Killigrew and the North-West Passage

by Jonathan Lunn

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘They only came to the Arctic for a single season. It isn’t fair to drag them along with us. We could be here for years.’

  ‘What would you have me do, Mr Cavan? Sail back through the Middle Pack so we can take them back to Upernavik, after all the trouble we went to get through in the first place? Oh, don’t look at me like that, Cavan! I’m not suggesting we keep them on board indefinitely. It’s still early in the season. We’re bound to encounter a whaler or two on our way to Beechey Island. We’ll put our guests on board the first one we meet.’

  ‘We’d stand a better chance of falling in with another whaler if we waited here for the rest of the squadron, sir,’ Killigrew pointed out. ‘I’ve already told you once: for all we know, the rest of the squadron is already well on its way to Beechey Island.’

  ‘And if we get as far as Beechey Island without falling in with any more whalers?’

  ‘Then what we do with our guests will be up to Sir Edward.’

  ‘And what if you’re wrong, sir? What if the squadron isn’t ahead of us? What if they don’t make it through the Middle Pack?’

  ‘If they don’t make it through, we’ll do no more good waiting here for them than we will waiting at Beechey Island. This is a naval expedition, Mr Killigrew, and I don’t intend that we should waste time at the British taxpayer’s expense simply on account of seven shipwrecked whalers who can count themselves lucky we chanced by to rescue them. We have a schedule to meet, a rendezvous to make.’

  The men who had descended to the ice pack to free the ice-anchors now returned to the ship. ‘Anchor’s aweigh, sir,’ reported Molineaux.

  ‘Hoist the jib, Mr Thwaites!’ ordered Pettifer. He watched to see that all canvas was drawing, and once the Venturer was under way again he turned to Yelverton. ‘Set course for Beechey Island.’

  * * *

  ‘Strachan, Strachan…’ Dr Bähr mused as the two of them worked on Fischbein and Immermann respectively in the sick-berth. ‘No relation to the Reverend Donald Strachan, are you?’

  ‘His son,’ Strachan replied curtly. He was not proud of the association. The Reverend Donald Strachan had lived by blind faith; his son was an atheist, dedicated to rationalism and scientific observation. The fields of geology and palaeontology in particular appealed to him as demolishing his father’s conviction that God had created the Universe on 26 October 4004 BC.

  ‘Good Lord! I’m honoured. I’ve no children myself – ghastly things, can’t abide them – but I always recommend your father’s book to the husbands of expectant mothers.’

  Strachan smiled thinly. He too detested children, but having been raised according to the precepts laid down in his father’s best-selling work Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child, he would not have recommended it to anyone.

  ‘I must congratulate you on your English, Herr Doktor,’ Strachan told Bähr, to change the subject. ‘Where did you learn it?’

  ‘Spent twenty years doing missionary work with the British in Burma and India. Nowadays my English is better than my German. When I go back to Hanover, I have people ask me if I’m British!’ He took a step back from Immermann’s cot. ‘Well, I’ve done all I can for this fellow. Not that that’s much.’ He glanced around the sick-berth. ‘I must say, you seem to have an awful lot of stuff in here.’ He cast an eye over the books on the shelves, and picked one out. ‘On the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Very impressive-sounding!’

  ‘It created quite a stir in the scientific community back home when it was published a few years ago.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘It expands some of Lamarck’s theories on the chain of being. About how animals seem to evolve into more developed species.’

  ‘Orthogenesis, eh? All gammon, if you ask me. Why would God create a creature that required nature to improve on it?’

  Strachan decided that now was not the time to get into a debate as to whether or not there was a God. ‘Well, until someone can posit an explanation of the unknown mechanism that leads different species to develop in different ways, I’m afraid orthogenesis is just going to remain a theory, and a tenuous one at that. But one that I adhere to, nonetheless. One of the reasons I enjoy studying wildlife is that I hope it will enable me to come up with an explanation myself.’

  ‘You’re interested in wildlife?’ asked Bähr. ‘So am I!’

  Strachan perked up. Perhaps he had misjudged the doctor. ‘Really?’

  ‘I should say so! Got a taste for it in Burma. Managed to bag myself a couple of tigers. Got quite a collection on the walls of my library, now: lions, tigers, bears… but never a polar bear. That’s one of the reasons I decided to get a job as ship’s doctor on board a whaler working the Greenland fishery. My practice seems to be more or less running itself now, and I needed a holiday. Signing on with Captain Weiss seemed like the easiest way to get passage to the polar regions. If I can bag meself a fine specimen of an Ursus maritimus, I shall return to Germany a happy man.’

  Strachan’s smile became sickly. ‘Oh.’ He turned to Fischbein. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to operate on this elbow immediately.’

  ‘Ich verstehe nicht,’ said Fischbein. ‘Ich spreche kein Englisch. ’

  ‘Er sagt, er muß an Ihrem Ellbogen operieren,’ Bähr told him.

  ‘Operieren? Wird es weh tun?’

  ‘Na klar wird es weh tun. Das will ich wohl sagen! He wants to know if it will hurt,’ Bähr explained for Strachan’s benefit.

  ‘Not if I use an anaesthetic. Doctor, I wonder if you’d help me with the chloroform?’

  ‘Chloroform, eh? I don’t know, all this newfangled stuff. Everything seems to be changing. And now they tell me they have woman doctors in America. Woman doctors! Scandalous! Only in America…’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘I’ll show you.’ The assistant surgeon took a bottle from the dispensary and tipped some chloroform on to a gauze pad. He held it over Fischbein’s mouth and nose. ‘Tell him to breathe normally.’

  ‘Normal atmen.’

  Fischbein nodded and closed his eyes.

  Strachan handed the bottle to Bähr. ‘I’d be grateful if you’d drip this – very slowly – on to the gauze pad.’

  ‘We didn’t have any anaesthetics when I was your age,’ sniffed the doctor. ‘When I performed amputations in India, we had to use a bottle of brandy, if there was one available.’

  ‘And if there wasn’t?’

  ‘Bless you, then I’d have to perform the operation sober!’

  * * *

  ‘“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great Mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption…”’

  Pettifer was interrupted by an explosive, hacking cough. Glaring about the Venturer’s upper deck, he saw the assembled marines part to reveal Yelverton wiping his nose and mouth with his handkerchief. The master gazed at the contents of his handkerchief with a slight frown on his face; then he became aware of the stares of Pettifer and everyone else on deck, which was the entire crew and the six surviving whalers. He hurriedly thrust the handkerchief into a pocket and mouthed the word ‘Sorry!’ with a suitably abashed expression.

  Pettifer gave Yelverton another bushy-browed glare for good measure, and then cleared his throat to resume the service. ‘“We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead, and the life of the world to come through our Lord Jesus Christ; who at his coming shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.”’

  The hatch cover on which Immermann’s shrouded corpse lay was hoisted at one end, tipping his weighted body over the bulwark and into the sea with a splash.

  ‘“I heard a voice from Heaven”,’ read Ziegler,
‘“saying unto me, Write, From henceforth blessèd are the dead which die in the Lord: even so saith the Spirit; for they rest from their labours”.’

  It was 8 July, two weeks and two days since the Venturer had picked up the survivors of the Carl Gustaf in the Middle Pack. They had left Greenland behind, sailing around the northern edge of the pack, and were now hove-to off Cape Walter Bathurst on the northern coast of Baffin Land, close to the entrance to Lancaster Sound.

  No one had been surprised when Immermann had passed away. Of the four men who had been left injured on the ice when the Carl Gustaf went down, Immermann had been the most grievously hurt, and it was a miracle he had outlasted Noldner and Tegeder. Of the four, now only Ignatz Fischbein survived, but he at least was well on the road to recovery. Back on his feet, he stood with his splinted arm in a sling next to Dr Bähr, Sørensen, Kracht, and Frau Weiss in her Inuit clothes. In spite of the solemnity of the occasion, and the fact she was recently widowed, Killigrew could not help thinking that they made her look damned fetching.

  As Pettifer led them in the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, Killigrew cast his eyes over his fellow mourners. Thickly muffled against the cold, the hands all looked suitably solemn: even in peacetime, death was never far from the life of a sailor, and it was not something they treated lightly. The officers, too, had composed their features into suitably grave expressions; all except Latimer, who looked as if he was bored and did not care who knew it. The sorrow on the faces of Ziegler, Kracht and Fischbein was very real, however, and the fact that he was the forty-second member of their crew to die in three weeks only added to their grief. Bähr looked aloof: an inveterate snob, he made no secret of the fact he was sufficiently well connected to be able to look down on everyone on board.

  Ursula looked stony-faced, but then she had looked stony-faced ever since Killigrew had met her, her expression giving away nothing. He had not expected her to cease mourning her husband all at once; but the occasional hint of a smile, no matter how wan, would have been healthy. Indeed, he was starting to wonder if she had begun to mourn, let alone finished.

  ‘“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore,”’ concluded Pettifer, closing his prayer book.

  ‘Amen,’ said Ziegler, and a murmur of ‘Amens’ ran round the deck. In the silence that followed, Hughes sang ‘Amazing Grace’ in a surprisingly good tenor: Killigrew had always acknowledged the Welsh to be the finest singers in the world, but somehow he had always supposed that if any Welshman should be the exception that proved the rule to be false, it would be Hughes. When he had finished, the assembled men remained on deck in contemplative silence out of respect for the deceased, for as long as the bitterly cold weather would allow, which was about five seconds. Then Pettifer nodded to Molineaux.

  The boatswain’s mate piped ‘up spirits’ and the men were served their grog. ‘Drinks in the wardroom, sir,’ Killigrew murmured to Pettifer. ‘That goes for you too, Doctor.’

  ‘Capital!’ said Bähr. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’ He followed Pettifer, Yelverton, Strachan and Latimer below. Killigrew was about to follow them – as president of the wardroom mess, it was his duty to play host – when he saw Ziegler and Ursula standing on the quarterdeck. He wanted to invite them too, but something about the way they were conversing in low tones suggested that his invitation would be an intrusion.

  Ziegler laid a hand on Ursula’s arm, but she shrugged him off. ‘Lassen Sie mich!’

  Ziegler hesitated, and then bowed away and headed for the after hatch.

  ‘Drinks in the wardroom, Herr Ziegler,’ Killigrew told him as he passed. The whaler ignored him, storming past with a face as black as thunder. Killigrew stared after him until he had disappeared below, and then contemplated Ursula. She stood at the taffrail with her back to him, staring out across the sea astern.

  He crossed the deck, instinctively removing his greatcoat. When he joined her at the taffrail, he tried to press it on her.

  She regarded him with an amused smile – a smile devoid of humour – and shook her head. ‘My Esquimaux clothes are perfectly adequate, thank you. I do not feel the cold.’

  ‘My condolences, Frau Weiss. This must have been especially painful for you, coming so soon after the death of your husband. A pity he could not enjoy the luxury of a funeral service, but I’d like to think that—’

  ‘What difference does it make? They’re both in the same place now, along with the other men killed when the Carl Gustaf went down.’

  Killigrew was a little shocked by her apparently callous attitude, but he thought he understood: she was using bitterness to armour herself against grief. ‘It’s all right to cry, you know.’

  She laughed – the first time he had heard her do so – and under the circumstances it was not the pleasantest sound he had heard. ‘Cry? For that Schweinhund?’ She moved her face closer to Killigrew’s, so that the rim of her hood almost touched the peak of his cap. ‘Permit me to let you into a little secret, Herr Killigrew: I hated that pig. Do you understand me? I hated him. I am glad he is dead.’

  Killigrew’s feeling of shock increased, but at the same time it was mixed with a sense of appreciation for her refreshing honesty, a feeling he knew should be out of place. ‘I take it you’re not referring to Herr Immermann?’

  She regarded him with a scathing expression of contempt. ‘Now you know what a monster I am,’ she said, and left him at the taffrail, clutching his coat and shivering in the cold.

  ‘Unfeeling devil, ja?’

  Killigrew turned and saw Kracht standing nearby. His first instinct was to upbraid the man for speaking out of turn, but that would have been hypocritical; Kracht had done no more than voice what Killigrew had been thinking.

  ‘On the Carl Gustaf we used to call her the Snow Queen – you know, like in Hans Andersen’s fairy tales? Oh, I don’t blame her for feeling no sorrow at Kapitän Weiss’ death: the Scheißkerl used to abuse her. Not just beat her – which is bad enough – but also be horrid to her. Always calling her a Schlampe – in English you would say “trollop”? – and telling her she was no good, she was a burden to him, she was lucky to have a husband like him who was willing to put up with her and look after her. Perhaps once she was a warm, caring woman; but she hears that kind of thing often enough, sooner or later she starts to believe it. I overheard them rowing about it in the great cabin more than once; I’m not a Lauscher… one who listens?’

  ‘Eavesdropper?’

  ‘Ja, eavesdropper. But it was difficult not to hear sometimes. Well, you must know what it’s like on board ship. Bulkheads thin as paper; the Kapitän made no attempt to keep his voice down. Then there would be smacks, sobs, and then she wouldn’t appear on deck for a few days so that we wouldn’t see the bruises. You know why he took her to sea with him? Because he was frightened that if he left her in Hamburg she would be unfaithful to him. The irony was, she and Herr Jantzen were at it like rabbits every time the Kapitän’s back was turned. Reckon he drove her into Jantzen’s arms. Everyone on board knew except the Kapitän, and he was bound to find out sooner or later; when he did, it would have been the worse for Jantzen: Weiss was insanely jealous. Take my advice, Herr Killigrew: never marry a beautiful woman twenty years your junior.’

  Killigrew smiled. ‘At my age, I think it’s illegal.’

  ‘It’s Jantzen I feel sorry for, schlecht Saukerl. She was using him: I think she wanted her husband to catch them at it. You think she shed a tear when she heard he was dead as well as her husband?’ Kracht shook his head. ‘Kalte Luder; the Arctic suits her.’

  He nodded to an iceberg drifting slowly past perhaps a mile to starboard. It was immense – perhaps half a mile across; it was impossible to be sure at that distance – yet as far away as it was it still managed to tower over the Venturer, dwarfing the tiny ship. Its centre was a deep indigo, its colour shading off from a deep blue to white where it grew thin and transparent towards the edges
and the snow-covered top. The crevices of its irregular mass were thrown into deep shade, in sharp contrast with the way the pinnacles glittered in the sun. A deep rumbling and cracking sounded from it constantly, and chunks of ice broke off it to tumble down into the water with great splashes.

  ‘See that iceberg, mein Herr? There’s more warmth in the centre of that than there is in Frau Weiss’s heart.’

  Chapter 5

  Terregannoeuck

  ‘A desolate place to spend eternity,’ remarked Strachan.

  Killigrew hunkered down on the barren shore of Beechey Island and stared at the three headstones as if they held the secret of Franklin’s fate. There had been 129 men on the Erebus and Terror when they had sailed into the Arctic, never to be seen again; by the time they had sailed from Beechey Island some time after 3 April 1846 – the date on the last of the graves – that number had been reduced to 126.

  ‘They’ve gone to a better place.’ Killigrew stood up and lit a cheroot. ‘And if they haven’t, at least they’ve gone to a warmer one.’

  ‘You believe that?’ asked the assistant surgeon. ‘All that Heaven and Hell nonsense?’

  Killigrew smiled. ‘We all have to believe in something, Mr Strachan. Religion may not hold all the answers, but then neither does your science.’

  ‘True. But at least science permits us… no, requires us… to look for those answers. As far as I can see, religion provides no answers at all; it all rests on blind faith. Put that in your pipe, and smoke it!’ he added, using a catchphrase he had overheard the boatswain use.

  Killigrew did not reply, disturbed by the thought that Strachan might be right. The assistant surgeon had argued religion with his father; if the Reverend Donald Strachan could not defeat his son in theological debate, what chance did the lieutenant stand?

  Less than two miles wide, Beechey Island was dominated by steep slate and granite cliffs that rose up to a plateau 800 feet above sea level. At the foot of these cliffs, a low shore land of dark gravel surrounded the island, which was linked to its larger neighbour – Devon Island, to the north-east – by a low gravel isthmus. Unlike the treeless coasts to tire north and south of Lancaster Sound – which had been ablaze at that time of year with purple saxifrage, low-bush cranberry, blue harebells, and acres of dog lichen and green moss – Beechey Island was utterly barren. It was without a doubt the most desolate place that Killigrew had ever seen; compared to this, the deserts of Syria had been the garden of Eden. There was simply nothing here: just rock, shingle, and the three graves.