“As you did, I believe.”
Crozier laughs a little ruefully. “As I did. For all the good it did me.”
Fitzjames locks the brandy away in the cabinet and returns to the long table. “Tell me, Francis, did you actually dress up as a black footman to old Hoppner’s lady of rank when you were frozen in up here in… what was it, ’24?”
Crozier laughs again but more easily this time. “I did. I was a midshipman on the Hecla with Parry when he sailed north with Hoppner’s Fury in ’24, trying to find this same Goddamned Passage. Parry’s plan was to sail the two ships through Lancaster Sound and down the Prince Regent Inlet — we didn’t know then, not until John and James Ross in ’33, that the Boothia was a peninsula. Parry thought he could sail south around Boothia and go hellbent for leather until he reached the coastline that Franklin had explored from land six, seven years earlier. But Parry left too late — why do these God-damned expedition commanders always start off too late? — and we were lucky to get to Lancaster Sound on ten September, a month late. But the ice was on us by thirteen September, and there was no chance of getting through the Sound, so Parry in our Hecla and Lieutenant Hoppner in Fury ran south, our tails between our legs.
“A gale blew us back into Baffin Bay and we were lucky sods to find an anchorage in a tiny, pretty little bay off Prince Regent Inlet. We were there ten months. Froze our tits off.”
“But,” says Fitzjames, smiling slightly, “you as a little black boy?”
Crozier nods and sips his drink. “Both Parry and Hoppner were fanatics for fancy dressup galas during winters in the ice. It was Hoppner who planned this masque he called the Grand Venetian Carnivale, set for the first day in November, right when morale dips as the sun disappears for months. Parry came down Hecla’s side in this huge cloak that he didn’t throw off even when all the men were assembled — most in costume, we had this huge trunk of costumes on each ship — and when he did throw down the cloak, we saw Parry as that old Marine — you remember the one with the peg leg what played the fiddle for ha’pennies near Chatham? No, you wouldn’t, you’re too young.
“But Parry — I think the old bastard always wanted to be an actor more than a ship’s captain — he does the whole thing up right, scratching away at his fiddle, hopping on that fake peg leg, and shouting out, “Give a copper to the poor Joe, your honour, who’s lost his timbers in defence of his King and country!”
“Well, the men laughed their arses off. But Hoppner, who loved that make-believe rubbish even more than Parry, I think, he comes into the ball dressed as a noble lady, wearing the latest Parisian fashions from that year — low bustline, big crinoline dress bunched up over his ass, everything — and since I was full of piss and vinegar in those days, not to mention too stupid to know better, in other words still in my twenties, I was dressed as Hoppner’s black footman — wearing this real footman’s livery that old Henry Parkyns Hoppner had bought in some dandy’s London livery store and brought along just for me.”
“Did the men laugh?” asks Fitzjames.
“Oh, the men laughed their arses off again — Parry and his peg weren’t in it after old Henry appeared in drag with me lifting his silk train behind him. Why wouldn’t they laugh? All those chimney sweeps and ribbon girls, ragmen and hook-nosed Jews, bricklayers and Highland warriors, Turkish dancers and London match girls? Look! There’s young Crozier, aging midshipman not even lieutenant yet who thinks he’s going to be an admiral someday, forgetting that he’s just another black Irish nigger.”
Fitzjames says nothing for a minute. Crozier can hear the snores and farts from the creaking hammocks toward the bow of the dark ship. Somewhere on deck just above them, a lookout stamps his feet to keep them from freezing. Crozier is sorry he’s ended the story this way — he speaks to no one like this when he is sober — but he also wishes that Fitzjames would get the brandy out again. Or the whiskey.
“When did Fury and Hecla escape from the ice?” asks Fitzjames.
“Twenty July the next summer,” says Crozier. “But you probably know the rest of the story.”
“I know that Fury was lost.”
“Aye,” says Crozier. “Five days after the ice relents — we’d been creeping along the shore of Somerset Island, trying to stay out of the pack ice, trying to avoid that God-damned limestone always falling from the cliffs — another gale grounds Fury on a spit of gravel. We manhauled her free — using ice screws and sweat — but then both ships get frozen in, and a Goddamned iceberg almost as big as that bastard squatting between Erebus and Terror shoves Fury against the shore ice, tears her rudder away, smashes her timbers to splinters, springs her hull plates, and the crew worked the four pumps in shifts day and night just trying to keep her afloat.”
“And you did for a while,” prompts Fitzjames.
“A fortnight. We even tried cabling her to a berg, but the fucking cable snapped. Then Hoppner tried raising her to get at her keel — just as Sir John wanted to do with your Erebus — but the blizzard put an end to that idea and both ships were in danger of being forced onto the lee shore of the headland. Finally the men just fell over where they were pumping — they were too exhausted to understand our orders — and on the twenty-first of August, Parry ordered everyone aboard Hecla and cast her off to save her from being driven aground and poor Fury got shoved right up onto the beach by a bunch of bergs that slammed her hard ashore there and blocked her way out. There wasn’t even a chance of a tow. The ice was smashing her to bits as we watched. We barely got Hecla free, and that only with every man working the pumps day and night and the carpenter laboring round the clock to shore her up.
“So we never got close to the Passage — or even to sighting new land, really — and lost a ship, and Hoppner was courtmartialed and Parry considered that his court-martial as well since Hoppner was under his command the whole time.”
“Everyone was acquitted,” says Fitzjames. “Even praised, as I recall.”
“Praised but not promoted,” says Crozier.
“But you all survived.”
“Yes.”
“I want to survive this expedition, Francis,” says Fitzjames. His tone is soft but very determined.
Crozier nods.
“We should have done what Parry did and put both crews aboard Terror a year ago and sailed east around King William Land,” says Fitzjames.
It is Crozier’s turn to raise his brows. Not at Fitzjames agreeing that it is an island — their later-summer sledge reconnaissance had all but settled that — but in agreeing that they should have made a run for it last autumn, abandoning Sir John’s ship. Crozier knows that there is no harder thing for a captain in anyone’s navy to do than to give up his ship, but especially so in the Royal Navy. And while Erebus had been under the overall command of Sir John Franklin, Commander James Fitzjames had been its true captain.
“It is too late now.” Crozier is in pain. Because the Common Room shares several outer bulkheads and has three overhead Preston Patent Illuminators, it is cold — the two men can see their breath in the air — but it’s still sixty or seventy degrees warmer than it had been out on the ice and Crozier’s feet, especially his toes, are thawing in a rush of jagged pin pokes and redhot needle stabs.