Voyage of the Narwhal

by Andrea Barrett

  But the Narwhal had lost half her crew, and he’d lost Dr. Boerhaave, the only true friend he’d ever had. He’d lost him, he’d lost Zeke, he’d lost his sister’s chance at happiness. Lavinia waiting so patiently at home—how could he face her? He thought of her life, stripped of Zeke. And of his own, stripped of everything he’d ever wanted. Next to his head was the skin of the ship, a wall of wood; and beyond that waves, water, wind, creatures flying and swimming and breathing, the world spinning and stars whirling around the fixed pole to the north. Years from now, so much later, he would remember wanting to punch through that wall and dive into the waiting water.

  PART III

  8

  TOODLAMIK, SKIN AND BONES

  (NOVEMBER 1856–MARCH 1857)

  ...There is a manifest progress in the succession of beings on the surface of the earth. This progress consists in an increasing similarity to the living fauna, and among the vertebrates, especially, in their increasing resemblance to Man. But this connection is not the consequence of a direct lineage between the fauna of different ages. There is nothing like parental descent connecting them. The fishes of the Palaeozoic age are in no respect the ancestors of the reptiles of the Secondary age, nor does Man descend from the mammals which preceded him in the Tertiary age. The link by which they are connected is of a higher and immaterial nature; and their connection is to be sought in the view of the Creator himself, whose aim, in forming the earth, in allowing it to undergo the successive changes which Geology has pointed out, and in creating successively all the different types of animals which have passed away, was to introduce Man upon the surface of our globe. Man is the end towards which all the animal creation has tended, from the first appearance of the first Palaeozoic fishes. In the beginning His plan was formed, and from it He has never swerved in any particular. . . . To study, in this view, the succession of animals in time, and their distribution in space, is, therefore, to become acquainted with the ideas of God himself. . . . It is only as it contemplates, at the same time, matter and mind, that Natural History rises to its true character and dignity, and leads to its worthiest end, by indicating to us, in Creation, the execution of a plan fully matured in the beginning, and undeviatingly pursued; the work of a God infinitely wise, regulating Nature according to immutable laws, which He has himself imposed on her.

  —LOUIS AGASSIZ AND A.A. GOULD, Principles of Zoology (1851)

  The engravings were beautiful, Alexandra thought: even those on which she’d worked. Again she pursed her lips and blew a gentle stream of air. Again the sheet of tissue folded back, revealing the image below. Dr. Kane’s Arctic Explorations, which Mr. Archibault had given to her; she could hardly believe she’d had a hand in its creation. Her gaze moved between the volumes and the advertisement Mr. Archibault had also brought:

  Caught up in the work itself, she hadn’t imagined the results. She hadn’t imagined everyone reading and discussing the book, leaving her to feel like such a liar. And she hadn’t imagined its effect on Erasmus, because she’d believed him dead.

  When the bulk of the whaling fleet returned in September, with no reports of the Narwhal, everything she’d learned about the arctic from her earlier reading had convinced her the expedition must be lost. Zeke’s father had begun organizing a rescue expedition for the following summer, but although she’d reassured Lavinia constantly that the men were alive, she’d lost hope herself. Then a whaling ship had hobbled into Marblehead, miraculously bearing Erasmus and a fraction of his crew.

  The newspapers had been writing about Dr. Kane’s voyage to England and his glorious book; perhaps weary of praising so much, they’d leaped to blame Erasmus for abandoning Zeke and the brig. They wrote as if a mutiny had taken place, or at least acts of fatal misjudgment; they hummed with indignation and questioned the fates of Captain Tyler and the others who’d splintered off from Erasmus’s command. For that boy with the ruined face, and Erasmus himself with his ruined feet, they seemed to have no pity. Erasmus had offered his journal and a piece of a boot he claimed had belonged to one of Franklin’s men; the reporters had scorned him and all but called him an outright liar. Linnaeus and Humboldt, who’d brought Erasmus home, had tried to keep the worst of the press from him. But they hadn’t been able to keep Lavinia from calling him a murderer. Nor could they keep him from learning that everyone, everywhere, compared him unfavorably to Dr. Kane.

  Even now, staying on at his house far beyond the time she’d planned, even with Erasmus recuperating in the Repository and Lavinia confined to her bed upstairs, Alexandra couldn’t make sense of this astonishing conflation of events. She tried to distract Erasmus with her copy of Arctic Explorations, but as he thumbed through the two blue volumes he groaned over the coincidences between his and Kane’s voyage. He looked up from the pages one afternoon, as if noticing her for the first time, and said, “What are you doing here?”

  She couldn’t say that this was her job now. Linnaeus and Humboldt had begged her to stay, at least until Lavinia was able to leave her bed. But she couldn’t repeat the way Humboldt had said, “There are things the servants can’t do,” or the way Linnaeus had added, “And you’ve been such a friend to the family. We’d be glad to pay you the wages of a housekeeper.” Closets and cupboards and linen presses had loomed in her mind, and the faces of the cook, the maids, the groom. She’d thought of herself as repaying a family’s kindness, not as a paid servant. “More than those wages,” Humboldt had added, seeing her face. “We wouldn’t want you to do any actual housework; if you need more help just let us know.”

  She couldn’t repeat this uneasy conversation to Erasmus. Instead she said, “Your brothers have been kind enough to allow me to stay here, and to continue my education while providing some companionship for your sister. And for you, if that’s agreeable.”

  The portrait of Franklin looked down from the wall; on a table lay a battered medicine chest; on the bed was a metal box. Erasmus hid the contents of the box from her, but she’d glimpsed a letter case, a handful of books, and the journal Lavinia had sent off with Zeke, now stained and worn. “I write a clear hand,” she said. “Perhaps I could help you with some of the papers you brought back?”

  IN A NEW book, plain black covers with a red leather spine, Erasmus wrote:

  I try to take comfort in what’s around me, I try to be grateful to be back home, to see what’s here to see. Outside my window the sky is a dark rich gray, shot through with occasional bolts of sun, the leaves alight then mysteriously dimmed, then alight again: golden leaves. Through them move a red cardinal, a black crow, a horde of crows swirling to roost in the big oak. As darkness falls they flock in from all over the city, birds crowding every branch and all of them speaking all at once, amazing noise: are you there? I am here. Are you there? I am here. Good night, good night, good night. Why can’t I simply enjoy them?

  After all the time I spent dreaming of home, now I dream nightly that I’m in my bunk on the Narwhal, with the crew intact around me. Lavinia blames me, everyone blames me, for returning without Zeke. I blame myself. I knew, as much as anyone could, what dangers we might face; those years on the Exploring Expedition let me imagine the arctic without the blur of romance. But why didn’t I see the great failure of Zeke’s imagination? None of his reading taught him the crucial thing. He could imagine the hardships faced by the explorers preceding us; but not that anything bad might happen to himself. Always he thought of himself as charmed. A boy’s belief.

  What I want is to talk with my companions, but they’ve scattered. Thomas, who dreamed we’d all be heroes, was so ashamed of what the newspapers wrote that he signed on with a merchant ship and has already left for California. Ivan and Isaac went home to their families. Barton found work on a farm. I’m all alone. Are you there? I am here; no one’s there.

  This week I finally started doing the things I should have done the minute I got back. I wrote to Lady Franklin, enclosing a list of the relics and a version of Oonali’s account of the sunken shi
p. I wrote to the families of Captain Tyler, Mr. Tagliabeau, Robert, and Sean, enclosing the letters they entrusted to me when we parted and promising to inquire into the status of the unpaid portions of their wages. I wrote to Ned Kynd, who sent a letter from the Adirondack Mountains; I paid him from my own pocket, and offered whatever help he needs. He says his nose is healed, but is permanently deformed. I told him my stumps are almost healed, and that I’d give anything for his wounds to be mine.

  The saddest task has been writing to Dr. Boerhaave’s friends. In his writing case were several thick letters to William Greenstone in Edinburgh, and one to a Thomas Cholmondelay in London. I made a packet for each, enclosing the letters and my own account of Dr. Boerhaave’s contributions to our expedition. How much he learned, how much he taught us all. How he died. Ned’s version, not Zeke’s; and even Ned’s I softened. He died, I said, on a trip to gather data about the Smith Sound Esquimaux and the flora and fauna supporting them. How bitter it is to refer them for further details to Dr. Kane’s book.

  Kane visited almost every place we went; almost all the coastline Zeke laid down Kane shows on his map, with his own names; the very sea to the north of us—the sea whose coastline Zeke left us to explore—shows up as “Kane Basin.” For descriptions of the Smith Sound Esquimaux I need only refer Dr. Boerhaave’s friends to the appropriate pages in Kane’s volumes; for illustrations of the people Dr. Boerhaave last saw I point to the engravings. And so forth and so on; unbearable. Even the Esquimaux names Ned muttered in his delirium are here. I wish I could compare experiences with Dr. Kane, but he’s gone to England: his health ruined by his arctic experience and the exertions of writing so much so fast. To William Greenstone I offered one personal note; that our lives were saved by the little white grubs in the caribou skins, which indirectly he taught us to eat. I didn’t tell him I have Dr. Boerhaave’s journal. I can’t stand to let it out of my hands.

  WHEN ZEKE’S SISTERS visited in December, Alexandra led them to the Repository. Both were taller than Alexandra, blond and impeccably groomed, and as she drew up chairs she couldn’t help comparing their rich, sleek, black dresses with her own tired poplin frock. Despite the money squirreled away in her sewing box she’d spent nothing on clothes and still had only this lilac, her brown silk, and the gray with a few fresh trimmings. Her clothes hadn’t mattered when she’d spent her days wrapped in a long tan painter’s smock. The chairs disappeared beneath the sisters’ swishing skirts as Erasmus propped himself up.

  “How is your health?” Violet asked. She gestured at the bed, where the box keeping the bedclothes off his feet made an awkward bulge.

  “Better,” Erasmus said. He’d seen no one from Zeke’s family since his first days back in Philadelphia. “The doctor says I may be able to start walking after Christmas.”

  Laurel nodded. “Alexandra,” she said. “It’s good to see you again. You’re enjoying your stay here?”

  “I keep busy,” Alexandra said. “I’m glad to be able to help Lavinia.”

  “She’s still . . . ?” Violet said.

  “Still,” Alexandra said.

  Then no one knew what to say. Zeke’s parents, when they emerged from their first month of mourning, had commissioned the building of a ship for the study of marine biology, in honor of their lost hero; the keel of the Zechariah Voorhees had already been laid. Dignified grief, a family behaving well. Although they still avoided Erasmus they’d sent their daughters. Yet their example hadn’t swayed Lavinia. Lavinia refused their invitations; she hid upstairs and wouldn’t come down and seemed to be doing her best to emulate Lady Franklin. Incoherent letters poured from her pen—to the newspapers, the Smithsonian Institution, members of Congress. Someone must organize another expedition to search for Zeke’s bones. Papers, papers; she gave them to Linnaeus, who promised to post them but hid them in his office safe instead.

  Alexandra poured coffee and offered macaroons. In the silence Laurel finally said to Erasmus, “Our father sent some addresses for you—the families of the crewmen you asked about. And says to tell you he wrote to them himself, the first week you were back.” A folded sheet of paper emerged from somewhere in the mass of black silk.

  “Thank you,” Erasmus said. “I appreciate that.”

  More silence. Alexandra felt Zeke in the room, as if he’d come through the window along with the sun and was standing there smiling and raising his tufty eyebrows. They all wanted to talk about him, and couldn’t or wouldn’t, she thought. His sisters were longing for something that would help them envision his last days; Erasmus was praying they wouldn’t ask a single question; and she herself was caught in the stillness . . . she rose and walked to the window and back.

  “I’ve been learning to engrave on copper and steel,” she said, not knowing what else to talk about. “Did you know that? Lavinia and I began taking engraving lessons last summer from one of the Wellses’ master engravers. I’m still taking them, it’s very interesting.”

  Violet swiveled her head on her neck, like a large swan. “You were always artistic,” she said. “Do you remember our lessons with Mr. Peale? One of your sisters came with you, I think.”

  “Emily,” Alexandra said. “She hated painting, she hated those mornings.”

  “And Lavinia,” Laurel added. “And the van Ostade girls, and the Winslows, and the three little Peale cousins. But you were always the best. When we did the flower paintings, yours were the only ones that looked like flowers growing. The still life with the dead rabbit, the one that made Martha van Ostade so sick; I still remember yours. You always had a flair. Do you like the engraving?”

  “I do,” said Alexandra. “Very much.”

  She had a sudden sharp memory of those Saturday classes in Mr. Peale’s atelier. In a high-ceilinged room lit by oblong skylights the girls had gathered around their easels, frowning seriously at a stuffed bird or a heap of fruit and crooking their thumbs on their palettes. For those hours it hadn’t mattered whose family was wealthy and whose was not. Later, as they turned eighteen and nineteen, Violet and Laurel would disappear into a world of dances and social events closed to Alexandra after her parents’ accident. But in the atelier Mr. Peale had encouraged them all equally, correcting shadows and skewed perspectives, teaching them to represent the real. Round objects onto flat paper: leaves, lizards, roses, pots. Sometimes they’d posed for each other, draped in bunting or wreathed with ivy, allegorically arranged and fully clothed. Never a naked human form—but how to learn the basic facts of anatomy? Secretly, at home, Alexandra had drawn her own limbs before a candlelit mirror.

  Violet and Laurel were smiling now and had a little color in their faces, as if the chatter about their shared girlhood had loosened something in them. To Erasmus, who’d been staring at the sheet of paper, Violet said, “We don’t blame you, you know. Some do, but not us.”

  “You must forgive our parents,” Laurel added. “They don’t blame you either, not exactly—but this has been so terrible for them, Father isn’t ready to see you yet. But he knows we’re here.”

  “That’s . . . kind of him.” Everyone was looking away from everyone else. Through the windows the leafless trees were black against the sky. “It’s so cold,” Erasmus said, pulling the quilt higher on his chest.

  The stove was glowing, but the women looked at each other and nodded. “We should go,” Violet said. “You’ll give our regards to Lavinia? We’d be glad to see her, when she feels ready.”

  “I’ll tell her that,” Alexandra said.

  When they were gone she stood a few feet from Erasmus’s bed, puzzled by his reticence. “Why didn’t you tell them something about what Zeke was like up there? How he was, something good he did . . .”

  “Something good he did,” Erasmus repeated.

  She waited, but he added nothing. In his first days home, during his bouts of fever, he’d spouted wild tales about Zeke. She hadn’t known what to make of these—what had happened between the two friends up there, amid the ice and darknes
s?

  “I feel like all I’m doing is waiting,” Erasmus said. “Waiting to heal, waiting to learn how to walk without toes, waiting to see what shape my life will take now.”

  Alexandra lit the other lamps and fiddled with the stove until the room was warm and bright. “What did you think your life would be like?”

  Erasmus leaned toward the stove. “Like my father’s life,” he said. “Only more so. Like the lives of his friends, who did this as more than a hobby. This little building,” he said, waving at the space around him. “If you could have seen what it was like when I was a boy—half zoo and half museum, my father let us do anything we wanted. For a while we had a big tree in the corner, with live birds roosting in it. Aquariums, and an ant colony, and turtles and salamanders; and jars of preserved specimens everywhere, big slabs of fossil-bearing rock and mastodon bones and a plant press, books open on all the tables. A wonderful, fertile clutter.”

  Alexandra looked around the Repository, which still seemed cluttered to her. So many books and specimens, so much equipment—the microscope, the dissecting table set before the window; shelves and saucers and little zinc labels; heaps of unbound books and pages ripped from pamphlets. But it was true there wasn’t a single living creature.

  “Almost every fine day,” Erasmus said, “we’d gather at breakfast, the four of us boys and our father, and tell him our plans before he went off to work.”

  Where was Lavinia? Alexandra thought. While the boys were making plans?

  “We’d pick some field or stream and go gather specimens. When we returned, three of us would work at mounting or dissecting what we’d gathered and the fourth would read aloud. Embryology, ichthyology, paleontology; it was all so exciting. Sometimes we’d visit Peale’s museum and study the mammoth bones and the sea serpents. At night our father would join us and examine what we’d gathered and ask us what we’d learned. Then he’d look at our notebooks.”