The Ice Child (26 page)

Just once.

The team left the ships on Monday, May 24, 1847.

Lieutenant Gore. Mr. DesVoeux, and six other men from
Erebus
.

Gus watched them go. He was angry that all the men were from Sir John’s ship—angry that no one on
Terror
had even been given the choice. He would have liked to be with them, the handpicked few who were loaded down with two sledges packed with provisions. The natives had dog teams, but the ships had no dogs, and so the men pulled.

Of course, Sir John had chosen the toughest of the crew, the biggest. Gus had to bear the disappointment. The humiliation. He was five feet eight inches tall—taller than some—but he was thin. He knew that. Too thin to pull a sledge for long. Too thin, really, to walk a great distance. He had clenched his fists and watched them walking away, the men’s bodies seeming further thickset by their clothing—cloth trousers, wool, shirts and jackets, wool coats, and their cleated shoes topped with fishermen’s boots of waterproof canvas.

The runners of the sledges had been burnished to make them slide better. On board they carried calico tents and poles, blanket sleeping bags, food, cans of spirit fuel, rum, cooking utensils, axes, shotguns, and powder and shot. And Goldner’s cans. On search parties and treks each man was assigned much more than the shipboard ration. They needed it. Walking in such conditions drained the muscles, thinned the blood, sapped the strength, drenched, and froze, and pounded them. And it was not only walking, but climbing too: breaching the rubble ice, piled haphazardly in all possible directions, like tumbled toy blocks that could be twenty or thirty feet high. In less than ten minutes the crew on
Terror
saw the men make the first climb of many: slithering back as often as they lurched forward, the little black dots that were their comrades ascended an ice wall. It took more than an hour before they vanished over the other side.

They waited for them as patiently as they could.

“They’ll not cover more than two miles a day,” it was said. “If they are lucky.” Gus reckoned on his fingers that that meant they would be gone twenty days. Perhaps thirty. A month.

A month would bring them to June. Surely in June there would be some little sign of the ice cracking. Gore would come back, perhaps to say that there was a wider severing of the ice hold just a little farther south. Maybe it would only be a mile from where they were now. Maybe two. And if there was a thaw this year, as there had not been last year, then with a little luck they might be able to break through.

It was a persistent theme, a kind of permanent hymn in Gus’s mind. It was surely such an ironic fate, to be lashed to an unyielding, barely moving floe here, when only a few miles north or few miles south there could be clear water. Crozier, talking to the men one evening, had smiled when they had asked him the same question—where the ice would be yielding—for the fiftieth time.

“No man knows the answer to that,” he said, affecting an almost cheerful countenance. “But I can tell you this, lads. There had never been known to be ice like this here. Never, in all the conversations I have had with the natives.”

“No natives have come close to the ship,” one man piped up. “Don’t you think that’s peculiar, Captain?”

Crozier had nodded slowly. “It is strange,” he said. “But if the Esquimaux cannot fish—and the ice is too thick to fish, and there are no seal—then they won’t come here.”

“But we’ve heard them passing, across the strait. Heard their dogs.”

“Yes,” Crozier agreed. “And take heart from that. For they must be passing to some hunting ground that is within a walking distance. We may not have found it yet, with all our treks to north and south,” he added, naming their anxious expeditions from the ships over the last year, which had been so fruitless—“but it is only a matter of time. It is a bad season, a bad year. That is all.”

“Why don’t they come to us, as they come to the whalefish ports?” another demanded.

Crozier had shaken his head. “They are not used to seeing ships here,” he said.

“They think we are dead men,” a third muttered, so low that Crozier did not hear. “They daren’t come. We are bad luck. They’re afraid of us.”

There was silence after that speech.

Each man wondered at the strength of the Esquimaux. They seemed like ghosts themselves, in the way that they could survive in this place. Inhabitants from some other, immaterial sphere, who materialized and vanished at will. Whenever some of the crew went out from the ships, the effort of the walk alone taxed them beyond measure, drove them to their knees by nightfall. If it were not the wind that so decimated and exhausted them, then it was the snow, whose color, in fine weather, blinded them, despite the mesh goggles they were given. And even in sun or bright light the cold was still agonizing, piercing the lungs as a man drew breath. And the struggles to set up camp were so slow, and the thirst so terrible. How did these people survive, these hunters in their animal skins, with their tattooed faces? How could they survive, when an Englishman, with all his wealth and idealism, could not?

After that night Gus wondered a lot what the Esquimaux thought when they saw the great ships marooned here. Over on low far stretches of the ice, where they traveled with their dogs, how did they regard the masts and hulls? What did they think they were? They must know, surely, that they were ships. And, if they were ships, then there were men on those ships. But, he thought, curling into a ball in his sleeping canvas at night, perhaps the Esquimaux didn’t believe they were men like them. Perhaps, just as he was tempted to believe that the Esquimaux were ghosts, they, in their turn, thought that he was a bad spirit, come to haunt them.

Dead men
.

He tried not to think of it. Instead, he fixed his mind on Lieutenant Gore, and imagined what mountains he might be climbing, and put himself in the officer’s shoes, and willed him on.

On June 8—Gore had been gone fifteen days—word came from
Erebus
that Franklin was not well. The men were not too concerned, because ever since the attack when they ground to a halt in the strait, Franklin had rarely been seen on deck. He would come up for the religious services, wrapped in his great fur coat and full uniform, attended by his stewards and officers, and he would read out the lessons. But he was not the man that he had been eighteen months before. He had shrunk a little, Gus thought, as if the apoplexy had taken a part of him away, and actually shortened him. One hand would tremble sometimes; once Franklin took a long time ascending the steps.

His stewards rallied around him like housemaids. Nothing was too much trouble. They served him his four-course meals twice a day; they laid the cloths and shined the cutlery, and gave him hot water and soap to wash, and brushed down his clothes, and kept his cabin warm. And so, when he first fell ill, everyone thought it was a passing infection that would be cleared.

If Gus, or any of the crew, could have seen what was happening in Franklin’s quarters, they would have been less confident.

The captain had dined as usual on the night of June 7. He had been served soup, pickles, and meat with vegetables, raisins, and a little cheese. Of course, the meat was tremendously salty, and the potatoes bland, and there was an unpleasant taste of grit—which some of the officers privately believed must come from the vegetables’ not having been washed properly before being canned—and the cheese was terribly poor and hard, but it was a full meal. Franklin had consumed everything, had a glass of Scotch ale, and retired to his bed.

It was early in the morning, before the usual hour of rising for him, that Franklin called the surgeons. He told Stephen Stanley and Harry Goodsir that he had stomach cramps, and they administered dogwood bitters. Half an hour later Franklin took brandy, and all was quiet for the morning.

Yet that night Franklin did not take dinner at all. He complained to Stanley that he could not feel one side of his face. Opium was given, to help the captain sleep, and he took a little Goldner soup and tinned tapioca.

Then, all hell broke loose during the night. On
Terror
the first that was known of it was that Crozier, and Lieutenant Little, and Lieutenant Hodgson, and John Peddie, were called to
Erebus
. It was three in the morning. Torches were lit to guide the small party across the ice, under skies that fluctuated with an opal green light and trails of luminous high cloud. At four Mr. MacDonald was sent for, and John Diggle, the ship’s cook. Diggle went across to
Erebus
with a face paler than the snow, not understanding why he had been called, and afraid of the silence on
Erebus
, and the tense line of men who met him there when he had climbed to the deck.

It was said that Mr. Stanley had prescribed both calomel and tincture of lobelia, and Rochelle salts and Peruvian wine of coca, which some men called cocaine. But nothing had the least effect.

Then, at five in the morning, Sir John sat upright in his bunk, with one hand fisted against his chest. And he died like that, without any sound, without a murmur of complaint. It was over in a matter of seconds. His personal steward, Edmund Hoar, fell to his knees and began to weep, and had to be half lifted, and half dragged, from the room.

At first no one knew what to do.

No senior officer had ever died on an Arctic expedition. No officer was ever expected to. Their lives were so different from those of the men—they were so protected from the ravages of temperature and diet that the crew underwent as a matter of course—that, while an officer or a captain might suffer, he would not be exposed to the infections and exhaustions of his men. The deaths of Torrington and the others, while a blow, had not been a shock. To the officers the Torringtons of this world, while acknowledged as good men and true—gallant even, in their way—were fodder to the great machine. They came from backgrounds utterly different from those of the officers; they lived in a perpetual state of uncleanness, and many did not even know what it was to bathe. Occasionally, when some seaman was enlisted in port, the other men would have to teach him to shave and cut his fingernails. They came from cities where regular waves of typhoid or cholera routinely wiped out thousands, and where sewage floated in the streets and rivers, and they lived in stinking tenements where there might be a hundred in four or five stories of rough-planked, bare-bricked holes in the wall that could not be called living spaces. More often they were dying spaces, the children dying quicker—much quicker—than the parents.

That the ships had only lost three men from disease so far was a testimony to the way that the
Erebus
and
Terror
were kept clean. Even with their cramped, smoky, and tar-smelling quarters, most of the crew were far better off than they had ever been on shore.

But for officers it was an entirely different matter. These were men raised in comfort and kept apart from their working class fellows. That pattern was repeated on the ships. No crewman—or very few—had ever seen an officer’s cabin. The closest they came to officers was to see them on deck, on the bridge. The fact that Augustus had even spoken to officers—MacDonald and Crozier—was considered a fine rarity, condescension to the boy’s age. It was not normal to, not even welcomed by, officer or man.

And so, when Franklin died, there was, for several hours on end, a vacuum on the ships. No routine was in place for storage of the body, for instance. It was plain that Sir John could not be stowed below, as had happened to Braine for a while. The rats would eat him. Yet the surgeons, fearing what had killed him, did not want him kept in the cabin. Eventually it was decided to bury their commander that day, at midday, out on the ice.

But worse still than the helplessness of not knowing what to do with a commander’s body was the fear of what had killed him.

As the officers gathered in the great cabin of
Erebus
, surrounded by the lockers filled with a library of over a thousand books, the controversy raged.

“It is not the cans,” Lieutenant Fairholme insisted. “How may it be Goldner’s provisions? We have been eating them for months. We are all alive.”

“It is something in the cans,” Crozier said softly.

“We took two cases out onto Beechey,” Fitzjames pointed out. “But for the few soup that had putrefied, none of the others had a concave appearance. We wasted a whole stock there, piercing and emptying them on your suggestion.”

“There is something wrong with the cans,” Crozier repeated.

“But what?”

Crozier sat staring at his feet. He was terribly aware of Franklin, laid out for burial, in the next cabin, only a few inches away through the thin partition.

“Sir John died of heart failure,” Fitzjames continued. And he looked at Stephen Stanley.

Stanley, the senior surgeon of
Erebus
, was a London man born and bred. He had known all the illnesses contingent upon so large a city—all those epidemics that the crew knew so well. He had trained at the Royal College of Surgeons and obtained their diploma in 1838, and there was little he had not seen, either in the primitive operating theaters of the city, or on ship. He had served in the Chinese war on HMS
Cornwallis
, and he had even specialized, and published an account of a rare spinal condition, a case where a complete dislocation of the fifth and sixth vertebrae was observed without any accompanying fracture.

But for all his experience Stanley had not seen a case like Sir John’s.

He had dimly heard of something like it, however.

“Sir John did die of heart failure,” he agreed, slowly. “Of a congestion of the heart already present from his first attack last year.…”

“But?” Crozier prompted. They had all heard the hesitation in Stanley’s voice.

“But the intestinal cramping which went before,” he said. “And the paralysis …”

“Botulism,” Goodsir said. It was such a quiet remark that it might have been missed, if Stanley had not nodded his agreement.

“Botulism?” Crozier repeated. “What is that?”

“We don’t know the cause,” Stanley said. “But it is a fast-acting poison, and they say it is caused by eating preserved meat.”