As quickly as the chaos began, however, it ceases. The berg loses contact with the edge of the ice, and the shuddering cacophony of impact gives way to the remnant howling of the wind and the oaths and curses of the men. Sumner notices for the first time that snow is pelting against the left side of his face and gathering in his beard. He feels for a moment wrapped up, cocooned, made strangely private, by the fierceness of the weather, as if the world beyond, the real world, is separate and forgettable, and he alone inside the whirl of snow exists. Someone tugs his arm and points him backwards. He sees that the second tent is now ablaze. Mattresses, rugs, and sea chests are burning fiercely; what remains of the canvas is whipping about in the high wind and flaming like a tar barrel. The rump of the crew stare aghast, their helpless faces brightened by the high dancing flames. Cavendish, after kicking at the embers and bewailing his ill luck, yells for them to take refuge in the remaining whaleboats. Working rapidly but without method, they empty out the two boats, pack themselves inside like cargo, then pull the tarpaulins taut across the top. The resultant spaces are fetid and coffin-like. The air inside is sparse and pungent, and there is no light at all. Sumner is lying on bare, cold timbers, and the men arrayed around him are talking loudly and bitterly about the incompetence of Cavendish, the astonishing ill luck of Brownlee, and their desire above all and despite everything to get home alive. Exhausted but sleepless, his muscles and inner organs beginning to itch and agitate with the unmet need for opium, he tries again to forget where he is, to imagine he is somewhere better, happier, but he can’t succeed.
* * *
In the morning, the storm has abated. The day is cool and damp with gray clouds overhead and flat bands of fog concealing the floe edge and lying like layered quartz across the dark faces of the distant mountains behind. They pull back the snow-laden tarpaulins and climb out of the whaleboats. The burned and blackened fragments of the second tent and most of what it contained are strewn untidily across the ice in front of them. Some of the spars, half sunk in pools of meltwater, are still smoldering. While the cook boils water and cobbles together a rough version of breakfast, the men pick and poke through the lukewarm embers for anything still usable and worth preserving. Cavendish strolls around amongst them, whistling and making ribald jokes. He carries an enameled mug of steaming beef tea in his left hand. Every now and then, he bends down like a gentleman fossil hunter to pick up a still-warm knife blade or a solitary boot heel. For a man who has just seen his ship crushed, and narrowly survived an iceberg and then a fire in the night, he appears, Sumner thinks, unusually good-humored and carefree.
After eating, they repack the whaleboats, then raise up the one surviving tent, weigh down its edges with provision casks, and settle inside with playing cards and pipe tobacco to wait for Black, Jones, and the others to return from the Hastings. After an hour or so, as the fog lifts, Cavendish goes outside with his telescope to check for signs of the returning party. After a while, he calls out for Otto, and, after a while longer, Otto calls out for Sumner.
Cavendish hands Sumner the telescope and points east without speaking. Sumner extends the telescope and looks through it. He is expecting to see, off in the distance, Black, Jones, and the rest of the crew tugging the four empty whaleboats across the ice towards them, but in fact he sees nothing at all. He lowers the telescope, squints into the distant emptiness, then raises the telescope to his eye and looks again.
“So where are they?”
Cavendish shakes his head, curses, and starts angrily rubbing the nape of his neck. His previous calmness and good humor has disappeared. He is pale-faced and tight-lipped. His eyes are wide open and he is breathing hard through his nose.
“The Hastings is gone,” Otto says.
“Gone where?”
“Most likely, she ventured out into the pack last night to escape from the bergs,” Cavendish says sharply. “That’s all there is to it. She will find her way back to the floe edge soon enough. Campbell knows just where we are. All we need to do is wait for him here. Show a bit of faith and a bit of fucking patience.”
Sumner looks through the telescope again, sees, again, nothing but sky and ice, then looks at Otto.
“Why would a ship unmoor in the midst of a storm?” he asks. “Wouldn’t she be safer remaining where she was?”
“If a berg is bearing down, the captain does what’s needed to save the ship,” Otto says.
“Exactly,” Cavendish says. “Whatever you have to do, you do it.”
“How long might we have to wait here?”
“That all depends,” Cavendish says. “If she finds open water it could be today. If not…”
He shrugs.
“I don’t have my medicine chest,” Sumner says. “It was taken across already.”
“Is any man here sick?”
“Not yet, no.”
“Then I’d say that’s about the least part of our fucking worries.”
Sumner remembers watching the iceberg through the gray veil of flailing snow: many-storied and immaculate, moving smoothly and unstoppably forwards with the frictionless non-movement of a planet.
“The Hastings could be sunk,” he realizes. “Is that what you mean?”
“She int sunk,” Cavendish tells him.
“Are there other ships that can rescue us?”
Otto shakes his head.
“Not near enough. It’s too late in the season and we’re too far north. Most of the fleet have left Pond’s Bay by now.”
“She int sunk,” Cavendish repeats. “She’s somewhere out there in the sound, that’s all. If we wait here, she’ll come back right enough.”
“We should go out with the whaleboats to search,” Otto says. “It was a fierce wind last night. She could have been blown miles off to the east. She could be stoved in, nipped, rudderless, anything at all.”
Cavendish frowns, then nods reluctantly, as if eager to think of some better, easier solution, but utterly unable to do so.
“We’ll find her soon enough when we go out there,” he says quickly, snapping shut the brass telescope and shoving it into his greatcoat pocket. “She won’t be far off, I’d say.”
“What if we don’t find her?” Sumner asks. “What then?”
Cavendish pauses and looks at Otto, who stays silent. Cavendish tugs his earlobe and then answers in a ludicrous music hall brogue.
“Den I hope you brought your swimming togs along widje, Paddy,” he says. “’Cause it’s an awful long focking way to anywhere else from hereabouts.”
They spend the rest of the day out in the whaleboats, rowing first east along the edge of the land ice, then turning north towards the center of the sound. The storm has broken up the pack, and they move without difficulty through the irregular fragments of drift and brash ice, steering around them when necessary or poking them aside with the blades of their long oars. Otto commands one boat and Cavendish the other. Sumner, who has been promoted to steersman, imagines every moment that they will sight the Hastings on the horizon — like a single dark stitch against the coarse, gray blanket of the sky — and that the fear that is aching inside him, that he is struggling to contain, will dissolve like mist. He senses amongst the crewmen an anxiety edged with bitterness and anger. They are searching for someone to blame for this perilous string of misfortunes and Cavendish, whose promotion to the captaincy is unearned and tainted with unnaturalness and violence, is the most deserving and obvious candidate.