“I’m surprised that you let a little thing like some water bother you,” Barney said, then turned to the propman. “Give me a full bucket, will you Eddie, right in the kisser.”
“Whatever you say, Mr. Hendrickson.”
Eddie took a long-arm swing and hurled the contents of the bucket into the air stream from the wind machine, which blew the solid spray into Barney’s face.
“Great,” he said, trying to keep his jaw from shaking. “Very refreshing. I don’t mind water in my face.” His smile had a ghastly set to it because he was half frozen to death. The September evenings in the Orkneys were cool enough without the drenching, and now the rushing air cut through his wet clothes like a knife.
“Throw water on me!” Ottar ordered. “I’ll show you about water.”
“Coming up—and don’t forget your lines.” Barney stepped back out of camera range and the projectionist called over to him:
“Reel is almost empty on the back projection, Mr. Hendrickson.”
“Rewind it then, hurry up or we’ll be here all night.”
The heaving, storm-tossed sea vanished from the back-projection screen and the company relaxed. The propmen, their platform next to the knorr, switched on the electric pump to fill their barrel with more sea water. Ottar stood alone, at the steering oar of the beached ship, and frowned angrily at the world. The big spotlights made a brilliantly lit stage of the knorr and the bit of beach beside it; the rest of the world was in darkness.
“Give me a cigarette,” Barney said to his secretary, “mine are soaked.”
“Ready to go now, Mr. Hendrickson,” the projectionist shouted.
“Great. Positions everyone, camera.” The two propmen threw their weight onto the long levers so that the bit of false decking that Ottar stood on pitched and tossed, “Action.”
With jaws clamped, Ottar stared into the teeth of the gale, fighting the steering oar that a man out of sight below was trying to pull out of his hands. “Stay away from the sail!” he shouted. “By Thor I’ll kill any man that touches the sail.” The water sprayed over him and he laughed coldly. “I don’t mind the water—I like water! Full sail—I can smell land. Keep hope!”
“Cut,” Barney ordered.
“He’s a great ad libber,” Charley Chang said. “That wasn’t quite the way I wrote it.”
“We’ll leave it in, Charley. Any time he gets that close I call it a bull’s-eye.” Barney raised his voice. “All right, that wraps it up for today. Morning call at seven-thirty so we can get the early light. Jens, Amory—I want to see you up here before you go.”
They stood in the waist of the ship, near the big mast, and Barney kicked the deck with his heel.
“Can this thing really make it to North America?” he asked.
“There is no doubt of it,” Jens Lyn said. “These Norse knorr were better ocean-going vessels—and faster ones—than the ones Columbus had, or the Spanish and British ships that sailed to the new world five hundred years later. The history of these ships is well recorded in the sagas.”
“Remember, we’ve come to doubt some of the sagas of late?”
“There is other evidence. In 1932 a replica of one of these craft, just sixty feet long, made the westward passage along one of the routes Columbus used—and improved on Columbus’ best time by over 30 per cent. There are many misconceptions about these vessels, for instance it is believed that they could only run before the wind with their large, square sail. Yet they could—they can—sail within five points of the wind. In fact, most interesting, the point of sailing is called beita, from which we derive the modem term of ‘beating’ up to windward.”
“I’ll take your word for it. What’s that stench?”
“The cargo,” Jens said, pointing to the large mounds with tight-lashed coverings that stood along the deck. “These ships do not have holds, so all the cargo is carried on deck.”
“What’s the cargo—Limburger cheese?”
“No, mostly food, cattle feed, ale, that sort of thing. The odor comes from the hide tarpaulins that are waterproofed with seal-oil tar and butter.”
“Very ingenious.” Barney pointed into the dark mouth of the open well behind the mast. “What happened to the hand pump you were going to install here? This ship has to get to Vinland or we have no picture. I want every precaution taken to make sure of that. Amory said a pump would be an improvement—so where is it?”
“Ottar refused to have it,” Jens said. “He was very suspicious of it and was afraid it would break and he wouldn’t know how to fix it. You can say one thing for the system they use, one man standing in the well and filling a bucket and another throwing it overboard with this wooden arm, it may be crude but it always works.”
“As long as they have buckets and men, which I’m sure they’ll have enough of. All right, I’ll buy that. I don’t want to teach Ottar his business—I just want to make sure he gets there. Where is this navigation thing you rigged, Amory?”
“It’s sealed inside the hull where it can’t be tampered with, and there’s just a simple dial topside for the steersman to look at.”
“Will it work?”
“I don’t see why not. These northmen are very good navigators in their own right. Their sea passages are usually very short so they set their course and sail from a landmark astern to one ahead. They know how the ocean currents run and the habits of the sea birds so they can follow them to land. In addition to which they can estimate their latitude very closely by the height of the North Star above the horizon. Any assistance we give them should fit within the system they already use, so it can be an additional help—but one that wouldn’t cause a tragedy if it failed. The most obvious aid would seem to be a simple magnetic compass, but that would be too foreign to them, and a compass is particularly difficult to use this far north where there are so many magnetic anomalies and where the difference between true north and magnetic north is so marked.”
“That was what you didn’t do. So what did you do?”
“Sealed a gyrocompass into the stem up against the hull here, along with a load of new long-life nicad batteries. We’ll turn it on when they leave and it should run at least a month before the batteries poop out. The gyrocompass is one of the new microminiaturized, no-tumble, no-precession things developed for rockets. Then right here, set into the rail by the steersman, is the compass repeater.”
Barney looked in through the thick glass covering at the white arrow clearly visible against the black dial. The dial was completely blank except for a single large white spot. “I hope this means more to Ottar than it does to me,” he said.
“He likes it a great deal,” Amory said. “In fact he is quite enthusiastic. Maybe if I draw a sketch it would be clearer.” He took a felt-tipped pen and a notepad from his pocket and quickly made a simple drawing.
“The dotted line represents sixty degrees north latitude, and you will notice that this parallel is the one Ottar would normally sail to reach Cape Farewell here on the tip of Greenland, sailing due west and estimating the height of the North Star to keep him on the latitude. What we will do is set the gyrocompass so that it always points to Cape Farewell. When the pointer on the repeater dial touches the spot—and they both are luminescent and glow at night—the ship is headed in the right direction. They will be guided right to the tip of Greenland.”
“Where they are going to spend the winter with some of Ottar’s relatives. Fine so far—but what happens in the spring when they have to go on? This sixty-degree course will take them right into Hudson Bay.”
“We will have to reset the compass,” Amory said. “Ottar will wait for us and we’ll put in new batteries and point the compass at the Straight of Belle Isle, right here. He should have enough faith in the instrument by then to follow it—even though his course won’t run along a parallel. However, the East Greenland Current does flow in the same direction and he is familiar with that. He’ll have no trouble reaching either the coast of Labrador or Newfoundland.”