Into White Silence

by Anthony Eaton

  Over the course of the next hour we systematically checked every space and compartment aboard the Raven and combed the ice floe immediately around the ship out to a distance of about forty yards, on the chance that the boy had collapsed or fallen through a snow-covered lead or something similar. None of this yielded any result though, and at 1000 hours we gathered back at the ship and set out plans for a more extensive series of search parties. Captain Smythe-Davis set out the rules:

  ‘All men in groups of four, no less, all roped together with a space of at least twelve feet between each man, but no more than twenty. Leaders should carry an ice pick and probe deep into the ice ahead. Once you’re away from the known region around the ship then you must check every step you take, before you take it. Search for one hour, and only in the area you’re assigned, then return to the ship and check here in case another party has found him. Keep calling out constantly and, above all, nobody is to take any unnecessary risks.’

  Thus instructed, we set out, each group assigned a different direction from the ship, so that we should cover a large diameter circle with the ship as its centre. I led a party including Michael Burke, Tom Walsh and Ernie Tockson.

  The weather was clear, with only a light breeze blowing and visibility out to ten or twelve miles. Our assigned route took us directly north away from the stern quarter on the port side of the ship and, as we set out, Tom Walsh voiced his confidence that somebody would find the boy.

  I was not so certain, and as the morning drew into afternoon and one fruitless hour of trudging through snow-covered ice and clambering over pressure ridges followed the next, a feeling of sick resignation began to settle upon all of us. Each time we reported back to the ship, there were only glum faces to greet us.

  By 2200 it was getting dark and Captain Smythe-Davis declared it too dangerous to continue. Already three men had slipped into the water and the risk of somebody becoming lost and disoriented in the darkness was far too great.

  We set a storm lantern at the top of the foremast to act as a beacon, should Piotre spot it, and after a late supper, all turned in.

  Searching resumed at first light – 0500 – the following morning, and this time we attempted to rig four sledges up with dog teams to enable us to reach further from the ship. This exercise was only slightly successful, at best. Myself, Lawson, Greg and Dick Ryan were all detailed to handle the sledges and of these four, only Lawson had any degree of success at managing the dogs owing, we think, to the fact that the dogs, like their handlers, understand only Russian.

  My own effort proved a disaster. The animals were so excited at the prospect of finally running that they almost killed one another in their enthusiasm. I chose as my lead dog a nice bitch we’ve named Vera, who I thought was a rather sedate and steady animal but, upon being attached to the trace, she promptly leapt at the dog behind her and half killed him for no apparent reason that I could spot.

  With the assistance of a couple of blokes, we separated the two and removed the unfortunate number-two dog from the mix, replacing him with a younger male and this, at least, seemed to settle Vera down.

  Not that it did me any good, though. Almost the moment after we pulled the anchor plate and set the team moving, they veered uncontrollably towards Ryan’s team, which was also setting out, and began the most terrible set-to, which took every spare hand to break up and untangle.

  With George Dalby running alongside, we then finally managed to get my team moving somewhat more effectively, but they still proved almost impossible to steer – Vera took to turning suddenly and unpredictably, and would occasionally shy at nothing, sending the whole team into disarray and on several occasions capsizing the sledge completely.

  The whole thing would have been funny, had it not been such a serious situation.

  It took us over an hour to make good a scant two miles from the ship, whose masts were still just visible behind us and then, for no reason that either George or myself could discern, Vera simply stopped running, the other eight immediately following her example. Almost as though planned, they slowed first to a walk, then to a complete stop and all flopped into the snow, except for one male in the pair harnessed closest to the sledge, who used the opportunity to try and take advantage of his female partner.

  Nothing we said or did could coax the animals back to their feet and for almost half an hour we sat there, frustrated and becoming increasingly angry. I was about to dispatch George on foot back along our tracks to the ship to fetch assistance, when suddenly the dogs all leapt back to their feet, glared at a ridge in the ice a few yards away, and set about the most awful howling – their wolf ancestry clearly evident.

  ‘Do you think they can hear something?’ George asked, and I told him I had no idea. He decided to investigate and, leaving me with the dogs, marched across and clambered up the ridge which was probably something in the order of ten or twelve feet high. At the top he turned back, waved to me that all was well, and then slipped down the other side.

  For some minutes I sat waiting for him to return. Slowly the dogs stopped howling and simply stood, staring at the ridge and occasionally whining slightly. In the distance the booming impact of ice against ice reminded me that I was, in fact, standing on the surface of the ocean, probably fifty miles out to sea, and this was not an altogether comfortable thought.

  While I waited, a stiff breeze began to build from the south and the dogs shifted restlessly in their harnesses then, from somewhere not too far ahead of us, and a little too close for comfort, a sharp report shattered the silence. It sounded something like a gunshot, but was more likely an ice floe splitting, possibly the very one upon which I was standing.

  Nervous now, I shouted for George, but only the whistle of the wind over the top of the fractured ridge answered me. For a moment I stood irresolute, then jammed the anchor plate down hard into the snow and, leaving the dogs sniffing at the air, I followed the Doctor’s footsteps across to the ice ridge, intending to climb to the top myself and see where he’d gotten to.

  I was perhaps halfway up the ridge, finding the footing treacherous and difficult, when another loud crack echoed across the ice, and the dogs recommenced their howling. I stopped and took stock, glancing around and not spotting any opening leads, nor cracks in the pack between us and the distant masts of the Raven, then made my way to the top of the ridge as fast as I could manage.

  The view on the other side was as breathtaking as it was frightening. Up to this point, despite the dogs’ wayward navigation, we’d managed to make our trip out travelling on relatively smooth sheets of thick floe ice. The other side of that ridge, though, was a glimpse down into a broken, fractured hell. Enormous upthrusts rising fifteen or twenty feet into the air, jagged-edged ridges bisecting one another at strange angles, and here and there between them the odd glimpse of dark, dangerous, fathomless water, filled the view as far to the north as I could see. It might well have been my imagination, but I thought for a moment that I could detect a slight movement – the tiniest heave of deep ocean swells, trembling through that tortured, frozen seascape.

  As if to emphasise this another loud groan filled the air, long and loud enough that I could almost feel the immense pressures being brought to bear upon the frozen surface beneath me.

  Quite concerned, now, I called for Doctor Dalby several times before finally receiving a reply from the broken ice-field below. His voice was little more than a distorted whisper, impossible to locate. Luckily, before I had to climb down and begin searching, the doctor appeared from behind a jagged ice chimney, forty or fifty yards away, waved, and set off in my direction.

  ‘I thought I caught a glimpse of something down there,’ he told me, once he had attained the top of the ridge and we’d both started back down towards the dogs. I asked him what precisely and he shook his head, looking perplexed.

  ‘Hard to say, exactly,’ he answered. ‘It was just the tiniest hint of movement that caught my eye but when I turned my head to look directly, it had gone
. It might just have been a bit of snow blowing off the ice or something similar. Still, I thought it worth investigating.’

  ‘There were no tracks, though?’ I asked, and again, he shook his head.

  ‘Not that I could see,’ he replied.

  Arriving back at the sledge, it took us several minutes to untangle the dogs again and then slowly turn our team around. Had we continued forward, we would soon have found our way blocked by the broken icescape, and so we judged it best, at that point, to return to the Raven.

  Back at the ship, two of the other teams, Dick Ryan’s and Greg Shannon-Stacey’s, had already returned, having managed to cover even less ground than we had, and with as little success. The atmosphere aboard the ship was sombre, all of us acutely aware of the fact that with every passing hour our chances of finding Piotre alive – or at all – were growing less and less likely.

  Nobody was willing to give the dogs another try, at least not just then, and so further foot searching was organised for the afternoon and we set out again, once more roped into our groups of four. This time I took a more southerly course, heading off in line with the ship’s head, and we made good time across flat and well packed sea ice, following the tracks of Lawson’s sledge until they veered sharply west, possibly a mile and a half from the ship. We continued on south, more cautiously now that we had to test each step, and commenced calling and checking each hummock and icy ridge but to no avail.

  In this manner we continued for about another forty minutes until, abruptly, we reached a wide lead of open water, stretching east–west ahead of us for as far as we could see in both directions and possibly half-a-mile or so wide. Ernie Tockson remarked that it was ‘a pity this lot opened up here and not around us.’ But the rest of us were too exhausted at that point to comment.

  It took me several moments to notice that the water in the lead was far from smooth – a stiff breeze had continued to build throughout the day and was now sufficient to stir small whitecaps in the water ahead, which slapped against the ice-edges and sent small bursts of icy spray whipping into the air. A glance at the sky and I realised with alarm that, while we’d been concentrating on our walking and searching, a heavy layer of slate grey cloud, usually the first sign of an impending blizzard, had swept up from the south and was now beginning to block out the sun. Already, in the few minutes we’d been standing beside the water, the afternoon had gone noticeably dark.

  Quickly we got ourselves into order and headed back along our tracks with all haste. Well aware of the fact that we had walked perhaps an hour-and-a-half from the ship, and knowing all too well how quickly the weather can turn down here, I set a cracking pace, about which nobody complained.

  With the wind at our backs the walking was slightly easier, however as it continued to increase it became more and more difficult to keep our footing, especially on patches of slick ice, and all of us fell several times. Another effect was that the wind was soon strong enough to whip up the snow from on top of the sea ice, reducing our visibility by degrees until the only way I could find our path forward was by keeping my head low, my body half-bent at the waist, and following the vague imprint of our tracks from the way out. It was something of a relief to reach the point where our own tracks met with the deeper, more compressed lines of Lawson’s sledge and dogs and from there we increased the pace still further.

  After a solid hour of forced march, most spent doubled over so as to see our way, I was startled to bump into something solid, tripping and falling hard onto the ice. To my relief, the culprit was one of the props that we laboured so hard to put into place last week; two minutes later we stumbled up the gangplank and descended into the warm hold, where we discovered that we were the last search team to return. We were greeted with great relief from all aboard. After we removed our outer clothing, Cook produced mugs of hot soup, thickened with seal meat, and I must say that I’d never have thought that awful flavour could taste so good.

  While we’d been gone Lawson had returned, having had no more luck than the rest of us in finding Piotre, but having at least mastered the basics of handling the sledge and the dogs, skills he promised to teach the rest of the company over the next few days.

  With the blizzard well and truly set in, there seemed little else to do but turn in for the night, which we did, waking this morning with the storm still howling outside, and having to face the fact that, in all likelihood, poor Piotre is now lost to us forever.

  13th March, 1922

  Blizzard had blown itself out mid afternoon and we emerged to a different world. On the windward side of the ship, the snow is piled all the way to deck height. On the leeward side, where the dog lines are, is a layer perhaps four feet deep. Most of the dogs came through the blizzard okay, though we lost two to the cold – both older animals, which is a pity. Doctor Dalby suspects at least one of the females is pregnant, though, so this will hopefully make up for the loss.

  The ship herself is an astounding sight – every spar, line and stay is festooned with icicles; long fingers of ice hanging from every possible vantage point. The deck is slick with compressed snow and the sails, which Dick Ryan had gasketted down as hard as possible, are now solid, frozen blocks, encased in ice.

  Our first task was the excavation of the larder, which had become completely buried, and then the thawing of enough blubber to keep the wardroom stove fired. This will be vital from here on in, as the drop in temperature during the blizzard has frozen all the water in the main tanks, which had previously relied upon heat from the engine room boiler to keep them liquid, and so we are now reliant upon melting snow each day to keep ourselves supplied with drinking water.

  Indeed, we have all noticed the coldness which is increasingly seeping through the ship – even with the large galley stove burning almost constantly in the ’tween deck, all of us are already notably colder than we were a week ago. Doug King suggested that perhaps the steel armour on the hull makes the Raven more susceptible to icing down than other wooden ships, but Mr Rourke dismissed this theory as ‘uninformed and unhelpful nonsense’.

  Whatever the cause, the upshot is that our coal supplies are going to be very tight indeed, and it looks likely that we will have to ration ourselves to only a couple of hours of ‘stove time’ every night, if we hope to make it last us through the winter.

  No sign of Piotre, and this evening at sunset we held a memorial service for him. There is no possible way that anybody, least of all a fifteen-year-old lad in sickly condition, could have survived this last week without shelter or supplies and so we have accepted the inevitable. Why and how he managed to leave the ship unnoticed will remain a mystery.

  As the sun hit the horizon, an event which occurs earlier and earlier each evening, we gathered on the ice beside the ship and Captain McLaren read the service for the dead, then Randolph Lawson said a few words in Russian. Nobody knew what he said of course, but his demeanour was surprisingly sombre and there was little doubt in anybody’s mind that he was genuinely distressed. It was bitterly cold, with a strong breeze still blowing from the south and, as the service ended and we all moved to re-board the ship, the dogs set about their usual howling, which added a further dimension to the already melancholy atmosphere.

  16th March, 1922

  Everybody woken in the small hours by the most tremendous groaning from the ship; the icepack began to put pressure on her at around 0130 and within fifteen minutes, every steel plate on the hull was grinding against the others and every timber protesting loudly. The noise was the most unsettling I’ve ever heard and, lying in my bunk in the pitch darkness, I thought I could almost feel the monstrous force that the frozen ocean was exerting upon our little ship, just a few scant inches from my head.

  The pressure continued to build until, by 0220, most of us had climbed out of our warm sleeping bags, lit lanterns, and were beginning to plan our course of action should the hull give way. Even Mr Rourke, usually so staunch in his defence of his ship’s strength, was unusually subdued
as the cries of the ship reached their crescendo at around 0235. Then everything went strangely and suddenly still. In the silence that followed, nobody even dared to breathe, as we waited for the sound of splintering which would herald the end of our ship, and of our chances.

  Fortunately, though, the dreaded sound never came and by 0315 most hands were turning in again, weary as much from nerves as from exhaustion. Captain McLaren and I decided to inspect the hold and the hull, just to be on the safe side.

  Down in the hold is freezing cold now; it is impossible to venture below the level of the chartroom without first dressing in full parkas and woollen pants. Everything stored in the lower hold is already covered in a layer of icy rime and crystals have formed on all surfaces, including the beams of the ship and the inside of the hull itself. The yellow, flickering light from our hurricane lamp threw glittering shadows off every crate, barrel and sack as we systematically worked our way from the bow to the stern, noting with concern a small area, perhaps four feet square, amidships on the port side, which was bowing in considerably. Other than that, though, everything seemed sound.

  In the course of our check, I passed by the brig. Lawson had reclaimed this as his darkroom until the cold snap froze all of his chemicals solid overnight. He has since had to decamp to a temporary space set up between the cargo in the lower forecastle, which is above the waterline and closer to the ’tween deck stove. The brig now is empty, just a dark little hole which reminded me, naturally, of poor Piotre and the days and nights he was forced to spend down here.

  Having checked the hold we proceeded outside, into the teeth of a bone chilling wind, and completed a circuit of the ship, our lanterns revealing a large protrusion in the ice halfway along the portside – no doubt responsible for the bowing in the hold. Otherwise we discovered no significant areas of concern. By 0400, I was back in my bed, though it took me some time to warm up enough to get back to sleep again.