The Broken Lands Read online

  With the return of the better weather, Franklin’s birthday was celebrated. Crozier presented him with a new looking-glass incorporating tinted glass to reduce ice-blink, commissioned by him from Selles and Walker at Sir John Barrow’s suggestion. He also handed over greetings cards entrusted to him a year previously by all the members of the Arctic Council. From Fitzjames, Franklin received a new Bible, bound in calf and embossed with gold, its pages also gold-edged, adding to its appearance of authority and solidity.

  Perhaps strangest of all Franklin’s gifts was the photograph he received from Graham Gore, made the previous September when they had first gone ashore on Beechey. Still unconvinced of his expertise or of the value of his work, this portrait of Sir John was Gore’s most successful picture so far. In the glass plate, Franklin stood at the top of the beach with the imposing cliff rising sheer behind him. He held his helmet in one hand and his sword in the other. The men ashore had been cleared from the background so that he stood alone, and Gore had set up his equipment slightly below Franklin, making him appear taller and more imposing. Sir John stood turned to one side, gazing into the middle distance to where his ships lay at anchor. Afterward he had left the beach without speaking to Gore, not even expressing an interest in the finished result.

  Later, looking closely at the image he had produced, Gore was surprised to see a band of white, like a roll of unwound silk between the back of Franklin’s head and the cliff face. Unable at first to explain this, it finally struck him that what he had captured on the plate was a flight of gulls passing behind Franklin, each bird following closely in the path of the one ahead, and each leaving its own fleeting and insubstantial image on the exposed plate.

  He explained all this to Franklin upon presenting him with the portrait, and in turn Franklin explained the effect to everyone else who asked to see it. He now seemed pleased by the picture, as though his own solemn features had been somehow enlivened by the ghostly birds, and as though the portrait had been enhanced rather than spoiled by them.

  Goodsir, upon being handed the plate for his own comments, drew his finger across the smear left by the birds, where here and there a wingtip was more distinctly visible, and half jokingly suggested to Gore that this was how an angel might eventually come to be seen.

  They waited nine more weeks for the ice in the bay to break and disperse. It was by then the middle of July, and the watches posted on the outer heights reported daily that the disintegrating broader pack was already braided with channels, the widest of which might already prove navigable were they able to reach them.

  On the 18th of July, the two ice-masters and a party of marines hauled a boat over the bay ice and put to sea at its rim, moved out into the flow of the Wellington Channel and there rowed and drifted among the floating ice until they were carried south with it into Barrow Strait. Here they anchored to a grounded berg and studied the movement of the breaking pack all around them. It quickly became apparent that they stood little chance of sailing south through the easterly flow without serious risk of collision. There was no safe harbor closer than Cape Walker, 100 miles to the west, or the north coast of Somerset, 50 miles south across the turbulent strait.

  They stayed amid the ice for six hours, watching as it moved unceasingly past them, and only left their secure anchorage when another large berg threatened to collide with their own and crush them. They turned north, making slow progress against the Wellington outfall, where the wider view was lost to them amid towering bergs. A close watch was kept for any submerged ice which might slide beneath them and lift them clear of the water.

  Turning back into Beechey Bay they were caught in a sudden and powerful surge of water caused by the calving of a nearby berg. The small boat rocked and they were spun until a collision with the surrounding ice looked unavoidable. Reid told the marines to fix their oars and hold them out from the boat at half their length. They had already secured themselves to the benches upon which they sat. One man, William Pilkington, was slow to position his oar, and as he fumbled with it, snagging it on a rope, the boat struck the ice and he was thrown overboard, landing, to his surprise and relief, in less than a foot of water, which skimmed the surface of a submerged shelf. He scrambled to pull himself clear, fearful that he might be caught in a gap between the ice and the boat.

  After this they pushed themselves into more open water. Two of the marines took off Pilkington’s boots and over-trousers. He was unhurt and the water had not penetrated to his underclothing. Composing himself after his brief ordeal, he returned to his oar.

  Waiting until the surrounding ice was carried clear of them, they resumed rowing.

  An hour later they were beyond the influence of the channel, and the ships came into view ahead of them. A fire had been lit at the outer edge of the ice to guide them and its dense black smoke rose in a curve like a trick rainbow. A second boat rowed out to meet them and help them back ashore.

  Around the fire the outermost bay ice was already beginning to break. It cracked but remained in position, rocking as the deeper currents began to probe underneath it. It was sea ice, not fresh, and because of the manner in which it had formed, it remained flexible, bulging and rippling without breaking, and where men walked upon it they felt it give beneath them like saturated turf.

  During the previous week the Erebus and Terror had both been re-rigged, and their wooden props had been sawn away and dragged clear. Now all they waited for were the fissures in the ice to reach in and release them. Night watches were doubled and rigging parties remained on full-day alert for the first indication that they were about to float free.

  On the 20th of July a giant berg appeared on their western horizon and drove in upon them, crashing through the shallow ice of the bay and grounding itself less than two hundred yards from the ships. They shook as it gouged along the bottom, leaving a broad open channel in its wake.

  Parties of men went out to inspect the berg. Warmed by the high sun, water ran in small streams and cascades from every exposed surface, and upon their approach, the first men to arrive discovered that it contained a small arch through which they might easily pass. Such features were known as the Eyes of God, after the remark supposedly made by St. Brendan upon encountering something similar during his own voyage in northern waters. These Eyes were considered a good omen, and men passed through them shouting out the names of their wives and sweethearts to ensure that they would return to see them again.

  Having visited this new arrival himself, Franklin called a conference and he and his officers discussed what they might do next.

  “We’ll need three days at the very least if we’re to collect all the supplies ashore,” Gore said, conscious that even this was an optimistic assessment.

  “I don’t think we have it,” Reid said, his calmness only adding to the sense of urgency which had come so suddenly upon them, and which some of the others were only then beginning to feel.

  “Then every man available must be put ashore,” Franklin said.

  “There’s a possibility that if we can break up the firmer ice surrounding our moorings then we might be able to nose our way out using our engines,” Reid said.

  “They’re ready to be stoked up,” Fitzjames added enthusiastically.

  It was Fitzjames who had petitioned the Admiralty for the engines to be fitted to the ships in the first place, and he had arrived at Greenhithe a month before their departure to supervise their installation and then to test them on the river. Few others shared his enthusiasm, but masking his disappointment at the size of the engines, and at the locomotive wheels and gearing still attached to them on delivery, he declared himself satisfied with them, convinced that the future of all close-work Arctic exploration lay with steam and sail rather than sail alone. Even the Rosses’ near useless paddles, he pointed out, had taken the Victory farther into the heart of the frozen sea than anyone before them.

  “Explosives,” Goodsir said unexpectedly, his fingers moving in calculation. “A line of small ex
plosions along our intended course. Weaken the ice before we even begin to push it clear.”

  This idea appealed to many, but when Franklin asked Reid what he thought, Reid said that the ice surrounding them was already too unstable and variable in thickness and that to disturb it any further before they were floating free and ready to move out of the bay would bring them more problems than it solved.

  “I agree,” said Thomas Blanky, and Goodsir withdrew the suggestion.

  Two days later the argument was taken out of their hands. Men working on the Terror’s rigging felt her shudder and then begin to rock beneath them. Others out on the surrounding ice saw this and ran toward her. Watching from the fore-deck, Crozier saw the ice directly alongside his bow rise and then sink, causing water to rush up against the hull. He called down for the men on the ice to stay clear, and if possible to return to the safety of the shore. He watched in alarm as a dozen other cracks appeared simultaneously, many of them running toward the Terror as though she were the hub of a buckled wheel, and all around her the ice began to tilt and sway, and men abandoned what they were doing and raced for the land. Less than twenty yards from the port bow of the Erebus a mound of coal ten feet high was shaken loose and then tipped into the basin of water which suddenly appeared beneath it. A fire upon the ice was equally suddenly extinguished in a spout of steam.

  Franklin watched all this from the rail of the Erebus, and felt his own vessel begin to shake beneath him. A man was knocked from his perch on the fore-stay and fell heavily to the deck below, where others ran to help him.

  Most of those working on the ice made it safely to the shore, where they congregated and stood waving and calling.

  All along its outer rim, the bay ice began to break free. Caught off guard by the speed with which the breakup had finally come, Franklin ordered all their boats to be lowered, including their inflatable dinghies, and for these to move among the pieces of floating ice and rescue the men still trapped there. Several men, he saw, had fallen into the water, but were close enough to the shore to be dragged clear. They were in little danger of suffering from exposure in the warming sea, only of being caught and injured by the grinding ice.

  Fitzjames and Gore went ashore to supervise the retrieval of the last of their stores, determined that as little as possible should be lost or abandoned by this unexpected turn in their fortunes.

  An hour after the breakup had started, both ships were able to cast off and move into open water. There was still no navigable channel leading out of the bay, but they were now in a position, their sails unfurled and their rudders fixed, to make the dash into the wider reaches when the opportunity arose.

  By the following morning they were ready to leave. Their boats and sledges had been retrieved, and everywhere around them, on the shore and floating on the ice and in the water, lay the scattered debris of their long stay.

  And above all this, clearly visible on the lower slopes of Beechey, were the wooden markers of the three men who had died there.

  On the morning of Sunday the 23rd of July, Franklin held a service during which he read aloud the first chapter of Genesis in its entirety, and afterward, shortly before noon, the Erebus led the way out through the crumbling ice into the open sea beyond.

  BEYOND THE EYE OF GOD

  JULY 1846—APRIL 1847

  TWELVE

  “How does she look?” Franklin asked, standing close behind Fitzjames, his own lantern held high to examine the walls, one of them a bulkhead separating the hold from the forward quarters.

  “She’s no longer shipping,” Fitzjames called back, his voice amplified and distorted by the confined space in which he was wedged.

  On the first day of sailing into Barrow Strait, the Erebus shipped two tons of water into her forward coal store through a sprung plank. Her stokers worked for nine hours to carry the damp coal astern and then a caulking party sealed the leak and pumped the bulk of the water clear. A length of planking on the outer hull had been crushed, previously held in place by both the buttress to which it was attached and by the pressure of the outside ice. Once in open water, and without the support of the ice, the buttress had been jarred, rupturing the inner hull and bunker wall.

  Wading knee-deep through the black sludge, Fitzjames shone his lantern into the gap between the two hulls, searching for further trapped water which might need to be pumped away.

  Franklin passed him a hammer to test the surrounding spars, and both men fell silent to listen to the dull wooden knocks which reassured them that the remaining timbers were sound. New wood had already been taken to the store and now lined the walls, held clear of the dirty floodwater in rope slings.

  “How far below her waterline, do you think?” Franklin asked as Fitzjames twisted his chest and arms to extricate himself from the tight space.

  “A foot or two.” Fitzjames examined the warm caulking to the left and right of the damage. There was still some seepage, but no more than might be expected after so long out of the water.

  It was nightfall by the time the examination was completed, and Franklin ordered any remaining repairs to wait until the following morning. Leaving, they passed the exhausted stokers, and Franklin thanked them for having acted so promptly. The men were coated black from head to foot, only their hands and eyes and mouths washed clean. Water still lapped around them in the narrow passage, and they were forced to back out of it to allow Franklin and Fitzjames to pass by.

  The two men parted, and Franklin went on deck, surprised by the darkness of the brief summer night. The Terror’s lights were visible a mile off their port bow, momentarily extinguished as a large berg passed silently and unseen between them. There was no moon and he could pick out only the closest of the drifting ice.

  The repair work resumed at dawn. Regardless of the progress of this, they would sail at noon, taking advantage of a broad lead which had appeared ahead of them during the night, and which ran due south, taking them only a few degrees from their projected course.

  When Fitzjames joined Reid on the fore-top platform, Reid inquired about the progress of the repair and the likelihood of their hull having been weakened. He himself had survived two ships which had been crushed and sunk by the ice. He indicated ahead of them, pointing along the lead to their southern horizon. Ice still moved across their path from west to east.

  “Is it heavy?” Fitzjames asked him.

  Reid answered him with a nod, his eyes fixed on the colliding ice ahead of them. “It’ll turn us and flush us straight back out into Baffin if we don’t find some way through it before the end of August. A winter in it would cripple us for good, and come next spring we’d be struggling to keep the pieces of ourselves together.”

  “Sir John is hopeful of a twenty-day passage,” Fitzjames said, probing for Reid’s own estimation.

  “So I hear,” Reid said. “I wish us luck.” He climbed down from their narrow perch.

  Fitzjames remained where he was until the noon bell was sounded and he felt the Erebus move beneath him as her mooring lines were released.

  Moving swiftly along the open channel, there was an air of excitement and expectation among both crews. This did not last long: after only four hours of unobstructed sailing they came up against an impenetrable rush of ice across their bows, a mass so dense and fast-moving that it would have been madness to try and enter it. Nothing they had so far encountered had prepared them for what they now saw: islands of ice immeasurable in the glare sailing past them at three times the speed they themselves might achieve even with a favorable wind; bergs twice their own height, caught, crushed and scattered, and all around them the water flowing and eddying in foaming torrents, which every now and then rose in spouts and fountains where submerged ice collided and forced it up.

  The Terror was the first to reach the edge of this maelstrom, and at the first indication that she was being drawn into its peripheral currents, Crozier gave the order to turn about and retrace their course back into calmer water.

  The
first those on the Erebus knew of the problem ahead was when they saw the Terror coming toward them with a warning flag rising on her foremast. Seeing that Crozier was headed for the safety of a grounded berg, Franklin set a course to join him, and the two ships drew alongside each other.

  A boat was lowered and Crozier and John Irving came aboard the Erebus.

  “Too powerful, and filled with far more ice than you can see from here,” Irving told Franklin and Fitzjames. “We were barely able to draw back.”

  “Mr. Irving exaggerates,” Crozier said. “Vessels as stout as ours might enter it with care.”

  “And the reason for your withdrawal?” Fitzjames asked.

  “To await your arrival. And to bring you the news that the Terror at least is ready to forge a crossing.”

  “With an invitation to follow in your wake?”

  Crozier breathed deeply and turned to Franklin. “Sir John?”

  “I agree with James and Mr. Irving, Francis. Even if we were able to negotiate a passage, we would undoubtedly become separated and then waste time in searching for each other once we were clear at the other side.”

  “As usual, Mr. Irving has overstated the case for doing nothing. Delay, delay, delay.”

  “Look at it,” Fitzjames said in Irving’s defense, pointing to where the swiftly moving ice ran in a constant stream, heliographing its dangerous presence to them each time a piece spun or overturned and caught the sun.

  “I still say that to delay is the wrong decision. We all know how calm and stable by comparison the southbound straits beyond are likely to be.”