by Robert Edric
“Nothing so sumptuous,” Crozier assured him, pacing the length of the table and examining it in greater detail, more for their host’s benefit than his own.
One of the governor’s men whispered in his ear, and he turned immediately to where a group of five Eskimo women stood in the doorway leading to the kitchen. Attracted by the messenger the others turned to look too.
“Certainly not,” shouted the governor, immediately apologizing for his raised voice.
The official shooed the women out of the doorway and held the door closed behind them.
“They came in hope of an introduction to the famous kabloonas.” The governor looked dispassionately at the door. “Curious as children, and just as quick to turn to mischief. I doubt—”
“It would have done no harm to have introduced them, sir,” Reid said unexpectedly. “They understand our course as well as any of us, and who is to say when we ourselves might not be grateful for the help or guidance of one of their relatives.”
“Their relatives, ice-master? They have no relatives; they live here, in a dwelling attached to this house. They work here and sleep here and are visited by no one. What can they possibly understand of the noble quest you are about to undertake?”
“I meant no insult by the suggestion, sir.”
The governor looked to Franklin, who could only look evenly back at both men.
The tension was released by Surgeon Stanley, who asked the governor about the family likeness in several of the portraits hanging around them. Having thus sacrificed himself, Stanley was then committed to following him from picture to picture as individual histories were repeated, each as dull and forgettable as the last. Stories of traders and civic dignitaries, and none of them so highly placed as the governor himself. The tour ended only when the meal was announced, and the governor led each of them to their designated seats, again flanking himself with Franklin and Crozier at the head of the table.
The feast began with clams, and the governor told the story of the American whaler which had arrived at Lively the previous summer with six tons of foot-wide quayhogs as ballast. These had been dumped in the shallow waters of Danish Bay and the benefits were still being reaped. The bay did not freeze below a foot of the surface all winter and the oversized shellfish were resilient enough to survive. The shells would not fit comfortably into an outstretched hand, and to save the diners the effort and messy business of opening these themselves, the clams had already been prised apart and their meat gouged loose. There were lemons and pepper sauce for those who wanted it.
Fresh bread and thick white butter followed, a small loaf delivered to each man in a steaming linen cloth by the women who had earlier been dismissed. The governor, unaware of the bakers on board both the Erebus and the Terror, explained that he had had the bread made specially so that the memory of it and all it suggested might remain with them during the months ahead. Franklin signaled to his officers not to disabuse him of the generosity of his gesture. Accordingly, each man found something complimentary to say about the loaves.
Three large joints of fresh roast pork were brought out, each accompanied by several bowls of vegetables and dishes of apple sauce. The glazed head of a small pig was then added to the table for decoration, its skin shiny and crisp, its ears pinned upright. Its uncooked eyes had been returned to their sockets, and a bunch of grapes positioned in its mouth. More wine was served, and with each new decanter, a fresh toast proposed.
Outside, a wind rose and rattled the windows and the governor called for them to be shuttered inside and out. More candles were brought into the room and logs thrown on to the already large fires.
“I hope,” said the governor to them all, having tapped his glass and waited for their attention. “I hope that the unseemly display on your first morning ashore did not in any way lower your opinions of our existence here.”
“Be assured—” Franklin said, and was then interrupted as the governor resumed speaking.
“I am their governor, but I must also be very careful. Our more usual visitors are a wild breed and they have little respect other than for their profits. To have prevented them from going ahead with their cruel display would have achieved little and almost certainly have resulted in a riot. As you can see, I have no militia to enforce my wishes, and the few of us here who struggle to impose even the rudiments of law and order are all a very long way from home.”
By then the man was intoxicated, as were several others, most noticeably Edward Little and James Fairholme.
“This, all this,” he went on, gesticulating around him. “What is it but a flag upon a forsaken island, a stake-post in the wilderness?” He picked up a piece of meat, the tender flesh separating in his hands, the milky juice running over his chin.
Fitzjames watched him and it was as though he were seeing the man for the first time, seeing beneath his pomp and his feathers and his speeches, and he felt a sudden great sympathy for him, caught here in a despised and treacherous wilderness, attended by his fawning and speechless lackeys and pierced a hundred times a day by the looks of the native men and women and whalers with whom he was forced to surround himself.
As though in some way suddenly aware of these pitying thoughts, the governor unexpectedly announced that he had a wife and five daughters, the eldest twenty-one, the youngest only five, back home in Copenhagen. “I have seen none of them for four years,” he added, shrugging at his inability to do anything about this and then draining his glass in a single swallow.
This reference to the years lost by separation silenced them all, and the next round of toasts was a private, unspoken one.
The meat was followed by a concoction of cherries and cream, and by rich pastries coated in chocolate. Fruit was brought out, and then several cheeses. Port was uncorked and placed on the table. “Could your wife and daughters not have accompanied you upon your appointment here?” Fitzjames asked.
“And have their hearts and minds frozen to ice? I think not. Unfortunately, one does not turn down such an appointment. Had I done so, my career would have been over very swiftly. My uncle was governor of Iceland for seven years. Christian Sundbeck, perhaps you know of him.”
Several around the table nodded to indicate that they had at least heard of the man.
“And your own stay here?” Fitzjames asked.
“Who knows? I think one more year, perhaps two. At any rate, I regret that I shall not be here to welcome you upon your return.”
“Our return?”
The man became immediately aware of his mistake. “Gentlemen, forgive me. I meant only—”
“No apology, please,” Franklin said. “If there exists no clear passage, then we may indeed be forced back upon your further hospitality.”
No one spoke. It was the first time defeat and withdrawal had been suggested. The unthinkable had been put into words, and they had all, however briefly, been made to face the possibility.
Coffee was served, and with it an almond liqueur considerably sweeter than the spirit with which they had been greeted on the shore. To accompany it, sugared almonds in tortoiseshell bowls were set alongside the bottles.
It was ten in the evening before Franklin and his officers were ready to depart, leaving the warmth of the house for the numbing night air outside.
The mute boatman was waiting for them, and they pulled away into the darkness until the few lights astern looked like scattered fires on the shore, one by one extinguished as some other low and invisible land blocked their view.
Four days before they were due to leave, news reached the Erebus of a whaler that had grounded several miles to the north of them, having reputedly just accomplished a six-day ice-free journey across the area of the Middle Pack. Upon hearing this, Reid was determined to visit the vessel and hear a first-hand account of the state of the water, but the news came late in the day and could not be acted upon immediately.
The waist boat was lowered at four the next morning. The sea remained calm, deadened by the co
ld of the melting ice to the north, and the dip and rise of their oars did little to disturb it.
Gore sat in the prow of the boat, a cape over his shoulders, and warned them of obstacles ahead. On several occasions they were forced to divert from their course to avoid mooring chains and ropes gone slack with the ebb.
“A pity her captain couldn’t bring her to an anchorage here,” Fitzjames said to Reid.
“If she’s holed he’ll have good enough reason to stay away from the scavengers of this place.”
“Do you know him?”
“If it’s the same man, I haven’t seen or spoken to him for almost ten years.”
“And will he be able to make his repairs where he is?”
Reid sniffed the air deeply, making it appear as though his answer somehow depended upon whatever this brought to him. “I should think so, Mr. Fitz.”
Fitzjames had not been in his bunk until after midnight, spending three hours the previous evening completing a long letter to his sister, and he was aware now that if he sat back and leaned his head upon his shoulder, then he might easily fall asleep. Gore, too, looked tired and disheveled, a thick scarf wound round his neck beneath the cape, and wearing tweed leggings to his calves. His hair was unbrushed and he yawned frequently.
“You should have brought along our camera, Mr. Gore,” Fitzjames said to him, avoiding the use of Christian names in front of the two marines who rowed them.
At the mention of the camera, Gore frowned.
Upon hearing of Franklin’s expedition, the photographer Robert Adamson had traveled to the Admiralty from Edinburgh and presented them with one of his cameras with which to make a record of their exploits. It was an opportunity not to be missed, he had insisted, convincing them of the merits of the device, of the irrefutable evidence and record it would take back to them. He had explained the operation of the camera to men who would not be using it, and had then, as requested, written all those instructions down. Unable to refuse, Graham Gore had been appointed the expedition photographer. He had inspected the machinery and read and reread Adamson’s notes regarding its use, but as yet he understood little of the true nature of its operation, and doubted its value. In Adamson’s absence it had been pointed out to him by various members of the Arctic Council that no one would be genuinely disappointed if the device could not be made to work under the conditions in which it was to be used. Gore believed he had been chosen for the task solely on the grounds that he had once built an accordion to his own design, and that the two instruments were not totally dissimilar in appearance. His passion now was for the flute, several of which he had brought with him on the expedition.
“The camera,” he said to Fitzjames, “is considerably more obscura than illuminata.” He was not genuinely angry that he and not someone else had been chosen as their photographer—although the title itself was too strange—but he was frustrated by his own inability to master the techniques involved. He prided himself upon his versatility and his willingness to explore all aspects of artistic and scientific development, but here was something which professed to be both, yet which might turn out to be neither.
“Tell me honestly, James, are our journals and dispatches not equal to the task? They are, after all, no more or less than an accurate and honest portrayal of all we might achieve. I feel my heart sink every time I look over Adamson’s illegible scrawl. Perhaps the man would have been better advised on how to write grammatically and legibly before being encouraged into the realms of the fantastic.”
Fitzjames laughed at this, as did Reid and the marines.
They cleared the crowded bay and arrived at a headland, beyond which lay the beached whaler.
Sighting it a mile ahead of them, Reid instructed the marines to pull closer to the shore, where the shoal current might be avoided and their work made easier.
“A little suspicious, don’t you think, Mr. Reid?” Gore said. She supposedly has an ice-free passage and is then run ashore holed.”
“If she is holed, Mr. Gore. And if it was ice that did the damage.”
“What else could have done it?”
“A wounded fish, perhaps.”
“I don’t believe it.”
This skepticism did not concern Reid, and he rose to study the outline of the distant vessel.
“She shows no lights,” he said, causing Fitzjames and Gore also to examine her through their telescopes. He then told the marines to ship their oars.
“What are we doing?” Gore asked him.
“Holding off until they see us approach.”
“For heaven’s sake, why?”
“So they don’t mistake us for wreckers or looters and take a shot at us in the poor light. She’s in the shade of the cliff, see.”
Gore looked back, but still did not understand Reid’s reluctance to approach the vessel once they were in a position to hail her and identify themselves.
“Best do as he advises,” Fitzjames said to Gore. “You are, after all, the closest and largest of our targets.”
They sat drifting in the shallows. Nothing of the buildings or the vessels to the south of them was any longer visible, and all five men were awed and silenced by the emptiness of the place into which they had come.
“He’s run her up on to a good bed of soft shingle,” Reid said eventually. “He knows that the tides are all falling behind a cut moon, but that there’ll be enough water along here in a week for him to refloat himself.”
“Won’t she keel over?” Fitzjames asked.
“I doubt it. He’s taken down her top arms, run her up at the turn of the tide and then got his men overboard shovelling the stone and sand to hold her up. See along her hull.” He pointed. “He’s lowered his boats and driven them in alongside her to act as props. If she’s carrying a full load she’ll settle upright fast enough.”
“And the mass of her hull will meanwhile be above water, enabling him to make his repairs,” Gore concluded. “Ingenious.”
“She’s the Potomac,” Reid told them. “And no doubt one of the first into the water if she thought the ice was clearing early.”
As he spoke, a light appeared on the shore alongside the ship. It was not a steady light, but the intermittent flicker of a fire being started. Smoke rising above the outline of the cliff into the gray sky above confirmed this.
“Can we approach her now?” Gore said.
Reid watched the glow for a further minute and then told the marines to resume rowing.
The whaler rested almost perfectly upright in a broad groove of piled shingle, her upended boats wedged against her hull. The fire on the shore had been lit inside a shallow pit, and was tended by a blacksmith; it was a coal fire and burned solidly and low, throwing up a cascade of sparks each time the man applied his bellows to it.
He was the first to see the approaching boat and called out for them to identify themselves. He also rang a bell, at the sound of which several others appeared carrying lanterns. These cast little light, but sent flashes across the beach and up into the rigging.
Reid rose in his seat and identified himself, and the clamor on deck subsided until only a single man stood amidships and leaned over the rail, his lantern held above his head.
“Taddeus Herrick,” Reid called up to him.
“Is that you, James Reid?” the man shouted back. He lowered his lantern until a ball of light floated across the shallows toward them.
“You had a brush with the ice. You surprise me. The price of oil must be rising fast to send an old hand like you too close to a breaking pack.”
Above them the man laughed. “Brush with the ice, you say! We were struck by a shooting star. In twenty fathoms. What would you say the chances were of that, James Reid?”
“Are you sure?” Reid called back, the grin of recognition falling from his face.
“A shooting star?” Gore said, but was prevented from inquiring further as their own keel touched bottom and he was jolted from his seat.
“Later,” Reid to
ld him.
They climbed ashore, leaving the marines to secure the boat, and went toward the Potomac. Taddeus Herrick climbed down a rope ladder to greet them.
“Are you badly damaged?” Reid asked him, their introductions complete.
“Port mid and aft. I tell you, James Reid, I’d not want to go through that again, not even for a forty barrel blue. We were caught a hundred miles northwest of here. A full field of them, every one ungiving as a boulder and fast as a rocket. I’ve seen them individually before now, and heard tell of full fields of the devils, but it’s the first time I’ve been forced to sit helplessly among them and wait for one to do its worse. I’d take my chance against cannon any day.”
Gore, who was still confused about the cause of the damage to the ship, asked for an explanation.
“Last year’s ice, Mr. Gore,” Herrick told him. “A berg reduced in size, which for some reason known only to the Almighty and itself sinks to the bottom and sticks there in a cold current in mud or sand. Sticks there a full year and then something happens to release it, a warmer current perhaps, but instead of coming loose and finding another resting place on the bottom, it suddenly pushes straight back up to the surface.”
“And these you call ‘shooting stars’?”
“We call them a lot worse than that when they come up close. I had two fish in tow which we had yet to render. I was forced to cut them loose so that I might sail clear unhindered.”
Fitzjames, who had heard of such phenomena, but had never himself witnessed them, asked how many times the Potomac had been struck.
“Once was enough. My mate said he could feel it coming, but what could we do? Come with me, I’ll show you.”
They followed Herrick to the groove excavated by the Potomac’s keel in the shingle. There were a dozen men already at work, and broken timbers lay all around them. A carpenter sawed off jagged edges and others clawed the damaged planking from its spars. Further along the beach stood a mound of barrels. This, Herrick explained, was their cargo.
“I shipped it ashore before we made our dash up the beach. A good landing, I think you’ll agree, Mr. Reid. I can recommend it in an emergency.”
