The Broken Lands

by Robert Edric

  They left as Stanley prepared the body for removal onto the ice, knowing that its eventual interment would prove difficult, if not impossible, while the ice remained so unpredictable and uneven all around them.

  Goodsir suggested that it should be taken and placed in one of the cabins of the abandoned Terror until those final arrangements could be made. They were all agreed upon this, and afterward all their corpses were disposed of in this manner.

  For six weeks following the loss of the Terror, the surrounding plain shook only to the reverberations of distant and largely unseen disturbances, and despite their surprise at this movement so late in the year, they were well prepared for these smaller shocks and able to protect themselves from them.

  This peaceful interlude ended on the 14th of December with a sudden tremor which caught them all by surprise, especially the men in Tozer’s camp, where it struck most violently, and particularly those who were out on the ice when it came.

  Four men were returning to the shelters from their store when a crevasse opened up directly ahead of them, tilting the ice and knocking them off their feet. Others emerged to see what was happening. The crevasse stopped opening, and the block of ice upon which the men had fallen came to rest at a gentle slope. They rose and continued back to the shelters, jumping over the low steps and ridges which had appeared on the surrounding surface.

  As they approached the shelters the ice moved again, this time opening directly beneath them and forcing them back to the ground.

  At the first indication of the tremors, men had also come out of the Erebus, and all eyes were on the distant figures. Some ran to where the four men had fallen and could no longer be seen.

  A second fissure had opened up, its two lips drawing apart as it extended in length. One of its edges had tilted upward, and it was this which hid the men from view. They had fallen into the space created beneath them, but rather than find themselves dropping helplessly into the depths of a widening chasm, their fall was broken only four feet down by a broad ledge, beneath which the fissure was no more than a foot wide. Only the surface layer of ice had been disturbed by the tremors, and that beneath was holding fast.

  The first of the men pulled himself free, signaled to those running toward him that he was unhurt, and then knelt to help the second man out of the trench.

  The remaining two stood where the buried shelf was at its deepest, ready to edge their way along the platform and await their own turn to be pulled clear. Both were aware that the fissure was still opening up away from them and that it might suddenly become much wider beneath their feet.

  By then the first two men had climbed clear and a small group had gathered around them, some with ropes, which they threw across the sloping ice to the others.

  As the two men in the ice fastened the ropes around their chests the opening began to move in on them, and everyone urged them to hurry, directing them along the shelf to where the drop beneath them was less sheer. The men edged sideways, panicked by this resumption of the tremors. As they did so, the ice upon which their rescuers stood fractured into several large pieces. Men ran in all directions, abandoning the ropes as they stumbled clear.

  The pieces of broken ice settled back into place, and one of the two trapped men let out a scream. He slipped from his foothold, and although the chasm had still not opened up beneath him, he was now on his knees in the narrowest part of the fissure, its sides against both his shoulders. The other tried to help him up, but it was difficult to maneuver in the confined space, and he shouted for those above to retrieve the ropes and begin pulling them out. Then he too stopped shouting and suddenly screamed.

  The men above scrambled over the tilted rim of loose ice to see what had happened. Some took up the ropes and hauled on them, but one of these was now trapped between two pieces of ice, and the other flew out of the crevasse and caused the men pulling on it to fall in a line on the unstable surface.

  Fitzjames and Reid arrived, ran around the main body of men and approached the broken ice from the opposite direction. It was Reid who first saw what had happened to the two men: the chasm beneath them had not opened up, but the shaking of the ice above had forced a large wedge of it into the narrow space alongside them. This wedge now formed a new and unstable lip to the fissure, reducing the space in which the two men stood to less than half its original width.

  Taking charge, Reid called for them to raise themselves slowly upright and then to stand perfectly still.

  Speaking behind his hand to Fitzjames, he pointed out that instead of trying to squeeze the two men out through this narrow space, they ought to turn their attention to pulling clear the ice which imprisoned them, and which, if it slid any farther into the fissure, would crush them where they stood.

  More rope was brought to the scene, tied into wide loops and thrown over the wedge of ice in an effort to draw it away from the two men, allowing them to be pulled to safety behind it. Reid ordered those who were not directly involved in the rescue attempt to move back so as to cause no further disturbance to the already precarious surface.

  He returned to where Fitzjames crouched talking to the two men. A moment later they were joined by Tozer, who offered his own suggestions and encouragement.

  The rescue attempt began cautiously.

  “What happens if she gets the shakes again?” Tozer asked Fitzjames out of hearing of the two men.

  “God forbid it will,” Fitzjames said.

  “I think He might have stopped taking an interest in us long ago,” Tozer said.

  “Then our own efforts will have to suffice.”

  Momentarily unsettled by Tozer’s suggestion, Fitzjames turned his attention back to the men throwing the ropes, and from his vantage-point at the far side of their target he directed them to throw where the ice protruded the farthest over the fissure, and where it might be more easily caught.

  Three more casts were made, each as unsuccessful as the last.

  “Tozer does have a point,” Reid told Fitzjames, dismayed by their repeated failure. He took Fitzjames to one side and showed him where the surface of the ice was again gently vibrating.

  “The dying tremors of the earlier shock?” Fitzjames said.

  “Possibly. Or the forerunner of another.”

  They searched around them for any other indication of this, distracted after only a few seconds by a shout from Tozer, followed an instant later by screams from the trapped men.

  The wedge of ice had slipped and now rested close against their chests. It was not crushing them, nor was it even propped against them, but in slipping it had deprived them of the last of their space.

  Controlling their screaming, the two men pleaded to be saved.

  “Could we not prop the gap open and pull them out farther along?” Fitzjames suggested.

  Neither Reid nor Tozer was enthusiastic about the idea. A prop would need to be fetched, and its weight and the vibrations it would cause as it was being manhandled and then driven into place would unsettle the overhang further. In addition, the gentle trembling of the ground upon which the three of them crouched was becoming more distinct. Several others had also noticed this and had moved away from the far edge of the ice.

  Tozer continued talking to the trapped men. He told them to turn themselves and then to edge slowly to the left where the ice did not come so close to touching them.

  They were more encouraged by this than by the efforts of the men with the ropes and they called out for Tozer to tell them that they were going to be saved.

  Unseen by anyone but Reid, the marine sergeant gently eased a pistol from his belt and laid it down beside him. He looked around, and spotting one of his privates, he beckoned the man toward him, indicating for him to bring his rifle.

  Unaware of this, Fitzjames rose and left them, withdrawing to where Crozier had arrived with Hodgson and Irving. He reported what had happened and then explained their rescue attempts. Crozier listened without speaking, clearly skeptical, and then asked Fitzjames for
his opinion on their chances of saving the men now that the temperature was dropping so quickly. He left, calling Hodgson and Irving after him, pausing only to tell Fitzjames to report to him on the outcome of the rescue.

  Fitzjames returned angrily to Reid and Tozer. Reid too remarked on the falling temperature and called for more lanterns to be fetched. The previous day a drop of thirty degrees had been measured between two and three in the afternoon. The marine private was now crouching close beside Tozer, his rifle held over the crook of his arm, primed and ready to fire.

  By then the two men had been caught in the ice for over an hour, and having been held immobile for so long they would be suffering from the onset of frostbite in their hands and feet. They were well protected by their clothes against the cold, but were threatened by their immobility.

  It was as Fitzjames considered all this that the ice shook again—a sudden violent judder, and this time there was nothing any of them could do to prevent the wedge from slipping farther into the fissure, tilting and dropping as it went and crushing the two men below.

  They both screamed louder than ever, and then one of them fell unconscious. The other went on screaming, barely pausing for breath as he beat on the ice with his fists and tried to kick his legs free from beneath it.

  Seeing that there was now nothing to be lost by rushing forward, the rescuers abandoned their ropes, ran to the edge of the fissure and tried to push the slab away. But this only caused the man who remained conscious to scream even louder and to call for them to stop. The other remained slumped forward over the ice, his arms spread and his face turned to one side. Blood ran from his nose and mouth and froze upon his cheeks and chin, barely remaining liquid long enough to form in a pool around him. To those with lanterns close enough to see him more clearly, he appeared to be already dead.

  Reid lowered himself into the gap beside the unconscious man and felt his neck for a pulse, which he found. He saw the unstanched blood spreading outward from the man’s stomach, squeezed along a joint between two planes in the ice. Careful not to let the other man see him, he motioned to Fitzjames and pointed this out to him. He also called to Tozer, who came as close as he dare to the rim and then leaned over until his face was only inches from that of the screaming man. He too saw the blood. He retrieved his pistol and slid it toward Reid.

  Fitzjames called out for them to stop, but neither man spared him more than a second’s glance.

  Then Tozer reached out and held the head of the screaming man, and as he did so the block of ice moved again. The man stopped screaming abruptly and a sudden spray of blood shot from his mouth and colored the surface all around him. More flowed from his nose and from beneath his jacket, and his legs began to kick and then to run, as though of their own accord, thrashing wildly in the confined space until it too was smeared red and they were lost to view. The sound of his splintering bones was unmistakable, but still he did not lose consciousness, his mouth repeatedly filling with blood, which he spat out in his struggle for air. The ice tilted upward, crushing his lower ribs, riding higher over his unconscious companion and driving even farther into his chest.

  Amid all this noise and confusion, Tozer rose and ran to the marine waiting behind him. Grabbing the man’s rifle he ran back to stand above Reid, and for a moment the two men looked hard at each other. Then Reid picked up the pistol and held it to the unconscious man’s forehead. Tozer knelt and leveled the rifle at the bloodstained face of the other. He was the first to fire, followed an instant later by Reid. The screaming stopped immediately. Throwing down the rifle, Tozer called for two more, passed one to Reid and then the two men aimed again and fired together into the corpses.

  The fading echo of the four shots drummed into the distance around them, but close to there was only a stunned silence, and then the murmuring voices of the others as they came to see for themselves what had happened. A pall of gray smoke hung around them in the freezing air.

  Fitzjames stood stunned by what had taken place, by the brutality of it all, and by the speed with which the last thirty seconds had just passed, thirty seconds between the last of the screams and the arrival of the others to stare down in fear and revulsion at the soaked and flattened corpses.

  Reid climbed clear of the fissure and stood beside him. “It had to be done,” he said simply.

  Fitzjames knew that the prompt action of the ice-master and marine sergeant had absolved him of his own responsibility in the matter. He nodded in acknowledgment, but could not bring himself to speak, his gaze still fixed on the bloody mess below.

  There was no possibility now of retrieving the bodies until the following day, and one by one the men moved away.

  Fitzjames returned to the Erebus, reporting the outcome to Crozier before making his way alone to his cabin. He was tired and dazed and sickened by what had happened, and also shamed by his own indecisive part in the tragedy. He wrote in his journal only that two men had been lost to the ice, that their names were George Cann and William Shanks, that both had been seamen on the Terror, more recently resident on the ice, and that their loss brought the number of deaths to date up to twelve. He drew two small crosses in the right-hand margin of the page.

  Christmas was a subdued and cheerless occasion that year, a celebration in name only, marked by storms, hymns and prayers. As life out on the ice became harder still, some left the camp and returned to the broken Terror to find shelter amid the abandoned cabins and quarters of her mangled innards. Some even tried to return to the relative comfort and safety of the Erebus, but Crozier continued to refuse them admission, and an untidy cluster of unauthorized shelters grew up on the ice all around her.

  Scurvy spread more rapidly, and by the end of the year its symptoms had appeared in all but a dozen of their number.

  There was talk of an expedition leaving the Erebus and striking out northeast across the frozen sea and the Boothia Peninsula in the hope of reaching Fury Beach, of rebuilding Ross’ shelter and surviving on the stores known to be still cached there.

  The idea came from Graham Gore, who was supported in his application by Fitzjames, Vesconte and Irving. Crozier refused them on the grounds that they were 250 miles from Fury Beach, but only half that distance north of Back’s River, via which, if all else failed, they were almost certain to find salvation. He also rejected it on the grounds that it represented retreat in the face of adversity. He conceded that continuing north from Fury Beach the following summer was likely to lead to rescue, but that this would come only to those who were strong enough to make the journey in the first place. Their main responsibility, he insisted, remained with the weak and the sick. This did not convince those who wanted to attempt the journey, but they backed down in the face of his angry rebuttals.

  The March South was by then firmly established in Crozier’s mind as the only feasible alternative to being freed by the ice and continuing to Bering under sail.

  Later, as the old year became the new year, prayers were held, and afterward, well protected against the cold, Graham Gore went out on the tented deck and played his flute. A small audience gathered to listen, and in the freezing air of the Arctic night the notes seemed to last forever. To some they sounded like distant birdsong, to others like the receding babble of voices. They reminded Fitzjames of the even more disturbing near-human cries of peacocks heard on a summer dawn. Other than the cries of badly wounded men, it was the most distressing sound he had ever heard, and after a few minutes he excused himself from the muted revels and returned below.

  TERRA DAMNATA

  January 1848—

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Fitzjames supervised one of the parties which crossed from the Erebus to the rapidly disintegrating Terror to collect firewood. As the men worked, they heard the shots and clattering ricochets of bolts and treenails snapping free, fingers of ice quickly poking through the evacuated holes, and they smelled too the distinctive aroma of turpentine as it was squeezed from the newer planking of the Terror’s refit.

&n
bsp; Fitzjames had been aboard two days earlier when the latest of her spars had been squeezed and then snapped by the ice, as though the yard-square sheathed and bolted timber had been nothing more than a doweling rod. The blossoming ice, almost as though it were spring-loaded, had immediately pushed in to take full advantage of its gain.

  The Terror’s bow was now completely severed from the rest of her hull. She was tilted forward, her stern raised, and her headboards frayed and lifted up into the air like the feathers of a lifeless wing.

  The ice which had once been mounded outside had collapsed under its own weight and spilled into the cleaved body. From a distance, and in the dim and shifting light of the men’s lanterns, it looked as though she had split under pressure from within, and as though a loose cargo of lime or saltpeter had suddenly spilled out, its spread quickly arrested on the freezing surface.

  As they left they were replaced by a party of men led by Tozer, come to salvage wood for their own fires.

  Following the incident with the men in the crevasse, and seeing how well Tozer had maintained order in the camp, Fitzjames’ earlier dislike of the man had turned to respect. He wished he were back aboard the Erebus to help strengthen the weakening chain of command there, but knew that neither Crozier nor Tozer himself would countenance this while the other remained aboard. He asked him how they were faring in the camp.

  Four men there were already ill, two of them, in Tozer’s opinion, close to death. Stanley and Goodsir visited all those living out on the ice as frequently as the weather permitted, but with their medicines now greatly reduced, they could do no more than they were already doing for the sick on board the Erebus, where at least six others were not expected to survive long beyond the end of the month.