by Dan Simmons
Franklin smiled and said nothing.
“Say you arrive at where you winter in the ice with seventy-five percent of your ninety tons unburned,” continued Ross, boring ahead like a ship through soft ice, “that leaves you what … how many days’ steam under normal conditions, not ice conditions? A dozen days? Thirteen days? A fortnight?”
Captain Sir John Franklin had not the slightest idea. His mind, although professional and nautical, simply did not work that way. Perhaps his eyes revealed his sudden panic — not over coal but over appearing an idiot in front of Sir John Ross — for the old mariner clamped a steel vise grip on Franklin’s shoulder. When Ross leaned closer, Captain Sir John Franklin could smell the whiskey on his breath.
“What are the Admiralty’s plans for your rescue, Franklin?” rasped Ross. His voice was low. All about them was the laughter and chatter of the reception in its late hour.
“Rescue?” Franklin said, blinking. The idea that the two most modern ships in the world — reinforced for ice, powered by steam, provisioned for five years or more in the ice, and manned by crews handpicked by Sir John Barrow — would or could require rescue simply did not register in Franklin’s brain. The idea was absurd.
“Do you have plans to cache depots along your way in through the islands?” whispered Ross.
“Caches?” said Franklin. “Leave our provisions along the way? Why on earth would I do that?”
“So you can get your men and boats to food and shelter if you have to take to the ice and walk out,” Ross said fiercely, eyes gleaming.
“Why would we walk back toward Baffin Bay?” asked Franklin. “Our objective is to complete the transit of the North-West Passage.”
Sir John Ross had pulled his head back. His grip tightened on Franklin’s upper arm. “Then there’s no rescue ship or plan in place?”
“No.”
Ross grabbed Franklin’s other arm and squeezed so tightly that the portly Captain Sir John almost winced.
“Then, laddie,” whispered Ross, “if we’ve not heard from ye by 1848, I’ll come looking for you myself. I swear it.”
Franklin slammed awake.
He was soaked with sweat. He felt dizzy and weak. His heart was pounding, and with each reverberation his headache tolled like a church bell against the inside of his skull.
He looked down at himself in horror. Silk covered the lower half of his body.
“What is this?” he cried in alarm. “What is this? There’s a flag thrown over me!”
Lady Jane stood, aghast. “You looked cold, John. You were shivering. I put it over you as a blanket.”
“My God!” cried Captain Sir John Franklin. “My God, woman, do you know what you’ve done? Don’t you know they lay the Union Jack over a corpse!”
3
CROZIER
Lat. 70°-05′ N., Long. 98°-23′ W.
October, 1847
Captain Crozier descends the short ladder to the lower deck, pushes through the sealed double doors, and almost staggers in the sudden blast of warmth. Even though the circulating hot-water heat has been off for hours, body heat from more than fifty men and residual warmth from cooking have kept the temperature here on the lower deck high — just below freezing — almost 80 degrees warmer than outside. The effect on someone who’s been out on deck for half an hour is the equivalent of walking into a sauna fully clothed.
Since he’s continuing down to the unheated orlop and hold decks and thus keeping his cold-weather slops on, Crozier doesn’t tarry long here in the heat. But he does pause for a moment — as any captain would — taking the time to glance around and make sure that everything hasn’t gone to hell in the half hour he’s been away.
Despite the fact that this is the only berthing, eating, and living deck on the ship, it’s still as dark as a working Welsh mine with its small skylights snowed over in the daytime and the night now twenty-two hours long. Whale-oil lamps, lanterns, or candles throw small cones of illumination here and there, but mostly the men make their way through the gloom by memory, remembering where to dodge the innumerable half-seen heaps and hanging masses of stored food, clothing, gear, and other men sleeping in their hammocks. When all the hammocks go up — fourteen inches allowed per man — there will be no room to walk at all except for two 18-inch-wide aisles along the hull on either side. But only a few hammocks are up now — men catching some sleep before late watches — and the din of conversation, laughter, cursing, coughing, and Mr. Diggle’s inspired clankings and obscenities is loud enough to drown out some of the press and moan of the ice.
The ship’s diagrams show seven feet of clearance, but in reality, between the heavy ship’s timbers overhead and the tons of lumber and extra wood stored on racks hanging from those timbers, there’s less than six feet of headroom on this lower deck and the few truly tall men on Terror, like the coward Manson waiting below, have to walk in a perpetual hunched-over posture. Francis Crozier is not that tall. Even with his cap and comforter on, he doesn’t have to duck his head as he turns.
To his right and running aft from where Crozier stands is what looks to be a low, dark, narrow tunnel, but it is actually the companionway leading to the “officers’ quarters,” a warren of sixteen tiny sleeping cubicles and two cramped mess quarters for the officers and warrant officers. Crozier’s cabin is the same size as the others’ — six feet by five feet. The companionway is dark and barely two feet wide. Only one man can pass at a time, ducking his head to avoid hanging stores, and heavy men have to turn sideways to shuffle down the narrow passage.
The officers’ quarters are crammed into 60 feet of the 96-foot length of the ship, and since Terror is only 28 feet wide here on the lower deck, the narrow companionway is the only straight-line access aft.
Crozier can see light from the Great Cabin at the stern, where — even in this Stygian cold and gloom — some of his surviving officers are relaxing at the long table, smoking their pipes or reading from the 1,200-volume library shelved there. The captain hears music playing: one of the metal disks for the hand organ playing a tune that had been popular in London music halls five years ago. Crozier knows that it’s Lieutenant Hodgson playing the tune; it’s his favorite, and it drives Lieutenant Edward Little, Crozier’s executive officer and a lover of classical music, absolutely mad with irritation.
All apparently being well in officers’ country, Crozier turns and glances forward. The regular crew’s quarters take up the remaining third of the length of the ship — 36 feet — but into it are crammed 41 of the surviving able-bodied seamen and midshipmen from the original ship’s muster of 44.
There are no classes being taught tonight and it’s less than an hour until they will unfurl their hammocks and turn in, so the majority of the men are sitting on their sea chests or heaps of stowed material, smoking or talking in the dim light. The centre of the space is taken up by the gigantic Frazer’s Patent Stove, where Mr. Diggle is baking biscuits. Diggle — the best cook in the fleet as far as Crozier is concerned and a prize, most literally, since Crozier had stolen the obstreperous cook right off Captain Sir John Franklin’s flagship just before the expedition departed — is always cooking, usually biscuits, and curses and bangs and kicks and berates his assistants all the while. Men are literally scuttling near the giant stove, disappearing down the scuttle there to bring up stores from the lower decks, hurrying to avoid Mr. Diggle’s voluble wrath.
Frazer’s Patent Stove itself appears, to Crozier’s eye, almost as large as the locomotive engine in the hold. Besides its gigantic oven and six large burners, the bulking iron contraption has a built-in desalinator and a prodigious hand pump to bring water in from either the ocean or the rows of huge water-storage tanks down in the hold. But both the sea outside and the water in the hold now are frozen solid, so the huge pots bubbling on Mr. Diggle’s burners are busy melting chunks of ice chipped out of the water tanks below and hauled up for that purpose.
The captain can see, beyond the partition of Mr. Diggle’s s
helves and cupboards where forward bulwarks had once stood, the sick bay in the forepeak of the ship. For two years there had been no sick bay. The area was stacked from deck to beams with more crates and casks and those crewmen who needed to see the ship’s surgeon or assistant surgeon at 7:30 a.m. lubber’s time did so near Mr. Diggle’s stove. But now, with the amount of stores depleted and the number of sick and injured men multiplying, the carpenters had created a more permanent and separate section of the forepeak to serve as sick bay. Still, the captain could see the tunnellike entrance through the crates where they’d made a space for Lady Silence to sleep.
That discussion had taken the better part of a day last June — Franklin had insisted that the Esquimaux woman not be allowed on his ship. Crozier had accepted her, but his discussion with his executive officer, Lieutenant Little, as to where to berth her had been almost absurd. Even an Esquimaux wench, they knew, would freeze to death on deck or on the lower two decks, which left only the main lower deck. She certainly could not sleep in the crew’s berthing area, even though they had empty hammocks by this time thanks to that thing out on the ice.
In Crozier’s day as a teenaged lad before the mast and then as a midshipman, women smuggled aboard were put in the lightless, almost airless stinking hawser room in the lowest and most forward part of the ship, within reach of the fo’c’sle for the lucky man or men who smuggled her aboard. But even last June, when Silence appeared, it was below zero in HMS Terror’s hawser room.
No, berthing her with the crew was not an idea to be considered.
Officers’ country? Perhaps. There were empty cabins, with some of his officers dead and torn apart. But both Lieutenant Little and his captain had quickly agreed that the presence of a woman just a few thin partitions and sliding doors away from the sleeping men would be unhealthy.
What then? They couldn’t assign her a sleeping place and then post an armed guard over her all the time.
It was Edward Little who’d come up with the idea of shifting some stores to make a little cave of a sleeping area for the woman in the forepeak where the sick bay would have been. The one person awake all night, every night, was Mr. Diggle — dutifully baking his biscuits and frying his breakfast meats — and if Mr. Diggle had ever had an eye for the ladies, it was apparent that day had long passed. Also, reasoned Lieutenant Little and Captain Crozier, the proximity to the Frazer’s Patent Stove would help keep their guest warm.
It had succeeded in that, all right. Lady Silence was made sick by the heat, forcing her to sleep stark naked on her furs in her little crate-and-cask cave. The captain discovered this by accident and the image stayed with him.
Now Crozier takes a lantern from its hook, lights it, lifts the hatch, and goes down the ladder to the orlop deck before he starts to melt like one of those blocks of ice on the stove.
To say it’s cold on the orlop deck would be the kind of understatement Crozier knows he used to make before he first voyaged to the arctic. A drop of six feet of ladder down from the lower deck has dropped the temperature at least sixty degrees. The darkness here is almost absolute.
Crozier takes the usual captain’s minute to look around. The circle of light from his lantern is weak, illuminating mostly the fog of his breath in the air. All around him is the labyrinth of crates, hogsheads, tins, kegs, casks, coal sacks, and canvas-covered heaps crammed deck-to-beams with the ship’s remaining provisions. Even without the lantern, Crozier could find his way through the dark and rat-screech here; he knows every inch of his ship. At times, especially late at night with the ice moaning, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier realizes that HMS Terror is his wife, mother, bride, and whore. This intimate knowledge of a lady made of oak and iron, oakum and ballast, canvas and brass is the one true marriage he can and will ever know. How could he have thought differently with Sophia?
At other times, even later at night when the ice’s moaning turns to screams, Crozier thinks that the ship has become his body and his mind. Out there — out beyond the decks and hull — lies death. Eternal cold. Here, even while frozen in the ice, there continues the heartbeat, however faint, of warmth and conversation and movement and sanity.
But traveling deeper into the ship, Crozier realizes, is like traveling too deeply into one’s body or mind. What one encounters there may not be pleasant. The orlop deck is the belly. This is where the food and needed resources are stored, each thing packed away in the order of its presumed need, easy to hand for those driven down here by Mr. Diggle’s shouts and blows. Lower, on the hold deck where he’s headed, are the deep guts and kidneys, the water tanks and the majority of the coal storage and more provisions. But it’s the mind analogy that bothers Crozier the most. Haunted and plagued by melancholia much of his life, knowing it as a secret weakness made worse by his twelve winters frozen in arctic darkness as an adult, feeling it recently triggered into active agony by Sophia Cracroft’s rejection, Crozier thinks of the partially lighted and occasionally heated but livable lower deck as the sane part of himself. The brooding mental lower world of the orlop deck is where he spends too much of his time these days — listening to the ice scream, waiting for the metal bolts and beam fastenings to explode from the cold. The bottom hold deck below, with its terrible smells and its waiting Dead Room, is madness.
Crozier shakes such thoughts away. He looks down the orlop-deck aisle running forward between the piled casks and crates. The lantern’s gleam is blocked by the bulkheads of the Bread Room and the aisles on either side constrict to tunnels even narrower than the officers’ country companionway on the lower deck above. Here men must squeeze between the Bread Room and the sleeves holding the last sacks of Terror’s coal. The carpenter’s storeroom is forward there on the starboard side, the boatswain’s storeroom opposite on the port side.
Crozier turns and shines his lantern aft. Rats flee somewhat lethargically from the light, disappearing between casks of salt meat and crates of tinned provisions.
Even in the dim lantern’s glow, the captain can see that the padlock is secure on the Spirit Room. Every day one of Crozier’s officers will come down here to fetch the amount of rum needed for that day’s doling out of the men’s noonday grog — one-fourth pint of 140-proof rum to three-fourths pint of water. Also in the Spirit Room are stored the officers’ wine and brandy, as well as two hundred muskets, cutlasses, and swords. As has always been the practice in the Royal Navy, scuttles lead directly from the officers’ mess and Great Cabin overhead to the Spirit Room. Should there be a mutiny, the officers would get to the weapons first.
Behind the Spirit Room is the Gunner’s Storeroom with its kegs of powder and shot. On either side of the Spirit Room are various storage and locker spaces, including chain cable lockers; the Sail Room, with all its cold canvas; and the Slop Room, from which Mr. Helpman, the ship’s clerk, issues their outdoor clothing.
Behind the Spirit Room and the Gunner’s Storeroom is the Captain’s Storeroom, holding Francis Crozier’s private — and personally paid for — hams, cheeses, and other luxuries. It is still the custom for the ship’s captain to set the table from time to time for his officers, and while the victuals in Crozier’s storeroom pale in comparison to the luxurious foodstuffs crammed into the late Captain Sir John Franklin’s private store on Erebus, Crozier’s pantry — almost empty now — has held out for two summers and two winters in the ice. Also, he thinks with a smile, it has the benefit of containing a decent wine cellar from which the officers still benefit. And many bottles of whiskey upon which he, the captain, depends. The poor commander, lieutenants, and civilian officers aboard Erebus had done without spirits for two years. Sir John Franklin was a teetotaler and so, when he was alive, had been his officers’ mess.
A lantern bobs toward Crozier down the narrow aisle leading back from the bow. The captain turns in time to see something like a hairy black bear squeezing its bulk between the coal sleeves and the Bread Room bulkhead.
“Mr. Wilson,” says Crozier, recognizing the carpenter’s mate
from his rotundity and from the sealskin gloves and deerskin trousers which had been offered to all the men before departure but which only a few had chosen over their flannel and woolen slops. Sometime during the voyage out, the mate had sewn wolf skins they’d picked up at the Danish whaling station at Disko Bay into a bulky — but warm, he insisted — outer garment.
“Captain.” Wilson, one of the fattest men aboard, is carrying the lantern in one hand and has several boxes of carpenter’s tools tucked under his other arm.
“Mr. Wilson, my compliments to Mr. Honey and would you ask him to join me on the hold deck.”
“Aye, sir. Where on the hold deck, sir?”
“The Dead Room, Mr. Wilson.”
“Aye, sir.” The lantern light reflects on Wilson’s eyes as the mate keeps his curious gaze up just a second too long.
“And ask Mr. Honey to bring a pry bar, Mr. Wilson.”
“Aye, sir.”
Crozier stands aside, squeezing between two kegs to let the larger man pass up the ladder to the lower deck. The captain knows he might be rousing his carpenter for nothing — making the man go to the trouble of getting into his cold-weather slops right before lights-out for no good reason — but he has a hunch and he’d rather disturb the man now than later.
When Wilson has squeezed his bulk up through the upper hatch, Captain Crozier lifts the lower hatch and descends to the hold deck.
Because the entire deck-space lies beneath the level of outside ice, the hold deck is almost as cold as the alien world beyond the hull. And darker, with no aurora, stars, or moon to relieve the ever-present blackness. The air is thick with coal dust and coal smoke — Crozier watches the black particles curl around his hissing lantern like a banshee’s claw — and it stinks of sewage and bilge. A scraping, sliding, scuttling noise comes from the darkness aft, but Crozier knows it’s just the coal being shoveled in the boiler room. Only the residual heat from that boiler keeps the three inches of filthy water sloshing at the foot of the ladder from turning to ice. Forward, where the bow dips deeper into the ice, there is almost a foot of icy water, despite men working the pumps six hours and more a day. The Terror, like any living thing, breathes out moisture through a score of vital functions, including Mr. Diggle’s ever-working stove, and while the lower deck is always damp and rimed with ice and the orlop deck frozen, the hold is a dungeon with ice hanging from every beam and meltwater sloshing above one’s ankles. The flat black sides of the twenty-one iron water tanks lining the hull on either side add to the chill. Filled with thirty-eight tons of fresh water when the expedition sailed, the tanks are now armored icebergs and to touch the iron is to lose skin.
