Cold Truth by Richard Woodman

Author:Richard Woodman [Woodman, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sharpe Books
Published: 2020-05-20T04:00:00+00:00

THE THIRD EVENING - THE WHITE ISLAND

Before we go on I want to say something about Hanslip. I really don’t want to give the impression that we were sailing under a latter-day Captain Bligh. You journalists turn easily to commonly comprehended references and clichés, but Hanslip was no William Bligh. Besides being excessively bad-tempered, Bligh was a supremely competent seaman who, even standing amid the wreckage of his career, never took to drink though his bad-language was legendary.

Hanslip, on the other hand, was a grievously wounded man and, God knows, this present war is creating a lot of them, particularly at sea where no-one sees what we endure and we lack the glamour of the Brylcream Boys of the RAF. The Crabs might have saved Britain from a German invasion, though they would have proved totally ineffective if Gerry had actually got afloat and made the effort to cross the Channel, but it’s out there, in the Western Ocean that Britain is being saved – if she is, and I’m by no means convinced of this for all the effort, blood, sweat, tears and treasure that are being expended by our little island…

Sorry, I digress, I merely wish to make the point that I can now better recognise what was happening to Hanslip, a personal insight that was denied me all those years ago aboard the Alert as she struggled through the pack-ice. Alan Tomkins knew, so too did Doc Crichton, for Crichton, perceiving how the land lay, partially broke his Hippocratic oath to the extent of warning Alan that circumstances might arise in which he had to take over the ship. It was a pity your father didn’t know. Somehow Hanslip had wormed his way so far into your dad’s good books that Lord Southmoore saw only what he wanted to see. Perhaps Crichton thought he had cured Hanslip, perhaps your father thought he had, but in retrospect the late appointment of a doctor to the ship was, of course, significant. Anyway…

It took us, oh, I really can’t recall how many days to reach Kvitøya. It’s some miles to the east of North-East Land, the unromantically named large island that lies east of West Spitsbergen. It’s low – Kvitøya I mean - and by the time we got there it was around the end of May, I think. It was a good month before mid-summer and still the weather held, just the occasional drifting fog and sea-smoke, but nothing to worry us beyond the pressures of the pack-ice fields and the steadily diminishing stock of coal. Not then, anyway. I think we were to some extent lulled into a false sense of security, coping well with the ice, while no-one dared mention the coal again, at least not publically. It seemed that if Hanslip was worried about being in the ice, as Alan Tomkins surmised, then most of his anxieties were of his own making.

Still, as I was saying, Kvitøya is low-lying. These islands, being of dark rock heat-up

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