A Poem by Catherine Rockwood

The Surgeon of a Whaler

(—June 1818, lat. 80 N)

What would bring you here? Cold Edinburgh:
raked stone against the sky, red bones on tables
in taverns or, brandished, at Barclay’s theater
where dissections were done. How in Auld Reekie
all the high places understood their distance, 
while down low in the New Town modern gutters 
shoved out floods that soaked a young man’s spats:
regurgitated turds and perished cats! 
It wasn’t to be borne, so here you are
in the tall latitudes, among the floes.
Freezing. Thrawn. With half an education
that falters in the clinch. These men’s health, yours.

It’s part experiment, it’s all for taking.
Fulmars that stoop to bait, a narwhal hauled
onto the deck and slit from end to end
full, you note, of animals and fishes.
There’s more than can be recorded: still, you write!
You render sharks and frosts. A fog becomes 
this saltish rheum arising from the sea.
Whales are killed and winched. You witness how
stricken beasts will behave wickedly,
setting boat crews at risk, and wonder then
in fancy if the ship is a machine
running on men who cannot sign their name.

Look. You are, James Douglas! Soon to be
enrolled again within the Surgeon’s College;
today free of all books except your own.
This first account. A log of observations
anent the mind you had at age nineteen,
absent a single word of navigation
but full of terms that cut beneath the skin.
Crossing the Line into the Arctic Circle,
you narrowly avoid democracy:
the ritual shave and tar for virgin sailors
waived only when you hold aloft a key
that unlocks rum (and universal favor.)  

What turns you back? The answer is concise:
your whaling ship has gathered all it can. 
Barrels of hacked-down fat lie in its hold,
and every crewman knows his bounty’s won.  
Likewise you’ve stored up rare experience
for private use. A wealth of anecdote.
How icebergs crushed the whaler Diamond,
how polar bears will salve their wounds with snow.
In later years you’ll remember blue water
opening before you to the south:
behind, a different life of hesitation
now silent as a luckless boatman’s mouth.

(Lines in italics are quoted from James Douglas, ‘Surgeon of a Whaler’, Chapter 2 in Douglas,
Journals and Reminiscences, privately printed in New York in 1910.)

Catherine Rockwood lives in Massachusetts. She reads and edits for Reckoning Magazine, and reviews books for Strange Horizons. Poems in or forthcoming from The Ilanot Review, Contrary Magazine, Moist Poetry Journal, Scoundrel Time, and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion, is available from The Ethel Zine Press.