Voyage of the Narwhal

by Andrea Barrett

  Zeke bounded from the porch to the grass below. “Of course!” he said, pacing before the columns. “It’s a huge imposition— I wouldn’t think of asking you if your work weren’t so invaluable . . . but that’s why you’re the right person. I didn’t want to bother you until I was sure I had backing for the expedition. Think of what we’ll see!”

  Somewhere in those icy waters, Franklin and his men might still be trapped in the Erebus and the Terror. Even if they couldn’t be found, many new species, even new lands, were there to be discovered. Erasmus thought of being free, this time, to investigate everything without the noxious Navy discipline. He thought of northern sights to parallel, even exceed, his brief experience in the Antarctic; of discoveries in natural history that might prove extraordinarily important. Then he thought of his sister, who appeared on the porch with her white dress foaming like a spray of catalpa blossom.

  “You should go in,” she said to Zeke. “All the guests are longing to talk with you.”

  He leapt up the steps and she steered him inside. With a swirl of skirts she turned to Erasmus.

  “Will you go?” she said.

  Eavesdropping, he thought. Again. She’d done this since she was a little girl, as if this were the only way she could keep track of her brothers.

  “Please? You have to go with him.”

  He had his own reasons, Erasmus thought. For going, or staying. “Did he keep this secret from you?”

  “He had to, he said he needed . . .”

  “Doesn’t that worry you?”

  “As if you ever tell me anything,” she said. “And who are you to criticize him? Especially since Father died: all you do is mope around, sorting your seeds—do you think I haven’t seen you at eleven in the morning still in bed? So Linnaeus and Humboldt can run the business without you. So you haven’t found anyone to fall in love with since Sarah Louise.”

  Sarah Louise, he thought. Still the simple sound of her name made him feel like he’d swallowed a stone. A dull ache, which never quite left him. As Lavinia knew.

  “Copernicus isn’t married either,” she continued, “but you don’t see Copernicus moping around, you don’t see Copernicus wasting his life . . . I need you.”

  A snarl of guilt and tenderness caught at him. As children, he and his brothers used to bolt for the woods and return hours later, to find Lavinia waiting by a window with an unread book in her lap. He’d been the one she looked up to, the one who tied her shoes and taught her to read. Sometimes, when the other boys weren’t around and he’d remembered not just that her birth had cost him his mother, but that she’d never had a mother, they’d drawn very close. Then his brothers would tumble in and he’d abandon her again. Back and forth, oldest and youngest. He had failed her often enough.

  She drew him inside, to a corner behind a case of stuffed finches. “This is who I love,” she said fiercely. “Do you understand? Do you remember what that feels like? What if something happens to him? You have to take care of him for me.”

  “Lavinia,” he said. Her hands, squeezing his left arm, were very hot. Once, after Zeke had been describing the shipwreck that made him a local hero, Erasmus had found her weeping in the garden. Not with delayed fear over what might have happened to Zeke, not with hysteria—but with longing, she’d managed to make him understand. A boundless desire for Zeke. When he’d tried to remind her that Zeke had flaws as well as virtues, she’d said, “I know, I know. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is the way I feel when he touches my hand, or when we dance and I smell the skin on his neck.” The strength of her feelings had embarrassed him.

  “You know this means waiting even longer,” he said. “Has he mentioned a date?” His fault, he thought again. Why hadn’t he asked Zeke himself?

  “Not exactly. But when he gets home, I know he’ll want to settle down.”

  Of course he wanted her to marry Zeke, not just to ease his own responsibilities but because he wanted her happy. Didn’t he? She’d cared first for their father and then him. “You’re sure . . .” he said. “You feel sure of his feelings for you?”

  “He loves me,” she said passionately. “In his own way—I know he does.”

  A blinding headache had seized him then, blurring the rest of the party. And through a process he still didn’t understand, he’d been led to this table and Alexandra’s pointed questions; to the fact that, in two days, he’d be sailing north in the company of a young man he’d known for ages yet couldn’t imagine accepting orders from.

  One of the maids came in with the tea tray: Agnes? Ellen? The servants were Lavinia’s province; as long as meals appeared on time Erasmus didn’t notice who did the work. He thought they didn’t know this, although Lavinia sometimes reproached him. And although once he’d overheard the staff in the kitchen referring to “the seedy-man” and then laughing furiously. Now he avoided the eyes of the girl with the tray and drew a breath, waiting to hear what Zeke would say about the open polar sea.

  “You read a lot,” Zeke said to Alexandra. If he was startled that she’d remembered his comment at the party, it didn’t show. “I’ve noticed that. So you must have learned about the stretches of open water persisting all winter and recurring in the same places every year. What the Russians call polynyas. Inglefield found open water in Smith Sound. Birds have been seen migrating northward from Canada. A warm current flows northward beneath the surface, several people have observed it—suppose it leads to a temperate ocean, free from ice, surrounding the North Pole beyond a frozen barrier?”

  “Suppose,” Alexandra said. Her right hand sketched an arc in the air, as if she were still holding her paintbrush.

  “When Dr. Kane left,” Zeke continued, “he said he was going to look for signs of this phenomenon if he could. So there’s nothing so strange in my wanting to look as well.”

  Many times in the months since the party Erasmus had sat in the offices of wealthy men, while Zeke proposed their search for Franklin. A portrait of Franklin in full-dress uniform hung in the Narwhal’s cabin—Franklin, Franklin, Zeke had said, as he asked the men for money. It made sense that he concentrated on this aspect of the voyage—how proud the merchants were, contributing to such a good cause! In Zeke, Erasmus thought, they saw a young man who could succeed at anything. The man they’d dreamed of being, the man they hoped their sons might be. Other expeditions might have failed, but Zeke’s would not.

  “It’s a theory,” Zeke told Alexandra now. “An interesting theory. In the arctic one can never predict where the ice will allow one to go, nor one’s speed, nor even always one’s direction. My plan is to follow this route and search for Franklin. But were conditions to be unexpectedly good—were one of the northern channels to be open, say—it’s possible we’d do some exploring.”

  “Possible,” Alexandra said. “Hence you provision for eighteen months?”

  “For safety’s sake,” Zeke said. He stroked his eyebrows, taming the springy golden tufts; perhaps aware that Lavinia followed the gesture intently. And perhaps, Erasmus thought, a bit annoyed that Alexandra didn’t. A sensible woman, she seemed immune to Zeke’s charms.

  Lavinia, tearing her eyes from Zeke’s hand, said, “I don’t see here on the maps where you’d head north at all.”

  “Only if he were driven to it,” Alexandra said. “Were he to raise this money to search for Franklin, and then purposefully head in another direction, that would be quite wrong.”

  Zeke gazed steadily at her, and she gazed as steadily back. “The maps never tell us what we need,” he said, turning toward Lavinia. “That’s part of the reason we go.”

  Later Erasmus would realize that for all his alertness to Zeke’s gestures and the women’s responses he hadn’t been paying sufficient attention. The lamps were lit, the sun was setting, they were munching delicious chocolate cake; the maps beckoned and he was dreaming of glory. His own glory, his own desires. They might find survivors of Franklin’s expedition; or if not, surely better evidence of what had happen
ed than Rae’s dispiriting tale. With any luck they’d find other things as well. All sorts of specimens, not just plants but seaweeds, fishes, birds—he would write a book. He’d sketch his specimens and write their descriptions; his talent was for drawing from nature, capturing the salient features as only a trained observer could. Copernicus, so skilled with color and light, would turn the sketches into paintings; Linnaeus and Humboldt would prepare the plates. Together they’d make something beautiful. For years, in the light of his disappointments, he’d pretended to himself that he wasn’t ambitious—but he was, he was. And lucky beyond belief to be part of this voyage. A blaze of excitement blinded him.

  “And you, Erasmus,” Alexandra said. “What do you think of all this?”

  “In the polar regions,” he said, “it’s true that one must be flexible, and take what opportunities are offered.”

  He looked down at the volume she’d relinquished. He would bring it, after all. Surely there was room for one small book. “Zeke and I will respond to what we find, and decide accordingly.”

  THAT NIGHT, IN her diary, Alexandra wrote:

  It’s not Lavinia’s fault her brothers underestimate her. I know she’ll be different once the men leave and we’re on our own; her mind dissolves in Zeke’s presence. I’ll be glad when we can be ourselves. This house is so beautiful, so spacious—what would my parents think, I wonder, if they were alive to see me in these two gorgeous rooms I now call my own? The window over my bed looks down on a planting of dwarf trees. My bed-linen is changed weekly, by someone other than me. And this painting is such a pleasure, so much more satisfying than needlework. So much better paid. Beneath the lining of my sewing box I’ve already tucked a surprising sum. Soon I’ll be able to purchase some books of my own, an extravagance when I have the Repository shelves to browse through, once the men leave . . . I’m impatient for them to go, I am. And wish that, like Erasmus, I might have the luxury of sleeping out there.

  Does he know that he rocks the toe of his boot in the air whenever Zeke speaks? I wonder what Erasmus was like as a boy. Before he grew so frozen, before he sat with his chin tucked into his collar like that, and his right hand wringing his left so strongly one wonders he doesn’t break the bones. Lavinia says that when she was a girl he was fond of beetles and moths, and teased the succession of governesses who raised her. I can’t imagine him teasing anyone.

  THE NARWHAL SET sail on May 28, in such a wild flurry that everything important seemed still undone and nothing Erasmus meant to say got said. He and Zeke stood on the deck in their new gray uniforms, waving their handkerchiefs. Above them the Toxophilites’ pennant streamed in the wind, snapping straight out then beginning to droop, snapping straight out again. Terns hung motionless in the high currents, and Erasmus felt as though he himself were hanging between two worlds.

  The acquaintances of the Narwhal’s crew gathered in little knots close to shore, followed by the cheering Toxies in their green outfits. Dotting the wharf in separate clusters were Zeke’s and Erasmus’s relatives and friends, their clothing splayed into wide colored planes by the wind whipping across the river. Alexandra had brought her entire family—her sisters, Emily and Jane; her brother, Browning; and Browning’s wife and infant son—all of them huddled so tightly that it was as if even here, in the open air, they couldn’t expand beyond the confines of the tiny house they’d shared since their parents’ deaths. They were small, neat, and yet somehow fierce-looking; abolitionists, serious young people. They dressed in the colors of sparrows and doves but more closely resembled, Erasmus thought, a family of saw-whet owls. Browning had a Bible in his hands.

  Later, Alexandra would write in her diary about the argument she and Browning had over the verses he read out loud. Later she’d sketch a portrait of Erasmus during these last minutes, which showed his hand clasped nervously around a stay, his graying hair curled beneath a cap that made him look oddly boyish, the tip of his long, thin nose sniffing at the wind. But for now she only stood silently, watching him watch everyone. In the oily water around the pilings wood shavings swirled and tossed.

  To the left of Alexandra’s family stood a group of employees from the engraving firm and some representatives from the Voorhees packet line; beyond them were Linnaeus and Humboldt, as plump and glossy as beavers, and Lavinia, leaning on both of them, overdressed in swirls of blue and green and flashing in the sun like a trout. At the tip of the wharf, befitting their support of the expedition, came Zeke’s family. His father stood suave and proud, his still-thick thatch of ruddy hair moving in the wind and revealing his massive eyebrows and the lynxlike tufts on his ears. His mother, shrouded in black for the death of an aunt, was weeping. Not surprising, Erasmus thought; she was famous for the way she coddled her only son. Flanking her were Zeke’s sisters, Violet and Laurel, beautifully dressed and seemingly contemptuous of their merchant husbands, who weren’t sailing north.

  They waved; the water opened between the wharf and the ship; the tune piped by the Toxies’ piccolo player shattered in the breeze until the separate and unrelated notes merged with the calls of the gulls. Behind the mountains and beyond the north wind, Erasmus’s father had once read to him, past the cave where the cold arises, live a race of people called Hyperboreans. Here are the hinges on which the world turns and the limits of the circuits of the stars. Here there is no disharmony and sorrow is unknown. The figures on the wharf began to shrink. Everyone, except the dead, whom Erasmus had ever loved; every person who might be proud of him or admire his courage or worry over his fate. The faces faded, and then disappeared.

  2

  PAST THE CAVE

  WHERE THE COLD ARISES

  (JUNE–JULY 1855)

  Of the inanimate productions of Greenland, none perhaps excites so much interest and astonishment in a stranger, as the ice in its great abundance and variety. The stupendous masses, known by the name of Ice-Islands, Floating-Mountains, or Icebergs, common to Davis’ Straits and sometimes met with here, from their height, various forms, and the depth of water in which they ground, are calculated to strike the beholder with wonder; yet the fields of ice, more peculiar to Greenland, are not less astonishing. Their deficiency in elevation, is sufficiently compensated by their amazing extent of surface. Some of them have been observed near a hundred miles in length, and more than half that in breadth; each consisting of a single sheet of ice, having its surface raised in general four or six feet above the level of the water, and its base depressed to the depth of near twenty feet beneath.

  The ice in general, is designated by a variety of appellations, distinguishing it according to the size or number of pieces, their form of aggregation, thickness, transparency, &c. I perhaps cannot better explain the terms in common acceptation amongst the whale-fishers, than by marking the disruption of a field. The thickest and strongest field cannot resist the power of a heavy swell; indeed, such are much less capable of bending without being dissevered, than the thinner ice which is more pliable. When a field, by the set of the current, drives to the southward, and being deserted by the loose ice, becomes exposed to the effects of a grown swell, it presently breaks into a great many pieces, few of which will exceed forty or fifty yards in diameter. Now, such a number of the pieces collected together in close contact, so that they cannot, from the top of the ship’s mast, be seen over, are termed a pack.

  When the collection of pieces can be seen across, if it assume a circular or polygonal form, the name of patch is applied, and it is called a stream when its shape is more of an oblong, how narrow soever it may be, provided the continuity of the pieces is preserved.

  Pieces of very large dimensions, but smaller than fields, are called floes; thus, a field may be compared to a pack, and a floe to a patch, as regards their size and external form. Small pieces which break off, and are separated from the larger masses by the effect of attrition, are called brash-ice, and may be collected into streams or patches. Ice is said to be loose or open, when the pieces are so far separated as to all
ow a ship to sail freely amongst them; this has likewise been called drift ice. A hummock is a protuberance raised upon any plane of ice above the common level. It is frequently produced by pressure, where one piece is squeezed upon another, often set up on its edge, and in that position cemented by the frost. Hummocks are likewise formed, by pieces of ice mutually crushing each other, the wreck being coacervated upon one or both of them. To hummocks, the ice is indebted for the variety of fanciful shapes, and its picturesque appearance. They occur in great numbers in heavy packs, on the edges and occasionally in the middle of fields and floes. They often attain the height of thirty feet or upwards. . .

  A bight signifies a bay or sinuosity, on the border of any large mass or body of ice. It is supposed to be called bight from the low word bite, to take in, or entrap; because, in this situation, ships are sometimes so caught by a change of wind, that the ice cannot be cleared on either tack; and in some cases, a total loss has been the consequence.

  —WILLIAM SCORESBY, The Polar Ice (1815)

  Zeke started heaving over the Narwhal’s rail before they cleared the bay. He had mentioned, Erasmus remembered, some seasickness on his father’s ships—but this was no spasm, a few hours’ illness and a night’s recovery. This was endless retching and a white-faced speechless headache. As they passed New York and surged ahead of the ship heading off to search for Dr. Kane, the elation Erasmus might have felt was squelched by worry over Zeke’s condition.

  “Why didn’t you warn me?” he asked. Around him the crew hovered, disdainfully watching Zeke respond to the slightest swells.

  “I thought it would be different this time,” Zeke whispered.

  Erasmus, contemplating Zeke’s falsehood, remembered an image he’d long forgotten. A pale, frail, yellow-haired boy reading mounds of natural history books and explorers’ journals in a deep chair piled with pillows—that had been Zeke, aged thirteen or fourteen.