" Men have ghosts, and so have islands," I replied. " So have the Wetherbys."
I, the last of the Wetherbys, had also been drawn inexorably to the waters of Bouvet. Off the island I had sunk the notorious raider Meteor.
I liked Upton, but everything was moving too fast for me. " I don't follow what you are saying about krill and whales, Sir Frederick," I said. " Your offer about Bouvet is all I could wish for. Why did you come looking for me at Tristan? Why me? You haven't come all this way just for the pleasure of indulging my oceanic whims. Time means money to you. What do you want from me?"
He grinned. " Even modern business pirates have their quixotic moments."
" That's no answer, and you know it," I replied.
" I quote the Admiralty and the Royal Society," he went on. " Captain Wetherby is one of the most brilliant and experienced sailors the Antarctic has seen since Lars Christensen broke open the ice continent thirty years ago." He added crisply, "I want your knowledge of the Southern Ocean. I want your knowledge of its currents. I want your sailor's skill. I want Sailhardy's know-how."
" If you want seamanship, you can buy it a-plenty among the whalers in South Georgia," I replied. " You've refuted that argument yourself. You've got whaling skippers on their way here now."
" Shut that door, Helen," he said. " Turn the key." His movements were jerkier still. " What do you know about the Blue Whale?"
" It's the most profitable kind to hunt. I suppose a single one must weight a hundred and fifty tons and be every bit of a hundred feet long."
He said rapidly, " The Blue Whale has been killed off by the hundred thousand. You'd have expected that the most elementary fact about it would have been known by now where it breeds. The Norwegians, first under Lars
Christensen, have been searching for that for half a century. It's never been found."
" What has this to do with me?" I asked. " I'm not interested in whales, blue or otherwise."
He went on as if he had not heard me. " To any whaling concern the knowledge of the whereabouts of the breedingground of the Blue Whale would be the biggest break-through since the harpoon-gun." He faced me. " You told me to-night."
I stared at him. " I have not even mentioned the Blue Whale, let alone its breeding-ground."
His words tumbled over each other like a pressure ridge of ice building up. " South of Bouvet, where the two prongs of The Albatross' Foot join-that is where it is. You've put a million pounds in my pocket!"
" I still don't understand…" I said rather helplessly.
" The Albatross' Foot!" He turned the name over. " Don't you see-plankton means krill, and krill means food-food for whales. Vast concentrations of krill, scores of square miles of them-food for young whales, Blue Whales!"
" You must know that you're over-simplifying, Sir Frederick," I said. " A season's catch of Blue Whales is 45 limited by the International Whaling Association to about eighteen thousand. You can't hunt undersized whales, even if you knew their breeding-ground."
Upton strode angrily across towards the map, but before he got there, turned on his heel and tore open a drawer. He threw a pile of papers on the desk. " Somewhere there," he said thickly, " is a copy of the Laws of Oleron." The wicked pink tinge across the pewter skin was the most ominous dangersign I have ever seen in a man.
" I have never heard of the Laws of Oleron," I said. Sailhardy looked confused.
" I don't give a damn that you haven't," he went on thickly. " I quote: ' Through the inspiration of these ancient laws and the common brotherhood of mariners throughout the world, men are able safely to pass on their lawful occasions.' That was said eight centuries ago. Nowhere have more men died or come to a violent end than on the sea. Brotherhood-bah!"
" I simply do not know what you are talking about," I said.
" Listen!" he said, cocking his head. " That's a Southern Ocean gale outside and these bloody fools…" he slapped his hand down on the papers-" are trying to put a halter round its neck."
A flicker of a smile passed across Helen's face. Her controlled voice showed nothing of it. " What my father has got there, Captain Wetherby, is a copy of the new Antarctic Treaty. He's trying to tell you he doesn't like it."
"There is only one unexplored continent left," he said. " That is Antarctica. It was discovered by individualists. It is as big as the United States and Europe together. It is the one continent left for man's free spirit to break open. What happens?" He banged the papers again. " Government committees sit ten thousand miles away and decide its future."
" It is not as bad as that," I interjected.
" Listen!" he said. " Antarctica has a population of about four hundred men-all of them governmental-committee stooges with not a drop of red blood among them. They live in pre-heated, pre-fabricated, pre-lined huts and take the predetermined, sissy readings they're so bloody proud of!"
" What has this to do with the breeding-ground of the
Blue Whale?" I asked.
He brushed my question aside. " Because they haven't got the guts of an ice algae, twelve of these nations have got together and signed this shameful thing called the Antarctic Treaty, banning all activity but scientific investigation for peaceful purposes and--God's death! -the possibility of opening up a tourist trade to the South Pole!" He tossed off his guarana drink at a gulp. " It's the negation of the human spirit, Bruce! Every one of those four hundred men scattered about Antarctica is a stooge. He's part of a committee, a weather organisation, or… Listen! This is how they spend their time." He read out from random papers which he snatched up: " ' Directional sensitivity of neutron monitors '; ' short-term decreases in cosmic ray east-west asymmetry decreases at high Southern latitude'; glacio-geomorphological features.
" He threw it down on the floor in disgust.
I picked it up. It was something about a scientific symposium on the Antarctic, held in Buenos Aires.
Upton pulled himself together. He picked up a long ruler and went across to the map. Suddenly he grinned. I could not help warming to the man. " It's a funny thing to be in love with a continent. Anything one loves must be different. That's the way it is with me. Some bright lad in the U.S. Navy has worked out a formula to predict the number of icebergs you will find in the North Atlantic in summer. There aren't any formulas in the Antarctic. You can put a halter and bridle on the Arctic, but not, thank God, on the Antarctic!"
I too went across to the map. I picked out Bouvet. The cut of the jib of the two models given pride of place in the island's discovery, the Lively and the Sprightly, was unmistakable to my sailor's eves.
" You may well look," Upton said bitterly. " In this treaty the Norwegians have inserted a clause laying down a ban of two hundred miles on hunting whales round Bouvet." He snatched up a pair of dividers, placed one point on Bouvet, and sketched a circle. " See? The ice mainland opposite Bouvet is also Norwegian. It's about four hundred and fifty miles from the island. So with a territorial limit of two hundred stretching towards Bouvet from the mainland, and also stretching from Bouvet towards the ice, it means that there's only fifty miles in which you can legally hunt a whale. Put simply, Norway has closed one-quarter of the entire ocean between Antarctica and South Africa to whaling. Why? Lars Christensen surmised, and I know now, that somewhere in that wild waste of waters is the breeding-ground of the Blue Whale."