The Terror

by Dan Simmons

  John Bridgens was that steward. He was now the oldest man on the expedition, by far. When they had sailed from England, the joke in both Erebus’s and Terror’s fo’c’sles had been that John Bridgens, lowly subordinate officers’ steward, was the same age as the elderly Sir John Franklin but twenty times as wise. Harry Peglar, for one, knew that this was true.

  Old men below the rank of captain or admiral rarely were allowed on Discovery Service expeditions, so it was with some good humour that both crews learned that John Bridgens’s age on the official ship’s muster had been reversed — either by accident or by a purser with a sense of irony — and listed as “26.” There had been many jokes made to the grey-haired Bridgens about his youth and callowness and presumed sexual prowess. The quiet steward had smiled and said nothing.

  It had been Harry Peglar who had sought out a younger steward Bridgens on the HMS Beagle during their five-year round-the-world scientific survey voyage under Captain FitzRoy from December of 1831 to October of 1836. Peglar had followed an officer he’d served under on HMS Prince Regent, a lieutenant named John Lort Stokes, from the first-rate 120-gun ship of the line to the lowly Beagle. The Beagle was only a Cherokee class 10-gun brig adapted as a survey bark — hardly the kind of ship that an ambitious topman like young Peglar would normally pick — but even then Harry had been interested in scientific survey work and exploration, and the voyage of the little Beagle under FitzRoy had been an education for him in more ways than one.

  Steward Bridgens had been about eight years older then than Peglar was now — in his late forties — but already known as the wisest and most widely read warrant officer in the fleet. He was also known as a sodomite, a fact that hadn’t bothered twenty-five-year-old Peglar much at the time. There were two types of sodomites in the Royal Navy: those who sought their satisfaction only on shore and never brought their activities to sea, and those who continued their habits at sea, often by seducing the young boys almost always present on Royal Navy ships. Bridgens, everyone in the Beagle fo’c’sle and in the Navy knew, was the former — a man who liked men when ashore but who never bragged of it nor brought his inclinations to sea. And, unlike the caulker’s mate on Peglar’s current ship, Bridgens was no pederast. Most of his crewmates thought that a boy at sea was safer with subordinate officers’ steward John Bridgens than he would have been with his village vicar at home.

  Besides that, Harry Peglar was living with Rose Murray when he sailed in 1831. Although never formally married — she was a Catholic and would not marry Harry unless he converted, which he could not bring himself to do — they were a happy couple when Peglar was ashore, although Rose’s own illiteracy and lack of curiosity about the world reflected the younger Peglar’s life and not the man he would later become. Perhaps they would have married if Rose could have had children, but she could not — a condition she referred to as “God’s punishment.” Rose died while Peglar was at sea on the long Beagle voyage. He had loved her, in his way.

  But he had also loved John Bridgens.

  Before the five-year mission of the survey ship HMS Beagle had ended, Bridgens — at first accepting his role of mentor with reluctance but finally bending under the young topsail midshipman’s eager insistence — had taught Harry to read and write not only in English but also in Greek and Latin and German. He had taught him philosophy and history and natural history. More than that, Bridgens had taught the intelligent young man to think.

  It had been two years after that voyage that Peglar had looked up the older man in London — Bridgens had been on extended shore leave with most of the rest of the fleet in 1838 — and requested more tutoring. By then, Peglar was already captain of the foretop on the HMS Wanderer.

  It was during those months of shorebound discussion and further tutoring that the close friendship between the two men had moved into something more resembling lovers’ interactions. The revelation that he was capable of doing such a thing astounded Peglar — dismaying him at first but then causing him to reconsider every aspect of his life, morals, faith, and sense of self. What he discovered confused him but, to his astonishment, did not change his basic sense of who Harry Peglar was. What was even more astounding to him was that he had been the one to instigate intimate physical contact — not the older man.

  The intimate aspect of their friendship lasted only a few months and ended by mutual choice as much as by Peglar’s long absences at sea on Wanderer until 1844. Their friendship survived intact. Peglar began writing long philosophical letters to the former steward and would spell all words backward, the last letter of the last word in each sentence now first and capitalized. Mostly because the formerly illiterate foretop captain’s spelling was so atrocious, Bridgens suggested in one responding letter that “your childlike idea of Leonardo’s backward-writing encryption, Harry, is almost unbreakable.” Peglar now kept his journals in the same crude code.

  Neither man had told the other that he was applying for Discovery Service duty on Sir John Franklin’s North-West Passage expedition. Both were astonished a few weeks before sailing time when they saw the other’s name on the official roster. Peglar, who had not been in communication with Bridgens for more than a year, traveled from the Woolwich barracks up to the steward’s North London rooms to ask if he should drop out of the expedition. Bridgens insisted that he should be the one to remove his name from the list. In the end, they agreed that neither of them should lose the opportunity for such adventure — certainly Bridgens’ last opportunity because of his advanced age (Erebus’s purser, Charles Hamilton Osmer, had been a longtime friend of Bridgens and had smoothed his enlistment with Sir John and the officers, even going so far as to hide the subordinate officers’ steward’s real age by being the one to write it as “26” on the official rolls). Neither Peglar nor Bridgens said it aloud, but both knew that the older man’s long-standing vow never to bring his sexual desires to sea would be honoured by both of them. That part of their history, they both knew, was closed.

  As it turned out, Peglar had seen almost nothing of his old friend during the voyage, and in three and a half years, they rarely had a minute alone.

  It was still dark, of course, when Peglar arrived at Erebus sometime around eleven on this Saturday morning two days before the end of January, but there was a glow in the south that promised to be, for the first time in more than eighty days, a predawn glow. The slight glow did not dispel the bite from the −65-degree temperatures, so he did not dawdle as the lanterns of the ship came into sight.

  The view of Erebus’s truncated masts would have dismayed any topman, but it hurt Harry Peglar more than most since he had, with his Erebus captain of the foretop counterpart, Robert Sinclair, helped supervise the dismantling and storage of both ships’ upper masts for the endless winters. It was an ugly sight at any time and was made no prettier by Erebus’s bizarre stern-down, bow-up posture in the encroaching ice.

  Peglar was hailed by the watch, invited aboard, and he carried his message from Captain Crozier down to Captain Fitzjames, who was sitting and smoking his pipe in the aft officers’ mess since the Great Cabin was still being used as an ad hoc sick bay.

  The captains had begun using the brass canisters meant for cached reports to send their written messages back and forth — the couriers hated this change since the cold metal burned fingers even through heavy gloves — and Fitzjames had to order Peglar to open the canister with his mittens, since the tube was still too cold for the captain to touch. Fitzjames did not dismiss him, so Peglar stood in the doorway to the officers’ mess while the captain read the note from Crozier.

  “No return message, Mr. Peglar,” said Fitzjames.

  The foretop captain knuckled his forehead and went up onto the deck again. About a dozen Erebuses had come up to watch the sunrise and more had been getting into their slops below to do so. Peglar had noticed that the Great Cabin sick bay had about a dozen men in it on cots — about the same number as Terror. Scurvy was setting in on both ships.

 
; Peglar saw the small, familiar figure of John Bridgens standing at the rail on the stern’s port side. He came up behind him and tapped the man on the shoulder.

  “Ah, a little touch of Harry in the night,” said Bridgens even before he turned.

  “Not night for long,” said Peglar. “And how did you know it was me, John?”

  Bridgens had no comforter over his face, and Peglar could see his smile and watery blue eyes. “Word of visitors travels quickly on a small ship frozen in the ice. Do you have to hurry back to Terror?”

  “No. Captain Fitzjames had no response.”

  “Would you care to take a stroll?”

  “By all means,” said Peglar.

  They went down the starboard side ice ramp and walked toward the iceberg and high pressure ridge to the southeast so as to get a better view of the glowing south. For the first time in months, HMS Erebus was backlit by something other than the aurora or lantern or torchlight.

  Before they reached the pressure ridge, they passed the scuffed, sooted, and partially melted area where the Carnivale fire had burned. The area had been well cleaned up on Captain Crozier’s orders in the week after the disaster, but post holes where the staves had served as tent poles remained, as did shreds of rope or canvas that had melted into the ice and then been frozen in place. The rectangle of the ebony room still showed even after repeated efforts to remove the black soot and several snowfalls.

  “I’ve read the American writer,” said Bridgens.

  “American writer?”

  “The chap who caused little Dickie Aylmore to receive fifty lashes for his inventive set decorations for our late, unlamented carnivale. A strange little fellow by the name of Poe, if memory serves. Very melancholy and morbid stuff with a touch of the truly unhealthy macabre. Not very good, overall, but very American in some undefinable sense. I did not, however, read the fateful story that brought on the lashes.”

  Peglar nodded. His foot struck something in the snow, and he bent to pry it out of the ice.

  It was the bear’s skull that had been hanging above Sir John’s ebony clock, which had not survived the flames — the skull’s flesh, hide, and hair gone and bone blackened by the fire, eye sockets empty, but the teeth still ivory-coloured.

  “Oh, my, Mr. Poe would love that, I think,” said Bridgens.

  Peglar dropped it back into the snow. The thing must have been hidden beneath chunks of fallen ice when the clean-up parties worked here. He and Bridgens walked another fifty yards to the tallest pressure ridge in the area and clambered up it, Peglar repeatedly giving his hand to help the older man up.

  On a flat slab of ice atop the ridge, Bridgens was panting heavily. Even Peglar, normally as fit as one of the ancient Olympic athletes he’d read about, found himself breathing harder than usual. Too many months of no real physical duty, he thought.

  The southern horizon was glowing a subdued, washed-out yellow, and most of the stars in that half of the sky had paled.

  “I almost can’t believe it’s returning,” said Peglar.

  Bridgens nodded.

  Suddenly there it was, the disk of red-gold rising hesitantly above dark masses that looked like hills but must be low clouds far to the south. Peglar heard the forty or so men on the deck of Erebus give three cheers, and — because the air was very cold and very still — he could hear a duplicate but fainter cheer coming from Terror, just visible almost a mile to the east across the ice.

  “Dawn stretches forth her rosy fingertips,” Bridgens said in Greek.

  Peglar smiled, mildly amused that he remembered the phrase. It had been several years since he’d read the Iliad or anything else in Greek. He remembered the excitement of his first encounter with this language and with Troy and its heroes as Beagle had been anchored off São Tiago, a volcanic island in the Cape Verde Islands, almost seventeen years earlier.

  As if reading his mind, Bridgens said, “Do you remember Mr. Darwin?”

  “The young naturalist?” said Peglar. “Captain FitzRoy’s favorite interlocutor? Of course I do. Five years on a small bark with a man leaves an impression, even if he was a gentleman and I wasn’t.”

  “And what was your impression, Harry?” Bridgens’ pale blue eyes were watering more heavily, either out of emotion at seeing the sun again or just in reaction to the unaccustomed light, as pale as it was. The red disk had not completely cleared the dark clouds before it started descending again.

  “Of Mr. Darwin?” Peglar was also squinting — more to bring back memory of the thin young naturalist than because of the sun’s wonderful illumination. “I found him pleasant, as such gentlemen go. Very enthusiastic. He certainly kept the men busy transporting and crating up all those damned dead animals — at one point I thought the finches alone were going to fill the hold — but he wasn’t above getting his own hands dirty. Remember the time he joined in the rowing to help tow old Beagle upstream in the river? And he saved a boat from the tidal wave that other time. And once, when whales were alongside us — off the coast of Chile, I believe — I was amazed to find that he’d climbed all the way up to the crosstrees on his own to get a better view. I had to help him down, but not before he looked through the glass at the whales for over an hour, the tails of his coat flapping in the breeze.”

  Bridgens smiled. “I was almost jealous when he lent you that book. What was it? Lyell?”

  “Principles of Geology,” said Peglar. “I didn’t really understand it. Or rather, I did just enough to realize how dangerous it was.”

  “Because of Lyell’s contention about the age of things,” said Bridgens. “About the very un-Christian idea that things change slowly over immense aeons of time rather than very quickly due to very violent events.”

  “Yes,” said Peglar. “But Mr. Darwin was very keen on it. He sounded like a man who had experienced a religious conversion.”

  “I believe he had, in a manner of speaking,” said Bridgens. Only the top third of the sun was visible now. “I mention Mr. Darwin because mutual friends told me before we sailed that he is writing a book.”

  “He published several already,” said Peglar. “Do you remember, John, we discussed his Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle in the year I came to study with you … 1839. I couldn’t afford to buy it, but you said you’d read it. And I believe he published several volumes on the plant and animal life he saw.”

  “The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle,” said Bridgens. “Yes, I purchased that as well. No, I meant he has been working on a much more important book according to my dear friend Mr. Babbage.”

  “Charles Babbage?” said Peglar. “The fellow who tinkers up so many odd things including some sort of computing engine?”

  “The same,” said Bridgens. “Charles tells me that all these years, Mr. Darwin has been working on a quite interesting volume discussing the mechanisms of organic evolution. Apparently it draws in information from comparative anatomy, embryology, and paleontology … all great interests of our former shipboard naturalist’s, you may remember. But for whatever reasons, Mr. Darwin is loath to publish and the book may not see print, according to Charles, in anyone’s lifetime.”

  “Organic evolution?” repeated Peglar.

  “Yes, Harry. That’s the idea that species, despite all civilized Christian agreement to the contrary, are not fixed since creation, but may change and adapt over time … much time. Mr. Lyell’s amounts of time.”

  “I know what organic evolution is,” said Peglar, trying not to show his irritation at being talked down to. The problem with a student-teacher relationship was, he realized not for the first time, that it never changes while everything around it does. “I’ve read Lamarck on the concept. Also Diderot. And Buffon, I believe.”

  “Yes, it’s an old theory,” said Bridgens, his tone sounding amused but also slightly apologetic. “Montesquieu has written about it, as has Maupertuis and the others you mentioned. Even Erasmus Darwin, our
former shipmate’s grandfather, had proposed it.”

  “Then why would Mr. Charles Darwin’s book be important?” asked Peglar. “Organic evolution is an old idea. It’s been rejected by the Church and other naturalists for generations.”

  “If Charles Babbage and other friends Mr. Darwin and I have in common are to be believed,” said Bridgens, “this new book — should it ever be published — offers proof of an actual mechanism for organic evolution. And it should give a thousand — perhaps ten thousand — solid examples of this mechanism in action.”

  “And the mechanism is what?” asked Peglar. The sun had disappeared. Rose shadows faded into the pale yellow gloom that had preceded its rising. Now that the sun was gone, Peglar hardly believed he had seen it.

  “Natural selection arising from competition within the countless species,” said the elderly subordinate officers’ steward. “A selection passing along advantageous traits and weeding out disadvantageous traits — that is, ones which add to the probability of neither survival nor reproduction — over vast amounts of time. Lyellian amounts of time.”

  Peglar thought about this for a minute. “Why did you bring this up, John?”

  “Because of our predatory friend out here on the ice, Harry. Because of the blackened skull you left back where the ebony room had once echoed to the ticking of Sir John’s ebony clock.”

  “I don’t quite understand,” said Peglar. He used to say that very frequently when he was John Bridgens’s student during the five years of Beagle’s seemingly endless wanderings. The voyage had been planned as a two-year venture, and Peglar had promised Rose he would be back in two years or less. She had died of consumption during Beagle’s fourth year at sea. “Do you think the thing on the ice is some form of species evolutionary adaptation from the more common white bear we’ve encountered so frequently up here?”