Dropping Hartnell’s heart back into his abdominal cavity, I dissected the lower part of the able seaman’s lungs with quick strokes of my scalpel.
“There,” said Surgeon Stanley.
I nodded. There were obvious signs of scarring and other indications of Consumption, as well as signs that the seaman recently had been suffering from pneumonia. John Hartnell, like John Torrington, had been tubercular, but this older, stronger — and according to Stanley — harsher and louder sailor had concealed the Symptoms, perhaps even from himself. Until today, when he keeled over and died just minutes before getting his salt pork.
Pulling and cutting the Liver free, I held it under the light, and both Stanley and I believed that we noticed adequate confirmation of the consumption as well as indications that Hartnell had been too heavy a Drinker for too long a time.
Just yards away on the other side of the curtain, Hartnell’s brother, Thomas, was shouting, furious, being held in check only by Commander Fitzjames’s stern bark. I could tell from the voices that several of the other officers — Lieutenant Gore, Lieutenant Le Vesconte and Fairholme, even Des Voeux, the mate — had joined in calming and intimidating the Mob of sailors.
“Have we seen enough?” whispered Stanley.
I nodded again. There had been no sign of Scurvy on the body, on the face or in the mouth, or in the organs. While it remained a Mystery how the consumption or pneumonia or a combination of the two had been able to kill the able-bodied seaman so quickly, it was at least obvious that we had nothing to fear from some Plague-like Disease.
The noise from the crew’s Berthing Space was growing Louder, so I quickly thrust the lung samples, liver, and other organs back in the abdominal cavity with the heart, taking no care to set them in proper place, more or less squeezing them into a Mass, and then I returned Hartnell’s chest plate roughly back in place. (Later I was to Realize that I had set it in upside down.) Chief Surgeon Stanley then closed up the inverted-Y incision, using a large needle and heavy sail thread with a quick, confident motion that would have done credit to any sailmaker.
Within another minute we had Hartnell’s clothes back on — rigor mortis was beginning to be a problem — and we thrust the curtain aside. Stanley — whose voice is deeper and more resonant than mine — assured Hartnell’s brother and the other men that all we had remaining was to wash their crewmate’s body so that they could prepare it for burial.
For some reason this Burial Service was Harder on me than the first. Again we had the solemn Procession from the ship — with only Erebus and its crew involved this time, although Dr. McDonald, Surgeon Peddie, and Captain Crozier joined us from Terror.
Again the flag-covered coffin — the men had dressed Hartnell’s upper body in three layers, including his brother Thomas’s best shirt, but had wrapped his naked lower body in only a shroud, leaving the top half of the coffin open for several hours in the black-creped Sick Bay on the lower deck before the nails were hammered in for the burial service. Again the slow sledge procession from the Frozen Sea to the Frozen Shore, lanterns bobbing in the black night, although the stars were out this Midday and no snow fell. The Marines had work to do, since three of the Great White Bears came sniffing closer, looming like white wraiths out of the ice blocks, and the men had to fire muskets at them to drive them away — visibly wounding one bear in the side.
Again the Eulogy from Sir John — although shorter this time, since Hartnell was not as well liked as young Torrington had been — and again we walked back across the creaking, squeaking, moaning ice alone, under the stars dancing in the Cold this time, the only sound behind us the dwindling scrape of spades and pickaxes filling in the frozen soil in the new hole next to Torrington’s nicely tended grave.
Perhaps it was the black cliff face Looming over All that murdered my Spirits this second burial. Although I deliberately stood where my back was to the Cliff this time, closer to Sir John so that I could hear the Words of Hope and Solace, I was always aware of that cold, black, vertical, lifeless and lightless slab of insensate Stone behind me — a portal, it seemed, to that Country from Which No Man Has Ever Returned. Compared to the Cold Reality of that black, featureless stone, even Sir John’s compassionate and inspired words had little effect.
The morale on both ships is very low. We are not yet a Full Week into the new year, and already two of our Company have died. Tomorrow the four of us surgeons have agreed to Meet in a Private Place — the carpenter’s room belowdecks on Terror — to discuss what should be done to avoid more Mortality in what seems to be a Cursed Expedition.
The headstone on this second grave read
The wind has come up in the last hour, it is almost Midnight and most of the lamps are out here on the lower deck of Erebus. I listen to the wind howl and think of those two cold Low Heaps of Loose Stone out on that black, windy isthmus, and I think of the dead men in those two cold Holes, and I think of the Featureless Black Face of Rock, and I can imagine the fusillade of snow pellets already working to eradicate the letters on the wooden headstones.
7
FRANKLIN
Captain Sir John Franklin had rarely been so pleased with himself.
The previous winter frozen in at Beechey Island, hundreds of miles northeast of his present position, had been uncomfortable in many ways — he would be the first to admit that to himself or to a peer, although he had no peers on this expedition. The death of three members of the expedition, first Torrington and Hartnell so early in January, then Private William Braine of the Royal Marines on 3 April, all of consumption and pneumonia, had been a shock. Franklin was not aware of any other Navy expedition losing three men of natural causes so early in their endeavor.
It was Franklin himself who had chosen the inscription on the thirty-two-year-old Private Braine’s headstone — “Choose this day whom ye shall serve,” Joshua, ch. xxiv, 15 — and for a short while the words had seemed as much a challenge to the unhappy crews of Erebus and Terror, not yet near mutiny but neither so far away from it, as it was a message to the nonexistent passersby of Braine’s, Hartnell’s, and Torrington’s lonely graves on that terrible spit of gravel and ice.
Nonetheless, the four surgeons met and conferred after Hartnell’s death and decided that incipient scurvy might be weakening the men’s constitutions, allowing pneumonia and such congenital defects as consumption to rise to lethal proportions. Surgeons Stanley, Goodsir, Peddie, and McDonald recommended to Sir John that the men’s diet be changed — fresh food when possible (although there was almost none except polar bear possible in the dark of winter, and they had discovered that eating the liver of that great, ponderous beast could be fatal for some unknown reason) and, failing finding fresh meat and vegetables, cutting back on the men’s preferred salted pork and beef, or salted birds, and relying more on the tinned foods — vegetable soups and the like.