by Robert Edric
Fitzjames looked at his own hand. When he was next alone, he experimented to determine for himself precisely how much of the use of his hand Goodsir had already lost.
Out on the ice, Fitzjames walked with two sticks, having chosen these from the dozen offered. The one in his left hand was a gift from Thomas Blanky; that in his right from Crozier, having been presented to him by the governor of Cape Town upon his arrival there with James Ross after their withdrawal from the Antarctic four years ago. It was made of horn, polished and light, and slightly curved with a handle carved of ebony.
Having climbed down from the Erebus, Fitzjames stood for a minute, breathing in the intoxicating air as deeply as he dared. He was conscious of the fact that Reid had not yet fully recovered from his own injuries, that his breathing was still painful, and that he was still forbidden to speak. During their enforced convalescence the two of them had frequently sat together, holding long, one-sided conversations composed of reminiscence and speculation. A flannel cloth and swabs of soft wool were packed into Reid’s mouth to soak up the blood from his injured gums. His hands were still bandaged, but other than the loss of four complete fingernails and the skin from one palm, he had suffered no other injury. In addition to soaking up the blood, the cloth in his mouth was also intended to encourage him to breathe through his nose, this being considered preferable by Stanley until the full extent of the damage to his lungs became clear, but which made his breathing sound labored and more of an effort than it actually was.
To begin with, Fitzjames, Gore and Vesconte avoided the upturned boats, the ice-houses and Franklin’s bleak mausoleum and walked instead among the piles of stores and coals, all neatly stacked and marked, and each with a well-trodden track running to the main path leading back to the ships.
“What’s that?” Fitzjames asked, pointing one of his sticks at a sheeted mound close to the Terror.
Neither Gore nor Vesconte could be certain and so they went to investigate.
The tarpaulin was frozen stiff, coming up from whatever lay beneath it like a disused trapdoor.
“Their engine,” Fitzjames said, as the pieces of dismantled machinery were revealed to them. Giant levers and stripped cogs shone silver and black in the bright sun. Elsewhere the dismantled driveshaft and casing lay coated in sculpted grease, solid and lava-like where it had bled and then cooled from the abandoned works.
Gore prised loose, a small piece of this, inspected it and then threw it with a grunt into the open space beyond them.
Sensing Fitzjames’ anger at seeing the engine so completely discarded, and knowing that there was little possibility of it ever being reassembled, Vesconte lowered the tarpaulin.
“Their orders were to take out as much of the useless weight as possible,” he said. “The smiths and stokers did most of the work. The boiler was sealed to go on producing hot water for them.” He hesitated before going on. “I believe he was right to do it. It was a dead weight and the Terror was suffering under the burden. There were men on board who were with Ross in the Victory when—”
“Then damn Ross for his example,” Fitzjames shouted, striking the ice with his stick and almost falling at the sudden exertion.
Neither Gore nor Vesconte spoke, both watching him closely.
Fitzjames composed himself. “No—praise Ross for his four winters to our two.” He lowered the scarf from his mouth, took several more deep breaths and then replaced it.
“Franklin was insistent that our own engine should remain,” Gore said to appease and reassure him. “Goodsir proposes that at the first sign of a break in the ice ahead of us, however distant or however late it comes, we should detonate a line of explosives along our path, fracture the ice more deeply and then use our screw to cannon back and forth until we are once again back out in open water.” He seemed genuinely excited at the prospect, as though the simplicity of the plan, and the confidence of the man who had proposed it, would in some way ensure its success. Vesconte shared his enthusiasm, but not Fitzjames.
They left the dismantled engine and, avoiding Tozer’s camp, made their way toward the new ice-range which had appeared during the expedition’s absence.
The previous day, just as dusk was settling, the watches on both ships had reported a disturbance in the direction of these new peaks, and out on the ice the spreading tremor of this disturbance had been powerful enough to topple carefully balanced stacks of crates and knock men off their feet. Alerted by the commotion, they had watched as a slab of ice almost a mile distant rose vertically out of the lower slopes of the new range and then stood there aglow in the last of the sun.
This uplifted slab was calculated to be forty feet thick and twice the height of their own mainmasts. They watched it in silence, waiting to see what it might do next—whether it would continue to rise as it was forced up by further movement beneath, or whether it would become unstable and collapse, sending a further fast-moving tremor rushing toward them.
Neither of these things happened; instead the monumental block began to sink, silently at first, and then with a grinding noise louder than any they had heard so far, and as it sank geysers of spray were forced up all around it and these too ignited in the last of the sun.
The dying moments of the sinking block were as spectacular as its beginnings: it appeared to slow for a moment, as though it had encountered some buried obstacle, after which it shook vigorously for a few seconds and then dropped with a sudden roar and rush of spume, slamming into the ice at its base. By that time the sun was almost gone, and as always when this final crescent of light sank beneath the horizon, complete darkness descended in minutes.
The three men walked toward where all this had taken place. They attracted the attention of a small group of men who followed them at a distance, several of them armed with rifles.
“Watch the ground,” Gore warned suddenly, stepping back from a piece of ice which had unexpectedly rocked beneath him.
“Recent fissures,” Fitzjames pointed out, noting the cracks and barely visible ridges, little more than inches high in most places, which now criss-crossed the ice-field all around them.
“Where was it?” Vesconte asked them both, searching for signs of the previous evening’s upheaval.
Gore believed it was to their left, indicating a higher ridge and a series of crevasses which extended from the plain into the lower slopes beyond.
Fitzjames confirmed this by pointing out a mound of ice whose edges were clean and sharp. Gore went ahead alone, moving from side to side on the sound ice and testing the uncertain ground before he committed himself to it. He stopped suddenly, crouched down and then called for them to join him.
The raised slab had been part of the surface layer, and where it had been tilted and raised there was now a depression in the ice so geometrical and sharply defined that it might have been cut out by men using saws. More interesting than this was what lay at the level base of this depression, for there, entombed in ice as clear as glass, were the corpses of at least three hundred narwhals, most fully submerged in their tomb, but some with their tusks and tails and backs breaking the surface, all of them giving the appearance of having died instantaneously as they were long ago coralled together and then trapped by the encircling ice.
The three men stood and looked down in silence. They had all seen small whales frozen in blocked leads before, but never in such great numbers or in such packed confusion, and they could only wonder at the frenzied panic of the creatures as they realized that every route of escape into open water had been cut off to them, and as they were forced to circle closer and closer, crammed side by side and one above the other as the water all around them began to solidify.
The bodies stretched from side to side and end to end of the great depression, suggesting that even more might lie buried beyond those they could already see.
“A fortune in ivory for the man stupid enough to sling over a ladder and take down a saw,” Gore said, his words interrupted by a creaking beneath them wh
ich caused them to back away from the edge. At the far end of the depression a slab of ice several feet thick came loose and fell in on the whales, shattering as it struck their frozen bodies and then skittering over them.
Gore and Vesconte helped Fitzjames away from the lip of the excavation, pointing out where cracks in the ice which had been closed on their outward journey were now several inches apart.
Turning back, they encountered the men who had earlier followed them, and who had stopped short at the first distant rumble of the ice.
Fitzjames recognized several of them as marines under Tozer’s command. He greeted them and they said they were pleased to see him so well recovered. One of them pulled a recently killed hare from his jacket and offered it to him.
“Fresh meat,” he said simply. The gift was not made grudgingly, but the man’s manner suggested to Fitzjames that he wished he could have given it without the others looking on.
Fitzjames took the hare and pressed its still-warm body to his face for a moment. He thanked the man and then warned them all against proceeding any farther in that direction. He made no mention of the whales for fear of encouraging the dangerous plunder of their horns.
“Are you with Tozer?” he asked, trying to appear more concerned with tying the hare to his belt than with their answer.
The marines exchanged glances before admitting that they were.
“We thought of paying him a visit and looking over your new quarters,” Fitzjames said, again attempting to make light of the matter, but noting the alarm on the men’s faces at the suggestion.
He felt Gore’s hand on his arm and turned to him.
“I don’t think you’re ready for this,” Gore said quietly.
Already exhausted by their morning’s walk, Fitzjames agreed with him, to the obvious relief of the watching marines.
“We are expected back aboard,” he told them, and the men turned and walked away from him without speaking.
Halfway back to the Erebus, just as they had once again entered the stained and trampled ice surrounding their stores, Fitzjames felt faint, dropped one of his sticks and then fell. Neither Gore nor Vesconte was fast enough to catch him, able only to pull him up and brush the moisture from his face.
NINETEEN
Sailing north in his search for tin and amber, the Greek navigator Pytheas imagined that a sea unicorn had pointed the way for him upon leaving the cold island of Thule, and that another had emerged from an impenetrable barrier of ice and fog and pointed in the direction he had come, warning him to turn back into those warmer waters with which he was already familiar. None of his masters or oarsmen had argued with these interpretations.
Twenty years later Pytheas suggested that the original home of these strange creatures might once have been the moon, and that they had possessed the wings which enabled them to make the journey from there to their new home in the icy northern sea. Speculating further on this, he was led to the conclusion that the surface of the moon was also composed of ice, which had once been liquid, but which had gradually hardened, forcing the unicorns to seek out their new home.
Goodsir recounted all this with obvious relish, his common-book open on the sheets beside him. Fitzjames took down his intermittent dictation for him.
“And write this, James. Write that on his second voyage into the Arctic, Frobisher himself came upon a narwhal frozen into the ice at the mouth of the strait afterward to bear his name, and that he too identified this strange creature as a unicorn, dug it from its tomb, sawed off its horn, and took it home with him as a gift for Elizabeth, who—” here Goodsir took the book from Fitzjames and searched back through its pages. “Who received it ‘graciously and full of awe, as though it were the most precious of jewels.’ Her own words, James. The most precious of jewels. Afterward to be kept guarded, admired and untouched in her wardrobe of robes until her death.” He handed the book back to Fitzjames so that he might finish taking his notes. “And forever afterward regarded as ‘a creature of mythical proportions, born in unfathomable depths or otherwise escaped from some strange bestiary’.”
As Goodsir spoke he frequently wiped the sweat from his brow. On occasion, he spoke quickly, hardly separating his words, and at other times he became distracted, behaving as though he were alone and unobserved, as though he had forgotten what he wanted to say and was having to make a great and silent effort to retrieve some elusive word or lost meaning.
All this Fitzjames attributed to his fever. He finished writing and waited.
“Of course, it is unlikely that Frobisher’s specimen was anything like as well preserved as any of your own fish,” Goodsir said suddenly, staring at his bandaged hand. “More likely that he came upon a beached and rotting corpse, from which he pulled out the horn with no more effort than he might pull a carrot from its bed of sand.”
He laughed at this and then drew up his sheets to wipe his face. There remained a mark on his bandaged hand where old blood and the darker stain of cauterization still showed through. When he lowered the sheets, he had stopped laughing, and was staring directly ahead of him, trembling slightly.
“You felt us rocking in our cradle earlier?” he said.
“Distant tremors. We may yet be released.”
“Ah, yes, release.” This time he spoke almost mockingly, making a flourish with his good hand.
“Whatever,” Fitzjames said, reluctant to continue.
“You used the word corpses,” Goodsir said, stopping him.
“They were all surely dead, even those deeper down.”
“No—‘corpse’—that is where they are supposed to take their name. Old Norse. ‘Nar’ and ‘Hvalr’. Corpse and whale. It was later believed that their flesh was poisonous, and that this was also how they had come to be named.” Goodsir was now speaking loudly and quickly, as though he were addressing a larger audience. “Scoresby refutes this, of course, and I trust his rigor. According to him, the cooked flesh is a powerful antiscorbutic, better than any of our ordinary meats, that it is greasy and pungent, but that it tastes of chestnuts. Imagine that—chestnuts—as though it were a wild pig rooting for mast all day in a submerged forest.”
“Have you eaten it yourself?” Fitzjames asked.
“Once.”
“And?”
“Scoresby was right.”
It occurred to Fitzjames that a party of men might be sent to excavate a number of the frozen bodies and add these to their stores, but in view of what Goodsir had just told him, and the sinister connection made, he did not suggest this.
Goodsir went on, his excitement growing. “Buffon believed that the whale would attack without warning, that it reveled in carnage and would eat human flesh wherever it could find it. There is a marsh on the coast of Iceland, Pytheas’ Thule, known as the Pool of Corpses. In the twelfth century, Anhald, the first bishop of that island, was shipwrecked there, and among the washed-up bodies of his sailors and the flotsam of his ship he discovered a large number of horns, upon each of which was carved runic symbols colored in red.”
“Signifying?” Fitzjames said, believing he had missed Goodsir’s point.
“Who knows? Signifying perhaps that each man had been given some warning of his own inescapable and terrifying end.”
“Ridiculous,” Fitzjames said, unhappy at the morbid turn their conversation had taken, at the divide they had crossed.
“Perhaps. But such associations take hold in men’s minds. And as both you and I are well aware, there is no mind more open to such prophetic suggestion than the mind of a sailor.” Goodsir laughed at this, and seeing that the laughter was genuine, and that he was being made fun of, Fitzjames laughed with him.
Goodsir retrieved his journal, read closely what Fitzjames had written and then slapped it shut.
Prior to embarking on his own expedition six weeks earlier, Graham Gore had arranged for John Irving to make a photographic record of his preparations and of the members of his party.
Gore himself set up the equip
ment, explaining to the reluctant Irving how to expose the sensitive plates and how long to keep them uncovered, afterward going to great lengths to arrange his men and their stores in a variety of compositions, running back and forth to examine them through the eyepiece before handing over to Irving. Of the nine plates exposed, only three were successfully developed.
The first showed a broad sweep of ice with broken ground and peaks in the distance, the foreground composed of various piles of stores and four unrecognizable men looking directly at the photographer. One of the dogs was also present, but only as a blur, the animal refusing to sit still for the necessary length of time.
The second plate was more successful, showing the entire party standing side by side with their arms folded across their chests. They had been arranged by Gore in order of height, declining from left to right, a slope reversed on the finished plate.
The final exposure showed only Gore and Des Voeux standing against the Erebus, their elongated shadows stretched across the ice and then curved against the hull. Both men held their right arms rigidly upright as though waving to the photographer, this being Gore’s first attempt to include any suggestion of action into the otherwise artificial immobility of the plates.
On his journey south, he took with him mates Des Voeux and Edward Couch, and five others, including James Rigden, captain’s cox, and a single marine private, Robert Hopcraft.
They left on Monday the 24th of May, Gore’s orders being to march until he reached King William Land and establish the true distance and the nature of the terrain between their present position and that part of the known coastline. Current estimates of this varied between twenty and a hundred miles.
They took with them a single sledge on which to haul their tents, and each man carried his own marching rations in his pack.
