On the Proper Use of Stars

by Dominique Fortier

  “I do not believe that the Arctic ice is as concerned about common sense as we are, James. And what if this bay had been free of ice in the summer of 1846 for the first time in a thousand years? And if it took another thousand years before open water were found there?”

  “Is that your opinion? That things happen here once every thousand years rather than repeating themselves again and again for all eternity?”

  There was something comforting in the words for all eternity, a nearly religious, calming quality. Crozier sighed. Now that he had expressed aloud the fear that each of them nourished in secret, he knew that he could no longer ignore it and that he must act.

  “I believe the time has come to study the various choices available to us,” he said.

  “An excellent idea. I was unaware that we had choices,” retorted Fitzjames curtly. He busied himself for a few moments adjusting his sextant, which had no need of it, then spoke again, his tone less abrupt. “Very well, Francis, if you believe we are at that point, let us ask the question of the officers, you can hear the opinion of each and then do as you please – as you’ve always done.”

  Crozier smiled faintly and felt himself nearly falter. It seemed to him that a terrible burden had just fallen onto his shoulders which he now must carry until death.

  24 February 1848

  YESTERDAY I bROUGHT together the officers of both ships in the mess of the Terror and presented the situation they’ve been fearing for weeks, ever since bread has no longer been baked and even the sea biscuits crawling with maggots have become a rare luxury.

  The faces around me were grave. Hollow cheeks, bright eyes, trembling hands: the young officers seemed to be living in the bodies of old men.

  “We cannot remain here any longer,” I said simply. “As most of you already know, we do not have enough coal to hold out for another winter, or even another autumn, and we have rations left for a few months at most. We must leave the ships and set out on foot.”

  My words were met by silence. All eyes were on me, but I do not know if the majority saw me. Then DesVoeux asked in a peculiarly shrill voice: “Where are we supposed to go in the middle of this blasted continent of snow?”

  I reminded him that twenty years ago Parry and I had left abundant provisions in Prince Regent Inlet, where we had buried in caches nearly everything from the Fury, which was too badly damaged to go back to sea. From there it would no doubt be possible to head back up north to Lancaster Sound, where ships are relatively numerous. I felt an imperceptible easing among the men.

  DesVoeux snickered and asked if I had heard the rumours shortly before our departure claiming that those caches had been plundered, or were about to be, by some unscrupulous whalers. These tales had reached me, of course, as had others: that not far away there was an Esquimaux city of ice palaces shining in the sun; that in these waters were whales with the gift of speech; and that there were islands where the birds sang hymns in Latin. Stories by sailors with too much time on their hands, as I tried to explain to him, but already his restlessness had come back and was affecting the others, each of whom began to express his opinions aloud, determined to make himself heard amid a growing cacophony.

  I demanded silence. All obeyed, looking at me. Once again I yielded the floor to DesVoeux: “What if we made our way instead towards the west? The mouth of Great Fish River is no farther than the cache where the provisions are hidden, and unlike it, we know that we will find the river intact where it has always been.”

  Some nervous laughs greeted his last remark. But he was right. The route to the mouth of the river was no longer than the one that led to Prince Regent Inlet. The river, however, was still cruelly distant from our goal, as Fitzjames emphasized:

  “And you suggest that we drag the Terror or the Erebus and then sail the seven hundred miles to Fort Resolution or Fort Providence?”

  DesVoeux shrugged:

  “Of course not. We need only bring perhaps eight rowing boats that we shall use as well for transporting the provisions and the gear necessary for the expedition. Is that not the practice of those Esquimaux whose virtues and ingenuity you praise so enthusiastically?”

  “Indeed,” I broke in, “except that they do not drag wooden boats heavier than they are, and if you recall, it is not they who are harnessed but their dogs.”

  Little, who until then had been silent, asked why we would not try to enlist the services of those Esquimaux who, without a doubt, know better than we do the territory we shall have to cross, and whose dogs and sledges could be of great use to us. Moreover, he added, so long as we supply the necessary weapons, they could no doubt shoot down some game only they know about, so that the remaining provisions would last longer. I reminded him that it was the custom of the Esquimaux to move about in small groups and that it would be surprising if four or five of them, even fitted out with rifles, could feed a crew of more than one hundred men.

  Once again, DesVoeux shrugged and made no reply. Most of the men were looking down to avoid meeting my gaze. Coming back to the question of whether it was better to start walking towards the west or towards the east, Fitzjames conceded that the territory around the mouth of the Great Fish River was known to abound with game and provided a habitat for a great many horned animals and vast numbers of birds, while the coast near to Prince Regent Inlet was likely to be desolate and deserted, as I admitted myself, but this only made the difficult decision even harder. I remembered the children’s game in which one asks as seriously as possible whether someone would rather lose an arm or a leg, and it seems to me that today we were asking for a response to a similar question. But this time, once the reply is given, I shall not go off to hunt pigeons with other young rascals like me; rather, a blade will indeed fall, but I am not able to say on whom or on what.

  My life is no longer terribly important, but upon me a hundred other lives depend. I find myself missing Sir John in a cowardly way, not that I think he would be able to make a more enlightened decision, but because he would relieve me of a weight from which I cannot free myself.

  27 February 1848

  It is now almost as cold on the boats as on the icefield, the wooden flanks of the ships offering most imperfect protection from the wind that blows here over hundreds of miles without encountering any obstacles and forces its way into the most minuscule cracks, producing a lugubrious hissing that sounds like the breath of a dying creature. The boilers are now operated only two hours a day, and we muster the men below decks where the temperature goes up a few degrees; just as in England, stables and pigsties stay warm thanks to the animals packed into them. The men spend the entire day muffled in layers and layers of wool; one sees virtually no sign of their uniforms under the scarves, gloves, and headgear. At meal times in the officers’ mess this creates strange sights that might come straight from a dream, when the silhouettes covered in wool and leather, gesturing awkwardly, their gait hampered by the thickness of the garments, conscientiously carry silver trays holding a brownish, foul-smelling gruel that last year even Neptune would have rejected. One could think them the crew of some ghost ship.

  Peddie and MacDonald can do little for the chapped skin, chilblains, and other injuries caused by the cold for which there exist, alas, very few remedies. Everything is done to limit exposure to the elements, crew members are advised to rub their hands, their feet, even their faces regularly, but several are all too happy for the pain in their extremities to stop and would rather lose some toes than feel that pain return.

  Tonight I decided that I would order an additional ration of rum to be distributed after supper, then thought better of it and instead asked Peddie to bring out a few volumes of the monumental herbarium on which he has been working almost since our departure. The men avidly shared the notebooks and plunged into them with happy abandon as if they were setting off for a stroll through the fields. Touching cautiously with numb fingers the delicate outlines of the flowers fixed to the paper, it was almost as if they had miraculously discovered a
fragment of summer in the middle of this winter that has swept through everywhere.

  28 February 1848

  I left the Terror by myself this afternoon and set out westward, where the mythic Passage is supposed to be found which I fear we shall never cross alive. A few men were outside, drawing water from holes made in the ice. They hailed me and I did not reply. I walked for hours under the white sun, obeying the strange determination that had taken hold of me. The snow on the icefield formed breakers and swells similar to those on a choppy sea, the difference being that on earth they are of a mineral fixedness, like a daguerreotype of liquid waves, a copy deprived of movement that looks dead. There was no sound but the wind on the plain and the creaking of my boots on the hard snow.

  A few hours later, I caught sight of tracks left by the Esquimaux, who we had thought had disappeared into some other territory, for it has been more than two months since they stopped visiting us. They are staying nearby, then, but invisible. At that moment I imagined that these inhabitants of Polar lands and a French gentleman by the name of Bergerac, who writes novels, possess a knowledge unknown to us, that would allow us, should we master it, to escape by the air, thanks to the condensation of all the water around us that soaks us to the very core, or through the grace of some mechanical wonder. For one brief moment I fancied the Terror and the Erebus opening out their immense masts and starting to beat their wings so as to rise peacefully above the water like two great lazy birds. Looking up, I thought I noticed some indistinct spots in the cloudless sky, which always stayed in the periphery of my gaze and vanished as soon as I tried to look directly at them. There is nothing unusual about the phenomenon; it can be attributed, like so much else, to the snow blindness that strikes exhausted eyes with daylight reflected off the white of the ice.

  The sun dropped until it touched the Earth and the sky was briefly filled with the colours of the rainbow. The huge ball of fire tipped over the horizon in red and orange folds, while higher up, clouds fringed with gilt were coloured with purple, blue, green. I was strangely moved at this sight which I felt I was witnessing almost as a voyeur, perhaps because I was alone to contemplate it.

  The day star disappeared and I turned to go home. To tell the truth I do not know what I was going to look for during this long walk, and I could not say whether I thought I had found it or had resigned myself to not discovering it, but I came back filled with a feeling of peace that has perhaps more to do with fate. No doubt the man who has nothing left to lose and knows it is infinitely freer than one who fears that at any moment he will see his happiness, his wealth, his life get away from him.

  CURIOUSLY, SOPHIA, who had always adored balls – to the point of having herself driven one evening to the Gramecys’, who were holding a party for which the preparations had been in the headlines for weeks, though she was running a fever and had trouble even standing up – was not, when she thought about Mrs. Rimple’s annual do, filled with her usual happy sense of expectation.

  While these parties had always struck her as the last word where entertainment was concerned, she had caught herself the week before yawning right in the middle of the Carletons’ ballroom, where, champagne glass in hand, she was listening to a young captain who, while he had never laid eyes upon a battlefield, had nonetheless an impressive collection of war stories to tell, which had in common their way of highlighting the courage he would soon surely have the opportunity to put to the test against the enemy. Who that enemy was, Sophia was uncertain, and she had not felt a need to question the young man, who pursued his narrative imperturbably. His story was certainly not one of the most fascinating, and normally she would have paid no attention to it, simply let herself be lulled by the music and the murmur of conversations while she gazed at the spectacle of the gowns and the hairstyles, the dancing couples who came together and moved apart beneath the crystals and the gilding that lent their brilliance to these enchanted evenings. And yet she had yawned. It was true that for some months she had experienced problems sleeping but all the same this was phenomenal. Was it possible that she no longer experienced the same pleasure in the company of brilliant young men, elegantly attired, with exquisite manners? Was she ill?

  When Lady Jane and Sophia arrived at Mrs. Rimple’s most of the guests had been there for some time already. Wisps of hair escaped from the coiffures of young girls rosy-cheeked from excitement. Middle-aged ladies were fanning themselves energetically while the gentlemen, young and old alike, strolled among the crinolines, distributing rapt gazes here and there. From the top of the staircase that looked down on the ballroom, Sophia had in a flash a vision of a cackling barnyard. She swallowed a nervous laugh.

  Lady Jane was quickly caught up by acquaintances who wanted to know all they could about the Polar expedition, about Sir John’s discoveries, and the probable date of his return; as was her habit, she did her best to be the worthy spokeswoman for her heroic spouse. Sophia moved away, passed absent-mindedly through the crush, and emerged in a room of more modest size and not so crowded, where small groups were conversing. There, she found Amelia next to an attractive pianoforte, busy resisting the entreaties of a young man who, if one were to believe him, had come to Mrs. Rimple’s solely for the pleasure of hearing her voice. Taking Sophia as witness that it had been centuries since she had touched the instrument, she sat on the bench and let her fingers run across the ivory and ebony keyboard. There rose up an odd music that was at once fluid and disjointed, in which one could first distinguish each solo note in isolation, then perceive the group of which it was a part, where two voices seemed at once to respond to and to shy away from one another. Sophia came to a halt to listen more comfortably to this strange melody that she seemed to be hearing for the first time.

  While the first bars were being developed Sophia, fascinated, grasped instinctively that the two melodic lines forming the counterpoint were not answering one another but, similar and distinct, paid each other no attention, and that it was at the heart of this insurmountable, never-filled distance that the clear mystery of Bach’s music was to be found. The two melodies were unfurling, isolated, straight, and parallel, their destiny never to meet but for each to reveal the other through their differences, their discrepancies, and their furtive resonances.

  Das Wohltemperierte Klavier

  Praeludium 1

  She sensed the presence of Mathieu de Longchamp without turning around. He suggested a stroll in the garden and she agreed as though it were the most natural thing in the world. They walked onto the terrace, went down a few steps, and slowly turned onto a path covered with small pebbles that crunched under their feet.

  “No doubt you will be surprised,” said Mathieu, “to learn that I wrote to you on numerous occasions when you were in Tasmania and I never received a reply.”

  As she said nothing he went on in a tone that was meant to be ironic:

  “I came to believe that the ships carrying my letters had all been mysteriously wrecked before they reached their destination, or that there were in Hobart two ladies named Sophia Cracroft and that my missives were being delivered to the wrong one, who, reading them but not understanding a word, considered it quite unnecessary to reply …”

  She remained silent, waiting for what would come next. His smile was acerbic but it did not ruin his features; on the contrary it lent them a certain firmness that ordinarily was lacking: “Either you gave in to the charms of a particularly seductive prisoner and devoted yourself night and day to working out a plan for escape, which obviously left you no time to answer my letters … Or to the attractions of a valiant captain, for ’tis said that you received a good many visitors during your exile, important ones, at that …”

  She broke in, placing her hand on his arm: “I should have answered your letters, Mathieu, I’m sorry that I did not. But all is for the best, is that not true? In any case, here you are happily betrothed … Or are you now married?”

  “Not yet. My fiancée and I have decided to wait for the restorati
on of the manor to be finished and hold the ceremony there. But that changes nothing, of course: rest assured that my happiness knows no bounds.”

  “I do not doubt that.”

  “I hope so.”

  Now his smile was not so harsh, and he suggested to Sophia that she seat herself on a stone bench not far from a gurgling fountain, at the foot of a tremendous statue depicting a half-naked faun.

  “I noticed you at the party given by Lady Cornell in honour of her daughter’s betrothal …”

  “You mean of your betrothal …”

  “As you wish, of my betrothal, of our betrothal … Whatever the case, you were ravishing.”

  “Thank you for the compliment, which has been deferred for nearly two years. You are too kind.”

  “I should have liked to pay it in person but I feared I would be unable to hold back and I’d have asked you to run away with me …”

  She looked at him, dumbfounded, wondering if he was serious or had simply wanted to push their flirtation a little further. Deciding that it was best to ignore his last remark, she looked up into the sky scattered with stars, seeking without realizing it the S that Francis Crozier had drawn there for her some seven years earlier. She did not find the constellation created specially for her but she envisaged four bright stars crossed through perpendicularly by a line formed by three other bodies, a line at the end of which descended two smaller ones. At the centre of the motif a distant luminous cluster made up of dots as fine as dust formed a bright mass against the black of the sky. It looked precisely like a commode. Sophia burst out laughing, and almost at once she felt a pang of emotion.

  “What do you find so amusing, dear one? Allow me to share your delight,” demanded Mathieu, obviously offended.