Voyage of the Narwhal

by Andrea Barrett

  We started last week. Mr. Archibault, one of the Wells’s master engravers, comes to us in the Repository, bearing burins and needles and steel plates spoiled by the apprentices, which would otherwise be scrapped. More broad-minded than the brothers, he remarks that both Helen Dawson and the Maverick sisters did excellent engravings; and so anything, he supposes, may be possible. Straight lines, curved lines, incomplete lines, and dots—I have much to learn, and little time. I gashed myself several times with the burin.

  LATER, ERASMUS WOULD wonder if Zeke’s disappointment over the Resolute was responsible for what happened next. Or if Joe’s earlier comments about Oonali had finally sunk in, until Zeke doubted the worth of their relics. At the point where they all expected to turn east, Zeke called the crew together on deck.

  “We have four days yet of August,” Zeke said. “And can look forward to several weeks of good sailing in September. The weather’s excellent and the season is far from over. Your hard work has already brought this expedition much success. And I know you’ll be willing to delay our return just a few more weeks, so we might bring back not only our news of Franklin’s expedition, but some significant geographical findings as well.”

  Erasmus, sketching the strata of a distant cliff, turned to stare at Zeke as Sean Hamilton blurted, “What?” Two seals popped their heads from the water and stared at the ship.

  “We’ll head into Smith Sound,” Zeke continued, “testing the boundaries of the open water. A little detour. The bulk of the drifting ice is south of us; you can see for yourselves that there’s no loose pack north of us. A swift, concerted probe through the Sound might bring us far before we have to turn back. We’ll make as much northing as we can in ten days, chart as much new territory as we can, and then make a quick run for Godhavn. I promise we’ll be there in less than four weeks.”

  “No!” Captain Tyler said. He grasped a shroud, squeezing until his swollen knuckles stood out like walnuts. “This is out of the question, you can’t consider it.”

  Mr. Francis and Mr. Tagliabeau backed him up and others also raised their voices: my mother is waiting; the season’s too late; this isn’t what you told us when we signed on—Isaac Bond, Nils Jensen, Ivan Hruska. Zeke brought out his maps, talking about his theory of polynya formation and why there should be open water north of the constriction of Smith Sound.

  “Please,” Erasmus said in his ear. “What about Lavinia?”

  But Zeke shook him off and did what Erasmus had dreaded from his first words. “You’ve pledged to support me,” he said, waving the contract. “This brief exploration is part of our goals, as I have determined them, and you must support me in this. You must.”

  Sabine, perched on his shoulder like a white epaulet, regarded the crowd and barked.

  THE ICEBERG’S FACE was sheer and as high as their mastheads, but Nils Jensen and Robert Carey managed to scale it. They were trying to anchor the Narwhal to the berg’s lee side, where they might find some protection from the crushing ice. Nils drove the anchor in; Robert adjusted the lines. Just as they began their scramble back to the ship, the berg split in two with a noise like a cannon shot. Robert leapt for the water, and although he was nearly frozen to death Dr. Boerhaave was able to save him. But while his companions watched, unable to help him, Nils toppled into the chasm between the berg’s two halves. Later this sight recurred in Erasmus’s dreams and he’d wake with his throat closed, imagining what Nils must have felt when the larger half sighed and rolled in the water, grinding a submerged tongue into the smaller half and obliterating the chasm. They did not find even a scrap of Nils’s clothing.

  For Erasmus this scene came to stand for the twenty-three days during which they battled the ice beyond the twin capes guarding Smith Sound. As they sailed into the great basin, he’d talked himself into sharing some of Zeke’s enthusiasm. But by September 3 thin ice was already forming around the Narwhal at night, bridging the floes that kept them pressed against Ellesmere and prevented them from crossing to the Greenland side of the sound. Joe gazed at the floes with a long face; any part of Greenland, even this far north where he’d never been, counted as home to him. The distant shores teased him terribly.

  “I joined you to look for Franklin,” he said to Erasmus, chipping at the ice on deck. “Not for this.”

  Meanwhile Ned cooked as if he’d never stop, rushing hot soup and coffee and biscuits to the frozen men. He made dried-apple pudding again and again, a food much beloved by Fletcher Lamb and Nils Jensen, who were gone. Although he’d not grieved openly for Fletcher when he died, now that Nils was also gone he set places at the table for the dead men, unable to stop until Erasmus gently reproached him.

  Nils was killed on September 6. By September 8 drift ice surrounded them and foot-long icicles hung from the rigging; by September 10 they were confronted by solid pack; by the eleventh they knew that an open polar sea, if it existed at all, lay beyond this barrier of ice. Beyond their reach.

  Zeke was stunned by Nils Jensen’s death, and disappointed by their failure to sail farther north, but he told the crew they’d done well. “We’ve charted a long new stretch of coastline,” he said, showing them the maps he’d drawn and the features he’d christened. Cape Laurel, Cape Violet, Cape Agatha—his sisters, his mother; but also, and more to the crew’s pleasure, Fletcher Lamb Bay and Jensen Point. What pleased them most was Zeke’s order that they turn and head for home.

  But on September 14 they found their route to the south walled off by a dense mass of ice that had floated in since they’d entered the basin. A stiff wind jammed the ice against the brig and her against the coast; they sailed through hail and snow and freezing rain, which glazed the deck and the rigging. They probed the pack, searching for a passage south but blocked again and again. Plates of ice swept toward the shore, grinding over the gravel and tossing boulders aside before being crushed and heaved by other floes; the rumblings and sudden, explosive cracks made the men feel as if they’d been caught in a giant mouth, which was chewing on the landscape. Their area of movement decreased each hour, until Zeke, who’d stopped eating during the five days of their frenzied oscillation, finally conceded defeat and began to look for a suitable harbor.

  Later Erasmus would wish he’d thought to remind Zeke of the advantages of a site that looked southward and eastward. But he was exhausted and so was Zeke, and so were all the men; hail was beating against their faces and they could hardly see what lay before them. From the gloom rose a towering triangular point, backed by smaller pyramids; they swept around it, forced by the wind, and to their great relief found a cove bitten into the point’s back side. Sharp walls loomed over them, blocking their view of Greenland, across the Sound, but in the harbor’s southeast corner was a small gravel beach and a bit of lumpy ground.

  Still it was a poor choice, Erasmus thought, when the sky cleared the next morning. The cove opened to the northwest, the coldest prospect. As they warped the brig closer to the beach, three icebergs swept around the point and grounded on a reef, partially blocking the mouth of the cove and plugging them in like a ship in a bottle.

  PART II

  5

  THE ICE IN ITS GREAT ABUNDANCE

  (OCTOBER 1855–MARCH 1856)

  The intense beauty of the Arctic firmament can hardly be imagined. It looked close above our heads, with its stars magnified in glory and the very planets twinkling so much as to baffle the observations of our astronomer. I am afraid to speak of some of these night-scenes. I have trodden the deck and the floes, when the life of the earth seemed suspended, its movements, its sounds, its coloring, its companionships; and as I looked on the radiant hemisphere, circling above me as if rendering worship to the unseen Centre of light, I have ejaculated in humility of spirit, “Lord, what is man that thou art mindful of him?” And then I have thought of the kindly world we had left, with its revolving sunshine and shadow, and the other stars that gladden it in their changes, and the hearts that warmed to us there; till I lost myself in memories
of those who are not;—and they bore me back to the stars again.

  —ELISHA KENT KANE, Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853,’54,’55 (1856)

  In Philadelphia it was beautifully clear and warm, the chrysanthemums rust and gold in the gardens and the leaves of the sweet gum radiant on the grass. Alexandra, secure in her spacious rooms, kept her diary faithfully. It was a form of discipline, she thought. A record of her education as well as a way of honoring her parents. Her first diary, smooth black leather with gilt thistles, had been a gift from them. Today I am eight, she had written. I got a box of pencils, a Bible, this book to write in. A promise from Emily not to touch my paints. I have a bad cold. Seventeen volumes now, one for each year since then; the only gap some months from her fifteenth year, when her parents were killed and she could say nothing. She wrote:

  I’ve finished my engraving of the Passaic smelt. Lavinia stopped after three lessons, she hated cutting up her hands; but I have a gift for this, I do. Even Mr. Archibault admits that my line is expressive and clear and that I have a fine touch with light and shadow. In a way I didn’t expect it’s much more than copying; more like re-making, re-creating. When I’m working everything else drops away and I enter the scene I’m engraving. As if I’ve entered a larger life.

  I meant to start on a copy of the hand’s nerves and tendons but the news set us in an uproar. First we heard that the abandoned British ship Resolute was found floating in Baffin’s Bay. A crew from an American whaler sailed her down to New London; we had hopes they might have met the Narwhal and have mail for us, but apparently not. Then Saturday the papers here carried the story of Dr. Kane’s rescue. No one can talk about anything else—such enormous good luck, the way the rescue squadron, driven back from Smith Sound, met Esquimaux who’d spent time with Kane’s party and been aboard the frozen-in ship.

  Learning that Kane and his men had abandoned their ship and gone south on foot, Lt. Hartstene made his way to Godhavn and discovered the party there, just as they were about to board a Danish brig. The front page of the paper was filled with Dr. Kane’s report. Sledge trips, news of Esquimaux living farther north than anyone suspected; long stretches of coastline discovered on both the Greenland and the American sides of Smith Sound; he claims two of his men have viewed an open polar sea. Having endured extraordinary cold and starvation, and a long journey by sledge and small boat, he lost only three members of his Expedition and is now a great hero. Against this his father’s behavior stands out even more despicably.

  Emily, who visited yesterday with Jane, is as angry as I’ve ever seen her. Despite the efforts of the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society and others, Judge Kane committed Williamson to prison on Friday, for failing to produce the runaway slaves he’s sheltered. One of the antislavery papers notes that ‘such a man can surely be no relative of the noble-hearted explorer. His opinion makes every state a slave state. . . . He is the Columbus of the new world of slave-whips and shackles which he has just annexed.’ The slaves are safe, Emily says—I’m not sure whether she has direct knowledge of this—but the abolitionists who aided them may be in prison a long time. The decision has caused a split in the city, and at every social gathering. Lavinia sides with me and Emily on this, but when Emily asked if she’d be willing to let her committee meet here she declined; her brother and Zeke, she said, might be back any day, and the house must be ready for them. Later I found her crying. She’s not been sleeping, though she tries to hide this.

  I can’t blame her for worrying. That Dr. Kane is home, while we have as yet no word of Zeke and Erasmus; that Dr. Kane is lionized for discovering the open sea Zeke hoped to find—we can only hope, Lavinia says, that Zeke and Erasmus are safe and have found some traces of Franklin. The truth, when one looks past the headlines, is that while Dr. Kane did remarkable things, he was in the wrong place; he didn’t learn until reaching Upernavik of Rae’s discoveries a thousand miles south and west of where he’d been. Also he lost his ship. But he is a hero nonetheless; and is not responsible for his father’s detestable decision; and will be in Philadelphia shortly. Lavinia has asked her brothers to seek an appointment with him, to find out if he’s seen any evidence of the Narwhal. But apparently he’s seeing few people.

  LATER ERASMUS AND the rest of the crew would learn that their cove was only a corner of a bay previously named by Kane; their home only the width of Smith Sound from Kane’s winter quarters. Later Erasmus would lay out calendar pages and his journal entries and the newspaper stories of Kane’s return, matching up days and trying to understand how the Narwhal had failed to cross paths with Kane’s retreat party. They’d missed each other so narrowly it seemed only fate could have kept them apart. But he’d remind himself, then, that it had never been their charge to find Kane. Even as they’d been loading the Narwhal, the Navy had outfitted two rescue ships, which had left New York as the Narwhal left Philadelphia. Everyone had understood that they’d head directly toward Smith Sound, in search of Kane, while the Narwhal would head for King William Land, in search of Franklin. A simple division of labor.

  The Narwhal had arrived in Smith Sound so late in the season, and so unexpectedly, that when Erasmus thought of Dr. Kane at all, he felt sure he’d already been found. By October, though, Erasmus couldn’t spare even a thought for his fellow Philadelphian. Only once, when he was adding to his growing letter to Copernicus, did he wonder if Dr. Kane had reached this far north. He wrote:

  Do you ever feel this in your travels out west? That all the unexplored parts of the world are closing their doors; that so many of us, traveling so far, cannot avoid crossing each other’s paths and repeating each other’s discoveries? Perhaps you’ve passed the Absaroka Mountains, into the Wind River Valley or Jackson’s Hole, and wondered what it would have been like to be the first one there. I wish I could pretend to be another Meriwether Lewis, but those days are half a century behind us. Sometimes I have such a feeling of people crowding the world. Up here all is emptiness, we see no human beings; yet we can’t know for sure that we’re the first ones here. I have no idea where you are. You have no idea where I am. I would give anything to know what you’re doing this very night.

  Then he returned to work, ashamed of having stolen even a moment. Although there were men weeping in odd corners; although those who couldn’t write crept up to Ned and Dr. Boerhaave and asked for help drafting last testaments; although Captain Tyler disappeared periodically and was of little help; still Erasmus tried not to give in to despair. But the Narwhal wasn’t yet ready for winter, and the ice thickened with each tide.

  He did whatever Zeke asked, helping the men dismantle the upper masts and lashing the lower yards fore and aft amidships. Around that framework they laid planks, which housed in most of the upper deck, and a thick layer of insulating felt. Boats and spars and rigging and sails they stowed in a shed hurriedly built on shore, along with all their coal, the supplies from the hold, and most of the plant and animal specimens. Alongside the storehouse they built another hut in which Zeke set up the meteorological instruments.

  Through a wavering cloud of frost smoke, Erasmus glimpsed the full moon gleaming. The thermometer read ten degrees, then zero, then ten below; cold hands, cold feet, shoulders hunched against the wind. All the men complained and swore they couldn’t get used to it, then did. When the weather permitted, Joe went hunting in the brief slots between the parenthetical twilights. No dovekies, no murres, no ptarmigan; but before the other animals disappeared he shot two musk oxen, seven caribou, and many hares. Erasmus made lists of the meals these might provide, along with their initial store of provisions and the salted fish Zeke had purchased at Godhavn. He might have made another list—on one side Zeke’s impulsive maneuvers, which had stranded them here; on the other Zeke’s foresight with the supplies that fed and sheltered them. With the help of Joe and Dr. Boerhaave, he dug out the Esquimaux furs Zeke had purchased and fitted each man with a suit.

  Later Dr. Boerhaave wro
te to his friend William:

  I couldn’t even tell who it was at first; two furry figures huddled over a moaning third. But it was Isaac, who was careless and exploded his powder box; his hand is in danger. I extracted several shards of metal and sluiced out as much of the powder as I could. A poultice of yeast and charcoal may draw out the rest.

  Everyone’s cold. This place—in the morning, when the sun is low in the east, the peninsula shadows us. In the afternoon we’re shadowed by the hills to our south, later by the three grounded icebergs; Commander Voorhees couldn’t have chosen a colder place. Away from him the men refer to the icebergs sarcastically as “Zeke’s Follies.” Some folly. I meant to be back in Edinburgh by now, writing up papers and arguing happily with you and the others: walking, talking, drinking, thinking. Instead I have only Mr. Wells; but I’ve grown fond of him. If it were not for him and the work we do together, I think I would feel desperate.

  THERE WAS NO point, Zeke said, in trying to maintain separate messes for men and officers. Their fuel was limited, they must conserve. Ned and Sean Hamilton moved the galley to a spot under the main hatch. Then Zeke rearranged the sleeping quarters, setting Thomas Forbes to remove the bulkhead between the men’s forecastle and the officers’ cabin.

  “You’d never see this on a whaling ship,” Captain Tyler grumbled. “How are you going to maintain discipline, if we’re all mixed together?”

  “I’m not doing this to be democratic,” Zeke retorted. The previous night several of the men’s bedclothes had frozen about their feet. “Just to be practical. We have only the one small stove besides the galley stove, and the best way to keep everyone warm is to allow the heated air to circulate.”

  As a concession to Captain Tyler, Zeke had Thomas build two shoulder-high partitions, each of which stretched from one side of the hull toward the midline, where the stove was set, and stopped a few feet short of it. From this common island the stove radiated warmth impartially fore and aft. Air flowed not only around the stove but also over the partitions, and although sound traveled freely between the men’s and the officers’ bunks, when the crew lay down they were hidden. When they pulled their stools close to the stove for warmth, the half-ring of officers aft and the half-ring of men forward could see each other, and talk if desired, yet were separated at least by the stove and its pipes. The division was more symbolic than real, yet it served, Zeke argued. By a judicious lowering of the voices and averting of the eyes, the officers might preserve an illusion of privacy. More importantly, they were warm.