After eating, they repack the whaleboats, then raise up the one surviving tent, weigh down its edges with provision casks, and settle inside with playing cards and pipe tobacco to wait for Black, Jones, and the others to return from the Hastings. After an hour or so, as the fog lifts, Cavendish goes outside with his telescope to check for signs of the returning party. After a while, he calls out for Otto, and, after a while longer, Otto calls out for Sumner.
Cavendish hands Sumner the telescope and points east without speaking. Sumner extends the telescope and looks through it. He is expecting to see, off in the distance, Black, Jones, and the rest of the crew tugging the four empty whaleboats across the ice towards them, but in fact he sees nothing at all. He lowers the telescope, squints into the distant emptiness, then raises the telescope to his eye and looks again.
“So where are they?”
Cavendish shakes his head, curses, and starts angrily rubbing the nape of his neck. His previous calmness and good humor has disappeared. He is pale-faced and tight-lipped. His eyes are wide open and he is breathing hard through his nose.
“The Hastings is gone,” Otto says.
“Gone where?”
“Most likely, she ventured out into the pack last night to escape from the bergs,” Cavendish says sharply. “That’s all there is to it. She will find her way back to the floe edge soon enough. Campbell knows just where we are. All we need to do is wait for him here. Show a bit of faith and a bit of fucking patience.”
Sumner looks through the telescope again, sees, again, nothing but sky and ice, then looks at Otto.
“Why would a ship unmoor in the midst of a storm?” he asks. “Wouldn’t she be safer remaining where she was?”
“If a berg is bearing down, the captain does what’s needed to save the ship,” Otto says.
“Exactly,” Cavendish says. “Whatever you have to do, you do it.”
“How long might we have to wait here?”
“That all depends,” Cavendish says. “If she finds open water it could be today. If not…”
He shrugs.
“I don’t have my medicine chest,” Sumner says. “It was taken across already.”
“Is any man here sick?”
“Not yet, no.”
“Then I’d say that’s about the least part of our fucking worries.”
Sumner remembers watching the iceberg through the gray veil of flailing snow: many-storied and immaculate, moving smoothly and unstoppably forwards with the frictionless non-movement of a planet.
“The Hastings could be sunk,” he realizes. “Is that what you mean?”
“She int sunk,” Cavendish tells him.
“Are there other ships that can rescue us?”
Otto shakes his head.
“Not near enough. It’s too late in the season and we’re too far north. Most of the fleet have left Pond’s Bay by now.”
“She int sunk,” Cavendish repeats. “She’s somewhere out there in the sound, that’s all. If we wait here, she’ll come back right enough.”
“We should go out with the whaleboats to search,” Otto says. “It was a fierce wind last night. She could have been blown miles off to the east. She could be stoved in, nipped, rudderless, anything at all.”
Cavendish frowns, then nods reluctantly, as if eager to think of some better, easier solution, but utterly unable to do so.
“We’ll find her soon enough when we go out there,” he says quickly, snapping shut the brass telescope and shoving it into his greatcoat pocket. “She won’t be far off, I’d say.”
“What if we don’t find her?” Sumner asks. “What then?”
Cavendish pauses and looks at Otto, who stays silent. Cavendish tugs his earlobe and then answers in a ludicrous music hall brogue.
“Den I hope you brought your swimming togs along widje, Paddy,” he says. “’Cause it’s an awful long focking way to anywhere else from hereabouts.”
They spend the rest of the day out in the whaleboats, rowing first east along the edge of the land ice, then turning north towards the center of the sound. The storm has broken up the pack, and they move without difficulty through the irregular fragments of drift and brash ice, steering around them when necessary or poking them aside with the blades of their long oars. Otto commands one boat and Cavendish the other. Sumner, who has been promoted to steersman, imagines every moment that they will sight the Hastings on the horizon—like a single dark stitch against the coarse, gray blanket of the sky—and that the fear that is aching inside him, that he is struggling to contain, will dissolve like mist. He senses amongst the crewmen an anxiety edged with bitterness and anger. They are searching for someone to blame for this perilous string of misfortunes and Cavendish, whose promotion to the captaincy is unearned and tainted with unnaturalness and violence, is the most deserving and obvious candidate.
They return to the ramshackle and burned-over camp, weary, bone-chilled, and low in spirits, having pulled hard all day and seen no sign of the Hastings nor found any indication of her possible fate. The cook builds a fire from barrel staves and sawed-up sections of the mizzenmast and fashions a sour-tasting stew of salt beef and ancient, woody turnips. After the eating is over, Cavendish taps a cask of brandy and has a ration served to each man. They sullenly drink down their allotted portions and then, without asking further permission, begin taking more until the cask is emptied and the atmosphere inside the tent is liquorous and unstable. Soon, after a period of drunken and cantankerous arguing, a fight breaks out and a knife is drawn. McKendrick, a mere onlooker, is slashed deeply in the forearm, and the blacksmith is knocked senseless. When Cavendish tries to intervene, his head is split open with a belaying pin, and Sumner and Otto have to step in to save him from a worse beating. They pull him outside for safety. Otto goes back to try to calm the men but is himself abused and then threatened with the knife. Cavendish, back on his feet, cursing foully, face gruesomely checkered with his own blood, takes two loaded rifles from the whaleboats, gives a third to Otto, and ventures back inside the tent. He fires once down into the ice to gain their attention and then declares that he will gladly put the second bullet into any cunt who fancies his chances.
“With Brownlee gone, I’m captain still, and I’ll cheerfully murder any mutinous bastard who dares think otherwise.”
There is a pause, then Bannon, a loose-eyed Shetlander with silver hoops in his ears, picks up a barrel stave and rushes wildly forwards. Cavendish, without raising the rifle from his hip, tilts the barrel upwards and shoots him through the throat. The top portion of the Shetlander’s skull detaches and flies backwards against the steeply pitched canvas roof, leaving a broad red bull’s-eye and, around it, a fainter aureole of purplish brain matter. There is a guttural roar of dismay from the other men, and then a sudden, leaden silence. Cavendish drops the empty rifle at his feet and takes the loaded one from Otto.
“You other cunts take heed now,” he tells them. “This pox-arsed foolishness has just cost a man his life.”
He licks his lips, then looks curiously about as though selecting who to shoot next. Blood seeps off his eyebrow and beard, and spatters down onto the ice. The tent is smeared with shadows and smells fiercely of liquor and piss.
“I’m a loose fucking cannon, I am,” Cavendish tells them quietly. “I do whatever takes my fancy at the time. You best remember that if you ever think of crossing me again.”
He nods twice in silent, bullish confirmation of this candid self-accounting, sniffs, and draws his hand across his blood-soaked beard.
“Tomorrow we make a run for Pond’s Bay,” he says. “If we don’t find the Hastings on the way there, we’ll surely find another ship to take us when we arrive.”
“It’s a hundred mile to Pond’s Bay if it’s an inch,” someone says.
“Then you bastards best sober up and get some sleep aforetimes.”
Cavendish looks down at the dead Shetlander and shakes his head.
“It’s a fucking foolish way to go,” he says to Otto. “Man’s carrying a loaded rifle, you don’t take him on with a barrel stave. That’s simple common sense.”
Otto nods and then steps forwards and, with a solemn and pontifical air, makes the sign of the cross above the corpse. Two of the men, unbidden, take the Shetlander by the boot heels and drag him out onto the floe. Off in a corner, unnoticed amidst this uproar, Drax in chains sits like an idol—cross-legged, smiling, watching from afar.