by Dan Simmons
“But a sledge with runners on the ice and possibly a sail — especially if we leave in March or April before the ice gets runny and sticky — would be easier going than man-hauling gear overland or through summer slush,” said Lieutenant Le Vesconte.
“I say we leave the boats behind and travel light to Baffin Bay with just sledges and survival stores,” said Charles Des Voeux. “If we arrive on the east coast of Somerset Island to the north before the whaling season ends, we’re bound to be picked up by a ship. And I would wager that there will be Navy rescue ships and sledge parties there looking for us.”
“If we leave the boats behind,” said Ice Master Blanky, “one open stretch of water will stop us for good. We die out there on the ice.”
“Why would rescuers be on the east side of Somerset Island and the Boothia Peninsula in the first place?” asked Lieutenant Little. “If they’re searching for us, won’t they follow our path through Lancaster Sound to Devon and Beechey and Cornwallis Islands? They know Sir John’s sailing orders. They will presume we made it through Lancaster Sound since it’s open most summers. There’s no chance at all of any of us making it that far north.”
“Perhaps the ice is as bad up at Lancaster Sound this year as it is down here,” said Ice Master Reid. “That would keep the search parties farther south, out on the east side of Somerset Island and the Boothia.”
“Maybe they’ll find the messages what we left in the cairns way up at Beechey if they do get through,” said Sergeant Tozer. “And send sledges or ships south the way we come.”
Silence descended like a shroud.
“There were no messages left at Beechey,” Captain Fitzjames said into that silence.
In the embarrassed vacuum that followed this statement, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier found a strange, hot, pure flame burning in his chest. It was a sensation rather like a first sip of whiskey after days without it, but also nothing at all like that.
Crozier wanted to live. It was that simple. He was determined to live. He was going to survive this bad patch in the face of all odds and gods dictating that he would not and could not. This fire in his chest had been there even in the shaky, sick hours and painful days after he had emerged from the pit of his malaria-and-withdrawal brush with death in early January. The flame grew stronger every day.
Perhaps more than any other man around the long table in the Great Cabin this day, Francis Crozier understood the near impossibility of the courses of action being discussed. It was folly to head south across the ice toward Great Fish River. Folly to head for Somerset Island across twelve hundred miles of coastal ice, pressure ridges, open leads, and an unknown peninsula. Folly to think that the ice would open up this summer and allow Terror — overcrowded with two crews and almost empty of provisions — to sail out of the hopeless trap that Sir John had led them into.
Nonetheless, Francis Crozier was determined to live. The flame burned in him like strong Irish whiskey.
“Have we given up on the idea of sailing out?” Robert Sinclair was saying.
James Reid, Erebus’s Ice Master, answered. “We would have to sail almost three hundred miles north up the unnamed strait and sound that Sir John discovered, then through Barrow Strait and Lancaster Sound, then get south through Baffin Bay before the ice closed on us again. We had the steam engine and armour plating to help us bash through the ice heading south. Even if the ice relents to levels it was two summers ago, we would have great difficulty traversing that distance just with sail. And with our weakened wooden hull.”
“The ice may be considerably less than in 1846,” said Sinclair.
“Angels may fly out my arse,” said Thomas Blanky.
Because of his missing leg, none of the officers at the table reprimanded the ice master. A few smiled.
“There might be another option … for sailing, I mean,” said Lieutenant Edward Little.
Eyes turned in his direction. Enough men had saved some rations of tobacco — stretched out by adding unspeakable things to it — that half a dozen were now smoking pipes around the table. The smoke haze made the gloom even thicker in the dim flicker of the whale-oil lamps.
“Lieutenant Gore last summer thought that he spied land to the south of King William Land,” continued Little. “If he did, that has to be the Adelaide Peninsula — known territory — which quite often has a channel of open water between the coast ice and the pack ice. If enough leads open to allow Terror to sail south — just a little over one hundred miles, perhaps, rather than the three hundred miles back through Lancaster Sound — we could follow open channels along the coast west until we reach the Bering Strait. Everything beyond here would be known territory.”
“The North-West Passage,” said Third Lieutenant John Irving. The words sounded like a mournful incantation.
“But would we have enough able-bodied men to crew the ship by late summer?” asked Dr. Goodsir, his voice very soft. “By May, the scurvy may have all of us in its grip. And what would we do for food during the weeks or months of our passage west?”
“Hunting might be good farther west,” said Marine Sergeant Tozer. “Musk oxen. Them big deer. Walruses. White foxes. Maybe we’d be eating like pashas before we got to Alaska.”
Crozier half-expected Ice Master Thomas Blanky to say, “And musk oxen might fly out my arse,” but the sometimes-giddy ice master seemed to be lost in his own reveries.
Lieutenant Little answered instead. “Sergeant, our problem is that even if the game were to miraculously return after two summers’ absence, none of us aboard seems able to hit anything with muskets … your men excluded, of course. We’d need more than your few surviving Marines to hunt. And it appears that none of us has any experience hunting anything much larger than birds. Will the shotguns bring down the game you’re talking about?”
“If you gets close enough,” Tozer said sullenly.
Crozier interrupted this line of discussion. “Dr. Goodsir made an excellent point earlier … if we wait until midsummer, or perhaps even until June to see if the pack ice breaks up, we may be too ill and hungry to crew the ship. We’d certainly be too low on provisions to start a sledge trip. And we have to assume three or four months of travel across the ice or up Fish River, so if we’re going to abandon the ships and take to the ice with the hopes of arriving at either Great Slave Lake or the east coast of Somerset Island or Boothia before winter sets in again, our departure obivously has to be before June. But how early?”
There was another thick bout of silence.
“I would suggest no later than the first of May,” Lieutenant Little said at last.
“Earlier, I would think,” said Dr. Goodsir, “unless we find sources of fresh meat soon and if the illness continues to spread as quickly as it currently is.”
“How much earlier?” asked Captain Fitzjames.
“No later than mid-April?” Goodsir said hesitantly.
The men looked at one another through the tobacco smoke and cold air. That was less than two months away.
“Perhaps,” said the surgeon, his voice sounding both firm and tentative to Crozier, “if conditions continue to worsen.”
“How could they get worse?” asked Second Lieutenant Hodgson.
The young man obviously had meant it as a joke to lessen the tension but was rewarded with baleful and angry stares.
Crozier did not want the council of war to end on that note. The officers, warrant officers, petty officers, and civilian at the table had looked at their choices and seen that they were as bleak as Crozier had known they would be, but he did not want his ships’ leaders’ morale to get any lower than it already was.
“By the way,” Crozier said in a conversational tone, “Captain Fitzjames has decided to conduct Divine Service next Sunday on Erebus — he’ll be giving a special sermon that I’m interested in hearing, although I have it on good authority that it will not be a reading from the Book of Leviathan — and I thought that since the ships’ companies will be assembled anyway, we
should have full rations of grog and dinner that one day.”
The men smiled and bantered. None of them had expected to bring back good news to their specialized portions of the crews from this meeting.
Fitzjames raised one eyebrow very slightly. His “special sermon” and this Divine Service five days away, Crozier knew, were news to him, but Crozier thought it would probably do the thinning captain good to be preoccupied with something and to be the center of attention for a change. Fitzjames nodded ever so slightly.
“Very well then, gentlemen,” Crozier said a bit more formally. “This exchange of thoughts and information has been very helpful. Captain Fitzjames and I will consult and perhaps talk to several of you again, one to one, before we make up our minds on a course of action. I will let you Erebuses get back to your ship before our midday sunset. Godspeed, gentlemen. I shall see you all on Sunday.”
The men filed out. Fitzjames came around, leaned close, and whispered, “I may want to borrow that Book of Leviathan from you, Francis,” and followed his men forward to where they were struggling into their frozen slops.
Terror’s officers went back to their duties. Captain Crozier sat for a few minutes in his chair at the head of the table, thinking about what had been discussed. The fire for survival burned hotter than ever in his aching chest.
“Captain?”
Crozier looked up. It was the old steward from Erebus, Bridgens, who had filled in on the serving because of both captains’ stewards’ illnesses. The man had been helping Gibson clean up the pewter plates and teacups.
“Oh, you can go, Bridgens,” said Crozier. “Go on with the others. Gibson will attend to all this. We don’t want you walking back to Erebus on your own.”
“Yes, sir,” said the old subordinate officers’ steward. “But I wonder if I might have a word with you, Captain.”
Crozier nodded. He did not invite the steward to sit down. He’d never felt comfortable around this old man — far too old for Discovery Service. If Crozier had been the one to make the decision three years earlier, Bridgens never would have been included on the roster — certainly not listed with an age of “26” to fool the Navy — but Sir John had been amused by having a steward aboard even older than himself and that had been that.
“I couldn’t help but hear the discussion, Captain Crozier — the three options of staying with the ships and hoping for a thaw, heading south to Fish River, or crossing the ice to Boothia. If the captain doesn’t mind, I’d like to suggest a fourth option.”
The captain did mind. Even an egalitarian Irishman like Francis Crozier bridled a bit at having a subordinate officers’ steward give advice on life-and-death command problems. But he said, “Go ahead.”
The steward went to the wall of books set into the stern bulkhead and pulled two large volumes, bringing them over to the table and setting them down with a thud. “I know you’re aware, Captain, that in 1829, Sir John Ross and his nephew James sailed their ship Victory down the east coast of Boothia Felix — the peninsula they discovered and which we now call Boothia Peninsula.”
“I am very aware of this, Mr. Bridgens,” Crozier said coldly. “I know Sir John and his nephew Sir James very well.” After five years in the ice of Antarctica with James Clark Ross, Crozier thought he was understating the acquaintance.
“Yes, sir,” said Bridgens, nodding but not seeming abashed. “Then I’m sure you know the details of their expedition, Captain Crozier. They spent four winters in the ice. That first winter, Sir John anchored Victory in what he named Felix Harbour on the east coast of Boothia … almost due east of our position here.”
“Were you on this expedition, Mr. Bridgens?” asked Crozier, willing the old man to get on with it.
“I did not have that honor, Captain. But I have read these two large volumes written by Sir John detailing his expedition. I wondered if you have had the time to do the same, sir.”
Crozier felt his Irish anger building. This old steward’s brashness was skirting on impertinence. “I have looked at the books, of course,” he said coolly. “I have not had the time to read them carefully. Is there a point to this, Mr. Bridgens?”
Any other officer, warrant officer, petty officer, seaman, or Marine under Crozier’s command would have received the message and been backing out of the Great Cabin while bowing low by now, but Bridgens seemed oblivious of his expedition commander’s irritation.
“Yes, Captain,” said the old man. “The point is that John Ross …”
“Sir John,” interrupted Crozier.
“Of course. Sir John Ross had much the same problem we do now, Captain.”
“Nonsense. He and James and Victory were frozen in on the east side of Boothia, Bridgens, precisely where we’d like to sledge to if we have the time and wherewithal. Hundreds of miles east of here.”
“Yes, sir, but at the same latitude, although Victory didn’t have to face this God-cursed pack ice coming down from the northwest all the time, thanks to Boothia. But she spent three winters in the ice there, Captain. James Ross sledged more than six hundred miles west across Boothia and the ice to King William Land just twenty-five miles sou’southeast of us, Captain. He named Victory Point … the same point and cairn site that poor Lieutenant Gore sledged to last summer before his unfortunate accident.”
“Do you think I don’t know that Sir James discovered King William Land and named Victory Point?” demanded Crozier. His voice was taut with irritation. “He also discovered the God-damned north magnetic pole during that expedition, Bridgens. Sir James is … was … the most outstanding long-distance sledger of our era.”
“Yes, sir,” said Bridgens. His small steward’s smile made Crozier want to strike him. The captain knew — had known before sailing — that this old man was a well-known sodomite, at least on shore. After the caulker mate’s near mutiny, Captain Crozier was sick of sodomites. “My point is, Captain Crozier, that after three winters in the ice, with his men as sick with scurvy as ours will be by this summer, Sir John decided that they would never get out of the ice and sank Victory in ten fathoms of water there off the east coast of Boothia, due east of us, and they headed north to Fury Beach, where Captain Parry had left supplies and boats.”
Crozier realized that he could hang this man, but he could not shut him up. He frowned and listened.
“You remember, Captain, that Parry’s supplies of food and boats were there at Fury Beach. Ross took the boats and sailed north along the coast to Cape Clarence, where from the cliffs there they could see north across Barrow Strait and Lancaster Sound to where they hoped to find whaling ships … but the sound was solid ice, sir. That summer was as bad as our last two summers have been and as this coming one may be.”
Crozier waited. For the first time since his deathly illness in January, he wished he had a glass of whiskey.
“They went back to Fury Beach and spent a fourth winter there, Captain. Men were close to dying of scurvy. The next July … 1833, four years after they had entered the ice up there … they set out in the small boats north and then east down Lancaster Sound past Admiralty Inlet and Navy Board Inlet, when on the morning of twenty-five August, James Ross … Sir James now … saw a sail. They waved, hallooed, and fired rockets. The sail disappeared east over the horizon.”
“I remember Sir James mentioning something about that,” Crozier said drily.
“Yes, Captain, I imagine he would,” said Bridgens with his maddening little pedant’s smile. “But the wind calmed, and the men rowed like smoke and oakum, sir, and they caught up to the whaler. She was the Isabella, Captain, the same ship that Sir John had commanded way back in 1818.
“Sir John and Sir James and the crew of Victory spent four years in the ice at our latitude, Captain,” continued Bridgens. “And only one man died — the carpenter, a Mr. Thomas, who had a dyspeptic and disagreeable disposition.”
“Your point?” asked Crozier again. His voice was very flat. He was too aware that more than a dozen men had died under his
command on this expedition.
“There are still boats and stores at Fury Beach,” said Bridgens. “And my guess is that any rescue party sent out for us — last year or this coming summer — will leave more boats and stores there. It’s the first place the Admiralty will think of to leave caches for us and for future rescue parties. Sir John’s survival assured that.”
Crozier sighed. “Are you in the habit of thinking like the Admiralty, Subordinate Officers’ Steward Bridgens?”
“Sometimes, yes,” said the old man. “It’s a habit of decades, Captain Crozier. After a while, proximity to fools forces one to think like a fool.”
“That will be all, Steward Bridgens,” snapped Crozier.
“Aye, sir. But read the two volumes, Captain. Sir John lays it all out — how to survive on the ice. How to fight the scurvy. How to find and use Esquimaux natives to help in the hunting. How to build little houses out of blocks of snow …”
“That will be all, Steward!”
“Aye, sir.” Bridgens knuckled his forehead and turned toward the companionway, but not before sliding the two thick volumes closer to Crozier.
The captain sat alone in the freezing Great Cabin for another ten minutes. He listened to the Erebuses clatter up the main ladderway and stomp across the deck above. He heard shouts as Terror officers on deck bid their comrades farewell and wished them a safe crossing of the ice. The ship quieted except for the bustle of men settling down after their supper and grog forward. Crozier heard the tables ratcheted up in the crewmen’s berthing area. He heard his officers clump down the ladderway, hang their slops, and come aft for their own supper. They sounded more chipper than they had at breakfast.