Voyage of the Narwhal

by Andrea Barrett

  Later he’d think of this as the first moment he saw himself back in the arctic. Not a dark dream, like those he’d had during his first days home, but a bright waking vision: the muddy Schuylkill turned into a glacial stream; the ducks turned into murres and dovekies; the limp, moist foliage dwarfed into a crisp tangle of willows. Beside him Alexandra, who’d had only his stories from which to build her vision, dreamed in less detail. But she imagined a ship passing through dense ice, both of them scouting a route from the bow as the floes glided past.

  10

  SPECIMENS OF THE NATIVE TRIBES

  (SEPTEMBER 1857)

  Miserable, yet happy wretches, without one thought for the future, fighting against care when it comes unbidden, and enjoying to the full their scanty measures of present good! As a beast, the Esquimaux is a most sensible beast, worth a thousand Calibans, and certainly ahead of his cousin the Polar bear, from whom he borrows his pantaloons.

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

  Here in the theater’s gallery, near the prostitutes scattered like iridescent fish through the shoals of dark-clothed men, Alexandra felt drab in her brown silk dress. Two seats down from her, a woman in a chartreuse gown with lemon-trimmed flounces was striking a deal with a pleasant-looking man. They would meet on the landing, Alexandra heard them agree. Directly after the lecture. The man’s voice dropped and the woman shook her head, shivering the egret feathers woven into her hair. “Twenty dollars,” she said. The man nodded and disappeared, leaving Alexandra to marvel at the transaction.

  “There must be a thousand people,” Erasmus said, scanning the crowd. “Maybe more.”

  “It’s frightening,” she said. “How good Zeke is at promoting himself.”

  All around the city, on lampposts and tavern doors, in merchants’ windows and omnibuses, posters advertised the exhibition. A clumsy woodcut showed Zeke holding a harpoon and Annie a string of fish, Tom peeping out from behind her flared boots. In the background were mountains cut by a fjord, and above those a banner headline: MY LIFE AMONG THE ESQUIMAUX. A caption touted the remarkable discoveries made by Zechariah Voorhees:

  TWO FINE SPECIMENS OF THE NATIVE TRIBES!

  MORE EXOTIC THAN THE SIOUX AND FOX INDIANS EXHIBITED BY GEORGE CATLIN IN LONDON AND PARIS!

  SEE THE ESQUIMAUX DEMONSTRATE THEIR CUSTOMS!

  Zeke had run a smaller version in the newspaper and mailed invitations to hundreds of his family’s friends and business associates—organizing this first exhibition, Alexandra thought, like a military campaign. Ahead of him lay Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, New York, Providence, Albany, Boston.

  Erasmus said, “Can you see Lavinia?” and Alexandra, scouting the boxes on the second tier, finally spotted her dead center, flanked by Linnaeus and Humboldt and Zeke’s parents and sisters. She was touching her hair then her cheek then her brooch then her nose, turning her head from side to side as if the mood of the entire audience were expressing itself through her. Everyone, Alexandra thought, made nervous by this month’s chain of disasters. Across the ocean, off the coast of Ireland, the telegraph cable being laid with such fanfare had broken. Two trains had crashed south of Philadelphia, killing several passengers; last week a steamship on its way to New York from Cuba had sunk. Each of these seemed to heighten the financial panic set off by a bank failure in Ohio. Banks were closing everywhere; the stock exchange was in an uproar. The papers were full of news about bankrupt merchants and brokers. Alexandra’s own family, who had no money to lose, hadn’t been touched so far, and the engraving firm seemed stable. But Erasmus, whose income came primarily from his father’s investments, had suffered some losses. And Zeke’s father’s firm was in trouble, which suddenly made Zeke’s future—and Lavinia’s as well—uncertain. Suddenly it mattered what Zeke charged for the exhibition tickets, and how many tickets were sold. The theater was full of people desperate for distraction.

  In the glow of the gaslights Zeke strode out in full Esquimaux regalia, adjusted the position of two large crates, and took his place at the podium. The roar of applause was startling, as was the ease with which he spoke. If he had notes, Alexandra couldn’t see them. Swiftly, eloquently, he sketched for the audience an outline of the voyage of the Narwhal, making of the confused first months a spare, dramatic narrative.

  Their first sights of Melville Bay and Lancaster Sound, their encounters with the Netsilik and their retrieval of the Franklin relics; the discovery of the Resolute and their stormy passage up Ellesmere until they were frozen in; their long winter and the visit of Ootuniah and his companions; the first trip to Anoatok. No mention, Alexandra noticed, of Dr. Boerhaave’s death, nor of the other men who’d died: nor of Erasmus. It was “I” all the time, “I” and “me” and “mine”; occasionally “we” or “my men.” No names, only him. Beside her, Erasmus fidgeted.

  Twenty minutes, she guessed. Twenty minutes for the part of the voyage involving the crew; then another fifteen for Zeke’s solo trip north on foot and his return to the empty ship. “Now,” Zeke was saying, “now began the most interesting part of my experience in the arctic. I was all alone, and winter was coming. I had to prepare myself.”

  From the crates he began to pull things. His hunting rifle, sealskins, a tin of ship’s biscuit, a jar of dried peas. His black notebook, the sight of which made Erasmus groan. Into his talk he wove some stray lines from that, and then read aloud the section about the arrival of Annie and Nessark and Marumah. “The angekok is the tribe’s general counselor and advisor,” he explained. “As well as its wizard. His chief job is to determine the reason for any misfortune visiting the tribe—and the angekok of Annie’s tribe determined that the cause of their children’s sickness was me. So was my life changed by a superstition. From the day these people arrived I entered into a new life.”

  He described the journey to Anoatok and his first days there. Then he said, “But you must meet some of the people among whom I stayed.” He stepped back from the podium and whistled.

  There was rattling backstage, and the crack of a whip. Two dogs appeared—not his huge black hunting dogs but beagles, ludicrous in their harnesses, gamely trotting side by side. Apparently Zeke would not subject his own pets to this. Behind them they pulled a small sledge on wheels, with Tom crouched on the crossbars and Annie grasping the uprights and waving a little whip. Both Annie and Tom wore fur jackets with the hoods pulled up and shadowing their faces. When the sledge reached the front of the podium, Zeke gave a sharp command that stopped the beagles. They sat, drooling eagerly as Zeke held out bits of biscuit, and then lay down in their traces with their chins on their paws. Their eyes followed Zeke as he moved around the stage, but Annie and Tom stared straight out at the audience, shielding their eyes against the glare.

  “These are two of the people who rescued me,” Zeke said. “The names they use among us are Annie and Tom.”

  While they stood still he recited some facts. Annie and Tom belonged to the group of people John Ross had discovered in 1818 and called Arctic Highlanders—there were just a few hundred of them, he said, scattered from Cape York to Etah. Fewer each year; their lives were hard and their children sickened; he feared they were dying out. They moved nomadically throughout the seasons, among clusters of huts a day’s journey apart and near good hunting sites. All food was shared among them, as if they were one large family. Because no driftwood reached their isolated shores, they had no bows and arrows, nor kayaks, and in this they differed from the Esquimaux of Boothia and southern Greenland. They’d developed their own ways, substituting bone for wood—bone harpoon shafts and sledge parts and tent poles. “A true sledge,” Zeke said, “would have bone crosspieces lashed to the runners with thongs, and ivory strips fastened to the runners.” He went on to explain how they subsisted largely on animals from the sea.

  “The term ‘Esquimaux’ is French and means ‘raw meat eaters,’” Zeke said. “But there�
�s nothing disgusting in this, the body in that violent climate craves blood and the juices of uncooked food.” From the nearest crate he took a paper bundle, which he unwrapped to reveal a Delaware shad. A few strokes of a knife yielded three small squares of flesh. Two he held out to Annie and Tom, keeping the third for himself. The beagles whined. Zeke popped the flesh in his mouth and chewed, while Annie and Tom did the same on either side of him. The audience gasped, and Alexandra could see this pleased Zeke enormously.

  “With the help of my two friends,” he said, “I would like to demonstrate for you some of the elements of daily life among these remarkable people.”

  Now Alexandra saw the bulk of what the crates contained. Certainly he hadn’t carried all these objects home with him; he must have made some here, with Annie’s help and whatever supplies he could find. There was a long-handled net, which Tom seized and carried to the top of one crate. He made darting and swooping motions as Zeke described capturing dovekies. “These arrive by the million,” Zeke said. “When the hunter’s net is full, he kills each bird by pressing its chest with his fingers, until the heart stops.”

  A soapstone lamp—where had this come from?—with a wick made from moss; Zeke filled it with whale oil and had Annie light it with a sliver of wood he first lit with a match, telling the audience they must imagine lumps of blubber slowly melting. In the huts, he said, with these lamps giving off heat and light, with food cooking and wet clothes drying and children frolicking, it had been warm no matter what the outside temperature. He brought out more hides and had Annie demonstrate how the women of her tribe scraped off the inner layers to make the hides pliable. “This crescent-shaped knife is an ulo,” he said, and Annie sat on her knees with her feet tucked beneath her thighs and the skin spread before her, rubbing it with the blade. Beside Alexandra, Erasmus pressed both hands to his ribs.

  “Are you all right?” she said. She couldn’t take her eyes from the stage.

  “That’s exactly the way I soften a dried skin before I mount it,” Erasmus said. “I have a drawshave I use like her ulo.”

  Zeke said, “The women chew every inch after it’s dried, to make it soft,” and Annie put a bit of the hide in her mouth and ground her teeth. “I can’t show you the threads, which are made from sinews,” he said. “But the needles are kept in these charming cases.” Annie held up an ivory cylinder, through which passed a bit of hide bristling with needles.

  Zeke took Tom’s hand and seized a pair of harpoons; then he and Tom lay down and pretended to be inching up on a seal’s blowhole, waiting for the seal to surface. As they mimicked the strike Zeke spoke loudly, a flow of vivid words that had the crowd leaning forward. They were seeing what Zeke wanted them to see, Alexandra thought. Not what was really there: not a rickety makeshift sledge, two floppy-eared beagles, a tired woman and a nervous boy moved like mannequins by the force of Zeke’s voice. Not them, or a man needing to make a living, but the arctic in all its mystery: unknown landscapes and animals and another race of people.

  Her face was wet; was she weeping? As Zeke’s antics continued Alexandra found herself thinking of her parents and the last day she’d seen them. Pulling away from the ferry dock, waving good-bye, sure they’d be reunited in a week. Then the noise, the terrible shocking noise. Great plumes of steam and smoke and cinders spinning down to the water—and her parents, everyone, gone. Simply gone.

  She turned to Erasmus, who had his face in his hands. Gently she touched him and said, “You have to look.”

  He raised his head for a second but then returned his gaze to his shoes. “I won’t,” he said passionately. “I hate this. All my life the thing I’ve hated most is being looked at. I can’t bear it when people stare at me. I know just how she feels, all of us peering down at her. It’s disgusting. It’s worse than disgusting. People stared at me like this when I returned from the Exploring Expedition, and again when I came back without Zeke. Now we’re doing the same thing to her.”

  Had she known this about him? She looked away from him, back at the stage; she felt a shameful pleasure, herself, in regarding Annie and Tom. She longed to draw them.

  Annie had pushed her hood back from her sweating face, while Tom had stretched out on the sledge and was pulling at one of the beagle’s ears. From his crate Zeke took a wooden figure clothed in a miniature jacket and pants. “The children play with dolls,” Zeke said. “Just as ours do.” Tom released the beagle’s ear, seizing the doll and pressing it to his chest. Then Zeke was winding string around Annie’s fingers, saying, “Among this tribe, a favorite game with the women and children is called ajarorpok, which is much like our child’s game of cat’s cradle, only more complicated.”

  He said something to Annie and stepped away. Annie’s hands darted like birds and paused, holding up a shapely web. “This represents a caribou,” Zeke said.

  Alexandra tried to see a creature in the loops and whorls, not knowing that, for Annie, it was as if the stage had suddenly filled with beautiful animals. Not knowing that for Annie this evening moved as if the angekok who’d brought Zeke to them had bewitched her, putting her into a trance in which she both was and was not on this stage. The angekok had shared with her the secret fire that let him see in the dark, to the heart of things. For her Zeke’s bird net wasn’t a broomstick and knotted cotton but a narwhal’s tusk and plaited sinews; on her fingers she felt the fat she’d scraped from the seal. She was home, and she was also here, doing what she’d been told in a dream to do.

  She was to watch these people, ranged in tiers above her, and commit them to memory, so that she could bring a vision of them to her people back home. Their pointed faces and bird-colored garments; the way they gathered in great crowds but didn’t touch each other or share their food. Their tools, their cooking implements, their huts that couldn’t be moved when the weather changed. In a dream she’d heard her mother’s voice, singing the song that had risen from her tribe’s first sight of the white men.

  Her mother had been a small girl on the summer day when floating islands with white wings had appeared by the narrow edge of ice off Cape York. From the islands hung little boats, which were lowered to the water; these spat out sickly men in blue garments, who couldn’t make themselves understood but who offered bits of something that looked like ice, which held the image of human faces; round dry tasteless things to eat; parts of their garments, which weren’t made of skins.

  “At first,” her mother had said, “we thought the spirits of the air had come to us.” On the floating island her mother had seen a fat, pink, hairless animal, a man with eyes concealed behind ovals of unmelting ice, bulky objects on which to sit, something like a frozen arm, with which to hit something like a needle. The two men who’d stepped first on the ice had worn hats shaped like cooking pots. Through them, her people had learned they weren’t alone in the world.

  Much later, when Annie was grown, she’d had her mother’s experience to guide her when the other strangers arrived. Kane and his men had taught Annie to understand their ungainly speech, and Annie had learned that the world was larger than she’d understood, though much of it was unfortunate, even cursed. Elsewhere, these visitors said, were lands with no seals, no walrus, no bears; no sheets of colored light singing across the sky. She couldn’t understand how these people survived. They’d been like children, dependent on her tribe for clothes, food, sledges, dogs; surrounded by things which were of no use to them and bereft of women. Like children they gave their names to the landscape, pretending to discover places her people had known for generations.

  From them she’d gained words for the visions of her mother’s childhood: a country called England and another called America; men called officers; ships, sails, mirrors, biscuits, cloth, pig, eyeglasses, chair. Wood, which came from a giant version of the tiny shrubs they knew. Hammer and nails. Later she’d added the words Zeke had taught her while he lived with them; then the names for the vast array of unfamiliar things she’d encountered here. In the dream her mot
her had given her this task: to look closely at all around her, and to remember everything. To do this while guarding her son.

  Her hands darted and formed another shape, which Zeke claimed represented ponds amid hills but in which she saw her home. She felt the warm liver of the freshly killed seal, she tasted sweet blood in her mouth. In the gaslights she saw the moon and the sun, brother and sister who’d quarreled and now chased each other across the sky. At first her mother had thought the strangers must come from these sources of light. Her hands flew in the air.

  “Can you see what she’s doing?” Alexandra whispered to Erasmus. “I can’t see what she’s making.”

  “I have to go,” Erasmus said. “We have to go. Can we go?”

  HE HADN’T EXPECTED the exhibition to pain him so much. Back at Linnaeus’s house, Lucy said, “Well, of course I wish he’d mentioned you. But still it was interesting, wasn’t it? You should have stayed until the end, he had Annie and Tom sing some Esquimaux songs. The way she ate the raw fish . . .” Lucy shuddered, yet she was smiling.

  “She’s sick,” Erasmus said. “She’s miserable. Zeke has no right to show her off like that, like a trained bear . . .”

  “It was the stage lights that were making her perspire,” Linnaeus said. “And I think he does Annie’s people a service, as well as himself. The more people see what Esquimaux life is like, the more they’ll respect their ways. How can that be anything but good for her and her tribe?”

  Erasmus retreated to his stuffy room, where he tossed and turned and dreamed about the copper kettle packed with relics, which had slipped beneath the ice. In his dream the prayer book and the treatise on steam engines, the silver cutlery and the mahogany barometer case had all sprouted eyes and were staring at him; the kettle was staring; the walrus skin sealing the top was staring. Annie, across that crowded space, was staring directly into his eyes, as Lavinia had stared when she was a girl of ten and he’d left, bereft and barely aware of her, to join his first expedition.