by Robert Edric
Others arrived ahead of them. The ice was new and easily broken, and several men climbed upon it, and the clean white block was quickly reduced to a broken dirty mass.
All the stores that were to be taken ashore had already been delivered there, and following a delay caused by the collapse of one of the shelters, the last of the cases were now being transported beyond the reach of any ice that might ground itself more forcibly.
Two men had been injured when the shelter had collapsed: seaman William Closson had been cut and bruised by a stack of falling crates, and Josephus Geater, slower than Closson in running from the falling wreckage, had had his foot crushed by a forty-gallon barrel of vinegar. He had screamed out at the sudden and unexpected pain of this and then fallen unconscious. Those working nearby rushed to help the two men and pull them clear of the debris. Stanley was sent for, and by the time he arrived Geater had come round, his screams gagged by a cloth forced into his mouth by one of the men now helping him to try and stand. A quick inspection of the shattered foot told Stanley that it would need to be amputated. Surgeon Peddie arrived from the Terror, and after his own inspection, he nodded once to let Stanley know that he agreed with him. He had with him his case and administered morphine to ease Geater’s pain. A makeshift stretcher was constructed and he was taken back to the Erebus.
Peddie stayed with William Closson, attending to his cuts with surgical spirit.
The scattered stores were retrieved and stacked in the open until the pieces of the shelter could be dragged from among them and rebuilt a short distance away from the site of the accident.
Passing Stanley and the injured man on their way ashore, Fairholme and Des Voeux arrived to inspect and report on the damage to Franklin. Two of the Erebus’ quartermasters, Daniel Arthur and John Downing, had already arrived. Arthur made an inventory and Downing, with the help of others, passed each can and case out of the wreckage and inspected it for damage. Most were discovered to be intact, but several 12-pound cans of fruit had been punctured and their leaking syrup stuck to the hands of the men handling them.
Arthur reported to Franklin. Very little had been lost, and those cans which had been damaged might be used immediately. He appeared reluctant to say anymore, but when urged by Franklin he took a can of peas from his satchel, green liquid seeping from where the container had been holed. The smell of putrefaction was unmistakeable and both men turned away from it. Franklin sent for Des Voeux, who tasted this liquid and then immediately spat it out.
“Just the peas?” he asked Arthur.
Arthur, aware of what was being suggested, called for Downing, and together they studied the inventory. In total there were two thousand cans of peas, half in 12-pound cannisters, half in six.
“And no way of knowing if they were all sealed and cooked in the one batch,” Franklin said.
“The damaged fruit tastes fine,” Downing said reassuringly.
Not wishing to appear prematurely alarmist, Franklin told Arthur to store the peas separately, away from the other stores. Those which they could prove had turned rotten he ordered destroyed.
Later, he and Des Voeux went to see Stanley and the injured Geater. Sedated but unconscious, Geater insisted that his injuries would not prevent him from continuing his work ashore, but Franklin told him that he was relieved of his duties there. The seaman saluted him from where he lay gasping on Stanley’s table.
A flock of several thousand geese and the same number of smaller birds alighted on the island during the night, and the following morning parties went ashore to trap and kill as many as they could before, having rested, the birds continued south.
Gore and Vesconte persuaded Fitzjames to accompany them, and the three men climbed the slope through the birds, few of which made any attempt to escape from them.
“They must be exhausted,” Vesconte said, surprised by the birds’ apparent lack of fear.
All around them men fired and netted, and back on the beach others were already gutting and plucking the carcasss and hanging them to dry.
“No sport,” Gore said, drawing a bead with his pistol on a passing tern without firing.
“And no one ashore from the Terror,” Vesconte remarked, shielding his eyes and scanning the scene around them.
“Confined to duties aboard,” Gore said. “I dined last night with John Irving.”
“And?”
“Crozier isn’t happy about the way some things are being done.”
“Oh?” said Fitzjames, as aware as any of them of Crozier’s recent black moods, but unwilling to give any further voice to his own thoughts on the matter.
“Common enough grumbles of confined men,” Vesconte said.
“Which won’t improve with being confined even further.”
“What did John Irving think was the cause?” Fitzjames asked.
“He didn’t say. But the consensus of opinion is that you should have been given—”
“Don’t,” Fitzjames said.
“There’s many would agree with that,” Vesconte said.
Fitzjames walked ahead of them and they let him go.
It was common knowledge that upon the expedition being proposed and organized, Fitzjames had been considered the man most likely to lead it. Sir John had been thought too old, was too recently retired from the Governership of Van Diemen’s Land, and had been too long away from the ice. And Crozier, following his defeats at the South Pole with James Ross, had expressed little interest. Then Franklin, largely at the insistence of his wife, had put himself forward, and Crozier had applied too. Both were senior to Fitzjames, and he had been offered, and accepted, a position subordinate to them both. It angered him that this “usurpation”—although this was not how he himself saw it—was still being discussed among the crews.
“My apologies, James,” Vesconte held out his hand.
“Accepted. But it cannot be ignored.”
“The man broods, it’s in his nature. You and I are fleet of mind and foot, like hunted gazelles. Francis Crozier is a … a rhinoceros, happy to bludgeon and curse and moan because he has an impenetrable hide. And happy to unsettle everyone around him just by being there.”
“And me?” Gore asked, joining them, and out of breath as the slope grew steeper.
“I think a bear,” Vesconte said.
Gore was happy to accept this. “Seriously though, James, Crozier lacks a certain, shall we say, flexibility in some situations. This is not Spithead or the Channel.”
“Nor the Mediterranean, more’s the pity,” Vesconte added in an attempt to help the situation.
“Did John Irving mention anything specific?”
“He thinks Crozier suffers from severe headaches, and that these—”
“He would never allow them to influence his judgment,” Fitzjames said. “The Admiralty chose him. We must abide by, and respect their decision.” His loyalty and support for the man surprised them both.
A fusillade of shots from close by sent a nervous ripple through the terns and fulmars at their feet, as though the small birds had been physically dislodged and then thrown up by the noise. Fitzjames reached down, picked up a tern and wrung its neck, held it out by its wingtips and then severed its wings to take back for Goodsir. He carefully folded these, fastened them into scrolls with pieces of ribbon, and slid them into the pouch at his side. “He wants a dozen perfect sets,” he said.
“Then a dozen he shall have.” Gore aimed and fired and brought down a bird which skimmed above them like a paper dart.
Later, when the samples were collected, and as the slaughter went on all around them, increasing in intensity as some of the larger birds struggled to get airborne and leave, the three men sat together on a rise overlooking the bay. Behind them was the shooting range that had been set up, using cans from the dump as targets, and melting down their lead solder for shot.
“You can’t ignore it, James,” Vesconte said.
“I don’t. But nor do I regret the fact that we have Sir John at our
head with Crozier his second.”
“The man expects too much,” Gore said. “I’m sorry, James, but he does. This is very likely going to be his last time in this place and it shows in everything he says and does. He was always John Barrow’s favorite. Glory, James, that’s what he’s here for now. Why do you think he was given this one last opportunity to find it? And it isn’t just me saying that. Every one of his officers knows it.”
“Which makes him no less of a captain and no less able to do the job entrusted to him.”
“Agreed,” Vesconte said.
Gore aimed his empty pistol at the distant ships and fired it.
Much later, upon returning to the Erebus and delivering the wings to Goodsir, Fitzjames spent the evening alone writing letters. He regretted that the old dispute concerning Crozier’s appointment had been brought back into the open, but knew that there was nothing he could now say to the man which would not make matters worse.
He wrote until two in the morning and then fell asleep at his desk. At three he was woken by a steward wrapping a blanket around his shoulders.
Assisted by Goodsir, Stanley amputated Josephus Geater’s foot. John Peddie and his own assistant, Alexander Macdonald, arrived from the Terror as the preparations for the operation were being made.
“A straightforward enough task,” Stanley told them, acknowledging their offer of help. It annoyed him to have so many others crowded into the small room watching him as he worked.
He unwrapped his bag of instruments and tested their sharpness, pulling down his strop and improving the edges of the saw and those knives which did not satisfy him.
Geater’s foot was swollen and badly bruised, and despite being heavily sedated he called out at each of Stanley’s exploratory prods, and at the smoothing motion of his thumb as Stanley felt beneath the swelling to determine where to make his first cut. He had taken the decision to amputate so soon after the injury because if gangrene was given the chance to take hold then he might be forced to delay by several weeks until the full extent of the contamination had revealed itself. This would greatly reduce his supply of laudanum, and he was convinced that as far as Geater was concerned the end result would be the same.
“Is there no hope of the bones being reset?” Macdonald asked, immediately regretting the remark when he saw the look on Peddie’s face.
“A garter cut?” Peddie said to Stanley, as though in apology for his assistant’s insensitive blunder.
“I think so. Ankle, shin and the mass of undetermined fractures in the foot itself.” He called for Goodsir to fasten his apron around him, and picking up the smallest of his scalpels he bowed his head and said a short prayer for the man on the table.
He began work without speaking to any of them. It was important to cut quickly, to trim away the skin and then to saw through the clean bone and out through the muscle behind before the pain became too great and Geater began thrashing around. Peddie and Macdonald held Geater’s shoulders, Peddie also clasping a wet cloth to his face.
Stanley looked at each man and then poured spirit over that part of the leg about to be cut. The blade went in quickly as far as the bone and he slid it deftly both left and right of the line he had chosen. There was little immediate blood, but this began to flow more heavily as he drew back the two lengths of severed skin. He picked up his saw, and positioning it on the exposed bone, he drew it back a few inches to feel the teeth bite and then pushed it quickly forward.
Geater screamed and Macdonald lost his grip on his shoulder, fumbling and grabbing at it as Geater tried to struggle free. Peddie pushed the cloth he held into Geater’s mouth. He leaned close to his ear and spoke to him. Stanley continued sawing. Blood flowed from the cut on to the cloths mounded beneath. Goodsir pulled tighter on the straps holding Geater’s thigh, releasing the one around his calf as he felt the bone finally give and as the saw passed through into the softer flesh behind. Stanley immediately took up a knife, and supporting that part of the leg he had already almost severed, he cut through the remaining tendons and skin with a succession of short slashes. The foot and shin came away completely and he let it fall to the floor. Goodsir released another of the straps, and with only a single tourniquet remaining at Geater’s groin, the flow of blood suddenly increased, spurting over his own and Stanley’s apron.
At Geater’s head, Alexander Macdonald began to retch.
Stanley took a bowl of diluted spirit and threw it over Geater’s exposed stump. Geater screamed again and then passed out. Taking advantage of this respite, Stanley stood back from the patient. Relieved of his part in the proceedings, Goodsir went to the door and called for Philip Reddington, who had been waiting outside.
Reddington came in with a small bowl of molten pitch intended as a temporary seal for the wound in its antiseptic state and to stem the flow of blood. There had been no improvement on this crude and simple remedy for as long as Stanley had been practicing, and it fell to the ship’s caulker to assist in this final, and often fatal, part of the operation.
Stanley poured the pitch, adding more spirit as this congealed and then set firm over the exposed flesh. Later he would peel it off using paraffin. He built up the thickening liquid in layers until Geater’s leg came to resemble the ball of a pollarded willow, and the scent of burning was added to the already overpowering smell of the spirit and pitch. Pungent smoke marbled the cabin.
Instructing Peddie and Macdonald to release their grip on Geater, Stanley looked more closely at the unconscious man. He opened his eyelids and felt his pulse. He pressed his palm to Geater’s soaked and burning forehead and then lifted the thigh of the sawn leg, peeling hardened splashes of pitch from the table before laying it back down.
Alexander Macdonald asked to leave and then ran from the room with both hands over his mouth.
Retrieving the amputated foot from where it had fallen, Goodsir examined it.
At a signal from Stanley, Reddington called for four men to carry Geater from the surgery to the bed which had been prepared for him in the forward hold.
When the patient was gone, Peddie apologized to Stanley for the behavior of his assistant. Stanley said nothing; instead he collected the cloths from the table and the floor and stuffed them into a sack for burning. He washed his bloody instruments, scraped the last of the pitch from the table and doused the bloodstains with cold water. Then John Weekes the carpenter was sent for and shown the severed leg to help him judge the length of the peg to be fitted to Geater’s stump.
NINE
The ice came slowly, a few small floe-pieces as hesitant as the first, drifting into the double bay from both the east and the west and then grounding in the shallows or running ashore on the beach or the spit of land. But gradually, the size and number of these pieces increased, and new watches were stationed at both points of entry.
James Reid had led the first party to their most distant outlook on the west Devon coast, following in the footprints of Vesconte and his surveying party, and then meeting the men as they made their way back down to the ships.
On their second day ashore Edward Little had fallen and slid eighty feet down a scree slope. He protested that he was uninjured, but had afterward walked with a painful limp. He was helped down the hillside now by Gore and Irving.
The climb to the peak overlooking Wellington Channel took three hours. With Reid went Des Voeux and John Bridgens, steward. They left Vesconte’s path and turned west, reaching a point at which the broad expanse of water beyond Devon was finally revealed to them in its entirety.
It surprised Reid to see how much of this was already filled with ice; equally surprising to him was the extent to which this had closed all around them in their sheltered backwater, surrounding them entirely and ready now to move in on them. Bergs larger than the ships drifted along the edges of the pack, collided with it and were either shattered or pushed forward by it. Watching this, it became clear to Reid that their own harbor would freeze over sooner than they had anticipated, and he becam
e concerned that the pressure of the ice arriving from the west did not push a wall of bergs in upon them from which they would later be unable to extricate themselves. He kept these thoughts to himself.
Bridgens called out that he thought he could see a vessel in Wellington Channel, but this turned out to be only a dark cap upon a large berg already run aground.
It was mid-afternoon and the light was fading as they began their descent to the Erebus across the isthmus, where they saw that in addition to the smaller bergs drifting in upon them, the water of the bay was freezing around its edges for the first time.
Four days later it had frozen outward from the shore to a distance of a hundred yards, thickening as it spread, until three days after that it was found to be solid to a depth of two feet and capable of supporting the weight of a man and his loaded sledge.
It also began to form outward from the two ships, until a precarious pathway existed between them. Props were sunk into this thickening ice to keep the vessels level as they rose and then froze into position. The Erebus remained at an even keel, but the Terror, standing in water a fathom deeper, began to list to starboard as the ice gathered beneath her. Crozier ordered her to be winched closer to the shore, using boat parties to break the ice ahead of her. She was anchored when her keel touched the soft bottom again, and her own boats and those of the Erebus waited alongside her all day and into the night as the ice re-formed beneath her hull. In this way they settled her level, and instead of rising beneath her, the adjacent ice was cut loose and allowed to mound into ridges a few feet from her sides.
Two men were taken ill during this time—John Torrington, stoker on the Terror, and John Hartnell, a seaman on the Erebus. Alerted by the appearance and the persistent symptoms shown by Hartnell, Stanley could only conclude that he was suffering from the onset of scurvy. At first he refused to believe this: no one else was suffering, and Hartnell had been eating fresh food and taking his lemon juice, of which twice the usual ration had so far been administered in an effort to build up a greater degree of protection against the disease when it eventually did appear among them.