The unsuspecting whaler would be sailing direct to the west coast therefore, so for Tyger it would be a diverging course to arrive on the east. What they did after that was not altogether clear as Kydd didn’t want to let it be generally known what they were going for until after they’d made landfall, and he could see with his own eyes what conditions would allow.
He was outwardly confident but inside he was uneasy. They were headed for breathtakingly high latitudes-eighty degrees north, where ninety was the North Pole itself. The very limit of human existing-the very top of the world!
Tyger put to sea a day later and immediately met a chill north-easterly.
It eased but the biting wind brought shudders and tested their gear-oilskins with plenty of wool under them.
Horner showed them a whaler’s trick: before going aloft, have a shipmate tie off the sleeves and ankles with spun yarn, together with a stout line around the waist, which was connected to another going fore and aft under the crotch. This enabled them to mount the rigging without their gear ballooning up in the fierce winds.
All hands, including Kydd, now wore Monmouth caps-warm, knitted coverings lined with felt and a tie-loop to save it if blown off.
Day by day they penetrated further into the north, the cold steadily more insidious. The first ice was seen, insignificant fragments that were beneath Horner’s notice but they held the Tygers spellbound-the first tokens of the reality that lay in wait for them out there in the frozen north. Close to, most of the floes were grubby and discoloured, some with seabirds perched cheekily on them as they watched the ship pass by. Horner grimly assured them that they would see far grander ice than this before they made England again.
Sometimes the broad grey seas were transformed to a vivid blue under a vast sky, always accompanied by piercing cold of a keen purity, the white of breaking wave-crests a sparkling brilliance, and as the latitude steadily mounted, an unearthly quality took hold. It was of a harsh light almost unbearable in its intensity; the bowl of the sky now seeming more immense, exalted; their ship, lifting over the ceaseless vast swells, now so humble and insignificant.
One morning there was a strange and preternatural luminosity growing out of the sea far ahead. It intensified, a low white glow spreading to each side and even catching the underneath of the thin grey cloud, but there was nothing on the clear horizon that gave away its meaning to the wondering seamen.
“That’s the ice-blink we get off of Spitzbergen,” Horner told Kydd. “And it’ll be Sorkapp Land-further on it has a dirty yellow in it where there’s bare land under.”
Within hours they raised a needle-sharp peak that stood above others like it, and then the lower levels came into view, ice-streaked and increasingly formidable as they sailed through scattered floes and fragments, these now a pure white and often tinted in soft blue and green.
Further in among the waves a pair of black forms rhythmically broke surface and fell as they progressed, their glistening backs and tall fins humping in unison.
“Where’s your harpoon, Mr Horner?” Kydd teased.
The old whaleman looked at him blankly. “As they’re killer whales only, not worth the stalking.”
Nearer still, the mountains took on massive form and colour-dark rust, for there was not a scrap of green to soften the appalling desolation that was spreading before them. Nothing but a cruel majesty of iron ramparts and sweeping valleys, sheer mountains and gleaming ice.
“Well, Cap’n, an’ we’re here?”
Kydd pulled himself together. In the midst of this grandeur, to be contemplating an act of war. And without charts or sailing directions he was completely dependent on just one man. There was no other option than to lay the whole thing before him.
“Mr Horner. We’ll go below and discuss our position.”
“Ha! Had a notion there’d be more to it than you said.”
“Then, sir, where’s the whaling station?”
Joyce’s atlas was produced.
“We’s here,” Horner said, tapping the apex of the inverted triangle, the extreme southern tip of Spitzbergen. “And all up the coast on the west you has mighty fjords-and some tiddlers. The Dutchy whalers are at Barentsburg, named after their hero, an’ that’s halfway up, a dozen miles into the biggest, Isfjorden.”
Even at the small scale of the atlas it was easy to see the repeated pattern of deeply incised fjords and it gave Kydd an idea.
“I can’t take him on this territory. Now, he’ll be sailing out of Isfjorden and will want to shape course south. If I lie out of sight in the next fjord below, he’ll be passing right by and I’ll know.”
“I’d say it’s as good a plan as any. An’ I can help you with that. Next ’un south is Bellsund an’ tucked inside is a quiet little bay where we rides out a westerly.”
There were still many questions to answer. Was the fur transport real or imaginary? And if it was, could it indeed be at Barentsburg awaiting this last shipment before sailing?
There was only one way to find out: to sail in and see for himself-but that was impossible. The sight of an English frigate would ensure that it stayed put, snug and wary, until they left.
The boats? A man-o’-war’s craft were distinctive and under sail a dead giveaway. And a quick glance at the dire landscape put paid to the idea of landing a party on the other side to climb up and observe from the heights.
Frustration built. To be thwarted at the final hurdle!
“We’ll get to Bellsund, the least we can do.”
“Might think o’ something, Mr Kydd,” Horner said sympathetically.
It was all of a day’s sail, yet further north, past frigid bastions, blotched and veined with white, and hummocked drift ice that reached out to them, occasionally bringing a thump at the bows and a bumping passage down the side.
Their pilot stood a-brace on the quarterdeck the whole time, sharp-eyed over to starboard where the mountains met the sea. “Squalls come whistlin’ down from your ice-rivers and no warning save you catch the sea’s darkling under ’em,” he muttered.
The weather was holding but that was no guarantee that it would last. The cold was mercilessly penetrating, especially for the group around the helm, who could do nothing to avoid the bitter down-draught from the mainsail and not even the sight of a long-toothed walrus staring up at them from atop an ice floe made up for it.
Rounding the headland into Bellsund itself, so close to the iron rocks and soaring crags, the sheer bleakness and hostility of the land beat out at them: this was a place of trolls and winter ogres where man had no right to trespass.
It was as Horner had said, a secluded little bay out of sight of the open sea. Kydd was taken aback at the visual impact of its colossal majesty-not one but two glaciers feeding into the milewide bay from between massive snow-capped mountain ranges that swept down to a desolate rock-strewn fringing shoreline, the bay filled from one side to the other with a dense scatter of small floating ice fragments.
“You’ll want to drop hook here, Cap’n.”
They were only just within the near-circular bay but Kydd took his advice. In the lee of the mountains the wind had dropped to a whisper and the sea was glassy smooth, the stillness breathtaking. Atop slimed crags countless rock ptarmigans, malamuck, kirmew and others kept up a ceaseless din while at the water’s edge seals stared at them.
The ship stood down but most men stayed on deck to gaze and wonder. Kydd felt a tug of sadness that his old sea companion and deepest friend, Renzi, was not there to witness this, Nature at her grandest and most terrifying.
“Sir?” It was Hollis, almost comical in his cold-weather gear. Kydd knew what was on his mind. Was the frigate going back to sea or would they remain here for an indefinite time?
He didn’t have an answer. “Ah, I’ll let you-”
A cry from the fo’c’sle made Kydd wheel about.
Appearing from around the headland was a small lugger with a trysail beetling seaward past them, their first sign of humanity for so long.