Killigrew and the North-West Passage Read online

Ohlsen just shook his head and stared down into the water a couple of feet below them.

  ‘Now what do we do?’ asked Ursula. ‘We’ll freeze if we don’t get out of these wet clothes soon.’

  ‘We’ll have to head back to where we left the others,’ said Kracht.

  ‘Go back!’ protested Eisenhart. ‘It’s almost thirty miles!’

  ‘It’s more than a hundred and seventy to Upernavik,’ the blacksmith pointed out. ‘Would you rather head south?’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Ursula. ‘It’s our only chance.’

  ‘We’ll freeze to death before we even get halfway!’

  ‘We’ll freeze to death sooner if we sit here and do nothing.’ Kracht stood up and looked about for a way off the narrow ledge, but the wall of ice was sheer above them.

  ‘We’re not even on the right side of the lead!’

  ‘We’ll have to swim for it, anyhow,’ said Kracht. ‘There’s no other way off this ledge.’

  ‘Swim!’ Ohlsen gazed mournfully across to the floating pack ice on the other side of the lead, at least a quarter of a mile away. ‘We’ll never make it.’

  ‘We’ve got to do something,’ said Eisenhart. ‘We can’t just sit here!’

  ‘The lad’s right,’ said Kracht. ‘Trying to swim that far in these temperatures is certain death.’

  ‘And sitting here in sopping wet clothes isn’t?’

  ‘Perhaps another ship will come by,’ suggested Ohlsen.

  ‘Perhaps,’ agreed Eisenhart. ‘But I wouldn’t count on it.’

  ‘Maybe we don’t have to swim all the way across to the pack.’ Kracht leaned out from the ledge, trying to spy a place where they could climb up further along the foot of the cliff. ‘Perhaps we can—’

  A judder ran through the ledge. The four of them exchanged glances. ‘What the hell was that?’ asked Ohlsen. ‘Don’t tell me this part of the cliff is about to fall away again – with us on it!’

  ‘No fear of that,’ said Eisenhart.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because we’re not on the cliffs, my lad. We’re on an iceberg. When the cliffs fell on our boat? An iceberg, calving away from the glacier.’ The four of them stared at one another in horror. Kracht swore. Another judder ran through the berg. ‘That’s the bottom of the berg scraping across the sea floor,’ explained Eisenhart.

  ‘So we’re stranded?’

  ‘It could be worse.’ Eisenhart took out his tobacco pouch and pipe, realised the tobacco was soaked through and hurled the pouch into the water below with a sigh. He gestured with his pipe across to where the Middle Pack seemed to drift past them. ‘I reckon the current’s taking us north at… what? A quarter of a knot? Half a knot? Sooner or later it’ll take us back to where we left the others.’

  ‘Later rather than sooner,’ said Kracht. ‘Even if we’re travelling at half a knot, it’ll be sixty hours before we reach the others. We’ll be dead in sixty minutes, if we don’t find some shelter and get out of these clothes—’

  Another shudder ran through the iceberg, and then the whole world seemed to spin around them. Ursula felt herself lifted up with a sickening lurch, spray hissing from the icy crags and dripping into the water that plunged away vertiginously beneath them. She clutched at the ice instinctively, bracing herself in the angle of the ledge as the wall behind her became the ground, and then started to tilt in the opposite direction. Kracht and Ohlsen slithered across the ice, dropping out of sight. Ursula and Eisenhart heard a scream, fading away into a distant splash as someone plunged into the icy seas on the other side. Then the iceberg swung back, swaying gently to and fro on the ocean swell as it found a new equilibrium.

  Ursula hardly dared move. She knew it was ridiculous to suppose that any motion on her part might upset the balance of an iceberg of several million tons’ mass, yet she had seen enough bergs roll and capsize in the water to understand how precarious their position was. The next roll might so easily plunge her and Eisenhart to the sea floor.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Eisenhart asked her.

  She nodded, too breathless to speak.

  He eased himself gingerly into a sitting position. ‘I think we’re safe for now.’

  Ursula laughed weakly.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘We’re stranded on a drifting iceberg, a hundred and seventy-five miles from civilisation, slowly freezing to death, and you say we’re safe for now?’

  ‘Massage your fingers and wriggle your toes in your boots,’ he told her. ‘Got to keep frostbite at bay.’ He stood up and looked around. Now they were on top of the iceberg, they could see the Greenland coast to the east, already a few hundred yards away. It was at least sixty feet from where they crouched close to the peak of the berg to the water far below, but even so, the granite cliffs seemed to tower over them.

  ‘We have to find a way down to the water,’ said Eisenhart. ‘Now we’ve got to swim for it: the pack or the shore, there’s not much in it. At least the pack is smooth; we’ll be hard-pressed to find a way up those cliffs…’

  ‘You couldn’t give me a hand first, could you?’ asked Kracht, his voice strained as he tried to pull himself up the frictionless ice to join Eisenhart and Ursula on the ledge beneath the peak.

  ‘Jakob!’ exclaimed Eisenhart. ‘I thought we’d lost you.’

  Kracht’s head dropped out of sight as he lost his footing, but his gloved hands remained in view where they gripped the ledge. ‘There’s time yet!’

  Eisenhart pulled him up. ‘Ib?’

  Kracht shook his head. ‘I didn’t see what happened to him. Must’ve gone straight under.’

  The iceberg was out of shoal water now, no longer scraping its bottom on the sea bed but floating freely. The three of them explored the narrow space on the top of the berg tentatively, searching for a way down. The sides of the berg were not sheer, but so steep that they might as well have been. ‘That’s it, then,’ Kracht said glumly. ‘We’re trapped up here.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Eisenhart. He edged across to where the sides of the berg were steepest, almost a straight drop into the water below. ‘I think we could dive from here.’

  ‘Dive!’ spluttered Kracht. ‘Are you crazy? It’s got to be a hundred feet!’

  ‘Nearer sixty, I’d say.’

  ‘There could be a projecting ledge just under the water; you’ll break your neck! And even if there isn’t, you’ll freeze to death before you get halfway to the pack ice.’

  ‘We’ll freeze to death anyhow if we don’t do something.’ Eisenhart sighed. ‘Look, I’ll admit it’s not much of a choice. If you don’t think you can make it, wait here. I’ll make my way across the pack ice to where we left the others. Perhaps we can salvage another boat, bring some dry clothes for you, something to make a fire with.’

  Kracht clasped him by the hand. ‘I don’t know if you’re the bravest man I ever met or just the biggest fool, but… well, good luck.’

  ‘Just try to stay alive until I get back.’ Without another word, Eisenhart took a ran up and dived over the precipice. It was a perfectly executed dive and he cleaved the water like a knife, a trail of bubbles rising in his wake.

  Ursula and Kracht watched and waited, but Eisenhart did not resurface.

  Kracht swore. Ursula buried her face in her hands. The blacksmith sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulders. He tried to draw her close to him, but she shied away.

  ‘Forgive the familiarity, Frau Weiss, but it’s the only way to keep warm. I’ve got a wife waiting for me back in Hamburg, and I happen to love her very much.’

  She grudgingly accepted his embrace. ‘You do not care for me much, do you, Kracht?’

  ‘That’s neither here nor there now,’ he replied evasively.

  ‘We’re going to die here, aren’t we?’

  ‘Let’s hang on to life just that little bit longer, shall we? You never know your luck. Maybe lb was right: perhaps another ship will come by. What’s the date today?’


  ‘Thursday… no, Friday. The eighteenth.’

  ‘Then by now I’ve probably got a child waiting for me at home, as well as a wife. And I intend to hold that baby boy in my arms before I die.’

  Ursula managed a smile. ‘What makes you think it’s a boy?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a boy, all right! Gerda will have some explaining to do if it isn’t. Are you a religious woman, Frau Weiss?’

  ‘I suppose so. You?’

  ‘Never been a devout churchgoer. But right now I’d become a Mohammedan, if Allah stood a better chance of getting us out of this pickle than God!’

  ‘Whatever God we pray to, we’d better pray for a miracle.’

  ‘Allahu akbar!’ breathed Kracht. Ursula looked up at his face, and saw he was staring off towards the cliffs of the coast. ‘Look!’

  She followed his gaze, and saw eight figures dragging a sledge across the top of another glacier that entered the sea up ahead of them. ‘Who can they be?’ she asked. ‘Esquimaux?’

  ‘They can be damned Chinamen for all I care, as long as they get me off this damned iceberg and into some warm, dry clothes.’ Kracht leaped to his feet and started waving his arms over his head. ‘Hey! Over here! Help! Help!’

  But Ursula knew it was hopeless. ‘Even if they do see us, what good can it do? There’s no way they can reach us.’

  ‘Maybe they’ve got kayaks nearby.’

  ‘Even if they have, how can that help? There’s still no way down to the water’s edge.’

  ‘Perhaps they can get help…’ Even as he spoke, Kracht must have realised how ridiculous his words were. But he refused to relinquish his grip on the slender thread of hope presented by the distant figures. ‘Damn it! There must be something they can do.’

  The men on top of the glacier had seen them now, and had stopped dragging the sledge to stand and stare, sizing up the situation. Kracht’s face crumpled as he realised the truth of Ursula’s warning: even if these men were willing to help, there was simply nothing they could do.

  Then the tallest of the figures was galvanised into action. He must have been their leader, for when he turned to address his fellows it was obvious from his gestures he was giving orders. They were obeyed promptly too. One man took some things from the sledge and started to sprint as fast as he dared across the ice, towards the precipice where the far edge of the glacier’s face overhung the water, jutting out like the prow of a massive ship. Even as the man moved, the leader was giving orders to the remaining six men, who started to pull equipment from the sledge.

  ‘It looks like they’re doing something,’ said Kracht.

  ‘But what?’

  The man who had broken away from the group had reached the precipice now and crouched down, attacking the ice with a Norwegian axe. Ursula saw that one of the things he had taken from the sledge was a coil of rope, and realised that the iceberg’s path was going to take them to within a few yards of where the prow of the glacier jutted out over the sea.

  ‘They’re going to try to lower a rope to us!’ Kracht exclaimed excitedly.

  Six of the men were now dragging the sledge across the ice at the double, heading away for the far side of the glacier, while the leader hurried to join the first man at the precipice. As the ocean current carried the berg on its ponderous way towards the overhang, Ursula and Kracht were close enough to see that these men did not wear Esquimaux clothes, but European apparel, adapted for the Arctic: box-cloth jackets, sealskin caps and boots, mittens and comforters. The leader carried a shotgun slung across his back.

  ‘Who are they?’ wondered Ursula.

  ‘Angels,’ asserted Kracht. ‘Angels sent from heaven!’

  The two men at the precipice fixed an ice-anchor, S-shaped like a butcher’s hook, in the ice, and rove one end of the rope to it. They lowered the other end of the rope over the ice-cliff, and Ursula and Kracht moved to the opposite side of the narrow space on top of the berg so they would be closer to it.

  ‘When we pass under that rope, you grab it and pull yourself up,’ Kracht told Ursula. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  They both knew that the rope would not be secure enough to take the weight of both, and as slowly as the iceberg drifted, there would not be time for each to climb up separately. ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘You’ve got a wife and a child waiting for you back in Hamburg. Now that Wolfgang is dead, I have no one.’

  ‘Ladies first,’ insisted Kracht, and grinned. ‘Besides, you never—’ He broke off as another judder passed through the berg, and the smile was frozen on his face. The berg spun slowly in the water, moving away from the precipice: only a few yards, but far enough to make it clear they would never be able to reach the dangling rope. ‘Oh, God in heaven!’ moaned the blacksmith, realising that their last chance of survival was about to be snatched away from them.

  On top of the precipice – now almost immediately overhead – the leader of the strangers pulled in the rope and retreated out of sight. The berg drifted past the overhang, only a few yards too far away. Kracht sank to his knees on the ice, sobbing.

  On the other side of the precipice, Ursula looked up and saw the leader running along the side of the overhang, away from the iceberg, the rope – still secured at one end to the ice-anchor – wrapped tightly around his leather-gauntleted fists, a Norwegian ice-axe dangling by its thong from one wrist.

  When there was no more slack left on the rope, he turned and, without even hesitating, launched himself off the edge.

  He swung low beneath the precipice, swooping around in a great arc, the skirts of his mackintosh greatcoat flapping. Ursula’s heart was in her mouth as he swept over the iceberg. He released the rope, flying free to plummet the last few feet on to the top of the berg, about a dozen yards from where she stood next to Kracht. He smacked against the iron-hard ice with a sickening thud that made her wince, and lay still, spread-eagled. At first Ursula thought he was dead, but then he began to slither down the cambered ice towards the edge and was galvanised into life. He gripped his ice-axe and swung it against the ice, halting his slide even as his long legs shot out over the precipice from which Eisenhart had plunged to his death only minutes earlier.

  The man managed to get a grip on an outcrop of ice with his left hand, and swung the ice-axe again. It bounced off; a second swing gave him firmer purchase. But his feet scrabbled uselessly against the ice below and he was unable to pull himself up.

  Heedless of her own safety, Ursula hurried across the top of the berg to where he dangled. She seized him by the arm and tried to drag him up. Then Kracht was beside her, and the two of them managed to drag the stranger up to safety. He lay on his back, condensation billowing from his mouth as he clutched his arms about his ribs, evidently winded and in considerable pain. He wore a pair of wire-mesh snow-goggles over his bronzed, wedge-shaped face, like a couple of tea-strainers strapped over his eyes.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Ursula asked him furiously. ‘You almost got yourself killed!’

  ‘I don’t suppose you speak English, do you?’ the stranger asked in that language, and managed a grin as he pulled his goggles down around his neck, revealing a pair of warm brown eyes with a hint of mischief in them. ‘I’m afraid I don’t speak German. The name’s Killigrew, by the way. Lieutenant Kit Killigrew, of Her Majesty’s navy, at your service.’

  Chapter 2

  The Venturer

  ‘I’m Frau Weiss,’ the woman responded, too stunned by Killigrew’s sang-froid to do anything but introduce herself in turn. ‘This is Herr Kracht.’

  ‘A foolhardy thing you did just now,’ said Kracht, who spoke English as well as Frau Weiss, if with a heavier accent. ‘And while I wouldn’t want you to think me ungrateful, I hardly see how it helps. Now there are three of us trapped on this iceberg, instead of just two.’ He nodded to where the overhang of the glacier from which Killigrew had swung was swiftly falling astern as the current carried them northwards.

  Killigrew sat up with a wince, and unlooped the coil
of rope he had slung from one shoulder, laid it carefully on the ice so there was no danger of it slipping from the iceberg, and took an ice-anchor from his belt and put it in the centre of the coil of rope along with his ice-axe. ‘Three of us,’ he said, ‘and one ice-anchor, one Norwegian axe, and a coil of rope.’

  He took off his greatcoat and handed it to Ursula, and then removed the frock-coat underneath it and passed it to Kracht. ‘Strip off those wet clothes and put those on, before you freeze to death,’ he told them, standing there in trousers of twilled cotton de Nîmes, a cable-knit Guernsey, woollen comforter, leather gauntlets and sealskin cap.

  ‘You want us to undress?’ protested Ursula, glancing across to where the seven men who had been left on the glacier were following the iceberg. They had cleared the sledge of all but a few objects, unidentifiable at that distance, and two of them were pulling it ahead at speed while the remaining five carried the rest of their equipment between them. ‘Out here in the open?’

  ‘I’m afraid the necessity of survival will have to overrule your modesty, Frau Weiss,’ said Killigrew, starting to explore the top of the iceberg. As cold as they would be wearing nothing but coats, better that than standing around in wet clothes that were already freezing on their bodies. ‘Besides, my men are too far away to see anything. You and Herr Kracht will just have to turn your backs to one another and get it over and done with as quickly as possible.’

  ‘What about you?’ asked Kracht.

  ‘I shan’t peep, I promise.’ Killigrew found the least steep part of the iceberg’s sides and crouched over it to study it more closely.

  ‘I mean, are you not cold?’

  ‘I’ll be fine. At least I’m dry. And working will keep me warm.’ He began to dig a hole in the ice with a succession of blows from his ice-axe, in which to secure the ice-anchor. ‘I suppose you’re whalers?’ he asked, working with his back to Kracht and Ursula as they stripped off their sodden clothes, the fabric crackling as pieces of ice broke off.

  ‘Yes. Our ship was crushed in the ice. Eight of us set out in a boat for Upernavik, but we were sunk by this iceberg when it calved off the glacier. Kracht and I were the only ones to survive.’