by Robert Edric
A month after the meeting with the first party, a second group of Eskimos arrived alongside the Erebus. There were thirty of them this time and they came directly to the ship. They called up to the men on deck, signaling that they wished to trade with them. Des Voeux saw them arrive and went immediately to tell Fitzjames. In his opinion, the Eskimos had not expected to find anyone aboard the ship.
“Or alive,” Fitzjames said without thinking. He also considered it unlikely that the natives had approached with the sole intention of trade when so many of their possessions already lay scattered all around them, and from which their earlier visitors had scavenged and stolen with obvious disregard for the men on the ship.
Philip Reddington and the two marines stood at the rail looking down at the men below, and both Bryant and Hopcraft held their rifles ready to fire, targeting individual figures as they moved amid the wreckage of the huts and bunkers and the discarded timber and rigging.
“I think they’ve come from the others, from Vesconte and Stanley,” Reddington told Fitzjames. “They keep pointing back in the direction of the land. And see—” He indicated the lengths of leather harness coiled around the shoulders of several of the men. Others held the small canvas satchels and pouches used to carry personal belongings ashore.
Reid volunteered to go down and communicate with them. He warned the marines not to fire while he was on the ice. Des Voeux and Reddington went with him.
At this approach, the Eskimos drew back, speaking among themselves and laying at their feet what they had already collected.
Fitzjames watched closely as Reid and Des Voeux approached them, and as they raised their arms in peaceful gestures, revealing that they were unarmed. Philip Reddington remained standing behind, his own hand raised as though he were about to signal to the marines. One of the Eskimos pulled back his hood, laid down the bundle of timber he was carrying and copied Reid’s gesture. He came forward, holding out the satchel he carried to Des Voeux, and having handed it over he turned and pointed to the east.
It suddenly occurred to Fitzjames, watching as Des Voeux fumbled with the buckles of the satchel, that the men might be acting as messengers, having come with papers from either Stanley or Vesconte, or perhaps even from Crozier himself, sent to inform them of their progress during the six weeks they had been separated. Realizing this, he made a rough calculation: even allowing for daily marches of only two or three miles hauling the boats, Crozier and his advance party might have easily covered the eighty or ninety miles south over King William Land to the mainland. And even Vesconte, allowing for a stay of two or three weeks on the shore where they had landed, might now be moving more rapidly south with his own less heavily burdened party and closing the distance between them.
So involved was he with all these silent calculations that he did not at first see Des Voeux crouch down and then tip the contents of the satchel onto the ice, and it was only when Reid called up to him, and as he too knelt and then quickly rose, that his attention was drawn back to the men below. He knew immediately from the silence, and from Reid’s bowed head as he came back to the ship, that he had been wrong to have allowed his hopes to rise so sharply at the encounter, and he waited in silence as Reid and then Reddington climbed back aboard.
From his jacket, Reid pulled out a handful of the contents of the satchel. Cutlery, buttons, watch cases and cap bands fell to the deck. He took out scissors and shaving gear, the firing mechanism of a broken pistol, a compass, a clothes brush, several horn combs and a letter nip. Fitzjames and the marines looked on in silent disbelief as he let all this booty fall to the deck and scatter at their feet.
Out on the ice other Eskimos approached Des Voeux and handed over to him their own collections. One had brought only empty bottles, another a collection of gaming boards and clay pipes. Others took out pieces of folded clothing with which they were reluctant to part, especially the brightly colored handkerchiefs and scarves and the pieces of starched, brilliantly white table linen.
Des Voeux looked down at all this piling up around his feet, and it was several minutes before he could bring himself to attempt to communicate with the Eskimos. He guessed from the confident, almost beseeching manner in which they displayed their booty that it had not been taken by force from the men on the land, and that if this was the case then it had either been discarded by those men to lighten their unbearable loads, or it had been taken from their bodies and their packs where they had finally fallen and died. Having guessed this much, he searched among the objects at his feet for some indication of their owners, hoping to determine whether they had come from Crozier’s party or the men on the shore. He found a backgammon board he knew to belong to George Hodgson, and a shaving kit, each piece of which was engraved with the initials of Alexander Macdonald, and looking beneath a mound of clothing, he came upon a copy of Moore’s Garden Almanac for 1845 inscribed with Thomas Blanky’s name, a gift from his wife given to him only days before their departure. All three men had set off with Crozier on his march to the south. Picking this up, Des Voeux indicated to the man who had brought it that he wished to keep it. He tried to ascertain if the man could remember where it had come from, if it had been found discarded or still in the possession of its owner, and whether that man had been dead or alive, but none of his questions brought forth an answer. He knew that Eskimos seldom spoke of the dead, especially those who had died in unnatural or painful circumstances, preferring instead either to pretend not to know the person in question or to point to the horizon and say that he had gone away on a long journey. He guessed too that they might be unwilling to admit to having plundered corpses, although this was hardly how they themselves would look upon their finds.
Indicating for them to wait where they stood, Des Voeux returned to the Erebus and told Fitzjames and Reid what he thought had happened, adding that he believed the Eskimos thought they had something to gain by returning all these objects to the ship. Fitzjames could not accept this, and in his anger he called down, cursing the men below. They did not understand him, and other than pause briefly as they gathered up their loot, they took little notice of him.
Des Voeux gave Reid Blanky’s Almanac, and seeing its inscription stung him to tears. Fitzjames fell silent. He apologized to Reid and Des Voeux for his outburst and then ordered the marines to put down their weapons.
“Do they intend to stay, do you think?” he asked Reid as the men below dispersed to search further among the spreading waste all around them.
“A short while perhaps. They’ll want whatever they can get while it’s still there for the taking.”
“Give it to them. Barter for whatever else they’ve brought. And make it clear that if they intend returning to the land I want a message taken for whoever they might come across.”
The hour upon the deck and the shock of the revelation had weakened Fitzjames considerably. He spotted several books amid the clothing below and asked Reddington to retrieve these for him, hoping there might be a journal or log among them. But in this too he was disappointed.
At first many could not bring themselves to believe what the encounter suggested, but others received the news philosophically, too weak to argue whether the men on the shore were dead or alive when the Eskimos had come across them and started picking through their loads.
“They only tell us what they think we want to hear,” Reid remarked later, sitting beside Fitzjames’ bed.
A wind had blown up and it was colder than usual. Out on the ice the Eskimos had erected their shelters amid the derelict dwellings.
Fitzjames had fallen on his way back to the cabin, unable to push himself up until Gore came to help him.
Later, Joseph Andrews arrived with the alarming news that the Eskimos had been heard in their abandoned forward hold and the adjacent quarters. An armed party was sent to evict them, but no one was found. Some said they had never been aboard at all, except as a figment of someone’s dream; others believed that the Eskimos had acquired their booty by at
tacking those on the land and that they were now preparing to do the same to them.
Goodsir arrived, having slept through the whole encounter, and listened without speaking to everything that had happened. He took Alexander Macdonald’s shaving kit and examined it for signs of recent use. Then he unbandaged Fitzjames’ foot and drained the liquid from his swollen ankle. Afterward, he gave Fitzjames a potion to help him sleep.
He had just come from visiting Thomas McConvey, who was now suffering from bouts of delirium in addition to his physical pains. He complained of being unable to see, and Goodsir had swabbed the dried blood from his eyelids, both of which were torn. To reassure him that he was not about to go permanently blind, Goodsir had doused these with a weak solution of spirit and then bound them. He was concerned that his increasing medication appeared to be having little effect on the seaman, and when Fitzjames asked him how long he expected McConvey to live, he thought for a moment and held up five fingers, then reduced these to four and then three, before finally abandoning his guessing entirely.
THIRTY-TWO
Thomas McConvey fell unconscious two days later, and the day after that he died.
Six days later a fissure appeared three hundred yards off their port bow, and the surface on either side of it rose and broke and crumbled. The last standing walls of the distant camp were shaken down, and the mound of timber under which the Terror lay buried slid from around her to reveal the unsettling skeletal remains beneath, the angle of her broken back and the collapsed hoops of her ribs.
Over the next few days there were further shocks and fractures in the ice. Some hopes were raised higher than others. Joseph Andrews, now bedridden, became convinced that they would soon be sailing in open water, surrounded by clean white bergs, negotiating the edge of the dispersing floe, and nosing into leads as these split and opened ahead of them. He began, like McConvey before him, to suffer from bouts of delirium, during which he called out orders as though they were already sailing in that open sea. He shouted in his drugged sleep, and then when he woke and his hysteria temporarily abated, he became confused about what was actually happening to them and what his feverish mind had so vividly and desperately imagined. Also like McConvey, he started to complain of periods of near-blindness, when he could make out men and objects in only the dimmest outline. Two days after his eyes were bound, he started to bleed from the bowels, and blood dribbled from his mouth each time he spoke.
So that they might not be taken entirely by surprise by any slackening in the grip of the ice, Reid and Couch, along with the few others who were still fit enough to work, set about trimming their rigging. Their mizzen had been rendered useless and Reid ordered this to be removed at the cross-jack, throwing everything above overboard. To compensate for this loss they removed the fore-mast above its top-yard, and the same with the main. The result of all this was to halve the area of their sail and to make the Erebus appear unwieldy, but Reid knew that if they could rig their main- and foresails then the few of them still capable of the work might later add to these if the need arose.
The work was hard and slow, and quickly exhausted everyone who participated in it. Everything which they neither needed nor were able to operate was chopped free and abandoned, and the remnants of the shelters below were finally flattened by the weight of timber and rope thrown down on them.
As he worked one morning trimming their main rigging, Reid was surprised to hear Joseph Andrews on the deck below, calling out orders as though to several dozen men working all around him. He stumbled from one side of the deck to the other, his loose bandages a dirty scarf around his neck, frequently falling over the heaps of tangled rope and blocks which had been cut free and fallen loose. Reid hurried down to him, held him by the shoulders and tried to reason with him. Andrews pulled free and saluted, addressing him as though he were Crozier and then commenting on the sight of their full sails and the open water ahead of them. Reid sent Des Voeux to fetch Goodsir, playing along with Andrews until the two men returned. Hearing them approach him from behind, Andrews became suddenly suspicious, pulled away from Reid and then ran for a few feet before becoming entangled in a mound of discarded cable. All three men ran to restrain him. They coiled a rope around his arms to prevent him from striking out and looped another around his ankles. Andrews cursed and struggled for a moment and then he fell silent and began to cry. His sightless eyes lay deep in their sockets, made even more prominent by the red mask where blood vessels had burst, causing him to weep thick bloody tears.
They helped him to his feet and led him, still weeping, back below, where they discovered the contents of his cabin smashed and scattered.
The following day, as work on the rigging neared its completion, the body of Edward Hoar was discovered on the ice. He had gone out with the two marines to check their traps, and had parted from them as they passed the Terror, saying that something had caught his eye and he wanted to investigate. Neither Bryant nor Hopcraft had been keen to accompany him into the ruin of the dead ship, and so he had gone alone, arranging to meet them on their return.
Later, there was no sign of Hoar and so they called for him, the only response to this being the appearance of several of the Eskimos close by the ruins of Tozer’s camp. The natives watched as the two men went closer to the Terror, calling into her open hull for Hoar to come out and join them. When he neither appeared nor answered, the marines assumed he had already left and returned to the Erebus ahead of them.
It was as they were picking their way back out through the debris that they saw his arm, the rest of him being hidden beneath a mound of clothing. A quick inspection told them he was dead and they searched his body for any indication of how he had died or been killed. They found nothing.
As they rose from their examination, Hopcraft pointed out the Eskimos, who were moving toward them, each man holding a spear or a club. Bryant told him to leave the body and to walk calmly back to the Erebus, but Hopcraft, upon seeing the natives quicken their pace, panicked and fired a shot high above them. This caused them to throw themselves to the ground, where they lay for several minutes as Bryant considered what to do next, and as Hopcraft reloaded and aimed his rifle. Bryant ordered him not to fire, but Hopcraft remained convinced that the Eskimos were about to attack, and that they had earlier killed Hoar, having come upon him picking through what they now considered to be their own. Bryant thought all this unlikely, and was relieved when the Eskimos finally rose and ran back to their shelters.
Reassuring Hopcraft that they were beyond the reach of anything that might be thrown at their backs, the two men returned to the Erebus.
Neither Fitzjames nor Goodsir accepted that the Eskimos had killed Edward Hoar, believing that his death had been accidental, that he had fallen, concussed himself and died as a result. They pointed to his physical debilitation and to the absence of any wounds or other marks on his body to support this view. Others were less certain, most notably Hopcraft, Weekes and Reddington, and to placate these, Fitzjames agreed to a daytime watch being kept aboard the Erebus to alert them all of any further approach by the Eskimos.
Reid confided his fears to Fitzjames that they were over-reacting to the presence of the natives, making them appear threatening when no threat existed, and depriving themselves of a possible source of assistance. Fitzjames agreed, but knew there was nothing they could do to convince the others of this.
Three days after the death of Hoar, the body of a freshly killed seal was found on the ice alongside the Erebus, a single bloodless spear wound in the back of its head. Goodsir responded enthusiastically to this gift and called for help to drag it aboard.
He butchered and cooked the carcass, slicing the greasy flesh into strips and boiling these on the galley stove. The others complained of the stink. Goodsir himself ate the meat raw, the amber oil running down his chin. He disguised his repugnance of the taste and forced himself to swallow each small piece. In an effort to help the others overcome their own distaste, he served it to them with f
reshly baked unleavened bread, into which much of the dissolving fat drained, and with honey, which he planed from a frozen cask, the shavings of which melted on the meat as the men attempted to swallow it without chewing. He then rendered as much oil as possible from the blubber and internal organs, taking over fourteen pints in all. Afterward he worked on ways of making this too more palatable, mixing small quantities with sugar, then adding nutmeg and ground cloves until the liquid formed into a paste which could be moulded into pastilles and swallowed whole.
Only Reddington and Hopcraft refused to accept any part of the seal, interpreting its appearance as an admission of guilt on the part of the Eskimos.
Regardless of their protests, Fitzjames asked Reid to arrange for a package of gifts to be placed at the spot where the seal had been found. He hoped to encourage the natives to bring more fresh food for them. In this he was thwarted by Hopcraft, who, waiting until a party of Eskimos approached the package, again fired over their heads. The men took fright and fled back across the ice to the safety of their shelters.
Upon hearing the shots, those below were at first alarmed, having lived with rumors of an attack ever since the death of Hoar. Others believed the shots to be a signal, and Reid went to investigate.
Confronting Hopcraft, he understood immediately what had happened, and looked down over the ice at the abandoned gifts and the distant figures. Resisting the urge to strike the marine for what he had done, for the fragile and vital link he had so ignorantly severed, he returned below to report to Fitzjames, advising him against any further reprimand while feelings concerning the Eskimos remained so mixed.
That night, and for several nights following, fires were visible amid the wreckage surrounding the Terror, and on at least one occasion figures were seen around a blaze which had been lit upon what little remained of her deck.