“Yes,” agrees Fitzjames, “but you were wise to have the gear and provisions sledged to King William Land in August.”
“It wasn’t a fraction of what we’ll need to ferry there if that is to be our survival camp,” Crozier says brusquely. He had ordered about two tons of clothing, tents, survival gear, and tinned food to be removed from the ships and stored on the northwest shore of the island should they have to abandon ships quickly during the winter, but the ferrying had been absurdly slow and extremely dangerous. Weeks of laborious sledging had left only a ton or so of cache there — tents, extra slops, tools, and a few weeks of canned food. Nothing more.
“That thing wouldn’t let us stay there,” he adds softly. “We all could have moved to tents in September — I had the ground prepared for two dozen of the big tents, you remember — but the campsite would not have been as defensible as the ships are.”
“No,” says Fitzjames.
“If the ships last the winter.”
“Yes,” says Fitzjames. “Have you heard, Francis, that some of the men — on both ships — are calling that creature the Terror?”
“No!” Crozier is offended. He does not want the name of his ship used to evil purposes such as that, even if the men are jesting. But he looks at Commander James Fitzjames’s hazelgreen eyes and realizes that the other captain is serious and so must be the men. “The Terror,” says Crozier, and tastes bile.
“They think it is no animal,” says Fitzjames. “They believe its cunning is something else, is preternatural… supernatural… that there is a demon out there on the ice in the dark.”
Crozier almost spits he is so disgusted. “Demon,” he says in contempt. “These are the very seamen who believe in ghosts, faeries, Jonahs, mermaids, curses, and sea monsters.”
“I’ve seen you scratch the sail to summon wind,” Fitzjames says with a smile.
Crozier says nothing.
“You’ve lived long enough and traveled far enough to see things that no man knew existed,” Fitzjames adds, obviously trying to lighten the mood.
“Aye,” says Crozier with a bark of a laugh. “Penguins! I wish they were the largest beastie up here, as they seem to be down south.”
“There are no white bears there in the south arctic?”
“None that we saw. None that any south-sailing whaler or explorer has seen in seventy years of sailing toward and around that white, volcanic, frozen land.”
“And you and James Ross were the first men ever to see the continent. And the volcanoes.”
“Aye, we were. And it did Sir James much good. He’s married to a beautiful young thing, knighted, happy, retired from the cold. And me… I am… here.”
Fitzjames clears his throat as if to change the subject. “Do you know, Francis, until this voyage, I honestly believed in the Open Polar Sea. I was quite sure Parliament was correct when it listened to predictions from the socalled polar experts — in the winter before we sailed, do you remember? It was in the Times — all about the thermobaric barrier, about the Gulf Stream flowing up under this ice to warm the Open Polar Sea, and the invisible continent that must be up here. They were so convinced it existed that they were proposing and passing laws to send inmates of Southgate and other prisons up here to shovel the coal that must be in such plentitude just a few hundred miles from here on the North Polar Continent.”
Crozier laughs with real humour this time. “Yes, to shovel coal to heat the hotels and supply the refueling stations for the steamships that will be making regular trips across the Open Polar Sea by the 1860s at the latest. Oh, God, that I were one of those prisoners in Southgate. Their cells are, required by law and for humanity’s sake, twice the size of our cabins, James, and our future would be warm and secure if we only had to sit in such luxury and wait for word of that North Pole continent being discovered and colonized.”
Both men are laughing now.
There comes a thumping from the deck above — running footsteps rather than mere feet stamping — and then voices and a sliding of cold air around their feet as someone opens the main hatch above the far end of the companionway and the sound of several pairs of feet clattering down the steps.
Both captains are silent and waiting when the soft knock comes on the Common Room’s thin door.
“Enter,” says Commander Fitzjames.
An Erebus crewman leads in two Terrors — Third Lieutenant John Irving and a seaman named Shanks.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Commander Fitzjames, Captain Crozier,” says Irving through only slightly chattering teeth. His long nose is white from the cold. Shanks is still carrying a musket. “Lieutenant Little sent me to report to Captain Crozier as soon as I could.”
“Go ahead, John,” says Crozier. “You’re not still hunting for Lady Silence, are you?”
Irving looks blank for a second. Then, “We saw her out on the ice when the last search parties were coming in. No, sir, Lieutenant Little asked me to fetch you right away because…” The young lieutenant pauses as if forgetting the reason Little had sent him to report.
“Mr. Couch,” says Fitzjames to the Erebus mate on duty who had led the two Terrors to the Common Room, “be so kind as to step out into the companionway and to close the door please, thank you.”
Crozier has also heard the odd silence as the snoring and hammock creaking has all but ceased. Too many ears in the crew’s forward berthing space were awake and listening.
When the door is shut, Irving says, “It’s William Strong and Tommy Evans, sir. They’re back.”
Crozier blinks. “What the devil do you mean, back? Alive?” He feels the first surge of hope he’s had for months.
“Oh, no sir,” says Irving. “Just… one body… really. But it was propped against the stern rail when someone saw it as all the search parties were coming in for the day… about an hour ago. The guards on duty hadn’t seen anything. But it was there, sir. On Lieutenant Little’s orders, Shanks and I made the crossing as quickly as we could to inform you, Captain. Shanks Mare as it were.”
“It?” snaps Crozier. “One body? Back on the ship?” This makes no sense at all to the Terror’s captain. “I thought you said both Strong and Evans were back.”
Third Lieutenant Irving’s entire face is frostbite white now. “They are, Captain. Or at least half of them. When we went to look at the body propped there at the stern, it fell over and… well… came apart. As best we can tell, it’s Billy Strong from the waist up. Tommy Evans from the waist down.”
Crozier and Fitzjames can only look at each other.
12
GOODSIR
Lieutenant Gore’s cache party arrived at Sir James Ross’s cairn on King William Land late on the evening of 28 May, after five hard days of travel across the ice.
The good news as they approached the island — invisible to them until the last minutes — was that there were pools of salt-free drinking water as they neared the shore. The bad news was that most of these pools had been leached from the base of an almost unbroken series of icebergs — some of them a hundred feet tall and more — that had been swept up against the shallows and shore and now stretched like a parapeted white castle wall as far as the eye could see around the curve of land. It took the men a full day to cross this barrier and even then they had to leave some of the robes, fuel, and provisions cached on the sea ice to lighten the sledge load. To add to their difficulties and discomfort, several of the cans of soup and pork they had opened on the ice had gone putrid and had to be thrown away, leaving them less than five days” rations for the return — assuming that more of the cans were not bad. On top of all that, they found that even here, at what must be the sea’s edge, the ice was still seven feet thick.