John Barrow the younger, chief of mapping at the Admiralty, had looked down his nose at him. I can’t think why Lady Franklin would appoint a French naval ensign as her cartographer. She could have her pick of the Royal Navy. And what does a Frenchman know about ice?
Colonel Sabine had made similar noises, as had Sir Francis Beaufort and the other British polar grandees whom Bellot tried to cultivate. But Lady Franklin knew her own mind better than Bellot knew himself: he would do for the north, she told him, and that was the end of it. So now here he was, waiting to sail off in search of her husband. If the storm would only slacken and release the wind-bound ship.
Prince Albert was not much bigger than a pleasure yacht, built for the Azores fruit trade but now strengthened for the ice. Despite the late hour there were dockers still aboard her, using a tripod and boom to load her last stores. It had been left to Bellot, who slept aboard, to watch over them: most of the eighteen-strong officers and crew were Orkneymen, who would stay with their families until the last minute; their leader William Kennedy, although born in Saskatchewan, was the son of a Hudson’s Bay trader who, like so many who worked for the Company, had been hired from Orkney: he too had been staying with family ashore. So when the workmen were done and Bellot went below, meaning to write in his new explorer’s journal, he was surprised to hear voices behind the cabin door. He stood in the dark passage, taking off his oilskins, and after some hesitation decided to knock: he would like to go ashore if someone could relieve him; there was to be dancing tonight in Miss Robertson’s parlour. Dancing was his secret joy.
The door swung open, leaking light into the passage. Captain Kennedy squinted in the darkness, adjusting his eyes.
‘Yes?’ Then he turned and called to someone within. ‘It’s the boy from the post office. Were you wishing to send something?’
‘I had not asked for him.’ It was the voice of a young woman. Bellot recognised Miss Cracroft, Lady Franklin’s niece and companion. ‘You can send him away.’
It’s my lack of height, Bellot told himself, mortified. And my blue uniform jacket, and the shine of my gold buttons. He wished he had not knocked. ‘Excuse me,’ he managed. ‘It’s me. Ensign Bellot.’
There was an embarrassed silence and then Kennedy stepped back to let him in. ‘Ensign Bellot. I do apologize – I don’t see well in the dark. Please come in.’
Sophia Cracroft sat at the table under the skylight. She was facing the door. A lamp shone on the table, and Bellot could see she was still in her cloak, a cape of local manufacture, made of brown-and-green wool silvered with rain. The lamp made shadows of eyes that were, Bellot knew, almost as dark as his own. Kennedy too still wore his damp street clothes, the black suit and coat that often had strangers mistake him for a clergyman, as if his great piety were not enough. His black beard was beaded by rain or by spray.
They must have only just come aboard, Bellot thought, and yet I did not see them. Perhaps my back was turned.
‘Good evening, Ensign Bellot.’ Miss Cracroft tried to stand up but she was as tall as the cabin was low. She made do with a half-bow over the table on which her hands were spread.
His eyes drawn downward in sympathy, Bellot noticed the paper held flat by her hands. It was a crude map, more like a child’s drawing, showing islands and channels with handwritten names. His eyes, never good, struggled to focus in the light of the lamp. Near the middle of the map was a drawing of a boat –
a tiny stick ship, as an infant would draw it, one-masted, flying a flag. Beside it, in firm childish letters, someone had written ‘A ship with no men in it’.
Miss Cracroft saw where he was looking and lifted her hands from the table. Freed of their weight, the little map rolled itself up with a snap. She picked it up and placed it behind her.
‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘I had just come aboard to confer with Mr Kennedy on a minor matter. Please ignore me. Or if you have private business I can wait up on deck.’
‘Not at all,’ said Bellot. ‘I was only wondering if I might go ashore for a spell. I have an engagement at Miss Robertson’s house.’
Kennedy, who normally stood a head taller than Bellot, had been brought to the same level as he stooped for the roof. Now he sank into a chair.
‘Of course, my dear Bellot. By all means go ashore. I shall be here anyway. I have some work to do at my desk.’
Taking his leave of them, Bellot went to the converted pantry which served as his cabin amidships (it is well you are small, Mr Kennedy had said, when Bellot joined the crowded little ship at Aberdeen – we need only take out the pantry shelves and instal a small cot for you). Closing the door, he lit a candle and fetched his journal from his chest. It was his plan to keep a plain and honest record of his daily adventures, ornamented with splashes of prose and philosophy, so that some day, God willing, he could make it into a book. If the book was successful – and his agent assured him that there was then a great shortage of French polar explorers on the literary market, and therefore a latent demand – it might provide him with the name and fortune that he would not inherit from his father, a hard-working blacksmith from Rochefort. He had been told he wrote very well. He need only put down a little each day.
But now, pen in hand, he had to ask himself: What exactly had happened today? He had eaten breakfast and lunch, and watched the ship being loaded. He had walked the narrow street of Stromness and tipped his hat to passers-by. He had gone below and heard voices in the cabin . . . Perhaps, he thought, I should write about that strange business with the map. Leave nothing out, that’s what he’d promised himself.
But it was late, and there would be dancing in Miss Robertson’s parlour. He could write up his journal tomorrow. By the look of the weather there’d be nothing else to do. So he put on his best trousers, swapped his sea boots for shoes, wiped the salt off his buttons and put his hat under his arm. Passing the cabin, he heard the murmur of several more voices.
Bellot danced that night with the cleverest girls of Stromness, stepping to a fiddle in Miss Robertson’s house. He taught them the Schottische, already a favourite in France yet unknown in Orkney. They reeled and jigged and clapped and formed fours, whirling sparks in the dance of the candles. They were lovely, the glowing daughters of the manses and farms and the Hudson Bay factors, each one determined to claim her turn with the soft-eyed young sailor in his dashing French uniform, the hero bound for places where the Company dared not go. When a break in the music allowed him to ease his thirst – buttermilk, alas, was all that was served in an Orcadian parlour – he saw Miss Cracroft watching from inside the door, her cloak dark from the rain which drummed on the windows.
She must have come up from the ship, he thought. Perhaps she has come for me.
The bow sawed at the fiddle, a couple of strokes to make sure it was in tune. Bellot, gathering his courage, walked to the doorway and held out his hand. She was taller than him, and only a little older.
‘Miss Cracroft. Will you honour me?’ He knew he had stammered the ‘Cracroft’, but he trusted his accent to lay a false trail.
She paused for a moment before she answered, as if she were considering his invitation. Then she smiled and shook her head. ‘You are very kind, monsieur. But I’m not one for dancing.’
I ought to retreat now, he thought. But I’m halfway across this bullet-swept ground – there is as much risk from retreating as there is from charging on. And this conversation might never come again.
His smile hurt his face. ‘Then I must mistake you for another lady. On our passage here from Aberdeen old Mr Hepburn spoke of a great ball that was held aboard Terror and Erebus ten years ago, when Hepburn was an official at Van Diemen’s Land. He said that a Miss Sophia Cracroft led the dance with Captain Ross. She was the pride of the ball.’
He waited, his hand still extended, feeling the blood rush to his face. But it is quite gloomy here, in this parlour without gaslight.
I can always retreat under cover of darkness.
‘You are not mistaken, Ensign Bellot – I was indeed another lady then. Since my uncle was lost I have had little time for dancing. Even so, I might be tempted tonight.’ She smiled at him, and he felt his heart leap. ‘But alas, I was sent here on business. Captain Kennedy has asked me to find you. He and Mr Leask and Mr Hepburn have just conferred with my aunt aboard the ship. Mr Leask expects the wind to ease tonight, and if it does you will sail for Greenland tomorrow.’
He no longer had any thought for dancing. So there had been a conference on the ship after he had left it. Lady Franklin had consulted with Mr Kennedy, the expedition’s leader, with Mr Leask the ice master, with Miss Cracroft the expedition secretary and even with Mr Hepburn, the elderly volunteer who had given up a sinecure to look for his old friend. But Bellot himself, the expedition’s only scientific navigator, had not been invited or informed.
‘Well then,’ he said at last, ‘I will follow you over in a few minutes. I can’t leave these kind ladies without saying goodbye.’
He watched her leave. She had reached the door, had a hand raised to open it, when the fiddler abruptly launched into a tune. It was a reel of some kind, lilting and skipping, yet he felt it a little more sad, a little less jaunty, than the sturdy Scottish fare that had been served so far tonight. He saw Sophia’s hand pause at the door latch, her frame frozen, as if listening, unable to move. So, he thought, she is not yet entirely lost to our world of dancing. Then she roused herself and was gone.
Baffin Bay, 16 July 1851
A day out of Upernavik, her last landfall in Greenland, Prince Albert entered the ice. Leask, the ice master, steered her into a lead of open water between two drifting bergs, translucent castles of white and blue that were buttressed and arched and crenellated, polished by cascading meltwaters.
The ship drove on with a fair breeze behind her, seeking the North Water passage to Lancaster Sound. Dovekies and gulls wheeled and cried through her topmasts, hoping the ship was a sealer with slaughter in mind. But the seals on the pack ice, wary of pot-shots, slipped into the water before she drew near.
Bellot, as was often his habit, stayed on deck when his own watch had ended. The evening was cool but not cuttingly so. Summer was ending in the high Arctic and everywhere he looked life hurried to conclude its business for yet another year. Flocks of purposeful seabirds – fulmars, guillemots, Arctic terns, auks – flew back to their roosts on the skerries and cliffs of the Upernavik Islands. Higher up, chevrons of brent geese arrowed into the south. Flurries of eiders and petrels skimmed low on the water, making patters of spray where the sprats swam too close to the sun. Once, looking over the side, Bellot saw a party of white ghosts gliding under the ship – belugas or narwhals, they were too deep for him to tell – diving from one open pool to another. Probing ever westward, manoeuvring with foresails and ice-poles, the little ship threaded through loose cakes of sea ice. The floes moved ponderously northward in the West Greenland Current, bearing on their backs the rubble of other, smaller floes that they had conquered on their tour of Baffin Bay. Bellot, watching them recede from the deck of Prince Albert, longed to understand their cold and lonely progress.
The sun did not set but only dipped to the horizon, burning red above the ice, yet the sky was now dark enough for Venus to make her first appearance of the year. Soon the stars and aurora would join her. Bellot waited until he could barely keep his eyes open, then went below to his cabin in the pantry.
Sometime later – there was no light or window, so how could be be sure? – he was woken by giant claws scraping both sides of the ship. He had heard that noise before, when Berceau had grounded in the Madagascar campaign. But he knew it meant something different up here: he had been waiting a long time to hear it. Instead of rushing on deck he lay there and listened. He had better get used to it. Timbers groaned and heaved the whole length of the ship, which shuddered and lurched and came to a halt. When he went on deck the lead had vanished, the pack had closed, and the ship was alone in a desert of ice.
Prince Albert had been caught in the pack for more than a week when two strange brigs were sighted on the northern horizon. At intervals the topsails of these ships were seen to billow and set to a breeze which did not stir Prince Albert. Their topmasts heeled and slowly grew taller, then their mainsails appeared in the glass of Bellot’s telescope. The brigs had found both water and wind and were working their way slowly south to Prince Albert. By the morning of the second day, when Bellot came on watch, they were only three miles away, jammed into the same close pack which held Prince Albert in its grip. They both hoisted their ensigns: two bursts of stars and stripes. Then two little dots detached themselves and crossed the ice towards his ship.
The leader of this pair of visitors – and the smaller of the two – was not much older than Bellot himself and not an inch taller. He was dressed in a plain sailor’s pea coat and a hat and boots of Eskimo sealskin, and he had a large leather satchel strapped to his back. Reaching the Prince Albert, the stranger scrambled nimbly up the side, threw one leg across the gunwale and then stopped, his grin frozen on his face, looking confusedly about the deck.
‘Where is Mr Snow?’ he demanded. ‘Where is Captain Forsyth?’
Captain Kennedy was a tall man with a dark beard and a wide, honest brow. Although dressed in plain seafaring clothes his authority could not easily have been mistaken, standing as he did alone on the quarterdeck. But he took the impertinence in good part.
‘I am William Kennedy. I command this vessel with my ice master Mr Leask –’ he indicated the old Orkney whaler who stood by the wheel – ‘and also Ensign Bellot, my deputy, seconded from the French Navy.’
Bellot, the sole naval officer among this crew of whalers and sealers and Hudson Bay veterans, was the only one to bow.
Still the stranger did not move, his foot comically cocked just clear of the deck. It was as if, having picked his way across three miles of shifting sea ice, he was unwilling to trust his weight to anything so unsubstantial as a ship.
‘But this is the Prince Albert,’ the stranger insisted. ‘I visited aboard her last year. She came to our rescue when we grounded in Lancaster Sound. She is the private search yacht of Lady Franklin. Her commander is Captain Forsyth of the Royal Navy, with Mr Parker Snow as his mate.’
He shook his head, like a man detained in a dream. Beneath him, still standing on the ice, his companion shifted about to keep warm. He was also quite young but wore an old man’s fierce whiskers. The gold buttons on his pea coat showed that he was, like Bellot, a naval deck officer.
‘You are correct about the ship,’ said Mr Kennedy affably, ‘but not about the men. Captain Forsyth and Mr Snow were replaced after they returned the ship to England prematurely last fall. Lady Franklin has sent us out in their place to continue the search.’
‘Ah.’ The stranger digested this information. ‘Then you are coming, not going. When I saw Prince Albert again I thought she might have been caught, like us, for a second winter in the ice.’
‘As to whether we are coming or going,’ said Mr Kennedy, ‘I hardly know myself, thanks to the drift of the floes. But we are six weeks out of Stromness in Lady Franklin’s service, searching for her husband and the men of Erebus and Terror. And may I ask, sir, who are you?’
The stranger, recollecting himself, stepped down on the deck and gave Kennedy his hand.
‘Please excuse me. But one forgets one’s manners after a winter up here. I am Elisha Kent Kane, surgeon, United States Navy. This –’ he indicated his friend, now climbing the ship’s side – ‘is Mr William Murdaugh, passed midshipman and first officer of the United States Ship Advance, which you see yonder with her consort, the Rescue. We too have been engaged in the search for Sir John Franklin. We sail under the command of Lieutenant Edwin de Haven, United States Navy.’
To Bellot, a change seemed to come over Mr Kennedy’
s normally open face, as if his Canadian friend had heard some delicate matter mentioned and wanted to hush it away.
‘Dr Kane,’ he said vaguely. ‘I have heard that name. You are Mr Grinnell’s friend, I recollect? And Mr Snow’s?’
Kane still held Kennedy’s hand, but with a new watchfulness in his face and his bearing. ‘I am,’ he said, and looked quickly around the faces of the men of the Prince Albert, all nineteen of whom were now on the deck, eager for news from the fabulous labyrinth to the west. ‘Mr Grinnell is the private sponsor of our mission. The United States government offered its men while Mr Grinnell has provided the funds and the ships.’
‘I too am a friend of Mr Grinnell. I stayed at his house in New York on my way to England to take up this present position –’ Kennedy indicated the ship, the ice. ‘If you please, come to my cabin.’
Bellot followed them to the companionway, as did Murdaugh and Leask, assuming the invitation applied to all the officers present. To his surprise, Kennedy stopped in the door after Kane had descended, barring any further entry.
‘If you please, Ensign Bellot, be so kind as to show Mr Murdaugh around our little ship. There have been several changes to her since he last boarded her. You may join us when I send for you.’
He was gone. And Bellot was left to wonder, as he gave the young American a tour of the Prince Albert, what private business Mr Kennedy could have with an obscure Yankee doctor – business from which Mr Murdaugh, a sailing officer, who outranked any mere surgeon, was excluded.
The Americans brought sensational news. The summer before they had penetrated deep into the maze of channels that wriggles westward from Lancaster Sound. They had been caught in the ice, dragged up Wellington Channel then spat back into Baffin Bay. Their ships were sprung, leaking and short of stores, their crews so mutinous that the officers went armed. But the summer before, at the western end of Lancaster Sound, the Americans had shared in a momentous discovery: the last known trace of Franklin’s ships on the gravel strands of forlorn Beechey Island.
Minds of Winter Page 9