4
A LITTLE DETOUR
(AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 1855)
I have no fancies about equality on board ship. It is a thing out of the question, and certainly, in the present state of mankind, not to be desired. I never knew a sailor who found fault with the orders and ranks of the service; and if I expected to pass the rest of my life before the mast, I would not wish to have the power of the captain diminished an iota. It is absolutely necessary that there should be one head and one voice, to control everything, and be responsible for everything. There are emergencies which require the instant exercise of extreme power. These emergencies do not allow of consultation; and they who would be the captain’s constituted advisers might be the very men over whom he would be called upon to exert his authority. It has been found necessary to vest in every government, even the most democratic, some extraordinary and, at first sight, alarming powers; trusting in public opinion, and subsequent accountability to modify the exercise of them. These are provided to meet exigencies, which all hope may never occur, but which yet by possibility may occur, and if they should, and there were no power to meet them instantly, there would be an end put to the government at once. So it is with the authority of the shipmaster.
—RICHARD DANA, Two Years Before the Mast (1840)
At first the voyage home was much like the voyage out, except for the intensity of the deep, enveloping light. The light was like silver, like crystal, like oil—but not, really, like anything else; Erasmus could find no comparison, he gave up. The light was like itself. Under it, in Lancaster Sound, he could imagine the promise of Baffin’s Bay: ships and mail and company and, a few weeks beyond that, home. At first the weather was calm, and so were the men.
Erasmus’s only sleep came in little catnaps but he slept deeply during those stretches and woke refreshed. In between he spent hours with Dr. Boerhaave over their specimens. He made lists and schedules, crossing off each item accomplished: these bird skins dried and packed and labeled, these plants identified. All immensely satisfying. One day he woke in the grip of an unfamiliar feeling—a compound of anticipation and physical well-being, all he’d accomplished in the previous days balanced with all he was eager to do that day. This was happiness, he thought with surprise. The sky hung above him like a gigantic glowing bowl.
On sunlit nights, when sleep seemed such a waste of time, Erasmus thumbed through his battered copy of Hooker’s Botany of the Antarctic Voyage of the Erebus and the Terror in the Years 1839-1843, not only because those same ships had later carried Franklin, but also because it reminded him of what he might have done on his own first voyage, had Wilkes not blocked him. Now he believed he might put together an arctic volume that would stand as a companion to Hooker’s. Next to him Dr. Boerhaave re-read Parry’s journals, assessing the descriptions of the Esquimaux. Collating his own notes, he talked about writing an account of the Netsilik similar to Parry’s famed Appendix.
“All the arctic peoples build a culture around the available food sources,” he mused. “And those cultures may be very different. Yet the tribes share racial characteristics. Just as the plants and animals recur across the arctic zone so do the people, uniquely adapted to this environment. More and more it seems to me they must have been created here . . .”
“Why must they have been?” Erasmus said affectionately. He’d grown very fond of the way his friend talked: one cerebral, slightly stilted sentence linked to the next, whole paragraphs unfurling. He’d never asked, he realized, if Dr. Boerhaave still thought in Swedish, translating mentally before he talked; or if he now thought in English. And where did his French and German fit in, and when had he learned all those languages? His grandparents, he’d once mentioned, had been Dutch. “That doesn’t follow.”
“You’re so old-fashioned,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “All the leading naturalists, and all the most progressive philosophers, lean toward this idea of separate, successive creations—why do you resist it so? Why does it seem so improbable to you that man, like the other animals, might have been created multiply in separate zoological provinces?”
“I just don’t believe it,” Erasmus said. And held up his hands in surrender, and laughed. Whenever they discussed the geographical distribution of plants and animals, they always parted company at the final step of the hypothesis—that just as the arctic supported a white bear rather than black or grizzly bears, murres and dovekies rather than penguins, so too might the Esquimaux differ at a species level from the men in other places.
The idea seemed wrong to Erasmus—not just theologically unorthodox, but scientifically unsound. One practical definition of a species was the ability to interbreed; everyone knew matings of all the races of men produced fertile offspring. Canadian voyageurs and Coppermine Indians, Parry’s crews and Esquimaux, plantation owners and their slaves: that no one wanted to discuss these conjunctions didn’t make them less true. Erasmus thought of the botanist Asa Gray, whose work he admired. That idea of varieties moving toward species over time—if man was part of nature as a whole, subject to the same physical laws that governed other organisms . . .
“Separate,” Dr. Boerhaave said, “does not mean inferior.”
“Differentiation always implies ranking,” Erasmus said. They smiled and left the subject, returning to the books before them.
Ned listened in on these conversations, occasionally asking questions of his own and practicing what the two older men taught him about the preparation of specimens. At first he worked on birds. In his lined copybook he wrote:
Remember to measure everything before beginning to remove the skin; record color of eyes and other soft parts; if possible make an outline of the entire bird on a large sheet of paper before skinning, otherwise sketch overall shape and stance. Break the wings as close to the body as possible, then cut the skin down the center of the breast to the vent. For the head, stretch the skin gradually until the ears are reached; cut through the skin there close to the bone; then cut carefully around the eye, making sure not to cut the eyelids. Sever the head from the neck and pull out the brain with the hook; remove eyes from sockets, cut out the tongue, and remove all flesh from the skull. Poison the skin with powdered arsenic and alum or arsenical soap.
If prepared carefully, Mr. Wells says, the skins will stay in perfect shape until we return home and will be of much use to scientists. Or they may be softened and mounted in a lifelike shape, so others will have a chance to examine what we’ve seen. Ever since I pulled Mr. Wells from the water at the base of the cliff he has treated me very kindly; who could imagine I’d find another man willing to help me like this? I have a gift for this work, he says. I might make a living from it someday, if I wanted—in museums, he claims, are assistants with no more formal education than me, who do the initial work on all the specimens. My father would have laughed and thought this no better than undertaker’s work. But that was there, and this is another country.
PART OF ERASMUS’S well-being came from the sense that he was teaching Ned something useful. As Ned’s hands moved among skins and bones, Erasmus was reminded of his own boyish efforts—a squirrel, he thought, had been his first preparation—and he watched happily. On his other side Dr. Boerhaave, busy himself with an ivory gull, asked Ned, “How is it you read and write so well?”
“I was lucky,” Ned said, comparing the spinal column in his palm to the sketch before him. “A man who took me in one winter taught me.”
They were interrupted by the lookout calling, “Drift ice ahead!” As they leapt to their feet and stared, the ice turned into a herd of beluga whales, glimmering white in the water. After gaping at them, Ned told Erasmus and Dr. Boerhaave how he’d gotten his education.
He had left Ireland in ’47, he said, at the height of the potato famine. All his family had died but his brother Denis and his older sister, Nora; the three of them had taken passage on one of the overcrowded emigrant ships bound for Quebec. But Nora had sickened on the ship, and at the quarantine station of Grosse Isle
, downriver from Quebec city, Nora had been taken from them.
“We were starving,” Ned said, gazing out at the water. “And Denis and I were sick ourselves, though we didn’t know it yet. Nora was almost dead. These men carried her off the ship and said she had to go into the hospital on the island. Me and Denis were forced onto another, smaller ship, crammed full of Irish like us, and they sent us upriver to Montreal. We never saw Nora again.”
In Montreal, he said, there were already so many sick with the fever that the residents had forced them along to Kingston. In Kingston, Denis had died.
“How old were you then?” Dr. Boerhaave asked.
“Twelve,” Ned said. “I turned thirteen there.”
He touched only briefly on the terrible years when, after being left for dead in a pauper’s hospital, and then wandering the streets, homeless and thieving, he’d been taken in by some farmers who worked him hard. Soon after turning sixteen, he’d run away.
“All I wanted,” he said, “was to be out of that cruel country. I thought that if I could just get to America, my whole life would be different.”
He’d crossed the St. Lawrence into New York State and drifted from Cape Vincent to Chaumont to Watertown; then, hearing tales of logging work to be had in the Brown’s Tract wilderness, he’d made the hazardous journey through the north woods. Deep in the forests near Saranac Lake he’d found work in a logging camp, though not as a logger. The men, immigrants like himself, had laughed at his slight physique but had been willing to hire him as cook’s helper.
Midway through his second season, the cook had left and Ned had taken on the duties of feeding the entire camp. That year, while picking up groceries on Lower Saranac Lake, he’d met a pale Boston lawyer who planned to winter there in the hope of curing his consumption. The lawyer was building a cabin in the woods and hiring a staff. He’d engaged Ned as his cook.
All that winter, while the lawyer lay wrapped in blankets on a porch facing south, simultaneously basking in the sun and freezing in the subzero wind, he’d taught Ned his letters, so that Ned could read to him and eventually take dictation. During Ned’s second winter a new cook had been hired, so that Ned might spend all his time with the lawyer and his books.
“It was a great thing he did for me,” Ned said. “I’ll always be grateful to him.”
“Why did you leave?” Erasmus asked.
“He died,” Ned said.
He was twenty, and in an hour’s conversation he’d said, they died, she died, he died, he died. Rising to return to the galley, Ned explained in a few more sentences how he’d drifted south to Philadelphia, been unable to find any clerical work, and ended up cooking at the wharfside tavern where Mr. Tagliabeau had found him. He said nothing about the fight that had led to his dismissal.
“I couldn’t seem to settle down,” he said. “Everywhere I went, I missed my family.” He paused for a moment, not sure how to say what he meant. What could where he traveled matter, when he had no hope of ever seeing Nora or Denis again? In a way, wandering like this was what gave him hope; he’d seen Denis die with his own eyes but Nora had simply disappeared, and if he kept moving it somehow seemed possible that she wasn’t dead. That she might be wandering, like him.
“It’s a strange thing,” he said, “knowing you don’t have a single living relative in all the world—how can you pick a place to live, when you’re a stranger everywhere?”
Dr. Boerhaave smiled, as if he knew exactly what Ned meant. Both of them, Erasmus thought, had cut their ties to home in a way he still couldn’t imagine.
“One thing I liked about the wharves was that all the men who came in were strangers too,” Ned continued. “I was beginning to think about shipping out on a merchant ship and seeing the world, since I had no ties to anyplace. But then you all showed up, and look how well everything worked out. Commander Voorhees took me on, and here I am: in a place where hardly anyone has ever been. Where we’re all strangers, except to each other.”
THEY HAD BEEN strangers, Erasmus would think later. Even to each other. But he forgot that for a while in the blinding light. Outside the sun shone and shone, and inside the relics obtained from the Netsilik, neatly boxed and stowed in the hold, shed a quiet radiance. Filled with purpose and caught up in his work, Erasmus was slow to register the mood of the men around him. They were fifteen people, isolated except for their brief time among the Netsilik, and they’d begun to tire of each other. Small habits loomed large: the way, for instance, that Zeke fed Sabine from his fork at the dinner table. Or Zeke’s bored, superior gaze when Erasmus tried to tell him what he’d learned about Ned.
“Well, of course,” Zeke said. Sabine sat on the chair beside him, following his hand alertly as it hovered over the plate. “Ned told me all of this ages ago.” When had that happened? Erasmus wondered. When Zeke was brooding over Fletcher Lamb’s death? Lately Zeke had seemed even more secretive than usual.
Several of the crew who’d quarreled at Boothia over women nursed those rivalries into fire again. On the voyage out, it had often been Joe who was best able to cheer and calm the men, entertaining them with his zither and his stories. But Joe had been glum since their departure from Boothia: so glum that, when a fistfight broke out between Sean Hamilton and Ivan Hruska, Joe left them to Mr. Francis’s harsh discipline and came above, to hang listlessly over the rail where Erasmus was perched with his sketchpad.
“They’ll get over it,” Erasmus said. “They’re restless, they’re all thinking of home. Really we’ve been incredibly lucky so far. Everything we learned from those Esquimaux . . .”
The biscuit Joe tossed over the rail was caught in midair by a fulmar. “What makes you think those Esquimaux were telling us everything they knew?”
“Because—they didn’t tell us, at first,” Erasmus said, startled. The fulmar flapped away with its prize. “We had to dig out the truth for ourselves. We had to pry it out of them. If Ned hadn’t seen those cooking kettles . . .”
Joe made a disgusted sound. “They told that story for their own reasons,” he said. “To get the ship to go away, and the men to stop hunting their caribou and preying on their women. Couldn’t you see that? They told us what we wanted to hear. And if Commander Voorhees hadn’t been so blinded by his own anger and his desire to find something, he would have realized just how ambiguous the situation was.”
“You’re saying they lied?” Erasmus thought back to the look on Joe’s face when he’d translated Oonali’s revelations about the ship’s boat. He’d assumed, then, that Joe was simply mortified by the earlier deceptions.
“Not lied,” Joe said crossly. “There was surely truth in what they told us. But they knew what we were looking for, and what it would take to satisfy us, and so perhaps they bent the truth a little. Shaped the story to our desires.”
“But you’re the interpreter,” Erasmus said. “It was your job to figure that out, and convey to us what was accurate, and what misleading.”
“I shouldn’t have to interpret gestures,” Joe said. His hands, brown and broken-nailed, clamped on the rail. “If Commander Voorhees had looked more closely at Oonali, instead of at me—if he’d paid any attention to Oonali at all—he would have understood how to weigh the information.”
Oonali, Erasmus recalled, had pushed two girl children behind him as he spoke at the feast, and shooed others away from the gathering of the men. Uneasily he said, “What did Oonali say, that you didn’t tell us?”
“It’s not what he said—it’s the way he said it. It’s the context in which he said it. I translated every word as accurately as I could. But I was also paying attention to other things. And you were not. Commander Voorhees was not. If you were in a negotiation with your people back home, you’d notice other things besides the words.”
“Do you think there was no boat, then?” Erasmus asked. “But where did they get those kettles, the pieces of wood—everything?”
“Of course they found a boat. Dead sailors, too. What I’m not so
sure of is that all the traces of them are actually gone. But they had every reason to discourage us from overwintering there, and from searching the island in the spring. Who knows what we might have found, if we hadn’t been satisfied so easily with their tale?”
He paused and picked at the dry skin around his thumbnails. “Oonali’s wife told me something awful,” he admitted. “When we were standing apart from the others for a minute. She said at that boat, near the dead sailors—they found human parts that had been . . . interfered with. Bones with the marks of saws and knives. Skulls with holes smashed in them.”
“Dr. Rae’s report,” Erasmus murmured, remembering the story he’d told Ned at the start of their voyage. “That’s just what the Esquimaux he met told him.”
“These stories are worse,” Joe said. “Oonali’s wife told me she found a sailor’s boot, which someone had been using as a kind of bowl. There were pieces of boiled human flesh in it.”
In his bunk, beneath his bookshelf, Erasmus had driven a tack and then wedged his secret scrap of leather between it and the shelf’s lower side. The one thing he’d kept for himself; still no one knew he had it, not even Dr. Boerhaave. Later, perhaps when they were home, he might offer this as a last surprise to seal their friendship. Something separate from Zeke, and from the goals of the expedition, which only the two of them would share. Until now that scrap of leather had seemed like a symbol of courage, a weary foot moving across the ice no matter how tired. Yet perhaps Oonali’s wife had meant it to signal something quite different. Perhaps it was the sole of the same boot she’d told Joe about . . . or perhaps these tales were horrible lies, and all Joe’s worries unjustified.
“You should be telling Commander Voorhees this,” Erasmus said. He decided not to show his treasure to Joe; it would only make Joe feel worse about what the Esquimaux might not have admitted. “Not me.”
Voyage of the Narwhal Page 11