OFF ST. JOHN’S, the scattered icebergs — pure white, impossibly huge, entirely covered with snow — cured Zeke like a drug. Captain Tyler, Mr. Tagliabeau, and Mr. Francis viewed them calmly, after their many whaling voyages. Erasmus, who’d seen similar bergs off Antarctica, restrained his excitement for the sake of appearances. But the men who hadn’t been north before gaped openly, and Zeke was overcome.
“Look! Look!” he shouted, racing about the deck and then diving into the cabin for his journal. His first entry, dated June 15, 1855, was a series of hasty sketches captioned with rough measurements: The largest iceberg is a quarter-mile across. Nils Jensen, who couldn’t read but had remarkable calculating skills, leaned over the drawing and murmured some numbers suggesting the berg’s volume and area. Other excited men crowded around, but perhaps only Erasmus saw, behind the hamlike shoulders of huge Sean Hamilton, the officers exchanging glances and sarcastic smiles.
That night, with Zeke up on deck and not heaving into a basin, Erasmus slept soundly for the first time and so missed the actual collision. One great thump; by the time he woke and ran up on deck the Narwhal was moving backward, rebounding from a slope-sided iceberg and shorn of her dolphin striker and martingales. Past him ran Mr. Francis and Mr. Tagliabeau, Thomas Forbes on their heels with a sack of carpenter’s tools. Shouts and calls and terse instructions; what was damaged, what intact; a dark figure draped over the bowsprit, investigating, anchored by hands on his ankles and a rope at his waist. Erasmus rubbed sleep from his eyes and tried to stay out of the way. Captain Tyler, standing next to Zeke as his crew worked, turned and said, “Had you taken the course I suggested…”
“This course is fine!” Zeke exclaimed. “The man in the crow’s nest must have been sleeping. You there!” He tilted his head back and hollered at the figure on the masthead: Barton DeSouza, Erasmus saw. Was that Barton? “You look sharp there!”
The moon was full and the berg gleamed silvery off the Narwhal’s bow. Barton muttered something Erasmus couldn’t hear. A hammer beat against a doubled wall of wood as Thomas and his helpers began repairing the damage. Nothing serious, Mr. Tagliabeau called back.
“It’s late,” Zeke pointed out. “They could do that tomorrow.”
“Better to do it now,” Captain Tyler said. “Suppose a squall were to strike in the next few hours?”
He turned his back, he called out orders, figures moved in response to his words. Zeke retreated — just when he should have asserted his authority, Erasmus thought. The men had instinctively looked to Captain Tyler during Zeke’s illness, reverting to what they knew; on the fishing and whaling ships where they’d served before, the captain was the sole authority. Here, with an expedition commander who couldn’t set a sail somehow in charge of the ship’s captain, they were all uneasy. Erasmus overheard them now and again, a grumpy Greek chorus: He’s never been north of New York he doesn’t know how to roll a hammock; he changes his shirt twice a week—Sean Hamilton, Ivan Hruska, Fletcher Lamb. Each time Zeke gave an order they turned to the captain and waited for his nod before obeying.
Erasmus saw all this, but couldn’t fix it. For the next few days he focused instead on trying out the dredge and the tow nets. Already he could see that Zeke wouldn’t share his scientific work; after all he was to be alone, as he’d been on his first voyage. He tied knots, adjusted shackles, replaced a poorly threaded pin, remembering how shyly his young self had hung back from his companions. While he was working up the courage to be friendly, everyone else had been pairing off, or clumping in groups of three or four from which he was excluded. Everyone had been courteous but he’d been left with no particular friend; and at times he’d thought he might die of loneliness.
He was older now, he was used to it. Yet still he felt grateful when Dr. Boerhaave, who’d been reading near the galley, edged up and broke his solitude. “Those little purple-tinted shrimps,” he said, “are they Crangon boreas?”
Later, Erasmus would gain a clearer picture of Dr. Boerhaave’s face. For now, what he first noticed was his mind: quick and shining, sharp but deep, moving through a sea of thought like a giant silver salmon. Dr. Boerhaave, Erasmus learned quickly, knew as much natural history as he did. Although he was the better botanist, Dr. Boerhaave was the better zoologist and was especially knowledgeable about marine invertebrates.
As they probed their captives, Dr. Boerhaave said he’d been raised in the port of Gothenberg, but educated in Paris and Edinburgh. His excellent English he attributed to his years at sea. Over a group of elegant little medusae captured in their tow net— “Ptychogastria polaris” Dr. Boerhaave said — he described his trips as ship’s surgeon aboard Scottish whalers and Norwegian walrus-hunters.
“I was curious,” he said. “I liked Edinburgh very much, but I didn’t want to set up a practice there and see the same people for the next forty years. And the idea of returning permanently to Sweden…” He shrugged.
Erasmus, embalming a medusa, said, “Commander Voorhees told me you’d been twice to the high arctic. With whalers? Or were those more formal expeditions?”
“The latter,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “On the Swedish exploring expedition I accompanied, we went up the west coast of Spitzbergen to Hakluyt’s Headland — not as far as Parry got, but we saw some of the same places that Franklin and Beechey explored with the Dorothea and the Trent.”
Franklin’s first voyage, so long ago. For a minute Erasmus thought how that had led, by an unexpected web of events, to their own voyage.
“Later I went with a Russian expedition to Kamchatka Peninsula and the Pribilof and Aleutian Islands, then into the Bering Straits. We’d hoped to reach Wrangel Island but were stopped by icepack in the Beaufort Sea.”
He drew an equatorial projection of the medusa before them, revealing the convoluted edges of the eight gastric folds. He had excellent pencils, Erasmus observed. The line they made was both darker and sharper than his own.
“What about you?” Dr. Boerhaave said. “Your own earlier journey — I read all five volumes of Wilkes’s narrative of the Exploring Expedition, it was very popular when the first copies arrived in Europe. But I don’t remember seeing your name mentioned. How is that so?”
Erasmus flushed and directed Dr. Boerhaave’s attention to some questionable seals on the preserving jars. “It’s a long story,” he said. “I’ll tell you another time. How did you decide to join us?”
“I thought it would round out my picture of the high arctic,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “Different ice, different flora and fauna. Anyway I was already on this side of the ocean. I came to America several years ago, to visit some of your New England philosophers. Emerson, Brownson and the others — it interests me, what they’ve done with the ideas of Kant and Hegel. You know this young Henry Thoreau?” “I don’t,” Erasmus said.