Kings of the Sea Read online

  Kings of the Sea

  Joan Van Every Frost

  © Joan Van Every Frost 1982

  Joan Van Every Frost has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1982 by Ballantine Books.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  Gideon: 1829-1830

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Emily: 1830-1834

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Elisabeth: 1832-1839

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Afterword: 1840

  PART TWO

  Christian: 1852-1864

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Katharine: 1870-1872

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  PART THREE

  David: 1898-1901

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Janice: 1899-1902

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  PART ONE

  Gideon

  1829-1830

  Chapter I

  “Thirty-Six!”

  For the first fifteen strokes, the man had bucked hard against his bonds, though not a sound escaped him, but now even his cries had ceased and he hung seemingly unconscious, his faded britches soaked with blood.

  “That will do, bosun.”

  The captain clasped his hands behind him and rose up and down several times on his toes, just like one of those great lizards sunning himself on the raw timbers stacked at the shipyard, Gideon thought as he rinsed the cat in a bucket of water. Jesus, how he hated laying on like that, not that Lawson didn’t deserve it; but if he didn’t do it, someone else would who might lay on harder.

  “I trust this will be a lesson to all of you,” Captain Poulson said to the line of silent men drawn up to witness the punishment. “When Mr. Rawling or Mr. Stead or even Bosun Hand here tells you to do something, you do it. You don’t argue, you don’t delay, you don’t refuse, and you certainly don’t offer physical violence; you do it.” He paused, staring into each stony face. The silence lengthened, and Gideon could hear a staysail slatting against its ties as the hove-to ship swung its nose upwind a few points. The captain turned away then and took up his usual stance on the quarterdeck, his ancient frock coat flapping about his legs.

  Old Grommet Poulson as he was known, though he was only in his early thirties, was a hard man, as were all the captains who sailed the Horn — they had to be — but he was at least a fair one. There were captains who would have had Lawson hanged for what he had done, no matter what the provocation.

  “All right, all right, fall out, you lubbers!” Rawling yelled. “The watch back to your stations, and the rest of you about your business. Tewson, Roxbury, carry Lawson below and soak him in brine.”

  The first mate’s thin face, his nose like the blade of an ax, still bore the bruise put there by a panicked Lawson the night off South Trinidad Island they had run into the sleet storm and Rawling had ordered Lawson, among others, aloft to reef sail. Gideon and Tewson and Lake were already up there, the yard bucking like some great horse between their legs, a gale of ice trying to pry loose their numbed hands, and sickeningly far below them the double white roils of foam on either side of the ship standing out like bleached bones against the black water. Latour, pleasant old Raul Latour, with his rollicking mouth harp, his endless tales of the distant Canadian woods, and his smelly clay pipe, an old shipmate of Lawson’s, had plunged to his death only days before on a clear sunny afternoon. They tried to tell Lawson he must have had a seizure or a heart attack, but Lawson was hysterical. “He always said the Wendigo would come get him one day,” he sobbed. “It’s the Wendigo come to get us all.”

  “For God’s sake, Bobby,” Tewson had tried to reason with him, “that’s only a Canadian woodspook. Now was I up there Canada way, I’d damn sure have a care about what I did around all them trees, but Raul’d be the first to tell you that those forests are half a world away, more’s the pity.”

  In the end, Gideon had wheedled a dipper of rum out of Stead, the second mate, and that had calmed Lawson down, though he cried out in his sleep. For the next few days Lawson went about his tasks with the solemn distant air of listening to something the others couldn’t hear, but he did his duty until that night. As Gideon heard it later: “Markham, Fenner, Turbot, James, Lawson, get your tails aloft and make it snappy!”

  The others had swarmed up the ratlines, but Lawson stood there, his head cocked to one side, still listening to something.

  “Lawson! Dammit, man, move!” Rawling had snarled, giving him a push.

  Lawson turned a pale calm face to the angry mate. “I can’t go up there, Mr. Rawling, and you hadn’t ought t’ve sent the others. Can’t you hear it? The Wendigo is waiting up there. It’s hungry again for a soul, and it will take one, you wait and see.”

  Rawling said no more but rapped Lawson smartly across the back with a belaying pin and prodded him painfully toward the ratlines. With a cry, Lawson turned on his tormentor and flattened him with a single blow of his great calloused fist. It took six of them to subdue him and put him in irons to wait for the flogging. When they lost Markham that night — he missed his footing and couldn’t hang on long enough with his bloody hands for anyone to reach him — the crew turned as preoccupied and distant as Lawson had been.

  The ship beat its way on south, past the Falklands, and on into the maelstrom awaiting mariners foolhardy enough to try rounding the Horn. Grommet Poulson, for all his faults of petty conceit, was a good seaman and a brave one, and they ran to and fro, mostly all but bare-poled, waiting for the unfavorable western gales to drop and switch.

  The crew and officers of the Beryl Queen all suffered from chilblains, frostbite, and boils from the constant cold, exhaustion, salt water, and maggoty food. They staggered about as if in a bad dream, so tired they could hardly stand, furling or unfurling the stiff frozen canvas like old men doddering on the edge of senility, their beards white with rime, their lips as cracked and bloody as their hands. Mr. Stead went down with a fever that Gideon almost envied, thinking how grand it would be to feel warm for once and be allowed to stay on your back.

  “It’s the Wendigo again,” Lawson told them. “It’s hungry once more.” His back was nearly healed, though his hands were bleeding like those of the rest of them.

  “If sailors died of a chill, there’d be none of us left,” Tewson joked, his blond mane flopping over his forehead.

  Two days later Mr. Stead was sewn into a canvas shroud and consigned to the freezing black depths.

  Talking as he paced back and forth in his cabin, his hands clasped behind him, Captain Poulson halted occasionally to move up and down on his toes. He was not a tall man, coming as he did only to Gideon’s shoulder, but no one had ever had the effrontery to challenge him physically. His ancien
t green frock coat had gone shiny and almost black with age and grime. He had grown a dirty blond beard along with the rest of them to protect his face, and he looked more like a street beggar in New York than the captain of a Down Easter, certainly bearing no relation to the dapper figure resplendent in royal blue serge and snowy stock who had boarded the ship in Boston Harbor.

  Sea captains were the gods of their domains and gods ashore as well, and Gideon had long since determined that one day it would be he who stalked the quarterdeck, feared and respected by all. He saw himself all decked out in royal blue with Sally on his arm gazing up at him proudly as they strolled down Broad Street on their way to a carriage with matched chestnuts that would take them to their mansion with its vast expanse of manicured green lawn …

  “I’ve called you up here, bosun, to tell you that I’m making you acting second mate in Mr. Stead’s place. This is, I needn’t tell you, a brilliant opportunity for you. The Beryl Queen doesn’t carry a third mate, so if you make a good job of it, you’ll be in an enviable position to get your second’s papers. You’ve had plenty of experience in square-riggers, God knows. I’ve been watching you — you’ve got ambition and nerve, and one day you’ll make captain, see if you don’t. Damn, I almost envy you.” He rose on his toes. “I’m told you read and write.”

  “Yes sir”

  “Teach yourself?”

  “No sir. My father is a shipbuilder outside of Boston. My mother saw to it that I went to school, said it would help me when I took over the yard.”

  The captain sat down abruptly. “A shipyard, eh? Then what in the devil’s name are you doing on the ships?”

  Gideon took a long breath. “I want to be a captain, sir — like yourself.”

  “Do you now? Well, I told you you could, and I’m never wrong. How’s your navigation? Know anything about it?”

  “John Hussler, second on the Sarey Ann, was kind enough to start teaching me, sir, and I picked up more later. I can use a sextant and figure a course alongside of anyone. Sir.”

  “We’ll see, Mr. Hand. We’ll see. I like a man to speak up for himself, but see that it doesn’t give you airs. Take over Mr. Stead’s cabin, and mind you, no playing favorites with the crew.”

  “Hardly likely, sir, is it, when I’m the one has had to flog them.” His voice held a bitter edge.

  “That’s as may be, Mr. Hand. All right, what’s all this about an evil spirit? I don’t like superstitions getting started among the crew.”

  “Well, sir, I won’t be telling tales when I say it was Lawson started it when Latour fell off the mizzenmast. He keeps talking about the Wendigo, whatever that is, some north-woods spook Latour had told him about. I wouldn’t name Lawson, only there’s nothing you can do to him now; he’s loony as a hound dog at full moon. Even if you could shut him up, the crew has already swallowed it all. Mr. Stead’s dying put the cap on it, so to speak. They say this is a Jonah ship —”

  “A Jonah ship, is it? Don’t they know that the Beryl Queen holds the record for Boston to Frisco? Jonah ship be damned! We won’t equal the record this time, we’ve had to hang around too long down here, but we won’t show a shabby log this time, either.” The captain peered at him shrewdly. “You’ve been in the fo’c’sle — what would you do in my place?”

  “Ignore it,” Gideon said firmly. “If you admit you even know about it, they’ll think you believe it, too. Ignore it, and drive them even harder, and hope to Christ we don’t have to hang around very much longer in this godforsaken piece of ocean.”

  “By God, you’ll do at that!” Poulson exclaimed, grinning.

  That night in the small icy cubicle meant for second and third mates, Gideon reveled in the unaccustomed privacy. From the time Gideon could toddle, his father had taken him to the shipyard, and his earliest memories were of the smell of newly cut wood, the rough and yet tender yard hands who slipped him tidbits from their lunches, the sweet curves of a ship’s bare ribs rising against a snowy sky, the scent of the hot tallow they used to grease the ways for a launch and of the hot tar and oakum with which they caulked the seams.

  Not enough, all that, not nearly enough to make up for the driving of his father. Gideon never could do anything to suit him, the bitterness of not having a whole flock of sons forcing the father to demand more of the son than any boy could give.

  “Your hands, dammit, boy, your hands! You hold the adz that way and you’ll smash your fingers, see if you don’t.” The graying stranger who was his father would hold up both hands. “You see yon fingers? I’ve got all ten of them still because I’ve used the tools properly and paid attention to what I was doing. You won’t find one shipwright in twenty has still got all his fingers … No, no, no! Use the small gouge to start an auger hole, you ninny … If you can’t judge the warp of rib timbers any better than that, blockhead, you’ll never make anything bigger nor a dinghy and mayhap not even that …”

  At sixteen he ran away to sea, easy enough to do when the crimps were forever busy up and down the waterfront impressing ignorant and unwilling men for the ships by getting them drunk and carrying them out bodily by shore-boat. His first berth was a three-masted full-rigged ship, the Calypso, on which he learned almost everything he was apt to see later of brutality at sea. The captain was a drunk, the first mate a sadist, and the bosun a pervert. On the long voyage to Manila he was raped three times by two different men and would have had it worse only there was an even younger boy aboard.

  The rapes had more than violated Gideon’s body, they had violated his spirit as well, and he began the necessary process of turning into a brute himself. His suggestion to Poulson that the way to deal with the crew’s uneasiness over the Wendigo was to force them even harder was not in any way toadying. Those captains were most successful and most admired who drove their ships and their crews unmercifully, and Gideon meant to be the most successful of the lot.

  Now as he lay in his bunk all alone in the second mate’s quarters, he felt free for the first time in weeks to allow his awareness of the creaking of the timbers, the long rocking plunge of the ship, the damp sour smell of his blankets to dissolve and to cast himself back in memory to his last shore leave in Evanston. He had hired a carriage and horse, and he and Sally had taken a picnic out into the country. They were allowed so much latitude because he was betrothed to her, would marry her when this voyage was over. Sweet Sally, she made him feel human again, she melted that rigid inhumanity that protected him and furthered his career at sea. She was blond and gay and just a hint blowsy, the kind of good-natured, generously endowed girl who would wear well to live with and be warm and soft and willing in bed.

  They had had their picnic near a stand of birch, and afterward had somehow become involved in a spirited game of tag in and out through the slender silver birch trunks. He could see her now, her skirts gathered up in an unladylike fashion, running before him through the trees, the dappled sunlight spilling across her golden head and the blue-green of her gown, the sound of her laughter infectious and tormenting at the same time. He caught her and bore her down on the soft dead leaves and made love to her there with the afternoon sun dappling the white skin of her breasts and her belly and that lovely dark-gold triangle between her legs. Now he groaned with the intensity of his unfulfilled desire and felt the temporary relaxation of physical release, but even after he fell asleep the sunlight of that distant afternoon splashed across his dreams.

  At midnight when he went on deck to take the second watch, he found that an awesome stillness had settled over the ship. The waves still rose into a mountainous, forbidding landscape of steep molten crests, but above them an almost full moon shone out of a miraculously clear sky, and the ringing cold of the air was still as glass. Even the staysails hung flat and empty. They saw the pale glistening peak of a distant iceberg like some strange ghost vessel silently pass them to the south.

  Gideon had been seven times around this terrible end of a continent, and he had never seen it dead calm like this. He
felt a shiver of premonition.

  It was Tewson who first noticed that the stars along the horizon, which had been blinking on and off as each wave passed before and then cleared them, were slowly hazing out. “Better take in sail, mister,” he advised.

  Gideon didn’t argue, but sent the men aloft. The hazing was now blotting out a larger and larger expanse of sky, a great amorphous black mouth gobbling up the heavens. The mouth suddenly reshaped itself into a black ridge bearing down on them with the speed of a cavalry charge.

  “Hang on!” someone yelled.

  The Beryl Queen, with a topsail still unreefed, was hit as if with the blow of a giant mallet. The topsail popped with a loud crack as the ship heeled over until her scuppers were under water, Tewson and Gideon both throwing their weight against the helm. The green water washed foaming across the deck, then drained off as the ship righted itself almost reluctantly, the streamers of topsail cracking loudly as they blew out horizontally from the fore topgallant yard against a dead-black sky that shrieked and whistled like spirits of the damned.

  As abruptly as it had borne down upon them, the squall disappeared, leaving behind the now almost comforting gale to which they had become so accustomed. They found Lawson crouched on his knees with his arms about his head, moaning incoherently. When the men came down, Hayward was missing. The fo’c’sle crew turned sullen and went about their work reluctantly, watching each other suspiciously.

  “I’ve never let the sea lick me yet, and I’m not about to start now,” Poulson commented later to Gideon and Rawling. “Push the men harder, gentlemen, until they’re too tired to think about anything. The wind is bound to come right for us soon.”

  Push they did, until day and night, watch on watch, were all but indistinguishable one from another. In his sleep Gideon could hear the constant “Ready to wear ship!” as they tacked fruitlessly to and fro, to and fro in a bitter booming wind that never ceased.