by Dan Simmons
They were still more than 1,600 miles from land when the last of the biscuits ran out at the same time as the last of the water was drunk. Crozier had figured that if the biscuits lasted his men another month, they would still be more than 800 miles from human habitation in winter even if they reached the mouth of Back’s River.
Pollard had no conveniently recently deceased men aboard his boat, so they drew straws. Pollard’s young nephew Owen Coffin drew the short straw. Then they drew straws again to see who would do the deed. Charles Ramsdell drew the short straw this time.
The boy wished the other men a tremulous good-bye (Crozier always remembered his scrotum-tightening sense of horror the first time he heard this part of the story while on watch with an older man high in the mizzen of a warship far off Argentina, the old seaman terrifying Lieutenant Crozier by saying good-bye in a trembling boy’s voice), and then young Coffin had laid his head on the gunwale and closed his eyes.
Captain Pollard, as he later testified in his own words, had given Ramsdell his pistol and turned his face away.
Ramsdell shot the boy in the back of the head.
The five others, including Captain Pollard, the boy’s uncle, first drank the blood while it was warm. Although salty, it was — unlike the endless sea around them — drinkable.
Then they sliced the boy’s flesh from his bones and ate it raw.
Then they broke open Owen Coffin’s bones and sucked out the marrow to the last shred.
The cabin boy’s corpse had sustained them for thirteen days, and just when they were considering drawing lots again, the black man — Barzillai Ray — died of thirst and exhaustion. Again the draining, drinking, slicing, cracking, and sucking of marrow sustained them until they were rescued by the whaler Dauphin on 23 February, 1821.
Francis Crozier never met Captain Pollard but he had followed his career. The unlucky American had retained his rank and gone to sea only once more — and once more was shipwrecked. After being rescued the second time, he was never again entrusted with command of a ship. The last Crozier heard, only a few months before Sir John’s expedition sailed three years earlier in 1845, Captain Pollard was living as a town watchman in Nantucket and was universally shunned by both townspeople and whalers there. It was said that Pollard had aged prematurely, spoke aloud to himself and his long-dead nephew, and hid biscuits and salt pork in the rafters of his home.
Crozier knew that his people would have to make a decision about eating their own dead within the next few weeks, if not the next few days.
The men were approaching the point where they were too few and those few too weak to man-haul boats, but the four-day rest on the ice floe from the 18th to the 22nd of July had not renewed their energy. Crozier, Des Voeux, and Couch — young Lieutenant Hodgson, while technically the second in command, was given no authority by the captain these days — rousted men and ordered them out hunting or repairing sledge runners or caulking and rerepairing the boats rather than let them lie in their frozen sleeping bags in their dripping tents all day — but essentially all they could do was sit on their connected floes for days since too many tiny leads, fissures, small areas of open water, and patches of thin and rotten ice surrounded them to allow any progress south or east or north.
Crozier refused to turn back west and northwest.
But the floes were not drifting in the direction they wanted to go — southeast toward the mouth of Back’s Great Fish River. They merely milled and circled upon themselves as the pack holding Erebus and Terror had for two long winters.
Finally, on the afternoon of Saturday, 22 July, their own floe began cracking up enough that Crozier ordered everyone into the boats.
For six days now they had floated, tethered together by lines, in patches and leads too short or small to row or sail in. Crozier had the one sextant left to them (he had left the heavier theodolite behind), and while others slept he took the best readings he could during the occasional short break in cloud cover. He reckoned their position to be about eighty-five miles northwest of the mouth of Back’s River.
Expecting to see a narrow isthmus ahead of them any day now — the presumed peninsula connecting the bulb of King William Land to the previously mapped Adelaide Peninsula — Crozier had awakened in the boat at sunrise on the morning of Wednesday the 26th of July to find the air colder, the sky blue and cloudless, and glimpses of land darkening the sky more than fifteen miles away to both the north and south.
Calling the five boats together later, Crozier stood in the bow of his lead whaleboat and shouted, “Men, King William Land is King William Island. I’m certain now that there’s sea ahead all the way east and south to Back’s River, but I’ll bet my last quid that there’s no land connecting the cape you see far to the southwest there and the one you see far to the northeast. We’re in a strait. And since we have to be north of the Adelaide Peninsula, we’ve completed the goal of the Sir John Franklin Expedition. This is the North-West Passage. By God, you’ve done it.”
There was a weak cheer followed by some coughing.
If the boats and floes had been drifting south, weeks of man-hauling or sailing work might have been done for them. But the leads and areas of open water in which they floated continued to crack open only toward the north.
Life in the boats was as miserable as life on the floes in the tents had been. The men were crowded too close together. Even with boards on thwarts offering a second level for sleeping on those whaleboats and cutters with their sides built up by Mr. Honey (the disassembled sledges also served as a crossed-T deck amidships on the crowded cutters and pinnace), wet-wooled bodies were pressed against wet-wooled bodies both day and night. The men had to hang out over the gunwales to shit — an event that was becoming less and less necessary, even for the men with serious scurvy, as the food and water grew less — but while all the men had lost all vestiges of modesty, a sudden wave often soaked bare skin and lowered trousers, leading to curses, boils, and longer nights of shivering misery.
On the morning of Friday, 28 July, 1848, the lookout on Crozier’s boat — the smallest man on each boat was sent up the short raised mast with a spyglass — spied a maze of leads opening all the way to a point of land to the northwest, perhaps three miles away.
The able-bodied men in the five boats pulled — and when necessary, polled between narrowing ice ledges, the healthiest men at the bow hacking away with pickaxes and fending off with pikes — for eighteen hours.
They landed on a rocky shingle, in a darkness broken only by short periods of moonlight when the returning clouds parted, a little after eleven o’clock that night.
The men were far too exhausted to dismount the sledges and lift the cutters and pinnaces onto them. They were too tired to unpack their soaked Holland tents and sleeping bags.
They fell onto the rough stones where they had ceased their dragging of heavy boats across the shore ice and rocks made slippery by high tide. They slept in clumps, kept alive only by their crewmates’ failing body warmth.
Crozier did not even assign a watch. If the thing wanted them tonight, it could have them. But before he slept, he spent an hour trying to get a good sighting with his sextant and to work it out with the navigation tables and maps he still carried with him.
As best he could reckon, they had been on the ice for twenty-five days and man-hauled and drifted and rowed a total of forty-six miles to the east-southeast. They were back on King William Land somewhere north of the bulk of the Adelaide Peninsula and now even farther from the mouth of Back’s River than they had been two days earlier — about thirty-five miles northwest of the inlet across the unnamed strait they’d been unable to cross. If they even crossed this strait, they would be more than sixty miles up the inlet from the mouth of the river, a total of more than nine hundred miles from Great Slave Lake and their salvation.
Crozier carefully stowed his sextant in his wooden case and set the case away in its oilskin waterproof bag, found a sodden blanket from the whaleboat, and th
rew it down on stones next to Des Voeux and three sleeping men. He was asleep within seconds.
He dreamt of Memo Moira shoving him forward toward an altar rail and of the waiting priest in dripping vestments.
In his sleep, as the men snored in the moonlight of this unknown shore, Crozier closed his eyes and extended his tongue to receive the Body of Christ.
50
BRIDGENS
River Camp
29 July, 1848
John Bridgens had always — secretly — compared the different parts of his life to the various pieces of literature that had formed his life.
In his boyhood and student years, he had from time to time thought of himself as different characters from Boccaccio’s Decameron or from Chaucer’s ribald Canterbury Tales — and not all of his chosen characters were heroic by any means. (His attitude toward the world for some years was, kiss my arse.)
In his twenties, John Bridgens most identified with Hamlet. The strangely aging Prince of Denmark — Bridgens was quite sure that the boy Hamlet had magically aged over a few theatrical weeks to a man who was, at the very least, in his thirties by Act V — had been suspended between thought and deed, between motive and action, frozen by a consciousness so astute and unrelenting that it made him think about everything, even thought itself. The young Bridgens had been a victim of such consciousness and, like Hamlet, had frequently considered that most essential of questions — to continue or not to continue? (Bridgens’s tutor at the time, an elegant don in exile from Oxford who was the first unabashed sodomite the young would-be scholar had ever encountered, had disdainfully taught him that the famous “to be, or not to be” soliloquy was not in any way a discussion of suicide, but Bridgens knew better. Thus doth conscience make cowards of us all had spoken directly to the boy-man soul of John Bridgens, miserable with the state of his existence and his unnatural desires, miserable when pretending to be something he was not, miserable when pretending and miserable when not pretending, and, most centrally, miserable that he could only think about ending his own life because the fear that thought itself might continue on the other side of this mortal veil, “perchance to dream,” kept him from acting even toward quick, decisive, cold-blooded self-murder.)
Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction — books and a sense of irony.
In his middle years, Bridgens most thought of himself as Odysseus. It was not the wandering the world alone that made the comparison apt for the would-be scholar turned secondary officers’ steward but rather Homer’s description of the world-weary traveler — the Greek word meaning “crafty” or “guileful” by which Odysseus’ contemporaries identified him (and by which some, such as Achilles, chose to insult him). Bridgens did not use his craft to manipulate others, or rarely did, but used it more like one of the round leather-and-wood or prouder metal shields behind which Homeric heroes sheltered while under violent attack by spear and lance.
He used his craft to become and to stay invisible.
Once, some years ago, during the five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle during which he had come to know Harry Peglar, Bridgens mentioned his Odysseus analogy — suggesting that all the men on such a trip were modern-day Ulysseses to some extent or another — to the natural philosopher aboard (the two played chess frequently in Mr. Darwin’s tiny cabin), and the young bird expert with the sad eyes and sharp mind had looked penetratingly at the steward and said, “But how is it that I doubt you have a Penelope waiting at home, Mr. Bridgens?”
The steward had been more circumspect after that. He had learned — as Odysseus had learned after a certain number of years of his wanderings — that his guile was no match for the world and that hubris would always be punished by the gods.
In these last days, John Bridgens felt that the literary character with whom he had most in common — in outlook, in feeling, in memory, in future, in sadness — was King Lear.
And it was time for the final act.
They had stayed two days at the mouth of the river that drained into the unnamed strait south of King William Land, now known to be King William Island. The river here, in late July, was running freely in places and allowed them to fill all their water casks, but no one had seen or caught a fish from it. No animals seemed interested in coming down to drink from it … not so much as a white arctic fox. The best one could say about this campsite was that the slight indentation of the river valley kept them out of the worst of the wind and afforded them some peace of mind during the lightning storms that raged every night.
Both mornings at this camp, the men — hopefully, prayerfully — laid their tents, sleeping bags, and whatever clothing they could spare out on rocks to dry in the sunlight. There came, of course, no more sunlight. Several times it drizzled. The only day with blue sky they had seen in the past month and a half had been their last day in the boats and after that day, most of the men had to see Dr. Goodsir for their sunburns.
Goodsir — as Bridgens knew well, being his assistant — had very few medicines left in the box he’d put together from the supplies of his three dead colleagues as well as his own. There were still some purgatives in the good doctor’s arsenal (mostly castor oil and tincture of jalap, made from morning-glory seeds) and some stimulants for the scurvy cases, camphor and Hartshorn being the last after the tincture of lobelia had been used so liberally in the first months of scurvy symptoms, some opium as a sedative, a bit of Mandragora and Dover’s Powders left to dull pain, and only Sulphate of Copper and Lead remaining to disinfect wounds or deal with sunburn turned to blisters. Obeying Dr. Goodsir’s orders, Bridgens had administered almost all of the Sulphate of Copper and Lead to the moaning men who had stripped their shirts off while rowing and added severe sunburn to their nightly misery.
But there was no sunlight now to dry the tents or clothes or bags. The men stayed wet and at night they moaned as they shook with cold and burned with fever.
Reconnaissance by their healthiest, fastest-walking shipmates had shown that while out of sight of land on boats they had passed a deeply indented bay less than fifteen miles to the northwest of this river where they had finally put in to shore. Most shocking of all, the scouts reported that the entire island curved back to the northeast only ten miles ahead of them to the east. If this was true, they were very close to the southeast corner of King William Island, their closest possible approach on this landmass to the Back River inlet.
Back River, their destination, lay southeast across the strait, but Captain Crozier had let the men know that he planned to continue man-hauling east on King William Island to the point where the coast of the island ceased its current southeastern slant. There, at this final point of land, they would set up camp again on the highest place possible and watch the strait. If the ice broke in the next two weeks, they would take to the boats. If it did not, they would try to haul them south across the ice toward the Adelaide Peninsula and, upon hitting land there, head due east the fifteen miles or fewer that Crozier estimated remained before they would reach the inlet leading south to Back’s River.
The endgame had always been the weakest part of John Bridgens’s chess skills. He rarely enjoyed it.
On the evening before they were scheduled to leave River Camp at dawn, Bridgens neatly packed away his personal gear — including the thick journal he had kept over the past year (he had left five longer ones on Terror the previous 22 April) — set it in his sleeping bag with a note that anything useful should be shared by his mates, took Harry Peglar’s journal and his comb, added an old clothes brush that Bridgens had carried for many years, put them in his peacoat pocket, and went to Dr. Goodsir’s small medical tent to say good-bye.
“What do you mean you’re going for a walk and might not be back by the time we leave tomorrow?” demanded Goodsir. “What kind of talk is that, Bridgens?”
“I’m sorry, Doctor, I just have a strong desire to take a stroll.”
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��A stroll,” repeated Goodsir. “Why, Mr. Bridgens? You are thirty years older than the average surviving seaman on this expedition, but you are ten times healthier.”
“I’ve always been lucky when it came to health, sir,” said Bridgens. “All due to heredity, I fear. No thanks to any wisdom I may have shown over the years.”
“Then why … ,” began the surgeon.
“It’s just time, Dr. Goodsir. I confess to considering trodding the boards as a thespian long ago when I was young. One of the few things I learned about that profession was that the great actors learn how to make a good exit before they wear out their welcome or overplay a scene.”
“You sound like a Stoic, Mr. Bridgens. A follower of Marcus Aurelius. If the emperor is displeased with you, you go home, draw a warm bath …”
“Oh, no, sir,” said Bridgens. “While I admit I’ve always admired the Stoic philosophy, the truth is, I’ve always had a fear of knives and blades. The emperor would’ve had my head, my family, and lands for certain, I’m such a coward when it comes to sharp edges. I just wish to take a walk this evening. Perhaps a nap.”
“ ‘Perchance to dream’?” said Goodsir.
“Aye, there’s the rub,” admitted the steward. The rue and anxiety — and perhaps fear — in his voice were real.
“Do you really think we have no chance to reach help?” asked the surgeon. He sounded sincerely curious and only a little sad.
Bridgens did not answer for a minute. Finally he said, “I truly do not know. Perhaps it all depends upon whether a rescue party has already been sent north from Great Slave Lake or one of the other outposts. I would think they might have — we have been out of touch for three years now — and if so, there may be a chance. I do know that if anyone on our expedition could get us home, Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier is that man. He’s always been underrated by the Admiralty, is my humble opinion.”