“Guess not, sir. But they’d probably be a lot less happy if the bow split and we went to the bottom.”
“This is not a life-threatening situation, Kit,” said Bob Lander quietly. “Just a nuisance we don’t want to get any worse. I’ll go below and check the patch-up operation in the paint shop, sir.”
At 1957 Tug Mottram ordered a short satellite communication to the command center at Woods Hole—“Position 48.25S 67.25E…intended movement 117-12 knots. Going inshore. Proceeding to inspect and repair minor bow damage caused by heavy weather.”
At 1958 he adjusted course for the northwestern headland of the island of Kerguelen. At the end of the earth, and virtually uninhabited, Kerguelen’s icebound terrain is untrammeled by the feet of man, save for a few Frenchmen at their weather station at Port-aux-Français in the remote southeast corner of the island.
No ships pass by this godforsaken rocky wasteland for months on end. No commercial airlines fly overhead. No military power has any interest in checking out the place. As far as anyone knows, no submarine has passed this way in more than half a century. Not even the all-seeing American satellites bother to cast an eye upon this craggy wilderness, which measures eighty miles long from west to east, and fifty-five miles north to south. Save for the huge rookeries of king penguins, and a plague of rabbits, Kerguelen may as well be on the moon. It is a huddle of frozen rocks rising out of the Southern Ocean, perhaps the loneliest place on this planet. It stands stark on the 69 degree easterly line of longitude, latitude 49.30 south. Gale-swept almost nonstop for twelve months of the year, Kerguelen is in fact an archipelago of much smaller islands set into a great uneven L-shaped mainland, and represents the tip of a vast underwater range of mountains that stretches for 1,900 miles, due southeast from latitude 47S right down to the eastern end of the Shackleton Ice Shelf. To the west of this colossal range, known as the Kerguelen-Gaussberg Ridge, the ocean is more than three miles deep. On the other side it falls away to more than four miles.
The whole concept of the place made Tug Mottram shudder. But he knew his job, and he knew how important that unseen range of subsurface mountains was to the Woods Hole scientists aboard his ship.
Vast clouds of tiny shrimplike creatures known as krill, a critical ingredient to the Antarctic food chain, swim in the craggy underwater peaks of the Ridge. The krill are devoured by a large network of deep-sea creatures: fish, squid, seals, and several species of whale, including the humpback. In turn the killer whale eats other whales and seals. Penguins feed on the small fish and squid that eat the krill. Flying birds also eat the krill, the fish, and the squid. The krill are so critical the ecosystem would collapse without them.
The Woods Hole scientific teams had discerned a sharp reduction in the krill population for several years. Professor Townsend believed that the krill were being wiped out by the ultraviolet rays streaming through the hole in the ozone layer that appears over the Antarctic in September. Furthermore his research studies suggested that the problem was worsening, and he now believed the ozone hole was growing steadily larger, much like the tear in Cuttyhunk’s hull.
Townsend’s conclusions had lent a new urgency to this expedition. He planned to take krill samples off the Ridge for around six days and then proceed to the US Antarctic Research Station on McMurdo Sound for another month of tests. He hoped to determine if the phytoplankton on which the krill feed were being harmed by the radiation and endangering entire species of sea creatures. Another sharp reduction of the krill population would signify to Professor Townsend that the ozone hole was increasing. The New York Times had been reporting extensively on Townsend’s research, and the eyes of the world’s environmental agencies were now fixed firmly on the Cuttyhunk scientists.
Tug Mottram’s eyes were fixed on the raging sea now rolling across his starboard beam, the white foam whipping off the wave tops by the gale making grotesque lacy patterns in the troughs.
The anchor was secure, but the men in the forepeak were having a hell of a time trying to stop the sea from coming in. Two big mattresses were jammed over the hole, held in place by heavy timbers cut to length for such an emergency. Three young crewmen, almost waist-deep in the freezing water, were trying to wedge the beams into place with sledgehammers, but it was so cold they could manage only three minutes at a time. When the ship pitched forward the water rose right over them. The job of plugging the tear in the hull would have taken ten minutes in calm waters, but it was more than an hour before the ship was watertight. Another ten minutes to pump the water out. Two hours to thaw out the shivering seamen.
At midnight the watch changed. Bob Lander came on the bridge, and the Captain, who had ridden out the worst of the storm, headed to his bunk, exhausted. At forty-eight years old, Tug was beginning to feel that he was not quite as indestructible as he had been at twenty-five. And he missed his wife, Jane, who awaited him in the Cape Cod seaport of Truro. In the small hours of an Antarctic morning he found it difficult to sleep and often spent much time reflecting on his divorce from Annie, his first wife, and the terrible, cruel half-truths he had told in order to break free and marry a much younger woman. But when he thought of Jane he usually persuaded himself that it had been worth it.
Outside, the weather was brightening a little, and although the wind still howled at around fifty knots, the snow had stopped falling and there were occasional breaks in the cloud. The worst of the cold front had passed.
On the bridge, Bob Lander would occasionally catch a glimpse of the sun, a fireball on the horizon as Cuttyhunk shouldered her way forward making seventeen knots on southeasterly 135. They would soon be in sight of the great rock of Îlot Rendezvous, which rises 230 feet out of the sea, a rounded granite centurion guarding the northwestern seaway to Kerguelen. It is sometimes referred to as Bligh’s Cap, so named by Captain Cook in 1776 in honor of his sailing master in Resolution during his fourth and final voyage — William Bligh, later of the Bounty. However, maritime law decreed that the French named the rock first, and the official charts reflect this.
Bob Lander spotted Îlot Rendezvous shortly before 0300, almost a half mile off his patched-up starboard bow. He called through to Kit Berens, who had returned to the navigation office at 0200. “Aye, sir,” he replied. “I have a good radar picture. Stay on one thirty-five and look for the point of Cap D’Estaing dead ahead forty minutes from now. There’s deep water right in close, we can get round a half mile off the headland. No sweat.”
“Thanks, Kit. How ’bout some coffee?”
“Okay, sir. Let me just finish plotting us into Choiseul. I’ll be right there. The chart is showing there’s a few kelp beds in the bay, and I think we ought to give ’em a damned wide berth. I hate that stuff.”
“So do I, Kit. You better keep at it for a bit. Don’t worry about me. I’ll just stand here and die of thirst.”
Kit Berens chuckled. He was loving his first great ocean voyage and was deeply grateful to Tug Mottram for giving him a chance. Tug reminded him of his own father. They were both around six feet three inches tall, both easygoing men with a lot of dark curly hair and deeply tanned outdoor faces. Tug’s was forged on the world’s oceans, Kit’s dad’s was the result of a lifetime spent in south Texas oil fields working as a driller. In Kit’s opinion they were both guys you could count on. He liked that.
