North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther

4.

Rounding a last corner, now a wide street. Setting foot on this lane is like opening the doors to a quiet shop where one has no business. The homes are Victorian. The hedges trimmed and boxed.

These grand and sturdy houses face the wharves and look like stern faces themselves. From the third-floor windows, which are the face’s eyes, successful shipowners may sit and survey their fortune being built right in front of them. For years they’ve watched from this high perch, satisfied, as barrels and barrels of oil are rolled from each returning vessel and set on the wharves, or warmed their hands as their ships were heaved over and recaulked and sheathed and prepared for yet another voyage. At least, that’s how it had been.

At a house unlike the others, Arnold Lovejoy stops to adjust his shirt. He checks the address on the letter. He knocks.

5.

He is received at the door by a stout woman in a black woolen overcoat, who, without a word, leads him through a dark and gloomy foyer and sits him in the library. In this room, all the shades are drawn. The walls are decorated with paintings of ships and scenes of the chase. Flensing Among Floes; Spouting Off Larboard; The Cutting Party. In one particularly gruesome illustration, two men prick at a large walrus with cutting spades while a third hoists what appears to be a large golden egg above his head. He looks more closely. It isn’t an egg, exactly.

The walrus wears an expression of deep discomfort.

Directly above the fireplace, centered over the mantle, hangs a portrait of a young boy in a lime-green hunting coat. In one hand he holds a bugle. In the other, a small dog whose mashed face seems drawn out of proportion. The books on the shelves are histories of the Ashley family.

“Your frown,” says Arnold Lovejoy, to the woman who has come and gone with his letter and now sits silently across from him, “is like a symbol in some long-lost alphabet.”

She makes no reply. At the sound of a bell, she turns and walks out of the room, summoning him; he stands and follows. There are no rugs on the floor, nor any wall decoration, but he knows the woman’s coat is made of the finest wool and the wooden floor planks are pine.

A flensing pole leans comfortably in the corner of the staircase.

6.

The curtains in this wide sitting room are drawn as well, and on one table someone has spread a map. The whole place is candlelit; even the dark corners are cast in a fine light. In front of Arnold Lovejoy sits a small man with no hair and a woman with sharp teeth. Ashley himself, and to his left, his wife. “Captain Lovejoy,” says Ashley. “Thank you for delivering your letter. Or, I should say, my letter. The Dromo was my favorite ship. I’m sorry she’s been lost.”

“Very sorry,” says Mrs. Ashley.

They are not really monsters, Arnold Lovejoy knows. They just appear that way. It’s in their blood.

7.

“For nearly a year I’ve sat in disquiet, eager for news of my ship. What’s happened to her, I wondered? I know now. And in that time, in this room, waiting off the water for so long, I’ve developed a strange craving. Not for foul duff, of course—foul. I’m speaking of salt horse, that special treat of the sea. You don’t have any, do you? At your age, I carried a strip in my breast pocket, which made me a friend to all dogs ashore I can tell you. They followed me all over town. With them I behaved admirably, I gave them licks. It’s nothing to be nervous about, if you don’t have one, you don’t, but I thought perhaps you were like me, and carried a strip in your breast pocket, like a memory of the sea itself. I ask every returning ship, and every returning captain who darkens my door. No? Very well.

“Come closer. Use your imagination: receive a strip from my hand. The proper way to wash it down is with water, sometimes after soaking it. Always, my favorite pieces were gamey ones, ones that no one else wanted. I chose them to be virtuous, but soon came to like the taste, and whenever I saw a piece that had been passed over two or three times by the crew, my mouth would go numb—my piece.

“Some men grow to hate the meat. But that’s the same as saying you hate the sea, and your ship, and your captain, and everything you’ve decided to do with your life.… Now, chew. It’s the fibers. They untwine in your mouth, and some lodge near your gums between your back teeth … I don’t have those teeth any longer of course, this was years ago! But don’t the years pass like days. This is always a double pleasure for me. First, to eat the meat, which is making me salivate as I speak to you now; then the pleasure of feeling a slight discomfort in your gums as you fall asleep; then further pleasure, as often the next evening as the next morning, when you relentlessly tongue the fibers and snag them, and they are finally released from their hiding place to drop back to your mouth. It was all we ate on my ships. It cost me no money at all. Some ships I knew caught and ate seal, but I myself have no taste for that tricky creature. Men who eat seal are not normal afterward. They open themselves up to nightmare.”

“That’s … ridiculous,” says Mrs. Ashley.

Ashley himself frowns. “Not at all.”

8.

“Tell us about Benjamin,” Mrs. Ashley says. “Leander, I should say. How did you come to have this letter?” Arnold Lovejoy coughs and speaks: “That was not the name he gave. In fact, he gave me no name at all. He said he’d been without his ship for months. He was wearing skins. He was alone on the ice. We were on our way out, and he asked me to deliver it to you.”

“Did you read the letter?” “Of course not.” “Did you invite him aboard?” “Oh, yes,” says Arnold Lovejoy. “He had no interest.”

“Did he ask you to deliver anything else?”

Pause. “No.”

“You realize he lives in the palace of his mind,” says Mrs. Ashley.

“I did not note that,” says Lovejoy.

“He always has.”

9.

In the silence that follows, Arnold Lovejoy feels as though he is sitting for a painting, lightheaded; he thinks he might leave his feet. In his hand, he still holds the imaginary piece of salt horse given to him; he places it in his pocket. He looks at the Ashley crest over the fireplace: a darting knot above three whales.

Overcome, he kneels.

“My father was a whaleman,” he says. “Our family has always admired yours. He is dead now. But he would be proud to see me here.” “How polite,” says Mrs. Ashley. He can think of nothing else to say. “How long ago?” “Ma’am?”

“Did he die.”

“I find I can’t remember, exactly. It’s been years. Years and years.”

10.

He had met the Ashleys once before. He’d been clean-shaven then, and young, at his father’s side, in this very room. And though their history on the water was indelible to him, he hadn’t expected to be remembered, for the Ashleys were famous and known to all good men of the sea. Revered around New Bedford, they had built a formidable fleet of whaling ships and had taken over or put out of business all other candlemakers in southern Massachusetts. As businesspeople they were ruthless.

As whalers, they’d had no equal.

On land, they were known as much for their generosity to the town as they were for their inability to forgive a grievance. They seemed to luxuriate in them, Mrs. Ashley in particular. She was a stern woman, with a muster of gray, metallic hair that sat atop her head like a ball of thin yarn, through which her scalp was visible; her brow was perpetually creased.

She did not forget a slight—why should she? She’d accompanied her husband on his early voyages and had born him two sons and a daughter on the sea.

Not a single Ashley was over five feet tall.

The Dromo had been an Ashley bark seemingly for centuries and was famous herself in her own way: once she had been used to return runaway slaves from Massachusetts to Charleston.

11.

“Here, now,” says Ashley. With a sigh he stands, walks to still-kneeling Arnold Lovejoy, takes him by the arm, and lifts. “He can’t stay on the ice like a madman. Surely you understand.” His grip is viselike and cold.

He compels Arnold Lovejoy to a table piled high with careful maps, selects one, and flattens it.

The map is beautifully rendered. It looks like an ancient scroll and appears to glow in the candlelight as Ashley runs his fingers over the markings—ink dots indicating barrel amounts of a take, sightings, routes. This map is of the northern grounds, from where Arnold Lovejoy has just returned. In one corner is drawn a lifelike sawfish. In another, a fantastically rendered mermaid, with beautiful breasts and a seal’s split tail.

“Point out where he was?” says Ashley.

As Arnold Lovejoy begins to explain—near St. Lawrence Island, slightly south, demoralized, unsure if they were seeing a man walking toward them over the ice or not—a small cry comes from behind one of the full-drawn curtains. He realizes that someone has been hiding there the whole time.

“Hush,” says Mrs. Ashley.

Finally, Ashley rolls up the map, locks it away, and thanks him. He retrieves a small sack from his desk and presses it into Arnold Lovejoy’s hands.

“Oh,” says Arnold Lovejoy. “This is unnecessary.”

“You haven’t read by light until you’ve lit an Ashley candle. Finest Sperm Candle. Drives the dark out, eliminates it, enfolds it, and kicks it outside. It’s for thee. In thanks, in admiration, in pity. For the letter.”

Arnold Lovejoy nods slowly, glances once at the curtain, and allows himself to be shown out by the dour, stout woman who had greeted him earlier with such misery. “Such a slaughterous age,” says she. “One can’t be sentimental. Still, I wish he’d come home. But he shan’t, shan’t, shan’t.”

12.

Well-known to all returning whalers is the Davit Inn, a tavern whose low-lit interior approximates a captain’s quarters. Upon entering, Arnold Lovejoy is pleased to see that after all these years the owner still hangs sketched drawings of old wooden ships on his walls. He reads the ship and signal flags carefully pinned above the bar. House flags hung to summon the old grandeur of the sea. Smudge pots line the corner like squat, silent sentinels. No pictures of steamers allowed.

The bar itself is lit by lamplight.

The owner of this inn is famous. Everyone knows him—he is an old whaling captain himself. He would be, thinks Arnold Lovejoy, almost seventy years old. One son abandoned him and the family business in the search for gold in the western seams, the other had his head taken clean off by cannon fire at Antietam. But when, as Lovejoy sits, he asks after the owner by name, the barman behind the counter sucks his teeth.

Let it be, he thinks, and orders his rum with sugar.

Of the four other men in the bar, three have no nails on any finger save the thumb. They are old riggers and will not look at him. Their hands are ruined. They are cloaked in tatters and wear their canvas pants stained. They will never be on a ship again in the role they had become accustomed to.

“I have just been to the Ashleys,” Lovejoy finally says.

“Not true,” says the barman.

“Inside, even. Summoned.”

“How was it?”

With a sip of his rum, he replies: “Magnificent.”

So settled, the morning returns to him: the dour woman, the shut door, the quiet street. As he’d departed and walked down to the harbor, the Ashley’s house had loomed behind him like a medieval castle, its twin widow’s walks dipping below the trees, just out of sight. The visit had been short, but what had he expected? He had at the very least delivered the letter and shown the proper respect. As he turned another corner and the tavern came into view, he felt the day’s silence swell through him.

Then the sun pulsed and pushed through the gray clouds like a vibrating eye.

“Excuse me,” said some woman.

He’d been startled by a clattering sound. Looking up from the cobblestones where he’d been tracing his thoughts, he saw, caterwauling toward him, the sweet dog Timbo. He ran with his mouth open, his tongue lolling like a limp flag; he had no teeth. In a panic, he was trying to outpace the large stick tied to his mangy tail, yet no matter what he did, the stick pursued him with relentless malice. He turned in circles, he threw himself at a bush. It seemed he was on the verge of losing his mind. He hopped once, twice. Then he reached between his legs, caught his tail in his mouth, and bit until he howled.

This delighted the children, who had followed him for much of the morning in the hope of hearing such a sound.

One saw the end coming and hoped it wouldn’t. His work on the sea had always been brutal and lucrative for his ship’s owners. But now the aperture had closed and gone dark, and embarking was like attaching a fresco to the inside of an eggshell.

“What is that, now?” says the barman.

“A candle,” says Arnold Lovejoy. “The finest.” He unwraps and sets it down on the bar. The cloth it’s come in is embroidered: three whales, a darting knot above. He flattens the emblem carefully and studies it.

“Fearsome creatures,” the barman says, and refills his drink.

Arnold Lovejoy nods.

Then he speaks.

13.

“To keep my sanity aboard the Sophie, I began to suspect there was a reason my men were not spotting whale and I felt it was my job to find out what that reason was. But I didn’t. The Sophie’s voyage was drudgery, gross work for nothing. We lost two steerers in the black water. Not a single thing went right. Near the end, I began to feel as though my life on that cursed ship had all along been happening to another person, and I was in someone else’s skull, looking out. Purest failure, of the purest sort. And now it is over. The Sophie’s debt is unconquerable. It is as though I have walked myself slowly into the darkest of caves, wet and cold, with no sounding equipment to help me out.

“My wife waits for me. My girls will be ten, now. Of them, I can recall very little. They were not present in my thoughts while I sailed. To think of them now—they are wisps of smoke. I attempt to grasp them, and I hold nothing. Perhaps I’m not trying hard enough. It’s a bad feeling. I’m sure you’ve heard worse. But the sea is empty. That’s what I have to tell you.

“Also this: years ago, sitting on this exact stool, I saw a man’s throat slit, lobe to lobe. The poor man flopped on the floor, no head, or more precisely, his head half off his body. His attacker stood over him, yelling abuse until suddenly his own face went white—for he’d been sent to kill one man but, in error, snuck up on and killed another. ‘I would take it back if I could,’ he said. He’d begun to cry. But he left and was not punished.”

“I’ve heard that story,” says the barman.

“I am not normally so talkative.”

“Another?”

Arnold Lovejoy signals, yes.

14.

By the time one of Ashley’s sons tracks him down, Arnold Lovejoy is well into his rum and has talked his way into the company of the riggers.

They’ve lit the sperm candle and set it in the middle of their glass-strewn table; they watch it burn clean and bright all the way down. It really is the finest light, and bathed in it, the riggers look like young men again. They lean into the candle’s glow and allow their thoughts to wander far and wide. “It’s the end of the world up there,” says one of the old riggers. “Ice, ice, ice.” “The world’s always ending somewhere,” says another. The third old rigger clears his throat. “A world is always ending,” he says. “Not the.”

“Captain Lovejoy,” the younger Ashley says. “That is not me,” says Arnold Lovejoy. But the young man knows better.

“I have a proposal for you,” he says. “It’s one you will want to hear.”

15.

“It is not true that all sailors are in love with the sea,” says the younger Ashley, “but I can say with relative certainty that the captains of whaling ships do not thrive in retirement. Where once they conducted themselves with utmost assurance and autocracy, on land they are uncertain and lost. At sea, a captain is the center of his kingdom, his word is law—his crew look to him for guidance and reassurance and accept their punishment should it be necessary.

“On land, even the most wily captains, those on whom nothing regarding the salt sea is lost, and to whom whaling came easily, who never once returned home with a ship less than fully greased, who presided over the slaughter and trying out and chopping and bundling of bone, who asserted their will over the great beasts of the deep and did not flinch—on land they find a circuit of social obligations impossible to navigate. Offense is given and taken freely; one finds himself without a head for numbers; one understands the humiliation of poverty if he is that unlucky; one reaches for a wife only to get a cheek, a tentative yes, the dawning recognition in the eyes of his children that the great man they’d heard about, whom they dreamt was just over the watery horizon, is nothing more than an ordinary fool who walks with his head to the ground telling stories of the sea to anyone who will listen.

“A captain without a ship is a flightless bird. This is not to romanticize the profession, or to deem it a calling of the highest sort, only to state the obvious—that a man, when stripped of his utility, understands with a great shame just how unnecessary to the Earth’s orbit he truly is. And what’s left for him then? Perhaps only civility, servility, the dull path of law.

“It’s tempting to think of our industry in toto as nothing more than a fleet of ships ridding the waves of whale, thinning their numbers, taking what the world’s oceans provide and returning full-up with casks—in other words, an industry that grabs everything and gives nothing. But that would not be true. For it was the whaling ships which brought influenza, cholera, and tuberculosis to the Pacific Islands. Measles killed thirty thousand natives … I’m kidding, of course … I’m almost in tears …

“Leander is the husband to my only sister. He has scuttled the Dromo, a bark not his to scuttle, taken her valuables as his own, and forsaken all kindness shown to him by my parents and, I might add, myself. My sister is heartbroken, and her child is a frail creature … One of our ships is being outfitted on the wharves. Her name is the Esther. You’ve had bad luck, but it need not continue, for despite what you’ve seen and read in various reports spread by our newspapers like a virus, grotesquely, the ocean is not empty.

“Let me lay the proposition in your ear: take command of the Esther and make haste to the northern grounds where you received the letter. Find my brother-in-law and escort him home if he is so willing. And take as many whale as possible along the way.”

16.

“Is this a true proposition?” asks Lovejoy. “It is,” says the younger Ashley. “It is redemption. It is, for you, a way forward. It is also a favor, asked. But it will make you rich.” “Why me?” asks Arnold Lovejoy. The younger Ashley nods.

“Why not?”

17.

“The world gives itself over to those in our favor. Do you believe in such luck? Do you believe in continuity? Do you prefer interruption and whimsy? Do you dream of penury? I will dispense with the flattery. I have spoken to your wife, and she is indifferent to you. I have seen your children, and of you they have no solid memory, simply a feeling of warm abstraction, the saturated idea of a gone father. Perhaps these are relationships you could salvage. But you cannot do so as a farmer or as a tax collector, baker, butcher, soldier, spy. They do not wish to be poor.

“My father knows the owners of your last ship. Your debt is a problem; he can snap his fingers at it, and it will disappear. It is simply a matter of will. Yours.” Snap. “This place is a theater of dreams. It already slips from memory.” Snap. “The Sophie, a vision of failure, gone.” Snap. “But allow me to draw your attention to something while we are here: these ships which hang on the wall. They are full-flagged ambassadors of reason and industry. And what wonderful names they had: the Mary and Helen; Sunbeam; Amaret; Commodore Morris; Fame. The Halcyon is right over there. She was the pride of Nantucket, a ship whose pure lines stopped sailors in their tracks. But she was sunk off the coast of Japan by the Shenandoah. My father is suing for that.”

18.

The younger Ashley draws down his drink, and taps it, delicately, on Arnold Lovejoy’s own.

Gazing at Ashley’s son, the young man hadn’t appeared to Lovejoy like his father, but as the eyes adjusted, he’d begun to look exactly like him. “Strange things do happen,” the boy continues. “One day, you return home with nothing, and the next you are given the opportunity of a lifetime. Simply summon your will. The lay is one quarter. And if you return with my sister’s husband, you will be paid even more handsomely. If you accept, there are a few more stipulations. But nothing major. We need your answer in one week.”

He signals the barman and pays.

“Did you hear?” Arnold Lovejoy asks the barman when the boy has gone. “I did,” the barman replies. “Not all of us live in such sunlight.”

19.

At home, Arnold Lovejoy finds neighbors who don’t recognize him, a wife who won’t touch him, and two children who, though fair and considerate, have not missed him at all. “Poor man, poor man,” his animals say.

And what would his own father have thought?

He dreams he is still on the waves. Twice he is kicked in the chest by the horse who’d been given his name. His bedroom will not stop rocking back and forth. The tall trees make him feel ill, small and sad. One evening, after an argument, he forces the issue with his wife, slips his fingers in her, turns her over, and, though she is quiet and acquiesces, afterward she runs, sobbing angrily, out the kitchen door and into the forest.

His debts dance before his eyes like merry men. He entreats his wife and daughters to accompany him on the Esther; they demur. Yet he knows what he’s been told is true.

The sea is calling.

It takes him four days to accept the Ashleys’ offer.

T W O

20.

“The Esther,” says the younger Ashley, “is a bark-rigged schooner, oak-ribbed, tub-bottomed, made from the finest material—her hull is finished with yellow pine and copper-sheathed.

“As you’ll see, she’s not a fast ship, but in her long and difficult life, she’s neither sagged nor hogged, and not much else can be asked of a whaling vessel of her stature. We are proud to say her tryworks have never been broken down; they sit midship and retain their original Ashley imprint. The only aspect of her appearance that might be held against her is not her fault: during the war, she was painted with false gunports at the waterline, and we have not painted them over.”