by Ben Jones
With the time to notice, I was struck by the suddenly falling temperature—it was now steadily fifteen or twenty degrees below zero—a sharper blade of cold than that we had had steadily prodding us. We could only stand a few minutes out in it without getting frostbitten. Shivering on the deck awaiting orders, I found us more often in the darkness than in the light, and the days, when they came, much shorter and strengthless; this searing land of light was flickering and fading; after hours of gray warning, the sun broke weakly over the horizon at ten, and disappeared at two. Around the ship, lumpy ridges of ice cast achromatic shadows; the whistling call of a skua echoed over the ice occasionally, but we saw no walrus or seals; lures idly cast overboard dragged through greasy slush and caught nothing. The dogs paced for no reason, turning in tight circles, starting fights and abandoning them, leaving their food to weaker dogs.
Adney and Reinhold started shanties, but without work to drive them, they died away in the silence; with no wind to animate us, and no ice to battle, a kind of lethargy settled over us, a low fatigue exacerbated by the freezing temperatures; stubborn lanyards pulled back as we pulled; obdurate sails would not shake free their frost. Every action called for more effort than seemed its due, and returned less than it promised. It was not simply the death of Hume that dispirited us—if anything it occasioned some glee, albeit muted—but the lack of results for all of our efforts, the lack of discernible progress, for the hint of reward. West’s promises seemed not simply evasive but mendacious and the strength of our backs revealed it. The doctor moved through us like a wraith, not responding to questions or greetings; waved us aside or shouldered past us, muttering and scribbling. He no longer called on me to help him, spending most of his time in the laboratory. No announcement was made about the cause of Hume’s death.
At twilit noon on the fifth day, Griffin ordered us at last to weigh anchor. We moved off under steam to the northwest. Even that little motion seemed to revive us; the shuddering of the ice under our bows, the whisper of breeze in our face, the sliding past of gray floes quickened our hands, sent our blood coursing again, created in us the hope that, at least, we might leave this gray deadness behind; as we pushed away our lethargy, even the miles of ice beckoned again.
Most of our work was done in darkness or in moonlight now. Griffin dispatched Reinhold and Adney to scout the route ahead. They returned and led by lantern, marching over the ice if the lead was narrow, or steering in an iceboat if it was broad. We moved out of the floes and into more open water. Several heralded it as a sign that we were nearing the approach to the volcanic archipelago, and stayed past their watches, looking for the glow of magma in the water. Men strained after blurry shapes, looking for any oddity, any novelty hidden in the craggy ice.
We soon returned to heavier ice. The scouting became useless; there was little open water—even the few leads we did find were quickly frozen over. We ground ahead where we could find passage, and battered where we could not. The silver moonlight was unhelpful at best, and treacherous at worst; its black shadows could hide soft, young ice or solid floes. At first we advanced cautiously, dropping men to the ice to scout before we attempted to plow ahead. But the doctor got impatient with our progress and demanded that West order Griffin to go ahead without scouting.
In response, Griffin threw the ship headlong at the shadows, his jaw set as she squealed against the ice or shuddered and shook and slid back. The doctor also demanded that the dynamite be used; Ash stood ready to slip to the ice to blast us ahead, descending again and again to set charges. The deck was showered with chunks of ice and water, the screw roared to life, and we bludgeoned on.
The ice, for its part, did not yield easily. Open leads disappeared into dead-end canyons of ice; small floes remained wedged beneath our bows despite battering and blasting; even the young ice on occasion would not give way and we were forced to batter our way back to our last point of turning. The ice grew thicker as we advanced; icebergs were more numerous, and the floe ice was more than twenty feet thick in some places, rising in great ridges about us. As we moved through these dark canyons, we seemed to shrink—first a ship of dwarfs, and then of mites, sheer walls of ice towering one hundred feet and more over us. The sun, when it reached us, was waning, like a heart slowing, a red ember glowering on the horizon as if retreating in bitter recrimination.
Without the light, the ice lost much of its majesty; its thousand colors disappeared into gray and black, a dead land without rot, without decay, the currents of its life arrested. Our curiosity was suffused with dread in the darkness, and we moved ahead with trepidation, casting glances over our shoulders, watching the water, our minds casting out for some trace of life from that reptilian monotony. We hung lanterns from the rigging, and scouted when we could, but there was often not even room to launch the boats in the narrow corridors.
On the twenty-eighth, we broke out into a sort of valley between masses of ice, and there caught our final glimpse of the sun. It hung, pale lemon, in gray clouds, then turned fiery orange as it fell, spreading red and orange across the horizon, a cold and distant apocalypse. Then it too faltered and fell into darkness; we were left with a string of lanterns and the distant and tiny stars.
In the last of the light, Adney saw, out over the ice, a small and oddly shaped spot of faint color—brown against the silver of the ice. We dropped into the boat and found, resting on a level floe, a log, with traces of roots—much battered to be sure, but clearly there. This caused tremendous excitement—we hauled it back and threw it up on deck. The doctor pored over it, cutting free samples and digging into the pith.
It was a tropical hardwood, of a type unknown in North America, though similar to some east Asian tropical varieties. It appeared from his examinations to be a tree in the traditional sense, relying on sunlight to grow, as opposed to some new phylum that used geothermal energy. Still, a tropical hardwood in the middle of the Canadian Arctic! No one slept that night.
The doctor paced the deck in the erratic light of the lanterns, calling out for this route or that one, snorting dismissively about the possibility of the ice to stay fast before us. He carried charts in his hand, and paused to make notes on them occasionally; he took soundings when we stopped and maintained his careful record of salinity, air and water temperatures, wind speed and direction. He seemed preternaturally calm, as if full sunlight still shone down on him, and the way stood revealed. We followed the path of one large iceberg for several miles into a battlement of icebergs. The temperatures fell into the minus thirties; even the mighty berg had ground to a stop and we halted behind it.
Around the ship, the ice rose like jagged, broken teeth; sharp lines silvered in the moonlight and deep crevasses stretched beneath them. We spoke in hushed voices and moved quietly over the deck, as if to avoid drawing notice to ourselves—with one exception. Reinhold seemed to take delight in the echoing canyons of ice; he bellowed and sang and guffawed defiantly. His voice boomed over the ice and penetrated into every corner of the ship. We spent two days jostling among the icebergs, and they ceased to move, though shallow channels of water still opened between them, kept free by the small but frequent shifting of the icebergs.
We would have made preparations to spend the winter there, but there was no level surface on which to descend. We had prepared the Ballroom, and the captain made some modifications to our routine—such as heating cannonballs in the boiler and dispensing them to our cabins to keep us warm, and shifting the watches from four hours to two so that we didn’t suffer the frost for as long.
Watch was still an interminable affair—spent hopping around the deckhouse or trying to avoid provoking the dogs. The dogs revealed vile tempers; there was none of the peaceful lounging of Newfoundland. They permitted only Reinhold to touch them and snarled at anyone else who drew near. Otherwise, the routine of the ship remained the same—Griffin inventing pointless tasks in endless scheduled repetition and badgering us to do them. The doctor refused to let us prepare to overwinte
r because he remained convinced that we were very close, and that the ice would open again for us, and so we must be ready to move. He pointed to the open water.
“In this temperature, in the absence of light, it is impossible,” he told us, “without some other source of heat. We are close.”
His certitude was echoed among the men, several of whom carved off chunks of the log for themselves and pressed to push ahead, if not in the Narthex, then in the boats. We remained in this state of nervous readiness for three days, then four.
On the fifth day, I was awakened by a terrible groaning and squealing. I rushed to the deck to see the eastern wall of the channel looming even closer over the deck. The mainmast spars poked into the wall of the iceberg.
“The iceberg in front of us is twisting, and it’s pulling that ice with it,” Adney said. “The channel sides are too sheer for us to slide up. We’ve got nowhere to go.”
We watched from the deck as the spar bent, buckled, and finally splintered against the wall of ice. From below, we could hear the metal sides of the Narthex protesting as the ice advanced.
“I’ve been marking off the progress of the iceberg over the rail for the last few days,” Adney said, showing a set of notches in the rail. Some were already obscured under the advancing ice.
“Well, that looks promising,” I said, and he laughed.
“It’s a mirage,” he said. “We’ll sail right through it tomorrow. Wait and see.”
“I wonder if this expedition has gotten further than the previous one did.”
“Don’t know,” said Adney. “I wasn’t along.”
“Why’d you come along on this? You weren’t in prison, were you?”
“No,” he said, laughing. “Prison might have been better. Why’d I sign on?” He looked off into the darkness. “You can’t believe how easy it is for a girl to get pregnant. And then there’s the world on its ear and me not even finished with college.”
“You just left?”
“I would’ve been pretty useless there. Not quite ready to strap on the green eyeshade. My father gave her some money.”
“Did you love her?”
“Christ, Kane, I didn’t even know her. The body’s got its own things it wants to get done, and we’d do better to stay out of the way. Doesn’t have much to do with what we want or think or choose.”
“So how’d you end up on this trip?”
“Much the same as you, I expect,” he said, looking me in the eye. “Out of alternatives when the choice came. Or are you Saint Brendan in the flesh, come back to find your Isles of the Blessed?”
“Not much money in that, I think.”
“I don’t know—it was supposedly the gateway to heaven. You might be able to sell tickets.” He laughed brightly.
The deck lurched and the sides began squealing again. The captain rushed from the deckhouse and ordered us to prepare the whaleboats to abandon ship if necessary. Around the ship the ice, too, groaned and roared; high-pitched whistling came from down the canyon, and booming cracks faded into low creaking. The ice, which had seemed dead for so long, was waking into a pack of beasts that began to circle the ship, prodded and played with it. We threw our supplies into two boats, but with the ice almost to the davits, there was no way to lower them. We hauled the remaining iceboat to the stern, along with our supplies; then we stood on deck and waited.
After an interminable hour of groaning, the ice stopped moving. Silence settled again, which was even more disturbing than the noise. Creely called up from the hold that we were taking on water, and we moved to man the pumps. Four of us fell on the handles and started to heave, but they would not budge. In the days since we had used them last, they had frozen solid. Griffin divided us into two groups—one passing buckets up by hand, the other working with Hunt to heat pans of oil on the stove to drench the pumps and perhaps unfreeze them. I was on the bucket line. Our hands, swaddled in their sets of mittens and numb already, could not control the buckets; we were lucky if half a bucketful made it over the side. Reinhold stood at the hatch of the hold passing buckets up, and he was rapidly soaked. His genial cursing kept us all moving, set us into a sort of rhythm, and the buckets began to move faster.
Creely called up that the water was still rising. Griffin ordered the oilers into our line.
With their help, the buckets moved faster, but more numb hands meant more spilling, and I doubt if we actually got much water out. Ash continued to work at the pumps, hammering at them, using a torch to heat one section, then another. Creely called up again that we were losing ground. We began to heave the buckets frantically, nearly losing one over the side.
“Stand back!” groused Ash, and poured kerosene over the entire pump mechanism and set it afire. We moved in, though some parts of the pump were still burning, and now the handles moved stiffly. We pumped furiously and they began to slide more easily. After a minute or so of pumping, however, no water had come out of the pipes.
“Damn,” said Ash. “Blocked.” He raced to his workshop and emerged with a long piece of rubber tubing, which he attached to the kerosene can. He shoved the other end down the pump pipe and lifted the can over his head. He waited as the kerosene drained into the pumps, then dropped the can, lit a rag, and stuffed it down the pump. Flames came roaring out.
“Just fire the ship,” said Pago. “That’ll take care of it.”
Water trickled out at first, then chunks of ice, and finally a reassuring roar. We cheered and began to sing as water gushed over the side. Our breath hung over us in great clouds, and icicles formed on our beards and coats. After half an hour with both pumps and buckets, Creely called up that the water was retreating, and we cheered. Two hours further, and Griffin ordered the buckets stopped. Ash joined Creely below to try to find the leaks and patch them.
The pump work was not bad—drier than buckets and not too strenuous. Once the initial danger had passed, we slowed our rhythm to an easy swing; Reinhold changed the fast-paced pump shanty to the slow story of Tom O’Grady’s search for love, which was equal parts melancholic love story and catalogue of exotic venereal disease. While we were singing, Creely clambered up from the hold. He was soaked, and his eyes were empty.
“What ho, Mr. Creely?” called out Adney. “Is our bath ready?”
Creely smiled weakly and stumbled down the fore hatch, his boots cracking as they froze.
We pumped another hour, until four others replaced us. Belowdecks, Hunt had a stew simmering, and tea and fresh biscuits. He was a remarkable man in his way.
Griffin came in while we were eating.
“Four hours on and four for sleep,” he said. “Two on the pumps and two below helping Ash and Creely caulk. Sleep in your clothes.”
We finished our dinner somberly and retired to our bunks to sleep in our soggy, stiff clothes. The ice, which had remained quiet while we worked, began to crack and screech again, though more distantly.
The summons to work came one black minute later, and we staggered back on deck. Adney and Preston took the pumps and Reinhold and I went below. Ash had rigged a harness for himself, which held him facedown out of the water. He pulled himself along the wall like a spider and reached down to block the leaks he could see. Creely stood knee-deep and felt beneath the surface for other cracks. Reinhold held the lines that controlled Ash’s height and direction. I tore sailcloth into strips to stuff into the cracks. They used spikes to drive the strips of cloth into the cracks and hoped for them to freeze solid before the pressure pushed them out. We couldn’t use the tar in the cold water—it wouldn’t set. Ash said the doctor was working on a cement that would work under these conditions, but he didn’t hope for much.
They worked furiously, and the pumps kept the water from gaining, but the leaks seemed to multiply as they worked. Creely moved from the worst leak to the next worst, skipping from corner to corner; Ash worked fastidiously, covering one square foot of the wall before moving on to the next. With his harness, he could work steadily, pausing only t
o warm his hands on cannonballs that Aziz brought up from the boilers. Creely could tolerate only about ten minutes in the water before he had to stop, remove his boots, and beat life into his feet again. His hands, which he kept bare, were white to the elbow, and he could not hold the cannonballs by himself. Still, after only a few minutes’ pause, he would stomp back into his boots and wade back into the water. He could not keep from cringing as the frigid water flooded over the top of his wellies, but he set his jaw and returned to the wall.
We finished our shift below and moved up to the pumps. Creely’s face stuck with me as we worked, and I tried to pump harder as I thought of him.
“Poor Creely,” I said, to spur us on. “He should get a break from the water.”
“Wouldn’t take it if we offered,” said Reinhold, “not after Griffin’s ordered him. He’d jump into hell first.”
We pumped harder still, the creaking of the pump echoing off the sheer walls that rose around us.
“We should abandon,” I said, “rather than waste ourselves trying to keep afloat.”
“We’ll float free yet,” answered Reinhold. “Besides, where would we go? We’re better off here than in a whaleboat. She’s a stout little gargoyle.”
At the end of two interminable hours, Preston and Pago stumbled up in relief. Hunt met us in our quarters with cocoa and more biscuits and we dropped into our bunks.
We battled the water for three days. Ash rigged a makeshift stove in the hold, which made their work more comfortable, though the water was still freezing. The leaks seemed to multiply as they worked, and no sooner was one section of the hold blocked when another would begin to leak. The ship groaned and squeaked under pressure from the ice, but it did not give. Under the foredeck in our quarters, where the pressure was the worst, the force of the ice pressed droplets of sap from the wood like slow wine from grapes. We awoke from dreamless sleeps to the sound of wood splintering somewhere, of cracks like gunshots, but still the Narthex did not yield.