Then they sailed again, out into the broad waters of the Pacific. The days grew warm. The sailors became calm. They cleaned between the decks, and scrubbed away old mold and vomit. They hummed as they worked. In the mornings, in the bustle of activity, the ship felt like a small country village. Alma had become used to the want of privacy, and she was comforted by the presence of the sailors now. They were familiar to her, and she was glad they were there. They taught her knots and chanteys, and she cleaned their wounds and lanced their boils. Alma ate an albatross, shot by a young seaman. They passed the bloated, floating carcass of a whale—its blubber stripped away clean by other whalers—but they did not see any living whales.
The Pacific Ocean was vast and empty. Alma could understand now for the first time why it had taken the Europeans so long to find Terra Australis in this tremendous expanse. The early explorers had assumed there must be a southern continent as large as Europe someplace down here, in order to keep the planet perfectly balanced. But they had been wrong. There was little down here but water. If anything, the Southern Hemisphere was a reverse of Europe: it was a huge continent of ocean, dotted with tiny lakes of land spread very far apart, indeed.
Days upon days of blue emptiness followed. On every side, Alma saw prairies of water, as far as her mind could imagine. Still, they saw no whales. They saw no birds, either, but they could see weather coming from one hundred miles away, and it often looked bad. The air was voiceless until the storms came, and then the winds would shriek in distress.
In early April, they encountered a most alarming change of weather, which blackened the sky before their eyes, murdering the day in the middle of the afternoon. The air felt heavy and menacing. This sudden transformation worried Captain Terrence enough that he lowered the sails—all of them—as he watched chains of lightning come at them from all directions. The waves became rolling mountains of black. But then—as quickly as it had come upon them—the storm cleared, and skies grew light again. Instead of relief, though, the men cried out in alarm, for immediately they saw a waterspout drawing near. The captain ordered Alma belowdecks, but she would not move; the waterspout was too magnificent a sight. Then another cry went up, as the men realized there were, in point of fact, three waterspouts now surrounding the ship at distances much too close for comfort. Alma felt herself hypnotized. One of the spouts drew near enough that she could see the long strands of water spiraling upward from the ocean all the way into the sky, in one great swirling column. It was the most majestic thing she had ever seen, and the most holy, and the most awesome. The pressure in the air was so thick, Alma’s eardrums seemed in danger of bursting, and it was a struggle to pull breath into her lungs. For the next five minutes, she was so overcome that she did not know if she was alive or dead. She did not know what world this was. It struck Alma that her time in this world was over. Curiously, she did not mind. There was no one she longed for. Not a single soul she had ever known crossed her mind—not Ambrose, not anyone. She had no regrets. She stood in rapt amazement, prepared for anything that might occur.
After the waterspouts finally passed and the sea was tranquil once more, Alma felt it had been the happiest experience of her life.
They sailed on.
To the south, distant and impossible, was icy Antarctica. To the north was nothing, apparently—or so said the bored sailors. They kept sailing west. Alma missed the pleasures of walking and the smell of soil. With no other botany around to study, she asked the men to pull up seaweed for her to examine. She did not know her seaweeds well, but she knew how to distinguish things, one from the other, and she soon learned that some seaweeds had conglomerate roots, and some had compressed. Some were textured; some were smooth. She tried to puzzle out how to preserve the seaweeds for study, without turning them into slime or black flakes of nothingness. She never really mastered it, but it gave her something to do. She was also delighted to discover that the sailors packed their harpoon tips in wads of dried moss; this gave her something wonderful and familiar to examine again.
Alma came to admire sailors. She could not imagine how they endured such long periods of time away from the comforts of land. How did they not go mad? The ocean both stunned and disturbed her. Nothing had ever put more of an impression upon her being. It seemed to her the very distillation of matter, the very masterpiece of mysteries. One night they sailed through a diamond field of liquid phosphorescence. The ship churned up strange molecules of green and purple light as it moved, until it appeared that the Elliot was dragging a long glowing veil behind herself, wide across the sea. It was so beautiful that Alma wondered how the men did not throw themselves into the water, drawn down to their deaths by this intoxicating magic.
On other nights, when she could not sleep, she paced the deck in her bare feet, trying to toughen up her soles for Tahiti. She saw the long reflections of stars on the calm water, shining like torches. The sky above her was as unfamiliar as the sea around her. She saw a few constellations that reminded her of home—Orion, the Pleiades—but the northern pole star was gone, and the Great Bear, too. These missing treasures from the vault of the sky caused her to feel most desperately and helplessly disoriented. But there were new gifts to be seen in the heavens, as compensation. She could see the Cross of the South now, and the Twins, and the vast, spilling nebulae of the Milky Way.
Amazed by the constellations, Alma said to Captain Terrence one night, “Nihil astra praeter vidit et undas.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“It’s from the Odes of Horace,” she said. “It means there is nothing to be seen but stars and waves.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know Latin, Miss Whittaker,” he apologized. “I am not a Catholic.”
One of the older sailors, who had lived in the South Seas many years, told Alma that when the Tahitians picked a star to follow for navigation, they called it their aveia—their god of guidance. But in general, he said, the more common Tahitian word for a star was fetia. Mars was the red star, for instance: the fetia ura. The morning star was the fetia ao: the star of light. The Tahitians were extraordinary navigators, the sailor told her with undisguised admiration. They could navigate on a starless, moonless night, he said, reckoning themselves merely by the feel of the ocean’s current. They knew sixteen different kinds of wind.
“I always wondered if they ever went to visit us in the north, before we visited them in the south,” he said. “I wonder if they came up to Liverpool or Nantucket in their canoes. Could’ve done, you know. Could’ve sailed right up there and watched us while we slept, then paddled away before we saw them. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn of it.”
So now Alma knew a few words of Tahitian. She knew star, and red, and light. She asked the sailor to teach her more. He offered what he could, trying to be helpful, but mostly he only knew the nautical terms, he apologized, and all the things you say to a pretty girl.
Still they saw no whales.
The men were disappointed. They were bored and restless. The seas were hunted to depletion. The captain feared bankruptcy. Some of the sailors—the ones that Alma had befriended, anyway—wanted to show off to her their hunting skills.