Voyage of the Narwhal

by Andrea Barrett

  “I did,” Erasmus said. “But I wasn’t aware you’d acquired these.” He searched the shelves, peering at the labels. “Weren’t there some Esquimaux skulls?”

  “Those were only loaned to Dr. Morton, by a friend,” the young man said. “The collection really isn’t complete without them and it’s too bad his friend took them back. If we could acquire even one or two specimens . . .” He paused. “You didn’t happen to collect any? That you’d consider donating?”

  Erasmus shook his head and the young men disappeared. Without a word Erasmus hobbled back to the herbarium, turned from Toodlamik, and went to work.

  They spent the day making notes and comparing one sheet to another, all the sheets to what Erasmus remembered. Alexandra fetched and carried, making encouraging comments and diverting Erasmus’s attention from the strangers who appeared at the doorway, gazed curiously at them, and then disappeared. This was his place, she thought. He had as much right to be here as any naturalist in Philadelphia, and she was proud of the way he kept his attention on his task. If people were staring at him, and whispering in the hallways—they’d stare at her too, if they knew of the work she’d done on Dr. Kane’s book. The quarrel between them seemed to have vanished, and as they worked in the shadows of Dr. Kane’s dog she felt very close to him. At the end of the day, when although she hadn’t glimpsed the thallophytes she thanked him for accompanying her, he said, “It is I who thank you.”

  FOR A FEW weeks, Erasmus’s dreams were haunted by Toodlamik—bones and body, eyes and sockets, versions of the living and the dead. Then letters arrived, which chased the dogs away. Captain Tyler’s family wrote, wanting to know what had happened to the balance of his salary. This Erasmus forwarded to Zeke’s father. After that, Copernicus’s letter limped in stained and travel-worn:

  Humboldt’s message finally reached me. Do you know how glad I am to have you back? I can’t wait to tell you everything. At the Canyon de Chelly I saw the Anasazi ruins. Hopi villages, pueblo kivas; I’ve been all over California. In the Salinas Valley, not far from Soledad, I painted in a place that was scorched by the sun. About the time you were beating through the ice in your little boat, I was toiling along on a mule, in temperatures over 110 degrees. We’ll have a lot to talk about, won’t we? I can’t wait to see you, am heading home immediately, hope you are recovering. Humboldt says there’s been some trouble but whatever it is hold on, I’ll be there soon. I am bringing you some seeds.

  The next day a letter came from Thomas Cholmondelay, Dr. Boerhaave’s friend in London, expressing his appreciation for the packet Erasmus had sent. A portion was eerily out of date; he wrote about seeing Dr. Kane in London—your fellow arctic traveler—how much he’d been celebrated, how sad Lady Franklin and everyone else had been when Kane departed and how worried they all were about his health. On the heels of that, a letter arrived from William Greenstone in Edinburgh:

  How can I thank you for forwarding Jan’s last letters to me, despite your own difficulties? He was lucky to have you as his friend, and all of us who knew Jan are grateful to you and wish you a speedy recovery from your injuries. It was Jan’s great wish to make another voyage north and I’m glad he saw so much before his terrible accident.

  I think of him often—not just among our familiar Edinburgh places but whenever I hear any interesting news. Among our literary and scientific men, as I imagine among yours, there is much discussion of Mr. Wallace’s “Sarawak Law” regarding the succession of species. Wallace remains in Borneo, but Lyell, Darwin, Hooker and others are in a flurry over Wallace’s insights into animal distribution. There can no longer be much question, I think, of varieties representing separate, special acts of Creation—though I know Jan, influenced by Agassiz, leaned toward that view. I’d give a great deal to be able to argue with him over this. Meanwhile I thank you again for this gift of his words and also, belatedly, for your description of the Greenland meteorite.

  He called him “Jan,” Erasmus thought, looking from the letter to his friend’s notebook. To each other they’d been Jan and William. Whereas he—despite all they’d shared together, they’d parted as Dr. Boerhaave and Mr. Wells.

  ON MARCH 14, Erasmus and Alexandra stood at the three tall windows of her family home: Emily with them on the left; Browning and Harriet and their new daughter, Miriam, in the center; Jane and little Nicholas on the right, gazing from the second floor down onto Walnut Street. There were neighbors below them, strangers above them, more strangers up on the roof—Browning had rented out these viewing spots for a fee—but everyone was silent and the street itself was empty. Erasmus could hear the drums, but the procession hadn’t yet come into sight. A light rain, falling all morning, had soaked the crepe hanging from the balconies of every house; in windows people huddled against the wind while on the rooftops black umbrellas sprouted.

  The street looked like an endless dark tunnel. And beyond it, Erasmus knew, the entire route was similarly shrouded. He was cold and his toes hurt, or the place where his toes would have been. Behind him, on a small cherry table, a stack of newspapers detailed the journey of Dr. Kane’s body across America. In his imagination Erasmus saw all the routes preceding this final one, spreading like a jet-black labyrinth across the country.

  From Havana, where Kane had died, to New Orleans by packet boat; the casket had lain in state in City Hall. For a week, while a steamboat conveyed the casket up the Mississippi and the Ohio to Louisville, people had stood on levees and wharves to watch Kane pass. In Louisville Kane’s arrival had been announced by the tolling of bells and the firing of guns; more formal ceremonies, another procession; a lying-in at Mozart Hall. Halfway to Cincinnati the steamboat was met by another boat, crowded with memorial-committee members wearing mourner’s badges. In Cincinnati the procession had wound from the wharf to the railway station; at Xenia people had swarmed the tracks, delaying the train’s slow progress; all throughout that afternoon and night, crowds had waited silently at every stop. At Columbus Kane’s body lay in the capitol building, silent focus of more long speeches. In the smaller cities of Ohio and West Virginia, where the casket remained on the train, people had gathered at railway stations while more bells tolled. In Baltimore there had been huge crowds and the grandest procession until today’s.

  On Monday the funeral car had arrived in Philadelphia, where it was met by a guard of honor: city police, an artillery company, and a dozen memorial committees from various civic groups, none of which had included Erasmus. The hearse had been accompanied by eight of Kane’s companions, who’d spread the flag of the lost Advance over her commander’s coffin and then, at Independence Hall, added Kane’s ceremonial sword and a mound of flowers. Until this morning, people had streamed through the hall to pay their respects. Now, at last, the procession was coming into sight.

  Policemen, more policemen, then the companies of the First Brigade and, flanking the hearse itself, the Philadelphia City Calvary. The sight of the horsemen so excited young Nicholas that he wriggled halfway out the open sash and had to be pulled back and scolded by his aunt. The funeral car, Erasmus saw, was marked at the corners by golden spears bearing flags. Above the casket a black domed canopy kept off the rain; the silk ribbons that stretched to the spears drooped and the horses shone with moisture. Emily said, “There’s that horrid father of his,” but Browning murmured, “Not today.”

  The drums beat, the car moved slowly, waves of people marched. Erasmus crumpled the newspaper’s guide to the procession in his hand. Almost every Philadelphian of distinction had been invited, from Kane’s companions to the mayor and the aldermen, the members of the Philosophical Society, the medical faculty and students of the University of Pennsylvania, the Odd Fellows, the Fire Department and more, so many more.

  “The Corn Exchange?” Browning said. “Why would they ask the members of the Corn Exchange?”

  Erasmus had no answer. In all this great crowd, he thought, no place had been made for him. Nor for any of his companions: none of the living and
nothing to honor the memory of the dead. At least the Toxophilites, he’d heard, honored Zeke at each monthly meeting.

  Alexandra pressed his arm and he reached over and squeezed her hand gratefully. She was all he had to lean on; his brothers were comforting Lavinia, who’d refused to leave the house since Kane’s body entered the city. Her presence at the procession, she’d said, would be an act of disloyalty to Zeke.

  As if she knew what Erasmus was thinking, Alexandra said, “I’m sure it was only a wish to protect your health that kept the committee from asking you to join them. For you to walk so far, in this weather and with such a crowd . . .”

  Erasmus looked down at his cunning shoes. “I manage very well with the walking sticks,” he said. “As you know.”

  The funeral car was almost out of sight; below him were the members of the Hibernian Society and the St. Andrews and Scots Thistle Societies. They would pass for hours, he thought. At the church the procession would march past the casket, set up on a bier on the stone steps, and then all who could would crowd inside to hear the service. Words and words about Kane’s goodness and glory and skills. As if Kane had not also lost a ship; as if his voyage had not also been marked by strife and rebellion. Someone, he noted from the program, would sing a Mozart anthem. One prominent minister would give an invocation and another the eulogy, which would be printed in the paper tomorrow but which Erasmus could already hear:

  “We are assembled, my friends, to perform such comely though sad duties in honor of a man who, within the short lifetime of thirty-five years, under the combined impulses of humanity and science, has traversed nearly the whole of the planet in its most inaccessible places. . . . Death discloses the human estimate of character. That mournful pageant which for days past has been wending its way hither, across the solemn main, along our mighty rivers, through cities clad in habiliments of grief, with the learned, the noble, and the good mingling in its train, is but the honest tribute of hearts that could have no motive but respect and love.”

  More prayers, more singing; a dirge and then a benediction. The arctic coastline Dr. Kane had explored and named, the ice he’d fought and the Esquimaux he’d discovered; the dark winters of his entrapment and the heroic journey by which he’d brought most of his men to safety—all of this was admirable and yet why should it have eclipsed Erasmus’s own journey? He’d brought men home himself, he had done what he could, he had tried . . . he pulled his hand from Alexandra’s.

  “Lavinia was right to stay home,” he said. “I can’t bear to watch any more.”

  He withdrew from the window, moving cautiously to the davenport. In the damp lines of his palms he found the visions he’d been fending off since his return: Zeke dying, Zeke dead, all alone in that vast white space. Death coming violent or quiet or both—a bear, a slipped razor, a fall through the ice; tumbling iceberg or slow starvation; fury or resignation. He heard the ice cracking beneath Zeke’s feet; he saw Zeke searching for a hand to grab, a line to grasp, where there was nothing but a field of fractured floes. Then Zeke looking up into the sky and sinking, his arms at his side. Above there was no one to rescue him, no one even to watch. Just a fulmar, perched on a walrus’s skull and regarding the bubbles of his last breaths and the skin of ice beginning to seal the hole.

  Against this great mourning for Kane stood Zeke’s unwitnessed final days. I should have been there, Erasmus thought. Somehow, I should have been with him.

  9

  A BIG STONE SLIPPED FROM HIS GRASP

  (APRIL–AUGUST 1857)

  If a person asked my advice, before undertaking a long voyage, my answer would depend upon his possessing a decided taste for some branch of knowledge, which could by this means be advanced. No doubt it is a high satisfaction to behold various countries and the many races of mankind, but the pleasures gained at the time do not counterbalance the evils. It is necessary to look forward to a harvest, however distant that may be, when some fruit will be reaped, some good effected. Many of the losses which must be experienced are obvious; such as that of the society of every old friend, and of the sight of those places with which every dearest remembrance is so intimately connected. These losses, however, are at the time partly relieved by the exhaustless delight of anticipating the long wished-for day of return. . . .

  Of individual objects, perhaps nothing is more certain to create astonishment than the first sight in his native haunt of a barbarian—of man in his lowest and most savage state. One’s mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks—could our progenitors have been men like these?—men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men, who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason. . . . In conclusion, it appears to me that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in distant countries. It both sharpens, and partly allays that want and craving which, as Sir J. Herschel remarks, a man experiences although every corporeal sense be fully satisfied.

  —CHARLES DARWIN, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839)

  Ruddy and bearded and long-haired, Copernicus swept into the Repository and threw his arms around his brother, squeezing so tightly he lifted Erasmus from his shoes.

  “Oh, be careful!” Alexandra cried.

  Copernicus shot her a startled glance, then followed her gaze to his brother’s feet. Quickly he lowered Erasmus into a chair.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I’m so glad to see you!” He bent and grasped Erasmus’s right ankle, then ran his hand along the foot: tarsals, metatarsals—but most of the phalanges gone. “Do they hurt?”

  “No,” Erasmus said, smiling in a way Alexandra had forgotten. “Say hello to Alexandra Copeland.”

  “Humboldt wrote me about you,” Copernicus said. “What a help you’ve been with Lavinia, and what a good friend to our family. I’m delighted to meet you.” As if, Alexandra thought, he’d forgotten all the times they’d met when she and Lavinia were girls. He clasped her hand and then spun around and said, “But where’s Lavinia? I’m longing to see her.”

  “Let me go fetch her,” Alexandra said, hoping Lavinia was up and dressed.

  Later, as Copernicus unpacked the crates piled along the garden paths, she would see his paintings: Pikes Peak and the Grand Tetons and the Rocky Mountains; the Great Salt Lake, where the breeze had blown his floating body about as if he were a sailboat; alkali deserts and the Humboldt Mountains; the Yosemite Valley and El Capitan and the Indians he’d met in each place. Astonishing paintings, flooded with light and dazzling color. But for the moment she saw only the smile on Erasmus’s face, and the possibility of Lavinia similarly transformed.

  HAVING COPERNICUS HOME was a comfort, Lavinia confided to Alexandra. After all he was her favorite brother. She began to plan the household meals again: roast lamb with herbs and carrots, chicken bathed in cream. Nothing but Copernicus’s favorites, she said. He’d been away so long. When her work was done, she and Alexandra sometimes joined the brothers as they sat exchanging stories of their adventures.

  Each of Copernicus’s paintings had a tale behind it, and a trail that could be followed through his sketchbook. A sort of visual diary, Alexandra saw, during those warm lazy afternoons. Fort Wallah Wallah on one page and a herd of buffalo on another; a group of men drying and pounding buffalo meat for pemmican. Delaware and Shawnee and Osage Indians; Kickapoos, Witchetaws, Wacos. Mormons. The black-tailed deer of the Rocky Mountains. Thousands of sketches and just a few words of description, the obverse of Erasmus’s journal.

  In turn Erasmus offered his own pages, Dr. Boerhaave’s papers, and the long letter he’d written to Copernicus during the voyage. The papers cast shadows, Alexandra saw. Sometimes Erasmus would have to retire abruptly, leaving Copernicus alone. Sometimes, when she came down to breakfast, Erasmus would look as if he hadn’t slept and later, in the Repository, he’d admit that all this talking brought him nightmares. Zeke haunt
ed his dreams, he said. In the ice, nailed to the frozen ship, was a list of the dead in the shape of a headstone that he saw again and again. Still, the more the brothers talked, the more excited Erasmus grew. Copernicus showed Erasmus a sketch of the footwear that had protected him during a winter crossing of the Rockies: buffalo-skin boots over buckskin moccasins over thick squares of blanket over woolen socks. Erasmus showed Copernicus the tattered fur suit Ned had made for him and said, “I might write a book.”

  It would not be, as Dr. Kane’s effort had been, an adventure tale built from transcribed journal entries, but neither would it be a simple description of the arctic. Rather, Erasmus said, the narrative would pull his readers along on a journey, as an imaginary ship moved from place to place and through the seasons. On the flagstone patio beyond the solarium, he described a sequence of verbal portraits, a natural history that caught each place at a particular time of the year. He wouldn’t be in the story, Erasmus said. He’d be erased, he’d be invisible. It would be as if readers gazed at a series of detailed landscape paintings. As if they were making the journey themselves, but without discomfort or discord.

  “Why not include some color plates?” Copernicus said. “I could do the paintings myself.” From Erasmus’s sketches and descriptions, and his own knowledge of glaciers and light—what if he were to make a series of paintings introducing the sections? Each could combine all the important features of one region, all the representative animals and plants—imaginary, and yet a portrait truer than simple fact.

  Erasmus reached into his pocket and pulled out a withered slab of leather wrapped in a handkerchief. He unfolded the cloth. “Paintings like this?” he said. “That stand for a whole set of things?”