Killigrew and the North-West Passage Read online

  Killigrew and the North-West Passage

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  The Killigrew Novels

  Copyright

  Killigrew and the North-West Passage

  Jonathan Lunn

  For Jack Rosenthal

  Epigraph

  …In a state of nature, and in places little visited by mankind, they are of dreadful ferocity. In Spitzbergen, and the other places annually frequented by the human race, they dread its power, having experienced its superiority, and shun the conflict: yet even in those countries prove tremendous enemies, if attacked or provoked.

  Barentz, in his voyages in search of a north-east passage to China, had fatal proofs of their rage and intrepidity on the island of Nova Zembla: his seamen were frequently attacked, and some of them killed. Those whom they seized on they took in their mouths, ran away with the utmost ease, tore to pieces, and devoured at their leisure, even in sight of the surviving comrades. One of these animals was shot preying on the mangled corpse, yet would not quit its hold; but continued staggering away with the body in its mouth, till dispatched with many wounds.

  They will attack, and attempt to board, armed vessels far distant from shore; and have been with great difficulty repelled. They seem to give a preference to human blood; and will greedily disinter the graves of the buried, to devour the cadaverous contents…

  Thomas Pennant, Arctic Zoology, 1784

  Chapter 1

  The Wreck of the Carl Gustaf

  The English whalers called Melville Bay the ‘Breaking-up Yard’.

  Four sounds discharged floating ice into the north end of Baffin Bay: Lancaster Sound, Whale Sound, and Smith and Jones Sounds. When the ice met the contrary winds and currents at the centre of the bay, it collected to form the Middle Pack: a field of ice nearly 150 miles across, made up of thousands of floes all jammed together. Constantly in motion, the vast mass circled in a counter-clockwise direction, and where it met the Greenland coast at Melville Bay it ground against the shore ice like a gargantuan millstone.

  Each year whaling ships from Europe tried to pass through this maelstrom of ice to gain access to the open, whale-rich ‘North Water’ of Baffin Bay. Sometimes the pack, blown away from the Greenland coast by offshore winds, opened up to reveal a lead through which the ships could sail. But the ice was nothing if not capricious, and could close again just as easily. More than 200 whaling ships had been wrecked there in the past thirty years.

  On Thursday, 17 June 1852, the name of the whaling ship Carl Gustaf was added to this toll of destruction.

  Of 310 tons burden, the Carl Gustaf was a three-masted barque, measuring a little less than 100 feet from stem to stern. She had departed from Hamburg nine weeks earlier, sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to Cape Farewell at the southern extremity of Greenland. Her master, Kapitän Wolfgang Weiss, was a seasoned Arctic hand, having sailed into the North Water every season since 1820. He had been captain on his last fifteen voyages, and was considered remarkable amongst the whaling fraternity in that he had never lost a ship.

  The old Arctic hands working on deck doffed their caps as a mark of respect as the ship passed the Devil’s Thumb: a peculiar, sheer-sided pinnacle of rock that jutted up on the Greenland coast. But such superstitious gestures would not be enough to save them.

  The summer sun – shining twenty-four hours a day in those latitudes – worked upon the vast, pristine glaciers that snaked their way down from the mountainous, granite-faced plateau of Greenland, calving off huge chunks of ice to form icebergs. Sometimes these would break off the top of the glaciers to plunge into the cobalt-blue waters with an immense splash, sending up fountains of water that drenched the men working on the Carl Gustaf’s rolling deck, freezing at once to form icy cuirasses about their torsos. The men were employed constantly, struggling to bend sails frozen stiff or to work running rigging that had become as hard as iron, or simply trying to keep the ship’s upper works free of the build-up of ice, to stop her from becoming top-heavy and capsizing.

  Out of her crew of forty-eight, only sixteen survived the initial sinking, an appalling mortality that can only be accounted for by the rapidity with which the disaster occurred. The wind, blowing offshore, did not back or veer, so the only explanation for the movement of the pack was some unseen ocean current that drove it against the shore. If the lookout in the crow’s nest cried a warning, none of the survivors remembered hearing it afterwards; the lookout may have dozed off, but since he was one of the first to die the truth will never be known. Indeed, so much confidence did the crew have in their captain’s ability to see them through the ice that half of them were below, asleep in their hammocks in the forecastle, when the first cry of warning came from Bjørn Sørensen, the chief harpooner.

  Born thirty-six years earlier on the Danish island of Rømø – famous for its whalers – Sørensen was as much a legend amongst the whaling fraternity as Weiss was himself. Six foot two in his stocking feet, he had broad shoulders, tattooed arms, blond hair and a shaggy beard that reminded his shipmates of his Viking forebears. Normally a gentle giant, put him in a barroom brawl on the Hamburg waterfront and he exploded with berserker fury, but he was never more alive than when he stood in the bows of a whaleboat, bearing down on his quarry with a harpoon in one hand.

  ‘The ice!’

  Kapitän Weiss had been on the quarterdeck, conferring with his first mate, Niklaus Jantzen, when he was alerted by Sørensen’s cry. He looked up and saw that the pack, which had been a cable’s length to larboard a minute ago, had already halved that distance and was closing rapidly with the Carl Gustaf.

  ‘All hands on deck!’

  ‘All hands on deck!’ Sørensen repeated the captain’s order in a roar, clanging the ship’s bell frantically. ‘Tumble up!’

  In these waters, the men did not need to be told to sleep in their clothes. Even if it had not been for the cold, the constant fear of a disaster like this would have been enough for them to take that basic precaution. Even so, they may not have realised the immediacy of the impending disaster, and many paused to put on their boots before ascending the companion ladder. The third man to emerge was still climbing up through the fore hatch when the ice pack slammed into the Carl Gustaf’s port side.

  A terrific shudder ran through the ship. The men of the watch above – including several topmen working in the rigging – were thrown to the deck. One of the men climbing the companion ladder to the fore hatch lost his footing and was hurled down on to the men behind him. The Carl Gustaf’s hull, reinforced with triple layering against shocks such as this, withstood the initial onslaught.

  But the pack kept on coming.

  The Carl Gustaf was being pushed sideways through the water now, heeled over at thirty degrees to port. The men on deck st
ruggled to their feet, fighting to keep their balance on the slippery, canting deck. Some of them scrambled over the gunwale and jumped for the relative safety of the ice at once; others, only slightly more cool-headed, scrabbled for their kitbags first. Some grabbed the first kitbag that came to hand; others wasted precious seconds making sure that they got their own belongings. Two men even squabbled over a kitbag that each was convinced was his own.

  As soon as the Carl Gustaf had rounded Cape Farewell at the southern extremity of Greenland, Weiss had ordered his crew to keep a spare kitbag with a change of clothes stowed on deck: a standard practice on board Arctic whalers, in case the ship was ‘nipped’ by the floes and the men had to jump on to the ice. The Carl Gustaf’s six whaleboats were already hoisted in their davits, each loaded with an emergency medicine chest and enough food to keep eight men alive for two weeks. The whaler was by no means the only ship trying to reach the Northern Water that summer, and two weeks should have been more than enough time for the men to reach the safety of another vessel.

  ‘Wait for it!’ roared Weiss, who knew that jumping on to the ice prematurely was even more dangerous than lingering on the doomed ship. He had taught them this in the many drills they had performed during the voyage up the west coast of Greenland, but in their panic the raw hands forgot his warnings.

  Weiss knew instinctively that the ship was doomed, and he had a more pressing concern than the welfare of his men: his wife. Like the wives of many skippers on the Greenland fishery, she accompanied her husband on his voyages into the Arctic.

  Ursula Weiss would have had to be deaf not to hear Sørensen’s warning and the ringing of the bell. Twenty years younger than her husband, she had been married to him for nine years, and this was the ninth time she had accompanied him on one of his voyages, so she knew better than to delay. She jumped out of the bunk and hurried to pull a fox-skin jumper over the shirt she had been wearing in bed, made from the down of hundreds of auks. She had plenty of European clothes, but when venturing on the ice she preferred a full suit of Inuit apparel she had purchased from one of the natives at Lievely harbour, their clothes being warmer and more hard-wearing than anything manufactured by Europeans.

  Kapitän Weiss was crossing the great cabin aft when the Carl Gustaf was thrust against the shore ice to starboard. A second shudder ran through the deck, and this time the ship heeled violently to starboard, almost thrown on her beam-ends. In the stateroom, Frau Weiss was hurled back across the bunk, bumping her head badly on the bulkhead. The heavy wooden bureau at which Weiss did his paperwork was thrown across the great cabin, smashing into his back, slamming him against the side and crushing him instantly.

  The ice did not hesitate, but sliced through the ship’s hull from both sides to meet amidships below decks. Many of the men fighting to clamber out of the forecastle must have been crushed before they had a chance to be frozen by the icy water that now gushed in through the breaches in the hull.

  The foremast was smashed at its base and its forestays, frozen brittle, snapped under the impact. The mast toppled, bouncing against the rigging that supported the mainmast. The crow’s nest broke free from the foretop and splintered against the upper deck, killing the lookout instantly. Then the foremast came down a second time, slicing through the rigging and landing across many of the men who crowded the port bulwark. Their screams were drowned out by the crunching of the ship’s timbers and the awful screeching of the grinding ice.

  As the pack ice met the shore ice, the floe on to which many of the crew had already jumped snapped under the immense pressure of the pack behind it with a crack like a peal of thunder. Two chunks of the floe rose up out of the water in an inverted V, the men on the ice sliding down it into the closing gap between the floe and the ship. Some fell into the water and drowned as the sub-zero temperature of the water paralysed them with cramp; others were crushed against the ship’s side. Then the split floe fell across the upper deck, knocking down the mainmast, which in turn dragged the mizzen-mast after it. The screams and groans of terribly injured men mingled with the sound of water rushing into the hold.

  Committing himself to divine providence, Third Mate Dietrich Ziegler made his way to the great cabin and knocked on the door of the captain’s stateroom. There was no reply: for all he knew, Frau Weiss had already left the ship. But he had to be sure. He kicked the door in, and found her sprawled unconscious across the bunk.

  There was no time to fetch some hartshorn to try to revive her, even if it was possible to reach the sick-berth in the stricken ship: for now, the only thing that stopped the Carl Gustaf from sinking was the ice that impaled her sides. Ziegler slapped the captain’s wife into consciousness. She recovered quickly, realising without a word from him that they needed to get off the ship fast. She pulled a pair of bearskin breeches over her Turkish pantaloons – a new garment, popularised by Mrs Bloomer – worn more because of their practicality than as a conscious statement of any belief in women’s rights.

  Ziegler looked away, embarrassed at the sight of her undergarments. ‘Come on!’

  She pulled a hooded sealskin jacket over her head and followed him out of the stateroom. But she came to a dead halt when she saw the corpse of her husband, crushed against the bulkhead by the bureau.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do for him,’ Ziegler told her. He was twenty-seven, the same age as she, and had served as an officer on many merchant ships plying between Hamburg and London. But this was his first voyage on board a whaler and his experiences so far had made him doubt he was cut out for the life of a ‘spouter’.

  Frau Weiss allowed Ziegler to drag her from the great cabin and the two of them made their way to the companion ladder, but they could not raise the after hatch: it was pinned down from above by wreckage. Seeking to escape via the main hatch, they opened a door leading forward to find themselves face to face with a solid wall of ice.

  Feeling panic rise within him, Ziegler led the way back to the great cabin. The mizzen-mast had fallen across the skylight above, and the carpet below was covered with shards of glass, but there was a chance he could smash away enough of the remaining frame for the two of them to climb up on deck. They were moving the table to the centre of the cabin when they heard a tapping on the window that looked out astern, and saw the end of a boat-hook.

  Ziegler ran to the window and saw Sørensen below them, in one of the whaleboats with half a dozen other men. He could have kissed the harpooner, but given that Sørensen was not inclined to such displays of emotion, even under circumstances such as this, it was probably just as well that the glass was between them.

  There was no chance of simply opening the window: it had been sealed with oakum to keep out the cold and the water. ‘Get back!’ shouted Ziegler. ‘I’m going to smash the glass!’

  Sørensen nodded and ordered his crew to back water. The third mate did not wait for them to get clear, snatching up a chair and smashing at the glass with the legs. The first blow shattered the panes, but it took five more to knock out the leading. He swept the legs around the frame to knock out the remaining shards, and then Sørensen and his men brought the boat back in closer so that Ziegler could lower Frau Weiss to them. Sørensen caught her, and once she was safely in the boat the third mate lowered himself from the window. The glass sliced through his mittens and lacerated the fingers within, but that was the least of his concerns. Two more of the men in the boat caught him and lowered him gently to the bottom boards.

  ‘The captain?’ asked Sørensen.

  Ziegler shook his head. ‘He’s with God now.’

  Jakob Kracht laughed. The Carl Gustaf’s blacksmith, he was a brawny fellow who could repair anything from a twisted whaling iron to a cooking stove. ‘With God! I don’t share your certainty in an afterlife, Herr Ziegler; but if there is a heaven, I very much doubt that old bastard has gone to it.’

  The third mate scowled and flicked his eyes to where Ursula sat in the stern sheets, but she had a dazed expression on her face and had
not apparently heard Kracht denigrate her husband.

  Sørensen ordered his crew to row away from the ship. Even as they got clear, the ice started to part again and the wrecked whaler, pulled free of the projecting shelf of shore ice that had skewered her, began to sink.

  They rowed to one of the larger floes, now the pack was quiescent, and saw another six men from the Carl Gustaf picking their way across the ice to rendezvous with them, two of them carrying a third between them, while a fourth limped and was forced to lean against a companion for support. With the help of the boat’s crew, Ziegler and Sørensen dragged the boat up on to the ice, and turned to greet the other survivors. Ziegler was pleased to recognise the second mate, Konrad Liebnitz, among them – it meant that responsibility for these men no longer rested on his shoulders alone – and Dr Bähr, carrying his rifle slung from one shoulder. In his early fifties, Bähr was a tall, lean man with a balding head, spiky eyebrows, liver-spotted hands and a scrawny neck that had earned him the nickname ‘das Geier’ amongst the hands: ‘the Vulture’.

  ‘The captain?’ Liebnitz asked Ziegler.

  ‘Didn’t make it. Jantzen?’

  ‘The same.’ Liebnitz was silent while he contemplated their situation. ‘All right, let’s get organised,’ he said at last, and gestured to where several barrels floated on the water where the Carl Gustaf had gone down. Dozens of large tuns, freed from the whaler’s hold, floated high on the water: the empty tuns in which they had hoped to transport the oil from any whales they had caught. Others, almost submerged, might carry victuals from the ship’s stores. ‘Sørensen, take the boat and see what you can salvage.’

  ‘First things first,’ said Bähr. ‘We must light a fire before we freeze to death. We’ve got four injured men here. They need to be kept warm—’

  ‘Light a fire?’ Liebnitz seemed amused. ‘With what, Herr Doktor?’

  Bähr looked abashed. Liebnitz clapped him on the back. ‘Never fear, Herr Doktor. Sørensen will get you your firewood.’ He noticed the rifle slung from Bähr’s shoulder. ‘I see you brought your shooting stick. Did you think to salvage your medicine chest from the sick-berth?’