The Discovery Of Slowness

by Sten Nadolny

  John stretched his arm toward the tent flap, holding it at the height of his shoulder while hiding his hand behind some baggage so that Michel could not see it when he entered. With the slightest turn of the body the pistol could be aimed at his head as soon as he appeared. John remained in this posture, rigid and tense.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’ll do it myself. Ten years of war – what do you think I did all that time? Only one always kills the wrong men.’

  ‘The wrong men?’ Hepburn did not understand. ‘And your arm, sir?’

  ‘I can hold up my arm for hours,’ said John. ‘I could already do that when I was ten. He’ll sneak up and listen. We’ve got to talk loudly about harmless things or he’ll shoot us from the outside through the wall of the tent, because he realises we’re about to do something.’

  ‘It’ll be a fine day today, sir,’ said Hepburn. ‘I think the weather’s on our side, too.’ He added in a low voice: ‘I hear him.’

  John cleared his throat. ‘Then let’s get up slowly, Hepburn. I’ll fetch firewood …’

  At this very moment Michel appeared in the tent entrance, his rifle at his hip, ready to fire. He was aiming at John. Hepburn drew his pistol fast. Michel turned the barrel of his rifle toward him. The picture of this scene remained fixed in John’s eyes. The next thing he became aware of was that Hepburn had seized his hand and held it for a long time. They did not say a word for minutes. Hepburn spoke first: ‘You shot him through the forehead, sir. He suffered nothing; he didn’t even know it.’ John answered: ‘This journey was one week too long.’ The next day they saw the fort at the lake shore.

  In the blockhouse they found four living skeletons who could barely rise: Dr Richardson, Adam, Peltier, and Samandré. No supplies, not a bite of food. They had scraped off the top of a reindeer blanket that had been discarded half a year ago with their knives and had eaten the shoes they had worn to get there. ‘Where are the others?’ asked John. The doctor tried to answer. John admonished him not to speak in a voice that sounded like the grave. Richardson rose, clawing his way up the centre beam with spidery fingers, stared at John with bulging eyes, and said in a rattling voice, ‘You should hear yourself just once, Mr Franklin.’

  Richardson had found nothing but a note from Back: ‘No food and no Indians here. Going farther south to find people. Beauparlant dead, Augustus missing. Back.’ Wentzel had apparently been there and had taken the maps, but he had not kept his promise: he had not seen to the supplies.

  Hepburn dragged himself outside and tried to shoot something. He was lucky and came back with two partridges. Greedily the six men devoured the raw meat – barely more than a morsel for each. That was 29 October.

  Their journey was not yet at an end.

  Peltier and Samandré lay dying. Adam could no longer get up or even crawl. His abdomen was swollen. He was in great pain.

  The doctor sat by the tiny fire Hepburn had lit and read aloud from the Bible. It seemed oddly weird and crazy: in the midst of the Arctic, a man sat and read in a broken, barely understandable voice crochety sentences from an ancient book of the Orient which likewise could be barely understood. Still, it was a comfort to them all. He might just as well have snapped his fingers and hoped that would bring rescue – since he believed in it himself, it was also a comfort to the others.

  In confidence, John told Richardson what had happened. They looked at each other for a long time with their bulging eyeballs, bent forward, coughing slightly, looking like two miserable old drunks in London’s Gin Lane.

  ‘I would have done it, too, Mr Franklin,’ the doctor eventually muttered. ‘But now, pray. Do pray.’

  They discussed the situation. Gradually they began to lose their minds. Yet each of them considered his own capacity for clear thought greater than that of the other. Therefore, they all talked to each other in a calming, endlessly patient, and simple way, constantly repeating everything because they forgot what had just been said.

  It all depended on Back.

  During the night of 1 November Samandré died, and when Peltier noticed this he lost all hope and died three hours later. The others were now too weak to carry the bodies out of the hut.

  Hepburn and John, who could still move about on their hands and knees, tried to find tripes de roche and firewood, but they fainted constantly and returned with slim pickings. They had long since begun to burn every piece of wood that could be spared; inner doors, shelves, floorboards, the wardrobe.

  Now Adam lay close to death. He had not spoken for days, had not even tried to find a more comfortable position.

  ‘He’ll come,’ said John.

  ‘Who?’ whispered Richardson.

  ‘Back. George Back. Midshipman George Back. Don’t you understand me, Doctor?’

  He broke off, because he realised that Richardson had been speaking, or rather hissing, for some time. Now he repeated it: ‘… is good. All will turn out for the best.’

  ‘Who?’ asked John.

  With a movement of his head, Richardson pointed at the ceiling.

  ‘The Almighty.’

  ‘Don’t know,’ whispered John. ‘You know, of course, I …’ They were lying wrapped in the remnants of their field blankets. The fire went out. They were waiting for death. The smell was atrocious.

  On 7 November, Akaitcho, chief of the Copper Indians, arrived with twenty warriors at Fort Enterprise in the deepest snow. Although near starvation, a walking skeleton, Midshipman Back had made his way to the tents of his tribe with great tenacity and begged the chief for help. Despite the severe frost and nearly impassable snow, Akaitcho had fought his way from the Great Slave Lake to the Winter Lake in only five days. He found Franklin, Dr Richardson, Hepburn, and Adam still alive.

  At first the Indians refused to enter the hut because corpses were lying there. They said whoever does not bury the dead is dead himself and needed no help.

  Franklin alone could still grasp the situation. It took him an hour and a half to drag the two corpses through the door and cover them outside with a little snow. Then he collapsed and lost consciousness.

  The survivors were given pemmican and drink. The doctor forbade them to eat too much too hastily, but he was unable to stick to his own prescription. Terrible stomach pains set in; only Franklin was spared them because after his great exertion he had become so weak that he had to be fed, and that was done more cautiously. The Indians stayed with the rescued men for ten days, until they could start the journey to Fort Providence together.

  Eleven men were dead. In addition to the four British, only Benoît, Solomon Bélanger, Saint-Germain, Adam and Augustus remained alive, the latter having reappeared after all. But John knew he could not have kept anyone else from dying, perhaps not even himself. Back and the Indians were the rescuers of the survivors.

  ‘After such a journey,’ Richardson speculated, ‘the rest of life will go by quickly toward its end.’ John Franklin now had another worry. He thought it possible that he would never be given an Arctic or any other command again. He had neither found the North-West Passage nor reached Parry’s ship by land. They had not even been able to establish relations with the Eskimos. For long nights John pondered what the errors had been that had led to the deaths of so many people. It had been wrong to rely on Wentzel, but that couldn’t have been all of it. Should they have turned back immediately after their first failure in making contact with the Eskimos? No. They might have had better luck with other tribes. Should he have threatened any person with instant death who lost or destroyed supplies – anyone who stole or embezzled something? No. His system, ‘Faith for Confidence’, would have been compromised even more rapidly, and for any other system their physical power would have been inadequate. Should he have brought along better hunters from England, people who also knew more about survival in this cold desert? But who would that have been?

  He said to Richardson, ‘The system was right, only we should have learned more in time. I’m the one who made the mistakes. You can be l
ucky in spite of them, but I wasn’t. The system works. Next time I want to make a better show of how well it works.’

  ‘It’s quite similar to my system,’ answered Richardson with a thoughtful nod. He meant it without mockery, lovingly. ‘In any case, I won’t again have the idea of comparing you with the captain of the Blossom.’

  John Franklin thought some more. ‘The admirals won’t discern the slightest success. They’ll believe that I’m the wrong man. And they’ll be right.’ He was silent. ‘But when one looks at it all from a different angle, then I am the right man – and they couldn’t get a better one. I’ll just have to help the admirals to see it that way.’

  Franklin took heart again. In any case, he had remained sure of himself, even during the worst moments. Neither fear nor despair had crippled him. He was stronger than ever before in his life.

  The North-West Passage, the open polar sea, the North Pole. With or without the Admiralty, he would reach these three objectives on his future voyages. But in no case would anyone under his command ever starve again. That was as certain as the Crown of England.

  15

  Fame and Honour

  The clock faces in London were white these days. And many clocks now had second hands; only ships’ chronometers had used them before. Clocks and people had become more precise. John would have welcomed this if the result had been greater calm and deliberation, but instead he observed everywhere only the pressure of time and haste.

  Or was it that nobody wanted to sacrifice time to him, to John, any more? No, it had to be a general fashion. Reaching for one’s watch-chain had become a more frequent move than reaching for one’s hat. One hardly heard curses any more; the exclamation ‘No time!’ had taken their place.

  John felt estranged. Added to this was the fact that he had too much time on his hands himself: a new command was not in sight.

  He had been received with scorn and blame. Dr Brown was monosyllabic; Sir John Barrow, blustering and ungracious. Davies Gilbert, the new head of the Royal Society after the death of Sir Joseph, was icily friendly. Only Peter Mark Roget now and then sought out John in his home to chat about optics, electricity, slowness and fresh ideas for the construction of the picture rotor. He avoided the topic of magnetism, presumably because of the magnetic North Pole. So much tact was almost unbearable. Most of the time John sat ruminating behind his window at 60 Frith Street in Soho, thinking about the possible course of the North-West Passage and how he could make it all good again and go on with his life in the necessary consistent order. In the house opposite, an old woman polished her window several times a day, sometimes even at night. It was as though before she died she wanted to accomplish one single thing no one could find fault with.

  Often it helped to walk the streets – to go on deck, as John called it. He wandered through London and set himself objectives in order to forget, however briefly, snow, ice, hunger and dead voyageurs. He looked at the new houses: they had fewer windows now because of the window tax. He studied iron bridges: the carriages made a racket when they drove over them and that was annoying. Then he took up women’s clothes: bodices had moved farther down, to the middle of the body, and seemed more tightly laced; skirts and sleeves were puffed up, as though in the future women would claim more space for themselves than ever before.

  John was also abroad at night, because he often had trouble falling asleep. A few times he got involved with wild women who wanted to make him buy them gin by the bottle. Robbers didn’t dare come near him. His body had become as heavy and strong as it had been before the journey.

  One early Sunday morning he watched two gentlemen duelling with pistols in Hyde Park. They were miserable shots, perhaps intentionally so: after a slight wound, they let it be. In the afternoon he observed three drunken oarsmen who couldn’t manage the current under London Bridge. The boat crashed against the pier; all of them drowned. Suddenly people had time to gawk. Time’s pressure was nothing but fashion; here was the proof.

  At a street stall, for the fee of a penny, he could read newspapers standing up: the Greeks were rebelling against the Turks; China had prohibited the opium trade. The first steamship in the navy. That was laughable! All they had to do was to shoot at one of those paddle-wheels and the thing would go in circles and offer the best target. On top of that, parliamentary reform. Many words for it, many against. It was all a matter of timing: Push through reform quickly before it’s too late. Choke off reform quickly before it’s too late.

  Twice he went to the Griffins’ house, but beautiful Jane was, so they said, on educational tours somewhere in Europe most of the year.

  What to do? Where to turn?

  He also sat in coffee houses. There he could get pen, ink and paper whenever anything important occurred to him. Actually, nothing occurred to John, but he ordered writing-materials just the same, stared at the white sheet of paper, and thought, if I have something important in mind, I’ll just write it down. Well, perhaps it also worked the other way round: if I have something to write on, perhaps something important will come to me. And so it happened: suddenly the Idea appeared. It seemed foolhardy to John, but that spoke more for the Idea than against it, especially since the project was in some respects similar to a long journey. The Idea: writing. John conceived of writing a book to justify himself, a fat book in which he would seek to convert all sceptics and convince them of his system. And since he knew what a footloose fellow the human will was, he committed himself in writing then and there. He wrote on the white sheet: ‘NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY TO THE SHORES OF THE POLAR SEA – not under 100,000 words.’ That rescued the plan at the last minute, for the head had already begun to whisper its objections. For example, John Franklin, if there is anything you cannot do, it’s writing books.

  The first words were surely the hardest:

  ‘On Sunday, 23 May 1819, all our people embarked …’ ‘Our people’? But they went on board themselves, not just some other people who belonged to them. So he’d better say, ‘travelling-party.’ No, ‘the men under my command’. But that was also wrong, since the phrase didn’t include him, and he had installed himself on the Prince of Wales at the same time. ‘I and the men’ pleased him as little as ‘the men and I’. ‘We embarked in full number’ was inaccurate; the ‘entire party including my own person’ discouraged reading. ‘On Sunday, 23 May 1819, our entire party led by me embarked …’ Well, now what?

  The head said, Throw it away, John Franklin, you’ll lose your mind over this. The will quacked in a monotone, Keep going. And John himself said, ‘Almost a dozen words already as good as set.’

  * * *

  The old woman polished her window, and John wrote his book, day after day. Soon he had written more than fifty thousand words and had reached the first encounter with Akaitcho and the Copper Indians. Writing was as arduous as a sea voyage; it generated the energies and hopes it needed while also providing enough for the rest of one’s life. No one who had to write a book could be desperate for ever. And despair over proper formulations could be conquered with sufficient industry. In the beginning, John especially had to fight repetition. All his life he had refused to use several words for the same thing. He therefore had to distinguish between basic and superfluous words and keep his stock as limited as possible. Now, however, it happened that the same words occurred ten times on one page; for example, the phrase ‘to be found in’, as in an enumeration of Arctic plants. John would even wake up in the middle of the night with a start, searching for repetition as one would search for some obstinate vermin preying on one’s sleep.

  Still another thing disturbed him at first: the more zealously he described the actual episodes, the more they seemed to retreat. The mere act of formulating it in language turned what he knew by experience into something even he himself saw only as a picture. The air of familiarity was gone; in its place he had retrieved the lure of strangeness. At some point John began to think of this as an advantage rather than a disadvantage, although in the light
of his aim to describe something familiar it was actually a disappointment.

  ‘The chief came up the hill and with a measured and dignified step, looking neither to the right nor to the left.’ John let this passage stand, although he knew it conveyed but little of the feelings he had had at the time he viewed this scene, of the unclear, uneasy situation and the strange hope the chief had instilled in him from the first moment. Still, it was a useful sentence, because it allowed, and indeed compelled, everyone to project his own feelings into it.

  So in the end something good came of the disappointments of writing: a new work that John could accomplish, because in it he wanted to achieve what was possible and to omit what was impossible. By the time he had got to the fifty-thousandth word, his aims were within reach.

  If it was to exonerate the author, the book had to be well written. That was a matter of time, nothing else.

  It had to be simple, so that as many people as possible could understand how good it was.

  It had to be more than three hundred pages long, so that all who owned it could be proud to be seen with it.

  The old woman died. For four days the window was still noticeably cleaner than the others. John was sad, because he would have liked to have given her the finished book as a gift. Dejected, he sat and thought suddenly that his story might bore readers. He decided to visit Eleanor the poet. He wanted to ask how one managed it so that a book didn’t bore anybody.

  ‘How much have you written, then?’ she asked. ‘Eighty-two thousand five hundred words,’ he answered. At that she laughed and hopped. John instinctively encircled her waist with his arm and held her tight. He shouldn’t have done that, for she obliged him on the instant to take part in her literary Sunday circle. He tried to get out of it, pointing to his work, even pretending religious reasons which strictly forbade attendance at literary events on Sundays. Nothing helped; she didn’t believe a word.