He was cut off, Erasmus thought. Cut off from home; or free from ties to home. What did that feel like? “And in Edinburgh,” he asked, “. . . does someone wait for you there? A woman friend?”
“Friends,” Dr. Boerhaave said. Not boastingly, or in any indelicate way; just a simple statement. “Now and then, between trips, I’ve grown close to someone, and I stay in touch with them all. But every few years I go off like this, and it never seemed fair to get too entangled with any one woman, and then ask her to wait. I’ve been alone for so long it’s come to seem normal.”
He turned his head to follow a string of murres spangling, black and white, across the bow. “I love those birds,” he said. “The sound their wings make. What about you? Are you . . . does someone wait for you at home?”
“No one but my family—not since my fiancée passed on.”
“Such a pair of bachelors!” Dr. Boerhaave said.
There was a moment, then, as the murres continued pouring past them, in which anything might have been asked and answered. Erasmus might have asked what Dr. Boerhaave really meant by “alone”—with whom he shared that aloneness, and on what terms. Dr. Boerhaave might have asked Erasmus what he’d done since Sarah Louise’s death for love and companionship: surely Erasmus hadn’t dried up completely? But the moment passed and the two shy men asked nothing further of each other. Erasmus didn’t have to say that he’d lived like a monk, except for brief entanglements that had left him feeling lonelier than before; that he’d not been able to move past the feeling that if he couldn’t have Sarah Louise, he wanted no one. Or that, despite his love for his family, he’d often felt trapped living at home but hadn’t been able to move. Where would he move to? Every place seemed equally possible, equally impossible. His father had tried to be patient with him but once, irritated by an attack of shingles, he’d spoken sharply. Erasmus, he’d said, was like a walking embodiment of Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Set moving, he moved until someone stopped him; stopped, he was stuck until pushed again. Just like you, Erasmus had wanted to say. But hadn’t.
THAT NIGHT HE lay in his bunk, mulling over what he’d revealed. Perhaps he shouldn’t have mentioned that voyage at all—yet how could Dr. Boerhaave know him if he didn’t share the biggest fact of his life? All those wasted days. While he’d been stalled a host of other, younger men had thrown themselves into the search for Franklin. Now that search was also his.
Back home he’d resisted the frenzy surrounding any mention of Franklin’s name. That men sold cheap engravings of Franklin’s portrait on the streets, or that because of Franklin he and Zeke had been interviewed in the newspapers and had gifts pressed in their hands, had nothing to do with him. The syrupy letters of a Mrs. Myers, saying she lived on a widow’s mite but wanted to donate three goose-down pillows to aid in their search; the way, when he ordered socks in a shop, clerks came out from behind their counters to ask questions in breathless voices, as if not only Franklin and his men were heroes but so were he and Zeke—that puffery had made him uneasy. He’d focused on the practical, the everyday. Still there might be men alive, living off the land or among the Esquimaux; he and Zeke searched for them, not just for Franklin.
As he’d told Dr. Boerhaave the story of his earlier voyage, he’d seen how different it was from his present journey. This one was worthwhile. This one meant something. And when he finally slept, he dreamed he saw a column of men walking away from a ship. The ship was sinking, slowly and silently; the men turned their backs to it. Erasmus could see faces. A blond man with a broken nose, a short man with dark eyes and a mole on his chin. But not Franklin, nor any of the officers; no one whose portrait had been reproduced in the newspapers. Simply a group of strangers, waiting for help.
The dream both embarrassed and delighted him. Since the days of his first expedition, he’d not let himself admire anyone, nor been willing to bend his life to follow something greater. But he woke rejuvenated, feeling as if a great hand had reached down and brushed him from an eddy back into the current.
AS THEY CONTINUED to struggle through Melville Bay, Zeke rolled off the names of the headlands they passed and said wistfully, “Wouldn’t you like to have your name on something here?” Around his berth he’d built a rodent’s nest of maps and papers. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to discover something altogether new?”
At night he pored over the accounts of Parry and Ross and Scoresby, sometimes reading passages aloud to the men while he paced the decks and they worked. He showed little interest in the amphipods Erasmus found clinging to the warping lines, or the snow geese and terns and ivory gulls that swooped and sailed above them. Nor was he interested in the miraculous refractions, which painted images in the sky near the sun. Sometimes whole bergs seemed to lift themselves above the horizon and float on nothingness, but Zeke no longer raptured over them. And Erasmus noticed that Zeke’s journal—a handsome volume, bound in green silk, which Lavinia had given him—showed only a few scrappy entries.
“You’ve had no time?” Erasmus asked.
Zeke shook his head. “I keep meaning to,” he said. “Lavinia made me promise I’d write in here, for her to read when we get back. But it’s so large, and water spots the cover—and anyway I have this.”
He showed Erasmus another notebook; he’d been keeping it for several years, he said, under his pillow at night and in his pocket during the day. Erasmus stared at the battered black volume, troubled that he hadn’t known about it before.
“I started it when I began wishing I could do something to find Franklin,” Zeke said. “It’s where I keep notes on things I’ve read, little reminders to myself, and so forth.”
He held it out and Erasmus read the pages where it fell open. The titles of four books Zeke meant to read and seven he’d recently read, a letter to the Philadelphia paper praising Jane Franklin’s continued quest for her husband, some thoughts about scurvy and its prevention (FRESH MEAT, underlined twice. In the men, watch for bleeding gums, spots and swollenness of lower limbs, opening of old sores and wounds), a recipe for pemmican, a drawing of a sledge runner, a Philadelphia merchant’s quoted price for enough tobacco to supply the crew for eighteen months.
“Interesting,” Erasmus said, although he was taken aback by this hodgepodge. Where was the urgency of their quest? “I can see this is where you kept track of what you learned while we were planning the trip. But what about now? Don’t you—describe things? Write about what you’ve seen each day, and the progress we’re making?”
“That’s not important,” Zeke said. On the cabin table a candle burned, casting improbable shadows. “Or not as important as planning ahead for what’s to come. I like to use this for thinking, writing down what’s really significant. Captain Tyler may run this brig on a daily basis. But I’m the one with the vision. I’m the one who has to keep us on track in the largest sense.”
“I could do the mundane part,” Erasmus offered. “Keep a record of our daily life, I mean. Then you’d be free to keep a more personal account.”
“Why don’t you take this?” Zeke said, indicating Lavinia’s gift. “It’s a good size, you’ll have plenty of room.” He lifted a stack of pages and let them slip along his thumb: a whirring noise, like wing beats. “When we get home, we can tell Lavinia we worked on it together.”
THE WIND GREW fierce again. Not far from Cape York, Zeke gave in to Captain Tyler’s wishes and ordered a dock cut in the land-fast ice, where they might shelter until the gale passed. Above them a glacier poured between two cliffs crowded with nesting murres: black rock streaked with streams of droppings, the clean white river of ice; more soiled rock secreting waves of ammonia and an astonishing squawking noise. As birds left their eggs to seek fish in the cracks between the floes, a hunting party fired at them. Dr. Boerhaave, perched on a boulder, stayed behind to examine the parasites in the slaughtered birds’ feathers. Zeke and Erasmus and Joe headed up the glacier’s tongue.
They climbed joined by a long rope, which Joe looped aro
und their waists as protection against the crevasses. Wissy, attached to Zeke by a separate rope, led; then Zeke and behind him Erasmus, who kept listing to the glacier’s edge where it met the cliff, and where plants grew in the rocky, sheltered hollows. Chickweeds and sorrel and saxifrages, willows hardly bigger than his hand—but Zeke pulled on him like a farmer tugging a reluctant cow. In the rear Joe called out instructions when he detected a weakness in the ice. The lichens alone, Erasmus thought, would have repaid a week’s visit; he didn’t have a minute with them. The heaps of envelopes he’d brought for seeds were useless. The white bells of arctic heather like dwarfed lilies of the valley, the inch-high tangle of rhizomes, everything spreading vegetatively in a season too short for most plants to set seeds—he should be taking notes, copious notes, but they were moving too fast.
What was Zeke pulling him toward? A rough, craggy object half-embedded in the ice; he was missing his chance with the cliffside plants for the sake of a rock. By the time he caught up to Zeke, about to complain, Zeke was digging out one side of the boulder, assisted by Wissy’s frantic paws. “What’s so interesting?” Erasmus asked.
“I don’t know,” Zeke said. “It caught my eye, it looked so out of place—what is this doing here?”
Erasmus bent and saw that the side of the boulder opposite his hands was chipped and fractured in a way that suggested human interference. Elsewhere was a crust he recognized. “It’s a meteorite,” he told Zeke, annoyed that he hadn’t discovered it himself.
Joe caught up to them, out of breath, and inspected the chipped side. “One of the iron stones!” he exclaimed.
“Why do you call it that?” Erasmus asked. He could feel where flakes the size of fingernails were missing.
“There are Esquimaux around here,” Joe said. “The ones Ross called Arctic Highlanders. Even as far south as Godhavn we’ve heard stories of how they use the odd rocks stuck in the glaciers. They chip harpoon heads from them.”
Erasmus inspected the rock more closely and probed it with his knife: a siderite, he decided, metallic iron alloyed with nickel. A similar specimen had fallen in Gloucestershire in 1835—but how remarkable to find one here! And for Joe to know the story that made sense of it. “Ever since Ross explored this area, people have been wondering about the source of the northern tribe’s iron,” he said to Zeke. “They must have been getting it from this stone, or from others like it.”
Joe nodded. “Somewhere near here are supposed to be three large ones, which the Esquimaux have named. And perhaps smaller ones like this as well.”
Zeke tapped the lumpy, dull-colored rock. “We can’t leave such an important discovery here.”
“You can’t take it,” Joe exclaimed. “The natives need these. They call them saviksue, they believe they have a soul.”
Erasmus looked at Joe, at Zeke, at the rock. He couldn’t help himself, he coveted it.
“Them,” Zeke said. “You acknowledge yourself that there are others. I’m only taking this small one.”
Over Joe’s protests Zeke and Erasmus chipped the ice away with their knives, until the rock was free. It was as heavy as a man. “Just help us roll it to the ship,” Zeke begged; and Joe finally agreed.
In the eerie pink light they sweated and struggled and pushed, all the time hearing the distant gunshots and the indignant roar of the birds. Erasmus, as the angle of the glacier grew steeper, slipped near a patch of meltwater and fell. Joe and Zeke, roped on either side of him, tumbled seconds later. The meteorite, free of their hands, rolled clumsily as they untied the knots that tangled them. It gathered speed and lurched down slantwise, leaping over a last ridge of ice to plunge into the gap where the glacier had pulled away from the side of the cliff.
Erasmus heard it shatter and leapt to his feet. Running after it, too late to save it, stumbling and slipping and hoping, still, that he might retrieve a piece, he stayed upright most of the way down the glacier but skidded off the last, lowest ledge. He was flying; his eyes were open. He was arcing over the stony shore, heading for the ice, praying that he’d die quickly. He saw a patch of darkness the size of a dining-room table, an open pool in the ice; then he was underwater. Then under ice.
The water burned him like fire and scoured his mouth and eyes, but even as he thrashed and struggled and felt his limbs numb he saw the fish schooling around his legs, and the murres serenely swimming like fish, and the cool, green, glowing underside of the ice. He had a few minutes, he thought, remembering Ivan’s near drowning. No more. Something shimmered white: belugas? He fainted, or froze, or drowned. When he came to himself again he was looking up at Dr. Boerhaave’s anxious face.
“Am I alive?” he asked.
“Just barely,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “Ned pulled you out.”
“Did you see the meteorite?”
Dr. Boerhaave shook his head.
THEY COULDN’T RECOVER even a single piece of the stone before Captain Tyler hurried the Narwhal into a suddenly open lead. In his berth, recovering from his chilly bath, Erasmus rested for a day. When he felt better he thanked Ned.
“It was nothing,” Ned said. “I was gutting a fish, looking right at the hole in the ice where you landed. All I did was run over with the boat hook.”
With Dr. Boerhaave’s help, Erasmus wrote up a description of the meteorite to send to Edinburgh. The weather grew fine—warm during the day; just below freezing during the gleaming north light that was as close as they came to night—and as Erasmus wrote to Dr. Boerhaave’s friend he noted the odd combination of summer and winter features: cool air, hot sun; black cliffs, white ice. On the cloudless day when they reached the North Water, he felt as though he were home during harvesttime.
The air was warm, the water gleaming like steel and the icebergs elevated against the horizon. The men had stripped off most of their clothes. Mr. Tagliabeau was urging them on at the capstan bars when the lookout shouted, “We’re here!” and the brig broke into open water. All hands stopped work and gave three cheers. Mr. Tagliabeau and Captain Tyler embraced one another and then, to Erasmus’s astonishment, shook Zeke’s hand. Joe broke out his zither and played several cheerful tunes; Captain Tyler ordered the sails set; and they were free of the pack.
3
A RIOT OF OBJECTS
(JULY–AUGUST 1855)
It was homeward bound one night on the deep
Swinging in my hammock I fell asleep.
I dreamed a dream and thought it true
Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew.
With a hundred seamen he sailed away
To the frozen ocean in the month of May
To seek that passage around the pole
Where we poor sailors do sometimes go.
In Baffin’s Bay where the whalefish blow
The fate of Franklin no man may know.
The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell
Franklin and his men do dwell.
Through cruel hardships they vainly strove.
Their ships on mountains of ice was drove
Where the eskimo in his skin canoe
Was the only man to ever come through.
And now my hardship it brings me pain.
For my long lost Franklin I’d plow the main.
Ten thousand pounds would I freely give
To know on earth if Franklin do live.
—“LADY FRANKLIN’S LAMENT”
(TRADITIONAL BALLAD)
In her diary, Alexandra wrote:
On the calendar Lavinia keeps by our desks, she not only crosses off each passing day but counts the days remaining until October. She’s embarrassed when I catch her doing this, embarrassed to catch herself doing it. When we visit Zeke’s family, she wraps her arms around Zeke’s black dogs and buries her nose in their fur; the smell reminds her of him, she claims, his clothes often carried a faint odor of dog. But otherwise she puts up a brave front and tries not to talk about her worries.
Still, I can see how distracted she is and how hard she finds
it to concentrate. Apart from her anxieties, she’s not used to sustained periods of work. I remind myself that at least I had my parents throughout my childhood, while she had no mother at all: of course this has shaped her, as has life with her brothers. On Tuesday, while we were trying to mix a difficult shade of greenish blue, she told me she was often invited to join in when their father read to them—if she wasn’t taking drawing lessons, or piano lessons, or being instructed in cookery or the management of the household—but she listened with only half an ear, sure she’d never use that knowledge. Erasmus and Copernicus would travel; Linnaeus and Humboldt would learn to engrave the plates and print the books that resulted from other men’s travels. But always, she said, always I knew I’d be left at home. So why bother to learn those lessons well?
Because, I wanted to say. Because there is something in the learning; and because we can never tell what we may someday need. Instead I pointed to our paints. When you were taking drawing lessons, I said, did you ever think we’d be doing this? It is my hope to distract her with the pleasures of our task.
We completed the plates of the annelids today and then Lavinia worked on her trousseau, arranging piles of embroidered white lawn and ribbon-threaded muslin. Waists and knickers, nightgowns and petticoats—most made by two young sisters, half-French, from Chester. Her own stitching is clumsy, but she’s good enough not to ask me for help even though she knows I’ve sometimes supported myself by sewing. I told her something she didn’t know about me—in her back issues of the Lady’s Book, which she saves religiously, I pointed out the plates I colored by hand for Mr. Godey. A gown in green and yellow, not so different from a beetle’s wing covers, made her smile. “You could do this,” I told her. “If you don’t like working with plants and animals, I could help you find work coloring fashion plates when we’re done with the book.” She told me her brothers would think that frivolous work, especially as she has no need to earn her living.
Voyage of the Narwhal Page 7