The Broken Lands Page 8

  “You’re going to tell me, aren’t you, lad?” he said. He stroked Hickey’s smooth face with the back of his hand, flexing it suddenly into a fist and then relaxing it. Hickey tried to turn back to his companions, but Tozer grabbed and squeezed his cheeks, holding his face only inches from his own. “You talk to me,” he said, his warm breath causing Hickey to flinch.

  Before he could incriminate himself, Sait and Wilson confessed that they had started the fight.

  “So, you two and Jopson, it is,” Tozer said. “You three and young Hickey here.”

  “He had no part in it,” Sait said, attempting to come forward, but being pushed back by one of the marines.

  “And I say he did,” Tozer said. He squeezed Hickey even harder, and then released his grip, swiftly cupping his hand upon the youth’s head and pushing him to his knees before he realized what was happening.

  Tozer then left him and went to examine the overturned cases and scattered cards where the fight had broken out. To his disappointment there were no coins; the men had been betting with their rations or promises of an exchanged duty.

  Returning to where Thomas Jopson now stood with a cloth to his bleeding mouth, Tozer pulled this away and threw it to the ground. “You stand as you are until Captain Crozier gets here,” he told him.

  They did not have long to wait. Crozier came ashore with two of his warrant officers, Honey and Lane. He regretted the absence of his lieutenants, feeling vulnerable without them to back him up and to mediate between himself and Tozer, whom he did not trust.

  By then a large number of other men had gathered to watch, all of them careful to maintain their distance. Crozier sent Honey and Lane to talk to the others involved, while he and Tozer confronted Jopson.

  He was uncertain what to say to his steward, a man who had served him well on this and other occasions.

  “You do not deny that you were involved in this unseemly brawl?” he said.

  Jopson stood to attention and said, “No, sir,” his chin up, his eyes raised above Crozier’s head.

  “I believe he started it, Mr. Crozier,” Tozer said. “I have the word of young Hickey here.”

  “Is that true, Thomas?” Crozier asked, unaware of what had already happened on the beach.

  “Sir,” Jopson said.

  Crozier turned and took several paces away from him. He did not want to punish the man or to create any further ill feeling among the members of his crew. He joined Honey and Lane, who were then interviewing the others, all of whom now expressed their regret at what had happened. Sait apologized to Wilson for accusing him of cheating and Wilson accepted this apology. If Tozer were not present, Crozier knew, he might now simply caution them all and demand their promises of good behavior in the future.

  He returned to Tozer and told him to order his marines back to the Terror. Tozer hesitated for a moment before giving the order, uncertain of whether or not he too was being told to return. He understood perfectly Crozier’s dilemma, and though he could not despise him for the way in which he sought to resolve the situation, nor could he dismiss from his mind the fact that his own authority had been publicly undermined, and that some form of redress was now required. He looked hard at Jopson, Sait, Wilson and Hickey before turning sharply and joining his men in the boat.

  Crozier watched him go, regretting that he might have made an enemy of the man over something so minor. He went to where Hickey was still on his knees and helped him up. He saw the marks on his cheeks where Tozer had held him.

  “And you too had a part in all this, Hickey?”

  Hickey nodded contritely, relieved that he was not now to be dealt with separately from the others.

  “You disappoint me, you all do” Crozier said aloud. He looked at them all as he spoke. “You do right to hang your heads in shame. Take their names, Mr. Honey. Meanwhile, I suggest an extra hour ashore until all these stores are safely gathered in and carried higher above the water line.” He turned to their audience. “These others, too, might participate, seeing as how they are so keen to stand and watch.”

  He walked back to his waiting boat. He was still angry that the situation had not somehow been resolved without his own reluctant intervention, but relieved that it had not warranted any more serious punishment.

  The men on the shore stood and watched him without moving, and then, as though at some hidden signal, they all returned to their work of hauling and stacking the stores, those who had been involved in the fight quickly becoming lost in their midst.

  They prepared the ships for the onset of winter and for the eventual appearance of ice in their anchorage. Both vessels had been originally built as floating platforms for mortars, and had been powerfully reinforced even before being re-equipped for Arctic service. They were known to their crews as light-built, requiring the minimum of ballast, and were considered by many who had served on them under difficult circumstances as “floaters”—ships which would not sink other than as a result of the worst imaginable damage. Both had sailed and wintered in the ice before, been damaged by it, and escaped to be repaired and to return.

  In readiness for the ice now, the Erebus was moved closer to the shore, towed rudderless over the shallows until barely two fathoms lay beneath her.

  The previous day, Reid and Des Voeux had rowed along this projected course taking soundings and samples every few yards, and on each occasion the scoop had come up filled with a mixture of mud and sand.

  Stern anchors were dropped first, and the Erebus, moving forward under her slowing momentum, ran aground for a quarter of her length before being winched clear. Once in place she was allowed to drift until she was side on to the shore and then half a dozen mooring ropes were deployed, holding her secure in her new position. Her rudder was lifted and stored close to its brackets, ready to be dropped and bolted in place when the need arose.

  The boats then gathered around the Terror, and she too was pulled closer to the shore, drawing astern of the Erebus before being pulled back and then swung around in the same manner. There was some difficulty this time as the Terror ran too far ashore and then had to be tail-shook out of the soft bottom in which she had grounded. Thomas Blanky supervised this, with Reid and Des Voeux relaying his orders to the boats on either side of her. It took four hours to free her, after which she was towed into her own mooring position. The men on the water cheered their success and then sat exhausted by their efforts.

  A distance of two hundred yards was measured between the ships—a vital space in the event of one of them being released sooner than the other, or if the pressure and direction of the ice forced them closer together.

  Several days later, their upper rigging was dismantled. Gangs of men worked high on both fore and mainmasts, unpegging and unbinding, and using pulleys to lower the yards and timbers to the deck, where these were repaired and stowed away. Lengths of rigging were dropped to the decks in man-high tangles and then carefully separated and coiled; their braces were temporarily slackened.

  It was never an easy task to strip a ship of even part of its rigging outside of a dock, but both Franklin and Crozier were pleased with the speed with which this was accomplished, and also at the way in which a new and spartan winter-order was achieved out of such apparent confusion and disarray.

  Their main- and fore-sails were left furled, but the remainder of their canvas was taken down. Some of this was stashed on deck to be used later, but the bulk of it was carried below.

  Tarpaulins were used to build a roof over each ship, turning their decks into giant tents, further protecting them from the winter winds and outside temperatures.

  Three weeks after their arrival at Beechey, these sheets were finally secured in position, cutting out a great deal of the already fading light from the holds. Foresails were set to maintain a steady draught below. Ridge poles were nailed into place between the masts, and guy-ropes thrown over the new canvas roofs to hold them down. To secure the tarpaulins even further, cases and barrels were laid end to end a
long their lower edges, keeping them taut. These stores were carefully selected: exposed in this manner they would freeze solid within hours once the temperature fell. Kegs of salted meat and vegetables provided the best anchors; all liquids and foodstuffs preserved in brine were kept below and unfrozen.

  The work ashore continued apace with the preparation of the ships. The blacksmiths built their forge on the beach and performed all their repairs there.

  Several crude dwellings were constructed in the lee of the cliff, but it was never Franklin’s intention that these should be occupied in preference to the ships. They were intended only as storerooms and as shelters for the men working ashore. Many hundredweights of canned goods had already been transferred and it was vital that these be afforded some protection against the elements if they were to remain retrievable. It was a great source of pride to Franklin that his expedition was the first to take such quantities of foodstuffs preserved and packaged in this manner. Their barrels of lemon juice and other antiscorbutics remained on board, with only a small emergency cache being transferred to the farthest of the shelters.

  Determined to spend their first winter in as orderly a fashion as possible, Franklin ordered that a broad depression on the beach should be used as a rubbish dump, into which all their waste, consisting largely of opened and discarded cans, was to be thrown. A collection and disposal detail was organized, usually reserved as a punishment, whereby a party of four men would collect the refuse from both ships, transport it to the shore on sledges and then haul it to the depression. Later, when it became apparent that this dump might offer temptation to bears looking to fatten up before hibernation, an armed man was added to each detail. As an additional precaution, at least two armed marines were posted on the shore whenever there were others working there.

  “Coryphaena hippurus,” Harry Goodsir said, holding up the small watercolor upon which he had been working as Fitzjames knocked on the open door of his cabin. “The common dolphin. Having completed my treatise upon the narwhal, I have chosen hippurus as my next object of study.”

  “And after that?” said Fitzjames, amused and intrigued by the way in which the assistant surgeon’s mind worked, leaping from one subject to another as though nothing in the natural world were beyond its eventual understanding. It was not the way his own mind worked: he preferred not to concern himself with things which held little interest or relevance for him, choosing instead to consolidate what he did know until he was certain that there was nothing left to surprise or confuse him regarding those few and relevant subjects.

  Goodsir was on leave from the Museum of Natural History in Edinburgh where, at the age of twenty-one, he had been appointed its youngest ever curator, having entered university there at fifteen, and having gained his degree four years later. After this he had traveled and studied and written. Upon receiving his appointment in Edinburgh, he had not left the city for three years, and then he had read the works of Scoresby and others on the potential of the Arctic whale fisheries and had found himself drawn to the ice.

  Given sufficient time and opportunity, he believed, he would produce the fullest account yet of the natural history of that region.

  In addition to his duties alongside Surgeon Stanley, Goodsir spent at least three hours a day writing up his journals, and as much time again in meticulously drawing and painting the specimens he collected. He professed to require no more than four hours’ sleep each night, and he frequently stayed up working until two and three in the morning, slept and was then back at his crowded desk by six or seven, his face blackened by the soot from his lamps.

  “A very intelligent creature, James,” he said, laying the painting on his desk. “As clever, I would imagine, as you or I.”

  “Surely not as clever as you,” Fitzjames said.

  Goodsir thought about this for a moment. “Perhaps you’re right.” He looked at his painting, shook his head at some slight imperfection and then slid it inside a bulging folder.

  The walls of his cabin were lined with narrow shelves, each with its restraining bar to prevent the books, bottles, jars, rocks and bones upon them from falling off each time the Erebus sailed in a heavy sea. He had also painted a map of their possible route on the low ceiling, a confusing tangle of solid, dashed and dotted lines until one lay in his bunk and looked directly up at it from below.

  Fitzjames moved a microscope from a chair and sat down. He filled a pipe and handed his tobacco to Goodsir, who selected a pipe of his own from a rack of thirty by his side.

  They had encountered a school of dolphins on their crossing from Orkney to Rona and it was then that Goodsir had chosen to study them. They had appeared in a school of several hundred, surfacing simultaneously and perfectly synchronized in their movements, slicing the water close to both ships.

  Gore, upon hearing Goodsir declare that he would begin his study of the creatures that same evening, had offered a reward of a guinea to the first man to spear and bring aboard a healthy specimen, and he presented Goodsir with two less than an hour later.

  “They communicate, James, did you know that? I’m not the first to remark on it. They know fear and they know pleasure—the two essential constancies in any life, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Fitzjames nodded, knowing that it would be pointless to argue now that Goodsir himself was convinced of this fact.

  Goodsir then searched among the clutter of his desk and picked up a jar. He unscrewed its cap, took out a piece of whatever was inside, and ate it. He passed the bottle to Fitzjames, inviting him to do the same. “Pickled mango,” he said, licking his fingers. “Mango in oil and mustard seed. I picked the fruit myself three years ago.” Fitzjames sniffed the contents and declined. Goodsir stood the jar on a shelf beside another in which a small white snake lay coiled in its preserving fluid like a slender root.

  “There were some narwhal horns in Whalefish,” Fitzjames remarked.

  “So I saw. A great pity that they had been carved by such incompetent craftsmen. I would have bought a dozen specimens for the Museum but for the crude and ugly figures and acts that had been scratched upon them in the hope of enhancing their appeal.”

  A year earlier, determined to understand the effectiveness of the various acknowledged antiscorbutics, Goodsir had lived for a week at a time upon a diet of each, keeping an hourly record of how he felt, of how well his hair and nails grew, of changes in the texture and color of his skin, of his appetite and eyesight, his bladder and bowel movements. His methods and conclusions were criticized, but nothing that was said to him convinced him that he had been wrong to conduct the experiments. It was why he now ate mango pickled in oil and mustard seed, and why he insisted upon eating his own raw pickled offals in preference to the boiled meat and vegetables supplied by the Admiralty.

  “I shall work until we sail,” he said, removing his reading glasses and rubbing his eyes. Looking up at Fitzjames, he said, “I’m boring you.”

  Fitzjames denied this.

  “Nevertheless, one man’s passions are another’s—what?”

  Fitzjames, too, could think of no immediate comparison.

  “A long day,” Goodsir said. “Blunt wits. Our passions can save.” He pulled open a drawer in his desk. “Except this one.”

  From the drawer he took out a chess board upon which the pieces were already positioned, held in place by pegs. The game was already well advanced, having so far lasted six days. When time was short or they were too tired to play they set a limit of six moves apiece. Tonight they decided on a dozen.

  Fitzjames picked up his surviving knight, and knew immediately from his friend’s pursed lips that he had made his first mistake of the evening.

  EIGHT

  The first of the encroaching ice entered the bay three weeks later. It was a small piece, no larger than one of their boats, but its unobstructed arrival in their sheltered harbor convinced them all that more was soon to follow.

  “See how it hesitates,” Vesconte said to Fitzjames as the two men w
atched it approach the shore close to where they were moored. “Almost as though it had entered by mistake and is now uncertain of what to do. A drawing-room, perhaps, a dozen hushed voices at its unannounced and unwelcome appearance.”

  “Row out and make it welcome,” Fitzjames suggested.

  “Why exert ourselves? Soon it will run aground, either to thaw in the sun or to lock on to the land and sit out the winter in precisely the same manner as ourselves.”

  It occasionally occurred to Fitzjames that Vesconte might only have been repeating the words of some character he had encountered in one of the endless novels he read. They had with them a combined library of over eight thousand volumes, dozens of which might at any time be found in the surveyor’s cabin. He professed to prefer reading a single page of twenty books at a sitting rather than twenty pages of any one title, and would frequently pull a book from one of his pockets during an idle moment, however short.

  At his reference to the sun, Fitzjames turned to see where it hung in the sky above them. Each morning and afternoon he marked the position of its rising and setting. It had long since been losing its light and warmth and would soon be lost to them entirely as the Arctic night announced itself with its first full span of darkness, when the only natural light available to them would be the cold hard glare of the moon. Even in the short time since their arrival the sun was circling considerably lower in the sky, and would soon barely clear the outline of Beechey, rolling across the horizon in a cooling ball, ready to plunge into and be extinguished by the frozen sea.

  The small floe-piece ran aground only a few yards from the Erebus’ bow, and upon being joined by Goodsir, who was keen to collect samples from this advance guard, Fitzjames and Vesconte rowed ashore to inspect it.