The Ice Child (37 page)

She put the chances at twenty million to one.

Give or take a million or two.

Twenty-nine

April 27, 1848. Maundy Thursday.

Crozier stood alone on the ice.

A hundred yards from the ships he looked at them with a full heart. They said that sailors were married to the sea, and their ships, and it was true for him. Whether that made him more of a sailor or less of a man, he could not guess. But his whole soul was welded to his vessel, whose back had still not been broken by the hurricanes that winter.

His fate had been tied to the
Terror
for nine years. He had seen two ice continents in her. He had crossed thousands of miles in her. He had sailed to the Antarctic in her under the command of Sir James Clark Ross. He knew her better than any man alive. Her shape and sound, her abilities and strengths. The rock-hard, stubborn feel of her. She was his, his partner, his pride.

And despite the assault on her by the storms, she was still a fine girl. Standing at a slight angle in the ice, she had keeled over only a little, and closing his eyes, he might imagine that she was tilted in some seagoing breeze, rounding a shoreline, making out of harbor for an open sea. And she had traveled, even in the last winter. By his own calculations both
Erebus
and
Terror
had, in fact, traveled nineteen miles south, carried by the ice drift. A little progress, but not enough. Not enough by a hundred miles.

He wondered how long the ships would stand.

They might be broken up tomorrow by the weather or the ice. Or they might drift for years, if the ice did not break up. At nine and a half miles a year it was conceivable that, in ten years or more, these two extraordinary giants might even break free and be washed out into the straits that flowed westward. Crozier wondered if that would happen. He wondered how
Terror
would fare, unmanned, unmasted. A ghost ship riding the unmapped ocean. He wondered if she would find the Northwest Passage alone, without him.

Without any of them.

Because, no matter how much she meant to him, and how much married he was to her, he had to leave
Terror
now.

He looked down at his hands. It was a mild day, only ten degrees below freezing, and he had ventured to remove his gloves. Out here in the bright light of the day he could see more clearly. He lifted his hands closer to his face and turned them over, palm upward. The bruises had even begun on the fleshy mounds of his palm and around the fingernail of his thumb. His skin was ochre pale, splattered with pigment like an old man’s. On his wrist, thread veins. On his knuckles, lesions. Cuts that were neither cold sores nor injuries, but a curious, creeping disintegration.

He put the gloves back on, carefully, slowly, allowing the truth of their situation to come to the front of his mind. He had pushed it away for months. He had pushed it away even in the last few weeks, when he had ordered stores to be ferried from the ships to the shore, because he was afraid that the terrible storms might break up the vessels. Even in the last few hours, after he had given orders for the men to pack their belongings, he had actually pushed the real facts away.

And the truth was that they were dying. Even the best of them. Even the marines. Even the ice masters. Even him.

The worst of the scurvy had started last year. He didn’t know—no one knew, not even the doctors—exactly what it was that caused it to appear. That it was something to do with diet they knew, and that fresh meat and the daily ration of lemon juice could keep it at bay. But what exactly—what chemical, what deficiency—was the culprit, they had no idea.

Scurvy was feared, but expected. When a man became tired, and he bled under the skin, and his gums became swollen, and his teeth became loose, sailors recognized it for what it was. The sufferers would become breathless on the slightest exertion; they could not concentrate even on routine tasks. Mental work—the writing of a journal, the making of calculations—became mountains to climb, whose impossible gradients sharpened by the day. Crozier knew that his own mind wandered. Often he could hardly form words to complete sentences; he found himself clumsy, even about clothing himself, or washing. He could not finish a chapter in the books he loved. He was irritable with everyone. And whatever he suffered, it was multiplied a hundredfold around him, in every face.

There was one surefire way to combat scurvy, and that was to provide antiscorbutics. Lemon juice. Both
Erebus
and
Terror
had come equipped with plenty, packed into kegs, measured by pounds. There had been over four and a half thousand pounds of lemon juice on both ships, and they still had three months’ supply left. But Crozier was sure that it had lost whatever qualities it once had to prevent the disease. They still issued the lemon—four days’ lemon juice and three days’ vinegar—but its effect wasn’t as it should be. It had been frozen and unfrozen perhaps a dozen times. Maybe that was it. Maybe the freezing did something to it. He didn’t know.

He looked up and saw Fitzjames coming toward him across the ice.

He looked hard at the slow progress of his second-in-command. Fitzjames had once been called the handsomest man in the navy. Once tall, dark, striking, he seemed to have shrunk a little now. His shoulders were hunched, his steps sluggish. And as he drew close to Crozier, no man alive could describe his face as handsome.

Fitzjames had suffered in the last few weeks. He had had pneumonia. The surgeons claimed that they had eradicated it, but Crozier was not so sure. You could hear Fitzjames breathing from yards away—rattling ominously.

“What are the results?” Crozier asked.

He had that morning asked Fitzjames and William Rhodes, one of the quartermasters, to check the remaining supplies.

“Not good,” Fitzjames told him. He coughed, frowned. “We have ten days of coal.”

“For steam.”

“Yes.”

“And for cooking?”

“It might last the summer.”

Crozier beat his fist impotently against his hip.

Today was the first calm day in four weeks. For the last month they had been in the grip of one relentless storm after the other. The sun that they so longed for had hardly been seen. No one had got out to fix traps. Only a handful of men had managed—and then at a cost of one man’s life—to cut holes in the ice to get fish. The fury of the gales had been demonic, unbelievable. And so, at the very season when they ought to have used less fuel and less canned food, they had run through their supplies at double rate.

They had only ever been equipped for three years. And the three years were finished on May 19.

Scurvy had arrived in earnest in January. Since then twenty-three men had died of it. Their deaths were prolonged, their battles heroic. But finally they lay down and gave in to an inexhaustible foe. Two succumbed in their sleep, four of consumption, eight others of pneumonia. And the rest—nine men, shadows of their former selves—died hallucinating, weeping, and rigid with seizure.

In their deaths Crozier was haunted by the same recurrent idea. There was something else on the ships. Something besides the deadly botulin, whose very name he loathed. There
was
something else, he knew. Something to do with the tins. The deaths were harder and quicker than on any other ship he had known; the cases of tuberculosis were quicker too. The pallid look of the men, even those not reported sick, was unnerving. And the arguments, and imagined slights, and the stories they told each other—it was not the same. It was just not the same as other ships.

Trying to shake himself free of what he constantly feared was delusion—another sign of the sickness—he knew that there was no time to lose. They could not stay on board the ships. No fuel and little food. Their only hope was the fresh meat that lay to the south of them. They would leave, and outrun the ghosts. They would turn their backs on their only security before it became their tomb.

“That’s not all,” Fitzjames said. “It’s not the worst.”

Crozier glanced up at him. “Not all?” he repeated. “What do you mean?”

“We inspected every last carton,” Fitzjames said. “We have taken out the very bottom shipment, the first of Goldner’s that came in.”

“And?”

“There are blown cans in every case,” Fitzjames said. “Meat.”

They stared at each other.

“How many?” Crozier asked.

“Ninety-one six-pound tins.”

“Dear God,” Crozier muttered. “How many have we left?”

“Eighty-two tins of meat and a hundred soup.”

Crozier stared back at the ships. At half rations that meant they had barely enough food for seven weeks. Seven weeks took them to the end of June. Last year nothing had moved here in June. Not a single fracture of the ice. They could not afford to take that gamble again.

He had to take his men to wherever the ice might thaw. Not north, not west; there would be hundreds of miles to traverse before they reached open water. South. It was the only direction. They would go where the ships could not go, toward the passage that Gore claimed to have seen, or guessed at, in his final journey.

He looked at Fitzjames. “I am sorry, James,” he said.

Fitzjames gazed back at him. There was no need to spell it out. He knew what Crozier knew. The waiting was over, and the march must begin. But not a flicker of emotion passed over the younger man’s face. He had had difficulty even negotiating the hundred yards between them and the ships. His face was livid with sores, especially at his mouth. The ulceration spread to his lips: it was visible on his tongue. Fitzjames was not fit to walk a mile.

Crozier touched his arm.

“There is no choice,” Fitzjames said.

Together they walked back across the ice.

Gathered on the deck of
Erebus
were 104 men. In the past three years they had lost twenty-five of their number, including Franklin. For a moment Crozier remembered not only his commander, but a man from the lowest of the ranks, poor Torrington. Then, in the crowd, he searched out the face of Augustus Peterman. Gus was tall now, wiry. A little more than skin and bone, but not by much. His mother wouldn’t recognize him now, Crozier thought. The boy was a man.

He let his gaze run over the others. Felt their apprehension.

“When we began this journey,” he told them, “we did so with every hope of success. That we had floundered in the ice I need not tell you; it is you who have known and lived what no other man had ever done, no sailor before you.”

They waited, listening. Not a man moving. He supposed they knew what he had to tell them. Above them the sky was perfectly clear, and the light cast on the deck was opalescent, bringing up every detail. If he looked closely, he could see on others the very bruises that he dared not look at for too long on his own body. He caught a man’s glance, a dogged look of determination. Another looked away, bringing his fist to his eyes.

“I could not have asked more from you, and you could not have given me more,” Crozier said. “And for that I salute you, as your country salutes you, for your fortitude.”

Silence. Not even the ice pack shifted. No murmur even from the ship, pinched in its intolerable embrace.

“We set out from Greenhithe equipped for three years,” Crozier continued. “And by good judgment and care we have provisions still for three months.” There was a groan somewhere below him. The crew had already guessed the result of Fitzjames and Rhodes’s frenzied counting and recounting that morning. Yet he still had paused, unwilling to declaim their fate.

“We will abandon both ships in the morning,” he said. “We will load three boats. We will make for the Backs Fish River.”

Then, there was a real murmur. Having expected it, he let it flow over the crowd, reach a crescendo of doubt, even of dissent, before fading away.

Backs Fish River was 210 miles south. They could not haul boats more than a mile or two a day. Even if every man had been healthy, fit, and strong, they would not have made the river for at least 150 days. And from the mouth of the river to the first Hudson’s Bay outpost at Great Slave Lake was 900 miles. Every man there knew that they were not likely to make Great Slave Lake. Many of them would not even make the river.

“I have maps of the area,” Crozier told them. “Maps in detail, which I do not possess for the area to the east, across land. Backs Fish River is a tortuous route, I know. But when we reach it, it will still be summer. There will be no ice on the river, which is at a more southerly latitude. And I am confident that we will be met on the river by scouts from the Hudson’s Bay Company, who will be sure to set out for us if there is no news of us by this spring.”

The murmurs continued. Not all of them placed so much faith in Hudson’s Bay.

“Sir George Back recorded that there were large numbers of deer, musk-ox, and birds at the river mouth,” Crozier said. “There we can eat our fill. We can stock for an entire winter, if need be.”

He did not tell them what else Back had said: that the river was a never-ending series of rapids and waterfalls, running through a landscape of frost-shattered rock.

The voices had become louder at the back of the crowd. Crozier looked down toward them. “Speak up,” he said. “Speak up if you have any doubts.”

The men looked at each other.

“Fury Beach,” a voice called.

“What of it?”

“There is food there,” came the reply. “Ross left a cache there.”

Fury Beach was hundreds of miles north, on the east coast of Somerset Island. It was almost back at Lancaster Sound. It was named for HMS
Fury
, which had been wrecked here in 1825 while commanded by Sir Edward Parry, and all
Fury
’s stores had been dumped on the shore.

Crozier shook his head. “The provisions on
Fury
are over twenty years old,” he said. “What we need is fresh meat and game. There is no fresh food on
Fury
, and there is no game. Sir John Ross said as much ten years ago.” He turned to his ice master. “Mr. Blanky served under Sir John at that time,” he said. “He has told me that Fury and Somerset are barren. There is no game, barely any foxes or hares. Nothing to sustain even five men, let alone a hundred.”