The breeding-ground of the Blue Whale was far more important to Norway than Onassis' mere infringement of whaling limits. That was where the parallel between the Olympic Challenger expedition and Upton's ended. Had the Olympic Challenger had on board an oceanographer like me who could have nailed down a killer-current the Peruvians call El Nino-a warm, less saline stream which blitzes the life-flow of the Peru Current and kills fish, whales and seabirds by the million off the coast of South America-the knowledge in itself would have been worth that?1,000,000 indemnity many times over.
The Albatross' Foot represented a mighty challenge. What, I asked myself as the catcher skippers grew more noisy, if a similar challenge had been rejected by the man who, only since World War I, had revolutionised all ideas on the great Gulf Stream itself? He was laughed to scorn
– but he proved his theory. Until ten years ago the United States was unaware that yet a second great Gulf Stream, known as the Cromwell Current, swept in to its shores, this time from the Pacific; again, it was one man's persistence, pitted against all contemporary scorn, which proved that a 250-mile-wide column of water, equal to the flow of the Nile, Amazon, Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Yellow and Congo Rivers together multiplied several thousand times, washed the Pacific coast of the United States.
Here, at my fingertips, lay the possibility of a discovery as great as either of these, if not greater. The whole of the world's whaling industry would be affected by knowledge of my current. That, I argued with myself, could bring conservation on a global scale of the disappearing schools of whales in the Southern Ocean, even if Upton killed off a few hundred in pinning down that knowledge for me.
There was, too, a vital military aspect of The Albatross'
Foot. In H.M.S. Scott I had sunk a U-boat deep in the Southern Ocean toward the ice. She had surfaced before she sank, and I recovered her log. For submarines, knowledge of water temperature and salinity is vital. I had been surprised at the data the log had shown of the area where I now knew The Albatross' Foot must be: it was a picture of current and counter-current, of rapid temperature changes in the boundary layer between surface water and the main body of the sea itself, which we oceanographers call the " thermoc-line ". A study of the waters round Bouvet would yield new and invaluable operational information for atomic submarines guarding the vital sea route round the Cape of
Good Hope.
How else but through Upton would I ever get near Bouvet? It had been difficult enough to persuade scientists at the Royal Society to let me investigate the Tristan prong of The Albatross' Foot; no government or scientific organisation would be prepared to spend tens of thousands of pounds on an expedition to the wild waters of Bouvet merely to test an unsubstantiated theory. The answer was: Upton's expedition must not be located. To me that meant only one thing-I must take command. Sailhardy and I knew every trick of the Southern Ocean. We had learned it the hard way. I grinned a little wryly to myself now that the decision had been formulated: I was deliberately seeking out the worst seas in the world, among whose fogs I would hide the factory ship and catchers from whatever ships Norway might have there while I sought within my " circular area of probability " ( as the missle-men say of the target at Cape Canaveral) the missing prong of The Albatross' Foot.
Sailhardy moved away from the porthole when Upton tried again to press a drink on him, and came over to me, frowning deeply. " Bruce," he said, " we can get to Tristan, even in this gale. Let's get out-now."
I submerged my own misgivings. " Why? This is a oncein-alifetime opportunity for me to get to Bouvet, as you know."
" Look," replied the islander. " We've been shanghaied. Politely, but none the less shanghaied. Upton has sailed all the way from Cape Town to Tristan in order to tell you that your plankton discoveries will help him discover the breedingground of the Blue Whale. Fair enough-they probably will."
"Then what are you objecting to?" I asked.
" His methods, his timing, everything," he replied. " He could have written you a letter asking you to go to see him in England, or flown you there from Cape Town, for that matter. True, the letter might take six months to reach you, but six months are not important for something that has been searched for for half a century. It must have cost five thousand pounds a day to bring this ship to Tristan. When he gets here, he sends his daughter off into one hell of a storm to find you. It all points to one thing: you must be valuable-very valuable indeed-to him."
" He told us, he could net a straight three million pounds." " It's a big expedition, isn't it?"
Yes."
" If he finds this breeding-ground, you'd expect this factory ship to be mightly busy, wouldn't you?"
" Yes."
" Pirow and I walked through the crew's quarters when we landed, to put his gear in his cabin," he said slowly. 57
" There are only enough men to cope with a moderate catch. I smelt a rat at once, so I asked the chief flenser about biomycin. Biomycin is the latest American way of preserving a whale-you know, normally the meat and fat of a whale is quite useless about eighteen hours after the kill, unless preserved with biomycin. You can then keep them up to forty hours. You'd expect them to be cutting up whales on an assembly-line basis if Upton found the breeding-ground. Yet there's no biomycin aboard, and tiny, almost skeleton, flensing crews to cut them up."
" Upton may be a bit old-fashioned in his methods…" I started to say.
" What have you got in that bag of yours?" Sailhardy demanded, indicating the oilskin bag which the sailor had brought from the whaleboat.
" Charts, sea-temperature readings-that sort of thing." " What charts?"
" Admiralty charts of Tristan, Gough, the South Shetlands – you can buy them anywhere. Oh, and an old chart and log which came to me when Wetherbys folded up. It's about 1825. It's probably the first of the waters round Bouvet."
"Bouvet!" breathed Sailhardy.
The cabin door flew open, Pirow stood there, a radio message in his hand. It was the disciplined attitude of the man, his deference to Upton, his superior, and his taut bearing, that made me recognise him in a flash.
The Man with the Immaculate Hand!
I looked in silent wonder across the noisy room at the
Geoffrey Jenkins
A Grue Of Ice man who had lured so many British and Allied ships and men to their deaths during World War II. Carl Pirow, radio operator of the German raider Meteor, was a very different proposition now from the oil-drenched wretch they had brought aboard H.M.S. Scott after I had gone in with torpedoes while the Meteor's 5.9-inch salvoes blanketed my ship. I considered Pirow the most dangerous single man the war at sea had thrown up against the Royal Navy. The Man with the Immaculate Hand we called him, and the
Merchant Navy took over the nickname in awe, because of his uncanny ability to imitate any type of ship's radio transmission. When I had started my long search for the