by Dan Simmons
Magnus Manson is waiting at the bottom of the ladder as Private Wilkes had said, but the huge able-bodied seaman is standing, not sitting arse-on-ladder. The big man’s head and shoulders are hunched beneath the low beams. His pale, lumpy face and stubbled jowls remind Crozier of a rotten white peeled potato stuffed under a Welsh wig. He will not meet his captain’s stare in the harsh lantern glow.
“What is this, Manson?” Crozier’s voice does not hold the bark he unleashed on his lookout and lieutenant. His tone is flat, calm, certain, with the power of flogging and hanging behind every syllable.
“It’s them ghosts, Cap’n.” For a huge man, Magnus Manson has the high, soft voice of a child. When Terror and Erebus had paused at Disko Bay on the west coast of Greenland in July of 1845, Captain Sir John Franklin had seen fit to dismiss two men from the expedition —a Marine private and a sailmaker from Terror. Crozier had made the recommendation that seaman John Brown and Private Aitken from his ship also be released — they were little better than invalids and never should have been signed on for such a voyage — but on occasion since, he wished he’d sent Manson home with those four. If the big man was not feebleminded, he was so close to it that it was impossible to tell the difference.
“You know there are no ghosts on Terror, Manson.”
“Yes, Cap’n.”
“Look at me.”
Manson raises his face but does not meet Crozier’s gaze. The captain marvels at how tiny the man’s pale eyes are in that white lump of a face.
“Did you disobey Mr. Thompson’s orders to carry sacks of coal to the boiler room, Seaman Manson?”
“No, sir. Yes, sir.”
“Do you know the consequences of disobeying any order on this ship?” Crozier feels like he’s talking to a boy, although Manson must be at least thirty years old.
The big sailor’s face brightens as he is presented with a question he can answer correctly. “Oh, yes, Cap’n. Flogging, sir. Twenty lashes. A ’undred lashes if I disobeys more than once. ’Anging if I disobey a real officer rather’n jus’ Mr. Thompson.”
“That’s correct,” says Crozier, “but did you know that the captain can also inflict any punishment he finds appropriate to the transgression?”
Manson peers down at him, his pale eyes confused. He has not understood the question.
“I’m saying I can punish you any way I see fit, Seaman Manson,” says the captain.
A flood of relief flows over the lumpy face. “Oh, yes, right, Cap’n.”
“Instead of twenty lashes,” says Francis Crozier, “I could have you locked up in the Dead Room for twenty hours with no light.”
Manson’s already pale, frozen features lose so much blood that Crozier prepares to get out of the way if the big man faints.
“You … wouldn’t… .” The child-man’s voice quavers toward a vibrato.
Crozier says nothing for a long, cold, lantern-hissing moment. He lets the sailor read his expression. Finally he says, “What do you think you hear, Manson? Has someone been telling you ghost stories?”
Manson opens his mouth but seems to have trouble deciding which question to answer first. Ice forms on his fat lower lip. “Walker,” he says at last.
“You’re afraid of Walker?”
James Walker, a friend of Manson’s who had been about the same age as the idiot and not much brighter, was the last man to die on the ice, just a week earlier. Ship’s rules required that the crew keep small holes drilled in the ice near the ship, even when the ice was ten or fifteen feet thick as it was now, so that they could get at water to fight a fire should one break out aboard. Walker and two of his mates were on just such a drilling party in the dark, reopening an old hole that would freeze in less than an hour unless rammed with metal spikes. The white terror had come out from behind a pressure ridge, torn off the seaman’s arm, and smashed his ribs to splinters in an instant, disappearing before the armed guards on deck could raise their shotguns.
“Walker told you ghost stories?” says Crozier.
“Yes, Cap’n. No, Cap’n. What Jimmy did was, ’e tells me the night before the thing killed ’im, ’e says, ‘Magnus, should that ’ellspawn out on the ice get me someday,’ ’e says, ‘I’ll come back in me white shroud to whisper in your ear how cold ’ell is.’ So help me God, Cap’n, that’s what Jimmy said to me. Now I ’ear ’im tryin’ to get out.”
As if on cue, the hull groans, the frigid deck moans under their feet, metal brackets on the beams groan back in sympathy, and there is a scraping, clawing noise in the dark around them that seems to run the length of the ship. The ice is restless.
“Is that the sound you hear, Manson?”
“Yes, Cap’n. No, sir.”
The Dead Room is thirty feet aft on the starboard side, just beyond the last metal-moaning iron water tank, but when the outside ice stops its noise, Crozier can hear only the muffled scrape and push of the shovels in the boiler room farther aft.
Crozier’s had enough of this nonsense. “You know your friend’s not coming back, Magnus. He’s there in the extra sail storage room securely sewn into his own hammock with the other dead men, frozen solid, with three layers of our heaviest sail canvas tied around them. If you hear anything from in there, it’s the damned rats trying to get at them. You know this, Magnus Manson.”
“Yes, Cap’n.”
“There will be no disobeying orders on this ship, Seaman Manson. You have to make up your mind now. Carry the coal when Mr. Thompson tells you to. Fetch the food stores when Mr. Diggle sends you down here. Obey all orders promptly and politely. Or face the court … face me … and the possibility that you’ll spend a cold, lanternless night in the Dead Room yourself.”
Without another word, Manson knuckles his forehead in salute, lifts a huge sack of coal from where he’s stowed it on the ladder, and hauls it aft into the darkness.
The engineer himself is stripped to his long-sleeved undershirt and corduroy trousers, shoveling coal alongside the ancient 47-year-old stoker named Bill Johnson. The other stoker, Luke Smith, is on the lower deck sleeping between his shoveling hours. Terror’s lead stoker, young John Torrington, was the first man of the expedition to die, on New Year’s Day 1846. But that had been from natural causes. It seems Torrington’s doctor had urged the 19-year-old to go to sea to cure his consumption, and he’d succumbed after two months of being an invalid while the ships were frozen in the harbour at Beechey Island that first winter. Doctors Peddie and McDonald had told Crozier that the boy’s lungs were as solidly packed with coal dust as a chimney sweep’s pockets.
“Thank you, Captain,” says the young engineer between heaves of the shovel. Seaman Manson has just dropped off a second sack of coal and gone back for a third.
“You’re welcome, Mr. Thompson.” Crozier glances at Stoker Johnson. The man is four years younger than the captain but looks thirty years older. Every seam and wrinkle on his age-molded face is outlined in coal black and grime. Even his toothless gums are soot grey. Crozier doesn’t want to reprimand his engineer — and thus an officer, although civilian — in front of the stoker, but he says, “I presume we’ll dispense with using Marines as messengers, should there be another such instance in the future, which I very much doubt.”
Thompson nods, uses the shovel to clang shut the iron grate on the boiler, leans on the tool, and tells Johnson to go above to get him some coffee from Mr. Diggle. Crozier’s glad the stoker is gone but even happier that the grate is closed; the heat in here makes him slightly nauseated after the cold everywhere else.
The captain has to wonder at the fate of his engineer. Warrant Officer James Thompson, Engineer First Class, graduate of the Navy’s steam factory at Woolwich — the world’s best training grounds for the new breed of steam-propulsion engineers — is here stripped to his filthy undershirt, shoveling coal like a common stoker in an ice-locked ship that hasn’t moved an inch under its own power now for more than a year.
“Mr. Thompson,” says Crozier, “I’m
sorry I haven’t had a chance to talk to you today since you walked over to Erebus. Did you have a chance to confer with Mr. Gregory?”
John Gregory is the engineer aboard the flagship.
“I did, Captain. Mr. Gregory’s convinced that with the onset of real winter, they’ll never be able to get at the damaged driveshaft. Even if they were able to tunnel down through the ice to replace the last propeller with the one they’ve jury-rigged, with the replacement driveshaft bent as badly as it is, Erebus is going nowhere under steam.”
Crozier nods. Erebus bent its second driveshaft while the ship was throwing itself desperately on the ice more than a year ago. The flagship — heavier, with a more powerful engine — led the way through the pack ice that summer, opening leads for both ships. But the last ice they’d encountered before being frozen in for the last thirteen months was harder than the iron in the experimental propeller screw and driveshaft. Divers that summer — all of who suffered frostbite and came close to dying — had confirmed not only that the screw had been shattered but that the driveshaft itself was bent and broken.
“Coal?” says the captain.
“Erebus has enough for … perhaps … four months of heating in the ice, at only one hour of hot-water circulation through the lower deck per day, Captain. None at all for steaming next summer.”
If we get free next summer, thinks Crozier. After this last summer, when the ice never relented for a day, he’s a pessimist. Franklin had used up Erebus’s coal supply at a prodigious rate during those last weeks of freedom in the summer of 1846, sure that if he could smash through those last few miles of pack ice, the expedition would reach the open waters of the North-West Passage along the northern coast of Canada and they’d be drinking tea in China by late autumn.
“What about our coal use?” asks Crozier.
“Perhaps enough left for six months of heating,” says Thompson. “But only if we cut back from two hours a day to one. And I recommend we do that soon — no later than the first of November.”
That is less than two weeks away.
“And steaming?” says Crozier.
If the ice relents at all next summer, Crozier plans to cram all the surviving men from Erebus aboard Terror and make an all-out effort to retreat the way they’d come — up the unnamed strait between Boothia Peninsula and Prince of Wales Island, down which they rushed two summers ago, past Walker Point and Barrow Strait, out through Lancaster Sound like a cork from a bottle, then rushing south into Baffin Bay with all sail set and the last coal being burned, going like smoke and oakum, burning extra spars and furniture if need be to get the last bit of steam, anything to get them into open water off Greenland where whalers could find them.
But he’ll also need steam to fight his way north through the south-flowing ice to Lancaster Sound, even if a miracle occurs and they are released from the ice here. Crozier and James Ross once sailed Terror and Erebus out of the south polar ice, but they’d been traveling with the currents and bergs. Here in the damned arctic, the ships have to sail for weeks against the flow of ice coming down from the pole just to reach the straits where they can escape.
Thompson shrugs. The man looks exhausted. “If we cut off the heat on New Year’s Day and somehow survive until next summer, we might get … six days steaming without ice? Five?”
Crozier merely nods again. This is almost certainly a death sentence for his ship, but not necessarily for the men of both ships.
There is a sound out in the darkened corridor.
“Thank you, Mr. Thompson.” The captain lifts his lantern off an iron hook, leaves the glow of the boiler room, and heads forward in the slush and darkness.
Thomas Honey is waiting in the corridor, his candle lantern sputtering in the bad air. He is holding the iron pry bar in front of him like a musket, clutched in thick gloves, and hasn’t opened the bolted door of the Dead Room.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Honey,” Crozier says to his carpenter.
Without explanation, the captain throws back the bolts and enters the freezing-cold storage room.
Crozier can not resist lifting his lantern toward the aft bulkhead where the six men’s bodies have been stacked in their common canvas shroud.
The heap is writhing. Crozier expected that — expected to see the movement of rats under the tarp — but he realizes that he’s looking at a solid mass of rats above the shroud-canvas as well. There is a solid cube of rats, extending more than four feet above the deck, as hundreds of them jostle for position to get at the frozen dead men. The squealing is very loud in here. More rats are underfoot, scuttling between his and the carpenter’s legs. Rushing to the banquet, thinks Crozier. And showing no fear of the lantern light.
Crozier turns the lantern back to the hull, walks up the slight incline caused by the ship’s cant to port and begins pacing along the curved, tilted wall.
There.
He holds the lantern closer.
“Well, I’ll be God-damned to hell and hanged for a heathen,” says Honey. “Pardon me, Captain, but I didn’t think the ice would do this so soon.”
Crozier doesn’t answer. He crouches to investigate the bent and extended wood of the hull more closely.
Hull planks have been bent inward here, bulging almost a foot from the graceful curve elsewhere along the hull’s side. The innermost layers of wood have splintered and at least two planks are hanging free.
“Jesus God Christ Almighty,” says the carpenter, who has crouched next to the captain. “That ice is a fucking monster, begging the Captain’s pardon, sir.”
“Mr. Honey,” says Crozier, his breath adding crystals to the ice already on the planks and reflecting the lantern light, “could anything but the ice have done this damage?”
The carpenter barks a laugh but stops abruptly as he realizes his captain is not making a joke. Honey’s eyes widen, then squint. “Begging your pardon again, Captain, but if you mean … that’s impossible.”
Crozier says nothing.
“I mean, Captain, this hull was three inches of the finest English oak as it was, sir. And for this trip — for the ice, I mean, sir — it was doubled with two layers of African oak, Captain, each one and a half inches thick. And them African oak panels was wrought on the diagonal, sir, givin’ it even more strength than if it were just doubled straight-like.”
Crozier is inspecting the loose planks, trying to ignore the river of rats behind them and around them as well as the chewing sounds from the direction of the aft bulkhead.
“And, sir,” continues Honey, his voice hoarse in the cold, his rum-tainted breath freezing in the air, “on top of the three inches of English oak and the three inches of diagonal-laid African oak, they laid on two layers of Canadian elm, sir, each two inches thick. That’s four more inches of hull, Captain, and that wrought diagonal against the African oak. That’s five belts of serious timber, sir … ten inches of the strongest wood on earth between us and the sea.”
The carpenter shuts up, realizing that he’s lecturing his captain on details of the shipyard’s work that Crozier had personally overseen in the months before departure.
The captain stands and sets his mittened hand against the innermost planks where they have come free. There’s more than an inch of open space there. “Set your lantern down, Mr. Honey. Use your pry bar to lever this loose. I want to see what the ice has done to the outer layer of hull oak.”
The carpenter complies. For several minutes the sound of the iron bar prying at iron-cold wood and the carpenter’s grunts almost drown out the frenzied gnawing of the rats behind them. The bent Canadian elm tears back and falls away. The shattered African oak is leveraged out. Only the inward-bent original oak of the hull remains now as Crozier steps closer, holding his lantern so that both men can see.
Shards and spears of ice reflect the lantern light through the foot-long holes in the hull, but in the centre is something much more disturbing — blackness. Nothing. A hole in the ice. A tunnel.
Honey bends
a piece of the splintered oak farther in so Crozier can shine his lantern on it.
“Holy fucking Jesus Christ fucking shit almighty,” gasps the carpenter. This time he does not ask his captain’s pardon.
Crozier has the temptation to lick his dry lips but knows how painful that will be here where it’s 50 below in the dark. But his heart is pounding so wildly that he’s also tempted to steady himself with one mitten against the hull the way the carpenter has just done.
The freezing air from outside rushes in so quickly that it almost extinguishes the lantern. Crozier has to shield it with his free hand to keep it flickering, sending the men’s shadows dancing across decks, beams, and bulkheads.
The two long boards from the outer hull have been smashed and bent inward by some inconceivable, irresistible force. Clearly visible in the light from the slightly shaking lantern are huge claw marks in the splintered oak — claw marks streaked with frozen smears of impossibly bright blood.
4
GOODSIR
Lat. 75°-12′ N., Long. 61°-6′ W.
Baffin Bay, July, 1845
From the private diary of Dr. Harry D. S. Goodsir:
11 April, 1845 —
In a letter to my brother today, I wrote — “All the Officers are in great hopes of making the passage and hope to be in the Pacific end of next summer.”