Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  After a while we were sent for, and found Lady Franklin in her parlour with Hall and the other lady, Miss Sophia, who was her niece. The story that interested them most was the one that Pat had told us, that Lord Franklin’s body had been sealed by his men in a grave made of concrete, and that later, when the men began to starve and the ships were abandoned, various records and other things were put in a cache made of the same substance. Lady Franklin begged to know if Captain Hall had searched for this grave and this cache. When he replied that he had done all he could in the time he had on the island, she asked him if he would make one more trip to King William Island on her behalf to search for them some more.

  Hall said he couldn’t do as she asked because he had recently received orders from the President of the United States to take an American navy ship to the North Pole. All the English sailors had been lost in the Barrens a long time ago. It would be vain to search any further, he said.

  It was strange to hear Hall speak so carelessly of King William Island, having lived with him for so many years when it was his only goal in life. As for me, I had always thought that Franklin’s ships were an odd kind of quarry: when men vanish in the ice they seldom come back again, and what does it matter how they were lost? You freeze or you starve or you drown, or you are killed by a bear or a walrus or perhaps by your own kind. This woman was very old – even her niece was almost an old woman now, older than Hall – and yet she still talked of her husband as if he could return to her. You mourn your dead but you must go on living: to do otherwise is impious. Lady Franklin ought to have married another man years ago rather than cling to this corpse, this old man who would have been dead by now even if he had never sailed from his home. As for her niece, who went quietly about the room serving tea to us, she was still a very handsome woman, graceful and dark, yet Taqulittuq told me afterwards that Miss Sophia had never been with any man but merely travelled the world with Lady Franklin. And when I heard that, I thought I understood her better.

  Having again begged Hall to lead another expedition to King William Island, and again been refused, Lady Franklin then asked him if he would consent to go as paid guide with an English expedition. Hall told Lady Franklin that he had been made an officer of the United States Navy by the president himself and could not be hired for money. Lady Franklin then suggested that he let her have Taqulittuq and I to guide her expedition, since we had already been to the island. Now instead of being hot Hall grew very cold, and told Lady Franklin that he needed us himself for his next journey. Besides, we were not his property, he said, but his friends. We were as dear to him as his own children.

  Hall had two young children, I believe, and a wife as well. But he seldom saw them and I never met them, not even in Cincinnati.

  Then Lady Franklin said that she hadn’t wanted to purchase us but to hire us, and that we would be very well paid and that afterwards she would undertake to return us to America or Cumberland Sound or wherever we wanted to go. She said she didn’t see how Hall, if he really was our friend, could prevent her from making such a generous offer.

  They were standing face to face now, and Captain Hall was very pale, and she was quite red, so that the contrast almost made me laugh. Miss Sophia tried to intervene, standing between them and saying soothing words, but nothing would calm them. Then Taqulittuq stood up from the couch and said in a loud voice that she and Joe thanked them very much, but that Captain Hall was our friend and we would go with him wherever he went and had no desire to return to King William Island or even to Cumberland Sound. And so that was settled. But I wish she’d consulted me before she spoke. I’d have accepted Lady Franklin’s offer.

  The navy gave Hall a ship called the Periwinkle, which I thought was a good hard name for a ship that must serve in the ice. Hall renamed her Polaris, the north star, which she would steer by. Our old friend Captain Budington was appointed to command her.

  While the ship was fitting out at the Brooklyn navy yard we stayed with Mr Grinnell in his big house in Manhattan. Taqulittuq was happy there, but I was very restless, and I took to wandering the shores of the island and talking to the sailors and dockers whom I found about the piers. Often enough we would go to a bar together, because I was now drawing navy pay, and money would be of little use where I was going. Nor did I worry that I was now drinking alcohol, a weakness which I had been careful to avoid since coming to America: I would very soon be out of temptation’s way. And it was fun to sit in these American bars, with their coloured glass and brass rails and smoke and pianos, and listen to stories about racehorses and wars and boxing and countries I hadn’t visited yet. Sometimes there were fights, and I once saw a man beaten half to death until the police came and rescued him. But no one ever harmed or hindered me. Whenever I wished I could walk into the street and the people who passed by wouldn’t even see me.

  Before we sailed for Greenland we attended one last big meeting in New York. Mr Grinnell organized it, and we were asked to go in our sealskins. At the meeting everyone praised Captain Hall and prayed for his success. And they gave him a special surprise, which was an American flag that had been sent out before on other great journeys. A captain called Wilkes had taken it with him when he’d tried to reach the furthest place south, the South Pole, where it is said to be as cold as our own country. Ten years after that this same flag had gone north with another friend of Mr Grinnell, Dr Kane, when he tried to find an open ocean in the north. Now it would go north again with us. Hall was so pleased with this honour that he wept in front of all the people.

  After the meeting I sat in Mr Grinnell’s drawing room and watched as he gave Hall a small wooden box. This, I heard him say, had been left in his keeping by Kane himself. He would now entrust it to Captain Hall for his journey. Hall couldn’t speak, but he took the box and opened it, looked inside, then took out a smaller box with a glass lid. He weighed it in his hands, with fresh tears in his eyes, then he put the smaller box back in the larger one, closed it, and put it in his portable writing case. I was sitting there with Taqulittuq and Mrs Grinnell, waiting to be allowed to go up to bed, and although I was curious to see ­Captain Hall so dumbstruck I didn’t want to ask Taqulittuq to explain the situation to me. I had been bored at the big meeting and had slipped away for a while, and I didn’t want Taqulittuq to hear me speak and know that I was drunk.

  If you ask me, Dr Bessels murdered Captain Hall, and I believe that he did it with poison. Captain Hall believed this too, because he told us so himself, me and Taqulittuq, as we tried to nurse him in his cabin on Polaris. Later, when we all had to appear before the navy court in Washington, I heard Dr Bessels swear that he hadn’t even been aboard the ship when Hall drank the coffee and became very ill, but was ashore in his magnetic observatory on the beach at Thank God Harbour – which is what we called the place in the far north of Greenland where the ship was trapped by winter. But Bessels was lying, because I had seen him myself near the door of the galley where the coffee was prepared.

  Dr Bessels looked down on the American officers and sailors and anyone else who hadn’t studied in books. I believe he looked down most of all on Hall, whom he considered stupid, and on Budington and Tyson, the captain and first mate, whom he regarded as common fishermen. He thought he should command the expedition, as it was a scientific mission, and he was a scientist. Perhaps that is why he did it. I’ll never know.

  After he was poisoned poor Hall sometimes had convulsions, while at other times he suffered from paralysis and vomiting. He thought he saw blue flames coming from our mouths, and clouds of blue poison in the cabin air. He was mad at times, at other times cunning. Often, pain seized him and shook him until he became senseless and shouted strange words in his daze. I never heard him speak of his wife or his children. Sometimes he crawled around the cabin looking for his pistol, but I’d stolen it from him and hidden it, because I couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t shoot one of us with it, and not merely Bessels or himself. Hall las
ted two weeks before he died, as had Pat. And so Hall atoned for Pat’s murder.

  They dressed Hall’s corpse in his new navy uniform, put him in a coffin and covered him with Mr Grinnell’s special flag. The crew carried him from the ship across the sea ice and buried him in a shallow hole that the men had dug into the frozen ground with crowbars and pickaxes.

  We were so far north that it was as black as midnight, though it was not quite noon by the clock, and Mr Tyson the mate held a lantern so the chaplain could read the prayers for the dead. After that rocks were piled on the grave to keep off the bears. Everyone else went back to the ship, because it was terribly cold up there in the north of Greenland where the sun didn’t rise for months on end. But Taqulittuq and I stayed by the grave to say goodbye to our old friend.

  They had buried him with his feet facing south-east, which is where the Christians have their holy place, so he lay with his back half turned from the north and from the frozen bay where the ship lay beset. Taqulittuq and I said nothing, because there was nothing to say to each other, and then we turned and walked for a little way north up the beach. An aurora had appeared in the south, giving enough light for us to see the rings of stones that protruded from the snow. These were tent-rings, left by people like the old ones who had lived on Lok’s Land, perhaps a long time ago, perhaps only recently. I was glad that Hall had died before he noticed them: when he and I had sledged northward ahead of the ship the previous autumn, just before he was poisoned, and we had climbed the furthest mountain ridge and seen only a frozen sea beyond it – no new lands stretching ahead of us into the north, nothing green or living, no warm blue waters or spouting whales – Hall had been very disappointed; his consolation was to tell himself, falsely, that he had at least gone further north than any human had ever been before.

  There was aboard ship another of our people, Hans Hendrik, a Greenlander, and his wife and children. As the winter drew on we took our families away from the ship and built our own snow-houses ashore. We were safe there should the ship’s hull give way in the ice and sink. And we were kept apart from the madness of the crew. At night, when it was quiet, we could hear them aboard the Polaris, howling and fighting and singing their songs. They were often drunk, brewing their own liquor from sugar and tinned fruit or stealing the alcohol which Dr Bessels had brought to preserve his dead animals. It was this latter stuff that maddened them most.

  One night in December Captain Budington, who was the drunkest of them all, became terrified of something he thought he had seen on the ice in the moonlight. He ordered that all the rifles and pistols aboard be shared out to repel an attack. Of course, once the sailors were armed he couldn’t disarm them. Half of the crew weren’t Americans by birth but Germans. Now factions began to form, with Dr Bessels, who was also a German, stirring up trouble, so that neither side would agree to hand in their guns. Sometimes the white men came out on deck and shot at the sky or at phantoms they saw on the floes; after a while Hans and I had to move further up the beach so that our children were safe from the bullets skipping off the ice.

  We moved back to the ship when the sun returned and birds and seals reappeared in the strait and the crew became less crazy. But the ice in the bay didn’t break when it should have. We didn’t see a clear lead until August, and no sooner had the ship passed into the strait then the ice closed on us again and bore us away. The ship was moving south, but only at the speed of the drifting pack, and there was now no way to break free and find another winter harbour: we were in the middle of the strait, at the mercy of the first autumn storm.

  It hit us in the night far out to sea. The storm broke the ship free of the ice and sent her whirling through a lead of black water until she crashed into an old floe on the other side. The waves smashed most of the boats and part of the aft hatch. Water flooded the stokehold so the engineers couldn’t raise steam. Then the ice closed on us again, driven before the great storm, and we heard the timbers and braces groan and then crack until the ship heeled right over. It seemed sure that her ribs were broken and that only the ice now held her afloat.

  Hans and I and our families were the first onto the ice, taking all our best gear with us: we trusted the ice more than we did any ship. Tyson the first mate was with us, and a few of the others. We got the last two whale boats over the side, and Hans’s kayak, and some tents and some food. The wind-blown snow blinded and numbed us as we stumbled about on the floe, trying to stop our gear sliding into the black water.

  Then the wind veered and the floes parted once more. But the ship didn’t sink. Instead, the wind and waves drove her, without power or sails, into the night. And though we were frozen and terrified, stranded on the ice in a storm in the sea, it was we who felt sorry for Captain Budington and the others who were still aboard Polaris: the ship would surely sink soon, and we on the floe had both of her surviving boats.

  The floe which we lived on was quite large at first. On the second day I shot two ringed seals and Hans got another. We had taken some tinned food and bread from the ship, and if we could only drift a little further south we could hope for a calm spell which would allow us to rig the two whale boats and make for the eastern shore, where we might fall in with some Greenland people.

  We were nineteen in number – seven Germans, two Americans, one Englishman and nine Inuks of whom five were only children. Captain Tyson, the first mate, was the senior officer.

  While we awaited our chance to escape we built snow-houses to shelter us all. The men seized most of the canvas and packing crates which we had with us to make their own house comfortable. And when it grew colder, and their small supply of coal and wood ran out, they burned one of the boats to keep warm.

  Tyson tried to stop them, but they had pistols and rifles and shotguns and Tyson had brought none for himself from the ship, having worked through the night of the storm with no thought of himself. Unlike the Germans he was a whaling man, a skipper in his own right, and he knew the ice well, and that one whale boat couldn’t take all of us safely with all the food and gear we would need for a sea crossing. The waves would wash into it and it would founder and sink. When they burned that first whale boat we lost our best chance of escape.

  As the winter deepened there were hardly any seals to hunt, not nearly enough to feed both ourselves and our dogs, so we ate the dogs one by one until there was none left and then Hans and I had to go hunting without them. It’s an eerie thing to be out on the sea ice in the black night of winter without a dog to smell the air for you. When the mist scatters the moonlight, or when there is no moon and only the light of the stars or the aurora, every hummock and ridge in the ice becomes a stalking bear, and indeed might conceal one. When a swell lifts the floe and the water sucks beneath its edge you hear the snort of a bear breaking cover and charging you. And when the temperature drops and ice flowers form on the leads of open water, rustling on the waves, it sounds like the whisper of voices on distant floes. I often thought on such nights of the people of Lok’s Land and what had become of them.

  Only the ringed seals, who chew their own air holes in the ice, live so far north in the winter, and they are wary and small. At first the Germans tried to hunt for themselves, shooting whenever a seal would appear, but this only drove the seals back into the sea, whether wounded or not, before we could secure them. The Germans then took to following Hans and I at a distance so that they could seize any seals which we caught before we could take our own share.

  But the white men wouldn’t eat the guts of the seals – not at first – so I would collect them in a bag and take them back to our house. Punny was no longer playful but listless, and sat in the dark of the sleeping bench. Every few minutes throughout the day she would sigh and say in English, ‘I am so hungry. Oh, I am so hungry.’ And when you are hungry the cold soaks through your clothing, your legs grow heavy and your thoughts distracted, until you are no longer able to hunt. When you feel the cold stealing up on you like that it
is time for desperate measures. So I began to count heads.

  For friends we had only Tyson, and Jackson the black steward and Herron the Englishman. By now the Germans wouldn’t speak to anyone in English, or smile or help or share. Poor Tyson could do nothing with them, as he had put all his energy into saving general stores on the night of the storm and had brought nothing off the ship for himself, not even a gun or a coat. For the same reason, he was confined to the hut from December to February, having no warm clothes to save him from the cold.

  By now Meyer had fallen from favour and a man called Kruger was the leader of the German faction. He was the worst of the lot, a loud-mouthed bully and a liar who still carried fat on his bones when the rest of us were starving. Much good would his fat have done him if things had got any worse. I would have eaten him first.

  Tyson now lived all the time with Taqulittuq and Punny and I, because without proper clothes he needed the warmth of our lamp to keep himself alive. He sat on the sleeping bench all day, dressed in the scraps of canvas and wool that Taqulittuq had sewn into a jacket. He stared at the lamp, or hummed to himself, or played string games with Punny. Sometimes he would write in his diary and read back his own words aloud. He often lamented that he hadn’t brought any books from the ship apart from his journals and a maritime almanac; this was his greatest privation, to sit confined to the snow-house with nothing to look at but whatever it was that he saw in the flame of the lamp. It seemed to me likely that he would kill himself, so I didn’t tell him about Hall’s pistol, which was hidden in Taqulittuq’s bag along with some other things of Hall’s she had rescued from the ship.

  We were all in the house one day in February when Kruger arrived with three other Germans. They stood outside and shouted to us to come out. We looked at each other, afraid, because we didn’t want to have to crawl out of the low entrance in front of them, unable to raise our hands to defend ourselves. I’d left my own rifle and shotgun outside to preserve them from the condensation, so when Tyson went out first I took Hall’s pistol from Taqulittuq’s bag, hid it inside my parka and followed him outside.