“I know his father, Frederick Hannah,” Drax says, “and I know his brother, Henry, also.”
“Captain Brownlee has decided the matter is closed anyway. Unless the boy changes his mind, nothing more will be done.”
“So that’s the end of it?”
“Probably.”
Drax peers at him carefully.
“Why did you choose to become a surgeon, Mr. Sumner?” he asks. “An Irish fellow like yourself. I’m curious.”
“Because I wished to advance. To rise from my humble origins.”
“You wished to advance, but now here you are on a Yorkshire whaler fretting over cabin boys. I wonder what has happened to all those grand ambitions?”
Sumner closes the medicine chest and locks it. He puts the key in his pocket and glances at himself quickly in the wall mirror. He looks a good deal older than his twenty-seven years. His brow is scored, and his eyes are rimmed and baggy.
“I have simplified them, Mr. Drax,” he says.
Drax grunts with amusement. His lips stretch out into a pantomime version of a grin.
“I do believe I’ve done the same,” he says. “I do believe I have.”
CHAPTER TEN
They cross into the North Water by the last week of June, and near dawn the following day Black strikes their first whale. Sumner, woken from his slumbers by the sounds of shouting and boot heels pounding the deck, follows the progress of the hunt from high up in the crow’s nest. He sees the first iron go in and the wounded whale descend. Twenty minutes later, he sees it rise again, closer to the ship but nearly a mile from where it first went down. Black’s harpoon, he can see through the spyglass, is still dangling from its broad flank, and blood is sluicing brightly from its leadish skin.
Otto’s boat is closest to it now. The oarsmen ship their oars and the steersman sculls them steadily forwards. Otto crouches in the bows with the harpoon’s wooden shaft gripped tightly in his fists. With a giant horselike snort, audible from Sumner’s perch in the crow’s nest, the whale exhales a V-shaped flume of grayish vapor. The boat and crew are temporarily obscured, but when they reappear, Otto is up on his feet and the harpoon is poised above his head—its barb pointing downwards and the shaft forming a black hypotenuse against the sullen sky. The whale’s back looks from Sumner’s aerie like a sunken island, a grainy volcanic hump of rock peeping from the waves. Otto hurls the iron with all his strength, it sinks in deep, up to the foreganger, and the whale instantly convulses. Its body bends and spasms; the eight-foot flukes of its enormous tail break from the water, then crash back down. Otto’s boat is tossed wildly about and the oarsmen are thrown from their seats. The whale descends again but only for a minute. When it rises, the other boats are gathered round ready: Cavendish is there, Black, Drax. Two more harpoons are sunk deep into the whale’s black flank, and then they begin with the lances. The whale is still alive, but Sumner can see that it is damaged now beyond repair. The four harpooners pierce and probe. The whale, still hopelessly resisting, blows out a plume of hot vapor mixed with blood and mucus. All around it, the smashed and bloodstained waters boil and foam.
Drax, far below in the hectic midst of the killing, bears down hard on the butt of his lance and whispers out a string of gross endearments.
“Give me one last groan,” he says. “That’s it, my darling. One last shudder to help me find the true place. That’s it, my sweetheart. One more inch and then we’re done.”
He leans in harder, presses, seeking out the vital organs. The lance slides in another foot. A moment later, with a final roar, the whale shoots out a plume of pure heart’s blood high into the air and then tilts over lifeless onto its side with its great fin raised like a flag of surrender. The men, empurpled, reeking, drenched in the fish’s steaming, expectorated gore, stand up in their flimsy boats and cheer their triumph. Brownlee on the quarterdeck wafts his billycock hat in circles above his head. The men on the deck roar and caper. Sumner, watching it all from above, feels a brief thrill of victory also, a sense of sudden, shared advantage, of obstacles overcome and progress made.
They bore two holes in the tail and secure the dead whale to the bow of Cavendish’s boat. They lash the fins together, retrieve and coil the whale lines, and then begin to tow the corpse back to the ship. As they row, they sing. Sumner, descended to the deck, hears their voices coming across the water, tuneful, gruff, carried by the cool damp wind. “Randy Dandy-O” and “Leave Her Johnny.” Three dozen men in unison. He feels again, and almost against his will this time, that he is part of something larger and more powerful than himself, a joint endeavor. Turning away, he notices Joseph Hannah standing by the fore hatch talking happily with the other cabin boys. They are reenacting the recent kill; they are throwing imaginary harpoons, plying imaginary lances. One is Drax, one is Otto, one is Cavendish.
“How are you, Joseph?” he asks him.
The boy looks back at him blankly, as if they have not met before.
“I’m well, sir,” he answers. “Thankee.”
“You must come to my cabin again tonight for your pill,” he reminds him.
The boy nods glumly.
What has the boy told his friends about his injuries? Sumner wonders. Has he made up some story, or do they know the truth? It strikes him that he should question the other boys also. He should examine them too. What if they have suffered in the same way? What if the secret is not Joseph’s alone but is something they share amongst them?
“You two,” he says, pointing to the other boys. “After supper you come to my cabin with Joseph. I want to ask you some questions.”
“I am on the watch, sir,” one of them says.
“Then tell the watch commander that the surgeon, Mr. Sumner, has asked to speak to you. He will understand.”
The boy nods. All three of them, he can see, wish he would now leave them alone. The game is still vivid in their minds, and his is the voice of dullness and authority.
“Go back to your pleasures now,” he tells them. “I will see the three of you after supper.”
The whale’s right fin is lashed onto the larboard gunwale with its head facing sternwards. Its dead eye, not much larger than a cow’s, peers blindly upwards at the shuffling clouds. Strong lines are secured to the nose end and rump, and its belly is heaved a foot or so out of the water by means of a block attached to the mainmast and a rope hooked onto the whale’s neck area and brought to tension through the windlass. Brownlee, after measuring the corpse’s length with a knotted line, estimates it will yield up ten tons of oil and half a ton or more of whalebone—a value of close to nine hundred pounds at market, if prices hold firm.
“We may yet be rich, Mr. Sumner,” he says with a wink.