Moses found the item he wanted in the issue of February 22, 1938. A big banner headline announcing:
RAVEN CONSOLIDATED POURS FIRST BRICK
Considerable ceremony attended the pouring of the first gold brick from the Raven Consolidated plant in the Yellowknife gold fields. The brick weighed 70 pounds and was valued at approximately $39,000.
Several company officials and a number of out-of-town guests attended a banquet Tuesday night to celebrate the event. Prominent among the out-of-town guests was Raven’s major shareholder, British investment banker Hyman Kaplansky.…
No imp leaning on a malacca cane appeared in Cyrus Eaton’s biography and there was no mention of him in all the material Moses had collected about Armand Hammer, another tycoon who had made his first millions peddling cough medicine during Prohibition.
Fragments. Tantalizing leads. Tapes, journals, trial transcripts. But so many pieces of the Gursky puzzle missing. Take Aaron Gursky’s case, for instance. Moses had been out west many times, seeking out old-timers who might remember Aaron, who had died in 1931.
Such a nice Jew.
A real good guy.
Some hard worker.
So far as Moses could make out, Aaron had been no more than a hyphen, joining the Gursky generation of Ephraim with that of Bernard, Solomon and Morrie. A shadowy presence, inhibited in the first place by his father’s mockery and then by the turbulence between his sons.
Then there was the problem of Ephraim. The Newgate Calendar entry aside, Moses could find little hard evidence of his sojourn in London or his voyage out with the doomed Franklin.
Ephraim couldn’t have been at ease in London, circa 1830. Henry Mayhew wrote of that time and place, “Ikey Solomons, the Jew fence, buys in the cheapest market and sells in the dearest.” He noted two distinctive races among the London poor. The Irish street-sellers, a numerous and peculiar people, with “low foreheads and long bulging lips, the lowest class of costermongers, confined to the simplest transactions,” and then of course there were the Jews. Mayhew deplored the prejudice that saw the Jews only as “misers, usurers, extortionists, receivers of stolen goods, cheats, brothel-keepers,” but he did allow there was some foundation for many of these accusations. Gambling was the Jews’ chief vice, he observed, just as the extreme love of money was their principal characteristic. But the Jews, he wrote, were also known for their communal spirit, contributing generously to Jewish charities, so that no Jew ever had to die in a parish workhouse. Remarkable, he concluded, “when we recollect their indisputable greed for money.”
Once, while he was still living with Lucy, Moses took her to Westminster Abbey to show her the memorial to the foolish but intrepid Franklin, the epitaph composed by the explorer’s nephew, Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
Not here: the white North hath thy bones, and thou
Heroic Sailor Soul!
Art passing on thy happier voyage now
Toward no earthly Pole.
An afternoon in Sir Hyman Kaplansky’s library had been sufficient for Moses to determine that luxuries of a sort were not unknown on the Erebus and the Terror. Each of Franklin’s ships had a hand organ, capable of playing fifty tunes, ten of them psalms or hymns. There were school supplies for instructing illiterate sailors, mahogany desks for the officers. The Erebus boasted a library of 1,700 volumes and the Terror 1,200, including bound copies of Punch.
For the voyage through the Northwest Passage the officers packed all the finery appropriate for a ball. But, unlike the natives, they had no animal skins that could be worn in layers, providing ventilation to prevent sweat from freezing on a man’s back. Putting in at Disko Bay, on the west coast of Greenland, they did not bother to acquire any teams of sled-dogs. Neither did they take on board a translator or a hunter, though none of their company knew how to take a seal or a caribou. So, in their last extremity, Franklin’s men were driven to boiling each other’s flesh. And seemingly not one of them, save for Ephraim, survived their northern ordeal.
A framed copy of the notice that appeared in the Toronto Globe on April 4, 1850, hung over Moses’s bed.
SIR JOHN FRANKLIN’S EXPEDITION
Copies of the following advertisement have been forwarded by the admiralty to the authorities in Canada:
£20,000
REWARD WILL BE GIVEN BY
Her Majesty’s Government
To any Party or Parties, of any country, who shall render efficient assistance to the crews of DISCOVERY SHIPS
Under the Command of
SIR JOHN FRANKLIN
1.—To any Party or Parties who, in the judgement of the Board of Admiralty, shall discover and effectually relieve the crews of Her
Majesty’s Ships Erebus and Terror, the sum of
£20,000
OR
2.—To any Party or Parties who, in the judgement of the Board of Admiralty, shall discover and effectually relieve any of the Crews of Her
Majesty’s Ships Erebus and Terror, or shall convey such intelligence as shall lead to the relief of such crews or any of them, the sum of
£ 10,000
OR
3.—To any Party or Parties who, in the judgement of the Board of Admiralty, shall by virtue of his or their efforts first succeed in ascertaining their fate,
£ 10,000
W.A.B. HAMILTON
Secretary of the Admiralty.
Admiralty, March 7th, 1850.
Why, Moses wondered, returning to the riddle again and again, hadn’t Ephraim told his tale, claiming the ten-thousand-pound reward? Why did he deny intelligence of either the Erebus or Terror to McNair, pretending to be a runaway off an American whaler?
There was another problem.
Neither Ephraim Gursky nor Izzy Garber were listed in the Muster Books of the Erebus or Terror (available at Admiralty Records, Public Records Office). But they had been there Moses knew, oh yes Ephraim Gursky had been there, and Izzy Garber as well.
Two
Following his arrest, after his ill-fated bug-hunting expedition with the Sullivan sisters, it was Newgate for Ephraim; and in that dark and fetid hole—as he told Solomon some seventy years on, a raven perched on his shoulder, the two of them warming themselves under the shifting arch of the aurora on the shores of Great Slave Lake—he met the man who met the man who would lead him and now Solomon to this place. Ephraim shrunken now, but still frisky, saying: “He was an old Orkney boatman with a bad milky eye and a spongy grey beard and he stirred me as never before with his tales of his journey to the shores of the Polar Sea with Lieutenant John Franklin, as he then was.”
It began innocently enough, Ephraim explained, when he cursed the jailer who once again had served them rancid sausages. This roused what at first glance appeared to be a sack of bones flung into a corner of the communal cell in the felons’ yard, causing it to splutter and sort itself out, assuming the shape of a tall emaciated man, his lips chalky, his hair matted and his beard a filthy tangle. “Young man,” the boatman said, “you are looking at somebody who was once grateful for the putrid powdered marrow bones and horns of a deer that had already been picked over by the white wolves and the black ravens of the barren land.”
“Tell the lad what brought you here, Enoch. Why it’s bound to be a leap into the dark for you.”
“A Jezebel of a daughter bore false witness against me.”
“I thought it was poaching on the Tweed,” another voice called out.
“Poaching,” somebody else put in, “but not on the Tweed.”
“His son-in-law’s slit it was.”
Ignoring their lascivious laughter, the boatman sucked sausage into his all but toothless maw. “Why, when there was no tripe de roche to be had we boiled scraps of leather from our boots and praised the Almighty for providing it. And such was the cold that when we still had it our rum froze in its cask. Aye, and all that time we had to keep watch on the Canadian voyageurs, a thieving lot, and that Iroquois heathen, the treacherous Michel Teroahauté. But the
worst of it was we did not know whether poor Mr. Back, lusting after that Indian harlot, had perished on his trek or would return to us with supplies.”
Seizing Ephraim by the elbow, turning his own face aside the better to fix him with his good unclouded eye, he told him how the white wolves bring down a deer. “Those ferocious predators,” he said, “assemble in great numbers where the deer are grazing. They creep silently toward the herd, and only when they have cut off their retreat across the plain do they begin to race and howl, panicking their prey, tricking them into fleeing in the only possible direction—toward the precipice. The herd, at full speed now, is easily driven over the cliff. Then the wolves, their jaws dripping saliva, descend to feast on the mangled corpses.”
The boatman’s eyes flickered upward and in an instant he was asleep, his mouth agape. Ephraim shook him awake. “Tell me more,” he said.
“Have you any tobacco?”
“No.”
“Gin?”
“No.”
“To hell with you then.”
The next morning the boatman’s only response to Ephraim’s questions was a bilious glare. He was intent on the lice in his beard, flicking them into the flame of a candle.
Out for exercise in the men’s courtyard Ephraim, ignoring his cellmates, strolled up and down, surveying the rough granite walls of the enclosure. He sighed at the sight of the revolving iron spikes near the summit, possibly fifty feet from the ground. It would be impossible, he calculated, for him to squirm between the chevaux de frise and the masonry. And even if he could manage it, the cunning bastards had implanted yet another barrier above. A row of sharp, inward-projecting teeth rising from the top of the slimy wall. Hopeless, he thought.
Later in the day an anxious Izzy Garber hurried to Newgate and arranged to meet with two of the turnkeys at the George. The chaplain of Newgate, the Reverend Brownlow Ford, was already in place, soused, lolling on the sofa with the hangman Thomas Cheshire. Old Cheese, recognizing Izzy, raised his glass to him, his eyes charged with rancour:
By noose and gallows and St. Sepulchre’s Bell
Until we meet—I wish you well.
Ignoring him, Izzy fed the turnkeys ribald stories and stuffed their pockets with guineas. As a consequence, Ephraim was tossed a straw mattress that evening and discovered he now had a line of credit in the prison taproom. He promptly loosened the old boatman’s tongue with gin and tobacco for his pipe.
The Orkney boatman, his voice hoarse, complained to Ephraim about the ruinous addiction of the Cree to spirituous liquors, and how they had become debased by their undying thirst for the noxious beverage, cursed to live out their days without any of the consolations which the Christian religion never fails to afford. A vain, fickle, and indolent race, he said, given to seducing each other’s wives.
The boatman, given to fits of shivering, obviously feverish, would doze fitfully from time to time, coming abruptly awake to demand more gin and to resume his tale as if he had never let off. “I have seen reindeer too numerous to count, the herd extending as far as the horizon, and learned to eat its flesh raw.” The staple food for the voyage, he said, was pemmican, buffalo meat, dried and pounded with melted fat. But there were times, the boatman allowed, when fish and fowl were plentiful. River salmon, jack fish, the singular and beautiful gold eye, which could be caught in nets in the spring at Cumberland House. There was also ptarmigan, Canada grouse, mallard and wild swan.
Ephraim, who had never heard of such things, hungered for more details, but dared not interrupt the cantankerous boatman’s flow.
If the boatman disapproved of savages, he also pitied them, his unbridled contempt reserved for the Canadian voyageurs, a riotous lot, lazy and complaining, who thought nothing of wintering in the fur forts with Indian wives of twelve years of age, whom they often bartered for a season to one or another of their rude companions. “When the cold abates, which you—in your ignorance—might consider a mercy, and the sun prevails day and night on the barrens, then do the mosquitoes begin to swarm everywhere, flying into your ears and mouth, a hellish torment, and the only thing for it is to light a fire, dampen it, and fill your tent with stinging smoke. Without a doubt, it is the land God gave to Cain.”
“Then why did you undertake such an arduous voyage in the first place?”
“I had no way of knowing.”
“True.”
“For my sins, of all the men assembled in Mr. Geddes’s house on June 14, 1819 , I was one of the four who agreed to join the expedition, tempted by the promise of adventure and a wage of forty pounds annually as well as free passage back to the Orkney Islands. I was most impressed with the Christian character of Mr. Franklin. He bore with him a translation of the Gospel of St. John in the Esquimaux lingo printed by the Moravian Society in London. He also carried with him gifts to conciliate any savages we might encounter. Looking-glasses, beads, nails, tea kettles and so forth.”
In that stifling cell that crawled with lice, cockroaches, and sewer rats, that stank of excrement and urine and reverberated with the hacking of men already taken with typhus, Ephraim dreamt of a cool white land where the summer sun never set and herds of reindeer extended as far as the horizon. He was jolted awake when one of the boatman’s tormentors crept close to him, pretending to be the Bellman on his eve of execution visit. Ephraim lunged at him, grabbing his hand. Then, even as the man cried out, Ephraim gave his hand an even sharper twist, seemingly determined on uprooting his arm from its socket. “Tell me the name of your companion in the far corner.”
“Larkin.”
“Well now, he was with me in the Steel and he can tell you about me.”
In the morning, after another discouraging stroll through the exercise yard, Ephraim wakened the old boatman with gin and filled his pipe with tobacco.
“I want the sodomites’ sausages when they come,” the old man said.
“And you shall have them. Now tell me more.”
“I would also find a straw mattress most beneficial.”
“Take mine.”
Coughing, clearing his faltering lungs of phlegm, the old man told him that they had espied their first icebergs some ninety miles off the coast of Labrador. A day later the brilliant coruscations of the aurora borealis appeared to them. “We did not encounter any difficulties until we quit York Factory in a small boat, bound for the interior. Then we couldn’t make progress on that damned Steel River by sail. The current was running too fast for using oars so we were bloody well bound to commence tracking.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then you are blessed. What I’m saying is that we had to drag the boat by a line to which we were harnessed like beasts of the field. This is not easy at the best of times, but these were the worst for anybody but a mountain goat, considering the steep declivity of the high banks and the soft slippery footing. Aye, we were fortunate indeed to advance at the rate of two miles an hour. Are you for the dance upon nothing?”
“I’m too young. And then?”
“And then the water in the Hill River was so low we were obliged to jump into it, though it was freezing, and this we did several times a day to lift the boat over our shoulders. And next came the sprouts, and we were leaping in and out of the boat all day, working in wet clothes in freezing temperatures. I take it you’re a Four by Two.”
“Yes.”
The old man began to chortle. “Gin. Tobacco. Steak-and-kidney pie. The turnkeys dancing attendance. I thought as much.”
“Did you now?”
He held out his tumbler for more gin.
“You’ve had enough.”
“I want more, lad.”
“Then tell me more.”
It was the long trek back from the interior that really exorcised the boatman; a time when they had to contend with fearful famine and cold, the thieving of rations by the Canadian voyageurs and the unspeakable treachery of Michel Teroahauté. “We ate the skin and bones of deer and the storms raged without and within. Don
’t you see? Mr. Franklin had to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Separate them. Hood and Back. Sending Back on his long trek.”
“Why?”
“How can you be such an idiot?”
“I wasn’t there.”
“Hood had already got a savage with child at Fort Enterprise and now he lusted after the little Copper Indian harlot—after Green Stockings—who couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. But Back, an even worse whoremonger, was also smitten. That brazen girl would bathe in cold streams, displaying her cunny to the officers on the bank, inflaming them. She lay with both of them in turn. They took her from behind, like a bitch in heat.”
“And how would you know that?”
“Why, if not for me those two midshipmen would have fought a duel. I consulted with Dr. Richardson and then I removed the charges from their pistols. Then it was that Mr. Franklin sent Back away for the winter.”
“You were spying on the girl.” “I did no such thing. Mind, I did stumble on them fornicating in the bush once. Aye, and it was a disgusting sight. Not to you or your kind, perhaps, who have denied Christ. But you must understand that my Christian upbringing stood me no matter how far from civilization.”
“Though not necessarily when you came back to it.” “I am here falsely accused by my daughter and the court will see that soon enough. Now I must get some sleep.”
Prowling the men’s courtyard the next morning, cursing the chevaux de frise, Ephraim loitered once again under the water cistern that protruded immediately below the revolving spikes at the corner of the yard. And once again he saw that the turnkeys did not keep a constant watch on it. Back in his cell he roused the old boatman with gin and tobacco and pleaded with him to resume his tale.
“But where was I?”
“Mr. Back had been sent off to search for supplies and the rest of you were driven to eating deer skin.”
Solomon Gursky Was Here Page 41
