by Robert Edric
Later, upon reporting to Fitzjames that he had dressed Braine’s wounds, Stanley informed him that the man was also showing symptoms similar to those of Hartnell and Torrington. Alarmed by this, Fitzjames reported the news to Franklin, for whom it came as yet another painful disappointment after the events of the previous few days, during which he had slept for only two or three hours each night, and who himself now looked unwell, exhausted and drawn.
Communicating this news, it was clear to Fitzjames that Franklin did not wish to discuss the matter any further, and so he returned to Stanley, who had by then been joined by Goodsir.
“I’ve spoken to him,” Goodsir said, meaning Braine. “Hartnell and Torrington were involved.”
Fitzjames already knew this, but only then did the full significance of the fact—two names among two dozen others—strike him. “Have you found some contaminated food common to them all?” he asked.
Neither Stanley nor Goodsir answered him and he was aware of some reluctance on the part of both men to speak.
“What is it?”
“Mr. Goodsir believes it may be connected with the canning process and not necessarily the food itself,” Stanley said, suggesting that he did not share his assistant’s belief.
“Whatever it is, we may be able to isolate it,” Goodsir said more optimistically. “Even if it were somehow connected with the cannisters themselves we might yet find a way—”
“But so many of our supplies are canned,” Fitzjames said.
“So were Ross,’ so were Parry’s. Ross opened cans of soup and meat ten years old and found them as nutritious and as untainted as the day they were canned,” Goodsir said.
Their ensuing conversation lasted an hour, ending only when Stanley rose and left them, promising to approach Franklin concerning the treatment and observation of Braine.
“How was the flogging?” Goodsir asked Fitzjames when they were alone, and after they had sat for several minutes in silent contemplation of all that had been suggested.
“I’ve seen too many to tell you it was barbaric.”
“But do you believe it was necessary?”
Fitzjames nodded once.
“And having headed the inquiry, you consider yourself responsible for what happened to the man?”
“I am responsible,” Fitzjames said.
Goodsir did not pursue the painful subject. Instead, he took down a flask and shook from it a marble of ice, studying it in his palm before handing it to Fitzjames.
“Another of your specimens?” Fitzjames said, taking it from him, still distracted, and less intrigued than usual by what his friend was about to reveal.
“No—one of Scoresby’s.”
At the mention of the name, Fitzjames examined the ball more closely: it was old and opaque, and seemed no more than a piece of moulded ice in which some impurities, grains of sand or silt, had been frozen.
From a label attached to the flask, Goodsir told him the exact date twenty-eight years earlier when Scoresby had collected the ice, and the precise location of the berg in Baffin Bay from which it had come.
As the ice melted, Fitzjames felt the impurities settle in his palm. Goodsir took his hand and blew away much of the water. Then leaning close he breathed upon the few dozen grains which lay exposed. He withdrew, and Fitzjames looked more closely at what he held. The specks which had been at the heart of the icy kernel appeared to agitate, and then to his amazement, and all within no more than five or ten seconds, each of the tiny black dots sprouted a set of minute legs and metamorphosed into a spider. In an instant the two dozen insects had scattered in all directions over his fingers and beneath the cuff of his sleeve.
Watching him, Goodsir burst into laughter. He caught one of the spiders, squashed it on his thumbnail and held it up for Fitzjames to see. He told him its forgettable Latin name, but nothing could distract Fitzjames from the sudden and almost casual resurrection in which he had participated, all thought of the flogging now gone from his mind.
“Twenty-eight years?” he said absently, catching another of the insects and then watching it drop from an invisible thread close to his-face, swinging from side to side on the draught of his breath.
“Perhaps a hundred and twenty-eight years,” Goodsir told him. “Who knows? Perhaps even a thousand and twenty-eight years.”
“Are you serious?”
“Perfectly, and it is my intention to retrieve further specimens.”
“Do you believe they can survive for so long without food or air?”
Still grinning, Goodsir nodded. “These otherwise intolerable conditions suit them perfectly. I melted another of Scoresby’s samples in Edinburgh, caught its occupants in a glass tube at room temperature and they never revived. They thrive only in the cold. Even now this latest clutch will be making its way outside.”
“To lay their eggs and wait another hundred years?”
“Very possibly. Endure, survive, thrive.” Goodsir returned the flask to the shelf from which he had taken it. “Did you know,” he said, causing Fitzjames, who had risen to leave, to pause for a moment, “that the recent excavators of Pompeii came across the petrified bodies of the city guards still standing to attention at each of the gates and in the doorways of all the public buildings? All around them was panic and mayhem, but these men, perfectly alert and aware of everything that was happening, of the red-hot ash pouring down upon them, remained standing to attention even as they were being buried alive and the flesh burned from their bones. Incredible.”
“And is that how you imagine we might all one day be discovered? Locked in the ice, our palms to our brows, peering into the distance of the Passage.”
“Cabot, Frobisher, Davis.”
“What of them?” Fitzjames said, stooping in the low doorway.
“They all sailed into the ice in vessels sheathed with lead so convinced were they of emerging into a warm tropical sea full of not so warm-hearted tropical boring worms.”
Fitzjames considered this for a moment, and was in some uncertain way gratified by the revelation and the common bond of faith it exposed, as fleeting but as undeniable as the miracle of the spiders which still ran up his arm.
Ever since his fall two months earlier, Edward Little had been unable to walk any distance on his injured leg, and recently the pain from this had grown worse. On board the Terror this was of little inconvenience to him, but ashore and on the ice it now caused him pain even to stand upon it.
On one occasion, walking with Irving and Hodgson on a fishing expedition to where a hole had been cut in the ice of the outer bay, he fell and lay clutching his leg in agony, having done his best until then to disguise the pain from the others. They helped him to his feet and then supported him as they made their way back to the Terror. Little asked them not to let anyone know what had happened, but Irving argued that Peddie ought to make another examination of the injured limb. Reluctantly, Little agreed, and the surgeon was sent for.
The original swelling had barely subsided, and Peddie expressed his surprise at this, realizing immediately the extent of Little’s prolonged suffering and deception. The earlier, darker bruising was reduced, but the skin all around this remained discolored and could not be dismissed as easily as Little would have liked.
Upon hearing of what had happened, Crozier came to see for himself, and Irving and Hodgson stepped outside to make room for him in Peddie’s surgery. Expecting him to repeat their own reassurances, they were surprised when he became critical of Little and accused him of endangering the men under his command by his inability to respond to any unexpected emergency. Little, too, was surprised by the harshness of this, but said nothing in his own defense.
“What is it, a break, a fracture, what?” Crozier asked Peddie.
Peddie, unhappy at his role of mediator, said that it was unlikely to be either. Even the smallest fracture and the leg would tolerate no weight whatsoever upon it. So far during his examination he had administered no pain-reliever, and Little’s face w
as bathed in sweat.
Peddie finally conceded that a bone may have been cracked and that it had not mended because it had not been immediately bound and rested. He cleaned the swelling with iodine and bandaged it. Until this was fully healed, Little would have to walk with a stick.
When Fitzjames heard of these developments he asked John Weekes, the Erebus’ carpenter, to make a stick, the head of which was to resemble the head of the monkey, which now spent most of its time in Little’s cabin, and which he cared for and fed.
Crozier complained to Franklin about Little’s deceit in not informing him of the injury sooner, and Franklin could do no more than repeat Peddie’s reassurances that the otherwise healthy young lieutenant would be fully recovered by the time they were ready to prise themselves free and sail into the disintegrating ice to the south. He invited him to remain on board the Erebus for dinner, but Crozier declined. He apologized for being poor company. He seemed to Franklin to be distracted, unable to focus on the matter at hand.
They parted out on the ice, where a flock of raucous ravens hopped over the frozen surface around them, some of the birds following Crozier on his way back to the Terror, as though believing he might at any moment pluck a handful of food from his pocket and throw it down for them.
ELEVEN
Their first storm of the new year arrived at the end of March, a month after the reappearance of the sun. On the day it came, the Devon watch, including Fitzjames and Vesconte, was descending in single file to the bay below when the wind overtook them from the north and a curtain of snow drove into them from behind, engulfing them completely and making it impossible to see more than a few paces ahead. Fitzjames called for them to gather together, knowing that they were in danger of losing their path back to the ships. There were no precipices, but the slope was steep, and anyone who fell and was afterward unable to call out for help might be quickly and irretrievably lost to them. They covered their faces and put on their goggles. A rope was tied to the waist of each man, leaving only an arm’s length between them.
They descended further and the slope became firmer and less steep. Dropping into a sheltered hollow, they met a party led by John Irving. The lights of the ships were pointed out to them, and Fitzjames was surprised to see how far away these were, and not directly ahead of them as he had supposed. They had turned from their path in the storm and were walking downhill on a slope parallel to the shore. They had been spotted by men on the ice below and this rescue party had been sent to guide them down.
Within a quarter of an hour they were back on the frozen sea and crossing it to the ships.
All around them, men carrying and hauling provisions ran across the ice shouting to each other. Their smaller boats were hoisted back on board, and the larger ones secured more firmly where they sat in the open.
Only two days earlier, the lookouts over Wellington had for the first time reported movement in the winter ice, raising hopes for an early release. Unnavigable leads had opened in the pack and then closed again, and slabs of ice had risen almost vertically from the water and been neatly stacked ashore like so many paving slabs waiting to be laid.
Upon receiving these reports, Fitzjames and Vesconte had returned to the observation post with the new watch and witnessed for themselves these first, premature signs of the new season.
It seemed improbable to them that such a depth of ice—calculated by Vesconte to be between forty and fifty feet thick in places—could be so suddenly or so easily released, split and cast aside as though it were only inches deep. In some places the open water ran directly upon the shore. Geysers of foam rose where the blocks of ice collided, and the air, calm before the approaching storm, was filled with the hollow booming of countless unseen fractures and collisions.
Now Fitzjames and Vesconte met Franklin and Gore on the ice, inspecting the iron staves to which the Erebus’ mooring ropes were attached. Gore believed that somewhere in the shallow bay, water was already moving beneath the ice, threatening to fracture it and add to the confusion and danger. Only inches apart, the four men were forced to shout to one another to make themselves heard as the snow now drove around them as fiercely as it had blasted the exposed hillside.
Franklin gave the order to his mates and quartermasters to call a halt to the gathering of stores and for everyone to return aboard. He left his officers to supervise the tightening of the guy ropes over their tented roof, calling for a stowing detail to clear the decks of all their detritus of the previous few weeks.
Fitzjames, Vesconte and Gore assisted in the collecting of the last of their provisions from the Beechey shore. Several of the redundant storehouses had already been dismantled, and the casks and cases now scattered on the beach were in danger of being buried and lost.
A crate containing the last of their live geese was dropped on the ice, breaking and releasing its captives. Two were recaptured immediately, but the rest were plucked away by the strong wind and lost.
Marker lanterns were torn from their posts, spilled their fuel and erupted in brief gaseous flames before being extinguished. There was some panic as men ashore were cut off from their companions and their calls for help were lost on the wind. Many abandoned their loads and raced unencumbered back to the safety of the ships.
Fitzjames and Gore encountered Reid and Blanky returning from their own watch over Barrow Strait. The ice here had not yet started to break, but that moving out of the west and the north was already piling up along the precipitous southern shore.
Gore expressed his concern about the movement of water beneath the ice in the bay and the two ice-masters went with him on to the sea and knelt to listen to it. Reid retrieved a crowbar from an abandoned sledge and struck the surface in several places, and both he and Blanky listened intently to the notes this produced.
Around them the running and shouting men quickly decreased in number. Chains were formed to take aboard the provisions which had so far been collected. By now conversation had become impossible, and the wind could be felt through even the thickest clothing. Vesconte tried to ask Reid what he had discovered about the ice, but Reid signaled with a hand over his mouth that he could not speak. Ice had already collected on the faces of all five men.
They were among the last back aboard, climbing with what little they had managed to retrieve. They brushed the snow from each other’s backs and shoulders.
The canvas roof had so far held fast, and beneath it they no longer had to shout so loudly. The tenting was pulled taut, occasionally released to hang slack for a few seconds, and then sucked suddenly back out again with an alarming crack.
Further preparations continued into the night. Their bunkers were filled and their condensers and filters cleaned in readiness for their prolonged confinement.
Outside, after a month during which the noon temperature had rarely fallen below minus 30, figures of minus 50 were recorded on both ships. The mercury froze in their thermometers.
For six days there was no communication between the Erebus and the Terror. On the seventh, even though the storm still blew, a party of four men, comprising Fitzjames, Reid, Sergeant Bryant and Corporal Paterson, made the hazardous journey over the buried ice to the Terror.
The new surface accumulations lay ten feet deep in places, blown and collected in disorientating drifts over the ice beneath. One of the last tasks accomplished before the two ships had been shut down was the connection of a single hawser between them. This was still attached to the rail of the Erebus, and Fitzjames sought for it as he waded through the snow, eventually locating it and lifting it free.
It took them an hour to complete the short journey, and upon reaching the Terror they communicated their arrival by banging on the hull until ladders were lowered for them.
Once aboard, Fitzjames reported to Crozier, delivering a message from Franklin and explaining how they were coping aboard the Erebus. Crozier compiled a list of damage and injuries for him to take back to the ship.
They were joined by Peddie an
d Macdonald. The surgeon expressed his concern over four men who had been taken ill with influenza, and showed no sign of improvement since their confinement. He asked about William Braine, and Fitzjames told him that both Stanley and Goodsir now agreed that the marine would shortly die of the same ailment which had taken Torrington and Hartnell.
Crozier asked Fitzjames to convey his compliments to Franklin, and his hopes that the imprisoning storm would blow itself out in time for himself and his officers to make the journey to the Erebus in a week’s time to celebrate Sir John’s sixtieth birthday.
Fitzjames and his party left and made their return journey along the hawser. From a distance both ships were reduced to hummocks of snow, distinguishable only in outline, and by their masts. Neither showed any lights in the strong wind, and it would not, Fitzjames believed, have been difficult to convince himself that they were already empty hulks which had drifted abandoned and unnoticed into this desolate backwater so far from the eyes and concerns of the world.
When the weather finally cleared, William Braine’s body was carried ashore and buried alongside Hartnell and Torrington. The marine had died three days earlier, his corpse dressed and wrapped and taken to the Erebus’ forward hold, where it froze within an hour of being laid out. He had been thirty-three and was the first of the expedition’s fatalities to leave behind him a widow and orphans. His belongings were auctioned, and the proceeds from the sales collected by Osmer to return to his dependents along with his back pay. A copper plaque was nailed to his coffin lid, upon which the details of his company were engraved. Chiseled upon his wooden headboard was a quote chosen by Franklin from Joshua 26.
