Voyage of the Narwhal

by Andrea Barrett

  “It would be mutiny,” Ned argued. “Without you. The contract said the brig was to be under Captain Tyler’s command, but you were to head the expedition. And the brig might as well be sunk. You’re in charge now.”

  “You take the men,” Erasmus said to Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau. “I’ll stay here and wait for Commander Voorhees.”

  Captain Tyler stared at him with frank dislike. “I will not,” he said. “The chain of command is clear. If you give the order to go south I’ll aid you in any way possible. But I’ll not take responsibility for this without you. If I made it home somehow, having abandoned the brig and you and Commander Voorhees, my reputation wouldn’t be worth a penny.”

  “Nor mine,” Mr. Tagliabeau said.

  “Whatever happens, then,” Erasmus said, “it will be on my head. Is that what you want?”

  “It’s not what we want,” Mr. Tagliabeau said. “It’s simply your duty. Your choice.”

  ERASMUS PACKED SOME instruments, his fur suit, and Lav-inia’s green silk journal. He took Dr. Boerhaave’s medicine chest, both because it had belonged to his friend and because he was now the closest thing the men had to a doctor. From the relics they’d obtained on Boothia he made a painful selection: the small copper cooking pot, the prayer book and the treatise on steam engines, the silver spoons and forks and the mahogany barometer case Dr. Boerhaave had once held in his hands. The rest he had to leave behind, but he hoped that these, and the careful account in his journal, would be enough to confirm Dr. Rae’s findings and their own contact with the Esquimaux who’d seen the last of Franklin’s expedition. He packed the smaller items in the copper pot and sealed it with a piece of walrus hide.

  From the hold he removed his specimens, too heavy to ferry home. Unwilling to let them sink when the Narwhal was eventually crushed by the ice, he returned them to the storehouse. He made a list of all he’d consigned there, and in a tin box he placed that, his own journal, one of Dr. Boerhaave’s precious volumes of Thoreau, and Agassiz’s work on the fossil fishes. He added the studded bit of boot sole, which had spent all this time lying flat and silent beneath his bookshelf: one little relic of his own. Then he broke into Zeke’s private box and stole Dr. Boerhaave’s journal, leaving Zeke’s black volume behind. Zeke was dead, he must be dead. That frail boy with the vibrant eyes was gone and now he must look after Ned. Lavinia—he put Lavinia from his mind.

  He added Dr. Boerhaave’s journal to his own tin box and prepared to solder it closed. At the last minute, he took down the portrait of Franklin and stowed that as well. In Captain Tyler’s bunk, he saw, everything had been removed except for the paper gravestone, on which the names of their lost companions had been inscribed. Zeke’s name now occupied the bottom of the list.

  He had the men clean the ship, and he left behind enough provisions to support Zeke in case a miracle brought him back. He wrote out a careful statement, explaining the situation that had driven them to leave and their proposed route; he noted the crates of specimens in the storehouse and the provisions left on board. We leave this brig August 26, 1856. In the season called aosok, he thought, remembering the word Joe had taught him. The short interval between complete thaw and reconsolidation of the ice. For their long, improbable journey they had, at most, until the end of September. Not nearly enough time.

  While the men began the laborious process of hauling the boat across the level plain, toward the point that blocked them from the Sound and onto the ice belt attached to the cliffs, he checked over every inch of the Narwhal. Then he nailed his statement to the mast and walked onto the ice.

  7

  THE GOBLINS KNOWN AS

  INNERSUIT

  (AUGUST–OCTOBER 1856)

  Enterprises of great pith and moment command our admiration, sympathy, and emulation with the varied force which the quality of their motives and objects deserves. The agility and courage of a rope-dancer on his perilous balance do not affect us in the same way as the generous daring displayed by a fireman in the rescue of a child from a burning house. There is natural nobleness enough in anybody to feel the difference between a hard day’s journey on an errand of benevolence, and the feat of walking a hundred successive hours for a wager. A novelist, an orator, or a player, may work upon the sympathetic emotions of virtue until our heart-strings answer like echoes to his touch; but we are not deceived nor cheated into an admiration unworthy of ourselves. We were not made in the Divine image to take seemings for things. Our instincts stand by the real interests of the world and of the universe, and we will not meanly surrender our souls to any imposture. We say to every man who challenges our admiration for his deeds, “Stop! worship touches the life of the worshiper. If your objects are nothings, expect nothing for them: if your motives are selfish, pay yourself for them. We will not make fools of ourselves: we will settle the account justly to you and honorably to us.”

  —WILLIAM ELDER, Biography of Elisha Kent Kane (1858)

  Later, different scenes from the boat journey would float back to each of them. So much work, so much pain; so little rest or food or hope. What happened when? What happened in fact, and what was only imagined, or misremembered? Erasmus made no diary entries, nor did Ned or the other men. Of the days when they were out on the ice, heaving against the harnesses and rowing through lanes of ice-choked water, or sleeping packed like a litter of piglets inside the canvas-covered boat, nothing remained but a blur of impressions.

  From their cove down the ice belt to Cape Sabine, then across the broken, heaving Sound to a point slightly north of Cape Hatherton: pack ice, water, old ice, hummocks, thin ice, pressure ridges. Always pulling, except for the wearying, exasperating times when their way was blocked by an open channel and they must unload everything, remove the boat from the sledge, ferry across, reload, and begin the whole process again. Their shoulders and hands were rubbed raw by the ropes, and Ivan would remember the acid burn of vomit on his lips; they all threw up, they were pulling too much weight. Near the leads the ice was covered with slush and often they sank above their knees. Sean would remember how his ankles ballooned, forcing him to slit his boots and finally cut them off entirely, so that he made the rest of the journey with his feet wrapped in caribou hides. Robert would remember his persistent, burning diarrhea, and the humiliation of soiling his pants when he strained against the weight of the sledge.

  Erasmus would pause one day after skidding helplessly on the ice, and then he’d think of the bit of boot sole sealed in his box and wonder why they hadn’t all thought to stud their boots similarly. In what seemed to him now like another life, his boots had shot him off the face of a cliff—and still he hadn’t learned. But it was too late now, they had no screws; they fell and stumbled and were relieved only once, when the ice field was smooth and the wind blew from the northwest. That day they set the sails and glided for eight miles: a great blessing, never repeated, which Barton would dream about for years.

  From a high point of land on the Greenland side of Smith Sound, Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau saw more ice south of them, but also, in the distance, an open channel between the land-fast ice and the pack ice slicing southward. Isaac, blinded by the snow, would not remember this sight, but the others would; and Thomas would remember his frantic rush, at night when he was already exhausted, to caulk the boat’s seams and repair the holes. And how anxious he’d felt when Erasmus told him they all depended on his ability to keep the boat together with no proper supplies.

  At the Littleton Islands the ice field thinned, abraded from beneath by the currents from a nearby river. Barton would remember inching forward the last few miles, sounding the ice with a boat hook at every step and eying the eddies gurgling just below his feet. And then breaking through, despite his precautions: one side of the sledge crashing under, the sickening lurch and the scramble to firmer ice. Ivan remembered that moment—always, always—because he’d been tied in closest to the sledge and, as his companions heaved, had lost his footing and been pulled into the wate
r, to bob briefly under the edge of the ice. By the time Erasmus pulled him out by the hair, he’d broken two fingers and seen blood pour from a gash in Erasmus’s forehead. In the ice-choked water Erasmus floundered, scrambling for the provision bags slithering out of the boat as the sea slithered over the sides. The copper pot containing the Franklin relics slipped out too, but the air beneath the walrus skin kept it floating low in the water and at first Erasmus thought he might retrieve it. Under the broken floe it sailed, the floe that had nearly claimed Ivan; and although Erasmus pressed his shoulder against the edge and swept with his arms and then a paddle, finally lowering his head beneath the ice, the pot disappeared. That night a hard wind blew from the northeast, nearly freezing the wet men to death.

  Erasmus would remember this because it was here that he lost the evidence of their search for Franklin’s remains, and also because, although he could never be sure, he suspected that here began the process of freezing and constriction and infection that would later cause him to lose his toes. He should have been resting, with his boots removed and his feet wrapped in dry furs. But instead, that night he and Captain Tyler, with whom he’d been arguing since they left the brig, stood screaming at each other in front of the men and nearly came to blows. Each blamed the other for the accident and the loss of the relics—as each had blamed the other for every wrong turn taken, bad camping site chosen, failure hunting—and Captain Tyler had slashed the air with a boathook and said, “I despise you.” A moment that Mr. Tagliabeau, never more than a few feet from his captain but less and less certain that his loyalty was justified, would also always remember. He’d longed to turn his back and say, “I despise you both,” but had said nothing; on this journey he learned that he was both a coward and a complainer.

  Not long after that accident, though, they stood on a high mound and saw a lane of open water spreading before them. With much effort they made their way to a rocky beach, and then unloaded the boat for the last time and sank it for a day to swell the seams. Not long enough, Thomas would remember thinking. The surf was beating against the cliffs; was it his fault the boat still leaked when it was finally, properly launched? They were ten men in a whaleboat made for six, with too much baggage. Trembling inches above the water they rowed, and felt like they were swimming. Under reefed sails, in a fresh breeze, they rounded Cape Alexander.

  Ned would remember the mock sun that appeared in the sky that evening; a perfect parhelion—Dr. Boerhaave had taught him that word—with a point of light on either side. But neither Ned nor anyone else would be haunted by the sight of Dr. Boerhaave’s head, which in the months since his drowning had been severed from his body by a passing grampus and then swept south in the currents, coming to rest face up on the rubble below a cliff. Among the rounded rocks his head was invisible to his friends, and the singing noise made by the wind passing over his jaw bones was lost in the roar of the waves.

  Sutherland Island, where they’d hoped to land, was barricaded by ice. They bobbed all night in irregular winds and a violent freezing rain, and Ned would remember this place for the weather and the onset of his fever, which caused this journey to be jumbled forever after in his mind with his two earlier crossings of Smith Sound. Eastward with Joe and Dr. Boerhaave and Zeke he’d gone; westward with only Zeke. He remembered that. Pushing like an animal against the harness, pulling the sledge sunk into the soft surface—those journeys, or this journey?

  Once the worst of the fever hit and he lay helpless among his companions, he repeated to himself the stories Joe had told him as they pulled another sledge, in another month. The stories that, once they reached Anoatok, Joe had translated for him around the fire. They’d lain on a platform inside the hut, mashed in a crowd of Esquimaux and sharing walrus steaks. Meat was piled along the ice belt and walrus skulls glared eyeless from the snowbanks. A mighty spirit called Tonarsuk, Joe had said, spearing a morsel from the soup pot. In whom these Esquimaux believe. And many minor supernatural beings, chief among them the goblins known as innersuit, who live among the fjords and have no noses. The innersuit hide behind the rocks, waiting to capture a passing man so they may cut off his nose and force him to join their tribe. Should the victim escape their clutches, his nose may be returned to him by the intercession of a skillful wizard, or angekok. The nose may come back, Joe had said; he’d been translating Ootuniah’s words for Ned and Dr. Boerhaave, as they steamed companionably in the hut. The nose may come flying through the sky, and settle down in its former place; but the man once captured by the innersuit will always be known by the scar across his face.

  Ned’s fever, or frostbite, or something putrid he ate, had caused his own nose to erupt in pustules that leaked yellow fluid and then crusted over and cracked and bled. He would remember dreading his whole nose might disappear. And then thinking it should disappear—along with his face, his entire body: Who was to blame for all this, if not him? He had lied to Erasmus; he’d made those fur suits and shifted supplies like a thief; he’d planned this trip and organized the men. On Boothia, he’d pointed out the copper kettles that had set everything else in motion; on his earlier crossing of the Sound, he’d failed to save Dr. Boerhaave. As they passed fjords and glaciers he heard singing—not Dr. Boerhaave, but someone else—and begged the man against whose knee he was pressed to guard him from the goblins. The innersuit cause much trouble, Ootuniah had said. They plague many a journey. Weeping with guilt and fear, his hands cupped over his nose, Ned remembered his grandmother’s tales back in Ireland. Malicious spirits who made porridge burn, toast fall buttered side down, cows lose their calves. Perhaps it was the innersuit who’d haunted this journey and brought the fickle, difficult weather.

  Perhaps, he told Erasmus one night—perhaps it was the innersuit who were to blame for their bad luck. They pushed through half-solid water, around icebergs and currents of drift ice. One night they anchored in a crack as a gale struck from the northwest, watching helplessly as a floe on the far side of the channel broke off, spun on an iceberg like a pivot, and closed upon their resting place. When it hit the corner of their small dock the floe shattered, their haven shattered, everything around them rose and crushed and tumbled. The boat was tossed like a walnut shell into a boiling slurry of crushed ice and water, and Robert would remember this more sharply than the other accidents, because it was here that he dislocated his shoulder. Captain Tyler held him down while Erasmus torqued his arm back into place, and Robert would remember being amazed, even through the blinding pain, that the pair had worked in concert.

  On Hakluyt Island they found birds, but failed to shoot any. A seal they shot near an iceberg sank before they could retrieve it. They ran out of food, for a week eating only a few ounces of bread dust and pemmican each day with all of them feverish, all of them weak, and Ned muttered that perhaps the innersuit had stolen Joe from them, and tipped Dr. Boerhaave into the water. Erasmus would remember this comment and how sharply it pained him. Despite his worry for Ned, and for the others who didn’t understand how weak they’d grown but were each day less capable, still the mention of Dr. Boerhaave could make his mind freeze up. He never thought about Zeke, the thought was impossible; he hardly thought about what was happening to his feet, although they were oozing and stinking and numb; he focused on getting them all through each day, pushing forward and cooking and eating and resting and pushing again, putting the miles behind them. But when Ned muttered about goblins and Dr. Boerhaave, Erasmus had to fight to keep his concentration.

  Northumberland Island, Whale Sound, Cape Parry. The sea was covered with drifting pack ice, which poured from Whale Sound in a constant stream. At night thin ice formed in the open patches, and Erasmus would remember the panic this caused him. If they were caught here they would never survive; and Ned would be the first to go. Ned was delirious, and when Robert and Ivan shot a heap of dovekies, Ned sat upright, his nose a bloody, eroded mass, and babbled. Something about a great hunt: he and Joe and Dr. Boerhaave joining the Esquimaux on the cliffs where the
dovekies were breeding. Sweeping the birds from the air with nets at the end of long narwhal tusks; thousands caught as easily as one might pick peas and the bodies boiling in huge soapstone pots, the children sucking on bird skins and tearing raw birds limb from limb, their faces buried in feathers and blood smeared over their cheeks. But Ned wouldn’t eat these other birds, he couldn’t bear to bring food near his nose. He said names, only some of which Erasmus knew—Awahtok, Metek, Ootuniah; Myouk, Egurk, Nualik, Nessark—and later, when those names and the people behind them would return to haunt Erasmus, he’d remember envying Ned all he’d seen on that trip, and wishing yet again that he’d been present: Dr. Boerhaave might still be alive.

  Erasmus both heard and didn’t hear Ned as he forced the boat farther south. Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau contradicted his every order, more and more confident as they passed Hoppner Point and Granville Bay and it began to seem that, if they could just beat the final freezing-in, they might actually reach the whaling grounds. They were racing, racing, the temperature dropping each day and the new ice forming, the pack consolidating, the narrow channel closing: yet despite the urgency Captain Tyler argued over every tack and turn. These were his waters, Erasmus would remember him saying; they were in his country now and Erasmus must cede command to him. Here he knew what was best for the expedition.

  Erasmus had unlaced his boots that morning, unable to resist confirming by eye what he could already feel; eight of his toes were black and dead. In Dr. Boerhaave’s medicine chest were amputating knives, still sharp and gleaming, but it was impossible that he should use them on himself. It was also now impossible that he should walk any distance if the ice closed around them, but no one knew that yet. Or maybe Captain Tyler did know; he seemed to sense Erasmus’s growing weakness.