The Broken Lands

by Robert Edric

  From where they now stood at the center of an unbroken basin, nothing of the lead could be seen, and in every direction they were dazzled by the sun on the ice. Those who had brought their veils and goggles put them on; those without shielded their eyes and walked back to the ships with their faces down.

  On their return journey, Hodgson made notes on the condition of the ice through which they might yet have to forge a path, remarking with dismay upon its thickness and solidity, and upon the fact that much of it was old ice which had neither moved nor ruptured for some years past.

  Crozier was critical of their failure to locate the distant lead. He took his two lieutenants on the deck of the Erebus and pointed it out to them, his anger barely suppressed in the presence of the others working all around them. He pointed to where the root of dark water still appeared to snake toward them, and to both Hodgson and Irving it seemed impossible that they could have traveled so far and not come upon it; it looked now to be little more than a mile distant from them, the intervening space lost in the confusion of the glare.

  “An illusion, I’m afraid,” Irving ventured, immediately regretting having spoken, realizing how provocative this excuse might be to someone whose hopes had been so high.

  “An illusion? You dare to speak of illusions to men for whom—” Crozier fell silent. “Rest assured that I intend making a full report of your failure for the log. Of your failure, and your lack of commitment and concern.”

  Neither Hodgson nor Irving responded to this, aware of all the men around them who had paused in their work to watch.

  Fitzjames arrived, knowing only that the party of men had returned.

  “Good news?” he called to them, aware only as he spoke of all the silent men around him.

  Crozier stood with his back to him. “The matter has been dealt with, Mr. Fitzjames. What passes between myself and the Terror’s officers is no longer a matter for public consumption, and I’ll thank you not to interrupt.”

  Surprised by the vehemence in his voice, Fitzjames said, “Surely an explanation is not too much to ask for.”

  “Explanation, Mr. Fitzjames?” Crozier shouted at him, surprising him even further. “I think not. Look for yourself. You see what I see. You see, in all probability, our salvation. You see an avenue leading us toward an open sea and the completion of our task.” Crozier strode away from the four men, speaking as he went. “You see it, I see it, everyone upon this deck sees it, and yet neither Mr. Hodgson nor Mr. Irving are able, having been out upon the ice, to confirm that what we can all see is actually out there.” He stopped abruptly, as though only then aware of the violence of his outburst. He pushed through the men ahead of him and left the Erebus by her rail ladder. A murmur rose from the nervous silence.

  Down on the ice, Crozier shouted orders at the men collecting supplies, calling for a group who sat around a fire to extinguish it and get back to work. Midway between the two ships he turned and called for Hodgson and Irving to report to him immediately, and seeing that they did not instantly respond to his command, he shouted again, making himself hoarse in the process.

  “Go,” Fitzjames said to them. “It serves no purpose to aggravate him any further.”

  The men on the ice put out their fire and climbed back aboard the Erebus, where the angry confrontation remained the topic of discussion throughout the day.

  All this happened four days before Franklin’s funeral, and only six hours before the onset of the storm, which came swiftly and caught them unprepared. The men living out on the ice secured their doorways and awnings and sat out the freezing winds as best they could. The upturned boats were buried completely and then abandoned after the first few hours of the storm. The ice-house was hidden by steep drifts which collected against two of its sides, and by loose ice which mounded on its roof.

  Those who suffered worst during the two days of the storm were those aboard the Terror close to her damaged bow, where the ice blew inside and built up around them, barely thawing in the warmth of their heaters and ovens. The tented roof of the Terror’s deck collapsed and was blown away, scattering the supplies and coals stacked beneath it. The men working there when this happened were unable to retrieve either the canvas or the stores and were quickly forced below. Noon temperatures of 30 degrees over the previous week fell to 10 below freezing in the storm, the ferocity of which surprised them all.

  It had long since occurred to Crozier and others that Franklin could not be committed to the ice in the same way as their other fatalities, and that a more ceremonious and dignified service was called for. Franklin deserved to be entombed rather than buried, and his grave needed to be carefully and solidly constructed. It also needed to be prominently marked in case the possibility later arose of retrieving his body and returning it home for the more civilized and acclaimed reburial it merited.

  To this end Crozier ordered that a hole be excavated in the old and stable ice off their starboard bow, and that this should be at least nine feet deep, by nine long, by five wide. At first these dimensions surprised those who were charged with the task, but he would consider no reduction.

  It took nine men three days using picks and axes to excavate a hole to these specifications, and only when Crozier was satisfied that this had been done did he explain to his officers that he intended constructing a tomb, using the sand and Portland cement the ships carried as ballast.

  The base of the vault would be laid down to a depth of four feet, thus providing a solid slab upon which the coffin might rest. The walls would be built up from this foundation, and Franklin’s coffin slotted between them. A concrete lid would await the lowering of the coffin and be slid into place above it. The whole tomb would then be sealed with fresh concrete, in which a marker might later be fixed. In this way the coffin would be sealed but not cemented into its base and walls, easily capable, once the grave had been located, of being lifted free. The empty tomb might afterward remain as a monument to Franklin and the expedition as a whole.

  On the day of the funeral, Crozier read the service and then each of the senior officers said a few words of their own. This took place close by the ships, and when a prayer had been said ropes were attached to the trestles of the makeshift bier upon which the coffin had been laid, and forty men pulled Franklin the level, frozen mile to his grave. It was Crozier’s intention that every one of them should play some physical part in the ceremony, and only those who were injured or still recovering from scurvy were excused their turn at the ropes. The giant sledge moved easily over the new powdering of ice.

  Tozer led his men from their camp and they too took their turn at hauling.

  The gravesite was reached and further prayers said. Throughout the proceedings a mixed flock of gulls and ravens hovered above, attracted by the prolonged disturbance below, and it was not until a salute was fired over the grave that the birds were finally dispersed, rising higher and then separating as clearly as grain from chaff, black in one direction, white in another.

  The lid of the tomb was manhandled into position, and following Crozier’s speech of thanks to everyone involved, the officers and men drifted slowly away. The concrete to seal the grave was mixed on the ice, and Fitzjames remained behind to supervise this, and then to attach the beaten copper plaque upon which Franklin’s name and honors had been engraved. No epitaph was added. Jane Franklin might add this later upon her husband’s possible reburial in London; or she might choose one and despatch it with some later expedition, having decided that her husband’s present resting-place was the most fitting.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Reid and Blanky walked the frozen sea for as far as Reid’s strength would allow. His feet were still bandaged, but the earlier padded dressing had been replaced by a much lighter one and he was able to pull on a pair of thin overboots. The bandages on his hands and his mouth pads had also been removed, and his healing wounds benefited from exposure to the clean air.

  The two men carried staves to sound the ice, which they did at regula
r intervals, or whenever some feature along their course caught their eye.

  They walked toward the southwest, all attention now being focused on this quarter, searching the ice for any indication of its breakup, and probing it for faults and any other weaknesses by which they might soon release themselves from its grip.

  It was obvious to them both that the ice beneath them was neither thinning nor weakening in the usual manner. It was already the 2nd of August, and if dispersal was not already under way, then there ought at least to have been some indication that this was imminent.

  “She’s here and there, up and down,” Blanky said, frustrated by the ever-changing pattern of the contorted ice beneath them, by its age and its clouded impenetrability.

  “New has come in on top of old and then held,” Reid said, unscrewing the augured tip of his stave and studying the ice caught in its thread. “Nothing we didn’t already know before we set out.” He banged the iron rod to clear it.

  Blanky inquired after his feet, and Reid lifted one and massaged it through the soft leather. As usual, he did not answer the inquiry and Blanky did not persist.

  The chief problem in assessing the nature of the ice through which they might eventually have to cut a passage was that it was uniform in neither depth, density nor configuration. Layer upon layer of fractured and faulted accumulations had been folded one upon the other and then flattened over many years, creating a stratification which had more in common with rock than with ice. In places they could detect the movement of deep water where a slipped plane had allowed the buried sea to rise into an empty space, but elsewhere it would not have been difficult for them to believe that they were walking on ice which extended right down to the sea bed, and that it was keel-ground and anchored there for all time to come. It was this, the fact that a great deal of the ice all around them appeared to have neither thawed nor moved during recent years, perhaps not since the time of Parry, which caused the two men the greatest concern.

  “Nine summers out of ten we wouldn’t have come halfway from Barrow Strait to here,” Blanky remarked. “She’s seen us coming, opened a door for us and then slammed it tight shut behind us.”

  Reid nodded slowly in agreement.

  The following day they intended making a similar search to the north in the hope of discovering how far they might have to retreat to come into open water in that direction if the necessity arose. Neither man was hopeful of this.

  “And she’s not only slammed the door on us, but she’s piling up the furniture on the other side,” Blanky said.

  They rested on a low mound and lit their pipes.

  “He’s growing impatient,” Blanky said after several minutes of silence, distracting Reid from his thoughts.

  “Crozier?”

  Blanky drew up a ball of phlegm and spat it heavily to the ground.

  “What does he suggest we do? Stamp our feet like Rumpelstiltskin and wait for the ice to open up beneath us?”

  “I might suggest it to him.”

  Reid examined the horizon to the southwest and then scored an arrow on the ice at his feet pointing in the direction they hoped to continue. “Safe harbors,” he said disparagingly. “We try too hard with these heavy boats to drive them into secure winter berths instead of letting them ride up and drift on the surface of the ice where it remains at its most vigorous. We need ships of shallow beam and less displacement to sit clear and to take full advantage of every new nip and lead.”

  “It’s a risky business with so many men,” Blanky said.

  “We push too hard,” Reid went on. “Weight and strength, weight and strength.” He rose suddenly and continued walking in the direction of the arrow he had drawn. Blanky followed him.

  They stopped again an hour later. They were several hundred yards apart, and at the call to halt, Blanky saw Reid drop to his knees and then fall forward. Fearing that he had finally exhausted himself, he ran to him. At his approach, however, he saw Reid rise back to his knees and then stand upright. Reid apologized for having alarmed him and then pointed out to him what he had found.

  Twelve or fifteen feet directly beneath them was a submerged stream of dark water, barely visible through the intervening ice. This was little more than a yard wide where they looked down at it, but following Reid’s arm, Blanky saw that this narrow channel quickly widened, and that within only a short distance of them it broadened to five or six times this width.

  Blanky ran along the line of this buried flow, dropping to the ground himself and then calling out upon reaching a point where he believed he could see some indication of its movement, of its scouring along the underside of the surface ice.

  Reid estimated their distance as a mile and a half from the ships.

  “What do you think?” Blanky asked.

  “If she’s moving, then she’s at least moving in the right direction.” Reid positioned himself at the center of the dark channel and pointed along its upstream course. In the distance, the Erebus and Terror rested on his palm.

  Any other two men might have cheered this unexpected and heartening discovery, but Reid and Blanky were content to reassure themselves that they were not exaggerating the significance of their find. They followed the line of the ice-capped fissure, one man upon each “bank,” until they were certain that it did not suddenly end against a dam of tilted ice, or that it did not drain deeper into the solid unfathomable mass beneath and become lost and useless to them.

  At one point the underside of the ice-roof was raised above the water by a height of three feet, this empty vault having been gouged clear when the flow of water beneath was more vigorous.

  The ice separating them from the moving water was still as hard as rock, but satisfied by the dark band stretching ahead of them that the channel might later prove to be navigable, they returned to the ships.

  They parted, and having warned Blanky against appearing too optimistic in front of Crozier, Reid went in search of Fitzjames.

  He found him with Des Voeux and the Erebus’ quartermasters.

  “Can we blast and haul our way toward it?” Fitzjames asked, having listened to all Reid had to say, and disappointed that the probing edge of the submerged fissure was still such a great distance from them.

  To Crozier, however, who was now undecided between forging their release and abandoning at least one of the ships and continuing overland, the discovery of the lead came as little short of a godsend, and he was unable to conceal his enthusiasm at the prospect of making headway toward it.

  Later he sought out Fitzjames and informed him that in view of the short amount of time still remaining to them, he would take over the command of the Erebus and she alone would attempt to push her way through into open water. He admitted that the Terror was not up to the task, but added quickly that the repair work on her hull would continue until she was capable of following in the Erebus’ wake. No one who heard him was convinced that this would now happen.

  Fitzjames woke Gore and Goodsir early and they went to join Crozier’s party at the Terror’s bow. With the exception of the recent storm, nighttime temperatures had not dropped below 10 degrees for two months, but the dawn air still felt sharp as they took advantage of the early light to inspect the Terror.

  Crozier was waiting for them, along with Hodgson and Irving and an assortment of petty officers and seamen, most of whom were already engaged on the repair work.

  A sail had been fixed over the ruptured hull, and this was drawn back to reveal the full extent of the damage. Twenty feet of broken planking had been cut away, at least half of this below the Terror’s waterline. Her bow rose proud of the ice and the damage was exposed in its entirety. Two of her forward spars had been loosened, and it was these structural supports which caused the carpenters and blacksmiths the most concern. Any repair to the bolted timbers could only be temporary and imperfect, and they would remain a dangerous weakness, with the likelihood of giving completely the next time any real pressure was placed on them.

  T
he carpenters explained all this to Crozier and Fitzjames, and pointed out where they had so far repaired the internal damage, including the replacement of the forecastle wall. A wedge of ice still protruded into the forward hold and could not be removed without causing the Terror to tilt and fall lower in her frozen cradle, which now served as scaffolding while the outside work progressed. This intrusive ice had been of some assistance while the internal repairs had been carried out, but later it had become a hindrance, forcing the carpenters to work around it, ever conscious of the fact that it might suddenly slip back beneath the surface as quickly and as destructively as it had first appeared.

  Crozier became impatient with all these explanations, making it even more evident that his real interest now lay elsewhere, and he drew Goodsir to one side to discuss the use of explosives to speed up the approach of the advancing fissure.

  Fitzjames, Gore and Irving remained with the blacksmiths, warming themselves on their braziers, the ground around them studded with fallen coals.

  Samuel Honey, the Terror’s smith, stood with them, explaining in greater detail some of the more intricate repairs they were attempting. They were joined by Thomas Watson from the Erebus.

  “We can seal her,” Honey pointed out, drawing imaginary planking over the hole. “But we can’t make her strong.”

  “Can you strengthen her sufficiently so that she might sit on the ice if she were to be left here to await rescue?” Fitzjames asked him.

  “You mean abandoned?” Watson said anxiously.

  “Could she be supported from outside so that she might at least be free of the ice?” Fitzjames said, his words still directed at Honey, who himself became suddenly concerned at the prospect of abandonment. “Answer me.”