Zeke took great pride in this, Erasmus saw, as he did in every aspect of their housekeeping arrangements. Otherwise Erasmus couldn’t guess what Zeke was thinking. The mistakes that had lodged them here, the families anxiously waiting for them back home, the true nature of the relics they’d brought from Boothia—if any of these worried Zeke, he gave no sign. Mostly he seemed pleased with himself: that he’d had the good sense to bring the planks and felted cloth that sheltered them, the furs that warmed them, the extra fish to supplement their diet. That he’d had the sense to find Joe, who was so much help. Perhaps he was also pleased that Captain Tyler and the mates had no real function, now that the Narwhal was a cramped but stable household, and not a sailing ship.
“What do they know?” Zeke asked Erasmus one afternoon, as they paced the walk along the shore. Well within sight of the ship, for safety’s sake, yet far enough away for privacy, Zeke had measured out a promenade and had the men mark it off with wooden wands. Another innovation he was pleased with.
“The whaler’s whole being is oriented toward fishing successfully and then getting home before winter sets in,” he said. “Captain Tyler did well enough transporting us where we needed to go, but he knows nothing about the physical and emotional demands of surviving an arctic winter and keeping a crew healthy and cheerful. Have you noticed how sullen he is after dinner? I’m beginning to wonder if he’s sick.”
“He’s foul-tempered enough,” Erasmus said. “Should we ask Dr. Boerhaave to examine him?”
“I’ll take care of it,” Zeke said.
But he was busy with other things—bubbling with ideas, always cheerful, endlessly energetic. By himself he built a latrine of ice; then, while the men watched curiously, a low wall around it to cut the wind. Ned and Barton joined him when he began a walled lane from the ship to the promenade; Robert Carey, with Zeke’s laughing encouragement, built a little watchtower overlooking the lane, which Zeke crowned with a roughly carved woman’s head. How clever he was, Erasmus thought. Zeke never asked for help, or explained what he was doing. He simply busied himself within sight of the crew and made what he was doing look like fun, until those who lagged behind felt left out. Erasmus was reminded of Zeke’s resourcefulness, one of the qualities Lavinia loved.
He was drawn in himself—the last two weeks of October, before the sun disappeared entirely, were filled with giddy play. Miniature ice cottages rose on the floes, and ice castles, palaces, gated walls. To the growing village Erasmus added a model of his father’s house, building another, larger and finer, when the ice shifted and crumbled the walls. Dr. Boerhaave built a version of the castle in Edinburgh, and Zeke one of Independence Hall. Mr. Francis and Mr. Tagliabeau jointly sculpted a whale, overwhelming Dr. Boerhaave’s moat. Foolish acts, grown men shaping ice like children raising sandcastles—yet the intent was far from casual. Erasmus noted the men’s lifted spirits, the renewed sense of camaraderie, and was filled with admiration for Zeke’s instincts. Perhaps, after all, Zeke knew what he was doing.
ALTHOUGH ERASMUS NO longer put anything in Lavinia’s green journal except for purely scientific observations, in his bulging letter to Copernicus he wrote:
Let me sketch one day for you, and let it stand for the whole of our autumn. Half past seven and we rise to the ship’s bell, tidying ourselves and our bunks. Some of us tend to the fires; Ned cooks and we breakfast at half past eight. Then the men turn to under the direction of the mates. Clearing the decks, filling and polishing the lamps, measuring out the day’s allowance of coal and fussing over our precious stoves, banking snow along the hull, chunking ice from the nearest berg for water, hanging wet clothes from the rigging on washdays—all these duties are finished by lunch. After lunch the men pace the promenade briskly, as ordered by Zeke for their health. Sometimes they play games on the ice. When there was still a bit of light, Zeke and I and Dr. Boerhaave and Joe often went out with our rifles, hoping to shoot a bear or a seal to supplement our diminishing supply of fresh meat. The light was so dim we were seldom successful, but the hunt gave us an excuse to be away from the others for a while. Sometimes we stumbled on Esquimaux artifacts; while we’ve as yet seen no Esquimaux, we’ve found remains of ancient encampments: ruins of stone huts, a part of an old sledge, pieces of a stone lamp, harpoon tips. Surrounding these, the bones of walrus and bear.
Later in the afternoon, while the men nap or whittle, play cards or repair their clothing, and while Zeke pores over his maps and books or tends to his instruments, Dr. Boerhaave and I catalog the specimens we collected earlier. We talk about what we’ve seen—how nature, in this place and season, is reduced to her bones. In the tropical places I visited with the Exploring Expedition all was lushness, and much obscured by overwhelming detail, but here each thing stands singly and strong. It is so, so beautiful here, despite the danger, despite the discomfort; I would never have chosen to winter here yet it’s as if I was waiting my whole life to see this. I stand on the ice, I watch and watch until the dinner bell rings at six. Afterward, in hours I’ve come to love, we have our school.
Close the hatches, open the hatches, dry the bedding, melt ice. Cook, sleep, hunt, study, sleep. This is how my days are shaped. Joe, Ned, and I killed a bear two days ago, huge and dirty and yellow-white. Before we killed it, it almost killed us. The sun disappeared for good yesterday, October 30, but this doesn’t mean, as I once imagined, that we’re in continuous night. Instead the nights are black, like our nights at home, but during the days we have twilight—a few minutes less each day but even when the solstice arrives we should still have that glow at noon. The sky is like no sky I’ve ever seen before. Our masts and shrouds, entirely coated with ice, glimmer against that blue-gray cloth.
Zeke said, “We should use our evenings profitably. Let each of us teach what he knows.”
Dr. Boerhaave began teaching the men who couldn’t read their letters; Ned assisted him, wonderfully patient because he’d learned to read so recently himself. When Zeke complimented him, he said, “May I teach one of the men to cook? So we might take turns, so I’d have more time to help Erasmus and Dr. Boerhaave with their work?”
When Zeke agreed, Ned chose Barton DeSouza. During Barton’s apprenticeship the crew swallowed beans as hard as pebbles, but Barton, whose beard was oddly chopped after part of it froze to his hood, took the jibes good-humoredly and soon grew competent.
Sean Hamilton gave a brief course in butchery; Dr. Boerhaave, using the same frozen carcasses, taught basic anatomy. Erasmus found it delightful to see Thomas Forbes, usually so quiet, arguing with Robert Carey over whether the bone on the table between them was a femur or a fibula. Twice a week Erasmus spread before the men samples of all he’d gathered.
“Fucus,” he said, showing them fronds from Godhavn. Isaac Bond was surprisingly interested in the different seaweeds and where they grew.
“Auk,” he said. “From Lancaster Sound.” Barton DeSouza was fascinated by the structure of the feathers and the quills.
As the men, in turn, taught Erasmus the whalers’ names for seals and salmon and cod, he understood that theirs was a different sort of knowledge, but no less valuable than his. He began to know them one by one, and not just as the group of men who did the unpleasant tasks. Sean Hamilton was very quick; Robert Carey was slower but persistent and steady. Ivan Hruska had a wonderful, cheering laugh; Barton DeSouza, who had trouble reading, drew quickly and accurately.
Joe told stories from the Bible, rendered simple and vivid by his long practice preaching to the Esquimaux; he mingled these with tales about the tribes among whom he’d worked. He also gave Zeke language lessons and helped him compile a simple dictionary. In his tattered black book—which still, Erasmus saw, housed the most remarkable hodgepodge of scribbles and extracts and sketches and plans—Zeke noted down words and their English equivalents: idgloo = a house; nanoq = a bear; bennesoak = a deer when it is without its antlers. Okipok = the season of fast ice.
Even Captain Tyler and the mates, who us
ually held themselves separate, were drawn into those pleasant evenings. Mr. Francis demonstrated a whole array of seamen’s knots, while Captain Tyler taught some basic navigation. In the darkness Mr. Tagliabeau, who had a wonderful eye for the stars, led groups to the tops of the icebergs. In air so cold their breath formed clouds of snow crystals, he pointed out the whirling constellations.
The second time he did this Erasmus left his outer mitts off for too long while he sketched: November 29, at eight P.M. He froze all but the little finger on his left hand, and the next day woke to find giant blood blisters extending from the tips past the second joints. The blisters ruptured a few days later, rendering his cracked and bloody hands useless for more than a week. But he was lucky, Dr. Boerhaave said; the flesh never blackened or died. Zeke held Erasmus’s hands up before the men, pointing out the oozing blood and enormous swelling.
“This is what you must guard against,” Zeke said. “This is what happens when you’re careless.”
Zeke lectured on the open polar sea. Erasmus thought the men would resent this, since the search for it was what had trapped them here. Yet they seemed interested. During their whaling days they’d all seen the open patches of water persisting strangely amid the ice and swarming with fish and sea creatures. Both Ivan Hruska and Captain Tyler had, on earlier trips, seen narwhals crowded into a small polynya, with their horns pointed straight up in the air as their bodies were crammed together.
“The theory of an open polar sea stems from ancient times,” Zeke told them. In the lamplight, with his beard shining and his cheekbones flushed, he looked like a young soldier. He made his own heat, he was often sweating. In the cabin he opened his shirt to the waist while others huddled in their jackets.
He held up a diagram of ocean currents. “Parry and others have shown that there are two sites of maximum cold on the globe, one for each hemisphere, both situated near the eightieth parallel. The isothermals projected around these points make it seem likely that, within an encircling barrier of ice, the sea remains perpetually open around the region of the pole.” Sabine barked, a tiny exclamation point. By then Erasmus had grown so used to her presence that he hardly registered her bounding over the shelves while Zeke talked, or standing on the table and sniffing at the cracks around the bull’s-eye, or sitting, tiny and bright-eyed and white, on Zeke’s shoulders as he paced the room.
The men’s spirits were good, he thought. Their days and nights were full, and their imaginations were fed by their studies, so that they seldom felt bored. Dr. Boerhaave brought out Agassiz’s Poissons fossiles and toured the crew through the plates, translating key portions of the text for them as they gawked at the bony relics.
“Nature,” he said, “is not random but is the product of thought, planning, and intelligence. The entire history of creation has been wisely ordained.”
From extinct fishes he leapt to Thoreau; a great collector of turtles and trout, Dr. Boerhaave said. An avid reader of explorers’ accounts, and a good friend of Agassiz’s. Erasmus was the one who suggested he share with the men the contents of the books and essays he’d collected in Concord. On the night when Dr. Boerhaave lectured on Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience, Erasmus saw attention on every face.
“There is a higher law than civil law,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “The law of conscience. When these laws are in conflict, Thoreau argues that it is our duty to obey the voice of God within rather than that of external authority.” He held a tattered magazine in his hand: Aesthetic Papers. The first and only issue. Robert Carey raised his hand. “What is ‘aesthetic’?” he said.
LATER, ERASMUS WOULD look back on those calm months and wonder what had brought an end to them. Just hardship, he would think. Enough hardship to disrupt the balance of any small community. As the solstice approached the weather bit at them. Routinely it was twenty-five degrees below zero, then thirty below, then colder, with a wind that licked through clothes and walls.
Pacing with Dr. Boerhaave on Zeke’s promenade, Erasmus would watch his friend’s beard, eyebrows, and lashes grow a crisp white frost, while icicles hung from his moustache and lower lip. They talked to keep their minds off the cold. Not of home, nor their friends and families, nor women—what would have been the point? Better to avoid any topic that would have drowned them in homesickness. They explored each other’s minds. In the light of the stars and the moon, the landscape glimmered indistinctly and edges disappeared, until they could imagine themselves at the moment of Creation. Could it be, Dr. Boerhaave asked, that the earth and stars and the planets and their moons had all condensed from swirling clouds of gas? And that these condensations developed constantly toward man?
The intricate joints of the hand, Erasmus said. The amazing complexities of the eye. From such everyday miracles one might infer a Creator. The hand and eye are but manifestations, Dr. Boerhaave replied. The Creator and the great design are the ultimate reality.
Their old difference rose again. A species, Erasmus said, was the collection of all individuals resembling each other more than they resemble others, and producing fertile offspring; presumably all descending from a single individual. A species, said Dr. Boerhaave as he whirled his arms in circles, was a thought in the mind of God. Everything on earth was just as God had created it, during the biblical six days and again in subsequent, successive creations after catastrophes similar to the biblical flood. Each new set of living beings was progressively more complex.
“Look at Cuvier,” he said.
“Look at Lyell,” Erasmus retorted.
Talking grew difficult; their beards froze to their neckerchiefs and saliva sealed their lips. The wind tore tears from their eyes and froze their lids together.
On December 21, all they saw of the sun was a red glow at noon. The cabin walls began to drip moisture; the men’s furs, dusted with snow and ice, drooped damply when they came inside and stiffened when they went out again. The weakest of the men—Robert Carey, who’d never completely recovered from the dunking that had killed Nils Jensen; Ivan Hruska, who’d always had the stunted look of an undernourished boy—grew reluctant to leave their bunks in the morning and claimed an assortment of aches and congestions. The night school fell apart.
They were hungry, Erasmus thought. Or not so much hungry as filled with violent lusts for all they couldn’t have. The meat in the rigging was gone by then, and Joe could find nothing to shoot. Ned and Barton tried their hardest to make appetizing meals, but everything began to taste alike. Dr. Boerhaave took Erasmus aside and said, “You know, you’re remarkably pale. Are you feeling all right?”
Erasmus stared at his friend’s face, as white as a boiled potato, then looked around at the others. Each complexion was waxy and pale, except where the cold had bitten crusty sores. Four of the men complained of shortness of breath.
“With your permission,” Dr. Boerhaave said to Zeke, “I’d like to make a brief medical inspection of the crew each Sunday.”
“No one’s sick,” Zeke said, frowning. “We’re doing well.”
“No one’s sick,” Dr. Boerhaave agreed. “Yet. But as ship’s surgeon I’d like to take this extra precaution, so nothing gets hidden until it’s serious.”
“I don’t want to encourage malingering,” Zeke said. “We can’t coddle ourselves up here.”
Dr. Boerhaave pressed his lips together. “I simply think it’s wise to check them regularly.” Zeke shook his head.
Although Erasmus agreed with Dr. Boerhaave’s caution, he understood Zeke’s reluctance as well; any acknowledgment of sickness made the men nervous. So did the darkness, and the daily task of scraping from bunks and bulkheads the frost that formed from their breath while they slept. It was disturbing, Erasmus thought, to watch the air that had lived inside their lungs turn into buckets of dirty ice. Tossing the shavings over the side, he felt as if he were discarding parts of himself.
SABINE THE FOX was cleaning herself in the tub of snow Zeke kept on deck for her delight. Even those who disliked having
her in the cabin were charmed by her habit of burrowing her nose into the snow, tossing it over her back and hindquarters, and then rubbing herself with her paws. She was watching, unconcerned, as Sean and Ivan lugged a scuttle of ice to the melting funnel on the day before Christmas. Then Sean tripped, dropping his side of the scuttle, and Ivan slipped on the spilled ice and fell, thrashing his arms and his legs just as Barton emerged through the hatchway. Ivan’s arm knocked Sabine from her tub and hurled her through the air: and in an instant she’d bounced off Barton’s thighs and tumbled down the hatch.
She broke both hind legs. Zeke, who rushed from his bunk at the sound of her howls, was too busy comforting her to be of any practical help. Although Erasmus knew he should wring her neck right then, Zeke talked him and Dr. Boerhaave into splinting her bones and then dribbled water from a spoon down her mouth all day. Still he couldn’t save her. He wrapped her in a length of gray flannel and buried her under a pile of stones near the promenade. He squatted next to the stones; he wouldn’t come in. Erasmus had to go out after him.
“Zeke?” he said. “They’ve made dinner for us, Christmas Eve dinner. You can’t let them down . . .”
Voyage of the Narwhal Page 14