Life and death on a whaling ship Based loosely on the disastrous voyage of the whaling ship Essex, Jamrach's Menagerie explores the claustrophobia and the madness of a protracted sea trip

Life and death on a whaling ship

Based loosely on the disastrous voyage of the whaling ship Essex, Jamrach's Menagerie explores the claustrophobia and the madness of a protracted sea trip

A boy walks down the street in a small town and meets a runaway tiger. Curious, and without the animal's permission, he leans forward to stroke the animal's nose. The tiger clamps his jaws on the boy's clothes and, clearly looking forward to a meal, walks away. An animal salesman, Jamrach, jumps on the tiger's back, and the annoyed, alarmed tiger releases the boy. The boy, Jaffy Brown, becomes a hero for his ostensible 'way with animals', and is hired by Jamrach for his shop. Thus begins Birch's tale. Jamrach was the legendary circus owner PT Barnum's animal supplier, and the poet Dante Rossetti bought wombats from him. Here his menagerie is the place where Jaffy sees all sorts of animals and befriends Tim Laniver, the part-bully, part-best buddy with whom Jaffy will set out on the great voyage. Jamrach decides that he needs a dragon, and dragons have been seen, according to reports, somewhere in the islands of the eastern seas. Jaffy and a motley crew set out in a ship for the voyage of a lifetime, for it will be a life-changing experience for Jaffy. On the seas he experiences the horror of whaling, an enormously cruel mode of killing a whale: "he stabbed her again and again, seven, eight, nine times, probing determinedly for the heart…" When the great creature finally dies, Jaffy has a 'moment' (there will be many more): it was then I truly realised the whale is no more a fish than I am… she died thrashing blindly in a slick of gore, full of pain and fury… so much strength dies slowly… we watched in awe, wordless… she swam around in an ever dwindling gyre, and I begged her to die. The team picks up some Malays and finally enters the island where they find the 'dragon', a kind of large lizard-like creature. They trap it and start on their return voyage, with Jaffy in charge of feeding and caring for the creature. One day, the madman among them, the artist Skip who is drawing the dragon in his notebook, opens the cage. In the resultant mayhem the creature jumps off the boat and swims away — westward, thinks Jaffy, towards the island that was his home. From here things begin to go horribly wrong. First there is "seven days of darkness, like a biblical plague". Then storms beset them, and waterspouts destroy their ship — some drown in this accident, while the others get away on the boats with limited rations. Their stocks dwindle, and thirst and hunger assail the sailors. They decide that things cannot go on, and draw lots to shoot their friends dead. Jaffy draws the short straw and Tim decides to die — Jaffy shoots his friend dead as an act of mercy. One by one they begin to die. With diminishing food, the sailors are forced to commit that ultimate taboo: they cook and eat their dead comrades. When they are finally rescued, somewhere toward the coast of Chile, only the senior Dan and the young Jaffy, both half-crazed and nearly dead, survive. Dan quits the life of the sea. Jaffy, after some attempts to lead a life on land, returns to the sea despite his horrid memories of his comrades, the dragon, the cannibalism, and the dementia. Based loosely on the disastrous voyage of Essex, the whaling ship that sank after being struck by a sperm whale, Birch's work explores the claustrophobia and the camaraderie, the survival instinct and the madness, of a protracted sea trip. The novel invokes Moby Dick, arguably the greatest sea-tale ever in the English language, as well as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem, 'The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner'. Birch's novel is richly evocative for the atmosphere of whaling and a sea voyage. She captures the derangement, the pathetic attempts at civilised behaviour in the face of dire needs, and the utter insignificance of humanity in the face of nature. The 'menagerie' might very well be the sailors on the ship — like the animals in Jamrach's store, helpless, vulnerable and ultimately dispensable. Several pro-animal rights points emerge, and once the story shifts to the voyage, it is turn-a-page pace. Mankind's pursuit of the exotic, the great technologies of the Victorian age (the novel suggests the end of whale oil industry as man discovers oil in the earth), and the mythical-mystical beliefs by which men live (and die) — Birch's novel showcases each of these. From the slightly comic-surrealism of the opening sections to the grim goriness of the voyage, Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie is a great read.