The Broken Lands

by Robert Edric

  Vesconte had calculated that the sun would not rise high enough in the sky until the beginning of March for them to gain any benefit from its warming rays. On the 15th of January, minus 52 degrees was recorded, their lowest yet.

  The previous day Fitzjames had visited Goodsir, who had shown him a number of bottles of medicine, retrieved from the Terror and then inadvertently left beneath the canvas of the Erebus’ deck. The glass of these had shattered in the intense cold, but their frozen contents had retained their shape and stood uncontained where they had been left, some of them bearing their manufacturer’s imprint from the disintegrated glass.

  Their first death of the new year came on the 26th of January. His name was William Fowler, purser’s clerk to Charles Osmer. His emaciated body had been washed and then dressed in his best clothes. His mouth and eyes had been stitched shut, his feet bound together and his arms strapped to his side.

  “I traveled to London with him on the coach from Wiltshire,” Goodsir said unexpectedly as he and Fitzjames lowered the shrouded corpse to the ice and then released their hold on it.

  “Was he married? A family?”

  “I believe so. The names of his wife and children are embroidered on the collar of his shirt.”

  Fitzjames regretted that he had neither known nor noticed this. “When did he fall sick?” he asked, partly out of indifferent concern for the dead man, whom he had barely known, and to whom he had spoken only once or twice during the whole of the voyage, and partly because he knew that the death of William Fowler was likely to be the first of many in the coming year, and that as each one took place they might all soon become resigned and then indifferent to the losses.

  He climbed down and called for the men fastening the corpse on the sledge to wait a moment. Untying the drawstring at the neck of the canvas shroud, he pulled this back to reveal William Fowler’s contorted features, his dark, sunken eyes, his hollow cheeks, and the frayed and bloody mess of his mouth. He unfastened the top few buttons of his jacket. On one side of his collar was the single name “Mary,” and on the other “William” and “Mary.” He smiled at the coincidence and wondered if this royal echo had ever occurred to William Fowler, eventually deciding that he must have known, and that it was patronizing of him to think otherwise. To qualify as assistant purser to the expedition Fowler must have been accomplished at his work, trusted, and his capabilities respected by the Admiralty.

  Fitzjames had intended making a note of the names so that he might make his letter of condolence to the man’s widow more personal, but there was no need now that he had seen them and knew that he would never forget them. At first he thought that the simple repetition suggested a lack of imagination, but as he refastened the shroud he realized that he had confused repetition with continuity and its more admirable qualities founded in the strength of belief and, in this most obvious of ways, guidance by example. He covered the dead man’s face and then tugged on the coarse material so that nothing of its hidden contours, its protruding nose or jutting chin might show through.

  He returned to Goodsir, who had watched him throughout.

  “When did he fall ill?” he asked him.

  “William and Mary, am I right? Goodsir said. “I remembered from the coach. “Just now, as you were looking at him, I remembered. And the same for his children. We, you and I, thank God, do not have that unsupportable burden to bear.”

  Fitzjames avoided remarking on this. “How long was he ill?”

  “A month, no more. He began to ache, then he began to grow tired. And then he began to die. It really is that simple.” Goodsir controlled the anger in his voice. “Everything else, all these incidentals of suffering, are merely the awful surface dressing of that simple and straightforward progression. It takes root in our mind, and is then nurtured by what we see happening to others. You tell me—you were the one who went to look closely into his stitched-up eyes. How often do you study your own bruises or rub your own aching joints and limbs with more than the merest suspicion of dread?”

  They parted before Fitzjames could think of an answer to the unanswerable question, Goodsir back to the sick below, and Fitzjames to accompany the makeshift hearse.

  Midway to the Terror he climbed upon a mound of empty cans, frozen into a solid mass and resembling a fallen meteor, and looked back in the direction of the sun, its weak glimmer reddened and diminished during the half hour since it had appeared.

  It was four days since anyone had visited the Terror, and the usual means of entry to her was no longer available to them, having been blocked by a jag of risen ice. Others in the small group were concerned that the room which held their dead might itself have been penetrated, and Fitzjames climbed aboard to investigate.

  Inside he discovered that the corridor leading to the mortuary had been blocked by collapsing timbers, and that the room had indeed been lost to them. He saw too that the corpses already resting there were beyond retrieval, and that when the time came to collect them, either for burial or passage home, then a considerable amount of work would be needed to get them out.

  He returned to the men on the ice, informed them of all this, and then helped them to manhandle the body of William Fowler into another passageway, where it might be left until somewhere more suitable was found.

  The others were anxious to leave, but Fitzjames insisted on saying a final brief prayer over the body. They stood silently around him, and when he had finished they raced to get out of the faintly trembling hull.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Toward the end of February, Stanley noted in his register that he was treating two of their four boys for the first symptoms of scurvy, aggravated by nausea and stomach cramps, possibly brought about by eating spoiled food.

  George Chambers had attended to Franklin, and Robert Golding had signed on the Terror, where he had been instructed and watched over by George Hodgson, the two of them sharing the same home town of Chatham. Neither boy was yet fifteen, George Chambers having celebrated his fourteenth birthday only a week earlier.

  In the column alongside their names and the date at which they came to his attention, Stanley kept detailed notes of their deteriorating condition. In part he was concerned because he knew how well fed they had been prior to falling ill. Older men had befriended the apprentices, sharing their own dull meals whenever any of the boys complained of hunger.

  Examining George Chambers, Goodsir made light of his swollen joints and nausea. With Golding too he did his best to reassure him, and he put them both to bed in the same cabin, away from the other sick-bays, where the recently ill were now forced to lie alongside those approaching death.

  Robert Ferrier, seaman of the Erebus, died the day after the boys were admitted. He had been suffering since the late autumn and had eaten nothing for the past ten days, spending a good deal of that time dictating a letter to Fitzjames to be forwarded to his wife. In it he made light of his suffering, and whenever he could think of nothing to say he expressed his devotion to her. He frequently asked Fitzjames to translate his intentions into more precise and expressive language, and this Fitzjames did, reading it back to Ferrier for his approval.

  Ferrier died during a pause in his dictation, having exhausted himself by a sustained effort lasting an hour. Fitzjames had known by the way he had spoken that the dying man was aware of how close he had finally come to death, and he finished the letter with words which were entirely his own, but of which he felt certain Ferrier would have approved. He then sealed this in an envelope and put it in the sack of Ferrier’s belongings which he delivered to Crozier.

  Ferrier’s body was taken to the Terror the following day, making room for the three others waiting to take his place in the sick-bay.

  Stanley expressed his concern over the sick boys, and the apparent weakening of the two others to Fitzjames, convinced that some part of their dwindling supplies had again become tainted. He had recently inspected a barrel of pemmican, reserved in readiness for even darker days, and instead of the rump s
teak and suet specified in the chandler’s docket, he had found cheap meat, possibly horse, embedded in Russian tallow—equally sustaining he conceded, but considerably less appealing to men with no appetite who had difficulty keeping down what little they did eat. He had seen starving men eat candles before and knew how devastating this could prove to their already weakened digestive systems.

  Fitzjames shared his concern over the boys and visited them daily, taking with him small luxuries gathered by the other officers—a few glace cherries or roasted almonds, honey or pieces of sugar.

  Robert Golding remained the stronger of the two, and he accepted these gifts with delight, confessing conspiratorially to Fitzjames that Stanley would later confiscate them and then ration them out when they had eaten their less tempting meals. George Chambers, however, said very little. He was the smaller of the two boys physically, and a week of vomiting, bleeding and diarrhea had sapped his strength even further. His listlessness and the look of resignation in his eyes made Fitzjames fear the worst.

  “The miners have their canaries, we have our rats and our pampered boys,” Goodsir remarked when he and Fitzjames were alone in his cabin. “I sometimes wonder if that isn’t the real reason we include them in our crews. They act as a balance and regulator—our indifference and brutality against their innocence and blind desire to become a part of it all.”

  “Brutality? Surely not.”

  “I’m afraid so. We pin our hopes on brute strength and ingenuity, and whereas the latter might be the most admirable and readily acknowledged of our qualities, deep down we are convinced that without the former it is all to no avail.” He could see that Fitzjames was still not convinced. “Look around you. What have we done but pitted our strength against the ice, barging and blasting our way into this miserable dead-end? Where is the ingenuity in that?” This tirade was born of Goodsir’s own suffering and of his concern for the boys, especially Chambers, whom he estimated had only a fortnight or twenty days to live.

  “Surely we also benefit by their presence,” Fitzjames insisted.

  “Possibly,” Goodsir conceded. “Even if it is only to be constantly reminded of our own regrets, our own losses.” He gestured to suggest that his words should be ignored.

  Five days after the body of Robert Ferrier had been transferred to the Terror, both ships were struck by a series of shocks, resulting in a number of new and superficial fractures in the ice. Crozier called for Reid and Blanky to explain what was happening, but they were as mystified as he was as to the cause of this unexpected disturbance, neither man having anticipated any further movement for another three months.

  Later, the Erebus’ rudder mounts were found to be damaged, and a length of her hull beneath the ice had been fractured and shoved in. The vibrations also shook off the last of her gingerbread work, and jolted her mizzen mast sufficiently for both her cross-jack and topsail yards to come loose. All this was of little consequence to them; no one was injured by the damage, and for as long as they were held firm in their dock there was no danger of shipping any water before repairs could be carried out.

  Later, during an inspection of their lower quarters and ice-filled bilge, Graham Gore discovered damage to their spars that could only have been sustained the previous autumn when the basin of water in which the Erebus had briefly floated free had refrozen. Two of the timbers had come loose of their iron shoes, their cross-bolts having sheared completely, and the balks now held in place by the frozen bilge alone. Alerted by this, Gore made a more complete inspection, and although he found nothing else of such consequence, he calculated that in addition to the ice which pressed in on them from outside, they were now carrying at least eighty tons within their hull. This was not an unduly excessive weight measured against their ballast capacity, but it unsettled him to realize how completely and surreptitiously they had been breached and then undermined by the ice.

  Discussing what he had found with the others, he was reassured by Reid’s remark that it had at one time been common practice not to pump deep-hulled whalers clear of water if it became apparent that they were about to be trapped in winter ice. Flat-bottomed and shallow-keeled boats would dry out and rise up on the surface of the thickening pack, but deeper vessels were often secured by allowing themselves to be set into it, the only danger with this method coming during the days of release, when the ice inside needed to be thawed and pumped clear before the surrounding floe broke up and dispersed. Asked if they were capable of doing this themselves, Reid said that he thought they were, but omitted to mention his reservations concerning the repair of their spars when that time came.

  On the 1st of March, Thomas Tadman, the seaman who had accompanied Fitzjames on his journey to the west, and who had been the first to sight land after their crossing of the frozen strait, was found hanged from their taffrail, having gone on deck to exercise after being laid up for a week. David Bryant discovered him, and sent for Fitzjames to help cut him down. As they severed the rope and the body fell, Fitzjames remembered the promise he had made to the man to name the land he had discovered after him, but about which, overtaken by the events of the last nine months, he had done nothing. It was he who found the misspelt note of apology in Tadman’s mouth, and who sent for one of their smiths to cut the rings from his swollen fingers so he might return these to his mother.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Now without any of her masts, and with her low outline lost beneath the mounds of piled timber and drifts of snow and ice which coated her inside and out, the Terror was barely recognizable for what she had once been, resembling instead a small tumulus on a vast plain, weathered by the elements, exfoliated, gutted and crushed, and waiting only to disappear completely beneath the slopes of her own spreading debris. Her back had long since been broken, and it was now only a matter of time before some whim of the ice swallowed her and her cargo of corpses whole.

  The men from the camp, desperate for fuel, approached the ship with caution, as though, in addition to being their mortuary, she had become the lair of some hidden dormant beast they dare not arouse for fear of their lives.

  She was stripped of her chains and ropes. Doors were lifted from their hinges and carried out on the ice. As much of her glass as remained unbroken was retrieved and taken to the Erebus. A dozen sacks of potatoes were discovered, hard as stones but otherwise undamaged. Crockery and cutlery was taken out, and copper pans. Even the oven and the remaining stoves were dismantled and carried out in pieces on to the ice. Dozens of chairs, small tables, chests and cabinets were collected and arranged as though at a country auction. A mound of frozen bedding was removed, along with several dozen mattresses as stiff as boards.

  All this lasted four days, after which there was nothing left for them to take, and the Terror, apart from her useless detritus and corpses, lay eviscerated.

  The more valuable pieces of this bounty were taken directly aboard the Erebus, but by far the largest part of it was left out on the ice between the two ships where it had been carried and then discarded. Heavy chests and tables were dragged only yards before being abandoned, and once thawed, most of the bedding was found to be unusable, waterlogged and rotted. The crockery and cutlery, over three thousand pieces in all, was sorted into Navy issue and that which was privately owned, and only the latter was taken aboard the Erebus. Most of their silver plate had long since been retrieved, but the few items which had been overlooked were delivered to Crozier for safe-keeping. Some complained that valuable pieces had been stolen by men from Tozer’s camp, but Tozer denied this, and without any evidence Crozier was reluctant to pursue the matter.

  Later, Tozer and his marines foraged among the spreading circle of abandoned possessions, returning with their spoils only to discard them themselves later upon finding they took up too much valuable space in their overcrowded dwellings, several more of which had been rendered uninhabitable by the recent bad weather.

  Some of the shelters surrounding the Erebus had also been abandoned, and the more substantia
l of these empty structures now served as storerooms for the supplies which could no longer be accommodated aboard. Others, those less well constructed, had been flattened and their contents scattered by the wind.

  All around them their debris lay spread like that of an army in urgent, unexpected retreat, and it was impossible, thought Fitzjames as he looked out over the countless dark shapes on the ice—the hundreds of buried mounds and the strangely unsettling pieces of furniture, tables and chairs arranged as though men had just vacated them—impossible for anyone coming after them to look out on that same desolate scene and not to believe that the greatest disaster imaginable had already befallen the men who had once been there.

  Considering all this, he felt a sudden pain in one of his ungloved hands, and when he lifted it from the rail on which he had been resting, the skin of his palm tore where it had frozen to a bolt. He had been careless in not noticing this and avoiding it. The wound was a perfect circle, an inch in diameter, and he stood watching it for a moment, unable to take his eyes from the button of blood which rose slowly into the hollow. He wrapped a handkerchief round the wound and went in search of Goodsir for a proper dressing.

  March was a bad month too for their sick and their dying, and in the space of four days they lost six more of their number, including the boy George Chambers.

  For the first time, those physically incapacitated by either injury or scurvy outnumbered those who remained healthy and capable of reduced duties. Word from the camp and the surrounding shelters suggested that the situation there was even worse.

  Chambers’ death was followed by two more the next day, both long-term sufferers: James Rigden, the captain’s coxswain on the Erebus, and seaman John Handford of the Terror.

  The day after that another man died, but this time it was not one of the sick or injured who succumbed, but Henry Wilkes, one of Tozer’s marines. He and several others from the camp had been alerted to the presence of a fox amid the debris of the Terror, and they had gone to investigate, hoping to shoot the creature.