Barney and the Secret of the Whales (8 page)

Two sailors — impossible to tell who in the blaze of red and blackness — hooked squares of whale skin onto the fire, while others pushed blubber into the pots. Two more used wooden hooks to tip hot oil into barrels tethered ready on the deck. As soon as one cauldron was empty, more blubber was piled into it, while other hands hooked crumpled black things out of the barrels, like burned sheets of paper but big as a cabbage, and threw them into the fire.

The fire snatched them up, burning higher yet, the flame tops turning blue, and I remembered what Captain Melvill had told me back in Sydney Town. We were boiling the whale on its own skin. The only wood needed had been for the first hour of the fire.

So this was how a whaling ship could sail away from land for so long, yet still be able to boil each whale down. The whales fuelled the fires that destroyed them.

The great pots heaved and steamed. Men ran, rolling empty barrels, filling barrels, tethering barrels, hammering repairs to barrels, as if we were a ship full of coopers, pouring out more oil into barrels then hammering down the lids, great gushes of hot liquid reflecting flames and night.

The sound of hammers was as loud as the wind now. The oil poured into the barrels was hot enough to burn, and even the barrels were too hot to touch for long. They rolled and twisted crazily about the deck but somehow always landed in the great hatchways — not the small ones we normally used, but great gates into the heart of the ship itself — not overboard. And somehow, this time anyway, no one was crushed by one.

Had Peg-Leg Tom's lost leg been crushed by a barrel of whale oil, not bitten by a shark? I wondered if he'd tell me. I suspected that we could sail all of the seven seas and he never would.

Over the side of the ship the great head still stood, white, its skull cleaved open. It must at last be empty, I thought, though the decks were still slippery with its wax and the oil from the blubber.

Someone thrust a long hook into my hands so I too could haul out the black wrinkled skin pieces from the barrels before the lids were hammered down, and throw them onto the fire and watch them flare. The sweat poured down my face and I longed for cold, fresh water; for an afternoon breeze that smelled of soil, not flames and death; for the time when my hands were a gardener's, and not a hunter's or a butcher's.

The wind howled like it was clamouring for more whale flesh too; the ship groaned and creaked around us, the waves crashed. And the dead whale said nothing, just bumped against the ship now and then, kicking us harder than a wave even in its death.

Our faces were red from the flames, black with soot about the eyes and neck and anywhere else the greasy stuff could gather. Men's grey beards turned black again. Bald heads grew smoky hair. My arms were loaded with weariness. Every bit of me seemed almost too heavy to bear. I wondered if the hell Mr Johnson spoke about was like this, the red flames and the smoke and stink of burning flesh, the screaming wind so loud you couldn't tell sometimes what the man next to you was saying.

I slept a bit, later that night. I don't remember going to my hammock, but I remember the next man whose turn it was to use it tipping me out, remember crawling back up to the deck, my back aching so much it was hard to stand. The air was grey now, not black, but the flames burned just as red. And still we cut and fed the cauldrons and poured the oil into barrels, and men rolled them down into the hold.

For another day we cut and plundered the vast whale, slippery with its oil, grimy with its soot, stained by its
blood. And on the next day, when I woke from my few hours of slumber, the ship was quiet.

Men slept, in hammocks or on blankets in the hold, all but the watch and one man at the helm. And me, picking my way across a deck still slippery with oil and black with soot, soot so thick you could skim off a piece as wide as your hand from the mast.

I peered over the side. A few sharks nudged at a bloody skeleton. That was all the great whale was now: the hide, the blubber and the contents of its massive head, all harvested and stowed below, the meat eaten by the sharks, except the scraps we'd fed on too. Now there were only bones.

I looked back at the brick platform, piled with white ash. How much of a whale, I thought, would make a pile of ash that big?

Oh, that ash. I grew to know it well. Me and Call-Me-Bob swept it on and swept it off the deck, then used what was left, wetted with seawater, to scrub, scrub, scrub every inch of the ship, the quarterdeck first, for the captain to walk clean, and then the masts, to make it easier for the watch to get aloft, then the deck and galley and then the deck again, for somehow the very air still held enough soot to rain down on us, despite our
rushing south through the breakers, away from the site of the whale's death.

There was no need for buckets of water to wash off the sooty foam. The great southern waves did that. Where ash and water met they turned to soap, frothy and so strong it took the skin from my hands so they burned and reddened. Every crevice of my body grew sore where the ash collected, rubbing, chafing, with only salt waves to wash it off. Every time we washed, more ash would cling to us.

But I kept scrubbing, except during my watch aloft, until the ship shone white again, as white as the foam on the waves.

By then the giant whale carcass had been cut free, what was left of it after we and the sharks had plundered it, gone to sink to the bottom perhaps, for smaller creatures to feast on in the inky depths. Only the giant head was still lashed to the
Britannia:
a third of the great beast, the skull now whiter than bloody, picked clean by sharks and seabirds. There'd be plenty of whalebone to take home later in the voyage. The oil was the real treasure.

The mates climbed onto the head once more, and with their blubber knives and blubber hook cut the giant lower jaw free and hoisted it onto the deck. It lay there,
tethered, while they used the blubber knives to slash the gums and cut out the teeth, forty-two of them. They looked a bit like people's teeth, but bigger, and not worn down like old people's teeth.

I wondered how old the whale had been: young or old. How long did a whale live? Did they have families, as we do? I asked Call-Me-Bob, but he just shrugged. The men hunted whales, captured them with skill and daring. But they only knew whale death, not life.

All that was left of that great beast was in our hold, its life gone and its beauty; its remains were just another piece of cargo.

I dreamed that night of a whole world turned to ash, just like the whale; all life was held in barrels stacked in the dark, like me, Ma and all the other convicts had been on our voyage out from England. But this time we would never get out into the good air of New South Wales. Never feel the shadows of the trees touch our faces, or see the bright birds whistle overhead. This time we had nothing to look forward to but darkness and sea, and death.

I don't want to tell you what I did after that. But in these books I put my honest heart for you to learn from what I did.

The wind blew from the south, smelling of far-off snow. The waves pounded at our sides, rearing up like the monsters that we sought and crashing down. The further south we sailed, the more the wind grew, as if it was trying to push both the ship and me back to Sydney Town.

I wished I could fly with the wind like a seagull, ride the wind north, back home. But the closest I got to flying was sitting up the mast on watch. And day after day we beat the waves, just as we had defeated the whale.

We sailed on.

And I did my watch again, time after time, up on that mast. Two times I called out, ‘There she blows!' to tell the men the whales were there for capture.

I didn't plead, ‘Let them go.' What would have been the use? They would have laughed, those men who knew that whale oil meant gold, gold in their hands and gold in their pockets and for their families back home.

But I could have kept silent, not told them the whales were there. I didn't.

Twice the ship's boats went out after the whales. We saw other ships that had also sailed as part of the Third Fleet, now here, giving the same chase as us.

But each time the boats came back empty, the harpoons red with blood but the whales gone before they could be stabbed to death. They'd been saved by the storms.

Perhaps. Maybe the whales died of their wounds, and floated in the waves until the ocean dragged them down. Or perhaps harpoon wounds healed, like my knees did
every time I fell down and scraped them. I never asked; and not even in all the years since then have I asked what happens to a wounded whale once the men who chased it have gone.

It was late dusk when I saw the black bodies again, surging through the waves. They were to the east of us, the sun setting below the land's green mountains on our right-hand side. The waves pounded the
Britannia
back and forth, but the whales didn't seem to notice. Six of them, a different shape from the ones I'd seen before. I wondered if they were a family, or a sort of family, like me and the Johnsons and Elsie and Sally.

I should have yelled, ‘There she blows!' and pointed to them. I didn't. I sat up on the swaying mast, the salt wind lashing my face. I cried, because my family was days away from me, and it might be years before I saw them once more. I cried for the beauty of the whales. Even as I looked, one leaped like it was trying to catch the sun, then dived back down.

I thought of Birrung again then. I don't know why. Maybe because she had dived like that, as if the water was her home as much as the land. Maybe because we were taking her land, much like we were conquering the whales' seas. Maybe because she was beautiful, and so
were the whales. Birrung had gone back to her people and the whales were sailing north, and both were lost to me. And tomorrow and tomorrow I'd have to hunt. Nothing I could do would change that, for I'd signed my papers, and signed three years of my life away. And if I didn't hunt them, there'd be others to take my place wherever men longed for gold more than the beauty of the sea.

I didn't call. I didn't know what would happen if someone else saw the whales too. They'd know I must have seen them, way up there, with better eyesight than anyone on board. I'd be flogged, most like, or worse, for those whales were the reason we were here, risking our lives in a twig of a ship being tossed in the giant southern waves.

I sat there, high above the ship, almost high enough to touch the storm-wisped clouds, and watched the whales slip away across the sea.

One day a ship like ours might hunt them down, turn them into meat and oil, and fire and bone, with the sharks nosing through their blood. The secret southern whaling grounds would soon be secret no more, not once the first ship had returned with a hold full of oil. It only needed one of the crew, drunk on shore, to say where his
vessel had been and dozens, maybe hundreds of ships would head this way. Or perhaps a letter from Governor Phillip or one of the officers back to England would give the world a clue of the riches that waited here.

But today, in the wind and churning waves, I watched the whales sailing north, not just safe, but free from the terror of men and harpoons in boats. The sea turned darker as the sun sank to the west behind the clouds. At last the bell clanged, and I made my way down the mast. The whales were too far away for the next watch to see, especially as dusk approached.

I was so used to the deck beneath my feet lurching one way and then another now that I hardly slipped as I made my way down to the galley. Peg-Leg Tom grunted at me, and held out a bowl of stew. He still hadn't thanked me for saving his life. Hadn't spoken to me at all since that day, though I'd got a cuff about the ear a couple of times when I was slow finishing my meal and someone else was waiting for the bowl.

I spooned the stew up, fast.

The ship tilted. I kept on drinking, used to all that now. But still we kept tilting, more and more, as the wave beneath us climbed rather than crested. Peg-Leg Tom swore, and grabbed his pot to stop it spilling, then
stamped on some cinders that had scattered on the floor before they could burst into flame and set the ship alight.

And still the ship listed and lifted. I grasped the table in terror. It at least was bolted onto the floor. Up . . . and up . . . and up . . .

Peg-Leg Tom's face turned white under his whiskers. He muttered something under his breath that might have been a prayer.

Had there ever been a wave as large as this? I tried to remember the storms on the voyage to New South Wales. I remembered clinging to the bunk, to Ma, remembered her singing to me softly, right by my ear, so I forgot the crashings of the waves and the women screaming all around. Had any wave been as bad as this then?

Higher, and higher still. Our ship had become a seagull, heading for the sky. But we had no wings to bring us safely back down.

And still the ship climbed.

I'm going to die, I thought. I didn't want to die here. I didn't want to die at all, but I especially didn't want to die in the cold sea. I wanted to be an old man, sleeping in my garden, with the trees I'd grown around me, and children laughing among the flowers, the smell of soil and leaves and birds to carry my soul away.