Voyage of the Narwhal

by Andrea Barrett

  On bad days, when the channel disappeared, they warped the brig like a wedge between the consolidated floes. Two men with an iron chisel cut a hole near the edge of a likely crack and drove in an anchor; a hawser was fastened to the anchor and the other end wound around the ship’s winch. Everyone took his turn at the capstan bars. By the pressure of their bodies against the bars, the winch rotated, the hawser shivered, the ice began to groan. If the hawser didn’t break, nor the anchor pull loose, the brig inched forward into the little crack. For hours they worked and got nowhere; an inch, a foot, the length of the ship.

  THOSE DAYS BLURRED in Erasmus’s mind. The great cliffs looming above him, the drifting bergs and shifting ice; brief bouts of sailing interspersed with long bouts of warping and tracking; the fog and wind and the brutal labor and the snatched, troubled bits of sleep; their wet clothes and hasty meals and Captain Tyler, red-faced, shouting at the men and occasionally whacking one with a fist or the end of a rope. Mr. Tagliabeau was somewhat less brutal with the men than the captain; Mr. Francis was worse.

  “You have to do something about this,” Erasmus said to Zeke one day. He was sweating horribly, itching from the wool next to his skin, and he thought he knew just how the men, working three times as hard as he was, felt. Fletcher Lamb had walked away from the towline after tearing the skin off his wrist, and Mr. Francis had hit him on the side of his head and chased him back.

  Zeke shrugged. “What can I do? We have to make our way through this place, and there’s no other way but to work the men as hard as they can stand. I promise things will be different when we reach the North Water.”

  It was like a single long nightmare, in which time passed too quickly and then, especially when they were bent to the capstan bars, refused to pass at all. The continuous light made things worse, not better: white, white, white tinged with blue, with gold, with green; white; more white. Their eyes burned, and as the sun looped around the sky, to the east in the morning, then south then west then finally in the north at night, with them still working, horribly sunburned, they began to yearn for the colors they never saw: sweet rich reds, the green of leaves. In their blurry sleepless state, with their bodies strained and aching, Erasmus wasn’t surprised that they should lose sight of what had brought them there. It was all the crew could do to keep the brig moving and out of danger.

  Zeke tried to keep the goals of the expedition alive by telling stories about Franklin; a way, he told Erasmus privately, of motivating the men. Off duty, they sprawled on the hatch covers or leaned against the boats while Zeke paced among them, describing Franklin’s three earlier voyages. Franklin as a young lieutenant, seeking the North Pole by way of Spitzbergen, turned back by ice and returning to England with badly damaged ships. Franklin commanding an expedition through Rupert’s Land, across the tundra to the mouth of the Coppermine River and exploring the coastline eastward in tiny canoes; Franklin in the arctic yet again, traveling down the MacKenzie River and exploring the coastline westward, nearly reaching Kotzebue Sound. In their winter camp on Great Bear Lake, Zeke said, Franklin had taught his men to read and Dr. Richardson, his naturalist companion, had lectured on the natural history of the region. After that last trip, Franklin had been knighted.

  Zeke spoke as if he were transmitting the great tradition of arctic exploration, of which they were now a part. As if the stories would heal the crew’s wounds and furies. But Erasmus noticed that Zeke never repeated these in the presence of Captain Tyler and the two mates. In a similar way, he was careful, himself, not to mention his disturbing dreams. Always he was sitting with his brothers at their father’s knee, with Zeke, transformed into a boy their own age, hovering in the doorway and looking longingly at their family circle. Always his father was telling marvelous tales, as if he’d never taught them real science. In ancient times, his father said, it was recorded that the sky rained milk and blood and flesh and iron; once the sky was said to rain wool and another time to rain bricks. It is always best to observe things for yourself.

  Erasmus tried not to think too much about what those dreams meant, or about the quarrels brewing. He shot burgomaster gulls and two species of loon, which the ravenous dogs tried to eat. Whenever they were stuck for a while, Joe tried to calm the dogs by unchaining them and letting them romp on the ice. They barked as if they’d gone insane and often proved difficult to retrieve; Zeke was forced to leave a pair behind when a berg suddenly sailed away from the brig. After that he no longer let Wissy run with the others but kept her tied to him by an improvised leash.

  Ivan Hruska nearly drowned; a floe cracked as he was fixing an ice anchor, tossing him into the surging water. It wasn’t true, as Erasmus had once believed, that immersion in this frigid fluid killed a man right away. Ivan was retrieved numb and blue and breathless, but alive. Fingers were caught between railings and lines, ribs were banged against capstan bars, skin was torn from palms and toes were broken by falling chisels. Dr. Boerhaave was kept busy attending to their injuries and preparing daily sick lists, which Zeke and Captain Tyler were forced to ignore:

  Seaman Bond: abrasions to distal phalanges, left

  Seaman Carey: two cracked ribs

  Seaman DeSouza: asthma, aggravated by excessive labor

  Seaman Hruska: bronchitis after immersion

  Seaman Jensen: avulsed tip of right forefinger

  Seaman Lamb: complaints of abdominal pain (earlier blow to liver?)

  Seaman Hamilton: suppurating dermatitis, inner aspect of both thighs

  Unromantic ailments, never mentioned in Zeke’s tales. Meanwhile Joe tried to cheer the men. In Greenland, Erasmus learned, Joe had held services among his Esquimaux converts, during which he accompanied their singing with a zither. Now he plucked and strummed and taught the men songs, singing with them while they hauled.

  A WEEK INTO Melville Bay, they were finishing their evening meal when the ice began to close in on them.

  “If we cut a dock here,” Captain Tyler said, indicating an indented portion of the large berg near them, “we should be safe, even if the drift ice closes full in to the shore.”

  “There’s no time,” Zeke said. “Suppose we make harbor inside this berg, and the floes seal off our exit? We could be here for weeks. And we’ve got the wind with us, for the moment.”

  They sailed on, with the men waiting tensely for orders. On deck, near the chained dogs, Erasmus and Zeke watched in silence. Soon the lead closed entirely and forced them to tie up to a floe. A second floe, which Nils Jensen estimated at some three-quarters of a mile in diameter and five feet deep, sailed past their sheltering chunk of ice, sheared half of it away without taking the brig, and proceeded serenely to shore. As it reached the land-fast ice, it rose in a stiff wave and shattered with a noise like thunder.

  “Would you get out of the way!” Mr. Francis said, shoving Erasmus in his exasperation. Erasmus pulled back against the rail.

  While Captain Tyler and Mr. Francis shouted and the men ran about with boathooks and pieces of lumber, a third floe pressed the Narwhal into the land-fast ice. Ned Kynd, his face as white as the ice, said, “We’re going to be crushed.”

  He pressed into the rail beside Erasmus, who silently agreed with him. The ice on one side drove them into the ice on the other; the brig groaned, then screamed; her sides seemed to be giving way and the deck timbers began to arch. The seams between the deck planks opened. Zeke leaned toward Ned: two young men, one blond, one dark; one calm and one afraid.

  “Don’t worry so,” Zeke said. He tapped Ned’s shoulder and smiled at Erasmus. “I wouldn’t let anything happen to us. Our bows are reinforced to withstand just this kind of pressure.”

  As if his words had been a spell the brig began to rise, tilting until the hawser snapped and they shot backward and across the floes like a seed pinched by a giant pair of fingers. For several hours they balanced on heaped-up ice cakes, until the wind changed and pulled the ice away and set them afloat once more with a dismal splash.

  Ze
ke ordered rum for all the men and thanked them for their labor. To Captain Tyler he said, “You don’t understand how well we’ve designed this ship to resist the ice. This is not your common whaler.”

  “If we had cut a dock,” Captain Tyler said in a choked voice. His face was mottled, red on his fleshy nostrils and chin, white along his broad forehead and down the sharp bridge of his nose. His hands, Erasmus noticed, were hugely knotted at the joints. “If we had . . .” Abruptly he turned the watch over to Mr. Tagliabeau and retired below, where he wrapped his head in a blanket.

  Later, perched on the hatch cover, Dr. Boerhaave whispered to Erasmus that he’d feared their skipper might suffer an apoplexy. They looked out at the ice, too wound up to sleep and longing to talk: not about what had just happened, but anything else. They were still a little awkward with each other. Dr. Boerhaave said, “This is very different from the other expeditions I was on. Do you find it so? I’m curious about your earlier trip.”

  “I was twenty-three the last time I did anything like this,” Erasmus said, watching the ice pieces spin in the tide. Twenty-three, barely older than Ned Kynd; often he’d been frightened half to death. When had his commander ever taken a minute to reassure him? The sky was lit like morning, although it was past ten o’clock; how delicious it was to be alive, under the shimmering clouds! Had the brig been shattered here, some of the crew would be dead by now and the rest drifting south on the fragments. He was alive, he was safe and warm. What was the point of keeping secret his time with the Exploring Expedition?

  “When you asked why you never saw my name in Wilkes’s book,” he said, “there were nine civilians listed as ‘Scientifics’ among all those Navy men; I was the tenth. Wilkes never listed me because I joined the expedition at the last minute and didn’t receive a salary.”

  He swallowed. Two floes touched and then parted, as if finishing a dance. “My father arranged it,” he admitted. “The young woman to whom I was engaged”—Sarah Louise Bettlesman, he thought; still he could see her face, and remember her touch—“her lungs were weak, she died six months before we were to be married. I couldn’t get back on my feet after that, and my father was worried. He pulled some strings, and after promising Wilkes he’d pay my keep for the voyage, he landed me a berth as Titian Peale’s assistant.”

  “I am so sorry,” Dr. Boerhaave said gently. “But I’m sure Wilkes felt lucky to have you.”

  While the ice waltzed around the bow and the clouds cavorted overhead, Erasmus told the rest of the story that had preoccupied him as he sorted and sifted his seeds.

  The six ships of the Exploring Expedition had left Virginia in 1838. For the next four years they’d cruised the Pacific, from South America to the Fiji Islands, New Zealand and New Holland, the Sandwich Islands, the Oregon territory and more. Although Erasmus had been lonely, out of place, and often lost, he’d seen things he couldn’t have imagined: cannibals, volcanic calderas, sixty-pound medusoids; the meke wau, or club dance, of the Fiji natives—natural wonders and also, always, Wilkes’s brutality toward his men and his constant disregard of the needs of the Scientifics. The naval men had called the Scientifics bug catchers, clam diggers, and Wilkes had blocked their way at every turn.

  They weren’t allowed to work on deck, because of naval regulations and the bustle required to sail a ship. Below decks there was little light and less fresh air, and Wilkes forbade dissections there, as he found the odors distasteful and believed they spread disease. Their primary goal was surveying, Wilkes said, and he let nothing interfere with that. Day after day, Erasmus and his companions had watched the golden hours slip by while the naval men took topographical measurements of whatever island or coast was before them. Amazing plants and animals, always just out of reach. They’d set scoop nets when they could, consoling themselves with invertebrate treasures. When they thought they might expire from heat and anger, they threw themselves over the rail and into the swimming basin the men had made from a sail hung in the water. In early 1840, as they set off to explore the Antarctic waters and search for a landmass beneath the ice, Wilkes arranged to leave all the Scientifics behind at New Zealand and New Holland, so that whatever geographical discoveries he made need not be shared but might be wholly to the glory of the Navy.

  He left all except Erasmus, too insignificant to worry about. On a shabby, poorly equipped ship, Erasmus and the sailors had nearly frozen to death. But they’d seen ice islands several hundred feet high and half a mile long, with gigantic arches leading into caverns crowned with bluffs and fissures. Ice rafts, some carrying boulders the size of a house. The sea had been luminous, lit like silver, and the tracks they left across it looked like lightning. Their boots leaked so badly they had to wrap their feet in blankets; their pea jackets might have been made of muslin; their gun ports failed to shut out the sea. Erasmus had been awed, and very cold, the night two midshipmen first caught sight of the Antarctic continent. Climbing up the rigging to join them, he’d seen the mountains for himself and then the wall of ice that almost shattered their ship. From that journey had come Wilkes’s famous map, charting the Antarctic coast.

  Everything after that was sordid; how could he tell Dr. Boerhaave? The quarrels among Wilkes and his junior officers, one ship wrecked and another sunk with all hands; crewmen massacred by the Fiji Islanders and then the retaliatory raids; floggings and a near mutiny and so many specimens lost. He fell silent for a minute. “The real point,” he finally said, “isn’t what we discovered but what happened when we returned. Everyone ignored us. Or mocked us.”

  “That’s not in Wilkes’s Narrative,” Dr. Boerhaave said.

  “It’s not,” Erasmus agreed. “Who ever writes about the failures?”

  Yet this was the part he couldn’t get past, the part that had twisted all the years since. Wilkes court-martialed on eleven charges and then, in a fury of wounded pride, impounding all the diaries and logbooks and journals and charts, and all the specimens.

  “He took our notes,” Erasmus said. “Our drawings, our paintings—he took them all.”

  Back in Washington, the specimens that hadn’t been lost in transit disappeared like melting ice. Wilkes had compelled the Scientifics to work on what was left there in Washington, although all the good comparative collections and libraries were in Philadelphia. Then he’d ruined what work they completed. They’d come back to a country in the midst of a depression; what the men in Congress wanted wasn’t science but maps and guides to new sealing and whaling grounds. Wilkes, with his endless charts, had satisfied the politicians. But meanwhile he delayed the expedition’s scientific reports again and again.

  “And then,” Erasmus said, “after Titian Peale and I had spent years working on the mammals and birds and writing up our volume, Wilkes said it wasn’t any good, and he blocked its publication.”

  He stopped; he couldn’t imagine telling Dr. Boerhaave how he’d retreated from Washington to the safety of the Repository, turning finally to his seeds. Half living at home, half not; most of the privacy he’d required, without the fuss of having to set up an independent household. When he desired the kind of company he wouldn’t want his family to meet, he visited certain establishments downtown or returned to Washington for a few days. Small comforts, but they were all he’d had as he wasted the prime of his young manhood. Although there were days when he’d deluded himself into thinking he might still salvage something resembling science from that voyage, in the end it was only Wilkes who’d triumphed. Despite his setbacks he’d had the great success of his Narrative. Even Dr. Boerhaave, across the ocean, had read it.

  “It’s such a bad book,” Erasmus exclaimed. “Anyone knowing the people involved can see the pastiche of styles—the outright plagiarism of his subordinates’ diaries and logbooks. Wilkes made those volumes with scissors and paste, and an utter lack of honor. He stole the book, then had copyright assigned to him and reprinted it privately. It made him rich.”

  “There’s a certain unevenness of style,” Dr. Bo
erhaave agreed. He picked at a frayed bit of whipping on a line. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know—that’s a terrible story.” The string unraveled in his hand. “It’s to your credit you’ve put that voyage behind you and joined up with Commander Voorhees.”

  “It’s not a question of credit,” Erasmus said. Although he felt a wonderful sense of pardon, hearing those words. “Only—I want the chance to have one voyage go well. I want to discover things Wilkes can’t ruin. And—you know, don’t you, that my sister is engaged to marry Zeke?”

  “I didn’t,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “I had no idea. Commander Voorhees never mentioned . . . you’ll be brothers-in-law?”

  “I suppose,” Erasmus said. “Of course.” He picked up the scrap of string, unsure whether he should speak so personally. “My sister’s very dear to me,” he said. “Even though she’s so much younger—our mother died when she was born, I helped raise her. I came on this voyage partly because she wanted me to watch over Zeke. He’s so young, sometimes he’s a bit . . . impulsive.”

  “So he is,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “You’re a kind brother.”

  Was that kindness? He’d lost the person he loved; he wanted to spare Lavinia that. Surely that was his simple duty. He asked, “Do you have brothers and sisters, yourself?”

  Dr. Boerhaave smiled wryly. “One of each,” he said. “Both in Sweden, both married—excellent but completely unremarkable people. They’ve never been able to understand why I wanted to travel, or why I should be so entranced by the arctic. We write letters, but almost never see each other. They’re very good about looking after our parents.”