The Solitude of Thomas Cave Read Online Free PDF Page A

man alone needed might
be air.
    He will leave everything where it stands, this night at least. He pulls the heavy door to on his cell. In the log he will
write one thing only, the title and the date: The twenty-fourth day of August in the Year of Our Lord 1616. To Captain Thomas Marmaduke of Hull, an account of the experience
     of the seaman Thomas Cave, his stay at Duke's Cove on the shore of the unexplored territory of East Greenland, the first winter
     any man is known to spend at that place.

3
    H E SLEEPS HEAVILY that first night and knows no dream. He wakes innocent of thought in the insulated room, wakes to utter
silence and darkness broken only by the glow of embers. How long is it since he has slept without a dozen other bodies snoring,
farting, rustling about him? He closes his eyes again, lies back beneath the weight of deerskins and listens, listens with
intensity until he can hear the distant screech of gulls and a drumming that might be that of the sea but might be no more
than the pulse of blood in his inner ear. It is an instant more before the knowledge of identity and place return to him.
    Daylight is so very fine and clean that emerging from the tent he feels as if he has come from some shaft deep underground.
He stands and blinks, his hand upon the doorpost. The bright paleness of his eyes reflects that of the sky. Thomas Cave has
the look of the North to him even though he was not born to it: tall, long-boned, gaunt in his features, fair in his colouring,
some austere Nordic gene in the Suffolk man that gives him ease with this landscape, the spiny peaks, the coldly lapping sea,
that gives him also his sureness of movement, walking with loping strides across the scantily covered soil from the tent towards
the crease of the rivercourse, along it and away to a slope he knows where the walls of rock curve about and give shelter
facing into the sun and the scurvy grass is found.
    He carries a sickle and a hessian sack. He has his plan, knows that he must make full use of the daylight and the brief growing
season remaining. This day he will cut salad, though salad is a lush name for this grass which is almost the only edible vegetation
here, a bitter cress-like herb that the sailors know as a healing plant for ulcers and infections of the mouth, and more importantly
as a prophylactic against scurvy. He will work the day through, seek through the bog and across the base of the mountain,
fill the sack if enough green stuff can be found and take it in to dry under cover, spread the stalks as once he had done
hay on a rack to preserve it through the winter. He knows he is late; stems and foliage are sparse, hard to find, but even
the meanest leaves will have value brewed as tea.
    Three things they say hold against scurvy: salad and fruit, fresh meat, and activity also, for it is observed among sailors
that it is ever the indolent of nature who succumb first to the disease, as if God's judgement might be in it. Only this last
point Thomas Cave will not accept, he will not believe such judgements are made on a man in this life but only in the next.
His is a modern and reasoning mind, he will not put the cause down to any such superstition but suspects instead that there
is some direct correlation to be made there, either that physical activity builds the humours of the body to resistance against
the disease or that the lazy have some inbuilt weakness or predisposition upon which the disease may prey. Or it may be that
this impression is created only by the apparent indolence of the disease itself, which creeps up on a man and makes him slow
and feeble, thins his blood and his fibres so that his lips crack and his teeth loosen, and his energy drains into carelessness
until he lies and dies curled on his bunk like a baby with his fists between his folded knees.
    Either way he shall hold to his will. If by action he can keep the disease at bay then he shall do so. He ekes his way across
the