The Broken Lands Read online

  Wilson cleared his throat and composed himself. “Injuries? Do I have any injuries, you ask me? I have ten dead and eight dying. The rest of us are alive by the grace of God alone. Can you take us aboard and to safety?”

  This was impossible. Fitzjames shouted to them who they were, but this information had little effect on the two men.

  “We sighted a vessel three days ago, but she passed us by without acknowledging our signal.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t see you.”

  Wilson laughed. The man beside him began to cough violently and Wilson leaned down to hold his shoulders until the spasm passed. It was a full minute before he was able to speak again.

  “Is it scurvy?” Reddington called to him.

  “That and broken bones,” Wilson shouted back, his voice hoarse and faltering. “The bulk of our supplies were lost in the storm which drove us ashore. We were too light in the water.” His voice faded until he was barely audible.

  “Tell him to start marching to Uppernavik,” one of the marines said, unslinging his musket.

  Fitzjames doubted that the two men in the boat even possessed the strength to row back to the shore. He looked to Reid, but he too had little to suggest.

  “Others have done it,” he said. “Hundreds, thousands some years.”

  Fitzjames considered this before calling back to the two men. “We can land you some supplies and lemon juice,” he said. “Get your men into the boat and the current will take you south. Keep the shore in your sight and—”

  “No!” Wilson shouted. “They refuse to put to sea. Only my mate here is prepared to make the journey with me.”

  Uppernavik being so near, this decision seemed perverse to Fitzjames and he felt himself absolved of some part of his responsibility toward the stranded whalers.

  By then the two boats had drifted closer together, affording those from the Erebus a better view of the two emaciated men. Both wore heavy beards; their eyes were sunken and their darkened lips drawn back to reveal their remaining teeth.

  “Can we speak to your captain?” Wilson asked, reaching out to the other boat.

  At this, the marines raised their weapons and called for him to remain where he was.

  This sudden appearance of the firearms surprised the two men and they sat without moving or speaking.

  Fitzjames gave the order to shoulder arms.

  “You might just as well give the order to fire on us,” Wilson said. He held out both his arms, presenting himself as a target. “I have two men ashore who cannot last the week.” He paused before going on. “Three days after we were wrecked, and certain that help would not come to us from the sea, I sent a party of four men overland. After a fortnight they had not returned. Our second party found all four of them frozen in their blankets less than a day’s march from the ship. Perhaps now you can understand their reluctance to make any further attempt.”

  “And have you made no contact with the Eskimos?” Reid asked him.

  There was a long silence. Then Wilson said that they had, but that they could expect no help from that quarter either.

  “Explain yourself,” Reid told him.

  “A party arrived to steal from the Benjamin Lee. We had no choice.”

  “You mean you fired on them?”

  “Two men and a woman.” Wilson rubbed his face, as though he were condemned to repeating these damning details of his tragedy for the rest of his life.

  Realizing that the exchange was achieving little, Fitzjames called for the two men to remain where they were. He then gave the order for the marines to row back to the Erebus.

  Climbing aboard, he explained to Franklin what had happened.

  “Poor wretches,” was all that Franklin said, but in a tone of voice that made it immediately clear to Fitzjames that he did not intend to delay any further. He agreed to leave the stranded men sufficient supplies for their journey south and consulted with Stanley regarding the most appropriate medical aid to send them.

  As Fitzjames was about to return to the boat, however, Franklin told him to remain aboard. Fitzjames stopped himself from asking why. Like many others, Franklin considered that the men ashore had done insufficient to help themselves while the opportunity to do so had still existed, and calling for silence he reminded all those around him that they were now in the Arctic, where the price of a mistake was all too often the life of the man who made it. Crozier stood beside him and nodded emphatically, looking hard at Fitzjames as he did so.

  Only fifteen years earlier, so many vessels had been caught by the sudden onset of the winter ice in that same part of the bay—known by whalers as the “breaking-up yard”—that over a thousand men had found themselves camped out on the ice. They had retrieved most of their stores and then burned what remained of their vessels to keep warm. Not one of them had died or suffered anything but the slightest effects of scurvy before being rescued or reaching safety.

  The tales of individual vessels spread just as quickly and widely. In 1832 the Shannon of Hull had struck a berg there and lost sixteen men and three boys as she sank. Clinging to the wreckage, the frostbitten survivors were without food or fresh water for twenty-three days and kept themselves alive by drinking the blood of the three of their number who died during their ordeal. They had been rescued in a frozen stupor by a Danish brig, the drained corpses of their shipmates still among them.

  Captain Dannet saw the two ships on the morning of the 26th. His mate sighted them first and called him on deck. The sea in the Middle Passage was calm, and visibility good under a cloudless sky. There were bergs of all sizes scattered around them, but none of these presented any obstacle to the vessels navigating the broad channels between them.

  The Prince of Wales was moored to the largest of the surrounding bergs, one twice her own length, half as high and with a flat top. One of their boats had been pulled up on to this level surface and several men were now busy there unwinding and recoiling their harpoon lines.

  Dannet had made his first kill the previous evening, an immature female pike-whale, and this was lashed to his stern. A fog had come down an hour after the kill and they had been unable to flense and render the fish. This was now the task of the men gathered on the ice.

  On the Erebus, Fitzjames, Gore and Reid examined the whaler and the activity on the berg. Reid was the first to spot the fish, his attention drawn to it by the flock of birds which hovered above.

  Fitzjames gave the order to take in part of their sail.

  “Shall we wait for Sir John?” Gore asked. He had just eaten a large breakfast and the thought of seeing the whaler at work repulsed him.

  “She’s only a small fish,” Reid observed.

  Franklin, Fitzjames knew, would want to make contact with the vessel to determine the state of the ice further west. They were fifteen degrees east of the entrance to Lancaster Sound, their course west-southwest, and the ice was certain to be thicker and faster-moving the further they now sailed.

  The Erebus and Terror had been fourteen days in the bay and this was their first sighting of another vessel close enough to make contact. They too had spent the night moored in the lee of a small berg in the fog, and throughout the night the hulls of both ships had rubbed and ground along the ice, causing those who were new to the experience to wake in panic with fears of being holed in the darkness.

  The Erebus drew closer to the whaler and came alongside. A boat was lowered and Fitzjames, Gore, Reid and Des Voeux rowed across to her. Dannet greeted them and helped them aboard. On the far side of his ship the men on the ice hauled the head of the small whale up on to the level surface, and when this was done, Dannet untied the tail and let it fall back into the water with a loud slap. A minute later the whole carcass was lifted free and the claver of the birds was matched only by the sound of knives being sharpened.

  “Don’t let us delay you in your work,” Fitzjames told Dannet.

  “We’ll carve her up on the ice and save ourselves the trouble of swilling clean afterwar
d. What’s left we’ll leave for the birds.”

  “Like a feast set out on a tablecloth,” Gore said. He had never before seen a whaler at work, and, having overcome his initial repugnance, was now fascinated by the process and stood looking across at the men about to start stripping the carcass.

  A large cauldron was rolled on to its base-plate on the deck behind Dannet and a fire lit in the iron well beneath it. Dannet considered this for a moment before turning to Reid. “What about you, ice-master, does our fish look dry to you?”

  Reid studied the body and said that the skin was badly creased, confirming with a shrug what Dannet already knew.

  “They’ve opened her up,” Gore called from the rail.

  They turned to watch one of the men on the ice plunge his long blade into the flesh of the whale and then run the length of the carcass, his knife still embedded, slicing as he ran and only one step ahead of the flesh which peeled behind him like a breaking wave. The blubber lay flat in a twelve-foot strip, and a second man, this time using the ice as a chopping board, detached this flap from the bulk of the whale. A third followed behind him chopping it into manageable pieces. Blood and juices stained the ice and formed a pool around the wound. The noise of the frenzied birds doubled in volume and intensity. Other men hooked and dragged these smaller pieces of blubber toward the ship and threw them aboard with practiced, confident motions. By then the cauldron was heated and the first of the blubber burned with a foul stink.

  “Too hot,” Dannet called to the man tending the fire. The man wore a leather apron from his chest to his feet and used the blade of an oar to scrape and prod at the liquefying mass.

  “Not so good,” Reid said to him.

  Dannet shrugged. “We only went after her because we’d had an idle day.” The two men understood each other perfectly. “Collect her white bone,” Dannet called across to the men on the ice. “No part barrels. And the second rendering waits for my inspection before anything goes in the manifest.”

  Reid found himself nodding at everything the man said.

  They went below and Dannet handed Fitzjames his log so that he might assess for himself the nature of the ice the whaler had already encountered. It was a mark of trust and respect to be given the log so freely, and Fitzjames acknowledged this by complimenting Dannet on the thoroughness of his entries.

  “Too far north,” Dannet said.

  “Lured by the prospect of the breaking pack?” Reid asked him.

  Dannet nodded. “Sixteen years I’ve been coming and I’ve never seen it so broken or so scattered at this latitude.”

  “Do you have a sister ship?”

  “The Orion. Probably full and sailing for our transports by now. She’s under contract to the Spanish off the Azores at the end of the month.”

  “Small fish, hot work,” Reid said, and the two men smiled.

  “And you?” Dannet asked.

  “Forty-eight hours for observations and then west into Lancaster.”

  “You expect to find an opening?”

  Fitzjames looked up, first at Dannet and then at Reid.

  “We expect to find Chinamen dancing on the shore in welcome,” Reid said.

  “I wondered why they were gathering.”

  Fitzjames handed back the log, and because none of them wished to enter any further into their useless speculations, the three men returned above deck.

  “Come aboard this evening and dine with us,” Fitzjames said as they climbed the ladder.

  Dannet accepted. “Barring a favorable wind or a blow close enough to wet our brows.”

  They emerged into the bright sunlight and looked across to where the flensers were still at work. By now the blubber and meat had been stripped from the skeleton, and the men were cutting out the ribcage. The skull, its eyes still intact, lay like a boulder a short distance from them. The stain on the ice was now wider and other internal organs lay scattered all around. The liver had been retrieved, and the stomach had been dragged with its thick rope of intestine to the far side of the berg. A man swung at the jawbone with a mallet, and another probed inside the mouth with a knife to secure the tongue.

  Seeing Fitzjames and the others back out on the deck, Gore called for them to join him. The edge of the berg was held fast against the hull and Fitzjames alone stepped across on to the level surface. He joined Gore and they watched together as the vertebrae were chiseled one by one from the curved spine. These were inspected by the man in charge of the operation and then kicked off the ice into the water, where they slowly sank.

  “No use to us,” he said to Fitzjames, that being the full extent of his explanation. He cursed the birds which had become braver in their desperation to reach the congealed mess to which the carcass had been reduced, and which now flew among the men, narrowly avoiding their heads and flailing arms.

  The last of the blubber was thrown to the deck and the flensers cleaned their knives. A small group gathered around the shining bulging stomach and called Fitzjames and Gore over to watch as they slit it open to see what it contained. One man stood ready with a rack of bottles to collect specimens. They made this final act of disembowelment seem like an honor, and there was a murmur of concurrence when the man in charge held out his knife to Graham Gore and asked him if he would like to do it. Gore readily accepted, and only Fitzjames saw the shared glances and smiles as the knife was handed to him.

  Gore approached the bloated sac and prodded it with his finger. It was flattened on the ice, but still the size of a resting pony, longer than he was tall and mounded almost to his waist. He prodded it again, this time more forcefully, and set it quivering. Around him, the others took several paces back, and seeing this, Fitzjames did the same.

  “Now slit her long and clean,” the man called to Gore, making a slashing motion with his hand.

  Gore selected his starting point, flexed his arm, took a deep breath and drove in the knife. And as he did so, the men around him turned and ran, racing each other through the clamoring birds back to the ship.

  Gore had no opportunity to cut the full length of the stomach, for the instant his knife entered it there was an explosion of liquid and gas and the bag collapsed, spilling its contents in a gush against his legs and knocking him off his feet. All around him the birds turned into insatiable demons.

  Later that day, Dannet’s favorable wind arose. He detached himself from the berg and shouted his apologies to the Erebus that he would not after all be dining with them. Franklin called back that he understood and asked him to report their encounter to the Admiralty upon his return home.

  As they pulled away, the crew of the Prince of Wales stood in a line at her rail, raised their caps and cheered.

  WINTER’S CITADEL

  August 1845—July 1846

  FIVE

  They entered Lancaster Sound on the 31st of August, the two vessels sailing line astern through the dispersing ice there.

  At midday a broader channel of open water appeared ahead of them and their progress for the rest of the day was good. There was a sense of relief aboard both ships—not only at having found their entrance open, but also at now having moved beyond the sphere of others in the region. They passed into a stillness and an emptiness that even the flocks of following birds seemed to acknowledge in their silence. Baffin Bay, long since probed and charted in frustrating detail since the days of Davis, Frobisher and Cabot, had presented them with no real challenge, and to have been forced to turn back there would have embarrassed and shamed them all. But with the northern shore of the island slipping out of sight astern they had entered an unknown wilderness which bore few signs of those who had gone there before them, and who had been lost there, or returned home beaten and incredulous at the stubbornness, complexity and confusing impermanence of the place. They all knew who these men were, and many paid silent homage to them.

  “We pass through Ross’ mountains,” Vesconte remarked to Fitzjames and Gore, causing them to turn and look at the open channel still unwinding
ahead of them.

  Twenty-five years earlier, John Ross, sailing with Parry, had entered the Sound, then unconfirmed as the only true entrance to the Passage, but had turned back at what he believed to be a range of mountains blocking his way ahead. These turned out to be nothing more than a solid bank of cloud, through which Parry himself sailed a few years later, eclipsing his former captain and taking up the baton of exploration, until he too withdrew a decade later, old and defeated and privately convinced that where he had failed no one would succeed after him.

  The Terror moved closer astern and sounded her bell. Turning to study her through his glass, Fitzjames saw that the man upon her prow was signaling to landward. He looked where he pointed, and amid the ice there he saw a darker form.

  Reid too had been alerted and he was the first to speak. “She’s a country ship come out in this year’s rush,” he said solemnly. “No rigging, no deck. She’s floundered and been carried in the pack, left high in the crush.”

  “Are you certain of this, Mr. Reid?” Franklin asked him, relieved that they would not again be obliged to delay or alter their course.

  “No need to turn, Sir John,” Gore said, expressing the thoughts of them all.

  A few moments later the abandoned hulk was lost to sight.

  These ice-locked wrecks were common enough on the edges of the Arctic, usually whalers too late or too careless in the forming pack, sucked into the drift, savaged and then spat out again, sometimes many years later and hundreds of miles from where they had been trapped and abandoned.

  They continued due west until the sun began its late descent ahead of them, barely darkening the sky until it touched and then burned into the horizon. They moved closer to the ice-littered shore and dropped anchor. Watches were posted and their plans for the following days’ sailing were discussed over dinner. It had been decided that there should be no exchange of men between the two ships until the full 200-mile length of the Sound had been navigated. It was unlikely that they would become separated for long, but it was now important for the ships to begin to function independently of each other as soon as possible.