On the Proper Use of Stars

by Dominique Fortier

  1 June 1847

  THE MYSTERY OF THE magnetic readings is cleared up. The key is disarmingly simple. Adam rapped on the door of my cabin a few minutes ago, carrying in his arms an officer’s tunic that was slightly worn and faded, which he presented to me, announcing: “Here is the guilty party.”

  Immediately I recognized my tunic, which I had left for mending with Andrew, who is in charge of the laundering and upkeep of the officers’ clothing – which for several months has been limited to perfunctory repairs – and without letting anything show, I asked if he knew to whom the garment belonged and what reason he had to reproach him.

  He replied that Andrew had refused to identify the owner, but that all the same he had confirmed that it was someone who had participated in several expeditions to take magnetic readings. Then he begged me not to punish the guilty party, to which I had no trouble agreeing, especially because, though I did not yet understand how or why, I was beginning to suspect that the guilty party was none other than myself.

  “That is all very well,” I said. “Now, would you mind explaining why you are bringing this jacket to me?”

  “When you dismantled the instruments for taking measurements some days ago, sir, you noted that they were accurate. I thought to myself that there had to be something that was disturbing the instruments, something that was not part of their mechanism but was to be found nearby …”

  “And you found that piece of a uniform?”

  As I uttered those words I seized the garment and studied it more closely, overcome by incredulity. One of its buttons did not shine as brightly as the others; it was the thin iron button with which I had replaced the brass button that I’d thrown into the sea in the cylinder.

  I murmured, nearly without noticing: “The iron …”

  Adam, still standing in front of me, nodded silently. I placed my hand on his shoulder, gave him the jacket, and he went away, treading lightly. As for me, I am more convinced than ever that the slightest thing we do, even with the best intentions, is likely to end in a disaster. Our learned calculations, our meticulous measurements, our precise formulæ – invalidated, all of them, because of me, and a button …

  Now every time I go out I shall have to be certain that not one person carry on him the smallest bit of iron or the slightest trace of iron filings that could alter our precious instruments, which are renowned for their precision but are nonetheless absolutely easy to deceive.

  THEN THIS ASTONISHING thing happened: Franklin, Sir John Franklin, hero of the Arctic, the man who had eaten his boots, died. While more than once Crozier had imagined his own death, depicting it to himself as a gradual and altogether gentle process, warm water progressively covering his mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, until it swallowed him entirely and silenced the voices that were disturbing him, never had he imagined that Sir John might depart this life. Sir John, whose refusal to envisage the possibility that their undertaking would fail struck him on certain days as proceeding not so much from an invincible folly as from a kind of courage, as if the Captain had, unlike himself, who took pleasure in facile despair, consciously determined to go on, regardless. Perhaps he really was made of the stuff of heroes. Especially dead.

  Sir John’s remains were wrapped in the flag of England that he had kept, folded in eight, in his cabin, the very one that his wife had embroidered shortly before his departure. Then, at the height of summer, when the sun had started to melt the ice in spots, creating thin gurgling rivulets and pools of different depths covered treacherously with a soggy layer of snow in which a man, misstepping, could disappear completely, his body was entrusted to the sea. The pack ice did not disappear that summer and the ships remained imprisoned. The ice soon re-formed, crystalline, over Sir John’s remains. For months you could see, through a protective coating resembling the glass that isolates precious artifacts from viewers in museums, the colours of the flag that covered the Captain. Exhibited in that way, it seemed to signify unequivocally that it was the ice that had taken possession of Her Majesty’s expedition, and not the reverse.

  Lady Franklin’s Lament

  You seamen bold, that have long withstood

  Wild storms of Neptune’s briny flood.

  Attend to these few lines which I now will name,

  And put you in mind of a sailor’s dream.

  As homeward bound one night on the deep,

  Slung in my hammock I fell asleep,

  I dreamt a dream which I thought was true,

  Concerning Franklin and his brave crew.

  I thought as we neared to the Humber shore,

  I heard a female that did deplore,

  She wept aloud and seemed to say,

  Alas ! my Franklin is long away.

  Her mind it seemed in sad distress,

  She cried aloud I can take no rest,

  Ten thousand pounds I would freely give,

  To say on earth that my husband lives.

  Cathedra foraminata

  WHEN SHE WAS NOT BUSY PAINTING her maps that looked like numerous multicoloured labyrinths, Lady Jane plunged back into the journals of Scoresby, Ross, and Parry, all of whom had tried unsuccessfully to discover the passage that her husband had set out to conquer more than two years earlier.

  She annotated these narratives that she had consulted a hundred times, as if this time they would give up a secret she hadn’t seen before: sometimes she scrutinized them literally with a magnifying glass in the hope of discovering the blanks between the words, small black islands arranged evenly on a mute sea of white. As for what use it would be to her, seated at her desk in the small sitting room of her London house, should she discover the route that must have been taken by her husband, master and prisoner of his iced-in ship at the other end of the world, the problem, while difficult, did not seem insoluble. She had long since developed the habit of finding out by herself the solutions to complex questions and to passing them on without allowing it to show, by osmosis in a sense, to her particularly receptive husband. He would wake up in the morning, after having had the time to consider something that Lady Jane had almost imperceptibly suggested, and he would cry out, delighted, that he had found it. She did not see why a way of doing things that had long been an integral part of the behaviour of the couple would stop working simply because there was an ocean between them.

  She tirelessly reread the first volumes of Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, the great work of her dear von Humboldt, which had just appeared in English translation. Cosmos offered an admirable description of the physical world, whose universal laws it is possible to infer from its details, just as one can deduce from those same laws the singular manifestations of different observed phenomena. That wonderful symmetry which harmoniously united, in an unceasing exchange, the general and the specific seemed to Lady Jane the quintessence of Science. It proceeded at the same time and in equal measure from Knowledge and Philosophy, from Technology and Literature, and seemed to her moreover to mysteriously confirm her own instincts.

  With her practical, scientific mind, Lady Jane had never put much store in fortune tellers, hypnotists, or other charlatans who claimed they could read the future, but here it was a matter of reading the present. The one obstacle then was that of distance, of matter – a problem easily resolved, as witness the experiments of Dr. Mesmer and the more recent ones of Mr. Morse.

  Lady Jane wrote to Sir John almost every evening, long letters crammed with details, with shades of opinion, with observations and recommendations. He would not read these missives before he came home but she almost believed that she need only write the words on paper and they would find a way to reach her husband in one form or another – perhaps, who knows, in a dream? Surely such an exchange of distant thoughts would not be all that different from the wonders attributed to magnetism, and if one of the Earth’s poles could attract all those magnetized needles, why should her husband’s mind not attract the words sent to him by his wife from across the sea?


  25 June 1847

  SIR JOHN FRANKLING died two weeks ago and it is not until today that I dare to write those words that until now I have refused to write, as if one could suspend, erase the fact of his death. He was found lifeless on the morning of June 11, his face at peace, lying on his bunk, dressed in the uniform he had worn the night before. No one knows the cause, and I have forbidden Peddie, who wanted to perform an autopsy, to search through his entrails, which seemed to me an unnecessary insult. Although it would have done no harm to my vanity, while in England, to have been made commander of the expedition, still, it displeases me more than I can say to think that I now owe it to a man’s death.

  The day after Sir John died, DesVoeux asked me if I wished to move onto the Erebus, where apparently Sir John’s cabin is more spacious than mine. Naturally I refused, stipulating that nothing must be touched. Fitzjames, who for the most part was already seeing to it that everything on board was in good working order, is now Captain of the Erebus and my Second-in-Command. Surprising as it may seem, I discover that I am happy that I can count on him.

  I prayed only once on Sir John’s grave and could stay for just a few minutes before that odd display case formed by the ice covering the flag that wraps his body. I understand why we take care to bury the dead or to entrust their bodies to the depths of the sea: it is not natural to continue seeing them for so long after their demise, or to feel as if they can go on contemplating us after their eyes are closed forever.

  18 July 1847

  Had it not been so laughable, it would be something to cry over. I invented a rival from whole cloth. Who knows what other tricks my imagination may have played?

  Fitzjames, in spite of a genuine talent for drawing – witness the series of officers’ portraits executed freehand while the models were busy downing their port, which, when distributed to the men, gave them great pleasure – swears by the daguerreotype and insisted on supervising its loading, as well as that of the hundreds of copper plates carefully stacked in the hold of the Erebus.

  The device, somewhat cumbersome and inconvenient, requires patience and meticulousness equal to that needed for the declination compasses, but the process necessary to develop the image at the end of the exposure time is so complex and delicate that I sometimes find myself longing for the time when a pen and a scrap of paper were enough to portray any landscape – as they still are to draw any map.

  It goes without saying that scientific progress is a wonderful thing and that it allows us to spread further every day our dominion over the world around us, but the sight of Fitzjames with his eyes creased, bent over his basins steaming with mercury and sodium hyposulphite, makes me feel as if I have wandered by accident into the laboratory of some alchemist of bygone days, absorbed in executing his Great Work.

  The result of these operations, however, never ceases to amaze me and I cannot accustom myself to this marvel whereby we manage to set down on silver a genuine object, or, more precisely, its image. This is truly a marvel close to sorcery and I have sometimes wondered if a consequence of this process is to strip the depicted object of a fleeting but essential part of itself. When observing the image that is taking shape we feel we are witnessing the appearance of some ghostly form that has lost its substance and is now simply a blank surface. The collection of daguerreotypes produced since the beginning of our voyage seems to me to show something like the underside or the shadow of what we have truly observed.

  When I opened my heart to Fitzjames about these reflections just now, as he was busy dismantling the device in order to wipe off any trace of condensation, he laughed heartily.

  “Francis, do you think that by executing someone’s portrait in oil or charcoal we steal some fragment of his being?”

  “No, of course not …”

  “Basically, the daguerreotype does nothing different, except that for the uncertain hand and eye of the artist it substitutes the unerring accuracy of the mechanism.”

  I am well aware that he is right, but nonetheless, the notion of those images separated forever from their model, leading apart from him an independent life, bothers and displeases me.

  I asked him if he had executed portraits before he embarked on the Erebus.

  “Yes, a few, during the weeks before our departure, to become familiar with the device. Lady Jane, Sir John’s wife, who was curious to learn everything about the mechanism, and also her niece, a rather pretty young person whose name I do not recall.”

  “Sophia.”

  And so it is to him that I owe the only image I possess of the woman I think about day and night, he who cannot recall her name.

  “Yes, Sophia. I had to redo the plate several times if memory serves. She wouldn’t hold still.”

  I mumbled something or other and staggered out, like a man who is intoxicated, at the thought of Sophia wriggling with pleasure before the camera’s cold eye.

  – ADAM

  – Yes.

  – Are you asleep?

  – No.

  – I’m hungry.

  – I know. Go to sleep and you won’t feel the hunger.

  – What about you?

  – Yes.

  – Do you think it will go on much longer?

  – Longer?

  – Being iced in. Do you think the ice will give way soon so the ships can leave?

  – I don’t know.

  – Neither do I, no one knows. But what do you think?

  – The truth?

  – No.

  – I think it’s a matter of days. The sun is a little stronger every day. Soon they will start up the engines again and smash all this ice as easily as a person can shatter the ice that covers the ponds in the moors after the last freeze-up in spring. Today I saw cracks that weren’t there yesterday. And then the icefields will open by themselves and it will be summer.

  – Will there be birds?

  – Enough to fill the sky. Thousands. Gulls, terns, fine plump geese with lush red flesh. There will be foxes, too, and herds of reindeer that will come to graze nearby.

  – Adam?

  – Yes.

  – What do you miss most of all?

  – The horizon. Knowing where the earth stops and where the sky begins. Not having to picture an imaginary line between the white and the white …

  – I miss my wife, Adam. Every day I think about her all day long, and I see her in my dreams, but she runs away as soon as I try to come near her. I wish I were lying beside her in a real bed, with an eiderdown, and watching the sun rise through the window while I listen to her breathing at my side.

  – …

  – Adam?

  – Yes.

  – Now, the truth.

  – I don’t know.

  – The truth, I said.

  – We’re at the end of July. Since we arrived at more or less the same time last year, it means there was no ice then and there is now. The maps that we have cannot tell us whether this year is particularly cold or last year was particularly mild. In either case, it will soon be autumn and we shall have to wait for another spring before we can leave.

  – Adam?

  – Yes.

  – I’m hungry.

  – I know, go to sleep, then you won’t feel the hunger.

  – She runs away as soon as I try to come near her, Adam.

  – I know.

  FOR SOME WEEKS NOW Sophia has been unable either to sleep properly or to stay awake, and she spends most of her days slumped on a sofa, victim of a kind of drowsiness, unable to take an interest in anything, unable even to read more than a few pages at a time. At night she sleeps badly, gets up in the morning pale and drawn after struggling for hours in dreams, retaining of them only a vague sense of ill-being and some hazy images. A man introduces himself first as John Fitzjames and then, turning around, reveals behind his skull the face of Mathieu de Longchamp, who is then transformed into Francis Crozier. With a multitude of partners, she dances to a strident-sounding waltz in a ballroom where t
he crystal and gold give off a brilliance similar to what one sees in a kaleidoscope. The dancers and the flashes of light move to the rhythm of the racing violins, to explode in a highly charged sarabande from which Sophia is excluded. She wakes up in a cold sweat, the pallid light of dawn seeping in through the partly open shutters; not a sound can be heard from either the deserted street or inside the house, where everyone is still asleep. She is alone, trying to control the beating of her heart, which flutters in brief surges. She breathes deeply, picks up a book in which she makes out a few paragraphs in the half-light, rereads them twice, three times without remembering a word, then finally goes back to sleep when the first servants are getting up, to the sound of running water and muffled footsteps on the main floor. Certain images of the night pursue her for days at a time: Crozier’s face, oddly transplanted onto the body of another man; his eyes that express a never-ending reproach.

  2 September 1847

  FOR OVER TWO YEARS we have been in this land of snow and I have more and more trouble remembering my life before: County Down where I spent my childhood, my previous missions, the ships on which I served and the crews in whose company I lived, my last expedition to the Antarctic, the preparations for this voyage, even the few blessed weeks spent in Tasmania seem to me now part of a dream. I often recall snatches of it, generally without wanting to and sometimes at oddly ill-timed moments, but as soon as I try to hang on to them, to evoke images that I know could not have been erased from my memory, they fray and scatter as if I were trying to scoop up armfuls of spindrift. In the same way I am incapable of imagining an “after” to this icy stay that seems to me as bereft of an ending as it is devoid of a beginning. I know, of course, thanks to this journal, thanks to the instruments, that it has been exactly 723 days that we have been prisoners of whiteness, but they could just as well have been a few very long days, or decades. Time is no longer a familiar measure, regular as a metronome, an absolute and absolutely consistent benchmark. The skein of the hours and the days has been unwound, leaving me but one moment, everlasting and forever started afresh.