The Voyage of the Dolphin (3 page)

‘Then, I think it's fair to say, you would be in
very
good standing with the College.'

‘And how long would I be away?'

‘We estimate six months, maybe more.'

‘That's a long time. I'm not sure I…'

‘The other factor you may need to consider, Fitzmaurice, is that, unfortunately, this voyage would prevent you from going to the Front.'

‘On the other hand, there's nothing really... Could I take anyone with me?'

‘You could take Crozier with you, that's a good explorer name.'

‘And Rafferty?'

The masters consulted.

‘It would be useful to have a medic around, but… Fitzmaurice?'

‘Yes?'

‘For Godsake don't let him operate on anyone.'

Over the next hour Fitzmaurice took in more information than he had in the entire term. From the Regius Professor he learned how science might benefit from study of the giant, the potential advances in the fields of osteology and genetics, and how boffins would come scurrying from all four corners of the Earth just to behold him. From the Master of Discipline, who lectured in the School of Medicine, he heard about ‘adenomas' and ‘pituitary malfunctions' until his head swam. The Senior Dean talked of Atlas and Cyclops, Gog and Magog, Orion, Antaeus, Polyphemus – the sons of Uranus and Gaia who were brought to Earth by Hercules; regaled him with tales of the Giants of Crete, the twelve-foot prehistoric Castelnau Giant, the Prussian infantry regiment of ‘Potsdam Giants', and the Irish giants ‘Big Frank' Sheridan, Patrick Cotter, the Knipe Brothers, and finally, Charles Byrne, the toast of eighteenth century London.

‘Byrne's skeleton is in the Royal College of Surgeons of England,' the Regius Professor squeaked. ‘Seven foot seven inches, and a wonder of the age. Our man, McNeill, stood eight foot nine in his stockings –
eight
foot nine
! Imagine that. We'd outclass them by more than a foot.' And his little eyes gleamed.

On the huge, ornate globe that stood beside the window, they traced the route the ship would take, sailing up through the Atlantic to Reykjavik, snaking around Greenland and across Baffin Bay to the mouth of the Northwest Passage, and thence into the slow-churning waters of the Arctic Archipelago.

By the time the masters had finished with him, Fitzmaurice could barely see for the visions of heroism that swirled in his head: silver-oxide portraits of courageous men (himself mostly) with rime-crusted beards and eternity-haunted eyes, straddling chasms and planting flags on cathedrals of ice; front-page ticker-tape blizzards and hysterical crowds. As he tottered down the stairs from the Senior Dean's office and out into Front Square he pictured the parade that would greet his homecoming, himself at the head of it, carried shoulder-high.

‘This calls for a celebration,' the Senior Dean announced, ringing the bell for a servant. ‘Another bottle of the Margaux, I think.'

As he trimmed the wick on his lantern, the cellarer glared up from the cobbles at the Senior Dean's window and softly cursed the shadows that cavorted on the ceiling. The temperature had dropped and a chill, eye-level fog was forming. He crossed the square and unlocked the door to the vertiginous stairwell, took a couple of deep breaths, and still swearing to himself, began his descent. Somewhere in the dark below, in the furthest passageway, the spirit of the labyrinth started up again its strange threnody.

Standing on the edge of Queenstown harbour that late March morning, breathing plumes of sharp, briny air, Crozier was seized by a dizzying sense of imminence. The
Dolphin
, a three-masted barquentine of oak and Norwegian fir, had arrived from the re-fitting yard in Bristol during the night and now rocked gently on the early tide, gulls wafting and yelping above it. The prow was painted with gold curlicues on bands of pale blue, while a gleaming figurehead of a white, bottle-nosed dolphin chortled beneath the bowsprit. On the dockside, stacks of packing cases awaited loading. Voices could be heard from below deck. It was suddenly clear that, after all the talk and speculation and imaginings, the voyage was
actually
going to happen.

Since arriving at the southern Irish port the previous morning, the room-mates had passed the time wandering the streets like out-of-season tourists, or scouring the stores for stray provisions. Food and drink for the journey, and equipment for the expedition, had been arranged by Captain Eagleton before his untimely death, and would be stowed shortly. Last-minute purchases included dried fruit, tinned beans and a hot water bottle for Fitzmaurice's iguana Bridie (a souvenir from his father's South American travels) that he was insisting on bringing along despite strong objections. ‘There's no one to look after her. She'll die otherwise,' he protested. When reminded of the well-known reptilian aversion to low temperatures, he harumphed and said she would snooze out the voyage in some cosy nook near the ship's furnace.

Neither Crozier nor Rafferty approved of Bridie, a weighty conglomeration of clammy green frills and warty dewlaps measuring over three feet from nose to tail. They did not like her haughty demeanour and malevolent stare, nor the way she kept very still for hours on end, then
moved
very quickly
. Nor did they care for how she would sometimes hold up a tiny, chainmail-gloved hand before emitting a loud, propulsive sneeze, usually in their direction. Rafferty, in particular, refused to be in a room alone with the creature following a high-pitched late-night encounter that had every resident of Botany Bay bolt upright in their beds. Fitzmaurice loved her dearly, however, and much to the horror of his friends, would occasionally let her sit in his lap and take chunks of carrot from between his lips.

As a concession to the presence of Bridie, Rafferty had been allowed to bring along his banjolele, an instrument he had taken up in the first term after finding it in a pawn shop in the Liberties at a knockdown price. The reason for the discount was a warp in its frame – unadvertised and invisible to the naked eye – which meant it could never fully be brought into tune. That any prolonged solo induced a debilitating headache in everyone within earshot was unfortunate, as Rafferty had a mellifluous voice and a rich repertoire of songs gleaned from his maternal uncles who were in music hall. He was not entirely insensitive to the effect of the instrument on others, but was convinced that practice would make perfect, and he was nothing if not persistent.

 

‘Ahoy there.'

A stocky man with a shaggy white moustache and black button eyes was making his way down the gangplank.

‘Are you Fitzmaurice?' he asked, surveying Crozier with suspicion.

‘No, but I'm one of his party,' Crozier said, and introduced himself.

‘Right y'are. Ewan McGregor is my name. Skipper of yon tub,' he jerked his head sideways ‘God preserve us and keep us.'

‘And a handsome vessel she is too.'

McGregor shot him a quick look, coughed richly and spat something heavy into the water.

‘She's Glasgae-built, like myself, but I'd say my mother did the better job,' he said. ‘She floats, though, that's the main thing. Will your party be ready tae leave on the morning tide, first light?'

‘We'll be ready whenever you say the word.'

A Navy Cut appeared between McGregor's fingers.

‘I'm led tae believe, and correct me if I'm wrong,' he struck a match, ‘that you boys have never been tae sea before. Is that the case?'

Crozier met the full force of the Glaswegian's obsidian stare.

‘Well, technically speaking,' he replied. ‘I mean, Fitzmaurice has done some sailing and Rafferty, I seem to remember, took a ferry to…'

‘So that's a no then.'

‘Yes.'

There followed a pungent silence in which Crozier gazed at the horizon with intense interest while the skipper reduced his cigarette to a red-hot spike.

‘Right then, me and the boys are going to hae a wee bit of shore leave.' The dog-end hit the water followed by another oyster from the sea-bed of McGregor's lungs. ‘So that puts you in charge. Keep your eye out for strangers sneakin' aboard, and try not tae sink her.'

 

With the help of two porters, the adventurers spent the morning lugging their belongings from the guesthouse to the
Dolphin
.
The ship was more spacious below decks than it appeared from the outside and smelled of shaved wood and tar. It was planked throughout with oak, and the walls and ceilings webbed with rope netting in which was stored bales of sailcloth, lanterns, spools of twine. After some token argument, Fitzmaurice bagged himself a master's cabin, which was larger than all the others except for the skipper's, and featured, along with a single bed, a writing desk, bookshelves and a porthole. The other two took smaller lodgings under the fo'c'sle. Bridie, in her glass cage, was installed on top of some boxes of provisions in a corner of the galley next to the stove flue.

When they had arranged their baggage, they convened at the big table in the mess for a pot of tea and some hard, flavourless biscuits they found in a tin. Above them they could hear the shouts of the stevedores, who were winching aboard cases of canned food, medical supplies and trekking equipment. McGregor and his crew had long since disappeared up the pastel-terraced hillside of Queenstown in search of a sailor-friendly early house.

‘Well gentlemen,' Fitzmaurice said, ‘here we are. Almost at the point of no return.'

Neither of his companions responded. Rafferty, cradling his banjolele, plucked a chord, frowned, tweaked a peg.

‘Who'd have thought?' Fitzmaurice continued. ‘Just shows you, doesn't it? You never know what's round the corner. I mean, a month ago I was facing the sack, destined for some ghastly desk job in Dublin Castle or a commission to the Front, and now here I am with you two fine fellows on our own ship headed for the top of the world, and, providing all goes as planned, for fame and…'

He was halted by a sudden flurry of discordant strumming.

‘Actually, let me stop you there,' Rafferty said. ‘Here's a quick question. What exactly
are
our chances of finding this giant? I've been thinking about it and it doesn't seem to me that we've really got much to go on.'

Fitzmaurice's mouth formed an outraged pout.

‘Of course we'll find him. It's imperative.'

‘How though?' Rafferty set down his banjolele. ‘We don't even have a proper map.'

‘What are you talking about? We've
plenty
of perfectly decent maps.'

‘Yes, but not an
accurate
map, a map that actually shows where the body's buried. As far as I can work out, the grave could be anywhere within a hundred-mile radius.'

‘Rafferty's right,' said Crozier. ‘It's all a bit vague.'

Fitzmaurice tapped a rhythm on the table with his fingertips.

‘And has that only just occurred to you? Why didn't you mention all this before we left Dublin?'

No response.

‘And what if it
did
turn out to be a wild goose chase, would you pass it up? The gangplank's right outside. Be my guest.'

Rafferty adjusted his spectacles.

‘No, but I just wish we had a better idea of where we're going.'

Fitzmaurice thought for a moment, then rose and left the room. Rafferty embarked on an uncertain tune.

‘Seriously Frank,' Crozier said. ‘A skeleton? The Arctic? Do you think we're wise?'

Rafferty set his instrument down.

‘Jaysus, definitely not,' he took another biscuit, ‘but the way I look at it, we have the rest of our lives to…'

Fitzmaurice had returned, holding an object aloft.

‘I was saving this as a surprise but I suppose now's as good a time as any.'

He set on the table a tattered, leather-bound notebook tied with a length of cord. The other two stared at it. And then at him.

‘This, my friends, is the lost journal of Sir Hamilton Coote,' he tugged at the fastening, ‘from the expedition in search of Franklin.'

The book was fragile, and its spine creaked. The pages – a number had come free of their binding – were crammed with notes written in a sloping, elegant hand, along with sketches of miscellaneous flora and fauna, and roughly drawn maps in pencil and ink.

‘Where on earth did this come from?' Crozier demanded.

Fitzmaurice smiled.

‘The masters. It turned up a year ago at the bottom of a trunk in the Old Library, along with a Gutenberg Bible that had gone missing from the Vatican. Look at this,' he leafed towards the end of the journal, then stopped, tapping the page, ‘here's our man.'

They leaned in. It was a map showing a small island off a stretch of coastline, with the sea represented by squiggly waves, hills by upside-down ‘V's, and various scribbled sets of bearings. A more detailed sketch on the facing page appeared to depict the lower tip of the island, and a cluster of mountains. At the top of one of them was an ‘X', below which was written:

‘The remains of B.
F. McNeill, ship's cook, and last of the Tyrone
Giants, died 9th of July, 1865, of the consumption, aged
27 years. May God have mercy on his soul.'

Fitzmaurice sat back with a pleased expression.

‘There, that make you feel any better?'

His companions absorbed the new material.

‘Seems a bit more specific, I suppose,' Rafferty conceded.

‘Would appear to narrow it down,' Crozier agreed.

‘Of course it does. Now buck up and stop worrying.'

Refreshed and reassured, they spent the next hour exploring the ship. Though showing signs of age on the interior, the
Dolphin
had been skilfully bolstered on the outside, every joint and fitting cross-braced, the bow thickly sheathed in greenheart wood to crash through ice. Of her three masts, the forward one was square-rigged, while the other two carried fore and aft sails, like a schooner. In the stern, below the galley, there was a coal-fired steam engine capable of driving the ship at around six knots, although as the coal bunkers were relatively small, this was a limited option. For warmth, the inside ribs had been tarred and panelled, and iron-clad hearths installed in both the captain's cabin and the mess, the exhaust fumes vented by pipes to the main funnel.

‘I still don't understand,' Crozier peered in at the long, low galley, ‘how a giant would manage on a ship like this. My head is nearly scraping the ceiling and I'm not much above average.'

‘I believe,' Fitzmaurice said, ‘that Sir Hamilton was so fond of McNeill's cooking that he wouldn't travel anywhere without him. The ship was designed with a vaulted galley and a specially extended cabin just to accommodate him.'

‘That must have been some good grub.' Rafferty rubbed his hands together. ‘Let's hope we're in for something similar.'

 

At dusk, McGregor and the rest of the crew, half a dozen in all, returned. Crozier, who was up on deck, heard them before he saw them, rolling along the pier, arms about each other's shoulders, singing a ragged shanty. The quality of the performance indicated that a local tavern had enjoyed a good day's takings.

‘Yis're all settled in then?' said McGregor, barrelling off the gangway. Behind him two of his shipmates were having trouble assisting a third.

‘Indeed we are, Skipper,' Crozier replied. ‘And you and your men found refreshment, I see.'

‘Ah, don't worry about the cabin boy, he's only young – cannae sniff the barmaid's apron without…'

The struggling trio fell onto the deck, gasping and swearing. A gaunt man with red-blistered cheeks sloped into view.

‘Are you hungry? Cookie here's going tae feed us all, aren't you, Victoor?'

The cook gazed morosely at Crozier, then, putting a hand to his mouth, lurched sideways and vomited over the side of the ship. Two of the fallen men, meanwhile, were upright again, both of them broad and blond with red beards and pinkish blue eyes.

‘The twins,' said McGregor. ‘Magnus and Mikkel, but for Christ's sake don't ask me which one's which.'

‘Skål!' the pair shouted at Crozier, saluting and laughing as they headed for the hatchway.

Two more men followed, Doyle the bosun, a Sligo man with huge, dark eyebrows and a hard handshake, and Harris the first mate, a genial Londoner whose frizzy grey hair was tied back in a nautical ponytail. McGregor blocked their way.

‘Get the cabin boy down tae his scratcher,' he ordered. ‘But first, one of yis needs tae go back for Bunion.'

‘Bunion?' said Crozier.

McGregor jerked his thumb. Crozier peered over the side. Down below, shivering next to a mooring bollard and staring up at him with watery eyes was a pale, squat dog with a wedge-shaped head and skin the texture of scuffed baize on an old billiards table.

‘What's the matter with him?'

‘He's a f---ing wee bastard is what's the matter wi'im,' McGregor growled. ‘Disn'ae like the sea.' He paused, hawked, and launched an audible projectile onto the dockside. ‘F---ing wee boaker.'

Crozier watched as Harris went back down and engaged in a brief
pas de deux
with the beast before grappling it in his arms and attempting to lift it clear of the ground. There was a crack of compacting vertebrae and a sharp grunt of pain. Harris staggered sideways.