Voyage of the Narwhal

by Andrea Barrett

  He decorated that small stone house in his mind: the most comfortable armchairs, the neatest linen. Then suddenly there was wildlife around, and he dropped his daydreams and hunted with a passion and accuracy he’d never known before. He shot a burgomaster gull, three ptarmigan, and two caribou—the first since October. The men ate the venison gratefully and grew stronger. Ivan, the first to recover, helped Erasmus shoot a seal at a newly exposed breathing hole. One seal, then crowds of them climbing out to bask in the sun; Sean and Barton caught two more. Barton, who’d twice worked on a Newfoundland sealing ship, taught the others to eat the dark, oily flesh with slices of fresh blubber, disconcertingly sweet and delicious.

  The succulent beef of the first musk ox Erasmus shot roused the last of the men. They cleaned the winter’s accumulation of soot from the beams and walls, aired the squalid corners, laundered bedding and socks and shirts. Only Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau remained in their bunks. When exhausted by sickness, Erasmus remembered his father saying, elephants will lie on their backs and throw grass toward the sky, as though beseeching the earth to answer their prayers. The elephant is honest, sensible, just, and respectful of the stars, the sun, and the moon—qualities rarely apparent even in man. Just then Erasmus would have happily traded Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau for a pair of useful pachyderms. He tried alternately to bully and coddle them, but they would not be moved.

  Since Zeke’s departure they’d collapsed entirely, as if finally giving in to their grief over the loss of Mr. Francis. Or as if they no longer believed they wouldn’t share his fate, despite the vibrant signs of spring. In his bunk, above his pillow, Captain Tyler had pinned a small sheet of paper. On it he’d drawn the outline of a gravestone and written:

  He and Mr. Tagliabeau wouldn’t hunt, or work on repairing the brig, or pace the promenade. They lay in their bunks, openly drinking and reading as if this might somehow save them. Mr. Tagliabeau burrowed into a copy of Pendennis; Captain Tyler into Dr. Boerhaave’s David Copperfield, picking up where the doctor had left off reading aloud during the worst days of winter. When the men came by their bunks and said, “What should we do? What are your orders?” Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau shrugged and said, “Do what you want. What Mr. Wells says. It won’t make any difference.”

  MAY 5, 10, 15. Still the sledge party didn’t return. Erasmus worried about them—but only for their own sake; whatever meat they brought back from the Esquimaux would now be superfluous. The weather stopped chewing at them and twice the temperature rose above freezing. The light made it feel warmer; the light made up for everything. When Erasmus woke and first stepped outside, the dazzling whiteness pierced his eyes and made his head swim until he treasured the nights, when the sun sat lower in the sky and lent shades of red and yellow to the clouds. A soft mist hovered over the hills and the falling snow was heavy and wet, like spring snow back home. Home, where he might one day live in the company of his friend. What would it mean, he imagined asking Dr. Boerhaave, to grow up hearing stories in which truth and falsehood are mingled like the minerals in granite? To which Dr. Boerhaave might reply, It could mean you were being taught to understand that anything you can imagine is possible.

  The brig was still frozen in solidly, but trickles of water seeped down the sides of the icebergs and the floes were bare of snow, sometimes wet on the surface. The broad strip of land-fast ice began to crack as the tides nibbled away at the base, and rocks tumbled down upon it from the cliffs above. Nothing like a lead opened in the solid sea ice of their cove, not even a crack appeared, but the signs of breaking up were everywhere.

  Erasmus gathered the men on May 17. He was in charge now; he accepted it. Dismissing entirely Zeke’s dreams of heading north, giddy with sun and the birds in the sky, he said, “I propose we break up the storehouse. The ice might begin to open any day now, and we should be prepared to stow the brig swiftly.”

  “Then we can go the minute a lead opens up,” Isaac agreed.

  They made heaps and towers on the ice and then slowly began moving the things they were least likely to need back into the hold. Erasmus, Sean, and Barton, with the guidance of Thomas, tore down half the deckhouse and closed off the remainder roughly. Erasmus began sleeping in that breezy shanty, and soon the men abandoned their stuffy quarters and joined him, leaving only Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau below.

  Thomas said, “Should we rebuild the bulkhead? We’re not so dependent on the stoves anymore, and Commander Voorhees will surely want the regular arrangements restored for our voyage back.”

  “Leave it for now,” Erasmus said. “It’s a day’s work; we can wait and see what he wants to do when he returns.”

  As their spirits rose they knocked down the remains of their autumn ice village and rebuilt it more elaborately. A Greek temple rose white and elegant, next to a model of the Boston library and diagonally across from a miniature tavern which, Thomas swore, was just like the one nearest the wharf from which the Narwhal had sailed. Sean built a railway station and Barton, not to be outdone, built an imitation Japanese garden. Erasmus thought the men built even more gleefully and skillfully than they had in the presence of Zeke, perhaps because they knew each building raised was temporary. Not something they’d have to regard all winter, soiled and slumped and covered with snow, but a living, glistening thing that might dissolve in a few weeks. To their efforts he added a boathouse, with a little river carved before it and curving toward home.

  A DISTANT SOUND woke Erasmus during the night of May 21. He threw on his clothes and ran outside, into the pearly, improbable midnight light: two figures, dark against the ice, were creeping toward him. No matter how quickly he moved, how he halved the distance between himself and the figures and halved it again, still there were only two. Two. Ned, bent forward but still upright, resting a long moment before each step; and leaning against him, almost being carried by him, Zeke.

  “Wait,” Erasmus said to the blackened, bloody faces. “Only a minute more.” Before he touched them, before even determining how far behind them Joe and Dr. Boerhaave might be, he flew back to the brig, rounded up Barton and Sean and Isaac, and tossed down the smallest sledge. Ned and Zeke, weighed down by the lumpy packages tied to their backs, had crumpled to the ice by the time the crew reached them. Zeke was unconscious and Ned hardly better, but Erasmus bent close to Ned’s ear.

  “How far back are they?” he asked urgently. “Can you tell us where to start looking? Are they with the sledge?”

  Ned twisted his head into Erasmus’s face.

  “Can you talk?” Erasmus asked, pulling back. “You’re almost home, we’ll have you inside in five minutes—are they far?”

  “Joe left us,” Ned groaned. “He stayed in Greenland. Dr. Boerhaave . . .” He banged his cheekbone into Erasmus’s mouth, hard enough to split Erasmus’s lower lip. Joe in Greenland? How could that be? Once more Erasmus pulled his head away.

  “Under,” Ned whispered. “Under. We were, he was blind from the snow, we stopped. Zeke and I, we unharnessed ourselves, we left him in the traces while we were unloading the sledge to camp, we were, we were—it was safer to leave him tied in for a minute we thought, so he wouldn’t wander, he couldn’t see—we were unloading.”

  “Unloading,” Erasmus repeated. He put a hand to his streaming lip. How could he be bleeding when time had stopped?

  “It cracked,” Ned whispered. “The floe, right under the sledge. There was ice and then there wasn’t. The sledge went in and it pulled him. So fast. I couldn’t even touch his hand before he was gone.”

  ZEKE REMAINED UNCONSCIOUS for eleven days and was weak for a fortnight after that; brain fever, Erasmus thought. Ned was in better shape physically, but too exhausted and brokenhearted to talk. In their sleeping sacks Erasmus found some clues from which he tried to piece together the story.

  Before the sledge had vanished, Ned had unloaded those sacks, most of their supplies, and Dr. Boerhaave’s small medicine chest and oilskin-wrapped journal; he’d car
ried home both despite his weakness. Erasmus went through the chest’s contents, not mourning his dead friend—not yet, he couldn’t admit that Dr. Boerhaave was truly gone—but searching for remedies for the survivors. Ointments, plasters, a few canisters of pills, oiled silk, lint, bandages, scalpels. Many small bottles and vials: tartar emetic, mercurous chloride, syrup of squill, tincture of opium. Not much use to Erasmus, but he heard Dr. Boerhaave’s voice as he read those names aloud. When he retreated to his bunk after tending to the invalids, he browsed through Dr. Boerhaave’s journal. Before leaving the Narwhal Dr. Boerhaave had written:

  The last pages of my acquaintance’s Walden continue to comfort me. “Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would find?” Thoreau writes. “Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes—with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary, and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. . . . What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.”

  Those words made Erasmus weep. A message for him, he thought: that Exploring Expedition was the one he’d been on as a youth, that search for Franklin had sent him here. If he and Dr. Boerhaave had truly heeded those words they might be safe in Philadelphia, comparing notes on crustaceans. Instead Dr. Boerhaave had crossed the Sound.

  He’d written nothing during the crossing itself. His next entry read:

  How difficult that was! Ridges of hummocks, barricades blocking our way again and again; I’ve never suffered such bodily pains. Yet we’re safe, finally. Ned’s snow blindness seems to have responded to treatment. For the last two days of our crossing I washed out his eyes with solution of boric acid, then put in morphine drops and bandaged his eyes shut; we pulled him on the sledge. A terrible trip.

  The birds have been remarkable: snow buntings, a passerine that is probably the Lappland longspur, hoary redpolls, the American pipit (surely this is the extreme north of its range?), wheatears. Red-throated loons, ivory gulls, a white gyrfalcon. The pipits fly high then flutter down, repeating their song faster and faster as they approach the ground. How these songbirds change the barren landscape! Suddenly everything seems alive. The dovekies are the most numerous; our hosts slaughter great flocks of them. We join their feasts gratefully.

  Campions, cochlearia, and lichens are beginning their growth beneath the snow. In a sheltered pocket, where an ice crust had formed, a purple saxifrage was flowering and a cinquefoil was greening. On some dry stones, from which the snow had already melted, I found two spiders.

  And that was all. Not a word about the disappearance of Joe, the nature of the Greenland Esquimaux, the response to Zeke’s requests for dogs and help. Not a word, of course, about his own trials on the journey back.

  He was blind, Erasmus thought, staring out into the harsh morning light. Not just blind but in pain. On what day had that happened? And why had he been walking blind, harnessed like a dog to the sledge? Why wasn’t he being pulled on the sledge, as Ned had been pulled on the journey over?

  DURING THE MONTH that Zeke was laid up, Erasmus tried to prepare the brig for their departure. Ned still couldn’t or wouldn’t talk. To the men, who clamored for explanations about the disappearances of Joe and Dr. Boerhaave, Erasmus could say only what Ned had whispered before his collapse: that Joe had left them, and that Dr. Boerhaave had died in an accident on the ice. Erasmus grieved for Dr. Boerhaave constantly, and was consumed with questions about his end—but there was work to do, so much work to do, and Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau continued to shirk their duties. Leaning into Captain Tyler’s bunk and shouting at him that he must get up, they were so shorthanded, Erasmus saw that Dr. Boerhaave’s name had been added to the paper gravestone. After that he left the captain alone.

  He gave orders, made lists, split the duties of nursing the sick among the well, and assigned hunting teams. He waited impatiently for Zeke’s recovery, but it was Ned who recovered first and Ned, leaning on his arm while they paced the promenade, who first told Erasmus what had happened.

  The ice in Smith Sound had been murderous, Ned said, like nothing they’d ever seen before: great tumbled blocks, amid which the sledge crashed like a toy. Sleeping had been almost impossible and they’d walked for twenty hours some days, half-blinded by the glare. Ned’s eyes were the worst. For ten or eleven days they’d wandered, finally reaching the coast with still no idea of where they were. But Dr. Boerhaave found tracks, Ned said, the faint tracks of a sledge, and Joe steered by them to a small settlement.

  How lucky they’d felt then! For there were Ootuniah and Awahtok and the three other Esquimaux who’d visited the Narwhal; also a few other men, four women, and a handful of children. They were feasting on walrus, and although they seemed startled by the arrival of their guests they shared their food freely and took them into their hut—a large dormitory, built of stone and lined outside with sods, very different from the tents of the Netsilik. Around a blubber fire their wet furs steamed.

  For two weeks, these people had sheltered the four pale men. While Ned recovered his eyesight, Joe and Zeke and Dr. Boerhaave hunted with their hosts, capturing birds, seals, and two more walrus, which they afterward ate in the warm hut. Zeke had asked Ootuniah for dogs and men to help him journey north—he needed help, he said. And would pay for it generously. Or so Ned understood from what Joe told him.

  Much of what Ned knew he’d gathered only by asking Joe. On their arrival Joe had begun to interpret, as always, but Zeke had ordered him to stop. He didn’t need Joe’s interpreting skills after all, he said; he’d studied hard and now he could understand the Esquimaux language himself.

  “I’m not sure about this,” Ned told Erasmus. “How much he understood—but he seemed to be doing well enough, and he really didn’t want Joe to help him. He said he couldn’t establish true friendships with these people if Joe always interposed himself between them and him. You’re to be quiet, Zeke said. So Joe had time to interpret things for me. And time to talk with Ootuniah alone and listen to his stories. He told me some, they were like Esquimaux fairy tales.”

  The hunting trips, Ned thought, were where Joe and Ootuniah had grown friendly: he knew no more than that. On their last night in Anoatok, when Ootuniah finally, firmly, denied all Zeke’s requests and said that they could spare no dogs or men, and that Zeke shouldn’t travel north at this time of year, Joe slipped away. Ned and Zeke and Dr. Boerhaave woke the next morning to find that Ootuniah and his companions had loaded Zeke’s sledge with a huge heap of walrus meat, but that Joe was gone.

  Zeke had translated Ootuniah’s explanations for Ned and Dr. Boerhaave, his face stricken as he did so. “This land is your friend’s homeland,” Zeke repeated. His face twisted, as though the words were sour on his tongue. “Although his own people live far south of here. He has borrowed a sledge and dogs from us and headed there. We wish him well in his journey, as we wish you well in yours. All this meat, it is for you and your men. Your friend has gone home.”

  Ned and Dr. Boerhaave hadn’t been surprised; they’d both seen how tired Joe was of Zeke. Zeke’s demands and requests and posturings, Zeke’s plans and questions and maps; many times Ned had seen Joe and Ootuniah together, talking and laughing and sharing food. “It was Commander Voorhees’s moodiness that drove Joe away,” Ned said. “His carelessness—Joe was our most val
uable crew member, and now he’s gone. I could almost feel what Joe was feeling: he was in Greenland, even if so far north, and among Esquimaux, even if not a tribe he knew—and he had a chance to get away from us. Of course he took it. If I had a way to go home, I’d do the same.”

  Ned and Zeke and Dr. Boerhaave had been forced to travel back without Joe, loaded with precious walrus meat but with none of the things that Zeke had most desired. That trip was worse than the first, Ned said; the pack was shifting and the floes heaved beneath them. After a brief stretch of smooth, clear ice, they’d run into a maze of pressure ridges, ten-foot blocks heaped in snaking walls that forced them backward and then in circles. Zeke refused to lighten the sledge by discarding any of the meat. It was all they had to show for their trip, he said, and the Narwhal’s crew needed it.

  “Although you didn’t,” Ned said bitterly. “How could we not have understood that if the Esquimaux were finding food, you would be too?”

  On the fourth day, Dr. Boerhaave’s eyes had given out completely. A vast confusion of rain and snow and glaring sun, wild winds and sudden sharp cold; their furs were soaked through and they had to keep moving to stay warm. Were Dr. Boerhaave to ride on the sledge, Zeke said, he would surely freeze to death. He must keep walking. Perhaps that was true. But it was also true that the sledge was already almost too heavy to pull. Dr. Boerhaave couldn’t possibly lie atop that heap of meat and Zeke wouldn’t discard his sole prize.