by Sten Nadolny
The ice did as it pleased.
They saw stormy petrels fishing and flying so tightly along the valleys between mountains of waves that the space seemed as snug as a cannonball inside its barrel. Young codfish, shimmering like golden crystals, were lying on the deck in the low light, spread out like treasure lifted from the sea. They saw bears, white masses of fur, irresistibly lured by the burning fish-oil, padding nearer and nearer over snow hills and across ponds. Nothing could stop them.
One day a herd of walruses tried to overturn the boat with their tusks and round skulls – a furious mass attack. When shortly afterward the men stood on the ice-floe, the animals tried to tip the other end of the ice with their weight, inviting them to a sliding-party that would have ended on their tusks. The sailors fired their muskets, but not until the heavy leading bull was killed did the herd at last swim away.
The next outing on foot was even more dangerous, because heavy fog came up and each man had to hold on to the next by his jacket. They wanted to walk back to the ship by following their own tracks. John Franklin checked the direction with his compass. But it became apparent all of a sudden that the tracks were strangely fresh and, in addition, became more and more numerous. According to both compass and clock time they should have been back on the ship long ago.
They had lost their way and had wandered in circles.
John ordered the men to build an emergency shelter out of ice-plates. Reid made no bones about the fact that he would have preferred to go on simply at a right angle to where they had been walking.
‘We’ll stay warm that way, and we’ve got to arrive somewhere.’
‘I take my time before I make mistakes,’ Franklin countered amiably. He ordered them all to wrap themselves up as warmly as possible and sit round the oil lamp. The muskets were carefully loaded in case a polar bear should come by.
John crouched and reflected. Whatever the others put forward – proposals, theories, questions – he only nodded and thought some more.
Even when Reid whispered to Back, ‘You’re quite right about the “handicap”,’ John pushed all questions aside. He now needed only time.
A while later Reid asked, ‘Should we simply wait here, sir?’ But John still wasn’t ready. There was no reason to end his reflections prematurely, even if death was at the door. At last he got up.
‘Mr Back, fire a musket every three minutes, thirty times all told. After that, fire every ten minutes for three hours; after that, once an hour for two days. Please repeat.’
‘Won’t we be dead by then, sir?’
‘Possibly. But until then we fire. Please confirm.’
Back repeated his instructions, stuttering. Just as nobody counted any longer on getting an explanation, John said, ‘The entire ice-field is turning round. It’s the only solution. That’s why we are walking in circles, even when according to the compass we are always marching in the same direction. If there had been a wind we would have noticed it at once.’
Four hours later they heard a faint shot in the fog, and then again and again answers to their own shots. An hour after that they heard voices calling out; men with ropes became visible at last; and, behind them, barely a hundred feet away, they saw the towering stern of the Trent.
‘You’re a lucky dog, sir,’ Back remarked, relieved and insolent but without a trace of condescension. On the contrary. Reid pulled a face. To him Back said, ‘If we had listened to you we would now be somewhere else; we’d probably be icicles.’ Reid was silent. He suddenly gave himself a jolt and stamped violently on a snowflake. John wondered. How could one stamp on a snowflake? Or was there still something else?
In the bright light of day, and from the mainmast, one could observe the entire labyrinth. Even if they had gone in the ‘right’ direction they would have missed the ship by a wide margin. Had they gone in the opposite direction they would have reached a point where nobody would have looked for them. It would have been a death trap of the first order, but John wasn’t caught in it.
It’s easier for me now, he reflected, and there are no more problems with Back. The kings of the schoolyard are beginning to listen to me. He had hardly thought of this when suddenly he knew: Back reminded him of Tom Barker, his schoolmate of twenty years ago.
They had not even reached latitude 82 degrees north, and already Buchan wanted to turn back. ‘We ought to find a sheltered anchorage and repair everything.’
‘We ought …’ John noted the unaccustomed words. He felt challenged to contradict.
‘The polar summer would be over before we were done with that. The damage isn’t really that great. Let’s have one last try.’
‘Do you want to play daredevil?’
‘Sir, so far we’ve discovered nothing and proved nothing.’
‘I’ll tell you something,’ Buchan replied. ‘I believe that what you want to prove is something personal. I’ve watched you. You want to prove that you’re no coward. Perhaps cowardice is your problem.’
John decided that he didn’t have to think about such remarks. ‘Only a single try, sir. We haven’t much time left, but the open polar sea can’t be very far.’
‘Oh, to hell with you! And what if there’s a storm?’
‘By then we’ll surely be in a proper channel and will be sheltered. We have to try farther west.’
Buchan wavered. The summer was nearing its end. That was a fact.
‘I’ll decide.’
* * *
For five days they sailed north-west past a wall of pack-ice – the Trent first, and the Dorothea a quarter-mile behind. John looked through the telescope. ‘They’re sailing too close to the pack-ice. When the wind stops, they’ll drift on to the lee shore with the tide.’ Beechey nodded: ‘They’re bored. They want to watch the seals. And yet the weather outlook isn’t very good.’ John ordered sail reduced to a minimum. Only as a precaution.
‘And do you know what’s best of all?’ exclaimed Gilbert. ‘We’ll arrive at the Sandwich Islands six weeks from now. The reporters are already waiting.’
‘And the girls,’ Kirby added. God knows, he always talked about girls. No charitable storm blew that word out of his mouth.
The storm broke suddenly, as though it had been lying in wait in the wings. A calm, silvery sky kept on smiling above racing thunderclouds. Consequently, the violent squall appeared as a particularly vicious attack.
Excitement. Change course: ‘Hard on the wind. Away from the ice.’ Will we make it? Hasty prayers. Several voices screamed suddenly, ‘Man overboard!’ Gilfillan, the doctor, had been swept into the sea by a single gust. But now what? Two basic rules checkmated each other: never drift towards the shore in a storm, and keep your eye on the man when a man’s overboard. John decided that here he could judge only blindly. He had given such cases some thought. He kept his eye on the man. Lower boat into water to leeward! Heave to! A dreadful loss of time and distance from shore. One man pointed towards the ice shore; the Dorothea already lay helplessly by the wall, rolling and thumping among blocks of ice. She couldn’t get away. She would be ground to pieces. In just a few hours she would be nothing but wooden parts which would be whittled away. Amen. In the face of this storm, she couldn’t escape.
Gilfillan’s body was saved, but was he still alive? Hanging on the line, Spink had thrown himself on top of him and had brought him in, still laughing. Each person got his strength from something. Spink had to laugh even while risking his life. Gilfillan breathed again. Done. What next?
Get over to the Dorothea by boat? Sheer suicide. No, let’s get out of here while the going’s good, they screamed. But John Franklin knew his own principles. ‘Never be ashamed like Captain Palmer.’ That was fifteen years ago. And the Bridgewater had soon disappeared without a trace, not a single survivor. The sea’s justice is terrible, and it had to be taken into account.
Questions came – more and more urgently. Franklin thought about them and gave no reply. The swift, raging seas were not simply heavy; they contained
ice fragments as big as launches which pushed the ship beam on the waves. Soon it was clear: it would be a miracle if the Trent got across. And John didn’t believe in miracles; that was something for children.
The critical moment had arrived; even Beechey became nervous: with their slow captain the ship would be wrecked. But why did Franklin stay so calm? What did he actually believe? Why did he stare at the shore; what did he look for with his telescope?
‘There!’ John shouted. ‘We’ve got to get there, Mr Beechey!’
What did he mean? Into the pack-ice? Voluntarily?
‘Precisely that.’ John grabbed Beechey by the shoulders and held him. ‘Logic!’ he roared against the storm. ‘Logic! In pack-ice we’re safe. The only solution.’
And an inlet actually opened up, a fiord barely wider than the ship. The captain had seen it; he still had that much calm in him. But now they had to get in. It just couldn’t be done. Two ship-lengths before the inlet, a huge ice-block smashed the rudder, and just as they reached their goal a heavy breaker turned the Trent beam-on to the seas. At once the starboard side of the ship crashed into the massive pack-ice. All the men tumbled down: no one could hold on to anything. It was as if someone had pulled a rug out from under them. In addition, a terrible sound, the signal for the dead: the ship’s bell started to ring. John clawed his way upright again and pointed up the foremast, shouting, ‘Shake out the reefs!’
They all looked at him as if they were seeing the first signs of insanity. The next heavy wave came thundering towards them and again smashed the ship into the wall like an egg into a frying-pan. The masts bent like plant stalks. And someone was supposed to go aloft and – what did he say? – ‘Shake out the reefs’? The ship’s bell rang like crazy. Of course it did. Everything was finished. It wouldn’t stop till they were all dead. The men clutched at whatever was handy; no one stirred any more. The next big wave, the same. The ship was lost.
John Franklin seemed stranger and stranger. Now he grabbed his left shoulder with his right hand, held it tight and pulled it with all his might. Did he want to demote himself in rank, or even tear himself in two? At any rate, he had gone mad; here was the proof. Gilbert cursed, Kirby prayed; they all prayed. Would Kirby ever speak of girls again?
Franklin had torn the sleeve out of his uniform jacket, crawled up to the ship’s bell, and between two strikes of the storm warning said to the first officer, ‘Mr Beechey, please be so good as to have the reefs taken out of the foresail.’ Then he wound the uniform cloth round the bell’s clapper, tied a knot, and pulled it so tight that it might have choked an elephant. ‘Now we have some quiet,’ he said contentedly, as though he had gagged the storm, too.
And all at once they felt again something like safety. The bravest among them dared to go aloft to the top of the foremast and shake out the reefs. They saw from above what John already knew: the bow of the Trent had struck a short way into the inlet; with full sail on the foremast, without the reefs, they might succeed in sneaking the ship all the way in, if they could make her swerve away from the ice wall between two breakers. Others removed sails still remaining on the mainmast; no one lost hold, and as the sea retreated before making another terrible run, the Trent turned obediently, even without her rudder, and slipped away from the storm. The wind drove her into the ice mountains, still threw several bits of debris into her splintering stern, and tore the sails into rags. With a loud crunch the bow wedged itself between the glasslike walls and went on crunching. Finally the ship lay still. One could hardly sense the motion of the sea, not a breath of wind. Where had the wind gone?
Now previously prepared fenders were brought out, thick stuffed walrus skins to protect the ship from further friction and jolts.
The cook, a man with a wooden leg, limped out of the galley and appeared on deck, quite pale. ‘Have we landed? Do we get off here?
How could they help the Dorothea? First of all, they had to get over the glass walls. The first man leapt across from the topgallant yard to the ice: Spink, of course, laughing loudly. He tossed a lanyard to the ice wall; now people, equipment, loose rigging, and above all the whole anchor cable of the Trent could be heaved over. John Franklin had a plan again; there was no doubt of that. No one thought to ask any questions. Only Beechey, who had to stay on the ship, said briefly, ‘Good luck, sir. I bet you’ll get them all out of that wreck.’ ‘Oh, no,’ answered John, ‘we’ll get the ship to safety. There’s an inlet like ours just a hundred paces ahead of her bow.’
Back had listened in. ‘How do you know?’
‘“Sir”, I’m addressed as “sir”,’ answered John, with pointed slowness. ‘I’ve seen the inlet.’
For half an hour they fought their way across the crevasses opening in the ice plateau until they reached the cliff above the Dorothea. Deep down she still hurled herself against the ice-wall long since surrounded by the debris of her own masks and spars and one of her boats. How many might already have succumbed?
In a great hurry they lowered the end of the anchor cable down to the Dorothea and a short time later hacked an abutment into the ice round the majestic summit on the other side of the fiord. Thank God Buchan grasped the situation at once! The anchor cables were spliced together, wound round the foot of the foremast, and pulled through the grooves they had carved into the abutment at the other end. The storm let up slightly, but the swells were as dreadful as ever.
Twenty-five men stood in the holes they had chopped in the ice and hauled on the rope with all their might. The ship hardly moved from the spot. Or at best, by inches. John divided them into two shifts and took his watch from his pocket. Each group laboured for ten minutes; then it was the other’s turn. Any man who let go of the rope dropped to the ground as if unconscious; some of them vomited. Presumably the ship became heavier and heavier as the water poured in. John took all necessary steps to get the survivors out of the wreck, and the exhausted crew thought they might as well start now.
‘Two hours by now,’ Kirby panted, his face pale. ‘We’ve got to give up.’
‘He has no sense of time,’ Reid panted back. If he had had enough breath, he would have said more. An hour later he could barely form even this first sentence in his mind. Talking was impossible for them all. During this time, John pulled on the rope, too, although this was usually not acceptable for an officer. But his bare arm was freezing.
All at once the ship gave way and came along. Length by length, she crept forward beneath the cliff. Now Buchan had the foresails cleared and unfurled as the Dorothea lay before the gap. Laboriously, the half-wrecked ship slouched into the inlet, more like a saturated sponge than one of His Majesty’s ships.
Saved! A single boat lost, but two ships saved and all the men well.
Back went over to John Franklin and said, ‘Sir, I apologise. We owe you our lives.’
John looked at him, and after all the exertion he couldn’t get the captain’s wrinkles out of his face quickly enough. Why had Back apologised? For Tom Barker, he thought. Odd idea.
As captain, he didn’t always have to ask when he didn’t understand a sentence. He could pick what he had to know, and Back’s motives weren’t part of it. Back became insecure and wanted to turn away. But in place of a reply John simply put his arm round Back’s shoulders and embraced him.
Meanwhile, Beechey had secured the Trent with only five men and had caulked the first leaks. John embraced him, too.
The sailmaker tried to untie the sleeve of John’s jacket from the ship’s bell to sew it on again. But he had surely imagined that untying the sleeve would be an easier task. It took him almost quarter of an hour. What changes a storm could bring! Suddenly Reid no longer spoke to Back or, when he did, his remarks were cool and ironic. Sometimes he withdrew, and when he returned he looked as if he had been crying. Spink seemed to understand him. He told the young man a story – to him quite alone. It had to do with the adventures of the Patagonians, those giant people down at the southern end of South America who could grab
several steers at once by their horns and for whom the rule of love was equality. There were no preferences among them; love there was as universal as air is for breathing. But just that seemed to be the point that made Reid sad. With that he really got tears in his eyes. He had been saved, as well as his ship and his companions – and he wept because he had convinced himself that a certain person loved someone else.
‘Perhaps somebody will understand these midshipmen,’ said Beechey.
‘Give him a lot of work to do,’ answered Franklin. ‘He must not cry but learn his profession.’
On taking their bearings they discovered that they had passed latitude 82 degrees. John got out Dr Orme’s treatise on Pupil F. Now he was not a pupil any more. He could read it.
He even felt suspense. ‘The creation of the individual through speed’ – he had always feared that the essay would tell him how things would go on in the future. Now he even hoped so, for it couldn’t be anything bad any more.
Dr Orme used difficult phrases like ‘differences among people insofar as, measured by individual appearances, they are distinguished by the completeness of their vision’. These differences Dr Orme found not in the mechanical properties of eye or ear, as one might think, but in the orientation of the brain: ‘Pupil F is slow because he has to look at everything that comes into view for a very long time. The image held by the eye remains in place to be thoroughly explored; succeeding images glide past unexamined. Pupil F sacrifices completeness for detail. For the latter the entire head is required, and it takes some time before there is room for the next unit. Therefore, a slow person cannot follow fast developments––’