3AN UNKNOWN WRECK, MACQUARIE ISLAND
There calmly let him sleep.
Not all the winds that
blow
Can shake his bed, and he shall keep
A quiet watch
below.*
Chief harpooner, Henry Whalley, squinted at the frozen
island
as the feeble day foundered in a clobber of hailstones.
Other ships
had broken backs on this saw-blade island coastline,
and Whalley might have
heard amidst those cut-throat night winds,
unknown voices bellowing,
fear-fogged, to the rocking darkness,
that such violent seas as these could
have no origin in Christendom,
but in the demented ragings of an Old World
sea god.
Sparks sprayed and shrieked in the iron traveller's manic
shuntings.
A volcanic belch erupted in a red-hot hiss of stove
steam.
Invisible hands unfurled the jabbering jibs to shred and vaunt
like
ghosts in the gale, and a skeleton hand of lightning
pointed shorewards to
the shingle.
Thunder overrolled the Captain's orders.
Cables
jerked and dragged the folded sea bed
until a comber, foaming high as heaven,
dumped its avalanche of silence.
Desperate oaths and prayers surfaced
slowly,
in a swirl of splintered wood and bone and rags of
rigging.
Dawn was a lurching lifetime away
to Whalley, stowed,
injured, in the cabin swill below,
until an icicled morning safely
slipped
towards seals that survived their long submersions
to pulse and
wallow around kelp-strung wreckage,
while bird eyes beaded from leeward
shelters
watching the rope-line of men hauling barefoot to the frosted
shore.
Soon the piercing air was hung with albatross, prion and petrel,
swooping to gobble the bright spoils of the storm,
then wobbling heavy
bellied, away from their flensings.
Quizzical penguins re-assembled their
choirs
to intone again a querulous chorus,
while clutching their salvages,
the castaways at last found shelter.
Whalley gulped some warm salty
coffee, sighed
and slipped to an endless sleep, where he might have
seen
his frozen-bearded father, pointing out new grounds
of seal and
whale, while his mother surged to surface in sea rocks,
to mourn the
harpooning of the Old World by the New.
When the castaways dug
Whalley's grave,
their iron struck wood, deep in the shingle,
exposing the bones of an older wreck
that had carried unknown mariners
from an unknown country, across all known frontiers.
Shrouding him in the
ribs of mystery,
his shipmates bequeathed him to their God
and the snow
and shingle.
Mist drifted on the storm-stilled ocean,
draping peace around
the island,
then retreated to another Eden
untouched as yet by New World
harpoons. *Epitaph of Henry Whalley, son of a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman
and the unofficial governor of Kangaroo Island. (J.S. Thomson, 1912, Voyages
and Wanderings in Far Off Lands and Seas.)
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