The Ministry of Time

Chapter VIII

April 1848. Commander Gore has been gone—presumed dead—for eight months. It is about to begin. He never sees any of it. He imagines it instead. He reads books about it, published decades, centuries after it happens. He takes the awful images conjured by scholars and hobbyists and palms out a story.

The companies of Erebus and Terror struggle through the winter of 1847. Their best sportsman is dead—not that there’s much hunting to be had. A single storm on the ice wipes out another hunting party of two officers and three men, whose bodies are never found. Others succumb to the claws of the climate, to scurvy, to madness. Men starve and rave, dreaming of gravy. There isn’t enough coal to heat the ships, nor enough candles to light the Arctic winter. Franklin’s bold adventurers lie for hours in the dark, too cold and hungry to move, while the darkness looks like ink-soaked cardboard pressed against the portholes. The ships smell like carrion.

Spring comes. By this time nine officers and fifteen men are dead: the highest death rate of a polar expedition in hundreds of years. Crozier, whose soul barely inhabits his flaking, creasing body, orders the ships abandoned. Franklin’s expedition—still, in 1848, “Franklin’s expedition” and not “Franklin’s lost expedition”—will march eight hundred miles with provisions to last barely half that, and hope that on the journey south, they’ll find game and open water.

They fasten whaleboats onto runners and fill them with what they imagine they will need. Tents, of course; their sleeping bags of sealskin and deer pelt; their provisions, which are mostly tinned; one set of spare underclothes per man; guns, for hunting. Other things too. They pile the whaleboats with soap and books and candlesticks and journals and crockery. They are afraid they might be needed. They are afraid of everything, so they leave nothing. Their backs bruise under the weight of the boats. Their joints crack. They die by inches.

They haul the boats.

The officers pull alongside the men. Even Crozier and Fitzjames haul. The men are too weak to manage alone. There is no beauty in this, not after the first fifty miles. Just sore bodies, frostbite, and dysentery. The surviving surgeons are granted a marine guard each, to keep desperate sailors out of the medicine chests. The marines have orders to shoot on sight. Goodsir is, for a time, one of the surviving surgeons, but he’s seen off by a tooth infection and dies with poisoned blood. He is lucky; he is buried.

They haul the boats.

They start by burying the dead in shallow graves, then, further on, piling rocks over the bodies in makeshift cairns, but soon there are too many dead. They leave the bodies where they drop.

They haul.

They abandon empty cans, trinkets, clothing. They leave bizarre oases of clutter, civilization in its larval form. The notion of expedition, of England, streams off them. They put one foot in front of the other and balance their minds on their heads.

They haul.

The landscape looks like something suspended in glass. It is like walking through a perfect, terrible illusion. Their tiredness is an omnipresent thing, God of the bones and the sinew.

Gore reads that thirty or so survivors from the hundred-odd crew make it to a final camp. “Starvation Cove,” later explorers call it. They are still hundreds of miles from the nearest European outpost.

Gore dreams about his friends. He sees Le Vesconte lying on the canvas of a collapsed tent. “Henry,” he says in the dream. Le Vesconte does not respond. He has no legs, and half his pelvis is missing. His hip bone pokes through torn meat like the gunwales of a shipwreck. The bone is not white but ivory and speckled gray. Le Vesconte’s mouth is slack and open. The dark purple fruit of his tongue lolls from his lips. His eyes are white and slimy. They have rolled back in his head.

Gore dreams he sees Lieutenant Little of Terror, creeping toward the body. Blood is tracking sluggishly down Little’s face. His eyes are clouded. Gore understands, in the dream, that Little can no longer see people, only flesh.

“Edward, listen to me,” Gore says. Little creeps along the stones. “Edward. That was a man. Not food.”

Surviving testimony suggests the Inuit tried to help, where they could. But more than a hundred poorly prepared Europeans, already dying, in a land where the Inuit lived at a level of strict subsistence, in a year where summer never came, were too many souls to save. Franklin’s expedition hadn’t been invited to the Arctic. Why did they insist on leaving their bodies so far from their native earth? This is the rational response.

Gore knows better. He thinks of the face of the woman whose husband he killed. He wakes up with the taste of dead flesh in his mouth. It is God’s love, or God’s vengeance, that he survived in this impossible way, that he has to remember them all and her besides. He will not be responsible for another death, another friend lost. He dreams with the bitter determination of a man who must reach camp before dark.