Voyage of the Narwhal

by Andrea Barrett

  Erasmus wrote the firm in New London, letting the captain know he’d need only two berths; while he waited for his sailing date he packed and made lists and mused over Copernicus’s advice. Carl Linnaeus, their father had said, proposed a separate species of man, possessed of a tail and inhabiting the antarctic regions. Erasmus had seen for himself that no one, tailless or otherwise, lived near the South Pole. Beyond the north wind live the Hyperboreans. Those he’d seen, but hadn’t seen clearly. He felt, still, that he’d been right to leave himself out of the story; he was a minor character after all. Not just in Zeke’s story, but in the stories of Ned and Annie and Tom, even Copernicus and Alexandra—he was only the wave that rocked the boat. Yet he’d omitted from his book not just himself, but the Esquimaux.

  Observing people wasn’t his business; even on the Exploring Expedition, the work of the linguists and anthropologists had made him uneasy. Instead he’d cultivated a kind of reserve. He had not, like Zeke, invaded an Esquimaux tribe; he hadn’t, as had his dear Dr. Boerhaave, tried to record their way of life before it vanished. Thinking himself virtuous, he’d averted his eyes and studied the plants and animals instead.

  But perhaps he’d simply been afraid? As if, by not passing judgment on the people he saw, he’d hoped to avoid having anyone pass judgment on him. The best thing might be never to visit such places—but he had visited, the damage was done; and he had to visit again. When he returned Tom to his family, he might watch everyone. Women, patiently scraping and chewing skins. Men with feet encased in bears’ paws, bent over a seal’s breathing hole; children swooping nets through clouds of dovekies. He might talk to them. Would they talk to him?

  ON APRIL 26, late at night, Alexandra walked into his room. Twenty-two buttons down the front of her gray dress; she unfastened the first six, as simply as if she were shedding her dress for her painter’s smock. Erasmus undid the rest. The first sight of her bare shoulders struck him like his first sight of the ice—how could he have forgotten that? He ran his thumb along her collarbones. Never would he forget this. He was leaving soon; she might be staying here or going somewhere new; she hadn’t revealed her plans. Perhaps, as she’d told her family, she might be a teacher. Against her thighs, under her hands, with her tongue touching the base of his neck, Erasmus felt his life pulsing and streaming. Up north, when he was lonely, he could unfold this night against the sky. He wound Alexandra’s hair around his palm and pulled it like a curtain over his eyes. Alexandra thought with surprise: Oh, it was this. This pleasure that bound Lavinia to Zeke, no matter what.

  Later that night Erasmus gave Alexandra the little slab of screw-studded leather, which he’d carried all the way from Boothia and failed to share with his first friend. He opened his hand, he released it. She rested the sole on her bare stomach, with the metal points touching her weightlessly. How delicious, the contrast between the cool metal and his warm hand.

  “It’s for you,” he said. “Something to remember me by.”

  She walked the points up her skin. She’d meant to enter this room weeks ago, as she’d also meant to make, separately, another request. Two different things, one not necessarily linked to the other. But she’d waited too long and now everything was happening at once. If she waited longer, though, she’d lose it all. “Take me with you,” she said. “Instead of Copernicus.”

  Erasmus was silent. Once she’d pried him out of his desolation by pretending to need his company at the Academy of Sciences. Not for months had he understood what she’d done. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he said finally. “This—us together like this—I’ve wanted this for a long time. But you don’t have to feel bound by it. I promise I’ll be back. And if you happen to still be free then . . .”

  She sat up impatiently and pressed the scrap of leather back into his hand. “I want to go,” she said. “Don’t you understand? It’s what I’ve always wanted. When you were gone I read Parry’s journals out loud to Lavinia, all the time wishing I could be where you were. And since you returned and we started work on this book . . . I want to see. I want to travel, I want to see everything.”

  A strand of her hair wound down her neck, across her left breast, unfurling over her ribs. Lovely, lovely. He gazed at her, then down at the graying hair on his own chest. “Look at me,” she said. “I didn’t come here to try to trick you into taking me, or shame you, or anything else. I wanted this, to touch you like this—but that’s something different from wanting to go north.”

  She bent her knee, placing his hand above it on the inside of her thigh. “Any terms,” she said. “You choose the terms. If you don’t want us to be . . . to be together like this, we don’t have to. I’ll go as your assistant, your friend. Anything.”

  IN THE ROOM they shared for those last few weeks, Alexandra moved one hand along the curve of Erasmus’s ribs. Next door, she heard Tom rustling in his bed. All the time they’d wasted—they might have made their way to each other months ago, but only when Tom had cracked a channel in Erasmus’s heart could she sail in. Of course she would take care of Tom, she owed him everything. They would marry, they’d agreed, before the ship sailed.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “How slow I am,” he said.

  Outside their door Copernicus painted. An extra painting, not one they’d planned—but the story Erasmus had told him months ago, about the underwater world he’d glimpsed when he fell through the ice, had suddenly seized him. He was anxious to finish, so he could begin painting the mountains around him. But for the moment he focused purely on the layer of ice, white on top then darkening to green and gray, lit by rays of sun pouring through a giant crack.

  “How slow to make crucial decisions,” Erasmus said. “To sense what’s going on around me. I think how long it took me to understand Zeke, how I almost missed being friends with Dr. Boerhaave, how Ned had to force me to lead the men from the Narwhal.”

  The bottom of the ice was covered by a rich field of algae, on which infant fish and small crustaceans grazed. Three belugas, glowing and pale, occupied the lower left corner; a walrus, hanging vertically with its flippers swaying, was just about to surface. There were schools of capelin and swarms of jellyfish; murres he’d caught flying through the water. Copernicus pushed the stepladder to the right, so he could work on the narwhal whose tapered horn skimmed the walrus’s flippers.

  “How I was too late to save Annie,” Erasmus said.

  “Zeke moves quickly,” Alexandra said. “Do you want to be like him?” She touched his chest.

  “I almost missed you,” Erasmus said. The gentle rasp of Copernicus’s ladder against the floor was the sound that sent both them and Tom to sleep.

  Tom dreamed a darker version of the scene Copernicus painted. The same ice, humped and shattered, but twilight rather than streaming sun; cold October rather than brilliant July. He dreamed a scene that preceded Zeke, at first as if he were dreaming simple history. His mother’s brother left the camp with his sledge and six dogs, hoping to hunt seal on the thickening sea ice although the weather was bad. He left and didn’t return. In Tom’s dream, as in real life, a fog arose, and a terrible wind, which trapped them in their huts. When they were able to search for the lost hunter, they followed the tracks of the sledge until they vanished. In the moonlight a round area of new ice, surrounded by broken blocks, marked where the hunter had fallen through. The men chopped through it, widened the hole, and prepared the lines and harpoons and the sturdy bone hooks.

  In his dream, Tom was no longer a small boy watching, but one of the men. In his arms he felt the pull of the line, and the gentle shudder of the hook as it bumped against something and then caught. In his back he felt the weight as he joined with the others, pulling up first the sledge and then, one by one, the dogs still tangled in their traces. On the traces he saw the marks of their teeth, where they’d tried to free themselves. Laid head to head on the ice, the dogs froze solid instantly. His hands grew numb as he coiled the line and sent the hook
back into the water.

  In his dream he could see everything, all he’d only been able to imagine when it happened; beneath the ice he saw the hook touch a booted leg. As if it were alive, the hook bounced three times along the leg and then caught the ankle. Gently, gently. He was the hook; he was the line; he was the strong body above, pulling delicately. He was the woman wailing as the boot broke the surface of the water, and he was the man watching as the body was born, feet first, from the sea. Feet, legs, hands, chest, head. The mouth was open in a terrible grimace, the fingernails broken where they’d clawed the edges of the hole. The body, laid out on the ice, glazed and stiffened and turned pure white. Tom bent over the face and saw not his uncle, but Zeke.

  The sight jolted him awake; around him were only walls. At the foot of his bed lay the cache of bones and the muskrat pelt that would someday be his tupilaq. He turned so his head was near them. The place he had fled, and would never return to again, was called Philadelphia; and in that place, unaware of his fate, Zeke was sleeping. The sunny, golden length of him sprawled across the sheets, one arm almost touching the floor, one foot sticking off the mattress, bobbing as he dreamed of Annie.

  Not Annie as she’d been in this house; not Annie as she’d been in Washington; not, not of her skeleton gleaming through a glass display case. But Annie as she’d been in Anoatok, utterly strange and utterly herself. She was smiling at him beneath a bird-filled sky. The life he’d lived with her and her family was the life Erasmus’s father had taught him to seek; his dream shifted and he was part of that family, the true son, the son Mr. Wells had always wanted. The four sons of his body were only boys, listening wide-eyed to tales of bees brought back to life when covered by a fresh-killed ox’s stomach. None of them had understood, as Zeke had, that those tales were natural history and not science. Surely that was what Mr. Wells had meant to teach him?

  A FEW MORE times, in the drafty house, the four companions slept and woke. Then they were gone. Into the woods went Copernicus, easel and paintbox strapped to his back and Ned at his side: just for the summer, he said, just for the brief months of buttery, tree-filtered light. Erasmus and Tom and Alexandra set off for the coast. Later that summer, they’d learn that McClintock’s Fox had been caught in the ice of Melville Bay during their own winter in the mountains. Swept twelve hundred miles south in the moving pack, the Fox had started north again as soon as the ice released it—headed, Erasmus knew, for exactly the place he and Zeke had explored. He guessed McClintock’s crew would meet the same or similar Esquimaux and find their way to King William Land as he and Zeke had not. Driving a sledge bearing a red silk banner embroidered by Lady Franklin herself, they’d find relics and bodies and evidence, returning to the glory that might have been his.

  But by the time all this happened, he wouldn’t care. He’d be in Greenland, after an easy trip during which no disasters happened and no one died. A Scottish whaling ship ferried the three of them from Godhavn to Upernavik; after that came a Danish fishing boat, and then a skin-covered umiak. They had little luggage, and weren’t much trouble. Past cliffs and glaciers and low gravel beaches strangers guided them: where the geese nest; where the goblins hide; where the ice cave grows beneath the ledge.

  Erasmus took no notes: he would do that later. Beside him, though, Alexandra drew in a larger version of the black-bound notebooks she’d been filling since she was a girl. The sights she saw resembled those she’d first glimpsed in Erasmus’s green journal and then reconstructed with his guidance: and were also completely different. She lay on gray rocks, eyes level with a tuft of tiny, bladder-shaped blossoms. In Philadelphia she’d drawn these twenty times but only now saw what Erasmus hadn’t captured: each flower was really a calyx, inflated and striped and deceptive; the true petals were hidden inside. The stems, the texture of the rock, the ice, the sky, the streaming clouds—they looked one way to Erasmus, another way to her. Also—also, she thought, it was everything—they were themselves.

  Erasmus watched her draw. Nothing she rendered was new to him, yet each stroke of her pencil—he had bought her special pencils, Dr. Boerhaave’s pencils—was like a chisel held to a cleavage plane: tap, tap, and the rock split into two sharp pieces, the world cracked and spoke to him. Annie spoke to him each time it rained, Dr. Boerhaave when the wind blew; Tom was silent much of the time but Erasmus could hear the language of his body as he strengthened and straightened and breathed the air and ate the food he’d missed.

  They found Tom’s people late in August. Against the hills beyond Anoatok were two-legged dots, four-legged dots, which Tom was the first to spot. He ran up the rocky shore, Alexandra and Erasmus following more slowly but still steadily: Erasmus had grown used to his feet and regained his balance, casting aside his walking sticks for a single ball-headed cane. As he approached the dots turned into figures, and faces appeared. Among that small crowd moving toward him were Tom’s father—which one was he?—and men who’d hunted and talked with Dr. Boerhaave. A tall man in a worn fur jacket stumbled forward, stretched out a hand, pressed Tom to his chest and then lifted him into the air.

  Sometime later, the people moved toward Erasmus and Alexandra, and Tom made introductions: Ootuniah, Awahtok, and the three other young men whom Erasmus remembered visiting the Narwhal; Nessark, Tom’s father, who had known both Dr. Boerhaave and Zeke; the angekok, who wore around his neck a thong strung with long teeth. A few more men and then, behind them, shy women and children. Alexandra took four steps and stood among them, bending so the children could touch her hair. One of the women touched the back of her hand and she turned it, offering her palm; the woman rested three fingers there. Erasmus felt that touch in his own hand but he kept his gaze on the men before him, repeating each name, burning each face into his mind. When it was time, speaking slowly, waiting after each phrase for Tom to repeat the words in a language he was just beginning to grasp, Erasmus explained to them what he knew of Annie’s death.

  As he spoke Nessark clasped his son’s shoulders, nodding but saying nothing, looking down when Tom continued to speak for some time after Erasmus had stopped. Two geese flew by, and a swarm of murres. The angekok stepped forward to speak for Nessark and the rest of the tribe but for a moment said nothing at all; only the birds’ thrumming wings broke the silence. Erasmus lowered his eyes and waited. He would be judged now, he thought. Alexandra’s presence by his side had altered every other aspect of this final journey, but she couldn’t spare him this. He might not be forgiven. He looked up again and caught the angekok’s stern gaze. When he spoke, Erasmus could hear in the words only the sound of running water and an echo of the wing beats.

  The angekok paused so Tom could translate. They did not blame Erasmus for the loss of their sister’s body, Tom said. Their sister, Erasmus thought, looking from the boy to his judge and back. Tom’s mother. He would never be Tom again, that had never been his name; to which of those syllables did he answer? He himself, the angekok said, had determined that the tribe should guide Zeke out of their country; and he had permitted their sister and her son to leave them. His fault. His left hand folded around the teeth swaying on his chest. On her voyage of discovery, he said, she had been betrayed; when the poison took hold she had left her bones, so that she might save her son. The angekok pointed toward Erasmus’s feet—so small, he said. Who had taken the rest? He gave Alexandra an ulo and Erasmus an amulet of little bone knives, with which to cut through bad weather.

  Still later the angekok, after speaking with the boy, led him down the shore and across the worn floes leaning against each other like drunken soldiers. At the water’s edge the boy handed over his collection. A skin laid flat against the ice, a bone laid here and another there; the angekok folded the pelt around the ill-sorted shards, chanting as he tied the bundle with a thong.

  A few years later, as Zeke floated in the Rappahannock River, his face and chest above the blood-ribboned water, his shoulders bumping the hundreds of men who struggled, like him, to cross to the other side, s
omething like a muskrat would brush his hands and Copernicus—drawn by the chaos, drawn by the wounds, always in movement but that day painting furiously on that bank—would see those dark shapes intertwine and wonder what they were. A war would have started by then, obscuring the arctic in people’s minds as if it were no more than legend: here are the hinges on which the world turns and the limits of the circuits of the stars.

  But for the moment Erasmus and Alexandra stood on the shore, peering down at the water as the boy who had led them here knelt and slipped the bundle in.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Most of the background characters in this novel—including Titian Peale, Charles Wilkes, John Rae, John Richardson, Elisha Kent Kane, Sir John Franklin and his crew, Louis Agassiz, Samuel Morton and the other naturalists and philosophers mentioned, as well as Ootuniah, Awahtok, Nessark, and the other Smith Sound Inuit who befriended Dr. Kane—are historical persons. The foreground characters—including Zechariah Voorhees, Erasmus Wells, Alexandra Copeland and their families, as well as Dr. Boerhaave, Ned Kynd, the crews of the Narwhal and the other ships mentioned, and Annie and Tom—are invented.

  I’m indebted to the journals and memoirs of many nineteenth-century arctic explorers, particularly those of George Back, John Barrow, Edward Belcher, Alexander Fisher, John Franklin, William Godfrey, Charles Francis Hall, Isaac Hayes, Elisha Kent Kane, William Kennedy, George Lyon, Francis McClintock, Robert McClure, Sherard Osborn, William Edward Parry, Julius von Payer, John Rae, John Richardson, James Clark Ross, John Ross, Edward Sabine, Frederick Schwatka, William Scoresby, and Thomas Simpson.

  Also helpful were many more recent books about the arctic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially Pierre Berton’s The Arctic Grail, George Corner’s Dr. Kane of the Arctic Seas, Richard Cyriax’s Sir John Franklin’s Last Arctic Expedition, Ernest Dodge’s The Polar Rosses, Peter Freuchen’s The Arctic Year and Book of the Eskimos, Sam Hall’s The Fourth World, Chauncey Loomis’s Weird and Tragic Shores, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, Jeannette Mirsky’s To the Arctic, Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s Arctic Manual, and Doug Wilkinson’s Land of the Long Day.