“I’m looking for Joseph Hannah,” Sumner says to him. “Have you seen the boy about?”
“The one with the sore arse?” Black says. “No, I can’t say I have.”
Sumner shakes his head and sighs.
“The Volunteer is not such a large vessel. I’m surprised a boy can so easily go missing.”
“There are a thousand nooks and crannies on a ship like this one,” Black says. “He’s probably off pulling his pizzle somewhere. Why do you need him?”
Sumner hesitates, aware that his concern with the health of Hannah’s fundament has already become something of a joke amongst the officers.
“I have a task for him,” Sumner says.
Black nods.
“Well, he’ll emerge by and by, you can be sure of that. The boy is an awful malingerer, but he’ll not miss his rations when they’re served.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Sumner says, looking at the candle for a moment, then dropping it into his jacket pocket. “Why should I trouble to search for someone who doesn’t want to be found?”
“There are other cabin boys,” Black agrees. “Ask one of those.”
Later that afternoon, since there are still no signs of whales and the weather is calm enough, Brownlee orders the men to commence the making off. They reduce the sails and begin to break out the main hold. Eight or ten casks, previously filled with water for ballast, are brought up onto the deck, thereby exposing the lowest stratum of casks, the ground tier, which will be first to be filled with the minced-up blubber. The men on deck make ready the equipment (speck trough, lull, chopping blocks, and knives) needed to separate blubber from muscle and skin, and to cut it into pieces small enough to be squeezed through the bunghole of a cask. Sumner keeps an eye out for Joseph Hannah, assuming he will appear soon enough, roused by all this commotion from whatever hiding place he has found.
“Where’s that little shit Hannah disappeared to?” Cavendish shouts out. “I need some knives taken down for sharpening.”
“He’s missing,” Sumner says. “I was looking about for him this morning.”
“He’s a shiftless little cunt, that one,” Cavendish says. “I’ll show him the true meaning of a sore arse when I discover him.”
The casks on deck are emptied of water one by one, by means of an iron hand pump. Otto takes charge of this operation, inserting the pump’s end into the bunghole, draining off each cask, and then mopping it dry. The ballast water, which sloshes across the deck and out through the fore-channels, gives off a noxious, sulfurated reek caused by long contact with the rotting residues of blubber left in the casks from previous voyages. Other men climb the rigging to escape this eye-watering miasma, or tie scarves across their noses as they work, but Otto, putty-faced, thick-shouldered, slow and deliberate in all his actions, seems immune to the repellent stench. After emptying four casks, he discovers the fifth one has been damaged. The head has been partly stoved in and most of the water appears to have leaked out already. He calls over the cooper and asks if it can be repaired. The cooper leans down, pulls out a piece of the broken cask head, and examines it.
“It ain’t rotted away,” he says (he has his hand against his nostrils as he speaks). “No reason for this to crack on its own.”
“But it’s cracked all right,” Otto says.
The cooper nods.
“Best break it up and start again,” he says.
He tosses the splintered wood aside, then peers indifferently and without expectation back into the half-empty barrel. He sees curled up inside it, part submerged in the remnants of the ballast water, like some monstrous fungal knottage, bred and nurtured in the fetid petri of the hold, the torn, dead, and naked body of Joseph Hannah, cabin boy.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
They carry Hannah’s body down to the mess cabin and lay it out on the table for Sumner to examine. The room is crowded but silent. Sumner, who can feel the heat of the other men’s breathing and sense the dour intensity of their concentration, wonders what they expect him to do exactly. Bring the boy back to life? The fact that he is a surgeon makes no difference anymore. He is as helpless and useless as they are. Trembling, he takes hold of Joseph Hannah’s hairless chin and moves it gently upwards to better note the dark chain of bruises around his neck.
“Strangled,” Brownlee says. “It’s a fucking outrage.”
There is a murmur of assent from the other men in the room. Sumner, feeling a degree of reluctance and shame, turns the boy over onto his side and pulls apart his pale buttocks. Some of the spectators lean in to look.
“The same or worse?” Brownlee asks.
“Worse.”
“Fuck.”
Sumner glances up at Cavendish, who has looked away and is whispering something to Drax. He turns the boy over again and presses down on his ribs to count the fractures. He opens the child’s mouth and notes that two of his teeth are missing.
“When did this happen?” Brownlee barks. “And how in God’s name is it possible that no one noticed?”
“I last saw the boy the day before yesterday,” Sumner says. “Just before the first flensing.”
There is a garbled rush of other voices as the rest of the men in the room recall their last encounters with the dead boy. Brownlee shouts them down.
“Not all together,” he says. “By Christ.”
The captain is pale and furious; his agitation is profound. He has never even heard of a murder occurring on a whale ship before — there are fights between crewmen, of course, plenty of those, stabbings even on some rare occasions, but not an outright murder and not of a child. It is an appalling thing, he thinks, repellent, sickening. And that it should happen now, on his final voyage, as if the Percival was not enough to darken his reputation forever. He looks around at the twenty or thirty crewmen packed into the mess cabin — grubby and bearded all of them, their faces burned and blackened by the arctic sun, their blunt hands clasped in front of them as though at prayer, or pushed deep into pockets. This is Jacob Baxter’s doing, he tells himself, that unrighteous bastard: he chose this idiot crew, he set this whole unnatural scheme in motion, he is responsible for the calamitous consequences, not I.
“Whoever is guilty will be taken back to England in chains and hanged,” Brownlee says, scanning the vacant twitching faces. “I promise you that.”
“Hanging’s too good for a fucker such as that,” one man says. “He should have his balls cut off first. He should have a red-hot poker rammed up his arse.”
“He should be whipped,” someone else suggests, “whipped down to the fucking bone.”
“Whoever he is, whatever he is, he will be punished according to the extent of the law,” Brownlee says. “Where is the sailmaker?”
The sailmaker, an aged, lugubrious man with vague blue eyes, steps forwards, his greasy beaver cap clutched in his hands.
“Stitch the boy into his shroud now,” Brownlee tells him. “We’ll bury him betimes.” The sailmaker nods and sniffs. “And the rest of you men get back to your duties.”
“Will we continue with the making off now, Captain?” Cavendish asks.
“Indeed we will. This atrocity is no excuse for idleness.”
The men nod meekly. One of them, a boat steerer named Roberts, raises his hand to speak.
“I saw the boy down in the forecastle after the first whale was flensed,” he says. “He was listening to the fiddler and watching the men dance their jigs.”
“That’s true,” another man says. “I saw him there too.”
“Did anyone see Joseph Hannah later?” Brownlee asks. “Did anyone see him yesterday? Speak up.”