by Cormac James
6th August
He spread one of the oilskins. As at a market, he set out his wares. He laid out the smallest compass and one of the sextants. I don’t suppose they’ll save you if you run into any great difficulty, he said. But it will be some comfort to know you have them at hand.
To you or to us? DeHaven asked.
To us both, I hope.
He brought out his watch. He sprung open the cover to check it still ran. He handed the thing to Daly. It felt as though he was confiding to their trust something precious, that he expected to be returned intact.
I watched them pack, he wrote. Banes and Leask were giddy as schoolboys. I wanted to see them humbled. A few days travelling will see to that, I promised myself. But for the moment, in their minds they are still the chosen. So be it. I will admit to being as jealous as ever of such men, but I will make no more efforts to emulate them.
The party continuing south has been given food for 10 days. I have totted up the weight per man. I am also giving them the spare shotgun, that in all honesty I never cared for. I believe I have been generous with the ammunition too, of which I note we have no shortage. Perhaps I was always expecting or indeed hoping for a separation of some kind. Who can honestly know what one has been hatching secretly?
He looked up. Banes had their mirror on his knee, had his razor open, was splitting matches lengthwise.
They are taking the mast, he wrote. It is the longest piece of wood we have. Also, the grappling hook and ropes. They will move from floe to floe as best they can until the mess begins to congeal. They say they will draw the floating fragments to them and hop across, where the mess has not yet frozen, or is yet too thin to take their weight. Where necessary, they shall use the mast as a sort of bridge or plank. In any case, that is their stated plan. I think it ludicrous, but confess I did not prod it too hard. I was perhaps afraid they would change their minds.
When they left this morning, he wrote, their packs looked pitifully small. I took care to note the details of the scene. Even as they moved away, a dozen gulls came down to heckle. As they came to the first line of hummocks, without breaking his stride Dr DeHaven raised his arm and held it aloft a moment, no doubt a last signal of his defiance to those he flattered himself were watching him go. Long after the last of them had walked into the labyrinth, the sea-birds could still be seen wheeling overhead, as over a fishing boat.
Morgan had already written out his latest sheet of paper and slipped it into a bottle. He put it in the boat. This is our furthest point south, it read. Necessity caused us to abandon our ship, lying as she did entirely confined in ice and inept for navigation. Greater necessity now obliges us to return to her; namely, increasing weakness, decreasing supplies, the advancing season, and our perfect lack of progress. We shall pass the coming winter aboard as best we can, in the hope of more propitious conditions next spring, when we will attempt once more to return home, by the means available to us. August 6th 1852. RICHARD SPREAD MORGAN, Acting Commander, HMS Impetus.
After breakfast, he gathered those who had chosen to return with him to the ship. He made a little speech. The sky was fraught with birds, directly overhead. All through his own speech, Morgan heard only their garrulous banter. They seemed determined to shout him down. They seemed ready to celebrate. Their time had come. They hung in the air, waiting for the men to be gone.
They piled the boat with all they were leaving behind. They knotted their Union Jack to the steering-oar and jammed it in the tabernacle. Flushed with a strange kind of joy, they leaned forward into the raging light. Of the flag, he wrote: It is no boast or claim. It marks a limit, that is all, and testifies to the efforts we have made to rejoin our former life, which even now seems to lie directly before us. More, it testifies to our reluctance to admit the unattainable. Could it have been otherwise? I do not know. I confess I did not expect obstacles so perfectly conceived to frustrate us.
Last night, Morgan wrote, as I was drifting into sleep, I distinctly remembered an event I had previously blanked from my mind, involving those two musk oxen we managed to round up last summer. You may not remember them, as you were even then much confined to bed. My hope, I confess now, was to keep them for milk, for Tommy, if you died. For two months we kept them in the coal-house, but the situation was obviously ill-adapted to their habits or needs, and they did not thrive. By September they were dying, and I decided they should be released. Whether or not this was out of kindness I cannot say. I suspect it was only in order to spare us the sorry spectacle of their lingering death. Also, you were by then much improved, and DeHaven was confident the danger was past. I myself undid the ropes and unblocked the door. The creatures looked at me curiously but made no move. After waiting for a minute or two, I took one by the halter and pulled it outside, in the direction of the island where we had happened upon them. I managed to lead or more properly pull it perhaps half a mile. The other followed at some distance. In the end, growing cold and tired and not a little irritated, I let go the rope and started back for the ship. When I looked around, the animal had dropped to its foreknees. I watched as it bent its head to the ground, then toppled onto its side, as though it had been shot. I went back and stood over the thing, watching the steam rising from its flank, and watching its nostrils slowly flare and pinch. As well you may imagine, there was nothing I could do. I could not even put it out of its misery, as I had not brought my gun. After a time the nostrils were still. Its fellow had finally caught us up and came to stand close by. It too stared down at the dead ox, from whose body the steam continued to rise. I do not know how long we stood there together, but in the end I began to walk back towards the ship. The surviving ox turned to follow me, like a lovesick puppy, and I must say I was not really surprised. The thing was alone in the world now – for an animal, surely an unappealing thought. As I walked along I could hear distinctly the beast labouring behind me. It was blowing hard, but scraping its way patiently over the ice. I did not go directly up the gangway, rather stood by the door of the coal-house waiting for it to arrive. I remember DeHaven saying afterwards that when his own time came he hoped he would face it as well. What he meant was, just as quietly, with equal resignation or indifference. ‘I thought you wanted to die like a soldier, spitting and swearing,’ I answered him, for that is what he had proudly asserted many times. But he denied this and maintained what he said. I have often thought about the matter since, especially during my last sickness here, and during the many other moments of idleness our travels have afforded me. What I realize is that I want not to die but to live like an animal, to face into it all just as quietly, with resignation or a comparable indifference, to use DeHaven’s words.
Assuming she lies exactly where we left her, from our current position it is not much more than 100 miles to the ship, due north. Between us and her, it is hard to know what exactly keeps the pieces in place. They seem the fragments of a gigantic puzzle forced together, made to fit. What I fear most is a sudden blast from the north, which would scatter them, or inspire a drift that would bear us south, ever farther from the ship we are now trying to regain, even as it previously drew us backward, as we struggled to advance. I believe, however, that time is now on my side. It is growing colder again by the day. This morning, there was a thin veneer in our water-cask. It wrinkled to the touch, like the skin on cold soup. Soon there will be young ice again in every lead. Soon the nights will begin the s
imple task of gluing together again all the fragments of summer. Tomorrow morning or the morning after, I know, when we go to wash we will have to smash the surface with our pans. This is not a prediction but a certainty. All of a sudden, even in its humblest details, the future appears to me more definite and reliable than the past.
This evening, he wrote, I have been reading again to the men, from DeHaven’s journal, which he was obliged to abandon on account of its weight. I treat them to at least one instalment daily. The men receive it as news not of another time but another place. What I mean is, they talk as though what is described occurred quite recently, but far, far away. I can hardly quibble. To me, likewise, the events referred to are no more real now than those of a storybook. The transformations have begun. With reminiscence and silence, we are consigning ourselves to the past.
May 17th, 1852, Morgan read. Today we bid adieu to Petersen. To the end he kept faith with the old dream, that we would push through to Cathay, as he liked to name it, and round the world again all the way to Disko, to fame and fortune and a good wife. But here he will stay, his corpse perfectly preserved for all eternity, a heathen laid under a wooden cross, a fitting monument in my opinion to the inanity of mortal ambition and design.
This was the turnstile, he knew. Every next step was for exile. In two little weeks, if all went well, they might be looking again at the ship, if the ship was where they left it. At this remove she remains a source of hope, even of unexpected feelings of nostalgia, he wrote. Speaking of her, the men speak as of the gift of a benevolent power. To every one of them, just now, she is a warmer, better life. This morning I stood atop the berg I have chosen as a home for this my last letter to the world. I had a clear view, in all its fullness, of what lies ahead. It was one white tract. It is blind ream, to every point. From that vantage, I myself thought of her with a sort of giddy caution. I hardly dare believe that, in such a hostile setting, something so fragile can continue to preserve us, and perhaps one day be the means of our salvation. Yet I cannot help but hear the promise farther north. North, there will be no more grand or petty ambitions to harass me, only an endless roster of little miseries. To balance all that, when finally we arrive, there may be a smile of recognition from my son. Then the lad will probably want to climb up on the sledge, to play. I know that ought to suffice me, just as I know it will not. I want more. I want to hold him in my arms. I want to press him hard against me, his warm living flesh. I want to feel it beating, my other heart.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For many details and a number of incidents I am indebted to first-hand accounts of the search for Franklin, and of 19th-century Arctic exploration. The most important sources are listed below.
The Surfacing is a work of fiction but takes as a template a general historical context and specific historical events. In 1850, ten British and American ships converged on Beechey Island and found the famous traces of Franklin there. From there they dispersed to different zones (mostly unmapped) of the Canadian archipelago to pursue the search. Their route to Beechey and beyond was often similar, but the Impetus broadly follows the itinerary and methods of the Advance and Rescue from Disko through the ice to Cape York, to Beechey then Griffith Islands, then up into the Wellington Channel, as given in Kane and Carter. From there, aficionados will know, no ship ever managed to go so far north and west of the Queen’s Channel as the Impetus. That said, Belcher ascended the Wellington and Queen’s Channels to c. 77° N (and sledged far beyond); and Franklin himself, in 1847, got about as far in much bigger ships; they had their unexpected drifts, and I want mine. Besides Kane, Carter and Belcher, the general drift north also takes as a model the drift of the Fox in Baffin Bay in 1857–58.
I am greatly indebted to the numerous accounts of sledge travel in the Wellington Channel and on Somerset Island given by Sutherland and Kennedy respectively. These have provided me with detail specific to sledging in those conditions and that geography; I have reworked several incidents related in those accounts. (I am also indebted to accounts of McClintock’s sledging on Melville Island and Somerset Island/the Boothia Peninsula; and of the sledge journeys out from the Resolute, Enterprise and Investigator.) The ‘retreat’ with the whaleboat of Part V takes as models the retreat south to Cape Sabine of Greely in 1883, the retreat from the Advance of the 2nd Grinnell expedition in 1855, and the retreat of Payer from the Tegetthoff in 1874.
Cape Dundas was an agreed point of rendezvous and refuge for all the Franklin searchers. Parker and Deuchars were whaling captains McClintock and others met in Baffin Bay, and who advised them. As told to McClintock, the Princess Charlotte went down off Cape York in 1856, much like the wreck Kitty describes. The character DeHaven has nothing to do with the commander of the 1st Grinnell expedition (I just liked the name). There is an Offshore/Inshore table in Collinson; a sun-house in Payer; a bird-man mirage in Kane; a present of coffee and seeds in McClintock; a balloon with tail-papers in McDougall; and many other little debts too numerous to mention. The phrase ‘Je ne reviens pas, je viens’ is from an interview with the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich. All temperatures are in Fahrenheit. Where known facts have not suited my narrative, I have ignored them.
SOURCES
Personal Narrative of the Discovery of the Northwest Passage, Armstrong; Last of The Arctic Voyages, Belcher; Searching for the Franklin Expedition (Arctic Journal), Robert Randolph Carter; Journal of HMS Enterprise 1850–55, Collinson; Narrative of the Last Grinnell Expedition, Godfrey; Three Years of Arctic Service, Greely; Ghosts of Cape Sabine, Leonard F. Guttridge; The US Grinnell Expedition, Kane; The Eventful Voyage of the Resolute, Kellett; Short Narrative of the 2nd Voyage of the Prince Albert, Kennedy; Voyage of The Fox, McClintock; Voyage of HM Discovery Ship Resolute, McDougall; Frozen Ships (Arctic Diary 1850–54), Miertsching; Discovery of the North-West Passage by HMS Investigator, Osborn; New Lands Within The Arctic Circle, Payer; Journal of a Voyage in Baffin’s Bay & Barrow Straits, Sutherland; Abandoned, Alden Todd; Dr Kane’s Voyage to the Polar Lands, Villarejo.
For more details, photographs, etc., visit cormacjames.com
THANKS
Thanks to Isobel Dixon for her faith and tenacity, and to all at Blake Friedmann. Thanks to Robert Davidson, Moira Forsyth, and all at Sandstone Press. Special thanks to Jerry Page for reading, advising, photos, and much more. Thanks for keen reading and comments to Fin Keegan, Greg Flanders and Brian Hanrahan. Thanks to Kirstin Chappell and Marie-Martine Khamassi for help on visuals. Thanks to Colum McCann, Rose Tremain and John Boyne for their generous encouragement and support.
