CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Laurens van der Post

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  1 A Matter of Luck

  2 Captain

  3 Port and People

  4 The Crew

  5 The Sea

  6 ‘Tutuka! ’Nkosan, Tutuka!’

  7 Peter Bright-Eye

  8 The Fore-top

  9 Man-in-the-Sun

  10 The Stirrer-up-of-Strife

  11 ‘One-Bullet’ and ‘Sway-Back’

  12 Storm without Wind

  13 The Bee Swarm

  14 Homeward Bound

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Laurens van der Post was born in South Africa in 1906, the thirteenth of fifteen children in a family of Dutch and French Huguenot origins. Most of his adult life was spent with one foot in Africa and one in England. His professions of writer and farmer were interrupted by ten years of soldiering in the British Army, serving with distinction in the Western Desert, Abyssinia, Burma and the Far East. Taken prisoner by the Japanese, he was held in captivity for three years before returning to active service as a member of Lord Mountbatten’s staff in Indonesia and, later, as Military Attaché to the British Minister in Java.

  After 1949 he undertook several official missions exploring little-known parts of Africa, and his journey in search of the Bushmen in 1957 formed the basis of his famous documentary film and book The Lost World of the Kalahari. Other television films include All Africa Within Us and The Story of Carl Gustav Jung, whom he met after the war and grew to know as a personal friend. In 1934 he wrote In a Province, the first book by a South African to expose the horrors of racism. Other books include Venture to the Interior (1952), The Heart of the Hunter (1961), and A Walk with a White Bushman (1986). The Seed and the Sower was made into a film under the title Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, and, more recently, A Story Like the Wind and A Far-Off Place were combined and made into the film A Far-Off Place.

  Sir Laurens van der Post was awarded the CBE in 1947 and received his knighthood in 1981. He died in 1996.

  Also by Laurens van der Post

  IN A PROVINCE

  VENTURE TO THE INTERIOR

  THE FACE BESIDE THE FIRE

  A BAR OF SHADOW

  FLAMINGO FEATHER

  THE DARK EYE IN AFRICA

  THE LOST WORLD OF THE KALAHARI

  THE HEART OF THE HUNTER

  THE SEED AND THE SOWER

  JOURNEY INTO RUSSIA

  THE NIGHT OF THE NEW MOON

  A STORY LIKE THE WIND

  A FAR-OFF PLACE

  A MANTIS CAROL

  JUNG AND THE STORY OF OUR TIME

  FIRST CATCH YOUR ELAND

  YET BEING SOMEONE OTHER

  With photographs by Burt Glinn

  A PORTRAIT OF JAPAN

  A PORTRAIT OF ALL THE RUSSIAS

  Dedicated to

  INGARET GIFFARD

  The Hunter and the Whale

  A Story

  Laurens van der Post

  “Y sobre el mar la sangre se extendia

  Como un manto de purpura flotante.”

  From El Arponero

  by S. A. LILLO

  “And on the sea the blood spreads out

  Like a crimson mantle floating . . .”

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Matter of Luck

  THERE WAS NO one in the Kurt Hansen when I boarded her that Saturday evening for my fourth season as a spotter with the Norwegian whaling fleet based on Port Natal. As the ship which had held the record the past three years for the greatest number of catches, she occupied the obvious place of honour: immediately alongside the quay and at the head of the line of twenty-four whalers, moored three abreast in the crowded harbour. Like the rest of the little ships, she appeared in that restricted berth even smaller than usual.

  Her crow’s-nest, which, when I occupied it on watch at sea, always seemed to me to stick out so far above the water, now barely cleared the stern rail of the purple Royal Mail steamer which had called in at dawn that morning, in a hurry as usual, and now, with fires undrawn in her boilers, was lying almost against the Kurt Hansen’s nose, trembling with impatience to be off again.

  At the other end of the line of whalers rose the black bow, tall saffron masts and long black funnel, topped off with two thin bands of red, of the Clan MacGillivray, a bulky turretship, whose Blue Peter, hoisted limp in the still air, signified that she was about to resume her beat for freight around the world. Beyond both mail ship and tramp rose the funnels and masts of many other vessels, their flags flapping like household dusters on the sky-line, and all anointed and shining with the yellow of the sinking sun. As I knew, there was not a single hull in this great concourse of shipping that did not exceed the combined tonnage of the fleet to which the Kurt Hansen belonged. Indeed one could easily have had the impression of pigmies huddled together for protection in the world of giants, were it not for the way the whalers turned up their noses at the glittering pinnacles of glass and painted steel that surrounded them. This air of self-assurance if not impudence seemed to me most marked in the Kurt Hansen, perhaps because after three seasons in her my senses were not free of bias.

  For me the extraordinary thing about those remarkable little ships was that ultimately no two of them were alike. Built by the same people in the same yard to the same design, they were technically not just sister ships but twelve identical pairs of identical twins whose nurses, at sea, could never tell them apart without referring to the names inscribed on their sterns. Yet for us who sailed in them, there was always something, an oddity of mast, cat’s-cradle of rigging, set of wheel house, mounting of harpoon gun, grip on water, or just subtle departure in general line which distinguished one ship from the others.

  These differences, of course, manifested themselves also in their behaviour at sea, and I never ceased to marvel how members of the same united brood could differ so much in their performance. One would excel at pert answers to her helm, another rejoice in the roughest of storms, another make light of towing the heaviest of catches, and yet another out-distance all in the vital matter of sprinting from the drifting position with her engines stopped to full speed ahead where a vanished whale had suddenly re-appeared in an unpredicted quarter of the ocean. Or, to return to the ship which mattered most to me, to combine so many refinements of these qualities as to become the greatest all-rounder in the fleet.

  I know there are people who, lacking direct experience of these ships, try to explain away these differences as consequences not of the individuality of ships themselves but of variations in the capacity of the crews who man them and, above all, the quality of the Captains who command them. Of course, no one could have served in these ships for long, particularly not in the Kurt Hansen, without appreciating the very great importance of the human element in these matters, but in the end the skill and devotion of sailors only mitigated and did not abolish the influence of the difficulties of which I have spoken. I sensed that there was only one element that could over-ride even the most formidable combinations of these differences, technical skills and human qualities, and that was the infinitely mysterious matter of luck.

  Before I joined the Kurt Hansen for the first time as a boy of fourteen on long vacation from school up-country, I had never given this question of luck a thought. Since then we had rarely returned to land a catch at the slipway for the factory on shore without my respect for this awesome phenomenon being greatly enhanced. Indeed, it would have comforted my imagination even in those comparatively care-free days of my boyhood if I could have discovered some law which was in charge of the workings of luck in life and circumstance on earth, some calculation why, for instance, one ship and set of men should have so much of it, and others so little. It would have helped if I could have believed fully that luck could be earned and that we all, ships, men and stars, got the luck we deserved. But I soon discovered that this was only partially true and that, however wise it was to do all one could to draw luck one’s own way, fortune was no mere extension of a system of human ethics, however exalted, nor just an instrument of some discernible principle of promoting life by injecting incentive of good and deterrents of bad into its processes. Where it appeared one day to coincide completely with the deserts of the recipients, the very next day it would shower good fortune on others who one would have thought utterly unworthy of such bounty.

  We had, for example, one ship in our fleet which had been notoriously unlucky ever since the day of her launching fifteen years before. I am deliberately not mentioning her by name because of the belief held by all members of the Kurt Hansen’s crew that to do so would bring down on ourselves some of the unfortunate ship’s capacity for mis-timing and mishap. I know that this will be dismissed as ridiculous superstition by most people on shore, where life in its metropolitan context wears such a plausible air of logic and security that they overlook what a fundamentally brief, brittle and insecure business it is, rather as persons who, shutting out the night by drawing the curtains and lighting a lamp in their locked rooms, no longer remember how great is the darkness and how remote the pin-prick of stars outside. But those of us who encounter life beyond the fortifications of towns and civilization, who still climb mountains and experience their fall of cliff and avalanche, who till the land and endure the inconstancies of rain and harvest or sail the seas to hunt for whales, enter an uncircumscri
bed area of existence where all our brightest knowledge and deepest experience often fail and what is despised as foolish superstition becomes the best available answer to the onslaught of the great unknown in the mind and life of man.

  Certainly the most successful whalers I had met in my short time at sea were those who combined a regard for efficiency and the disciplines of their calling with an almost religious observation of the rules prescribed by superstitions born long before their own day. Even my own Captain, who tended to be an exception in this regard and whose crew despite his great success and undoubted skill were worried by a suspicion of flippancy, if not cynicism, in his attitude towards their own deeply entrenched superstitiousness, would never let the name of this particular unlucky ship pass his lips. When he was forced to do so, I noticed that he never failed to spit after its utterance with the same lack of inhibition and no doubt the same instinctive purpose as the Amangtakwena, the Bantu people among whom we lived up-country who, whenever they caught the stink of a dead animal rotting on the veld, spat vigorously, convinced that thereby they ejected the spirit of evil which death symbolized and which had just tried to enter their person through their nostrils.

  Now this unmentionable and unfortunate ship in the fleet could never do anything right. Some of the best crews and Captains had been assigned to her and had all been defeated in their turn, not one particular combination of men serving more than a couple of seasons in her. The representative of the owners, who lived in great luxury in a large house on the fashionable heights overlooking the city and bay of Port Natal and whom one would have thought safely padded against the pricks of superstition, had been so wounded by the ship’s continued misfortune that he had already sanctioned three changes of her name because some of his more experienced skippers held that he might alter her luck thereby. Luck, however, is nothing if not a seaman too, and needed no names to tell one ship from the others. For reasons strictly its own, it went on resolutely avoiding the wretched little ship. All in all, everything that was technically and humanly possible was tried to obtain better terms from fate for her, but up to this moment without marked effect.

  I do not know whether they relished it, but in their plight, the ship and her changing crews should have had one great consolation: they were exceedingly popular in the fleet. One reason, of course, was that everybody felt free to be sorry for them and all the better in themselves for indulging their sense of commiseration. Another was that no one could possibly envy them as they envied the Kurt Hansen.

  Just as the seasons behind me had been my kindergarten in the education of luck, so they were primary lessons for me in the radio-active fall-out of envy in the condition of men and their relationships. Our sister whalers may not have actually hated us, but there was not one among them, I am certain, who did not long for the Kurt Hansen to be reduced to their ranks with the same ration of success as they themselves received from the fates. It was as if in this regard they looked on luck as some kind of black marketeer of providence, and the Kurt Hansen its favourite spiv; whereas they valued our unfortunate sister ship as a kind of lightning conductor which would prevent the cumulative electricity of misfortune from being discharged through any single one of them. While this ship was there with them and continued to be so unlucky, they somehow assumed their own misfortune could never be too great.

  And so I could go on multiplying examples, but I think this is enough to suggest how complex and pervasive this influence was in our minds and life at sea. I myself found some comfort in one thing only; a growing suspicion that luck, however much appearances were against it, was not capricious. I had a feeling that if we knew all now, in the beginning as at the end, we might see it woven into a surpassing pattern, an unbroken thread of such a multi-coloured brightness that we would find it difficult to forgive the limitations and blur of perishable senses which seemed to us so final and authoritative. I wondered more and more whether there could not be some vital link between good and bad luck. Perhaps the only thing to do was to trust one’s bad as much as one’s good fortune. Could not what seemed to be so inexplicably bad today turn out years later to have been a stroke of good fortune and both be part of a meaningful whole amounting to something which was greater even than the sum of their parts?

  In fact I found it of help to admonish my own impatient thinking by adapting a famous New Testament observation and contemplating the probability that the children of this world might well be luckier in their own generation than the children of the light. Perhaps this is what we all unconsciously implied when we said that so and so or such and such were “lucky devils”. Who, after all, had ever spoken of “lucky angels”? The matter, I felt, could not be disposed of on all levels until one had faced also the awful question: “Who was the more fortunate, Barabbas or Christ?”

  Now I have discussed all these differences and particularly this matter of luck at such length because suddenly they were very much on my mind that Saturday evening. I had no sooner done with the water policeman on duty at the gates to the docks and picked out the Kurt Hansen than these considerations assailed me.

  All these differences between our whalers that I have mentioned were somehow expressed in the paintwork of each ship. It was as if the experience of each, though vanished behind them, had left fingerprints in the varying patches of paint applied to repair the damage which sea, weather and time had inflicted on them. At least so it had always struck me until this particular evening when, for no known reason, at my first glimpse of them in the last light of the sun, I seemed to be looking not at sets of fingerprints but into the hand of providence itself. Proud, perhaps self-assured even to the point of arrogance so tempting to the small, as the Kurt Hansen lay there, my delight at seeing her again was spoilt by an involuntary apprehension, and the valedictory light of the dying winter’s day seemed to enfold her like a mantle of fate. My uneasiness was increased when next I hailed her and got no answer.

  I quickly boarded her, opened the door at the head of the companion-way leading down into the forecastle where someone on duty was most likely to be, called out loudly “Anyone aboard?” but got no reply.

  I tried the door to the saloon next with the same result. This was so unusual, even for ships as notoriously informal as whalers, that the more I thought on it, the more uncomfortable I became. We may never have considered it necessary to go to the lengths of the great ships all around us who set continuous watches night and day on their gangways but, as far as I knew, it had always been a rule to have at least one man always on duty in ships lying alongside the quay as was the Kurt Hansen. However, telling myself not to be too fanciful and that a perfectly simple explanation for it all soon would be available, I took my gear down into the saloon.

  The air in this small triangular compartment was heavy with the smell of the cigarillos the Captain incessantly smoked. He anyway could not have been gone long. In fact a glass, which I was certain had been emptied not long before, of a good measure of schnapps still stood by his place at the head of the small table as if he had left in too great a hurry to put it away. Wide open beside the glass lay the ship’s big black Norwegian Bible. This was even more astonishing.

  The Captain, although a man of deep feelings, was not an overtly religious person. In fact on Sunday, when most of his colleagues and their crews were attending evening service at the small Norwegian church close by the harbour gates, he preferred to call on the owner’s representative where after a day of tennis there was always a lively assembly of people and a great deal to drink. Now not one of the least of odd things about it all was that the Bible was open at the 38th chapter of the Book of Job. Since Job is perhaps the greatest text-book available to any student of luck, I need not stress how the sight of it stimulated the mood I had brought on board with me.

  I noticed that the Captain had underlined the sixteenth and seventeenth verses, but as I read no Norwegian it was not until I looked it up in the Authorized Version a week later that I got its drift. I found then it consisted of some of those terrible rhetorical questions that answer themselves only too convincingly and which the Almighty seemed to have used deliberately to increase the temptations of doubt and the feelings of helplessness in the heart of his good and faithful servant Job sitting there on his ash-heap already stricken so unfairly by any earthly measure of justice. “Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea?” Jehovah had thundered at Job, as if the answer were not self-evident. “Or hast thou walked in search of the depth? Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?”