctic navigation was short and the newspaper reporters and expedition’s donors were ready to send them off on Thursday. Did he have enough socks? The right charts, enough pencils?

He was wild with anxiety and stuck here at home, with Zeke and Lavinia and her friend Alexandra Copeland. They were in the front parlor, all four of them working. Maps and charts and drawings spread everywhere. Without explanation he rose and ran to the Repository, which he ransacked in search of Scoresby’s work on the polar ice.

He rolled the ladder along the shelves; the book was gone, yet he couldn’t remember packing it. And couldn’t bear the thought of explaining why it had suddenly seemed so crucial. The wry face Alexandra had made as he bolted embarrassed him. Yet her presence had been his idea—Lavinia couldn’t stay alone, with only the servants for company, and she hadn’t wanted to join Linnaeus or Humboldt. “A companion,” he’d proposed. “Who’d like to share our home, in return for room and board and a modest payment.”

Lavinia had chosen Alexandra, who’d accepted a pair of rooms on the second floor. When Linnaeus and Humboldt, unexpectedly generous, offered work hand-coloring the engravings they were printing for an entomology book, Alexandra had accepted that as well and made herself at home. Now there was no escaping her; sometimes she even followed him into the Repository. But she was good for Lavinia, he reminded himself. The way she pulled Lavinia into her work was wonderful. He took a breath and headed back.

At the parlor doorway he paused to watch his sister, who was frowning with concentration and shifting her gaze from the original painting pinned above her desk to the engraved copy she was coloring with Alexandra’s help. Caught up, he thought, as she’d never been helping him with his seeds. The plates showed four tropical beetles. The sun lit the brushes, the water jars, and the ruffled pinafores so dabbed with gold and rust and blue that the beetles seemed to have leapt from the plates to the women’s legs. “Has anyone seen my copy of Scoresby?” he asked.

“I’ve been reading it upstairs,” Alexandra said. She touched her brush to the paper, leaving three tiny golden dots. “I didn’t know you needed it.”

Erasmus, admitting his foolishness, said, “It’s not as if I have room for one more thing.”

“I’ll get it.” As Alexandra put down her brush and moved away, Lavinia called for tea and leaned over the table on which Erasmus and Zeke had spread their papers: rather too close to Zeke’s shoulder, Erasmus thought. As if she were pulled by the fragrance of Zeke’s skin; as if she did not have the sense to resist the almost farcical beauty that made women stare at Zeke on the street and men hum with envy. It pained him to watch her betrayed by her body’s yearnings. To him she was lovely, with her wide hazel eyes and rounded chin, now charmingly smudged with blue. Yet he suspected that to the gaze of others—perhaps even Zeke—she was merely pleasant-looking. She seemed to know that herself, as she knew that among her monthly meetings of earnest young women, gathered to discuss Goethe and Swedenborg and Fourier, she was valued more for her sensibility than for her brilliance. One by one those women had married and disappeared from the meetings, leaving behind only Alexandra and her. Once, when he’d been voicing his concerns about Zeke, she’d said, “I know I love him more than he loves me. It doesn’t bother me.” Then had flushed so darkly he’d wanted to pick her up and pace her around the floor, as he’d done when she was an infant and needed comforting.

As Lavinia traced their planned route with her index finger, past Devon and Cornwallis and Beechey Island, where Franklin’s winter camp had been found, then south along Boothia Peninsula and King William Land, Erasmus thought how maps showed only two things, land and water. To someone who hadn’t traveled, their journey over that arctic map might seem a simple thing. Turn left, turn right, go north or south, steer by this headland or that bay. He and Zeke, who’d pored over their predecessors’ accounts, knew otherwise. Ice, both fluid and solid, appeared and disappeared with consistent inconsistency; one year an inlet might be open, the next walled shut. Lavinia, unaware of this, traced the route backward and said with satisfaction, “It’s not so very far. You’ll be home before October.”