Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  Their own landing party, along with those of several other search expeditions that chanced on the scene at the same time, had found the shore of Beechey Island littered with food tins and discarded naval gear, proving that British sailors had recently spent time there. The chance discovery – by Dr Kane himself – of three graves on the beach, marked with the names of men of Erebus and Terror and dated winter 1845, confirmed the supposition: the North West Passage Expedition had spent its first winter on Beechey Island before sailing on to its unknown end.

  This was remarkable news: the ships had not vanished entirely. But where had they gone next? On this point the mystery only deepened. For although Sir John Franklin’s men had built a stone message cairn on the crest of the island, marked with a cross to attract passing ships, when the searchers opened it they found not a word from Erebus and Terror. It seemed that, contrary to all accepted rules and custom of exploration, Sir John had omitted to leave a note of his intentions before he moved on.

  An urgent dispatch for Lady Franklin was immediately fastened to the leg of Prince Albert’s best pigeon, the prodigious Sir John Ross, to be sped to the bird’s native Ayrshire. Alas, the bewildered pigeon flew three times around the ship, landed on deck and was eaten by a dog.

  ‘And then,’ said Dr Kane, ‘after I discovered the graves, I came across another mystery on Beechey Island. Erected above the beach on the eastern tip of the island was a second cairn, much the same size as the empty stone cairn on the cliff. Only this one was made not of stone but of empty food tins, some six or seven hundred of them, filled with gravel and arranged in a pyramid. And when I searched inside . . .’

  He looked about him at the faces crowded round the table in the cabin of Prince Albert – Kennedy, Bellot, Leask, Murdaugh and the American commander, Lieutenant de Haven, a gloomy, thickset man of about thirty-five. Nearest the door sat old John Hepburn, Franklin’s former seaman-servant, who had come as supercargo to search for his old friend.

  ‘Inside?’ prompted Bellot, impatient.

  Kane was enjoying his moment of suspense. He took a sip of the strong tea which – Mr Kennedy being an abstainer – was all that was served aboard ship.

  ‘Inside,’ he said, ‘this cairn proved just as empty as the first! It was beyond all explanation. I took it apart there and then, tin by tin, and found nothing inside it. Some other men then chanced on the scene, and together we dug into the tundra beneath the tin cairn until we met the frozen soil below. There was nothing. Nothing at all.’

  ‘When you say “we”, Dr Kane, I presume you mean the Americans of your Advance and Rescue?’

  ‘Well, yes, Ensign Bellot . . . although there may well have been men of other ships present by then; by this time several different expeditions had also arrived at Beechey Island and sent parties ashore. They all appeared there, as if by magic, within the space of two days at the end of August last year.’

  ‘A remarkable coincidence,’ remarked Mr Kennedy. ‘Unless we take it as a sign of guidance from a higher power.’

  ‘One might take it as such,’ said Dr Kane, smiling, ‘but other explanations can also be found. The map will show you that Beechey Island lies at a crossroads for the high Arctic, where five great channels diverge from the Lancaster Sound – Prince Regent Inlet, Peel Sound, Wellington Channel, Barrow Strait, McDougall Sound. It also has a large harbour protected from the currents and the ice. Little wonder that Sir John and his men selected it for their first winter quarters.

  ‘We ourselves came to the island in consort with Felix, a steam yacht under the private command of the famous Sir John Ross. With us also were the Lady Franklin and Sophia, both under the renowned whaling captain William Penny. Then the following day Captain Austin of the Royal Navy bought his Resolute and Pioneer into the harbour. His colleague Captain Ommanney, who had inspected the empty stone cairn on Beechey but missed the graves, was still only fifteen files away with the Assistance and Intrepid, detained in the ice of Barrow Strait. That makes nine ships, from five different expeditions, all in the same anchorage or its immediate neighbourhood. And your own Prince Albert, then under Captain Forsyth, cannot have been far away.’

  Now old Hepburn spoke, which was a rare enough occurrence. He talked with the precise, spidery accent of his Scottish boyhood, a manner of speaking that allowed him – although by birth a cowherd – to sound when he wished like an Edinburgh lawyer, one whose statements take the form of carefully barbed questions.

  ‘When you say that nothing was found on the island, Dr Kane, no written note or record, you can only speak for yourself. There must have been many sailors roaming ashore on those days in late August. And there is, I believe, twenty thousand pound offered for the men who rescue Sir John Franklin, or discover his fate.’ He let his meaning sink in, then continued: ‘Captain Ommanney and his men were alone when they inspected the stone cairn and found it empty?’

  Poor Bellot, shocked at Hepburn’s suggestion, could only turn and look at Kane, hoping to hear him refute it.

  But Kane was silent for a while, tapping his fingers on the table. ‘This is true, Mr Hepburn,’ he said at last, ‘as far as the general run of the island is concerned. But as for Captain Ommanney, I do not believe that an officer of the Royal Navy would do such a thing. In any case, he was not alone when the stone cairn on the cliff was inspected. The master of our own consort the USS Rescue, Mr Griffin, was present when the stones were removed.’

  ‘And you are as sure,’ said Hepburn quietly, ‘of all the men of your American ships?’

  ‘I am as sure of that,’ replied Dr Kane, ‘as I am sure of the ­honesty of my own dear fiancée back home in Philadelphia.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Bellot stoutly, looking from one man to another, ‘we need say no more of that.’

  ‘What a miracle,’ said Mr Kennedy, who had seemed distracted while all this went on, gazing up at the soft white glow in the skylight. ‘What a miracle, that so many ships and men should have been present last year, brought together in that extreme desolation, to bear witness when such a discovery was made. It passeth all understanding, except that we trust in the ways of the Lord. Let us pray now, gentlemen, that He will continue to guide us, and lead us through this icy maze, that we may succour our brothers who have commended themselves into His hands . . . And let that prayer be our grace before eating as well, for supper is about to be served.’

  ‘Amen,’ said all, and bowed their heads.

  Prince Albert had killed her last sheep for this special occasion. The allure of fresh mutton, combined with the news from Beechey Island (and with the absence of wine from the menu) to make for a silent and thoughtful mood at table. Little more was said until the meal was over and Mr Leask proposed – as Mr Kennedy abstained also from tobacco – to go on deck to smoke a pipe. There followed a general exit from the cabin, with only Dr Kane and Mr Kennedy – who had hinted at a private medical concern – remaining together below.

  The evening was clear and windless, the air almost mild. The officers lounged amidships, looking across a wasteland of pack to the stark peaks of Greenland. The mountains swam on a haze above the sea ice. Above and beyond them gleamed the dome of the ice-cap, also floating in blue air. The sun, now nearing the horizon, wore a halo which was set, at its cardinal points, with smaller, sharper copies of itself.

  ‘It is very beautiful,’ Bellot said, waving his hand at the shimmering peaks, the geometric wonder of the gleaming parhelia. ‘All these tricks of the polar light. I wonder if one could ever grow tired of them.’

  Lieutenant de Haven, to whom he had addressed the remark, puffed his pipe a couple of times in quick succession, as if getting up steam. Then he spat over the side.

  ‘They’re beautiful, alright. But treacherous too.’

  Young Mr Murdaugh, who seemed relieved to hear the silence broken, now joined in the conversation. ‘It’s all very well on a clear day,’ he told Bell
ot, ‘when the sun throws plain shadows and shows you the horizon and which way is up. But an overcast sky can play painful tricks. If you are crossing fast ice or an open snow-field you may think you are setting foot on a hillock then step into a hole instead. You hop down from a little hummock and fall ten feet onto your face. You lose your bearings and all sense of distance, then see a friend across the way, large as life, waving his arms at you. But when you approach him he turns into a bird and flies away, leaving you more lost than ever. In a fog or a blizzard it is all too easy to wander and die.’

  It was Lieutenant de Haven who next spoke. To Bellot, watching the pensive, wondering look on his face, the American seemed to be talking as much to himself as anyone present.

  ‘The light has its tricks, and so does the perception, and I am not scientist enough to swear that there is not some other prankster at work in the polar latitudes.’ He waved at the mountains to the east. ‘These are the mountains of western Greenland. The Vikings knew them a thousand years ago. It is two hundred years since this coast was charted by whalers, and we know from our navigational science exactly where we lie in relation to it. These mountains are known to us. They are real.’

  Still no one else spoke. Bellot saw Kennedy and Kane come out of the cabin, discussing a little wooden case that Kane was showing Kennedy. The case’s hinged glass lid, together with a glimpse of a round white dial, revealed the object to be a commonplace marine chronometer. Seeing how rapt the other men were, the newcomers fell silent as they joined them, and Kane stowed the clock inside his leather satchel. De Haven paid no heed to their arrival.

  ‘Before I ever came to Baffin Bay I knew what I would find from looking at the maps. And I had already seen these mountains.’ After a pause he went on: ‘Or rather, mountains just like them. Their mirror image, in fact, because I saw them at the antipode to where we lie now, on the exact opposite end of the planet.’ His face moved as he sorted his memories into words. ‘Ten years ago I was a midshipman with the United States South Sea Expedition. Pressing deep into the Antarctic pack we saw new lands to the south of us, a range of high mountains and glaciers and bays. I stood beside my commander, Lieutenant Wilkes, and wrote down the bearings he took with his instruments, transcribing the new coast onto our map. The yards and ratlines of Vincennes were lined with staring sailors. And every man aboard, including myself, would have sworn on the Book that our new lands were as real as any landfall we made in our circumnavigation, as real as Madeira, Tierra del Fuego, the Sandwich Islands, the Heads of Port Jackson or the bay of San Francisco.’

  He stopped again, to knock out his pipe over the side of the ship. And Bellot understood why the others stayed silent. The scandal of Wilkes was generally known.

  Lieutenant de Haven turned back to his listeners, whose gazes – all except for that of young Bellot – were now averted.

  ‘A few weeks after we mapped that new coast Commander Crozier of the Royal Navy –’ he nodded to the west – ‘who is now himself missing in the ice, sailed HMS Terror through that very same spot, at sixty-six degrees south, one-sixty-five east. He saw there only open waters. His six-hundred-fathom line could find no bottom. There was no new continent there, not even an island or shoal. Alas, this news did not reach Washington until long after we ourselves did, and by then Wilkes’s new coast, claimed for the United States, was already printed on our maps.’ De Haven spat over the side. ‘Many of our Washington politicians, who hated Wilkes almost as much as he despised them, tried to turn his error into a fraud. It greatly damaged his career and those of his officers. That is why I volunteered for this mission. It is not for any great love of the ice.’

  He leaned back against the gunwale and folded his arms. It was Kennedy who broke the heavy silence.

  ‘I have seen a few such phantoms myself in the Bay service, and heard of many others. When I first shipped to Orkney as a boy, to be schooled at Saint Mary’s Hope, an old sailor swore to me he had once seen High Brazil, the magic island west of Ireland from which no man has ever returned.’

  ‘Once,’ said Dr Kane, ‘when I was travelling though Italy,

  I saw the Fata Morgana. It appeared as a fabulous city of

  towers and arches looming over the Strait of Messina. I even saw people walk on its battlements. It is said to be a glimpse of lost Camelot.’

  They are trying to comfort de Haven, thought Bellot. They mean to be kind.

  Old Leask cleared his throat. ‘We whalers have our own names for such will-o’-the-wisps. Sometimes in the Spitsbergen or Chilean fisheries you will spy on the horizon a mountain range or headland, but however long you steer for it and however fair your wind, it will always flee before you. We call it “Cape Flyaway”, or “the Coast of Cloud Land”.’

  Bellot, seeing that Lieutenant de Haven still stared gloomily out to sea, decided to join in. ‘Such honest mistakes are easily explained. We know from science that they are caused by simple optics, by the reflection or refraction of light through atmospheric ice crystals or layers of air of different temperature. I am sure it was a similar mirage that deceived Sir John Ross thirty years ago when he thought he saw mountains blocking Lancaster Sound, and turned his ships early for home to the great hurt of his reputation.’

  ‘The fabulous Croker Mountains,’ said de Haven. ‘I sailed through their position twice last year and never noticed a thing.’

  No one replied to him. And in that silence Bellot was seized by a queer kind of vertigo, an inward spinning and trembling. He saw at last that this journey might prove treacherous in ways that he had not previously understood. Well, he would chart his islands carefully. He would check and recheck his instruments, take diligent temperatures and bearings, be doubly and trebly sure of his path by ship and boat and sledge. And he would resist in himself and in others that siren’s lure of empty fame, the lust to have one’s name attached to some cape or frozen sound. His journal would be his scientific Bible, his instruments his Redeemers. They would guide him through the dark.

  London, 1853

  Lieutenant de vaisseau Joseph René Bellot held his hands up to the bedroom mirror, inspecting the insignia of his new rank. There they were: three golden rings beneath a fouled anchor, bright on the ends of his sleeves. He had just taken delivery of a bespoke dress uniform: his unspent pay, backdated to his promotion in absentia the previous spring, when he’d still been wandering the Arctic behind a team of dying dogs, had covered the fees of a good London tailor. I am not overdoing it, he told the face in the mirror. It is not every day that a French officer is made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. I owe it to my country to show myself well.

  But the face in the mirror (older now than its years, scarred badly by frostbite) would not let him off so easily. Your old uniform, it reminded him, was good enough for Queen Victoria last month. It was good enough for the Minister of the Marine in Paris, and for the Emperor himself. It would have been good enough for Sophia Cracroft, when she and Lady Franklin finally return from New York.

  He turned away from the mirror and went over to the window. It was already dark outside his Islington lodgings, the gloom deepened by one of those ghastly London fogs. A boy in a messenger’s uniform flitted through the globe of sick light that stifled a gas lamp; he vanished in the darkness at the front of the house. Bellot heard the clack of the knocker, the sound of the front door. Perhaps it’s for me. Perhaps . . . He pushed the thought away from him. It was not yet time to feel hollow; his latest wave of triumph still had not broken, and he must rehearse the words he would say tonight to the Royal Geographical, the extempore little speech – a touch bashful, perhaps a little halting, though in fact his English was very good – in which he would accept this humbling honour and give his own brief account of those terrible months on the ice. It was only a shame that Lady Franklin, and Miss Cracroft, would not be there.

  He shut his eyes and leaned his head against the grimy window, hoping the cold would
shock him out of his melancholic mood. It did not work, and he opened his eyes to see his own face in the window. Why, his own eyes asked him, must you always second-guess your luck?

  Footsteps came up the stairs from the hallway. They passed the sitting room on the first floor and the two suites of grand rooms off the second-floor landing. They continued past the goodish rooms on the third floor, where Kennedy would stay whenever he was in London. Now they took on a hollower tone, mounting the narrow, uncarpeted steps that led to the corridor under the eves, that row of cheap little rooms, formerly servants’ quarters, in the cheapest of which Bellot lodged alone.

  He opened the door before the servant could knock. The houseboy stood with a lantern and a brown paper parcel, smiling obsequiously. He was only twelve or fourteen but his teeth were stained by tobacco and porter. ‘Package for you, sir. Heavy it is too, up all them stairs.’

  Bellot felt his heart sink within him. He knew what it was. He’d been told to expect it earlier in the week, but he had begun to hope that it wouldn’t come at all. If he did not have to look at it then maybe it would not exist. Now here it was. He took the parcel reluctantly.

  The houseboy stood his ground. ‘I had to tip the messenger, sir. He wouldn’t leave it otherwise.’

  ‘Really? You had to pay the boy from Mr Kennedy’s publisher to do his own job?’

  The porter did not so much as blink. ‘I gave him tuppence from my own pocket, sir. You can ask him if you like.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I can go after him, sir. I saw which way he went.’

  Bellot gave up and handed him tuppence. He would soon have to swallow bigger ones than that.

  He untied the string that fastened the parcel and took out a book smelling fresh from the press. A Short Narrative of the Second Voyage of the ‘Prince Albert’ in Search of Sir John Franklin. By William Kennedy.