One of the seamen in the back of the group behind Crozier dropped to his knees and began to dry retch into the gravel.
“I have an instrument called a tenaculum to crack the sternum and to remove the ribs,” Goodsir said softly, “but I’m afraid I can’t let you borrow it. A good ship’s hammer and chisel — there’s one in every boat kit, you’ve noticed — should serve that purpose almost as well.
“I do recommend you attend to rending the flesh first and set aside your friends’ heads, hands, feet, intestines — all of the contents of the soft abdominal sac — for later.
“I warn you — it’s more difficult than you think to crack open the long bones for their marrow. You’ll need some sort of scraping tool, rather like Mr. Honey’s wood-carving gouge. And do note that the marrow will be lumpy and red when it’s forced from the center of the bones… and mixed with bone chips and fragments, so not terribly healthy to eat raw. I recommend you put each other’s bone marrow into a pot for cooking straightaway and let yourselves simmer before trying to digest your friends.”
“Fuck you,” snarled Cornelius Hickey.
Dr. Goodsir nodded.
“Oh,” the surgeon added softly, “when you get around to eating one another’s brains, it will be simplicity itself. Simply saw off the lower jaw, throw it away with the lower teeth, and use any knife or spoon to gouge and hack your way up through the soft palate into the cranial vault. If you wish, you may invert the skull and sit around it, scooping out each other’s brains like so much Christmas pudding.”
For a minute there were no voices raised, only the wind and the groan, crack, and snapping of the ice.
“Is there anyone else who wants to leave tomorrow?” called Captain Crozier.
Reuben Male, Robert Sinclair, and Samuel Honey — Terror’s fo’c’sle captain, Erebus’s foretop captain, and Terror’s blacksmith, respectively — stepped forward.
“You’re going with Hickey and Hodgson?” asked Crozier. He did not allow himself to show the shock he felt.
“Nay, sir,” said Reuben Male, shaking his head. “We ain’t with them. But we want to try walking back to Terror.”
“No boat needed, sir,” said Sinclair. “We’re going to try hiking cross-country as it were. Straight across the island. Maybe we’ll find some foxes and such inland, away from the coast.”
“Navigation will be difficult,” said Crozier. “Compasses aren’t worth a damn here and I can’t give you one of my sextants.”
Male shook his head. “No worries, Captain. We’ll just use dead reckoning. Most of the time, if the fuckin’ wind is in our face — pardon my language, sir — then we’re headed the right way.”
“I was a seaman before I was a ’smith, sir,” said Samuel Honey. “We’re all sailors. If we can’t die at sea, at least this way perhaps we can die aboard our ship.”
“All right,” said Crozier, speaking to all the men still standing there and making sure that his voice would reach to the tents. “We’re going to assemble at six bells and divide up all the remaining ship’s biscuits, spirits, tobacco, and any other victuals we still have. Every man. Even those who had their surgeries last night and today will be brought to the dividing-up. Everyone will see what we have, and every man will get an equal share. From this point on, each man — except those being fed and cared for by Dr. Goodsir — will be in charge of his own rationing.”
Crozier looked coldly at Hickey, Hodgson, and their group. “You men will — under Mr. Des Voeux’s oversight — go ready your pinnace for your departure. You’ll leave at dawn tomorrow, and except for the divvying up of goods and food at six bells, I don’t want to see your faces before then.”
52
GOODSIR
For the two days after the amputations and Mr. Diggle’s death and the muster of the men and the hearing of Mr. Hickey’s plans and the pathetic dividing up of the food, the surgeon had no stomach for keeping his diary. He tossed the stained leather book into his traveling medical kit and left it there.
The Great Dividing Up, as Goodsir already thought of it, had been a sad and seemingly endless affair, extending into the shortening August arctic evening. It soon became obvious that — at least when it came to food — no one trusted anyone. Everyone seemed to harbour some bone-deep anxiety that someone else was hiding food, hoarding food, secreting away food, denying everyone else food. It had taken hours to unpack all boats, empty all stores, search all tents, go through Mr. Diggle’s and Mr. Wall’s stores, with representatives of each class of man on the ship — officers, warrant officers, petty officers, able seamen — sharing the search and distribution chores while the other men looked on with avid eyes.
Thomas Honey died during the night after the Dividing Up. Goodsir had Thomas Hartnell inform the captain and then he helped sew the carpenter’s body into his sleeping bag. Two sailors carried it to a snowdrift about one hundred yards from the camp where Mr. Diggle’s body already lay in cold state. The troop had begun forgoing burials and burial services, not because of an edict from the captain or some vote, but simply through silent consensus.
Are we preserving the bodies in the snowdrift so they won’t spoil as future food? wondered the surgeon.
He could not answer his own question. All he knew was that while he was giving Hickey — and all the other assembled men (quite deliberately since he had spoken to Captain Crozier about the tactic before the muster assembly) — the anatomical details of carving up the human body to serve as sustenance, Harry D. S. Goodsir had been horrified to find himself salivating.
And he knew that he could not have been alone in that reaction to the thought of fresh meat… from whatever source.
Only a handful of men had turned out at dawn the next morning, Monday 14 August, to watch Hickey and his fifteen companions leave camp with their pinnace lashed onto its battered sledge. Goodsir had come back to see them off after making sure that Mr. Honey had been secretly buried in the drift.
Earlier, he had missed seeing the three walking men off. Mr. Male, Mr. Sinclair, and Samuel Honey — no relation to the recently deceased carpenter — had left before dawn on their proposed trek across the island to Terror Camp, carrying with them only their rucksacks, blanket sleeping bags, some ship’s biscuits, water, and one shotgun with cartridges. They had not so much as a single Holland tent for shelter and planned to build caves in the snow if serious winter weather reached them before they reached Terror Camp. Goodsir thought that they must have said their goodbyes to friends the night before, since the three men were out of camp before the first grey light touched the southern horizon. Mr. Couch later told Dr. Goodsir that the party headed north, inland and directly away from the coast, and planned to turn toward the northwest on their second or third day.
In contrast, the surgeon was amazed by how heavily Hickey’s departing men had loaded their boat. Men all over camp, including Male, Sinclair, and Samuel Honey, had been abandoning useless items — hairbrushes, books, towels, writing desks, combs — bits of civilization they’d hauled for a hundred days and now refused to haul any farther, and, for some inexplicable reason, Hickey and his men had loaded many of these rejected pieces of junk into their pinnace along with tents, sleeping gear, and necessary food. One bag held 105 individually wrapped chunks of dark chocolate that was the shared accumulation of these sixteen men’s allotment of a secret store hauled all this way as a surprise by Mr. Diggle and Mr. Wall — six and a half pieces of chocolate per man.