The Broken Lands

by Robert Edric

  “Oh?” Fitzjames said.

  “History, Mr. Fitzjames, history. For the want of only a few days’ sailing we might just as well never have crossed Baffin for all we’ve achieved so far.”

  “We wait,” Franklin said firmly, aware of the men gathering around them to listen.

  Crozier, too, saw them. “Back to the Terror,” he said to Irving, almost pushing him to the rail.

  Fitzjames was about to speak, but Franklin stopped him.

  The delay frustrated everyone, and was further exacerbated by the warm sun and pale blue skies beneath which they waited.

  “We are being mocked,” Gore remarked to Fitzjames, Goodsir and Vesconte as the four men exercised upon deck during the fifth morning of their enforced idleness.

  The following day was the 1st of August, and they were all aware of the turning point this represented, of how the loosening grip of the previous winter would shortly become the stiffening, probing fingers of the next.

  Later that day, the lookout on the Terror called down that the distant ice flow appeared to be decreasing. A boat was lowered, and Fitzjames, Irving, Reid and Blanky rowed to the limit of the open water to investigate. There they saw that the islands of ice moving past them had diminished in size, and that there were now free-moving bergs in the water, through which a passage might be navigated with luck and caution. The current too appeared to be flowing less vigorously now that it was no longer forced into narrow channels amid the ice.

  “The time might have come to take our chances,” Irving said uncertainly.

  “The chance of collision weighed against an early arrival in the south?” Fitzjames said.

  “Captain Crozier believes—”

  “That we might earn ourselves some charmed protection by pitting our wits and strength against it all,” Blanky said.

  “Propitiate the Gods.”

  “The Gods are up there, we are down here,” Reid said. “What do they see that we can’t? There’s been no let up in the flow since we first arrived alongside it.”

  They all nodded in agreement.

  “Whatever Mr. Crozier or Sir John might pray for, we’d be fools to try and get across it as it now is. We’d be forced to sail almost directly against the flow of the ice.”

  “And still need to maneuver when the need arose,” added Blanky.

  “Which would be every few minutes,” Fitzjames said dejectedly.

  “And trust to favorable winds for the entire passage.” Blanky licked his palm and held it up. “Which, regardless of whatever sacrifice we might care to make, we have yet to be blessed with.”

  Fitzjames rose to his feet and took out his telescope. “There are some stationary islands, keel-ground amid the rush.”

  “Impossible,” Reid said. “Too deep. If they’re stuck it’s because they’re grounded on the ice beneath them.” He too examined these larger bergs.

  “Even so, might we not, given that favorable wind, move from piece to piece, mooring each night and selecting a new target for each day’s sailing?”

  In the event, they were surrounded during the night by a dense bank of fog, and their departure was delayed until the morning of the 3rd.

  They sailed only with close-reefed topsails, allowing themselves to be drawn south in the drift. In support of his plan to move cautiously from berg to berg, Fitzjames also suggested that their boilers be fired so that they might be ready to use their engines if the wind turned against them, or if either vessel became uncontrollable by sail alone in the unpredictable currents ahead. Franklin agreed to this, and as they sailed smoke rose for the first time from both their stacks. Only Crozier voiced the opinion that he would sooner trust to providence than his stokers.

  By dusk they had made three miles, and at ten in the evening they moored to an island of ice which had been constantly visible ahead of them from their starting point.

  Despite their slow progress, everyone was encouraged that they had made this part of their passage safely. In the lee of the island the water was calm and the wind had dropped completely. A glossy white cliff rose 200 feet off their starboard side, and once secured their mooring ropes were let out so that they might come to rest away from this and any ice which might fall from its overhanging rim.

  Collisions were heard throughout the night, and on several occasions the alarm was sounded when ice from the main flow drifted in upon them. None of this damaged them, and as the night progressed the alarms became fewer.

  The repair to the Erebus’ bunker was completed the following morning and its cargo laboriously returned.

  Franklin and Crozier breakfasted together and congratulated themselves on the previous day’s crossing.

  Apart from their more obvious common concerns, their only other cause for alarm now lay with the men who remained in the sick bays of both ships. Genge continued to suffer from the symptoms which had killed Torrington, Hartnell and Braine, and Edward Little was still in considerable pain from his leg. It was Peddie’s belief, Crozier told Franklin, that Genge would shortly die, and upon hearing this Franklin regretted having allowed him to be so severely punished.

  The following day they made three miles, and the one after that seven.

  And on the 6th of August they sailed free of the bulk of the ice, and for three days were able to cruise without mooring until they once again encountered ice too concentrated and fast-flowing to penetrate.

  They tied up to a secure berg, and during the night of the 9th, Edward Genge died.

  He was buried at sea the following morning, his corpse weighted with ballast and dropped into the water an hour before they sailed. The Terror’s marines fired into the air, and all around them flocks of hidden birds erupted from their roosts on the surrounding ice.

  On one occasion, nineteen days into the strait, the Terror scraped her keel on the submerged tongue of a berg around which she was sailing. The Erebus lay half a mile ahead of her, oblivious to what had happened. The damage was not great, but part of the Terror’s rudder housing was lost, and until even a crude repair could be made she proved difficult to steer. The problem was made worse by the increasing number of smaller, free-moving pieces of ice among which they were once again sailing.

  By the time Franklin realized something was wrong he was almost two miles ahead of the Terror. He finally saw her signal in the falling dusk, and ordering all their own sail to be taken in, he waited until she caught up with him. Because there was no substantial berg to which the Terror might moor while repairs were made, Franklin offered her a tow and Crozier accepted. The ships were still in open water as darkness fell, and it was not until two in the morning that they came upon a mass of ice large enough to provide them with the necessary shelter.

  At sunrise an hour later they saw that they were moored to an island of old ice, which rose from the sea in a gradual slope rather than precipitously. Its surface was mounted and furrowed, and was already heavily scoured by rivers of meltwater. A party went ashore to explore it and to examine the surrounding sea from its peak.

  Accompanied by Goodsir, Fitzjames was the first to make the climb and see what lay beyond. He was not surprised by what he saw—more ice and navigable water until the shifting pattern of light and dark confused him—but what did attract his attention was a large number of vivid red stains on the southern shore of the island. He pointed these out to Goodsir, who immediately became keen to investigate.

  They reached the marked ground and Goodsir announced that they were blood stains.

  “It’s like a battle ground,” Fitzjames said, searching around him for some clue as to the origins of the marks.

  “But without the bodies,” Goodsir added. He collected samples from the nearest of the stains.

  “Hunters?” Fitzjames crouched beside Goodsir. Some of the stains looked fresh and wet, but when he touched these he discovered that they were buried, that meltwater had frozen over them and not yet started to wash them away.

  Goodsir left him and walked toward the sea.r />
  Fitzjames walked in the opposite direction, coming across a small flock of gulls pecking at the ice to reach their disgusting meal beneath.

  Goodsir called to him, and approaching him, Fitzjames saw that there was something at his feet. Arriving beside him he saw that this was the frozen corpse of a walrus, its open mouth plugged with ice.

  “Our mystery explained,” Goodsir said.

  “Then it is hunters. This animal was wounded and left behind.”

  Goodsir laughed at this. “Nothing so dramatic, I’m afraid.” He tapped the solid corpse with his foot and then stepped aside to reveal more fully the encircling pool of frozen blood, at the center of which lay a newborn calf, as dead and as frozen as its mother.

  “This must be their birthing ground,” Goodsir said. He tried to prise the calf free of the ice, eventually having to chip at it with his hammer to break it loose.

  They continued south for five more days. On good days they made twenty miles, on poor ones only two.

  On the sixth morning they saw in the early dawn that the slender channel they had followed the previous day had become even narrower in the night as the ice along its edges gathered and consolidated. They saw that they had been surrounded by a drifting field of level surface ice which, even as they looked out upon it, threatened to consolidate further and trap them within it.

  The Erebus was the first to get away, pushing through the floe and nosing to port and starboard as she part-sought and part-created a path through the gathering mass, aiming for the dark water a mile ahead.

  The Terror followed immediately astern, taking advantage of the leading ship’s open wake.

  Reid guided the Erebus from his perch on the bowsprit cap, signaling first one way and then the other as new leads offered themselves ahead. Running up against a heavier shelf of ice they were forced to turn through 90 degrees and seek another route, a difficult maneuver with the floe already pushing along their entire length. Seeing what had happened, the helmsman on the Terror was able to turn her at a less severe angle and avoid the obstruction.

  It took them eight hours to sail a mile and pass through the ice into open water beyond.

  Minutes after their release, the dark cap of an island appeared on their starboard horizon, but other than note its position on their empty charts, neither vessel took any further account of it.

  Their way south now appeared clear. Open channels penetrated the field of scattered bergs, and although the water was filled with the debris of these larger masses, this presented them with few obstacles.

  Returning from his uncomfortable perch, Reid called for Vesconte to fetch several of his aluminum canisters. Waiting for him, he explained to the others that the ice off their starboard bow was starting to move in a different direction from that behind them, and he deduced that they had entered the fan of a southerly drift, and that the west coast of Boothia lay hidden off their port bow. The ice there would be more densely packed than at the center of the channel or along any corresponding land mass to the west, and he suggested that they should continue south until they were clear of the ice which presently surrounded them. They might then adopt a south-southwesterly course and see what lay ahead of them in that direction. He felt certain that this passage would prove similar in many respects to that unsuccessfully sought along Prince Regent’s Inlet by Parry and Ross to the east of Boothia, and although he was unsure of what lay to the south and west of them, he was further convinced that they should avoid the known shore to the east and follow a course toward where the stronger southerly currents exerted their influence on the drifting ice.

  Vesconte arrived with his canisters, into which details of their position and progress to date were already sealed. Taking several of these from him, Reid went to their prow and cast them overboard in rapid succession so that they formed a line in the water like the floats of a submerged net. Most of these were immediately lost amid the smaller pieces of nearby ice, but those that floated into open water began to drift ahead of them.

  Countless thousands of these canisters had been thrown overboard since being adopted as the only viable, albeit distrusted and unreliable, means of communication between vessels in the ice and the world beyond. Inside them a form in several languages requested that they be returned to the Admiralty. Some were picked up decades after they had been thrown. Most were lost, sunk or frozen over. And some, everyone knew, probably drifted forever with cargos of hope or despair so large they could never be contained, and which, if ever released or exposed, crumbled to dust and disappeared as completely as the men who had thrown them, and whose calls and screams and prayers had drifted with them to the horizon of their shrinking world.

  They were caught in gathering ice for the next eight days, box-hauling in enclosed leads and lowering their boats to investigate every time a navigable channel opened up ahead of them.

  The Terror suffered further damage when she was caught in a nip while chasing open water to the southwest. She came to an abrupt halt and was shaken from prow to stern. Those watching from the Erebus realized immediately that she had struck more submerged ice.

  “She’s hauling astern,” Fitzjames said, standing beside Franklin, the attention of both men focused on the efforts of the Terror to release herself from the trap into which she had sailed.

  Franklin called down to Des Voeux to take out a party on the ice and help them pull clear.

  Des Voeux gathered together a dozen men and led them over the side onto the stable ice. They ran until they were alongside the Terror, whose boats were already lowered and coming toward them.

  Reluctant to move any closer, and concerned about their own position in the narrow lead, Franklin ordered a second party to stand ready to lower their boats and haul the Erebus astern until she too was back out in open water.

  “She’s grinding,” Fitzjames said suddenly. A distant crunching sound could be heard, and many of the men on deck stopped what they were doing and turned to look at the Terror.

  James Fairholme arrived beside them and directed their attention to their own stern, pointing to where one slab of ice had been pushed upon another and was now sliding over it at an angle. The distant noise resumed, and was concluded by a sudden crack as the uppermost slab broke and fell in two halves upon the ice it had mounted.

  Those watching on the Erebus waited for the tremor this might produce, but nothing came.

  It was difficult to judge the size of this upheaval, or its distance away from them, but Fairholme, the son and grandson of farmers, estimated the risen shelf to be at least an acre in extent.

  There were other, less distinct noises, as the reverberations of this collision died down, and only when they were convinced that there was no more to follow did they turn their attention back to the Terror and her efforts to free herself.

  By then, Crozier had landed on the ice, and was supervising the work from the shore. John Irving and George Hodgson worked alongside him. In addition to their land-lines, the Terror’s boats were attempting to pull her astern.

  “She’s free,” Fitzjames said eventually, watching as the bow of the Terror rocked in the water and sent out an irregular wave on either side of her.

  Confirming this, Franklin ordered all their sail to be taken in, and for them too to be pulled astern.

  The two ships were moored where they sat at the onset of night. Lanterns were lit on the ice and sea anchors made ready in case the banks of the channel closed further in on them in the darkness.

  Crozier spent the evening aboard the Erebus.

  “There are times when I wish I had never set eyes on the borders of this cursed place,” he said. “I make no excuses for my carelessness, but I ask you, who in their right mind would not have taken the course I followed?”

  “It certainly appeared to offer a reasonable chance of getting ourselves clear,” Franklin said. He had followed Crozier against his own better judgment, keen to raise the spirits of his inactive and restless crew by the simple expedient of sett
ing them in motion, however slow or tortuous.

  Crozier rose to press his outstretched palm into the empty space at the center of the map hanging beside them. “My suggestion is that we remain where we are and try again to move forward along the same path.”

  “We retreat back out into open water,” Franklin said, handing Crozier a decanter of port. “We retreat and try again elsewhere.”

  Crozier saw that argument was useless. He wondered if Franklin made a note of these private discussions in his Admiralty Book or journal. “I would prefer the word ‘withdraw,’” he said.

  “Then withdraw it is.” Listening to all this, it occurred to Franklin that Crozier spoke in the aggrieved tone of someone who believed he had been unfairly treated, almost as though he were seeking some reward for his labors, whereas instead he had received only mockery. “These are not mistakes or misjudgments we make,” he said. “For that we would need to know what lay ahead of us.” But Crozier was not to be appeased and they parted soon afterward.

  They resumed their hauling the next day, and more men were sent out on the ice to assist in this. The Terror’s rudder was lifted, and without it she became unwieldy in the confined space, her stern wave rocking the boats which pulled her.

  Word reached Franklin late in the morning that her bow reinforcement had also been damaged in the collision and that she was being pumped as she was towed.

  Irving reported to Franklin mid-afternoon that the shock of the collision had been largely absorbed by the Terror’s outer sheathing at a point where she was best protected, and that the damage was superficial. She was shipping water into her empty bow, but her restraining timbers were still intact. He pointed out to Franklin the slight dip in the Terror’s bow, passing on Crozier’s reassurances that once the towing parties were back aboard she would be quickly pumped and sealed.

  By late afternoon the Erebus was free of the lead and back out in open water.

  As they followed the edge of the ice to the west, everyone on board the Erebus was surprised to see the rush of smoke from the Terror’s stack and then to see her complete the last half mile of her own reverse journey using her engine. Even rudderless she came out into the open water in a straight line and at a constant speed considerably greater than that at which the Erebus herself had come clear.