Killigrew and the North-West Passage

by Killigrew

  The names of the occupants of the graves were clearly marked on the wooden headboards: Leading Stoker John Torrington of HMS Terror, who had died on New Year’s Day 1846; Able Seaman John Hartnell of the Erebus, who had died three days later. After that there had been a gap of three months to the day before Private of Marines William Braine had died. How they had died remained a mystery; Strachan had offered to carry out a post mortem, but Pettifer refused to disturb the dead with an exhumation.

  There was no indication where the Erebus and Terror might have gone after they left Beechey Island. It had long been standard practice for Royal Naval vessels exploring the Arctic to build cairns on prominent headlands, containing messages in watertight canisters giving details of when they had been there and where they were bound. Someone had built a cairn on the summit of the island, and it was presumed to be the handiwork of Franklin’s men, but the searchers who had come to the island two years ago had dismantled it and searched all around without finding any trace of a message.

  It was Thursday 22 July, a week since the Venturer had dropped anchor in the natural harbour to the north-east of the island. There had been no sign of the rest of Sir Edward Belcher’s squadron when she had arrived. Nor, indeed, had her crew seen any other vessels in the uneventful voyage through Lancaster Sound. A fortnight after they had buried Immermann at sea, the survivors of the Carl Gustaf remained inadvertent guests on board the Venturer.

  Strachan waggled the geologist’s hammer he had brought ashore with him. ‘I’m going to look for fossils,’ he said. Killigrew nodded, and the assistant surgeon headed off in the direction of the slate cliffs.

  Killigrew, meanwhile, followed a precipitous path that led up the side of the cliffs to the plateau. There he paused for a few minutes, smoking another cheroot and gazing off to the east in the direction of Lancaster Sound, expecting the rest of the squadron to heave in sight at any moment.

  The Venturer looked tiny below him, dwarfed by the vast immensity of the nothingness that stretched in all directions. To the north-west and the south, the open waters of Wellington Channel and Barrow Strait respectively showed cobalt blue beneath the pale sky; to the north-east, Devon Island, like Beechey itself, was denuded of snow by the summer thaw, but every bit as barren. A trick of the sharp, clear Arctic light enabled him to see further than the earth’s curvature should have permitted, making this wilderness seem even larger than it was. Cornwallis Island, more than twenty-eight miles away on the opposite side of Wellington Channel, looked so close it seemed that he could reach out and touch it.

  Killigrew felt as though he was gazing into eternity, and he had never been more aware that he was nothing more than a flyspeck on the face of God’s creation; and not a very large flyspeck, at that. The sensation was not humbling – growing up with his grandfather, a cold man who had no time for children, after his parents had died, Killigrew had learned at an early age that the universe did not revolve around him – so much as unnerving. But most striking of all was the oppressive silence. The only sound was the gentle soughing of the wind across that barren landscape. The endless sky seemed to swallow up all other noises.

  He heard scrunching on the gravel behind him, and whirled round in time to see O’Houlihan – one of the crewmen in the dinghy that had brought Killigrew and Strachan ashore – clambering up to join him on the plateau. The seaman looked surprised to discover him there. ‘Begging your pardon, sir. Didn’t mean to startle ye.’

  ‘That’s all right, O’Houlihan. I was miles away. Not playing football with your shipmates?’

  ‘The ground’s too hard for a decent game of footie, sir… I can leave you be, if ye like, sir…’

  ‘No, no. You’ve come this far, you might as well enjoy the view.’

  ‘It’s a beauty, though, is it not, sir?’

  ‘Is it what you expected?’

  O’Houlihan shook his head. ‘I’m not sure what it was I was after expecting, sir. Snow and ice, I am thinking. Isn’t that what everyone thinks of when they’re thinking o’ the Arctic?’

  Killigrew smiled. ‘You wait until winter comes, O’Houlihan. We’ll have all the snow and ice a man could wish for.’

  ‘Aye, I s’pose you’re right, sir.’ He crouched down, seized a fistful of gravel and began to pick out pebbles, pitching them into space. ‘I don’t know, sir. Somehow it don’t seem right.’

  ‘The lack of snow, O’Houlihan?’

  The seaman shook his head. ‘Not that, sir. Us being here, I mean. You go to a place like New Zealand, the climate’s good and the soil’s rich, and you think: God meant this place for man. Sure, and it’d be an insult to the Almighty if ye didn’t cultivate it, as if the Big Man upstairs had given you a gift and you were turning your nose up at it. And then you come to a place like this.’ He sighed and shook his head, before letting the last few pieces of gravel in his hand cascade through his splayed fingers. ‘God never meant for us to be here, sir.’

  ‘The Esquimaux manage to survive here.’

  ‘Maybe so, sir. But they’ve got their way of life, and we’ve got ours. And ours was never meant for a place like this.’

  Even though Killigrew could not claim to have O’Houlihan’s appreciation for the soil, he felt he knew what the Irishman meant. He told himself he had come here with the noblest of motives – to rescue Sir John Franklin and his men – but when he had volunteered for this expedition, he had secretly half hoped he would be part of that happy band to whom fell the honour of discovering the North-West Passage. Now he felt that the Passage was not something God intended Man to find. Which begged the question, what was he really doing here? Seeking new lands for Queen Victoria, lands that no one but the Esquimaux had any use for? Suddenly, for the first time since the Venturer had sailed from Greenwich, he did not want to be where he was. He wanted to be warm and safe in his rooms in Paddington, or on the quarterdeck of a ship cruising the Tropics. Where did not matter; anywhere but here would be an improvement.

  The two of them stood in silence for a while, lost in their own thoughts. ‘Come on,’ Killigrew said at last. ‘Time we got back to the ship. You go on ahead, O’Houlihan. I’ll follow you shortly.’

  ‘As you will, sir.’

  While O’Houlihan preceded him down the precipitous path, Killigrew lingered on the summit, gazing in the direction of Lancaster Sound. The wide, open, empty sea mocked his hopes.

  * * *

  Days turned into weeks without any sign of Belcher and the rest of his squadron. The hours – the very minutes – dragged slowly. Pettifer and his officers tried to keep the men busy with drills, exercises and boat races. In the evenings Killigrew gave those hands who wished for them lessons in reading and writing – no easy task, when the literary skills of the men ranged from Stoker Jemmy Butterwick, who had signed the ship’s articles with a cross, to Molineaux, who could quote Milton and Coleridge. On Sundays, Strachan gave lectures on topics that took in botany, zoology, chemistry, geology, vulcanology and palaeontology. These lectures were invariably packed out, and not simply because there was nothing better to do. Strachan had a enthusiasm for science that he was able to impart to his audience, and a skill for talking about the more abstruse aspects of the natural world in a way that even the most ill-educated of seamen could understand, and yet at the same time even the best-informed of the officers could attend and come away having learned plenty.

  Yet these provided only brief respite from the tedium. Like all the officers on board, Killigrew had not joined the navy for a quiet life, and although his service had inured him to long periods of boredom, at least on a long voyage on the open sea he could usually count on occasional fits of rough weather to liven things up. Yet while the Venturer was anchored at Beechey Island, the weather remained mild and unchallenging. The monotony of the dreary, oppressive landscape served only to emphasise the monotony of their dreary day-by-day existence.

  When the lookout in the crow’s nest spied a sail on the first Saturday in August, it was enough
of an event to bring the whole crew on deck.

  ‘Where away?’ asked Killigrew, taking the telescope from the binnacle.

  ‘Fine off the port bow!’

  Killigrew and Cavan exchanged glances. The Venturer was anchored on a west-east axis, so that any vessels coming from Lancaster Sound should have appeared astern.

  ‘I can’t see anything yet.’ Killigrew lowered the telescope.

  ‘Perhaps the squadron did get here ahead of us,’ suggested Cavan. ‘Perhaps it’s Resolute and Intrepid returning from Melville Island.’

  ‘So soon?’ Killigrew was sceptical. ‘If the squadron’s already been here, then where’s the North Star?’

  ‘Perhaps the rest of the squadron got split up too,’ said Cavan, as Latimer emerged from the after hatch. ‘Or perhaps it’s Enterprise and Investigator. Perhaps the summer thaw has freed them from whatever icy prison held them, and they are continuing their eastward voyage.’

  ‘Or perhaps it’s Erebus and Terror!’ said Latimer.

  ‘Perhaps it’s Cleopatra’s barge,’ said Killigrew. ‘But more likely it’s a whaler that got through Melville Bay ahead of us.’

  A gutta-percha speaking tube ran from the crow’s nest to the binnacle. Killigrew handed the telescope to Cavan and blew into the brass mouthpiece, sounding the whistle at the other end. Then he lifted the mouthpiece to his ear to listen for the lookout’s response.

  ‘Crow’s nest,’ Endicott responded in his unmistakable Liverpudlian accent.

  ‘Can you see what kind of ship it is?’ asked Killigrew, before transferring the speaking tube to his ear.

  ‘You’re not going to believe me, sir.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Well, sir, unless I’m very much mistaken… it looks like a paddle-steamer, sir!’

  ‘In the Arctic?’ exclaimed Killigrew. ‘Impossible. No one would be foolish enough to take a flapper into the Arctic. The ice would break off her paddles in a brace of shakes.’ He lowered the mouthpiece and turned to Cavan and Latimer. ‘He says it’s a paddle-steamer!’

  ‘A paddle-steamer?’ Cavan echoed incredulously. ‘In the Arctic? Who’s in the crow’s nest?’

  ‘Endicott.’

  ‘Endicott? Not like him to make a mistake.’

  ‘I see it!’ Latimer said excitedly. He was pointing the telescope forward. ‘He’s right, sir! It is a paddle-steamer!’

  ‘Give me that telescope.’ Killigrew looked for himself. It took him a moment to locate the ship; it was little more than a speck, and should have been too far away to see – only the peculiar refraction of the Arctic light made it visible, he supposed. And there was no mistaking the plashing of her paddles. ‘Good God! It is a flapper!’

  ‘What the devil’s going on?’ asked Bähr, coming on deck with Pettifer and Ziegler.

  ‘There’s a paddle-steamer approaching from the west, sir,’ said Cavan.

  ‘A paddle-steamer?’ echoed Pettifer. ‘In the Arctic?’

  ‘Take a look, sir.’ Killigrew handed him the telescope.

  ‘Good gracious! She must be lost.’

  ‘That’s putting it mildly, sir,’ said Killigrew.

  ‘May I see, sir?’ asked Ågård. In the seven weeks since they had passed through the Middle Pack, the ice quartermaster had recovered himself, and his shipmates – officers and ratings alike – had forgiven his moment of panic. But now there was a niggle at the back of Killigrew’s mind, a doubt about Ågård’s reliability. He hated that niggle, but he could not ignore it.

  Pettifer handed Ågård the telescope. ‘What do you think?’ he asked Killigrew. ‘Could she have seen us? Perhaps we should send up a rocket to get her attention.’

  ‘Good thinking, sir.’ Killigrew was about to order Thwaites to prepare a signal rocket when Ågård spoke again.

  ‘Yes… yes, there’s no mistaking it,’ said the ice quartermaster. ‘It’s a kayak.’

  Pettifer smiled tolerantly. ‘I’ve been at sea since I was twelve, Ågård. I think I can tell a paddle-steamer from a kayak when I see one.’

  ‘See for yourself, sir.’ Ågård held out the telescope. Pettifer seemed reluctant to question his own conviction, so Killigrew took the glass and raised it to his eye.

  ‘It’s a paddle-steamer,’ he asserted. ‘No question. It is, without doubt, incontrovertibly and incontestably, a… a kayak?’

  ‘What? Give that to me!’ Pettifer snatched the telescope from Killigrew and levelled it once more.

  ‘The fata morgana, sir,’ said Ågård. ‘The Arctic mirage.’

  The ship’s library was well stocked with the journals of previous Arctic explorers, and all the assembled officers had read enough to know the Arctic had a way of producing images that put desert mirages to shame, making a few rocks on a distant shore look like a range of mountains, or turning a walrus into a whale, but the deceptive effects of the fata morgana had to be seen to be believed.

  ‘I’ll be a Dutchman!’ said Pettifer. ‘It is a kayak. Yet I was certain…’

  ‘If it’s any consolation, better men than ourselves have been caught out by the fata morgana,’ said Killigrew. ‘Sir John Ross, for one.’

  ‘Unusual, to see a single kayak,’ mused Ågård. ‘Usually the Esquimaux travel in bands of a dozen or so, the men in their kayaks, the women and children in an umiak.’

  ‘Is it coming this way?’ asked Pettifer.

  ‘Making a beeline straight towards us, sir.’

  The kayak was much the same as those they had seen at the Whalefish Islands. Twirling his double-bladed paddle, the oarsman scudded the canoe across the water. Dressed in typical Inuit clothing, he paddled right up to the Venturer, trailing the blade of his paddle in the water to slow his light craft as he drew near to the side.

  ‘Good day to you!’ Pettifer called down to him.

  The Inuk seemed to ignore him, making his kayak fast to the Venturer’s accommodation ladder.

  ‘Perhaps he doesn’t understand English,’ suggested Cavan.

  Pettifer nodded. ‘Does anyone on board speak Esquimau?’

  Sørensen shouldered his way to the front of the men crowded round the entry port. ‘I speak a little. Tunnga-sugitsi,’ he called down. ‘Kinauvit?’

  The Inuk did not reply at first, but climbed nimbly up the accommodation ladder and through the entry port to stand on deck, his eyes slowly searching the faces of the men who stood in a circle around him. Dressed in sealskin boots and bearskin breeches, he peered out of the deep hood of a buttonless sealskin jacket from behind a set of Inuk snow-goggles: made from a strip of whalebone tied across his face, with two horizontal slits cut on either side of his nose to reduce the amount of painful glare reaching his eyes. A bear’s tooth – an incisor, at least two inches long – hung on a thong around his neck, presumably some kind of talisman.

  He looked at Killigrew. ‘You are the captain?’ He spoke slowly and ponderously, but his English was perfect.

  The lieutenant shook his head and indicated Pettifer standing next to him.

  ‘You speak English!’ exclaimed the captain.

  The Inuk arched an eyebrow, as if to suggest that confirming what they already knew would be a waste of words.

  Pettifer remembered his manners. ‘Commander Orson Pettifer, of Her Majesty’s navy, at your service. And you are?’

  The Inuk thumped his chest with the flat of his hand. ‘Terregannoeuck.’

  ‘We’re looking for two ships,’ said Pettifer. ‘Big ships, much like this one, with many kabloonas on board. Have you seen such ships?’

  ‘Erebus and Terror?’ asked Terregannoeuck.

  The officers on deck exchanged glances. ‘You know of the Erebus and the Terror?’ asked Pettifer.

  ‘Terregannoeuck meet them six years ago. Cap’n Franklin take Terregannoeuck on board, give him vittles and grog. Terregannoeuck like Cap’n Franklin very much.’

  ‘You met Sir John Franklin?’ Pettifer said eagerly. ‘Where?’

  ‘Terregannoeuck very hun
gry.’ The Inuk rubbed his stomach theatrically. ‘Bad year for seals, poor hunting. Terregannoeuck not eat in three days.’

  Pettifer could take a hint as well as the next man. ‘Have some hot food and some grog brought to my day-room at once, Mr Cavan!’ he ordered. ‘Mr Terregannoeuck, perhaps I can tempt you to partake of our hospitality in my quarters…?’

  * * *

  ‘Is that one of my calves’ heads, Mr Cavan?’ asked Pettifer.

  ‘I took the liberty of ordering Armitage to take it from your private stock, sir,’ the mate replied disingenuously. ‘I assumed you’d want him to have the best, under the circumstances.’

  ‘I just hope the wretched fellow appreciates it. I’d’ve thought that after a lifetime of dining on seal-meat and whale blubber, even salt-horse and hard tack would make a pleasant change.’

  Seated at the table in the captain’s day-room, Terregannoeuck looked up. With his sealskin jacket taken off and the goggles removed, they could see his angular face more clearly: leathery brown skin stretched taut over high cheekbones, his hollow cheeks pitted by the ravages of smallpox, and deeply incised scars all over his head, disappearing behind his beard and his hairline.

  He did not smile – it was impossible to imagine a smile cracking that scarred, leathery face – but he seemed pleased. ‘Mamaqtualuk!’ he pronounced, pouring himself a second glass of claret. ‘Kabloona vittles very good!’