The Discovery Of Slowness (18 page)

John was silent, perplexed, and began to suspect something.

‘He knows you. He read what you wrote about Flinders's compass. And Sir John Barrow, the first secretary of the Admiralty …'

‘What's the meaning of this?' John asked hoarsely.

Mr Roget hesitated. ‘Actually, Sir Joseph wanted to tell you himself. You … will take command of a ship in Deptford and go to the North Pole.'

T
he
expedition. Everyone in Deptford knew what that meant. It consisted of the copper-sheathed brigs
Dorothea
and
Trent
, which were being loaded with everything needed at the North Pole.

‘Above all, leather jackets and fur coats,' the furriers hoped.

‘Action books,' said a bookseller. ‘It's very dull there.'

‘Audacious men,' surmised the ladies of London society, and let themselves be driven there by coach to sightsee.

Everybody insisted on knowing the precise orders received by the expedition. One person wanted to hear about it directly from the Admiralty, another from Captain Buchan, commander of the enterprise. Some cited Lieutenant Franklin, captain of the
Trent
. Others doubted it: ‘Franklin? He never says anything.'

‘A slow captain. That sort of thing won't wash,' Midshipman George Back announced. ‘How will it be when we're on the high seas?'

Andrew Reid looked at his friend with admiration and contradicted him only to continue the conversation. ‘But the chickens disappeared from on board fast enough, George.'

‘That'll prove to have been a mistake. Hens are fresh meat. But that's not the least of it. Whenever he speaks there's first of all a pause. How can anyone like that give orders?'

They were newly out of nautical school and knew exactly what had to be done. Back already had a nickname for Franklin: ‘Cap'n Handicap'.

The first night on board John had a fever and shivered. In his half-sleep he heard countless voices conveying incomprehensible
messages, demanding decisions, and criticising something he had supposedly ordered. He tossed back and forth, ground his teeth in his dreams, and sweated through his blanket. In the morning his neck muscles were aching and he padded out of his cabin with a crick in his neck.

Fear it was, nothing but fear, yet hard to conquer. Closemouthed, he went through the entire ship, returned salutes, accepted reports, and tried to transform himself from a member of the Horncastle Reading Society into a captain. He recognised this from before: fear of not being able to understand everything, of no longer being able to do things very well yet of not being able to defend himself if he was simply passed over. Fear that no one could adjust to his pace and that in trying to adjust to the pace of others he would fail miserably.

The
Trent
gauged only 250 tons, but at the moment she seemed to him more gigantic and incomprehensible than his very first ship, that merchantman on the voyage to Lisbon eighteen years ago. This kind of fear was familiar. So far it had been dispelled by his habit of wanting to see everything through to the end, with or without luck. But now another fear was added: if he were to fall deathly ill now, or go down, or be replaced, he would have waited and struggled in vain for years.

The strength, calm and confidence he had found on the
Bedford
after the battle of New Orleans seemed to have gone into hiding – in any case, this state could not be recalled on command. He also lacked mystique: a scar whose history nobody knew didn't help any more.

A good antidote to fear was – learning. To begin with, John learned the instructions of the Admiralty.

The North Pole was not the primary destination of their voyage but merely one of several way stations, of interest to the Crown only insofar as it might be located in an open sea through which one could sail to the Pacific. A whaler had reported that the ice-fields in the extreme north tended to break up. Secretary Barrow had hoped for this information. He announced immediately that he and a man named Franklin
had always believed in an open polar sea. The expedition, at first mildly ridiculed, now seemed extremely important to everyone.

The
Dorothea
and the
Trent
were to sail through the opening between Spitsbergen and Greenland, then cross over the North Pole to the Bering Strait, and call at the port of Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka peninsula, where Cook had landed in his day. From there, duplicates of logbooks, travel notes, and charts were to be sent to England by land, while the ships would continue to the Sandwich Islands to spend the winter, returning to England the following spring, preferably once again across the North Pole.

A second expedition was to find a way to the Pacific along the rim of the North American continent. But it was believed that this route was more problematical.

How interested these politicians and merchants were. John put his papers down on the cabin table and spun them round with his fingers. Excitement pulsed in his throat. From the North Pole on, everything would be new; you just had to get there.

He also learned his ship by heart, memorising whatever leeway figures he could lay his hands on. He checked the calculations of anything that had to be calculated: weight of the load in relation to total weight, trimming, sail area, draught. He had already hit upon the first detail: the
Trent
's draught seemed to increase more rapidly than could be accounted for by the daily increase of the load. He calculated it once more precisely, then called in Lieutenant Beechey, his first officer. Beginning immediately, he wanted a report from every watch as to how deep the ship lay in the water and how deep the water was in the bilge.

Did the lieutenant notice John's insecurity and disquiet? But Beechey was tactful. When their eyes met, he turned away, blinking. When listening, he seemed to examine the condition of the deck; when talking, he would scan the horizon with his eyes narrow slits, his lashes white. His face betrayed nothing more than a kind of ill-tempered guardedness, and he never spoke one word too many.

So John's calculations were correct. The
Trent
had a leak. It
did not seem to be big, but the trouble was it couldn't be found. The water flowed into the hold, but where it came from could not be determined. They kept on looking. They hadn't yet left the port and the pumps were already making their noise. But John felt strangely relieved: a leak was at least a real worry.

The commander of the expedition apparently believed that John was a protégé of the secretary of the Admiralty. David Buchan, a red-faced, impatient man, never wanted to listen for any length of time and above all didn't want to postpone their departure because of a leak.

‘Are you serious? You have a leak but can't find it? Are we supposed to wait till the polar summer is over again? Let your men pump for a few weeks; they'll notice soon enough where the water comes from.'

Buchan's rudeness only made John calmer. Now he had a concrete adversary; that helped and was comforting. ‘Sir, of course I'll go to the polar sea, even with a leak.'

That sounded so self-assured and cutting that Buchan became a little insecure: ‘If the topic isn't exhausted by the time we get to the Shetlands we'll take the
Trent
out of the water and look at it from the outside.'

25 April 1818, was the day of departure. The pier was bright with faces. Eleanor Porden turned up to wish an astonished John lots of good luck, slipping him a lengthy poem at the end of which the North Pole itself, speaking directly, declared itself conquered. John knew now: she really liked him. She even admired the long ice-saws and the equipment with which seawater was supposed to be desalinated. She was enthusiastic about research, mesmerism and electrical phenomena, and she implored John to observe whether there was a particularly high degree of magnetism in the air in the polar region and how this affected sympathies among people. When saying goodbye she fell twittering on his neck. With the best of will John could do no other than to reach round her waist. If only he didn't always hold on to everything so long. He sensed that he ran the danger of being obvious to her and to others, and so he hurriedly withdrew into important
calculations about the expedition's course. Then they cast off. Daffodils were blooming. Even as a thin line in the distance, the shore was aglow with yellow.

The water poured in more voluminously every day, and there were not enough men. For a full crew the
Trent
lacked exactly one-sixth of her regular complement. Every man spent half his watch at the pumps.

In Lerwick, despite all his efforts John found neither the leak nor any volunteers to reinforce the crew. The people of the Shetlands lived off seafaring and whaling, and they knew well what it meant when a ship, reeling in shallow water, is looked over inch by inch. When they were told that only the copper plates were being fastened more securely, they laughed, embarrassed. Nobody wanted to be hired aboard a leaking ship. John began earnestly to fear that this invisible hole in the hull would cheat him of the North Pole.

Buchan thought of replacing the missing sailors by pressing men into service. But since this was now illegal he said to John, ‘I'll leave it to you, Mr Franklin.'

When John was alone with his first officer, Beechey scanned the horizon with his grey eyes and remarked, ‘The crew will stick it out. It's a good crew. Three or four forced men who don't share their mood are worse than none at all.'

‘Thank you,' John mumbled, perplexed.

The good thing about Beechey was that he spoke his mind when it was needed.

Seaman Spink, from Grimsby, knew how to tell more stories than three village oaks put together, and he had knocked about a good bit. At the age of twelve he had been pressed into service for a while. He had sailed on the little ship
Pickle
under Lapenotie ‘re, was taken prisoner by the French, had broken out, and, in the company of a man named Hewson, had fled across Europe to Trieste. He told of an Alsatian cobbler whose boots lengthened one's steps so that with them one could march almost twice as fast as a Frenchman could run. He told of the peasant women
in the Black Forest, who could hide two or three escapers from Bonaparte under their wide Sunday skirts. And in Bavaria they had rowed across the stormy Chiemsee in a boat with only one oar. Then, in a fishing village on the eastern shore, they had consumed a tender roast with a wondrous dumpling that allowed them to march on for a fortnight without a pause or a morsel of food, as true as his name was Spink.

They all rushed on deck: a narwhal had been sighted. His horn stuck out distinctly. That was a bad sign. There was only one thing worse: when the ship's bell started ringing on its own. But that never happened, or it could never be told because soon thereafter the ship would sink with mouse and man.

It was not mentioned again. After all, in the open polar sea beyond the ice barrier, completely different creatures of gigantic dimensions awaited them. The Admiralty even thought that after the pack-ice had melted these creatures might penetrate southward to the Atlantic trade routes and devour a ship or two. Even if nobody in the
Trent
's crew was superstitious, nobody could be entirely without fear.

There was not a soul on board who was rebellious or lazy. John had prepared himself for the fact that sooner or later he would have to order his first punishment, but so far that sort of thing was not in sight. For some time now every commanding officer had had to keep a Logbook of Punishments. John opened his book every evening and wrote in it, ‘No infractions of rules today.'

He could not make head or tail of George Back, or rather, as far as Back was concerned, he did not know his own mind. There remained a shyness, an awkwardness, a guardedness. This could not be explained in official terms alone. John put it out of his mind. It was better not to understand Back at all than to misunderstand him. Back might possibly save his life someday. Instincts were good, but only when expressed clearly.

A slight guardedness remained.

He now had the courage to request that statements be repeated,- that impatience not be allowed, that his own pace be imposed on others for the good of all: ‘I'm slow. Please adjust accordingly.' Back clearly heard this remark delivered in a perfectly friendly tone, and his subsequent reports were relayed distinctly. Man overboard, Fire in the ship? No reason to swallow entire syllables. It was most important that the captain understood where, what and when. Confusion was more dangerous than any emergency, and the captain's confusion was the most dangerous kind. They all learned that.

Endurance. John needed no sleep. He practised phrases and words as he had as a ship's boy. The way orders should begin: for example, Mr Beechey, please be so good as to let …; Mr Back, would you be so kind as to … Kirby, see to it at once that …

He again thought about the fixed look. It was and remained dangerous. But when this look was not part of war service and was used only rarely, it no longer determined a slave's speed but rather represented the power to act instantly exercised by a good commander who usually relied more on the study of details and on dreaming. Slowness became honourable; speed became the servant. The large overview was not a good view, for it overlooked too much. Presence of mind, raised to a law, created neither a present moment nor a specific point of view. John opted for absent-mindedness and was sure of himself. He thought of devising a system by which one could live and lead ships as well.

Perhaps a new era would begin with him, John Franklin? Seventy-four degrees, 25 minutes. They had reached the latitude of Bear Island.

Beyond latitude 75 degrees north it began to snow. John sniffed outside his cabin door and looked at the quarterdeck covered with white powder. It had smelled exactly like this when he had seen snow for the first time. He looked around furtively, then dared to go outside and began to do an ungainly bear dance in order to see whether his feet left imprints. He felt so young that he had to think about it: perhaps it was real.
How do I know, then, he wondered, that I'm over thirty just like the others? If I'm slow like a clock, it takes longer, too, for me to run down. So perhaps I'm only twenty. Abruptly he ended his bear dance, because Midshipman Back was staring at him from the mainyard, seriously, almost as though admonishing him. John wanted to ignore him but couldn't help looking at his own footprints through Back's eyes and calling to mind his own movements. He had to laugh, and he looked at Back again.