Wild Island

by Jennifer Livett

  Jane had thus determined to go to Aberdeen at once, where the little Prince Albert, ninety tons, was preparing to leave. She did go the following day (Sophy stayed in London). Captain Forsyth of the Prince Albert listened respectfully, but did not alter his course, and again, nothing was found.

  But I am leaping too far ahead; we knew this only later. As we left at the end of that London visit, Jane handed me a book.

  ‘Alfred’s poetry,’ she said smiling. ‘Remarkable, but more your taste than mine, Harriet.’

  She always preferred factual works: memoirs, travellers’ tales, books about natural sciences. Poetry she considered rather rich emotional fare, allowable in small helpings, like pudding, although some of it—Wordsworth, say—could pass as philosophy or religion at a pinch. Novels she thought mostly dramatic nonsense.

  When Gus and I looked at the book that night in our hotel room after Thea was in bed, we found it was Jane’s own copy of Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. Alfred was ‘Family’, of course, and now the Laureate. The long elegiac poem had been published the previous year, 1850, just about the time when Jane must have been facing the possibility that her husband might be dead, even if she would not admit it. A faint asterisk in pencil marked one of the verses:

  The Man we loved was there on deck,

  But thrice as large as man he bent

  To greet us. Up the side I went,

  And fell in silence on his neck.

  But in the poem this was a dream, and Jane had written beside it: So Alfred has them too, these dreams of the beloved dead.

  A week later, when we called on John Gould in Broad Street, he said, ‘Lady Franklin is still refusing to admit they are dead, I suppose? Of course they are dead. Franklin should never have been allowed to go on the expedition, let alone lead it! A man of nine-and-fifty, grossly overweight, with a perpetual cough? He was only given the place because people were sorry for him over that business with Montagu.’

  ‘The Arctic Circle is large,’ said Gus mildly. ‘There are many places where they might have taken refuge. It is only six years; they had enough provisions for that length of time.’

  Gould shrugged and said, ‘Well, I have given Jane Franklin ten pounds towards her search—though I judge it useless.’

  He added with candid pleasure that he was able to give such a large amount, in spite of having children to educate, because he found himself suddenly beginning to be wealthy—and curiously enough, this was all because he had not been invited to display his work at the Great Exhibition! He was Europe’s most famous bird collector—and yet the Committee had passed him over! So he had set up his own display in Regent’s Park: a Hummingbird House.

  ‘Have you seen it?’

  We had. Gould had displayed the exquisite little birds with all his skill, poised as though they were arrested in mid-flight, hovering among flowers in their iridescent colours, their tiny impossible perfection. London had become hummingbird mad, and thousands were being slaughtered in the wild to satisfy the craze. A consequence he had not intended.

  ‘But the real joke is that I am the only person made rich by the Exhibition,’ he chuckled.

  Those who had been invited to show in Prince Albert’s Exhibition were not paid, but the Hummingbird House was making him wealthy. He could have given Jane Franklin twenty pounds, but would not throw money away.

  We spent Christmas that year with Jane and Rochester at ‘Ferndean’. The house was beautiful and they were flourishing. Jane’s memoirs had been published by then, and in certain circles she was becoming celebrated, but she was more concerned with the dame schools she had set up in Hay and Milton. She and Adèle, who was now her secretary-companion, visited the classes. Thomas, the same age as Thea, was at Eton, but just then at home for the holiday. He was rather lordly with Thea until he discovered she could shoot an arrow at a target in the barn a little better than he. He softened further when she made much of his dog, Raffy, and his pony, Tarquin; and his rabbits, his pet sheep. Rochester was a magistrate now, and owner of a prize flock of Romney Marsh, a breed he could defend at length against their rival, the Dishley Leicester. We learned a great deal about sheep during that visit. We had told them in letters of Anna’s death, and Rowland’s, but the subject was not mentioned.

  It was the trains in England that most captivated Gus on that first visit. He never tired of train travel, nor of discovering the new surveying methods developed from cutting rail-lines across England.

  When we returned to Hobarton towards the end of ’52, we learned to our great sorrow that Booth had died while we were away; of heart disease, in his fifty-first year. His death was not entirely unexpected: his chest had been weak since he was lost. He knew his heart was precarious, but it never affected his cheerfulness; it only made him try desperately to economise so Lizzie would be well provided for after he was gone. But both he and Lizzie were sociable and liked to live in style, and Lizzie insisted they keep a carriage, in spite of Booth’s grumbles that it wasn’t necessary. Lizzie had a temper, though, and Booth hated quarrels. They were the first family in the colony to have a croquet lawn made, some years before it became madly fashionable, because Lizzie had played the game at a great house in Dublin when she was young. And although Booth again protested at the expense (they were still only renting the mansion from Spode, never managed to buy it), there were many joyful summer days when we all (the Boyses too) played there with the children. They were a great family for games and excursions. But the result was that when Booth died, Lizzie, after fifteen years as a much-indulged wife, was almost penniless at the age of thirty-two. Amy was a year younger than Thea, Charlotte was six. Gus helped Lizzie write to the Colonial Office to secure a small pension, and she and the girls returned to England. She never married again but became Matron at several schools in Berkshire, Bath, and then at Denbigh in Wales near Ruthin, where her mother was living, also widowed by then.

  John Price was one of those who showed a malevolent interest in the fate of the Erebus and Terror, but by the time we eventually heard more of the Expedition, he was dead, murdered by a group of convicts at Williamstown, near Melbourne. Seven men were hanged for it. Which, as Sophy later wrote, seemed a pity.

  It was not until 1859, two years after Price’s death, that we heard a cairn had been found with a message in it from the Expedition. Weasy’s cairn, Jane called it in her letter to me, because it was found exactly where Captain Coppin’s spirit-child had indicated—at Point Victory in Victoria Channel, Prince Regent’s Inlet. Even then, the two messages found in the cannister were short and unsatisfactory. Sir John had died two years into the voyage, in 1847, and after another winter beset in ice, Fitzjames wrote a brief addition: the survivors were abandoning the ships to walk to safety via the Great Fish River. This was not enough. The search must go on.

  In 1870 we went to London a second time. Thea had by then been married ten years to a young orchardist, Robert Kerr, a son of our neighbours at the Huon. They had three children: Alice, Louisa and William, to whom Thea was an admirable mother, loving but brisk, active and good-humoured. (And I found being a grandmother—which I had never expected to be—so much easier than being a mother. The same pleasures, so much less anxiety.) Robert now wanted to visit his cousins in Dundee. We would go with them as far as London to help with the children on the ship, after which Gus had arranged a two-month tour of railway workshops around England. He was charged with buying a railway engine for Tasmania’s first private passenger line. I would stay with Jane and Sophy in London for the summer.

  We arrived in London and waved Thea, Robert, and the children off to Scotland, only to discover Jane had changed her plans. She and Sophy must go to San Francisco and then Alaska. I must go with them.

  Gus groaned when I told him. ‘Jane! I’d forgotten how high-handed she . . . You don’t want to do that, Hattie? More travel . . . But you can’t stay alone in London all summer. I’ll have to give up the tour. If we go to Leeds I can try to . . .’

 
He had been planning this for two years and was desperate to do it. For a moment I considered going to Jane and Rochester, but as I said to Gus, Sitka had a certain curious appeal. I had never heard of it until Jane and Sophy described it, but then it sounded to me very like Hobart. Both towns are on islands, little more than large villages wedged between mountains and sea at opposite ends of the earth. Hobart turns its back on the great Transylvanian wilderness with an air of whistling in the dark, of defiant liveliness; Sitka has the great north behind it. Hobart huddles at the water’s edge gazing out towards the far distance where Europe lies, invisible but ever-present. Even at this date it still had a frontier rawness overlaid by a hopeful, sometimes desperate, gentility.

  But no, said Jane. She did not believe Sitka would be like Hobart. For thousands of years it had belonged to the Tlingit Indians, who were overrun in 1799 by the Russians. The Russians held on to it until 1867, when they sold it to the Americans—and for the last three years it had been an American Army base. Part Indian, part Russian, part American; an intriguing mixture.

  I will not dwell on the tedious journey, but by the fifteenth of May 1870 Jane, Sophy and I were in Sitka’s harbour waiting aboard the Newburn, the ship that had carried us up from San Francisco, until somewhere could be found for us to stay. Sitka being small and having few visitors, it had no hotel, we now discovered. Nowhere to lodge us, and Jane’s maid Marie, and a manservant, Lawrence.

  Sophy, who seemed to have grown more devout, spent the days of waiting reading her old Bible and book of sermons, both of which I remembered from Van Diemen’s Land: full of fraying silk page-markers, pieces of crumbling palm from long-ago Palm Sundays, and ancient brown pressed pansies. Jane’s reading matter came from ‘the Box’, a small metal trunk holding books, charts and letters connected with the many search parties she had urged out over the years. Her eyes were very poor now, she used a strong lens for short periods. Generally Sophy or I read aloud to her—but it was hardly necessary; the Arctic was written on her heart, she said.

  After three days a house was found, to rent furnished from a merchant going south for the summer. When we stepped ashore at last, it was cold in spite of the bright sun, a wind sharp as glass parting our furs and watering our eyes, whipping and rattling a flagpole nearby. We walked the few hundred yards up from the wharf to the two-storey log-house, which had a front door onto Sitka’s main street. This led into a short hall, where a staircase mounted to the living quarters: sitting-room and bedroom, kitchen and dining-room. Jane would sleep in the bedroom, Sophy in the dining room, and I in the kitchen, which would not be used for cooking. Our meals would be sent in from the bakery down the street. Marie the maid was allotted a kind of cupboard in the upstairs entry, Lawrence had a corner in the hall below.

  Sophy grimaced at the furnishings, neatly simple in the American style, none of the upholstered cosiness of London. Walls and ceilings were lined with boards painted an ochre colour, and the heating came from a small black stove on four legs, like some agreeable domestic pet. Through one window you could see the water and two tiny islands, each with its neat family of pointed firs. The window on the other side showed a row of sharp little mountains behind the town.

  We had just finished luncheon on our third afternoon when Lawrence came in to say that General Davis, the Army Commander of Sitka, had come visiting. He proved to be a tall, spare, courteous man who deferred to Aunt with such grace he won Sophy over immediately.

  ‘The Better Sort of American,’ she said afterwards.

  The General apologised for not calling sooner. He had been away on his last inspection. Alaska was henceforth to be governed from the Territory of Oregon, and General Davis and his family had been transferred to Portland. His wife and household had gone ahead, and he was here for a final week with only his manservant, otherwise he would have had the pleasure of inviting us to be his guests during our stay. A shame, we agreed afterwards, we would have liked to stay in Baranof Castle, a huge ornate wooden house named after an early Russian governor, more recently used by the Army Commander here.

  ‘But if there is any other way in which I can assist, ma’am . . .’

  Jane asked him to lend his authority to the collection or report of anything that might be connected with the loss of the Erebus and Terror. Relics of any kind, however small; stories, however wild. She would offer a reward of two thousand pounds for ‘significant information’ and wanted it known she would purchase ‘suitable objects’.

  General Davis nodded, hesitated, and said gently, ‘I am ashamed to say I do not recall exactly how many years it has been now, my lady? Twenty-five?’

  ‘Twenty,’ said Jane and Sophy together. They knew their lines.

  ‘We count it twenty,’ Sophy explained, ‘because although the expedition left England in May of 1845, they carried enough provisions for five years—seven at a pinch—and therefore we did not begin to consider them truly lost until after 1850 . . .’

  ‘My husband hoped to make a speedy journey, of course,’ (Jane now) ‘to be home within two years. But he warned us a hard season might detain him far longer.’

  General Davis replied politely that he would do what he could; that the Arctic is vast, but Sitka is the old capital, called New Archangel by the Russians, and any news or trade-able object found by whalers or fur-trappers might eventually make its way here. The Inuit, or Esquimaux, or ‘Huskimay’ people, he said, do not set great store by paper and were unlikely to save anything of that kind, but they keep practical objects, knives and so on. The Indians, by contrast, take excellent care of paper or books, handing them down to their children.

  ‘Have there been other finds?’ he asked.

  ‘Many small ones over the years, but all of them more puzzling than explanatory,’ said Jane. A great quantity of monogrammed silverware belonging to the ships’ officers, for instance. Franklin’s men seem to have lugged all their spoons and forks into a whaleboat, which they intended to drag a thousand miles over the ice—and yet they’d left behind a large supply of chocolate, when provisions would be vital? Why was this?

  Sophy fetched a small package wrapped in linen and showed General Davis the spoons carrying Sir John’s crest. General Davis said quietly that it was an honour to have seen them. Sophy repeated several times later that he made ‘a most favourable impression’.

  I began a letter to Gus.

  Jane was right, dearest, Sitka is not like Hobart, but I believe you would love it, and find myself continually wishing you were here to see the skill of these buildings all made of logs or planks, even the huge ones like St Michael’s Church, also called the Russian Cathedral. It has an elegant onion dome of wooden shingles painted yellow, and sits almost in the centre of the town on a slight rise, with the Indian village on one side and the American Army compound on the other.

  Over the next two weeks I added to this letter: a visit from the Army wives, and one from an eccentric Army Captain calling himself ‘Prince Thoreau’; a visit to the Indian village. In the third week I tried to write but could not. As the sun moved towards the solstice, a strange malaise gripped all three of us. To my imagination it seemed to emanate from Jane, who was quiet and feverish with a burning desire to find some trace of the expedition. Nothing had come in. Marie and Lawrence ran away together the same week; perhaps they felt it too.

  We were scarcely sleeping; day and night seemed one. There is no midnight sun in Sitka, but in the middle of summer it is never entirely dark. About an hour before midnight the sun dips below the horizon for a short time, leaving the world lit with a golden crepuscular glow, an effulgent twilight which seems to make the mind at once languid and preternaturally active. We closed the curtains at first and tried to sleep, but restlessness often drove us outdoors, where the yellow sky seemed an extension of the earth, another path waiting to be taken.

  Sophy, after complaining for a week, took a heavy dose of chloral one night and fell deeply asleep. Jane and I shared a bottle of sweet yellow wine one of
the Army wives had brought us. Later I dozed and then woke, lay thinking about Gus and Thea, becoming gradually aware of shuffling noises in Jane’s room. It was not quite two in the morning. I heard the click of Jane’s door and soft footsteps. A creak of the stair as someone descended. Clicks of the downstairs lock, a thud as the front door closed. Silence. Jane never went out alone, would never do so at night.

  It took me two minutes to pull on slippers and a short jacket over my nightdress. When I emerged from the front door I could see Jane plainly, a lone figure in a white nightgown and shawl hobbling away along the empty road towards the Indian village, in the warm magical night. I ran to her, but when I came close I saw she was sleepwalking and hesitated to touch her. Her eyes were open, but glazed, fixed. I called softly, ‘Jane, Jane’, but she did not stop. We reached a little bridge crossing a stream where the water came rushing down from the mountains. Snow-melt, icy even now in summer. Then she wavered and veered off the road, and I thought she must stray into the water, and so caught hold of her arm. Nearby were some boulders with broad flat tops where we had rested when we walked to the Indian village, and I led her to these and sat her down, my arm through hers. She began to speak to me—in a delirium I thought at first.

  ‘Reports of a blue-eyed woman among the Apache—snatched from settlers when she was a child thirty years ago. And Mrs Eliza Fraser in Australia found with an aboriginal tribe three years after she was thought lost in a shipwreck. And the convict William Buckley!’ Jane laughed. ‘What a sight for the Port Phillip survey party! Six feet seven inches tall and clad only in skins—walking out of the bush when he had been believed dead for thirty-two years! And after all,’ her voice was firm, ‘there have been rumours over the years of a white man living among the Inuits.’

  Then I understood her forlorn hope. That somewhere out there in those thousands of miles of shimmering white there was a survivor from Franklin’s expedition, England still glimmering fitfully in the depths of his ice-altered mind. Jane gripped my arm as though she would make me see it, and I thought, Oh Lord, if only it were true!