“I met him and some of his friends in Boston, which was delightful. But all along I also hoped to do some exploring, either out west or in the arctic. At a dinner party I ran into Professor Agassiz, whom I’d once met in Scotland — we share an interest in fossil fishes. He put me in touch with some members of your Academy of Sciences, which is how I learned your expedition needed a surgeon. The position was just what I’d been hoping for.”
“Was it?” Erasmus said thoughtfully. “You might just as easily have had mine — you’re better trained. I expect you did both jobs at once on your other trips.”
Dr. Boerhaave looked down at his drawing. “Differently trained, that’s all. And in a way it’s a relief simply to be responsible for the health of the crew and to have someone else in charge of the zoological and botanical reports. I’ve always thought both jobs were too much for one man to do well.”
“But we must be partners, then,” Erasmus said. “Real colleagues. May we do that?”
“Or course,” Dr. Boerhaave said. With his pencil he drew a delicate tentacle.
DR. BOERHAAVE WROTE to William Greenstone, an Edinburgh classmate who was now a geologist of some repute:
Although we’re not to Greenland yet, we’ve not been idle. I’ve examined all the men, so as to have an accurate point from which to assess their later health. On a journey this short, and with ample opportunities to acquire fresh food, there won’t be signs of scurvy, but the alternation in day length and the sleep deprivation may cause changes.
It’s an unusual situation for me, having an official naturalist on board. I worried that he — his name is Erasmus Wells — might be jealous of his position and equipment, and that I might have few opportunities for collecting and examining specimens. Yet in fact Mr. Wells is quite congenial and seems willing to let me share in his investigations. So far we’ve found nothing exciting but are in heavily traveled waters where everything we capture is well known. Yesterday we took a Cyclopterus spinosus though: not quite two inches long, covered with the typical conical spines, and very like those I saw off Spitzbergen; I was surprised to see it this far south.
I thinly I’ll like my new companion. He’s somewhat fussy and tends to be melancholy, but he’s intelligent and well traveled. His formal education is spotty by our standards, but he’s read widely and seems more — I don’t know, more complicated than the usual run of Americans. Not quite so blindly optimistic, nor so convinced that one can make the world into what one wishes. Perhaps because he’s older. Except for him and me and the ship’s captain, the others are hardly more than children. I packed the bottom sampler you gave me carefully, and once we enter Baffin’s Bay I’ll do my best to obtain samples of the seafloor for you.
HERE WAS THE arctic, Erasmus thought, as the Narwhal moved through Davis Strait and the night began to disappear. Or at least its true beginning: here, here, here.
His eyes burned from trying to take in everything at once. Whales with their baleen-laden mouths broke the water, sometimes as many as forty a day. Belugas slipped by white and radiant and the sky was alive with birds. The men cheered the first narwhals as guardian spirits and crowded around Erasmus as he sketched. With one of Dr. Boerhaave’s excellent pencils he tried to capture the grooved spike jutting from the males’ upper jaws and the smooth dark curves of their backs. Nils Jensen, out on the bowsprit, watched intently as each surfaced to breathe and called back measurements — ten feet long, twelve and half— which Erasmus noted on his drawings.
One day the coast of Greenland appeared, the peak of Sukkertoppen rising above the fog and flickering past as they sailed to Disko Island. A flock of dovekies sailed through the rigging, and when Robert Carey knocked one to the deck Erasmus remembered how, as a little boy, he’d glimpsed three of these tiny birds in a creek near his home, bobbing exhausted where they’d been driven after a great northeaster. This one looked like a black-and-white quail in his hand. Bending over the rail to release it, he saw fronds of seaweed waving through ten fathoms of transparent water. As soon as they anchored at Godhavn he and Dr. Boerhaave sampled the shallows, finding nullipores, mussels, and small crustaceans. Then they saw people, floating on the water and looking back at them.
In tiny, skin-covered kayaks the strangers darted among the icebergs; their legs were hidden inside the boats, their arms extended by two-bladed paddles. Flash, flash: into the ocean and out again, water streaming silver from the blades. The paddles led to tight hooded jackets; the jackets merged into oval skirts connecting the men at their waists to the boats — like centaurs, Erasmus thought. Boat men, male boats. It was all a blur, he couldn’t see their faces.
Scan Hamilton tossed them bits of biscuit and Erasmus revised his first opinion: This was where the journey began, with this first sight of the arctic men he’d read about for so long. That these Greenlanders had traded with whalers for two centuries, been colonized by the Danes and converted by Moravian and Lutheran missionaries, made them less strange: but they were still new to him. On the first night in port, over a dinner of eider ducks at the huge-chimneyed home of the Danish inspector, he looked alternately at a bad engraving of four Greenlanders captured near Godthaab and brought to Copenhagen and, out the window next to the portrait, at the jumble of wooden huts and sealskin tents into which the mysterious strangers disappeared.
ON THE NARWHAL the crew made their final preparations. Thomas Forbes, Erasmus saw, kept his carpenter’s bench in perfect order. Ivan Hruska’s hammock had a hole in it, which he repaired beautifully. Mr. Francis appeared to regard the boatswain’s locker as a treasure chest, keeping close track of every marlinspike and bit of spun yarn he passed out. All this bustle pleased Erasmus. This was their last chance to ready the brig for her encounters with the pack, and finally, he thought, the men had been infected with the sense of urgency he’d had for months. He and Zeke, equally busy, acquired sixteen ill-mannered Esquimaux dogs, a stock of dried codfish, bales of seal and caribou skins, full Esquimaux outfits for all the crew, and an interpreter, Johann Schwartzberg. After sharing a walk with him, Erasmus wrote:
He’s a Moravian missionary — an extremely interesting man. He’s lived among the Esquimaux both here and in Labrador, and he knows their language as well as Danish, English, and German. He’ll be invaluable if we meet Esquimaux around King William Land. When Zeke approached him, we learned that he’d followed the news of Franklin’s expedition avidly and had already heard about Rae’s discoveries. He seems genuinely thrilled to join us. The men call him Joe, and already I can see that he’s sensible, mild-tempered, good-humored, and handy.
It was Joe who determined how many knives and needles and iron bars they should barter for the fish and the furs, and Joe who examined each Esquimaux outfit for proper fit. Zeke asked Mr. Tagliabeau and Mr. Francis to work with the dogs; when they tangled the traces and crashed the sledge and fumbled helplessly, it was Joe who demonstrated how to control them. Buff and brown and white and black, long-haired, demonic, and curly-tailed, the dogs were nothing like the well-mannered hounds Zeke kept at home. With a peculiar turn of the wrist, Joe directed the whip toward the head of the most recalcitrant creature and clipped off a piece of its ear.
Zeke, watching this with Erasmus, caught his breath and said, “Oh, how cruel!”
Mr. Francis shot a contemptuous glance back over his shoulder. “Perhaps you’d like to reason with them?” There was something weasel-like about him, Erasmus thought. That narrow chest; the thick hair growing low on his forehead and shading his deep-set eyes. “Maybe you can. persuade them,” Mr. Francis added.