The Discovery Of Slowness

by Sten Nadolny

  Solomon Bélanger decided that it would just have to be done. Back made a face. The rest of the British admired John openly. They got ready to move on.

  Back seemed unable to get rid of something – a desire for mockery, a malice, a rage. But no one was waiting to hear his opinion, no one like himself. Therefore, he eventually said to Hood as if to apologise, ‘I don’t like these addresses. He acts like a saint whom everyone must support, like some kind of Nelson.’

  14

  Hunger and Dying

  A field full of bones and skulls, split by the blades of Indian battle axes – that was the spot at Bloody Falls where fifty years before Samuel Hearne had been unable to prevent the bloodshed.

  John Franklin knew he needed Eskimos. He feared they would not have forgotten the long-ago disaster. Where people did not keep records about themselves, the past was not harmless. The slain men at the bottom of Copenhagen harbour came back to him often, even now. ‘Behave like gentlemen.’ ‘No fear of that.’ How little help these phrases offered once one was a commander.

  It was quite possible to instill confidence in two or three natives approaching slowly. It got bad only if an entire tribe or no one at all showed up.

  The bay was empty; not even birds could be seen. John held a list of names in his hand intended for mountains, rivers, capes, and bays: Flinders, Barrow, Banks, names of British companions, and of Berens, governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Oh, names! If they starved or were killed here, none of the names would stick to these rocks. But now they at least helped him to overcome his unease. He had walked all over the field of bones as he had walked all over the battlefield of Winceby with the apothecary. He had wanted to make clear what the crux of their meeting with the Eskimos would be. But for Back these old bones were obviously only proof that the Eskimos could be managed if they became troublesome.

  Suddenly Hepburn’s eyes were riveted on the sea. ‘Good heavens! It’s starting!’ On the periphery of his field of vision John noticed only that the bay had somehow darkened. He turned.

  About a hundred kayaks and a few larger boats were coming their way. They approached almost soundlessly, the way game is stalked on a hunt. The whites rushed to their rifles. John shouted: ‘Load and put on safety! But not one shot, not even a warning shot, or a shot by accident. We’d be lost.’

  Clearly the Eskimos had followed each of their moves, for the boats made a ninety-degree turn, synchronised like a school of fish, and steered toward a point on the shore a hundred yards away from the British.

  ‘I’ll go alone with Augustus,’ John said calmly. ‘If anything happens to me, Dr Richardson will be in command.’

  ‘And if you’re taken hostage so they can get to us and murder us all?’ asked Back.

  ‘We’ve got to have their spirits on our side,’ answered John. ‘Oh, well. Do what I say.’

  Augustus was instructed to keep two steps behind John. They walked as slowly as Akaitcho had walked at Fort Providence. Perhaps even more slowly. From Akaitcho and Matthew Flinders, John had learned what it took to be a chief.

  Meanwhile, the Eskimos, who had landed, were standing about like a thick-furred pack, motionlessly scenting, all staring in the same direction. Many of their faces were tattooed; their hair was black. John thought it would be difficult to tell them apart. Now he stopped and gripped Augustus’s arm firmly. He counted silently to twenty, then said, ‘Start your speech.’

  Augustus knew what he had to say. John had made sure he had memorised the sentences. He had also checked, with Junius’s help, whether they meant what he wanted to say: peaceful intentions, presents, bartering food for ‘good things’; had they seen a big ship coming from the direction dawn comes from? And, again and again, peace.

  When Augustus finished, the Eskimos threw their arms in the air and clapped their hands high above their heads like an enthusiastic opera audience. What the hell did clapping mean in this part of the world? Perhaps not applause at all. Loudly and rhythmically they all shouted in unison, ‘TEYMA! TEYMA!’

  John hoped this didn’t mean revenge. He thought of DEATH OR GLORY and BREAD OR BLOOD. He couldn’t ask Augustus because he was surrounded by clapping Eskimos; nor did he want to run after him. Everything, he knew, depended on his own show of dignity. So he remained standing, accepting the ever-swelling chorus of Teyma cheerfully and proudly as an act of homage, hoping intensely that it didn’t mean more than ‘Good day.’

  ‘Teyma’ meant ‘Peace’.

  The presents were distributed: two kettles and several knives. Now the bartering began. The Eskimos offered bows and arrows, spears and wooden goggles, wanting anything they caught sight of in the way of equipment and metal objects. Soon they began to take what they needed. With the friendliest smiles in the world they nudged forward and were everywhere, stealing Back’s pistol and Hepburn’s coat. Back wanted to retrieve his pistol, but they shouted loudly ‘Teyma!’ and didn’t give it up.

  John sat like a mountain and didn’t stir. He knew that he was the last person who could protect himself from these nimble fingers. He therefore asked Hepburn to join him. Just then an Eskimo tried to pull a button off his uniform jacket. John only looked at him with concentration. Hepburn rapped him across the fingers and pointed at Hood, who was offering buttons for barter. For a while this worked.

  The situation was confused and could be managed only by waiting. John sensed that the fate of the expedition would be sealed if he were to rise, show agitation and shout commands. Besides, the Eskimos knew very well what rifles and pistols could do. When one of the whites came near his weapon, several Eskimos clung to him, shouting ‘Teyma! Teyma!’ in unison and patting him, gently and in cadence, on the left side of his chest.

  Hood found a rope and tied the box of nautical instruments so tightly to his thigh that nobody could steal it without dragging him along as well. Then he pulled out his sketchbook and began to draw one of the women. He devoted a great deal of effort to the tattoos on her face, the bones of her forehead, her eyes. Eskimos clustered behind him, looking over his shoulder, telling the model in loud voices which part of her body was being worked on. The woman readily held out everything she believed required special precision: teeth, tongue, right and left ear, feet. The outcome was an odd picture: the details did not produce the accustomed whole, but it pleased the Eskimos very much. They stood bowing their heads right and left to take in all the subtleties. Almost all of them came to watch. When he had finished the sketch, Hood gave it to his model as a gift, kissing her hand. For a moment she stood stock still with pleasure; then she did a handstand.

  But now came the sorcerer. Laden with the head and furry coat of a bear, he circled several times around the whites on all fours, growling and groaning. Augustus explained that this might indicate misfortune: the sorcerer believed drawing and painting were dangerous. Suddenly all the Eskimos ran away. They rushed to their boats and paddled away in great haste, leaving behind many of the objects they had acquired with so much cunning and skill – including even some of the things they had obtained through barter. The woman left her picture behind but grabbed the protractor, that drawing instrument Hood used to commit his readings of landscapes to paper. At the last moment, she changed her mind, returned the protractor, and grabbed her picture after all. She leaped into the last boat – an open boat in which only women were sitting. Within a few minutes the bay was as empty as it had been in the morning.

  ‘We’re saved,’ said Dr Richardson, ‘but it was a failure just the same. We’ll never get anything to eat out of those people.’ Augustus confirmed this: ‘They don’t want to have anything to do with us. They’re Inuit from the western shore. In the summer they live in huts of driftwood, in the winter in igloos made of ice, but always on land. They’ve met whites now and then and had bad experiences with them. They wanted to kill us, but too many powerful spirits were on our side. The Spirit of the Bear wanted to eat us, but the Great Woman Who Lives under the Sea would not allow anything to happen to
us.’

  ‘Then let’s go out to sea,’ John countered. ‘She can protect us even better there.’

  On 21 August they pitched their tents at Point Turnagain. Their problems had increased. The lengthy, drawn-out Bathurst Inlet had not proved to be the long-sought water connection with Hudson’s Bay. It was simply another bay which came to an end: five days in and five days out again along the opposite side, and August was half over. Following this disappointment, they paddled eastwards along the shore until they eventually had to give up hope of reaching Parry’s ship before the onset of winter. They had marched on foot to the next large point of the Kent Peninsula and had named it Point Turnagain for the present – their renewed and now final return.

  They were hungry.

  Not even fishing brought in enough food, to say nothing of hunting. If only there had been time to learn from the Eskimos what they needed to know about fishing-grounds and seal territories. Augustus and Junius were not at home here. Or if only they had had better rifles with a longer range: there was no cover to hide behind in this bare country when stalking game – if game was sighted at all.

  This was not how they had imagined the Arctic coast. They had expected not this dead silence but seals and walruses on ice-floes and rocks, and polar bears swaying over hills, cliffs full of auks and other large birds, a fiery sea of red flowers – music for the eye.

  John had intended to name the place for Wilberforce, the fighter against slavery. But now that they were turning back here, this was out of the question. The philanthropist deserved better than a point that marked an end of the line.

  The voyageurs were pleased about life for the first time in a long while – they were getting back on land. On the other hand, the Eskimo interpreters were disturbed: deep inland, the Woman Who Lives under the Sea would not be able to protect them.

  ‘The captain of the Blossom might have remained a happy man, and the Blossom a happy ship, if they had not … Have I told you this story before? God knows, hunger makes me soft-headed.’ Richardson fell silent.

  Lacunae opened up in their memory, and there was no strength left for reflections or meaningful conversations. The only thing that had become stronger was their capacity for unbridled fantasy. Delicious pemmican was waiting for them in Fort Enterprise, with well-aged halves of reindeer carcasses, rum and tobacco, tea and zwieback. And Hood was talking about Green Stockings. The child must be born by now.

  Onward. On to the south-west until they reached the fort. Hunger displaced all other worries: the voyageurs didn’t bat an eyelid when in crossing Coronation Gulf in the open sea their boats were surprised by a heavy storm coming up from behind; they fought all day to keep the light canoes from capsizing, and towards evening the storm chased them towards a rocky shore at breakneck speed. The sailors thought the end was near; the voyageurs, on the other hand, saw land – at last land, tent sites and rich meals. John sat stoically in the boat, entering each of the islands in his logbook as they passed by on the right and left, while Hood bent over his sketchbook and drew the outlines showing how the rocks were formed right under the foam of the sea. ‘Maps, observations, reports and pictures,’ John had said. ‘Once we start to think only in terms of meat and firewood, we won’t get very far.’ It was a similar situation in the storm. So they held out, each in his own way, until they reached a sheltering bay which no rational mind could have expected or hardly an eye could have seen. They landed in fog and darkness and collapsed just where they stood.

  In his dream, John saw images of storm and rescue and of a newly built, perfectly functioning picture rotor which projected them on a wall. He tried to impress the construction graphically on his memory, but in the morning he could no longer put it together. Still, he felt renewed vigour: whenever machines appeared in his dreams, his sleep was especially sound.

  A few days later, by the estuary of a river John named after Hood, they jettisoned their superfluous baggage – above all, the remaining presents – and piled it on a small knoll, built a stone pyramid over it, and placed a British flag on top. At least they wanted the Eskimos to meet their successors in a friendlier way.

  Then they paddled up the Hood river until a gigantic waterfall forced them to a halt. Between rock needles rising up like walls, the torrents of water plunged down in cascades – a lonely, treeless place of solemn beauty. It was a good place for the name of the liberator of the slaves, and the appropriate counterpart to Hearne’s Bloody Fall. Contentedly John entered the name ‘Wilberforce’ on his map.

  It had turned cold, and game or tracks were nowhere to be discovered. The pemmican was at an end. Junius pointed at the rocks: a slimy lichen that was edible grew on the wall face. It tasted awful, but it was better than nothing. At night everyone lay awake in the tent. They observed that the lichen caused vomiting and diarrhoea. Hood suffered the most. He kept nothing inside him.

  On the next day, 28 August, again only two fish and one partridge; also two sacks of rock lichens. The voyageurs called them tripes de roche – ‘rock tripe.’ John had the large canoe rebuilt to make two smaller ones, which were easier to carry and sufficient for crossing rivers. Then two more miles of walking, very arduous. Thus ended the day. It was snowing.

  None of the Englishmen was a good hunter. John was not quick enough, Back not sufficiently patient, Hood was a bad shot, and the doctor was shortsighted. At most, Hepburn had some luck now and then. It was a fact that without Crédit, Vaillant, Solomon Bélanger, Michel Teroaoteh and the interpreters they would have starved to death. But recently the better a voyageur was as a hunter, the more he tended to ignore orders. For days and nights they stayed away from the camp, refused to account for used or retained ammunition, and secretly consumed some of the game they had shot by themselves. Only Solomon Bélanger remained honest.

  ‘Now we’re following a new system,’ said Back, as if parenthetically. ‘They have rifles and ammunition; we have only sextant and compass. And that keeps no one from stealing.’

  ‘The system is working,’ John replied. ‘Everyone knows that nobody can get through alive without us navigators. And when we do, he wants to return as an honourable man.’

  When Perrault insisted he had taken only a certain amount of powder and lead, Back agreed, all evidence to the contrary. He was impenetrable again – what game was he playing? Did he want to curry favour with the voyageurs? When he knew he couldn’t win, did he think surrender was preferable to open defeat? Did he want to survive a bloody rebellion by offering himself as a false witness?

  John clenched his teeth and wanted to put the thought out of his mind. His system prescribed that nothing like this must be considered possible unless it became a fact. But however ashamed he was, he held on to this suspicion as a form of security.

  1 September. Hood was truly ill. The tripes de roche had been a disaster for him, and as a result he declined more rapidly than the others, not only because his resistance was lower but also because he suffered more from hunger.

  The cold grew worse. The heavy snowflakes had seemed pretty, but now they were only dry white dust creeping into their clothes. At night it was more than an hour before the stiffly frozen blankets became warm enough to allow anything like sleep. They stuffed their boots under their bodies so they would not have to thaw them out in the morning. To do that would require a fire and therefore a search for wood.

  Hunger induced a kind of slowness that was not seeing but blind. They were, of course, still moving ahead; they tried to look cheerful and confident, but they made errors about the most obvious things. They crossed rivers in a canoe without taking anything along. They gaped at the approaching edge of a waterfall without springing into action. Their condition was reminiscent of that advanced state of drunkenness when gaiety tips over into misery. Not a single animal for food! Even rock lichens weren’t easy to find any more; they had to be dug out of the snow first. They found the remainder of a wolves’ meal – half-rotted reindeer bones, which they prepared by holding them over a f
ire until they turned black. ‘That’s no help,’ Junius said. ‘We’ve got to make soup out of it.’ John suggested they try that, but the others wanted to have something between their teeth. Soup? What did an Eskimo know about English and French stomachs? John gave in. He thought the moral lesson was more important than the experiment with the soup. Junius’s feelings were hurt. He disappeared for good with fifty rounds of ammunition.

  Morality was also on the way out. In effect it had already been abandoned many miles before. It didn’t help much that in many ways weakness seemed similar.

  Step by step, constantly trudging across a trackless snow cover interrupted only by rivers and lakes.

  Now and then it seemed strange to John that his feet were moving, strange, too, that without his doing his right heel always hit his left ankle – never the other way round, constantly, without fail. Weakness taught everybody how crooked one’s frame was. Postures became more and more bent. Odd – wasn’t man born with a straight back? Their beards were iced over completely; they couldn’t be unfrozen without a fire. And they weighed a lot. Such a frozen beard would be enough by itself to make a man bend forward. Their thoughts became dimmer and dimmer, and they feared tackling anything firmly. Now and again one of the voyageurs flew into a petty, childish rage about nothing – Perrault screamed that he didn’t want to walk behind Samandré any more because the stupid creases in the seat of his trousers moved back and forth so idiotically. Then they trotted on again for hours without a word. Suddenly they thought that they might be moving away from the fort instead of toward it. Perhaps their fate had been long since decided.